Major Arqueerna

Upcoming event: Sacred Space/Between the Worlds 2020

Every year, the Sacred Space Conference serves up top-notch esoteric and occult workshops and ritual, and 2020 is no exception. This year’s conference will be special, however, because it’s joining forces with the Between the Worlds (BTW) Conference, only held every few years. The last time the two conferences merged was 2015.

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The conference will be held April 9-12, in the northern suburbs of Baltimore.

What I love about Sacred Space and BTW is that I get to geek out in both intellectual and experiential ways about magick with a wide array of people, and learn from teachers with a wide array of perspectives and backgrounds. There’s plenty of opportunity to chat with practitioners from all over the world, too. And when the two conferences merge, the main rituals and gala are particularly grand.

Qabala is queer, and it isn’t even sneaky about it

Many magickal practitioners are turned off by Hermetic Qabala because, at first glance, it appears to be a deeply patriarchal and hierarchal tool with strong Abrahamic underpinnings: something both familiar and often repellant to those of us brought up in conservative, Abrahamic faiths. Today, we seek tools and traditions that are egalitarian, inclusive, and empowering – why bother studying this dusty, complicated, old magical tool?

In my work with the Tree, however, I’ve found that both the glyph and its associated imagery and energy flows are decidedly queer.

Why I use the word “queer”

I don’t remember why I initially joined Tumblr, but it quickly became a valuable tool for me to stay abreast of current trends, slang, and discourse about civil rights issues among Gen Z.

One thing I’ve found surprising, though, is a stunningly prevalent backlash to the use of the word “queer,” sometimes referred to as the “q-slur” by people who believe it shouldn’t be used.

“Outside the Charmed Circle” is the book we all need

If you’re interested in queerness and magick, you either already follow or should seriously consider following Misha Magdalene, a nonbinary queer blogger on Patheos.

Misha has written an amazing book called “Outside the Charmed Circle: Exploring Gender & Sexuality in Magical Practice,” to be released Jan. 8, 2020. After a mutual friend connected us, I had the pleasure to interview Misha and read an advanced copy of their book as part of my research for the Queering Your Magickal Practice workshop.

Friends, the book blew me away. My persistent thought as I read it was, “Why did I not have this book in my life five years ago? Or ten?” It hooked me right from the beginning, with the statement: