Good morning ladies, gentlemen, and those of you who know better! I am the enchanting Artemis and this is the laughing craft! Today I want to tell you all about something you may have seen in a cartoon in the earlier parts of this century. Magick in the garbage. Whether it’s dried wax flakes, spilled herbs beside your mortar and pestle, or pieces of paper with sigils on them that have been cast, magick leaves behind detritus as much as any human endeavor. It’s important to keep all your spaces clean. Whether they be your private, personal, or spiritual spaces it’s important to maintain a level of cleanliness. The question you should be asking yourself is “Does it matter where I throw my trash out?”
Technically no. Sort your recyclable things, but for trash no it doesn’t matter on any principle. The precept of avoiding the lust of results (sitting on your ass waiting for your spell to come back with what you want) would have you toss whatever leftover and unusable bits into the bin with all the tissues, pizza crusts, and expired coupons. Magick is weird, and since humans have displayed weird ritual behavior since we were banging rocks and siblings, it’s occasionally vulgar. I maintain that the cosmos has a sense of humor, and magick is just acting in line with that sense. I’m not here to tell you to get thirsty over your own witchy hijinks, after you perform a spell it is very important that you don’t worry about it. What I am here to tell you is that it can be used to recharge whatever mystic vibes you have.
You don’t need to bundle your spooky trash separately from your regular trash, for any worry of environmental damage or a vindictive fae. However, if you need a cleansing ritual to refresh your spiritual space or your practice in general, this is one such method. The concept of “The Hell Baby” was given to me by my teacher, but we differ on our practice of it. His method is more Hell than Baby. Mark a large paper bag from a grocery store to store the wasted material. Get a charcoal grill (or something equivalently simple), get a fire going, and put the Hell Baby in to burn on the night of the new moon. The fire will cleanse your magick space and you can start anew. My practice tends to be more Baby than Hell, but works just the same. I have a small box to store my Hell Baby materials. On the night of the full moon I take the material, I bundle them in an adult diaper, and I toss it into a regular trash bin. I’m very fond of the Moon, so if I’m going to involve her it’ll be when she’s “the most there”. The diaper is amusing to me in a vulgar sense. If you feel caught off guard by that, I felt a similar sense of shock when I got the idea. I just used that as a way to boost me into a magickal mood, where mystic hijinks are more potent because it involves your entire being. I’ll go into “Gnosis” later. It’s a topic that warrants its own article.
I mentioned my teacher disposing of the Hell Baby during the new moon, and then myself doing it under the full moon. Magick is weird. Those paradigms I mentioned in “Don’t Panic” all try to describe the same phenomena. It’s important that you experiment with different witchcraft methods and models. Not because it doesn’t matter how you do something, but that the method of doing it comes from a sacred space within. Your witchcraft is yours, all it is is caveman logic making the spacetime continuum giggle.
A twenty something mage summons a demon in his backyard in the dead of night. He bellows to the infernal spirit “O SPIRIT OF DARKNESS, I BID YOU TO CURSE THIS BASTARD WHO TWEETED THIS AT ME” and holds his twitter to the demon. The demon looks at the tweet, and sees the mage’s profile pic is him dressed as The Joker. The demon replies “OF COURSE! ANYTHING TO HELP A FELLOW TORMENTOR!”