It is done.
I took a deep breath of the insense filled air and surveyed the scene.
On my knees, I looked up in the gloom and the dim candle light illuminated the gold pentacle hanging on the backdrop before me, seeming to float off the black velvet towards me. My ears were ringing from the explosion of party poppers leaving colourful streamers all over the shrine and the handiwork of my past seven months of magickal work. The sound from the gunpowder was still ringing in my ears and it’s smell migled with the coconut insense.
I looked down at my future life. The little models I had made of my life to come. A graduate degree (I had no schooling), a house, world travel, spiritual power, money and income and the real piece de la resistance a wife. It was all real in my mind. Every day for seven months I had worked on these ‘models’, chanting, meditating, visualising. Empowering them each moon cycle with energy, writing down my intentions with belief and emotion, to leave my broken European life, friendless, jobbless, penniless, and to live the life which had now unfolded in my mind, solidified in the chaos ritual of my own making, sactified by goetic spirits and the energy of petitioned Gods and Goddesses from ancient cultures. On the astral plane it was already real, I was there, living in the tropics, rich, popluar, loved – and the reality of the broken, unhappy boy kneeling before the homemade shrine was a fading ghost world melting out of existence.
There was excitment, and fear… and also a sense of sadness. In the centre of the shrine were the two voodoo dolls that had become so central to my life. I could say my only hope, but my life also. I’d handstitched them and slowly filled them with magickal herbs of abundance, the ashes of my burned wishes, auspicious planetary flowerspetals, every occult correspondence I could think of. They were the anchor of the inner life I was now living, away from the greyness and cold lonliness of my earthly, dying ghost past, to my current astral place, my future, a wife and home in a new world.
A glance at the props around the shrine, Asia travel guidebooks, passport cover, travel washing line, absurd things I’d spent my unemplyment checks on… but I was so sure that reality was about to change. Soon, now, all this would be gone. The dolls, the models, magickal scripts, talisman, months of magickal work, to be sewn up in the black silk that it all now rested on, weighted with the italian marble egg purchased especially for the task at hand: to take the sewn magick, an auspicious hour, to the Serpentine Lake in London and dropped forever into it’s depths, together with my thoughts and attention about a life I had decided to no longer aknowledge nor live.