Astrological Services: The Stories in the Stars
I offer a full range of astrological services, using a mix of Hellenistic and modern tropical methods grounded in a deep understanding of ageless myth and the magic of the stars themselves. My approach is as much a science as an art, using both intuitive and analytical tools to identify and make sense of the prevailing patterns, find the signals you need in the noise of a living universe, and bring them to earth in a useful fashion. The following are the ser
- Natal chart analysis. As the oracle says, Know Thyself! There’s a lifetime’s worth of depth in every nativity birth chart, coded in a nuanced and carefully balanced symbolic language derived from tens of thousands of years of human experience. You can also explore another chart, such as that for an event or organization, in order to know the world from another angle. Please note, however, that I will not read the chart of a person not present for the reading without their express permission.
- Transits, progressions, profections, and other prognostic methods. Personalized space weather forecasts help you to move with, not against, the unfolding currents of your life. Get right with the zeitgeist!
- Synastry and chart comparison. Relational astrology helps you understand where your most important others are coming from, and how to find connection across your differences. Please note that both parties are required to be present for such readings.
- Chart rectification. For when you don’t know what chart to use.
- Remediation. Practical tools for working with difficult transits and natal placements.
- Astrocartography. Where you stand changes what stars you can see. Learn how your life interacts with place.
- Elections. Planning ahead? These methods help you take the right action at the right time for best results.
- Hand-drawn charts. See the Arts and Crafts page for more information; order one for yourself or as a present.
- Astrological tutoring and instruction. Learn to do it yourself.
Bibliomancy: Consulting Sacred Text
What does the I Ching have say? How about the Bible?
Sometimes it’s not what you ask but who you ask that matters. This is what tomes of ageless wisdom are for: to be repositories of the accumulated experience and wisdom of countless generations of those who lived, died, spoke with each other and their living world, had mystical insights and visions, lived the best and worst of their worlds–and wrote it down.
Bibliomancy is the art and practice of consulting these books to find the stories that can be of use to us here and now. While any meaningful text can be consulted and some truth found, certain works carry such richness and density of connection as to be of nearly universal application if approached correctly. For clients who ask, I will consult such sacred texts respectfully and according to my training and personal experience.
Cartomancy: Tarot and Beyond
Consulting
Our world is awash in information, but making sense of it is another matter! Mundane or magical, bring me your burning queries, and I’ll help you find a way forward. Many questions can be resolved simply through careful, compassionate, and critical discussion; for more complex issues, additional information may be required.
Some questions can be addressed with a little research–for these, I offer the fruits of a lifetime of reading widely and deeply to help you not only find the answers you’re looking for but to put them into context. Consider me your personal research librarian!
Other questions require a more personal and human investigation–for these questions, I compassionate and attentive listener with a range of tools for further inquiry. My goal is to help you find your way to the answers that you carry within yourself, as well as to make available wisdom from others who have grappled with similar questions.
Finally, some questions can only be addressed by an intelligence bigger than ours; for these I offer my skills as an experienced spiritual co-explorer, drawing on deep traditions and time-honored mystical practices to help you connect to your own spirit guides and sources of more-than-human wisdom.
Sessions may involve a range of information-gathering modalities, including but not limited to, empathic listening and conversation, critical analysis, practical experimentation, dream interpretation, cartomancy, I Ching, astrological analysis, exploration of somatic experience, trance journey (for those with an established practice), bibliomancy, academic research, scrying, and runework.
Finally, sometimes it’s not a matter of getting more information, but of using it to change the world or ourselves with practical tools to operationalize new understandings. Once you’ve got the answers you’re looking for, I offer a range of potent and efficacious personal ritual, public ritual, and talismanic magic to connect your heart’s desire directly to the power of spirit and support its manifestation in your life.
I offer single-session consultations in person, by phone, and over video. For those who want to go deeper, I offer ongoing programs of personalized investigation. Please contact me for rates and to schedule sessions.
Oneiromancy: Dreamwork
Pastoral Counseling
As an initiate of the Mysteries in the Crossroads lineage and a licensed minister, I’ve been holding space and confidentiality, listening sensitively to vulnerable confessions, caring for bodies and souls, and helping my clients navigate their personal challenges and spiritual journeys for over a decade.
Research, Academic
Some questions need you to be able to cite your sources. With over two decades as an editor in academic publishing, including cutting-edge research and foundational texts at an undergraduate, graduate, and professional level across many fields and with a BA in literary studies and textual analysis, I can help. While I won’t do your homework for you, I can talk you through analyzing and generating research questions, conducting literature reviews, locating potential sources and evaluating their usefulness, resolving contradictory information, evaluating potential experimental techniques, and other fine details of the scholastic art.
Somatic Exploration
Sometimes–often–the answer is inside you. This is the art of listening deeply to the body, hearing what it has to say, understanding what it’s asking you to do, and doing it. While this is primarily an information-gathering technique, it may also offer more direct benefits–such as relief of symptoms connected with chronic or acute conditions–due to its inherent embodiment in a powerful living system.
Spirit Work, Channelling, and Journeying
For some questions, it’s best to go straight to the source. Direct communication with the living and intelligent world, through a wide variety of techniques that are found in some form in every current or historical culture, is humanity’s oldest method of learning what we need to know. It’s at the root of all of our religion and the source of all of our sciences (don’t believe me? Ask how I know!). And it’s the backbone of my personal practice and a powerful tool for both gaining insight and changing the world.
And while I can go there myself and come back to tell you what I saw, ultimately it’s more useful for you to find it for yourself. While we all have the potential for direct communication with an unlimited source of knowledge, it takes time and experience to learn to navigate into altered states and other realms and come back with useful insight. My role is to help you find the door and open it; hold it open while you step across, offer protection and support; and help you integrate when you return.
This work is highly personal, potent, potentially dangerous, and absolutely necessary for the thriving of the humans and their planet. For those new to spirit work and serious about learning, I offer open-ended courses of personalized instruction from the initial consultation till you’re flying with your own wings. For those with an established practice, I offer skilled collaborative ritual planning, pre-ceremony and in-ceremony support when you need backup, another voice, or just a set of hands on a drum.
Preliminary consultation and divination are required before any advanced ritual practices are undertaken.
Teaching, Tutoring, and Mentorship
Want to study with me? For dedicated and self-motivated students at all levels, I offer one-on-one study sessions on topics mundane and magical. Using Socratic and learner-centered methods, I help you master material assigned in other courses, explore the connections between what you know and what you’re hoping to learn, offer accountability for meeting goals and deadlines, polish and clarify thinking, and unlock new avenues of inquiry.
Not sure if I can help you learn what you need to learn? Just ask! I’m happy to discuss my depth of knowledge in a particular field. I can provide tutoring in any field at a high school or 101 level; in many fields (especially in the humanities and social sciences) at an undergraduate level; and in select fields related to magic in theory and practice at a professional/postgraduate level.
I’m also available for group classes, presentations, question-and-answer sessions, and demonstrations of any material within my range of expertise. Engage me to speak to your class or small group on a topic of your choice!
Personal Ritual
Meet Me at the Crossroads
This is where theory meets practice and the magic comes through.
This page is not about my own personal rituals and practices–some of which are discussed elsewhere–but about how ritual and ceremonial tools and practices can help you open the ways to the full flourishing of your own life potentials and those of your loved ones, community, and world. It’s where the dreams become real, spirit meets body, and humans enact the that define our lives and help us meet the world in a good way.
For over a decade, I’ve helped clients and community, receive, plan, enact, and integrate their own ritual practices, and I’ve also offered my services as a ritualist, spirit practitioner, and ordained witch to negotiate with the more-than-human world on their behalf.
All ritual work for others is undertaken only after preliminary divination and consultation
Practical Magic
Divination
Divination is literally the process of asking for and inviting inspiration from the divine–not just any wandering spirit or wayward meme! Whether the medium is a deck of cards, a scattering of sticks, the use of sacred calendars, the language of birds, or the incubation of healing dreams, it’s about giving our fortunes a chance to reveal themselves in our lives in a good way, to intentionally let a greater meaning into our lives so we’re not adrift on the seas of fate.
Some form of divination is required when undertaking any work of magic beyond basic clearing, protection, and healing, and is strongly recommended before undertaking any major project or when facing big decisions–or even to navigate the ups and down of daily life.
Clearing, Grounding, and Protection
This is elementary. Grounding is for knowing where you are and connecting to something bigger and more stable than you.
Clearing is for when you’re picked something up along your path and haven’t been able to shake it. Whether it’s an ancestral curse or a toxic relationship, a bad habit or a spirit attachment, clearing your spiritual, mental, physical, and emotional bodies is one of the most important foundations for greater flourishing.
Protection is staying safe in a world full of countless beings, forces, and influences seen and unseen. It’s the practice of surrounding yourself with those who have your best interests at heart, knowing yourself and your allies, and tending your connections until you live in the heart of flourishing.
House/Space Clearing and Protection
Sometimes the trouble isn’t something you brought home, but what you’re coming home to. Before moving in to a new place, or when problems keep arising in a space you’re already in, the magics of space clearing, placemaking, home protection, and getting right with the land are vital tools for flourishing right where you are–and when it’s time to leave, to go cleanly and in good spirits.
Road Opening
Community Ritual
Community Ritual
A better world doesn’t just happen–we all have a part to play in our families and small communities, our circles and cities and wider cultures. Community ritual–coming together with intention, tending our interconnections with each other and a living world–weaves our lives into patterns of greater meaning.
In a world fragmented by rapid change and by cultures of exploitation, violence, and disconnection, our healing lies in the power to connect, and reconnect, with each other and with the greater cycles and systems that nurture life.
It has been my great honor and pleasure to serve various communities as a ritual planner, facilitator, and creator of sacred space, performer, and officiant, working within an earth-based, syncretic tradition that weaves together age-old practices and emerging streams of connection to bring blessing to the human and more-than-human world. If this resonates with you, contact me to discuss how I can help your family or community group celebrate your most important transitions.
Wedding Officiation
For many people, weddings are among the most significant and memorable ceremonies they’ll ever experience–as they should be, since the deep joining of one life with another is both a highly individual commitment and also an important foundation for strong families, thriving communities, and healthy cultures.
For those outside organized religion but who seek deeper and more authentic relationships, I help craft and solemnize ceremonies that draw on their deepest threads of meaning and connection, bringing together the blessings of families and friends, and the witness of many worlds to celebrate their commitments.
I’m especially excited to offer these services to members of the queer and LGBT+ community, in recognition of the special significance marriage holds for a group that has so often been denied the public recognition and validation of their love and deep relationship.
Due to the highly personal nature of this ceremony and the significance of the wedding vows, at least two sessions of in-person consultation and premarital counseling are required.
Dreaming the World to Come: Group Journeys and Collaborative Storytelling
Between the source and any destination, the going out and the coming home, run many roads, and each of us has our own path to walk through life, and a direction unique to us. But all roads interconnect, and none of us walks always alone. And when in unfamiliar territory–like everyone whose eye is on the future–it’s best to go with good companions, guides who’ve been where you’re going, and strength in numbers.
Seasonal Ritual
These are the big festivals
Song, Dance, and Sacred Drama
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Praesent tincidunt, erat ut gravida posuere, orci massa mattis enim, a commodo est tellus at erat. Nam non ligula et velit blandit rutrum. Mauris eleifend at dui eget consectetur. Donec eget vulputate tellus. Maecenas quis nibh ac ipsum pulvinar mattis. Morbi sagittis lorem et diam sollicitudin mollis. Vivamus laoreet eleifend luctus. Vestibulum ante ipsum primis in faucibus orci luctus et ultrices posuere cubilia curae; Sed ac ipsum quis neque tristique aliquet id ac velit. Ut risus neque, pharetra ut enim in, varius pretium ipsum. Mauris vitae odio leo. Maecenas mollis, tellus laoreet pellentesque pharetra, mauris augue maximus nibh, ac imperdiet odio sapien sit amet elit. Suspendisse sed est a leo ornare varius et et magna. Integer sed velit blandit nulla bibendum ullamcorper. Donec libero metus, feugiat nec faucibus vel, hendrerit ac enim. Donec ut rutrum erat. Phasellus pulvinar a ex non ullamcorper. Nulla egestas finibus pulvinar. Mauris faucibus nisl ac nulla imperdiet, consequat vehicula leo pretium. Praesent lobortis imperdiet urna, quis consequat tellus elementum ac. Nullam non rutrum augue, venenatis gravida massa.
Tools, Works, and Results
Tarot of the Watchers
This deck was begun as a personal exploration in 2004, and remains close to my heart. Though the deck is incomplete–and likely to remain that way for some time–many finished works have come out of the process. Some of these will be highlighted here, along with sketches and juvenalia.
Elements/Dark Sun
Over the course of 12 years and countless eons of dream time, I carried out a self-directed course of study into the Mysteries, looking for the light of truth shining through darkness. Thousands of hours of research and practical experimentation culminated in a nine-month ritual carried out in late 2013 and early 2014, which challenged every part of my life, transformed me irrevocably. My experiences left me with no doubt about the reality of Spirit, the infinitely miraculous nature of the manifest world, or the immortality of my soul; gave me sure knowledge of my personal nature, purpose, and destiny, as well as insight into many hidden and marvelous things; and offered at least a small window on the more-than-comprehensible, utterly unspeakable Truth that supports and sustains me and all things. Here you’ll find a few of the tools that I was given in darkness, journey-works of shadow to find my way to the sun. They may be entirely personal to me, and strange and barbarous to some; I offer them in the faith that miracles do not cease, and that my own records may be useful to other seekers in their journeys, as the works of past wizards were to me and mine.
Collaborations
The creation of culture is a work of many hands. Here you’ll find artworks that were created in part by others–some were canvases found half-finished and discarded, that I took it upon myself to elaborate; others were created by many hands at once, and passed last through mine; and some were created by others explicitly for me to enjoy finishing. This is a homage to all the creators, professional and otherwise, who have inspired me, taught me, and given me material for my contributions.
A Work of Angels
Older than the Abrahamic traditions with which they’re mostly associated, the beings called angels belong to some of the oldest and most universal threads of human interaction with the divine and more-than-human world: and they’re always present to help us, if we open to their help. I’ve been fascinated with these strange and deeply familiar beings since childhood. They range from the “fallen” Watchers, teachers of all human arts, to the great and holy Archangels, the choirs of flaming serpents, the Wheels and Thrones and Holy Living Beasts, and the august council of the 72 Angels of the Secret Name and beyond. Here you’ll find art drawing on received tradition and personal visions inspired by these messengers.
Star (Ch)Arts
Fully personalized maps of the heavens, hand-drawn, fully illustrated and illuminated, with accessory tables and tools. Each chart is an individual, fully custom work of art suitable for display, study, and meditation. Originally an offering for friends and family, I’ve received enough interest in these to offer them more widely, in a range of finishes to suit a variety of tastes and budgets. Due to their complexity and custom nature, I can only draw a few of these a year–so don’t wait! If you’re interested in ordering one for yourself or as a gift, contact me to discuss options and pricing.
Working Tools
Many magi who have achieved marvelous things, while seeking deeply into the works of their own teachers, claim that the tools will serve the worker best that were made by one’s own hand–definitely wise words, but since we’re not all professional wizards, here are some of the tools I’ve found or made, as well as (eventually) some guidance to help the aspiring wizard make their own.
A Queer Craft Indeed
I do love a good miscellany.