Lon Milo DuQuette - Homemade Magick: The Musings & Mischief of a Do-It-Yourself Magus

Llewellyn Publications

Woodbury, Minnesota

Copyright Information

Homemade Magick: The Musings & Mischief of a Do-It-Yourself Magus 2014 by Lon Milo DuQuette.

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First e-book edition 2014

E-book ISBN: 9780738733241

Cover design by Ellen Lawson

Cover images: iStockphoto.com/19726828/ adventtr, iStockphoto.com/5013957/ sbayram, Tarot images from Tarot of Ceremonial Magick, created by Lon Milo DuQuette and painted by Constance Jean DuQuette. Published by Thelesis Aura: http://www.thelesisaura.com. Used with permission. Family photo courtesy of Lon Milo DuQuette.

Editing by Andrea Neff

Interior art by Llewellyn Art Department pages

Interior photo credits on page

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Intent is the mechanics through which spirit
transforms itself into material reality.

Deepak Chopra

Constances dream board placed squarely over the washing machine.

. Deepak Chopra, The Spontaneous Fulfillment of Desire: Harnessing the Infinite Power of Coincidence (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2004), p. 115.

Special Thanks

This little book is dedicated to the talented, generous, supportive, and forgiving friends and brethren who have since 1975 taught Constance and me everything . All that is good and true, awesome and holy, has poured like liquid light from the cornucopia that is the love of these dear souls.

Most especially to our dear friends and fellow homemade magicians Doug and Karen James, and Steve and Judy Abbott, we say thank you. We are so lucky to have once again incarnated with you.

Special thanks also go to Hymenaeus Beta, Frater Superior of Ordo Templi Orientis, for his kind permission to print the various excerpts from the works of Aleister Crowley; and to North Atlantic books for permission to print material adapted from the translation by Blaise Daniel Staples of the Homeric Hymn to Demeter , originally published in The Road to Eleusis: Unveiling the Secret of the Mysteries by R. Gordon Wasson, Albert Hofmann, and Carl A. P. Ruck, Thirtieth Anniversary Edition published by North Atlantic Books, Copyright 2008 by the R. Gordon Wasson Estate. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.

Contents

: Nebraska Maids

Part I: Initiation

: Rant of the Homemade Magician

: Who Are You?

: Your Homemade Magical Motto

: Homemade Initiation

: Homemade Ritual of Self-Initiation

Part II: Magical Weapons

: What Are the Magical Weapons, Really?

: The Magick Disk (or Pantacle)

: The Magick Sword

: The Magick Cup

: The Magick Wand

: Homemade Consecration Ritual

Part III: A Magical Lodge in Your Home

: Think You Have Nowhere to Go to Learn Magick?
Start Teaching What You Wish to Learn!

: Raising Children in a Magical Home

: Magick on the Road

: Challenges and Rewards of Being Married to Another Magician

: Homemade Tarot Cards

: Do I Have to Get a Job

: Homemade Monastery

: The Demon Who Saved My Life

: Backyard Mystery School

: At the Gate of the New Year

prologuededication

Nebraska Maids

It does not matter much whom we live with in this world,
but it matters a great deal whom we dream of.

Willa Cather (Nebraskan), A Gold Slipper

Like my father and brother before me, I was born in Southern California and journeyed to rural Nebraska to find a bride. There is something primeval and mammalian about being born and raised in one part of the world, then traveling to some strange and exotic land to fall in love and find a mate. Indeed, many classic fairy tales tell of a wandering prince who wins his dream princess in a foreign land.

Obviously, Im not a prince, and Nebraska isnt exactly strange or exotic; but for a seven-year-old boy (rudely uprooted from his home in sunny Southern California), the Cornhusker State in 1956 was a grotesque nightmare. I felt like a shell-shocked war refugeecruelly banished from my beachfront homeland and exiled to a dusty, chigger-infested wilderness populated by coarse barbarians who didnt trim the fat off their ham sandwiches, considered Jell-O with a dollop of mayonnaise to be salad, and for some strange reason called lunch dinner.

I languished for a full decade in small-town Nebraska, fantasizing that Id be rescued by a flying saucer and plotting my escape back to the hip and trendy land of my birth. At night I dreamed I smelled the beach; I actually tasted the salt of the ocean on my dream tongue. Throughout my decade of Nebraska exile, California grew in my imagination into a mythical Ithaca. But unlike the hero Odysseus, I had no queen waiting for me on the golden shores of my lost kingdom. For that illusive treasure I would need to grow up and find a Nebraska woman .

Perhaps it is because Nebraska breeds a very special womanthe kind of woman who stoically endures some of the most brutal winters on earth for months on end when bitter arctic winds blast down from Canada and sweep through the Dakotas foiled by nothing higher than prairie grass; the kind of woman who, when the mercury tops a humid 110 degrees, will wash her hair in the kitchen sink and blithely brush it dry on the back porch; the kind of woman who, without blinking an eye, will lance a boil, stanch a bleeding wound, or gut a fish; the kind of woman who will, with firm and loving hands, tenderly end the life of a suffering dog or cat.

Despite all the cruelties and hardships this land inflicts upon them, these remarkable women love Nebraska. If destiny conspires to pluck them up and carry them off to faraway places, their hearts remain rooted in the thick, black loam of the prairie. They pine for that terrible and beautiful place like lovesick maidens who never recover from an adolescent romance. The change of seasons pulls their hearts back to the awesome land that wooed them so roughly. Like the majestic sandhill cranes, their souls migrate year after year back to the cruel and fragrant Eden of the Platte River Valleya world the Pawnees called the happy hunting grounds.