A homily for Beltane and the Full Moon in Taurus on May 1, 2026.
Dearly Beloved,
Blessed Beltane (and blessed Samhain to all of you in the Southern Hemisphere) and blessed Full Moon, dear ones. I greet you in the name of Aphrodite and the name of the Divine on this, the Beltane of 2026 and the Full Moon of Taurus.
We made it!
We made it to another year, another Spring, another Beltane. Despite it all, we are celebrating joy and fertility and warm green growth. Alone or with others, in our temples, groves, or living rooms, we are here, we are alive, and some of us are even daring enough to be hopeful.
Mission accomplished. Good job, everyone.
Now, I would love to be able to write a nice, horny Beltane homily. But I just can’t. I am bound by oaths. I have to preach the inspiration I am given and I have to lead with my vulnerability. Aphrodite will accept nothing less. I gave us all a break on the New Moon because I just plain needed to have a bit of mercy on myself and all of you, but it’s time for another hard teaching, dear ones. Brace yourselves.
I am an anxious person. I am constantly assessing the people and situations around me for threats. I have a whole team of Magie Sans Frontières diviners who give me weekly sortilege and monthly astrology reports so that I can have help detecting threats. The only place I truly feel safe is in my own home, behind my own house shields, wards, and defensive spirits, and even then I tend to avoid social interaction with anyone except my wife and my spirit family. Some of that is the way my grandfather “trained” me as a child to be a paranoid little airman. Some of it is the trauma of years of homelessness during a formative time of my life. Some of it is being transgender in a world where a lot of people want transgender people to not exist.
But a big part of it is just because the world is dangerous. And that includes the world of magick, mysticism, and living the spiritual life.
I have been working within the initiatory structure of the Thelemic order called the A.’.A.’. for most of my life (I started my probation in early April, 1996). Many people think of ceremonial magicians as being stuffy know-it-alls, and that is fair, but the reality is that this sort of initiatory system is a decades-long rollercoaster ride through the Tree Of Life. Crowley talks extensively about his grade work and his ordeals in the “Confessions”, known by some as “the Hag” because Crowley, ever the showman, labeled his autobiography as an “autohagiography”, which means that it is the autobiography of a saint. He also named himself a saint of the Ecclesia Gnostica Catholica, the religious arm of the Ordo Templi Orientis (of which I have talked much shit), an order that he was in charge of at the time. So…yeah. That was Crowley. Founder of my tradition and co-founder of my order. Magus of the aeonic word Thelema. A super-humble and down-to-earth guy.
Sigh.
I love Thelema the same way I love my country: like only someone who has seen its ugliness and come out the other side can. But today I don’t want to talk about Thelema itself, but rather the A.’.A.’. and the way its initiatory system works.
Each grade corresponds to a sephira on the Qabalistic Tree Of Life. Each sephira corresponds to all of these: a principle of existence, a mystical state of consciousness, a particular hierarchy of spiritual entities and magickal correspondences, and a particular region within the abstract realm of existence which I will, for simplicity’s sake, call the astral plane.
Each grade culminates in an ordeal, a crisis brought about through the continuous invocation of (and confrontation with) the principle of existence, state of consciousness, and spiritual entities keyed to that grade. In this ordeal, the aspirant must utilize the secret of that grade, discovered during their grade work, in order to succeed. No one can tell the aspirant the secret in words, or rather any words used will be meaningless to the aspirant. The words can only point at a lived understanding that comes from working the grade. Any attempt to communicate the secret of a grade to someone that has not learned that secret for themselves will be merely suggestive, not revelatory or transformative. Initiation into a new grade in the A.’.A.’. is actually the acknowledgment of a transformation brought about through the grade work and the ordeal, not the transformation itself.
If the aspirant fails their ordeal, they stay stuck in that grade, simmering in the juices of that sephira until another, worse, ordeal is provoked. Then the aspirant has another chance to properly use the secret of their grade to pass their test. This process will repeat indefinitely and escalate at each iteration until the aspirant either passes their ordeal or dies.
The aspirant can, of course, choose to forsake their oaths to the order, to the Divine, and to themselves and just quit the whole system at any time. They are free to stop doing their grade work and invocations and, if they do so, the pressure of the energetic current will soon be relieved. But that is generally ill-advised. Just because you are done with the gods doesn’t mean the gods are done with you, and once you are branded an oathbreaker in this business it’s a hard thing to make right. Promises matter immensely in magick and a deal is a deal.
So the whole order is, from one point of view, actually a system for provoking the universe into a series of increasingly transformative ordeals. Don’t get me wrong, we study a whole syllabus of magickal and mystical works (as well as philosophy) for each grade, we learn and practice theurgy, thaumaturgy, and goêteia, and I spent my probation year in almost daily instruction with my teacher, but the initiatory work is most of the system and that work is done alone. And the scary thing—the absolutely terrifying thing—about every single grade is that you have no clue who you are going to be after you come out of an ordeal. Like many initiations, it’s a cycle of death and rebirth. Your ordeal kills the old you, and the you that rises out of it is a new creature (which is why we take a new name or motto at each grade). So you end up taking a lot on faith and you spend a lot of time trying to figure out each different “you” when you get a chance to come up for air. During two of my grades I literally went from the extreme of the Right Hand Path (Orthodox Christian hesychasm) to the extreme of the Left Hand Path (theistic Satanism and Setianism), all within about 5 years. It was a hell of a ride, but I learned a lot of magick that I would never have learned otherwise.
Now, there are a lot of criticisms that can be made of the approach I took. As the creature of extremes that I was during those years, I left a lot of damage in my wake, especially during my elemental grades (the lower grades in the system). I was irresponsible in various ways, especially with hearts, both those of others and my own. I had two failed marriages and a daughter who went up for adoption. My health was shattered permanently. My heart was well and truly broken multiple times. In every grade, again and again, various forms of danger dogged my steps. I suffered and I suffer still. But I would do it all again in a heartbeat as long as I could treat people the way I do now instead of being an asshole.
I had a vision during my last grade, the Vision Of Understanding, a great alignment of all of my bits and pieces made available to my introspection as a whole. I saw it all…my whole life. The parts handed to me by the Fates, the parts I did with others, and the parts I did all alone. Every crisis and decision point. Every relationship built, love lost, and lesson learned. Every intense ordeal and every long haul where the ordeal was cooking up slowly and the lesson was simple discipline and perseverance over years.
In that vision every single phenomenon in my life was revealed to me as the direct dealing of the Divine with my soul. I saw it all, all at once. A lifetime of experiences, choices, consequences, and all the ways that I connected to the world and people in it. A lifetime of love and lust, of pain and loss, of near-misses and mundane dangers barely noticed yet, in retrospect, barely survived. And every little bit fit together. Every little detail made sense. Oh, I still can’t fathom the motivations of various other people, but my life, my initiatory path, my Great Work, me…it all fit together perfectly. I finally became legible to myself. I understood. I understand still, gods help me.
And one of those things that I understand is that I am afraid.
My country, the country I have spent my life trying so hard to love with all my heart, the country that was built by enslaved people, the country that has murdered millions in war and has let millions die to poverty, is coming for transgender people next. We are the easy target, the way to distract people from their own poverty, dire even though so many people work so hard every day. We are the way to get people riled up enough to forget their empty stomachs, their empty gas tanks, and their empty bank accounts long enough to hold their nose and vote Republican. We are the way to force Democrats to fracture their base no matter what they do. And there are so few of us that we will never be able to meaningfully resist, even if we organize every single transgender person in the US. It’s genius, really. We are the perfect target, the minority that will never be able to fight back.
But I’m still working the system. I’m a good little trooper. I will be an A.’.A.’. girl till the day I die (and beyond, technically). I still see, with that part of me that will always be in Binah, how all the parts fit together, and that includes the fact that I am transgender. That I was always transgender. And that being transgender exposes me to danger. To crisis.
To ordeal.
I took the name Xenē when I took my current grade, the New Moon before my last birthday. I assumed that since I had my Big Important Vision and got my aeonic words, that was it. All that laid before me was the ongoing work of making theiatry a real thing. But mere months later I was given the name Despoina by Demeter, given my mandate, and founded Magie Sans Frontières. Rather than being the end of my transformations, as I thought it would be, taking my last grade has turned into a perpetual transformation. I have become and I am becoming. And throughout it all, the danger hangs in the air. Bills are being passed. An infrastructure of facilities is being created. I am afraid, but I have to admit that the twisted part of me is also excited. I want to see what happens.
I want to see who I become next.
I am currently revising my book on magickal warfare. I will begin pursuing publication very soon. This book compiles my work on the subject over the last 30 years and a presents a systematic method. I have previously refused to publish or teach my system of magickal warfare because I did not want to be responsible for the harm that people might cause with my methods. But now I see that I was wrong. People are going to cause harm with or without me. Blame it on evolution or Titan blood or Original Sin as you will, but conflict between individuals and factions will happen. War is in our bones and in our blood. It is far better that I arm those who need it so that they can protect themselves and others. And with magickal warfare, we can at least resolve our conflicts without causing a nuclear winter or sending most of a generation of young people off to their deaths. That is definitely an improvement on the current situation.
The reality is that when the world becomes this dangerous, the only proper response is to get dangerous right back. So in that spirit I will end this homily with the final stanza of Kahlil Gibran’s amazing poem “Defeat”:
“Defeat, my Defeat, my deathless courage,
You and I shall laugh together with the storm,
And together we shall dig graves for all that die in us,
And we shall stand in the sun with a will,
And we shall be dangerous.”
Blessed Beltane and Full Moon, dear ones. May the gods bless you all in the coming weeks. In spite of it all, I remain…
In love,
Soror Alice
Art: László Mednyánszky, “Old Man’s Death”, 1890
Alice Adora Spurlock, also known as Soror Alice, Xenē, and Despoina, is a professional witch and ceremonial magician with 30 years of experience. She is available for hire to help you accomplish your goals. Learn more here. Book a session now (Tarot reading included!).