On The Blessedness Of Darkness

A homily for the Full Moon in Pisces on March 3, 2026. Written, as always, without authority.

Dearly Beloved,

Blessed Full Moon, dear ones. I greet you in the name of Aphrodite and the name of the Divine on this, the Full Moon of Pisces.

It’s been a rough couple of weeks.

I recently had a long, difficult, and yet also somehow delightful and healing journey down memory lane with someone who knew me back in my Santa Cruz days at the Sacred Grove. This person was someone I only interacted with a handful of times over a few years. Apparently I was distinctly unkind. I only vaguely remember these interactions but I have no problem believing this person’s account because I was a huge asshole when I was younger. I was in my earlier grades in the A.’.A.’. at the time, so I was going through those initiatory ordeals with just a year or two between them, which wasn’t fun for anyone, and I was doing all of that in a community that was very witchy (this was back when the “Wiccan Rede” was a very popular belief), so I felt defiant and defensive all the time as a ceremonial magician and as a Thelemite. I was also young, dumb, and very goth. I wore all black and a long black trench coat, I had long dyed black hair, I listened to Dead Can Dance and Bauhaus…I was very dedicated to the aesthetic. I was also very edgy and liked to shock people with my tales of evoking demons (it was Buer, and he was helping me with my logic homework) and my studies of magickal warfare (which I almost never had occasion to use in those days because I just didn’t get into conflicts very much).

So I got a largely undeserved reputation for being a “black magician”, which I hated and reveled in alternately as I grew up (I was 23 when we opened the Grove and I had a lot of growing up to do). This wasn’t helped by the seriously toxic relationship I had with my former best friend, polycule-mate, and business partner, Birch. He encouraged all the worst parts of me and used me as the “heavy” at the Grove. I was the person who had to confront people and be the villain that held people accountable so that the Grove Collective could function. My nickname at the time was “Puck” and, among the Sacred Grove folks, “pucking” someone was to get them alone after the shop closed and confront them with a long and painstakingly logical argument for why they were fucking up and needed to get their shit together before there were unfortunate consequences for all of us.

That was my role at the Sacred Grove, in addition to the rest of my work. I wasn’t even called “Puck”, technically. I was “the Puck”, like “the stick” or “the wrench”. I was a function, a tool, a weapon, not a person, and Birch was the one who aimed me and pulled the trigger. I fulfilled a really shitty function that everyone hated even while agreeing that it was necessary within the very broken little family we had formed. We were a collective of several people trying to run an occult shop, teach classes, and put on rituals, but all of the work of accountability was made my duty. And I hated it. The whole dynamic really fucked me up for a lot of years.

Time passed. I got out of school, left the Grove, moved away from Santa Cruz, and became both much simpler and far more complex. I worked the A.’.A.’. system on my own after my teacher died and took my grades at a (mostly) reasonable pace. My spiritual life led to profound transformations over the years. Ironically, it was only after I grew out of the aesthetics of darkness that I truly came to understand darkness. The darkness within others and the darkness within myself.

Because despite what I would prefer, there is a great darkness within me.

I am willing to do whatever it takes to get the job done. That was my Grandfather’s motto and it is my motto, too. It’s not that I lack a conscience. Quite the opposite. I am deeply concerned with the Ethical, as my philosophical and pastoral work will attest, and I am haunted with guilt over even small harms. But nonetheless, I will bind, curse, make pacts with demons, and quite literally bring Hell itself to my enemies if it means that those I care about will be made safer because of it.

And I will teach others how to do the same, to Hell with the consequences, because I think mages deserve to know how to defend themselves and others if they need to. That means that yes, the book on magickal warfare is coming. Soon.

Now, I have studied ethics for most of my adult life and I know what it means that I am willing to do all of that. It means that I am a bad person or, at the very least, it means that I am not a good person. I have wanted to be a good person for most of my adult life, and for a while it really looked like it was going to happen. But that’s just not the way it’s shaking out. I don’t get to be soft. I don’t get to be sweet. And I most assuredly don’t get to be good. My life will always have a certain level of ethical complexity. A certain amount of necessary darkness. It’s just what I am.

That breaks my heart in ways I can’t ever tell you in prose. It is a topic fit only for my poetry, such as it is. I seek the heights of Heaven, but all I will ever reach is Outer Olympus. I am a wretched thing, a broken toy, a temporary tension, an in-between, a hybrid moment striving against the order of things. But that is the price I am willing to pay to make sure my wife, my daughter that I put up for adoption when I was 21, and as many other people as possible are safer. I will do whatever it takes, in life’s name and for life’s sake, to find the Road To Dawn, the path through all of this where as many people live, are free, and can thrive as possible. The mission—this mission—comes first.

Always and forever.

The New Moon before Samhain last year I posted “Magick Without Borders”, the founding document of Magie Sans Frontières, an international organization of spirits and mages that provides protection, healing, and prosperity magick for those threatened by the forces of authoritarianism, bigotry, and colonialism. Since that document was posted, MSF has grown and thrived. We have been working missions for about two and half months and we have enjoyed some modest successes, enough successes to act as a proof of concept. The system works. MSF works.

This is my solution for what is happening, for the rise of fascism and violence that I call the Long Night. This is what I came up with, thanks to a big push from Demeter. We will protect those who need it and fight magickally for those who cannot fight for themselves physically.

And that sounds great. It sounds noble and good and true. I want it to be true. I believe in it and I want all of you to believe in it, too.

But my solution is still war.

War can never truly be ethical. Make no mistake about it, once we are willing to cause harm to pursue our objectives—even if that harm prevents a greater harm—we are damned. Using magick doesn’t change that. Just because it happens at a distance or over time changes nothing about the ethics of causing harm or interfering with free will. That doesn’t mean that it is always actually wrong to do those things, it just means that doing them has consequences both mundane and spiritual. Sometimes it is the right thing to do to punch the bully in the nose, but getting into fistfights with people can have a lot of adverse consequences, regardless of your reasons. We live in an ethically complex universe and sometimes the best choice available is still a shitty choice.

I do all of this out of love and love makes me willing to do terrible things. That is who I am. That’s who I’ve always been. That is why Aphrodite accepted me when I was introduced to Her by another priestess almost six years ago. Like calls out to like. Aphrodite’s chosen partner is Ares, after all. So I do this out of love, but there is a darkness in my love. A harshness. A cold protectiveness that I inherited from my true Mother. My love is the kind of love that would hold her child down while the doctor removed a gangrenous limb, the kind of love that would kill to protect her family and live with the nightmares gladly, the kind of love that will literally sell her own soul off slice by slice a month at a time to help keep everyone safe.

I will weep. I have already wept and I will weep more. I will mourn every slice of myself that is sold away for this cause as I become more and more Despoina and less and less Soror Alice. But I will do it. I will harness my darkness in service of the mission, in the quest for some way through all of this. I will use my magick to try to protect others and I will ask others—I will ask you, dear ones—to do the same, whether with MSF or on your own.

Because that is what is going to take.

Now is the time. All of you mages, all of you stars in the company of stars, listen now, listen to me, listen: you must rise up against evil. You must use what power you have to fight for life, because it is life itself that is at stake. If you have the heart and ability to fight, fight. If you cannot, then heal. Feed people. Make art and joy to keep up morale. Visibly support the vulnerable and make clear to the enemy that they are not alone. We need each and every one of you to bring your gifts, your hearts, and your strength into this fight as we seek the Road To Dawn.

We need you. Darkness and all.

Blessed Full Moon, dear ones. I apologize for another hard teaching this month. But this is a time for hard teachings in the hope of future joy. May all of the gods bless you in the coming weeks.

In love,

Soror Alice

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Art: Francisco Goya, “Witches’ Flight”, (1797)