New server and new blog

Well, I moved servers and still have not gotten everything straightened out yet. This new server should be much faster–I sure am paying more–and it certainly offers me a lot more in terms of managing the site. I plan to add finally a lot of pages that are coming loose from Alchemy Works as I gradually discontinue items there and focus more sharply on purely witchcraft/magic related plants and plant materials there. I had originally intended herbalwitchcraft.com to be about herbal witchcraft. The blog was just something to put on the site until I got it together (ha!). And then the blog just growed, as they say, and the herbal witchcraft content just didn’t appear, because I was always too busy to put it up. In this move, I did manage to lose all my old blog posts. So I’m starting the blog over again from scratch. This is the second time I’ve lost it. That happened when I moved it from livejournal to herbalwitchcraft.com too. It’s getting to be a habit. It’s traditional in alchemy to start The Work in Aries, so I guess it fits that I am starting this again now.:)

I had just about decided that I would not resume Abramelin after Passover ends. I just did not have the time to do it, especially because spring/early summer is the busiest time of year for my business and for my garden. I’m swamped, in fact, which is good; I’m not complaining. But it doesn’t make for a good time to be spending hours studying or praying. I realized, though, that the bulk of the studying and praying in the six-month Abramelin would come after the garden was subsiding and the business had calmed down for the fall. So I thought it over but came to no conclusions.

Then today I got a call from an elderly woman in Louisiana somewhere. She called to ask me about bdellium, because she was interested in its connection to manna in the Hebrew Bible. We discussed that for a while. I enjoyed listening to her speak on account of her wonderful accent and also because she had a rather unusual take on Christianity: she is one of those Christians who believes in abiding by Mosaic law–the whole nine yards, not just the Ten Commandments. So she did not eat crustaceans or pork, nor would she work on the Sabbath, which for her is Saturday. She belongs to a church that takes that approach. She was very old-fashioned. But she inspired me. I thought if this old woman can adhere to her oddball beliefs in some tiny town in Louisiana and if she can get such satisfaction from them, then surely I can reboot Abramelin here and now.

So come the end of Passover, I will restart Abramelin, this time the six-month version. And we will see what happens this time.