Dark Moon Mysteries: An Interview with Lady Absinthe by Drusilla Bivalve

Dark Moon Mysteries: An Interview with Lady Absinthe

By Drusilla Bivalve

I caught up with Lady Absinthe as she was making her nightly peregrination through the Mimsy Barrow Grove, a lovely forest of old trees and burial mounds. Lady Absinthe is of course renowned for her Musken Frenzy love potions and her ground-breaking Footsie-Wootsie ritual for divining upcoming trends in shoe fashions. Lady Absinthe was on her way to perform a dark-of-the-moon spell in her grove, but was willing to say a few words on the subject of dark moons.

Drusilla: I see that you’re preparing for a dark moon ritual. What kinds of spells and rituals do you find to be most effective during this phase of the moon?

Lady Absinthe: Without a doubt, the dark moon is the most efficacious for banishing spells. I also do house cleansings, anti-thief wardings, and occasional bits of dream magick.

Drusilla: What deities do you access during this lunar phase, Lady Absinthe?

Lady Absinthe: Well of course there’s Hecate. She’s got a wide range of powers and domains, including the underworld, the sky and the sea. She’s a protector of herds and crops as well as the goddess of witches and crossroads. I give her a lot of credit for keeping her full credentials in spite of the invasions that disenfranchised so many of the other old European goddesses. The invaders were so scared of her that they left her alone. Even in the later Orphic cults, Hecate was revered as the “shouting goddess with the terrible voice who led the stranger to the god.”

Drusilla: What other goddesses are efficacious at the dark of the moon?

Lady Absinthe: There’s plenty of dark goddesses like Kali, Hella, Baba Yaga, the Furies and Nemesis, along with Lilith. Persephone can be helpful during the winter months. Artemis is always effective, especially if you’re working in a forest. Brimo or Phorba Brimo is the appropriate epithet of Artemis during the dark moon. She’s an chthonic Orphic lunar deity associated with Kotys, Semele, Bendis and Leto. Brimo is superb for especially tough banishments. She just chews up the object of the banishment, and they go down the throat of the screaming goddess.

Drusilla: Lovely. I’ll keep that in mind. What do you generally do to get her attention?

Lady Absinthe: I call her with the Orphic katabasis formula: “Phorba-Phorba-Brimo-Azziebya!”

Drusilla: You’ve mentioned the Orphic cult a few times now. Why is this?

Lady Absinthe: Back in the pagan hey-day, the witches of Thessaly and Thrace were quite famous throughout the empire. They really took to the Orphic mystery cult when it started to spread around 500 BC. They fused the cult’s rituals with their own regional specialties. It was a pretty potent blend. They were considered the masters of witchcraft and wizardry.

Drusilla: In general, what kind of energies do you work with during the dark moon?

Lady Absinthe: To me the dark of the moon is like returning to the darkness of the womb. The Earth is between the twins Apollo and Artemis, the sun and the moon. It prevents them from sharing light, and this opens the doors for paradoxes, edges and crossroads. The waning light of the balsamic moon is reduced and withheld, moving the hours of night into a week-long abyss lit only by the stars. All of the hags, biddies and crones of the various pantheons are drawn out of their caves and catacombs.

Drusilla: Hags and biddies and crones, oh my!

Lady Absinthe: You might want to keep your voice down unless you want visitors. My rule of thumb is never to mention entities I’m not prepared to deal with. Back to the subject, waters of the ocean, one of Hecate’s realms, draw in upon themselves during low tide periods, and carry things out to sea. This is why it’s such a good time for banishment and release, because it’s a cycle of reduction in the most literal sense. The waters are shrink away from the shores before starting a cycle of expansion.

Drusilla: So why is this paradoxical?

Lady Absinthe: Because the best workings during the dark of the moon are banishing and release, but there are certain gathering activities that are favored as well. So while a witch might cast a banishing spell to rid herself of something annoying, she may also make a trip to her garden to collect herbs like deadly nightshade, belladonna, mandrake, datura, hellbore, or wormwood.

Drusilla: Why these herbs?

Lady Absinthe: Because they’re all poisons, and are mostly associated with the dark aspect of the lunar goddess. If you look them up in old grimoires they’re associated with Saturn, but that’s what happens when men are the only ones who write books about the Doctrine of Signatures. In my book, they belong to the dark goddesses of the dark moon.

Drusilla: Is there a particular image you use to visualize the dark moon?

Lady Absinthe: The Moon card in the tarot is a good one. The card usually features several of the things associated with Artemis-Brimo, like two lonely towers, the pillars of Boaz and Joachim in the High Priestess card forlorn and rotted. There’s also howling black dogs, and a crab or lobster crawling to the shore from the sea. Although it’s a card associated with the moon in general, the imagery is more suggestive of a dark moon, or even of a lunar eclipse. An eclipse is one of the oldest meanings of this card, and eclipses are dramatic celestial events when the light of the sun or moon is, in effect, swallowed. In terms of spell casting, eclipses aren’t much good unless you’re trying to bring an end something, or push something off course so it fails.

Drusilla: Why is this?

Lady Absinthe: Because eclipses bend and pervert the energies of the two strongest celestial lights, the sun and the moon. Spells require clear intentions and will power, the province of the sun, and strong, focused emotions, which is the province of the moon. Eclipse spells don’t often work out, even when they’re cease-and-desist spells. A normal fourth quarter moon process is gentle and natural, but an eclipse throws the celestial lights under the bus and squashes them.

Drusilla: So what kinds of spells have you performed successfully at the dark moon phase?

Lady Absinthe: One of my favorites was a talisman I created to banish spiders from my basement. I did it when the new moon was conjunct Saturn and it worked like a charm. I also make batches of Four Thieves Vinegar at the dark of the moon, always on a Saturday, which is Saturn’s day.

Drusilla: Care to share your recipe for that?
Lady Absinthe: There’s the old medieval recipe for rosemary, sage and thyme gently steeped in not-quite-boiling vinegar. I prefer apple cider vinegar for it, since apples are a good magical fruit. My recipe depends on what’s available in my garden when I make it, but I usually include wormwood, wolfbane, and some hot peppers. Not only does it keep out thieves, but dogs think twice before doing their business in my front yard.

Drusilla: Good to know. So what spell are you working tonight?

Lady Absinthe: This is a new spell I call “Down the Witching Well.” Since you’re here, you might as well help me set it up.

Drusilla: (Lady Absinthe takes a jar full of some mysterious potion out of her robes along with a hammer and a nail, then hands me a shovel that’s leaning against a nearby tree). What do you want me to do?
Lady Absinthe: It’s a shovel, you dimwit. Dig a hole.

Drusilla: (I dig a hole. It’s about a foot deep and a foot wide. Lady Absinthe takes a petition wrapped in black fabric out of her robes and puts it in the bottom of the hole. Then she uses the hammer to nail the petition to the bottom of the hole. She sprinkles black sand widdershins around the edges of the hole, and then casts her spell.)

Lady Absinthe: Troubles be gone, troubles be past,

Now banished by this spell I cast;

To the Stygian murk of Titan’s hell,

                         I cast you into the Witching Well!       

I offer you this wolfbane tea –

Devour this bane, good Hecate!

Drusilla: (Lady Absinthe pours the steaming, somewhat lumpy potion into the hole, pushes the dirt back into the hole, stamps it three times with her foot and walks away without looking back.) By the banshees, that was a nasty little spell. Who or what did you banish?

Lady Absinthe: Telephone marketers, reality TV and television shopping shows, saturated fats, and political lobbyists.

Drusilla: Well done! So what was in the potion?

Lady Absinthe: Chicken bones, wormwood roots, iron nails, hair of a black dog, skullcap, wolfbane, and a credit card offer I got in the mail, finely minced. I brewed them in rain water collected during a solar eclipse.

Drusilla: What, no black buttons from a dead man’s coat?

Lady Absinthe: I used those up last month. On occasion I’ve done spells for Artemis with sharpened pencil stubs.

Drusilla: Why pencil stubs?

Lady Absinthe: They’re rather like arrows, right? You can poke holes in the soil and set them up in a circle. If you don’t want to use nails, like I did in this spell, you can use pencil stubs. I save them in a box when they get too short to write with.

Drusilla: Good suggestion! So what spells will you be casting after the new moon?

Lady Absinthe: As far as I’m concerned, if you can’t see it, it isn’t there. The moon is dark until you see the new crescent. The new moon listed in your calendar is astronomically correct, but I don’t do spells for increase until the new crescent moon is visible. If it’s not there, then there’s nothing to work with, right? Call me old fashioned, but I bet you wouldn’t catch a Thessalian witch doing a prosperity spell unless the moon was at least half full.

Drusilla: Thanks for your wise words, Lady Absinthe.

….

Lady Absinthe and Drusilla Bivalve are fictional characters created by Elizabeth Hazel, an astrologer, tarotist, mystic, author and lecturer. She writes the Astro-Spell column for Witches and Pagans Magazine, hoping to encourage spell-casters to combine practical magic with the precision of astrology. Her weekly horoscope column is posted at WomensRadio.com.  Liz is also interested in mythology and folklore, and has contributed many articles on these subjects to the Llewellyn annual calendars and almanacs. Articles and samples of her artwork can be seen at: www.kozmic-kitchen.com; she can be contacted through this site.