Happy Birthday, Nephthys!

It’s very fitting that on this fifth and final of the ancient Egyptian Epagomenal Days (according to my reckoning of the Cairo Calendar), this liminal time between the year that is ending and the one that is beginning, that we celebrate the birth of the Great Goddess Nebet-Het (Nephthys), Wife of Set, Sister to Auset and Ausar, Mother of Anpu (Anubis). She is “the Lady of the House,” i.e., the embalming tent, the mourning kite and funerary goddess, the One Who Welcomes Those Who Enter Amenti.

I truly do believe in my heart that She Wyrdly marked me, to borrow the words of Edgar Allan Poe, “from childhood’s hour.” The parade of funerals in my own blood family starting from my early childhood (and shocking deaths too, I might add, such as my being the first person to surprisingly discover my maternal grandfather’s body after he had hung himself; I was 8 years old at the time) were, in hindsight, an Ordeal Path that ultimately baptized me into Her service. Her eerily-lit Underworld pathways are not for everyone but I look back on none of those profound episodes of loss with self-pity. Nephthys is absolutely my heart’s delight, and the Chief Power to Whom I dedicated myself for lifelong service when I became ordained as a Priestess in the Fellowship of Isis nine years ago. She is also the Patroness of my Death Midwife work.

The Mystery, Majesty, and Moral Ambivalence of the Great God Set

According to the way I reckon the old Cairo Calendar, today is the Third of the Five Epagomenal Days, sacred days set aside as certain Gods’ (the Children of Geb and Nut) birthdays during the liminal period of the old year ending but the new year (Wep Ronpet) not having yet begun. (The New Year in ancient Egypt was calculated by the heliacal rising of the star Sirius, which usually takes place between what we know now as August 1-3.) Day Three of the Epagomenal Days commemorates the birth of my most cherished Kemetic Holy Power: red-hot, ultra-dynamic, take-no-bullshit SET!

Come Check Out My Workshop on Ancient Egyptian Magic at the 2019 Chicago Pagan Pride!

This year, Chicago Pagan Pride will take place on Saturday, September 28. It’s being held at a new venue in the city: Que4 Studios, 2643 W. Chicago Avenue in the Wicker Park neighborhood. At the magical time of noon, I’ll be leading my “Hands-On HEKA” workshop on magic in ancient Egypt. Are you local? Come and say hello and sit for a (Greek Magical Papyri) spell, ha ha! 😉

The sacred talisman of the Tyet Knot, also called the Girdle of Isis.

I’m excited to be joining fellow Windy City Pagans, Polytheists, and Witches for a day of shared learning and networking! And the following weekend, the Chicago Fellowship of Isis community is having its 26th Annual Goddess Festival & Conference at Prop Thtr: a three-day event! Learn more on our Facebook page.

Selqet: Ancient Egypt’s Scorpion Goddess

Editorial Note: This is the transcript of the presentation I gave on Saturday at the 25th Annual Fellowship of Isis in Chicago Goddess Convention. I added photos from my PowerPoint presentation and my references list.

Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us for this historic 25^th anniversary Goddess Festival commemorated by the Chicago FOI Community! For those of you who don’t know me, my name is Anna Applegate, I’m an ordained Priestess, and as a Polytheist primarily dedicated to the Kemetic or Egyptian Pantheon of Gods in my personal spiritual practice, I am very excited to be talking to you about the mysterious and powerful Scorpion Goddess, Selqet. I love Her very much. She features prominently in my ancestor devotionals and in the Spirit Work that I do, and I am deeply honored to ritually invoke Her in our Main Liturgy this evening, “The Mystical Awakening of Scorpio and Kundalini.”  

I’m teaching my “Loving and Serving Dark Deities” Workshop at Alchemy Arts Tomorrow Night!

Cue the Norwegian death metal music score and strap on your dildos! It’s time for me to once again lead my popular workshop on the Great God Set and other “Dark” Deities! I’ll be speaking from 7 to 9 tomorrow night at Chicago’s awesome Alchemy Arts Bookstore, located at 1203 W. Bryn Mawr Avenue, where the owner has known me since I was a high school sophomore!

My Experiences at UAC 2018: Part 4 & Epilogue

Wednesday, May 30, 2018

“He went like one that hath been stunn’d

And is of sense forlorn:

A sadder and a wiser man

He rose the morrow morn.”

—Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834), “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” (lines 623-626)

The atmosphere in the Marriott Magnificent Mile hotel conference room where Dutch astrologer Karen Hamaker-Zondag taught her United Astrology Conference 2018 post-conference workshop on May 30, 2018, definitely felt gloomy and funereal. In many ways, the dimly lit and shockingly cold space would be a fitting Plutonian environment for delving deeply (six hours’ worth of learning in a single sitting) on the subject of “What Do You Really Want with Your 8^th House and Pluto?”

The Pleasures of Painting During Piscean Transits

Virgo me has been really loving the spate of benevolent planetary aspects involving Venus, Mercury, and Neptune in Pisces and the trine to Jupiter in Scorpio. (For an in-depth look at the month’s transits (applicable for all signs), read my post I published on Saturday.) Yesterday’s exact conjunction between Venus and Mercury in Pisces kicked off a frenzied spate of artistic creativity: I did three paintings from start to finish in less than 24 hours, a new record for me! Huzzah!

Calling All Setians: Call for Submissions for Debut Issue of “Questing SET” Magazine

I am so incredibly excited about this! My friend Judith Page, the co-editor of this debut magazine slated for a June 2018 publication date, has given me permission to broadcast far and wide the call for submissions for Questing SET! Friends and longtime readers of my blog who are devotees of this historically unjustly maligned Son of Nuit: now’s your chance to submit original essays, poetry, and other works of art to pay Him homage via Questing SET thanks to two pioneering voices in Western esotericism! (Judith’s colleague in producing this publication is none other than Don Webb–yes, he of Uncle Setnakt fame!)

Here’s Judith’s original notice for the call for submissions:

Judith’s email address can be found on her website here.

So get writing! Dua, Set!

My public shrine to Set at the 2015 Pagan Spirit Gathering festival.

A Devotional Ritual for Nephthys to Bless and Protect the Dead

This past Saturday at World Tree Healing, I led a workshop on “Loving and Serving ‘Dark’ Deities.” It was a well-attended workshop and for the first hour, I engaged the participants in a series of discussions based on the following prompts:

• How has staving off criticism from mainstream religions made Paganism afraid of its own shadows?
• How do you help outsiders to your tradition distinguish between “darkness” and “evil”?
• Has anyone ever had an experience of invoking Dark Deities in a group ritual context and then been castigated for invoking Them?
• How is the function of the Trickster valuable to a society? Who is devoted to Trickster Gods?
• In his Manifesto for his powerful Apocalyptic Witchcraft, Peter Grey has declared: “We call an end to the pretense of respectability.” What are your thoughts on this? What do Pagans lose by attempting to claw their way to the interfaith table, begging for scraps of acceptance from Abrahamic religions?

It was a great discussion that appeared to make two people with Abrahamic allegiances very uncomfortable, so they left after I had announced that we’d be taking a short break before our ritual to Nephthys would begin. Good riddance, I thought. I certainly didn’t want the miasma, or spiritual pollution, of their presences to spill over into my devotional ritual to my Patron Deity. The major risk of hosting a public Pagan ritual is that you never know what kind of people may show up, especially folks with overtly hostile ideologies (read: patriarchal monotheists) who attend solely to destabilize the gathering, which is why I absolutely favor doing private ceremonies in the company of fellow devotees I can vouch for.

Kickstarter Campaign for “The Ancient Egyptian Daybook: Perpetual Planner”

Signal boost: Calling all Kemetic polytheists! Egyptologist Tamara L. Siuda, a personal friend of mine and fellow priestess in the Fellowship of Isis, has 6 days remaining in her Kickstarter campaign to fund the publication of The Perpetual Planner, an ancient Egyptian calendar companion to her 2012 publication of The Ancient Egyptian Daybook. 

Please consider helping fund her campaign before time runs out; if she doesn’t meet her goals, the project will be kibboshed.

Seneb-ti–blessings!