The Alchemist Papers

In my head, I keep a version of my life I’m supposedly working toward. It’s a useful list that can also easily make me feel like I’m failing at something and completely forget any concept of gratitude for where I actually am.

The Sagittarius full moon is on May 31st at 3:45 am Central, and it’s also a blue moon (aka the second full moon this month). I will be observing it on Saturday night. Timely for the end of May, which has had me creating a lot of content about desire, intention, and what you’re actually tending. My life has felt both slow and fast at the same time, so I’m excited to sit with this for a bit.

In terms of astrology, Sagittarius is the archer: always aimed at the horizon. But here’s the thing: if you’re always aimed forward, you can pass right through the life you’ve already built without noticing it. The gap between who you are and who you could become is actually supposed to exist. It’s generative, and mental health often requires this tension rather than equilibrium. It’s good to know what you’re aiming for, just make sure you don’t slip into the existential vacuum of having the direction but no real relationship to where you actually are.

Mat Auryn’s Triple Soul model frames it differently: the Higher Self holds your True Will, your genuine direction. The Lower Self holds what you’re actually carrying. Full moon work is most effective when both are part of the conversation. Aiming from the Higher Self alone is how the arrow misses.

The gap inventory in slide 8 is the practice I’m doing this weekend. Two lists: what I’m aiming at, and what I’m already in a relationship with that haven’t been tending. I’m hoping the blue moon lends her light to illuminate both.

Photography by Jelly Luise from Death to Stock

It’s May 25th, happy Memorial Day, and I have a little question for you… What’s actually still running for you at the end of the month? What’s the practice you’ve been tending as the fire grows?

That’s the question I keep coming back to with Beltane and seasonal witchcraft practice every year. We’ve consumed a lot of content about what the fire means on May 1st. We’ve had very little about what it means on May 25th, when the season is just the season: hot, ordinary, and not particularly sabbat-flavored.

At the start of this month, the May Magick post made one point I’d like to reiterate: the Beltane fires weren’t the peak of anything. That was just the door cracking open to the work that comes with the rest of Summer. The fire that matters isn’t even the big bonfire everyone was having on the 1st of the month. It’s the little one that’s still going at the end of the month and all the way through July.

We’re smack in the middle of the Hawthorn month right now. This is said to be a threshold month, where we do the active work of deciding what crosses. I feel like evaluating and re-establishing our boundaries and where we give our energy is incredibly important right now, as we all know how quickly these resources can be absorbed by the heat of the coming months.

What from the first week of May is still alive? What are you tending, unglamorously, in an ordinary week? That’s the fire that’s important and is still burning.

So… what’s still running for you?

Photographs by Nick Fancher from Death to Stock

On Monday, I wrote about what it looks like when a practice goes hollow — going through motions that once meant something. This post is related but a different problem: understanding why something works changes how you practice it, even when it’s not broken.

I wrote a whole Substack piece once about the origin of the cinnamon-through-the-door ritual; the one everyone does on the first of the month. I was shocked to find that the traceable origin was WitchTok around 2019. I didn’t fully discount it, though, because cinnamon has a long, documented history as a prosperity correspondence in Hoodoo, European folk magic, and ancient commodity markets (a Roman pound of cinnamon could cost the equivalent of tens of thousands of dollars today). This is where the association with abundance actually comes from. Knowing that didn’t change the ritual. It changed what I was thinking about when I did it.

That’s what I mean when I say know-why vs. know-how. The ritual is the same. The understanding behind it is different, and the understanding changes the practice.

The bay laurel example in slide 5 is one I find useful to think with. Everyone is out here burning up bay leaves without even knowing why they reached for a bay leaf in the first place. The associations aren’t arbitrary. They have a genealogy. And knowing the genealogy tells you what the tool is actually for.

Photography by Eduardo Ramos from Unsplash+