There and Back Again: on the VGS 2018, deep changes, and upcoming news

I final­ly returned from the fourth edi­tion of the Viridis Genii Sym­po­sium, which took place in the Pack For­est in Eatonville, Wash­ing­ton, and it has been a hec­tic, impres­sive, and life-chang­ing experience.

I had the chance to trav­el to a com­plete­ly new place by myself, I met amaz­ing and like-mind­ed peo­ple, and I learned a lot about plants, plant peo­ple, and myself as well. I had nev­er attend­ed a sym­po­sium revolv­ing around the plant world from the mag­i­cal per­spec­tive, and it cer­tain­ly did not dis­ap­point. The loca­tion cho­sen for the occa­sion was just dreamy: wood­en cab­ins sur­round­ed by Nature, vis­it­ed here and there by Fox­glove, which I per­son­al­ly took as a faer­ic sign of approval. The atten­dants, par­tic­i­pants, and organ­is­ers dis­played a huge respect for the place and what was going on there, some­thing real­ly rare these days, in which the mag­i­cal prac­tice is either used as a means to earn mon­ey for per­son­al prof­it or as a self­ish way to gain pres­tige. As I claimed before my lec­ture, the organ­is­ers, Cata­ma­ra, Mar­cus, and all those who vol­un­teered (to whom I am immense­ly grate­ful for their hos­pi­tal­i­ty and ded­i­ca­tion) set an exam­ple for the rest of the world.

From a per­son­al per­spec­tive, I expe­ri­enced lec­tur­ing on the Pyre­nean con­cept of Met­zine­r­ia while being real­ly far from the Pyre­nees, in fact, the fur­thest from home I’ve ever been. This left me with a warm and deep feel­ing of val­i­da­tion from the Land I live in and I work with, which has proven to me that willpow­er only works when aligned with aware­ness: change and Death are nec­es­sary in order to be born anew. I hope this will encour­age you to take action and start work­ing on the life goals you have; even though we take risks, Spir­its val­ue what we do, and I firm­ly believe that if we fol­low our own path, we are com­pen­sat­ed by them.

This whole process has cul­mi­nat­ed in dis­clo­sure: I am now eager to keep research­ing, prac­tis­ing, and spread­ing the results of my work the best way pos­si­ble; I now feel like it’s worth my effort and ener­gy, but let me be frank here, I do not do this in order to teach you or show you any­thing, I do this because it is my duty ‑and a great one- to trans­mit the infor­ma­tion ade­quate­ly. I hope I will be able to do this bet­ter each time.

Apart from the deep changes I have under­gone, there are some oth­er changes that are about to man­i­fest. First­ly, we are about to fin­ish the new web­store in less than a month. The new web­store will com­bine Mons Niger, the upcom­ing pub­lish­ing endeav­our we are work­ing on right now, the Occvl­ta store (fea­tur­ing the new enam­el pins for which you have been patient­ly wait­ing for), and the Tri­an­gu­lum Ignis store as well. We are the same two peo­ple behind all three projects, so we thought it would make much more sense and would sim­pli­fy things for both cus­tomers and us. Hope this will ful­fil your needs.

I am also plan­ning on craft­ing more tal­is­mans and objects for the upcom­ing Death Cult Ris­ing fes­ti­val that will take place in Barcelona on Sep­tem­ber 7th, as well as for the next edi­tion of L’Homme Sauvage, that will take place in the Pyre­nees of France on Sep­tem­ber 28th and 29th. These events are amaz­ing, and we think we should sup­port them as strong­ly as we can.

Let’s do it, with will, aware­ness, and the aid of the Spirits.