Entry: 2/018

Dear self,

As much as I would have liked to huddle inside until the new year I only have tonight to do the Nightgloom ritual this month. The New Moon is the correspondence that I have the strongest personal affinity towards so it’s the ideal time for me to perform any personal rituals.

Nightgloom can be collected on during a moonless night such as tonight and the ritual actually gains power during the winter. The New Moon on the last month of the year is actually one of the strongest periods for me personally to perform rituals throughout an entire cycle.

So after drinking an improvised potion made from Embernap I set off to the glade we prepared specifically for celestial rituals. There a reflecting pool and a tiny obsidian pillar in the centre of the glade to help remove worldly influences and encourage a serene affinity. The ritual begins with placing several flowers on the edges of the clearing as offering to the spirits, which helps to keep any fairies from interfering. I brought a marble sphere as a focus to help with grounding the ritual. Normally I would take a sip of absinthe to help with the meditations but we’re a little low on our stock of that recently.

I place four candles at the cardinal points and light them. I then sit in the centre of the clearing by the reflecting pool and enter meditation to help attune with the night essence. Intangible essences such as darkness are especially fickle when it comes to attuning with them. Gathering Moonglance actually requires being inebriated to succeed for most people. While in meditation I chant various phrases related to darkness. The incantation continues with me voicing “dark thoughts” I personally have. These are negative thoughts such as anxieties, concerns, apathy, and anything which inhibits me from taking action or causes me to abe avoidant in my mannerisms and behaviours. Anger, for example, isn’t well suited since it usually incites people towards action, while some positively associated emotions such as contentment can actually also work using this ritual since they cause internal reflection and also do not necessarily incite any action or change.

During this process the light from the candles dim gradually, and the chanting should be maintained until they are completely unlit. When this happens darkness gathers towards the clearing from the edge of the forest and creeps inwards. A sense of calm should be maintained during this process or the essence will fail to coalesce. I prepared a warded jug to contain the Nightgloom essence beforehand. The essence flowed into the jug as I tipped it over, and I sealed the container as soon as the essence stopped entering. There was a generous amount of essence gathering into the jug, so this particular ritual was highly successful. I am unsure but it might have been a result of my failing to perform the ritual last month, but it could also have been a result of the strong winter season that seems to deepening rapidly.

As for my personal ritual, I brought a dream catcher I had personally woven a few weeks ago. I had placed the dream catcher on the obsidian pillar in the centre and focused my thoughts upon it throughout my meditation. I wanted to create an invocation to help me be more attentive to details and process senses more thoroughly. The intent seems to have taken hold in the dream catcher and will last for the month at least. As far as I am aware what I am attempting is a rather normal part of cognitive function, and a portion of the population naturally experience the effect I am artificially creating in myself.

The “sensitivity” is seemingly beneficial but is actually a trade off because the effect can labour the mind in some ways. In practice the effect drains the mind of a certain resource over time, which means that having this effect active will require me to manage my own thoughts more carefully, and might not actually end up being useful.

The analogy I heard from a passing alchemist was that it was like identifying one tree as having a separate pattern from another. While the less “sensitive” individual might potentially miss some small details, the “sensitive” individual will always spend more time considering the trees even if there might be no need to, and will re-examine obvious details looking for discrepancies even if they consciously know that they have discovered everything about the object that they can conceivably learn. It is almost as if they do not fully trust their own lerception and are perpetually searching for flaws. I was warned that this effect is only helpful is specific cases, but might actually end up detrimental in general usage, so I might have to dispel it if it is too much for me to handle, which would be a big waste of my only correspondence ritual for the month.

Hope we fare well.

Regards,

Me.

~*M*~