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Work begins Friday, April 1st, but this altar setting will be worked and available until Jupiter leaves Pisces on May 10th,so you absolutely can jump in late as long as you see slots still available. Lucky Stars IV this go-round is “the final chapter” – Jupiter leaves Pisces on May 10th and we have to say goodbye. But Jupiter is giving us one more gift before then – Jupiter is conjunct Neptune in Pisces on April 12th. More on this below. What’s This For? Jupiter’s at home in Pisces – you could call it his command center or throne room, even – so...

We’ve had a pretty significant monkey wrench thrown into the works with our shipping workflow.* Basically, things are gonna take a little longer to get to you for a little while. But we’re keeping an eye on everything and I’m having stuff that isn’t where it’s supposed to be by 20 days of the label ship date watched, so you don’t even need to write if that 20th day comes. It’ll already be on a report on my desktop. We are hammering out a new workflow for this. It’s not perfect yet by any stretch, but we’re still working on...

It used to really mess up my day when people would fail to read item listings and shipping/handling info before ordering and then file a dispute or leave crappy feedback because they were oblivious to what they signed up for by ordering something from me. But sadly, there are lots of folks like that, and I eventually decided that life was too short to have a messed up day because of them. So now when I’m forced to deal with one, I have a tiny little party for my customers that *don’t* suck instead. So if you’re a customer or...

Resurrecting an old blog post with a few variations on prayers to the seven archangels by days of the week. I could have sworn I had a blog post about lorica here, and I was gonna introduce it in the context of the prayer we usually call the Breastplate of St. Patrick, since that is a type of lorica prayer. But I can’t find the blog post I could swear once existed. Maybe it didn’t make the livejournal-to-wordpress transition intact… In any case, these are prayers for protection that are uniquely Irish in character and that work in remarkably somatic...

Adrienne Mayor, “Mithridates of Pontus and His Universal Antidote,” in Toxicology in Antiquity (2nd ed.), 2019, 161-174. Mithridates hypothesized that tiny doses of poisons could be ingested over time in carefully increasing amounts and thus ultimately make the body capable of tolerating larger doses that would normally be fatal – a dose-dependent protective mechanism, akin to modern vaccines. (He was right, about some chemicals at least – we call it hormesis, if you’re keen to learn more.) Mithridates’ recipe for his inoculating toxin brew reportedly contained tons of things, from herbs to toxic skink skin to blood from a breed of poisonous...