Episode 41: The Feast of Martinmas

Happy Feast of St Martin and, indeed, merry Martlemas, dear listeners! We welcome you to the forty-first episode of our folk necromantic co-ramble.

On the tail end of the Hallowstide, we honour not only the hallowed hagiography of the historical St Martin of Tours – former soldier, bishop, and miraculous cloak philanthropist – but the many calendrical reasons for the season of the feastday itself: from the migration patterns of geese, the bonus ‘settling-day’ of pre-modern village-life, to the Anglo-Saxon ‘blood-month’, and various Irish and Scottish apotropaic rites of Martinmas.

Our Demon of the month is the many-aliased goetic king, Purson, lion-faced granter of familiars, who gently guides us through survey of nigromantic spirit catalogues and the roles and significances of such devilish kings, as well as affording a little consideration of European bear mysteries.

Our honoured Herb is White Ginseng, the aged and elusive King of Dreams who favours only the most eagle-eyed of root-hunters; under whose advocacy we discuss both the economics and the medicine of botany, as well as First Nations lore, Catskills terroir, and much more besides.

Our lauded Mineral this time is Aquamarine, the watery beryl of phlegmatic healing and sensitivity, harmonious marriage, tolerant communication, and sanguine amity; considering not only Neptunian and Venusian image magic, but the links between sagacious clarity, the origins of reading-glasses, and some folkloric accounts of scrying.

Introducing a brand new topic, we begin our sorcerous Sesame-Streeting of Beasts with celebration of the natural magic and folklore of Toads, discussing the watery and earthy banes and blessings of venom, traditional witch-familiar lore, and its heraldic emblematics of choler, moisture, weaponized melancholy, and storms.

Further expanding our fields of episodic topics, we pay homage to the meanings and mysteries of the Daysign of Cipactli/Imix (aka Crocodile) in Mesoamerican calendrics, delving into the leviathanesque, the Toad With A Thousand Jaws who consumes the Sun, and the nature of beginnings, as well as providing some foundational orientation in how such day-signs inform us about underlying cosmo-visions, naming practices, and the heats of tripartite souls.

Our Style of Magic this time naturally follows on the creeping heels and occult thermodynamics of toadbones to analyse the Horseman’s Word: affording us opportunity to discuss the rites of trade secrets, union initiations and hazings, the folklore of animal-handling, the uses of hippomane, the influence of Masonic oathing, and the prestige of horse-whispering in traditional witchcraft.

Our brace of divinatory topics begins with the Geomancy of Acquisitio, the Fiery Jupiterian figure of Gain, expansion, increase, as well as the strictures and loopholes of formality, the risks of overcommitting and taking too much on, and both the wealth and pressures of tradition in ancestral relations, inheritances, and expectations.

From figure to Arcana, our triumphant Tarot Trump this time is the Chariot: vehicle of Mystery itself, historical icon of military advancement and the victory parades of the polis, and indeed the qabalistic means of conveyance into the Supernal realms, by which we discuss the horses-that-become-sphinxes, the harmony of steed and driver, Ezekiel’s visions, and where the rider ends and the wheels begin.

Finally, our featured Dead Magician is both the monstrous Black Annis and her likely point of inspiration, the “denigrated” remembrances of the anchorite Agnes Scott. Considering the shades of Reformation propaganda and pagan (re)articulations of Blue Hags, we explore folkloric practices – including precautionary children’s tales, the land legends of Leicestershire, and the dragging of anise’d cats – to celebrate the potent hag-ography of both nigromantic history and myth, the queerness of monstrosity, and both the historical trauma and reclaimed power that makes witches.

We hope you get as much from listening to this broadcast of lore and legend, miracles and medicines, myths and histories, and the container-and-contained of rider and ridden – as we got from co-rambling it. May all your horses be kindly whispered, your resources carefully managed that they may be sustainably shared, your dreams ever more expansive vehicles to sensitive realisation, your venoms properly alchemized (or at least meticulously deployed), your devils delightful, and your hags potent. Merry Martinmas!

We will of course continue to update the website and our facebook page when footnotes become available.

This episode is also available on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify.

Episode 40: The Eve of the Feast of All Hallows

Happy Hallowstide, listeners! We are delighted to invite you to an especially-very-special episode of Radio Free Golgotha – our 40th episode! We took this anniversary opportunity to do something a little different: rather than pick individual foci amongst the topics of our usual sorcerous Sesame Streeting, we got into the fields of the topics themselves: what and how we are continually inspired by getting to talk about Saints, Demons, Herbs, Minerals, Types of Magic, Geomancy, Cartomancy, and of course the folk necromancy of Dead Magicians. In other words, welcome to our Oops All Types of Magics episode.

In considering the Magics of Saints and Hagiography we got into (re)assessing the virtues of ritual time and liturgical calendricals of feastdays and the holy in these holidays, as well as celebrating the mysteries and meanings of the famous, infamous, and lesser-known sacred dead. We also got into – amongst other things – hagiographic blur, value centers, saint-masking, bottom-up folk veneration, and the protocols and practicalities of canonization.

In extolling the dark arts of the Magics of Demons and Demonology, we chatted about the values of grimoiric spirit catalogues not only as means for navigating infernal hierarchies, but demonstrating the interrelationalities of such ‘unclean’ spirits, and the organizational tools and perspectives that they afford the karcist working alongside their Good Devils.

In discussing the natural medicines and miracles of the Magic of Herbs and Herbalism we touched on plant allies, engagement with landscape and the natural cycles of the year, as well as what it means to conjure an ingredient – from the exorcising of unhelpful influences to (re-)baptizing our materia (and their substitutes) into that which deemed necessary for the operation.

This discussion naturally extended into considerations of the Magics of Minerals and Lapidary: from the archeo-geological blurring of names-which-are-more-descriptions in medieval books of stones, to the yes-and of working by a knowledge of both natural substances’ modern physick and their pre-modern spiritual virtues.

Turning the mirror upon itself we also got stuck into the Magic of Magical Techniques, Technologies, and Typologies, and touched on both the shortcomings of over-compartmentalizing sorcery as well as the crucial importance of celebrating the (especially differing) cosmologies of the world’s cultures and histories which underlie the common and uncommon strategies which humans (not to mention non-humans) apply in our spellcrafts and solutions when we make such horizontal comparisons and contrasts.

In highlighting the importance of the containers we develop and preserve to hold and empower our magics, conversation rather naturally turned to divination: firstly, to our beloved Magics of the Figures of Geomancy and their counterpart mysteries in the corpus of the Odu of Ifa and Merindiloggun, especially these Figures as markers of potential, “shelfmarks of reality”, patterned flavours of the cosmos, archives of befallen Fate, collections of historiolae and precedents, muster points of possibility, menus for operative sorcery, and haunted doorways.

In expanding our appreciation of divination we turned to the Magic of Tarot & Cartomancy, considering the uniting lingua franca that the grammar and shared understandings that tarot provides to find a common language with which to read for querents and help them navigate time’s meanings, the destiny of decisions, and the consequences of our actions; which included weighting the role, ethics, and best practices of diviners to communicate with their clients, and to search not only for forecasts but also strategies and forwards-motions of remediation.

Finally in turning to the appreciation and ongoing engagements with the Magics of Dead Magicians, we got far further into developing and cherishing this thing-we-call folk necromancy: further adumbrating how and why we may usefully consider the everyday encounters and engagements between the living and the dead; and how not only appreciation of the witches and wizards who came before us is good practice, but how inspiration and direct guidance from the ancestralised sorcerous dead may offer us both increased agency and efficacy, but also deeper and more fulfilling orientation, organization, and coordination of our wyrding ways.

In the course of all of this, it was wonderful to remind ourselves what we love about what we get to do at RFG, and to share some of our ideas with you all about where we would like to take our discussions and co-rambles next: especially proposing new episode Topics such as Beasts, Sky-Things, Mesoamerican Day-Signs, and perhaps more!

In all this thoroughly invigorating refreshment of our goals and lenses and ways forward, we gladly reiterate how grateful we are to our editors Mark and Cooper for all their help crafting these ramble-bouquets of topics into cohesive episodes that can appear to you in both a comely and timely manner, and once more offer our sincere thanks to all our listeners and supporters for joining us along the way. We are excited for the next forty episodes!

We wish you all a powerful Tide of the Hallows, full of as much merriment and medicine as you would have, here amongst the treats and the tricks of saints and devils and all the shades of the turning night and dawning light. Hail to the road ahead and those who walk it with us.

We will of course continue to update the website and our facebook page when footnotes become available.

This episode is also available on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify.

Episode 39: The Feast of Saint Hildegard of Bingen

Merry Feast of Saint Hildegard of Bingen, Golgothites! We are delighted to invite you into the Green for an especially verdant celebration of Hildegardmas and our patron saint of the day’s many attendant magics of natural physick, faith, feminist history, and more.

We begin, as is our custom, with the hagiographic reason for the season, celebrating the twelfth-century abbess, visionary, healer, and composer of both music and Unknown Language, Saint Hildegard of Bingen. We discuss Hildy’s biography and extensive bibliography, considering her letters – both known and Unknown – as well as her ‘equivalent canonisation’ by sheer popular appeal of her reverence.

Foraging for the medicines and mysteries amongst the hairy barbs of the earth, we find our Demon Heramael (sometimes Meramael), the Grimorium Verum’s premiere daemon of plant remedies and healing, and follow the paper-trail of the German Honorian manuscripts to consider some of this spirit’s identifications with other spirits of the goetic corpus, including Buer of the Goetia of Solomon and Gemer of the French Book of Spirits. We also discuss this spirit’s counterparted Exu in the Quimbanda of Fontenelle et al, Seu Curador, and grasp to apprehend the stinging antidotes of agency in the forest.

Our honoured Mineral for our virescent feast is Peridot, discussing its gleaming facets as treated in the lapidary lore of chrysolite, prassius, and other leek-green mineralia. We praise its piercing protections against demons, melancholy, and the phantasms of the night, as well as its greening ways of sharpening eyesight and gladdening the heavy heart.

Our treasured Plant of the episode is Nettle, in all its urticating potency. We consider its Martial and Fiery virtues in early modern herbals, its peppery tonic properties, the burning of its leaves and stems, and its enduring popularity in modern wort-crafts.

Our especially Hildegardian form of Magic is Viriditas itself: the ever-juicy viridescent mysteries of life. We explore both the humoural physick and spiritual medicine of this sap of vitality as explicated by Hildegard and scholars of her works, as this greening force of the vital and vivacious cosmos itself replenishes and revitalizes against the brittle aridity of the dry and dusty.

We mark the Venusian points of the earth that constitute our geomantic figure of the hour, Puella – the Maiden, the Hostess – through which we cherish amity, “soft power”, and queenly authority, as well as beautiful craft, artistic integrity, and feminine wiles and wisdoms; as this figure reminds us to hold close to our bosoms that which still stirs our senses and keep us young at heart; as well as meditating on the crafty mysteries of message and messenger in her sister-figure of Otura Meji.

Our Arcana is The Hierophant, by which we consider both the crossed and unlocking keys of tradition, pedagogy, and religious authority and transmission. We trace this card’s especially (folk) Catholic papal iconography, and discuss what it means to be a spiritual advisor, as well as understanding Tradition itself as matters of evolution and personal development.

Our lauded Dead Magician of this feast’s festivities is none other than twentienth-century witch, astrologer, and TV personality Sybil Leek. We share thoughts on her life, writings, and Complete Art of Witchcraft, touching on her distinctions between witchcraft’s veneration of nature and the obsessions with power and control over other others that characterized her conceptions of “black magic”, as well as her doubts about the limits of teaching magic outside of in-person apprenticeships.

We hope you find something truly livening and maybe even a little in-spiring in the Green of All Things by aid of these wordy wanderings through the forest of language we’ve co-rambled this time. As always, it is a pleasure to bring them to you as a bouquet of picked topics and blossoming tangents. Our profound thanks to Cooper for his editorial prunings of our (b)rambles. And so we wish you a very merry Hildymas, one and all. Stay juicy.

We will of course continue to update the website and our facebook page when footnotes become available.

This episode is also available on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify.

Episode 38: The Feast of Saint Rose of Lima

By the petals and thorns alike, we wish you a merry Feast of Saint Rose of Lima! We hope you have had an august August and invite you to join us for a stroll through the RFG ramble-garden with us.

We begin our promenade of featured topics with the hagiography of Santa Rosa herself, the first person canonized in the Americas; in which we consider penance, mortification, sweet-smelling funeral miracles, floral saint-masks, and the fine line between Catholicism and being goth as holy hell.

Hooting and scooting along, we admire our long-legged Demon of the episode, Stolas, and discuss night-ravens, bogeymen, and the flocking cast of corvid spirits of the goetic spirit-lists.

Our Magic of the hour is Sleep Deprivation, in which we discuss hypnagogic apparitions and illusions, ordeal, and how spirit and psychological models do not necessarily have to be mutually exclusive.

In these restless nightly wanderings and ponderings we look to the mineralia of the Moon to talk selenite and its many overlaps and with moonstone and varying reports of other lunary stones; from phlegmatic virtues for sailors and the pregnant, to noting the simplicity of divination via a mouthful of moonrock to know and fix in both heart and mind a course through the darkness.

Our nocturnal journeying leads us to the crossroads of Conjunctio, and the mysteries of combinations, the coagula, and ‘troublesome wit’; where X marks the spot, the sealed kiss, and the signed name on a contract you might not have read as thoroughly as you should; as well as considering some of the meanings and cautions of its counterparted Odu Iwori Meji.

Such crossed paths and ships in the night bring us to the romances beneath the Rose, our episode’s beloved Herb; crossroads emblem of unfurling mysteries, pallid innocence, red-blooded passion, divine and profane love, and the cartographer’s compass of the scented winds by which we orient ourselves.

Our Arcanum of this rosy adventure is naturally The Lovers: a card which has reflected at various points in its storied history political marriage, frisky couplings, Edenic blossoming and the love that Falls back, and the tensions between domestic responsibility and the dangerously adventurous.

Finally, our celebrated Dead Magician is Maria Sabina, the Mazatec spiritual worker who became a somewhat unwilling celebrity-psychonaut of the magic mushroom counterculture; prompting conversation on the folk healing of curanderismo, the ceremonies and historiography of the velada, and a commemoration of the profound poetry of psilocybin medicine, as well as the tragic and enraging colonialist consequences of Western bioprospecting.

We hope the ruby petals in our mouths sweeten our words to find their rambling way to spark your own interests, passions, and bloody-but-unbowed loves through the barbs and stings of the world, and that if you find yourself in a restless night of turning at the crossroads of sleep/lessness you may find some hypnopompic insight in the moonlight. Which is to say, as always, we hope you enjoy listening to this episode as much as we enjoyed recording it. Thanks as always to our friend and editor Cooper for wrangling this garden out of our weedy words.

We will of course continue to update the website and our facebook page when footnotes become available.

This episode is also available on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify.

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Episode 37: The Feast of Saint Ignatius of Loyola

Merry Feast of Saint Ignatius Loyola, dear Golgothans! We hope this month of July (what, already done?) has included enjoying lovely things and people and such for you; and we invite you to bring it to a close by joining for us with a light to St Ignatius and an especially fiery episode of this ‘cast pod.

For today we mark Ignatiusmas – the holyday dedicated to that patron of librarians and founding member of the Society of Jesus – and consider his punkish youth, alombrados-esque conspiracy, and Simple Contemplation of his Spiritual Exercises.

Lighting burning coals we discuss the demon of the Grimorium Verum, Haristum, and their patronage of fumigation and fire-handling, as well as paying our respects to Exus Brasa and Brasinha of Quimbanda with their blessing of spat embers and devil-baby mysteries.

Cultivating a suitable warming burn, we sprinkle Frankincense as our dedicatory Herb; inciting celebration of the tears of the Boswellias for church-scented Solary adoration, uplifting spirits, and daimonic dispossession and reward alike; reflecting on recipes of the Three Magi, and indeed on practices of suffumigation and scenting in spiritwork more broadly.

Our Mineral of the hour is Flint, the firestone, progenitor of firearms, an ever-hungry deity-tongue telling an incredibly long history of human knapping, sparking, slicing, and scraping.

Our particular technique of Magic is, appropriately enough, Calcination: lighting up discussion of alchemical curing and charred concision for storing the weird ingredients and powders of any self-respecting witch or sorcerer, as well as further developing discussion of traditional incense blends and their animalia.

Considering both the armoured stability and potential for heavy-hearted stuckness in our geomantic Figure of the episode, Fiery Solary Fortuna Major, we read between the elemental lines of this signifier of stamina, sovereignty, and enduring success; as well as offer homage to the lessons of the morphologically similar Odu Owani Meji.

Offering some quenching tempering of all this fiery forging ahead, we dip into the history, mysteries, and meanings of the Arcana of Temperance, to speak of the virtues of moderation in all things (especially moderation itself), some Michaeline associations, spiritual mixology, and much more.

Finally (although not, in this case, chronologically) we further poke the mythically-stoked fireside of that occasionally inflammatory Dead Magician Anton Lavey and his modern Satanism; giving high-collared cape-wearing devils their due with respect for the aesthetic in ritual, the vaudeville in villainy, the mouthfeel of the Enochian language, and putting out Christmas records for Satan.

We hope you enjoy sitting by our welcoming hell-fire with us through this episode, and that it brings you as much warmth as much as it does us, as it is always a pleasure to get together and cast this hell-pod from our hell-mouths to your hell-ears. Hell yes.

We will of course continue to update the website and our facebook page when footnotes become available.

This episode is also available on the YouTubes, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify.

Episode 36: The Feast of Saint Irenaeus

Merry Feast of Saint Irenaeus, dear Golgothites! In another holyday to close out the month, it is a delight to get together once more and welcome you to a lovely little chat about heresy, the divine spark, and the containers and connections we cultivate and celebrate to be able to cast that sacred illumination before us upon the path ever ahead.

So pull up a pew and please to be enjoying discussion of Saint Irenaeus, from whose writings against heresy have been derived glimpses of Gnostic cults, as well as a catchy little interpretation of the four beasts of Ezekiel’s vision as characterizing the four Evangelists of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.

Our demon of the season is the enigmatic Tharithimas, notably absent from most well-known manuscripts of the Verum family, but who yet appears in those of Fontanelle in his ascriptions of these devils to the Exus of Quimbanda. We are thus graced with a little more time to talk about the counterparted spirit Exu Kaminaloa as well as reflect on the influences and histories of the cults of Quimbanda more broadly.

Our blessed Herb of the episode is the prodigious Hazel, tree of so much lore and so many wands, batons, staves, switches, and Mosaical rods, as well as maidens’ garlands and tanning loops. Mercurial indeed – with both a capital M and without – we celebrate the many virtues and traditions associated with this noble tree: from its distinctive leaves to its nutting ways and much more.

Furthering such mercuriality, our Mineral of the hour is the quicksilver called Mercury itself, the living liquid metal of Neolithic cinnabar, Maya tombs, and countless laboratories and technological developments, which leads us into the underworld of colonial histories of enslavement and empire.

Returning to our saint’s legacy, our Magic up for discussion this time is Gnosis: from consideration of the historical variety of people-called-Gnostics, to their spiritual practices, and on to the term’s importance in Chaos Magic, and the twists and turns of that tricky but important topic of “Unconfirmed Personal Gnosis” as we seek some clarity trying to eff the ineffable and take a look at what “confirmation” can look like, both in community and in personal praxis.

Moving from mercurial mediums to the means of building our containers of worldly wisdom, our geomantic Figure in this episode is Carcer and its Saturnine Earthy mysteries of deadlines, discipline, and what we do with the limited time afforded by mortality. This conversation is ably assisted as always by reference to what can be said of its morphologically-similar Odu of Ifa and Diloggun, Odi Meji.

Continuing this encircling of the world and both its problems and promises, our Arcanum is The World: from its earliest depictions as the renewed geocentric Paradise of Revelation’s City of God, to the Assumption of the vesica’d Virgin and the shift in her interpretation as the very Anima Mundi; as well as saluting our goodly humoural pals, the four cherubic heralds of the Evangelists.

Finally, our beloved Dead Magician is Charubel, the Welsh curative medium and author of the text of plant spiritism that would come to be called the Grimoire Sympathia, which undoubtedly influences the green-craft and sigil-staves of modern herbariums (herbaria?) of Traditional Witchcraft, and which offers us profoundly grounded means to connect and heal with the flora and mineralia of the world as allies and not merely ingredients.

It is always a joy to get together and co-enthuse about our intended topics as well as our long walks on short tangents together. We hope you enjoy this – our latest two-headed ramble-child of a cast pod of co-stoked excitement and intrigued interest –  as much as we did committing it to digital ear-ink. And so from us and ours, to you and yours, merry Feast of St Irenaeus! May all your revelations be held in the ever-widening circle of a broadened horizon and recommitted resolve to walk towards what best lights your soul. So there.

We will of course continue to update the website and our facebook page when footnotes become available.

This episode is also available on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

Episode 35: The Feast of Saint Camilla Battista da Varano

Happy Feast of St Camilla everyone! On this feastday which brings the May to a close, we invite you to join us in discussing the life and spiritual reflections of St Camilla Battista da Varano; visionary, nun, and eventual abbess of the Order of Poor Clares. We consider her biography and writings and of course her visions – of Christ, of cherubim, and of her own soul separated from her earthly body to dwell closer to God.

In this especially vison-centered episode, we also invite you to reflect on the prodigious offices, monstrous omens, and home-brew chimeras of the demon of the Grimorium Verum, Segal; as well as the change-making potenties and world-turning tidal eddies of the Exu of Quimbanda, Seu Gira Mundo.

We (finally!) wander through the wayfaring gardens and sidewalk sproutings of Mugwort, exploring its folk etymologies, its medicines and neurotoxins – for dream, for women, for flavouring food and drink, and for protection against insects, wild animals and harmful spirits - as well as the fiery applications of its moxibustion.

We celebrate the variously-hued virtues of the mineral Opal, and its patronages of clear-edged healthy sight and the invisibilities that fog and obscure the actions of thieves.

Conjuring our thematic through-thread into sharper and more comely focus, our type of magic for this episode is, appropriately enough, Scrying; by which we discuss shifting trends in occult philosophy to consider mediumship, evocation, and knowledge-at-a-distance as not only internal processes but conversations with spirits and deepening engagement with our spiritual landscapes and ecologies.

Our geomantic figure of the episode is the road-opening Via, Watery Lunary figure of movement – whether of information or the feet on the path – and its mysteries of activation, foresight, and navigating the mysterious.

In amongst all these world-turning tides of fate and manifesting fields of vision, our Arcanum is of course The Wheel of Fortune; and we reflect on its changing historical emphases, its stoic cyclical depictions of the turning wheel of the world, and its iconography of alchemical theurgy as well as the material realities it may advise upon in readings.

Finally, our dead magician is the vastly influential L.W. Delaurence of the Delaurence, Scott, & Co. publishing company; purveyor of pirated grimoires, charms and talismans of alleged “Hindoo spiritism”, and renowned spiritual supplier to a host of African-American conjure doctors and working folk; offering some thoughts on his life and legal troubles, as well as the substantial lasting legendary impact of his catalogue in Caribbean and West African folk magic and culture.

From our wayfaring rambles and reflections to yours, we wish you a an excellent and clarifying Camillamas, and we will be continuing to update the website and our Facebook page when footnotes become available.

This episode is also available on the YouTubes, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify.

Episode 34: The Feast of Saint George

Merry Georgemas, each and every one and all of us!

Whether you are tuning in from Moscow, Malta, Ethiopia, Catalonia, or the chalky shores of Albion, we wish you a very merry Feast of St George! As the bluebells ring out from greening meadows and the seasons Spring further toward Summer, we celebrate and reflect on the mysteries of subduing the monsters that blight the land, battling jingoistic nationalism, the popularity of parading dragons, and the mumming of resurrected knights.

Via our Demon of the episode, Damostan, we get stuck into some deep grimoiric questions of both historical reception of magical texts and the practicalities of practitioners’ animism, conceiving such books of spirits as ecosystems as well as rogue’s galleries of shifting masques. We also pay homage to the transformative potencies and pontos of Exu Ganga.

Our celebrated good Herb is Crocus and the golden mysteries and precious magics of its saffron; from kitchen to the robes of Hekate and so many other goddesses, nymphs, Morai, and more; considering even more occult colour theory and dyeing practices, Jupiterian suffumigations, and much more.

Our mineralia magica for today is Jasper; whether spotted, speckled, emeraldine, bloody, or lordly. We survey the wide variety of this many-hued chalcedony’s virtues across lapidaries and talismanic medicine, touching upon its qualities of youthful vigor and victorious purity, as well as its blood staunching and even contraceptive usages across history.

Our Style of Magic is Patronage, and we delve especially excitedly into thinking about protectors and pedagogues – whether of places, peoples, practices, or particular endeavours – as well as thinking about patronage – both emblematically and locally – in terms of finding our patrons, heeding their calls, pledging ourselves, and exploring what discovery and integration of mysteries can look like in our practices and our lives.

Our geomantic Figure this time is Caput Draconis, the benevolent Dragon’s Head of the Benefic Wandering Ones, which speaks of undiscerning prosperity, and the powerful but undirected growth of spring’s saplings turning new leaves. We discuss both the traditional Renaissance attributions of this figure as well as its applications in the magics and mysticisms of trees; as well as offer respectful comparison and contrast with its counterparted Odu, the dynamic, energetic, and spirited Osa Meji.

Our Arcana takes us on a survey of the shifting trends in interpretations of the Fool and their journey; from the unhoused vagrant dogged by misfortune and mental illness, to moralized parables of self-control and forethought, to our Zero-that-is-Hero’s divine innocence and ‘pure spirit in search of experience.’

Finally, our Dead Magician of the episode is twentieth-century Czech occultist and hermeticist, Franz Bardon, and the cosmological theories, pore-breathing practices, and developmental pedagogies of his most famous trilogy of books – Initiation Into Hermetics, The Practice of Magical Evocation and The Key to the True Kabbalah.

From our own campaigns to battle the dragons of ignorance and xenophobia – and indeed to combat the hydra-headed monsters of our own ever-multiplying tangents and delightful distractions! – we wish you a hearty, healthy, and hermetically-vibrant Feast of St George!

We will of course continue to update the website and our facebook page when footnotes become available.

This episode is also available on Youtube and Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

Episode 33: The Solemn Feast of Good Friday

Dearest listeners, it is from the Place of the Skull itself we wish you an excellent and powerful Good Friday!

It is with seven years podcast luck this latest episode finally comes to Calvary and celebrates The Friday We Call Good. As our very name suggests, Golgothan themes are important to us here at Radio Free, um, Golgotha, and so we are particularly delighted to explore the is-it-hagiography of the Crucifixion of the Nazarene in this Jesus-numbered Thirty-Third episode.

Along with reflection upon the martyrdom and Harrowing of Jesus, our Demon(ised) of the episode is Judas Iscariot, and we invite you to join our discussion of his various backtributions of betrayal as well as his contexts in many European traditional witchcrafts.

Our blessedly bitter Botanical of the season is Myrrh, that foreshadowing gift of the Magi and incense of Saturn’s embalming table; and our Mineral is the Edenically greening stone of Emerald, the contagiously-hued stone which brightens the eyes, preserves purity, brings visions to emperors, and so much more.

Apropos of the Passiontide soteriology of the Rood, our Style of Magic this time is Sacrifice: from the blood of the Lamb of God to the animal life-force revered in so many traditions of magic and religion across human time and space.

Honouring the three hours of darkness of this Good Friday, our Arcana is The Sun, and we discuss not only its significances in the history and practice of Tarot but also reflect upon the uncanny phenomenology of experiencing solar eclipses.

Our geomantic figure up for consideration is Laetitia, the Delight that is both Fiery and Watery, and we continue our conversations about the volley-ball of Joy, keeping the flame of inspiration alight, and rippling our rejuvenations out to refresh both private and communal waters; as well as continuing to explore its counterparted Odu Obara Meji through Bantu cosmologies and spiritual medicines of the active head that knows what is necessary to carry even the unmotivated heart through resistances.

Finally, our Dead Magician could be none other than the accused goetes Jesus of Nazareth himself, pulling double duty in this episode as perhaps only a figure considered simultaneously human and divine could.

We hope, as always, you find some inspiration and illumination in these topics and tangents by the light of ramble and reflection they were recorded in. Also as always please check back here on the website for updates on classes, conference presentations, and more from both the Goat and the Good Doctor. Cheers!

We will continue to update the website and our facebook page when footnotes become available. 

This episode is also available on Youtube and Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

Episode 32: The Leap-Feast of Saint Oswald of Worcester

We bid you a transcendently merry Leap-Feast of Saint Oswald of Worcester! Here in the time-out-of-time we at RFG weave our usual merry way through our Sesame Streetlamp-lit special topics of the episode, beginning with the Saint(s) Oswald; that is, Saint Oswald of Worcester who died on February 29th washing the feet of the poor, “revived” English monasticism, and should not be confused – unless you want – with the raven saint Oswald of Northumbria...

Our Demon of the Month features an unboxing of Choronzon (or Coronzon ((or even Coronzom))) tracing the dispersals of this entity-concept across the Enochiana of dear Dr Dee, the Thelema of renowned mountaineer, OG yoga influencer, and Great Beast Aleister Crowley, and out into the experimental currents of Chaos Magick, and the philosophies of non-duality, shadow work, and ego death.

We invite you to our own little Night-blooming Cereus party for our Herb of the episode as we celebrate the wish-granting and immortality of this singularly-flowering dragon-maiden who comes when she will and counsels to keep up the unseen work that creates a perfectly perfumed moment.

Our Genre of Magic has us enthusing about Metrics of Time – what we do at the turn of the seasons, how we may mark the ritually operative as well as ceremonial festivities, how the jam of talismans acts as a battery of stored momentum, the secret seasonal names of the Earth and Sun, and how we may grasp the new in the experience-quenched patina of the previous.

We declare a beach day in delighted discussed of our timely Mineral of Sand; in which we hot-step across sand baths, hourglasses, the grandfathers of mountains, and the potentiating memory of the multitudinous to retain myriad sorcerous programmings and punctuations. The geomantic figure of Populus makes an appearance in our celebration of the millions of tiny grains and moments that make an hourglass and the seconds it counts.

Our Arcana of the episode presents a before and after of Judgment and the Aeon; touching further on time’s lessons in the forms of the find out that inevitable follows the consequences of our folking around.

Finally, our Dead Magician of the episode leans into the mythic with some love for that cambion shapeshifter prophet druid wizard magus Merlin himself; from his amalgams of origin, his fourteen centuries of rich popularity, his defiantly backwards aging, and his adaptations across time to serve a variety of intellectual and political agendas of the age.

From us in our astral RFG wizard tower floating in the kairotic in-between of The Leap to you in yours, we wish you a wonderful Time listening to our co-enthusings! Also as always please be sure to check back in on the website for updates on coming classes, conference presentations, and more from both the Goat and the Good Doctor. Cheers!

We will continue to update the website and our facebook page when footnotes become available. 

This episode is also available on Youtube and Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

Episode 31: The Feast of Saint Anthony the Great

New Year! New episode! Happy Feast of St Anthony the Great! (aka Anthony of Egypt, Anthony of the Desert, Anthony the Hermit, and more!)

Welcome one and all to our thirty-first very special episode of Radio Free Golgotha, and our seven year anniversary! We are delighted to mark and celebrate the Feast of Saint Anthony the Great, and offer you some tempting co-rambles and enthusings on hermitude, satyrs, and what happens in the wilderness that may or may not stay in the wilderness…

We are also honoured to mark the one-year anniversary of the passing of our friend and yours, the late Jake Stratton-Kent, and to celebrate his work, his life, and his influence in all things folk necromantic and beyond.

We begin as is our custom by discussing the legacy and lessons of the Father of Monasticism, (the other) Saint Anthony, offering some appreciation and sympathies for being bothered by demons, considering how pagan spirits are said to have got religion, and reflecting on how exactly a “desert” was depicted by medieval artists who may have never actually seen one.

This episode is also brought to you by extended discussion of the demon Scirlin, that intermediary spirit par excellence of the Grimorium Verum; tracing this most potent spirit through a range of historical manuscripts and comparing their intermediary role with fellow GV intermediary Duke Syrach, as well as the offices of Tantavalerion and Golgothiell in the wider early modern goetic corpus.

Our frothily-lauded flora of the day is Hops which we celebrate for its hop(e)ful blessings of sleep, dream, and of course beer; that most delectable fermented plant ally and patron of after-conference drinks and discussion, especially for the (AL EDIT: totally reasonable and normal) amount of pints that English magicians can put away.

Our mineral of the day is the mighty and true-moving Lodestone, whom we honour for its magnetism (however that works), its historical model of sympathetic action-at-a-distance, and its folkloric links to Polaris and the beams of both the stars and our ceilings; as well as getting very excited about its Adamical historiola and mysteries, and how we compass our morals, our practices, and our hearts.

Being an episode dedicated to JSK, we could not but make his favourite grimoire, the Grimorium Verum, our style of magic; discussing its sinister reputation as an infamous handbook of black magic, its pagan roots, and its immense practicality of use; via detailed reflection on (inter alia) the First Character, the Orison of (any and all) Instruments, the spellcrafts of the GV’s Natural & Supernatural Secrets, and of course the adoptions/adaptations of components of its hierarchy and infrastructure into traditions of Quimbanda.

Our patron geomantic figure for this very special episode is Albus, the white-haired peaceful sage in the library tending to the yellowing scrolls and tomes that make up the bodies of work of our predecessors, considering its capacities to throw necromantic dance parties, and comparing this figure to its counterparted homo-form Odu Oturopon Meji, to consider cats, divined destinies, and ways to live our best lives.

Our Tarot Arcana of the episode is, naturally, The Devil, prompting considerations of demonic pacts, what we chain ourselves to, and how to keep the home hellfires burning in the face of temptations, intoxications, ego, and the costs as well as benefits of our decisions down at the crossroads.

Lastly, though certainly never least-ly, we dedicate this episode to the late Jake Stratton-Kent most directly by nominating him our beloved Dead Magician of the hour, as we honour, remember, and express gratitude for his influence, his friendship, and his passionate rabble-rousing: from his monumental Encyclopedia Goetica and other revolutionising books on magic, to his spearheading of renewed interest in Paracelsian, Albertine and Cyprianic traditions in grimoire magic, and from his championing of the importance of the Underworld in grounded sublunary cosmo-visions, to his advocacy for folkloric spirits and elementals as a crucial part of the deeper grimoiric traditions.

We hope, as always, you enjoy these discussions and delved tangents in the spirit of after-hours chatter and camaraderie they were recorded in. Also as always please check back here on the website for updates on classes, conference presentations, and more from both the Goat and the Good Doctor. Cheers!

We will continue to update the website and our facebook page when footnotes become available. 

This episode is also available on Youtube and Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

Astrachios, Asac, Acra Bedrimuliel, Silat, Arabonas, Irehalem, Ideodoc, Archarzel, Blautel, Baracata, Adonai, Elohim, Emagro, Abragateh, Samoel, Geburahel, Cadato, Era, Elohi, Achsah, Ebmisha, Imachadel, Daniel, Dama, Elamos, Izachel, Bael, Scirlin; Genium Domos.

This pint’s on us, Jake!

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Episode 30: The Feast of Saint Olga of Kyiv

Happy Feast of Saint Olga of Kyiv! There are a great many Saints that lend themselves to magic, to folk expressions, to sorcerous doublings and syncretic masques; and there are some saints whose stories are so bold they become storehouses of witch power and strength in the mere recounting- Olga of Kyiv is notoriously one such Saint!

Join us in this very special episode, where our sister in serpent-shed and good friend Katarina Pejovic and the Goat and the Good Doctor discuss the fantastic St. Olga of Kyiv, recognized in both the Catholic and Orthodox Churches; the demoness “mistress of sorceresses” and oftime mother of Asmodeus, Agrat bat Mahlat; the bark and bite of the fabled Dogwood tree; the bezoar pearl revered as the Toadstone; the power and practice of Naming; the geomantic figure of Rubeus; the Tarot Trump of the Star, and the complex mythological sorceress Medea as our Dead Magician.

We hope you enjoy the hurlyburly of this episode, it is always a pleasure to talk with Katarina! Be sure to check out her instagram and website! We will continue to update the website and our facebook page when footnotes become available. 

This episode is also available on Youtube and Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

Episode 29: The Feast of Saints Salome & Judith

On this Feast of the anchorite saints Judith and Salome, we are most pleased to bring you another episode of RFG! Ahhh….. the merry month, where did go?! Perhaps into hiding with our sweet anchorites, not to be confused with a myriad of other Saints Judith and Salome, or the hagiographic (hag because saint, not because crone) blur with two badass ladies of the Hebrew Testament–but a happy feast to you all the same! Brought to you by the Demon King (or Queen, some say…) Beleth; the get-away-from-me-unless-you’re-lightning and beloved source of medieval nut milk, the illustrious tree and good herb Walnut; the blackest of Tourmalines for our stone; and the Hermit as our Tarot Trump this day.

We explore the geomantic figure of loss-but-not-sadness, Amissio, and its homo-form of Os(h)e Meji from the Ifa and Orisha corpus; and discuss the myriad magics of seclusion and exile, following in the footsteps of our anchorite inspirations. (When there was only one set of footprints, it is because I left you to live in a small cell and retire from the weary, well-worn world….)

And finally we discuss and explore the life and works of the divinely inspired artist and priestess Susanne Wenger, also known by her Yoruba name, Adunni Olorisa, an Austrian artist who expatriated to Nigeria and manifested her love of traditional Yoruba religion in her art and architecture, bringing new life to old temples and bringing the Divine to earthly form.

Now and always, may it always be a cell of our choosing, dear ones. See you next episode! Enjoy!

We will continue to update the website and our facebook page when footnotes become available. 

This episode is also available on Youtube and Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

Episode 28: The Feast of Saint Joan of Arc

Welcome welcome welcome to another very special episode of Radio Free Golgotha! This, our twenty-eighth outpouring, comes to you in honour of the Feast of Joan of Arc, and we are delighted to step into the fray and discuss all sorts of business around the revealed mysteries of God and the unseen secrets of state, the celebration of women, and the cultivation of Strength, the development of spirit-hearing as well as spirit-sight, and a remembrance of another persecuted Joan…

The reason for the season, this episode is primarily brought to you by this our Feast of the Maid of Orleans, and we will be paying bibliographic and as well as theological homage to her legend, life, and loyalties.

This episode is also brought to you by the Demon Musifin (aka Reschin) and his counterparted Exu Capa Preta, “Mr Black Cape”; via whom we discuss oaths, secrets, pacts, and both the sorcerous revealing and beclouding of private information and public trust alike.

Our cherished herb of the hour is the noble Iris, named for a messenger-divinity whose aura was celebrated in the fields of the meadow and the ring around the Moon. Celebrating from bud to root, we also consider the unguents and glamours wrought by the employment of queenly Orris Root.

Our mineral is a metal, and the coldest one at that: Iron. We discuss armours and armaments, protections and perturbations, the rust of blood and red hot pokers, ther security of blades and the warding off of ill omens.

This episode is additionally brought to you by discussion of Clairaudience; what it means to divine by sound, hearing as well as seeing spirits, and where the voices refine and not simply overwhelm the other sensory faculties of developing mediumship.

Our geomantic figure of the episode is Puella, the Maiden, or rather simply the Hostess-with-the-Mostess. We discuss what it means to be the figure of feminine craft, power, art, and mystery emergent from a patriarchal pre-modern European mindset, and how to hear the empowering skills and cautions in this figure’s voice across a shield chart, and consider some comparisons with the homo-formic Ifa figure of Odu Otura Meji.

This episode is also brought to you by celebration of the Tarot Arcana of Strength; and we converse of the history of this card and its predecessors, reflect on innocence and force, and even get a little downright Babalonian…

Finally, this episode is lastly brought to you by a little history lesson on the labour dispute that led to witchcraft hangings, honouring Joan Flower of the accused Belvoir Witches, along with her daughters and a host of further accusations and confessions, as our Dead Magician of the day.

We hope you enjoy listening to this as much as we enjoyed putting it together!

We will continue to update the website and our facebook page when footnotes become available. 

This episode is also available on Youtube and Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

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Episode 27: The Feast of the Holy Martyrs of Ostia

With a perspicacious opacity, we bring you this twenty seventh episode of Radio Free Golgotha in celebration of the Holy Martyrs of Ostia, those criminals turned martyrs, whose feast of April 10th coincides with the third of day of the writing of the Book of the Law, which informs the rest of our surveyed topics, and brings us to welcome our special guest, Joshua Adam Sharp, to the show!

Our Demon is that voice-from-over-the-left-shoulder, Aiwass, who delivered the book, styled the Holy Guardian Angel of Crowley himself, who is our necessary Dead Magician of the episode. We have chosen the Poppy as our herb for its dangerous dreamings and as tribute of fallen warriors; the Topaz as our Stone, to see what it might “shew” us still.

As a practice we highlight the concept of channelling, with the complexities and nuances such a practice demands. The audacious Puer is our Geomantic figure, and its homoform of the Odu Irete Meji, aka Merindilogun Meji. We also invite that noble Juggler of the Trumps, the Magician, to the discussion.

Our special guest Joshua Adam Sharp is a card carrying fez wearing O:.T:.O:. member, co-owner of Botanica Macumba in New Orleans, a crowned olorisha and a quimbandeiro. Catch him if you dare/can.

We will continue to update the website and our facebook page when footnotes become available. 

This episode is also available on Youtube and Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

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An RFG Guest Appearance on 'a starnight dwell', no. 7: Darkness, a Good Friday Anniversary Special

We recently had the pleasure of appearing the both of us as RFG on JM Hamade’s ‘a starnight dwell’ podcast, only a few short weeks after he appeared on Episode 26: The Feast of the Archangel Gabriel. Centered (with no centre) on the nature of Darkness, our discussions, permutations, rambling musings are appropriately being released on Good Friday, a day dear to our Golgothite hearts. (From the sixth to the ninth hour, there was darkness across the face of the land…) If you don’t know a starnight dwell, do check it out!

Here are the show notes for the episode:

On this one year anniversary special we are joined by Jesse Hathaway Diaz and returning guest Dr Alexander Cummins, the estimable and brilliant hosts of the podcast Radio Free Golgotha, to muse on ‘Darkness’ in its many facets.

As 'a starnight dwell' was founded one year ago during The Harrowing of Hell (the time between Good Friday and Easter) as a means of exploring the starry underworld of the Imaginal, it was only appropriate to speak with two so well versed on the eclipsing mysteries therein.

Our discussion was free-form and open-ended, as tends to be the nature of darkness. As a show based upon discrete focal points of light, what is it to use this same approach instead with the space around said luminosities? Must darkness always be in opposition to light, such as black to white? Is it our greatest ignorance and our deepest knowledge? Or perhaps it marks the beginning stages of the breakdown between these binaries; a fertile-merging, a mixing, and a fluid in between?

For the full episode of the podcast, extras, as well as writings, artwork, and so much more, please visit the Patreon (patreon.com/starnightdwell).

Music: ‘Going North’ by Mother Nun

It was a beautiful conversation with a dear friend, and we thought it relevant to cross-post here as well. Please do check out JM Hamade’s Patreon, and check out his website where you may also be interested in his expert astrological readings, services, and classes.

Episode 26: The Feast of the Archangel Gabriel

In this very special twenty-sixth episode of RFG we are delighted to welcome artist, teacher, podcaster, and stargazing sorcerer of celestial images and lettrism, J.M. Hamade, to join us in this discursive night journey across what goes bump in the sublunary. 

Trumpeting the reason for the season we bid you a wonderful Feast of the Archangel Saint Gabriel, as we explore the hagiography and arch angelology of Gabriel aka Jibrīl, the anunciating Strength of God and friend of the Prophet (PBUH); as well as the forked origins and heaped demonologies of Iblis, the Shaytan. We celebrate the verdant and ancestral greening of the mineral Jade and the luminous whiteness of the wort Lily, herald's wand of martyrs and bane of cats. 

And thus by the beams and benedictions of the Key of the Stars we discuss the forms of magic ascribed to the Lunar Mansions, from considerations of sidereal and tropical star-math(s), to cunningly enchanted rings for summoning illusory trees, birds, and castles in the air.  We tour the creative voids, teeming absences, and inertiatic habitats of the Lunary geomantic figure of Populus and its counterparted Odu, Oyeku Meji. 

And we count the rays and dewdrops of the Major Arcana of - of course - The Moon, and ponder its splendid adventures and phenomenal phantasmal phobias... Finally, we pay homage to the singularly prolific works and words of our dead magician Ibn Arabi; from his prayers to his illuminations and beyond. 

We were delighted and honoured to be joined on these rambles by our guest and dear friend, J.M. Hamade, and heartily recommend you check out and support his work over at his website, his Patreon, his Instagram, his Twitter, and his youtube channel and podcast, “House of Stars”.

We will continue to update the website and our facebook page when footnotes become available. 

This episode is also available on Youtube and Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

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Episode 25: The Feast of Pope Saint Hilarius

Well met/Hullo/Hiya folks, and welcome to a very special episode 25 of RFG. This episode is brought to you by the end of February closing in and the first ever Pope Saint to be officially allowed to be funny, St Hilarius.

It is also brought to you by multitudinous discussion of the Demon Legion and of the demonic legions, in both grimoiric write-ups and conjurational experience. And by consideration of the magic of Good Character, as the tangible actions of the soul growing to embiggen our Selves and to discover who we indeed are in the dark.

This episode is also brought to you by the bitter kiss and greening spirit of Wormwood, and by celebration of that most Venusian and verdigree-patina'd of native metals, Copper. It is also brought to you by the duct-taped passing luck of the geomantic figure of Fortuna Minor, and the resounding of the Odu Iroson Meji.

Finally, this episode is also brought to by reflection upon the lightning-wrecked devilish lessons of the Major Arcana of The Tower; and by admiration and gratitude for the bravely lived life, work, and art of our dead magician, Rosaleen Norton, the notorious Witch of Kings Cross–artist, sex magician, counter culture icon, and Green Ginger wine enthusiast!

We will continue to update the website and our facebook page when footnotes become available. 

This episode is also available on Youtube and Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

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Episode 24: The Feast of Saint Thomas Aquinas

This January, having finally served the leftover carrots we’ve been dangling for six years, we are… refreshed. And so, we record our 24th episode under the patronage of the Philosopher Saint and Doctor of the Church, Thomas Aquinas. In our excitement, we invited the demon Ashtaroth to the conversation (forgetting that we have indeed partied before with Ashtaroth on Episode 17) and yet a lovely time was had by all.

We discuss the mighty Oak, the shapely Thunderstone (in its many permutations across Thunder-wondered cultures), the Major Arcana of the Empress, the magic of the Passions, the Geomantic Figure of Via, and that  dead magician and godfather of modern occultism, Alphonse Louis Constant, aka Eliphas Levi.

We will continue to update the website and our facebook page when footnotes become available. 

This episode is also available on Youtube and Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

•

We recorded this episode on Jan 16th, 2023. In it we mention our friend Jake Stratton Kent. The next day we found out Jake had passed that morning of the 17th. We have kept in the mention as we often reference him on the show, indeed he was one our inspirations and a huge fan and promoter of the show. We will deeply, deeply miss you, Jake. Thank you for being you, for encouraging us, for your inkshed, for holding the Work as more important than any ego, for striving to build the occulture you wanted to see, for being a friend.

Give ‘em hell, Jake. This pint’s for you.

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And today we are six…

20+C+M+B*23

Our first episode was January 6th, 2017–a Happy Birthday the Sixth to Radio Free Golgotha! Over the last six years, we have, quite irregularly, recorded 23 episodes, yet only published about 14 of those…. until now. In no small part due to the sound interventions of Mark Steadman, last Cyprianmas we released a long lost 2018 Cyprian episode, and now, in the hands of our beloved Three Kings we are able to release unto you seven of those lost episodes, and the episode we had recorded for this last Michaelmas. Every day for a week we will be releasing a back episode, traveling back in time to our earliest lost files in the nether regions of 2017. 

While we search for more of the Valentine’s file, and rerecord the alleged Candlemas the First, please enjoy these gifts of the Magi, and thank you for listening all these years to our Golgothite dreamings!! Ever onward, friends~

Best,
The Doctor and the Goat

Release Schedule:

January 6th - Michaelmas (29 Sep 2022), John the Baptist (24 Jun 2020)

January 7th- Pancras (12 May 2020)

January 8th- Holy Relics (5 Nov 2019)

January 9th- Cosmas & Damian (27 Sep 2019)

January 10th- Justina of Padua (7 Oct 2018)

January 11th- Valentine (14 February 2018)

January 12th- Mary of Egypt (3 Apr 2017)