"The Serpent" by Myrkur

Again, I found Myrkur on one of my excursions into the lesser known parts of Spotify. This particular area has a lot of Scandinavian Dark Metal - there was one really killer playlist called "Northern Lights" that had various pagan/metal/goth artists from Iceland, Sweden, Norway, and the like. Although the artist, Amalie Bruun, is Danish, the word myrkur is an Icelandic word meaning "darkness" in English.

For the budding Master of the Dark Arts, you have to get familiar with symbols. It's called the occult for a reason - everything is hidden. Lessons are everywhere, hiding in plain sight. Now, the tricky thing with symbols, correspondences, and a lot of other magical trappings is that - while there are common meanings for everything - the meaning for many things is often at the discretion of the spellcaster. Basil is a common herb for love but, depending on your own personal experience or needs, you might use it for protection or good luck. Amethyst could be worn for protection or psychic enhancement (or both). And the glyphs and methods used to create sigils should be as unique as the witch/wizard creating them.

I chose "The Serpent" because I've been seeing snakes everywhere. My whole life, I've been terrified of them. I would have terrible dreams about being trapped in a room filled with snakes, where I'd wake up in a cold sweat and wouldn't be able to fall asleep unless the light was on. Given this information, you can imagine my surprise when I envisioned myself with a snake tattoo. And now I have one permanently on my body. The tattoo is not quite finished - after 4 1/2 hours, my arm felt so beat up that I had to stop. Even now, a few days later, it feels like I put my arm in a meat grinder. I could sense the artist was disappointed and, in hindsight, I wish I had just powered through that extra hour or so. Can't change it now, though, so I'm trying not to stress over it because it'll be finished in a few weeks. Anyway, this idea of a tattoo came to me and it was of an ouroboros surrounded by my favorite flowers. That particular symbol has been coming up for me a lot lately - in books, in movies, even in random conversations with coworkers. For those who don't know, an ouroboros is a snake eating its own tail. It's a reminder of the wheel of life, the constant cycles of death, transformation, and rebirth that we go through on our journey on Earth. Like a snake shedding its skin, we must leave behind all that is false in order to move forward through existence. Our soul is infinite, growing with each new incarnation.

You’ll always always feel it

Down your spine

Try me and suffer

Impure from holy wood

Where angels fall

Cause I put a spell on you

And I broke your book of rules

I put a spell on you

And I am the truth

Back to the whole snake thing - I had a revelation that maybe my fear of snakes was telling me something. As I look back, there have been pivotal moments in my life when a snake has shown up.

1. One of my earliest memories is one where I'm walking with my sister home from school through the woods in Ft. Meade when we found an injured snake lying on the path. Someone went to get their dad to move it out of harm's way. A few weeks later, my mom moved us to New Mexico, literally leaving in the middle of the night.
2. The summer before I was about to graduate from college, I was walking with a friend to Whataburger at night. I'm talking to him, only vaguely paying attention to my surroundings, when I see out of the corner of my eye what I think is a plastic bag by my feet. My friend jerks me away and I look up to see a sidewinder slinking in the moonlight across the street and into the ditch next to us. Yes, my stupid ass would've stepped on a rattlesnake if my friend hadn't been paying attention. Probably would've died. Probably should've died a dozen times by now, for various reasons, so this is just another failed attempt to take me out.
3. Finally, when I was living at my parents' house after college, I saw the bones of a little rattlesnake in the street while I was out for a run. I passed the skeleton on my daily run for the next week. At the time, I was starting to get really serious about witchcraft and it occurred to me that I should pick up the bones for my alter, but the next time I went running, it was gone. Weirdly enough, this is one of my biggest regrets. Anyway, about a month after this, I quit my job and moved to San Antonio, with only the vaguest of plans in my head.

As I said, I've been terrified of snakes all my life - up until this year. For some reason, the fear has up and left. I've run into garden snakes in my yard, pet a huge albino boa at the aquarium, and even the random pictures that would pop up on my Instagram and Twitter feeds don't startle me anymore. I still have dreams about snakes but they're not scary and I don't wake up in a panic. They're more confusing than anything, to be honest. And what I've taken from this is that our spirit guides don't always come in a form we want them to be. Not the friendly or mysterious creatures that we hope are our guides, like wolves or butterflies. Sometimes, they're the ones that terrify us, are harmful or whom we think cause mischief, like snakes, spiders, and opossums. That's the hardest part, is understanding the language of the spirit world, because it is so unfamiliar and unexpected. A good thing to remember, though, is that they always make themselves known when you're on the right path....which is why, when my husband found a baby snake the day after I got my tattoo, I took it for what it was. A good sign.

"The Serpent" Video