Full Moon in Taurus
on headlessness, getting into magic, and a ritual for releasing a hard-knuckled grip on rational effort
In the winter of 2021, my husband and I both performed the headless rite for the first and only time. We tucked the baby into his crib upstairs, tucked the monitor into a distant corner in the kitchen, tucked the dogs into their favorite pile of cushions on the couch. We turned out all the lights, lit all the candles, burned a cloying and inadvisable amount of incense.
We were doing the rite “chaos magic” style, not following any specific tradition or set of beliefs1, just wanting to make contact with the spirit world, just wanting something for ourselves other than the resentment and fear we had found ourselves cloaked in since my first cancer diagnosis, the big surgery. We were floundering, professionally, as writer and artist. We felt isolated in parenthood. We were angry, so very, very angry about the way cancer had arrived in congratulations for the near-decade we had given to life in Nebraska, a life that had been hard on my husband Kiernan in particular. Behind the anger was fear. We had been waiting for our adult lives to “get better” our whole lives. Not just waiting, but actively striving, at times, for “the better.” What had gotten better? A few things, but we never really found ourselves riding any wave of gratitude. The baby’s illness, or the pandemic, or various family dramas, or just a pervasive sense of isolation from the way people our age thought and talked about life kept knocking us about. The arrival of cancer into our lives was like a big “come the fuck on!!”
The only good thing about it was that the illness clued me into a spirituality lurking behind the scenes of my life that I was finally ready to begin embracing. I’d had prophetic dreams about the illness. Tarot readings came true. I allowed myself to buy the chaos magic book I’d been eyeing2. The headless rite was the “big one” in the center of it.
I’d lost my breasts, I reasoned, I was fine to lose my head for a while, too.
The headless rite is an old one. There are plenty of debates about where it comes from, how to properly do it, whether you should do it all, whether you’re selling your soul to a demon by doing it, whether, no, actually, you’re initiating yourself into the knowledge and communication of your holy guardian angel. Aleister Crowley apparently performed it in a pyramid on his honeymoon in 1904. I had a healthy disdain for Crowley back then and, though I’ve come to be intrigued by and sympathetic to him in recent years, he’s still not a magical figure I really align myself with.3
Say what you want about Crowley, though, he had no qualms about doing both the philosophical and practical work of magic, which Crowley defined as the “science and art of causing change in conformity with will.” A current teacher of mine, Duncan Barford, prefers to follow the magician Alan Chapman’s definition of magic: “the art of experiencing truth.”4 I like that one, too, and have begun to see my altar-building5 and morning divinations, my auguries and meditations, all my little weekly rituals as participating in a reality that operates alongside, behind, and in accordance with our normal one. I’m not asking for money so much from my magic anymore, or even really health and well-being. I’m asking for a sense of wholeness, however fleeting. For that felt sense of being an irremissable part of a larger whole that, in some inexplicable but palpable way, lifts me out of my usual angsty separation from life. Takes me out of my rational brain. Leaves me headless for a while.
When we performed the honest-to-god headless rite, though, we were performing it for all the normal things people want in this world. Money, professional help, an end to illness. A new home in a different place, with a greater sense of alignment with our community as well as the natural world. Help with raising our kid. I can’t really speak for Kiernan, but I felt we needed to decapitate ourselves, to stick our heads into another realm altogether to make these requests. The normal striving hadn’t been working. Cause and effect, in its most rational and mundane sense, seemed to be eternally screwing us over. Could we put aside our giggles and dismay at what felt like the hokeyness of a Midwestern A-frame lit up with smoke and candles to a decapitated god to truly do some magic, experience a different kind of will?
What starts out as self-conscious doubt for me, in magical ritual, becomes real serious, usually, by the end of the machinations. My head does come off. My body becomes part of a performance that isn’t performance anymore: the goosebumps are real, the sweat, the words I’ve said, my faster heartbeat. The wish for results, the intention for something different in my life isn’t realized in some distant future, it’s realized in the moment. In the chanting alongside my husband, in the strange shapes my body’s shadows make against the living room wall.
What were the results of our headless rite? Well. I still have cancer, don’t I? We still have debt. I no longer work at the university. Our son is better, but this weekend he’s got a walking pneumonia diagnosis. Trump will be president again. We do live in a new house, in a beautiful place, beside mountains that we used to only dream of, but our hold on this home is as tenuous as these things ever are, dependent on a careful, rational balance of income and debt and mortgage payments that always seem to be tipping in a direction we might not be able to manage. We have a stronger sense of community, yes, but I’m pretty sure that’s just because we’ve both put more elbow grease into building it out over the last several years—being there for people, allowing them to be there for us—than we ever did when we were smarting and seething our way through our insults and injuries in Nebraska.
What’s changed for me, since our initiation into headlessness, is a self-encounter, a self-honesty, maybe, I didn’t have access to before. I’ve opened myself to the mystery of myself, the world, this life, that paradoxically keeps me grounded even as I soar off into strange realms every week using magic, meditation, good books. Feet on the ground, head in the clouds (or in the underworld, depending on the day). Sometimes, sometimes, these days, I find I can stop worrying so much about accumulation, about progress, about death, about what’s not here. I get excited, a lot, actually, about what’s not here. I wonder: is there a ritual I can do for that? Can my body act as the bridge between nonsense and sense, the unrealized and the fully present, for a while? The point of the bridge is just to make it, not to make your home there. I’m learning to enjoy the making, leave behind the grasping.
Below you’ll find instructions for the headless rite. Today’s Full Moon in Taurus is sitting with the fearsome fixed star Algol, one of the stellar bodies that carries with it the myth of headlessness, in this case the story of the Medusa. I appreciate all of the tetchy debates between astrologers and magicians about how to view this star, whether we should reclaim her power, rolling our eyes at the horror and fear that patriarchy has foisted upon the debased feminine over the centuries. Or whether, instead, we should respect the old stories of the Gorgon’s terrible effects, avoid Algol’s malefic gaze as much as possible, particularly when she’s being magnified by the moon. Personally, I’m of the mind it’s both. That, in fact, the beauty and the horror6 often occur together, in tandem, entangled. As I wrote on Instagram (feeling silly, enjoying myself) for the Third House community initiative7 I lead with my friends here in Charlottesville: some full moons reveal what’s hidden in the deep corners of our lives, hearts, and psyches. Other full moons reflect ambitious heights we hope to soar beyond in our public roles or personal goals. Many full moons offer opportunities for both, or, at the very least, a reverence for how the “high” highs and “low” lows of life often touch each other, reveal each other’s truths in the same moment, experience, or thing.
Today’s Taurean moon plays on themes of sensible building toward a future you desire at the same time as you experience that subterranean feeling of losing your head a little bit (or a lot, lol). Sitting with Algol and ruled by a Venus-in-Capricorn that is stuck between the Nodes of Fate, the Moon asks for an acceptance of whatever intensity and darkness has accumulated in your life, recently. It also asks that you acknowledge that there’s no better time to look up, look forward, and dream a new dream than when the old one has gone dark and headless.