Wrathful Sweetness & The World That Wants To Become: Ritual Reflections
As the Third Temple is consumed by flames, the Asherah returns to Her roots beneath, to plant Her orchards in its stead.
Today marked three important events in the day-to-day cycles of my life:
Tisha B’av, the Jewish day of mourning for the destruction of both Temples,
My adoptive father’s yahrzeit (death anniversary), 9 years after his decision to end his life on his terms,
My sustained return to my vocation as a kasima (ancestral healer) & udagan (spiritworker; ‘shamaness’)
As I have previously shared here, the last few years of my residence in Philadelphia have been a bit of a doozy (an understatement.) They’ve been marked not only with the stains of blood + reverberating screams from multiplicities of genocide done in the name of my nation’s greed, and in one case the dishonor of my Jewish ancestors, but also in a great amount of personal transformation, shedding, and death.
It was also roughly this time last month that my mum was preparing to say goodbye to my grandfather, the honorable and venerable Isaka Shamsud-Din (z”l), who passed peacefully at home - surrounded by my devoted aunts and uncles - at the age of 84. The process of his transition and the spiritual events around and entwined in it continue to unfold, as does my mother’s grief, which I carry close to my heart as I reflect on the world and roads that lie ahead, and the example these two revolutionary spirits laid out for me.
In the haze of exhaustion, POTS, and grief, I tripped up and ctrl + alt + deleted from my spiritual awareness the fact that it was Tisha B’av. In the Jewish calendar, the 9th of Av is - historically - a day of great mourning, primarily demarcated by a 25 hour fast, in order to collectively grieve a truly astonishing amount of violence against our community. That it falls on the anniversary of my Jewish father’s suicide, in short succession from Huda Kattan reposting blood libel to 11 million people as Medinat Israel sadistically strains itself to confirm every last violent trope, would be a lot on its own. But in a wildly, poetically sinister, despairing and apt moment, it also puts into relief the razing of the metaphorical Third Temple of Rabbinic Judaism, brought down by its institutional hand-in-hand with the disdainful, Christianized minstrelsy of Israeli identity, and the disclaiming, learned helplessness of the violently bigoted subconscious of the collective American public. The ash, blood, and despicableness we’re using to starve the Palestinians, Sudanese, Congolese people to death, will inevitably destroy us all, too. It already is, as a dementia-addled, child raping, edema-cankled chanticleer, continues to overtly rally the cultish chickens of 440-years-old, progressively enshittified roost.
Everything I hold up as a lens for ethical and strategic clarity in this moment, comes from the fact that my father used his suffering to try to justify destroying the universe of my soul on his own Plutonian pyre, in a clear and dramatic attempt to purge himself of his own self-loathing and internalized oppressive poisons. I recently learned that his natal Pluto (conjunct his Sun; in the 12th house in Placidus) sits atop my natal Chiron in my 1st house of body + self, and his natal IC in Scorpio and namesake asteroid rest at the exact same degree of *my* natal Pluto in my 4th house, part of a stellium with my Sun, Mercury, and Mars, so the stars clearly concurred. This is the same stellium that a very charming older Jewish man and lifelong astrologer, old enough to be my grandfather, also recently told me was a formidable gift, one that I should steadfastly plumb the depths of fearlessly. As I sobbed to The Subway on loop on my bathroom floor, reflecting on what my father’s life and death has taught me about the costs of compassion, all I can think about is the moral injuries of navigating the limitations of its absence. I have spent my entire adult life, and too much of my childhood, working hard to develop the muscle memory of choosing not to suffer along with him every. single. fucking. day., all because so many people caved to cynicism and apathy when I was a child, and left me to defend and fight for myself. I had to be the one who got me away from it all, and in the wake of that, many parts and versions of me had to die, and it has been brutal, tedious, and terrifying.
The more time passes, the more I am only sure of the wisdom of Jewish tradition that every soul is a precious universe: even the ones making evil choices, even the ones I find terminally annoying, even the ones I find myself actively despising against my wishes. But even more than that, so too are the lives who are made into ‘justifiable collateral’ by others, all because of the presence of the former. The willingness for the ‘good’ to sacrifice those universes without a second thought, is representative of a calamitous moral and ethical failure all on its own. But navigating the limits of people invested in this idea, while claiming to want liberation, fills me with overbearing, infernal wrath. To never give compassionate regard to the existential obliteration of the people made to pull the triggers, the ones forced to chop off heads and burn their oppressors to death for their freedom, or even to the people who catch the strays of revolutionary shrapnel - all of whom are still the oppressed and violated, and for whom the momentum of ‘kill or be killed’ was imminently preventable - I cannot even imagine being willing to pay that price for the futility of my ego, and the placation of my own guilty conscience.
After three years of grateful sabbatical, tumult, and healing, I have returned to my own work of reconnection, with greater clarity about the role my vocation serves in preparing us to birth the world anew. In the wake of her passing, I chose to dedicate the work of my Road Opening and Sweetening the World ceremonies tonight to the legacy of Joanna Macy, whose clarity and compassion, and deep, abiding love of life reflect a spiritual devotion shared by my grandfather, and by the Grandmothers of my lineages, who gave me the gift of this time and of being remade into a reflection of Asherah’s Tree.
Ritual Notes: Baby Bertha’s Road Opening
I didn’t advertise participation anywhere other than my old stomping grounds of Facebook, primarily because I don’t know what relationship I want to have with any other platform yet. My apologies to anyone who is frustrated they got left out this time around, I just had to find a way to begin.
The plate of dried blood orange slices, the beeswax glass-encased candle dressed in Golden Titan & Froggy Subset (Mercury in Gemini) materia from Sphere + Sundry, and the dressed + prayed over petition with the names of screened participants, were the components of the Road Opening ritual that accompanied the consecration + installation of Baby Bertha (not her actual ritual name), the communal altar I will be using for all of my vocational work moving forward. Because the installation of this altar represents a remaking & rebirth of my spiritual practice- and the relaunch of my communal vocation, albeit housed at a new digital domain - I chose to do this road opening work during Mercury Retrograde in Leo to purposefully draw on the power of being able to renew and rebirth ourselves, in order to make radical changes in service of our own dignity, well-being, joy, and expression. It’s also a little bit of a nod to the fact that my ‘brand’ is now Bunny The Great: a subversively cheeky play-on-words, a Mercurial tet-a-tet of commerce under late-stage capitalism, where my vocation and its rules of engagement buck against the dreams of aspirant techno-feudalists worldover. It’s very seasonally chic 💅🏽
(and shout out to Sharon Wagner of Swail Studio, whose brilliant branding visuals helped me set up my own digs with more creative coherence.)
Hand in hand, Mercury, the Ancestors, and the Asherah, clear the roads of participants’ lives of Divine Detritus, with the help of the white and black fire of vayikra, producing much mazel: the aligning of good stars for all participants do moving forward, at least for a little while. Such is the way of the pathfinder, waymaker, and road opener, bringing us opportunities we couldn’t yet see or knew were available to us.
(Participants will be receiving a separate, private email with divinatory notes — if you can’t find it (check your spam, too), please reach out!)
Ritual Notes: Sweetening The World (July 2025)
Drawing inspiration from the proud tradition of Hoodoo, and the teaching of my spiritual brother, Theo, my Sweetening The World is one of my new offerings.
These are monthly ceremonies intended to ‘sweeten’ our experience of being in the world, by making our day-to-day lives and interactions more loving, generous, reciprocal, and compassionate. I perform two separate ceremonies: one for my Cleo Mae Club clients, and another on more-or-less the 30th of every month on a Pay What Works For You basis, where folks are also welcome to submit their information upfront for conclusion and pay whenever they have some means to do so. I fully trust that people understand that this work requires reciprocity to sustain its generosity, and that folks will conduct themselves safely with their finances, in order to get what they need for themselves, and also to give what they have to share, too.
I prepared a special paper talisman made out of an accurate-to-scale map of the world, which I encapsulated in a mini mason jar with a beautiful, large banded carnelian (fire-aligned stones are excellent for catalyzing tangible magical results), some sweetener, and other goodies. I placed it into a bowl filled with flower petals for flourishing and delight, with the prepared petition with all of the names sandwiched between it and the feeding candle, which was dressed in Thema Mundi, Golden Titan, and Froggy materia from Sphere + Sundry, along with my own proprietary blends of Luminous Gold oil (from my former Juno Jar work) and an electional-quality, Venus trine Jupiter oil from 2022, to add oomph, shine, and warm pizzazz to participants’ lives.
Thank you for hanging in there for this quite long update - I have a final offer in the works I’ll probably write to you about, but for now, I rest.
May you find the fruits of the Mother Tree in your everyday life, so you may deeply nourish your body, mind, and spirit.
XOXO,
Bunny