Barbelith Underground > Temple > Magical screw ups.

Practical mistakes...a coven thing...we did an 'angel' (star/sky/heaven/generally somewhere up there rather than down there) entity invocation where we essentially went fishing and wanted to see what we got. This all worked fine and we'd managed to get some interesting stuff coming through over the course of two or three workings but it all began to be a little challenging for one member and so we decided to close down the working and banish. Trouble was we'd made the entity attach to a clay talisman and every time we tried to get rid of the damn thing some mad shit would happen...in the end a crone friend told us that they thought it a little daft that we'd made the talisman in clay when it would have been better in wax, wood or paper, something easily destrucible...so we ended up having to spend a fair amount of time grinding the fucker up and getting very muddy before washing in the ocean. Obvious in retrospect, but isn't eveything?

The other humourous working was a Kali puja, part of a series of workings in a squat temple (there's a write up of some of this series in Julian Vayne's Now that's what I call chaos magic). The rite involved firing off some destruction at a rather shitty military industrial installation with Kali's support...so sigils inscribed on the back of a ripped up image of the installation during the puja, then set alight and dropped into the cauldron in turn, so there's maybe a dozen of us dropping these little bits of lighted paper into the cauldron. Thing is we'd forgotten that this was the cauldron we'd been melting wax in to build the large alter piece which consisted of skulls, teeth etc all bound together...so as the pieces of paper drop into the cauldron they eventually melt enough wax to catch alight, which then escalates rapidly into a six foor flame coming out of the damn thing like a dragon's roar...which in the basement of a squat with cloth hangings round all the walls and a cauldron no more than three feet from any of us is a little disconcerting. For a little while we all just sat there, slightly tranced, until reality bit and someone grabbed a fire extinguisher (always be prepared children ;-) and let if off. This insightful move would have solved the problem save for the fact that it was a powder extinguisher - right for the job I'll have you know, powders on oils and all that - and let out a huge gush of white smoke-like powder powerful enough to send the cauldron and its six foot flame scooting across the temple floor, narrowly missing one of the circle. The room, now filled with a breathdefying cloud of smoke suddenly came alive as we all legged it out the back fireescape door whilst the fire extinguisher was opened up and the cauldron blasted until it submitted. Naturally we all found it highly amusing and banished with a lot of laughter...and a few splutters...and the odd cross word.