I don’t really consider myself to be a person who has any culinary specialties.
With that said, I can make a pretty good cheesecake. I mean, I haven’t for at least a couple years, but I can.
Here, I’ll prove it.
I made those.
And anyone who has ever made a cheesecake can tell you that the tops are extremely prone to cracking… unless, of course, you put it in a water bath.
That water bath is called a bain-marie, which is French… derived from the Latin balneum Mariae, meaning “Mary’s bath.”
So who is Mary and what does she have to do with baking?
Mary the Prophetess (also known as Maria the Copt or Mary the Jewess) was an ancient alchemist. In fact, she was perhaps one of the first alchemical writers. Unfortunately, we don’t have any of her direct writings. We just know about her from people who came later and wrote about her, such as Zosimos of Panopolis around the 3rd century.
She’s credited with the invention of the water bath, which allows a substance to be heated evenly and without hot or cold spots.
As such, cheesecakes are basically alchemy. Remember that the next time you bake (or eat) one.
Good morning and happy Monday, friends.
Allow me to please bring up some important dates of places where I’ll be teaching something within the next year:
- January 24 – 26, 2025: StaarCon 5
- February 7 – 9, 2025: WitchCon
- March, 2025: Botanica Obscura
- June, 2025: Summer Magick 2025
I hope to see you all there! I know some of those are quite a ways into the future, but it’s always good to start planning early for festivals…
I wrote an article last week to share some of my favorite Rune Spreads. I think I’ll be writing quite a bit more about runes as we go along over these next few months.
Lots of other cool things coming up soon, too. I’ll be continuing the Agatha All Along series with a part 2, covering the latest three episodes. And next up in the M3 queue is Laura Perry’s interview!
We’re also gearing up for Samhain in prison. There’s been a new policy that restricts us from bringing food or beverages for our services unless it’s a “high religious holiday.” Well… Samhain is on their official list, so here’s hoping we can have a nice circle with the inmates! We just sent over a donation request form… wish us luck that the administration approves it expediently!
I’ve been sad to see that archive.org was hacked and has been down for at least the past week. This is an incredible resource of digital books, free for everyone to access, that I regularly reference and link to here. It’s one thing to read someone’s interpretation of a work, but it’s quite another to read the work for yourself and come to your own conclusions. I really hope their issues are resolved soon.
Anyway, here’s a picture of a baby sunflower.
I think it’ll be flowering in the next couple or weeks or so! Pretty exciting stuff… considering that I’ve been taking a short video of it just about every single day for MONTHS now.
Over the weekend, Selene and I drove down to Miami. it was her grandmother’s 95th birthday. Wow! What a number. We should all be so lucky! Other than that… I’ve just been trying to write as much as possible… squeezing the last remaining bits of information out of my brain for this book.
That’s all for now. Stay tuned for more!
Aerik Arkadian 
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