about
a·mal·gam:
From Medieval Latin amalgama (“mercury alloy”)
from Arabic اَلْمَلْغَم (al-malḡam, “emollient poultice or unguent for sores”)
from Ancient Greek μάλαγμα (málagma, “emollient; malleable material”); from μαλάσσω (malássō, “to soften”), from μαλακός (malakós, “soft”).
amalgam (countable and uncountable, plural: amalgams)
(metallurgy) An alloy containing mercury.
A combination of different things.
One of the ingredients in an alloy.
Amalgams of tin and mercury gilded ancient mirrors from the 16th until the 19th centuries. As metals traditionally associated with the planets Jupiter and Mercury, I named my practice after this metallurgical phenomenon in deference to the conjunction of these two planets in my nativity. This configuration rules the stakes of my own chart while the confluence of these spheres mutate and fractalize the seasons in opposing rays.
True to this form, I move within many disparate spaces: corporate america as an R&D chemist, queer abolitionist organizing, observant (and adamantly anti-Zionist) Judaism, and an eclectic magical practice fed by folk, astrological, and necromantic traditions. When not at my day job or working with clients, I'm a teacher's assistant for Austin Coppock's Fundamentals of Astrology courses. The through-line threading my life together is the distillation of complex traditions of knowledge and the synthesis of many elements into new operations and wilder truths in service to the larger Field.
Raised in Austin, Texas by a magically-operant teacher, a blacksmith, and a firefighter, I spent my childhood yearning for the thresholds of Middle Earth and scanning SETI@home data for signs of eldritch terrors lurking in the noise of the cosmos. This early sense of wonder eventually collapsed under the weight of personal and inter-generational trauma into a rigid and dogmatic empirical materialism.
Although it was a catastrophic rupture and violently disorienting at the time, I’m so grateful that Life forced me to reconsider this framework a few years later when I had to squarely confront my academic failings, my queerness, and my powerlessness in the face of mental illness and the carceral systems we live in. Desperate and stripped of any other ideas, I turned back to the stars for guidance. Though I had been surrounded by astrology my entire life—receiving my first reading on a cassette tape as a child—excavating my own chart was the first time I felt radically recognized. It gave me the necessary permission to contain my own multitudes and contradictions; my glorious potential and my regrettable shortcomings alike.
Like chemistry, I treasure astrology as a technical discipline that enables a direct experience of the ineffable. As my astrological education and spiritual practices have widened, I have found them to be invaluable wellsprings for the deconditioning required to maintain an enchanted orientation to aliveness. As your astrologer, I offer my expertise, curiosity, and care to help you enter into a right relationship with time. My work is dedicated to stirring that which is inherently celestial within ourselves and our spheres, recognizing that we are enspirited children of the divine, fed by the light of the stars and the intelligences of the planets.