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I would love to say I spent the last week in magical seclusion having achieved the total of the Abramelin Operation, but the truth is I spent the entire week being snowed under, literally and figuratively. Not only was the weather poor, but my magical practice went on hold as my on-call week at work was spent building software at 3am instead of doing important stuff like… sleeping. I was really really tempted to use the small hours for evocation, but my business unit is small enough they expect me to show up the next day even when on call so I have to sleep somewhere. I did start reading Pomethea, I wish the spirits were as anchored to this plane for me as they are in the comic.
I was pondering what I should do to kick it off tonight. Should I talk to planetary angels? Should I get ahold of Bast? Bast would be on the wrong night again, I would like to see that fail singly instead of in a group of spirits. My wife has been having decent dealings with her pet goetia spirit, so I figured calling him up and offering him some cider and a smoke might be nice. As I was having this thought, I opened my car door to step into the garage at the train station. My badge holder just perfectly lipped the grocery bag I was carrying my lunch in, and as I stepped out it swung my lunch across my vehicle, over the seat, out the door and it landed on the ground. The can of soda I had in there was punctured and exploded all over my tinfoil wrapped sandwich.
There’s the old oath “I will treat every event as the universe dealing with me personally”. And now I have no lunch. Since this was coined as part of the Crowley HGA operation, I think I have my answer. Back on the horse!
That being said, I did get a decent amount of catching up done in the RSS feed of shadows. TARM has a neat post on Enochian reconstructionism. Everyone, including myself sometimes, faults the Golden Dawn for taking Enochian magic and making it into something else. However, whats neat about magic in general is that if you agree to the scaffold, you can make it work. GD Enochian works just as well as classical Enochian, and I actually mix and match the two as I see fit. Whether you’re calling the quarters in Wicca or doing elemental work in the GD system or even asking for protection from the Watchtower as a Mormon, you’re using the Enochian system. Dee knew everything about magic, and tried to roll one giant thing with it. The product is amazing, and powerful, and it’s a testament to the flexibility of the whole thing that it works in so many formats. When the GD put it together, they did two really interesting things – they anchored the watchtowers so the layperson didn’t have to deal with them and they stripped it down to the elemental stuff so it was approachable. They took what little they had (remember: No internet, and Dee’s papers were in private possession for the most part) and they made it work and they made it work while guessing what was missing. Instead of flaming them for any perceived infraction to the system, it’s awesome they got it to work so well.
Also worth mentioning is The Unlikely Mage (not sure how he wants to be credited) is running a series on explaining Agrippa on his blog. His latest post is well worth the read. I have read Three Books and I hate to say it but it’s hard to get anything out of them how they’re written. It is a wonderful tool to approach the medievalist philosophy though. Polyphanes also has a post on this topic.
Finally some other fun reading for the multilingual – Levi’s Clavicules de Salomon. If anyone has a reputable version in English, I’m interested. That one is from Franz Bravo. It appears to be Levi’s personally correspondences for the tarot and the world at large. Like Franz says, “He had them beat by 200 years”. Also worth looking at is the new Tarot of the Magicians reissue. This was previously $100+, but Franz pointed out it was on sale for $15 a brief while ago. I would link to Amazon but their recent policy change has me looking other places for my books.
Ceremonial Magick Musings 
“even asking for protection from the Watchtower as a Mormon”
I was raised Mormon, but I am not sure what you’re referring to here. I am curious, because I know that Joseph Smith based some of the temple rituals on masonic rituals.
Tom, I actually thought about deleting this after I wrote it because I screwed up and wrote Mormons where I should have written Jehovahs Witnesses. No offense was intended, I was just typing off the top of my head. Sorry about that. I’m still tired.
No offense taken. They both annoy people by knocking on doors. 🙂
DISCLAIMER: I feel like I’m skirting too much into “THIS IS WHAT JEHOVAS WITNESSES ACTUALLY BELIEVE” territory. I would LOVE for someone who has a faith which uses a watchtower for religious allegory to post. I think the readership would be interested in this and it might kick off a neat discussion. As ceremonial magicians, I realize the magical tradition borrows from many other traditions and this is seriously ‘outside looking in’ sort of opinion. No offense is intended.
The thought here was the watchtower comes from the idea that (my paraphrasing) “Christ was fastened to a stake and not hung from a cross” (http://www.jw.org/en/publications/books/bible-teach/why-true-christians-do-not-use-the-cross-in-worship/). In my mind, this has interesting parallels to Dee’s transcript of the Visions of the Watchtowers: http://www.themagickalreview.org/enochian/kelley_vision.php or http://hermetic.com/jones/the-system-of-enochian-magick/the-hierarchy-of-the-watchtowers.html
The Magical Review has a crappy repro of the plate. The plate has 13 rows of stones which make up each tower (12 apostles plus Christ) but curiously only five columns, a window at the top, and ‘a thing like a crowne’ (presumably a battlement but why not an actual crown). There are four trumpeters, which could be the four wounds (five if you count the spear) of Christ. The trumpeters have trumpets with six horns, which is consistent with how someone might fashion a six sided stake or nail, or it might be me overreading it.
The Finished Mystery (http://archive.org/details/TheFinishedMystery – again, poor reproduction) has similar eschatology as the enochian visions. Really it comes down to – were Dee’s visions ultimately fueled by the same Bible which Russell and countless other people read or did Russell, living in a victorian age which was fascinated by occultism and pop-egyptology of the day, seek out occult sources for his interpretation of the End Times?