The B&N thing is a total wash at this point. I was thinking maybe I read the signs backwards and inverted, but it rose for the first three days, then tanked a bit last night. Assuming it takes the arc it’s been taking the last few days it’s opened like this, I expect it to close down today.
Anyway, I hadn’t done any serious evocation for maybe two weeks. Kids have been sick, I was sick, my daughter is teething so she’s sick and doesn’t sleep. I hate doing magic while tired because I find it hard to get myself into the mode versus falling asleep on the chair. I’ve been so wiped I even stopped reading the magical blogs, although some of this was also related to trying to find another RSS reader to replace google. You know what?
It felt really good to put the altar together.
I managed to have just a bit of a drink before firing up the good old wooden dias of doom. Being relaxed is important, getting hammered, not so much. For whatever bizarre reason, the spirit appeared to me as the Ghost of Christmas Present.
This, by itself, is sort of an interesting thing. We had a cold snap and it’s been snowing on and off for the last few days. Ostara is coming up, although the wiccan calendar is a backport from Gardner and there’s really only two seasons. The Sigrblot is the feast for victory which is really where the whole oak/ivy king thing comes from. The midwinter festival is usually the convening of kings and was more political than anything and there’s no midsummer festival in my cranky old Asatru roots. The heimskringla which was translated by Snorri Sturlason has the Yngling saga which has all the seasonal observances in it. If you’re reading the chapter titles and going “some of these look like runes”, you’re making the right connection. Dag = Dagaz, Ingald = Ingwaz, and so on – there’s entire stories in the stones. Snorri is a topic unto himself, I would like to think his motivation was to save the cultural stories and if he had to christianize them like the grimoires of his day to do that, that’s what he did. I seriously doubt he did it to “put one over” on the local culture. When people accuse Christians of stealing the regional holidays, it’s just a giant circlejerk of finger pointing. The reason why anyone proffered the day was because the Romans had made it a legal thing, and since the Romans had rolled over the local culture in the first place, we can all blame Rome. Similar to our problems in America now, it’s easier to just pile on new legislation than to do it right. December 25th a holiday? Great! Who cares what we call it, so long as it’s legal!
I digress.
I open by KC, LIRP, LIRH, KC. I get really good, giant storm cloud visualizations for the KC. I go with it and instead of the normal beams of light, it’s awesome lightning. The archangels hung out, they were sort of stoic and didn’t play the normal huge role of being the foundation of the temple and they seemed content to hang out in the storm. (Weirdly, it didn’t rain on them). Also in tune with this place of nothingness within the maw of the storm, the temple isn’t really there either. However, I see a face. I test it by signs and the face goes from sort of this full color image to a blue-and-white image, so the face tests well by signs and then tests well by colors to boot.
Being reasonably confident we have the spirit, I thank the angel for its help recently and keeping ends together. My wife had a few throwaway questions. Now, for all the CM crowd bags on Wicca, it’s good to have other people from other perspectives ask questions. Granted, she asked them to me to pass along to the spirit, but she was present there and the spirits acknowledged her. Unfortunately every time I see her in the wizard vision, her astral body is asleep. Not sure what to do about that.
Wife: Are you unhappy about the petition to interact with the ghost hunters?
I get a vision of Jupiter on a throne as the Christmas Present and he’s holding a golden scepter. At the top of the scepter is a giant purple jewel. There is a chessboard below him at his feet. He reaches two stones on the chessboard and pushes them around. One of the stones is Agares, the other stone looks like a diadem with three points. It could be Barbatos, but I’ve never called on that spirit in recent memory, certainly since I’ve started the blog. It could also be Sitri. Or it might be something one of the ghost hunters wore. Not sure.
Presently the spirit stands up and points with the scepter. Lightning comes out of the end of the scepter. Then golden light. My wife asked the question “Where does the lightning come from” so it’s one of these times the vision is very slightly ahead of the voice of the question.
Wife: Where is my (background check sheet) for work and can you speed it along?
The spirit gestured with the scepter. I see a flat brick building, sort of 1950s postwar style, which has a golden thread extend from it. The thread goes through the local post office building, and then touches my “chest”. Mail speeds out of the flat brick building, to the post office. I took this as acknowledgement.
Me: Thanks for the bonus, etc.
The spirit is now seated at a table, there are gold coins on one side, and then he’s writing on a paper. The paper is a small low wall, with more shadow-gold-coins (sort of transparent) on the other side. The spirit shows me that the table is really a balance, and the paper is the fulcrum. The spirit shows me that by helping me now, he doesn’t have to help as much later for this particular thing. Theres this idea of a scale and a balance sheet – pun intended – of money.
Wife: Have you been here since the creation of the universe?
This was the question of the night. Also it completely blew out my brain and I really didn’t have particularly well-ordered visions after that.
I see a vision of a sotto light. It’s sort of flat and uniform and just off white. This is as far as I’ve gone to see the godhead, it’s just this notional idea of presence and the bare, bare minimum for spiritual perception. It’s extremely hard to describe except as a space which is extremely clean and lit in a very uniform way, and even that uses verbiage I’m not entirely comfortable with. It is the Al La, the All and the Nothing. This ‘white light’ is present everywhere in this space, and then there is nothing else which is present here. It’s the “beginning of meditation” space and the consolidation of all things.
Presently this folds upon itself and some things become closer to other things and other places become sparse. It becomes wrinkles, like the stormclouds in the sky before the meditation. Visions and spirits don’t really exist in time, so it doesn’t surprise me that the stormcloud motif was seen before we even asked this question. Here it is again. As things are so shall they be. Is it stormclouds? Or the ridges on a brain? Before I have a chance to really think about that, a purple beam comes from somewhere in this great space. The beam wraps around a point, and becomes an atom or a the ‘tornado of energy’ I keep seeing for ‘raw angelic presence’. If someone were to imagine an atom with electrons orbiting it and that atom was moving in a direction so the elections were slightly behind it, it would look like a tornado sort of thing. I understand now that the tornado isn’t really a tornado, but some sort of energy projecting to/from something to indicate a movement for the body of the angel. My writing fails to convey this idea in any meaningful way, I just hope you understand.
From there the purple ‘congeals’ into a blue something which wobbles and then becomes Jupiter (the planet). It becomes Jupiter (the sign). It becomes Tzedeq. From there it becomes even more mundane things like contracts and jewels and gold coins. So, in short, yes the Angel is there before the creation of the universe, but the Angels ‘body’ is the things which make up the qualities of the angel while the spiritual nexus of the angel maintains these things. Because they are forms, there is a spiritual quality about them. Because a thing exists, it is the embodiment of a spiritual ideal. It was all a very Edward Kelley sort of vision where I saw all this first and then got the idea about what we were looking at.
Wife: So then all perceptions of the spirits are the same spirits by different names.
This was sort of a half question. I see Tzedeq as a faire, aryan sort of man. Really Tzedeq is Gabriel now. Gabriel means “God is my Strength” and Jupiters Sepherot is Chesed, which is Mercy. Gabriel is also the messenger of God, and since I’m strongly oriented to magic-as-theurgy, this lines up nicely even if I don’t like to talk about myself on the blog. I see this as though through a stained glass window, in a strong stone-walled church. There’s pews, and the light streaming through the window from the Godhead. From my seat, I see Gabriel. From my wife’s seat (I’m not sure how to describe this except I assumed her astral perspective), she’s in a stone grotto and the figure in the window is Jupiter, the sky god, with lightning in his fists and riding around on a cloud.
Wife: So all perceptions do actually see the same spirit.
Now I see the Tornado Of Power Angel, and in front of it hovers a mardi gras mask at the edge of its purple tornado self. The Angel looks through the mask and it sees us, and we look through the mask and we see the angel. The mask is dismissed, and a statue comes up. The angel looks through the face of the statue and we look at the statue. The statue is dismissed, and a gold coin comes up. The angel looks through the coin and we look into the coin and see the angel. The coin is dismissed. A fountain comes up and the angel looks through the fountain and sees us, and we look at the fountain and see the angel. I get the point and mentally ask the angel to pick one. The angel gives me a subtle jab and turns into Gabriel but the robes are made of whirling energy.
Again, we thanked the angels and went to bed.