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It really looks like someone was sipping the wine because the leavings aren’t spaced evenly. Curiouser and curiouser.
We keep the room locked to keep the kids out.
Posted by Phergoph | Filed under After Action Review
26 Sunday Jan 2014
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It really looks like someone was sipping the wine because the leavings aren’t spaced evenly. Curiouser and curiouser.
We keep the room locked to keep the kids out.
Posted by Phergoph | Filed under After Action Review
21 Tuesday Jan 2014
Posted Evocation and Invocation, Magic, Ritual
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I don’t know why this didn’t occur to me before but I became a believer in ceremonial magic by doing Enochian work which really scared the crap out of me. Sort of like riding a motorcycle or learning to blow glass, there’s great rewards in getting over the “terrified” hump and into the “respect” groove.
So that being the idea, my wife was having interpersonal problems with people she interacts with and Blumaza, having solved problems for me at work, was a slam-dunk for the job!
She started out the night throwing around some Runes, which were being pedantic as usual. She was asking very specific questions for initials and names and had forgotten to remove the blank rune tile. Or the blank rune tile apported into the bag, either one is plausible at this point. The reading really went to crap after she pulled it and said, “Oh I’m going to draw again.” The blank rune showed up because the answer was either “we don’t know” or “we won’t tell”. Either way ignoring it past that draw was the beginning of completely nonsensical draws. I’ve been fairly adamant about removing the blank rune from the set in my guide, and the same rule applies. If you give the reading an opportunity to tell you to take a hike, there’s a possibility that the system will express the answer to take a hike. Which it did.
At that point I said the blank rune was her answer, and so after a few draws and blanks and such strangeness she thanked the ancestors and grabbed me. For whatever reason at that point (probably too much wine for me) she asked who I was talking to in order to sort out problems at work and I said I had worked things over with King Blumaza using rituals from Mastering the Mystical Heptarchy. He “stands at the right hand of Uriel” and “bears the chain of Government”, so that’s a natural description for knowledge working and top-down change. We had some discussion about how the pentagram ritual worked from a nuts-and-bolts perspective, and she pawed through my copy of The Golden Dawn. This is all up-and-up, she wanted to get the full ceremony on and that made me extremely happy.
We put out the sigillum dei aemeth in each corner of the room and the AGLA sigillum dei aemeth in the center of the table. I lit a candle and put it on the table, and put my preferred black shewstone on the central sigillum dei aemeth. She did the pentagram and hexagram rituals, and then read the conjuration from the book (using the thelemic version). Putting out the sigillum dei aemeths make the room “poised”, but actually reading the conjurations make the room alive. I killed the lights.
She asked, “Can I have a sign of…” and there was a sound like someone sitting on the table. That by itself is hard to describe since the table is covered in ritual kit, but if someone sat on it, that’s the noise that was produced. As she was asking questions, affirmations were met with a similar noises, while negatives were met with silence, or a wavering of the candle. It gave a similar appearance to someone waving their hands over the flame.
Worth noting – she passed the evocation test. The magicians right foot is supposed to be placed on the seal of the spirit, and previous experiments with this to the end of second guessing the actual position of the circle and feet have produced clear results. The seal is supposed to be made to the size of a foot, the seal is not supposed to be the circle, and the seal only works when the right foot of the magician is placed on it. Placing both feet on the seal seems to deprive it of potency. Magical literalism, go figure. She commented her right foot was warm and tingled and her left foot was cool.
After interrogating the spirit, she put several tasks to the spirit and we cut it loose. One thing I was less than enthusiastic about was that King Blumaza seemed to stick around longer than other spirits, but it wasn’t a hostile presence. It was more like walking to a room with an owl in it and the owl takes note of our presence. We will see how the spirit accomplishes the tasks set to it, and if she has any follow-up insight. To that end, she was impressed with the spiritism sorts of effects that Enochian magic usually produces.
In other news, C from Ghana also managed to get over the hump and call up Tzadkiel. He said he prepared the altar as best he could, he blacked out a mirror, and he read the conjuration from Planetary Magick. He reported laying prostrate and praying for 15 minutes and “he heard a man command him to rise”. Unfortunately, he was so startled by the experience he completely broke his concentration and apparently tore through his house demanding the intruder show himself. I would say he’s off to a great start!
15 Wednesday Jan 2014
Posted History, Philosophy
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Enoch and the Day of the End – Wonderful commentary on hermetic thought and the Golden Chain which exists in philosophy. I’ve been reading it slowly but surely and enjoying it.
A True and Faithful Relation – Continuing the enochian kick, that particular link is the “fixed” text version of the True and Faithful Relation. While there’s a lot of “enochian system” books out there, very few of them quote extensively from the source material. This link is particularly nice because it’s presented in text, and not scans from the manuscript.
Alan Watts – a goldmine of esoteric thought. While I don’t get too interested in “zen thoughts” which tend to be navel gazing, he has neat commentaries on Gnostic Jesus and Meditation.
The Koran – I might end up writing a book on the Koran, or at least a series of posts. The Koran is a hot topic because, like all great esoteric works, it was filtered through the flawed vessel of humanity. I’ve discussed some of the ideas with my Muslim buddies and while they are enthusiastic to discuss it, they also warn me that my ideas are liberal, even for Sufi. Of course I filter everything through my own personal vessel made of my perceptions and present understanding and as such, my reading of the Koran is gnostic and hermetic. It is likely that Islam picked up hermetic thoughts and practices from its conquests of the Holy Lands where Christian monasteries held such ideas and simply applied them to the “new normal”. In addition to that, Islam would have its people pray five times a day, take ritual baths, and spend time reflecting on scripture. The lifestyle is similar to orthodox Jews. Any serious reading about the subject absolutely lends itself to comparison with ceremonial magic, if the reader can get past the politics. Further along the topic – Crowley himself stole significant portions of the imagery for the OTO and Liber Resh, and in so doing elevated himself to the head of his own mosque. I’m sort of surprised he issued Libers and not Fatwahs.
I’ve been feeling sick and run down lately, so it’s been a good week or so to catch up on my reading.
04 Saturday Jan 2014
I try not to pick on other people but Bro Moloch’s post was recently a serious kind of misguided. The long and short of it is, I suspect the man has or had some innate magical ability and he’s formed his own system. OK I get that. The trap is he’s decided that his system is the only system and he somehow believes his system exists in isolation. Ironically that idea might have actually worked in Dee’s time, it might have even been correct before the invention of the cheaply bound book. However, it’s sort of silly to say “I’m an island!” on the internet. This is a nice place to compare and contrast how people do magic.
Moloch’s writing starts out well-intentioned enough:
Yet another email from a poor kid who thought he was doing the right thing and hired some ‘vampire sorcerer’ (whatever the hell THAT is) to give him a pact with a Spirit. Now the Spirit is causing all sorts of shit with this kid.
Seriously, please do not think you can simply read enough about Spirits from some forum or group and then go out & summon Spirits and provide familiars to people via pacts. You don’t know what you’re doing and just trying to make money off the ignorance of others and playing a dangerous game.
OK we’re operating off the assumption that amateurs can summon spirits (correct), and make pacts (also correct). For most of us, probably not. I know it took me probably a year of messing with Enochian to finally get the system hacked together enough to produce any effects and frankly I’m still not sure that first evocation was who I called on. However I also realize there are people far more psychic than me or people who grew up in stronger religious contexts and they probably could summon a spirit on their first crack at it. I also object to doing magic for money, although I do think people should cover expenses, and I’m OK if they want to tip.
I spent years working with Spirits, interrogating some, conversing with others, learning, learning and learning some more before I got the wherewithal on how to deal with Them let alone give Their children away (with Their permission). Some of you are trying to do what I do and seriously you’re in way over your head. Sorcerer may sound like a simple title but it is not. If you want to play at practitioner, then go be a Hoodoo or Wiccan but leave Sorcery alone.
The same goes for your wannabe Ceremonial Flunkies. Just because you think you can summon up some Spirit out of a grimoire and threaten it with names of Yahweh, does not give you permission to give Familiar Spirits. Hell, you have NO Spiritual Authority to begin with so who the hell do you think you are to order a Spirit around in the first place? Fuck Konstantinos, Lon DuQuette & Joe Lisiewski because those asshats don’t know half as much as they think they do.
All I have to say is “That’s nice”. While I tend to agree with him that Wicca and Hoodoo are for people more interested in “the combination of the virtues of things”, I disagree that it’s not magic, and I strongly disagree with him that they are somehow ineffective. I think they are less effective when done without working with spirits but it’s not like the plants are somehow not magical because they are collected outside of religious context. I’m not going to throw down a circle and candles and robes just to pick some rosemary for an elixir. That being said, just as plants have virtues by themselves, the Divine Names (or Names of Power) also have power by themselves because they too are well worshipped and regarded. Not believing rosemary has any power doesn’t decrease its lunar influence, it just means they miss out. More importantly this is a protocol question – if the spirits have been used to being addressed in a particular way, I would venture it’s more dangerous to get rid of protocol than to make up an entirely new plan. To that end, I would be more worried about advice from Moloch than I would be worried about advice from grimoires. More importantly, the grimoires knew the power of the Catholic Church, and so when we see something like the Lesser Key with prayers and such, the grimoires themselves are piggy backing on the coattails of the Catholic ritual. I’m not even Catholic, but I recognize the power of literally hundreds of years of ritual.
DuQuette doesn’t practice anymore (his focus is on his music) and Lisiewski has been dead for years.
You people are playing a very dangerous game when you don’t know anything other than what some Medieval practitioner scribbled into a journal. There is far more info you need to learn and know before you have that ability. But, fuck it. I don’t know anything because I don’t hold some university degree or I’m not some Hippie turned Crowleyite or some Goth wannabe.
Another swipe at Lon. But I would venture that the “journal” of Dee is paramount to working it, along with the “journal” which brought us most of what he deems as sorcery. No-one ever gets their “journal” completely correct because a technical manual of evocation would probably just include the seals. Actually Stenwick’s Enochian books come to mind as a technical manual to evocation and he’s careful to separate out different flavors of rituals and stick to the “bare bones”.
I would venture there’s a serious problem in his thinking, however – If people don’t have the spiritual authority to evoke and work with spirits by dabbling, then it’s not a “dangerous game” simply because they don’t have the authority to compel spirits to actually show up. On the other hand, if they do have the authority, than it can’t be a “dangerous game” unless that person doing the evocation doesn’t have a strong religious or moral compass. Really this has to be on one side of the issue or another.
What really ginds my gears, however, is that instead of saying “Maybe you ought to be careful about what you do and how you do it”, this is crouched in, “I know my shit and these guys don’t”. I suspect he’s never actually read anything Lon penned or any of Hyatt/Lisiewski’s notes. Lon falls pretty far from the Dee purists, and doesn’t share much space with Crowley except for using Golden Dawn attributions, and Hyatt/Lisiewski is open about the fact that people actually are playing with fire and outlines the precautions for them because he has an interest in actually being helpful.
That being said, most of the Goetia manuscripts and a True And Faithful Relation both begin by cautioning the reader that they “are works of darkness”. If that doesn’t spur someone into considering the moral, spiritual, and ethical implications, I don’t know what will.
It’s one thing to think you know what you’re doing when you believe Spirits are simply aspects of your own mind and in that context you can’t really hurt anyone because your’e not doing any real Sorcery nor interacting with real Spirits. However for those of you who think you have what it takes to summon the likes of Belial and order Him around and then demand a Familiar Spirit from Him, you’ve got another thing coming!
Yahweh doesn’t mean shit to Belial or any of the 72. Nor are they threatened by some brass box held over hot coals. That’s an absolute bunch of horse shit anyway and it amazes me that otherwise rational thinking CM’s buy into that Medieval hogwash. Just because something is old does not mean it is ‘accurate’. Remember it used to be taught in universities by learned scholars that the earth was FLAT. Think on that, O wise one.
In case you haven’t noticed, I’ve left the spelling and grammar errors in place. This is confusing the model with the mode. LMD actually outlines how the “aspects of ourselves” works in Low Magick and Chicken Qabalah. I’m being polite here but I start to wonder how people work something like the Lesser Key without having the Hebrew background the work is crouched upon. The Goetia of Dr Rudd spells it out – the divine names don’t work because they threaten, they work because they are the aspects the universe is made from, whatever someone might call them.
Also the Greeks knew the Earth was round, and they knew how big, and the knew the distance to the moon. The Arabs knew it too, which means the Chaldees knew it, which means that Belial (Ba’al) knew it too. I guess he doesn’t hang out with Belial much. This is where this crosses into absurd. Lets say with a straight face that everything in 777, everything in The Magicians Tables, everything in Agrippa is wrong. To actually perform sorcery, you need associations between things, and Agrippa, etc all wrote those down. I’m not sure I can find an older version of plant/mineral/stone associations except in the Bible where the Tribes of Judea were given some of those associations. The Golden Dawn took it and ran with it and produced the Tablet of Shewbread (pp 21) and most people take that as cannon. However, the first people to do it were the Greeks. If we don’t want to use Greek associations, at least credit them with the idea. This is really where rubber meets road. I don’t think that religious beliefs are static, but I also have a hard time taking someone seriously who derides history while claiming to be in contact with ancient Gods.
04 Saturday Jan 2014
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I don’t normally dream, so I tend to sit up and take notice when I have a dream, especially an intense one. For the sake of notes, I drank the juice and rum I made for my wife and I had a glass of wine later also. That was it. My eating schedule recently has been completely screwed up.
We started out in a hospital. It was dark. People were laying in beds and the beds were haphazardly placed in the space. The space was clean and tiled, but the people were mostly covered in sheets. I wasn’t sure if they were people or merely bodies, but a few of them rolled over. The room was dim, so they were obviously sleeping. My one companion was asian and wore a fairly sharp green suit, the other one was sort of smokey and usually seemed female without taking a definite shape. We had a camera. “It takes pictures of auroras”, he explained. Note that it was auroras, not auras. The woman would take a picture, and the flash would pop, and we would walk along. This wasn’t the first time I had gotten devices from spirits, but at the time I just went with it, I didn’t realize it was a dream. Eventually medical staff came in and we understood we had to leave, so I left with these two. We stepped into an elevator. There was a sense of time passing.
The second time we went to take pictures, we showed up at the hospital somewhere in the lobby. Similar to astral travel, I’m not sure how anyone pops out at a specific place but… We were in the lobby of the hospital. This time we needed a keycard for everything. It was a generic white one, like any sort of office would have, and it scanned on various black bricks to open doors. The hallways were long, and I quickly became lost. The hospital seemed to alternate between being a clean white place and some sort of museum. The carpets were oriental and rich, there were framed paintings and things in glass cases, mostly mummies and egyptian kit. The hospital side was clean, the tiled floor was a giant checkerboard pattern in muted colors. The walls had colored stripes on them, I remember black and green. Many, many doors later we returned to the place. I got the impression the idea was that these people were either ill or going to die, and somehow with the aura (“aurora”) photography, we were doing something not entirely kosher by medical standards but somehow we could fix something via the device. We took more pictures, but the room itself was starting to look run down. The lights this time were kept low but would flicker like candle flame. A few of the fixtures were missing colors. This time when the medical staff came in, we left in a rush.
The third time we materialized somewhere in a classroom if someone had decided to shake the classroom up like a snowglobe. It’s not that anything was ruined, it was just that all the desks were smashed into the corner in a hopeless tangle. This classroom exited into a basement, or steam tunnel. We went upstairs out of the ridiculous classroom cave and found ourselves in an almost colorless version of the previous area. This time the keycards didn’t work. Finally our Asian friend pulled something from under his shirt and it would open doors simply by being held near them. We went through a few of these and finally ended up back in the room. I finally find my voice and say, “What is that?”
“Neat, isn’t it?” He pulls out the necklace and the round disk. The disk is the Secret Seal of Solomon (or the Table of Practice, depending on which Goetia you use).
“OH I GET IT.”
And I woke up.
01 Wednesday Jan 2014
Posted After Action Review, Dreaming and the Astral Realm, Magic
inTags
Fortunately, in this universe, I was wrong about any sort of terrorism on New Years Eve.
I actually didn’t even stay up to watch it, my kids had both missed their naps so Dad missed his nap, which means thank God for DVRs.
About the only interesting idea of note is that a bunch of police were walking around with little palm sized boxes. They were radiation detectors. This is the first year I recall (not that I particularly remember past News Years) which the police had palm sized radiation detectors.
So here’s the rub with prophecy – if I would have rolled my eyes and said “well that’s obvious” at the prediction, it’s not prophecy. The reality is that the police, Tom Clancy, various Presidents and such have been beating the dirty bomb drum for years now. The sad part is that it’s game over. People know how to make them. The topic has been discussed to death. We live in an age where boyscouts are able to collect enough radioactive material from smoke detectors to poison themselves. Saying “a nuclear event” isn’t prophecy. Saying “terrorism on New Years” isn’t prophecy – someone, somewhere is going to be a terrorist on some New Years somewhere in the world. Putting a time, a place, and an event in the same basket is prophecy, but obviously my record for prophecy is shit.