OTA Associate Membership Program

Tags

asatru, ceremonial magic, OTA, OTO, stephen flowers, wicca

I finally got around to sending off for the OTA membership program, and I’ve been re-reading Flowers books. While somewhat painful, because I now know way more than I used to ages ago, it’s good to go back and touch base. The OTA application prompted this loopback and examination because they want to know a bit of magical history and about yourself. Unfortunately for me, I won’t be joining in person because they’re on the other side of the nation from me but I always liked the Hermetic Hour and the videos, so why not support that?

Lets talk about what I like, first, about the OTA. Poke has a decent presentation. There’s an element of the ceremonial magic community which thinks all magic should be done in secret and taken very seriously even when casually discussed. While I have become more sympathetic to the first one the more I work (I haven’t published any rituals or readings in a while, compared to about two years ago when I would publish everything and anything), I strongly disagree with the second one. The argument I usually make is “my secrets keep themselves” and the argument from the other side is “pearls before swine”. Well I don’t think people are swine, I think people want good things for themselves and I think people want good things for their community, and I think people are incredibly short-sighted and actions are usually poorly thought out. A swine will never be gifted with philosophy, but people can certainly ignore philosophy and choose to act like animals. That being said, one of the things I love about the videos (especially Rites of Magic) is that the bones are there. The ceremonial magic themes are present, and the ritual circle is correctly constructed for what it is supposed to represent, and the actors understand the subtext of the presentation. Mot, for instance, enters under Saturn and literally works Baal over and through the alchemical elements. I’m assuming (although it’s not shown) that Baal “falls” before Mercury, and rises under Venus, but it could also easily be the sun and the moon. Stuff like that is pure gold. It presents the mythology, the guy playing Baal is a nice guy, I actually want to drink with Baal, and there’s an illustrative lesson about life and alchemy and planetary magic all rolled up in there. If someone’s knowledge level is just getting over the fluffy bunny hump, it’s a wonderful dramatic ritual. If someone is a planetary magician, there’s symbolism there. Alchemical interests are appealed to, and if someone is a flat-out atheist, heck, it’s just fun to run around with fire and mead.

Lets now talk about what didn’t work, or why I didn’t settle into a group. These are going to be locally colored experiences, your experience will probably be different.

Wicca tends to not work well for me. Llewelyns is a sodden mess with no discernment. Most of the wicca groups around here are “show me” groups. The rituals tend to be a mess of feel-good and not a lot of formal structure. I’m sure anyone reading the blog is familiar with the difference but where Gardner tried to remove Crowley’s ceremonial magic influences from his religion, Sanders with Alexandrian Wicca attempted to put them back. It remains the biggest division in the practice today. I could probably get on with Alexandrian Wicca except I find it disingenuous to go through Gardenarian Wicca to go to Alexandrian Wicca when I could just add ecstatic elements to ceremonial magic in the first place. The OTA does this very well. In fact I think that the ideas are so compatible that this is the subject of the next class and I feel strongly that removing the so-called “ceremonial magic” influences is wrong and hurts the product.

I joined the OTO, it was a lot of nice people but the drive killed me. There was also a bit of Crowley worship there. Coupled with the OTO’s political problems, copyright pissing contests, and everything else, it wasn’t really “home”. Also my local temple is a hell of a drive from me (over an hour) and add traffic to it and I could never plan on actually attending anything. I think I joined it expecting to practice Book 4 in a group like the Golden Dawn style magic and found it was much much closer to masonry with Crowley’s tastes than a magical lodge. Your mileage may vary, the OTO is intentionally structured around the Gnostic Mass (which is awesome) and everything else is up to the community for presentation and activities.

My local Asatru groups fell into two categories – people were preparing for the end of the world and people who were interested in the political structure of Asatru. The end of the world guys are actually pretty cool and practice the Virtues in Northman lore. The political guys are tools and were only interested in who is wearing whom’s oath ring. While having a “viking society” is interesting in a reconstructionist perspective, I still have to answer to the law of the land. I’ve come around to the idea that the first group is the better group and the sword thing is easy to get over once I realized two of the big three religions encouraged their members to keep swords. (Also: Some sects of Hinduism and Seikhs). They had community! They had camaraderie! They had neat rune tattoos! But neither group practiced magic!

Really at this point I have three distinct parts of appeal – I desire intellectual appeal, I want emotional appeal, and the je ne sais quoi – the spiritual zing which is really hard to make ends meet.

The first one is easy enough to accomplish. The intellectual appeal of  the group is as simple as the reading list. Are the books well cited? Do the members know what they’re talking about? Does Llewelyns account for less than 30% of the bookshelf? The real big win here would be – does the group produce its own materials? There is an intellectual hump between book club and philosophy discussion group. Simply giving someone a reading list means that once that list is over, that person is going to pack up the cats. Potentially worse, they’re just going to chase through the degrees without actually working the material and it encourages armchair occultism.

The second one is a bit harder to accomplish because the individual can come up with things which resonate with them emotionally while still working inside of intellectual constraints, but working inside of a group, the group needs to agree on the intellectual symbolism and the emotional resonance. This is one of the great problems with the information age – no-one joins a group “dry”. Most people, like myself, have come up with some personal system they like based on their intellectual understanding and personal tastes and stick to that system. Fortunately I think the OTA satisfies that (mostly) for me and I can cite a bunch of places where The Hermetic Hour has beaten me to a good idea. This is also a good sign that the group might be a good fit. More importantly, because we live in the Age of Mercury and people don’t go into things unprimed, it helps people make good decisions about those groups if those groups are publishing. I would, for instance, probably be happy in the OTO if I was in California hanging out with the Speech in the Silence folks or the Thelema Now folks. But then I could also join the OTA in person. Fortunately the OTA is not exclusive in whom a member can associate with, which is to the OTA’s credit.

The spiritual end of the triangle is the most pure – either someone agrees with the goals of the working or they don’t. If it doesn’t feel right, don’t do it.

Anyway, the biggest question I usually get is how I got from Asatru to Ceremonial Magic. The answer is that there’s fairly comfortable place around 1600AD where Christian (or Western Esoteric thought) was being co-opted into Icelandic magical texts. The product, the Galdrabok, is largely ignored by the Asatru guys and the Ceremonial Magic guys. The Asatru guys don’t practice magic as a general rule, and the Ceremonial Magic folks see Stephen Flowers and run. Stephen Flowers Galdrabok is pretty typical of his work – it tends to be undercited, he doesn’t note where he is making speculation, and he tends to read the rituals in the most provocative ways he can. Everything is blood ritual! Well, not really. Blood ritual was present, but not nearly everything was blood ritual. On the other hand, that particular piece of history was a lucky entry point for me into the greater framework of ritual and tradition and most importantly – that everything can be trued up. I almost wish I had read the Three Books of Occult Philosophy first, but it would have been less practical. Being a viking is just fun.

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Mind your own business! is the sole sufficient rule.

Tags

covens, crowley, divination, polarity, runes

Because I suck at wordpress, this post was accidentally published before it was fully baked. Oops.

This post is about divination and magical responsibility against philosophy. There is no morality for the magician. There is only philosophy and mindfulness. Actions are not inherently right or wrong but rather considered against their effects.

Yesterday, someone shored up to me who I sort of peripherally knew but couldn’t place the name. They expressed a desire to learn some ceremonial magic. Normally I just pitch people a reading list tailored to what I believe would be interesting to them and the onus is on them to read it and come back. This very quickly, and with little effort, separates the serious people from folks who just want to perform magic for some paltry end. Ceremonial magic is ceremonial magic because it very specifically requires proper philosophy and observation. This isn’t pick a color and light some candles, this requires an effort. If they can’t put forward the effort to read a book, I doubt they will have the required will to maintain some guard over what enters their minds and bodies. The book is easy. The book is the easiest requirement of magic. The hardest requirement of magic is priming the pump of the subconscious with the appropriate philosophy and imagery. Maybe it’s easier for me since I have kids and no desire to watch Dora the Explorer for the millionth time but I wholly understand people who, given to solitary life, there is a temptation to fill their minds with fiction and pornography. Crowley I think had a novel solution to it – simply make yourself sick of fiction and pornography through indulgence and you’ve bored your devils to death. The trick is to then reflect on the experience instead of moving on to the next immediately.

Rambling aside, for whatever reason (perhaps the name I felt I should have known) I decided to start throwing around the runes. His psychic space is fairly ridiculous and is either incredibly disorganized or he has employed or attempted to employ magic to everything in his life. It was such a consistently close-knit pile when trying to divine for him that I started looking at which runes were not in play just so I could pick out a negative set. This technique is not in the rune guide, I actually haven’t ever seen a spread this busy before. It was like asking “Hello Runes, show me the universe!” and a complete jenga stack of face up runes lands from the bag. The reading was just that absurdly busy. I decided this wasn’t particularly worth chasing, so I started playing the name game to try to narrow down sets of interactions. The name game works by picking a symbol, rune, or card and assigning it a person based on their qualities. Not sure about what the person represents? Pick a card, any card, and stick with it. However that is very last-resort and it is much better to pick something based on known-qualities.

After cycling through a few names and trying to come up with spreads that matched or implied a connection, I happened across a name of a person and she overlapped the center of the tightly knit spread. More importantly, she was actually present in the spread and face-up, while all the other names had been face down or at the edges of the cloth. While it sounds like I’m playing with the Dice of Satan to the casual reader, the symbols matter as much as the position of the symbols, which gives a fairly high significance to individual throws.

And here is where I screwed up. I assumed because there was a connection indicated between these two people, that they were best buddies and friends forever! In fact, they pretty much don’t get along at all. But this was after I had made the assumption that they were interested in working together and friendly. From a hermetic perspective the spirits (or runes) were not deceptive. They did indicate there was a connection there. It was a failure on the part of the operator to not then say “tell me about this connection” and divine that the connection was overwhelmingly negative. This is a really interesting idea to roll around in our heads – if we want to see someone we focus on meeting with them and if we don’t want to see someone, we focus in avoiding them. However that doesn’t mean there’s any less force of will, it simply means the polarity of that force of will is banishing or attracting. This isn’t to say an attitude like “ignore them and they will go away” is appropriate to every situation, but if someone is concerned about things coming down the magical spiderweb, it would be best not to operate on the person but to redirect the forces they’ve expended if there is open hostility. That doesn’t nearly appear to be the case and explores a worst case scenario, but the important takeaway is that effort along the attraction polarity or the banishing polarity directed at someone creates a detectable disturbance in the force.

Additionally to all this divination, everyone but me happened to know they didn’t get along and since I have infrequent interaction with the covens, I didn’t know any of the history. A quick mention and I got the crash course and ten-cent tour from my wife.

What is his reason for leaning ceremonial magic? Immediately, like most people I would guess who take the plunge, he has a need. He has a “haunting” over his friend’s place (in quotes because I haven’t explored the situation) and he’s tried to solve it with ad hoc new age tools and has been unable to bring it to any resolution. Ceremonial magic as a formal discipline means that the operator can (and will be as in the case of last nights divination) be wrong because there is structure and rules and philosophy. There is observation, and there is intent, and it’s bad to confuse them as given in the example above. I gave him the ever popular License to Depart and we’ll see how it goes.

Letters to Phergoph

Tags

letters to phergoph

I’ve been writing so much correspondence that I actually had a dream I was blogging. Not sure if that’s a message or not but I woke up and realized some of the material might be interesting to people. As usual, topics will be covered in a general sense (not quoting anyone) and in no particular order. These posts tend to be more practical than philosophical. 

Phergoph, people were laughing during magic class! Magic is serious business!

It’s a class. If we don’t make it fun and appealing to people, people will invariably arrive at the “why am I doing magic” question. From an external perspective if people are turned off by the rigid and impersonal nature of Christianity, or Islam (which specifically states that Allah is unknowable but then provides no provisions for contacting or currying his favor aside of duaa or Rightly Performed Prayer), then people are going to get turned off to magic entirely. Spiritual evocation is already an unpopular topic in magic, there’s no reason to make the material painful. Either people enjoy the flavor of the ritual and the equipment or they don’t. If they don’t, then they shouldn’t do this sorts of magic. It’s that simple. More importantly if they don’t enjoy the flavor of the magic, then they will not take the time to preload their minds with appropriate imagery for the spirits, and they will have a poor visionary state. If they have a poor visionary state, then the spirits won’t be able to communicate clearly, so the little bumps which lead us down the correct path and prompt us to philosophize won’t occur. That’s a bit of a lie, the HGA operation I think is a brilliantly designed experiment as put forward by Crowley specifically to see if spirits with little priming can help.

I can’t find red tape!

The tape in the lesson wasn’t a particular color. It just was a happy accident it matched the altar. I actually would have preferred fully white or black. Alternative: Put down butcher paper.

Did you really consecrate the entire box of chalk?

Yes. In for a penny, in for a pound. If you’re going to take the time to do the ritual, make a ridiculous amount of the stuff. You’ll use it, you will feel good about using it, and it will last awhile. However, the box of chalk is correct in solomonic magic where most of the items are blessed or somehow tied into the ruler of that particular age (Venus for purists, Mercury for us now). The idea here is to invoke the highest authority you can since the demarkation is between the sacred and the impure. It wouldn’t make much sense in my mind to consecrate some purple chalk to Jupiter and then use it for a circle. It would make sense to me to consecrate some purple chalk to Jupiter and then use it to make a talisman or something. Except your Solomonic Sharpie is much better than that since people tend to notice chalk all over things you hand them.

(Someone, somewhere is groaning at this idea). If you didn’t hew the chalk from the earth, don’t complain about the solomonic sharpie.

Those candles didn’t look like beeswax. Or Were the candles white for a reason?

My beeswax candles melted into consecrated puddles last time I ran the woodstove. They’re fragile and they burn quickly. I would be interested in suggestions if there’s a particular brand but I am pretty much completely fed up with beeswax as a material. The first SDAs I made were also pure beeswax and the stuff either dries out and gets fragile or becomes liquidy depending on the mix. Maybe I just suck at candlemaking, who knows. The candles were purchased from the Hebrew section of the supermarket, so I am trying to make some concession towards keeping is sacred, but I also realize I’m probably just paying extra for hebrew all over the box. White is the correct color for candles, but this goes into the whole thing about the archangels and colors – our white is different from “white” for them, which is really sort of a dusky yellow color because… beeswax.

Did anything happen after the ritual?

F eventually got a “wait” letter from the college he was applying to overseas, the letter arrived on the day of Luna, the hour of Saturn. I waffle on the idea if these are interchangeable or not, I eventually settled on the idea that it is similar to parenting. It doesn’t matter which parent someone is asking, they should consult each other. Obviously for scrying it is the same as talking – Hour of Luna is hour of Luna, and Hour of Saturn is Hour of Saturn. However the combination is definitely a product of both influences. This would then be an obvious sync. I asked him if he had asked for anything in the ritual circle. He said no, but this doesn’t particularly mean he didn’t have wandering thoughts and accidentally bring it up. This does fly in direct contrast to the meditation technique I was espousing where thoughts come, but they are not important. This is very Alan Watts, but I think Alan Watts is also not a magician. The easy meditation is to acknowledge the thoughts and let them go, but once someone gets to that point they have to learn discernment. The thoughts are either coming from them or originating from the spirit, and there has to be some sorting and testing going on there. If there has to be some sort of discernment, then the goal of this sort of meditation in this context is to not have your thoughts at all. If he was meditating on the spirit and a stray thought did occur, then the spirit addressed that thought and was aware of that thought.

I think this is why I find it very hard to do magic for and with other people. If I think my self control in this way is merely “good”, I worry other people at worst are worse than me at this or at best they are far better but our goals are not in alignment. Crowley would have his students slash their arms when they did this poorly, I personally use a livestrong armband which can be snapped satisfactorily to the point where I don’t want to do it while not raising eyebrows in polite society. This is a wonderful exercise since the conscious mind has to overcome the unconscious desire not to hurt yourself while at the same time making people mindful of their thoughts.

Hows the new material coming?

OK I sent myself that email. The problem is a lot of the information is fundamentally geometric or visual. We live in the age of youtube and the question really became how do I avoid making a series of posters to avoid Death by Powerpoint – Analog Edition. I decided the best way to teach it was going to be to come in with a whiteboard with magnets and just teach it like I teach my kids the alphabet. Look for a video on this one but don’t expect much in the way of notes.

Hello List Members!

Hello List Members! Please find the link at the top to the John Dee page.

I’m actually teaching a few classes in real life at the moment so expect the blog to be quiet, but don’t assume I’m dead. I will cross post materials from the class including youtubes when I get the time.

If anyone wants to help out by reformatting the images to be right side up and individual pictures of pages, it would be extremely helpful.

Enjoy, thanks for stopping by!

New Blog!

One of the guys I talk to fairly frequently about magic is starting up a blog! You can read all about it at Scarborough’s Affair!

You’re Starting in the Middle

Tags

classes, greeks, teaching

That’s a really interesting criticism, I thought. That’s an honest sentiment from when I started Enochian, too. “Look at these beautiful tables and strange symbols!” After we got the demons out of the neighborhood at great personal cost, I decided I better hit the books. For me, the approach to ceremonial magic was “lets start at the top” and then after a quick fall and a hard stop at the bottom, I decided I better learn everything else first.

But, there was a second ramp I didn’t quite realize was there until much later – by tracking down Dee’s books and material, and trying to follow around Crowley, there was a ridiculously broad exposure to classical literature. This was stuff I maybe, might have read under great derision in high-school, but certainly never with a critical eye. Sure I remember the stories of the Greek myths and such but somewhere, instead of presenting the stories as morality plays and as science projects, they simply became stories. Who knew Plato’s Republic was really commentary on the soul of man? If you’re asatru, you might end up at the Republic through Tacitus who wrote about runes. The path is not unique to ceremonial magic per se, but the classical era I think has the broadest exposure. Even if someone doesn’t read Roman or Greek works, the Medieval period right before and through Protestantism in Christianity enjoyed a revival of interest.

Vikings Season 2 Episode 6

I don’t normally put videos on the blog, but History Channel’s Vikings has just been fantastic. It follows the Ragnar Lodbrok story and while chasing that story line, it puts a historically accurate face on the history. The [Roman] texts are saved because (what would become) Protestant Europe is interested in conquest, so they’re interested in the old Roman empire, and the only folks who can read are the religious classes. Of course, they translate materials from the time of Christ looking for commentary on their religion and end up enriching the entirety of Western Civilization in the process. This is entirely relevant to the current age – the previous age married religion (or mystical thought) and science. The current age is all for the separation of church and state. The schism was Protestantism which sought to remove the dogma from the religion and in the process threw the baby out with the baptismal water because politics crept in, but at the same time produced thinkers like Giordano Bruno who might never have put quill to vellum were it not for the cultural and intellectual mix of the period.

To actually get here, however, we have to start in the beginning. I think that the last class generated the “You’re starting in the middle” comment because I really start looking at magic around 1000AD or so and come forward. The assumption (and this is the same pitfall Crowley makes) is that the readers are at least as well read as I am. This is poor form, but more importantly misses a very important problem: If I can’t answer a question on the origin of an idea, how can I teach it? Did I not just accept something on faith? And so the bones were laid for the next class – starting with Aristotle, talk about classical ideas of elements and alchemy, link that up with contemporary Qabalah so people have something to relate it to, go back and talk about Pythagoras and his ideas on numbers, then investigate the first six scales.

Feedback on the Class

Tags

class, review, teaching

I missed April Fools, I was going to turn this into a food blog or something just for a day. However I would like to plug these guys for their really hilarious video and product pitch.

Feedback on the class was generally positive. If you watch the video with the captions on, you’ll probably get more out of it since I think the sound quality sucked. That was the biggest complaint in private feedback was that I moved a mile a minute and no-one was too concerned because this is all recorded, right? Except the audio sucks, and then youtubes caption editor sucks, so I might just download the closed captions (if I can figure out how) and post them.

The second complaint was “it feels like we started in the middle”. That’s legitimate, I’m not going to say, “Well people had different ability levels”. The class should give feedback to the teacher and the teacher should be able to dynamically reflow the class to the students assuming they’re asking appropriate questions with an appropriate attitude. So far no-one has pulled the “but that’s not wicca” card. No, it’s not wicca. Someone could re-tool wicca to fit historical practice, but is it wicca? Not really.

To that end, I really didn’t expect the evocation to work. I didn’t get the creepy feeling I normally do, I think it’s a testament to the skill level of the crowd if they managed to get anything rolling in their own heads. I assume everyone is germane and honest when reporting their experiences. Another topic which came up for feedback was that we had electrical items in the circle. While Levi cautions against electric light, Poke Runyon loves blacklight and feels it’s important for setting the stage. I personally didn’t throw the mains in the house but did turn off all the lights – if we want to complain about electricity than we would be hard pressed to find a place without even cellphone coverage. I do know people who do evocations in caves, however.

I think the place to go from here when presenting to a broader crowd is to just take a hat-tip from “the beginning” and start with Pythagorean thought. I recently re-read The Loom of God, the first chapter where they start talking about geometric progressions could comfortably be put into the Golden Dawn Cipher Manuscript in terms of making broad associations between numbers. The Pythagoreans would have been more comfortable talking to Agrippa than Gardner, but the first step on arriving at an epic destination is to leave the house. We have to start from a known position. To that end, I think working through the orders of 2, 3, 4, and 5 will get them to the pentagram ritual and still be fun without presenting too much information, then we can do 6 and start talking about branching out in the grimoires. I have to pare down the lesson plan a bit more and I think people will be happier.