Tags
I Had Visitors Today
14 Friday Sep 2018
Posted After Action Review, Magic, wicca
in14 Friday Sep 2018
Posted After Action Review, Magic, wicca
inTags
16 Monday Nov 2015
Posted After Action Review, Evocation and Invocation, In the office, Magic, Naval Gazing, Notes, Philosophy, Ritual
inTags
Well, I can write about this now that it finally settled out.
My current job was a six month contract, which is pretty common in the IT world. Either folks get well integrated in the organization and have made a contribution in six months or they’re cut loose for something new. I was told I was making valuable contributions and they loved me and I seemed like an upstanding person (DON’T TELL THEM I’M A WIZARD) and so they wanted to make me an offer.
Well, my boss couldn’t get anything approved, so they extended the contract for one month.
Then my boss said he couldn’t get anything approved, so they extended the contract again another month.
Once I got the notice of extension which includes all the normal paperwork headache of SoW, rate, budget approvals, time sheets, equipment, etc I started looking. I wasn’t going to do this a third time and frankly I felt like they were jerking me around to try to get the project launched so they wouldn’t have to hire me. Being a magician, I started to setup magic to work for me to help.
Day of Sol and Hour of Sol
I put the SDAs out in their normal places in the ritual room and pulled the plug on the electronic claptrap which lives up there. The SDAs always give me a sense of being on top of a rollercoaster when I put them out. Merely looking at them inspires curiosity, but actually working through them inspires awe, even from an academic perspective. I dressed the altar in the enochian colors and made sure I was facing towards the sun. I had a yellow candle illuminating the shrewstone. Opened the temple by normal invoking pentagrams and hexagrams.
A spontaneous idea grabbed me: Frankincense (really, “church blend”) is what I normally use for the enochian work but I also decided to add some pine resin to the mix. Whats a plant which is so solar that it doesn’t even drop it’s leaves in winter? Evergreens, conifers. I added some to the frankincense mix and it really set the mood nicely.
Also off the normal course I decided to open by using calls 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5. The first call is normal. The other calls open the elemental tables. This in my opinion Just Works in the broad view of the system. Not only does it request physical, manifest changes, but it also is appropriate to the rulership of the Heptarchy and the Tablet of Union. Also frankly at this point I’ve been considering using the names of the tablet of union in place of the archangels in personal practice for enochian work but that’s a different post.
The opening generated a slightly strange, jammed up feeling. Which quickly felt like a coiled spring had just let fly and spiraled out into the universe. I took it as the generation of the solar system for the solar king. I felt connected.
Things were asked for, spirits inquired, all that good stuff. Similar to the post about needing a car, I was very careful to ask for something to fill the requirements, but not a specific job. Afterward my wife asked me “Why didn’t you ask for [that specific job]?” Well, I did go on an interview, I was pretty sure I was going to get an offer. I didn’t know if they would be willing to pay what I was asking for (basically my contracting rate) but I knew my old job really wasn’t willing to come up. However, I don’t know if the new job is a good fit. I would rather deal with my old job at a cut rate than deal with a new job I don’t fit in well at for the rate I was asking for. If I don’t say “Give me job X”, it really leaves it up to things with a broad view of the universe to hook me up. More on this problem in a minute. If I take the new job and I don’t fit in well, it’s likely they’ll fire me in six months and then we’ll have no income at all. So, I ask the spirits to fish me out a job for a comfortable rate I fit in well with rather than say that I want this particular thing over here. To some folks its probably a cop-out, but this is really a matter of faith.
To put it bluntly I strongly believe that it’s possible to say something like, “I want this job over here, for this rate, I want to get along with everyone, and I want it for three years, and I want the offer in two weeks.” The best case is the spirit can’t possibly fulfill that request, either because it’s unlawful by the designs of the One Thing or because there’s a factor unknown to the magician which prevents the spirit from fulfilling that request. At worst the request is fulfilled and because the magician hasn’t taken a broad view of the universe (which includes time), the magician isn’t a good fit for the job and gets fired shortly thereafter. But lets tighten it up and walk though it.
I want this job over here: Do you live near the job? Is the job going to cause problems with your family life? Are there undue contractual requirements like a noncompete which might kill future jobs? Does the company have a terrible reputation? Is the company going to put you on a product or project you don’t want on your resume?
for this rate: This is the easiest to point to for the “bad request” list. Simply – the position might not pay that rate. The company may not be able to come up. The person might overvalue the position. And the worst case is the person might get the job only to be fired when the project slips. Companies can (and do) buy contractors for the chopping block. It sucks. It totally happens.
I want to get along with everyone: Danger, Will Robinson! No-one gets along with everyone. This is really one of those True Will issues. I really strongly suspect that magic when done to people doesn’t really work. Sure the tricks like vanities can be used to maybe make a few pounds drop off but I strongly suspect that one person cannot do magic to change another persons True Will. This is pretty much my standard reply to the random “Send me a love spell” mails I get once a month from teenagers. (How do you even find my blog?) But yeah, forcing people to like other people through magic wears thin quickly, even if they buy into it. There’s simply too much other stuff on the astral that folks bump into which influences them to force everyone on the same page. Trust me, I’ve even heard of groups which tried to get folks to surrender their cellphones into a basket at the door to try to encourage them to get along. It’s sad. Don’t force it.
and I want it for three years: Is the company even going to be there in 3 years? Especially in the world of IT – the Trans-Pacific Partnership passed and we’re all going to be outsourced next week since it has provisions for the treatment, taxation, and tariff of intellectual property.
and I want the offer in two weeks: The final coup-de-grace of stupid. My job couldn’t even get me an offer in two months. Sometimes big corporations just move that slowly.
The more space you give the spirit to work, the better chance of finding something that fits those bare requirements you’re going to have. I don’t see it as embracing mediocrity (which is a frequent criticism of either my truck story or Lon Milo DuQuettes car story) but rather having the faith that if I understand what I need versus what I want, I have a much better chance of finding something. I actually really wanted to keep my existing job. I felt really quite betrayed that the company thought I was too expensive.
A full week ticked by, I got a call back from the new job asking for my salary, which I gave them. They said they wanted to call me back. Doubt set in. In the meantime my job came up on their offer another 10% which was minimizing the shave to 20%. It still wasn’t enough. I frankly was doing trench work and project manager work and I expected at least mid-level trench pay let alone project manager pay. I started to suspect that they wanted to lowball me to get me in so they could “promote” me and give me a token raise for a song. But, before I could really explore that thought, the job I interviewed for called me back to tell me it was no problem. I briefly thought DRAT I SHOULD HAVE ASKED FOR MORE but the whole Sphere of Availability cautions crept up on me and I decided to be thankful instead. Also because this job comes with health insurance and 7 month on Obamacare had really cut me pretty good.
To complicate issues – I’m a huge fan of the idea that strong, legitimate, heartfelt emotions power magic. Crowley got off on sexual exploits. Mathers loved the yolk of authority in a uniform. Bennett was really an aesthetic magician at heart. Myself? Plain, stupid, desperation fueled by pessimism. I am really great at working myself up over the idea that maybe the new place will suck. Maybe the old place just wants to launch the project and fire me. What would life be like for the kids if we had to move? Who would buy the house if they knew how I wired that one outlet? A hundred random things focus themselves into a “pure ray of will unassuaged”. It didn’t surprise me then when, the next day, literally before I could turn in my resignation, my boss said they could come up to the rate I asked for.
I still told him thanks but no thanks. I set the wheels in motion, I’m going to follow through.
27 Sunday Sep 2015
Posted After Action Review, Magic
inTags
Two years ago I wrote about Syria, and at the time it was the Syrian civil war which in America, we thought was largely an extension of the war in Iraq, and not much had shaken out of the situation as of yet. Certainly we hadn’t seen anything from the refugee crisis yet or Europe’s response. “Arthur” left me a note the other day simply saying “thanks”, which drug my attention back to the post. Honestly I was looking at local problems here and it didn’t even cross my mind that the post still existed, or that I even had written anything on the topic.
I’ve sort of come around to having a weird crisis where I seem to be decent at prognostication but the resolution never improves. It’s easy these days to move the rocks around and change the flow, it’s harder to anticipate the flow, it’s much harder to look at strange rivers and see their flows. It’s like a train, traveling at a good pace. I pass by apartments and storefronts and catch small glimpses when scrying, but never enough to really say, “I see clearly”. There are gestalt moments of that feeling when things come to fruit, but it’s merely a feeling of the passing of a round in boxing or a hole in golf. Did we make par? Did we anticipate that correctly? Did we move our pieces appropriately?
Do we understand? Yes.
Do we see? A dim glass.
Yehi or? Fiat Lux.
The spirit in that vision appeared as a bright flame, and in enochian in particular, spirits can be summoned mercifully or they can be summoned wrathfully, and it was clearly a wrathful image to be a living flame upon a throne.
The checkerboard floor is the Grand Game, although any of the standard antimasonic or Illuminati sites will make that bit obvious.
I took note of a water feature, but this isn’t particularly out of place considering the presence of the Mediterranean sea right there. I think more important is the notes on the “sense of being in two places at once”. What is a nation? Really it’s just lines on a map, and those lines have been the vexation of the middle east as a whole since the last world war. What makes a nation? The people. If the people move, so does the nation. We use terms like “little italy” or “chinatown”, but that doesn’t mean that the nations of Italy or China have any sovereignty there. Rather they recognize that the people from Italy or China have brought the national spirit with them and placed it in America. To be in two places at once was to follow the refugees from Syria to wherever they went.
The boats moving down the river are corpses, literally, corpses. We now find, in the news today, that this is actually happening. The sackcloth of saturn was a literal image – it was how corpses are wrapped. It was literal enough that it doesn’t surprise me to see the bodies washing up. It does sadden me.
The two skeletal kings have yet to reveal themselves. I suspect one is Russia, that much is obvious considering their recent military posture. I have no idea who the other one is. The mold is very likely chemical or biological weapons. I’m willing to put money on that considering how literal the sackcloth part of the vision was. Two syrias? Maybe not. Or not yet, but refugees taking syria with them? Sure.
10 Monday Aug 2015
Posted After Action Review, Lodgework, Magic
in≈ Enter your password to view comments.
Tags
28 Sunday Jun 2015
Posted After Action Review, Arts and Crafts, Lodgework, Magic
inIf you are at least an Associate Member of the OTA you can view the post on their site with multimedia. I have stripped the pictures and video out of this post.
12 Friday Jun 2015
Posted After Action Review
inTags
I get now what was happening on the last big evocation I did.
Turns out when the deal fell through (THANKS OBAMA), me and the rest of the support staff were very quietly sacked. Astute readers will probably be able to figure out where I was working, and co-workers will probably be shocked that I was actually the guy running the blog.
But, soft landings – I was hired a few weeks later into a new company doing the exact same roll for the exact same pay. This sort of sounds like it sucks – especially when considering the stock and the fact that I worked at the old place for three+ years which in technology is virtually retirement age. However, since I’m not paying city wage tax or investing two hours a day traveling and paying $200+ a month for a rail pass, it starts to look better. In fact, it’s a 7% raise just because of the wage tax, and I can bicycle to work. I ended up getting literally hours of my life back a day, I can see my wife and kids over lunch, and not paying $200+ a month plus gas expenses just to get to the train are really quite a bit of money in my pocket. How much? My truck payments are less than the money I’m saving not buying the rail pass. I’m now essentially driving, for free. Also everyone at work vapes, which is quite nice, and has kids, so they “get it” when it comes to peripheral stuff.
Now, there’s a lesson in everything. Life is not easy street. I can point to a place I clearly screwed up. I am always telling my wife when she does this stuff with me that Crowley was famous for harping on precision in language, and would mail people dictionaries. When I got ahold of Ibis Aum-Ra, I didn’t use the term “job”, I said “career”. My career is (currently) DevOps. For folks not in the know, it’s a systems engineer who also writes quite a bit of code. I use python, all day every day. Snake imagery is how the vision opened. Having a career is a big road. Having a new job, which is parallel to the old job, is like those two wagon wheel tracks. And peace with the higher ups was granted, HR complimented me on my conduct (apparently other folks were livid) and I was “first in line for a rehire”. I opted not to take it because it came with a pay-cut, but point being, the spirit was correct. Also I am struck by how I kept notes on sunlight in the vision. It was so bright it was hard to see. Ego is the sun (in a lot of ways in Western society, money is solar because our bank accounts are confused with our measure of worth as people), and for the longest time I had held my hopes on getting re-hired and really threw the current offer onto the back burner. Had I decided to give it serious sway instead of chasing stock options, or fiery gold in the sky out of reach, it would have been easier on me. But ultimately what swayed me was the family time, getting two hours a back each day not fighting the trains into the city (again with the rail images) has vastly improved the home life.
So, that settles that. Onward and upward. Know thyself for thou art God.
01 Friday May 2015
Posted After Action Review, Evocation and Invocation, Magic, Notes, Ritual
in≈ Enter your password to view comments.
27 Monday Apr 2015
Posted After Action Review, Arts and Crafts, History, Lodgework, Magic
inApril 25th, 2015 was a big day, since we had Poke Runyon of the OTA fly out to our corner of the world and bring the Traveling Temple out to our yard. Myself, along with 6 other folks, took initiation into the OTA, and received encampment letters for our study group. What, in my mind, made it a real winner was that a bunch of other OTA folks were just like, “Well if Poke is out there, can we come out too?” Sure! The more the merrier, which is how we went through literally a barrel of beer. Good times all around.
I have spent almost the last month solid working on things like coordinating the building of the henge, fixing up an altar where the lines are terrible, praying to the Gods that the ground isn’t completely frozen (or, as usually happens up here, muddy). I think it really paid off since we caught the trees in bloom which made the yard really pretty and the kids were actually on their good behavior. Our looky-loo neighbors even managed to only discreetly open a window to keep an eye on us. I planted white cedars at the edge of the yard so that problem will go away. The high point of it for me was Poke went around and as part of the initiation he explains the individual symbols attached to (literally painted on in the OTA sense) of each object and gives a short speech on each one. If you attend OTA seasonal events it’s a short version of that without as much acting but it’s all the seasonals rolled into one. What is nice too, is once I got the initiation ritual it took a lot of pressure off the group for the seasonal rites, since now we know what the meat of the expression is.Anyway, mission accomplished, I’m now officially into the OTA and can run study groups/seasonals at the house. If you happen to be in the northeastern US, you can use the Contact page to reach out and we can grab a coffee or mail me.
18 Sunday Jan 2015
Posted After Action Review, Evocation and Invocation, Howto, Magic, Ritual
inMoloch entirely made me before I even wrote a word about this, I try not to talk about magic “in flight” because I think dwelling on the thing robs it of the purity of it’s intent. If you wouldn’t want to be micromanaged at work, don’t micromanage the spirits beyond the ritual unless it requires a huge course correction.
I need a car. When I say “need” I don’t mean “it would be nice to have”, I mean the 1992 Toyota Camry is now only passing inspection because my mechanic takes pity on me and refuses to shift into OD or start when it’s wet out. I’m a pretty handy guy – but when I say “I’m stumped” and my mechanic says “do you really want to pay me to track this down”… yeah. It has as a conservative estimate about 270,000 miles on it.
Just to put that number in perspective, in the 13 years this car has been on this earth, it didn’t have to be on this earth! It could have driven to the moon, and had another 30,000 miles on the moon to screw around with and do moon stuff. Pretty incredible.
Per the usual problem of “what magic do we use to solve large systems”, I was really torn between the Goetia, who are good at managing the physical plane, and the Enochian magic, which works really well to line up large systems. Since a car dealership is a large system, most of which requires the car pass through several bits of administration before landing in my lap, I opted for the Enochian solution.
I had made that decision right in time for the thread on FB asking “Why not Enochian?” Sometimes I feel like magic works in ridiculously subtle ways. This was one of those times. Sure I happen to be friends on Facebook with Moloch so he can see my wall and my ranting about the car, but he’s not in my head in any meaningful way. We don’t chat back and forth. He’s got a fairly low opinion of the OTA (but like most magicians he has a low opinion of everyone who isn’t himself) so we really don’t talk shop. He’s also very much in the quick-and-dirty-whatever-works camp and while I can respect that, he’s going to see a system like enochian as being largely restrictive. This eventually bore out in the course of the conversation, but it also prompted me to throw together this post instead of keeping a private journal. Anyway. Part of the prodding at me was simply because I have spent so much time fretting over the temple kit that I had really gotten into armchair mode and lost the plot for anything more than the daily devotion to Astarte as part of the OTA curriculum. The spirits say, “You want a horse? GET BACK ON THE HORSE.” Cute.
Checking the Enochian Quick Reference Chart gives us a few tantalizing names:
The Names of the Sixteen Good Angels Skilled and Potent In Mechanical Arts
TNBR and companions | NBRT, BRTN, and RTNB | earth of AIR |
MAGL and companions | AGLM, GLMA, and LMAG | earth of WATER |
OCNC and companions | CNCO, NCOC, and COCN | earth of EARTH |
PSAC and companions | SACP, ACPS, and CPSA | earth of FIRE |
Since I don’t want to manufacture a car, I am really just looking for a car which is maximally functional to me, the angels who govern the composition and mixing of metals weren’t attractive. Also why not use the Angels of Transportation? Because they move things around. I don’t want a car literally dropped on my front lawn. After a bit of waffling, I decided that I would accept a car in good mechanical condition regardless of brand and appearance. The conditions for success would be:
I only later realized that the four qualifications of “good” lined up nicely with the four angels. It wasn’t intentional.
Here is one of the sticky wickets of Enochian philosophy and theology when it comes to the practical application of it – you will notice I did not pick a specific sub-element to work with. Reason being that I’ve started to play with the idea that the four enochian elements are actually the four worlds. Stealing a page from QBL, that gives us something like:
If you said this reads a lot like Plato’s Celestial Hierarchy, you would have a good eye. There’s more Plato in Dee than I previously thought and I’ve been poking around there. That particular current from The Republic may also be responsible for the wife swapping incident.
I’m still a little bit uncomfortable with the assignments, but I feel the language and names are the most important part of the system. If you’ve poked around in the Five Books of Mystery, the use of the language becomes a bit clearer. Most importantly, the system is fundamentally gnostic. We cannot know God. Dee goes to great lengths in the monad to make a body of God, but ultimately, he is describing God in the context of Earthly things. “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” Dee can only relate to God in a symbolic way which honestly sometimes feels short of the symbols he put to the task. If the system is Gnostic and we cannot know God, than the Place of Desolation is the place God occupies, because how can anything but God occupy the place that God does? This is an argument which would be recognized in Classical Philosophy. On the other hand if we hold that the Monas is actually God and that Dee apprehended the idea, then I would flip the names. It is my personal opinion that The Horned God is a very sexual image, and instead of the reconciliation or the Hermaphroditic union, we’re being handed a God who is only half the puzzle. This would also jive with the Hermetic current, so I feel there’s a strong argument for organizing the work this way. The first true creator, of the earthly realm, is human. God set the stage, if we want to go all biblical with it we can say that God created the world, placed the garden in it, then he made people and people gave the animals names, tilled the earth, and really took things over from there. God steps out. I kept the elemental associations with the names so as not to break other bits of the systems.
“He who’s name is unchanged from what it was” is pretty easy to suss out, anyone can look at a catalog of cars and identify that they are all in fact cars. Maybe the Chicken Qabalah is worth a review here. Also Crowley enters here with arguments about princes and kings if you happen to follow the Thoth tarot. Having worked through this in blog format, I’m leaving the associations how they are.
“He who burns up iniquity without equal”. There’s a lot of really nice imagery in here, but I chose to really go with the idea that the Earth is iniquity by most religions standards. The moment something is created, time itself conspires through the forces of entropy to destroy it. I’m not even talking about manmade things like houses and cities, the sun is literally running out of energy right now as you read this. Big thoughts, but it’s not going away tomorrow, so we’re good.
Given the fact that I need something for material ends, something which is made, and something which is suffering from entropy in the form of mileage and care, the Holy Name I chose to work with was “MOR DIAL HCTGA” (Earth). Going back to the previous chart here, all of the mechanical arts are in the Earth tablet, so really it feels like Earth of Earth (“OCNC”) is the correct thing to be working on. I’m a little surprised too, but thems the ropes. That gives us the top-and-bottom, so we can fill in the rest for the sake of working with the Essential Enochian Grimoire.
Tablet of Union: NANTA (Spirit of Earth)
Secret Holy Name: MOR DIAL HCTGA (Earth)
The Great Kings: ICZHIHAL – “He who Solidifies the Past” (Earth – neat, huh?)
Seniors: LZINOPO – “He who is first in the Deep Waters” (Earth – Moon)
Calvary Cross Angels: ABALPT and ARBIZ – “He who stoops down” (over the engine of your Camry) and “He who’s voice protects”. (Earth of Earth).
Archangels and Kerubim: POCNC – OCNC, CNCO, NCOC, COCN
We’re going to ignore the daemons for the moment. Why Earth-Moon? There’s no Earth-Earth and I’ve always felt like Jupiter is more for the continued operation of business and the affairs it entails, while the moon is really governing purely material manifestation, since material stuff is only temporary.
OK so I wrote all that about five days ago, got into the argument about neoplatonism, avoided getting baited by Mo and I had planned on actually conducting the ritual today (Sunday – Day of Sol, Hour of Sol) so that King Carmara, who is the “wildcard” in Enochian, could be overseeing the operation. Experience says planning a magical operation causes all hell to break loose if anyone knows you’re planning it, so I kept it real deep under my hat. Still, the camry managed to develop a miss when it was first started, which really sucked in the single-digit temps we’d been having over the first week since I couldn’t drive it until it warmed up. Also started making nasty valve noises. I was getting nervous. After triaging the miss by putting in fresh spark plugs, and adding thinner oil, it was happy enough I felt confident to go car shopping.
A philosophical point – working with the Angelic Language causes stuff to happen. There’s a whole lot of Enochian corpus which is simply “make this book” or “make this chart” and the Angels were trying to deliver it piecemeal because delivering it whole-cloth works the magic. The magic isn’t the ritual, the magic in Enochian is the language. Or the work of producing that product, but the work will involve the language. See what they did there?
If you’re playing to the timeline here, you’ll notice I’m going car shopping before I do the ritual. I have never actually purchased a car from a dealership or traded them in. I much preferred to find that car with 100k miles on it some guy can’t move because he doesn’t have receipts and throw $1k at it. If I get a year out of it, still cheaper than a lease. I would donate the old cars to charity when they blew up and let them keep the scrap money. Mostly this move was inspired to find out the pricepoints on things (I was planning on asking for specific things during the ritual I felt would show up in the price range) and to figure out which dealerships had good stuff. Also the larger car dealerships are over an hour from me since I live in the sticks. I looked at a few cars while I was out and about and found a Mitsubishi Raider I really liked. I did everything but sign the paper for that listing, since I wanted to go home and try to get a loan.
At this point the ritual planned above was off the books and I was going to change it to a “thank you” ritual after signing.
Next day the guy calls me. “Hey Phergoph, I can’t sell you that car.”
“Why?”
“Look, our guys just took a look at it, and it’s really leaking oil out the rear diff”.
“If you guys want to replace the rear diff I’m interested. If you think it’ll work if I do the seals myself I’ll still buy it. A seal kit is only $120” (and literally two days of trying to bang the stupid orbital gears out, having done this before).
“No, this is going to seriously explode in 15k miles, I know you got kids, I will find something else.”
I hung up the phone in a bit of a fog since a salesman literally just gave up a commission for the sake of helping me. That’s a paycheck for that guy, that takes some real balls. Seriously if you’re car shopping, hit up that dealership and ask for Jon, he’s a really nice guy. He didn’t have to do that. Turns out there was a Honda Ridgeline coming into the lot on trade in, but after talking to Jon about that car also, the miles were just way too high. He agreed to keep looking and I thanked him for being really honest.
On Saturday, I happen to be doing very little except reviewing/revising the ritual waiting for the snow to melt and I happen across a listing (no photos) of a Dodge Ram 1500, with the mid-size engine. 81k miles, asking $9k USD. I called the dealership and it was still there. Turns out they couldn’t take pictures because… it was covered in snow. It had been traded in two weeks ago and they just decided to list it now because of the weather. OK fine I’ll come out. Miracle of miracles, the camry started without too much prodding, so I got the kids dressed and buckled them in.
Turns out this truck wasn’t just a Dodge Ram 1500, this was a Dodge Ram 1500, with the Infinity Sound System, with the towing package, with the quad cab, and it had nice tires and the bed cap. The paint was so-so, but they had all the service records. It was also the Laramie trim level so it had a super nice interior. Best bit? Class III towing suspension and hookups. However in the secret center console (under the middle seat) I found… a 7 pin to 3 pin adapter and a Mr Green Lawnmower Sparkplug. What were they towing? A trailer that needed a 3 pin connector (brake lights only) and lawn equipment on that. Someone ordered a top-shelf truck to pull around a lawnmower business. Philosophical question time: Why did the guys who obviously detailed this and put the paper flootmats in miss the sparkplug? The wiring adapter I can see as being “part of the vehicle” but the spark plug is an oily mess and an obvious miss.
Anyway, they offered me $500 for the Camry and we settled up. While I don’t want a car payment, having something which gets my kids around safely (Laramies have extra side impact airbags) and lets me haul around all my work stuff and still gets 20mpg on the highway (keep telling yourself that Phergoph)? That’s a win. Plus payments are under $200 a month, which is manageable and leaves enough in the budget for repairs and other crap.
Here, we have a real temptation, and one I haven’t quite worked out all the details for. If the language is the magic, then do we have to perform the ritual? I’m going to opt for “yes”, I personally feel there’s a trap here for the lazy (Dee) to go fishing or whatever instead of following up with the magic. It also really smacks of “fuck you I got mine”. On the other hand, there’s plenty of places in the Enochian system where the spirits themselves are defined by their labels, so when writing out the ritual nicely on the finest cardstock money can buy, you are literally conjuring up the spirits by the writing of their names. “I create as I speak” and the “breath of God” literally. If that is the case, then the ritual really happened a week ago when I drafted everything and we’re merely on the execution side. This sort of reverse-order thing doesn’t happen to me using the Solomonic system.
Rather than the original plan of petitioning the spirits, I merely called them up and thanked them for their efforts and asked them for their continued efforts in protecting the vehicles, which is always something I worry about anyway which is why 4WD was a requirement to begin with. (As I’m typing this, the internet is being spotty because of a solid inch of ice on everything and we jokingly said the truck was christened).
I suppose that’s how you summon a truck.
EDIT: The ontological argument is a really good listen – http://www.historyofphilosophy.net/anselm-ontological-argument
24 Monday Nov 2014
Posted After Action Review, Arts and Crafts
inTags
We (me and the magic folks up here) managed to get Mot’s Mass done.
It was a fairly interesting step in my own personal path since I had conducted some group rituals before, but frankly trying to teach the classes and such really emphasized the need for putting the dramatic into “dramatic ritual”.
Practical notes:
For the incense, it’s probably worth it to have the actors carry several small pots of it. The giant bowl I had prepared didn’t work simply because the wind was blowing the wrong direction. If the performers had carried their own small incense burners, it would have been possible to clandestinely move with the wind to keep the participants in the zone.
For the henge, one of the things I would like to do is put up planetary banners. Just testing the tiki torches, the colored construction paper wrap wasn’t visible with the planetary symbols on it so I omitted it. The point was to have the alchemical symbolism present in the performance, which was accomplished with the large banner over the altar, which was dressed with three candles on top of three lead ingots, and under all that a black cloth. It might have been good to have at least a torch dedicated to Saturn and, given the seven points of the circle, either the Sun or Mercury next to the altar to work with Saturn. (I would have picked Sol).
The circle was setup to the participants looked to the west for Mot’s entrance. Just on the note of tiki torches, the plan is still to put up plywood forms (or cardboard) and cover them with spray on foam. One of the folks here has some stage experience and tipped me off that fake rocks like that are done with spray on foam. It sounds really doable and could be cheap and easy for a good effect.
The actors were all top notch, and I couldn’t have asked for better people to participate! That is one thing we did get correct – the folks we’re working with here are amazing.