I’ve read a couple really good blog posts in the last couple days about talisman creation.

The first is from The Crossroads Companion, written by a student in the Red Work series of courses. He’s made the seven planetary talismans using a technique inspired by Chris Warnock. I learned a couple things I didn’t know that will make my own future talismans much higher in quality.

The second is from Practical Solomonic Magic, written by my long-time colleague, Asterion Mage. He’s come up with a brilliant way to make gold talismans out of beeswax. I’m looking forward to experimenting with the rosin and shellac he recommends.

With the GD posts, I’ve expanded my audience a bit. I got a message on facebook from someone who liked the post encouraging magicians to do magic (I’m being nice about what I actually said), and during the course of the conversation, I was reminded how little about actual Hermetic Magic the Golden Dawn teaches.

Don’t get me wrong, you learn a lot of magic in the GD. All kinds of rites and rituals with cool anagrams, and they’re all fundamentally founded on Hermetic principles. But you’re not encouraged to actually read the source material for these basic principles, and you can’t understand what you’re doing without that key piece of info.

All the rites and rituals you learn in the Golden Dawn are based on some very old Hermetic tenets, practices designed to accomplish the Hermetic Great Work, taking you from the Black Phase of alchemy all the way through to the Projection Phase, where you’re using the Philosopher’s Stone to accomplish miracles and make the world a better place. The basic process is laid out in The Emerald Tablet of Hermes (yep, Hermes), and the Corpus Hermeticum.

But the core material gives you the fundamental framework you need to really understand what you’re up to.

And really, you should understand the basics of Neo-Platonism to really grok the Corpus Hermeticum, but start with the Corpus, then go back to the NeoPlatonic basics.

I’ve actually written a handy guide to the Neoplatonic Basics, and I explain how the Corpus Hermeticum makes sense from there. You should read the posts, or you can read the eBook. The posts are on my blog, but you have to scroll all the way to the bottom to see the first post, then work your way up. The eBook is easier. It’s all free.

If you read through the entire Corpus Hermeticum, you’ll be reading the oldest documents your Order can claim. There’s frequent kerfuffle about documents in your Orders, so I would think these would be pretty important to not only read, but actually understand. They were written sometime between the first and third centuries after Christ, long before the Kircher model of the Tree of Life was made, long before the Tarot card images were formed, reduced to the number of letters of the alephbeit and pasted to the paths of that Kircher model of the Tree. If you actually read through them, you’ll know more about the Hermetic path to ascension and becoming a living, breathing god than most of the Outer Heads of the various GD and GD-based Orders available today.

But we only have fragments of most of the Corpus Hermeticum. The most complete chapter, and coincidentally the most important and useful for beginners, is the Divine Pymander. Read it. Read it today. Don’t put it off, it’s got every Secret of the Golden Dawn magical system laid out pure and simple for anyone to understand, and it’s really beautiful.

After you’ve finished that, move on to The Emerald Tablet of Hermes. Remember what Pymander says the path to returning to the Source is, and read it as if it’s an instruction manual, and a description of what you’re supposed to be doing as a magician.

Read through this stuff, and note the lack of QBL involved. Despite what you’ve been taught, early Hermeticists had little to do with KBL. The integration of the systems came much later, around the time of DeLeon. Back in the Hermeticist’s day, the KBL available anywhere outside the kibbutz was at BEST the Sefer Yetzirah. Hermeticists used Hebrew names of God, but it tended to look like it was copy-pasted in without any real regard to the source. Sort of like the worst of the early 90’s Neo-Pagan descriptions of the “Celtic” gods and goddesses.

Once you’ve read through that stuff, and it really doesn’t take that long, you should move on to Agrippa. REally read the stuff he has to say about magic, and the practice thereof. Keeping in mind the Hermetic Cosmology, study the Scales of the Numbers, especially the Number Ten. By the time Agrippa was writing, QBL and Hermetic magic had been pretty firmly wed together, so you’ll recognize a lot of the stuff in there. Book 3 will seem most familiar to you, as it deals directly with Ceremonial Magic, but the first two books explain the framework a lot better.

Pace yourself, no one reads Agrippa through in a day. It’s good bathroom reading material.

Once you start wading through the source material, a lot of what you’re doing in the GD will begin to make a lot more sense. You may also find that a lot of what you’re doing does not make sense in a Hermetic context at all.

If you find yourself wondering why the heck you’re going through all the stuff of the GD, when the Hermetic Texts make the GD system look like a Rube Goldberg device with 100 extra steps just to make toast, you may find my courses in Hermetic Magic right up your alley. It’s a straight shot through to whatever Grade in the GD establishes you as a living, breathing god, without all the drama. It’s self-led, but there are forums for discussion available.

Please note, the courses are still in progress, years after I started them. There’s a LOT of information to write up. Currently, about 90% of the Black Work course is complete, 95% of the White Work course is complete, and the Green Work… Well, it’s in process, but it comes with all seven of the Gates Rites, which will let you get to work on the Green phase of the alchemical process.

I’m not trying to get you out of the Golden Dawn with any of this. The GD makes a lot of people happy, and provides them with the tools they need. Reading the Corpus Hermeticum and the Emerald Tablet will only add to your overall understanding of Great Work.

Ok, so the last GD post was, admittedly, a little … aggressive. The animosity comes entirely from my understanding of the Secret Chiefs of the Golden Dawn.

See, I read The Secret Doctrine, and I thought the Chiefs that were being debunked by Nick and company, and the Secret Chiefs that David and company claim to have met were the Secret Chiefs who are supposed to be the Shepherds and Stewards of the spiritual evolution of the entire Western Civilization.

Turns out I was totally wrong-o.

So, if the GD is NOT, in fact, claiming they are the best of the best, the ideal Rosicrucians, and the outer face of the Secret Chiefs who are supposed to be overseeing and shepherding us all from a place of omniscient omnipotence, then they can have their Magician Cards back.

If they’re willing to admit they’re a bunch of Hermetic philosophers with some neat magical tech Working on becoming the best godmen they can be, and not the Gatekeepers of the True Mysteries of the ENTIRE Western Occult Tradition, then good on ’em. There’s a big difference between “We have SOME awesome Western Hermetic Magic(k) going on over here” and “We have the ONLY TRUE awesome Western Hermetic Magic(k) ever.”

The way I see it now, both sides are presenting realistic versions of what the Secret Chiefs are really all about based on their own understanding. They’ve got a lot more in common than I thought, and they could probably hash out all their differences over a beer or twelve, if they wanted to.

And for the rest of the Occult Community, please note that the Secret Chiefs are not omniscient omnipotent awesome advanced spiritual adepts with wisdom and power galore. They are just people, in the flesh, with a magical tradition going back to the first through third centuries, just like anyone else with an internet connection. They’ve got tech that’s unpublished, but it’s not completely different than anything you can find with careful applied studies of the publicly available source material (the stuff from the first through third centuries, not the GD stuff that’s publicly available). They’ve got an initiatory structure, they’re a Secret Society, ok, but they put their pants on one leg at a time just like everyone else.

I’d still like to see Nick and David face off with wands drawn at high noon, last magician standing wins. I’d stand proud next to the winner. But neither side is interested in nuking anyone to prove a point to me. Except Fr. VL, who is a real magician.

In other news, today’s the last day for the Strategic Sorcery charity drive. If you haven’t donated, you should. There’s no better form of prosperity magic than charity.

Clean your fucking house, you fucking morons. You’re supposed to be the fucking MASTERS of the Western Occult Tradition, and you can’t even handle your fucking shit.

YOU ARE AS A WHOLE THE MOST PATHETIC MAGICIANS I’VE EVER FUCKING SEEN.

Wait, did I say Magicians? Fuck that. Your magician card is fucking revoked.

For the people who ordered the course package I offered a couple weeks ago, the Yahoo Group is up and running. I have sent invitations to the emails associated with the PayPal accounts. Check your inbox, and if it isn’t there today (Yahoo can take a while to deliver invites for some reason), check your spam folders.

You can sign up to the group using whatever email address you prefer using the link in the invitation. It doesn’t have to be the email you used for PayPal.

You will receive a ton of files when you join. Remember, the order is Black Work, then White Work, then Green Work. Check the Files section of the group for more information.

In the comment section of the Favor of Kings post, I had a conversation with Lance Michael Foster about what happens when you achieve your goals. To keep things in perspective, he offered the following:

The old chestnut goes is that there are three curses of increasing severity (often said to be Chinese, though there is no proof):

1. “May you live in interesting times.”
2. “May you come to the attention of those in authority.”
3. “May your wishes be granted.”

and:

“There are two tragedies in life. One is not to get your heart’s desire. The other is to get it.”

-Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman, IV

I don’t think he was being a a cheerio-pisser on purpose. I read through his blogs a bit to get a sense of who he was and where he was coming from before I started assuming he was being an intentional prick, and he comes across as an interesting guy with a wide range ofactivities . Subsequent comments have revealed him to be a decent fellow with good intentions.

I think he was sincerely trying to offer up some conventional wisdom that’s supposed to keep you from getting all excited and hopeful about something that’s going to turn out to be shitty in real life. There’s nothing wrong with that.

Except these proverbial nuggets of wisdom are based on a glaring false assumption: that the thing you want in and of itself will somehow bring you instant happiness, once and for all.

That’s not how it works. Most of us know that getting what you want means you have to take care of it to keep it nice. But some people don’t think about what their life will really be like after they get what they want.

Unexpected maintenance requirements are usually why people aren’t happy when they get what they want. That hot chick needs affection, has issues, gets PMS, expects you to listen to her and value her goals and dreams and accomplishments. That million dollars has to be invested, cared for, tapped into sparingly, not given away to family members and friends with can’t-fail investment opportunities.

Unanticipated consequences are another reason people aren’t happy with how things work out when they get what they want. That guy who killed his partner and stole the money from his armored truck is finding out that his mom didn’t just quietly go pick up the $25k he left at his grandmother’s grave site for her, and his buddy didn’t jump at the chance to live off the stolen loot on the lam for the rest of his life.

But I think the main reason people aren’t happy when they get what they want, the main thing that makes getting a heart’s desire into a tragedy is that it doesn’t satisfy them completely forever. They get what they wanted, and they integrate having it into their lives, and then they’re faced with the inevitable question:

Life isn’t static. It moves, lives, breathes. Creation never stopped. Manifestation is an ongoing process. Everything physical is decaying at varying rates. The universe is not designed to reach a particular state and then stay there forever.

Achieving goals makes you happy. It’s the process of achievement itself that is pleasing, not the actual goal. When you accomplish your goals, achieve your desires, you feel good, you enjoy the fruits of your labor, and then you move on to your next goal, taking the good vibes from your success and channeling it into your future efforts.

And that’s the trick to being happy forever. Keep making new goals. Keep moving. Get in tune with the process of manifestation, and you’ll see it’s a current flowing ever outward into the material realm from the un-manifest realms. Get to know yourself and your abilities, the way you think and the things that really make you happy, and you realize that you are a creator god. You’re designed to be happy when you’re creating your world.

Like most human decisions, PayPal’s efforts to curb sexual predation started out as a really good idea, but then they acted like idiots. Under their guidelines, the Bible and the Quran would be banned. Which you might not think is a bad thing, but it is. This is digital book burning. This is where it begins.

“it was agreed, that my endeavours should be directed to persons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic; yet so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment”

-Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Oh boy, Golden Dawn soap opera fans, this season ought to be good!*

Now there’s a 20-year conspiracy against the HOGD, and the puppetmaster will soon be revealed! Is it last season’s villain, the dastardly Nick Farrell? Is it a character we thought was written out of the plot? Or someone we haven’t seen? Are the writers going to keep the continuity of past seasons, or completely recast the entire history?

If it’s one person behind all the things woven together as a decades long conspiracy, they’ll have to have been around the GD since the 90s, pulling the strings of the Ciceros. They’d have to be really old now, unless…

It’s a Demon! Or a vampire, vampires are kind of played out in the mainstream, but the occult community is ripe for a good vampire genre resurgence.

I’m betting it’s a Black Brother though, he’s been sampling from the early GD school’s bag of tricks for the last couple of years, complete with new revelations from the Secret Chiefs. I’m hoping for something on par with Fabrato, one of the 99 Black Lodges or something, but I don’t really expect anything that good.

[Edit: The plot thickens! I started this post yesterday, and went to publish it this morning and found that the post has been removed! Nick is worried that the Black Rosicrucians might have gotten to him, so he’s thoughtfully re-posted the last message of David Griffin. I really hope it doesn’t turn out to have been a test episode, a potential plot line that didn’t get enough positive feedback from the test audience.]

[Edit 2: The post is back, thanks for the heads up, Satyr Magos!]

* Some people watch Jersey Shore and Real Housewives. Don’t judge me.