Plug Saturday continues! Though technically it’s Sunday now here.

It is with great joy that I get to review the latest work by Fr. AIT, of Heavens within Earth and the Book of Coelius fame, founder and expounder of the Ordo Octopi Nigri Pulveri, true Priest of Kronos, and generally Good Egg.

He told me about The Opening of the Book of Lambspring before it was published, and I got an advanced copy and spent a few hours going through it with him, comparing notes and exploring the symbolism of the images. It was a good afternoon. It was one of those moments where we got to talking like old school Hermeticists. We didn’t always agree, but we each had something really cool to bring to the table for discussion. If you’ve  had a chance to talk shop with someone who’s done as much Work as you have, you know what I mean. We were riffing off each other’s insights as we harmonized with the Emblems and talked through what we saw.

But I’m probably getting ahead of myself. First, a bit about the Book of Lambspring. It’s a series of alchemical images that reflect different phases of the Great Work pictorially. Each image captures the phase of the Work, but all in the language of the birds. The imagery that is meaningful if you’re a fellow alchemist who understands the Ideas behind the forms they take. But there are few on the planet comfortable enough to claim to understand it, and fewer among those who have any right to make that claim.

Fr. AIT is among the ranks of those who know the language. He provides an analysis of each of these images, an interpretation as seen through the eyes of the Hermetic Magician. It’s one of the most interesting pieces of occult information I’ve had the honor of working with this last year, in fact. Each image is a key to a phase of the Work. Each image is a gate as well, but more on that later.

Many of his interpretations are based on his personal experiences and training within the Golden Dawn Order to which he belongs. And he wrote during and after an incredible initiation based on the mythography of the “Great Rite,” so there’s a lot of emphasis on the holy sexuality of these images. He provides such broad hints at the mysteries of sex magic that anyone with an inclination towards deciphering the hidden meanings will find their way paved and easy, and won’t have to jump sacred fences and score tech in back alleys the way I had to. Here’s a hint: there’s no jacking off over sigils involved.

I rarely mix sex and magic these days, though when I do, it sends out seismic waves that make the richter scale.* In our conversations about the meanings of the emblems, I tended to focus less on the sexual interpretations than he does, but that doesn’t mean he’s wrong in any of them. Everything he says about each emblem is true. I prefer the parts where he sticks to the straight “Hermetic Magic” interpretations, though I suspect he’d argue they aren’t as separate as I like to think. And he might be right.

I found it incredibly useful to treat each Emblem as a Gate. I would turn each emblem into a small astral rite, passing within each, becoming a part of the image, and seeing what it meant from within. Most of my observations lined up perfectly with Fr. AIT’s, and where there were differences, there was still harmony.

This book touches on the deeper mysteries of the Alchemical process, and what it means to magicians attempting the Great Work through magical practice. It’s definitely on my list of things every magician should read at least once, though in all honesty you could spend a lifetime exploring each image, comparing experiences, and applying the lessons of each.

*That’s hyperbole right there. That earthquake was a coincidence.

A friend asked me if I thought Sleep Paralysis or the Night Hag experience was greater or worse for people doing the Great Work.

Starting with the basic cosmology, I believe the world as we know it is filled with spirits that we can’t see. Angels, fallen angels, elementals, and all the spirits of the dead that stick around this side of heaven, you know the drill.

When we have strong emotions, we put off a certain kind of “energy” that can be sensed in a room or even a house. Some of the spirits we wade through every day can absorb nutrition from these strong emotions, the kind usually triggered by the amygdala.

In order for the hags to be ble to feed off someone, they’ve got to be going through some kind of emotional duress or stress that has their amygdala working over time. Whatever the clonazepam does in the brain seems to patch this leak up in most people.

The wandering hag spirit gets the scent of the leak and goes in for a free meal. Like a lamprey, the spirit attaches itself to the leak, and I believe it has something like the anesthetic saliva of a mosquito. this triggers that “I can’t move” effect in the brain, and if we wake up during the attack, we can’t do anything about it.

As a magician pursues the Work, they’re patching up the holes, and learning new ways to deal with life that slowly eliminate the creation of any new leaks. So there’s less to feed on. We aren’t putting out a banquet every night for every wandering spirit.

However, in the early stages, and especially during a Tiphareth Initiation, there’s usually a lot of pain involved. The “Gethsemane” experience, I like to call it. Crowley talks about the pain of a Tiphareth initiation in Liber XCV, “The Wake World.”

“This Sixth House is called the Treasure House of Gold; it’s a most mysterious place as ever you were in. First there’s a tiny, tiny, tiny doorway, you must crawl through on your hands and knees; and even then I scraped ever such a lot of skin off my back; then you have to be nailed on a red board with four arms, with a great gold circle in the middle, and that hurts you dreadfully. Then they make you swear the most solemn things you ever heard of, how you would be faithful to the Fairy Prince, and live for nothing but to know him better and better. So the nails stopped hurting, because, of course, I saw that I was really being married, and this was part of it, and I was as glad as glad;”

So until you get to the married part, if you haven’t done the Work in the previous spheres, you may have more hag experiences as the skin is scraped on your back.

Also, as you progress in the Work, you begin to interact with the spirits more, and you get a few that hang around you. They tend to scare away the more aggressive spirits, wake you up before anything can happen, or just beat the shit out of the hungry ghosts that dare to infiltrate your sphere. Depends on the familiars you attract and work with.

Microsoft is looking for help developing applications for the home computer using the Kinect. They have the hardware interface designed, but one article I read that I can’t find now suggested that they needed help coming up with ways to use the Kinect as a human machine interface. So they’re offering start ups support if they’re going to be developing new ways to use the Kinect in the PC environment.

I would just like to say… Neuromancer much? Build the fucking deck! And a wet jack. We’re already living in the dystopian corporate culture Gibson so bleakly predicted in Neuromancer, we might as well get the fucking tech that goes with it.

One of my genuinely favorite Golden Dawn bloggers, Morgan Drake Eckstein, has been writing about his interpretation of the Fama Fraternitas as it applies to making money on the Great Work. He started with an analysis of the English translation that earned him some grief, and then he followed up with a post about the how he’s been told the English translation is flawed, and he makes some observations about whether the modern Rosicrucian (RC) movement in English speaking countries* is flawed as a result.

The posts sparked my interest. I’ve always been interested in the subject of money for the Great Work, especially because I make money off the skills I’ve gathered in pursuit of the Great Work. I also love a good manuscript mystery. That’s my favorite part of grimoire and Bible study, getting into the root languages and being an amateur archaeological word explorer, like a linguistic Indiana Jones. What I lack in training and experience, I make up for in enthusiasm.

Specifically, he dissects the first two of the six rules “the original brotherhood bound itself by.” The first is one that gets quoted a lot, and the second he applies to his interpretation of the first to support his argument:

From the English Manuscript Morgan quoted:

First, That none of them should profess any other thing than to cure the sick, and that gratis. 

Second, None of the posterity should be constrained to wear one certain kind of habit, but therein to follow the custom of the country.

Morgan masterfully reinterprets the first to mean that it’s ok to be more than a pro bono doctor if you’re a RC. He performed with the prowess of a professional Semantiad.** I’d have given him at least a 9.3 if it were an official competition.

Then the questions of the German manuscript’s true meaning came up, and that’s the part in the story where I showed up. I found this online version of the Gemran manuscript, and then I used Google Translate to render this result:

First No one should indulge in any occupation, to maintain as sick and do so in vain.

Thank you So Much, Google Tranlate! That’s awesome.

So looking at that, I thought there was room for reinterpretation. You can pick apart the literal meaning of root words, add different endings on them and look at how the roots are used in other words, as Morgan did in his analysis, and with a little effort I can see how someone reading the German version could walk away with something different than the English version.

No one should indulge in any occupation? So no working for a living? Works for me!

To Maintain as sick and do so in vain? What the living fuck? I got nothing on that, and I needed better sources. So I googled “online German to English Translator” and ended up at PROMT-Online, pasted in the First Rule from the Fama, and it rendered this result:

Nobody should dedicate itself to another employment, than to maintain sick people namely completely free of charge.

Aha! Now we’re getting somewhere. PROMT-Online has different intelligence driving it, and rendered something a little more comprehensible, and still used the same words. It makes sense! The English version was right all along.

The Fama’s First rule is simply, “You shouldn’t have any kind of job, or do any kind of work, except to heal the sick, and do it for free.” I think it’s literal, and stands alone. As such, I don’t think Morgan’s application of the Second Rule, though highly skilled, applies at all. But for the simple literal translation to work in practice, something’s got to pay the fucking rent. We’ve got bills to pay and cats to feed, right?

I think there are two ways that would make this simple literal translation work. The first way it would work is if all  Rosicrucians are independently wealthy. If they’ve done the Work and have been through the Chemical Wedding, they’ll have the secret of the Philosopher’s Stone, and they won’t exactly need any money now, will they? The Philosopher’s Stone turns lead into gold! All the gold they could ever need.

That’s my preferred source of their independent wealth.

It could also, however, be that the RCs were a fraternity of the wealthy elite, a gentlemen’s philanthropist club, like when Bill Gates and Warren Buffet had that private billionaire’s club meeting and asked them to pledge to give away half their wealth either before they died or at their death. Still cool, but not as romantic to me as having the Philosopher’s Stone as the source of independent wealth.

The second way a literal interpretation of the Fama’s First rule would work is if they just didn’t worry about it. In my youth, I was a big fan of the idea that the Universe will provide. “If you need it,” I said, “it will come. If it’s not there, you don’t need it.” Another favorite phrase was “The Universe doesn’t give unfunded mandates.” Or “If the Universe wants me to do that shit, it can goddamned well pay for it.”

And yeah, U2’s famous phrase, “My God isn’t short on cash.”

The RCs could have just been wandering hippies, living off the things God provides. That would be a pretty extreme lifestyle, completely and totally based on faith. They were, let’s not forget, devout Christians. In recent conversations on ethics with Jason, we were discussing the Sermon on the Mount. Having just recently reread it, I couldn’t help but be reminded of Matthew 6: 25-26:

25 Therefore I say unto you, be not anxious for your life, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink; nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on. Is not the life more than the food, and the body than the raiment?
26 Behold the birds of the heaven, that they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; and your heavenly Father feedeth them. Are not ye of much more value then they?

There’s been a ton of debate in the Christian world about whether this should be literal or figurative, and I won’t go into it here, but the fact is, some people live as if it’s literal, and they do manage to survive, and at times, to thrive. I’m not as good with other religions, but I believe this basic spiritual truth manifests in many different traditions. Throw it all away and let God provide all your needs, according to His riches and glory. Go be an itinerant monk who wanders around helping people, penniless, but always able to somehow get by. Like Cain in Kung Fu.

It’s a radical notion, and one better suited to the young without responsibilities to meet. I did it for a while, but honestly, it sucks. The universe did provide, but not at the quality to which I’d become accustomed. There are times now when I look back through the rose-colored glasses of nostalgia and think if I didn’t have kids, I’d live that way now…

But the fact is I went hungry a lot, could barely sleep,*** and ate a lot of food loaded with extra salt peter at shelters. I joined up with a clan of old hippies on a commune in Texas for a while, and that sucked too. Communal living. I still shudder thinking about it. Everyone in your space all the time! Feh. Give me doors.

The fact is, I’m too materialistic to want to live that way myself. And there’s my family. They deserve better, and I’ve got the skills, talent, and intelligence to be able to provide better. The Universe does indeed provide, but it provides nuts, berries, and meat that runs faster than you do, and if the weather’s shit and there’s no vegetables, you’re going to die. And that’s ok with the Universe. It’s balanced, natural, and harmonious. Spiritually sublime.

Fuck. That. Shit.

So, my opinion is that the Fama’s First Rule really means you shouldn’t work for a living, you should only heal people, and you should do it for free if you’re a Rosicrucian. It’s a great rule, because for it to be true, some very powerful magic has to take place: either the you’ve got endless wealth at your fingertips, or you’ve got to be completely in harmony with the materialization process of the Universe.

And that’s ONE of the reasons I don’t consider myself a Rosicrucian. Like other Mystery traditions, I think it’s got some cool stuff in it, but it’s not a system I’d throw myself into completely. My studies and practices have a lot of shared truths with those of the Rosicrucian tradition, and I can use the images of RC to interpret my experiences in Hermetic Initiations, but that’s because my tradition and theirs developed in the Hermetic current. They’re a formalized facet of the current that is different than mine.

I think the First Rule is the goal, to perform magic until you no longer need to work a profession to make a living, and you can devote your time to healing the sick without charging anyone anything. I sometimes think I’m at a point where I could do that, but honestly, I’m afraid to try to live that way. There are too many people depending on me to take that large of a risk.

So I keep my job, and I sell magical services and consecrated talismans and lessons, and I try to get ahead enough to not have to work for a living so I can do this full time, free, without jeopardizing my kids’ future. I’m making progress. I can see how it would be possible to conjure for a living, conjuring the things we need directly and then just having it sort of work in our favor, but it would take discipline I’m only just now developing. Maintenance. Strategy.

If I can find out how to just manifest the things we need consistently, I’m there. I’m all over it. Until then, I’m not an RC, though this research has me comparing the rest of the verses around Matthew 6:25-26 and comparing it to the rules of the Fama. Rule 2 is reflected in verse 28, for example. And Morgan said the RCs are forbidden from living beyond the time God gives them, and verse 27 says something about how worrying about it doesn’t add a day to your life. Interesting parallels there.

* I’m including the United States, even though there is some debate from the UK about whether Americans speak English or not.

** Like an Olympiad, but more meaningful.

*** Little known fact, homeless people get very little sleep. That lifestyle is hard, and frightening, and highly stressful. You can’t always trust the people you’re with, and you can’t afford to sleep deeply. It’s high, high stress, all the time. And it’s dirty as shit.

I was finishing up a Hermetic Diagnois for a client today, and when I was talking to Tzadqiel of Jupiter about some of his financial issues, I was told that there was little that could be done to increase the Jupiterean forces in the client’s sphere until he was out of Retrograde, which doesn’t happen until December 25th. There were things he could do to improve the general well being of the client, but for this one specific plan the guy had in mind, there wasn’t going to be any outpouring of new blessings until after Christmas.

I was also told that if the client would have done the Jupiter rites before the retrograde, there would have been more Tzadqiel could do now. It’s like when you’re building a house, there’s a part of the work that has to be done when the weather is clear, but once you’ve got the frame built, you can cover it in plastic and keep on working on the plumbing and electric even before the roof is put on if necessary.

Now there have been other clients who needed Jupiter Work during a retrograde, and it was no problem. Maybe they had less specific aims in mind, or maybe they had laid enough of a foundation while he was Direct to be able to work with during the Retrograde. Or maybe this one client’s natal chart leaves him personally susceptible to Retrograde Jupiter, or maybe the other clients’ natal charts left them with the ability to receive Jupiter blessings no matter what the astrological weather was like. Chris Warnock or Austin Coppock would be able to decipher the details better than I can, I have no doubt. There are so many variables to take into account.

In general though, it seems like its a good idea to do the foundational building up Work with a specific planetary power while they’re direct, and then maintenance Work when they’re retrograde.

A panacea that would address all the variables regardless of their causes would be a regular regimen of working with the planetary powers. If you cycle through the seven planets on a regular basis, communing with their Intelligences, working with the powers of the sphere, you’ll have a good momentum built up that will assist you when something unexpected pops up.

I thought this phrase summed up the relationship between magician manipulating manifestation, and the actual manifestation itself:

“Sometimes you can control it. But other times it’s going to do what it wants and you have to roll with it.”

First, this:

Next, this:

Ok, so a friend of mine was asking about lucid dreaming the other day. He recently acquired the Supernatural Assistant (SA), and had been through some intense Solar initiations. He’s also been through the planetary initiations, and is going through what I interpret as the Green Phase of the Work, where the magic comes to life and you really start doing it and learning about how to use it effectively. It’s my favorite phase of the Work, personally.

The first thing he wants to do is Lunar Work. Specifically, he’s got a hard on for Lucid Dreaming. He conjured up all the spirits of the Moon and his SA and asked for a lucid dreaming experience. He was serious about getting that lucid dream. His SA confidently assured him that he would be successful, and that this kind of thing was right up his alley, no problem providing the experience, it will happen. So he went to sleep.

No lucid dream.

So he came to me with his concerns that it might not be the SA he’s actually contacted, because he didn’t get the results he wanted instantly as promised. I explained that what he asked for was a skill that takes a while to develop, and that means it’s going to take discipline and practice to get good at it.

People don’t generally believe they can conjure a spirit and it will transform them immediately into a Banker, with a degree, experience, wardrobe, and position in a bank they’ve held for years. Yet when it comes to spiritual attainments, we sometimes think they can just instantly transform us into Ascended Master Priest Kings overnight. I do it myself, all the time, in spite of my experiences.

So I talked him through the process I went through to attain the ability to dream lucidly, explained the things I learned from my experiments, gave the tips and tricks I could. I encouraged him to do the work that results in lucid dreams, and to let his spirit do its work, give it a couple weeks before jumping to conclusions. I “level-set his expectations” so he would get the most out of his experience.

Sort of like Patrick Dunn, Aaron Leitch, Otter, and Jason Miller did for me after I made contact with my SA. It made me feel good to be able to help.

So after talking to him about his plans and his goals in Lucid Dreaming, I found myself getting a little wood over it too. A little teak. I’ve been doing an ongoing lunar rite for the Astral Warrior Talismans (which should be shipping this weekend), and my sphere’s abuzz with the powers of the Moon in general. Why not? I thought.

And then things got weird.

In good ways.

I tuned into a dream the first night, opening an Astral Vortex and stepping through after saying the Magic Words, and it was epic. As soon as I stepped into myself, I remembered the dream had been going on for months. I’ve been leading an entire life in a dream, doing things that I didn’t know about while awake because I haven’t been paying attention. I was fully aware of all the plans I’d made in the dream realm, and I remembered everything I had done over the last few months to accomplish those plans. I remember it now consciously, and I’ve been busy.

I felt a bit like Tyler Derden, but without the confusion and amnesia phase.

I remember now that the reason I’ve been so tired lately when I wake up is that I’ve been working my ass off in the Dream. I remember doing some specific things that fucked up my back in the dream, and I had this excruciating back ache for three days afterwards. This happened twice in the last two months. In my waking life, I’ve felt distracted, tired, and unfocused. I couldn’t seem to get my shit together long enough to make any headway on several important projects. I was annoyed in general, but I wasn’t really aware of it enough to address it as an issue. I was stressed, but it was a background stress I couldn’t put my finger on.

It’s irritating to have spent so long in a fog. This morning, I woke to dense fog all around, except over the highway where fast cars had cleared the air. I drove through a tunnel in the fog bank all the way to work. It was fascinating. In the midst of the fog there’s a current of motion and activity that has cleared the air, but to participate in clarity, you have to keep in motion.

In the Dream, things are always in motion, and I’m directing things like a conductor or an electrician conducts the flow of sound or electricity. It’s sort of like plumbing too. And weaving. Only all at once, keeping time to a beat and a rhythm that’s been going since the beginning of time. The tides are echoes of the heartbeat of the World.

In the waking world, things are always in motion too, but sometimes I feel a lot less like a conductor, and a lot more like someone coming into an art film student’s movie in the middle and trying to figure out what the fuck is going on.

Things are making a lot more sense now than they were. I can sense more of how things are interconnected between the activities in the Dream and the experiences here below. The flow of manifestation between the realms sounds a lot like the flow of blood through vessels in the brain.

The Moon sphere on the Tree of Life is Yesod, meaning the Base. She is the consort to all the planets, receiving each of their seeds and bearing them to fruition in her womb, manifesting the things Above here Below. Things emerge into being, attain fullness, and pass slowly away, returning to the realm of the Unmanifest.

It’s our base of operations. Our astral realm is the Idea that is represented on the Altar. Our elemental tools, our spiritual assistants are there to be worked with. When we do the rites down here, we’re doing them up there at the same time, in more detail and purity.

Being aware of what’s going on up Above isn’t something that comes without work and exercise. When we conjure the spirits and ask for initiations, we receive spiritual exercises to perform. For lucid dreaming, you don’t even have to conjure the spirits, they’ve already been recorded in lots of different places. Conjuring the spriits will help, of course, but it doesn’t replace doing the exercises that lead to mastery. Meditation, Contemplation, Rituals, and the mundane task of remembering to write shit down every morning for a few weeks, or in the middle of the night when you wake up. The exercises build connections in your brain so you can remember what’s going on and interact with it more directly. It’s training for the mind. 

And watch out for the Shadowlurker.