Conjureman Ali made an interesting comment on the Looking Forward post the other day:

As to the purspose of doing all “this,” Draja Mickaharic once indicated that magic’s aim was to prepare one for death. Unlike other people magicians are startled by waking up and realizing they’ve passed on. They are the ones that are able to function in death, continuing their purpose and helping man, with the most skilled and powerful becoming guides for other magicians. The ATRs hold to this view as well.

That’s exactly right, exactly the point of Hermetic Magic as I understand it. It’s a Secret Chief factory. It’s my intention to go directly into that phase of being after this. Can’t say I’ll make it, but that’s the goal. The process fascinates me.

For example, take the first step of the Hermetic transformation through death in the Divine Pymander:

Man-Shepherd said: When the material body is to be dissolved, first thou surrenderest the body by itself unto the work of change, and thus the form thou hadst doth vanish, and thou surrenderest thy way of life, void of its energy, unto the Daimon. The body’s senses next pass back into their sources, becoming separate, and resurrect as energies; and passion and desire withdraw unto that nature which is void of reason.

That’s from the Hermetic.com translation by G. R. S. Mead. Check it out in John Everand’s translation on the Sacred-texts.com site:

First of all, in the resolution of the material body, the Body itself is given up to alteration, and the form which it had becometh invisible; and the idle manners are permitted, and left to the Demon, and the senses of the body return into their Fountains, being parts, and again made up into Operations.

So the first thing it says is, “When you die…” right?

No, not at all. First it says when the material body is to be dissolved/resolved, you give it up. It’s not a passive process. It’s an active decision made by the magician. When it’s time. The magician knows when it’s time, apparently. It becomes obvious. I don’t know if that means they sense death is coming, or simply that they have accomplished everything they need to take the next step, including meeting all obligations and responsibilities here in this material realm as it relates to their current incarnation. I don’t see how it could be time to move on until all that stuff was taken care of. In Saturn, as you manifest, you acquire a debt to Fate, a list of things you’ve got to do before you can pass through this Gate again for a final time. When that debt is paid, you’re free to go.

And there’s the whole cycle of the Hermetic Alchemical Cycle that has to be gone through in its black, white, green, red, and projection phases. You’ll have to finish all that first too.

But when you’re ready and the time to dissolve/resolve the material body has come, you consciously turn the material body over to the process of transformation. It is transformed. It dissolves. It’s a process that happens to it, and it seems like the process is just waiting to happen at that point. It’s been waiting offstage for a while, or it’s been knocking on the door waiting for you to give it the body so it can start its job. I think it’ll be something like just saying, “Ok, I’m done, you can have it now” to the entity that transforms the body.

This entity is the “Daimon.” Agrippa talks about the Daimon as being one of the Three-Fold Keepers of a Man. He gives a description of the three fold keeper, and then gives instructions in a later chapter for getting its name from your natal chart. The Genius spirit. Your Daimon.

And then the form it had vanishes, and the senses of the body are transformed into their essences. Can you imagine what that would look like? At first thought I picture Yoda or Ben Kenobi getting struck down and coming back from the Force as blue ghost versions of themselves.

I never would have considered this to be a literal transformation if it weren’t for the Rainbow Body phenomenon in the tradition of Dzogchen. The best description of it I’ve seen is in Heartdrops of Dharmakaya. There are documented cases of a transformation after death that look like what Pymander says happens to those who are about to become Powers among the Powers. Could be a coincidence. I’d love to go out in a shower of colorful sparks as my body dwindles away.

See what I mean? Fascinating stuff.

     A voice hissed: “He sheds tears!”
     It was taken up around the ring. “Usul gives moisture to the dead!”
     He felt fingers touch his damp cheek, heard the awed whispers.
     Jessica, hearing the voices, felt the depth of the experience, realized what terrible inhibitions there must be against shedding tears. She focused on the words: “He gives moisture to the dead.” It was a gift to the shadow world–tears. They would be sacred beyond a doubt.

today i learned a brother in my extended online hermetic family lost his son. sitting here in my cubicle at work, i was surprised by the tears rolling down my face. i barely know him, really. we’ve argued as often as we’ve talked. we’ve never met in the flesh. yet the pain i feel at the horror of his loss is no less real. my own world would become a desert wasteland if it happened to me. no man should have to face what he must now, and my words of condolence are so inept, inadequate. it is not fair. it is not right. i weep for his loss, for the pain his family must face.

but he does not face it alone. he and his wife will cry together. others in our extended family will shed tears with him as well. we weep together in sorrow at the passing of beauty and life, and perhaps there is comfort and strength to be found in the sacred offering to the shadow world of our mingled tears.

may grace and peace be with you and your family in this time of sorrow, my brother.

First, let’s begin with a cool coolio, today’s Google Doodle in honor of Les Paul. Right on, mang.

Now, on with Looking Forward to… what exactly?

subtitled: Why I Do All This Shit

Back in the day, my nemesis and I used to argue about charging money for magic. He would accuse me of only being in this for the money, and I would get all offended and defensive, and sooner or later I’d question his parentage. We had every argument about it you can imagine, and the same basic arguments still go on across the web.

These days I don’t worry about it so much. If anyone thinks I’m only in this for the money, they’re an idiot. The people who “would never charge for magical services” are generally folks who couldn’t magic their way out of a wet paper bag anyway. Pagans with more opinions than experience are generally the ones with that attitude. Folks who do conjure magic are used to the transactional basis of the occult technologies we work with, and bringing that down to the mundane is natural to us*.

So if I’m not in this for the fat paychecks,** the question becomes what, exactly, are you doing all this magic for? What are you trying to accomplish, RO?

The glib answer is The Great Work. But what the hell does that mean? I can’t turn an ounce of lead into an ounce of gold, I’ve tried. My life isn’t perfect all the time. Arguably, I face more challenges now as an initiated magician with a hefty degree of spiritual authority and power to call on in times of need than I did before I started this process. As the worlds that I consciously interact with expanded from the material realm to the seven heavens and the Eighth Sphere, I ran into about seven or eight times the number of potential issues in any given day that I had before. Life isn’t easier for an initiated magician, it’s just more fun.

So what’s the goal then? The ultimate goal is to return to the spheres we came from. I don’t believe we reunify with the Source of All right away after we die. I think that may happen eventually, when time and space are rolled up like a scroll, but that’s a long, long way off in the future. As far as I’ve looked into the mists of time, humanity exists in one form or another.

I’m a reincarnationist, like my Christian forefathers before me. I believe we pass from one incarnation to the next, fulfilling our destinies and continuing the process set in motion when we descended to the material plane in the first place, all those millenia ago. As we go through our incarnations, we gain experience and knowledge that prepares us for our return to our home in the heavens above. The point of the Hermetic path is to attain the power, authority, and wisdom necessary to head back up and stay there.

And that’s my focus while I’m in the flesh. See, in each sphere we receive an empowerment and training about how things of that sphere manifest here below. We learn to see Saturn’s influence on the world at large, and more immediately on our own lives. We see how the Solar forces drive ambition and bring glory. We see the passions of Venus and the flow of Mercury, and learn the waxing and waning ways of the Moon. We become aware of these powers, receive the power to direct these forces through ourselves into the material realm, and gain skill and talent in the process of creating the world of shared experience. We learn Who we are, and Where we came from. We learn to speak our native tongue, the language of creation itself.

And when we’ve managed to attain this degree of authority and empowerment, we break through to the Eighth Sphere, where we begin to work not only on the physical realm here below, but on developing the skills to be a Power in the afterlife instead of returning to the flesh for another ride in the rodeo.

And then when we die, we are ready to take the next steps. We leave behind the body. The Divine Pymander talks about what happens to the flesh when an advanced Hermeticist dies, and there are similarities to the Rainbow Body phenomenon. The desires that fuel our activities here below, the things that inspire us to create return to where they came from. The passions, anger, and lust that have fueled our lives go back to their raw state within the unconscious potential of existence. And then we ascend through the seven heavens, leaving behind the negative aspects of each that we carry with us here below.

In the sphere of the Moon, we leave behind the power of growth and waning. In Mercury, we leave behind the planning and the plotting that we have to go through to survive. In Venus we leave behind the lustful desire to create and produce new things. In the Sun we drop the desire to rule, and striving ambition. In Mars we leave rash boldness. In Jupiter we give up our desire for wealth by any means necessary. In Saturn we give up the final lie that is always lying in wait while we remain here below, which I suspect is the lie of free will.

When these are gone, we return to the state of being we were in before we descended through the spheres to become incarnate humans. We’ve given up the urge to make things happen on our behalf. We come to the Eighth Sphere in our true power, and we take our place as Powers among the Powers, singing “hymns of silence,” directing and manifesting the powers of creation as pure spirits.

That’s the long term goal for this life. Ascension. Attainment of Power-hood.

To get there, the first thing to do is to establish a firm foundation. You cannot reach the heavens while you’re slipping around in a puddle of mud, dodging kicks and thrown projectiles from all around while scrambling for whatever food falls within your grasp that hasn’t spoiled yet.

You have to build yourself a tower, or a chariot to reach the heavens. That’s why I’ve been writing the Gates series of planetary magic guides. It’s a series designed to put you in a position of authority over your world so that you can stand on firm footing as you reach up to the highest heights. In addition to having a smoothly running kingdom, you’ll be gaining the skills and talents that you’ll need later on in your incarnation.

* At the most basic level, when we make an offering to a spirit, we’re creating a link between our sphere of experiential reality and the spirit’s sphere of influence. It’s like running a hard wire between two servers to create a network that exchanges information. The exchange of money in the mundane does the same thing. Clients without the initiation or experience to tap the powers of the Spheres on their own can hire someone who can. Purchasing the rituals from professionals is a ritual in and of itself, in a way.

** I figured out how much time I put into getting where I’m at today and figured out how much I’ve made on my occult business since starting it, and I make roughly $0.79 per hour.

“Heh. Heh-heh. Bwahahaha!”

That was the sound coming from my cube this morning here at work as I read this post by Pallas Renatus. It wasn’t just that it was funny, it was seeing myself in it. “Oh yeah,” I thought as I read along, “yep, that too. Uh-huh. Heh, yeah.” I especially loved the part where he boiled the tobacco, and nonchalantly offered alternative methods of extracting the tobacco essence later to avoid the smell, without mentioning the gagging, retching, and dry heaves that come from smelling boiling chewing tobacco.

I can’t post comments from work because they blocked blogger because SOMEONE here was posting a lot and they caught on. Can’t imagine who that was, but someone in Florida who logs in remotely ALSO complained about blogger being blocked, so it’s not just me. So to Pallas, I say, be careful. This psychotic Irish-Native American Asatru friend of mine once told me I could kill someone with the refined and extracted amount of pure nicotine from a single cigarette. I don’t know if it’s true or not, but you know, don’t drink the tobacco-camphor-ammonia tea you made, even if it does smell sooooo good.

But man, another thing reading through his post reminded me of was how messy I let things get in my life. While my office doesn’t give me a viral infection and it’s not infested with spiders (ok, not very many spiders), it could use some tidying. See, I’m a busy man, so I spend large chunks of time working on the things I have backed up, and I put off the little things for when I have more time, like filing paperwork, dusting, vacuuming, cleaning the incense ash off the desk, and throwing out the hundreds of stubs from the stick incense I use in every rite. My wife says if I spent the two to five minutes it takes to clean up after my projects, I wouldn’t have to take two hours on a Saturday to clean everything up at once, and she could be right. So there’s physical stuff to clean up.

I also do a lot of magic. I would say on a slow week, I’ll go maybe 18 hours straight without doing something that involves conjuring a spirit into my crystal ball for something. I like to think the steady traffic tends to keep things pretty clear. I also recently did the Mercury Gate rite, and that’s cleaned out a lot of crap that was stagnating. But regular cleansings of my house are on my list of things to do that I rarely get around to doing.

And another thing, I think that because I do magic of a certain variety, it takes care of everything spiritually that my family needs. The truth is, there are psychic cobwebs that build up around the house that my regular angel magic just doesn’t affect, at least, not without making a specific request. The thing about angels is that they aren’t nannies. They’re co-workers, highly advanced, further up the ladder than you co-workers, with more experience and more power. You wouldn’t invite the CEO and all the Vice Presidents of a Universal Corporation over and expect them to pick up a feather duster and put on an apron and go around cleaning your house for you after the business meeting is over, would you? Naw, didn’t think so.

I’ve noticed some patterns of behavior that are being expressed in my family that indicate it’s time to clean out the psychic air. In the Home Pwnership post, I talked about how when people live too close together, their shit gets on each others’ nerves. The same is true in a family, though it’s strongly mitigated by the love we have for each other. Still, when you hear the bickerings of the kids and the mutterings of the spouse (and yourself) begin to consistently contain the phrase “always*” in a negative context, it’s a good indication that it’s time to do some psychic cleaning in the home space in addition to checking behavior patterns, and maybe reminding people that we all have personal responsibility to make our collective experiences positive by taking ownership of our own messes.

So it’s time to break out the aspergillum and sprinkle copious amounts of Holy Water about the house. I don’t think I’m in need of the full PRGTFO potion he created, but a good psychic cleansing is definitely in order.

And yeah, getting down on the old hands and knees and scrub the base boards too.

* As in, “You always break my stuff,” or “I’m always the one who has to clean up the bathroom,” or “You always say you’ll get to it Saturday.” Patterns of behavior that need to be addressed in multiple levels.

Spring’s here, and I get to play outside in the Kingdom. Since writing the Home Pwnership post, I’ve been craving delicious kabobs, so I made some. It’s easy, it’s delicious, and it’s fun. It’s only magical in that I’m a magician. If you’re looking for secret occult insights into greater enjoyment of your world, this could technically count, but that’s totally stretching it. I didn’t conjure anything, and the only holy rites I performed was saying grace before I ate. If you’re looking for cool magical stuff, this post isn’t for you.

And Deb, this is a tribute to your weekly recipe posts. To the regular readers who are looking for magic posts, I promise not to do weekly recipe stuff, but once in a while you can expect to see some flotsam and jetsam like this wash up on the blog.

• Meat cubes (I like red meat cubes. You can get enough to feed a family of 5 for $5.)
• Kabob sticks
• Baby bella mushrooms
• Vidalia onions
• Green pepper
• Grape or Cherry tomatoes
• Montreal Steak Seasoning
• Sweet Baby Ray’s Barbecue sauce
• Minute Rice
• Lipton pitcher sized tea bag
• Earl Grey single cup tea bag

1. Put the meat cubes in a bowl and season them thoroughly with Montreal Steak Seasoning.
2. Cut the peppers and onions into 1″ squares.
3. Build kabobs.
4. Throw them on a grill.
5. Put some barbecue sauce over them.
6. Close the lid.
7. Go put the water on to boil for the rice.
8. Put a cup of water in a microwave safe measuring cup, throw in the tea bags, and microwave it for two minutes.
9. While that’s cooking, go flip your kabobs. 
10. Put another layer of BBQ sauce on ’em.
11. Close the lid.
12. Go back in and the water’s probably boiling for your rice. Add the rice and mix it up and set it in the back burner, covered, to absorb the water and become instant rice-like product.
13. Take the tea out of the microwave and get the bags out.
14. Mix it in a pitcher with cold cold water and sweeten to taste.
15. Flip the kabobs again and add another layer of BBQ sauce.
16. Set the table, dish the rice out and get the cups and ice out.
17. Fetch the kabobs.
18. Gather up the family and serve.

So freakin’ good. Not that unhealthy. Took about half an hour altogether. Cost about $20 and fed all five of us and there were leftovers. Should have tenderized the meat a bit, but my wife was on the phone, and I didn’t want to make a ruckus.

Today on XKCD the alt text says that if you click the first hyperlink on any page in wikipedia that is not in parentheses or in italics, and repeat that process, you will eventually end up at Philosophy.

I checked Lake Trout. 13 clicks later I was at philosophy.

From Tauroctony, 24 clicks.

From Nachos, 19 clicks.

From Magick, 19 clicks.

Ok, so Mr. White is writing interesting things about magic, money, and apocalypse living for the rest of us. Very interesting things. The last installment I read addressed home ownership and how we’ve all been sold a lie for the last three generations.

I have a different perspective. I happen to own my home, and while I’ve been through some issues as a result, I still prefer it to renting for a living.

So I did some research. First off, I thought, it’s an investment. You buy a house, spend 30 years paying it off, and yeah, you spend a lot in interest, but you’d spend about that on rent anyway, and when it’s paid for, it’s worth more than when you bought it. It’s gone up in value, and you sell it at a profit! How can you go wrong?

That chart’s from Standard and Poor’s Case-Shiller’s home price index. As you can see, the value of a home obviously does go up over time. If you bought your house in 1900, your investment would have doubled if you managed to sell it at the peak of 2008. You just have to have long term views, and, uh, know when the market’s going to crash again…

Ok, even I, with my amazing powers of bullshittery, couldn’t sell that to myself. Look at the figures! Pretty much, if you ever buy a house and pay for it for 30 years, you’re going to be lucky if you can sell it for what you paid for it. Once in a while the prices spike, but then they collapse. It’s a long shot, and chances are pretty good that you’re going to lose if you’re trying to get rich owning a home.

Ok, so what about taxes? I just filed a shitload of taxes, and I got back a lot of money because of my house. Repairs are tax deductible, interest is tax deductible, just about everything I spend that I can say is related to the house is tax deductible. Altogether I get back a lot of money by owning a house, and renters don’t get that, so nyah nyah nyah.

So I figured out how much I spent on my house in a year, including maintenance, mortgage payments and interest and taxes and all that, and the tax deductions I earned offset that a bit, but not really enough to make a solid case for home ownership.

So then I compared it to renting, straight up. I ran the numbers based on all the pros and cons from that Freakonomics article, and this is what I came up with based on my experience and actual numbers.

For a $200,000 house, you spend about $690,000 over the lifetime of your mortgage on your house. It’s mostly interest, which gets you a tax rebate each year, for now, until Obama cuts that deduction. Renting a place with as much space as I have here would cost me about $662,000 over 30 years, including the storage unit I’d need for all the stuff in the garage. You could argue I don’t need that stuff, but I’d argue back, so the fuck what, it’s my stuff and I don’t have to pay extra to be happy. At the end of 30 years, I will have spent $28,000 more than the renter, but I’d own the property, and it would probably be about worth what I paid for it, give or take a couple grand. So over 30 years, I’d be making $172,000, or $5,733 a year. That’s around $477 a month. Not bad for a side revenue stream. In bad times, I can get a low interest loan if necessary. And it’s 30 years of living in a house however I want to, not in an apartment, and no landlords rummaging through my shit when I’m at work.

Now there are a lot of variables that can be thrown into this kind of argument. Most people own for five to ten years and then sell before they’ve really paid a lot on their mortgages. After the dust settles, they walk away with roughly what they started with when they bought the house, or less. Some get more, once in a while. Other people set up bi-monthly mortgage payments that drastically reduce the interest payments and get the house paid off a lot faster, and they walk away with even more money. Other people buy foreclosed homes and flip them, and I know a lot of contractors (I live in a blue collar neighborhood, and there are four contractors on my block doing this, plus a couple parents of my kids’ friends at school) who bought houses at auction that are making a killing even in this economy renovating them themselves and selling them cheap. There are more ways to skin this cat than I can think of.

So overall, owning a house can be a profitable investment, financially speaking, even if you spend three times what it’s worth over the life of the loan.

But on the down side, it’s a pain in the ass. The neighbors can complain about your cats shitting in their bushes. You’re going to have about $2500-$4000 a year in unexpected expenses (which I factored into the total cost) that you’ll have to figure into your budget. You have to file all those fucking Home Depot or Lowes receipts to get the deduction. You have to mow the lawn or the neighbors will call the city, so you’re going to need a lawn mower and a weedeater. You’ll have flower gardens and pools, if you have a spouse into making your house look good, or kids to entertain in the summer, and that’s more expense. You’ll need siding, a roof, and your gutters will fall off. And no one will fix it but you, unless you pay someone to do it, and chances are good that your DIY project is going to cost all the materials you buy, plus the contractor you hire to fix it when it gets all fucked up. The plumbing…

Jesus, did you know that plumbers just basically go into a house and plumb it however the fuck they want? As long as the water goes down the right hole, it’s pretty much legal. I’m pretty sure the people who plumbed this house over the last 60 years were dabblers in the Necronomicon. If I ran all the faucets and flushed all the toilets at the same time, Marduk would appear in the living room, no lie.

So there’s a lot of headache in home ownership. I spend probably 32 hours a month taking care of my house. If I’m making $477 a month, that’s only $15 an hour, and I won’t get paid for 30 years.

But you know, neighbors in general suck. Ever notice how many hot foot powder anecdotes involve neighbors?  Neighbors bitch about you no matter how close or far away they live. I lived in the country a mile and a half away from my nearest neighbor as a kid, and people bitched about my dog getting out and chasing their cows. It happened ONCE, and I heard about it for years. I was ten. Those old ranchers gave me shit about it til I moved at 13. “Keepin’ an eye on yer dog?” Fuckers.

But in apartments, the neighbors are right the fuck there. I hate that shit. The closer you are to someone separated from you by two sheets of drywall, the more irritating bullshit you’re going to hear from them and they’re going to hear from you. Condos are the same, and so are town houses or row homes. People too close bitch at each other. At least in my house, they’re far enough away that I only hear from them when the cats are shitting in their bushes. And I’ve only heard about that shit once in 4 years.  They’re cats. Cats shit in bushes. They also kill rats and those little bunnies you hate eating your hastas. But I’ll keep them inside, fine, see how you like it. I’m not bitter. Fuckers.

And I have a lot more privacy and freedom of choice about my immediate living environment. Yeah, I can knock down the walls when I feel like it, and I can do about anything I want as long as it’s safe and legal. I have fewer restrictions about how I can decorate my life. I can go out in my backyard and grill up a steak or barbecued chicken kabobs whenever I want, without having to go to some park that lets you use their grill. That Freakonomics guy writes that off, but fuck him. I like it, it makes me happy, and that has intrinsic value in and of itself. Making me happy is important to me.

I’m also rooted in one community. That’s important for people, especially people with kids. Successful people are generally not moved around every couple years of their lives as kids. They grow up knowing people who get ahead, and in turn help them to get ahead. They have somewhere they’re from. They have friendships that last lifetimes. Kids like me who moved around a lot growing up tend to be shiftless vagabonds all our lives. I’d still be nomading about if it weren’t for my Capricorn wife nailing me down to one spot. I had no idea how nice it is to be established in one place until she managed to do that. There are perks to working in the same area for a decade too.

Now the dude in the Freakonomics article says that renters have more cash in the bank than people buying homes. Uh, how many of you renters see that “extra money” you have? Anyone? Right. Because what you don’t spend on your rent, you spend on something else. Are you a brilliant savvy investor? Hell, can you even save money in an interest bearing account? I can’t.

But I can pay my mortgage.

So what’s the value of renting? Really, the things that are best about renting instead of owning boil down to preference. You’re not making as much money, unless you’re disciplined with your cash, but you have fewer responsibilities. You have fewer liberties too. And you’re right up your neighbor’s (or landlord’s) asshole all the time, and they’re right up yours, and generally not in a pleasant way.

So yeah, there could be a three-generation ad campaign that’s programmed me to think a certain way, but when I do the math and look at my life, my preferences, my skills, my goals, and my responsibilities to my family, home ownership is a better option. Gordon’s life is better suited for renting, and his mind is better suited to taking advantage of all that extra cash he’s got from renting than mine. My brain power that would go towards that is spent on kid-management and such. If I were single and disciplined, maybe I’d find his approach more appealing, but I’m not. I’ll take the home.

And for the record, I’m aiming to go on the bimonthly mortgage payment that gets me out of the interest 15 years ahead of schedule, so when the dust settles, I’ll be making a lot more than $15 an hour for this investment. It just takes strategy.