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The MANSPELL kit comes complete with two stone spheres that are oddly comforting to hold, a roll of duct tape, and absolutely no directions.

Once upon a time, RO had a lot of time on his hands to post and set up posts on his blog in a way that brought a steady diet of ideas and interests he wanted to share to his audience. Then he got really busy, and these days writes a ton of posts in a morning and then nothing else for a week.

Uh, anyway, I can’t set them up to post sequentially like I used to from work, and I want to get stuff posted before I run out of time or forget, so sorry about the post clustering. As I adapt to my latest circumstances, I’m sure things will get back to a more even keel.

I think writing the Red Work Series of Courses has been the best thing I’ve ever done in my life. As I go back over the things I’ve learned so far and try to find a way to put it into meaningful words, I keep on finding all these cool things I picked up and forgot about over the years. It’s so cool.

I’m writing the Elemental Hierarchy lesson for the Black Work course now, and it’s amazing. Things I thought I understood years ago are making so much more sense now when I go back over them from my current perspective. Agrippa writes about things that are fascinating after you’ve been initiated into the Spheres and spent some time Working with the things he talks about, but until you have, it’s boring, complicated, and confusing. So much of his writing is referential to the actual experiences of a magician that I have no doubt that he was a practitioner and not just an occult journalist. His detailed understanding of how things work in the occult arts can only be explained by direct experience.

The first time I read through his stuff on the Elements, in the First Book of Occult Philosophy, chapters … uh, three through nine, I just didn’t get it. I understood the words, and I thought I grasped the concepts. I could read a correspondence table and understand the implications and the logic behind the linkages between things, but I didn’t have that gnosis, that knowledge that comes from experience to make it all really click.

After actually experiencing the three levels of the elemental spheres, the cardinal, fixed, and mutable aspects of each element, it makes perfect sense. Gates, Forces, and Manifestations. It took me years to understand what Agrippa says so plainly. It’s like someone says, “Put slot A in tab B,” it’s simple instructions, but until you understand tabs and slots, you won’t understand what he’s saying. But now I get it. Neat stuff, really neat stuff.

Anyway, for those like me going through this Great Work thing on their own, read, apply, and then go back and re-read is my advice. Helps put things into perspective a lot. I keep finding myself saying, “Oh, THAT’S what he was talking about!” as I go back over the basics.

Ok, take a look at THIS LINK showing the Dow Jones Industrial Average from 1900 through 2010. Then click the little links towards the bottom of the page that shows the time period in 20-year increments. Look at what happens every single decade. Towards the beginning, a big dip, followed by a slow recovery, followed by a climb for the last half of the decade, and then another crash, correction, recession, depression, whatever. Then slow recovery, rapid growth, correction/crash, slow growth, rapid growth, correction/crash, slow growth and so on and so forth.

Pretty much.*

Ok? Every 10 years. This ain’t rocket science. Our ancestors could figure out the astrological timing of the stars to set up neat tricks with the lighting and architecture of major massive monuments, right? You think economists could look at one simple graph and see that things are going along the same way they have as long as we’ve been keeping records?

Meh.

Anyway, folks, as summer follows spring, and winter follows autumn, so also will growth continue to be slow until around 2015-2016, at which point things will get better faster, especially for those who have prepared themselves to be in a position to invest when things start picking up. Invest heavily around 2015, start selling off the riskier stuff in 2017, pull out of the market by 2018, and then get back in when things are at the bottom. There’s not better time to have a lot of money than when the economy is bad. You get such deals on everything. Minions that cost $125k a couple years ago are going for $70k and no benefits now. And they’re working harder because they know they’re LUCKY to even have a job.

Think of your financial lifecycle as a farm. You start out with a few seeds, plant them, harvest them, sell a lot of the produce, but keep as many of the seeds for the next year’s crop as you can plant and take care of. Each year, plant, grow, harvest, and save. This is the time you build up your seed stores, and then when it’s time to invest, you’ll have plenty of seed money. Sock it away now in savings, only take sure bets, and work your tail off for meager profits that go right into savings for when it’s time to invest heavily. The more you’ve got on hand to put into the market in five years, the better.

Cycles, harmony, passive observation and working with the currents to strategically get ahead. Inhale. Pause. Exhale. Pause. IHVH. Get to work.

* “Pretty Much” means that yeah, there are exceptions, and it’s not exact, but I mean, come one, it’s close enough to be a good indicator, you know? Generally speaking.

I get it. I know why they call them Witch Doctors and Root Doctors. You’re giving the person a checkup, an evaluation based on years of specialized training that have required a great deal of education and various degrees of pain, and then, if there’s anything wrong in the areas you’ve specialized in, you offer a diagnosis, a treatment, or a cure for what ails them.

It’s just like going to the doctor.

Hippocrates was a contemporary of Plato, who called him an Asclepiad, which could mean a follower of Asclepius, god of healing, or it could have just meant he was a healer like Asclepis was a healer. The practices of Hippocrates were neat. They preferred to let the body heal itself, and they focused on the humors of the body, which were based on the four elements. He believed that the body had the ability to harmonize its own humors, and let the body do so. He taught passive treatment for most ailments, and developed the phases of disease still followed today. Crisis and relapse are based on his observations that diseases followed a pattern, and the crisis point happened a set number of days after the ailment began.

Neat stuff. Very in theme with Hermetic Magic and the application thereof. Modern magicians are fascinated by Science and the exploration of the Natural World, but perhaps we’d find more and better harmony in the medical field than in astronomy or physics. I mean, Physicists don’t even take an Oath before beginning their practices. Medicine is obviously closer to a Mystery Tradition or secret lodge in that regard.

“Applied Hermetics” is what one person suggested, and that sounds about right as an adjective. I’d rather have a proper noun, a title that described what we do. Asclepiad, the healer was called. Hermesthetician, I thought was closest. Well, whatever. I don’t know. Mage, diviner, shaman, therapist, conjurer, herbal treatment recommender, talisman smith, emissary to the divine and sub-divine realms, balancer of elemental disproportions, lifter of curses, exorcist, psalmist, hexencrafter, fixer, whatever you want to call me, that’s what I do these days. All the things the spirits of the Goetia were supposed to grant one the powers to do. Odd, eh? But interesting.

It seems Hermetic Magic is the spiritual medicine of the West.

Ever wish you had a really simple old-school text interface tool that you could use to write a chunk of text without any distraction? Trying to recreate that late-eighties mood for your latest writing project, but you can’t fine a copy of WordStar anywhere?

Check THIS out.

I love this stuff. Brought to me by Life Hacker, a link I’m sure most of you visit, and especially Jason and Gordon have probably shared it on more than one occasion. I know Jason was into using the term Life Hacking for what it is he does and teaches for a while. Thoughts on what to call magic had reminded me of that, and a google search later turned up pages of useful interesting tips and tricks. Love it.

Hermetic … counseling… no, therapy, ah, no… rehab?

scratch all that…

hermes… toth… ape chaser? heh. no, tothic engineering, tothtastic thotherapy, thothic analysis, thothity thoth thoth… sheesh. forget thoth.

hermes, hermetic counseling, hermetic doctor, hermengineering, hermeticology? hermeticologists! LOL. “We’re here to audit your spheres and bring clearness… To yo bank account!”

Ok, no. c’mon focus here. Hermetic shamanism? nah. Hermesthetics? Hermestheticians? probably the best one, but who’d be able to pronounce it? aesthetics are what magic is all about. remind me to write that art-magic post some time in response to VVF.

crap! how the fuck do you come up with something like this. ahhh, forget it. It’s just hermetics anyway. hermetic practice. The implementation of hermetic doctrine, the result of hermetic magic, the Great Work on the field of play. What do you call that? What do you call someone who does that, and applies the related disciplines to the lives of others?

Oh yeah… a magician.

Hey everyone, I broke the 200 mark for followers through Google’s blogger follower thing while I was all distracted from my beautiful blog. That’s in addition to the 388 subscribers through the Feedburner thing. I think. Maybe there’s some cross over though. I dunno.

But officially passing 200 followers for the blog is a big thing for me, so to celebrate I’m going to offer a 20% discount on the Red Work Series of Courses.

The discount will last between right now and next Tuesday. All orders must be received no later than 11:59:59 PM EST on Tuesday, 11/23/2010 to qualify for the discount.

Click THIS LINK to get the discounted price. I updated the buy now buttons for both Google Checkout (my preferred method of taking payments) and on PayPal (everyone else’s preferred method of making payments). The prices shown on the Courses page include the discount. I’ll be reverting to the regular page and regular prices after the 23rd.