We’re in the thick of it! Mercury is fully retrograde. Chances are pretty good that if you’re practicing some form of Hermetic-related magic, you are, right now, an asshole.

Uhm, more so than usual.

In fact I’m sure some people will realize that I’m being an asshole right now, just by mentioning it! It’s true, right now I am an asshole. I realized this when I wrote:

Unhappiness vibes are spreading through the world and trying to steal the sunshine. It’s worse than the Nothing, it’s the Nothing is Good. Happiness is in peril!

I propose that everyone on the planet needs to go through a happiness intensive, two weeks where they unwind and are forced to be happy, whatever it takes. And then, after two weeks of being happy, if they’re still bitter negative pessimistic bitches, they should be put out of their misery.

Happiness or death!

And I meant it, too.

So yeah, a happy asshole is a dangerous asshole, apparently.

Take precautions. Mitigate the situation, ask yourself, am I being a dick right now?

The answer is probably yes.

Next, don’t be a dick.

Nope.

Don’t do it.

I know.

Trust me, I know. It’s hard. Just don’t be a dick. Take a walk. Breathe. Meditate. No snarking. Don’t send the post. Take the high road. Wait it out. Don’t offer any advice, it’s asshole advice.

With the recent altar posts popping up, I can’t help but throw in my two cents. I just wrote about altars on a yahoo group last week.

Practically speaking, you’ve got to set your magical apparatus up wherever you can and fit it into your lifestyle. That’s pretty much a given. I’m looking at Jason’s and Jow/Deb‘s and Ian C‘s multiple altars, and honestly, I’m a little overwhelmed. They’ve got altars on top of their altars, and I can imagine how challenging it is to set up and maintain that many different sacred spaces.

I don’t have that many altars at all. I have one altar that is the material representation of all my spiritual pursuits and practices, and then I have an armoire with my other stuff in it. And a nightstand. And a bookshelf or two.But those aren’t altars, as much as they are talismans with some space to call their own…

Which, I suppose, would be considered an altar.

But personally, I only worry about having one altar set up in my house. Everything else is more like convenience and decoration, but the formal Altar plays a very important role in my life. I see it as one of the key pieces of equipment in a magician’s tool kit.

If you set it up right, you’ll have every sphere of existence comprehensible to the mind of man represented. The intelligences and spirits of each sphere will be symbolically present, on site. You’ll have conjured each spirit at the appropriate time to consecrate their talisman, which then is placed in the appropriate location to represent the powers of that sphere as they manifest on Earth. You have this for all the planets, the zodiac, and the Prime Mover. You’ve got the Nous and Logos all represented by the Lamp, and you’ve got the elemental weapons and the Angels of the four corners of the Earth and the Princes of the four realms there, and you’ve got it physically represented in one place.

It’s the most concentrated manifestation device you could ever design. It represents the point where all the forces that mingle to create our sensory realm actually touch this sensory realm. You’ve got a super-charged table of manifestation right there.

Drop a symbol of what you want on it, just over on the corner, say a quick oration to the powers represented, and you can almost see reality bend as it works to manifest what you’ve planted. Uncross a client using their picture, call down wrath on an enemy, empower your business, land a job, make a sale, whatever you can imagine. Pretty much.

That doesn’t mean you need a huge table in one room that is totally dedicated to the Great Work. Mine is currently on one shelf, and it fits nicely right there, out of sight from visiting children with big mouths and parents who ask uncomfortable questions when their kids go on about the daggers and cups and crystals and wands at my house.

And really? A whole YEAR has passed since Jason’s twins manifested? Crap!

I’m about ready to just do some to do some. Feck. I need me some juice. This rising through the spheres shit before bed is great and all, but I need the incense, need the tools, need the lamp and the anointing with the oil and the crystal all toned and resonating with spirity goodness. I misses it, my precious.

So close to being ahead of the game…

Well, the last week has been pretty busy. The week before my vacation arrived, my work life exploded. More work to do than God intended. Bleah.

The week of my vacation was busier than hell. We had a “fun” vacation, as opposed to a “relaxing” vacation. We went to the beach, and mornings were spent on the sand, evenings in amusement parks, with some reversals as weather and time permitted. We had a blast, and we needed that as a family. First vacation, real vacation that is, in 10 years! Way too long to wait, in my humble opinion.

But I’m exhausted now. I need a vacation from the vacation, and work has not let up at all while I was gone. One of these days I’ll get rid of my real job and be able to spend time just doing what I love. Until then, I gotta pay the bills.

I caught up on all the orders that have posted while I was gone (sorry for the delays) and I’ve got a couple more things to finish up on the Green Work Lesson 2 (sorry for the delays) and I haven’t even started the next Black Lesson (sorry for the delays). But I’m ready! Things should be rolling out shortly.

I’ve also got to catch up on all the blog posts for the last week.

And at some point, I’d kinda like to do some magic, too. It’s been too long. Maybe this evening. I had meant to wake at dawn every day of the vacation and make a talisman, but that didn’t work out at all. “Unrealistic Expectations” is what that’s called, I believe.

Ok, so I don’t know shit about Lugh, except that I read a fiction story about him once a long time ago that was more than likely 99% bullshit. I don’t know what Lugnasad is all about, nor do I know how to spell it. You heathens are celebrating something, and if you’re anything like us Christians, it’s probably his birthday or some shit.

So, Happy Birthday Lugh!

In honor of your birthday (or whatever) I’m taking your Crane Curse quoted by VVF and updating it the way I think you meant it. The language you used is beautiful, and I understand it’s a rhetoric-chant type of magic that probably loses something in translation, but I thought it was beautiful, and awesome, and didn’t make much sense the way it was, so accept this gift as my attempt to show the world how freaking cool you really are. No one curses like you cursed. Amen.

Spirits of the Land, Hear me! This utterly devastated, war-scarred ruin, stained with the blood of our brothers who fell in battle is the site where our enemies broke us, shattered us, and turned our home to rubble. They shall be utterly destroyed by the heavenly hosts! Come now eldritch fae, come now spirit warriors, come now warriors of fate! Bind our enemies! Their warriors are gathered, and one company cowers in fear, another sits paralyzed listening to you gather, they are petrified in fear, they are tormented in heart and mind, they are crushed with dread. Our strength is multiplied 9 times, and we roar in strength and power! Hurrah and Woe! Leftward, my beautiful warriors! The powerful magic of storm and earth brought up by our wizards shall sustain us. My curse shall drive them until they are defeated. I face my land laid waste by fire, I see it with death’s very form stamped into all things, and without fear I curse them, for from the death they sought to deal us we are reborn. With all the Sidhe, and Ogma, I swear, by the powers of the sky, the earth and the sea, by the sun and moon and stars.  Come now my band of warriors, my spirit army host like a sea, a boiling sea of golden mists, born now to crash upon them upon a field of battle. Their death is the song of battle! Havoc is the song I sing!

Man, magic is supposed to be fun. I don’t know how people forgot that, but while this whole Great Work thing is important and serious business and all, we’re doing it because we want to have more fun. We want the things that we think will bring more fun into our lives, more pleasure, to be better, live better, feel better, and thrive. Magic is about achieving the awesome and feeling good about it.

Recent posts by Kenaz Filan have been fascinating to me. In my fundie Christian days, we used to go on and on about how the shit of life was really just trials from God, opportunities to be melted down, refined, and reforged as something special in the Kingdom of Heaven. And let me tell you, if you think Evangelical Christians make life hard for Pagans and other non-Christians, they make life even harder on themselves. In worse ways. Their kids are born deformed because they have this “have moar babiez” doctrine in the Evangelical community these days, and women in their forties are having babies long after their zygotes have been corrupted by time on planet Earth. They have to look at their deformed children and give thanks to God for them.

And mean it.

Kenaz and Krasskova discuss a similar mindset, but from a Pagan point of view. A friend and I were talking about it, and his comment was, “If your spirituality regularly fucks up your life, you’re doing it wrong.” I completely agree. But at the same time I completely understand the reticence to recognize that your spirituality is fucking up your life. It’s supposed to be fun, it’s supposed to lead to good changes, and the suffering is surprising, but you justify it because you want to believe what you’re doing is right and good for you, regardless of the obvious pain and stress and emotional, mental, and physical illnesses it’s creating in your life. You don’t want to be wrong, and people keep telling you the rewards are great if you keep pressing on. Or you tell yourself.

And see, sometimes in the Great Work, it’s true, the suffering can sometimes lead to something powerful and spiritual, it can release something absolutely wonderful that you really need to finish the Work. Attaining the Supernatural Assistant can be a bitch, for example. But it’s not supposed to be that way all the time. If it’s lasting more than a season of the year, and it’s become regular and consistent, there’s something seriously wrong.

My foray into Goetia was like that. I kept on suffering, and kept on justifying it, mostly because I wanted to be right, but also mostly because I wanted to be right. You know, right as in “I’m always right,” and right as in, “These spirits really CAN bring you a million dollars in cash overnight while you’re sleeping and they won’t fuck up your life, I mean it!” I wanted the be so freaking right about that.

But I wasn’t. For four motherfucking years. Two years longer than I made it in fundy church. It wasn’t nearly as bad, though, fundy church is a lot of hell right away in doses that are far stronger than what you need to just plain kill you. Goetia was slower and more subtle. It never looked like it was fucking up your life from up close. Perspective matters.

And I’d lost that. But I got it back, and man, seriously, if your spirituality is fucking up your life all the time, and it’s lasting longer than three months, you need to either kick your magic up a few notches and blow that shit out of the water already, or change your approach. If it’s a blocked chakra that needs to be cleansed out because it’s tormenting your life, then raise the kundalini and blow it out. Lance the boil that’s oozing puss into your bloodstream already. If the shit stirred up during an attempt to commune with the Holy Guardian Angel is taking that long to incinerate, turn up the heat. More enflamed prayer from the Moon. Call that Solar Flame down already.

Because it ain’t supposed to hurt that bad that long.

If it’s not that, if there’s no major spiritual goal you’re working on, then seriously, reassess your approach. Is your God regularly kicking your ass? That’s an abuser, baby. What kind of example are you setting for your kids? You want them to grow up thinking it’s ok if God hits mommy when he’s drunk, cause he pays the rent on the trailer lot almost every month?

FUCK. THAT. SHIT.

Knock that aluminum can of budweiser out of his hand, turn off the game, and kick him out. You need cops or a big brother to back you up? Call on Michael the Archangel, or better yet, the LOGOS. He don’t put up with no shit out of any spirit that wants to play god and beat on women. I guarantee.

“It is quite possible to produce something slower, lamer, and weaker than what came before. It is possible to create a tool so ugly that it inspires nothing but shame.”

–Jason Miller, Strategic Sorcery

In honor of this statement, I proudly present the RO Gallery of Ugly Tools!

Years ago, in college, a friend of mine came back to the dorms after a party and said, “Man, people who don’t roll their own cigarettes can’t roll a fucking joint to save their lives!”

He had been to Rammstein AFB in Germany during high school, and had spent many weekends in Amsterdam. He had brought back the conceit of handrolling his own cigarettes. He got us all hooked on Drum tobacco, the best stuff for hand rolling, and we had all gotten pretty good at rolling our own. Our joint-rolling skills had likewise improved, in spite of the difference in texture and moisture between pot and tobacco. We’d gotten kinda spoiled, only hanging out with our current circle of friends, we always had nicely rolled joints to smoke. Going out to a public party was a rude awakening.

“That’s why I don’t even go to those things. Keg beer in plastic cups and shitty joints,” one friend commented. “Sums up the people, too.” And we all laughed.

I found myself thinking about a similar truth today. People who don’t depend on their spiritual techniques to satisfy a daily need aren’t going to be any better at the magical arts than an occasional joint roller is going to be at rolling a decent joint. It might get you high, but the experience will be, overall, less enjoyable to the connoisseur.

If you’ve ever had the misfortune of smoking a poorly rolled joint, you know that at inopportune moments it will develop a “runner,” where the paper burns up faster than the pot. The paper holding it together gets burned through and a big lump of burning pot falls off, leaving a scorch mark on the upholstery of your car or couch. Or if it’s rolled too tight, you can inhale til you’re blue in the face, and you still won’t get a hit and it’ll just go out. You’ve got to put a toothpick through it to get a channel for the air to get through, and even then chances are good that you’ll end up ripping the paper and ruining the joint.

These kinds of shitty joint experiences are annoying as hell. They interrupt the overall flow of the process, adding stress and frustration to what should be a calm expansion of your awareness while catching a good buzz.

When you’re first getting started conjuring spirits, the same kinds of things can happen. You get through the opening, turn to grab the appropriate incense, and then remember you left it in the garage last time you were consecrating the planet’s seal. Or you get to the statement of intent and realize you can’t read your notes and you’ve got to improvise, and it’s just not as poetic and moving as you wanted it to be.

Like the poorly rolled joint, it still “gets you high,” but it leaves much to be desired.

If you take the time to do magic regularly, you’ll know what things you need to get together before beginning. You’ll find your flow of the ritual is improved, the power rises in a nice smooth curve, the veils part smoothly, and the spirits arrive with grace and beauty. Everyone goes through the shitty joint phase in their work, but the difference between a dilettante and a pro is that the pro does it more often.

A good trick to get better at your conjurations is to need it regularly. Now, no one needs to do magic every day. Magic is pretty powerful stuff, and it doesn’t need to be tapped into to manage every aspect of your life. We are created with the powers and abilities necessary to get through most of our daily lives half asleep. And most people do so. So people don’t really need to do magic every day the way some people need to hand-roll a cigarette 20 times a day.

But setting yourself goals, like “This week I will consecrate seven planetary talismans and perform a nightly contemplation of the Hermetic Aphorisms” can help you develop the skills that will make your magic not only effective, but pleasant and smooth.

Holy crap, I just described myself as an “Initiated Neo-Platonic Animist Hermetic Magician attempting to accomplish the Great Work, without getting too hung up on himself in the process.”

With a straight face, even.

This author bio writing thing is fun.