Blogger’s being weird with comments. If you’ve commented up until now, I have approved your comments, but they aren’t all showing up on the page. Hopefully Blogger gets it fixed soon, there were some cool ones out there.

In my previous post, I talked about the logistics of the “tithe,” the offering of 10% of your gross income to the Temple or the Church. This money is supposed to cover the operating costs of the clergy, provide the clergy with food shelter and clothing, and the things they need to get by in life.

I also talked about what I consider the criteria for clergy getting supported by the congregation: If the clergy is providing information, instruction, and insight that leads to the laity having a better financial, emotional, and spiritual life, they deserve to get supported so they can spend more time developing the materials that would help more people get more money and happiness and gnosis in their lives.

There’s a Mystery of the doctrine of the Tithe, a spiritual truth that translates into substantive blessings in the lives of those who practice this discipline. I believe the Tithe is appropriate because I personally know that you get a lot more than you give when you tithe, and I’m not talking about the umbrella services of the church or whatever it is your tithe supports. There’s a spiritual mystery to it.

First of all, where does everything in the Universe come from in the Hermetic Cosmology? Everything, we believe, is an emanation of God. Some people call it by other names, others are more comfortable leaving it nameless. I prefer to think of it as the Prime Mover, the First Father, but people I have deep respect for see it as an impersonal force, a fount of information that expresses itself in various levels of complexity that we experience and sort through in our lives.

Whatever. I find it hard to have a personal relationship with knowledge, it’s all cold and compassion-less. Not much fun in that.

So everything is a manifestation of God. that means you and me and the chairs we’re sitting in, the clothes we’re wearing, and the cat shit that stinks up my basement if I don’t change the litter box. Everything that exists is a manifestation of God according to Hermetic doctrine.

If everything that exists is a manifestation of God… who does it all belong to? Whose money gets put in whose account when you get paid?

Philosophically understanding, theoretically seeing that everything is an emanation of God is pretty simple. Seeing our paychecks as a direct provision from God is something else altogether. After all, God didn’t work for that money, didn’t put up with my boss’s bullshit for 60 hours while only getting paid for 40 last week. Hell, God manifested as my boss in the first place. Why should I give him the first 10%?

It was easier when people were in an agrarian/nomadic culture. The crops depended on the right amounts of Rain and Sun, the animals’ health depended on the same. The weather was under the direct control of one or more Gods, so it was easier to see that what you had at harvest was a direct manifestation of the local deity’s pleasure or displeasure with you. His pleasure was maintained by offerings.

The Tithe, while in essence an offering, was different. The tithe was the portion of the year’s earnings that belonged to God no matter what kind of weather you get. Spending the tithe was stealing from God. Sacrifices and offerings were given above and beyond the tithe. They weren’t automatically God’s portion, they were your specific attempt to express gratitude to or request favors from the deity receiving the offering. Tithes weren’t sacrifices, they were a public acknowledgment that everything was God’s anyway.

One of the neat things about the tithe is that the more God blesses you, the more he gets. It’s sort of an incentive for God to give you more, when you think about it. Not that he needs the tithe, everything is his already. Everything IS God and he doesn’t need anything more. “My God ain’t short on Cash, Mister,” as Bono put it.

But if God doesn’t need any of it, what’s the tithe for? Is it just a conspiracy by the Clergy to keep themselves in business? It does keep them in business, it’s true, but in order to manifest, it had to be purposed in the Mind of God. The tithe is part of the Purpose of God.

The tithe is a spiritual discipline. It’s a gift for us, a tool, a practice that reveals a secret about the manifestation of God. See, when you give the tithe regularly, off the top, you prosper. It’s weird, but when you give money away, intentionally donating it to God in whatever manifestation of clergy or spiritual teacher he manifests in your life, you have everything you need. Why? I don’t know. But it works.

It’s the one thing in the Bible that God commands people to do that he also says you can test him on. You give God 10% of your income, and watch the blessings pour in. It’s a spiritual law. It doesn’t come from the person or group you gave it to, either. It’s not that direct. I tithed on my unemployment when I was unemployed, but did the Church that got the money provide for me and my family? They brought me a couple of casseroles, but they didn’t pay my rent or my utilities bills.

But those bills were all paid. For almost a year from 2002-2003. There’s no explanation for that. The need would arise, and a pile of money would appear. I didn’t get ahead financially, but I maintained my existence. I know a lot of people who tithe regularly, and they are living testaments to this spiritual fact. If you give the first 10% of your income to god’s representatives in your life, whether they deserve it or not, you will be blessed. Your physical, material life will have a spiritual foundation that provides for all your needs. The tithe and the resulting blessings forms the solid bedrock of financial prosperity that everything else we do with magic can add to over time.

See, the Church, by teaching this spiritual truth even though it has been misrepresented as coercion (“give me money or burn in hell”), is actually giving the laity a spiritual discipline that personally and miraculously benefits them. That’s why they deserve to get the tithe, because they meet my criteria for making your life better through their doctrines.

Because this revelation of spiritual truth was recorded and popularized primarily within the Hebrew and Christian religions, pagans miss out on the benefits. Their clergy misses out on a regular source of income (though typically only 10% of the congregation tithes regularly as noted in the previous post). The coven members or grove members or whatever miss out on having all their basic needs met consistently by the powers of the gods.

Magicians miss out too. We miss out on a chance to learn something fundamental about manifestation magic.

Now, if you want to enjoy the benefits of the tithe, but you aren’t Christian or Hebrew, and besides the Romans tore apart your Temple in 70 AD anyway, there are some things you need to understand. The tithe isn’t Christian or Jewish. It’s one of those spiritual laws that apply to anyone. You don’t have to tithe to an organization; anyone in your life that is doing God’s work (or the Work of the Gods, whatever) would be a good person to receive the tithe. Anyone who teaches magic, paganism, or any spiritual practices that benefit you personally and draw you closer to God is a worthy recipient of the tithe. That includes BLOG AUTHORS like Jason, Kenaz, and Witchdoctor Joe. Scott Rassbach, the good Gnostic Monsignor qualifies. Yours truly wouldn’t be a bad choice either. I would be honored to be the recipient of your tithe, but I’m not 501c3 compliant, you totally wouldn’t get a tax credit.

It doesn’t matter WHO you give the tithe to, because you aren’t really giving it to THEM. You’re giving it to God, as a means to recognize that everything is his already anyway, in faith that he will provide all your needs. It’s the intent that determines the spirit you receive, as Agrippa says, and when it comes to the tithe, it’s the intent that you are giving it to God that triggers the blessings in your life. In the Bible, it says that if you can’t make it to Jerusalem to give the tithe to the Temple, you’re supposed to take the tithe and EAT IT. You use it to have a celebration in honor of God. You and your friends, family, strangers, the poor, everyone in the community feast on the tithe in thanksgiving to God, and then whatever is left over is left out for the animals to eat.

That doesn’t mean you get to take the first 10% and go to the movies and say it’s in honor of God, by the way. Any secret justifications for spending the tithe on yourself negate the whole thing. It has to be for God, and the best way to do that is to take 10% and give it to someone doing what you consider God’s Work on Earth.

Over the last few weeks, I’ve seen some posts and comments that mention a certain sense of entitlement among some students who come to teachers, who maybe buy a $25 2-hour workshop, and expect the teacher to become their 24/7 confidant, conspirator, and confessor. Kenaz recently posted his thoughts about how a pagan community ought to support their “Elders” because the Elders have done so much for them, and how it’s not right that Elders get so little support from their fan base when they have needs of their own.

Kenaz talks about the sense of entitlement among students, but there’s a certain hypocrisy there I’d like to address, and it’s not about Kenaz personally. Kenaz mentions Bonewitz’ lament that people don’t take care of pagan elders, and I’ve seen similar laments from people talking about the Ciceros, the Sam Websters, and any number of other leaders within the spiritual communities who spend a lot of their time writing, coordinating, teaching, and helping people along their paths.

First of all, lots of freeloaders want to get all the spiritual wisdom of the universe given to them for free. There’s a guy who calls himself Digimob who goes around stealing occult author’s writings and publishing them on torrents. He calls it a labor of love, and defends his theft using the old “Information Wants to be Free” argument popularized by the hacker community, and even embraced by at least one Information Model spiritual group who came pretty close to recreating the neo-platonic cosmology using terms from the digital age, with Information as the Monad, not entirely self-aware, but expressing itself in various forms of complexity.

Bullshit. If I write a book, I expect to get paid. You wouldn’t expect a jeweler to give away the products of his craft, yet people think that my books ought to be free because they’re information about spiritual topics. It’s like they think it’s somehow less work or something, or that the hours I spend writing aren’t worth as much as the hours a jeweler spends… jewelering.

Look, the information is freely available to anyone willing to do the research and the work; if you want my opinions, experiences, and a quick-reference guide to the distillation of the resources we have on neoplatonic magical practices of the Renaissance Traditions that I spen the time developing, you can pay me for it. Or make your own. Asshole.

Ok, so I’m clear about that, right? I know there is a sense of entitlement among the masses that isn’t appropriate.

But there’s a sense of entitlement among occult teachers that isn’t appropriate either. They want to have all the benefits of a priestly caste, but they don’t have a congregation. They want all the money that they think goes into a megachurch,* but they don’t understand that occult teachers are not shepherds of their congregations. Occult students don’t go to one occult teacher and expect them to provide the management of their spiritual lives the way religious congregants do. As soon as a fan of an occultist’s work begins to behave like a congregant of a church, expecting spiritual advice and counseling, help with whatever drama is going on in their lives, etc., the occult teacher starts bitching about the nut jobs he has to deal with.**

We occult writers simply do not provide the same level of support and outreach and services to our followers that a church provides.  Even if the pagan community did provide that kind of support, there just aren’t enough pagans to support a paid clergy. In a church, they have the “tithe” that pays for the overhead costs of running the church. The tithe is 10% of the congregation’s gross income. The fact is, only about 6-10% of the congregation regularly tithes. The rest give offerings, sometimes, of a couple of dollars here, a twenty there, or for special projects the church is doing, like visiting Africa or helping single mothers or pregnant teens.

Here’s some quick figures. Let’s pretend I’m a pastor, and my blog followers are my congregation. Figure the average income of the followers is around $30,000 a year. If 10% tithe, I can expect to bring in around $42,000 a year. Out of that comes all the expenses of running a church, the rent/mortgage, the hymnals, the energy to heat and cool the building, and the weekly bulletins, plus the maintenance and administrative costs. There’s not much left for a salary when all is said and done. That’s the kind of life modern clergy can expect to live, if they have a belief system that the majority of people even believe in.

The occult genre represents about 6% of the total number of books sold in America each year. That means about 6% of America is interested in the occult. With roughly 300 million people in the US, that’s about 18 million people scattered from coast to coast and in Alaska and Hawaii. Most of these purchases are one or two books, and then the person moves on. Maybe 3 out of every 10 people who have ever bought one or two occult books actually goes on to do anything long term with the occult that would require a teacher. That leaves about 5 million people. You’ve got pagans, ceremonial magicians, hoodoo and vodousants, and all the people of the New Age and the Far East competing for the interest of these 5 million people, all scattered across the country.

The odds of having enough of a local community interested in what we present to be able to afford to support a full-time clergy are astronomical. It’s totally unrealistic for any pagan or occult teacher to expect the occult community to provide for them.

If we each had millions of followers who had reached financial and medical heights of success and attainment as a result of our teachings, then we would have a right to expect the people to provide for all our needs. I’ve got 139 Followers of my blog; are you richer and happier because you read this?

The fact is, no vodou book has made anyone so rich that they should pay the author anything more than the cost of the book. No occult books, even the ones that do tell you the answers to the Mysteries of the Universe, give the reader a happy life. All the things I talk about require you, personally, to do a lot of Work to make it useful. All I’m doing is entertaining you while informing, and hopefully inspiring you to do the Work.

My primary goal in doing all this is to have some magicians to talk to with similar experiences and attainment. Sure, I’d like to get rich, and if you use my information to get rich and it works for you, you fucking owe me 10%! But until I start teaching you things that make your life better, substantially better, until I start offering you the kind of support a priest offers the laity, I have no right to expect anything more from you than the money you pay for my products.

And comments, you could at least comment more on the posts. I spend all this time writing the posts, you can take a minute and comment.

* Megachurches are the exception, not the rule. They’re rare, and they never last long. The life cycle of a megachurch is this: a charismatic leader arises with a message that is appealing to the masses, that is either geared towards prosperity or emotional peace, or some combination of the two. Whatever it is, their message resonates, there’s a huge surge of increased membership, they get a short-term influx of donations from their starry-eyed followers, and they start building huge churches, producing television shows, radio shows, and lots of books about their idea. They finance all this shit, and it takes a year or so before all their planned stuff can actually start coming to production. By the time it does, the starry-eyed followers have moved on to the next TD Jakes, or Benny Hinn, or Marilyn Hickey, or Bart Pierce (the APOSTLE OF BALTIMORE!!!), and they go bankrupt, their buildings are foreclosed on, and their mistresses, no longer getting the fancy gifts, start going public with their affairs.

** And rightfully so! Your purchase of one book or course or whatever you paid isn’t going to support me for the 8-12 hours of advice, counseling and therapy that it will take to get you over whatever drama you’re going through!  We should get $45 an hour to listen to you bitch about how you fucked up your life and tell you how to fix it.Then maybe you’d get to the point.

It must be noted that practical magic manifests exactly the same way that everything else in this created universe manifests: via natural law. If you’ve done your magic right, there will be nothing but synchronicity to indicate there was anything “supernatural” going on.

Wouldn’t it be cool if you had this thing that you could set up in your house that worked to manifest in your life whatever it is that you symbolically place on it? Like, if you were sick and wanted to manifest health, you could just write “I Am Healthy” on a piece of paper, and then just place it on the table and have a ton of spirits immediately get to Work on making you healthy?

Or if you were having trouble in your relationship, you could write “I have clear communication with [NAME],” or “I Have A Brand New Car,” or “A Vacation to Disney” or “Extremely Large Amounts of Cash Left Over After All the Bills Are Paid Every Month.”

What would you think if I told you chances are pretty good that you already have this Magic Manifestation Machine set up in your home?

Because you probably do. It’s called an “Altar.”

The Altar is the focal point between the spirit world and the physical world. Chances are pretty good that you have representations of the spiritual forces in your life sitting on the altar, statues of gods and goddesses, or colored candles for the elemental kings, or a Lamp representing the Eternal Light of God radiating out from the Divine Darkness and becoming ultimately the manifest world. A couple people have posted recently about cleaning up their altars and feeling better. I’d like to take a minute to point out that there’s a lot more that can be done with the Altar as a magical tool for your every day mundane needs.

The examples above are basically little more than affirmations. Affirmations alone are a potent tool for manifesting change in your life. Putting them on the altar draws the attention of the spiritual forces in your life to whatever it is you put there, putting a little more power into the actual manifestation. I’ve discovered the truth of this fact by having my kids put pictures of dogs and cats that they’ve drawn on the altar. My altar used to be near my desk, and they would leave me pictures where I would find them in the most obvious place, the altar. My kids’ artistic efforts are awesome, but apparently to spirits, their drawings look like roadkill. I didn’t make the connection right away, but after a couple of weeks of seeing more squished animals than usual on the road, I figured it out and asked them to put their drawings in my in basket on my desk instead.

Is your altar set up to be an engine of manifestation? It can be. I suggest something like the Altar Glyph I designed based on Agrippa’s Scale of the Number 4. I have my entire cosmology and the intelligences of each sphere represented on my altar. There’s God the First Father represented by the Lamp, my HGA represented by a mini-HGA altar thing, Seven Planetary Seals arranged the way you would see them in the four directions if you were looking up from the Earth based on their attributions in Agrippa’s Table, the Four Elemental Kings, and the bound Four Elemental Devil Princes. I need to include the Sphere of the Zodiac to be completely accurate, I suppose. That would go in between the planetary seals and the Lamp.

This setup is a reflection of how I understand the manifestation of everything in the universe that I experience in my own personal sphere. Everything that we experience begins as an Idea in the Mind of God, and then passes through the Sphere of the Zodiac, each of the Seven Planetary Spheres, and then into the Elemental Spheres before it manifests in my physical life. this makes my altar a pretty potent Manifestation Engine. I can drop something on it, say a quick prayer to the gathered and represented spirits, and leave it in their hands. (Note, I would still only do so within the context of an overall plan after my little foray into the joys of using a home as a tinder box..)

A simpler version would simply include the Four Princes of the Spirits and your HGA. Oriens (East), Paymon (West), Egyn (North), and Amaymon (South) posted in the four directions appropriately, and a mini-altar to the HGA somewhere above or in the East to guide their efforts on your behalf. A simple oration should suffice, something like:

“Oh [HGA Name], I conjure you to hear my petition. Be present and draw now the Four Princes of the Spirits upon the four angles of the World: Oriens from the East, Paymon from the West, Egyn from the North, and Amaymon from the South. Come now, you Princes of the Spirits, in the Name of God and [HGA Name] I conjure you, be here now and let not my words fall to the ground without bearing fruit. I need [a band new car! or whatever the affirmation is], my need is great, though not greater than your Powers to bring it to me. Go now and mingle your elemental powers together, set your legions of spirits to Work on manifesting what is on this paper, and bring it to me in a way that brings no physical, mental, or spiritual harm to myself or any other incarnate human. Go now in the name of [HGA] and do not rest until that which I desire is manifest. I thank you, and all honor and praise be to the Source of us all, world without end amen.”

Or whatever.

If you’re using a full altar for this, with lots of gods and spirits and representations of powerful moments in your spiritual growth, it will be even more powerful. You can tailor the rite to be as detailed and exotic or as simple and straightforward as you like or have time for. Magical practice is pretty simple, especially when you’ve got the basics already in place.

Ok, I get a kick out of reading the Register’s output on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) run by CERN. I didn’t even know what a boffin WAS until I started reading their stuff. Very interesting stuff going on there in Geneva these days.

But, Dude… Check this out.

A would-be saboteur arrested today at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland made the bizarre claim that he was from the future. Eloi Cole, a strangely dressed young man, said that he had travelled back in time to prevent the LHC from destroying the world.

Ok, my reaction was right in line with that of Brian Cox:

Professor Brian Cox, a former CERN physicist and full-time rock’n’roll TV scientist, was sympathetic to Mr Cole. “Bless him, he sounds harmless enough. At least he didn’t mention bloody black holes.”

 And I thought it was cute, funny even. Then I read the last paragraph.

Mr Cole was taken to a secure mental health facility in Geneva but later disappeared from his cell. Police are baffled, but not that bothered.

Wait, what? He just disappeared? Just like that? REALLY!?

I reread the whole crucifixion and resurrection story to the fam last night, and then we watched The Miracle Maker, perhaps the very best movie about the life of Christ ever. Then we sent them to bed, and this morning they woke to the Easter baskets my spouse put together after they fell asleep. Later we’ll have ham and in-laws for dinner, though we’ll only be eating one of those things. The other would likely give us indigestion, and if you are what you eat… pleah.

After the resurrection, Jesus hung out on Earth for 40 days and nights before ascending to heaven. In that time hundreds of people saw him. I was thinking about how he just appeared and disappeared after the resurrection, and how cool that initiation was the other day, but really, the shit he did beforehand was pretty cool too. Time and space never had any claim on him.

Anyway, one of the things that popped out of the re-reading was that Angels were all over the place at this time of year in that little dusty town of Jerusalem. While Mary watched, a being who looked like lightning rolled away the tomb to reveal Jesus was already gone. Jesus didn’t need to be freed from the tomb by the angel, but Mary did. She was stuck in her head on the tomb and who was inside it, and what that meant for her in her life, her grief, her hope, her pain. The tomb was where she went in her agony, and that symbol of all her pain had to have its power over her broken. The Angel rolls away the stone and shows her he’s not there, tells her he’s alive. The angel breaks the power of the grave over the living.

You get the idea, right? We conjure angels all the time.

Easter’s about rebirth, having the power of death broken, but there’s more. One of the things that is really easy to forget is that it’s also about Fuckin’. Sex. Gettin’ laid. Procreation. Celebration of the return of John Corn with thrust and parry, the old in-out-in-out, penetration and blissful orgasmatronic union with God, or even just plain old cummin’.

So fuck for Christ’s sake. Or for your own. Whatever.

Happy Easter.

There’s a new blog … uh … I don’t know what it is. Community! Sphere? Anyway, a bunch of bloggers got organized. Mostly for promotional purposes. It’s over at Tribal Blogs, and I’m looking forward to seeing how it works.

I don’t know yet how well the fledgling community will respond to occultists, as it’s totally mainstream. There are less than a hundred folks on it so far. We shall see.

Jason reminded me that today’s Black Friday, the day Jesus was all crucified and stuff. Three days in a tomb, and emerging the risen Christ unbound by time and space. Tradition holds that this is the time that Jesus descended into Hell and took the keys from Satan. At least, the hokey Christianity I grew up in taught that. I’m pretty sure it isn’t scriptural.

In yesterday morning’s blog reading time, I had a chance to read St. Balthazar’s post on his Grimorium Verum dream experiences. They’ve had a very chthonic theme, and I couldn’t help but think about how Christ is also a Chthonic figure when you get down to the bare bones. I mean, yeah, he’s the Son of the Sky God, the Epitome of the Solar Sphere and its initiatory process and magical properties (Reconciliation, Exorcism, Attainment of the God Head, etc.), but he’s also old John Corn and the Bull of Mithras. Freaking beautiful, when you think about it.

The Crucifiction and Resurrection is the perfect representation of a Chthonic initiation. The death and rebirth cycle of initiation has been done to death in the occult world, so I’ll skip it, but I really want to focus on being buried in the Earth to harness the power that makes the seeds become the plants. Where did Christ go, according to the legend my parents taught me? To HELL. Where do we go right after attaining K&CHGA? To HELL. Well, we bring up its kings to us, but still, same thing. Christ went to the Infernal Sphere and returned with the Keys. Now, he didn’t need the Keys of Hell to exorcise spirits while in the flesh. Instead, he relied on the power of Prayer, his direct relationship with his Father, and lots of time in what probably looked a lot like meditation.

But after his death and resurrection, he was all over the place. Time and space meant nothing to him. He appeared and disappeared at will. Eventually he even staged the Ascension. Freaking awesome. I totally want to do that one some day, if I can. I promise not to spit on anyone on the way up, no matter how funny I think it would be.

I can’t really think of any more parallels. I’ve got a QA Audit on Monday I have to get ready for, I just wanted to get those thoughts out while they were still fresh in my head. Chthonic Christ. Buried, took the power of Hell, and went to Heaven. That about sums it up.

In Mary Poppins, one of the things that I always thought was pretty cool was that when the wind changed direction Mary Poppins blew into town, and stayed only until it changed directions again. Depending on your magical system’s tradition, you can probably narrow down which sublunar spirit she embodied if you figure out which way the wind is blowing.

Heh, that’s an idiom too. “I know which way the wind blows” means roughly the same as “I can read the writing on the wall.” And Shakespeare’s Hamlet was only mad when the wind blew in some directions.

Well, I can feel a shifting of the winds. The times, they are a changin’, as the song goes. I’m expecting blue skies after a storm, a cool breeze on a hot day. Hope springs eternal, I suppose.

It’s nice to be expecting things to get better again.