Greetings!

In the course of my rituals, I’ve created several talismen and lamens for use with the Art of Drawing Spirits into Crystals. Below you will find the Lamen of Kammael, and an image of my “Table of Practice” I use with the rit. I just put the crystal in the center and read the evocations while wearing the lamen.

As you can see, I wrote the names of God around the outer edges in the “Celestial Script” from Agrippa, but the text of the “grimoire” lists them in the Latin script. I just liked how it looked.

Greetings!

In the course of my rituals, I’ve created several talismen and lamens for use with the Art of Drawing Spirits into Crystals. Below you will find the Lamen of Kammael, and an image of my “Table of Practice” I use with the rit. I just put the crystal in the center and read the evocations while wearing the lamen.

As you can see, I wrote the names of God around the outer edges in the “Celestial Script” from Agrippa, but the text of the “grimoire” lists them in the Latin script. I just liked how it looked.

“The Great Work”

A magnificent phrase, eh? I’ve been through so many online debates and discussions about what the Great Work “means” that it isn’t even funny anymore. There are those who say it is “attaining unity with the Divine.” Others say it is becoming the best that you can. Others believe that every person has their own Great Work to do, that it represents the climactic culmination of all their efforts in life.

In tracking back the phrase in the esoteric community, I ended up back with the Alchemists. I’m sure it goes back further, but I’ll be damned if I can find it quickly enough to suit my purposes. If anyone has any input, let me know. 🙂

Briefly (there’s never enough space), the alchemists saw the Great Work as the accomplishment of a spiritual transformation. It was also seen as the creation of the Philosopher’s Stone, a stone with the ability to turn base materials into finer materials, like lead into gold. One couldn’t create the Philosopher’s Stone (in my opinion) without being spiritually “advanced.” The process of creating the Stone resulted in perfection of the person, and the perfection of the person resulted in the ability to create the Philosopher’s Stone. There’s a marriage here of physical and spiritual elements that I think cannot be stressed enough.

In the NP context, the goal of man is to return to the Source of all that is. The Philosophers saw this as a process of training the mind to think like a God without becoming falsely proud. Plotinus speaks of the process as “reclaiming” our race and value. I love that concept.

It isn’t becoming a God. (You’re already a manifestation of “the good,” “the One,”, the “Primum Mobile.) It’s a process of remembering where you came from. The reason we forget is detailed in the Enneads of Plotinus, and they’re an interesting read. Here’s an excerpt that pertains:

It must be noted, however, that the process of reclaiming your race and value did not result in anything spectacularly fabulous. No lightning from the fingertips, or flaming balls of fire. What it did result in was a change in the person you are. It changed the way you acted and interacted with everything else. You remember you’re here, and what your purpose in life is, and you’re suddenly happy. You see things as a whole complete process, and the painfulness of the moments of sadness are gone, and the moments of joy are magnified. It was a philosophical change, a change of Mind that brought satiety, the sense of being completely fulfilled. And if you weren’t feeling that way, you had forgotten, and needed to remember where you were from again.

So Plotinus said there’s two ways to remember your race and value. You honor the things of the higher realms, and dishonor the things of the lower realm. I’ve turned this into contemplative method of getting rid of the horrors of embarrassing moments that haunt you through your life. I broke it into steps at this link.

Asceticism blossomed under this philosophy. Lots of Gnostics took up the mantra of “all things material are evil and to be avoided at all costs.” This view influenced a lot of the early Christians too. Paul, for instance, expresses a lot of ascetic notions in his writings in the New Testament.

Iamblichus, meanwhile, took things down a different route. He was a “wee bit” more into the Hellenised Egyptian mythology. As a result of his initiations into the Egyptian mystery cults, he participated in the Theurgic rituals of his day. I’m intensely jealous. In the Theurgia, his reply to a letter written by Porphyry criticising Theurgy, he explains how working with the spirits of the higher realms results in getting you closer to God. He also talks about our role in this realm of matter.

Each level of emanation from the higher realms, each entity that inhabits the realms between the material and the Source of Everything has a purpose. We are also manifestations, and our greatest goal as magicians is to remember that we are emanations of God, and that we are here to do something specific. The Work is a process of learning what that purpose is, and how we’re supposed to accomplish that purpose while we’re here. We work with the spirits to learn, and to be raised higher and closer to God, but at the same time, we guide them in their ministrations here in the realm of matter, because that’s where we fit into the hierarchy of things. We’re the part of God that came to matter (Nature) out of love for matter to care for the matter and minister to it through the actions of the spirits on the higher levels. The trick is to remember what we’re here for, and then to learn to do it the right way.

In recent conversations with Fr. POS and Optimystic, the subject of where in the cosmology the Arbatel spirits belong has come up. They both place the spirits in the celestial or super-celestial realms. Personally, I think they’re more like the Spirits of the planetary tables, that is, terrestrial reflections of the celestial governors.

Opti pointed out the Arbatel says: “They are called Olympick spirits, which do inhabit in the firmament, and in the stars of the firmament…” (from aphorism 15). He also pointed to Aphorism 16, which says:

There are seven different governments of the Spirits of Olympus, by whom God hath appointed the whole frame and universe of this world to be governed: and their visible stars are ARATRON, BETHOR, PHALEG, OCH, HAGITH, OPHIEL, PHUL, after the Olympick speech. Every one of these hath under him a mighty Militia in the firmament.
   
[…]

So that there are 186 [196]7 Olympick Provinces in the whole Universe. wherein the seven Governours do exercise their power: all which are elegantly set forth in Astronomy.

(From Joe Peterson’s Twilit Grotto, The Arbatel.)

So the question remaining to my mind is “What is the Firmament?” Aphorism fifteen identifies their inhabitation as being both in the firmament and in the stars of the firmament. Why do both have to be mentioned? Opti interprets it as the super-celestial heavens. He could be right. He provided a dictionary definition that seemed to say the heavens. In Old Astronomy, the term meant “The orb of the fixed stars; the most remote of the celestial spheres.”(1)  That would place these spirits clearly in the super celestial realm, thus ending the debate.

I’m stubbon though. I looked up the meaning of the word in more detail, and found from Easton’s Bible dictionary this(2):

from the Vulgate firmamentum, which is used as the translation of the Hebrew _raki’a_. This word means simply “expansion.” It denotes the space or expanse like an arch appearing immediately above us. They who rendered _raki’a_ by firmamentum regarded it as a solid body. The language of Scripture is not scientific but popular, and hence we read of the sun rising and setting, and also here the use of this particular word. It is plain that it was used to denote solidity as well as expansion. It formed a division between the waters above and the waters below (Gen. 1:7). The _raki’a_ supported the upper reservoir (Ps. 148:4). It was the support also of the heavenly bodies (Gen. 1:14), and is spoken of as having “windows” and “doors” (Gen. 7:11; Isa. 24:18; Mal. 3:10) through which the rain and snow might descend.

Based on this, and the very Biblical tone of the Arbatel, I believed the Arbatel spirits are within the realm of matter primarily. The physical planets and sphere of the physical stars is certainly not what is referenced by the spiritual spheres of the neoplatonists. If we travel to Mars for colonization, the martian settlers won’t be considered to be in the sphere of the wandering stars, will they? All matter is within the sublunar realms, and the planets and stars serve as signifiers of their relative positionings in the divine or ideal realm. The actual spheres of the planets and fixed stars do not manifest physically.

Knowing I could be wrong, I performed some divinations that indicated I was partially right and partially wrong. The Arbatel spirits have qualities that make them both Super-Celestial entities, and terrestrial entities. They seem to be, based on divination, a combination of the Spirits and the Intelligences from the Kameas of the Planets in Agrippa’s Three Books of Occult Philosophy.

So, based on the research, conversation, divination and meditation, I’ve decided I won’t be ordering the spirits of the Arbatel around like servants. Instead, I’ll keep my approach formal, as if  it were one Vice-President speaking to another within a corporation. By divine right, magicians are granted the abiltity to petition the spirits of the Arbatel, but there’s no real authority over them provided in the grimoire. Instead, the only authority they are answerable to is God himself.

This rather helps explain why so much of the Arbatel focuses on your behavior. As a Christian saved by Grace, this behavioral thou-shaltism smacks of righteousness by works rather than by grace. That is, you do nice things and you get rewarded. I’m in Martin Luther’s camp, that salvation is by grace through faith alone. Works, good deeds, being nice to animals and not splashing panhandlers in the rain while cackling gleefully at their misfortune… that’s not going to get you anywhere with God, who says the righteousness of man is as menstrual rags before him. (mmmm, tasty.)

But we aren’t talking about salvation, atonement or being in a right relationship with God. We’re talking about magic petitions to spirits for direct intervention. Maybe you do have to be all righteous and pure to get anything out of the Arbatel spirits, and they don’t see the Cross when they’re measuring up whether you deserve their blessings or not.

hmmm. Well, it’s something to think about, anyway. But like I said, I’ll stick with the Goetic spirits for now. They recognize your position with God via the sacrifice of Christ readily enough.

Notes:
1. “firmament.” Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary. MICRA, Inc. 29 Oct. 2008. http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/firmament>.
2. “firmament.” Easton’s 1897 Bible Dictionary. 29 Oct. 2008. http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/firmament>.