It came as I droned aloud the ninth verse of that primal lay, and I knew amidst my shudders what it meant. For he who passes the gateways always wins a shadow, and never again can he be alone. I had evoked- and the book was indeed all I had suspected. – H. P. Lovecraft, The Book

Image: Sleeping Prophet, by Jenny Sargeant

Lo, there it is.

This excerpt is beautiful. It’s dark and twisted, but I realized from it today that Lovecraft really did understand the core tenets of the Great Work. He just expressed them darkly. Whether he knew the occult mysteries from his studies, as I suspect, or if it was a revelation from the spirit realm that passed into his dreams, I don’t know, but regardless, the occult mysteries are there.

Take the above quote, for example. Clearly, he’s talking about getting a familiar spirit as a result of accomplishing a ritual. Those who have been through the Knowledge and Conversation with the Holy Guardian Angel rituals will feel a resonance, I think, with this passage. From the moment you pass through the Gate, you are never alone.

Which Gate? I think the Gate the guy in the story passed through was the Gate of Saturn. He undergoes a spiritual transformation that leaves him with a wider lens through which to see time. He saw more of the immediate past and the immediate future in each passing moment:

Nor could I ever after see the world as I had known it. Mixed with the present scene was always a little of the past and a little of the future, and every once-familiar object loomed alien in the new perspective brought by my widened sight.

And of course, it was a horror story, so it had to focus on the spooky possibilities. We can extrapolate and see it through the lens of the seven heavens, and clearly the shift in his perception of Time would indicate a Saturnine initiation. I myself have experienced this altered sense of time after working in Saturn. It’s as if the past and future are overlapping everything we see.

Regardless, he passed through a Gate and received a spiritual companion as a result of his efforts.

In a way, I can see the spirits that represent the spheres I have been initiated into, hovering around me as I type. They are present and real, but muted, as if they were waiting for me to call on them. I feel their radiant power in my temple space, and I wonder if they come with me to work, and I’m just unaware because I’m distracted by the “Office” reality I get immersed in five days a week. Oh no, I’m not bitter about that.

(Side note: I went on a beautiful vacation for the Fourth of July. Three days of oceanic bliss, and then I went back to work. That’s got to be the most terrible ending to any story, “and then he went back to work.” Unless it was something he liked doing. Which clearly does not apply to me. Magic has been done. Results should be in by Wednesday.)

I think they are always with me, and they seem to be agreeing that they are. It is part of the License to Depart, after all, that they come again when called. It’s as if they have left a spirit from their legions on call to bring them when needed. And to work with me as necessary on tasks within their abilities.

For new readers, comments work like this:

1. You post it.
2. I review it.
3. If I like it, I publish it. If I don’t, I reject it. It’s totally biased and arbitrary.
4. Then it shows up on my page.

So if you post a comment and you don’t see it, you don’t have to post it again. I’ve been getting a few comments that are like 4-5 repeats of the same message. Mostly from a French Brother who steals other people’s work.

Save yourself any stress and annoyance, just be patient. I usually post comments throughout the day.

Sucae Sounds posted a neat commentary on the Primitiveness of Techno that got me contemplating the Music of the Spheres. Agrippa talks about it, and a musician friend of mine, Andy Keys, tried a couple of times to get a conversation going on Agirippa’s chapters on musicology in the Three Books of Occult Philosophy a couple of years ago. I couldn’t keep up. The extent of my musical ability is Smoke on the Water on a penny whistle, and Ghost Riders in the Sky on an acoustic guitar.

But I’ve been hearing things, and getting more in tune with the harmonies of the universe since then. I still can’t keep up a decent conversation on musicology, but I’ve been experiencing the universe through the metaphor of music, vibration, and resonance.

I think Music is the perfect metaphor for magic.One person does something over here with a specialized tool, and all the way across the room, another person’s mood is altered, their mind taken on a journey, and the first guy didn’t even touch the second. All he did was emit a vibration, and the consequences unfolded around him.

That’s what magic is, to me. We get the tools, we play the notes, we end up gaining skill and talent and become master musicians, only reality itself is our instrument. Each of the planetary intelligences is a master craftsman and musician combined, and tehy mentor us in our efforts to become the next Maestro. Sometimes I feel like the musician, other times like the conductor, and others like the conductor and the whole symphony and the music itself.

Good times. Good times.

This post title is referential to Jason’s new blog, but only tangentially, because he picked an awesome approach to his new blog and it’s in my mind now, festering, and memetically challenging me.

And it’s a good thing, that blog title. It’s neat. I like the idea a lot. Take back your mind, that’s the goal of the magician. Yeah, it’s given away and it’s your own fault, but also, yeah it’s stolen and the bastards have no right to it.

A major push of mine in magicalness is to get people to reclaim their divine Race and recognize their Value. It’s a Plotinus thing. It hit me at a sensitive point in my life, that is, I came across the reclaiming Race and Value piece of Plotinus’ Enneads at a time in my life where I was understanding new concepts, fleshing out the symbolic map from fundy Christian to Esoteric Ipsissismis of the UNIVERSE. You know, standard practice. I came across the phrase, the concept filled in some gaps, and I still use that push in my magical work, “Reclaim your Race and your Value, and you will receive the Key to the Kingdom.”

Pretty catchy, eh?

That state of mind that I was in is a lot like when I was in college. My mind was open to new ideas, I was figuring things out, receiving wisdom and symbols. It was a fun time. I was smoking a lot of pot, tripping on LSD, and my whole universe went through a reframing expeience.

Something else was going on at the same time. It was 1992, Autumn, and we were alll poor college kids. Different fast food services were offering special discounts. By far the cheapest and tastiest food we could easily munch down on was from the 59, 79, and 99 cent menu at Taco Bell.

The people I was with, the drug experiences I had, and the general sense of freedom and liberation of being 18 and away from my parents, it all must have some how gotten mingled together and framed Taco Bell as part of the goodness from that time in my life.

I must have associated Taco Bell with good times, because to this day, every few months or so, Taco Bell begins to appeal to me. I get hungry and get these impulses for what would feel good to eat, what would be fast, cheap, and open late. Mmmm, flashing through my mind, Taco Bell…

And I know it must be some kind of thing that I imprinted or something, I know it’s got to be something that I need to take my mind back from, because honestly folks, Taco Bell food full on fucking sucks. It is the ass rumblings of the fast food industry. Their food all tastes the same, like generic, vaguely Southwestern gloop squeezed out of a tube. With Lettuce. Iceberg lettuce!!!

Fuck Taco Bell. They don’t get that piece of my mind anymore. It’s mine.

Taco Bell, I’m talking to you: Your food sucks. It tastes bad! The texture combinations are nauseating. The beef is so obviously not beef it quit being funny in 2002. You guys have either A) RUINED your recipes with cheaper ingredients that have no flavor, or B) YOU ALWAYS SUCKED.

I’m beginning to suspect you always sucked. Fuck Taco Bell!

Jow’s comment on yesterday’s post got me thinking about the difference between a magician and a magician-to-be. There is no doubt that we go through a transition between being a socially awkward misfit who doesn’t understand the point of “society” (or maybe understands it too well) to a grimoire-following, spirit conjuring participant in the manifestation of reality.

Then again, as we learn the language and symbols of magic, we gain a context that explains many of our experiences in our youth. One of the first things the Holy Guardian Angel (HGA) does is take you on a review of your life, demonstrating its influence at every twist and turn, showing you all the times it protected and empowered you, leading you to the point where you established communion with him (or her, but not “it”). The magician truly is born as such into the world, as the Arbatel teaches.

But there’s a transition between ignorant participant and mostly aware magician. Looking at my own experience and that which my friends have shared, I think we tend to go through a period of gaining knowledge, gaining expeience, and gaining training to understand the revelation that comes when we experience something like Knowledge and Conversation with the HGA (KCHGA). We’re drawn into the occult by a fascination, an irresistible calling in our youth. We spend a lot of time reading, pursuing, testing, and moving on through different occult systems of varying popularity. As we do, astrological forces and initiatory ordeals manifest in our lives, preparing us, guiding us towards a vision of transcendence, a moment where the universe is stripped away and we can see all the pieces and parts of Truth scattered and hidden throughout the systems we’ve studied snap together to give us a glimpse of how everything works.

I’ve tried to shorten this period, because it seems like what a lot of us are doing is reverse engineering the basic underlying neo-platonic cosmology. We start with GD interpretations, and work our way back through the source materials until we’re immersed in the third century AD, and there discover the foundational bedrock of the Hermetic system. I wrote the Neo-Platonics Basics series as a shortcut to the truth, as I understood it. At the same time, to facilitate the applied heat that transmutes the knowledge into wisdom, I had people start Working with their HGA, Genius, or Solar Intelligence.

I don’t think I have succeeded. I think, ultimately, no one can hasten the intiation of another. The best we can hope for is that the pieces of truth we present have missing pieces that will contribute to their revelation of their place in the universal hierarchy, when the time comes. Still, I hope to provide as much philosophical gold as I can. I should probably adjust the signal to noise ratio of my blog.

I’ve argued before that the Spirit Model is the One True Model(TM), and put together that post that details my current understanding of what that means. I have tried GD-style magic, Crowleyan stuff, Chaos Magic, and a whole slew of Eastern and Near-Eastern practices I picked up on from my dad’s career as a Reflexologist. I’ve done chakra meditations and activations, I’ve used “psychic warfare” techniques to build shields and make daggers out of mental “energy.” I’ve done Celtic, Druidic, and American-Neo-Pagan too. I fully embraced Chaos Magick, with a “k” and everything for a couple of years.

I got better.

But everything I did in my life leading up to my conversion experience and subsequent KCHGA is completely annihilated by the simple power, or force I see manifesting things in my life. No other approach even begins to touch the raw power I find in the Intelligences and Spirits of the Planets and their terrestrial counterparts. They’re immense! They’re powerful. They’re pleased to work with mankind.

The transition to becoming a magician is definitely there, and I don’t think we qualify as full-on Heroes as magicians until we’ve at least hit that moment of transcendental understanding of the Mechanics of the Universe. I always hated that description, it makes it sound like an engine or motor. It’s mechanical, yeah, but in the same way a symphony is. The beings that are the “Mechanics” are more like musicians and master instrument crafsmen.

When you reach that point, you get a glimpse of your own relatonship to the whole. You see your divine nature, you understand that you are literally a “Child of God,” that Christ (LOGOS) is your Brother, and that your extended family includes every Name of God he’s ever used to get a point across to his kids. When you see that you are of the divine race, you see the source of your power as a magician. You understand it. Then you begin learning how to do Magic, and you learn the value of what you do. You see the results of your Work in the universe from an eternal perspective, and you know the impact you have on other people, and the world around you.

At that point, when you’ve reclaimed your divine race and reached an understanding of the value you add to the world by being what you are, you begin the Great Work. Everything else is just preparation for the Work. When you hit this point, you finally begin achieving your potential, by taking your wisdom, experience, and knowledge and creating the universe according to the principles you’ve discovered.

Magicians are a rare breed. I personally think they’re the equivalent of Iamblichus’ “Hero” classification of entities. That makes us like Hercules, half immortal and half mortal.

I base this on the Corpus Hermeticum’s Divine Pymander, where it talks about the reason Man became flesh, and the nature of Man. Iamblichus would have been familiar, I suspect, of this basic Hermetic belief, writing as he did in Egypt in the neoplatonic period. Man is the Image of the First Father, and is an immortal on par with the Logos in the original hierarchy. Man wanders down through the spheres, pokes his head into Nature, sees a reflection of himself and falls in love. Next thing you know, Nature’s created an image of the reflection, because She’s in Love with Man’s image too. Both can be excused for their infatuation when it is understood that Man was the Image of the First Father. Man cohabits the image made by Nature, and voila, Humankind is created, immortal by being of divine race, mortal in form, and all for the sake of love.

Isn’t it romantic?

So we’re Heroes. Now obviously, we aren’t going around with the strength of the Gods, going on fateful quests, and creating a new cycle of myths for the next generation to evaluate and draw insight from, are we?

Well, honestly, we are. Magicians have the strength of the Gods. We are the image of God, and are aware of “their” divine race. We accomplish creation in an ongoing process that follows God’s path of manifestation, through Word and spirits, to accomplish the manifestation of our thoughts.

We go on fateful quests. We work with certain spirits, and the next thing you know you’re surrounded by opportunities to implement the experience you’ve gained. The fates align our reality to accomplish specific goals.

And the new cycle of myths? How many people have poured over Crowley’s life, gaining insight and inspiration? Dione Fortune, Mathers, Westcott, Regardie, and the more obscure members of the GD left diaries and records of their Works that have provided our generation of magicians with wisdom and clues to finding our own paths of gnosis. We are currently Working in a time that will become poured over by the next generation of magicians. This Traditional Magic revival we’re going through is going to be a page in occult history that feeds the next big movement in thirty years.

Not everyone who happens to be human is a magician. I’ve had people ask me whether talent or skill is more important, and I’ve answered both ways and neither in the past. Right now I think everyone can develop the talent, but not everyone is destined to do so. Skill comes with experience, experience comes from being called to the occult, which means you have to have the talent to hear and respond, so it’s all pretty incestuous. I think I can get away with saying usually the talent is present before the skills are developed, but both talent and skill increase with practice. They are interdependent on one another.

The Power of a Magician comes from their relationship with the First Father. Being made in his image, we can do “magic” the same way he can. Our thoughts become reality. We can create. We converse with the Angels and Daimons and other Heroes, and we work together to make things happen. It is from our divine nature that the power to be a magician flows.

Hokey shit time.

Ok, so I get started on this one super cool writing project, and I am approximately 70% complete. So in the middle of some dryish research, Jason says, “I want to read a book on Astral Warfare…”

And I’m working on the Lunar Intelligence and Spirit, right? I’m like totally in the right place to begin an Astral Warrfare book. So Ok, I’m sitting here researching my Astral Warfare book using time-tested traditional resources (think: H.P. Lovecraft), and what do I find in The Whispers in Darkness? The Magical Nom de Plum of the fuse on this time bomb, Jason Miller. “I was into Enochian,” he said, “when I was given the Name Inominandum…”

And so it is, of course, that I am off to the DuQuette Enochian Vision Magick book with my pendulum and SDA in hand, searching for the next step in this strange masquerade…

So a friend of mine writes this book and publishes it on Lulu. It’s new age, it’s about astral warfare, and its not really my approach to spirituality in general. Regardless, it was her work, her effort, and her words. She published and marketed it completely by her self.

So these French guys translated it and are selling it in France now. When she found out, she promptly contacted them. Their response?

You react as a child, you treat me as thief it is incredible.
Our brother Tau Zorobabel did a BIG job by translating your book into French.
Did you think of all poor persons who does not speak Englishman ???
Your book put in Frenchman one a Honourable thing for you and for other persons who need to be helped.

If your book is in Frenchman, it is because DIVINE PROVIDENCE allowed it.

Fr :. Luxaour

Nice, eh? Apparently God’s Divine Providence sanctions theft. Wonder how well that will stand up in court.

So if you’re in France and you know these guys, punch them in the face on behalf of the author they have stolen from. Fraters Tau Zorobabel and :. Luxaor are thieves. Don’t buy anything they sell, and if you move in their magical circles, let their actions be trumpeted from the roof tops.

Did you ever stop to think about why we call them “grimoires?” I’m pretty sure I blogged about this before, but it’s been a while and my blog followers have grown. I’m perceiving a lack of awareness in several grimoire magic blogs I’ve perused today* of the reason they’re called “grimoires,” so for the benefit of new followers, the Grimoire tradition everywhere, and in case I haven’t really covered it in full before, I’m going to address Grimoire Magic and the Trivium.

For an accurate understanding, I suggest reading the Wikipedia entries on Paedia, the Trivium, and for a good overview of how it all works in modern recreations of the educational practice, this article from the Well Trained Mind web site.

In Medieval times, education was afforded to the elite, and was modeled on the educational system developed in Ancient Greece. The Trivium is the first thing you would learn, consisting of Grammar, Rhetoric, and Logic. The Trivium was designed to teach a person how to learn. From there you would move on to learning the Quadrivium, which consisted of Arithmetic, Astronomy, Geometry, and Music. The trivium and the quadrivium combined to form the seven Liberal Arts.

The three parts of the Trivium, logic, grammar, and rhetoric were three stages of progression. Logic taught one the mechanics of thought, the way to deduce truth. Grammar taught the way the truth was expressed, the symbols used (letters, and words), and the rules that govern how the symbols interact to create clear communication of the truths deduced in logic. Rhetoric taught how to use logic and grammar to communicate well. 

The word Grimoire is from the French and means “grammar.” Since most of the grimoires were compiled in the Renaissance when the classical education model of the trivium and quadrivium were being taught, I believe it’s a fairly logical leap to assume that the Grimoires were called such as a direct nod to this system of education.

Understanding the flow of thought to symbol to the art of expression, we can see the role of the magical grimoires in the development of a magician. They do not teach logic, but by inference we can deduce that the thought, the truth being codified into the symbols of the grimoires was the basic neo-platonic, Hermetic approach to the emanation of the universe. We see gods, angels, and demons discussed. These hearken back to Iamblichus’ four orders of entities, the gods, angels, demons, and heroes. Personally, I see the magician as the hero class of being, aware of his divine race, standing manifest as both mortal and immortal, the point of contact between that which is above and that which is below.

The grimoires do not teach the rhetoric of magical practice either. They are not handbooks of high art, they are basic lists of the pieces and parts, and the rules governing the symbols of the magician. They do not teach advanced magic, they simply teach an introduction to the system. A student who has completed the grammar stage of education will be able to construct sentences that express their thoughts clearly enough, but they will not necessarily have the skills required to write a strong argument that pursuades the reader to their particular point of view. Graduates of grammar education can write papers, but they are of the quality of middle school children.

It would be etymologically correct to say the magic of the grimoires is “trivial,” and I think that’s really funny.

Ok, enough with the boring bits. I see a couple of things that are interesting. The Lemegeton’s Goetia, a very popular “grammar,” has many spirits that teach the Quadrivium. More proof that they are part of the trivium, perhaps? It’s a logical assumption;. There are spirits that teach rhetoric as well, so I’m thinking they are the ones that teach the nuances of performing magic well, as opposed to simply “right.”

And I think this understanding of the role of Grimoires pretty much blows away the idea that you have to follow the grimoires completely to the “T” forever. I think it’s still important to do your best to follow the steps of the grimoires the first time you contact the spirits, and you definitely should avoid trying to add bits and pieces from other systems. LBRPs and Middle Pillars have no place in Grimoire magic, in my humble opinion.

But once you’ve learned what the symbols represent and the rules that govern them, it’s time to start honing your skills and doing magic well. In rhetoric, it is fairly common to break the rules you learn in grammar. You do it on purpose, to compel or pursuade, and you learn to do it with style. But you still have to have mastered the rules before you start breaking them. Beat poets can get away with bad grammar and no education, but a lot of beat poetry sucks and is ineffective at getting the point across. Granted, there are masters, virtuosos, savants born with skill sets extrardinaire from the womb, but odds are pretty good we’re not among them. If you cnjured demons to visible appearance when you were four, ok, you don’t have to follow the rules and learn to do it right.

Otherwise, learn the system. Follow the rules. See how the pieces and parts fit together to express the logic of the system. Then start improvising. Otherwise your Art is shit.

* I read a really good blog by a guy named Nestor, and a bunch of posts by someone who seems to have read the Lemegeton’s Goetia once or twice, and is 19. Sigh. And a couple others that some friends linked to.