Rufus Opus

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  • Forgotten Things

    I was talking to a friend of mine, Frater Servitor Lucem, in IMs a few minutes ago. We got to talking about the coming Depression, the economy in general, and what to excpect. Along the way, he gave me a brief history of the things that have happened since the last Depression. These are important things to know. He lived through it, as his mother and grandmother immigrated to the US in the 1930’s and he grew up knowing what had happened. I’m younger than he is, and most of my friends have the same general understanding of history I do, I suspect. Chances are you know all this, but here is the brief overview of what happened that lead us where we are today.

    And this is important to you magicians that seek to become members of the Invisible College. Our role in this world is to take notice of these things. You may not feel called on to do anything about this with your spiritual resources, but I am.

    His comments begin below:

    See, when the Depression was underway, there were also Commies. The rich people were really afraid of the Commies, because the Commies had a nasty habit of killing the people they took over from.

    So, the New Deal came about. Not because the rich people were being so nice about things, but because they were afraid they might die. Communism was seen as a really serious threat. Nazism was, in part, a reaction against the Communist threat. Democracy was in some big trouble in the ’30’s. People seriously wondered whether it had a future.

    So, the New Deal made for some social re-engineering that helped people along, but mostly because people who have nothing to lose, and know it, are extremely dangerous.

    Enter the Second World War, and things really heat up.

    Democracy pretty much successfully defends itself against the Fascists, but only at the cost of allying with the dreaded Commies. Afterwards, the Cold War was the big showdown between Communism and Capitalism. Both systems are more or less bankrupt in many of the same areas, but capitalists have more wealth, and provide better incentives.

    Besides, what we had in the West wasn’t at all pure Capitalism, anyway. There was a strong Socialist streak left over from the New Deal. More equitable distribution of wealth led to enormous overall wealth in the West. So much so that we were able to bail Western Europe out of certain death by starvation.

    However, after a few decades, the rich, once again, became tired of sharing, and started to take back what the New Deal had given the rest of us. And when Communism finally gave up the ghost, they said, “Hey, don’t like what we’re about? Tough shit, where are you gonna go?” And they took away all the restrictions that had been put in place to prevent another depression.

    And they took back a lot of the social programs that came out of the New Deal, and bankrupted the rest (like Social Security).

    And here we are.

    Pretty much where we were in 1929.

  • The Bune Radio

    Ok, so Fr. POS wrote about playing rock music for his Goetic compatriots as a reward. [Edit: It wasn’t his idea, I don’t think, it was HIS GAL‘s idea; she gets a lot of groovy ideas. It was a conversation wtih her that resulted in the Box I made.]

    Since I’m on a bit of a Mad Scientist binge lately, and because I had a clock radio that no longer clocked but still radioed, I took his idea and made a Bune Radio.

    I took apart the clock and removed all the components related to the clock part that didn’t work anymore. (I found residue of spilled something in the terminals and a lot of corrosion, and instead of cleaning it, I fried the clock trying to figure out how the LEDs worked; lesson learned: don’t use a 9V battery to test lights that run on 4VAC. Sigh.)

    Left with just the radio, I wired a copper Bune seal in line with the wires going to the speakers. I tuned it to a rock station, and played it for a while. Then I explained that when he gets me a specific dollar amount, I’d play it as a reward for a specific period of time.

    I’m also thinking I could use it as an audio-scrying device. I can tune it between stations and get some good white noise going on, and observe what I “hear” coming through.

  • Spirit Pot Update

    Greetings!

    I’ve gotten new information on formulating the Spirit Pot from a hoodoo worker and root doctor (are they the same thing?) over at the Solomonic yahoo group. He goes by the name “Inominandum,” and has written a book and quite a few interesting articles over at his website. I enjoyed the interview with Simon, author of the still-controversial Necronomicon, immensely.

    He suggested lining the bottom of the pot with dirt form my local community. Since Bune is associated with bringing riches and eloquence to a man, the ideal dirt would be from a local bank and from the local library. I’ll be gathering some dirt from my own branches of both this weekend. We also discussed including the ashes of burned books, and he indicated that would be useful as well.

    Everything that goes into the Spirit Pot serves some purpose. Tools for the spirit to use in his activities on your behalf are included. For example, the “Magickal Weapon” from 777 I included was the arrow, as Bune is a Sagitarian aspected spirit. With a weapon he is associated with, Bune becomes a more formidable spirit ally. The other stuff I’ve included in the pot serve to create a conducive environment for the spirit.

    Additionally, the process of making offerings was clarified. Inominandum confirmed that anything given to the spirit is the spirit’s for life. No giving and taking away. Food offerings that spoil can be taken away when the spirit indicates it is finished by turning the food into “ick.” (Ick is the technical term for food offerings deprived of spiritual essence, I believe.)

    Other members of the group have helped me understand how to set up the pot in my ritual space. Aaron Leitch suggested setting up a dedicated space with an altar cloth with Bune’s seal on it, and that suggestion was confirmed by others on the list as being appropriate. Inominandum mentioned that the pot can also be placed on a plate that serves as a place to make your offerings as well. Generally, anything placed in the vicinity seems to work.

    Last night I spoke directly with Bune via the Spirit Pot for the first time in a while. Mostly I’ve only addressed him casually while making offerings. I asked for more information on what the part of his description about spirits gathering on sepulchers was used for, and asked him to reveal it to me in dreams. I tossed and turned all night after that, couldn’t get into a deep sleep. I kept having short bursts of lucid dreaming where I heard Bune speaking, but in images that I couldn’t make out, or in a voice that was barely audible.

    I’ve been on an orgone generator craze lately, and I’ve got about three or four of them in my room. I think they were making too much static for clear communications. This morning in between snooze alarms, I had extremely visual dreams where Bune explained exactly what was going on with that part of his description, but as soon as I sat up, the dreams were gone. I expect to be able to recover the information in trance work later this evening though.

  • The Great Work in Theory and Practice

    Well, today the Great Work died.

    Not the real Great Work, I’m talking about the Yahoo group. It’s been on its death bed for a while, but it was fun, nevertheless, to visit. Sometimes it would sit up in its hospice bed and talk about magic, or the “good old days,” or have pieces of wisdom to pass on.

    Today I woke up and went over recent messages from the group, and as usual there was little to do with the Great Work. There was an interesting thread on politics though. Obama and McCain. Both of the Moderators are Obama supporters, but one of them, “ILV” is a little more … bombastic and caustic in his support of Obama.

    Someone stated her reasons for supporting McCain after ILV asked, and like a rabid dog, ILV attacked her mercilessly, claiming she had no ethics, was racist, and so forth and so on. The last thing he had to say about the subject was an insult to her, saying he should know better than to engage in a battle of wits with the unarmed. That kind of arrogance was completely uncalled for and way over the top.

    I know the woman he attacked. Not personally or anything, but from other groups. She’s not as eloquent and trained in classical rhetoric as ILV is, but she’s a damned fine magician whose wit is proved in her Work, not her Words. Her ethnic heritage is racially diverse, to say the least. She’s had a shitty life. She’s had a run of really bad luck. Yet she still takes care of the oppressed. She’s a New Age spiritual healer and teacher, and she travels around the world performing exorcisms for people. She doesn’t get paid much for her services, and she’s downright poor. She really does it to help people. I don’t think she’s got everything 100% correct in her spiritual cosmology, but I know I don’t know everything either. It’s her heart for people that I admire. That’s the fruit of the seeds of the Great Work in action. You can visit her web site at www.astralhealer.com.

    She’s not a Christian, as far as I know. This isn’t solidarity with Christians or anything like that. And it’s not worldly politics either. I don’t like what McCain has become this year. It’s like he gave up the straight talk and hard-line moderate-centrist stance he had in 2000 just so he can win. ILV pointed that out, and he’s right about that. If I bother to vote (I agree with the global view that the puppet on the left and the puppet on the right are on different hands of the same puppeteer), then it will be for McCain in hopes that after he gets in office, he’ll go back to being the maverick he was before. But that’s if I bother, and that’s not likely. If I really cared about politics, I’d go to the spirits that run the world, like John Dee did.

    I left the group today because its leadership, the co-moderator ILV, acted like an asshole. I’ve talked with him off-list, and he’s a good person at heart. He’s a trained magician, and has a great deal of information to provide. He’s really smart too. But in his interactions yesterday with list members, he demonstrated a lack of objectivity, tolerance, and respect that is required to be a leader of diverse people.

    Obama spent twenty years in a church that taught hatred. He voted with his presence and his finances in support of that church, and as a Senator, he sanctioned the teachings of his preacher by belonging to the church. He should have, as a responsible leader, recognized that the hatred being taught was unacceptable from any race. The fact that he didn’t until it threatened his ambitions is sufficient for me to realize his “hope” and “change” rhetoric is only skin deep, but his ambition goes all the way to the bone.

    Me, I don’t sanction the leadership of the “Great Work” group anymore. Scarlet, the list owner, is too busy to monitor it herself. She’s not to blame here, except in her support of ILV as a co-moderator. I left another group she started and co-mods with ILV as well, Spirit_Summoning. Mostly for dramatic effect, as he didn’t have much to say there, but also for the principle. She killed the thread and the topic as soon as she became aware of it. She’s a good moderator, and this isn’t about her at all, beyond the fact that she kept ILV as co-moderator.

    Part of it is for the current drama, to have a chance to make a stand that is somewhat meaningful. Part of it is old-fashioned revenge. I was co-moderator of the Great Work list for a while, but then I went off on a caustic and vitriolic attack on ILV when he started acting like the veteran of Golden Dawn egroups that he is. I got reprimanded, demoted, and put on probation. I deserved it. I wasn’t living up to the responsibilities of being a moderator for a diverse group of people. I didn’t behave the way a moderator ought to. Now ILV has fallen into the same trap I did, and I get to raise a stink over it. Yay for me!

    The truth though, if I’m being really honest, is that I’ve lost interest in the droning of magicians who treat magic like a religion, with doctrines and dogma, but don’t use it in their lives. The Great Work list was intended to be a place where pursuants of the Work could discuss the Work. It’s become a place where believers in magic talk about stuff. That’s fine if that’s what you want, but it used to be the place I learned some very basic key concepts about the Great Work that lead me to where I’m at today. That group died to me today. (“You’re dead to me! Dead!”)

    I’m considering starting a list for people to talk about doing magic(k). Something interesting to me, something that can challenge me to do more and be more. Something like Agrippa’s Magic in a Modern Age, or Traditional Techniques for Modern Magicians. Somewhere to talk about how we apply the teachings from the old grimoires in a modern context, without worrying so much about trying to pretend like we live in the 15th century. If I do, I’ll announce it here.

    Oh, and tomorrow, look for the “how to get rich using magic” post. Or Thursday, if I don’t finish writing it today.

    Hope all my American readers had a great Labor Day yesterday. Mine rocked.

  • My Man Sense is Tingling

    Cool pic, eh? Any mechanical engineers reading this spot the problem with any gear set up like this?

    I was just thinking about how sometimes a woman will make a suggestion about something that a man would never even consider. It happens a lot in my work. the Department Heads are mostly white males. They can’t do anything but guide others in their work. Literally, they can’t. They can barely work their email and blackberries most of the time. Most of them have assistants that schedule all their meetings.

    It’s the mid-level management that is chock fulll of women. They have this intuitive grasp of how things need to work. In my career, I’ve found that there were many times that I wouldn’t know the details of a situation, but I had a pretty good grasp of the situation in hand. I made some decisions, set the ball in motion, and then talked to a woman about it. “But isn’t this, this, and this true?” she would say. “Hmmm…. yes….” I would reply, realizing that I had just screwed up.

    The simple fact is that women have this ability to know things. They don’t communicate it well to men, usually because men and women have different ways of looking at things. That is the main problem between the sexes. Clear communication.

    But I’ve developed this sense about things. There are times now in my life where a woman will be telling me that I’m wrong about something, and they’ll have all these reasons to prove their point, but they just don’t add up to me. It’s like they’re using words I use in completely sideways ways.

    But there’s this feeling I get around my right shoulder blade. Sort of an extension of the heart chakra, or maybe (this just occurred to me) it’s where God took the rib. I call it my Man Sense. It gets warm when a woman is correcting me, and I don’t know why she’s right, but she is anyway. I’ve learned to trust this feeling. It guides me, and it improves my performance.

    Men and women are complimentary. We are different in design, function, interpretation, and approach. These differences have caused countless clashes, but they are supposed to be there so we can understand this world we live in better, and do our jobs right while we’re here.

    Men, learn to use your man sense. Next time you’re frustrated with a woman who’s babbling on about why you’re an idiot, instead of arguing check your man sense. Is she right? If so just accept it and move on. You don’t have to understand why she’s right. You possibly never will. Even if you do, it won’t change the fact that you’ll be doing the same thing regardless of your understanding. If you want to bend your brain into feminine angles, go ahead, by all means. But me, I just trust the man sense.

  • Calculating Goet

    Bokonon23 left a comment that he wanted to know more about calculating the correct correspondences for Goetic entities, so here’s a little more detail on the subject.

    I used 777, the correspondence chart developed by Aleister Crowley (from Alan Bennet’s notes, probably) when he was still a member in good standing in the Golden Dawn. This correspondence chart was published in 1909, and reflects the Golden Dawn attributions to magickal subjects.

    To use 777 effectively, you must understand how information is presented in a spreadsheet or table. “Columns” are the vertical data sets, and “Rows” are the horizontal data sets. The first column is the “key scale,” the number that will provide the common reference point for all other columns of data in the table. There are 35 rows of data, and 183 columns of corresponding attributes, items, angels, god names, goetic entities, plants, perfumes, etc. This compendium of information is extremely useful to magicians of all types.

    To find the correspondences of a particular Goetic entity, first find the entity in the columns of goetic spirits (Columns CLV-CLXV, or pages 27-28 [printed page numbers] / 36-37 [pdf page numbers]). Bune/Bime is found to correspond to Key Scale 25.

    Knowing the spirit is associated with Key Scale 25, I then went through the other columns in the table to get an idea of what correspondences related to Bune. All the information in the row labeled 25 had some relation to Bune. Since I was making a physical pot, I paid special attention to the physical items associated with Key Scale 25, the plants, the incenses, and the magickal weapon. I also checked the color charts for selecting the appropriate colored candles to use as offerings for the spirit. Since I am primarily interested in physical results, I used the color charts associated with the material realm, Assiah, which is called the Empress Scale in the Golden Dawn.

  • You can do magic

    Morning, folks. Just a reminder… this blog is for you to learn to accomplish the Great Work. I like to try to make money off it sometimes, because it’s fun. Money is a marker system, keeping track of time and worth and value and everything like that. It’s fun to use it as a mundane scorecard for my magical Work. Not that you have to be rich to be successful, I’m just saying. It’s fun. For me. When I’m winning. It sucks when I’ve let things slip, but it’s always recoverable. So far. Your mileage may vary.

    But what’s even more fun for me is when I get emails or comments about how people are using the experiences I’ve had to further their own Work. I’m trying to show people that magic is relatively easy. Any bumbling bafoon can do it. EVEN ME. You don’t have to be a highly skilled artist to do this stuff. Your Work can look ugly. Ugly works too.

    Looking at the requirements of making all the stuff you need to do magic “by the book” is intimidating. But if you’re willing to experiment, and keep some basic safety mechanisms in place, your experiments won’t be any more dangerous than any other mad scientist on your block. And you’ll have invisible forces helping you, grateful that you’re putting them to work.

    And let’s face it folks, the Spirits are a lot more forgiving and flexible than we like to pretend. If you don’t have silver, draw a Moon Talisman on a blank piece of paper. You can consecrate it to the Moon by drawing her planetary sigils around the border if you like. The spirits will work with that. Wands and Daggers and Cups and Disks are fun to collect. Planetary talismans are fun to make. But they aren’t the magic. They aren’t required to do the magic. What’s required ultimately from any magician is little more than a pen and paper and a whole lot of ambition. Aim for God, and if you only come close, hell, you’ve come a long way.

    The other day someone sent me an overview of what they’re working on, a bit of their setup, and they talked about a technique they’re developing to cast silver. It looks really interesting, and I can’t wait to see his work. Awesome stuff. Made me feel really good, because one of the reasons I talk so much about how to do stuff is to get people doing it. Finding other magical crafters is fun. So if anyone else has any special neat tricks they’re working on to produce some powerful artifacts, feel free to let me know. Heck, start a blog about it and email me a link. I’ll publicize you to the fullest extent of my abilities.

  • You can do magic

    Morning, folks. Just a reminder… this blog is for you to learn to accomplish the Great Work. I like to try to make money off it sometimes, because it’s fun. Money is a marker system, keeping track of time and worth and value and everything like that. It’s fun to use it as a mundane scorecard for my magical Work. Not that you have to be rich to be successful, I’m just saying. It’s fun. For me. When I’m winning. It sucks when I’ve let things slip, but it’s always recoverable. So far. Your mileage may vary.

    But what’s even more fun for me is when I get emails or comments about how people are using the experiences I’ve had to further their own Work. I’m trying to show people that magic is relatively easy. Any bumbling bafoon can do it. EVEN ME. You don’t have to be a highly skilled artist to do this stuff. Your Work can look ugly. Ugly works too.

    Looking at the requirements of making all the stuff you need to do magic “by the book” is intimidating. But if you’re willing to experiment, and keep some basic safety mechanisms in place, your experiments won’t be any more dangerous than any other mad scientist on your block. And you’ll have invisible forces helping you, grateful that you’re putting them to work.

    And let’s face it folks, the Spirits are a lot more forgiving and flexible than we like to pretend. If you don’t have silver, draw a Moon Talisman on a blank piece of paper. You can consecrate it to the Moon by drawing her planetary sigils around the border if you like. The spirits will work with that. Wands and Daggers and Cups and Disks are fun to collect. Planetary talismans are fun to make. But they aren’t the magic. They aren’t required to do the magic. What’s required ultimately from any magician is little more than a pen and paper and a whole lot of ambition. Aim for God, and if you only come close, hell, you’ve come a long way.

    The other day someone sent me an overview of what they’re working on, a bit of their setup, and they talked about a technique they’re developing to cast silver. It looks really interesting, and I can’t wait to see his work. Awesome stuff. Made me feel really good, because one of the reasons I talk so much about how to do stuff is to get people doing it. Finding other magical crafters is fun. So if anyone else has any special neat tricks they’re working on to produce some powerful artifacts, feel free to let me know. Heck, start a blog about it and email me a link. I’ll publicize you to the fullest extent of my abilities.

  • Using the Spirit Pot

    I’m experimenting with different ways to use my spirit pot. From what I can find on the internet about spirit pots in hoodoo and the spirit cauldron in Palo, offerings to the spirit are made by placing the offering in the general vicinity of the pot. So far my offerings have consisted of lit candles.

    The reason I chose Bune, as I said in an earlier post, was because one of his powers is to bring riches unto a man. (From the Crowley-Mathers edition of the Goetia.) I am a Taurus, and while I have learned to be content in all things, whether poor or rich, I still prefer riches and oppulence to being consistently overdrawn in my bank accounts.

    One of the things I learned early in my magickal career is to always be very specific in what you want when doing magick, and even then, don’t expect the outcome to be exactly what you intended. At best it will be exactly what you asked for.

    With this in mind, I sat down one afternoon and figured out exactly how much money I would need to have the lifestyle I desire. I want a nice-sized house in a good area, to pay for the vehicles our family requires, and enough residual income to make around $100,000 a year. I also specifically want this money all at once, not just an opportunity to make the money over 16 years of labor. Knowing that I would be paying axes on a lump sum, I added that to the initial amount, and came up with a figure of $7,142,857.14.

    Last night I created a talisman that included the exact dollar amount, my intent, and the names of God used in evoking Goetic entities, crowned with ADNI MLK, because the intent is to have this manifest in the realm of Assiah. I placed this talisman in the spirit pot and lit three candles around the pot, and anointed the pot itself with the Oil of Abramelin. Anointing things with oil and waters seem to be a big deal in hoodoo, and the Oil of Abramelin is a very potent thinner of the veils.

    Rest assured, I will post the results. Any suggestions from more advanced users of the spirit pot are welcome. Comment below.

  • Holy Wealth

    Well, it looks like it’s finally happening. Everything is falling into place for me to be stupid stinking wealthy. How long ago was it that I explained to Bune what kind of wealth I wanted? Friday in the post about the statue of Cthulhu? Damn. That’s right, I knew I did something like that.

    And I was bragging about “learning how to talk to the spirits.” Ha!

    How freaking typical.

    Anyway, if this pans out, one of the things I’ll be doing shortly after quitting my job and taking a vacation is publishing how I did it. Scan ye olde archives well, for if I’ve figured out how to get $MILLION$ through the Goetic Spirits, you can be damned sure I’ll write a book about it. And all this public knowledge shall be deleted and only those who were faithful blog readers will have a chance to know it for free. And I’ll have a ghost writer turn my blog posts into a book. And I’ll have it printed and leather bound and only sell them in lots of 200 every five years. For like $200 each. But it will be worth EVERY PENNY.