At some point in my blogging career, I must have mentioned something about “bikes with high handlebars.” Because people are finding my blog through Google using that particular phrase. I put it in Google to see where I turned up, but I didn’t see me there. It doesn’t make sense.
So in honor of those people who find this blog through weird ways, here’s a special video, just for you.
Ok, so someone asked for a better picture, and I can’t do it. Blogger has this thing they do with photos, and I could go through a process to get a clearer pic published, but it takes a while, and there’s enough detail to get the gist.
It was one Ebony Wand based on Trithemius made for me by Fr. Ashen, one old quartz point I got for a dollar fifty at the local occult supply shop a few years ago, the seven* Planetary Talismans, Holy Water, and Oil of Abramelin. In my garage already are several types of incense and a charcoal incense burner.**
When I bring a field kit with me in general, I don’t bother with the wand. It’s just too long to carry conveniently. Everything else can be easily stashed in a pocket if necessary, though it looks kinda funny.***
I was heading out to put an Evil Demon in some lead for a client. I brought the crystal to use on the side for communications with Cassiel, who I would be working with primarily, but also for my HGA and Kammael if necessary. I ended up not having to use it, the spirits and I have
strong relationships and we were able to talk without the crystal. Still, I like to have a crystal on hand for viewing purposes.
So I went to the garage and cleansed and banished with Holy water, consecrated the ground for our defense with the wand, fired up some incense and conjured my HGA. When he was present, I cleansed my self with Holy Water, saying:
Asperges me, Domine, hyssopo et mundabor, Lavabis me, et super nivem dealbabor. Miserere mei, Deus, secundum magnam misericordiam tuam. Gloria Patri et Filio et Spiritui Sancto, Sicut erat in principio, et nunc, et semper, et in saecula saeculorum. Amen.****
As I said the Father-Son-Holy Ghost part, I crossed my forehead, mouth, and heart respectively. I conjured up Cassiel and Kammael, and was all set to bind the demon into the steel and lead when I remembered a Table of Practice might be useful. So I sketched one out on a pad of paper I had on hand, and went to town. With Cassiel, Kammael, and my HGA, we got the client’s Evil Daimon bound, and then I sealed it up, waited for the wood glue to dry, and then wood-burned in the Seal and stained it a purty color. I like mahogany.
Now it’s curing in the garage. It’s taking longer than it ought to because we’ve been rained on all weekend. I hoped to get it in the mail today, but that didn’t happen. (Sorry, R.!) I checked it this morning and it’s still leaving streaks when you touch it. I could bake it in the oven for a while on low heat, but the family doesn’t like their meatloaf tasting like wood stain. Picky picky.
* Venus was on top one of the others, so it looks like there’s only six in the picture. Of course it was Venus. I’m pretty sure she was on Michael.
** The family has agreed the self-lighting charcoal smells like burning tires, and have formally requested that I stick to stick incense in the house.
*** “No, it’s a crystal point I use to conjure spirits in my pocket. I’ve never been that happy to see anyone.”
**** You will sprinkle me, O Lord, with hyssop and I shall be cleansed You will wash me, and I shall be washed whiter than snow. Have mercy on me, O God, according to Your great mercy. Glory to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit. As it was in the beginning, is now, and always shall be in ages of ages. Amen.
Portal is cool.
It’s also good practice for astral gymnastics.
And it is gone.
Because of your discerning taste in blogs, you’re in a position to get something that very few others are going to have a chance to get.
Michael Cecchetelli, author of Crossed Keys is putting together something pretty cool.
He’s a member of the Gentlemen for Jupiter, and for the last four months he’s been working closely with the the forces of the sphere of Jupiter, and having really good results. He’s written a few blog posts on his experiments, and I don’t know how much he’s made publicly available about his results, but from our conversations I can tell you he’s doing very well integrating the forces of Jupiter. He’s had increases in his income and windfalls of all sorts, with Jupiter making his ties to its manifestation apparent every step of the way.
One of the things that just happened to wander into his life lately was four (yeah, four, that’s how subtle Jupiter’s being with him) silver Jupiter Talismans made using the image from Francis Barrett’s The Magus*. He’s consecrating one for himself, but he’s making the rest available to the public.
And he’s using the rites of the Crossed Keys to consecrate them. He’s using both the Black Dragon and Enchiridion of Pope Leo together to create Crossed Keys Jupiter Talismans.
I’ll wait for a minute and let that sink in a bit.
The author of Crossed Keys, an awesome grimoire that you won’t be able to buy pretty soon, who has spent four months steeped in Jupiter’s forces, is using the grimoire he knows intimately to consecrate four Crossed Keys Jupiter Talismans he got from Jupiter.
He’s only got three available at the moment. He’s selling them for $225. If you’re interested, email him directly at THIS LINK.
I’ll update this post when they’re no longer available. They’re no longer available.
* That’s the “Joseph Smith Jupiter Talisman,” but done right, in case you’re wondering.
Gordon’s been writing about living in an apocalypse. I was skeptical for a while. I mean, yeah, we ARE living in an apocalypse, he’s right about that, but we have been off and on since 1974. There were a couple of good years in there, but most of the time I’ve been alive we’ve been on the brink of some kind of apocalyptic calamity that could hit at any time. Nuclear holocaust, the Reagan recession of 82, Y2k, 9/11, the housing bubble, H1N1, the double dip recession… Our food is either poisoned or too expensive to buy regularly. We’ve had gang warfare and race riots, tornadoes and hurricanes and floods and fires, and one political clusterfuck after another my entire life.
Ok, so the reason I wrote that article the other day was because I read a blog that I won’t link to because the pinhead doesn’t deserve the traffic. This idiot blogger basically said that anyone who researches anything occult on the internet or in any publicly available work is a delusional idiot if they think they can attain K&CHGA. For support he bashes Crowley, claiming to know more about Crowley and his spiritual state than Crowley did himself.
He claimed to have access to manuscripts that are a few hundred years old. He claimed that they were from the real A:.A:., which is allegedly a Memphis Misraim Rite. He said they only start teaching real mysteries after the 50th degree. He said available manuscripts don’t have the keys to make them useful. And then he bags anyone, whether it’s rootworkers, Hermeticists, or pagans who’s going out on their own to study, experiment, and implement the occult traditions without going through the Masons and getting inducted into the A.: A.:. He closes claiming to know that the Abramelin rite was really based on secret papers that he implies he’s seen.
It was only later, after posting my post and reading some comments by Morgan Drake Eckstein that I realized I’d just taken out the whole Golden Dawn-Thelemic/OTO tradition as well. Which wasn’t my point at all. I don’t mind taking out the Bozo Brigade led by delusional clowns who treat their tradition like a science fiction TV show or a cartoon, those buffoons suck donkey balls and they make a mockery of magic. Magic is serious business.
But there are a lot of GD folks who see the system as a valid and valued compilation of Hermetic, Alchemical, and Kabbalistic principles that can lead to understanding and advancement on the path of the Great Work. They ignore the obviously fake bullshit of the creation myth, and look at the material that was put together logically and cohesively to see how to make it work. They are mechanics, tinkerers who inherited a project car that needs a lot of love, but could run faster than greased lightning when it’s finished if they ever get the time and funds necessary to finish restoring it.
Mr. Eckstein is one of these, as are Sam Webster of the Open Source Order of the GD, and Nick Farrell. Frater AIT and Frater VL belong to a branch of the GD that’s infected by ludicrous leadership, in my opinion, but they are diligent workers who I respect a great deal. A well known author of instruction on traditional grimoire magic is one of the main leaders of another GD Order, and I have nothing but respect for him. The Soror who blogs as PhoenixAngel also has my respect for her efforts to attain spiritual insight and ability through the GD. Jason Miller is either an active or former member of several GD-based or Thelemic Orders with creation myths that run the gammut of believability, and you all know how much I respect his knowledge, understanding, and insight into the way the universe works.
These folks, and the thousands like them, are not the people I’m taking out. They all have a healthy skepticism in their approach to the systems they are working on. They’re looking for useful truth in systems of attainment, and I support and encourage that in everyone’s path.
And I’m not saying there’s nothing to be found in Orders with hokey origins. I’m a Hermeticist, for Christ’s sake (literally!). I get a lot out of the Corpus Hermeticum, and it’s almost certainly 100% total bullshit in its origin myths. I don’t take them literally, I take them as explanatory models. As an explanatory model, the Secret Chiefs of the Golden Dawn make sense. The myths present a metaphorical spiritual truth. Whether Mathers met or did not meet physical people who were or pretended to be the Secret Chiefs doesn’t matter, there’s something that began as an Idea in the Mind of God that manifested as the Golden Dawn, on purpose, to accomplish specific pieces of God’s plan on Earth, regardless of my opinion on the details.
But the main point I’d like to make on all this is that regardless of the origin, or the paperwork, or the living-dead-revived-zombified status of a tradition, anyone can perform the Great Work and succeed, no matter what anyone says about it. God calls us to the Work, in my interpretation and preferred expression of the process of becoming a magician. He reveals what we need to know when we need to know it. He makes a way for us to reach him and to become what we are meant to be. He does so through whatever spiritual tech or belief system is available, and when you get past all the words and symbols, we all learn to do the same kinds of things in our esoteric pursuits, whether it’s in a shamanic tribe, ATR diaspora, Lodge Hermeticism, Debutante Dilettante, or rogue Hermeticist with an internet connection and a few pages of spirit names and little common sense.
People are free to study, experiment, explore, record, and pass on their results to everyone else. There’s no limit to what you can or cannot learn on your own or in a tradition that goes back a few thousand years. If you want to learn how to do magic, there’s nothing that can stop you. Having secret papers may help you in your path if that’s what you’re called to, but secret papers don’t give you the corner on the market, or invalidate anyone else’s path.
Once upon a time, it was popular among certain groups of mystics to claim that they, and they alone, had all the secret papers that taught the One True Way to do Magic. They made up stories about meeting people who displayed fantastic powers, and used the fraudulent tricks of the Spiritualists that were popular at the same time to pretend to receive letters from invisible ascended masters.
When the various orders and traditions of these magicians inevitably imploded, the public at large jeered and happily went on with their lives. Mystics drawn to the promises of Secret Traditional Spiritual Wisdom were disappointed with yet another dead end, and went on their way looking to older materials for glimpses of the eternal light.
But some people, upon seeing the Temples and the Ordos implode, splinter, and implode again without ever producing any signs of ascended masters from their ranks, couldn’t stand to give up their illusions. “The lies they told, I mean, the Myths they told were really TRUE, it was just that they were lying when they said THEY had the secrets!” they told themselves. “Someone somewhere MUST have the REAL secrets!” And so saying, they bounded off into the darkness holding fast to their beliefs in Secret Lodges of Western Magick with unbroken lineages dating back to Atlantis that held the true keys to the secrets of the ages.
A whole new batch of frauds and fakes, seeing a genre to be tapped, a profit of power, control, and manipulation (and money) to be made at someone else’s expense, leaped at the chance to be the purveyors of the “authentic” secret papers and traditions. They built up new towers of falsehood for these eager-to-be-deceived fools to flock to. They produced manuscripts with older sources, for the archaeology they had at their disposal was much better than the archaeology available to their predecessors, and they found that the modern students were as eager to ignore the obvious fabrications just like they had been in the early 20th century. These truly Black Brothers tapped the will to believe the Masonic Myths, played on the eagerness to belong, to have the TRUE SECRET POWERS, and programmed their students to look down upon and mock those who saw through their lies as a defense mechanism, just like spiritual frauds and fakes have always done.
To this very day, there are those who espouse ludicrous, laughable and obviously made up bullshit as the truth because they really want to believe there’s a lodge somewhere that wasn’t just the Post-Victorian Imperialistic British playing dress up in what they thought Egyptian priests wore for a lark.
If you want to play those reindeer games, by all means feel free to do so. But don’t try to tell me your personal fantasies are really the really real truth. There are no secret documents that weren’t developed in the last century, there is no secret Order of initiates from Atlantis, there is no hidden group of ascending masters who will be able to teach you anything you can’t find on the internet for free (www.esotericarchives.com, www.hermetic.com) or figure out on your own if you try hard and ask the right spirits for help.
Fuck the idiots and their stupid fairy tales who try to tell you different. Conjure the spirits and get to Work on your own.
I can’t believe I forgot to link to a purchase point in the review. You should buy your own copy:
Rouge edition ($24.95):
http://www.amazon.com/Crossed-Keys-Softcover-Michael-Cecchetelli/dp/095672034X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1312487835&sr=8-1
Hardcover (only 1 new available for $75! damn! Selling out fast!):
http://www.amazon.com/Crossed-Chimeric-Binding-Dragon-Enchiridion/dp/B005E8187C/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1312487835&sr=8-2
