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Last week I saw an interesting article on what makes a witch a witch, “Forging the Body of a Witch,” by Peter Grey. Written in the language of a true bard, this essay is packed with rich language, complex sentence structures, and a turn of phrase that brings powerful images to the mind and heart. It was a fascinating read.

After getting past the prettiness of the words, though, I started thinking about what he was saying, and it really started to bother me.

First he was saying witches are basically broken:

My proposition is that witches are un-made by the social process, by the constrictions that distort the body of desire and are played out in a landscape of lost dreams. Witches are not only born and made, they are undone. They retreat, out of fear and out of necessity.

And the cures he suggests? Don’t be fat. Move more, don’t be still, society tells you to be still, but the witch’s body moves (but later he says you have to be still, but it’s different when he says it, because then you’re tied up). Have you tried vitamins? Herbs? Be more sexual, sexually liberated, but really, it’s women that need to hear that:

To celebrate the erotic furor that has always been condemned as witchcraft and that characterises female sexuality and female sexual response in particular. That is not fetishising the female but stating corporeal and historical matters of fact. Jouissance in the sense of Cixous, rather than Lacan, is the essence of witchcraft. Men can also learn these skills, though that is less common because for the most part, they do not need to.

Note he says he isn’t fetishizing the female, but then he goes on to say that an active actual witch is someone who is thin, fit, lithe, erotic, and into BDSM for the spiritual aspects of it, really.

Any resemblance to an adolescent male’s ideal sex slave who is somehow empowered by her submission and embrace of the icons of actual slavery is entirely coincidental, I’m sure.

And he goes on to talk about how witchcraft of this type was, after all, the product of the dungeon. The mythos, the cosmology, the entire foundation was based on a warping of the idea of the Sabbatic Goat, an idea that was created in the minds of sexually repressed Christian torturers, who then broke the bodies of women, with penetration and blood, and bondage, and pain, until the women adopted the fantasies of these psychotic men as their own, their broken psyches longing for the release of the flames.

And this is the mythos he suggests we embrace, including the methodologies. A return to a thing that never was, the adoption of a view of female sexuality that was foisted on them by men with red hot irons, who tortured, maimed, and finally killed those whose intelligence and psyches they had shattered.

I don’t see how that witch is a model for today’s women. Embracing an ideal that never was? That happens to be a sex slave, or sure looks like one?

I think today’s witches can do better.

What if your power as a witch had nothing to do with how you look, how you fuck, or don’t fuck, whether you believe new age theories of the vital importance of vitamins and herbal supplements, and whether or not you want to be tied up and spanked to enlightenment?

What if your power wasn’t measured according to a standard of a 14-year-old male’s ideal submissive bound sex toy? What if…

And this is kind of wild, I know…

What if you’re actually already powerful?

Regardless of your body type, if you can achieve an orgasm when you want to, what if that was ok, and there’s no need for you to subscribe to a narrative of innate brokenness that can only be redeemed and healed through pain? What if you weren’t really robbed of a childhood of innocence and bliss and purity because it never existed?

What if you’re actually fine, but you’re just tired because life can be hard sometimes?

Meh.

Hermetics teaches that we already have the power to do what we will, we just forget because we get distracted. Remembering that is the point of the Work. You don’t have to lose weight, take magnesium or witchy herbs, or be a nymphomaniac spewing crotch fluids on everything in sight to prove you’re a strong independent human who don’t need no other human, even though you’re trying to live up to (usually) his standards anyway.

You’re already powerful. You can change your entire life today, by making different choices. Where you work, who you work with, your career path, whatever. You can go to another country. You can leave the family and friends you’ve had all your life and go on an adventure. You can join a coven, take up new forms of magic, write a book, start a blog, volunteer in a political campaign, start a stand-up comedian career, clean out your basement, or order an amazing pizza. You have the power to change your entire world, every day, and the experiences you have in that day.

And you can use spells and rituals and curses and hexes and blessings and sabbats and equinoxes and solstices and community and politics and whatever you feel like to aid in that, by sitting still, or moving, as you see fit, when you see fit, as you see fit, regardless of whether anyone else sees your work as fit.

You can do other things with that mind of yours walking around in that body of yours, you powerful witch you, and it’s the doing of other things that makes a difference.

So yea, if Peter’s article speaks to you where you’re at, and you found something valuable in it that you want to pursue because it’s actually what you want, then great. You have the power to become a lean mean vitamin chewing herb taking BDSM scene queen machine, if you want that, and more power to you if you find what you’re looking for in that path.

But your power isn’t about your sex. It’s about what you do with yourself.

A few months ago, a client asked me to make him a Spirit Pot for an entity from the Lemegeton’s Goetia. I bought the ingredients, and before I put them together, he canceled.

This morning, I was doing some Work with Bune, and I got the urge to take those ingredients and swap them out for a Bune pot to send out into the world. An inspiration, if you will.

Putting thought to word to deed, I did.

So here’s a Bune Spirit Pot. It started out as a small box from Amazon, ivory colored and trimmed in brass. It received a generous amount of hyssop and high john root, some dried raisins, some amethyst, and a piece of coral I found on the beach in Florida. I was also compelled to include a raw copper ingot I had laying around, something I made a while ago before I started ordering my copper disks from online stores. Of course, it has the engraved seal of Bune (the one that works best in my experience) on a copper disk inside.

Duly consecrated, the spirit invoked and quite happy in the home I’ve made it, I am happy to offer it to anyone who wants it. I only have one, but I could make a couple more if there’s an interest, but it takes me forever to get around to it.

These are going for $275, and I’ve got one made, and the stuff to make two more, but that’s it. Three total available, I’m trying really hard not to do deficit selling these days:

Now for some Bune Spirit Pot fun…

I sold one of these Bune pots to a client on request, and after he’d received it, I got the following messages from him on Facebook:

Hey all you dads, hope your Father’s Day was awesome. I got to speak to most of my kiddos, and to my own Dad, and that was pretty great. We had “good speaks” as Harper likes to say. Connected, joyful, in-jokes, self-deprecation, the occasional ayyyyyyy, and terrible puns. It was awesome. I can die tomorrow and trust I did my part to make the world better JUST by having the kiddos I have.

But today I’m thinking about another thing.

Dads have a power we don’t like to own, because it’s scary as shit:

Every dad is a Magus… to their kids.

Every word we speak is a seed, and it falls on the most fertile of soils, and it stays with them for the rest of their lives. I hear my dad when I work on a car, or go fishing, or every time I screw up in life’s projects because I forgot to ask, “What do I do before I do this?” But I also hear him telling me how proud he is when I do well, even if he doesn’t even know what I’m up to. I got lucky like that.

I’ve talked to people a lot over the years about how they view the idea of “God” as a divinity, and as I’ve gotten to know them, I’ve learned that every one of them have an understanding of “God” that aligns 99.999% with their understanding of their fathers, in real life.

We shape reality with everything we do, as dads. We make the next wave of feminism with our choices with our daughters. We shape the politics of our nation by example. We lay out the framework of the next generation’s experience of the Patriarchal Archetype of Divinity, just by playing shitty guitar to them when they’re falling asleep, fighting the system for them when they’re being wronged, believing them, listening, and loving them because they are awesome.

So dads, and father figures of any type, don’t forget to be cool.

It matters.

Below you’ll find a link to an interview I did this weekend with John R. King, IV, also known on the internet as “Imperial Arts.”

John and I go back about 20 years, and have had our share of shenanigans. When we met he was mostly a chaos magician, and then 20 years later when we ran into one another again, he was still sort of a chaos magician at heart, but he’d applied it to his life and his studies, as if the tenets of Chaos Magick were for real.

And it worked out really well for him.

While I disagree with a lot of his interpretations of systems, and practices, I really enjoyed talking to someone with his depth of devotion and practice. I think his real-life views on the spirit-conjure path we travel will challenge many people’s opinions, and also demonstrate a thing about the people who Work with grimoires has been proven true across the course of interviews with people I’ve done lately:

In the end, whether we consider what we are doing to be “going by the book” or not, we all create our own system based on our experiences, and its effectiveness, regardless of the opinions of detractors, is only going to be determined by one person:

The Magician doing the Magick.

Also, whoever said I should get some music intro involved, it wasn’t a lot of fun.

So without further ado, here’s the interview:

Nine or ten paragraphs in, I get to the point, sorry, but there’s reasons.

This post is about what is best for the good of humanity. TL;DR – What’s good for humanity is Magick, the Great Work, Gnosis, Illumination, Enlightenment, and getting together as practitioners to remind ourselves that WE DO MAKE A DIFFERENCE.

And we’re planning an event related to that. And it’s not the royal we. So, on with the first things:

At a recent O.T.O. event, I got to hear Dr. David Shoemaker say something that has stuck with me. He was discussing the Guf-Nephesh-Ruach-Neschemah parts of the soul, and he was talking about the evolution of consciousness over time. Specifically, he said in a couple thousand years, we’ll look back at the people of our time as savages who lived primarily from the Ruach instead of from the Neschemah in the same way as we today judge historic peoples who acted from the Nephesh and Guf as savages.

Our society shows records of when our laws and customs were Guf (or the physical body)-based, primarily; clan warfare for resources, marriage that treated the participants like property, laws based on preserving the property of dynasties that provided for the well-being of the bodies of the tribe, and the leaders of the tribe.

Then the concerns about the Nephesh took prominence, and it was not just property that mattered, but the affairs of the heart, the emotions, the feelings that became of value to society in the Romantic periods. Divorce became functional and useful, because the welfare of the body was more of a given as we evolved socially. Marriage became an expression of the feelings of the heart, and the emotional wellbeing and safety of the participants with the introduction of the prenuptual agreement.

Today we live in a world that values the Ruach, the intellect that analyzes and determines the value and worth of our choices rationally, recognizing the needs of the body, and of the heart, but also the consequences of pissing everything away on a poorly-thought-out emotional decision.

Sometimes, and mostly. There are pockets of hold-outs, and sometimes we still screw it up, because this is a practice, a process, not a science that works out the same way every time.

But one of these days we’ll be a society that is founded on the principles and values that come from the Neschemah. We’ll be operating from that image-of-god part of us, or that god-particle consciousness, or that Enlightened/Illuminated state, and we’ll all still have struggles, but not these struggles.

Not people getting murdered because of what they choose to do with their genitalia.

The whole hetero-normative thing is a hold-out from the guf-consciousness. We had to pass on genes to the next generation, we had to have 6 kids to make sure 2 survived to replace us and maybe grow more of us a few hundred years ago. But the global body-consciousness is over that genetic track, and we’ve overpopulated, and are killing our environment in ways that will kill us all. So we have queer traits popping up to control our production of offspring. It’s natural and biological, and normative behavior in most of the animals on the planet. When a species overproduces, we get fabulous gays to make up for it. It’s normal Guf-stuff, really, but our culture hasn’t caught up yet.

And in truth, every culture that has thrived has eventually developed a normative queer aspect to it, guys, so let’s quit pretending it’s unnatural, and start maybe just culling the folks with problems with this fact from the herd? I’m down for a three-strikes-and-you’re-out law for homophobes, for the good of humanity.

And that is what this post is all about.

The good of humanity.

I got a ping from Tony Silvia, a Gnsotic friend who hosts Talk Gnosis regularly yesterday, asking what we can do as magicians to stop this shit. I was all “Mars, Saturn, The Lightning of Jupiter!” when I read it at first, but I stopped.

And thought a bit.

And realized STOPPING the shit that happened at the Pulse nightclub is exactly what we’re trying to do on a global scale for all humanity.

Tony does it with Gnosticism.

I do it with Hermeticism, and the Ecllesia Gnostica Catholica, within the A.:A.: and O.T.O. It is the purpose of the Great Work of the Rosicrucian systems, it is the outcome of the production of the Philosopher’s Stone. It is the Panacea to all ills that plague mankind upon the Earth.

The idea is that as we raise ourselves, all those we interact with have an opportunity to be raised with us. It’s the same boon extended to the demons by some medieval magicians, as I am raised, so shalt thou be raised, or peace between us forever or whatever. It’s the boddhisattva vow to not go on until everyone else gets it, to be the tutor until everyone manifesting is on the same page with the same short cuts as everyone else, no one left behind.

It’s the compassion for everyone else who suffers brutality, and also for those who suffer being brutes.

We do magick to make the world better. For us, through us, by us, yes, but not just that. Our lives, we see eventually, are better when everyone else’s lives are better. So we magick for them. We solve (Salve) their problems, and let their solutions coagulate around them. That’s what we do as magicians. We Solve the problems.

Tony is working on an Event. It will be Sunday June 26th. It will be geared towards getting the planet’s human population to kick things up a notch, and to be better to one another. To fix the things in us plural that result in us singular being total fucktards. Including, but not limited to the kind of things that unfolded in Orlando.

So whatever belief you are, whatever path you follow, if you think the world could use some enlightenment, a little illumination, join us on Sunday the 26th. I’ll post the details of the rite I’ll be doing, he’s putting together more stuff.

Anyone else interested in throwing other hats in the ring with the same aim, by all means, let’s do this.

Kick the world up a notch, get the rest of ’em to catch up and lap us, so we’re trying to catch up with them, instead of getting them to catch up with us.

Do your part, magicians, to change this world a bit. Add some momentum to the evolution of the population.

Sunday.

June 26, 2016.

Illuminate the World.

This afternoon, Jake Stratton-Kent and I got to touch base on a couple of different topics, including the role of integrating post-1899 magical practices into grimoire rituals, and the state of the Occult Revival as it stands today, and where it makes sense to see it end up in the future.

Tl;DR Click here

A couple of weeks ago, Harper and I got to go down to Indianapolis to talk about the Seven Spheres and the art of conjuration and scrying in general. It was awesome good times.

A couple long-time friends showed up who had been former pupils, but have long since become co-workers in this world-manifestation project we’re all participating in to various degrees, and it was so much fun to hang out with them, and shoot the shit.

I noticed right away that they were both sporting some obvious Skeleton Key bling, and over some delicious Greek (and later Indian) foods, we got to talking about what it represented. It turns out they are both part of Jason Miller’s Strategic Sorcery class, and had opted into his Sorcery of Hekate class. The Skeleton Key was a symbol of their particular Workings at the moment, and I was like, cool, neat.

But then they started talking about what it was they were experiencing, mutually, in their relationship with Hekate. It wasn’t long before the hairs on my arms were standing up, and I felt this harmonic resonance between the two of them. It was pretty incredible.

Both these guys are on top of their games, socially, economically, and spiritually. They know what they want, and how to get it. They aren’t afraid of doing the magic that it takes to change the world as they see fit. When you run into magicians/sorcerors/whatever who are actively doing the lines of reality-shifting that we do, you recognize it, and it resonates.

And they seem to have found a key to opening things in this Hekate system Jason’s pulled together.

Jason talks more about it in his blog posts, and even more about it in the Strategic Sorcery group. In short, his Work with Hekate over the years has resulted in the development of a seriously potent system of working with the powers that manifest and maintain the material and spiritual worlds we work with. It’s got elements of Goetia (in the Chthonic sense), but also taps into the psycho-pompic aspects of this Goddess, and her influences at the crossroads.

Man, honestly, I can’t even represent it well enough.

But Jason’s just offered the course publicly again, after a long period of capping it for further development. It’s a great time to get into the current, adopt, adapt, and implement a modern system of underworld/overworld interaction that creates a thing that you want to create.

And it’s friggin’ potent. Sitting across the table from these guys when they were talking about it, I felt wave after wave of power radiating from them that “spoke” to me at some deep levels. I couldn’t wait to let y’all know what’s up with this stuff.

So here’s the link with full information and the way to join:

This is not your average magick 101 bullshit. This is the next level stuff that people who have done the boot camp, seen the front lines, risen through the ranks, and taken command of their own troops should be working with.

Power, prestige, and potency.

Ahhhhhh, so once again that angelic genius Sef Salem has managed to balance his work/life/reason-for-incarnating, and has put together yet another amazing opportunity to interact with some of the best minds Europe has to offer on subjects of occult interest and Applied Hermetics! The Visible College is hard at work.

The schedule this year includes:

Saturday’s Programme:

• Elaine Bailey – The Isis Revival (Lecture) and the Golden Dawn (Workshop)
• Dr Liz Williams – The Hellfire Club (Lecture)
• Damh the Bard – Worldwide Druidry (Lecture) and Bardic Set
• Matthew Levi-Stevens – Strange Gods for the New Age (Lecture)
• Siany DragonOak – Modern Witchcraft for Busy People (Workshop)
• Sef Salem – Summoning Angels (Workshop)

Sunday’s Programme:

• Taster workshops from local practitioners
• Cavan McLaughlin – Open-Source Occultism
• Emma Doeve – Babalon: Where is She Now?
• Jake Stratton-Kent – Goetia Renewed
• Julian Vayne – Future Magicks

This morning I awoke to a concerned message from a long-time friend and mentor about the ongoing roast of me and everything I do or say on the internet on a tumblr site. I was like, no, no worries, it’s fine, and went on with my day.

So with the third time being the proverbial charm, I’ll go ahead and address it:

Julio has spent a lot of time making fun of me on the internet lately.

GASP! 

But … 

So what? 

I’ve seen his posts, and they’re funny. I get where he’s coming from. That shit I said about the Kybalion would have set me off in 2006:

Rufus Opus: “The Kybalion is a, you know 19th century, early 20th century distillation of, you know, 12000 years of emanationist evolution of thought, you know, belief systems.  It’s come down to us from, you know, the Chaldeans, you have, eh, uuh, the Persians. It’s a very ancient system”

See this Link for original.

I would have posted blog posts about it, with cussing and swearing and mockery galore. I hated the Kybalion with a passion for a ton of reasons that were totally valid to me at the time. 

Then I went through the Seven Spheres, reclaimed my race and value per Pymander, accomplished the Great Work, created the Philosopher’s Stone (and he makes fun of me for saying that too, and that’s also ok), and now I regularly provide the Panacea to the sick, the old, and I bring healing to the world.

Like in the deal.

And my opinion has changed, and it’s informed by some other stuff these days. And maybe I’ll get around to explaining that when I have time, if I feel like it.

So I get where he’s coming from. I’d have made fun of me too, back in the day, and you know what? 

It worked. 99% of my readers reading this are only reading it because I challenged and mocked almost all the well-known icons of the occult community at the time, and carved out a niche, and made a name for myself, and then in that niche I was able to offer courses, and conferences, and ebooks, and talismans, and I got published.

The “Challenge established authorities to get attention” schtick is exactly what I did to establish the very “Rufus Opus Brand” that I’m so pleased with today (and irritates people to acknowledge that’s what we do with this stuff). 

So how can I legit give him shit about this? 

And besides, he’s not wrong to challenge me on this shit. The things he’s mocking should probably be mocked. I’ve said some silly things over the years, and recently, and no one gets a pass on things just because they have a reputation or some silly brand they’ve worked towards establishing. 

Mostly his mockery is expressing a dogmatic traditionalist grimoire practitioner’s view towards the kind of living Hermetic tradition I practice, and it’s not new, folks. Traditionalist grimoire practitioners were telling me I’m wrong years before Julio could sign into Disney.com without his mom’s permission, and they had better arguments than snide gifs. 

Ahoy, me beauties!

The lovely and talented Harper Feist and your devilishly handsome, illuminated, (and not to mention modest) blog poster Rufus Opus will be appearing in Indianapolis on April 23, 2016!

That’s right, the Midwest Americans! We’re coming to your
town, we’re gonna party down, we’re an American Occult Specialist Team Focused Mostly on Hermetic Conjure, and Angels, but We have been Known to Do Demons and Bar Mitzvahs with enough notice!

Harper will be discussing the Art of Scrying that is essential to make any of this stuff we do work. Harper has an instinctual understanding of communion with the invisible world, and has developed a series of techniques that put her “in the zone” to be able to interact with the entities we call into our crystals. She’ll be discussing methods of moving out of the way, the cultivation of an internal emptiness, and the premise that the entire human body is a sensory device that the spirit world will use to commune with you, if you’re paying attention.

I’m going to be talking about the traditional Hermetic cosmology, the role of the Seven Planetary Spheres, and about the intent of my book to transform its users into fully activated and actualized human beings, with all the divinity that comes along with that.

After, we’ll create some talismans, and conjure the spirit of the hour and day to consecrate them, to strengthen our foundations, to expand our borders, and to reveal the hidden knowledge we need to better understand who we are, why we’re here, and how to get that thing done.

This event began its life as an invitation to discuss the book the local Indy OTO group, Anabasis Encampment, about the conjure book “Seven Spheres,” but it’s becoming kind of a thing. People are coming from Kentucky, Tennessee, New York, and Ohio so far for sure. Most of them have been friends of mine for years, and it’s totally not just an OTO event anymore.

It’s a party, bitches! I’d love to have as many people show up as possible, we don’t get out as often as we’d like to see the coolest of the cool.

When:

Saturday, April 23, 2016 E.V. at 10 AM – 4 PM EDT

Where:

Sacred Path
1818 W 57th St, Indianapolis, Indiana 46228

Full details can be found at this link:

https://www.facebook.com/events/1567534966870042/

Tickets are $25, and seating is relatively limited. I’ll be bringing copies of my book to sign as well. If you’re interested, send $25 to treasurer@anabasis-oto.org with a note explaining it’s for the HF-RO Seven Spheres event.