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Heh, I love Gnostic Conjure. Today he’s got a post on Frenemies. And it uses GUNPOWDER!

I love using gunpowder in my magical rites. I miss Goetia because I had a lot of opportunities to use it with those spirits in particular. Bune loved it in his spirit pot, and there’s something about the smell of just-burned gunpowder that reminds you of hell.

Do I need to point out that it’s dangerous, extreme caution must be used, a (very very) little goes a really long way, and don’t be stupid? Probably. So pretend I did.

I like the way he suggests you use it, with the candle igniting the little charge. I’m absolutely positive someone somewhere is going to use too much, ignoring his emphasis on a tiny little pinch, and it’s going to blow the candle, shards of shattered jar, and molasses all over the room.

And I feel really bad for that person, for sure.

So where do you get gunpowder, you ask? WalMart, of course! In the sporting goods section, because how can it be a sport without gunpowder? At least, that’s where I got mine last time I bought it. And it’s not really gunpowder, it’s flash powder for black powder guns. But it works. In college, an acquaintance invited me out to a quarry to blow up some pipe bombs he’d made from the stuff, and a good time was had by all.

My local occult and Wiccan supply shop would never sell gunpowder. They do, however, sell both sulfur and salt peter in small amounts, which combined in proper proportions with powdered charcoal (plain old Kingsford, not match light, not self-igniting-incense coals) makes gunpowder. I’m not giving out the exact proportions, but it wouldn’t take long to find it on the internet.

As an ingredient, it’s best used when you want some explosive results. If you’re going to put it into a spirit pot, use a very, very small amount, and make sure it’s mixed in well with the soil so it doesn’t explode when your house catches on fire.

Kammael’s influence should be included with this ingredient because he’s the Archangel of Mars, and it’s important to have some intelligence involved when you’re doing magic with gunpowder. I mean, obviously the intelligence isn’t coming from the magician, eh? You’re playing with explosives for Christ’s sake! Not frickin’ smart!

But fun.

Trace the seal of Kammael over the powder when you’ve made it. Only make what you need for the rite. Do not store the left overs. Do not dispose of the leftovers by tossing it on the charcoal briquette just to hear it sizzle and pop. Do not pack it in PVC pipes and toss them on the Samhain bonfire when no one’s looking, and then start screaming, “It’s SATAN, I knew it!!!” when it blows up.

If there are any leftovers, mix it up (gently) with dirt or its equal weight in more carbon, and then sprinkle it finely in your garden, plants, or in the grass. Plants like potassium nitrates and sulfur and carbon.

So I was thinking about how enlightened I am today. Not totally, I have some issues, a ways to go for a while yet, but I’ve made some decent strides, accomplished a lot, and picked up a few tricks.

So I figured I’d try levitating. You know. Because I’d like to fly.

So I stood up from my chair at the desk here at work, flexed a muscle in my lower-right abdomen I didn’t know I had, and kept right on going up. I was freakin’ thrilled, loving it, I was totally flying, in the office, not even Jesus had done that, and I looked down and saw my body falling back into the chair, and as my butt hit the seat, my consciousness slammed back into the flesh. Seems I popped out through the crown chakra thing and left the meat suit behind.

Sigh. I’m kind of getting sick of the “needs spiritual sight to see how cool I am” aspect of this enlightenment thing. I get it, I understand it’s like this for a reason, but why can’t I be exempt from the rules?

Probably because I’d master invisibility and rob a bank, and then fly away with the loot.

Just guessing.

Not quite as enlightened as I’d like to think.

And have mostly already registered. Well done!

If you haven’t registered, it only takes a minute.

Oh, and I was wrong yesterday, my readers are roughly spread out across the political spectrum pretty evenly. That’s good to know. Apparently Magic is something we can all come together on, setting aside political differences and focusing on the Work. Good show!

Ok, so three of you fine readers have gone through my voter registration button. That’s right, I’m keeping tabs on you. Three people so far care enough to vote this election. Now, judging by the comments, most of you readers are commie pinko liberals. I am a sane and rational capitalist conservative. And you read my blog anyway! Ha!

Scribbler is a good friend, blogging companion, and fellow graduate of a series of personal and empowering Lunar Mansion initiations that have left us brothers in a very small spiritual family.

He also regularly gets my jokes, and I would love him for that alone if nothing else.

Today’s post is awesome. The last couple of my posts (the more-serious ones, not the smartass ones) have been about finding the freedom to choose what to give a shit about, without getting stuck in the giving a shit process. As usual, Scrib lives out the things I try to write about without even thinking there’s anything special about it.

Last week I cooked “Fauxganoff,” my own creation consisting of egg noodles, browned ground beef, salt-pepper-garlic, concentrated cream of mushroom soup and sour cream. It’s a family favorite and a lot of fun to say. “Whatcha doin?” “Fauxganoff.”

But while cooking it I started to realize some things about the Planetary attributes of the ingredients, and how the recipe was very much a ritual, and the results among my family were right what you’d expect from a Saturn-Lunar rite with egg noodles. The magic of cooking was right up in my face, and today Scrib’s taken it to another level. Satori while cooking is, apparently, pretty common. And his analysis of magical tools, the part of ritual played by cellular consciousness of the implements used in traditional magic is pretty awesome.

And he mentioned something about the blogosphere that sums up my own experiences too. Good stuff. So go read it. It’s time well spent.

With a title like that, you know it’s got to be a good blog post. Uh. Right? Um. We’ll see.

So, Wicklow2012 comments thus on the Sorting things out post:

When you say that “it all ends” do you mean for the spiritual realms as well as the temporal? I had always supposed that there would be change and flux in realms beyond the material (as above so below) but I never pictured an absolute end to them, it’s a rather daunting idea really (for me at least). If you wouldn’t mind I’d love to hear more along this line. My personal death I accept (what else can I do?) but the ultimate void for absolutely all things, I admit that would be the most unkindest cut of all. 

Well, the last sentence has me a bit concerned, but nevertheless, I’m going to carry on and explain my thoughts and perspectives, and hope that everyone can see that it’s not really all that unkind or cutting.

I do indeed mean “it all ends.” The spiritual realms, the planetary spheres, the angels and demons, their homes, everything. Life as we know it from a temporal and eternal stance, everything we have documented from our dreams and visions, everything we’ve learned and experienced: it all ends.

As a Christian Magician, I see the end of all things foretold all through the Bible. Isaiah talks about the heavens being rolled up “as a scroll,” Peter talks about it in his epistle, and it pops up in Revelations as well. In the end, everything goes away, and even Jesus gives up his crown and returns to the Source, and God is All in All. When it’s all said and done, all that will be is the Source.

What happens to us? Well, first let’s remember the Hermetic lessons of Who we are. We are manifestations of God, emanations of his essence that exist to enjoy existence. As Crowley put it, we are “but an EYE, and what eye, none knoweth.” We are observers and participants. We are made in the image of God, and we are creators who manifest things through Words, just like God. We speak things into being, taking the invisible Ideas and giving them form that can be communicated and manifest. We are little drops of God, the microcosm of his macrocosm.

As a drop returns to the oceans that spawned it, we too shall return to God. “Self awareness” will fade, and we will remember who we have been all along. We shall not cease to exist in essence, but we will cease to exist as separate individuals. What comes next, we don’t know. But we have some clues.

In Revelations, we get a New Heaven, and a New Earth, only this time without the ocean. We know that god is essentially unchanging. He created everything we experience at least once (the Bible hints that there was another phase of existence pre-Genesis; the waters over which the spirit of God hovered had to come from somewhere, and we know he’s fond of ending phases of existence in floods). There’s no reason to believe he won’t do it again.

We also know that things progress. Life evolves, we grow spiritually, we progress through stages of initiation and understanding. I personally believe we’ll do it all again, only at a higher frequency.

Now, these thoughts are all based on my limited experience. I can only barely remember what’s happened to me in this life, and my memories of previous incarnations are less than perfect. I’ve always existed, to my conscious memory, within the matrix of time and space. Remove time as a factor, and everything happens at once. Remove space, and there’s no room for separate existence. There is only all-knowing, all-being. Where we go from there is pure speculation.

Fundamentally though, I don’t think anything will change. We’re already God, we just forgot while we were playing around in the park. I think God manifested as us and everything else because that’s what we wanted to do, collectively, as a whole, and we had the power and knowledge to do so. I think it’s mostly fun, even though there’s also the suck factor.

The most important thing to keep in mind though, imo, is that while everything ends eventually, and we don’t really know what happens after that, it doesn’t really matter much as far as we are concerned individually. Regardless of anything that comes after, we still get to live out every moment we have between now and whatever end cometh. Everything ends, but until then, life is what we make of it, given what we have to work with. The sky’s the limit, as they say.

So in the final analysis, I don’t take things that happen in one lifetime too seriously because it’s all going to end anyway. I also don’t take the end too seriously because we know for sure that what we get is what we have, and it’s all for us as long as it lasts. This balancing act results in freedom. Freedom from the temporary pain and drama, and freedom to create my world as I see fit. It provides the thing Anton Ego was looking for in Ratatouille, that most rare and hard to come by item that puts all things into proper context: Perspective. I can’t always choose what happens, but I can always choose what I’m going to do with what comes.

At a friend’s request, I’ve added a Rock the Vote widget to the blog. This tool lets you register to vote. With all the shit going on in the world today, politics matters. Do your part to change the world. Register to vote.

Henry Jenkins had a bit of built up tension in his life. His masseuse noticed it and commented that he needed to find a way to relax, and she suggested meditation and spiritual pursuits she found personally helpful. He grunted noncommittally and she sighed and got back to work on the deep tissues, wondering why she even bothered with her wealthier clients. It’s not like anyone with that much money had any interest in spirituality.

Of course, she was wrong. Henry Jenkins had spent a much higher percentage of his lifetime studying and applying spiritual teachings from around the world than she could in twenty years, even if she became a cloistered nun tomorrow. His material success was due to the practical application of several simple spiritual principles, in fact. “Leveraging relationships in high places,” he liked to call it when he was in good company.

Of course, for most of his life, being in “good company” meant being very nearly completely alone.  It was a regrettable state of affairs Henry Jenkins had spent years trying to correct. At last his plans were nearing fruition, and he could finally begin raising the spiritual awareness of most of the population on Earth simultaneously, bringing them closer to Enlightenment as a whole, and kicking off a golden age of  wisdom, beauty and peace that hadn’t been seen since the days of Atlantis. If he remembered right.

Just as soon as he killed the last three assholes on his list.

Gregory Hills. Gregory was a pastor’s son who had once given Henry very bad advice. Alcohol and prescription drugs were involved, and the near complete annihilation of a complete spiritual ecosystem. Women and children had been deeply scarred from that experience, and it had taken Henry years to treat and heal those scars Gregory had left. Gregory must die.

Travis Thompson. Travis was a gifted and talented young man with a bright and shining future ahead of him. He was in the Future Business Leaders of America, Advanced Placement courses in English, Math, and Science. In the 9th grade, he could solve complicated calculus equations simply by looking at them, though he had not yet figured out how to show the work explaining his solutions with those who couldn’t keep up. He even excelled in art, with a gallery in the nicer side of town already having sold a piece of his work when he was still 15. Then his parents divorced, and things … changed. By his senior year, he was on his last strike before being permanently expelled. He was well known as a drug dealer, and he regularly beat up other students, and stole almost everything that wasn’t nailed down. He had threatened to stab a teacher, and one day had the bad judgment to hold a drill with a large bit to the arm of Henry Jenkins in a Technical Theater class. Henry had seen the drill was unplugged and had registered no fear as he gazed into Travis’ eyes without flinching, and Travis, still slightly in multiple realms from a recent mushroom excursion, caught a glimpse of something truly vast in the depths of Henry’s soul. Letting him go, he said, “You’re psychotic” with a touch of awe in his voice. Yes, Travis Thompson had seen too much. Travis also must die.

Theresa Von Shwaartzenhymen. Theresa was a blond lady driving a small red car who made the poor choice of cutting off Henry Jenkins in traffic, and then flipping him the bird. Perhaps the biggest obstacle to his plans for global enlightenment, Henry didn’t even know her real name, and strongly suspected he had forgotten the make and model of the car entirely. He had several spiritual agencies searching for her, but to date had come up with nothing solid.

Perhaps it was latent frustration over this seemingly insurmountable obstacle his masseuse was feeling in his shoulders. He promised himself not to fall into the trap of forgetting who he was and why he was here, and he felt the deep tensions begin to break up and disappear. When he left, he gave the masseuse a large tip, and wrote, “Samsara: Profitable in proper proportions.” on the back of her invoice. The obscure cuneiform script he chose made her curious in passing, but thoughts of any hidden meaning were pushed aside when her next customer came in, still sweating from a long day at Wimbledon.

“Still not ready to retire yet, Mr. Agassi?” she asked with a smile. “Let’s see what we can do for you before you get too stiff.”