Blog

I may have taken a wrong turn a few years ago in my pursuit of the Great Work.

I had attained Knowledge and Conversation with my Holy Guardian Angel, and based on the Dehn and Mathers translations of that awesome manuscript of Abramelin’s legacy for his son, I figured the next most important thing to do after attaining K et C was to conjure up the demons of Hell and get them to serve me.

I figured the Lemegeton’s Goetia was as good of a list of Hell’s Minions as any other, so with conjuring all 72 in mind, I set out to master spirit conjure magic. Being a bit nervous about the whole “conjuring demons” thing, I started with the Archangels of the Planetary Spheres, and worked on getting the confidence and experience in spirit conjuration that I felt was necessary before diving into the fires of Hell. I think I took a good path for getting to Goety, all things considered.

But over the last month I’ve been working with some other magicians on an experiment involving planetary governors/intelligences/deities and the Mansions of the Moon. The things I’ve learned, though rudimentary at this stage, have completely and totally blown away all the things I’ve accomplished using the spirits of the Lem’s Goetia. I’ve seen potentials in the last 28 days that indicate the whole “sub-lunar spirits” thing was a red herring, a needless exercise that has been interesting, useful for some situations, but ultimately not the best method available to accomplish the goals of Hermetic Magic.

How did this happen? I mean, honestly, in all humility, I’m a pretty bright guy. Especially at this magic thing. I’ve got a calling on me, a geas if you will. I’m downright doomed (see definition 1). I read through the Emerald Tablet, the Abramelin Rite, and the Lemegeton’s Goetia, and I mixed them all together to come up with a system that let the magician accomplish everything on the Emerald Tablet in three easy steps:

1. Attain the Supernatural Assistant
2. Get initiated into the Seven Planetary Spheres
3. Start conjuring the demons and putting them to work creating the universe as you see fit

See? You rise to the heavens, you return to Earth in Power, and thus is the world created. I figured it had to be right, because the first thing you do in the Abramelin Rite after attaining Knowledge and Conversation is to conjure up the Four Kings of Hell and their minions. Makes sense, right?

Except for one little problem. See, Abraham the Jew gave his son Lamech the Abramelin ritual because he couldn’t give him the KBL.

That’s pretty obvious to anyone who reads the manuscript, but I never stopped to think about what it means. It means the “Sacred Magic” of Abramelin was the second best method of using the mysteries of the universe and God’s revelation/emanation to get ahead in life. The Sacred Magic of Abramelin is like a hammer and saw and a pile of nails. You gather the wood you need, and you can throw up a tree house or a deck, or whatever you might need that you can pound out in a couple of afternoons.

The more you do it, the better the results will be, and over time you’ll be a first-rate carpenter. And there’s nothing wrong with that. There are awesome things that carpenters can build. One of my favorite guys in all of history was raised by a carpenter, in fact. Carpentry is pretty frickin’ awesome, when you think about it. It’s relatively easy, relatively inexpensive, and the better you get, the more super-sweet things you can do with it. It’s always been a dream of mine to have a wood-working shop with everything I need to make inlaid exotic wood crafts that are functional and beautiful.

Working with the Lem’s Goetia spirits appealed to my Taurean pragmatism. It was relatively simple, and super effective. Sure, you never seem to end up with exactly what you want, but you always get exactly what you ask for. Is there a better magic for a pragmatist with a core philosophy of “The end justifies the means?”

But the Great Work of the Emerald Tablet and the Corpus Hermeticum isn’t carpentry. It’s architecture. You aren’t building a treehouse, or a garage, or a set of fine cabinets, you’re building the Ideal City.

It’s not a back-yard gazebo.

In the Divine Pymander, the process of accomplishing the Great Work is laid out pretty clearly. You ascend through the Heavens on your way to reclaiming your divine race and eternal value. Along the way, you gain initiations, integrate powers, learn to fit in with the Divine Plan, and you leave behind the attitudes and habits of the material realm that keep you from fully being that which you secretly, occult-ly already are.

Then, apparently, you get to the good stuff. You start learning things from the spirits that are beyond the things of this world. You know how with the Angels and Spirits of the Planets, you learn the herbs and stones and animal parts and plant parts to include in what amount to mojo bags? And how you learn to make talismans according to the astrological timing and all that? It’s awesome, truly cool to be able to make magical things. It’s an essential part of the Work, imo. It gives you a complete tool set to do stuff with stuff to make stuff happen.

But when you get to the Eighth Sphere, my God, it’s a whole new ball game! The Hymns of Silence are exactly that. In the rituals and rites of the Seven Planetary spheres and the lower realms, you speak and commune and direct, you mix and mingle and create talismans and tools and things. But in the Eighth, you intend and things happen. I’ve learned there are forces released when you make a physical movement with a specific intent empowered by teachings from certain spirits at certain times, and the world just bends a little bit.

And you’re always singing, but without words, without melody, without harmony, but you’re in perfect harmony at the same time. You’re doing it right now, in fact. It’s what is meant by Willing a thing to Be.

There are no limits to the extent of what can be accomplished, I believe. All the super mystical powers of the adepts that seem so cool are right there, just waiting to be tapped. It’s an awareness shift, sort of, but at the same time it’s an initiation, and also a ritual, in a way.

But it takes a fuckload of practice, training, and more practice, and attunement, and more practice, and did I mention practice? But it’s not practice like conjuring spirits is practice. I had a dream, learned a technique, and applied it consistently from the morning I woke to this very day. It didn’t take long, but it’s a lot like learning to wiggle your ears or arch one eyebrow when you don’t have the genetic predisposition for such things. To unlock the rest, I need time, and peace, and patience. I need both feet on the ground.

And the thing is, it’s all right there in the Divine Pymander. The Goety doesn’t get mentioned. The Hermetic path has room for Goety, and frankly it’s a damned useful set of tools to have in a pinch. But I don’t think we’re in the pinches we think we’re in as often as we think we are.We don’t need Goety.

I think the Supernatural Assistant or Holy Guardian Angel is still a vital part of a Hermetic Magician’s arsenal. It makes a way through to spirits that are essential to your attainment. It’s the Silver Key, the Gate, and the Lock that keeps the eldritch nasties we run into in the Work at bay. In that sense, the Abramelin rite is not a wrong at all. There is nothing whatsoever useless in attaining knowledge and conversation, I still firmly believe it’s a necessary step.

But the demons of hell… they’re a useful set of tools, and as Solomon demonstrated, they can be worked with to accomplish Holy Goals and Ambitions. But there are other methods that don’t have the bite that comes with the demons of hell. I’m torn now, frankly because Goety is addictive. It’s almost instantly gratifying, and is totally fun to do. But I’ve also learned you never get exactly what you want or need, even when you get exactly what you ask for. It’s really powerful for affecting manifest reality in majorly awesome ways… but it hurts.

There’s a story of this guy who picked up a kid hitchiking home from the local fishing hole. The kid had a ton of fish, huge bass and trout. He looked kind of tired and pale, so the guy offered him a ride. He asked the kid his secret for catching all those fish, and the kid said the trick was some special fat worms he found. They bit, he said, but he’d found a nest of them and kept going back to get more after he started landing the big fish. They were little and had a funny tail. The fish couldn’t get enough of them.

It turned out the kid had been using baby rattlesnakes to catch fish. Every time he grabbed one, he got bit, and the poison slowly accumulated in his body. In the story, the kid dies in the pickup with the biggest haul of fish he’d ever caught.

I don’t think Abraham would have left his son something as bad as a pit of baby rattlers, but I no longer think the Lemegeton’s spirits are the best option for Hermetic Magicians, no matter how big the fish you catch might be. Maybe if I’d stuck with the Demon Kings that were depicted in the Dehn translation, things would have gone better. I don’t know.

But the spirits of the Lem’s Goetia are still very useful, and maybe someone might figure out the trick to handling them without getting bit. I thought I had it, and I know my HGA kept the worst of the potential evils at bay, and my initiations into the spheres helped shield me a lot, but in spite of the hundreds of thousands of dollars I received, in spite of the exorcism skills I picked up, there was always something wrong in the manifestation that sucked away the results before I could put them to proper use.

And it could just be my poor money management skills, and laziness in general. I haven’t counted that out. And there’s never been an Ideal City built that didn’t need carpenters at some point in the process. So I’m not exactly sure whether Goety is a red herring after all. There’s too much benefit I’ve received to say the whole thing is a waste of time.

But I can tell you this: there is a better way.

My primary focus is still on moving, sorry for the continued hiatus. It’s amazing how many things can take so much longer than anticipated with this shit. Still, I’ve been extraordinarily lucky throughout the process, and I can’t thank God and his emanated spirits enough.

I got a report of the kinds of shit my HGA and other spirits I’ve been working with over the last few years have deflected over the last week, and it’s incredible.Some day I’m going to write a book on the most powerful “blood magic” available to Christian magicians that will explain the empowerment of the ultimate defensive sphere that requires no upkeep and runs on pure Love of God. It will go over like a lead balloon among certain circles, I’m sure, but it is what it is, and it is wonder-full.

Back to work for me! Continue the work in my absence, I’m telling you, no matter what physical or spiritual forces we fight against consciously or unconsciously, every conjuration you do today will continue to pay you back in the years to come! Spirits you think of as a knock-off, one time conjuration for info only will be there to protect your ass when you don’t even know what they’re up to when you need them the most. Every ritual you do is valuable, useful, and has life-long influence that ripples outward through time and space to be exactly what you need, exactly when you need it. Eventually.

Kenaz wrote an interesting post about the nature of humanity and deity that got me thinking. The Pagan sphere of occultists face a lot of weird issues that I, as a Hermetic-Christian magician do not have to wrestle with. Plato, Plotinus, Iamblichus, and Dionysius the Areopagite laid out the framework of a celestial hierarchy that I use in my regular practices. Between this framework and a couple thousand years of theological debate on the role of Man and God within the Christian realms, I don’t have to struggle much with whether I’m a God or co-creator or whatever.

But for those who might be struggling with where things all fit, I’ll lay out my understanding of the roles, and maybe that will help you figure out where you’re at in the grand scheme of the cosmos.

At the top of the food chain is the Source of all things, the guy I refer to as “God the First Father.” I know there’s no gender, but I’m more comfortable with the masculine pronouns. It’s easier than being politically correct, and if you want to call it a her, go for it, I don’t think she cares since it’s as wrong to call it a her as it is to call it a him, or even an it.

Below God is the LOGOS, who is also God. In the beginning was the LOGOS, and the LOGOS was with God, and the LOGOS was God. Being the first emanation of God, it’s still slightly lower than the First Father.

Below the LOGOS are the gods. In Hermetics, these are the 7 Planetary Governors. It’s no coincidence that the names of the planets are the names of the gods. Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Helios/Apollo, Venus, Mercury, and the Moon. Many pagans had different goddesses for each phase of the moon, but still. In a recent article on JWMT, Nick Farrell postulates that the 7 Olympic Spirits of the Arbatel are the gods. The Gods. Interesting take on things indeed. I personally Work with the Planetary Governors in the forms of the Archangels or Intelligences of the Planetary Spheres, but Hermetically, this is where the gods fall in the hierarchy. All the brothers and sisters of the gods who don’t get planets would also fall into this level, since they’re kin.

Below the gods are their servants. Iamblichus refers to these as the Angels, or messengers of the gods. In the grimoires we see each spirit having legions at their command, and each of the gods in the classical pantheons had daimon-servants who worked for them.

Next in the general hierarchy comes the Elemental spirits, the Genii Loci, and the various nature spirits we run into in our magical travels. Some of these spirits fall under specific gods, others are more like us, free to do what they will within their sphere of influence without really answering to anyone.

Human beings are on a different track. We’re made in the image of the First Father, and because of this, all the other spirits love us and work with us. We were created, I believe, to appreciate the Works of the First Father, and to continue these Works, functioning as his hands and feet within the material realm. There’s nothing in any Hermetic texts to make me think this is true, but I still believe it. It just seems right.

We spend most of our lives unaware of our Divine Race. We forgot that we were created in God’s image, and that we have the authority and power to create the world, and we spend most of our time in a stupor, pushed here and there by the winds of fate. The goal of the Great Work is to remember and reclaim our eternal nature, and to behave as if we were God’s Image on Earth. It ain’t easy.

Iamblichus teaches that there are Gods, Angels, Heroes, and Men. The Heroes are usually those like Heracles who were born of the union of a god and a mortal, but they are also the humans who, through theurgical magic, reclaim their divine nature and become half-divine, half-mortal within a lifetime.

In the Corpus Hermeticum, we also learn that humans can become “Powers,” leaving behind the mean nature and becoming like an angel or even a god after they die.

Each class of being is an emanation of God the First Father. We’re all related, all in the same family, and the ties that bind us together into a cohesive whole are stronger than anything we can begin to imagine in the flesh. In one sense, “Thou art God” is totally and awesomely true, while in another sense it’s hubris to think such things. While we are all aspects of God, we are not all gods or goddesses, any more than we are all angels. We are lower manifestations of a higher power, and I believe we need to be respectful of our brothers and sisters and cousins in the divine family when we work together with them in creating and maintaining the world.

Regarding the oil spill in the Gulf:

“Now that we know how to fix it… Drill Baby Drill!”

Aww yeah, gonna be pumpin’ out teh powers, makin’ me some cash off BGE for a change, and Ima be chargin’ them outrageous. Of course by then they’ll be regulating what citizens can charge corporations. Fuckers.

But yeah, as soon as they start selling them to residential homes Ima be all over that.

Don’t curse BP, they’re the only ones who can afford to do anything right now. Wait til AFTER they fix the leak, yo.

EDIT: And wait even after that. Cause there’s too much shit going down, as Ron points out.

I believe this article is best appreciated if read while listening to this song. (NSFW)

Change we can believe in… depending on how we define “change” and/or “believe.”

I’m in the process of moving back into my house, so the next couple of weeks may see fewer posts. Rest assured any hiatus will be temporary.

Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve been working with some fellow magi on an interesting project that is a long way from being publishable, but it’s definitely had some cool effects that have got my creative juices flowing.

After I get settled in, I will be resuming the Red Work series of courses. Based on recent experiences and revelations, some aspects of the overall course will be updated. It’s coming together nicely, and I believe I’ll be able to provide a simple and effective framework to accomplish the aims of the original Hermeticists as laid out in the Corpus Hermeticum.

I’m very excited about the prospects. I expect the Red Work series to provide communion with the Supernatural Assistant, Theurgical and Practical Work through the Four Elemental Spheres and the Seven Planetary Spheres, Access to and Integration of the Eighth Sphere, as well as a Goety aspect, which I may tone way down based on the evidence of current research. A lot depends on the outcome of the project I’m working on. If things continue the way they have been going, the whole Demon-conjure thing may be completely and totally a red herring, unnecessary to the accomplishment of the process depicted in the Emerald Tablet.

But Goety still provides a useful set of tools that are an aid to the magician while s/he masters the practical implications of the Eighth. Assuming they turn out to be more of what I’ve seen so far, that is.

As you cans see, things aren’t coalesced enough to talk about publicly. There’s too much “swirl,” and not enough data to reach an informed conclusion. But there’s more to come!

Aaron Leitch posted a neat link to an article at the Solomonic yahoo group today. He was excited about the book bindings that are illustrated, and rightly so. They are truly beautiful. Take a look here:

http://www.maybelogic.org/maybequarterly/06/0609RoyalBookbinding.htm.

What I found most interesting is in the interview with the creator of these beautiful works of art and magick. Specifically, the book binder is speaking about an earlier project called the Guardian Angel Grimoire, which he created for his partner Margaret:

The Guardian Angel Grimoire came about as the result of the problems my life partner Margaret was facing. I made the Grimoire as a Xmas present for her, I drew upon the knowledge I had put away 20 years ago and it all seemed to come back as if it never went away. The interior of the book starts with the Enochian Tree of Life, followed by the Major Arcana of the Tarot, followed by the Pre-Raphalite paintings (Morgan LeFay, the seduction of Merlin etc) ending with 14th-19th century magical symbols, with an 8pp section inserted within each illustration to write whatever.

The strange thing is, everything Margaret has written in the Grimoire has happened in one form or another. She has been offered many, many thousands of pounds for it, but now she will never part with it.

How cool is that? How many times would you have used a Magick Book to manifest things if all you had to do was write out what you wanted to happen in the pages?

I’m telling you, I’ve had this in mind for years. Ever since I read Crowley’s interpretation of the elemental weapons of a Magus in the Book of Toth as the implements of a writer. The quill knife, the ink well, the quill and the page. Beautiful representation of the Work of Materialization, in my opinion. In my chaos days, I attempted to create such an item, and failed MISERABLY. The results were pathetic, as usual.

However, I think this guy Paul has hit upon the method here, and I’ve got a theory to explain it, based on my own experiences with my Altar and the Glyph I go on about from time to time.

I’m able to manifest things in my sphere of sensation simply by placing a symbolic representation of what I want on my altar in the Table of Practice. The Table of Practice on my altar represents all the forces of creation and the managing intelligences and spirits that control the processes of manifestation. Articulating what I want symbolically is like planting the seed in the aethyrs and letting it grow.

Paul has done the same thing in his creation of the Guardian Angel Grimoire above. He’s got the structure of existence and all the powers and principalities that manage it represented in the Tree of Life, the pathways of manifestation presented in the Tarot imagery, and specific images that tie his life partner to the grimoire. He’s also got the seals of various entities included with pages for writing at various stages through the work.

It’s a beautiful piece of craftsmanship on many levels.

As soon as his partner writes something in the pages, the spirits associated with their seals set to work to manifest whatever is written. Simple, direct, and aestheticlaly pleasing. There’s not much more that one could wish for.

It reminds me of something Susanne Illes is working on with her Table of Practice. (Check out her blog for some really excellent art work: http://www.bone-singer.blogspot.c