Rufus Opus

Tag: RO’s Musings

Tag: RO’s Musings

  • The Magick Book

    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.com/)

    Well, anyway, it’s something to work on in our spare time. We aren’t all Master Book Binders, but finding journals of blank bound paper is a lot easier than it used to be. Get yourself one, and start putting together your own materializer. You’ll need some representation of the cosmos (like the Ptolemaic System: http://tinyurl.com/ys6ym2). You can draw it yourself or print it up and paste it in, coloring it appropriately.

    Then you’ll need the servants. There’s 72 Shem Angels, a few hundred Ophanim and Enochian angels, or Seven Planetary Intelligences and their legions of Spirits. Plenty of systems to put your servants together from. The Goetia springs to mind. Maybe have a page for each Spirit and a few pages afterwards dedicated to that spirit. If you’re going to do something like that, make sure to include all the other seals and such.

    While we can’t all emboss hand-tanned leather covers with gold gilt lettering for our works, we can all create wooden bindings out of shingles engraved or wood-burned with the appropriate symbols and seals.The key to success is creative ingenuity. I think I’ll put together my own Magick Book of Manifestation this weekend, a little materialization engine that I can just write things in and have them happen.

    I’ll need a lot of pages for whichever spirit I find that makes mountains of gold coins appear at will.

    Keep it simple!

    -R.O.

  • Meditation on a Spark

    I was thinking about rising through the Spheres of the Planets tonight, and the image of a spark came to mind.

    You know, bonfires, they shoot out sparks. The sparks rise up high into heavens before they burn out. A little tiny ash floats back down to the earth. Every bit of it that could burn is consumed.

    So we’ve got seven planetary heavens, right? And under the lowest, the Lunar sphere, hanging off the lowest edge of heaven is the Elemental sphere of Fire, the highest and purest form of matter. Below that is Air, and below that Water. At the bottom is good old solid Earth, the most material of material realms.

    And here’s this spark. It’s sunshine and minerals from the earth consumed in the release of all that energy it absorbed while it was alive. As it goes through its final transformation, it shoots up through the aethers aiming for heaven, using the heat of its own combustion to get higher, and leaving behind a husk of itself to drift back down to earth, empty of all the power and effort that went into creating it in the first place.

    So, neat stuff. I don’t like ham handed mataphors, but I do seem to have a habit of using them myself.

  • “Raising Energy”

    In the Neo-Platonic tradition, in the grimoires that comprise it, in the writings of Hermes Trismegistus that frame it, and in the writings of Agrippa that provide the most comprehensive resource of the modern occult, there are mentions of demons, maleficent spirits that cause trouble. I would personally rather believe that all spirits are basically neutral, and they don’t have any ill will in and of themselves towards humanity. Unfortunately, the Neo-Platonic writings (and my experience) fail to support this belief.

    Going back thousands of years, mankind has known that there are spirits that are out to make life miserable for humans. It’s in the Bible, the Hesiod, and in the African Traditional Religions. From the steppes of Siberia to the Amazon rain forest, shamans deal with evil spirits every day. Modern cultures have lots of rational ways to explain away the existence of demons, from anti-Christian rhetoric that says the Church is to blame for misrepresenting gods of other cultures (which is true, to a degree), to psychological models that say they’re all in our heads (which is also true, from the perspective implied by the notariqon ARARITA). Regardless of the veracity of these explanations, the pragmatic truth is that if you are doing magick regularly, you will run into spirits that will behave as if they are Demons.

    2.6.1 The Role of Demons

    Fortunately, we have the benefit of thousands of years of occult research on our side. We know from sources like the Bible and the Divine Pymander that the evil spirits are under the authority of God. If you’re into paganism, you’ll find in the story of Pandora’s box that evil spirits contained in a divine spirit pot were sent to plague mankind by Zeus after Prometheus gave us fire. They’re serving god. In the Divine Pymander, Pymander tells Hermes that the Evil Daimon is sent to the impious to drive man further away from the Logos by filling the senses with desire for more sensations than can ever be appeased. In the Bible, evil spirits are sent to set up kings to fall, to reveal the glory of God.

    They are sent by God into the world to wreak havoc in the lives of those who are ignorant of God. Their primary victims are those who have grown ignorant of their Race and Value in God and instead of seeking their Source, people who seek satisfaction in the things of the material world. Demons serve as tempters, bringers of illness, and they serve to create situations that result in spiritual advancement. They perform evil acts, but they do them to draw people closer to God.

    2.6.2 How Demonic Influence Manifests

    In your life, you’re going through all kinds stress that I can’t begin to know about. Job insecurity, financial woes, emotional problems, and sickness plague us all. Most of the people reading this blog have it pretty good compared to poorest of the poor on the planet, but that doesn’t make the problems we face any easier to bear in the moment.

    I don’t believe every bad thing that happens is the result of a demon, but they do happen to be present every time bad things happen. I’m sure it’s a coincidence, really. They could just be attracted to bad things… sure… that could be it…

    Alright, I really do think all bad things that happen are the result of demonic activity. I’m a Christian, for Christ’s sake. “We wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against powers, principalities, and wickedness in high places.” It’s the simple truth.

    They set the stage for pain and suffering, they sit at the edges of our sphere whispering thoughts that sound a lot like our own, speaking fear and doubt and anger and anguish and despair into our minds. They entice our senses with lights and shining things. They use the people at work like pawns to challenge us, to bring us to the brink of catastrophe. They influence kings, presidents, princes, senators, congressmen and women, people in power across the lands of the earth to create a realm that will drive those with an understanding of their race and value closer and closer to the Logos within.

    Pretty nasty, really. And as annoying as hell.

    2.6.3 How to Deal with the Bastards

    Demons are under God’s authority. God’s within. We deal with spirits in every ritual. We have the names of the demonic princes from Agrippa’s Book 2, chapter 7. We know how to make talismans and spirit pots. They can only do what they’re allowed to, and God sets the boundaries.

    The fastest way to lessen the effects of the evil spirits is to put the Demonic Kings in spirit pots and bind them with melted lead sealed with the Names of the four Elemental Kings. I’ve got a makeshift version of this on my altar at the moment. It hasn’t completely eliminated bad things from happening, but it sure has cut down on the extremes of my emotional reactions to bad things when they come. That in itself robs the demons of their powers over us and our lives.

  • Ceremonial Redneck

    I just looked over at my altar, and it seems that some GENIUS ( … er, no, not the spirit kind, the really sarcastically human kind) needed to light a candle to Bune a month or so ago, and he didn’t have a candle holder. What did he use to put the candle in? His empty chewing tobacco can, of course!

    Sometimes I worry about myself.

    At least my Camaro is Cthulhu-green.

  • From the Sun to Saturn, and Back to the Sun

    I have a nemesis. Maybe that’s stretching it a bit, but there’s this guy on a couple of message boards that I belong to, and we tend to disagree. He’s an Aries, I’m a Taurus, and we fight. Many of the readers here who also read through the Yahoo occult groups will be familiar with this guy. His name is Logan.

    Anyone who has endured the misfortune of witnessing a “debate” between myself and Logan on any of the message boards we share deserves an apology. We can get boring, sarcastic, and we tend to use each other to demonstrate what we consider our own wit and brilliance. It usually lasts about as long as it takes for me to get disgusted and start calling him foul names. Every few months or so, I’ll forget why I can’t stand him, and enter into a conversation that rapidly becomes a debate, and then turns into a name-calling match. I’ve been better lately, but he still gets on my nerves.

    What bothers me most is that the smug self-righteous British bastard has helped me out a lot in my pursuit of the Grail, the Great Work. He helped me appreciate Plato, and destroyed my confidence in the GD Tree of Life by demonstrating its shaky foundations. This lead me to fully embrace the Neo-Platonic realm of Agrippa, and to understand something Patrick Dunn is always going on about regarding the arbitrariness of semiotic webs.

    So anyway, Logan told me months ago that I needed to read Eliphas Levi. He had quoted something about how Levi said “Magick is not a vocation” in response to my selling Conversation with the HGA through the conjuration of the Genius (See the Products and Services link at www.rufusopus.com). I have never read Levi, and with Logan as his sponsor in my current magical environment, I was set against it. Until earlier today.

    First off, Levi may have said Magick is not a vocation, but if he did (I haven’t gotten that far yet), he said it after saying the Magician is a Priest and King. Both Priests and Kings collect Tithes and Taxes, so the whole argument against taking money for magickal services is undermined right there, wha-bam!

    Ok, that said, Levi is really good reading. The guy presents magick with no holds barred. He tells it like it is, presents the Great Work more impressively than anything I’ve seen in a long time (outside my own writing, of course). It’s WORK. It’s hard. It’s even “dangerous” in that if you give up after starting, you’ll be worse off than if you’d never started at all. Not that you can quit once you’ve begun anyway, but at least he tells you you’ll end up a Monarch or a Madman at the start. Good stuff.

    What inspired this particular blog post though was the following:

    “there is no point in infinite extension which may not be regarded as the centre of a circle having an expanding circumference receding indefinitely into space”
    (Page 6 at http://www.hermetic.com/browe-archive/pdf/DogmaEtRituel%20Part%201.pdf)

    Think about that for a moment. We are such points, beginning in our Work at the center of a circle with a somewhat fixed circumference. As we progress, we expand the circumference, becoming aware of all the things within the circumference of that circle, learning to integrate the “energies” of the things we find into our own spheres as the limits of our spheres expand. The limits of the spheres expand as the Light from the center of the sphere increases its radiation, exposing more of what can be found within the darkness at the edges of our sphere of awareness.

    In Crowley’s popular magickal system, we find the Holy Guardian Angel (HGA) in Tiphareth, the Sephira that corresponds to the Sphere of the Sun. When the magician establishes Knowledge and Conversation with their HGA, they undergo a Solar Initiation. The hidden corners of their personal sphere are exposed to the light, and the magician is forced to confront and deal with those parts of themselves they hide in the darkness. Each character flaw, each untamed passion, every sin or self-destructive tendency comes to the fore and must be corrected, tamed, repented from, or channeled into proactive directions with the help of your HGA. The Point gets enflamed with the Light of the Sun, and as the Sun reveals more, the boundaries of the sphere of the magician are expanded.

    Boundaries… yes, the realm of Saturn, the furthest planet observable by the naked eye. The first sphere of Form in the Kircher Tree of Life (Binah). The layer of emanation where ideas take form, where the limits are set, where the Lord tells the Sea, you may come this far and no further. These are the properties of Saturn.

    Knowing this, you can see that the act of spiritual advancement is the interplay of the Sun and Saturn. As the Light of the Sun increases, the limits set by Saturn are made mutable, and they move further out. As we explore our new boundaries, integrating the things that were hidden in shadow before, learning to function within the newly expanded sphere, we grow, gain insights, authority, and responsibility. With each new attribute of ourselves that we integrate, the understanding of the things we learned in our previous stages of advancement are enhanced. The responsibilities we had earlier change form, and we end up traveling back towards the Sun at the center of our sphere to reintegrate all the things we knew with the things we’ve learned. When we return to the sun at the center of our microcosm, we hit the next level, and the Light increases, and our boundaries expand, and we begin to explore the furthest reaches of the Light yet again.

    From the Sun to Saturn and Back again. The path of the Labyrinth. (Which is not to be confused with a maze; a Labyrinth has one entrance and one exit side by side, travels only to the center and back to the beginning. A Magician travels to the center and returns to the beginning, carrying with him the treasure held within and sharing that with the realm outside.)

    All this theory and stuff is great and fun and all, but I’m still a Taurus. It’s meaningless without application, in my humble opinion.

    Where are you at? Have you plateaued in your Work? Are you stuck at a level of attainment, and you need to expand your boundaries? The answer is Working the Sun and Saturn. Conjure up the Archangels Tzaphqiel and Michael. Are you feeling like you’re stumbling around in the dark? Work with Michael of the Sun to bring the hidden things to light. Have you worked through everything you can think of, and still feel stuck in a rut? Conjure Tzaphqiel and Work with him to move the boundaries of your sphere. Head between the Sun and Saturn, make that your path, and you won’t get stuck.

    Sorrow turns to Joy in the light of the Sun, and unfocused rays become lasers when their boundaries are properly aligned.

    Grace and Peace!

  • Enochians

    Fr. AIT over at Heavens Within Earth recently posted the question, Is Enochian Theurgic? I’m interested in whatever follow-up he may have to post about it.

    In the Corpus Hermeticum, when Man came to Earth, seven Governors were made in the image of the seven celestial Intelligences. Eventually they became the Urges in later gnostic interpreatations, but originally they weren’t considered evil by any means.

    Sometimes I think the seven Terrestrial Governors and their legions are the Spirits of the Lemegeton’s Goetia. Other times, I think they’re the Seven Winds that make an appearance in the Picatrix.

    Right now, I suspect they’re the seven “Angels” on the SDA. I think it would explain the elemental attributes of the Enochian spirits, as well as the whole “I’m the savior of the WORLD” trip that the Enochians seem to pull on people, or at least, that people seem to pull on themselves after Working the EE’s for a while.

    I was just talking about this to a friend and student from the course earlier this week, and lo and behold Fr. AIT posts his corroborative hunches. I’m sure it’s all a coincidence.

    In my limited experiences with them, I felt like they were terrestrial spirits, akin to the Goetia spirits I’ve worked with previously. I think it’s odd that they express the kind of jealousy over the Goetia that they showed Kelley. It reminds me of stories of the Ghede and the Loa and other packs of spirits.

  • Remembering a Mother-in-law

    My mother-in-law passed away last Monday. It’s been a long week, funeral arrangements to make, two days of viewing the body, and today’s funeral. I had the honor of writing and presenting a eulogy for her at the service today. It went really well. The service was outstanding, and the funeral chapel did a wonderful job with everything. She was a good woman, and I realized at the viewings that she touched so many lives with her goodness.

    At the service, a great Catholic affair, I couldn’t discuss the things about her that meant the most to me personally. She was not an occultist, but she was a believer. One of the ladies that payed her respects was her tarot card reader, who also couldn’t talk about what role she played in my mother-in-law’s life. They had been expecting this for a while.

    My mother-in-law knew of my occult activities. She asked for help with my sister-in-law, and in addressing her needs, I learned a great deal about Bune, the Goetic spirit in my spirit pot, and Michael and Raphael. She saw angels and spirits, and was very aware of the spiritual realm in which we live and move and have our being. We had long talks about the spirit realm, and she always was interested in the things we talked about. It wasn’t like she was just asking to be nice, she really wanted to know what I thought about things. Her respect for me as a magician is something that meant a great deal to me.

    I’ll never forget the things she did for us as a family, and I’ll never forget that she treated me with dignity and respect, even in the realm of . We had our differences, but before she died we were at peace. The last thing she told me was that she was proud of me, and thanked God for my presence in her daughter’s life.

    The neat thing is, I know she’s still with us. When she was younger, she had a vision of an angel wearing a robe with two patches, one over her gall bladder, and one over her liver. For years she wondered what the patches represented. She passed away during a liver transplant surgery from an obscure liver disorder. They discovered it while removing her gall bladder. We’ve figured out the “angel” she saw that day was her own spirit, ministering peace to herself. she drew a picture of that angel the day she saw it, and everyone has commented on the “family resemblance,” some thinking it was her mother, others her father. No one had thought it might have been her.

    We’re looking forward to keeping in touch with her until we have a chance to join her.

  • Not crazy, no mad prophet here…

    For anyone disturbed by yesterday’s post and thinking I’m some kind of doom and gloom mad prophet, good news! I’m totally not.

    I was trying to express frustration with the role of suffering in existence. I’m not happy with it, and I wanted to know what the alternative was. Why the hell can’t we just not suffer? I asked God, and he said it’s just part of the whole thing, and you can’t exist without it.

    Sometimes I think it would be better for everyone not to exist than for the people who get hurt the most to have to suffer as badly as they do. I am he who hates that evil should be done on the face of the Earth, and all that.

    But the question I get stuck with

  • The Magick Book

    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.com/)

    Well, anyway, it’s something to work on in our spare time. We aren’t all Master Book Binders, but finding journals of blank bound paper is a lot easier than it used to be. Get yourself one, and start putting together your own materializer. You’ll need some representation of the cosmos (like the Ptolemaic System: http://tinyurl.com/ys6ym2). You can draw it yourself or print it up and paste it in, coloring it appropriately.

    Then you’ll need the servants. There’s 72 Shem Angels, a few hundred Ophanim and Enochian angels, or Seven Planetary Intelligences and their legions of Spirits. Plenty of systems to put your servants together from. The Goetia springs to mind. Maybe have a page for each Spirit and a few pages afterwards dedicated to that spirit. If you’re going to do something like that, make sure to include all the other seals and such.

    While we can’t all emboss hand-tanned leather covers with gold gilt lettering for our works, we can all create wooden bindings out of shingles engraved or wood-burned with the appropriate symbols and seals.The key to success is creative ingenuity. I think I’ll put together my own Magick Book of Manifestation this weekend, a little materialization engine that I can just write things in and have them happen.

    I’ll need a lot of pages for whichever spirit I find that makes mountains of gold coins appear at will.

    Keep it simple!

    -R.O.

  • It’s this or nothing.

    As I was meditating one day, the Spirit descended upon me and took me up into the heavens, whether in body, or in a dream, I do not know.

    In the Workshop, I saw my Brother overseeing a manifestation of Plague. It was time for the new pandemic to be rolled out, under the supervision of the appropriate spirits of  Saturn and Venus.

    “It’s going to kill millions of people,” I said, and my Brother looked up at me.

    “Yes, it is.”

    “But why? Why like this? That’s going to hurt, and leave families without children, children without parents, and it’s going to hurt the poor worse than the rich. It’s not fair to any of them.”

    Gently, he sighed, and got that look he gets when he’s going to tell me something I won’t like, agree with, or understand.

    “They have to die.”

    He just looked at me. His face is always so compassionate. He knows what it means to be human, mostly cut off from our birth-right, yet still conscious enough to be aware of the disconnect. He knows I don’t see the beginning and the end the way he does.

    “Like this?” I asked.

    “Yes. Exactly like this. It has to happen.”

    “Why? You’re God, or close enough for it not to matter any more. You can let them live and find their deaths of old age. What could happen if you just had mercy and spared us from this stupid plague?”

    “This,” he said, and took me over to a corner of the workshop that seemed dustier than the rest. He sat me on a stool and sat across from me. “Close your eyes.”

    He’s totally done this before. It’s a vision trip, where he shows me shit that I can’t understand in words.So I know what to expect; he’s going to show me a future with too many people, or something to justify the horrors this disease will cause.

    Instead, all I see is nothing. Deep nothing. Nothing without even anything to compare it to, no way to know it is nothing. Nothing. No eyes to see, no me to look through eyes, even if they were there, nothing for my brain to process, no brain to process with. Nothing. Empty.

    “See?”

    “I didn’t see anything,” I said.

    “Right.” My blank stare spoke volumes.

    “Look,” he said. “Remember the sign on the Boot Hill Saloon?”

    (The Boot Hill Saloon is a bar in Daytona across the street from the old Boot Hill cemetery, where outlaws and the destitute were buried.)

    “You’re better off here than across the street?”

    “Yeah.”

    “That’s the big mystical secret? It’s this or nothing?” There was a brief pause, and I heard laughter in the distance. “Nothing’s a hell of a lot better than unleashing this disease and suffering!”

    He returned my gaze without flinching for a long moment, and when he had my full attention again, he simply said one word.

    “Really?”