In recent conversations with Fr. POS and Optimystic, the subject of where in the cosmology the Arbatel spirits belong has come up. They both place the spirits in the celestial or super-celestial realms. Personally, I think they’re more like the Spirits of the planetary tables, that is, terrestrial reflections of the celestial governors.

Opti pointed out the Arbatel says: “They are called Olympick spirits, which do inhabit in the firmament, and in the stars of the firmament…” (from aphorism 15). He also pointed to Aphorism 16, which says:

There are seven different governments of the Spirits of Olympus, by whom God hath appointed the whole frame and universe of this world to be governed: and their visible stars are ARATRON, BETHOR, PHALEG, OCH, HAGITH, OPHIEL, PHUL, after the Olympick speech. Every one of these hath under him a mighty Militia in the firmament.
   
[…]

So that there are 186 [196]7 Olympick Provinces in the whole Universe. wherein the seven Governours do exercise their power: all which are elegantly set forth in Astronomy.

(From Joe Peterson’s Twilit Grotto, The Arbatel.)

So the question remaining to my mind is “What is the Firmament?” Aphorism fifteen identifies their inhabitation as being both in the firmament and in the stars of the firmament. Why do both have to be mentioned? Opti interprets it as the super-celestial heavens. He could be right. He provided a dictionary definition that seemed to say the heavens. In Old Astronomy, the term meant “The orb of the fixed stars; the most remote of the celestial spheres.”(1)  That would place these spirits clearly in the super celestial realm, thus ending the debate.

I’m stubbon though. I looked up the meaning of the word in more detail, and found from Easton’s Bible dictionary this(2):

from the Vulgate firmamentum, which is used as the translation of the Hebrew _raki’a_. This word means simply “expansion.” It denotes the space or expanse like an arch appearing immediately above us. They who rendered _raki’a_ by firmamentum regarded it as a solid body. The language of Scripture is not scientific but popular, and hence we read of the sun rising and setting, and also here the use of this particular word. It is plain that it was used to denote solidity as well as expansion. It formed a division between the waters above and the waters below (Gen. 1:7). The _raki’a_ supported the upper reservoir (Ps. 148:4). It was the support also of the heavenly bodies (Gen. 1:14), and is spoken of as having “windows” and “doors” (Gen. 7:11; Isa. 24:18; Mal. 3:10) through which the rain and snow might descend.

Based on this, and the very Biblical tone of the Arbatel, I believed the Arbatel spirits are within the realm of matter primarily. The physical planets and sphere of the physical stars is certainly not what is referenced by the spiritual spheres of the neoplatonists. If we travel to Mars for colonization, the martian settlers won’t be considered to be in the sphere of the wandering stars, will they? All matter is within the sublunar realms, and the planets and stars serve as signifiers of their relative positionings in the divine or ideal realm. The actual spheres of the planets and fixed stars do not manifest physically.

Knowing I could be wrong, I performed some divinations that indicated I was partially right and partially wrong. The Arbatel spirits have qualities that make them both Super-Celestial entities, and terrestrial entities. They seem to be, based on divination, a combination of the Spirits and the Intelligences from the Kameas of the Planets in Agrippa’s Three Books of Occult Philosophy.

So, based on the research, conversation, divination and meditation, I’ve decided I won’t be ordering the spirits of the Arbatel around like servants. Instead, I’ll keep my approach formal, as if  it were one Vice-President speaking to another within a corporation. By divine right, magicians are granted the abiltity to petition the spirits of the Arbatel, but there’s no real authority over them provided in the grimoire. Instead, the only authority they are answerable to is God himself.

This rather helps explain why so much of the Arbatel focuses on your behavior. As a Christian saved by Grace, this behavioral thou-shaltism smacks of righteousness by works rather than by grace. That is, you do nice things and you get rewarded. I’m in Martin Luther’s camp, that salvation is by grace through faith alone. Works, good deeds, being nice to animals and not splashing panhandlers in the rain while cackling gleefully at their misfortune… that’s not going to get you anywhere with God, who says the righteousness of man is as menstrual rags before him. (mmmm, tasty.)

But we aren’t talking about salvation, atonement or being in a right relationship with God. We’re talking about magic petitions to spirits for direct intervention. Maybe you do have to be all righteous and pure to get anything out of the Arbatel spirits, and they don’t see the Cross when they’re measuring up whether you deserve their blessings or not.

hmmm. Well, it’s something to think about, anyway. But like I said, I’ll stick with the Goetic spirits for now. They recognize your position with God via the sacrifice of Christ readily enough.

Notes:
1. “firmament.” Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary. MICRA, Inc. 29 Oct. 2008. http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/firmament>.
2. “firmament.” Easton’s 1897 Bible Dictionary. 29 Oct. 2008. http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/firmament>.

Nothing interesting popped up in the Mercury work yesterday. I didn’t get around to it. :sigh: Excrement occurs.

We’re living in strange days, friends and compatriots. I went off on Dude that wanted to do the apocalypse rite, and I think he’s plannig on doing it this Saturday from the posts he’s made since then. Or he’s going to off himself. He’s been vague enough to let it be interpreted either way.

To him, I say: Don’t kill yourself, you’ve got a lot of potential, and you’ll be wasting it by offing yourself. Prove you’re an Adept by facing life on its own terms from a position of authority, not as a victim. Don’t be a bitch.

Now, assuming he’s going to go through with the Enochian-Goetic working to bring about Revelations’ series of events… Time to come clean. Years ago, I wrote my own Enochian Apocalypse ritual. I didn’t know shit about Enochian or Apocalypse at the time. It looked pretty bad ass though. I tried to get other people to do it, just in case it worked, but no one was interested. Years later, I know what would have happened if I’d gone through with it: I would have gone through my own apocalypse. The rest of the world would be fine.

I know I’m not the only magician to go through that phase. It seems to hit when you’re around 25-27, coinciding with the Saturn Return, when Saturn returns to the same place in the heavens that it was when you were born. Your old boundaries of life are shaken away, and you set the stage for the next 25 years or so of your life. It can be emotionally violent. It’s a death and rebirth of sorts, but in a spiritual way.

You realize that mommy and daddy, or whoever raised you, aren’t going to be there for you forever, and you have to face the fact that your life, for the rest of your life, is what you make of it. All you can control is your own actions, and how you react to others. Faced with this awareness of our own relative powerlessness, some folks decide to end the world as we know it. Kinda selfish, in my opinion, but I was there.

It doesn’t work. Most folks who do this have nothing happen. Some folks go insane, I’ve been told. I don’t know anyone personally that went over the edge, but people I trust assure me that they know folks who ended up in the looney bin after this kind of thing. I’m sure a bit of googlemancy could turn up a couple hundred examples of people who are convinced they’ve ended the world, started the apocalypse, or done some kind of insane crap. One guy on OccultForums was convinced he was literally killing the archangels of the spheres of the Sephiroth, and literally destroying the “real” Tree of Life.

Anyway, what’s likely going to happen to Dude is he’s going to instigate more fallout from his Saturn Return, and will end up going through his own personal apocalypse. Which might be good for him, I don’t know. I know the introduction to the HGA can be a lot like that, so maybe his HGA is getting him ready for the next level.

Regardless, if he kills himself, I WILL bind his spirit into a little pot (shown right; your spirit’s home for at least the rest of my life, and I’ll likely pass you on to some other magician when I die too) and roast it slowly over coals for not listening to me. And then I’ll use him as a spirit bitch and force him to do really nasty stuff, like clean out Cthulhu’s fat rolls.

(Note, I got that badass picture up there from this web site: http://civilizer.wordpress.com/2007/11/26/yet-another-award-for-bill-belichick/)

Words words words. I just deleted a huge old long post about how I’ve slipped in my Work, and replaced the Great Work with Working for money. After a lengthy discussion on sin, repentance, and how that works as a magician, after detailing out plans to get right with God through magic and balancing out my spheres with rituals, I had to face something uncomfortable. The only reason I wanted to get right with God was still so that I could get the money.

What a pain in the ass.

How do you kill the Golden Calf? How do you stop lusting for results, if you’re only trying to stop lusting for results to get the results you lust after?

It’s totally absurd. I can’t stop wanting money. It’s good stuff. It buys good stuff. It solves a myraid of problems. Instead of turning away from wanting money, I’ve got to find a way to focus instead on the Great Work and getting money. I have to get in harmony. Integrate the passions for payola with the passions for God. To celebrate God in money, because it is, after all, an emanation from him as much as anything else is. It is what it is.

So, fuck it. Back to Bune. He’s always pulled my fat out of the fire. I’ll let him take care of the money, and I’ll just go back to focusing on the Great Work. I’ll just quit spending the money I get from my magic on stupid shit. Be fiscally responsible. I’ll Work with Tzadqiel on that aspect of my spheres, because as long as I’m being irresponsible, no amount of funding that irresponsibility will result in Wealth. But I still need the money to get out of the hole I’m in. Ignoring that would be pretty stupid. Sure, I’ll start by cutting back expenses, going through the steps that all the financial gurus say to do (which is basically spend less than you earn, frickin’ duh), but when it comes to generating the wealth, I’m still going to stick with the spirits.

Cool pic, eh? Any mechanical engineers reading this spot the problem with any gear set up like this?

I was just thinking about how sometimes a woman will make a suggestion about something that a man would never even consider. It happens a lot in my work. the Department Heads are mostly white males. They can’t do anything but guide others in their work. Literally, they can’t. They can barely work their email and blackberries most of the time. Most of them have assistants that schedule all their meetings.

It’s the mid-level management that is chock fulll of women. They have this intuitive grasp of how things need to work. In my career, I’ve found that there were many times that I wouldn’t know the details of a situation, but I had a pretty good grasp of the situation in hand. I made some decisions, set the ball in motion, and then talked to a woman about it. “But isn’t this, this, and this true?” she would say. “Hmmm…. yes….” I would reply, realizing that I had just screwed up.

The simple fact is that women have this ability to know things. They don’t communicate it well to men, usually because men and women have different ways of looking at things. That is the main problem between the sexes. Clear communication.

But I’ve developed this sense about things. There are times now in my life where a woman will be telling me that I’m wrong about something, and they’ll have all these reasons to prove their point, but they just don’t add up to me. It’s like they’re using words I use in completely sideways ways.

But there’s this feeling I get around my right shoulder blade. Sort of an extension of the heart chakra, or maybe (this just occurred to me) it’s where God took the rib. I call it my Man Sense. It gets warm when a woman is correcting me, and I don’t know why she’s right, but she is anyway. I’ve learned to trust this feeling. It guides me, and it improves my performance.

Men and women are complimentary. We are different in design, function, interpretation, and approach. These differences have caused countless clashes, but they are supposed to be there so we can understand this world we live in better, and do our jobs right while we’re here.

Men, learn to use your man sense. Next time you’re frustrated with a woman who’s babbling on about why you’re an idiot, instead of arguing check your man sense. Is she right? If so just accept it and move on. You don’t have to understand why she’s right. You possibly never will. Even if you do, it won’t change the fact that you’ll be doing the same thing regardless of your understanding. If you want to bend your brain into feminine angles, go ahead, by all means. But me, I just trust the man sense.