Arrrr! There do be something akin between ye pirates and ye magicians. I’ve been trying to put it together, and all I’ve come up with so far is this:

Pirates are looking for a way to tap into the wealth and prosperity of global commerce despite a lack of social standing or the specialized skill sets required to participate within the constraints of legal authority. They don’t stay in their assigned social class. They are outlaws, and they put their lives on the line to accomplish their goals. Their motto can be summed up in the phrase “Surrender the Booty!” Surrender because they are taking it whether you want them to or not, demanding that you give it up or perish.

They also drink a lot, and have sex with anyone they can.

Magicians are looking for a way to tap directly into the engines of manifestation and the hierarchies of ascension in order to accomplish their spiritual and physical goals.  Magicians don’t stay within the social constraints to get their desires. If we’re working on Theurgy, we don’t stay within the lay community of whatever religion dominates the land. We look for the hidden, occult means to accomplish our aims. We look to ascend on our own, without any intermediary telling us what God said, and what he really meant. We go outside the social norms to get what we want on our own. If we’re working on getting ahead financially, we don’t rely only on our training, education, and experience. We take a shortcut. We’re after the booty. +

And we share the penchant for mind altering chemicals and sex.

The similarities are fairly apparent. Outlaws seeking the treasure in spite of our social standing. The Lemegeton’s Goetia, if you look closely at it, provides an interesting social commentary. The main things the spirits provide are the education you’d receive in a Liberal Arts school in the Renaissance. The term “Liberal” in liberal arts refers to the fact that it was an education reserved for the free citizens, not to be had by the slaves or the serfs or the non-noble classes. Only nobility and clergy received a formal education in theology, the maths and sciences, and the emerging middle class had no recourse to the training. They couldn’t be officers, couldn’t command troops. So they went to the spirits to learn the nature of things, to get aid in commerce, to have access to troops for defending their cities.

The occult methods provided a means to overcome the liabilities of our birth, and the whims of our fate. Like pirates, we go outside the prescribed constraints of our birth or training to reach heights that are denied us by our culture, our tribal custom.

Arr! We do be pirates, of a sort!

And yet there are differences too. Pirates accepted the risks they faced. Magicians tend to want the booty without risking their lives. We may joke about risking our sanity, but we usually think those who find madness in their occult pursuits brought it with them into the cave in the first place. Pirates will work their tails off to get their treasure. Pirate life is hard frickin’ work. They earn their treasure by the sweat of their brow, the strength of their backs. Magicians can be a little less willing to do the mundane work that makes a way for the occult powers to manifest their desires in their lives.

We also approach the obtainment of our goals and desires with a bit less gusto. We can’t very well conjure up the Intelligence of the Sun and demand it Surrender the Booty or Else! At best we’d be ignored, at worst fried in a solar flare. Pirates had swords and cannon, and their targets were vulnerable to swords. Our target is the Universe, and it’s bigger and stronger than us. No amount of threats will work in most magical practice, and the few techniques that involve threatening our co-workers usually tender results that leave something to be desired.

Nevertheless, there’s a passion in the demand of the Pirate that I think we need to incorporate into our Work. Will you accept less than the complete fulfillment of your ambition!? Will you take no for an answer? There are times when the answer from the spirits is “no,” but we don’t have to stop there. When we get a “No,” press harder, ask like a child, “Why not!?” Maybe there’s something we have to change about ourselves to accomplish our goal. Maybe there’s something we have to learn that makes the thing we want moot. Maybe we already have it. But taking the “No” at face value is weak. What are we leaving on the table if we leave too soon?

I demand change, I demand the prize. Surrender the Booty, universe! Move, or move me! If I can’t have what I want, then change me, teach me, school me so I know why I don’t need it, or why I can’t have it. Show me the way to what I want if I can’t have it the way things are right now.

Or kill me dead, because if you won’t give me what I want, or raise me to the level where I can see that I don’t REALLY want it, then this is no world I want to live in.

With my wife dealing with chronic illness beyond the scope of my magical ability to heal, there are often times when I have to cook. I used to cook in a restaurant… Ok, it was a bar and grill, but it had delusions of grandeur. We had gourmet soups, the best prime rib on the planet, and we constantly went out of our way to make the dining experience shock the customers. So I’m a decent cook, and my kids rarely complain.

This isn’t my chili, but it looked similar.

So last night was a night I had to cook. I decided on chili, because it’s super easy. My recipe is pretty straight forward, a pound of ground beef, a whole sweet onion, one huge ass can (26 oz) of dark red kidney beans, two regular (I think 15 oz) cans of diced tomatos, one (15ish oz) can of sweet corn, drained, and a little can of tomato paste. And a tablespoon of minced garlic, or two cloves, salt and pepper to taste, a quarter teaspoon of cumin (I forgot it last night, but it adds a mild “dirt” flavor that seems to go well with chili), and the chili powder.

The chili powder was an issue. See, usually I get the most expensive seasoning possible, keep it for short periods of time so it tastes fresh, and ditch it when it starts to lose its aroma. Last time I bought chili powder, I was totally at Wal Mart. And money was tight, so I bought the generic. And you could totally tell when I made the chili. So last night, I cheated: I used magic.

I browned the ground beef with the chopped up onion and garlic, salt, and pepper. I love that smell. Then I got all the canned stuff together and the spices, saw the generic stuff, and remembered the generic flavor of the last chili I’d made. Remembering that the Supernatural Assistant (SA) is also supposed to be able to bring together an awesome dinner on command, I conjured him up and said, “Make this the best tasting chili in the world, improve the flavor of the ingredients that the end product is better than it should be by rights.”

When the ground beef was done and the onions had started to turn translucent, just, I added all the canned goods. I added the chili powder, and again asked my SA to bless the seasoning and the end product with good flavor. I stirred it all up, and turned down the heat of the burner to simmer.

Then I made my mistake.

Thinking it needed to be brought up to a boil before turning it back down, I cranked the burner back up to about 6. I figured, less than high heat, shouldn’t burn, but still hot enough to get it boiling. I’ll be in the next room, I’ll remember to come back and turn it down to simmer. No worries!

And I went off and played video games with my son and daughter. Pretty soon, the aroma of burned beans began to fill the house. With a loud “SHIT!” I ran to the kitchen as my kids made the, “oooo, you said the ess word” noises they always make when I cuss. It was too late though, the beans had burned on the bottom.

If you’ve ever burned beans in chili, you know the whole pot is ruined, right? The smoke flavor permeates the whole thing. I was pissed. I turned the whole thing off and made plans to run to KFC. Before heading out though, I had to at least taste it.

Best damned chili I ever made. Somehow, the smoke flavor wasn’t total ass. Don’t ask me how. It was great! I just had to be careful not to scrape the bottom when serving it. The kids loved it, and they’re total chili snobs. My teen loved it.

It was a complete miracle.

First, your return to shore was not part of our negotiations nor our agreement so I must do nothing. And secondly, you must be a pirate for the pirate’s code to apply and you’re not. And thirdly, the code is more what you’d call “guidelines” than actual rules. – Barbossa in Pirates of the Caribbean: the Curse of the Black Pearl

I’m not a traditional grimoire magician at all. I am a modern magician.

Traditional grimoire magicians who read the blog and my books are already aware of this fact, but I just wanted to make sure that’s clear. To me, the grimoires are a source for really powerful magic, but they are not complete in and of themselves. They don’t talk about initiations, they don’t teach the hierarchical cosmology that makes it make sense. They don’t explain much about the god names and words of power. They don’t teach how to accomplish the Great Work.

They’re cliff’s notes. Reference guides. They’re like the notes you make when you’re going to give a presentation. Sometimes everything in the notes is covered, sometimes more is covered, sometimes less. I’ve written up rituals of my own in great detail, but when I do the rite, shit changes on the fly. If I had to stick to a script, I’d get nowhere fast.

I’m not a grimoire fundamentalist, but I do believe the grimoire magic is the most powerful I’ve used. Yet an argument can be made that I’ve never really used grimoire magic. So what does it mean when I say the system is more powerful (in my experience) than other systems? Only that the names of the spirits and their seals are really useful? No, because there’s more to it. The structure they present is important to understand as well. The system is more than the pieces.

But at the same time, we aren’t the magicians who wrote the books. The “unknown unknowns” leave us unable to really do the magic the way they were doing it back then, if it was ever done that way at all. We’re products of a different culture, living in a different time. Agrippa would have had an ipad, you know it. And spreadsheets.

Magic is living and breathing, it’s not set in stone. Grimoire writers were compilers and syncretists. We are too. Adaptation is necessary to be able to do any of this. It’s a given.

So my approach is to look at the grimoires as snapshots, references. I use the names and seals of the systems, and my rituals are something a Renaissance magician would recognize. I use the right god names and the right words of power from the scripts. I use the right incenses and metals, when possible. I do my best to keep it as close to the original as possible, but I do it the way it makes sense to me to do it using the technology I have at my disposal. I keep my adaptations traditional, if that makes sense.

And I experiment. I innovate. I work with the spirits to figure out the best way to work with the spirits. It’s a philosophy as much as a set of techniques.

The grimoires, imo, are more what you’d call guidelines than actual rules.

A potential client wrote me this morning asking for help getting rich. He’s spent a lot on other practitioners trying to get rich, and it’s failed. He wants to work with me, but he’s been burned before and keeps getting deeper in debt. He’s not looking to get megabillionaire rich, which is good, but he wants to get some money coming in fast. He asked for a guarantee of success.

So here’s my response:

No, man, there are no guarantees in magic. Magic is a force you can apply to your life. It’s one force. There are many other forces applying to your life too. Adding a force for getting you wealth is good, but it still has to compete with everything else affecting you.

Are you cursed with poverty? That could be a major factor. You need to get rid of any curses if they are there.

Are you destined to be poor? It’s different from a curse, it’s something that cannot be changed if it is your fate. You need to have a professional astrologer check your natal chart. Christopher Warnock at www.renaissanceastrology.com is good at that. If you are just destined to be poor, you have to learn to live with it. You can be poor and still be happy.

Were you taught poor financial skills? No magic can make you wealthy if you spend more money than you make. Magic cannot make you financially disciplined.

Are you aware of opportunities? Magic brings opportunity to make money, it doesn’t bring money. You still have to do the work.

If you’ve done a lot of wealth magic and you’re still poor, more wealth magic is not going to help. You need to figure out the reasons it’s failing.

RO, Flying & Invisible at the Same Time

So Jason says that grimoire magic is not the best magic in the world. He says it’s not clearly superior until he sees people turn invisible and fly.

For the record, I turned invisible and flew. Swear to gosh. I even have a picture. That’s me, invisible, flying over on the right.

Like most skeptics though, even this clear evidence won’t be enough to sway him, I’m sure.

But anyway, I’d like to take a moment to address something he said for real. In talking about someone who expressed the following experience:

They were convinced that following these texts [The Grimoires] as close to the letter as possible was the key to real success, but after a few years of spending lots of time and money on doing just that, they were not getting any better results than anything else he tried. Even worse, when he really looked around at the reports from the people that are trumpeting this approach as the key to magic, they really are not reporting results that are markedly different than what anyone else reports. No one is turning actual lead to gold or learning chemistry directly from the mouths of spirits.

Jason goes on to say that all systems, if practiced diligently will tender the same results. I’m paraphrasing.

I’ve got mixed thoughts on the subject. On the one hand, like Jason, I went through the pop magical trends as they came up, though I was a few years behind him because I’m younger than a coprolite. My path was neopaganism, Ceremonial Magic ala Kraig’s Golden Dawn stuff in Modern Magick, followed closely by Crowley’s Magick in Theory and Practice, and then Chaos Magick. And to their credit, all this stuff worked. I got results. I could change the world, sort of, using the techniques of each system.

But then I got into the grimoires of the renaissance, and started using them, and fuck me, dude, the power was just incredible. I did the same kinds of things I did as a neopagan, ceremonial magickian, and chaos magickian in terms of goals aimed for and achieved, but the speed that the changes came internally, the speed that the changes came materially were just totally off the charts in comparison. The time to manifest went from three months to a couple of weeks. The time for the internal changes I sought through initiations and contemplation/vision questing (pathworking) went from months to weeks too. I went from thinking “it’s all in my head” to talking with entities who knew more than I did, and could do a lot more than I can, and who were clearly not me. They were other.

But, as you know, no piles of gold showed up in my garage, no matter which spirits I Worked with, no matter how I treated them. I’m not bitter. Really.

Ok, maybe just a little.

So I managed my expectations a bit. I accepted that at my level of attainment and initiation, the way the spirits manifest stuff for me is the way they manifest everything else, through natural law. No such thing as supernatural or natural, let these two asses be set to grind corn and all that. Bending the laws of manifestation the way Reb Shimon did, piles of gold filling a valley to prove how little money mattered to a student of the KBL and such takes the kind of single minded and physically devoted focus that I just don’t have time to do at this point in this incarnation.

Oh, but man, I catch glimpses. Eighth Sphere stuff, the reason I’m always on about it, it’s the shit. It’s the True Shit that blows everything else away. And ever since I had that sweet little taste, I haven’t been able to do much exploring. What good is what I’ve got so far? Not much, except it manages my expectations. It teaches me what I need to know: It’s possible, but not yet, for me, because I’ve made other choices.

Quantification. How do I tell you that Grimoire Magic is superior to everything else I’ve experienced when I can’t Midas everything around me literally? How do I quantify the difference between the results I get form grimoire magic compared to chaos magic or GD magic or Thelemic Magic? All I can really do is point to the time differences I’ve found. Weeks instead of months. Great. Still not instant.

You know how when you’re all in a slump and can’t get motivated to get anything done, doing one small thing completely, finishing one small task provides the motivation to go out and accomplish more stuff? It’s true of magic too. I had a ton of stuff start piling up over the last couple of weeks, and every time I tried to get something started, something else would come up to distract me.

So I finally picked something small, did it start to finish in a few short minutes, and checked it off my mental list. Sure enough, the accomplishment gave me the momentum kick I needed to get just about everything done I had left to do.

And now I have a death ray! I love this stuff!

Nom nom nom

Wanna read something AWESOME?

G’head, read it.

Once again Fr. AIT has shown what it is that I like about him so much. He finds cool shit and puts it into words. Really good words.

So good, in fact, that I’m not going to add anything else. Except the caption on the picture, cause it had to be done.

And this: Yeah! Right on!