So when I started Rufusopus.com and the blog, I figured I’d get some odd requests, people looking for riches, love, power, revenge, you know, all the shit in the grimoires.

I’ve gotten my fair share of those things, mostly from people in Africa, South America, and the Phillipines, where people know what magicians are supposed to be able to do.

Some pet peeves I have managed to gain:

Make me 10X more Pow’rful!

“Will you just do magic to make me a powerful magician like I used to be when I was 16? Ever since I hit 27 and moved back home with my mom, it’s been like the magic’s gone.”

NO! You do the Magic, you get the power. And what you had when you were 16? That was “sex appeal to 15 year old girls.” That’s all over now. Grow up.

What surprises me is how many people are like this. I’m picking on one dude, but really, he’s not alone. People had this great role playing thing going on with their occulty friends in their teens, and everyone was a reincarnated astral warrior fighting demons. And nothing happened. And they couldn’t figure out why. And now they want a real magician to make them back into their old characters. Grow the Eff Up.

Bossy Beggars

Please! I am on bended knee and contemplating suicide! Help your brother I am counting on you! Get me business in my store. Send your spirits to get me $10,000 by Friday. I sent you four emails yesterday telling you what I wanted, why haven’t I gotten it yet? Waiting for your reply.

I understand when you’re in a fix you need immediate attention. I understand that you think I’m sitting around doing nothing but waiting for opportunities to do magic for people. I know you think you’re doing me a favor by giving me an opportunity to do magic for you for free. But I have three kids and a spouse who hasn’t worked in 9 years. My father in law is going in for open heart surgery. I have a job I work at for 50 hours a week. I have a lawn to mow, cars to fix, and bills to pay. These things take time. My magic has been relegated to a part-time pursuit. When I have time for it, fixing your bad business decisions isn’t that high on my list of things to do. Don’t get snitty with me.

The Quaking Pseudo-Noob

Gee, Mr. Opus, I’ve been practicing for years, but I haven’t got a blog and I’m not published, so even though I’ve conjured more spirits than you know exist, I’m still all nervous about talking to you.

This isn’t a pet-peeve as much as it is a shock. I’m no expert. Every time I think I know more than I do, God provides people like Jason or Optimystic or someone like that to remind me of the depth of my ignorance. I tend to think I’m a Goetia expert because I’ve Worked with 18 spirits from the Lemegeton’s Goetia. Then I meet people who have gone much deeper into their research and practice, and I find out that ok, I’ve worked more than most people, but I’m still a ways away from being an expert.

So if you’re nervous about talking to me about something because you think I’m special, I’d just like to remind you that I’m not. I’m a magician like you.

In my youth, I was homeless for a while, hitch-hiked across the states for a while, and lived on an organic commune for a while. While I was there, I met some uber-neo-hippies, and this one was a white kid with dreads who lived in Maui in the national parks, and in Nicaragua in the rain forrest for a while, just living off the land and being one with nature.

This guy stank. Big time. What holds white-people’s dreads together? Dirt. Dirty dirt. Smelly dirty dirt. It’s not cool, it’s just dirty.

But he had this scar on his shoulder. It was about the size of a nickel. While he was sleeping in the rain forrest, a little bug came along and used its numbing saliva to render the insertion of its eggs under his skin painless. It deposited a few eggs in his back, and flew merrily away. The dude… ok, he had issues. But he let them incubate in his flesh and hatch. They burst through his skin painlessly, he claimed, and flew away. He said he felt like he had given birth. Only his babies were bugs.

I had started this post to be about the anger thing. However, Jack Faust recently posted a link to an article about the holographic culture we live in. Some hippy who lives in Central America was going on about how Americans are stupid and live in a bubble. I responded that there’s nothing better that anyone has to offer, and questioned the validity of the opinion that we should return to living in dirty grubby nature. Jack suggests that it’s better to get back in touch with Nature. I’d like to offer the above anecdote as a major reason to appreciate our alleged disconnect from Nature.*

When humanity was supposedly in tune with nature, we died young. The main reason for this young death was insects. Filthy nasty germy insects. They suck. They swim up your urine stream and block your urethra. They lay eggs in your flesh. They carry malaria and plague. Insects are the dominant species of the planet.

People who advocate returning to nature to get back in touch with their alleged role in the planet’s ecosystem have forgotten the basics. Jack accused me of being a yuppie. I don’t have a problem with that. I’m kind of flattered with the “young” part of Yuppie. Yuppies recycle more, buy more hybrid vehicles, and generally contribute less to the destruction of the planet than your average college student, after all. We bathe more regularly too.

Having actually lived on a commune where I was very much a part of an agrarian subculture, living in tune to the seasons and phases of the moon, living dirty, living grubby, I can attest that soap ROCKS. Insecticide? ROCKS! Clean house, nice clothes, central heating and air conditioning? They all ROCK! They rock out loud. Maybe I appreciate these things more for having been a part of the alternative life cycle than the average American, but so what? Who says living dirty and dying younger of infections caused by insects is a better option than living longer and being out of tune with Nature? Some hippy? Fuck him. I’m eating me a Ho-Ho. Mmmm.

*I say alleged because we aren’t really disconnected from Nature. As Hermetic Magicians, we know that the Archetypal Man took on human flesh out of Love for the Image of God. We are mortal for Love’s sake. We are part and parcel of Nature. We aren’t separated. As such, everything we make out of nature, every adaptation of nature, every chemical, plastic, landfill-filling item we discard is, technically, Natural. We can’t get out of touch with Nature any more than we can decide to stop having bowel movements. As long as the heart beats, the blood flows, the brain fires electrical impulses through tubes of water matching the salinity content of the ocean, we are very much natural beings. Cars, planes, computers, and global warming are natural. Being out of tune with the planet’s cycles is natural. Whatever “solutions” we come up with to address whatever “man-made problems” we created are going to be natural too.

Well, folks, it’s about that time again. The scientific community will lose a great mind, but the new age believers of the future will have someone they can claim to have been in a past life.

Stupid POS posted that frumpy housewife video of the British lady singing the song from Les Mis, and then I wanted to listen to “Do you hear the people sing,” and “Red and Black,” and then I just sort of got lost in youtube, listening to all kinds of musicals.

I had planned on doing something useful. I stayed up the other night (yes, all night) watching the anime movie Gankatsuou. It’s the story of the Count of Monte Christo by Alexander Dumas, but told in sci-fi anime from Albert’s perspective, rather than the Count’s. It’s, uhm, well… It’s 24 made-for-TV episodes, each about 25 minutes long. Yes, that’s 10 hours, and yes, I watched the whole thing in one night. And then went to work without sleep for another ten hours, because it was already 7:00 in the morning, and if I’d gone for a nap, I’d have gotten fired.

I’m 35, almost, and have two point five kids. Men like me aren’t supposed to be doing that kind of thing, staying up all night watching cartoons.

So I crashed when I got home, and woke up wide awake at 3:00 am, ready to piss and do something useful. Instead I ended up watching musicals on youtube, and it’s all POS’ fault.

So, thanks, Frater mi, you continue to help in mysterious ways.

Musicals. What is it about them that sucks me in the way they do? It’s drama, it’s music, it’s passion plays… They’re ridiculous, in many ways, but at the same time they’re beautiful. They express raw human emotions, not just the little ones, but the most terrifying, awe-inspiring human character traits that are formed by the emotions, and they examine how that trait can affect a life in magnified, grandiose ways. They capture the drama of our lives and make being human look interesting.

I mean, take the song from Les Mis, “Do you hear the people sing.” Listen to the lyrics, the music, ignore the hand gestures, the facial expressions, those are awesome on stage, but in a song like that, it looks weird. It’s an anthem of liberty and revolution. Now watch this version. It puts it into a perspective that we can too easily forget. It’s not a song capturing the passions of the French Revolution, it’s capturing the IDEAL of the best quality of Revolution. The world has seen it in France, America, China, the Soviet Union, seen it done through capitalism and communism, seen it put in action to accomplish good and evil, in both economic and social systems. No mattter how it turned out, you know that THIS was what they were trying to do.

What is it about a musical that can get into a grown man’s mind? I think it’s that we can see our own petty dramas expressed in ideal form. I mean, when I think my boss is being a prick for expecting me to show up every day by 9:00 wearing the dress code the way we’re supposed to, and I’m bitching about it to my friends, it’s fucking petty. But in my own eyes, I’m singing the anthem of the oppressed of the world, you know? Ridiculous.

Relating all this to magic, I think we find in the musicals the same things we find in our pursuit of the Great Work. The meaningless trivialities of our daily lives fade into obscurity, and we remember for a moment that Being Human should be capitalized. We see the value in the feelings we share, we see for a moment that there is more to life than what it looks like, and that we are not alone in our moments of triumph or despair.

I guess that’s the goal of all theater, film, and art in general. Magic itself is also an Art, as some have noted. Each ritual is a passion play, we are drawing down the Intelligences that embody the primal source of the things we experience, removing for a moment the cheap and paltry manifestations of that Ideal for long enough to experience it, learn from it, become initiated into the fullness of that Ideal so that we can live lives that channel it into our daily activities more purely, enriching our own lives and those of all who come into contact with us.

Maybe musicals demonstrate to us that there is something intrinsically beautiful that can be found in our own lives, that the feelings we have can be put to music, in metered rhyme, and can be made to be holy, noble, Ideal. Maybe that’s what a lot of what we do with magic is all about too.

In my posts, I tend to focus primarily on my Work in the Hermetic traditions. I don’t do a lot of other kinds of magic. I stick primarily to the grimoires, and the philosophical and cultural roots of those texts. I like to think I’m laser focused on what I’m doing.

However, some folks might find that to be narrow minded. I don’t write about things like hoodoo, or the practices of other cultures much. They aren’t my thing, and as an outsider, the level of understanding I can get from those cultures is limited by my experiences, my cultural programming. As it is, I have a hard enough time really grasping the grimoires as well as I do. If you want to see posts about chaos magic, Golden Dawn or OTO magic with LBRPs, Hexagram rituals, and Star Rubies and Sapphires, or even Pagan Wiccan Faery magick (with a K), I’d suggest this isn’t the blog for you.

I’d also hope that you don’t read a single blog expecting to find all you need to Work your magic. I mean, I think I have All The Answers(TM), it’s true, but I recognize I have all the answers for me.

Now, regarding the charge that I’m narrow minded, I’d like to point out that I have written lately about Dzogchen, as well as the Hermetic “sacred texts,” and that in practice, if you go back over my blog, you’ll find that many of the techniques I use are very much similar to the rites and rituals of Hoodoo, Palo, Pow-wow, Curanderismo, Brujeria, and traditional witchcraft. The things I do with the spirits are very much what you’d call “Shamanic” if you weren’t particularly careful with your terminology. The things I make tend to look a lot like mojo bags, spirit pots, and even use a lot of crystals, herbs, and incenses that Wiccans will be right at home with. The spirits I work with can mostly be found in Crowley’s 777 with all the correspondences you could imagine.

I just have my way of working with them. And frankly, it’s the best method I’ve ever found. Direct communication with the spirits. Direct initiations by the spirits into their realms. Direct teaching from the spirits, informed and framed by the writings of the Masters across human history, the source texts for the magicians of the 19th and early 20th century from before they started syncretizing the beliefs and practices with misunderstood Eastern philosophy from Theosophy and the primitive archaeiological findings from Egypt.

I don’t understand the charge that I am too narrow in my pursuits. I don’t see why anyone would even want to dabble in lots of systems, gain initiations into several lineages, cross cultural barriers with the intent to bring back some new system when the end result is usually either burn-out, or worse, a watered-down system that produces more magical theoreticians than magicians.

The cliche “Jack of all trades, Master of none” comes to mind. Jacks are knaves, knaves are fools. Dabblers in many systems have a thin grasp of the obvious similarities of each system, but are robbed of the wmpowerment that comes from devotion to any one of the systems. Their magic is weak, and I speak from experience. I’ve met folks that are BRILLIANT at coming up with syncretic post-modern rites that draw from several cultural traditions that look awesome on the surface, but a little research reveals the pantheons they’re blending belonged to people at war with one another, or the gods they’re using together were traditionally opposed to one another.

I’ve been hexed by chaos magicians, cursed by neopagans, and I’ve even had Focalor tell me a magician who writes a lot about his experiences with spirits of the Goetia tried to kill me by his power. Their magic is WEAK, because their understanding is dime-thin.

So for me, I’d rather be narrow-minded and sure of my standing in relation to God and his many manifestations than be aware of the many manifestations and hae no part in any of them. And I’m not saying anyone who is “eclectic” is a fool; Jason Miller has a broad scope of experiences with multiple systems from multiple cultures, for example. But JAson also has depth in each of the systems he uses, he rarely dabbles. He’s spent the time in his core system to develop the power and authority, the gnosis of his place in the cosmos to be able to then move between the cultural manifestations of Deity without losing the impact of his Will. It’s not impossible.

But I’m not there yet, so I’m immersing myself in my core system. I haven’t run out of interesting things to pursue. I haven’t attained full Mastery of any aspect of my activities. I’m at best at the cusp of White stage of the Alchemical Work, where the dross has risen to the surface and begun to be burned to pure white ash. I consider myself an Adept, fer sure, but big dealio. Manifesting wealth and prosperity, binding evil and exorcising demons, that shit’s just High School work, Freshman High School at that (9th grade, where you learn basic geometry and read Romeo and Juliette, for my foreign readers). There’s more, so much more.