In case you’re wondering, not ONE person sent me a dollar. By the time I was done with the Remote Viewing part of my previous post, I was in a zone, a mental state that I can only describe as highly tranced out. I figured reading it would make you trance out too, and that you’d send me a buck given the proper motivation.
Experiment FAIL. So much for my AMAZING POWERS OF MESMERISM!!!
Goodish news, I've finally gotten fed up with the Angelic Grimoire writing project. Therefore, a nice little manual that covers the basics of conjuring an angel of the planets is now available. For a limited time, I'm sending it out in PDF format for free. After I've gotten some feedback on it from the sample audience, and when I'm ready to face it again, I'll publish an updated version and start charging for it.
So, if you want a free draft, let me know, and I'll email it to you. If you're interested, drop me a line at frredactumopus@gmail.com.
Jason wrote a great blog post explaining Strategic Sorcery in Action. I think it’s a must read for all magicians who wonder what the Great Work looks like when you’re doing it.
Another friend of mine, Fr. Servitor Lucem, wrote a series of articles at Rending the Veil (the archives STILL aren’t up, if you know web administration and have some free time, email Sheta there) about his own attempts at strategic magic. While he got exactly what he asked for, he learned a lot in the process.
When I perform manifestation magic, I tend to contact a single spirit, state my request, and then let the spirit handle any additional details. While this is effective, it is only effective to a degree. The things I have happen that are truly awesome usually involve working with multiple spirits, and have a bit of planning involved.
I am paying attention to this fact.
A book I read, The Four Hour Work Week, taught me that the key to wealth isn’t a single job (no kidding), or a single investment. It comes from setting up multiple streams of income. They don’t have to be huge sources of income, they can each provide a hundred or so dollars a month. After setting up enough of them, you’re bringing in a few thousand a month, and some are more effective than others, and some less. You cultivate the ones that pay well, and you keep on growing until you’re getting what you want.
This is a principle that applies to the Great Work as well. I’m in Project Management for my day job. That gets things done and keeps everyone working on the project focused on what they are supposed to be doing. It involves analyzing specific requirements, designing solutions, executing the design, implementing the solution, and then monitoring and controlling the solution while it is being used. The final stages are closeout and lessons learned, which feed into future projects.
As a Magician accomplishing the Great Work, I need to apply these techniques to my magic as well. I have some health issues to address, and there are friends and family that could use my help as well. I have a couple of “You: out of my Universe!” projects going on at the moment that I can use this information on. There are a few things I want to accomplish using the spirits of the Pseudomonarchia. There’s this guy I’m planning on turning into a first-class active full-time magician with something to contribute to the world.
The gold brick project … I’m still wanting to stick to a single spirit at a time on that one because it’s a hobby. I have ACZINOR of the Earth Tablet, and probably whichever Senior rules the Sun as well to Work with on that, and if they don’t work, there are the gnomes that I can send to fetch me one. I don’t want to mix systems on that particular front because it is a more controlled experiment. I don’t NEED a gold brick, I just want one.
Then there’s just my own personal life that this can be applied to as well. Work, home improvement projects, wardrobe, diet, exercise, parenting… What is it we’re talking about here? Taking responsibility for controlling your life as it manifests around you. Planning, reasoning, and then acting on the decisions made, following up on it, making it happen, taking care of it, and then learning from everyhting. Progression, action, building, making, doing, creating, Rising and Descending in Power, by this were all things created.
Strategic Sorcery: The Great Work in Action. Jason rocks.
(Jason Miller, also known as Inominandum, is the author of Reversal and Protection Magic. Again I say, if you don’t own the book, buy it, it’s about more than Protection and Reversal, it’s about doing magic.)
Ok, making fun of the bugfuck crazy is not only a privilege among the Ceremonial Magician crowd, it is a Sacred Duty. NO ONE is exempt from the condescending mockery, not even ourselves in our youth! I make fun of my delusion that I was the Black Dragon come to destroy the Wheel of Time and return the manifest realm to a Mythic Age frequently.
That said, I have a soft spot in my heart for the Astral Warriors. How do we know, really, that they AREN’T the thin red line that keeps the rest of reality from collapsing, imploding, or from being overrun by highly evolved reptoids living in the center of the hollow Earth? Maybe if that dude hadn’t gone around dropping Orgone Energy devices in the Vortices at sea in the Bermuda Triangle, in the Pacific near where Pacifica fell in steam and fire, and at the dreaded Montauk AFB, the Greys and their Evil Masters would be eating the fluid released from the decomposition chambers which hold the decaying remains of my very own children.
We may never know.
Every once in a while, I run into Astral Warriors who just don’t deserve to be mocked. They may be clinically insane by society’s standards, but they’re damned sincere. I’m not talking about the folks living a fantasy novel existence because it’s really cool to be a vampire this week, a fairy next week, or an otherkin. I’m talking about the people who experience really Weird Shit that’s just totally unbelievable, and talk about it in the same ways they talk about their tires going flat on their cars. On those occasions, I try to extend to them the benefit of the doubt.
One astral warrior friend of mine is waigng a war against a being she claims has found a means to draw “energy” from those who pray in the name of Jesus. Of 8 infected clients, 6 have been cured, and the other two are still exhibiting symptoms of obsession, if not outright possession. She gets mocked for this, and you can tell it hurts her feelings, but she knows her shit and puts up with the mockery because she gets results and the people she helps are happy.
Giving the benefit of the doubt doesn’t hurt, so I offered my advice about how I would deal with it, and she was gracious and explained that she might go ahead with my suggestions, but that she already has plans in place.
Out of curiosity, I went ahead and checked on this entity and her Astral Warfare. I asked Raphael and Michael about it. I wanted to know whether she was mad and counseling the mad with madness that was effective because they were mad, or if it was something serious. I got a picture of the entity she’s fighting, and saw that her efforts were effective, and that she is one person dealing with things that are part of a plan that doesn’t involve me and my friends at all, but that she isn’t working alone. I got the sense that what she’s doing is creating a path back to God for people who have forgotten that God is there, or never knew they didn’t know in the first place. By having a spiritual battle for their minds, souls, and actions in the material world, they are experiencing the fact that they are spirits in a physical world. What that triggers in their souls is an awakening to a hunger or thirst that they didn’t know they had, and that can only be fulfilled by God (however he reveals himself to them).
So is it hokum? No, not at all. Are the planes in danger of being overrun by aliens or creatures from universes overlapping ours invisibly, taking power from people by sucking their “energy?” Yes, but no more than ever before, and chances are it will not affect you.
But if it does, let me know and I’ll send you to someone who can help.
Most of my faithful readers know about Inominandum (Jason Miller)’s book, Protection and Reversal Magick. Either you read his blog, have read the book yourself, or you remember me mentioning it a while ago.
After speaking at Thelesis (an AWESOME experience that I’d GLADLY do again), I found myself suffering all the symptoms of being hexed. I don’t know if I offended an attendant, or if my Christian presentation upset the OTO Egregore (The Christians to the Lions! is a Crowleyism that runs deep in Thelema, from my own experience, although NOT at Thelesis, they were truly a great group of folks).
I like to think it was an Ordeal. I took on the mantle of Hierophant in a more active way, and the Powers that Be saw fit to test my mettle to demonstrate to me that I need to be aware that if I’m going to teach things of a spiritual nature, I can expect a spiritual test to demonstrate I have the right to do so.
However, the most probable cause was simply Mercury going retrograde the day after the Thelesis lecture.
Anyway, whatever the cause, I ended up in exactly what Jason describes in his book as a “crossed condition.” It was relatively easy to fix, once I recognized the symptoms, and things immediately got better after a quick ritual. Having read his book gave me the ability to figure out that something wasn’t working right and a clue about what to do to fix it.
If you haven’t already, you really should buy and read this book. It also provides some insights into a method he uses to work with Hekate that would be really useful to people looking for a way to use traditional grimoire magical techniques in a more pagan friendly way than is sometimes presented in the classical grimoires themselves.
I collect awesome blogs to read. My latest addition is from a Brazilian Portuguese fellow who accidentally conjured (imo) Barbatos by doodling his seal.
The division between matter and spirit is an interesting conundrum. In the Corpus Hermeticum, God contracts part of infinity leaving a sphere of smoking matter. In the contraction, he had to remove everything from that sphere *except* what would later become “matter.” So, it’s safe to believe that the stuff that became matter existed within God eternally “before” the contraction.
Now, did *all* of the “stuff” that became matter that was in God before the contraction get dumped into that sphere? Or is there still the “stuff” of matter in the Ain Soph Aur-Pleroma-Infinite Light of God? If it all got dumped, we have a foundation for saying Spirit is separate from Matter. Both combined were the infinite Monad. (Oh, wait, that would mean that after the contraction, the Monad became somehow less than what it was before the contraction, and the pros and cons of this difference can be argued.) If God separated himself from matter, he would no longer be infinite.
Since I’m not literally light floating in a sea of light, it’s safe to say the contraction occured. I don’t know what the ramifications of this contraction are.
Based on my experience, there’s no “where” I can go without running into evidence of God. I tend to be more animistic lately, Working with the spirit of my laptop as I type, for instance, thanking it and treating it with respect. I believe all spirits are a manifestation of God, and the more I treat my “stuff” as if it a spirit indwelled it, the better things seem to work. So I guess I’m currently in the camp that God is in the earth and Matter, while separate from God, is indwelled nonehtless by God in some form.
Hmmm. When speaking to the Athenians, Paul quoted a Greek poet who said, “In him we live and move and have our being.” As an apostle inspired by and given the Words by the Holy Spirit, his acknowledgement of that phrase as a manifestation of the truth og God’s being-ness would indicate that the World *is* God.
So matter is God, but a dumped part of God, and is indwelled by manifestations of the Spirit of God. With the “ISes” used in the previous sentence indicating a logical map tht helps me understand where I’m coming from, not necessarily a declaration of truth.
Let us not forget to keep this in mind, hey what?
Keeps us humble. 😀
So I went up to Thelesis Lodge in PA yesterday and gave a course on The Modern Angelic Grimoire. It went AWESOME. To the people that were there: you were the best audience a person could hope for as a first-time lecturer.The people at Thelesis were warm, welcoming, and damn fine cooks.
Seriously, damn fine cooks. Raymond made this chicken stuff, it was Indian and so delicious. The hoagies were great (thanks Persephone), the cookies (homemade by Steve) were just right, crispy at the edges, soft in the center, and the pie was outstanding (pretty sure that was Amy). I didn’t get to the salsa and pita-hummous, but I meant to. I was pretty stuffed. People paid me to talk. That was cool. After paying the babysitter (highway robbery it was) and tolls and gas (more highway robbery), I ended up losing $10 on the whole deal, but it was worth EVERY PENNY! And then some. Meeting magicians who understood the Christian aspects of my Work was fanulous.
The folks were cool. They raised their hands and asked questions, they put up with me rambling, they interacted well. We conjured Haniel (the time was right, even if the day was wrong) and he popped up, almost everyone felt his presence, and it was just awesome. The folks all got to see how easy conjuring a spirit could be, and the flexibility of the grimoires. I think it was worth their time and money. I hope a few of them will be using the techniques in their work soon.
I talked for like two hours almost. Maybe an hour and a half. My throat was a little sore, and I was standing the whole time. This fat magician isn’t used to that. My wife was able to attend (thanks to the baby-sitter who miraculously appeared last-minute), and she mentioned that I slouched the whole time. Today my back is killing me, so she’s probably right.
All in all, I had a blast. The questions were excellent and thoughtful. There were people from Baltimore that drove up (and got pulled over on the way because they were running late), and I finally got to mee Fr. Ararita from Blake Lodge in DC-Baltimore. After years of correspondence online, he was awesome to meet in person.
Yeah, I’m rambling now, but it was a great time. I didn’t need to be worried as much as I was. When I couldn’t think of a word, they usually knew what it was, between my wife, the linguist (Brian), Ararita, or someone there. It went well.
And Tokyo is in Japan. Not China. You knew that. I knew that. I kinda forgot during the lecture, but I was thinking of other things and that part of my brain wasn’t working right. That’s my explanation.
For those local to MD, I’m going to take a stab at keeping the Maryland Center for Occult Studies blog up and running. If anyone has any local events going on in the MD-Baltimore-PA-DC areas, let me know and I’ll update the blog.
