Strategic Sorcery Blog

Me and Gordon from RuneSoup.com making fun of you for not updating your blogs.

The “Blogosphere”? What is this 2008? 

Yes dammit! The Blogosphere!

Many of the magic blogs that I follow have slowed down to a snails pace. Those that have been active, seem to have most of the comments on facebook rather than on the blogs themselves. Part of this is due to spammers slamming blogs so hard that we shut comments off unless we approve them – which is a hassle, but part of it is simply that most people are on FB and its a good platform for commenting and sharing.

But we shouldn’t yield ground to Facebook for what it is not good at, and it does suck for long form thoughts and articles. I am re-committing myself to this blog and am aiming at two original content posts a week: Tuesdays and Fridays. There will still be sales announcements and global rite announcements and all that jazz, but at least two articles a week.

I am also re-doing my blog-roll on the side and wanted to bring attention to the following Blogs and Bloggers, all of whom have passed through the hallowed halls of Strategic Sorcery and may or may not have a post or two that relates to that work. Some of them have been blogging for a long time and just new to my blog roll.

• Traif Banquet
• Wanderings in the Labrynth
• The Modern Fortune Teller
• Adventures in Woo Woo 
• Turning the Magic Around
• The Astral Bridge
• Alban Awen
• Witch in the Burbs
• Ye Olde Magic Shoppe
• Transcendant Spirit
• Jack of Many Trades
• Blue Flame Magick

All the bloggers above have active and vibrant blogs with at least one post per month. Any less than that and I will be dropping them from the blog roll.

A few other blogs took long breaks but now seem to be springing to life:

Patrick Dunn is waxing philosophic at POST MODERN MAGIC

Christopher Warnock seemed silent for a bit but has popped out a few new posts over at RENAISSANCE ASTROLOGY

Balthazar woke up CONJURE GNOSIS last year after a long slow period and has continued to pop out excellent posts

Of course there are many long standing blogs that have been active and kicking up much since their inception.

RUNE SOUP has now gotten into podcasting, and Gordon is releasing not one but TWO books this year.

CHARMED I’M SURE remains the place to get the Glad Hand on Deborah”s  Glamorous Glamoury

BLOGOS continues to tie Occultism to genetics and cellular consciousness, and to tell us what us wrong with the WMT (hint: it has to do with the Kircher Tree...)

HEAD FOR RED has slowed down but is hanging in there.

ANANAEL is the home of Aaron Leitch who is also doing the blogging duties at Llewellyn since the passing of DMK.

GLEAMINGS FROM THE GOLDEN DAWN manages to be one of the only GD related blogs that is still sane and interesting to non GD people.

AUGOEDES is the place to go for commentary on occulture.

WANDERINGS IN THE LABYRINTH is the home of one the most insightful occultists I know.

Do you have a blog that I should be following? Did I miss you? Let me know.

There are a lot of people I would like to hear more from, but who have not updated their blogs in more than a month. Get writing! Make Video! Record something on Vocaroo! Something…

This morning, Tiffany woke me up with the words “David Bowie died last night”. It’s kind of odd how some moments feel like they just get stapled into the memory books because of their importance. I barely knew who John Lennon was when he died, but remember distinctly the moment I heard about it and feeling that it was an important moment of loss. This felt like that

Bowie had been on my mind lately because I just purchased his new album Blackstar two days ago based on Gordon White‘s recommendation. I am still absorbing it. It was released on his birthday, January 8th. Like a lot of people I will be listening with new ears today and hearing it as his goodbye to the world. It inspires me deeply that he released relevant and good work right up to the end.

Bowie of course was deeply interested and involved in magic and the occult, and so is certainly on-topic for this blog, but other than a few songs he kept that part of his life mostly private. In other ways his influence will continue to be felt for ages, and I don’t think it is much of a stretch to say that the culture would look different if he had not been here. By playing with gender and androgyny at a time when it was deeply taboo, he helped pave a way for thousands of people to feel comfortable in their own skin and be who they really are.

Today is the last day of Christmas, also known as Epiphany.

There are a lot of events and meanings that get tacked onto this day: the baptism of Christ, the extension of grace to gentiles, and most importantly the visitation of the Three Magi-Kings.

The three Magi: Caspar, Melchior, and Balthazar are mentioned in several grimoires. The Epiphany Mass is when special chalk for making the circle mentioned in the 6th and 7th books of Moses gets consecrated.

Catholics of course use the chalk to mark their door with the year and initials of the three wise men.

20 + C + M + B + 16

The initials also stand for Christus mansionem benedicat, “May Christ bless the house.”Carmelites use the following prayer:

The three Wise Men, Caspar, Melchior, and Balthazar followed the star of God’s Son who became human two thousand and sixteen years ago. May Christ bless our home and remain with us throughout the new year. Amen.

Visit, O blessed Lord, this home with the gladness of your presence. Bless all who live or visit here with the gift of your love; and grant that we may manifest your love to each other and to all whose lives we touch. May we grow in grace and in the knowledge and love of you; guide, comfort, and strengthen us in peace, O Jesus Christ, now and forever. Amen

I have to thank Dr. Al Cummins for posting a link to an amulet that links the Kings to Atropos – the eldest of the fates.

There are lots of other traditions related to Epiphany: The Three Kings Cake, the Candlelight Mass, etc.

Whether you care about any of this or not, its a good opportunity to take a sip of a Three Wise Men cocktail:
1 part Scotch Whisky (recommend a blended Scotch for Coctails. Johnnie Walker Red or Black. Green, Gold and Blue should never be mixed with anything else.
1 part Tennessee Whiskey (e.g., Jack Daniels).
1 part Kentucky Bourbon Whiskey (e.g., Jim Beam White or Black Label).

Serve either neat or on the rocks, according to taste.

Variations include:

Three Wise Men go Hunting, which is the recipe above with the addition of Wild Turkey Bourbon.
Three  Men and a Baby: recipe above, add milk. (YUCK!)

The new cycle of Take Back Your Mind begins on Monday, January 11th.

Rather than talk more about the class, here are some words from Diotima Mantineia, who took the course last year:

“Jason always delivers solid, in-depth knowledge based on personal experience, and Take Back Your Mind was no exception. Given that I started my meditation practice back in 1972 and have studied a wide variety of techniques over the years, I wasn’t sure I’d learn anything new. I had fallen off the meditation wagon recently, and took the class because I thought it would help me get back on track. It did that, and, as it turned out, I learned quite a bit, and not just new techniques. I also got deeper insights into techniques I was already familiar with

If you think you can’t meditate, or it’s never worked for you, or whatever your excuses for not meditating are (there are plenty, and I think I’ve tried them all) give this class a shot. You’ll learn a number of different ways of meditating, and having the support of a group is very helpful.  (And yes, meditation really is the foundation of a successful magical practice!”

Diotima Mantineia
www.uraniaswell.com

READY TO TAKE BACK YOUR MIND?

Every other Monday for six month you will wake up to a recording in your inbox that gives the mind-training instructions I want you to focus on. That Thursday night at 9:30pm eastern time there will be a conference call where we do a Q&A and practice session based on that material. If you cannot make the call live, you can submit questions by e-mail and will receive a recording of the call after it happens

What I require from you is dedication. That’s it. You need to do it to get it. 20 minutes a day for meditation and a few minutes scattered here and there throughout the rest of your day is all I ask of you. You do not need to practice at a particular time every day – but you do need to commit to a practice.

Fee for the course is $108 a month, payable by paypal subscription.

The last weeks of the year are stressful for me. The kids are home for a week and, since I work from home, I pretty much spend every waking moment in their presence.

It has been a solid week now.

I was talking to a friend, someone I consider a meditation teacher, and confided: “The kids are driving me so crazy right now, I feel like a total fraud running a Take Back Your Mind program“.

His response, was something that I think all meditators need to keep in mind: “It’s been over a week now of being pretty much constantly in the presence of two six year olds? You aren’t yelling or freaking out, you are making a few sardonic posts on facebooks and talking to a friend. That is pretty much ideal.”

“You are aware of your mindstate and managing it in distress. More than that, you aren’t playing the spiritual teacher game of hiding feelings and pretending to be zen.”

Good spiritual friends, even ones you cannot mention by name on social media, are important to have at all levels.

On one of the first four nights of the New Year, along with hundreds of students and alumni, you can perform the Hekate Global rite asking her to be a guide in the dark, initiate you into the mysteries, and help unfold the secrets of Sorcery. The Next Morning or afternoon you will perform a ritual honoring Helios and the powers of the Sun. You will ask him to increase your wealth, power, potency, and grace.

Not only are we beginning a new calendar, and still in the darkest nights of the year, but we are also reaching the perihelion – the time when the earth is closest to the sun. At this time calling upon Helios and Hekate as a pair has been shown to be especially effective.

If you are already enrolled in the Strategic Sorcery course, you already have the rite in your inbox. If not, then now is the time to join!

BEGIN A YEAR OF THE BEST SORCERY TRAINING AVAILABLE AND PARTICIPATE IN A RITE DESIGNED TO BOLSTER YOUR SUCCESS.

STRATEGIC SORCERY ONE-YEAR COURSE AND GLOBAL SUCCESS RITE- $150

“This is a great depiction of my mind before and after Jason Miller’s Take Back Your Mind course. The before’s me, struggling up the mountain, with my mind all scrambled, just like the one on the head of the guy climbing up that mountain. And the after is me, sitting sitting zen-like and calm, with my mind finally ordered and settled, just like the guy meditating on the top of the mountain. LOL, Okay…I’m really nowhere near that yet…that’ll take years for me, even with a course as great as Jason’s! But still, it was a hell of a lot closer to that after his class!”  – L.L.

I received the above picture and comment from one of last years Take Back Your Mind students.

I am so happy that she is closer to solved mind depicted above, but I am also glad that she is not sitting meditating on top of the mountain. So many systems are designed with that as the ideal, and treat anything short of that as sort of a contemplative consolation prize. Like if you can’t be a monk or wandering yogi, at least you can do something…

But that’s not how I see it.

I see contemplation and mindfulness as the birthright of every person on the planet, one that has been stolen by our own lack of awareness as well as a world that seems almost designed to keep us stressed, paranoid, and distracted.

The Take Back Your Mind program provides exercises that have an extremely high return on investment, to make the best use of the time you have. Rather than stripped down monastic practices crammed into a non-monastic life, this program integrates fully into your life.

Heres are the details

Every other Monday for six month you will wake up to a recording in your inbox that gives the mind-training instructions I want you to focus on. That Thursday night at 9:30pm eastern time there will be a conference call where we do a Q&A and practice session based on that material. If you cannot make the call live, you can submit questions by e-mail and will receive a recording of the call after it happens

What I require from you is dedication. That’s it. You need to do it to get it. 20 minutes a day for meditation and a few minutes scattered here and there throughout the rest of your day is all I ask of you. You do not need to practice at a particular time every day – but you do need to commit to a practice.

I don’t want this to be just another New Year’s Resolution, so I am giving you a week to recover from the Holiday celebrations.

The first class arrives on January 11th. 

Fee for the course is $108 a month, payable by paypal subscription.

I was chatting with an apprentice at the beginning of the season about the whole Jesus thing. He felt this attraction to esoteric Christian work, but strangely balked at the name Jesus.

He liked the Logos, the word of god and divine spark. It was suitably Cosmic in his mind to be divine. He could deal with Christos, since it is a title and is again could be kind of non-specific. But every time he used the term Jesus, it would be “The Gnostic Jesus” or something like that.

We investigated this and he had a hard time reconciling the idea of immanence and transcendence. That one could be so mired in the dirt and slime and ego of this world yet still be fully and completely divine.

This being the Christmas Season and all, I reminded him that kind of talk will get Santa Clause to punch you in the face! 

For me, the whole mystery is the paradox of being fully divine and fully human. That’s the whole damn reason for the story as I see it.

It is also why I am always stressing to my students to keep working on Spiritual and Sorcerous practice at the same time. Awaken to the reality of your primordial divine nature and your actions in the world be the rays cast by that light.  Jesus is, in this way, a great role model for the aspiring Sorcerer Saint.

Which brings me to my yearly sermon on the three Keys of Christmas.

When it comes to Christmas, there are three things to the story that I think are important.  Three sacred keys to understanding what the story of the nativity is really trying to communicate. They have fuck-all to do with accepting Christ, or proclaiming yourself a Christian, or anything at all about what you believe.

Since I do not have the time to delve supply multiple sources, I will confine myself to one passage from the most holy and sacred Christmas scripture in existence, one that reveals all three of the keys. I am speaking of course of “A Charlie Brown Christmas”*.

 “And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night. And lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them: and they were sore afraid. And the angel said unto them, ‘Fear not: for behold, I bring unto you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people. For unto you is born this day in the City of David a Savior, which is Christ the Lord. And this shall be a sign unto you; Ye shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger.’ And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host, praising God, and saying, ‘Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.’”

Here are the three mysteries. The three things about Christmas that I think are important.

1.  “The Glory of the Lord shone round about them”. This is HUGE, and very few people get it. The Glory of the Lord is the Shekhinah. It is not figurative, but a literal light that indicates the lords presence. Until this point in Jewish history, the Glory of the Lord shone in the temple and only in the temple. It was the response to the efforts of the hereditary line of High Priests. Now, it is appearing to lowly shepherds in a field! Christ is not of this priestly line, which is why Paul refers to him as being of the Order of Melchizedek – the Priest King who Abraham paid tribute to in ancient times.

2.  I bring unto you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people. The key words here are “all people“. In our age it is easy to lose sight of how territorial religions were at the time. Gods were the god of a particular people – not of everyone. Buddhism was one of the first religions that was for anyone that wanted in – no race, culture, or caste requirement needed – the truth was for anyone or it was not the truth. This statement is saying the same thing. Divinity is too big to be contained in such a small vessel as a race or culture. It is beyond that or it is not divinity.

3.  And this shall be a sign unto you; Ye shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger. This is not just instruction on where to go find the child, it is a SIGN. Divinity manifested in one of the quietest, meekest, and lowest possible manners: as a defenseless child laying in an animals feeding trough. The idea here is that Divinity is not the providence of kings or priests or even the well off. The highest possible level of divinity can and IS manifest in the poorest and meekest.

These three keys are not just for those that call themselves Christian. Christ never drilled people on belief . They are sacred keys of understand a truth. Divinity is accessible not only to a select lineag or special vocation – it is available to everyone, even shepherds. Divinity is for all people, not just a single group or race. Divinity manifests from the highest to the lowest in status or stature. Becoming “Christian” is about the least important thing you can take away from it.

Merry Christmas.

*Ok, its a quote from the Gospel of Luke, but I always hear it in Linus’s voice.

I recorded an AMA for Occult Corpus Forum this afternoon. If you want to hear me blather for 80+ minutes about magic, this is RIGHT UP YOUR ALLEY.

Topics include:

• Eastern vs Western Magic
• Why to have a mentor and how to work with one.
• How I fit daily practice into a busy day
• Why I read the VGW three times.
• Lion Faced Dakinis
• The Necronomicon
• Unhelpful Angels
• The ceiling of what can be done with Magic
• Magic and Politics
• A whole bunch of other stuff. 

Listen to PART 1 HERE

Then when you recover give a listen to PART 2 HERE

Or check out the OCCULT CORPUS FORUM. 

** Strategic Sorcery Students: this is not the AMA I am doing for you guys That will be out next week and you will get links in an e-mail. 

One of the great gifts of being a teacher is that you get to learn from your students. This is especially useful when your students take your teachings and find new framing to express them. In the Strategic Sorcery group students are always cheering and challenging each other. Yesterday Student A.M. threw down the glove in a way that struck me as particularly useful, and I wanted to share it here on the blog so that others can pick it up and do it.

Its a very simple idea, and here is A.M. expressing it in his own words:

I’ve got a christmas challenge I’d like to set – conjure something that you want, but think you don’t deserve. Maybe it’s a raise that you think you haven’t worked for, or the attention of someone special that you think is out of your league, or just some fun or pretty gift you’d like to give yourself.

This has been a pretty powerful mental short-circuit trick for me – a lot of the time I get distracted by thoughts of whether or not I’ve ‘earned’ (in mundane or spiritual terms) the result that I’m summoning. Doing this every once in a while helps me remember that it doesn’t really matter who ‘deserves’ success or not. What matters is whether or not we make it happen for ourselves.

Those of you that have taken the course or read Financial Sorcery know about Set Point theory already – what better way to shift that point than by doing this?

The degree to which people who are ostensibly dedicated to causing change in strange and subtle ways are often trapped by ideas of what they do and don’t deserve has always amazed me.

Fuck what you deserve or don’t deserve: just go get it because you want it.

Don’t come up with some faux cosmic “it is my true will” justification; go for it just because you want it.

Don’t invent some reason you “need” it. Just do it because you want it.

If there is some kind of karmic-rewards point system that monitors what shit people get based on their actions, trust that it is FAR too complicated for your slightly evolved monkey brain to figure out, and assume that if you want it, it’s ok to go for it.

If you are concerned about God or Gods having a destiny for you, than let them worry about that. Assume that your desire for a car with third row seating is in fact part of that plan.

I am NOT saying to just do whatever you want and screw the consequences. That’s a whole other ball of wax. I am not suggesting you screw people over, swindle your neighbors, or in any way act rampage through the world less ethically than you normally would.

I am also not saying to drain your bank account of crap you can’t afford. This is not about treating yourself because you deserve it.

It is about blaspheming against the idea that you do or don’t deserve anything.