The fiction vs real god/spirit thing stirs up and rages on again. Go to Jacks blog here, as well as the next several posts he makes. His thoughts on this are golden and you can follow his links to see the rest of the debate in other forums and blogs. This time it is a much wider conversation because it hits the Pagan blogs. That makes it more complex because we are not just talking about magic and results, but religion as well. The issues are different. Magicians are largely just concerned with results. Pagans however are also concerned with defining their religious movement and having that movement taken seriously on the world stage. If you don’t think it looks bad for Paganism to have people defining themselves as Pagan, and then explaining to their neighbors and co-workers that they worship Batman and Wonder Woman you have some real blinders on.

This is not a pagan blog however, so here we only have to deal with Sorcery and Results. 15 years ago I wrote a piece for Behutet suggesting that the reason not to invoke Superman is a matter of sacredness. That no-matter how much attention and even fervent fandom such a figure receives, it is not the same as actual belief and faith. That is not to say that there is no energy there. It is to day that it is different.

More recently in my posts on Post-Chaos magic, I suggested that rather than argue that working with Spock is the same as working with Mercury, we start to take a look at them and see if there are things that Spirits do well that thoughtforms don’t (something that Jack gets at in his posts) but also if there are operations that thoughtforms are more suited to than traditional spirits such as personal behavior modification, and enchantment.  From my experiments, spirits and gods are much more suited to effecting events than they are to changing peoples minds and habits, whereas a character from fiction seems to get a pretty solid result in the area of psychological change. This is true when trying to effect myself as well as others.

My ideas on the actual nature of Gods and Spirits is pretty fluid and my view differs a lot from that of the western magical community at large. Though I don’t push my view on others, it certainly does effect how I teach.

1. The names and descriptions of spirits are names that humans have given them. How do you pronounce their actual names? Can you speak in 12 tones at once and speak words backwards and forwards in time? No? Then don’t worry about it. Names like Michael, Ekajati, Legba, and so on all have traceable etymologies from human cultures. It may be names that a single being has responded to for centuries, or it may be a name that legions of spirits answer to.

2. That said, some names and images have power that others do not. Names that have been used widely for long periods accrue a certain amount of power. Names established by great mages and yogis who are able to bind that name on many levels at once have a different sort of power, and may be known only to a few.

3.  I don’t believe in divine beings in the sense that they are immortal, or that they are creator beings, or that they are the rulers of thunderstorms childbirth or any other such thing. In this I follow my Vajrayana training. Buddhists have never suggested that the gods of other people don’t exist, just that they are not really gods and not worthy of taking refuge in or making yourself subservient to.

4. That said, not all beings are equal. A being that lives for 500,000,000 years and is fully aware of itself in 9 dimensions certainly will appear as a god to us. Spirits that are connected with a specific river or tree will probably not seem as LARGE, yet might actually be more useful to us in some ways than a far removed being.

5. Just as people can have certain genetic pre-dispositions, so can certain classes of spirits. Thus I do believe that there are spirits that are largely benevolent towards humans, others that are largely malevolent towards humans, yet others that are neutral and so on.

6. Some non-physical beings seem to be contained in three-dimensional space like us. Others are not. When you can point to where they are in a room it tends to be what history calls nature spirits or ghosts. When it is not contained that way, or needs to be contained such as in a triangle during an evocation, we tend to think of them as divine or semi-divine like angels or demons. Magicians often think of the former as less powerful and effective than the latter, but I disagree.

7. Just as we exist on mutiple levels at once, so do spirits. It is entirely possible to tap into the Zeus that is a transcendent and wise being. It is also possible to appeal to the Zeus that is egoistic, petulant, and at time a bit rapey. Don’t confuse them.

8. Consciousness is not contained, not for the spirits and not for us. Rather than asking whether your HGA is a part of your mind, it might be worth asking if you are part of its mind. Or perhaps if you are both manifestations of a stream of consciousness that is beyond both manifestations.

9. We are spirits. Going to spirits for help is great, but there is much we can do for ourselves. The work on internal alchemy and realization can be aided by the intercession of spirits, but it cannot be done for you. If all you do is call up spirits to zap you, or fly around the astral getting initiations from god, you are missing a large piece of the puzzle.

10. We not only do not currently know for sure the nature of what we deal with, but we currently do not have the capacity to know for sure the nature of what we deal with. Therefore every operating theory, including the ones above, might be wrong. Keep this in mind whether you are doing traditional work or experimenting.

Today is not just Mercuries day because it is Wednesday  It is Mercuralia, the sacred feast!
At at his hour which falls on his day of the week, which falls on his day of the year you can raise a glass to the god of intelligence, speed, speech, commerce, and of course thievery!

“Glorious Mercury, grandson of Atlas, be present here today as You were once
upon Arcadia’s hill, a Pleiad’s son by Jove. Arbiter in peace and in arms among
the Gods of the heavens above and on earth, traveler on winged feet, You who
enjoys the lyre and who takes pleasure in whoever glistens with the wrestler’s
ointment, You who has taught eloquent speech in all tongues, for You on the
Ides of May, the Fathers once dedicated a sacred shrine near the Circus and
named this day ever after to be Your feast day.” ~ Ovid Fasti 5.663-70

“Mercurius, by Atlas born to Maia, God who fashioned our uncivilized ancestors
into cultured men of urbane speech and athletic bearing, to You I sing,
Messenger of the Gods and of mighty Jove, inventor of the curved lyre, it
pleases You to compose secret jokes and play pranks skillfully. Gladly You
restore pious souls to their proper places and by the golden staff confine the
trivial quarrel. Dear are You to the Gods above and below.” ~ Horace Carmina
1.10.1-8; 20-24

Hail Mercury!

Just a quick note on business.

I am getting completely caught up and if you live in the US and are expecting something from me, you should get it by Monday the 13th. If you do not get it, please write me and I will make sure you get it by the end of the week.

If you do not live in the United States, give it an extra week. If you do not get your product by May 20, please contact me and I will make sure you get it straight away.

For those waiting to hear on the Apprenticeship program – I delayed the start until June 21st. You will be hearing from me before the end of the month.

Cycle 13 has begun.

If you did not get an e-mail with Lesson Zero and the Walpurgisnacht Meditation in it, but have signed up for Lesson 13, contact me and I will straighten it out.

EGO EIMAI SYMPLANOS HYMIN ASTER
KAI EK TOU BATHOUS ANALAMPON

Jason

Last week I was sponsored by the Tri-College Mellon Working Group on Magic to give two lectures. The first on The Place of Magic was held at Swarthmore College and was only to professors and guests of the group. In attendance was Yvonne Chireau author of Black Magic: African American Religion and Conjuring Tradition, Eoghan Ballard the famed scholar of Afro-Carribean traditions, and Professor Radcliffe Edmond author of Redefining Ancient Orphism: A Study in Greek Religion and the upcoming Redefining Ancient Orphism: A Study in Greek Religion.*

The second lecture was held at Bryn Mawr, was open to all students, and was on Sane Eclecticism: Responsible Synchretism and the Occult.  Truth be told, because of my own eclectic background about half of the first talk was about this as well. The balance between eclecticism and tradition is something that I think about a lot.

One the one hand, the great gift of our age is that the doors have all been more or less thrown open. We have unprecedented access to magical and religious practices that people in former decades never dreamed possible. This is not ONLY because of the internet either. I grew up in a small town in NJ and before I was 20 I had encountered and learned magic from a Wiccan Priestess, a African American Conjure Man, a Santera, a Rosicrucian/Ceremonial Magician, and the Ngakpa that not only became my Root lama but introduced me to the OTO and Thelemic thought.

If I was to just pick one tradition and only one, I feel like it would be a betrayal of what the universe presented me with.

On the other hand we have people that are so loose and eclectic that it is silly. This is the Wiccan that tells you Kali is her Goddess and Jesus is her God – meanwhile she knows almost nothing about either one. This is the person that announces that they also practice phurba – but what they mean is that they use it as an athame to cast circles. This is the ceremonialist that calls on the Orishas in the LBRP. This is the Crowley himself when he tried to tackle Taoism.

So how do we walk the line? How do we take advantage of the access that believe is the great gift of the age, without falling into dilettantism, delusion, or danger?

The question is different for different people, but I myself have some rules that I follow and would like to share here. Following these has generally allowed me to put together a magical system and style that draws upon traditions new and old, yet still allow me to be taken seriously by most traditionalists.

1. DO NOT USURP TITLES: this is by far thee most important rule. If you read a book on Vodou it does not make you a Houngan or Mambo. If you read every book on it ever written, memorize 12 cd’s worth of songs, and spend every weekend drawing veve’s and invoking the Loa it STILL does not make you a Houngan or Mambo, because that is based on an initiation. You can be a Vodousant, and you may even know more than many initiated Houngans out there (more on that in a minute) but you still have not been initiated, so don’t take the title.

This is  not just personal titles. You should not usurp the titles of traditions or toold either. You can read books on Dzogchen. You can do the practices. You can even attain the result. But if you have not had the introduction to mind from a person, you are not doing Dzogchen. Call it something else. You can make a spirit pot. You can even study and draw upon how Prendas are constructed, but unless you do it in that tradition it is not that thing, and should not be called that.

2. IF YOU HOLD A TITLE, DON’T THROW IT AROUND UNTIL YOU KNOW YOUR SHIT: This is the flip-side of #1 above and is something that not a lot of people talk about, including traditionalists. It is possible in this day and age to get the coveted initiations that I talk about above, but still know next to nothing. Houngan Hector here in New Jersey told me that shortly after he developed an interest in Vodou he flew down to Haiti and was initiated Houngan Asogwe along with a bunch of other people that were very new to Vodou. This is the highest level of initiation. He flew down, did his thing, and flew back. The problem was that he only knew a handful of songs and some other things that he gleamed from books. Now, much to Hector’s credit he flew back down again and again, and found people to give him the training that he knew he wanted. Other people however are happy with the title and just use it to validate whatever they make up.

Again, the same thing happens in the east. You can be born a Tulku (recognized incarnation) and be enthroned as a lama without ever going on retreat. One famous Lama was the subject of a paternity suit that he eventually lost. Some true believers thought that he must be innocent because Tantra teaches how to hold back your semen during orgasm, and therefore he wouldn’t get someone pregnant by accident. The problem with this line of thinking is that this particular Rinpoche probably did not ever master that technique or many others you might expect. He was a Tulku by birth, and spent most of his life in the west. He can write books on pop psychology and anything else he wants, and it will be passed off as Buddhism as long as his name is attached.

I am a Bishop because I have been consecrated as such, but I don’t throw the term around much because I have not had (nor am I even desiring) the training that one gets in a mainstream seminary or even in a larger Gnostic Church like the AJC. Thus, I don’t try to use the title to add validity to my crap.

3. SEPARATE TECH FROM SYMBOL SET: Systems of magic can be broken down into symbol sets, and tech. Symbol sets are usually dependent on culture, time, tradition, and sometimes only available through initiation. Using a symbol set outside of its culture, or initiatory stream can sometimes be difficult, disrespectful, or even downright dangerous. Tech on the other hand works because it works, and thus can be looked and examined from outside of any specific tradition. In this way you can find the most effective techniques without falling into the trap of making an eclectic mess. For example it would be find to borrow the idea of multiplying offerings with the mind from Tibetan Buddhism and use it in Wicca. It would be quite another to grab the nearest Phurba and call it your Athame, using it in the way that an Athame is used without really learning anything about the Tibetan Phurba traditions.

Iron being apotropaic. Triangles trapping or manifesting spirits. The appearance of the Swastika. Circles as protection and microcosms. These things work because they work. There is tech there that is beyond anyone’s claim of propriety.

4. REALIZE THAT TECH TAKEN FROM ITS ORIGINAL SETTING IS NO LONGER EXACTLY THAT THING ANYMORE: Recent university studies of Tummo have confirmed that you can control core body temperature with breath and mind. You can do it outside of the context of Tantric training. There are health benefits, and mental benefits. This is a good thing. However, it no longer Tummo at that point. Some people think Tummo is about producing heat in a cold climate (Tibet), but that is not it at all. Tummo developed in India. It is about producing bliss. The heat is a by-product. You use that bliss in Kamamudra practices and other yogas to realize Buddhahood.

I think it is great and cool to learn how to do Tummo and gain the helth benefits, but outside of Tantra it is no longer Tummo. It is something else.

5. REALIZE THAT YOU ARE GOING TO PISS SOME PEOPLE OFF. BE O.K. WITH THAT. For instance I recommended a while ago that people who did not want to use animal sacrifice could borrow the Tibetan tech of the so-called blood red tormas. These are cakes that look like severed heads and blood sacrifices that Buddhists used to propitiate local beings as as Dharma protectors, but who previously relied upon blood sacrifice. I noted that some people involved in ATR’s are already doing this using red palm oil as blood. A noted practitioner who has expereince in both Tibetan Buddhism and ATR took issue with this advice because there is not the same concept of emptiness in ATR’s as there is in Buddhism and the Gods would be offended.

The thing is that this tech was specifically developed when a people that did not sacrifice animals came into contact with, and needed to interact with, people and entities that DID. It arose out of cross-cultural magic. This is EXACTLY what this kind of thing is for.

In the end people have to experiment, look at the result, and decide for themselves. Part of this is respectfully noting, but eventually ignoring the occasional detractor.

6.  APPROACH ANY TRADITION FROM ITS OWN BASE. The Chakras are not the Sephira. If you try and approach the Chakras as Sephira you will not understand them at all, and probably mess up your understanding of Sephira in the process. Freya is not just another venusian Archetype. She is different.

Recently someone on FB was asked if they do the Middle Pillar ritual. They replied that they do not, and they do my Pillar and Spheres excercise instead. While I am honored and touched by this, the two rituals are completely different and have almost  nothing in common with one another, Pillars and Spheres sets up an alchemical reaction among the five elements in the body by placing them in a certain order. It has nothing at all to do with the Tree of Life, and is not a substitute. No reason that one could not do both if you wanted to.

When you approach a different system, try as much as possible to forget what you know about other systems for at least a while. Approach it as a complete newbie so you can view it on its own terms and from its own base.

7. DECIDE ON THE LEVEL OF INVOLVEMENT YOU WANT, AND DON’T CONFUSE IT: An argument that people have used against practicing more than one magical system, and even against raising children in more than one religion, is that any given path takes a lifetime to master. This is true. I could spend the rest of my life living in Nepal and studying Himalayan magic and never learn it all. You an spend your entire life as a Kimbanda Priest and never exhaust what there is to learn and master. You can be Catholic from birth till death and never completely master the whole thing. You can spend 30 hours a week practicing Tai Chi and still never get as good as Chen Xiouwang. All this is true.

But sometimes you don’t want to Master something. You just want to gain competency, and that takes a lot less time. You can spend your life studying German and learning to master the language, but for most of us the ability to hold conversations is enough, and it doesnt take that long to learn that. Being a Martial Arts master is wonderful and amazing, but for most people learning enough to maintain health, defend themselves in a fight, and maybe have some fun sparring will not be a lifetime obsession. I am a not about meditation and would spend hours in meditation a day if I could. A cubicle jocky at the insurance company however might only want to lower his stress levels, gain some control over their thoughts, and be happier, in which case 20 minutes a day will do them a world of good.

People that are competent in multiple areas themselves become masters of making connections that specialists lose the ability to see. Look at the CEO’s of the world. Do you think Steve Jobs as the best design person at Apple? Was he the best accountant? Was he the best technician? The best marketer? Probably not. He could however see connections that maybe others could not and bring these all together in ways that others could not.

Competency is fine. Great in fact. I like it. I forget who said it but specialization is for insects. Just don’t confuse competency with Mastery.

*Yeah. Total shameless bragging and name-dropping here. For a community college drop-out to find themselves invited to give a talk to a group like this at a University like Swarthmore was kind of a big deal for me.

Just one week before the beginning of CYCLE 13 of STRATEGIC SORCERY TRAINING COURSE

I am one of those people who listen to NPR on the way to work every day. I check several news sites every day. During election cycles I am jacked in to cable news TV shows, talk radio, and polls. When major news events happen, I am one of those people that feels the need to stay on the news for hours. Live it and breathe it as if I was there.

I have been critical of this behavior and decided last weekend that I was going to go on a low-information diet to make room for some of the better things in life. That was last Sunday. On Monday a bomb went off in Boston.

After checking in with friends to make sure that they were ok (nobody even close) I decided to stick to my plan and shut the damn news off. I would check my news feed in the morning, and that was it. Music or silence in the car and at home.

Even on Friday when Boston was completely shut down and a massive manhunt was on for the second bomber – I ignored the news coverage. At first I felt stress over this. My mind is like “what if they catch him? What is they don’t? You won’t know…“  So I took those questions seriously. The answer of course is: WHO CARES. I am not in law-enforcement or media, so getting the scoop does me no practical good. I then went about my day, just like I did the rest of the week – almost no deliberate news consumption.

I noticed a few things:

1. My sense of needing to know has blown into a sense of “needing to feel like I am right there and that it is happening to me”. This is not information, this is porn. News porn is not good for you.

News porn creates a false sense of fear. You feel that you might be blown up any minute, when in fact your chances are ridiculously slim. You feel that children that are out of your sight for even a second will be kidnapped and molested when in fact this also is slim.

A good historical example of this negative effect of news porn happened after 9/11. Thousands of people decided not to fly after 9/11 because they were afraid that terrorists would hijack their plane. This caused an increase in auto travel. Auto-travel being generally less safe than air travel, this increased the number of auto accident deaths to a number that was greater than what would have happened if 9/11 happened all over again.

2. Throughout the week I was generally happier and more balanced. Not that I am unhappy or unbalanced, but like anyone I have enough stress from my own life without having to feel like I am in a terrorist attack. I was able to focus on my own life more fully and the lives of those people I actually know.

3. Strangely I remained just as informed as I always have been. You hear things by osmosis remarkably quickly, especially on facebook. I knew they caught they guy within the same hour that the story broke.  People tell you things. It’s hard NOT to find out about stuff.

4. Another strange one is that I was able to be informed about things OTHER than the main event of the week in a way that I generally am not when I get swept up in event fever. I follow the career of General Musharraf pretty closely (he took over Pakistan in a coup in 1999 exactly three hours after I bought a ticket on PIA that would have me in Karachi for a couple days). He was put on house arrest last week, which most people did not even notice.

5. Compassion and care are not effected at all. Some people seem to stay jacked into a story as an act of compassion or empathy. Not staying jacked in, did not lesson my compassion at all. Indeed it gave it a bit of space to manifest. Not only for the family of the victims, but the families of the bombers as well. How strange it must be. As a father I cannot imagine either loosing my 8 year old to senseless violence OR loosing my young adult to radical ideology and violence. What a nightmare.

6. Being the first to announce a story on FB just seems silly now, but it is exactly the type of thing I used to do. Same things with posts about how the bombers are FBI patsy’s or how they should have their rights taken away, or any other wingnut input. I mean, if you have a strong opinion, by all means share it and act on it. It’s just that facebook seems about the least effectual and non-committal way of protesting/lobbying that there is.

In general I am in the process of revamping my processes for everything I do. I want the rest of 2013 to be meaner and leaner and more productive. One key to that is going to be continuing a low-info news diet. Let’s see if I miss anything. I bet I won’t.

CYCLE 13 of STRATEGIC SORCERY TRAINING STARTS ON MAY 1st

Hermetic and Kabbalistic correspondences can a very effective tool for mis-understanding everything. One of the dangers of thinking of gods and spirits in these terms is that we can loose sight of their fullness and only see the aspect that we are working with. I have written about this many times before, often bringing up the example of a magician that placed the Orishas in the quarters of their circle based on elemental attributions, without knowing that Yemeja and Oya do not get along. Correspondences are nice, but they do not over-ride tradition, mythology, and history – even the stuff that you aren’t aware of.

Alas, just because you write about something and warn others about it, doesn’t mean that you won’t occasionally fall into the same trap yourself.

I have been working on my upcoming chapbook on Planetary Magic for a while now. I am on the last chapter, a series of 49 Interplanetary Spells that explore the full potential of the hours/day system for magical magic. In some of these spells I have been making references to the Greek Gods as associated with the planets: Chronus, Zeus, Ares, Helios, Aphrodite, Hermes, and Selene. I was sipping along at a great pace until I arrived at the spell for the hour of the Sun on the day of Venus. I just stopped dead. I revisited it every day. For a MONTH AND A HALF. I could write other things, but I just could not get this damn spell to spit out.

Yesterday, while I was again banging my head against my desk in frustration, I remembered something from a book on Greek Gods that I read when I was in 6th grade about Aphrodite sleeping with Ares and getting busted by Helios.

Turns out that Aphrodite was pretty pissed that Helios spilled the beans to Hephaistos about her infidelity with his brother Ares. To get back at him she cursed him with love for the Persian princess Leucothoe, who he promptly seduced. The goddess, Clytie, who held unrequited love for Helios, revealed the seduction of the princess to her father, King Orchamus, who buried her alive as punishment.

This story tells us two things:
1. Aphrodite and Helios probably don’t get on well, and should not be called upon in the same spell.
2. The Greek Gods are a bunch of psychotic drama queens. Greek Mythology is like Days of Lives S.V.U.

Anyway, I made separate offerings to Helios and Aphrodite to smooth things out. I then approached the combined powers through their inherent emptiness (Buddhist training has a lot of uses) and immediately was able to tap into the current and get it written.

A lot of books on magic place a great emphasis on belief. Rock solid belief in magic, we are sometimes told, is the main ingredient in successful sorcery. If we believe it is so, we can make it so. In Chaos magic theory this was taken even further where belief was treated as a force unto itself that could be easily switched from object to object. Mr Spock was easily as useful as Mercury we are told, if we generate enough belief.

Belief also gets used as a really lame excuse by witches and mages who are too lazy to study.  No need to learn the traditions of herbal lore before making that charm, “it only matters whether you believe in it”. The rituals and tools and formula that have been painstakingly preserved for centuries? These, we are told are merely props for the power of belief.

Now me, I don’t place a lot of stock in beliefs. The magic I do and teach works whether you believe in it or not. Modern religion is much more about what you believe in, than what you do. Sadly people also bring this attitude in to magic. I recently suggested that someone make an offering to local spirits. They informed me that it wouldn’t work because they didn’t believe in nature spirits like that. They were kind of shocked and I think maybe a little offended when I suggested that the spirits didn’t care about whether he believed in them or not, they just want the offering. He still went ahead and made the offerings and lo – the desired outcome came quickly.

Do you need to believe in Hekate to get her to answer your call? Not anymore than you need to believe in your car to get it to take you to work. But won’t she be offended if she is invoked by someone that doesn’t have strong faith? No. Honestly, I can’t think of anything more narcissistic than thinking that a god or spirit is worried about what you think of them.

So, no, I am not a big believer in the usefulness of belief.  I am however a fan of doubt.

I think that occultists could use a little more doubt in their practice. Even notice that you don’t see a lot of blog posts about spells and magical experiments that don’t work out? Part of the reason for that is that we tend not to doubt that we are getting the results we ask for. We call a spirit, and get some kind of response, we instantly declare it a success. It’s rare that I see an occultist question whether they got the spirit they asked for, or whether they even genuinely made contact at all and are not just fantasizing.

Very often I see occultists taking synchronicity and gematric coincidences as proof of their work and direction. I do not often see occultists question whether they might be buying into a texas sharpshooter fallacy or suffering a confirmation bias.

Doubt has served me well in my practice. In the 90′s I did a series of enochian workings that sparked a fairly intense and detailed spiritual communication. The spirit had apocalyptic information, it insisted that I write it and share it, it insisted that I was a prophet. I was all kinds of excited to have my ego stroked and to join the ranks of people that were channeling Thelemic Libers, but decided to take a step back and take a look at it in a month with a cooler head. I asked myself, is the information useful? NO. Is there any chance that this might be incorrect? YES. I decided not to do what the spirit said, which is good because all the predictions were wrong.

In 2006 I received a few teachings from Hekate that were meant to go into the Hekate work that I have been collecting since 2001. These specific visions related to a very sexualized form of Hekate. Unlike most of the rest of the teachings, this had no root in her historical practice. While I am not reconstructing anything, I had, up until that point, had things I could point to as roots or historical confirmations. Rather than accept this communication, I let it sit for a bit and did some purification  I then came back to it months later and determined it to be an outside influence – mostly from my own mind.

I think direct experience is great. It is the reason I do what I do. But some  people escape the trap of placing blind faith in tradition only to fall into the trap of placing blind faith in their own experiences. A little doubt can be a good thing for the magician to hold on to.