“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!

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.
 

“I have to say that I find your insistence on meditation frustrating and I really don’t think it has as much to do with magic as you think. The magic I am interested in involves talking with spirits, traveling the astral, and raising and controlling the energies of the body. Meditation seems like a side issue.”

My answer: I think that talking with spirits, astral travelling, and energy work are great. Meditation is getting to know and control your own mind.  What part of those things do not involve your mind?

Spirits? Do you think you hear them only audibly with the normal ear?
Astral Travel? Is your mind not essential to this? Is the astral not a realm of mirror-like appearance that can fool and deceive?
Energy Work? There is no system of yoga, chi-gung, or anything else that does not recognize that the subtle winds are linked to mental processes. Literally none.

Setting all this aside, even just normal waking experience of reality itself is only known through the mind. Every day we all perceive reality through a deeply flawed lens. Not only are we a slave to the heuristics that we use to make sense of what we take in, but our mechanistic slavery to what can only be described as the programming we all hold, keeps us from seeing reality-as-such and acting accordingly. If this is the case with normal reality, how more susceptible are we when we start dealing with subtle realms and mystical states?

Meditation is the best way to know the tool that you interact with all experience through. It is the best way to clean that tool and keep it sharp. It is the best way to keep yourself from getting carried away by your own bullshit.

Still though, if we are not just mediators  but Sorcerer’s and Sorceresses’s, we need to know   how and when to let the visions in, when to listen to the gods, and when to make the potent signs and grand invocations. Another student of the course is doing a lot of meditation and mentioned that she knows she is supposed to ignore the awesome visions, but finds it hard.

The rick here is harmony in your practices. When I and other teachers tell people to ignore visions during meditation, it is mostly because we do not want people to confuse visionary and trance work with meditation. Once you know that, there is no reason that you cannot explore those visions outside of meditation. You can either finish your session and mentally attempt to revisit them or explore the vision right when it happens and make time afterwards for more meditation. The trick is knowing that you are departing the meditation in a mindful way for a purpose, not getting distracted from your meditation by shiny spirit baubles.

While potent and meaningful visions are not meditation itself, they are a sign of progress in meditation. By reducing clinging to old perceptions, surface level mental chatter, and base karmic traces, you are making room for deeper stuff to manifest. In fact, meditation can sometimes be a better way to generate such visions than specifically visionary or shamanic methods, as well as leaving you in a position to deal with them critically.

I will leave my thoughts on self-critique for my next post: The Usefulness of Doubt.