When last we left our hero Kalagni was proving eir inability to make reasonable decisions and had entered into a tantric retreat while working.
Anyways, I survived. The retreat was, not surprisingly, rough and tough and emotional. To make matters worse near the end I was told to complete the retreat a week early, meaning adding in about a thousand extra mantras per day.
It was definitely intense, and I can’t wait to do the next one.
Even though I finished a week ahead of schedule (a week before solstice) I’ve been decompressing and processing the experience since then. The retreat itself was a big event, but it’s finished with a fire puja, which is a long elaborate ritual of burning offerings. I spent two hours in the snow and slight drizzle invoking gods into a fire pit, and throwing food, alcohol, flowers, a hell of a lot of melted butter, and more into a fire. It was awesome, I cried…not cause of the ritual, because I had thick viscous black smoke in my eyes for a lot of the ritual.
One thing that came up with people before, during, and after was the fact that people often say to me things like “How do you manage to make time for all these things?” or “I wish I had the extra time to spend on my practice.” Here is the thing that bothers me, so here beginneth the rant, it is very unlikely that you don’t have the time, the thing is you’re not making it a priority. Don’t blame your life, you’re choosing not to do these things in most cases. I didn’t have a casual extra three hours a day to spend in my basement calling up gods and saying mantras, and there are things that would have been more fun, and more practically productive, at least short term, that I could have been doing. The thing is I make my magickal practice a priority.
When I did the Abramelin I had a fulltime working commitment, but still managed to dedicate nearly five hours a day to the ritual. Currently I work, volunteer, and go to temple three times a week (doing stuff unrelated to the retreat, and each temple session is a three hour minimum commitment), and I still managed to set aside two to three hours a day for the retreat. I even went out of country for a few days to spend some important time with friends, and still had time to follow through with my commitments.
How? It’s nothing special, I’m not saying it as a point of pride, it’s simply a matter of priority. Cut down the time you spend on email/twitter/facebook/youtube. Don’t watch tv, drop your hobbies, stop playing games, whatever. You probably work 8-10 hours a day including travel time, sleep another 8, you spend maybe two hours a day between preparing and eating food, one hour doing chores, that’s still 3-5 hours free. And to be honest most people spend less time preparing and eating and doing chores, and most people don’t sleep as much as they should. Your day is filled with all this time, it’s just a matter of prioritizing it. Even when I was at my friend’s place I made the retreat a priority, and as much as I loved spending time with everyone there, I still would excuse myself for a few hours a day and hide in a secluded area to do the ritual.
We’ve become a culture that often treats our entertainment as a right and necessity, and our commitments as choice. It should generally be reversed. Remember when you were a kid and your parents said you could go outside and play, or watch tv, but only after your homework and chores were done? That’s how we should treat our spirituality, especially if we’re trying to do something intense, or make time for a retreat. When you come home from work, don’t hope onto the computer or watch tv, go to your altar and do your prayers and mantras for the day. Don’t settle down to knit or play video games until your commitments are done.
It’s tough, you’ll miss your hobbies (but probably not as much as you think), you’ll have to really ration your social time with friends/family, and you might have to let things slip a bit. (Apologies to my neighbours about the state of my backyard during the retreat) But if you want to take your practice seriously, you have to treat it as seriously as anything else, if not more so. It shouldn’t be this boredom activity of “oh, I have an extra twenty minutes before bed, maybe I’ll meditate and talk to my Patron,” it should be something that you’ve made time for, that’s scheduled into your life, and everything not a necessity comes after.
If you don’t make the time for your gods, why should they make the time for you?
What’s the matter?
I have a headmate.
It might be a tulpa.
I’m sure everyone has seen the articles going around now about the “Tulpamancers.” The TLDR version is there is a group of people who are creating mental companions that reside inside their heads. They’re making personalities, entities that are separate from their consciousness, but also somewhat a part of it. If you’re familiar with plural/multiple parlance they’re creating headmates, though as far as I’m aware, and I totally admit I’m not looking into tulpamancers, no “tulpa” ever fronts, or takes control of a person.
Now I’m not here to criticise what they’re doing or their techniques. The articles talks about the emotional/mental benefit these people are getting from their mentally constructed companions, and as I generally say about magick, it’s about getting results and whether it benefits you. So a few people mentioned that their companion helped them through their depression, good for them, depression is horrible to deal with, and if it works then I’m glad for them.
While not the same I’ve used similar techniques to separate and control aspects of my personality, for those familiar with my Egoetia work, which at this moment I can’t remember if I’ve ever talked about on this blog. (And if I haven’t blogged about it, that just goes to show you should attend the classes and conventions where I yatter about this stuff) So again, not challenging techniques or results, I don’t know enough about them to make a well-founded evaluation, but there is something I can say:
It’s not a tulpa.
What is a tulpa? Well, that’s a kind of tricky question. Tulpa is a Tibetan term, and this is where the issues majorly comes from. You have a group of people misusing a term from a religious tradition in a way that really misrepresents and misunderstands what it actually means. Even aside from issues around cultural appropriation it just seems foolish and lazy to me. Tulpa (sprul pa སྤྲུལ་པ་) can be broken down into two pieces: tul, and pa. Pa is just a suffix that terms a verb into a person (agentive particle). So for instance I perform the ritual chöd, so I’m called a chödpa, and someone who transmits a lung (rlung རླུང, in this case meaning the “energy seed” of a text to simplify it) is a lungpa. Tul means basically created, incarnated, emanated. So it really just means an emanated person or emanation.
Now it gets a bit confusing because it linked with the term Tulku (sprul sku སྤྲུལ་སྐྱ), ku (sku) meaning body, so emanated body. This term gets used in relationship to a Tibetan Lama who is recognized as a reincarnation of a specific high lama, they are an “emanated body” of that lama. The reason this gets confusing is an older term for Tulku was tulpaku, the person who has emanated their body
Back to tulpa, so emanation, that could apply to these people and their creation right? Yeah, if you want to go by dictionary translation meaning rather than how a word is used and understood within the culture. A tulpa is something used all the time in Vajrayana Buddhism, though the word is almost never used. When performing a ritual where you’re calling a deity of some sort you create a damshig sempa (dam tshig sems dpa’ དམ་ཚིག་སེམས་དཔའ) meaning Commitment Being. It is basically a visualized form of the deity first. So if you’re calling on Chenrezig, before you actually call on him you visualize him in front of you, create him with your mind, create an energetic “shell” for him, that’s a damshig sempa. That is sometimes referred to as a tulpa but not often. Once this is created then you call on the yeshe sempa (ye shes sems dpa’ ཡེ་ཤེས་སེམས་དཔའ) meaning Wisdom Being, which refers to the “real” deity. First you make a shell, and then you call them into it.
I mentioned tulpa is a term rarely used though. In fact yesterday at lunch, knowing I’d be writing this article I asked my lama what a tulpa was. His response? “A what?” When I wrote it down he recognized the word from having read it, but never really heard it discussed. (It was my lama who told me the older form of tulku was tulpaku, which I confirmed at home with a dictionary) At home I grabbed my various books and texts. Some ritual texts, some academic, some glossaries. Do you know what word I wasn’t able to find? Tulpa. I have huge textbooks used for teaching University courses on Tibetan Buddhism that cover everything you can think of, no tulpa. I know where the word’s popularity comes from (and I’ll get to that in a minute) but I decided to check my non-Buddhist texts
It shows up in almost 30 texts I could find (note: I didn’t actually check too many, I just had a sense of where they’d be if anywhere). They’re all over the place; Kenneth Grant, Donald Tyson, in books on Ceremonial magick, and books on Wicca. What do they say about tulpa? They just say it means an energy construct or thought form.
So where do we get the term? Alexandra David-Neel’s classic book “With Mystics and Magicians in Tibet.” In it she heard about the term, and stories about it, but it sounds like she’s confusing a few different things.
Nevertheless, allowing for a great deal of exaggeration and sensational addition, I could hardly deny the possibility of visualizing and animating a tulpa. Besides having had few opportunities of seeing thought-forms, my habitual incredulity led me to make experiments for myself, and my efforts were attended with some success. In order to avoid being influenced by the forms of the lamaist deities, which I saw daily around me in paintings and images, I chose for my experiment a most insignificant character: a monk, short and fat, of an innocent and jolly type.
I shut myself in tsams and proceeded to perform the prescribed concentration of thought and other rites. After a few months the phantom monk was formed. His form grew gradually fixed and life-like looking. He became a kind of guest, living in my apartment. I then broke my seclusion and started for a tour, with my servants and tents.
The monk included himself in the party. Though I lived in the open riding on horseback for miles each day, the illusion persisted. I saw the fat trapa, now and then it was not necessary for me to think of him to make him appear. The phantom performed various actions of the kind that are natural to travellers and that I had not commanded. For instance, he walked, stopped, looked around him. The illusion was mostly visual, but sometimes I felt as if a robe was lightly rubbing against me and once a hand seemed to touch my shoulder.
The features which I had imagined, when building my phantom, gradually underwent a change. The fat, chubby-cheeked fellow grew leaner, his face assumed a vaguely mocking, sly, malignant look. He became more troublesome and bold. In brief, he escaped my control.
Once, a herdsman who brought me a present of butter saw the tulpa in my tent and took it for a live lama.
I ought to have let the phenomenon follow its course, but the presence of that unwanted companion began to prove trying to my nerves; it turned into a “daynightmare.” Moreover, I was beginning to plan my journey to Lhasa and needed a quiet brain devoid of other preoccupations, so I decided to dissolve the phantom. I succeeded, but only after six months of hard struggle. My mind-creature was tenacious of life.
This is the origin of the tulpa as thoughtform in the Western sphere. In fact every reference to tulpa that you can find, traces back to this book, or is unsourced. Even the wiki article, while it includes other sources, everything that supports a tulpa as a construct traces back to this book. It also seems like a good source for at least some of the concern about thoughtforms gone wild. (Which really isn’t as sexy of a DVD as it sounds)
Now Alexandra David-Neel was an amazing woman. One of the first westerns to meet a Dalai Lama, a single female explorer who roamed Tibet (when it was illegal for foreigners to be there) and studied Buddhism with the lamas. While I don’t want to play a race card though, we have to understand that French explorer from a hundred years ago isn’t going to have the best understanding of Buddhism. So while her works are some of the most engaging and evocative accounts about Vajrayana, they also have a lot of issues, and the tulpa as a thoughtform is one of them.
Tulpas are an “energetic body” that you summon a deity into, they are not a thoughtform. You do not make a tulpa of just anything, in fact arguably you can’t, because it lacks the yeshe sempa. Visualized imaginations, and thoughtforms are something else altogether, tulpas are a very specific concept in a ritual process. They’re also, not even by extension something applicable to a personality that resides in your consciousness somewhere. So back to the tulpamancers, like I said, my issues with their technique and practice are none, but I do have problems with their terminology. We have words for things like that: constructs, egregores, thralls, thoughtforms, headmates. Hell English is a great language for building new words, or making up one. But don’t misapply a misapplication of a foreign word.
“Do I take the new job, or stay where I am? What is the best option?”
Questions like this are really common, specifically the variation of that last point: What is best/better? Hell, I often think like that to myself, but frankly it’s a horribly ambiguous way to think, it’s also one that lacks power and responsibility.
It’s not something just from divination though, people use similar terms regarding the gods/guides. “Please put me on the better path” or “They know what is best.”
Maybe I’m in a nitpicky mood, but this always bothers me. These all presuppose that there is some singular ultimate universal best, and it’s just a matter of you getting there, and I don’t know if I believe that there is.
Take the job question above. “What is the best option [between these jobs]?” Well that could depend on what you mean. Job A might make you more money, but lead to a career so stressful it cuts ten years off your life. So what is better? A stressful shorter life with more money? Job B might make less but it could have better health and vacation benefits. So what is a better? More money, or having more freedom and time off? Maybe Job A is really emotionally fulfilling and Job B is brain numbing to you. Maybe Job B will suck for the next 5 years, but then you’ll get an awesome promotion. Maybe Job A is horrible, but you’ll meet the love of your life at it.
And so on and so on and so on. So when people ask me about the better options I do two things: I make them narrow it down (Do you mean financially, emotionally, physically, and what time frame? Etc.) and also look in terms of general knowledge. So rather than “what is better” my questions are “What does So-and-so need to know about A? B?” Often these answers are more revealing about their values, one way or another.
The reason I’m stressing this though, is so often when this comes up, the person doesn’t know what would make one job better, they haven’t figured out their values. They want the cards to make all the choices for them, even their value judgments. So if you ask about better options, make sure you can say what better would consist of.
Now even if there is some ultimate universal best for these people there are issues with that. They might not be ready for that best right now. As a matter of fact I would say if there is this ultimate universal best for all of us, that easily 95% of the world wouldn’t be happy with what it entails from their current position. Sure, maybe years down the line after they realized all the things that didn’t make them happy (but did briefly), and they’ve undone conditioning, or are over emotional attachments to “toxic” people, scenarios, whatever. So maybe according to the Cosmos Option A is best for them, but the person takes it, and quickly realizes they hate it and abandon it. How helpful was the reading then? They might not believe you, reject and deny you (as we often do with good advice).
The same and moreso for people who frame it in terms of their gods and whatnot. “To my highest good” has that problem, cause you might not want that good. Also, that’s a lot of trust to put on another spirit, and that is something I’m a bit uncomfortable with. Now for perspective I sacrificed a chunk of my life to do the Abramelin as close to the text as was reasonable just to get an Asshole In My Head, and I don’t wholly and blindly trust them. I believe a certain Entity/God/Whatever literally made my Soul, and I wouldn’t wholly and blindly trust them. I have a Yidam, who is supposed to guide me practice, and I wouldn’t wholly and blindly trust them. Do they have my best interest at heart? Sure, but their understanding of it.
My HGA’s interpretation of my best interests might be to burn down my house and force me to wander the city performing chöd or something to push me to enlightenment. Maybe that is my ultimate and universal best, but I’m not ready for that yet. The common analogy is the perspective difference in sports. If you’re in the stands watching a sports game (I don’t care which, they’re all the same to me) or even on TV you have this really big perspective, and can see if someone should do something one way or another. The player on the other hand sees from a smaller perspective, with more things in the way, but they also see the details a lot clearer. So maybe from way up it looks like doing something a specific way, but down on the field the player sees something you don’t, and that means the method you think is best could actually be flawed.
What it boils down to is when people toss out these vague best/better statements it strikes me as indecisive and irresponsible. “What job is the better option?” Well, what are you looking for? What do you value in your work and life? Chances are if you hash that out you won’t need divination to know the job to take, but because you’re indecisive and unclear you’re lost. (Or at least it will redefine what you’re looking for in the questions) Also, and this can be totally judgmental, but some people think it’s totally devotional and spiritual to toss up their hands and say “Whatever my god wants,” but to me that’s just passing the buck. Your life sucks, blame your god, they want you there, your life is awesome, thank your god, they want you there. I don’t deny this can happen, but there is a reason you incarnated into a realm of freewill (okay, maybe not really, but a semblance of it most of the time) and your god didn’t (at least directly). That’s for you to live, to make choices. Or when you claim your god won’t let something happen because it’s against your “highest good” that puts the responsibility on them, not you. Didn’t get that job you applied to, I guess it wasn’t your highest good, not the fact that you’re woefully unqualified or wore your vintage Rolling Stones shirt to the interview. Oh, your spell didn’t work, must not have been your god’s will…not the fact that you might have lacked focus, will, energy, understanding or anything like that. Highest good, and best options, while I don’t deny these on a conceptual level, I feel they’re used more as an excuse to think/act certain ways.
If you’re a magickal person of some sort, I think you owe it to yourself to stop being indecisive, and call the shots in your life.
This entry has been stewing in my head for a bit, but reading Davies’s Grimoires really brought it out to the surface.
I’d call myself a Solomonic magickian, a lot of my work revolves around the communion with spirits from grimoires in that style. Yet unlike many I don’t think I’m really “bound” to one text. Granted most of the grimoire spirits I use are from Book I of the Lemegeton, the Goetia, but my summoning circle is based on a design from the Heptameron, using Angel and Godnames I spent over two years skrying, my robes are adorned with the Shem ha’mephorash around the edge, and a variety of angelic and demonic seals on the chest and sleeves. So even though I’m Solomonic, my practice in that regard is all over the place a little.
Why? Because it works. There are some people that this boggles greatly, grimoire-purists. We’ve all seen them, people who are convinced that grimoires can’t and don’t work unless you perform everything exactly to the letter. (These are most notably though people who despite this claim lack the fame, fortune, and harem of King Solomon.)
Now, do not get me wrong, I believe grimoires should be used by the book, or as close to as possible until you are proficient with them. I wouldn’t say everything in them is absolutely necessary, but until you know how they work (and that takes experience, not educated guesses based on other systems or your intuition or lack of drive) I recommend keeping as much of the system intact as possible when you use it. Some things are most definitely symbolic I’d say, others are more relative, others might not be important at all, and some are crucial. If I gave you a recipe for amazing cookies, you shouldn’t make substitutions until you’ve made them my way and think I like my cardamom a bit too much. Follow the recipe the first several times, then you have a sense on what can be shifted.
This is where I get trapped in the middle ground. On one hand “Follow the book” on the other hand “Don’t be a slave to it.” What I wanted to address through was some of the issues with the notion of Grimoire-Purists.
Basically, why do you assume the text is right? Just because King Solomon (didn’t) write it, doesn’t mean it’s perfect. How many of us would pick up any modern occult book and say “The author is 100% right, and we have to do everything as they say or it won’t work”? If you’d do that with any magickal text I think you should re-evaluate your critical thinking skills.
As a subset of that issue, just because it is right, doesn’t mean it’s the only way it can be right. Sure, frankincense might be the right incense to summon a King of the Sun, but that doesn’t mean copal wouldn’t work, wouldn’t work just as well, or even better. Right does not have to be this binary exclusive category. Tied into this is the realism of it being 100% exclusively right. Just because my cookie recipe is awesome doesn’t mean you couldn’t make awesome cookies using a variation on my recipe. Good cookies are good cookies. One thing that came up recently in a discussion group around Solomonic magick is the necessity of wearing a belt made of lion skin. People battled back and forth on why it was or wasn’t necessary, names were called, it was the internet. I made a comment, which largely got glossed over though. Lions are going extinct, and while they’re doing better than they were 15 years ago, they’re still endangered. What happens when the last lion is killed? What happens when the last piece of lion fur deteriorates with use and age? Will these spirits then be forever beyond our ability to communicate with? It seems silly, but that’s the way some people think about it when they go hardcore grimoire-purist.
Lastly I want to question the idea of the texts being 100% right from a historian’s perspective. One of the first things I was ever taught as a historian was “Cui Bono” meaning “To whose benefit?” or “Who benefits?” Thousands, and millions of documents have been lost since humans started writing, and each one that survives there is a reason. The first question a historian asks is “Cui Bono” who benefits from this text still existing? Why was this text preserved when others weren’t? In the case of magickal and religious texts you can say belief, divine intervention, or because it works.
The trouble with this notion is not all texts were preserved on purpose, and not all were lost on purpose. For instance the autohagiography of Christina of Markyate was preserved by chance. The only known copy was in a house that caught fire, and it was one of the few texts near the window that the owner saved by throwing it out before having to flee the fire. If not for its random placement in the library we would have lost the first example of Self-Insert Biblical Fanfiction.
Did grimoires survive by luck or human choice? Well, according to Davies they survived by sheer volume. Why were there so many grimoires though? Because they were big business, forbidden texts that teach you to find treasure and get laid, who wouldn’t want that. The trouble is twofold though, not every person who manually copied the texts, or later every printer, had access to the grimoires, and eventually if there are only two or three or whatever grimoires, soon enough everyone who wants them, will have them, or know how to do what it is them. What is the solution to these problems? Make up grimoires, and that’s exactly what happened. As an idealist you can look at the similarities to grimoires and say that shows a continuation of thought and practice, and to some extent that might be right. What it probably shows more often is plagiarism. You own two grimoires and a book on herbs. Well include the prayers and circle from one text, the spirits from the second text, and mix in the herbs from the third, then make up a story about how some great mystic wrote it, it was found somewhere amazing, and boom, next grimoire craze.
Now the tricky part is, just because its random stuff cobbled together doesn’t mean it doesn’t work (doesn’t mean it will either). Here is the thing though, we know virtually nothing about these grimoires and their creation, we have myths, and ideas, and historical theories, but we don’t know. For all we know the Heptemeron or the Lemegeton were just forgeries crafted by a bored innkeeper looking to make some extra money, and by fluke they became popular, printed in large numbers, and got preserved.
So if you’re considering being a grimoire purist, think about the issues, rationally and historically with that, and see where it takes you. Remember, I do advocate trying to be as much by the book as possible, especially until you’ve worked with the system, but don’t assume that everything in it is 100% right, and that right information is exclusive of all other.
“It is folly to suppose that the Black or the White Mass is of greater importance, it is but the Power enslaved in them that must be freed –the Power of their Belief that must be utilized and aligned unto Our Path.” ~Chumbley
Came across this quote again, and it resonated with something I’ve been thinking about off and on lately. Another potentially controversial statement: Your tradition isn’t better than mine.
Okay, not too controversial depending on how you read it. By which I mean to say what I feel is fairly obvious, and mostly true; that magickal systems in and of themselves aren’t superior to one another. Most of the time it’s the person working the system that makes the difference, not the system itself.
TLDR: Good sorcerers, not traditions.
I got thinking about this for a few reasons, but most evidently when watching a friend, who recently converted magickal traditions, talking about how amazing their new system was, that it was far superior than the last one they were a part of (or the one before that, as the middle tradition was superior to the first) and just worked so much better. She might be right, but to an outsider it doesn’t look like it. Why? She’s always been good at what she does, and even if the first two traditions she studied in were shitty, she made them work for her. I say in this case it isn’t so much her new tradition or initiation did anything, it’s the fact that she is a wise person (with her blind spots like us all) with great focus and discipline. It wouldn’t matter if she was studying Neo-Wicca, Khemetic Reconstructionism, Santeria, Buddhism, or whatever. As long as she is in a system that has room for magick and flexing willpower, I think she would be a good sorcerer.
Now, don’t get me wrong, some traditions have different advantages and niches. Want to evocate a spirit, I think Ceremonialism is the route, want to invocate a spirit, I think Buddhism has that down, want to be ridden by a spirit, get thee to a Santero’s house. The thing is these advantages are only there for people who have the capacity to use them, some hypothetical good sorcerer. Just because you work with the grimoires doesn’t automatically mean you’ll get spirits appearing, just because you have an empowerment doesn’t mean Vajrayogini is going to come dance in your mind, just cause you made Ocha doesn’t mean Oya is going to take your body for a spin. All systems have the potential for training and growth and magick, but it’s the person that does the work, not the system. Though again caveated some systems are better suited for different people and bringing out the desired traits. The second thing that got me thinking about this was seeing someone automatically assuming that someone from a certain tradition couldn’t hurt them magickally because it was an inferior system. Two things can happen here, either your disbelief works wonders on your personal magick and deflects stuff, or more likely, you’ll leave yourself open because you assume that Goetic spirits or animal fetchs have nothing on your protective angel/spirit/Chihuahua and get your etheric ass handed to you. Again, some traditions have different advantages, some might have better offence, others better defence, but that is no reason to discount them. As much disdain as I might drip on the newage movement, if think a whitelight newager can’t curse you, you haven’t crossed many of them, cause some of them wield the most potent hateful energy you’ll ever encounter. I see with pagans a lot of disregarding Christians and their prayer/magick, but I know a Catholic priest who works as an exorcist. He’s the sweetest man, but magickally he is a force to be reckoned with. He’s nearly thrown a friend of mine out of body (and said friend is well trained and not exactly “fragile”) and I had him bless an object for me so I’d remember this lesson, and when he blessed it I felt like someone was crushing my heart in a vice, just from the pressure and type of force/energy he called upon.
Granted most of the time this isn’t an issue in the occult community, we get along for the most part. I’m a Buddhist ceremonialist and my closest friends and my magickal allies are everything from newage neo-Native shamans, to vampires, to strict Solomonic practicitioners, to Santeros, to atheists (they can do magick too), Cambodian shamans, witches, and whatever else I’m not thinking of. We learn to talk across the differences, and learn from each other, but the thing is, the traditions we follow, the techniques we learn, they’re not what make us good sorcerers. It’s the fact that we’re people of devotion, intelligence, focus, and drive.
The flip side of this is look at yourself and your practice. Is your magick not what it should be, do you not get the results you need or want? Is the problem the system you’re studying, does it lack the technology for the result you want? Or could it be the fact that you don’t have the Strength/Wisdom/Compassion to wield it? You might be better off working on your discipline and focus, redoubling your effort than adding in another tradition or technique. Crowley said “About 90 % of Thelema, at a guess, is nothing but self-discipline” (Magick without Tears, Chapter 70) but I think much the same applies for all magick. Magick, techniques, spells, and visualizations, they’re tools, and can be phenomenal, but if you don’t have the skill to wield them, then the world’s best written conjuration won’t really change that.
I’m not saying don’t try new things, I’m not sayin learning techniques from other traditions is useless or bad. I’m just saying that no matter how many spells you know, no matter how many meditations you’ve been taught, how many magickal techniques you have, or how many initiations you’ve taken, you’re the sorcerer not these tools. If you don’t have the focus, discipline, and drive, if you don’t have the Strength, Wisdom, Compassion to utilize these tools, then they’ll never be truly effective.
“Sorcery uses Will, Desire and Belief with such precision as is permitted by the talents of the Individual Practitioner.” -Chumbley
If you missed the first and second part of this discussion/rant you can find Part 1 here and Part 2 here.
I have looked over what I’ve written several times, and sadly I can’t find anywhere to divide this post, regardless of trying to make it two, three, or four sections, the ideas are just all too connected on the final point. So my apologies for a long post, the TLDR version is “If everyone who did it one way gets one set of results, and everyone who didn’t doesn’t have the same results, then maybe they’re not achieving the same thing.”
So having discussed some of the reasons on why I think we should entertain the possibility that HGA may be a system specific term and some of the reasons why it might matter I want to cover one more reason why it might matter, but it’s less supported hence separating from the others. Not necessarily what I believe, I’m agnostic on this point, but just giving another piece of the puzzle perhaps.
People ask “Why does it matter?” and specifically frame it in the terms of “Well they’re not hurting anyone, and if they’re wrong then they’ll find out eventually.” Here I jokingly hear in my head Helen Lovejoy screaming “Won’t someone please think of the Abyss?”
Now this idea comes not from the Abramelin text, and I don’t know if it really came up in the later writings on the HGA (that I don’t remember currently) but it did come up in some of my earlier magickal training, and while I haven’t had any revelation from my Angel to say if it is right or wrong, it is something I’ve pondered on. If we were to frame the HGA and K&C in Qabalistic terms we can say perhaps that the HGA resides in Tiphareth, or at least our connection to them does, more likely they’re something of Kether (I also use a Jacob’s Ladder Tree, so this sometimes conflicts with other systems), and to achieve K&C we have to travel the Third Path to Kether, but what’s along that Third Path? Everyone’s favourite dumping ground the Abyss of Da’ath. If you go from Tiphareth to Kether you must pass over(around/under/through/whatever) the Abyss.
No, not this Spirit of the Abyss.
Now in the system I came from I was taught two things in this regard, first off people that fail to get Knowledge and Conversation with their Holy Guardian Angel end up communicating with a spirit of the Abyss, who claims they are the HGA, acts as them, and lives with the person, while they never see they’re being subtly misled. The second thing is that apparently people who get trapped in the Abyss are stuck there for this incarnation. The second part I have more trouble believing, but I can’t say for sure. If these are both the case, then to me that’s another reason why the way people discuss K&C and the HGA should be reconsidered, but as said, I don’t know what I think about them, and my Angel didn’t give me anything about that idea one way or the other.
Moving on I’d also like to touch on a good point from Polyphanes (he is full of them); it’s hard in many ways to generalize about Knowledge and Conversation. Yet on the other hand I feel the phrase/understanding of Knowledge and Conversation is becoming so generalized as to be useless (oddly makes me think of copyright saturation). I’m not generalizing here based on my experience, I’m drawing on it most definitely, but I’m also drawing on conversations with other people who have done the Abramelin, or written works by such people. So while I can’t generalize, there are patterns that have shown up in the lives of these people and myself, but I see nothing similar from the majority of people claiming Knowledge and Conversation through non-Abramelin means. The revelations will always be different, mine was heavily focused on the marvels of the physical universe. The encounters will always be different, I don’t know anyone else whose HGA decided to play “Moses on the Mount” with them and gave them vitiligo to prove their existence after badgering. (You know what would be better proof? Giving me my pigment back.) But when patterns show up for everyone who did it one way, and they don’t show up when being done another way it makes me question if we’re really talking about the same thing. To go back to the analogy from my earlier post about taking a trip to the beach, if everyone who follows the directions gets to the beach and describes a beautiful sunset, and a person who took a different set of directions say the sunset was nice but the trees were in the way, and no one else mentions the trees, then why would they assume they reached the same point on the beach?
The Abramelin ritual is not just about establishing contact with a specific spirit, it’s about Knowledge and Conversation with the Holy Guardian Angel. (Yes, I know the phrase Knowledge and Conversation was termed by Crowley, but Abraham didn’t give a term for the entire operation. I’ll end up using some of Crowley’s language for a lot of this because he did create a good lexicon for discussing the entirety of it. Even though he himself failed to do the ritual.) What’s the difference? Contact with your Holy Guardian Angel is easy. I was in contact with mine in the first trimester of the ritual, and Abraham says in the text itself that you may even have contact with the HGA before starting the ritual as it “will secretly stand by your side and place suggestions in your heart on how you should organize your life and how to follow everything that is written in this book.”
So what is Knowledge and Conversation then? That’s the result of the entire ritual, it’s not just about chatting, it’s about transformation, and not superficial transformation, not life hiccough transformations, it’s about shaking the very foundation of your identity, core, and understanding. “The Guardian Angel will remind you what he has done for you and how you have insulted him in the past. He will tell you how you please him in the future. He will also explain to you about what is the true wisdom, where it comes from, if-and how- you fail in your work, what you lack, how you should behave to control the unredeemed spirits, and how to achieve all you desire.”
“How you have insulted him in the past.” This is a great example of how Knowledge and Conversation differs from simply contact. I have never or heard anyone who achieved Knowledge and Conversation through Samekh (for instance, but insert any non-Abramelin form of supposed K&C here) talk about this. Sure, they may discuss confessions and humbling themselves, but there is a difference between confession and being told every time you have insulted your HGA. While I don’t want to personalize this with my experiences, I feel it’s the only way to make some points. During my Abramelin experience I ended up reliving times I lied before I even started school and having to apologize for those. Confessions and visionary experiences guided for months with hours poured into them a day, and you’re going to experience pretty much every time you failed. I had done confessions and humbling with Mother for years daily before the Abramelin, but they were nothing like what the Angel led me through over that period. This is something I don’t see mentioned by any other method, and I can’t see how you could have the depth of this upheaval and confession in something that takes less time (either per day or in terms of months and years). This isn’t about contact, this is about coming to terms with your nature, your failures, and past. This is showing you the ground from which you grew and where the transformation will be born from.
To turn more Thelemic in language looking at the last part of the quote, Knowledge and Conversation is about having your True Will revealed for you. Now obviously True Will is a really complicated concept, to say it’s what you are to do in the world is an oversimplification. True Will is about being in your perfect place, your Orbit within the Cosmos. This isn’t just about what you do, in terms of a job, this is about everything: your outlook on life, your view of the world, your understanding of cosmology, your ethics and your relationship with external morality, your connection and interaction with other people, your habits, your True Will is everything in your life and all parts of you.
When many people say they’ve achieved Knowledge and Conversation, it’s amazing how little has changed, in fact this observation is what inspired this rant, not a desire for dogmatic adherence to a strange German text. Again being a bit Thelemic about this, I was listening to an episode of Thelema Coast to Coast, when Keith418 was discussing magick as escapism and people being unwilling to do the hard work of transforming the self, and he said something to the effect of “If your HGA isn’t transgressive to your life you probably don’t know them.” This was a moment that if I were in a workshop with Keith418, I might have clapped. Sure most people talk about disruptions that happen as they work towards meeting their HGA, but these are superficial issues that come and go quicker than a Mercury Retrograde. External disruptions are nothing, they often occur with any major Solar working, and any initiation. In fact, while not as widely observed, I’d argue that the Abramelin working tends to cause more internal disruptions than external.
If your HGA isn’t disrupting you to the core, I think it might be questionable, at best. My experience, and essentially every record of the Abramelin I’ve read, talks about this. So when someone says they performed Samekh twice a day for two months, got the same result, and lost a job at the same time, I can’t help but think “Uh…no.” Heck, I magicked myself out of my job by summoning the Angel of Earth. That’s not a major disruption. (In fact, that tends to be a cliche in magick) Remember the HGA brings true wisdom, how you fail, and how to act. These aren’t simple things, remember that list? Your outlook on life, your view of the world, your understanding of cosmology, your ethics and your relationship with external morality, your connection and interaction with other people, your habits, it’s everything. For this ritual not to shake you to the core, to not destroy you and remake it requires one or two things. First, that our modern culture has all of this right, and second, that whatever isn’t right you’ve already worked out for yourself.
I would explain the Abramelin ritual as a massive undertaking in Social De-conditioning. Your outlook on life, as much as you want to think you decided on it with free will, you didn’t, you were given it piece by piece through every TV show you’ve ever watched, every book you’ve read, every song you listened to, everything your parents told you. You took all this, and you incorporated it, you rejected it, you negotiated with it, you synthesized it, you made it into something new and you weren’t aware of it, it’s all unconscious. Think of all the times you say or do something and suddenly realize “Oh my gods, I’m my mother/father” but really most of our thoughts and personalities are shaped by our social conditioning and what we slowly accept and reject over our lives. Now I will not claim I have overcome this, not by a long shot, but my Angel showed me how much of this is there, and has been giving me tools to work on this. Years after the ritual was complete and my Angel is still making me do things to change this world view.
Now I would also like to point out that if you’re thinking “Oh, that makes sense, but I have already dealt with that, noticed it, and my world view is my own” I would like to point out the third-person effect which states that people always think that these things apply to other people but not them, and generally (but here, not always) the people who are more sure that it doesn’t apply to them are actually more likely to be victims of it. So maybe you, or these people actually have actually dealt with this stuff, but never underestimate the human mind’s ability to deceive itself, and this is something I keep right in the front of my mind whenever I think about this stuff. (Actually that’s a good thing to always keep in mind with magick in general)
Okay, maybe this got close.
This goes for everything. Your ethics, they’re made up of everything you’ve seen, done, experienced, and if you think the Angel is going to reveal that you won the jackpot and just by chance those 80s/90s (or whenever) cartoons actually instilled the perfect balance of compassion and wisdom and strength into your personality, again, I’m going to doubt it. Your magickal world view, your mundane worldview, your personality is constructed (or shaped) by all of these things. This is what the ritual begins to break down, especially in the last trimester. This is the metamorphosis of the ritual, this is the point, not having a voice/presence stuck with you for the rest of your life, or until it fades away.
These are the types of things I’ve never seen addressed by people who have “achieved Knowledge and Conversation” by another means. Their disruptions are losing jobs, lovers, moving, periods of bad luck, illness, etc., and while all of these can be part of the Abramelin experience, they’re the window dressing to what is going on inside the ritualist. In fact, now that I typed it, everyone I know who lost a job or lover, or had to move, it wasn’t due to external factors, but internal ones. They realized they couldn’t work in that field anymore, they realized they didn’t love their partner, they realized they were attached to the wrong place and had to move, all of these disruptions were due to the internal upheavals. There are major internal upheavals as you go through it, I joked in a surreal way that the soundtrack of the Abramelin should be “Everything you know is wrong” by Weird Al. (Everything you know is wrong / Black is white, up is down and short is long / And everything you thought was just so important doesn’t matter) In my case my HGA challenged everything from my view on alcohol (I think I’m the only person who was told by their Angel to start drinking), to money and the poor, to how reincarnation operates, to how I treat my literal neighbours, to the very words I would use to define myself, those little labels we all think of as “Me.” Years later and I’m still unpacking all of this, years later and I’m still given whispers on things to do to break all these socially conditioned ideas and habits and attitudes so that my “true wisdom” as Abraham calls it, and how I am to succeed shine through. To use a phrase Polyphanes brought up in our discussion, these changes might be sunrise slow at times, but their triggers that break that self are as bright as stepping from Plato’s Cave. To use an unfortunate parallel it’s like being in a car accident while drinking, that incident shows you that you have a problem, but it will take you months, if not years, to come to terms with your alcohol issues.
Now granted, some people might be closer when they start to being in their Orbit, following their True Will, achieving Knowledge and Conversation, so maybe they won’t need as much work, or have to experience the same type of disruptions. Well, as above that’s exceedingly unlikely. Now if I were to completely interject my personal understanding on what Knowledge and Conversation is and does to you, if you came into this life in such a way that Knowledge and Conversation was not a challenge to achieve, and it didn’t or barely disrupted your life or your self, then you came into this life in your Orbit in the way that I would suspect only Bodhisattva/Enlightened figures do, and that just adds again to the unlikeliness to me. (Note: I do not conflate Enlightenment with Knowledge and Conversation, Enlightenment is something far beyond it. What I mean is that for a person to be able to reach their Orbit so easily that K&C isn’t disruptive is something on the level of mythic in my framing, though I admit that might be bias.)
So to bring this all back. I want to reiterate, when I say the Holy Guardian Angel and other potentially similar spirits are different, it’s not a value judgment it’s just a statement. Zomp isn’t better than seafoam (okay, the name is better) it’s just different. I also don’t think that people who have contacted their tutelary spirit aren’t undergoing interesting and great spiritual and personal revelations, I know I went through great things and upheavals when Mother came to me. Though (and here is where the egotism comes into it a bit) I don’t think most of these experiences compare to Knowledge and Conversation based upon the comparisons of these experience. It doesn’t mean they’re not great, but they’re definitely not the same and shouldn’t be labelled as such.
If you missed what is the lead up to this post, catch it here.
A friend complained that my last post didn’t live up to my warning of it being controversial or egotistical, I hope this post or the next one will live up to that a bit more. As is, what I thought was going to be a two part post, is going to be at least three parts. I’d put it all up at once, but I know almost no one would make it through such a post, without the hit of cocaine required for some exceptionally verbose bloggers.
So I already made a basic case for my issue around people saying they established contact with their HGA, but before I continue I’d like to clarify some points as they came up with discussion with Rachel Izabella.
She raises the very good point that she isn’t sure if it is possible to really distinguish between the Holy Guardian Angel, and potentially similar figures like the Supernatural Assistant. I agree; if it is possible, it’s very tricky, these figures/terms aren’t clearly defined, and honestly when you get “up there” in the magickal realms things start to vague up a bit, but just because they’re hard to tell apart doesn’t mean we should label them the same thing.
Zomp. Now you know.
It’s very hard to distinguish between seafoam green, aquamarine, sea green, and zomp (yes that’s a colour name) and their related colours, but that doesn’t mean we should consider them the same. If we can’t look at these colours and immediately tell them apart, the best way to know which is which is to mix it, and that way we can explain the differences. I can tell you how many drops of what colours to make any of these colours or on a computer I could give you the Hex code for it, and that is how we can tell the difference, when it might not be possible or easy with the naked eye. If it is made this way it’s seafoam, if it is made this way it’s zomp. So while I can’t say how these magickal tutelary assistant spirits are different, and I doubt anyone can that easily, it goes back to the idea that we can only tell them apart if we know how they’re made, the ritual process involved in establishing contact. This isn’t to say one is better than the other, I’m not implying that in the slightest, it’s not my Angel is Bigger/Has More Wings/More Eyes/Is More Fiery than your Angel, it’s just that I think they might not be worth conflating, especially when the experiences are so different…but maybe that’s more about contact than whom you reach?
Now contact is the basis of my secondary argument with people saying they’ve achieved Knowledge and Conversation with the Holy Guardian Angel, and while I somewhat had this idea boiling in the back of my head, I have to thank Polyphanes for his conversation on this which helped clarify the issue.
Even though it’s cutting to the end of the argument he brought up the good question of “What does it matter if people misuse the terms?” Why care if their Knowledge and Conversation experience isn’t like mine or that their “HGA” is a different class of spirit from mine? Well a couple of reasons. First, but not the most important, is it is insulting to go through something that takes up so much of my life, and have someone say “Oh, I did 15 minutes of ritual a night for a few weeks and got the same result.” I should note this isn’t just about magick stuff though, think about your careers and have someone saying they could do it just as well cause they read a book on it, or could figure it out themselves. And granted in both cases some amazing people might actually be able to just step up and do it, but they are far far far in the minority that to give them a percentage would be overestimating them. Think about any achievement or training you’ve taken, and the inevitable “I could do that” or “I did that” statements come up. “Wow, you spent 12 years getting your black belt? I just taught myself watching Bruce Lee movies, I’m just as good as you.” It’s an insult, but it also shows how absurd some of the claims are in comparison.
The second reason is that it weakens the traditions. Now, this is always been a problem, people could make the same claim to spiritual/magickal realization and there isn’t anything you can necessarily do about it. In the past though these people were more the town charlatan (this implies a level of conscious deceit that I don’t think is there for most people claiming K&C) so their claims didn’t spread. Sure, the inept witch made witchcraft look silly for the village, but that was it. But now on the internet when anyone can blog or post on forums people who used to be the sole misguided person can now spread their misinformation to dozens and hundreds of people, and if they come off as reasonable/intelligent (and many can and do), people can buy into the idea that they can achieve with little effort too, and it becomes a cycle. Eventually Knowledge and Conversation becomes something that can be achieved in a weekend, and yes, I’ve actually seen descriptions for doing just that. So I think it’s important to clarify the potential differences between the spirits we contact and the mode and result of the communication.
Pretty much like this
I parallel it to the way Reiki has “degraded” in the West. Traditional Japanese Reiki requires work, study, and practice, it took me six years to be ready to start my “third degree” (technically not called that, but whatever). Now on the other hand you can go from Zero to Reiki Master again in a weekend, because what Reiki was and meant in the West has shifted; people deemphasized the bulk of the system and practice. It became about energy healing, not about personal growth and attaining Satori.
Related to that, there is just respect for the tradition. We don’t conflate other spiritual ritual experiences as being the same thing. Initiations into a Greek Mystery Tradition are different than initiations into a Tantric Buddhist practice, and we keep them that way. If people want to argue and make a case for how their initiations are doing the same thing, and getting to the same result, I would support that discussion, but I wouldn’t be a fan of someone outright declaring they are the same. That is part of the problem, people don’t seem to discuss it in terms of “My experience might be similar or comparable to Knowledge and Conversation” they say that they have Achieved it. Granted I have seen a few people who take that sceptical link, and I appreciate that, but pretty much all of them seem to fall short of the ritual results of people who performed the Abramelin, which again leads back to the question of why consider them the same? Reiki lost that respect for the tradition. What was a beautiful and elegant system of meditation with some energy work involved, was diluted and repackage to be a newage rainbow chakra plug-and-play energy healing system. Why? Well, there is a lot of stuff about Takata and what she did to Reiki, but you could say that what Reiki is or was, wasn’t held to any standards, and eventually anything with a basic similarity (Mikao Usui, Japanese, Energy Work) was allowed to be labelled Reiki and no one questioned why dissimilar elements and ideologies were working their way in.
I see Knowledge and Conversation going the same way as Western Reiki, people are deemphasizing the bulk of the system and focusing on what is arguably a minor part of the working, contacting the Angel.
Depending on how people take this, this post may be the beginning of my most controversial and egotistical post set, but I’ll start with the simplest, which is really a transition into the issues regarding the next post on this.
So last week I was at a Halloween party (because that’s what you do in June when you have awesome friends) and I was complaining to a friend that “My Angel woke me up at 0430 yesterday.”
“Now when you say angel you mean…?”
“My Holy Guardian Angel.”
“Now when you say Holy Guardian Angel you mean…?”
“Knowledge and Conversation.”
“Achieved…?”
“Via the Abramelin working.”
“Why didn’t you try an easier or quicker route?”
“Cause then I couldn’t be sure I got the right result.”
A trend in magickal/religious practices for ever, but I’d say more so now with more communication and ideological liberalism, is syncretizing concepts. It’s how we bring peace to different systems and get them to work together, it’s how we justify borrow the nifty things from other traditions. Sometimes the syncretisation is really superficial and useless, other times it is profound. Then oddly sometimes we don’t syncretize things because we get hung up on language (usually of our own tradition), so despite the fact that most definitions of god would apply to Bodhisattvas or Orishas, a lot of people fight the idea of considering them gods. Sure there are some nuanced differences, but for the role they play and the like I’d argue that in general parlance they could share the categorization of “god” but understand that in more cultural specific practices they might not be interchangeable.
So sometimes we combine things under the same label, or the same category/process when they shouldn’t be, and sometimes we don’t when we should. Either way it can murky the water.
In the last week I’ve seen this happen in regards to Fae, Elves, and Tuatha, and I’ve seen it regarding Spirit Guides, Fetches, and Totems. What I want to focus on though is the Holy Guardian Angel. In Western occultism that generally refers to the spirit you come into contact with through the Abramelin ritual. Yet more and more I see people using it refer to other spirits that they have contacted in other ways. Sometimes spirits from other traditions are labeled as the HGA cause they seem similar: The eudaemon from the Greeks, or the Supernatural Assistant from the Greek Magickal Papyri, your guardian angel (as opposed to Holy Guardian Angel), the Fravashi, the Yidam, Godself, your Orisha, the higher self, and so on.
Are all of these the same things? I don’t think so, but I also can’t say for sure. Some of them seem pretty close, others are so distinct I wonder why people are making the connection. What I can say for sure is the only way to know that the spirit is the Holy Guardian Angel as described in the Abramelin and derivative texts, and not something similar, is to perform the Abramelin. It seems like a quibbling point, but it is true. This isn’t to say filing these things under HGA is wrong, but it could be, and is something I think people have to be more open to.
I don’t talk about it much, but that’s the reason I did the full Abramelin ritual; it is the only way I could be sure that the spirit I came into contact with is my HGA and not something similar. It’s a trite analogy, but think about getting directions to a beautiful spot on the beach to watch the sunset. If you follow those instructions you’ll find the spot, and see beautiful sunsets. If you look at the instructions and figure out your own route (or worse, just listen to the description of the destination and try to find it that way) then you might end up in the same place, but you could also end up a kilometre, or tens or hundreds of kilometres away, and while you might get a nice view, or even a beautiful view, it’s not the one you were going for.
So when people ask why I went the path of praying five hours daily, retreating from the world, confessions, sackcloth, ash, rituals, and all that instead of performing Crowley’s Samekh, or doing the Bornless One, or creating my own ritual to achieve Knowledge and Conversation, that is why. Anything else, I wouldn’t be able to say for sure got me the result I was looking for. Similar, or comparable, yes, but not necessarily the same.
Maybe my HGA is the same Supernatural Assistant I’d get from following the PMG route, or performing Samekh, but maybe not. This also doesn’t mean that everyone who performs the Abramelin achieves Knowledge and Conversation, and that’s not to mean it can’t happen other ways. I know people on both ends of that spectrum, but they tend to be exceptions, not rules.
My issue is not just about the spirit that is contacted, but the process of purification and unification that comes with it. It’s not just that the HGA as explained and contacted through the Abramelin might be a very specific spirit different from what is contacted via other routes, but the type of contact and what that means can also be very different, that communication/contact might be different than Knowledge and Conversation, but that, as they say, is a story-rant for another time.
As I previously linked, good-old Polyphanes wrote a post Divination-Related Disorders and I mentioned in my linkage that I rarely do multiple readings for people in a short period. I will generally refuse a reading more than once a month. One reason is a month is rarely enough time for people to make a meaningful change and thus the outcome won’t be too varied. Another reason is divination gives people a sense of power, they know (or think they know) what is coming, and this makes them feel better. Sure being confident is good, but it should stem from something other than fortune telling.
A month or two back Jackie and I talked about divination on Occult Spectrum, and we chatted about the issue of divination addiction, and very briefly about what it’s okay to read on. Specifically I’ve had people try to use me as a private detective about their partner, if he is cheating, and more than once. We also touched on how divinations tend to verge on counselling sessions, and not everyone can handle what comes up in them. There I’m lucky, I used to be in social work, so I have some training and experience when that stuff comes up. That being said, the Cosmos listens, and likes to test. Though posting this now, the events in question came up the week after the show.
I considered changing details of this story to protect the innocent, but frankly if I did that it wouldn’t have the same impact, and people don’t know my client list, so I’m comfortable talking about this knowing the pieces can’t be put together.
I’ve had a repeat client for about ten months. She’s gotten close to my once a month limit, but never broken it. We’ve looked into and talked about her pregnancy, her now newborn baby, job and finance prospects for her husband, marriage troubles, moving concerns, and such. She’s been a good client, she asks important and thought out questions, and she follows the advice I lay out for her, with a critical and questioning take. Then she requested a divination last week, and I declined.
It read something to the effect of “My husband hit me, and I’m not sure where our relationship stands.” I ended up writing her a letter on why I couldn’t do the reading for her. First off, divination gives you a sense of power, and security, but this isn’t always a good thing. People sometimes get caught up in divinations and knowing, and not in acting which is what they need to do, this is one of those situations. I know there are probably few times in someone’s life where that security of divination would be more desired, but also few times when it could be more damaging. Divination should guide action, not paralyze choice.
Second, this wasn’t a matter of divination and knowledge; it was a matter of safety. I explained to her that I used to be in social work (so I didn’t seem to be a fortune teller overstepping my area of knowledge) and frankly that it was a safety issue more than anything. I’ll save the bore of stats (and me searching for notes) but it is exceedingly rare for a partner to only be physically abusive once. After that first step is taken they almost never turn back. So I told her that I didn’t feel her priority was divination, her priority was safety, and that meant taking her child and finding somewhere safe to go. Friends, family, a woman’s shelter, but before she contemplates her relationship with her husband she had to get herself out of his reach.
It was surprisingly difficult to write, I wanted to help, I wanted to look at her path and see what I could suggest, but I knew deep down that all of that was sidetracking for the importance of her safety. As readers of the flows of fate we have to accept where our understanding and limits are, we have to know what we can and shouldn’t talk on, and understand there are times when divination and knowledge (and the reliance on them) is more harmful than the answers they would give.
When it comes to physical harm, I think we’ve reached that limit. If someone attacks you it’s more important to get to safety than divine why or what to do or if it will all work out. If someone threatens you it’s more important to contact the authorities than divine if they will or how to avoid it. If your health gets really bad it’s more important to see a doctor than divine the underlying causes. Divination can come after, but get out of dodge first.
I’m not saying divination as a process can’t see these things, or is useless here, but the consequences are too important to just rely on divination, and that compulsion to rely on divination –especially during such a crisis– will only be strengthened. He hits you, and you wonder if it will work out, if you get a reading that says stay then the next time he hits you you might not ask, or you wait longer, or you get to the point where you don’t know if you should run without checking in with some form of divination. It can paralyze.
Divination lets us glimpse the flux and flow of fate, but as readers and recipients it is coloured, and like anything it is neither good nor bad, but a reliance upon something in the wrong situation is dangerous. I wrote this discussing in terms of reading for others, but it applies just as much to when we read for ourselves.
Know thyself, and know when you should act not divine.
(I thought I had posted this, but apparently not)
Recently I was introduced to another occultist by a mutual friend. Friends often know people that I “really must meet” and friends who understand me actually tend to have a good idea on who I’d find a purpose in engaging. When I first started talking to this person (who I’ll call Jordan for no reason other than it is a name from the book beside me) he immediately took control of the social dynamic and began the questioning. I was fine with this, by letting him think he had control of our conversation I could observe him easier without seemingly like I was doing so, ironically I realize also a pattern from the book beside me.
At first Jordan’s line of questioning was fairly typical for such an encounter. He asked about the systems I studied, for how long, were they solitary or group, was I self-taught or did I have a teacher? Very superficial getting a feel for my path, then the conversation went 90 degrees from the direction I expected, I was expecting questions about lineage or practice or results, but suddenly he asked what I was doing in my life. Answer: Going to school for a few degrees. He asked what the degrees were for, so I told him about the job field they prepare me for, he asked why I wanted that field, why I started late on that goal (I was 24 starting University), and questions related to my education and career choices, past and future. I thought I was understanding the general trend of the questioning when he switched it up again, and began asking about hobbies, what I did for fun, and oddly enough he seemed more interested in my talk of playing the theremin and the piano, hiking the Bluffs, and painting, than he did about my brief mentions of Buddhism and ceremonial magick.
I found this entire conversation fairly odd, far more directed than expected, more of an interview in some ways. Suddenly an understanding and appreciation for Jordan spread through me. He was doing what I would like to do in a similar situation, but I find such methods make people feel uncomfortable, thankfully he either didn’t care or realized I don’t respond normally to most social interactions. He was interviewing me frankly, and he wanted to know one thing: was I a good magickian? Too many people on the surface they think a good magickian should have extensive knowledge of systems, have lists of transcendent experiences where the world was revealed to them, have spirits as though on speed-dial ready to help, and many stories of events that just shouldn’t be. Now a magickian can have all of these things, don’t get me wrong, but a magickian in many ways needs none of these things. Jordan wasn’t looking for such stories of magick and mystery, he was looking for the signs of a true magickian. Success and happiness.
I’d phrase it as progress/functionality and contentment, but his language was success and happiness when I called him on the mode of his interview, so I’ll stick with that. This is what I appreciated, he wasn’t evaluating me as a magickian based upon how much Hebrew I knew, how many Goetic and Enochian entities I dealt with, how many times reality “fell apart” around me. No, he was evaluating based upon my life, my past, my present, my future, and my situation within all of them. He wanted to see where I had come from, where I wanted to be, and if I was on my way. This is what magick is for, at least on this level, not trying to deny a spiritual/religious aspect as possible or important in some cases.
Magick is a tool for being who you are, and becoming who you are to be. Magick is a tool to find your path, to put you on your path, and to keep you there. To Jordan my being on this path was more important than the technical knowledge, practical results here and now. Needless to say we got along well because we began to talk on magick as a practical system meant to get results and our issues with people who use magick more of an excuse than a tool. (And I guess I should be glad that I “passed” his test heh) It was very refreshing to get to talk with an occultist who saw things in this way, as so many magickians (if I decide not to be a judgemental ass) seem to focus on the wrong things. It might be splitting hairs, but this is part of the distinction between magick and faith religions, it’s not about belief or visions, it’s about getting your shit together, and getting shit done.
Don’t get me wrong, there is definitely room and reason for the mystical experiences rather than magickal results, but for the point of this post I’m just harping on the over-emphasis some have on experience to the detriment of results.
After all, Crowley’s definition of magick wasn’t about dreams of the Goddess, seeing spirits, and collecting tomes, it was about causing change.
