A Curriculum for Gaining Power: Cycle 1

 

Cycle 1 - Unifications 

Goal: unite body, emotions, mind, and spirit.

Books to acquire:

·       Modern Magick: Twelve Lessons in the High Magickal Arts, Donald Michael Kraig.

·       The Art of Shen Ku: The First Intergalactic Artform of the Entire Universe, Zeek.

·       Korean Sword Mastery, Jerry Laurita.

·       The Greatness of Saturn, Robert Svoboda.

·       The Essential Law of Attraction Collection, Esther and Jerry Hicks.

·       Angels of Alchemy and Magickal Protection, Damon Brand.

·       Uncle Setnakt’s Essential Guide to the Left Hand Path, Don Webb.

Other items:

·       A journal with blank pages and a pen you like.

·       Black tea lights and incense. Burn on your altar daily.

·       Index cards.

·       Tarot deck (Rider-Waite or one inspired - 78 cards).

·       A bokken or a stick that resembles one.

·       Analgesic (Tiger Balm is good. So is White Flower Balm Oil and Wong To Yick Woodlock Medicated Oil, but Ben Gay or Icy Hot will do).

·       A small box for your items and books, which you can also use as an altar (get a black altar cloth for it or cut a black T-shirt for it).

·       A small bowl or metal can for burning slips of paper.

·       A small plate stand and a wooden or metal pentagram, which you will place on the plate stand point down (i.e. as an inverted star, representing you as a singularity in which all other elements and saltes find meaning).

·       A piece of dedicative jewelry. Can be a pendant or a ring or something else. The point is that you will wear it every day. Suggestions are: an ankh, an inverted pentagram, or if you’re feeling a bit radical, a “Baphomet,” a Sulphur / “Leviathan Cross,” or  the symbol of Saturn.

You cannot separate body, emotions, mind, and spirit. Each of these are ways of seeing the singularity that is you. For the purposes of the practice of gaining power, they are useful fictions. This map, however, is not the territory.

Read the tiny parables by Jorge Luis Borges, entitled, “Inferno, I, 32” and “On Exactitude in Science.”

Understanding this comes in waves or layers. You can grasp the idea at once (ideas are aligned with the element of air and, as such, move very quickly relative to other things—for example, the mind is often where a magical working first manifests). But you cannot know a thing just with the mind. And understanding with the body, emotions, and spirit often comes at different times.

Cycle 1 Length: 78 days.

Daily Practices (do as much of these as you can at any time convenient to you).

Body:

·       Stretch (Shen Ku: “A Traveler’s Guide to Therapeutic Stretching”).

·       Five Tibetan Rites (Modern Magick, many places on the internet).

·       3x10 knuckle push-ups.

·       3x50 sit-ups.

·       15 long jumps (land on the balls of your feet, do 3 jumps one way, turn around and do 3 jumps back).

·       Bear Crawls about 30 feet out and 30 feet back five times (look on the internet for this).

·       100 basic sword cuts (Korean Sword Mastery, pages 71-114).

·       Apply analgesic to sore muscles.

Emotions:

·       Develop emotional discipline: no complaining for this entire cycle. Whenever you catch yourself doing it, go do 10 knuckle push-ups. If you can’t embrace this, renew your Netflix subscription and quit this praxis.

·       Practice “pivoting”: when you experience something unpleasant or any kind of negative emotion, say, “I know what I don’t want. But what do I want instead?” (Essential Law of Attraction, “Part 1: Pivoting and the Book of Positive Aspects”)

Mind:

·       Tarot Contemplation Ritual (Modern Magick).

·       Read The Greatness of Saturn.

·       Read Uncle Setnakt’s Essential Guide from “Initiatory Magic” on page 25 to the end of the chapter on page 31.

Spirit:

·       Read Uncle Setnakt’s Essential Guide from “Metacommunication” on page 19 to the end of “Practical Sigil Construction” on page 23. Use the system to bring you more money. Record the operation in your journal (cf. Modern Magick, “The Ritual or Magickal Diary” and Uncle Setnakt, page 32, Method 1: “Keep a diary”). After you draw some money to yourself, do 4 more of these sigil workings for the following: sex, insight, spiritual communication, and domination of someone else. I leave it to you to interpret what the specific subject matter will be. My only requirement is that you have courage and accept all consequences without complaint.

·       Begin recording your dreams (Modern Magick, “Tips for Remembering Dreams”).

·       Learn Damon Brand’s “Sword Banishing Ritual” (Magickal Protection).  Do it daily.

·       Invoke the Shem Angel, Tzafuniel, with Damon Brand’s Angels of Alchemy method. Ask for endurance to complete this first cycle (only do this at the beginning of the cycle). Record this working like any other.

Anything someone does more than once begins to get hard. You will fail. You will slack off. You will feel very uncomfortable. You will question this. You will wonder whether you have to do this for 78 days. This is part of it. The first day of practice is relatively easy. The 50th day, less so. You can always quit and return to your confusion and self-loathing. This is a path of transcendence, which means you have to internalize that concept. You have to evolve, transcend, grow stronger. No one cares whether you do. But you must care deeply about this. You must be extremely serious and quiet about it.

Cycle 2 notes will follow shortly. Good luck.

 

Silenciumetaurum

You Are What You Think I Am

 

Essential Salts (Standing in the Place of the Other, Part 3)

 

Don’t read a book about Hamlet to understand Hamlet. Read Hamlet. Then ask yourself what you feel. There’s your answer. There’s your truth. There’s the sum of your current understanding, all you need in order to progress. Take the interpretations of others and throw them out. They are not yours. They mean nothing to you. Listen instead to your heart with bravery and sincerity. That is how to set foot on the path of understanding, of initiation. It’s where all meaning begins, evolves, and remains. It’s where Hamlet as a living thing can take root and grow into your life. Everything else is a maze of lies and self-deceit.

We can say the same things about the occult, which is real but more elusive than most people imagine, so long as they search for power with their minds. True power is not to be found in the forms, attestations, and concepts of others (even in this text), but in the essential salts, which is to say in the alchemy of the body, in the vitality of life in motion, in desire, and in its fulfillment. In other words: true power is in you. You find the truth, your truth, nowhere but in yourself.

In The Red Book, Jung writes, “There is only one way and that is your way. You seek the path? I warn you away from my own. It can also be the wrong path for you. May each go his own way” and “The way is within us, but not in Gods, nor in teachings, nor in laws. Within us is the way, the truth, and the life.” This is the meaning of “essential salts”—the crystallization of who and how you are in essence.

It is your way, but you have to develop the capacity to perceive and feel it. And so there are things like wacky new-age belief systems, religions, cults, books of magic, taboos, red-light districts, prayer circles, sororities, orthodoxies. They all provide opportunities for honing self-directed perception because they frustrate and limit freedom. That intensifies desire and gives the individual a chance to refine himself. But they are not repositories of truth.

This is also what Anton LaVey means when he writes, “Satan has been the best friend the Church has ever had, as he has kept it in business all these years!” The Church, or more broadly, Christianity in the West, has always been a striptease, a pantomime, and a magic show, the ultimate Command to Look. It says, “There is something forbidden in you. Desire it, but admit that you are not worthy of having it” or “There is something forbidden in the life around you. Desire it, but fear it.” There is always something hidden behind the tabernacle curtain. And that something is always the Devil, the embodiment and unification of what we want but cannot have. The Devil is the eternal dance of indulgence and abstinence in a single character.

In this sense, Christianity has done more for the fulfillment of desire, for the intensification of vital life force, than any other belief system in human history. It functions entirely on the Law of the Forbidden (LaVey, in The Satanic Witch, puts it like this: “Nothing is so fascinating as that which is not meant to be seen,” but we might refine his definition by replacing “seen” with “enjoyed”). Knowing this, when we hear someone praising the lord, we might wonder which one—the lord of light, judgment, and things-as-they-are or the lord of darkness, release, and things-as-we-wish-they-could-be. Or perhaps there is only one vital life force, one orgone, one dao, one way, truth, and life in each of us. And when we find it, it proves out indivisible from us after all.

Consider the imagery of Oswald Wirth’s baphomet circumscribed by an ouroboros (or encircled in an equivalent but more abstract way by the Hebrew five-letter name of Leviathan, the great sea monster), the unification of earth, air, fire, and water in a single image, the bottom point of the inverted pentagram often representing the individual in which these essences are brought to bear. It’s meant to be a sensational and threatening image, but get beyond that initial reaction (also notice I didn’t say dismiss that initial reaction—note it, take it in, but don’t stop there). Try to see it as a symbolic map of the Self, as a kind of “spiritual anatomy.” How could it be a doorway to a more occult understanding?

The reason certain powerful methods and realizations are “occult” and elusive is not that they’re concealed in arcane grimoires or otherwise held back from public consumption by shadowy groups. Nothing is actually hidden. All the secrets are on display. They’re as evident as an image brought up by an internet search (or by looking in the mirror).

If you can accept this, you are definitely in the Place of the Other. You have become alien to the thought processes of most people. And it is with this thought and the following quote from The Satanic Bible, that I will end this three-part series on initiation, alienation, and the inherent adversity of the Left-Hand Path: “Then all thy bones shall say pridefully, 'Who is like unto me? Have I not been too strong for mine adversaries? Have I not delivered MYSELF by mine own brain and body?'”

 

From The Red Book: Liber Novus, Carl Jung

 

Golden Dawn Enochian: the Mirror of the Self

 

The sorely missed Jake Stratton-Kent used to advocate for not letting tools and rules get in the way of magical practice.  I think most working magicians, having grappled with the technical demands inherent in traditional grimoires, would agree.  I certainly would.  But rather than a sensible discussion on why it’s good to err on the side of using paper when the skin of a wildebeest isn’t handy, I will start with a message from an angel—i.e. from within my Unverified Personal Gnosis.  In an essay dealing with the vagaries of using vibrated words to connect with the Astral Light, why not start there?

On October 16, 2020, I used the (very simple, yet unaccountably unsettling) praxis of Frater Pera (from Codex Astarte—then a blog, now a Substack newsletter-blog) to evoke the angel, Elubatel, with whom I was already familiar via Geof Gray-Cobb’s amazing Miracle of New Avatar Power.*  When I write, “familiar,” though, I don’t mean “on friendly terms.”  Like many, my first exposure to this angel was through NAP’s “Chant for Success,” a working I stopped doing because the “success” always came at a high price.  I think there’s a good reason for this, but that’s subject matter for a different essay.

Instead, I’ll note that, having deconstructed and reconstructed the modular components of the NAP system over and over, having used it to approach the spirits of the “chants” directly, and having learned a lot about ceremonial magic firsthand from the spirits (which I believe is an advanced application of Gray-Cobb’s system that you can discover if you carefully study the text), I’d developed an ongoing relationship with Elubatel unique to my personal gnosis and work.**

So in 2020, Elubatel appeared to me; though, it feels like I did this working in the recent past, like last week or a month ago.***  As usual, it was not the most pleasant sensation to have this particular angel come before me (or maybe I came before him).  But I had only one question to ask.  I was seeking insight into the 6^th & 7^th Book of Moses, which includes Elubatel, and wanted his advice on the best way to study it. 

He said that one does not make notes on a grimoire.  Rather, studying a grimoire is like gazing into a mirror and taking notes on yourself.  In other words, everyone’s experience of a grimoire and of its workings and worldview will be subjective and self-revelatory to a large extent.  He suggested that I seek the “reflection of the book in me” and that I should read it with no assumptions until it starts to show me things about myself.  The aggregate of those “things” and the magical processes from the text associated with them will stand as my edition of the 6^th & 7^th Book of Moses.  So it is with any magical book.  To grimoire purists, this is complete garbage.  Luckily, I am not a grimoire purist.  But, as with all UPG, keep what I have written here in the appropriate perspective.

I mention this approach because it has helped me go further into the study of traditional grimoires and intermediate-to-advanced ceremonial workings.  I’ve applied it successfully—call it the “reader response approach”—beyond grimoire work to many other magical concepts, practices, and disciplines.  Recently, I found myself spirit-led to resume my Enochian magical experiments.  I applied this to studying the Calls and want to share how that worked out relative to the pronunciation of Enochian.

In Enochian Magic for Beginners, Tyson writes “We can take some comfort in the knowledge that, no matter how badly we mispronounce Enochian words, we are almost certain to be closer to the original than MacGregor Mathers or Aleister Crowley, who both used Enochian magic with good results” (102).  When I first read this, I decided I had been doing it wrong.  I changed the way I was pronouncing Enochian from the Golden Dawn’s vocalization of every letter to Aaron Leitch’s phonetic pronunciation, which I believe remains the dominant view on the proper (or what comes closest to the proper) form. 

Additionally, Aaron Leitch, in The Essential Enochian Grimoire, points out that “While it is good to know what sound each letter makes, it tells us little about what sounds are made when the letters are combined into actual syllables and words” (287).  This seems to agree with Tyson’s claim that “no one really knows what pronunciation Dee and Kelly used, let alone how the angels intended the language to be pronounced” (102). 

Michael Aquino, following Anton LaVey’s idea that Enochian was a sort of pidgin and not a real language, also wrote that in his opinion Enochian works no matter how you vocalize it.  There is a Satanic Enochian, a Setian version, and there are many others as well which all seem to function just fine for various sorcerers using it in their respective magical currents.  Still, grappling with my own portion of “grimoire insecurity,” I wanted to be as historically accurate as possible.  So, while I got good visionary results from the Golden Dawn style, I switched to the Leitch method but didn’t experience the same powerful results. 

Going back to the Golden Dawn pronunciation, after a lot of disappointment and frustration with the phonetic approach, and keeping Elubatel’s advice in mind, I realized a few things.  One was that my mirror perhaps reflected a personal bias in favor of Mathers and Crowley.  Another was that LaVey’s and Aquino’s experiments set forth an important point: the magic you do is in you; the rest is scaffolding.  That includes Enochian magic, which should not be viewed as monolithic or absolute. 

As Tyson points out, “To his credit, Mathers was able to add, in a more or less intelligent way, many details concerning the Watchtowers that are not clearly stated in the angelic conversations” (54).  Crowley also had to invent Enochian words in order to work with the system.  The angels did not smite him for it.  I would extend that observation to the Left Hand Path students of Enochian in the tradition of The Satanic Bible, who replaced “God” with “Satan” and at times reinterpreted whole phrases from the Calls. 

Enochian will never be “complete” or self-contained (Can we say this of any magic system?).  One always looks into it, as if into a mirror, and sees one’s own reflection.  And so I looked.  Scrying on the method itself, I learned that the Golden Dawn method works the way chanting (vibrating) the Heart Sutra works.  In the latter, the meaning of the words, while important, is not as significant as their physical vibration in the body and from there into the world.  When I vibrate “Hannya Shingyo,” I’m making it part of myself.  I’m aligning my personal vibration with the vibration of the words, which changes me alchemically in a fundamental way.  As Jonathan Back puts it in Spirits Walk With Me: an Enochian Odyssey, “By scrying each of the Aethyrs, working from Tex upwards, the Magician can be said to be absorbing the energies of the entire Table, with a resultant transformation of his or her psyche or spiritual nature. He or she turns spiritual lead into spiritual gold.”

It’s no different than vibrating god names in the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram or the Kabalistic Invocation of the Highest Divine Force.  Donald Kraig reminds us that “all matter is made up of energy that vibrates.  This results in the conclusion that if we can control vibration, we can control matter,” especially our own matter.  So when we vibrate the Enochian Calls, we’re aligning ourselves with the Enochian current, with its Aethyrs and denizens in an intensely personal way.  And each individual Enochian letter is part of that.

As a practical experiment, you can feel this by vibrating the letters of your first name.  Notice, when you do that each individual letter carries the overall essence of the whole name as it applies to you—your matter / vibration / unique nature as a spiritual and incarnate being.  So looking at your name in a delimited technical way as a collection of letter-sounds that only acquire meaning when they are combined as a word is misguided.  Just as the Hebrew alphabet (or any alphabet) attributes levels of meaning to each semantic unit, so does Enochian.  Therefore, using the Golden Dawn style of individual letter vibration is not only legitimate, it links both magical currents in a powerful microcosmic way.

The power in question is astral.  J.H. Brennan writes the following in Astral Doorways: “It occurred to me eventually that the Astral Plane was not a place—one reason why magicians like Lévi prefer the expression Astral Light. . . . In London, seeking membership of an occult Fraternity, I put the question to one I thought should know.  He told me ‘Astral Plane’ was an old term for the realm of the visual imagination” (2).  It’s the “visual imagination” (the part of the mind that generates it) that gets stimulated when the Enochian Calls are vibrated.

For example, when I scryed the 27^th Aethyr, ZAA, using the Leitch-phonetic method, it felt rather flat, spiritually entering the Aethyr was difficult, and though there was the usual “movement” in my sphere of sensation, I had a rather underwhelming experience.  When I did it Golden Dawn style, however, I wrote the following experience in my magical journal:

This time, I saw the door into the Aethyr as being of the same gray stone, but the letters were inscribed with “ZAA” in brilliant blue light, which then became white light as I pushed through.  After a moment of disorientation, I found myself on a plane of endless light.  There was nothing but my body and light.  And so there was nowhere to go because every “place” was indivisible from every other place.  It was a world of homogeneity. 

My “body” was the only dark thing, a hollow shell that also contained the same light of ZAA.  And I got the impression that my physical shell (which had blackened as if it were burned) was a kind of falsehood, that it, too, was made out of light but in a way that allowed me to believe I was distinct and separate.  And I understood that this was true and false at the same time, depending on my point of view.

As soon as I had this thought, I saw another blackened shell (much like an empty corpse) of an old man hovering before me.  It’s eyes and mouth were full of the same light.  A voice came through the open mouth without the features moving.  It said, “These are fields of light.  There is nothing but light.  The light shines on itself and the darkness is illuminated.” 

I had the insight that the darkness is illuminated meant that it was (can be seen as) another form of the same light, just as I had sensed this relative to my own distinctness.  I then saw a vision of a ray of light coming through a window and impossibly bending back so that it formed a kind of endless loop into itself.  The entire Aethyr seemed, for a brief moment, like a giant crystal prism reflecting itself to itself.

The difference was outstanding.  This is not to say that many Enochian magicians, maybe the majority, do not get dramatic results from the phonetic approach.  Remember, I’m speaking from my own UPG, from the mirror-reflection of my self and the intense subjectivity of my visual imagination.  I am merely pointing out what seems like an insight, voiced by Dion Fortune in Applied Magic: “The wind bloweth where it listeth, not where it is chartered by established authority” (66).  In other words, with due respect to writers like Leitch, Laycock, and even the giants, Mathers and Crowley, for making Enochian coherent, one’s experience of this magic is like one’s experience of the Astral Plane, which is to say, highly subjective.

I want to encourage those who read this essay to remember that and to follow the wind of inspiration where it listeth without getting bogged down by grimoire insecurity and whatever approaches may be in vogue.  Hence will the darkness be illuminated.

* I have much to say about this excellent, influential, hidden-in-plain-sight book / system and intend to repost one of my old essays about it very soon.  If you want to work with it, get the 1974 edition, not the more recent, ignorantly edited reprint.

** Wanderer has something like that of his own here: https://www.sorcerousendeavors.com/sorcery-blog/working-with-elubatel.  Take a look at his website if you’re interested in the musings of a smart, working sorcerer.

*** This, by the way, is a hallmark of powerful magical work.  It’s timeless.  It casts a long shadow over your life for better and often worse.  It can also be retro-causal.

Gnothi Seauton: where is your place of power?

 

Many years ago, when I was first learning the Supreme Invoking Ritual of the Pentagram, I wrote to Donald Kraig about the crazy things I was seeing at the edges of the circle, far crazier, I felt, than anything I’d ever witnessed during my study of the lesser pentagram and hexagram rituals. He very patiently (with his usual kindness and humor) wrote back that whatever I thought I was seeing, hearing, feeling, thinking, or otherwise experiencing during performance of the SIRP was unimportant. The important thing was being consistent in daily practice without letting astral garbage distract me. I took that advice to heart, as I did with everything he told me over the years, and eventually the visions subsided. But this taught me something important about magical practice: one’s perception of personal “power” or “energy” are largely subjective.

In fact, I will go so far as to say these perceptions are part of a practitioner’s unverified personal gnosis (UPG). What seems powerful and meaningful today can seem the opposite tomorrow and vice-versa—depending on a lot of factors, not the least of which include emotions, diet, weather, astrological moment, state-dependent memory, pattern recognition, imaginative capacity, comprehension, related reading, invisible friends, dream journeys, and personal wyrd. I think this is why Kraig, in Modern Magick (and in person) always stressed keeping detailed records of daily practice. You won’t know which factors regularly contribute to your power unless you examine how it rises or fails to rise in space and over time.

This sounds complicated, but it’s just a matter of paying close attention to yourself and staying consistent. I’ve written about avoiding pretentious, repetitive “grinding” from poorly written occult manuals. That’s not what I’m talking about here. Rather, I’m pointing out that no ritual (or, for that matter, true book of magic) reveals its secrets right away. One has to sit with it, practice it, and see the world through its perspective. Then gradually, like getting to know a person, it opens up and you start to see its inner nature. This takes patience and work.

Still, no one who has seriously engaged in occult study would deny that some form of tangible “energy” exists and can be directed through ritual. Moreover, there are some days when you feel magically or energetically filled up with that energy and some days when you don’t. If you look carefully, you can predict these peaks and valleys to a limited extent.

For example, say you know you’re going to have a heavy day at the office. You’ve gradually come to understand that eight hours of paperwork behind a desk makes you feel drained. You never do much magic on those days, preferring instead to just go home, make dinner, watch a show, and get to bed. This would be a valuable insight about one of your personal “valleys.” You probably wouldn’t plan for the culmination of a major grimoire evocation on a day like that. Alternately, you might feel that midnight is the loosest, most open, time for you to be “magical.” Maybe midnight is one of your “peaks.”

As with time, so with space. You may come to believe that a particular public garden or rotary park or monument or area of a museum is the best place for you to do certain surreptitious acts of magic. Whether or not that has always been the case or will be so in the future is an open question (since it will depend, at least partly, on your subjective, personal gnosis). But for now, that’s what it is. So that may be where you leave an offering or charge a sigil, etc.

Urban magicians immediately think of their magical chamber (or the corner of their studio apartment where they keep a second-hand coffee table covered in crystals, figurines, and other tacky brick-a-brac). Well and good. But your main place of power doesn’t have to be your altar or anywhere in a space you have to pay for once a month. You don’t even need an altar (regardless of what occult social media seems to think). All you need is to feel that “energy” rising at a particular location and moment and to believe that it is.

So where is your place of power? Mine is very unobtrusive, hidden in plain sight, but real to me nonetheless. You can find yours by paying attention. Then you will have a true magical secret that is wholly your own. And, as Don Webb once wrote, “The more of you that is in your magic, the more powerful your magic will be.” He also liked to say that the secret of magic is that it causes change in the magician. Put both of these ideas together and you get spiritual dynamite. You light that fuse by knowing yourself, which is the main idea of this entry.

Thorn Mooney on "Internet Witch Life"

I have lots of respect for Thorn Mooney and her ideas.  This one is no exception and, in my opinion, is worth an hour of your time.  If you participate in online occult conversations, you will find this interesting, I think.

Grimoire Note: Celestial Angel Magick by Corwin Hargrove

 

As the venerable Brother Moloch, a sorcerer near and dear to my heart, once pointed out, the Gallery of Magick books (and those, like Hargrove’s, that are GoM-adjacent, being extremely similar in format and approach) are not “grimoires” in the primary sense of the term.  Rather, they are spell books. 

Though they often profess a magical grammaire, they do not provide a variable syntax for it, which is to say, for a creative range of magical expressions as in the Greater and Lesser Keys of Solomon or the first part of the Grimorium Verum.  Instead, the GoM approach gives simplified rigid methods, focused on one or two groups of spirits or magical aesthetics, usually incorporating sigils or mandalas of Hebrew letters from the tradition of Jacobus Swart.  The difference is comparable to learning the rules of a language versus memorizing various blocks of text in that language verbatim.

 

Unfortunately the term, “spell book,” is now heavily associated with 1980s mass-market Wicca.  I’m loathe to climb on the Wicca-bashing bandwagon.  Before that, the trend in occult book-talk was ceremonial (i.e. Golden Dawn) bashing and, before that, it was New Thought-The Secret-Law of Attraction bashing, etc.  It never ends because occultists will never stop feeling insecure.  It’s all very high school, in my opinion. 

 

So for the time being, I’ll use grimoire when I talk about Celestial Angel Magick.  And I’ll call this a “grimoire note” instead of a book review, since I’m only saying one or two things about it (and those from a subjective, working perspective, avoiding much analysis of the text itself).

 

I’m writing this mostly because I’ve been using the book and because I think the GoM (-ish) grimoires work (as verbatim blocks of text in a magical language).  At least, they work for me, which is the most truthful and transparent thing any magician can say about occult things.  Of course, these books aren’t really “occult.”  They’re mass-marketed just like the self-initiatory eclectic Wiccan material from 30 years ago.  But the difference is that the GoM books can be overtly useful right away.  They can produce results (if you know how to use them properly) without you having to undergo very much self change.

 

In the present case, Hargrove gives a “pathworking” approach similar to that found in Jareth Tempest’s Raziel’s Paths of Power, Theodore Rose’s Lucifer and the Hidden Demons, and Gordon Winterfield’s Demons of Magick.  I think Damon Brand has this in a few of his books and there are several other GoM-adjacent and demonolatry imitators as well.  None of these texts are bad or worthless.  And most of them more or less pass the practical magic “laugh test.”

 

Pathworking (really the old “transvocation” under a misapplied, perhaps less intimidating name—we’re not actually working the paths on the Tree of Life) isn’t a bad way to go about conducting spirit contact.  Many serious mental mediums, witches, spiritual mentalists, and non-charlatan psychics also use it.  One could also argue that Paul Huson’s excellent demonic summoning method in Mastering Witchcraft is another example, if a bit closer to the original Solomonic grimoire method.  A reason this works is that it depends on skill in visualization and on a strong graphic imagination, something most occultists develop as a fundamental tool.  If you are also adept in any form of visual art or creative writing, you may find that it’s really easy, powerful, and satisfyingly dramatic.

 

Celestial Angel Magick, for me, in my subjective experience, is unique only in how it feels.  Specifically, it feels incredibly light and airy.  This must be from my UPG, but when I do a working from Lucifer and the Hidden Demons, there is a weighty, almost leaden sensation that accompanies the visualizations.  Not so with CAM.  The first time I used it, I almost let myself worry that nothing was happening outside my imagination.  I normally get a powerful sensation that spirit contact is happening within me but also beyond me in some way, but I didn't this time.

 

Magical sensations, especially those involving our otherwise invisible friends, are hard to describe.  But that’s the main reason I’m writing this: Celestial Angel Magick feels unique.  I suspect (and right now this can only be a suspicion) it may have to do with the fact that these are lunar angels.  As the author puts it, the invocable spirits in the grimoire are the 28 angels of the Mansions of the Moon.  And though Hargrove claims “these angels have real power, and best of all, it’s a power that feels strong and weighty while being easy to access” (11), I’ve gotten the idea that the moon phase will certainly affect the texture of the work.  This probably means that sometimes the feeling will be strong, but at other times, it will impart an almost insubstantial, ephemeral sensation. 

 

When I did my first working from CAM, the moon was in Aquarius (spiritual air).  The second was today with the moon in Pisces (spiritual water).  The airy and fluid nature of these signs no doubt influenced my impressions.  Only time will tell if the moon sign consistently seems to condition the work.

 

Did I get results?  I did, both times, within 24 hours.  In that sense, I should recommend the grimoire as a work of practical practical magic.  But, as the saying goes, your mileage may vary.  Just don’t be too quick to dismiss Celestial Angel Magick if its spirits don’t slap you upside your head.  Trust your visualization.  Do the work.  Then watch and wait—as always.

The Way of the Transgressor is Hard (or Standing in the Place of the Other, Revisited)

 

"Good understanding giveth favour: but the way of transgressors is hard." 

— Proverbs 13:15 (KJV)

In 2024, the hegemony of the always-online occultnik shut-in has come to an end for all but the most diehard identity performers, incels (and femcels), parasocial masturbators, and medicated incompetents still lurking on platforms like Tumblr, TikTok, Patreon, and YouTube.  Covid was their heyday, but once social distancing peaked and social life slowly started to go back to normal, they had to slink back to the basement.

Unfortunately, on magical-ish platforms—I hesitate to say “in the magical community” anymore, since most of what passed for that went south after the so-called “blog renaissance” got destroyed by social media—a certain kind of annoying cretin persists.  To be honest, this kind of fool comes with the territory, since a large chunk of the occult book industry makes a living off his credulousness and need to feel clever.  Think: 101 Ways to Sell Your Soul and Win or Arcane Seduction Spells or, in a more contemporary guise, Non-Appropriative Trans Witchcraft to Fight the Patriarchy.  Whatever the zeitgeist makes trendy, you can bet lots of occult books will emerge along the lines of money, sex, and petty personal power dressed up in those fashions.

 

But once you see this imbecile, you’ll never unsee him.  He comes in two distinct flavors: vanilla and edgelord, which ultimately amount to the same thing, since they emanate from the same personality defects.  Goes like this:

 

I feel that, on some level, the world has given me a raw deal.  I’ve discovered the occult and am (probably, though this is never certain) sensitive to magical energy.  I am determined to use this sensitivity to fuck over people I resent, get money, and play a rapey seduction game with those who otherwise wouldn’t give me the time of day.  I don’t want to put in the long hours of study and practice to acquire genuine magical capacities (since I don’t really care about anything deeper than the above goals).  So I’m going to look for occult shortcuts in the form of existing patterns, formulas, and workings—even better if I can contact the authors of those and quiz them about their ideas without having to do any research of my own.  Yes, I’m ignorant, lazy, and unwilling to even do a Google search to learn the proper definitions.  But the world owes me!

 

This person is useless.  His “occult” short-cutting and sense of entitlement will turn out to be as effective as everything else he attempts.  Maybe he knows how to take a shit properly (one hopes).  With that as his one skill, everything may have begun to resemble it.  But the world owes him money, love, and a sense of authority, certainly.  Therefore, he may also be proficient in using these assumptions to annoy anyone who has the misfortune of encountering him—in real life, but far more likely online.  He’s not a troll.  He’s just an immature consumer displacing a certain amount of space for a time while he fantasizes.  He’s an unaware LARPer.  He’s having a nice, long wank that might last a few decades.

 

Why in the world am I spending time on this sort of person in a blog post?  I’m tired of him.  Very tired—as much for how much he personally annoys me as for the ignorance he perpetuates.  Before you dismiss this post as merely a personal rant about an occult-world cliché, consider the opposite of this personality type.  Success in operative magic (results-based sorcery) always depends on an almost diametrically opposite approach.  Think about it.  Nothing (and this very much includes magical work) can be accomplished without a certain amount of risk, effort, and strain.  Anyone telling you different is selling you an inferior product.

 

Operative work, the kind that creates tangible, measurable effects in the practitioner’s perceptual fields and ultimately in the objective universe, is magnified in proportion to one’s courage.  And it works like that the more you do it.  This is, incidentally, why rebellion and opposition are such key concepts on the Left Hand Path.  They’re always-available power sources.  But it’s true for any spiritual system that seeks change: you have to put yourself out there.  You have to suffer (in the old sense of the term, which is as much to “undertake” or “withstand” as it is to experience discomfort).  As Louis Martinié famously put it, “First comes the working; then comes the work.”  To even get to a personal understanding of what Martinié’s talking about, you have to be brave, turn off OnlyFans, and leave the basement.

 

Matt Zane, in Transpersonal Satanism, puts it like this: “If necessary steps are not taken to willfully remove the self from what society or social circles impose, the external environment will define it.”  In other words, make your own choices or someone will make them for you.  Magic is about causing a change in the self on some level, which may cause comparable changes beyond the self in the world.  This is inherently transgressive, since the world (including the social world of consensus culture) always tends toward conformity.  The mere act of magic is a small violation of that consensus.  Don’t believe me?  Try loudly invoking Odin in the lobby of the largest bank downtown and see how connected you feel to society.  Even better, try it in the waiting room of your healthcare provider.

 

As the quote from Proverbs at the top of this post points out, the way of transgressors is hard.  Indeed.  In the words of a radical religious text that has been used to enforce some degree of social conformity since it began to be compiled, yes, transgress and you will taste salt.  But the alternative is ultimately worse.  And so we see the occultnik consumer who thinks he has a clever take on getting paid and laid.  He is undeniably a fool.  He wants to transgress, but he wants it to be easy.  That’s not how it works.  Back to WitchTok and the latest book on socially conscious non-appropriative teen witchcraft.  That’ll work, for sure.