Caveat

 

 

Be careful not to summon people, places, things, ideas, and experiences into your life if you have no space for them. You may have the power to pull anything to you or push anything away from you. But knowing when, where, and how to do these things comes either from trial and error or cautious awareness. May you learn through more of the latter than the former.

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.

Learning Magic: Focus on the End and Don’t Worry About the Means

 

Do practical magic for a while and you start to wonder about results.  Of course, you felt insecure about results from the beginning of your involvement with sorcery because reductive conformist materialism has drummed into your head that nothing exists unless you can place it on a physical scale: emotions are chemicals; there is no soul; and human identity comes down to DNA and brain architecture.  The non-material is synonymous with the non-real.  Science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and profit are all that truly matter in life, with social status as an irrational adjunct.  That’s the reductive materialist party line we all inherit.  Acting contrary to such ironclad scientism inevitably creates a lot of inner dissonance for creative and magical people.  Getting over it and transcending the dark side of post-industrial capitalism is a crucial part of learning magic.

But you always wonder about results.  This is mostly because, when your magic succeeds, it seems self-guided or directed by fate or some other power beyond your understanding.  The simplest money drawing candle can cause you to get fired by one employer and subsequently hired by another.  It can bring you marriage (or divorce).  It can send you around the world, grant you an inheritance (sorry grandpa), or drop a suitcase of cash on your doorstep in the middle of the night with no explanation at all.  And so you’re bound to ask: why did it do exactly what I envisioned last time and utterly surprise me with an unorthodox trajectory or outcome this time?  Is this all just coincidence?  Am I delusional?  Am I imagining connections and cause-effect relationships where there is only chaotic recombination of pre-existing variables?

If you’re good enough at divination, you can sometimes answer a few of these questions.  But the answers don’t matter because results-based magic isn’t rocket science.  It’s more like art—the picture you paint today might seem better or worse than the one you painted yesterday, but you can be sure that they won’t ever be identical, even if the materials you use are the same.  The old adage about not being able to step into the same river twice very much applies: you can’t systematize a magical act beyond the most basic ritual observances.  Magic always goes its own way and it often takes the path of least resistance toward the goal.  Accepting this is another difficult step in one’s magical education.

Make fun of Anton LaVey all you want, but he knew more about practical magic than many of today’s so-called occult scholars.  The chapter in his Satanic Bible entitled, “The Balance Factor” is worth more than most of today’s doorstop-worthy sorcerous manuals, especially the chapter’s last sentence: “Magic is like nature itself, and success in magic requires working in harmony with nature, not against it.”  Nature is always changing.  Therefore, magic is always changing.  Therefore, being receptive to the ebb and flow of that continuous process of change is fundamental to doing magic.  In other words, in magic, as in everything else, change is the only constant.

So how do you develop this receptivity?  Meditation works wonders.  Developing keen powers of observation, visualization, and critical thinking are essential.  Learning how to suspend critical thinking in the service of ecstasy also matters.  And, if you’re trying to learn magic, you should do a lot of it in addition to theorizing about it.  It’s what Aleister Crowley (partly) meant when he said, “Invoke often!”  The only way to do a thing well, especially a magical thing, is to do it a lot.  Accept that you will fail.  Learn its nature by involving yourself with it. 

Malcom Gladwell, in his tiresome Outliers, suggested that it takes 10,000 hours of practice to get good at something.  Perhaps that’s true, even if the number seems a bit spurious and arbitrary.  Still, the basic idea is compelling: practice, practice, practice, practice, practice.  In so doing, try to recognize trends and “laws,” for lack of a better term, amid all the changes.  Magic does have some in spite of its incessant variations and paradoxes, even if the laws you think you’re uncovering may only apply to you and may eventually change when you do.  

It’s hard to tell when you’re getting good at something so protean, but as Crowley says in Liber Al, “Success is your proof; courage is your armour.”  Indeed, it is.  Success is your only reliable metric.  Courage is the only thing that will keep you engaged and persevering.  And as success builds on success, you will start to see the practice clearly.

The simplest spells can be the most instructive.  Recently, I did a binding.  Instead of affecting the target, the spell affected me.  It made me emotionally immune to the target’s bad behaviour.  I am alright with that outcome because the conditions of success were not necessarily that the target be harmed or manipulated (though, I wouldn’t have cared if that had happened).  Rather, the spell was intended to remove the source of my upset and protect me against future offenses.  In this case, the path of least resistance involved creating an emotional break between us, not unlike the classic hoodoo “cut and clear” trick.  And that’s just fine.  Binding achieved; though, I had not imagined it would come about that particular way.

Bindings I’ve done in the past have operated differently, which doesn’t bother me at all.  I’m open to the changes.  I’m willing to accept new and different pathways of manifestation as long as the sought-after results do manifest.  Similarly, I once did a death curse—don’t get excited; I’ve done very few of them—which resulted in the target becoming dead to me.  She moved out of town.  I’ve never heard about her, from her, or seen her again.  It was as if she were plucked out of my reality forever.  Did it matter that a dump truck didn’t fall out of the sky and squash her in the street?  Not at all.  My deepest wish was that she would be erased.  And so she was.

This is how sorcery (a wonderous part and expression of nature) actually works.  Sometimes the dump truck falls out of the sky.  Other times, the target moves to Houtouwan, China, and it’s as if they took a space ship to a distant galaxy never to return.  They could have merely moved across town or down the street, but because they are dead to you, you will never encounter them again.  The path of least resistance is tantamount to the path of least reality distortion.  This is what LaVey means when he says one works in harmony with nature, not against it.  The end is what matters, not the means.

So do.  Learn.  Think.  Stop thinking and feel.  Record your results.  Do again.  And accept that the pathways of fate and consequence are more profound and entangled than you or I can fully grasp.  That’s part of the beauty of magic.  And it is a profound teacher.

Fix Your Love Life with Sorcery: a Comprehensive Outline

 

You’re lonesome and you want some companionship.  Here’s a formula for getting it in a way that won’t bring destruction and grief into your life.  It’s better than a one-off love spell of the sort that’s likely to mess you up.  This outline involves more than just a ritual in your basement—because authentic change demands self-change.  Follow these steps and notice that we don’t get to the actual ritual magic until the end, which is quite simple and direct.  

This praxis always works, but it is work.  And it will change your life.  If you want to skip down to the ritual, be my guest.  But know that, although it can succeed without the other parts, the ritual will take the path of least resistance and bring someone into your life as soon as possible.  The other parts are designed to make what the ritual brings be good, healthy, and satisfying—while giving you a lot of additional benefits and powers.  Just doing a love spell is like dialing a random number and asking that person to come over for tea.  It might be good.  You might get a serial killer.  Be warned.

Fix Your Physicality: cardio is more important than weights, but they work well together. You don’t need to run marathons.  You just need to be fit.  I am personally a fan of the USMC physical fitness program.  But find what works for you.  Joining a gym and going every day is more than acceptable.  Martial arts are wonderful.  Yoga and isometrics.  Mountain biking.  You decide.  Just remember: cardio and some form of resistance to build muscle.  And practice daily hygiene.  If you do this, people will eventually want to fuck you. 

Fix Your Finances: if you’re over the age of 18 and living in a western country, you need some sort of income stream.  Yes, it means a job.  This is material for a separate post, but for our purposes here, just focus on getting work that doesn’t drive you crazy or make you exhausted.  You don’t work to be happy at first.  You just work to survive.  Then you can figure out how to get a better job or modify your current job to get more satisfaction.  This will also give you many, many other benefits and lessons.  And mundane work, even if it doesn’t seem like it on the surface, is pure magic.  If you’re a college student living off loans, college is your job.  College, done mindfully, is also a deep form of magic. 

The bottom line is that you need a little (not a lot of) money to carry on a relationship.  You need to be a responsible person if you want people to respect you and if you want to respect yourself.  You even need money for a one-night stand.  You don’t have to be rolling in it.  But you do need some.

Fix Your Personality: no one will want to be near you if you radiate depression and desperation.  You need to be socially happy and funny in order to be charming.  And you need to be charming for people to feel like you have something to offer beyond a one-night hookup.  You may think you might not know how to be happy and funny, but that’s only because you’re afraid. 

Learn to be socially happy by finding something you can do with others that you enjoy.  This can be a sport, a hobby, whatever.  Join a choir.  Take bowling lessons.  Take a massage class.  It doesn’t matter.  The point is that you have to enjoy it and you have to be able to do it with others.  I’m not going to put down video games; they’re a wonderful way to unwind.  But video gaming with others does not count. 

Online gaming posits too many layers of technological mediation between people.  You need to be physically present so you can have nonverbal communication replete with pheromones and body language, even with people you are not romantically interested in.  This is essential.  If all you want to do is relate to people in your MMO raiding group, you don’t need sorcery.  You just need a computer.  Conversely, those who find love, do so more effectively by going old-school: learn to relate to your body and its chemistry and to other people’s bodies and their chemistries in real space and time.  Be present.  Give your Steam account a rest.

Learn to be funny by developing the ability to laugh in a non-cruel way.  Everyone develops cruel laughter as a kid.  It’s a weapon.  But very few people will desire someone who uses that childish weapon with impunity (or at all).  Instead, learn to laugh at the absurdity of life for its own sake.  Laugh with people, not at them. 

Watch a bunch of stand-up comedians.  Find the ones that annoy you the least and try to understand why they’re funny (why people in the audience are laughing).  This can be a hard study for some people.  Even more challenging: if you want to up your game considerably, read Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More than IQ by Ray Goleman, Yes, And: How Improvisation Reverses "No, but" Thinking and Improves Creativity and Collaboration - Lessons from the Second City by Kelly Leonard, and Truth in Comedy by Charna Halpern.  Really advanced: practice regular “laughter meditation.”  If that seems crazy and impossible, learn a little more about it in this old BBC spot with John Cleese.

If you can learn to laugh in a non-cruel way, you will know how to be funny from time to time without forcing it.  Most people say that someone with a great sense of humor (i.e. their sense of humor) is highly attractive.  This is your work.

Fix Your Spirituality: I make sacrifices and offerings to dark gods at night.  During the day, I try to practice compassion and avoid hurting others.  It may seem like these are at odds, but they really aren’t.  A mature spiritual practice embraces the totality of the human condition, the dark and the light, the negative and the positive. 

For example, if you consider yourself a theistic Satanist or a demonolator and you only relate to non-STEM aspects of life in an adversarial way because that’s the aesthetic of your belief system, you need to improve it.  That means you need to understand how a mature Satanist can have a lot of friends.  It means that even though you’ve pledged your soul to Asmodeus, you’re not using that as an excuse to avoid making yourself socially vulnerable.  Don’t be a cliché and fall into the trope of the angry, friendless occultist in the basement—the magical incel (or femcel).  The most advanced spiritual practitioners are magnetic.  People seek them out.  They have more friends than they will ever need—not because they put the root on everyone they know, but because they are charismatic and kind.

If you practice dark rites and adversarial individualism, you need to add in some light.  I recommend you read and adapt methods from The Spiritual Practice of Good Actions by Greg Marcus, Creating True Peace by Thich Nhat Thanh, and / or The Mindful Self-Compassion Workbook by Kristin Neff.  If you practice something with a lot of love and light and community, you need to add in some darkness.  I recommend Dark Goddess Craft by Stephanie Woodfield, Uncle Setnakt’s Essential Guide to the Left Hand Path by Don Webb, and / or How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World by Harry Browne.

Do a Simple Ritual: having studied all these things and improved yourself, you are radiating attractiveness, balance, charm, and wisdom.  People will already be drawn to you.  And the magic will be easy at this point.  You won’t need much.  On a Friday when the moon is waxing, get a red glass novena candle.  Dress the top with rose oil.  On a piece of paper write, “Love and sex come to me.”  Fold the paper towards you in half and put it under the candle.  Light the candle and invoke your love entity of choice.  If you don’t have one, Venus is always listening.  You could do worse than reciting the Orphic hymn to Aphrodite over the candle with sincerity.

Orphic Hymn to Aphrodite (#55)

 

Heavenly, smiling Aphrodite, praised in many hymns,

sea-born, revered goddess of generation, you like the nightlong revel

and you couple lovers at night, O scheming mother of Necessity.

Everything comes from you; you have yoked the world,

and you control all three realms. You give birth to all,

to everything in heaven, upon the fruitful earth

and in the depths of the sea, O venerable companion of Bacchos.

You delight in festivities, O bridelike mother of the Erotes,

O Persuasion whose joy is in the bed of love, secretive, giver of grace,

visible and invisible, lovely-tressed daughter of a noble father,

bridal feast companion of the gods, sceptered she-wolf,

beloved and man-loving giver of birth and of life,

with your maddening love-charms you yoke mortals

and the many races of beasts to unbridled passion.

Come, O goddess born in Cyprus, whether you are on Olympos,

O queen, exulting in the beauty of your face,

or you wander in Syria, country of fine frankincense,

or, yet, driving your golden chariot in the plain,

you lord it over Egypt’s fertile river bed.

Come, whether you ride your swan-drawn chariot over the sea’s billows,

joying in the creatures of the deep as they dance in circles,

or you delight in the company of the dark-faced nymphs on land,

(as, light-footed, they frisk over the sandy beaches).

Come, lady, even if you are in Cyprus that cherishes you,

where fair maidens and chaste nymphs throughout the year

sing of you, O blessed one, and of immortal, pure Adonis.

Come, O beautiful and comely goddess;

I summon you with holy words and pious soul.

 

Translation by A. Athanassakis

Burn the candle for 15 minutes a day until there’s nothing left.  On the day you start, go to your calendar.  Put a note in for three days from now, three weeks from now, and three months from now.  These are your check-in moments.  Do not think about this work except on those days.  If it comes to mind, say to yourself, "I am pleased with my progress and will check in with it on the appropriate days."  Then go about your business.  Continue all the non-ritual practices given above (the exercise, the spiritual development, the emotional development, the income).

 

In less than 1 year but probably within 3-6 months of you starting this work, you will find love and sex.  In a future post, I’ll write about how to deal with getting what you want.

Impressions of Strange Energy

I’ve been feeling extremely strange since this morning. The tides of energy have not been moving the way they usually do. Being an empath,* I can feel this intensely but, as usual, I have no idea what it means.  Moreover, In order to write about this, I have to use "energy" in the new age way or at least in the post-Theosophical mode of "a subtle force inherent in organisms" (see Frater U.D.'s "Models of Magic" essay hosted on chaosmatrix.com for a great discussion of this as an operative magical paradigm).  So I'm going to give myself permission to write this entry in an impressionistic way; though, I would normally be a lot stricter with my terminology and assumptions. 

The energy seemed much “thinner” and more fluid early this morning. I took note, though sometimes early morning energies are a little wonky. So I didn’t feel like things were unusually out of order. However, right in the middle of teaching my two-and-a-half-hour Monday seminar, I felt the energy “drop.” By this, I mean that the stream of creative energy usually flowing through me, fueling my teaching, seemed to completely dissipate, leaving me with only willpower and a little intellectual (mind) energy to keep me going.

That would have been strange and noteworthy in itself if my energetic impressions hadn’t seemed to get even stranger after class. I ended a little early because the students seemed exhausted. And, to be honest, I felt willing to dismiss all my perceptions as end-of-semester fatigue. But people looked strange, their energies and facial expressions seemed off, distorted, unusual.

I had to run some errands around campus and the bureaucrats who normally seem pinch-faced and sour were lavishly polite, while those I look forward to seeing were uncharacteristically unpleasant. Some strangers looked unnervingly familiar. And everyone’s auras seemed unusually “open,” such that I was feeling a degree of kinship with everyone. The usual cold separation was not between us to the same degree or in the same ways.

I wondered if this was due to me increasing zazen since the weekend or whether there was some other psychological, physiological, or energetic reason. But answers are not forthcoming. Sometimes (as happened when I received my reiki attunements) a rebalancing of inner energies causes a certain amount of energetic distortion around a person for a short period of time. Zazen could be causing that. But I’m not satisfied that’s the answer, since I have practiced zazen for almost two years with nothing like this happening. Of course, recently meditating at the temple might “up the wattage” to some extent, but I still feel like that’s not it.

Now I’m sitting in the campus library and everyone still seems extremely off and strange, as if I were looking at an imperfect simulation of the world, a not-quite-accurate approximation of how things usually are. I’ve even gone so far as to check myself in a restroom mirror, wondering if the weird expressions on people’s faces are because something about me is comically askew. But I could see nothing unusual in my appearance.

Having investigated the mundane possibilities, I’ll turn to magic—which was my first thought, to be completely honest: something is afoot. I’ve described this sensation before (though I cannot remember it ever being this strong) as a “sorcerous key turning the lock of fate.” When magic is powerfully at work, I can often feel it shifting cause-effect relationships and probabilities around me. Yes, this is impressionistic and wholly subjective, but so is operative magic—until it isn’t.

The sensation is that reality is “softening” and becoming less definite, less stable. And it can emanate from work I’ve done or from work someone is doing in my proximity, whether it’s aimed at me directly or it’s simply moving past.

My magical-interpersonal context right now is complex. So I also have a hard time drawing any conclusions there.  If I had my divination tools with me, I could tell. But I’m going to have to wait. And by the time I get home tonight, everything might have gone past or run its course.

* When someone says they're an "empath," it's usually a new-age-marketing-influenced way of saying, "I think I'm a very sensitive person."  And that would not be inaccurate in most cases.  Much more is made out of the concept (for spiritual marketing purposes), entering the special category of "spiritual bullshit."  I am not trying to shovel said bullshit by saying I think I am rather sensitive to the emotions adhering to people, places, and things.  But I have to include this note because otherwise that bullshit will apply.

What if you've been cursed?

 

The only thing more pathetic than the term, “spiritual entrepreneur,” is the individual who describes him- or herself that way. It may seem a bit ironic that I'm saying this, given that I used to practice public sorcery and charge for such services. But there is definitely a difference between a “spiritual entrepreneur” and a “spiritual worker” as the terms are commonly understood and used.

A spiritual worker is a magical individual (rootdoctor, sorcerer, Reiki master, herbalist, card reader, etc.) who provides a set of spiritual services to a community. These days, that includes an online community. This person may work through various established spiritual traditions and usually tries to educate and counsel his or her clientele. For example, my former sorcery-for-hire practice was not only dedicated to conjure, evocation, and Reiki. It was also committed to fostering multiculturalism, tolerance, and sharing across ethnic and spiritual boundaries. I did such work not just for my own monetary benefit but also to teach the art of magic, initiatory spirituality, and, in the process, to make the world a better place.

Conversely, a spiritual entrepreneur may or may not be a magical individual but will try hard to seem like one (using the most trendy suburban Wiccan* or new age styles, keywords, and assumptions). This person promotes a spiritual technique, product, or service, relying heavily on e-marketing, focused spam via “newsletters,” usually a content-lite YouTube channel, and niche customer targeting to generate as much passive income as possible. A spiritual entrepreneur's focus is on his or her multi-platform business first, then content, then the clients. For this person, it's all about the “brand.” If you go to YouTube or TikTok and type in one of the key words associated with spiritual entrepreneurialism, “witchy,” you will get a veritable phone book of unimaginative cliché examples. After watching one or two of those videos and looking at the linked websites, you wouldn't be wrong to wonder whether we need another post entitled “Six Signs You Might Be a Witch” or “Crystals Dealing with Toxic Family Energy Over the Holidays” or “Working with Angels and Spirit Guides.”

In the 1990s, more serious (or at least more style conscious) magical people coined the term “fluffy bunny” to describe Wiccans who pretend that they only work with love and light (with an equally pretentious subsequent reaction, “dark fluff”). And many spiritual entrepreneurs still believe that a generous helping of fluff will more easily part a certain type of customer from his or her money. But spiritual entrepreneurialism isn't about love or “ascension” or, actually, anything at all beyond branding. It's the most cynical commodification of spirituality available in the West and we see it everywhere. It's the reason why occult publishers like Llewellyn and Weiser have taken so much criticism from real practitioners over the last 20-30 years, even though they've published quality work along with poorly researched, padded, repetitive trash.

Most of what I'm saying here is obvious and anyone who spends time looking through social media and reading Tumblr will quickly come to these conclusions.  As in all things Theodore Sturgeon's “garbage theory” applies: 90% of a given set of things is crap to support the 10% that isn't. All well and good. However, it's not so good when we need spiritual services that actually work, especially when the situation is dire.

Uh-oh. What about when you've been cursed? What then? If you think only members of certain ethnic communities worry about curses, you're dead wrong. Every culture has them. And I can tell you confidently that if you haven't been the target of a curse or some other form of psychic attack at least once, you will be someday. It's part of life.

Imagine you find yourself in a situation where a highly suspicious chain of nasty events is taking place in your life. Maybe you've also come down with a case of heavy depression and insomnia. You're having reversals and problems at work and at home. And all of this happens to coincide with a falling-out you've recently had with someone or with some envy-inducing advancement, like a raise or a new relationship or a financial windfall. You say to yourself, why would anyone want to curse me? I haven't done anything wrong! But curses don't just work for justice. You can get crossed up by any individual who resents your happiness enough to do something about it.

Most of us, if we're leading adult lives and not living in a cave, have a sprinkling of enemies who want to see us suffer. Often, a few of those people will either have some metaphysical aptitude or will be willing to go to a sorcerer-for-hire. And many times those people will be very close to us—ex-lovers, family, or coworkers. If you're a decent person, like most people are, you won't want to believe it. Jane from accounting?! She's still bitter about me turning her down but, really, is that enough for her to pay a hoodoo worker to fuck up my life? Sure. Why not? You have no idea what's going on in her head. She may just frown at you and avoid eye-contact when you pass her in the hallway, but maybe she's lurking on your Facebook page, spending a lot of time fixating on why you turned her down, etc. With that in mind, do you think it's so far-fetched that if she has a few books on magic, she might try something? Maybe she starts searching for “love spells” and comes across a professional's website. And the rest is, as they say, academic.

In a situation like this, do you want to go to a spiritual entrepreneur who charges you $300 to change your vibration with a $10 quartz crystal and some essential oil? Do you want to go to a cute-as-a-button Wiccan girl on YouTube who says she can sage the bad juju away? Really? How about getting a reading from a teenager on Tumblr who snaps it out in just 20 minutes? Because I've been contacted by people who've taken that route at first. They nearly always write the following: I've gotten burned by workers before. Paid a lot of money and nothing happened. Or got a tarot reading and it made no sense / was totally vague. Or so-and-so cursed me and now my life is in tatters and Jenny the Lightworker told me my chakras were just out of balance. And then I have to clean up both the mess that their lives are in and whatever half-baked work the spiritual entrepreneur did (if anything).

All the new-age stuff, all the Wiccan stuff, all the watered-down pop-occult techniques and Law of Attraction and “abundance manifesting” can work. I don't want to give the impression that “my way is the only way.” The problem is not actually with the techniques. It's with the branding and the people who think they can make a living off of others by doing very little beyond curating their feeds and smiling into the camera. Most of the clients I get are desperate and sometimes locked in life-or-death circumstances. Many of them have been victims of baneful magic or a deep run of crossed-up luck or some force, whether human or otherwise, holding them down. They have been unjustly harmed and they feel like their options have become very limited. Understandably, they have no sense of humor about this stuff. They're not playing. They need help and they need it yesterday.

My recommendation is that if you are one of those people in need, do not waste your time on someone surrounded by a lot of slick e-commerce because that's where all the energy is going. Instead, look for three qualities in a worker: (1) reasonable rates; (2) professionalism (i.e. scheduling, doing a small diagnostic reading in the beginning, providing updates, not seeming money hungry, ethical); and (3) doing more than just protecting and curating their brand / internet presence. It's important to keep these things in mind if you want to avoid throwing your time, money, and emotion away on someone who doesn't have your best interests at heart.

 

* I actually love Wicca. I'm not putting it down. I'm putting down those who cynically use it to hook customers in support of a superficial brand.

Sorcery and the Acceptance of Death

 

Sauron was become now a sorcerer of dreadful power, master of shadows and of phantoms, foul in wisdom, cruel in strength, misshaping what he touched, twisting what he ruled, lord of werewolves; his dominion was torment.

– J. R. R. Tolkien, The Silmarillion, Quenta Silmarillion: Of the Ruin of Beleriand and the Fall of Fingolfin

There are sorcerers who will help you and sorcerers who will harm you. But, strangely enough, in a world that doesn’t believe in anything but physics and money, magic takes uncanny and subtle forms. With that in mind, the deadliest sorcerers of all are not those who wear robes and cast spells. Rather, they are those who work with the darkest, most powerful metaphors of this age: money, cynicism, doubt, fear, and bigotry.

Tolkien lived through a time when the rise of modernity had brought forth extremely efficient ways of exterminating or enslaving large groups of people. And his Middle Earth fairy tales gave the West a new mythology, a new language through which hope and goodness could be expressed—since the ancient metaphors of troth, right action, and maat had been largely forgotten or corrupted over time by industry, fascism, spiritual ignorance, and senseless materialism. When Tolkien writes of Sauron (or the Nazgûl Witch King) as being a powerful, dreadful sorcerer opposed by the forces of light and life, he’s talking about operative forces in the 20^th century.  Now here we are. And Sauron has won.

In Tolkien’s mythos, Sauron is not Morgoth, not the first or historically greatest expression of evil the world has ever seen. But, for the people of Middle Earth in the Third Age, he certainly is. When the One Ring is destroyed in Mount Doom, the physical incarnation of Sauron dies once and for all. He is reduced permanently to “a spirit of hatred borne on a dark wind” (The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, Letter 211). But he is not gone.

The world we live in exists only analogically to that of myth and fantasy, and in our gray morally relative existence—where nothing is ever absolute or certain and concepts like loyalty, justice, and honor are regularly ground under the relentless tread of ambition, exploitation, and commerce—the “spirit of hatred” finds many willing human hosts. It cannot die; it cannot be conclusively defeated. Just as Morgoth gives rise to Sauron’s many incarnations over time, so does the corrupt spirit of hatred and cynicism reemerge in every age of our world. 

Tolkien believed this when he wrote: “That Sauron was not himself destroyed in the anger of the One is not my fault: the problem of evil, and its apparent toleration, is a permanent one for all who concern themselves with our world” (Letter 211).  It’s a war that every generation has to fight on some level. History is full of brutality, ignorance, xenophobia, and sectarian violence. One need only do an internet search or open a book on world history. It’s all there. And, historically speaking, dark lords win more often than not.

The knight fights the dragon, the Free Peoples of Middle Earth fight Sauron, until such time as the dragon eats the knight or Sauron regains the Ring. Then, for lack of an enemy, the dragon eats itself and Middle Earth dies covered in darkness. And only then will the world be reborn with new heroes and new dragons. This is the cycle of creation described in every apocalyptic world myth. And we are seeing the Twilight of the Gods now in the 21^st century.

And so I leave this message for my gentle and kind friends, many of whom follow spiritual paths of light, life, and love, practicing compassion and living in harmony with nature as best they can: from darkness, new light will come. But it is unlikely that you will live to see it. Rather, as Yeats wrote in “The Second Coming”: “Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,/ The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere/ The ceremony of innocence is drowned.”

This is a difficult thing for us to accept. We want to believe that a hero, Frodo maybe or some other embodiment of hope and sincerity, will save us from the end the way the Allies beat the Axis or the way Beowulf defeated Grendel. But the world has already passed the 400 PPM threshold with no signs of abating, indicating that catastrophic environmental, economic, and social repercussions forecasted by (very solid) climate science are inevitable.

The spirit of hatred will rule, preventing the world from recovering. Resources will be put towards bread and circuses. Useless walls will be constructed. Race baiting and tribal hostility will prevail. The good, protective social forces will be rendered powerless and the poor, sick, and otherwise vulnerable will die. New forms of economic and physical slavery will come into being through the instruments and systems provided by an unchecked corporate culture. Education will become further monetized and the arts and humanities will only be carried on by private individuals if at all. This is the end of the world as we have known it, but it has been coming for a long time.

So what remains for magical people to do? Make peace with your gods. Stop trying to get that promotion or get revenge on your ex or paying street sorcerers to help you get laid for the umpteenth time (or, for some of you, at all). Cultivate your soul. Meditate more. Work more on the Inner Planes. Forget a lasting legacy for yourself. No one is likely to care or remember you after everything is gone. Do you know the names of more Ancient Romans than you can count on your fingers? Yet the Roman Empire was vast and powerful. It fell, too.

Instead of petty trivial things and animalistic obsessions, focus on spiritual advancement and transcendence in the time you have left. Contemplate the fact that your immortal soul is indestructible. Or, as Hexagram 54 (“The Marrying Maiden”) of the I-Ching puts it: “the superior man/ Understands the transitory/ In the light of the eternity of the end.”

Do that and stand tall when the dragon comes.

Sorcery for Hire: the Ins and Outs (Part 2)

 

When I was doing sorcery for hire, I never talked about the particulars of client issues in public and just because I got pissed off from time to time didn't mean I was going to betray a client’s trust.  But still, something has to be said: being a client is not a passive game.  It doesn’t mean that for $100 or $150, you’ve bought the rights to your spiritual worker’s life.  It only means one thing: this person will make the products or take the actions that he or she promised.

No spiritual worker can give you an airtight guarantee.  What he or she can do is the agreed-upon work as well as talk about past success rates, provide a timeline for signs / movement / manifestation, teach the client how to back up the work on his or her end, and give good advice about the situation.  We can be honest and up-front about what magic is and is not from our learned perspectives.  And that is all. Take a second and read the previous paragraph again.

First, you need to understand that obsessed and / or deranged clients are a problem that each spiritual worker must handle.  Obsessed and / or deranged clients tend to run from reader to reader and from worker to worker hoping against hope that someone will fix their issue. These people won’t take no for an answer, and if you are the one who gives them a timeline for the work or who honestly tells them “this work won’t succeed,” they may bad-mouth you and say you are “not strong enough” or they may keep running from worker to worker until their money runs out and then start bad-mouthing conjure or magic in general, saying “it’s all a scam.” This is not true of ALL clients, but we have all noticed the phenomenon, and some of us don’t like dealing with obsessed and / or deranged clients.

But it’s true that clients sometimes don’t listen when you say that the problem might take longer than the client wants it to take. Yes, it might take some time!  Magic is rarely in harmony with the culture of instant gratification.  As I once tried to explain to a new client who came to me with an extremely distrustful attitude: we do magic to have a spiritual connection, to shift probabilities and perceptions.  This is what generates results.

If you come to a spiritual worker with the thought in your mind that she’s going to defraud you, what do you think that does for the spiritual energy being generated on your behalf?  Did you think you had nothing to do with the working?  Wrong.  You are as much a part of it as the practitioner you hire. When a client would email me continuously, distrustfully, lusting for results and paranoid that I haven’t written back when, in fact, the magic needed time to work, it burdened the relationship with a massive amount of negativity.  Don’t be that kind of client.  If you’re going to pay someone to do traditional rituals for you—whether it’s conjure, evocation, or some other thing—be classy about it.

Don’t obsess about the money or the work done will be primarily about that.  Be relaxed and open to the possibilities. Most of my long-term clients were fantastic.  But every spiritual worker has to deal with the obsessive / deranged lot from time to time.  I guess it’s an occupational hazard.

Sorcery for Hire: the Ins and Outs (Part 1)

 

A colleague over at the newly restored Studio Arcanis recently posted a story about how doing conjure for others can be a thankless undertaking.  Don't I know it.  I thought I'd add something about that here.

A long time ago, when I decided that it would be a good thing to offer reiki and spiritual services, I knew nothing about working for clients apart from doing public tarot divinations.  I already had a lot of magical experience, but it was mostly through doing work for myself, close friends, and family.  I had yet to discover the ins and outs of working for positive change in the lives of complete strangers.  But I would soon learn that there are many hidden lessons in this line of work.  It changed my magic.  It changed my outlook on the world.  And it wasn’t easy by any stretch of the imagination.  It was a crash course in interacting with the human condition as well as in the complexities of sorcery for hire.

The first lesson I ever learned was that everyone is sincere—even the most acerbic doubting Thomas.  Everyone, without exception, who contacts me for conjure or reiki on some level wants the benefit of my services even if they are too nervous or shy to allow themselves to fully admit it.  Strangely enough, the doubters are the ones who want to believe the most.  And it’s really good to doubt if you’re going to give a complete stranger your money in exchange for a spiritual service.  You should be thinking critically about this person: is he acting professional?  Is he clear?  Is he responding intelligently to your situation?  Critical thinking comes from doubt.  But we also know that you can have too much of a good thing in this case—too much doubt gets in the way of the entire experience.  So from the very beginning, the client and I walk a fine line of trust.  The client evaluates me and I evaluate him.  We enter a sincere partnership and do everything we can to create change.  Learning to trust complete strangers meant I had to mature in ways I never anticipated.

Another key lesson I learned was that no situation is simple—every life is hard; everyone’s doing the best he or she can with available tools and resources.  If someone comes to me, they have a problem that they haven’t been able to solve through mundane means.  Their lawyer stole all the money.  Their fiancée ran off with the neighbor.  Grandpa went missing in the park.  Maybe they got assaulted and are having a hard time healing from lingering psychological and physical pain.  Maybe their career is stalled.  Maybe they just need to have a spiritual experience, something completely alien to them because of the way they were raised.  Whatever the case may be, they’re suffering on some level.  Learning to understand and appreciate the suffering of others meant I had to get over myself and learn compassion.

A huge lesson I learned was that the magic doesn’t come from me—it comes through me.  This is the “spirit led” part.  A sorcerer or reiki practitioner who “tries to do things” fails a lot.  Beginning practitioners often mistakenly think that if they just concentrate hard enough, if they just WILL something into being, the world will respond.  This can work sometimes, but grabbing the world by the throat and shaking it more often results in nothing or even in the opposite coming to pass.  Instead, through a lot of grimoire work—by seeking out both human and non-human mentors—I quickly came to understand that the most powerful work has a spiritual origin, not a human one.  I started to relax and let my spirit guides, spirits of divination, familiars, and other contacts do their jobs.  This is the secret to my success.  It’s not me.  It’s spirit working through me.  Learning to trust my connection to spirit meant I had to develop a large amount of faith in a world I could not see or touch.  Paradoxically, doing so eventually helped me see it and touch it, but that took time, belief, and the willingness to be patient and practice the art while not having all the answers.  I still don’t have all the answers.

One lesson I had to learn multiple times in multiple ways was that people in pain are often very unpleasant to be around.  We all know this to some extent.  But doing conjure is sometimes like working in the customer service section of a department store.  People are angry, sad, bereft, despairing, or even suicidal before they even speak to you.  You have to be ready with mundane solutions as well as spiritual ones, keeping a suicide hotline number handy, having online links to addiction recovery centres, women’s shelters, walk-in clinics.  Learning about my community so that I could help others made me a better spiritual worker.  It also meant I had to get out on the street and pay attention.  Now very few things escape my notice in my spiritual or physical environment.

These are only a few of the important lessons that have come from this work.  One of my teachers used to say that “many are called but few are chosen.”  And I wouldn’t truly understand what she was saying until I actually set up my website, made business cards, started doing community reiki, sorcery for hire, and counselling others.  Then I understood what “gifted for the work” really meant.  To be chosen for something like this means you have to have skills that others don’t—not just the ability to perform effective rituals, but a whole panoply of hidden qualities that enable you to thrive in this field.  And if you don’t have them right off, you learn the hard way whether you can find them in yourself.  But I wouldn’t trade those experiences, even the painful ones, for anything.

Sometimes the Answer is No

 

Sometimes, when doing a divination on a prospective magical action, the message will be “No, this is not something you can affect.” When the tarot (or some other oracle) says this, it’s usually because the outcome of the situation, or at least its trajectory, is already decided.

It can be hard for a practical sorcerer to accept this answer, since we are inherent controllers and scholars of the unseen shape of events. We are not passive and often not very accepting of the status quo by temperament. But having to occasionally surrender to the impervious dictates of fate is one of the hard realities of doing operative magic. It means admitting that, no matter how skillful and gifted we may be, we are not the most powerful force under the Moon. We are a human beings with human limitations.

It is important to bow to this deep truth and remain humble. If the answer is no and we go ahead anyway, at the very least nothing will happen and we will have wasted our time and energy. At worst, life will take steps to prevent our magic from interfering. And such a thing can turn out to be very unpleasant for stubborn magicians.

Instead, try to flow with the sometimes all-powerful, unalterable demands of fate and destiny—the Confucian “Will of Heaven”—in a way that results in harmony, not in resistance. Things will then unfold as they should. And if you can’t change the world, you can always change yourself, which is often the better course anyway.

This lesson is reflected in the traditional representations of the 7 of Cups, where it seems like there are many possible destinations and pathways, but there is really only one.

The Rule of the Sorcerer

 

Thoth Amon's tower in Conan the Destroyer (1984)

Sorcery seems very much like a gun. After many years of study and trial-and-error experimentation, I got good at miraculously adjusting things and sometimes causing outright changes in myself and the world around me.  I learned which so-called "laws of magic" apply to my experience and which do not.  I got good enough that I could teach this art to others and even do it for hire.

But for every problem I avoided or neutralized through practical magic, other problems were created (much the way a weapon can function as an agent of change in a difficult situation without being a perfect solution to the root problems). 

Ultimately, I came to see that I was trading one set of difficulties for another.  I still do sorcery because sometimes that "trade" is better than the status quo.  Sometimes, a bullet improves a situation (the attacker is taken down; justice is served), but the problem nearly always continues in some other form.  The sorcerer has to accept this and be ready to adjust to the new circumstances that came about, at least partly, through her magic.

Only consistent mundane efforts that include self-work cause lasting positive change.  This can be hard for beginners and intermediates in magic to accept, especially when they start to get comfortable with a form of practical magic that works for them.  They want to change everything and get upset and confused when those efforts, no matter how successful, embroil them in further difficulties.

"Mundane efforts" because we may be spiritual beings having a physical experience, but we are also made of clay and live in a clay world, the material plane, the realm of physics and cause-and-effect.  Consider: you live in a house with 20 windows.  They are all open (maybe you just fumigated the place or something).  What would be more effective, walking around and shutting each one with your hand or doing a ritual that causes a convergence of remarkable events and probabilities to render each window closed over a month's time?  Sometimes the most effective way of travel is on the ground, using your two feet.

"Self-work" because all magic begins in the perceptual field, the inner imaginative "subjective universe," of the magician.  If he doesn't work to improve and change who he is inside, his magical efforts will be circumscribed by that unwillingness to change.  In pragmatic terms, this means he has to clarify his values and determine how the magical working(s) are in line with them: who is he becoming in this work and why is it good?

1970s sword-and-sorcery movies and comics are great teachers of this and it's why I wrote "Rule of the Sorcerer" at the top.  Remember what happens when Conan the Destroyer slays the evil wizard?  The wizard's crystal tower collapses.  This is a fantasy trope repeated throughout this genre of pop-culture and may come from Robert E. Howard's influence on Gary Gygax: the magic is sustained by the wizard's will.  When his will falters, the magical creations crumble.  The will was the lasting thing.  The magic was only a temporary expression of it in the world.  And when the tower collapses, something is always revealed—a treasure chamber, a monster, a portal to another place.  And so one problem is replaced by another . . .