Simplicity in Life & Magick

I am continuing in my slow build-up to my trip to Europe next year. What this has meant so far is a lessening of physical possessions, and an attempt to gather as much practical (or quick&dirrrrty) magick as I can into a compendium.

I am planning on taking a small devotional book with me, which I am slowly assembling, but that is primarily invocation and energy work. My compendium, on the other hand, is a stab at giving me access to information that is useful in the conditions in which I will find myself. What I mean by that is it is magick that can be performed with the mind, or very simple tools (string, paper, a pen, etc) as I will be extremely limited in the supplies I can carry with me.

So far I have amassed a lot of information on runes, barbarous words, instant spells (penczek) and more, but I need as much as I can find.

Anybody have any suggestions on things to include?

Do not meddle in the affairs of Wizards, for they are subtle and quick to anger.

Recently a friend of mine was gravely insulted by some magickal practitioners. This was not a simple snub or failure of civility, it was an outright attack on his personality, magickal bonafides and even his body. This has enraged me, but it also brought a question to mind.

To wit: Why would people who claim to have an understanding of magic (within the bounds of their faith) go out of their way to insult a fellow practitioner?

I think it comes down to the fact that even these people who claim that their lives revolve around a magickal faith don't really buy into the consequences of that knowledge. They don't believe my friend, and those insulted on his behalf, can do anything to them. That we are powerless.

Nothing could be further from the Truth. I know I, and some others I have spoken to, stand ready to use our arts and gifts to redress this wrong. I just think it's funny that people who spend so much time making magickal protections and talismans to protect themselves from occult assault would so casually enter into conflict.

Hubris is thy name.

Innocence

I lay my head upon a rock,
Pillowed on a clump of moss.
The stars are my blanket,
Lived through another day.

Tears stream down my face,
Bathe me in the moonlight.
Why do I cry?
Only the wind knows.

Stave unstrung and standing tall,
Like an alder it towers over my bed.
Arrows quiver in my quiver,
Like leaves from a storm-tossed glade.

Nature is as creature does,
The beast lives within us all.
Music cannot soothe it's soul,
for it only finds joy in the war drum.

Whisper in my ear breeze,
Say the name upon my lips.
Never to leave them evermore,
Buried as deep as her corpse.

Soul Music

 Music is Magick. Throughout History, humans have used music to move their minds, spirits and souls to a higher state. Instrumentals have the power to raise us to the heights of euphoria, or to take us down a path of sorrow. Lyrics sung to a tune have encouraged us to some of our greatest triumphs, and also some of the human race's greatest acts of evil.

We live in the greatest era of music, not simply for what is produced currently but because we have access to all of the music of the past. Mechanical reproduction of sound rapidly changed the nature of music because it allowed people to make popular music, which could be disseminated widely, instead of just playing the music that rich patrons would pay to listen to.

I know that personally I have been greatly helped and influenced by the music I listen to. I used to live in a very dreary world, and then I found music that lifted my being to a state of exhilaration. I could rise above my petty existence and view a universe full of beauty (sometimes scarily so) as well as the feeling that there was something Epic to existence.

I am going to link some of my favorite music below, listen if you want. Some of it may not be uplifting to your ear, but that is the beauty of music. There is something out there for every ear.





Image courtesy of Daniel St.Pierre / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

The Truth In The Night

"Night, the beloved. Night, when words fade and things come alive. When the destructive analysis of day is done, and all that is truly important becomes whole and sound again. When man reassembles his fragmentary self and grows with the calm of a tree."  Antoine de Saint-Exupery

I love to do something really weird, and dangerous, at Night. First of all, you have to understand, the Night is my time. My whole life I have been a Night-Owl. As far back as I can remember I have been staying up late into the Night to do things I should have, could have done during the day. I literally feel better when the Sun goes down, and I don't think it's purely psychological.

In any case, I love to do something really weird, and dangerous, at Night. There is a road here in Bowling Green, right in the city, that is surrounded by fields, and dare I say forests, and I love to walk it at Night. It has no sidewalks so I walk against traffic, trusting in my boon staff to get me into a ditch in time, and I have found many truths along it's stretch during the Night.

 In the Night you have to truly admit to yourself what you do and do not believe. Take tonight for example; I was walking and I saw something in a field off to the side. Shadowed as it was, I could not tell what it was except it was a hunched shape and the closer I drew to it, the more I was sure that it was some sort of gnome or other northern creature, ready to devour me. Of course it wasn't (I am here to write this!) but I had to admit to myself that I actually believed it was a possibility they existed. This is not a Truth I could have discovered in the Light of Day, I had to let Night touch my heart to find it out.

At Night a tree is a tree, it is also the site of a nature shrine, the totem of an old spirit, and the harp a god of the wind is playing. A stream babbles as it runs over rocks, and it is also crying out for a sacrifice. Nothing is sure, Nothing is safe, Nothing is concrete.

Only in the moments of uncertainty can we discover what, for us, is Truth. I have heard that there is no Truth, only Perception and this is made abundantly clear at Night. I think there is still a lot of value to Truth, even if it is our own Perception, because as magickal practitioners we are called upon to upon our Perception, our Will on Reality. That is Truth, and I found it in the Night.

Islands of Sanity in an Ocean of Unreality

I have been thinking about this post for a long time. A very long time. This post has been fermenting in my brain in one form or another for at least 10 years, if not more. I am sure it may end long and rambly, but there you are. Bear with me if you can, I got something to say.

We Are Collectively Crazy

In the future, people will look back at the 1950s through today and into, at the very least, the short term future and we will be condemned as a Society gone mad. We aren't notable for our Wars, conflict being so germane to the human condition that our International squabbles are only notable for their brevity. No, we live a life of mass hysteria with all the other little rats in this collective dream/nightmare we call "life".

What we have is not life. It's an existence, wrapped up in a human lifespans worth of greed, gluttony, waste and lust. I don't say all this as some pontificator holding himself above the fray, I am as guilty as any and maybe more then most. We have all been sold an existence that is so divorced from reality, we are all treading water in an Ocean of Unreality.


What am I really talking about. We work more, and harder, then we have to, to buy things we don't need. We sacrifice our friendships and families, creativity and passion, for plastic. As a Society, we have become incredibly divorced from Nature. This is one I have struggled with my whole life, until the last few years when I learned to take a new passion from being in the world. The Real World.

We Have Been Sold A Lie

I have spent the greater part of my life being unhappy. I blame books.

I grew up without a lot of friends, reading books on all my breaks and lunches. I lived in a lot of small towns as well, so their libraries were definitely not up to date. What that means is until I reached my teens and started buying books, I probably had never read a book written after 1960. Those books contained stories of people and relationships that existed in a harder world, but one that was infinitely more real then my own.

This lead to years of disillusionment, but I never could take the next step to figure out what I should be doing differently. I made my way through life doing the things I was told I should: school, college, work. All I knew is that they didn't fit me, and the lifestyle I was living didn't fit me.

It's easy to be unhappy, it's much harder to change things. Especially when you don't know what should change, just that something should be different.

Reasons To Change

I have always wanted to visit Europe. I grew up moving around a lot and never lived by any of my family. Genealogy became a refuge for me, and I was interested to hear about these far-flung places my ancestors had come from. Most of my relatives couldn't care less, and this only drove me to find out more.

Some of this had a tangible affect on how I viewed myself. All of my ancestry came from Northern European roots that I knew of, and to find that I had ancestors who were Native American and Jewish changed things. I don't claim to be either of those, I wasn't raised in those lifestyles and I would never try to coopt their culture to assuage my own loneliness, but to learn that part of them was in me was still a big deal.

This lack of connection with our own past is another one of the problems our modern material obsessed culture has. How could someone from a hundred years ago have any bearing on our lives unless there was a tv show made about them?

In any case, even before I cam to my new paths, I wanted to trod the old sod. Once I came to desire to see the holy spots of Europe as well, I seriously started to plan. I started with the idea of taking several trips to different spots, and then the realities of our lives started to set in. Oh, my job wouldn't give me that much time. Oh, this could negatively affect my chances of getting a better job, or a new place to live.

I have learned a couple important lessons lately, and one is this: There will always be a reason to quit, to not go, to put it off. It's the same reason I muddled through the rest of my life doing what I was told was the way we were meant to live. It's the same reason i worked a job I hated to live an existence I could barely stand.

Then it came to me, I didn't have to buy the lie. People in my life like GreyerJane helped me see, I didn't just have to have an existence, I could have a LIFE.

Put The Burden Down

Possessions Possess You. Intellectually, I think most modern western people understand this. I certainly understood it when I was 16 and put it into a punk song. We all get it, but what do we do about it? Nothing, right? I'm not judging, most people buy into our modern life and never look back. Those who do look back, well, maybe they shouldn't have.

Because it's a hard life to leave. Many people have houses, pets, kids, hobbies. It's hard to just... set it aside. But that's what I am going to try and do. When I leave for Europe, I will have sold everything I own of value. I will have quit my job, and said goodbye to my friends and family. I am trying to put aside the material things I so craved, that now taste of ashes.

I am going to camp my way across most of Europe. Oh yes, I have plans to make some money while I am on the road, as much as we try it's hard to live on bread and water. But what I am doing is attempting to get to know myself, and the world around me, as one who has set aside attachment. In a lot of ways, I find buddhism to be very fatalistic, but the way they view attachment has come to be more of my oen mind lately.

Raison d'Etre

I think as a magickal practitioners we stand on the outskirts of society already. Many of us have a connection to nature, or humanity or the worlds beyond that allows us to not be fully consumed by the modern doldrums of a technological age. I am hoping by setting aside the drives and desires that make modern life such a soul sucking experience that I can be the Island of Sanity for someone in this Sea.

Sticking up through the surface of it's chaotic chopping waves, I want to remind people as they sail through life that it's not just the endless ocean out there, there is more to us then an existence. I just want to encourage, as I have been encouraged.

P.S.: Yes, this did get long and rambly but I'm not going to edit it. This is like the edge of a wave of thought and feeling and it deserves to be experienced raw. I am super excited to speak with anyone who has questions, concerns or criticisms.

The Late Mr. Ogdoad

My curious curse was born with me. Born in the early 80s to an America in the last gasp of the Cold War, the gleam was already off and people were starting to look around and say, "Is this all there is?". That should have been my first clue that I wasn't being born with a silver spoon in my mouth. And it just went on like that from there...

 See, the thing is, for me, that I always arrive at the last sunrise of a golden age. Doesn't really matter what it is, as soon as I take an interest in it, it has already peaked and is heading down to a grizzly end in a knacker's yard. Music, games, social and political movements. I arrive at the end, and am sometimes the one left to turn the lights off for the last time.

It's an incredibly lonely fate. The vaunted comradeship and sense of community many of these things spawned for others were only distant memories and cold ashes by the time I arrived. I can't tell you how many things I have shown up for and people, while very nice, go on to say, "Man, too bad you missed it. You woulda had a hell of a time!". Thanks for that...

So I hang my head and enjoy the last little bit of life to be had, and move on to something else. I feel like the last disciple of a dozen dead religions. Caught between generations, all my cornerstones have turned to sand. Except magick.

Magick is something that will never die. It's shape and form and face, how we look at it and work with it, these things are mutable. But, that mysterious thing that is just beyond our reach, that sparkle in the dark, the glint of something in the eye of an animal who knows more then it should. These things will never fade away.

The people I journey these paths with, they never have to leave either because this is a path that we have not lived to start, and will not live to see end. The history of magic wends it's way through human existence and beyond, we simply walk the path together for a bit and see part of it. There is no beginning or end, and best of all, that means I will never be late again.

Book Review: Advanced Magick for Beginners

In light of my last post I am reviewing a book I recently finished reading...

Advanced Magick for Beginners by Alan Chapman

This book is somewhat of a rant about magick mixed with some excellent exercises and a few really worthy pieces of information. In some ways I feel like perhaps this book was written in pieces, because it almost feels like he repeats some of the faults he decries earlier in the book.

Basically, he starts out talking about Magick. All about it. What is it, who uses it, the culture of Magick. He makes some interesting points here. One of them is the point that inspired my last post, he talks about how people really haven't been pushing into the far edges of magick anymore, and they also tend to regurgitate magickal knowledge in  books. This is an excellent point. He kind of undercuts it later in the book but reiterating some of those bits of magickal knowledge. He has a lot on sigilization he could have just said "Go read Peter Carroll!"

Where the book starts to shine is later on when he discusses invoking gods and working with them with some of the most straighforward instructions I have ever read. I really recommend this portion of the book. He also goes on to discuss what some people call your "Holy Guardian Angel" or "Future Magickal Self." This is an interesting concept where you can learn to work with a higher magickal self of yourself to do works you would not be able to do under normal circumstances.

All-in-all, it's not a genius book but it has some really good parts and at 166 pages it's worth the read.

3/5 Wands

Magickal Redundancy & Complacency In An Information Age

I have spent a significant amount of time in the last year reading books on Magick - introductory and otherwise - and noticed something interesting. About 3 or 4 books in, it became obvious that they contained a great amount of information that was repeated between them, very little being truly unique.

Greyer Jane and I have discussed the difficulty she had finding Occult books of any quality while growing up in the 70s, having to wade through bookshelves of dross to find anything worth reading. That problem still exists, I grant, as there are a lifetimes worth of bad Occult books floating around, but the general quality has greatly improved.

No, now our main problem seems to be sifting through generally informative books for the few genuine nuggets of new or even differently explained material. Now, don't get me wrong - I definitely see the upside to having many people explain techniques in different ways. Who knows which one will strike you the best and enable you to gain a new skill, but I believe this new problem has created an insidious new threat to Magick.

Complacency - it's a trite word, but one I feel accurately describes this stumbling block. Now people can pick up a decently written book by someone like Christopher Penczak (and no slight to him, I enjoy his work greatly) and feel they have mastered Magick after they read it. Because they don't have to search out new sources of information to piece together a magickal roadpath like people used to, there is no impetus to seek out new and exciting magick. This problem is exacerbated by the already mentioned problem of redundancy.

Imagine you are self taught, or even have a mainline magickal mentor. You have been practicing for a while and you pick up some books to see if there is anything else to learn and it's the same old stuff over and over. That is going to shut down your desire to poke into some new dark holes or bits under the staircase.

To combat information overload I feel like we need to fight it with organization. Is anyone interested in working with me to put together some sort of listing of magickal operations and the books they appear in, and also pointing out to each other the good bits we may be missing? Or entire epochs of magick we have all missed.

Complacency is the enemy of Imagination, and is thus the bane of Magick.

Magic Word Magic

“ The study of magic is not a science, it is not an art, and it is not a religion. Magic is a craft. When we do magic, we do not wish and we do not pray. We rely upon our will and our knowledge and our skill to make a specific change to the world.

This is not to say that we understand magic, in the sense that physicists understand why subatomic particles do whatever it is that they do. Or perhaps they don’t understand that yet, I can never remember. In any case, we do not and cannot understand what magic is, or where it comes from, any more than a carpenter understands why a tree grows. He doesn’t have to. He works with what he has.

With the caveat that it is much more difficult and much more dangerous and much more interesting to be a magician than it is to be a carpenter.”

Lev Grossman - The Magicians

Magic is magical. Trite, I know. It's a word that has been used so much that it has lost almost all meaning. So much so, in fact, that many people write it Magick (myself included sometimes) in a vain attempt to give it back a little of the meaning it has lost.

It's funny that a word that symbolizes the very essence of unknowable power, unending mystery, and unresistable force could become so... mundane. Maybe it's very nature encourages people to try and make it as normalized as possible, simply so our pea-sized brains can avoid a permanent and overwhelming paralyzation.

I think the world is full of people who want to avoid at all costs what goes bump in the night, and a few of us (crazies) who desperately seek that bump out. It's the ultimate passive-aggressive revenge to take the unknown, the mystical, the magical or any other form of supernatural and drain it of it's essence by these people who dare not speak it's name.

Well, I'm taking Magic back. No, i'm not going to resort to whimsical t-shirts and bumper stickers. I am taking it back by making it real in my own life. I am doing my daily practice, I am seeking out teachers and students, I am collaborating with many fine practitioners (yoo hoo book club! *waves) and I am making it a reality. And I am making it real because I am writing it here. It's easy to tell yourself that you will do something or that you will make a commitment or take a stand, but when you write it down it becomes real. That is Magic.

As Ramses II said in the Golden Age of Hollywood, "So Let It Be Written, So Let It Be Done."

Let's Make A Deal: Modern Covenants For Modern Mages

I am part of a really good book club and we have been working our way through a book on chaos magick. This has led to some really wide-ranging discussions, and really caused my mind to really re-examine some magickal concepts.

One of the areas we have recently delved into is the concept of "god-slaves", as well as the correspondences for invoking and evoking with deities, as well as the idea of pagan reconstructionism. I am going to delve into that a little here. If that is your thing, just let me say this is all my own musing and attempts to work through this, and not some kind of slap in the face.

Let's Make A Deal: Modern Covenants For Modern Mages

First, let me say this, I am an eclectic. Phew! Got that off my chest so that I can admit that my cosmological view of the heavens is very fluid. That's really important to me, because I want to play Let's Make A Deal!

I personally ascribe to the idea that whatever you consider a god [be it truly divine, an empowered thought-form, or what have you] it has a function that it performs, and desires to perform, and it is both empowered by and empowers those who call on it. This relationship is symbiotic I believe, and because of this, I feel we live in a golden age of "deal making".

There is an entire cosmological constellation of deities out there who have the desire and impetus to act, but lack the willing workers they used to command. They are smart enough to know that the whole setup of these matters has drastically changed in the past few years, but let's not ignore how matters changed even in the heyday of their particular faiths.

For example I have been really interested in the Ogdoad (hence my username) who were a group of 4 frog headed gods, and their 4 snake-headed goddesses from Ancient Egypt.

[The Egyptians believed that before the world was formed, there was a watery mass of dark, directionless chaos. In this chaos lived the Ogdoad of Khmunu (Hermopolis), four frog gods and four snake goddesses of chaos. [Balance in infinity]
These deities were Nun and Naunet (water), Amun and Amaunet (invisibility), Heh and Hauhet (infinity) and Kek and Kauket (darkness).

The chaos existed without the light, and thus Kek and Kauket came to represent this darkness. They also symbolized obscurity, the kind of obscurity that went with darkness, and night]

Even in the time of the Ancient Egyptians, the beliefs surrounding these goods and goddesses changed at least 3 times in a major way, so I decided they could go with another. I have started calling on them and trying to work with them as much as possible and it has born dividends. A frog showed itself to be my animal totem after long striving, and the elemental sea of chaos they represent meets me in my meditations with power (sometimes too much). 

I believe the time is ripe for those who would find deities of worth, but who are not called upon, and try to work with them. Much like the internet and mass media has made our world much smaller, easy availability of arcane and occult texts has made the cosmological world of the gods much more available.

Let's make a deal.

I'm done wandering in the wilderness

I was raised in a strict Christian household my whole childhood. My family's life was completely involved in Religion. I thought Jesus lived in our car because we prayed to him so much while driving places. But, one of the earliest remembrances of Church that I have is how much I wanted to believe, and how hard that was because I didn't.

Magick has always interested me. It was a dark and forbidden thing, and that excited the imagination of a young boy who was told exactly what he would and wouldn't believe about every single thing. My family, unlike many main-line Christians, fully reinforced in our childhood development that Magick is real. That powers beyond our human ken exist all around us, and that they can be harnessed by the human mind and soul. But, of course, the people who used these powers were evil.

I think I knew I wasn't destined to sit in a pew as young as 10 or so. I started having prophetic dreams, dreams that absolutely came true. Now, it was no great or portentous  things that I dreamed out, simply my own life and the things that would happen to me in the future. It scared the crap out of me at first. I thought I was cursed or doomed or something, but I knew I had not done anything to bring this fate upon myself. Thus began my quick disillusionment with a system of religion that would condemn me to hell for a natural ability.

I grew and kind of put this ability by the wayside, well it never went away but I didn't focus on it. I finished school, tried college like many others my age and did some reading about Chaos Magick along the way. I dabbled, as it were. Enough to know what was believed in those communities, but not enough to mar my soul, or so I hoped. It took me many years to get where I am now: free of personal doubts about my path.

I can't claim to be some powerful Mage or Priest of a delighted god but I am slowly finding the pieces that work for me and putting them together into a system. What I do know is, I'm done wandering in the wilderness.