So I have been posting a lot about the works of Joesph Lisiewski the last month or so and it might seem like I am thinking he is pretty hot shit but I think it is time now to address my issues with his work as well, just where I disagree with him.
I have previously posted my agreement with him that the ceremonies we learn and practice should be done to the letter in our practices to get the results we desire. I definitely agree with him in that regard but where I disagree with him is that he advocates never changing that praxis. Always follow the grimoires to the letter or you're going to suffer the "slingshot effect" and shit's going to get ugly.
My own philosophy on this is do it by the book, or close to the book, whatever book it happens to be, and as you develop a relationship with the spirits they will help you to make the work more efficient and specialized for yourself. Say you are using Lon's wonderful Illustrated Goetia of Aleister Crowley to start working with the Goetia, follow his advice because the spirits have helped him to cultivate his craft in this regard and through his practice he has developed the system he espouses in the book. Work with the system as he suggests. Where he suggests modifications based on your own spiritual system then do it. If you feel that Crowley's Circle as per Book 4 part II works for you as your special circle, get it done that way.
What I really am agreeing with in Lisiewski's work is that one should become as intimately aware of what one is working with before launching into working with it. He suggests memorization of the ritual word for word, doing walk throughs etc. I won't go so far as memorization but definitely walk throughs are necessary to help you get comfortable with the work you are doing and the words being spoken so that you possess more confidence in the actions undertaken. Analyze the ritual, understand why you are doing certain things and make it a part of your world view. Just performing a rote recitation will provide weak results and possibly a complete blowback on the working.
I also tend to agree with his criticisms of modern Qabalistic teachings in Hermetic circles. Many of the authors have only studied what Crowley, Regardie and Fortune have written and then go and write books based on those materials. This creates a patchwork experience and can be incredibly dull. I am not suggesting go out and read the source material, I am suggesting study some of the older, pre-GD texts on the subject like the Kabbalah Denudata, Eliphas Levi (even if he is inconsistent at times) and Agrippa etc. Here you will have received a stronger foundation in classical Qabalah and systems of thinking than you will in most modern authors. I am not saying that Fortune, Regardie and Crowley are shite by any means, read them but also read the older authors. These three are great for a foundation in Qabalah of the Hermetic variety.
The main problem with Lisiewski is that there is little in his works on innovation, where modifications can or have occurred, how the spirits will instruct us in easier and more individually potent ways to communicate with them. If you write your own evocations based on Agrippa's teachings or similar resources (if Golden Dawn keep in mind that their source was the flawed The Magus by Francis Barrett and many diagrams need corretions) that is just awesome and it does work but understand the formulas you are working with and ground yourself in an understanding of the material that is intimate. It doesn't take long and it becomes an intuitive process.
Dr. Lisiewski speaks of the grimoires as if they are unchangeable gospels and anyone who doesn't perform the rituals per the instruction in the grimoires is fooling themselves if they think they've gotten results and not had a full on manifestation. I call bullshit in this regard. I've known magicians who have gotten fabulous results (myself included) using what he terms "new age" occultism. Unlike many, I admit I am more hardcore about these things than the average magician and those I know who have gotten the best results have been pretty damn hardcore as well.
In working with Lucky Hoodoo and the Monastery of 7 Rays material I have had wonderful results from my workings. Sadly over the course of the last year I admit most of it has been in the form of "emergency" magick, which I don't suggest because it does result in some blowback. Cultivate your relationship with the spirits even in times of properity, don't just whip them out when shit goes down.
For those that read my blog and are involved in working with Lucky Hoodoo my strongest suggestion on how to do this is not to think of the Dedication Rite from the first lesson as a one and done. Make it a daily practice as one in the Golden Dawn derived movements would an LBRP. Take your baths, do the shadow bath and then do the dedication as a daily practice, strengthening the relationship with the Hoo & Doo spirits. Do the silent prayer method to communicate with the spirits during down time at work, visit them in their temples. My own temple for the spirits is a beautiful wheat field with a crop circle in the center where we talk and discuss problems and where things are and what things that are going well that I would like to see strengthen. They advise me, and I don't always take it but I thank them. During this currently troubled time they have been here for me but also have suggested practices outside of the LHG to strengthen the work they are doing.
Inominandum, in his The Sorceror's Secrets emphasizes working strategically in your magick. Keep all three planes in mind (yes, I am aware there are four, I am discussing his work here) and do work that cultivates the energies of the working in each. This serves to ground the magick. It is a pretty basic thing that we should all keep in mind and know but I think something we all forget.
This is what being hardcore is all about, living the lifestyle. David Beth talks about the "Merciless Path" in his work and I think he hits the nail on the head. If you aren't devoted to magick and using it to improve your life, then why are you doing it? People jump religions constantly in the occult world, they try Thelema, they try the Golden Dawn, they try Wicca and Chaos Magick and mixing of techniques is great but if you don't stick to one with any discipline then how can you possibly know if it is really working? Further, if you are jumping constantly from one tradition to the next you aren't cultivating that relationship. If you are jumping in & out of different occult movements because of matters of time etc. then either make the time or stick to a solitary practices. I am not saying trying to find a religion that is friendly to your family, work and social life is invalid, but don't pretend to be a magician if you are just looking for a religious expression.
This is how all of this related back to Lisiewski. He has a concept called Subjective Synthesis where the magician integrates the work he is doing with the grimoires, the GD material, the Thelema material or what have you, into his subconscious mind so that it is not question by the emotional self. By working with the material, studying it, analyzing it, asking questions and finding the answers in your studies and intuition, you are going through a process of synthesis of the material needed for it to make an impression on the subconscious.
All of the suggestions I made for working with the Lucky Hoodoo Grimoire fall under this process of evaluation and integration. As you work with the material I actually suggest reading it from the book until you have the full thing memorized just so that you are in the process of starting to cultivate that relationship. You will also find ways in which to individualize the words and processes of the rituals contained in the grimoire and how to implement later lessons with earlier lessons, developing an understanding of how they inter-relate, allowing you to make modifications to something like the Contraite to achieve different results.
So do I think Lisiewski is hot shit? No, I think he gives sound advice while also presenting a very narrow world view on the processes of magick and while I agree with some of his criticisms of Golden Dawn derived movements, I disagree with his assumption that people are buying his books because what they have done thus far hasn't worked for them. Sometimes, Jospeh, we buy things like your books to expand our knowledge and become more proficient in the work that we do.
Sunday, January 26, 2014
Tuesday, January 21, 2014
Why Esoteric Voudon?
Today on a Golden Dawn group Sack of Ships, by all appearances a true aspirant with many good questions, posed a question to me and while I responded onlist I thought I would also answer the question here because it is a great question and after sending my response I thought it would make a great blog post and so I am rewriting and expanding it. I will quote it here.
"Jason, I have been following your blog lately. I am curious as to why you are exploring this aspect of occultism in your daily magical practice. What does the voodoo path offer that hermetic magic doesn't?
Jordan"
A good question is it not? It is challenging to come up with a response to these sorts of questions because at their core it addresses the Powers of the Sphinx in a lot of good ways. In particular- To know thyself. If you can't come up with a reason why you are doing something then why are you doing that particular action? What does it say about you in particular?
My first exposure to "real" magick was Donald Michael Kraig's first edition of Modern Magick. I jumped in whole hog and it led me on a wonderful adventure where I came in contact with a "representative" of the A:.A:. and linked up. I was really, really drawn to Thelema from the first moment I read about Crowley in Don's work. After learning about Thelema and reading through a series of books that Don suggested I made the mentioned contact and further research led me into Kenneth Grant and his magical offspring like Nema, Linda Falorio and Louis Martinie. I was drawn to the "darkness" which is a term I use lightly to describe their works. I still love their work mind you but in the last decade much darker work has emerged. Of all the cohorts of Mr. Grant that leaped out at me, none moreso than Michael Bertiaux and dammit, the only references to his work you could find were in Kenneth Grant as at this time the Voudon Gnostic Workbook was out of print! As I have related I leapt at the reprint and the rest is history as I have related. What I haven't really related is the "why" of esoteric voudon.
I was always drawn to the grimoires as well, and as I have relayed, David Beth once said to me that the VGW was similar to Goetia and that played to me very deeply. As I read the LHG portion of the book for a second time and keeping that in mind I saw it all in a new light and understood why I felt so drawn to Esoteric Voudon.
These spirits call to you. You feel them nagging at you, singing to you, trying to seduce you. You have to answer that call in some way no? It becomes an obsession. I started using the grimoire and I didn't really understand why, I just knew I had to.
As I started understanding the Renaissance and other classical magical texts and descriptions of the cosmology of the western system I started to see the links in Esoteric Voudon with the European school of magic that pre-dated the Golden Dawn. I started to see the some of the rituals of the LHG worked similarly to the grimoires. I saw elemental spirits and as I started studying the Monastery of Seven Rays lessons I started to see working with the Planetary spirits and the Zodiacal spirits.
I had been working with the GD system for years with all its unnecessary complexity, flashing colors etc. I wasn't so much into the initiation rituals per se, but the ritual forms were brilliant and used quite effectively by Crowley. The formulas of holy names etc. infuse the rituals of Thelema. The Pentagram ritual forms the core of Crowley's system along with his design for the magical circle. I was also starting to really connect the dots on magick before the GD not really resembling the Golden Dawn tradition much at all. It was in reading Aaron Leitch's Secrets of the Magical Grimoires that I really started seeing the vast differences and that the Golden Dawn Tradition was more an invention of the comparably modern era.
Reading Aaron's wonderful book I started seeing the parallels in Bertiaux's system continue to abound. The system of Esoteric Voudon has little in relationship with the Golden Dawn- very, very little. But in seeing the Neo-Platonist views of the cosmos and in relation to the Hermetic Tradition, how the Shaman transitioned into the Priest and King, I started seeing the parallels more deeply and saw that Bertiaux's system of magick, aside from not using the seals of the spirits as seen in the classical medieval and Renaissance texts had more in common with Agrippa and Pseudo-Agrippa than the Golden Dawn!
That out of the way, at the heart of esoteric voudon is a system that is, I hate to use the word untainted because I love the GD, but it fits. Not to say I think the GD is a pox on occultism, its not, its influential for a reason. It works and quite well. That said there is a purity in the simplicity. I am more drawn to the methods they use than the darkness some see in Bertiaux's work. I am not at all drawn to exploring the "qlippoth" as many drawn to this system seem to be. There are intense practical applications in the system akin to Goetia and also deeply spiritual applications akin to angelic Magick. The simplicity of using the system for the planetary style work is simpler than Trithemius but as potent. The practical applications are simpler than goety but as effective. The spiritual development practices are akin to the purification processes of the grimoires and as intense. While it sounds like the system is easier, it is as demanding as grimoire practices if not in the gathering of the materials, then in the personal work expected. Sacrifice is entirely different than traditional forms of voodoo as well. There is an intense exchange of energy going on, reciprocal as the practitioner is purified, similar amounts of energy to the amount put into the grimoire practices in finding the materials for the equipment!
In choosing Esoteric Voudon I moved into an older paradigm that spoke to me. A dirty, well not so dirty, secret, well not so secret, is that I possess an obsession with the Fraternitas Saturni of Germany. The magic practiced in the F:.S:. is more classical ritually than the Golden Dawn. While GD ritual made its way into the Brotherhood, it wasn't as dominate as Eugen Grosche had developed a unique view of things more influenced by classical occultism than the works of the Master Therion, whose influence and importance to the modern, Golden Dawn based Western Ceremonial Tradition is massive and key in how important that system has become. In Germany not much of the Master Therion's work was being translated and so the magic of the F:.S:.developed almost in a vacuum and the system practiced was largely based on the grimoires and the work of Cornelius Agrippa. In cultivating this obsession I was also able to see in Esoteric Voudon the core of the pre-GD western magical practices! In the Brotherhood was a system mostly "untainted" by the Golden Dawn.
So it isn't a choice of why Voudon over Hermetic magick. It is a question of defining Hermetic magick. Esoteric Voudon is Hermetic magick.
*copy paste always fucks up my formatting... Fucking fuck fuck two ducks
"Jason, I have been following your blog lately. I am curious as to why you are exploring this aspect of occultism in your daily magical practice. What does the voodoo path offer that hermetic magic doesn't?
Jordan"
A good question is it not? It is challenging to come up with a response to these sorts of questions because at their core it addresses the Powers of the Sphinx in a lot of good ways. In particular- To know thyself. If you can't come up with a reason why you are doing something then why are you doing that particular action? What does it say about you in particular?
My first exposure to "real" magick was Donald Michael Kraig's first edition of Modern Magick. I jumped in whole hog and it led me on a wonderful adventure where I came in contact with a "representative" of the A:.A:. and linked up. I was really, really drawn to Thelema from the first moment I read about Crowley in Don's work. After learning about Thelema and reading through a series of books that Don suggested I made the mentioned contact and further research led me into Kenneth Grant and his magical offspring like Nema, Linda Falorio and Louis Martinie. I was drawn to the "darkness" which is a term I use lightly to describe their works. I still love their work mind you but in the last decade much darker work has emerged. Of all the cohorts of Mr. Grant that leaped out at me, none moreso than Michael Bertiaux and dammit, the only references to his work you could find were in Kenneth Grant as at this time the Voudon Gnostic Workbook was out of print! As I have related I leapt at the reprint and the rest is history as I have related. What I haven't really related is the "why" of esoteric voudon.
I was always drawn to the grimoires as well, and as I have relayed, David Beth once said to me that the VGW was similar to Goetia and that played to me very deeply. As I read the LHG portion of the book for a second time and keeping that in mind I saw it all in a new light and understood why I felt so drawn to Esoteric Voudon.
These spirits call to you. You feel them nagging at you, singing to you, trying to seduce you. You have to answer that call in some way no? It becomes an obsession. I started using the grimoire and I didn't really understand why, I just knew I had to.
As I started understanding the Renaissance and other classical magical texts and descriptions of the cosmology of the western system I started to see the links in Esoteric Voudon with the European school of magic that pre-dated the Golden Dawn. I started to see the some of the rituals of the LHG worked similarly to the grimoires. I saw elemental spirits and as I started studying the Monastery of Seven Rays lessons I started to see working with the Planetary spirits and the Zodiacal spirits.
I had been working with the GD system for years with all its unnecessary complexity, flashing colors etc. I wasn't so much into the initiation rituals per se, but the ritual forms were brilliant and used quite effectively by Crowley. The formulas of holy names etc. infuse the rituals of Thelema. The Pentagram ritual forms the core of Crowley's system along with his design for the magical circle. I was also starting to really connect the dots on magick before the GD not really resembling the Golden Dawn tradition much at all. It was in reading Aaron Leitch's Secrets of the Magical Grimoires that I really started seeing the vast differences and that the Golden Dawn Tradition was more an invention of the comparably modern era.
Reading Aaron's wonderful book I started seeing the parallels in Bertiaux's system continue to abound. The system of Esoteric Voudon has little in relationship with the Golden Dawn- very, very little. But in seeing the Neo-Platonist views of the cosmos and in relation to the Hermetic Tradition, how the Shaman transitioned into the Priest and King, I started seeing the parallels more deeply and saw that Bertiaux's system of magick, aside from not using the seals of the spirits as seen in the classical medieval and Renaissance texts had more in common with Agrippa and Pseudo-Agrippa than the Golden Dawn!
That out of the way, at the heart of esoteric voudon is a system that is, I hate to use the word untainted because I love the GD, but it fits. Not to say I think the GD is a pox on occultism, its not, its influential for a reason. It works and quite well. That said there is a purity in the simplicity. I am more drawn to the methods they use than the darkness some see in Bertiaux's work. I am not at all drawn to exploring the "qlippoth" as many drawn to this system seem to be. There are intense practical applications in the system akin to Goetia and also deeply spiritual applications akin to angelic Magick. The simplicity of using the system for the planetary style work is simpler than Trithemius but as potent. The practical applications are simpler than goety but as effective. The spiritual development practices are akin to the purification processes of the grimoires and as intense. While it sounds like the system is easier, it is as demanding as grimoire practices if not in the gathering of the materials, then in the personal work expected. Sacrifice is entirely different than traditional forms of voodoo as well. There is an intense exchange of energy going on, reciprocal as the practitioner is purified, similar amounts of energy to the amount put into the grimoire practices in finding the materials for the equipment!
In choosing Esoteric Voudon I moved into an older paradigm that spoke to me. A dirty, well not so dirty, secret, well not so secret, is that I possess an obsession with the Fraternitas Saturni of Germany. The magic practiced in the F:.S:. is more classical ritually than the Golden Dawn. While GD ritual made its way into the Brotherhood, it wasn't as dominate as Eugen Grosche had developed a unique view of things more influenced by classical occultism than the works of the Master Therion, whose influence and importance to the modern, Golden Dawn based Western Ceremonial Tradition is massive and key in how important that system has become. In Germany not much of the Master Therion's work was being translated and so the magic of the F:.S:.developed almost in a vacuum and the system practiced was largely based on the grimoires and the work of Cornelius Agrippa. In cultivating this obsession I was also able to see in Esoteric Voudon the core of the pre-GD western magical practices! In the Brotherhood was a system mostly "untainted" by the Golden Dawn.
So it isn't a choice of why Voudon over Hermetic magick. It is a question of defining Hermetic magick. Esoteric Voudon is Hermetic magick.
*copy paste always fucks up my formatting... Fucking fuck fuck two ducks
Thursday, January 16, 2014
Experiencing the 7 Rays, Qabalah and Old System Magic and where it is leading in this blog
As I have related in past posts I have begun working with the material of the Monastery of 7 Rays, overseen by Michael Bertiaux and the training ground for the work of Esoteric Voudon and the Gnostic Magical system of the Ordo Templi Orientis Antiqua. In this post I want to discuss the first year course and the first sixteen lessons and my experiences with them.
The material in the first sixteen lessons is very simple and addresses the Hermetic school of thought and elaborates on this topic in very powerful ways. When first reading the material when I received it through Tau David Beth in 2009, I was taken aback at the simplicity and basic nature of the material. Here I had been looking for these very mind blowing techniques and perspectives on magick that were promised in reading the first edition of Beth's Voudon Gnosis from Scarlet Imprint. I was, needless to say, very disappointed, but I was still very drawn to the Esoteric Voudon system and continued working sporadically with the Lucky Hoodoo Grimoire (LHG). I knew there was something more and I knew the Lwa wanted me to work with this system of magic, but I wasn't quite ready to embrace the Monastery lessons for what they were and I had a problem I needed to get over. What was this problem? Well it was two fold.
Firstly I had my personal prejudices, my own issues with Voodoo itself that were based more in a distaste for sacrifice and the impractical nature of the Voodoo for the situation of my life. While I acknowledged that Esoteric Voudon had little in common with traditional African and Haitian Voodoo practices, the reputation of Voodoo in general was a very vampiric one. This intimidated me and actually relates to the second problem I experienced in looking at the Monastery lessons and one that many modern magicians experience when they first see the Voudon Gnostic Workbook. I had read New Orleans Voodoo Tarot by Louis Martinie and Sallie Ann Glassman in 1997 and was very taken by the imagery. Around the same time I had a woman that I now assume was either a Santeria devotee or Mambo, insist I was the reincarnation of a black farmer from the 19th century and that the Lwa were very drawn to me. In fact she had handed the deck & book to me off the shelf. Still, the personal prejudice, the idea of the vampiric nature of Voodoo, stuck with me and disturbed me. I had heard many stories about crooked Houngans and Mambos in Haitian communities and especially of the superstitions and I was deep into Crowley in those days. Still am to a much lesser extent. So I acknowledge that deep in me, I was very afraid of Voodoo and the Lwa in spite of my draw, or maybe because of my draw to Lwa.
Secondly and this relates to the first, I was deep into the Crowleyan system. I was a student of David Bersson, focused on the S.O.T.O. and A:.A:. and therefore intimately entwined in the perspective of the Golden Dawn style of magick. So when I read the Monastery lessons and saw how simple they were, my perspective created arrogance and preconceived notions of what magick is and I balked. I saw this simple, basic material we all learn in our earliest readings and in that arrogance of 13 years (at that time) in magick I got bored with that material but I held onto it on my hard drive on three different computers and when one of them crashed I got a hold of a brother who had them and retrieved them above all other lost things. I was sorely mistaken in my perspective on the material presented though.
I hooked up with a mentor in the system a little over a year ago. I signed the required applications, received the instructions on how to work with the material and struggled with it. I mean I struggled with it, to get through what I felt was beneath me, while not acknowledging that was the problem I was experiencing with the material, the prejudice of being brought up in the Golden Dawn style of magick and my arrogance after so long. Here I was starting over in magic (drop the K here) and I felt like such a NOOB. A NOOB! I lamented feeling this way to my mentor. I was saddened and it wasn't directed at the material, I knew going in I would have to start at the beginning. I was "humble" enough to say "first year" on the application because I knew there would be things I didn't know in that first year course. It was just that early material. I failed to see the inspired brilliance in these first 16 lessons and what was happening in integrating the material!
I struggled to get through the first 8 lessons. I'd set it aside periodically, letting life get in the way, something I get frustrated with when I see it in others. All I had to do was read two or three pages a week, several times and make notes and I couldn't find the time to do that but I also made excuses to watch television, read other material that was unrelated or stare at my computer screen for hours on end. Thusly I no longer have a Facebook account!
I would build periodic moments of momentum for a few weeks at a time, make my notes, thinking I'd grasped the material. Always I would allow myself to get distracted though. Each time I went back I would re-read the previous material, catch things I had missed and subtly, very subtly I noticed a change occurring in myself and my experiences. I started noticing my prejudices were based on my Golden Dawn understanding of magick while the system I was being presented with, this very basic material, had some in common with the Golden Dawn, it was also quite different and tangentially related as it came from similar source material.
What was going on? What was I going through?
I was experiencing a paradigm shift from the Victorian era occultism with its flashing colors, telesmatic images, god forms and grade signs. Away from the Masonic structures wherein these systems developed. I was moving into a more old school perspective on magic, pre-Golden Dawn and more grimoiric.
Even after finishing those first 16 lessons of the first year course, I still felt strange with the material. I used the holidays to focus on family and work with full intent on getting into the next 16 lessons in mid-January, which I have done. I needed to paint some cards and read the works of Joseph Lisiewski and therein I found the key to what was going on in my work with the Monastery.
You see, looking at the grimoires, you don't really see any of the trappings that would become common place in our post-GD systems of magick like Wicca, Thelema, Chaos Magic and the various Golden Dawn derived orders of today. You see a far more basic, yet more intensive form of magic. A more demanding form of magic.
Nowhere in the grimoire systems do you see the "assumption of God Forms" practices created by the Golden Dawn. You didn't see various grade signs that were supposedly "impregnated" with magical force. I am not decrying the idea of godforms, I still find them valuable in my practices. What I am saying is that what we take for granted as Western Magic, or the Western Ceremonial Tradition, is that what we consider standard operating procedures in magical practices are the creation of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and their form of magic that went on to inform Wicca, Thelema and Aurum Solis (in spite of Aurum Solis claims to the contrary) and these systems all went on to influence New Age ideas, leaving the old system of magic in the dust of the past. Except for a few scattered traditions out there, the old system of magic appeared to be lost.
In the Monastery of 7 Rays though, as I have learned more and more about the old, pre-Golden Dawn systems of magical practice, are very powerful remnants of the old systems. Even the teachings about magic are closer to Neo-Platonism than the complex Qabalism of the Golden Dawn with its four color scales and various attributions and Crowley's later 777 compilation based on that material.
What the material in the Monastery courses gets back to is Hermetic thought and a strong emphasis on those ancient texts in those first sixteen lessons. We see therein an emphasis on re-learning how to experience the world from the perspective of a subjective universe and uniting with the divine. Sure this happens with the modern material but the way in which the lessons are approached and integrated it brings up Joseph Lisieski's concept of Subjective Synthesis wherein through study and analysis, asking questions of ourself about the material and digging into what nags us about the material, we rebuild it and make it our own, activating power zones. Here it occurs on a much deeper level. Spending a week constantly reading the same two or three pages, making notes and observations, putting it through an intense analysis, we wind up not just analyzing the material, but ourselves, building a relationship with the divine within ourselves.
The lessons are approached in blocks of 16. The first 16 unlock certain power zones within our psyche and then the next 16 power zones, Syzygies, in our bodies through contemplations of a color and integrating that color into the corresponding body part wherein the Syzygy in question is attributed. Carefully we unlock new empowerments in ourselves that open us up, in each stage of 16 lessons, to more intense experiences and powers.
As I said, when I first started the material and over the course of the last year I experienced difficulties with the material in my arrogance. When I finished I had experienced a paradigm shift though and developed a deeper level of respect for the material and my synthesis of the material has opened me up to new ways of thinking and approaching magic. Couple that with my readings on the grimoires lately and I have found such a commonality in the material in the Monastery, this wholly Gnostic approach (there is very little Voudon in these early stages, rather, work with Lwa, it's all voudon) causes an alchemical change I have not experienced in any other system I have partaken in.
My view shift has opened me up to seeing more clearly and observing phenomenon like I haven't before. I have really seen things for the simplicity that they factually possess and see the divine in much, which exasperated my sense of frustration in the last 2 years of my life wherein I haven't been able to get a foot hold on anything. My recent evocation of Orobas was a part of the answers I was seeking to life's problems at this time. Without the Monastery I don't think I would have pulled off the evocation as well as I did. I think, it would have been a failure.
I like this old school approach. I feel that in many ways the Golden Dawn further complicated the Qabalah with their additions to the system that weren't part of it beforehand. The Qabalah is in many regards a very simple system of magic and mysticism and on the other, when you get really deep into the source material, like the Sepher Yetzirah, the Zohar and similar materials, you come into a very deep, complicated system of mysticism and magic and the Golden Dawn just tacked more complexity onto it with their color scales, various pantheons that are incompatible, creating scenarios where magic would blow up in a practitioners face at worst and fail at best, because they would use different deities attributed to the same Sephira without thinking... Maybe Jupiter and Odin would conflict.
A part of this is the flawed notion of the "psychological model" of magic. This was popularized in an essay created by Ralph Tegtmeier, Frater U:.D:., to explain the ways in which magic works and also in Crowley's "Initiated Interpretation of Ceremonial Magic" where Crowley first posits that the Goetic spirits are a part of our subconscious. In Tegtmeier's essay he goes farther than Crowley by presenting 5 different models to explain the processes of magick. When I was younger I thought this essay was a great tool but as time has gone by I have noticed people saying they are "psychological model" or "energy model" and being quite bullheaded about their chosen model to explain spiritual phenomenon without really seeing the essay for what it truly is. RUACh masturbation, making something that sounds wonderful and like it explains everything and gratifying our ego, limiting us in our experiences to being only able to accept one paradigm of thought on a topic. I don't really think it was Tegtmeier's intention but it was the end result.
When Lon Duquette wrote "It's all in your head, you just have no idea how big your head is", he was absolutely right and absolutely wrong. Contained within each of us is a divine spark, we are all one with everything. It is solidly grounded in the Hermetic Axiom of "As Above, So Below" but misses the other side of that coin for "As Below, So Above" and this continues infinitely downward and upward, infinitely outward and infinitely inward. The real danger in all of this is Crowley's Black Brother. The "I am I".
By only accepting that everything is simply a part of our consciousness and ceases to exist or what ever one may be inclined to think, we fortify that tendency in ourselves to preserve the sense of identity. It is one thing to say we are all connected but according to psychology and I am all there is, we fail to acknowledge that Lucy might exist. In this I am using an extreme example because I don't think anybody really thinks in that manner aside from casual philosophical discussion but the flaw is this... we don't deny that Lucy exists in our material world but the Angels, Gods & Demons we deny their very existence by arguing for the flawed "models" of psychology, energy and information models. The other two models in Tegtmeier's essay are as tragically flawed but not as dangerous to spiritual development.
I am a fan of Jung as much as the next guy, his ideas of archetypes, shadow self etc. are just brilliant but the atheistic approach many take is not a scientific approach. Aetheism isn't scientific skepticism. If you are an aetheist great, but if you are an aetheist magician, I guarandamntee you one day you are going to have an experience, if you get into performing things like the Goetia, Angelic Invocations etc. that will rock your world like the first time you discovered what masturbation is and how to do it and then got caught behind the door or in the bathroom by your mom or dad. That "oh shit, I wasn't expecting that" experience.
This is what drives magicians insane, that things they thought weren't real just might be and they just might be subjective in existence.
In all honesty, I think both subjective and objective perspective must both be cultivated, the Relativistic model of science and the Quantum model of science co-exist and are very illustrative of subjective and objective perspectives of the Universe.
I really feel that the majority of magicians I have met exist in a comfort zone that they never challenge. They get into their chosen model and only perform magick that keeps that model from being challenged. Most of the models prevent these magicians, psychologically, from performing evocation or invocation per the grimoires. They fail to challenge their notions and assert "I am GOD" as opposed to "I am a GOD".
The nitty gritty in this latter part of my post, before you hamstring yourself with some model of magic to explain the processes you experience or what you do and what it is, usually magic as therapy, realize that just maybe... Asmoday exists in his own dimension and isn't some dark aspect of your consciousness. On the same token, he does exist as part of you and if anything I learned from the Monastery lessons that I haven't learned in the A:.A:. is that this which is below is that which is above. I am as much a part of Asmoday as Asmoday is of me.
The material in the first sixteen lessons is very simple and addresses the Hermetic school of thought and elaborates on this topic in very powerful ways. When first reading the material when I received it through Tau David Beth in 2009, I was taken aback at the simplicity and basic nature of the material. Here I had been looking for these very mind blowing techniques and perspectives on magick that were promised in reading the first edition of Beth's Voudon Gnosis from Scarlet Imprint. I was, needless to say, very disappointed, but I was still very drawn to the Esoteric Voudon system and continued working sporadically with the Lucky Hoodoo Grimoire (LHG). I knew there was something more and I knew the Lwa wanted me to work with this system of magic, but I wasn't quite ready to embrace the Monastery lessons for what they were and I had a problem I needed to get over. What was this problem? Well it was two fold.
Firstly I had my personal prejudices, my own issues with Voodoo itself that were based more in a distaste for sacrifice and the impractical nature of the Voodoo for the situation of my life. While I acknowledged that Esoteric Voudon had little in common with traditional African and Haitian Voodoo practices, the reputation of Voodoo in general was a very vampiric one. This intimidated me and actually relates to the second problem I experienced in looking at the Monastery lessons and one that many modern magicians experience when they first see the Voudon Gnostic Workbook. I had read New Orleans Voodoo Tarot by Louis Martinie and Sallie Ann Glassman in 1997 and was very taken by the imagery. Around the same time I had a woman that I now assume was either a Santeria devotee or Mambo, insist I was the reincarnation of a black farmer from the 19th century and that the Lwa were very drawn to me. In fact she had handed the deck & book to me off the shelf. Still, the personal prejudice, the idea of the vampiric nature of Voodoo, stuck with me and disturbed me. I had heard many stories about crooked Houngans and Mambos in Haitian communities and especially of the superstitions and I was deep into Crowley in those days. Still am to a much lesser extent. So I acknowledge that deep in me, I was very afraid of Voodoo and the Lwa in spite of my draw, or maybe because of my draw to Lwa.
Secondly and this relates to the first, I was deep into the Crowleyan system. I was a student of David Bersson, focused on the S.O.T.O. and A:.A:. and therefore intimately entwined in the perspective of the Golden Dawn style of magick. So when I read the Monastery lessons and saw how simple they were, my perspective created arrogance and preconceived notions of what magick is and I balked. I saw this simple, basic material we all learn in our earliest readings and in that arrogance of 13 years (at that time) in magick I got bored with that material but I held onto it on my hard drive on three different computers and when one of them crashed I got a hold of a brother who had them and retrieved them above all other lost things. I was sorely mistaken in my perspective on the material presented though.
I hooked up with a mentor in the system a little over a year ago. I signed the required applications, received the instructions on how to work with the material and struggled with it. I mean I struggled with it, to get through what I felt was beneath me, while not acknowledging that was the problem I was experiencing with the material, the prejudice of being brought up in the Golden Dawn style of magick and my arrogance after so long. Here I was starting over in magic (drop the K here) and I felt like such a NOOB. A NOOB! I lamented feeling this way to my mentor. I was saddened and it wasn't directed at the material, I knew going in I would have to start at the beginning. I was "humble" enough to say "first year" on the application because I knew there would be things I didn't know in that first year course. It was just that early material. I failed to see the inspired brilliance in these first 16 lessons and what was happening in integrating the material!
I struggled to get through the first 8 lessons. I'd set it aside periodically, letting life get in the way, something I get frustrated with when I see it in others. All I had to do was read two or three pages a week, several times and make notes and I couldn't find the time to do that but I also made excuses to watch television, read other material that was unrelated or stare at my computer screen for hours on end. Thusly I no longer have a Facebook account!
I would build periodic moments of momentum for a few weeks at a time, make my notes, thinking I'd grasped the material. Always I would allow myself to get distracted though. Each time I went back I would re-read the previous material, catch things I had missed and subtly, very subtly I noticed a change occurring in myself and my experiences. I started noticing my prejudices were based on my Golden Dawn understanding of magick while the system I was being presented with, this very basic material, had some in common with the Golden Dawn, it was also quite different and tangentially related as it came from similar source material.
What was going on? What was I going through?
I was experiencing a paradigm shift from the Victorian era occultism with its flashing colors, telesmatic images, god forms and grade signs. Away from the Masonic structures wherein these systems developed. I was moving into a more old school perspective on magic, pre-Golden Dawn and more grimoiric.
Even after finishing those first 16 lessons of the first year course, I still felt strange with the material. I used the holidays to focus on family and work with full intent on getting into the next 16 lessons in mid-January, which I have done. I needed to paint some cards and read the works of Joseph Lisiewski and therein I found the key to what was going on in my work with the Monastery.
You see, looking at the grimoires, you don't really see any of the trappings that would become common place in our post-GD systems of magick like Wicca, Thelema, Chaos Magic and the various Golden Dawn derived orders of today. You see a far more basic, yet more intensive form of magic. A more demanding form of magic.
Nowhere in the grimoire systems do you see the "assumption of God Forms" practices created by the Golden Dawn. You didn't see various grade signs that were supposedly "impregnated" with magical force. I am not decrying the idea of godforms, I still find them valuable in my practices. What I am saying is that what we take for granted as Western Magic, or the Western Ceremonial Tradition, is that what we consider standard operating procedures in magical practices are the creation of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and their form of magic that went on to inform Wicca, Thelema and Aurum Solis (in spite of Aurum Solis claims to the contrary) and these systems all went on to influence New Age ideas, leaving the old system of magic in the dust of the past. Except for a few scattered traditions out there, the old system of magic appeared to be lost.
In the Monastery of 7 Rays though, as I have learned more and more about the old, pre-Golden Dawn systems of magical practice, are very powerful remnants of the old systems. Even the teachings about magic are closer to Neo-Platonism than the complex Qabalism of the Golden Dawn with its four color scales and various attributions and Crowley's later 777 compilation based on that material.
What the material in the Monastery courses gets back to is Hermetic thought and a strong emphasis on those ancient texts in those first sixteen lessons. We see therein an emphasis on re-learning how to experience the world from the perspective of a subjective universe and uniting with the divine. Sure this happens with the modern material but the way in which the lessons are approached and integrated it brings up Joseph Lisieski's concept of Subjective Synthesis wherein through study and analysis, asking questions of ourself about the material and digging into what nags us about the material, we rebuild it and make it our own, activating power zones. Here it occurs on a much deeper level. Spending a week constantly reading the same two or three pages, making notes and observations, putting it through an intense analysis, we wind up not just analyzing the material, but ourselves, building a relationship with the divine within ourselves.
The lessons are approached in blocks of 16. The first 16 unlock certain power zones within our psyche and then the next 16 power zones, Syzygies, in our bodies through contemplations of a color and integrating that color into the corresponding body part wherein the Syzygy in question is attributed. Carefully we unlock new empowerments in ourselves that open us up, in each stage of 16 lessons, to more intense experiences and powers.
As I said, when I first started the material and over the course of the last year I experienced difficulties with the material in my arrogance. When I finished I had experienced a paradigm shift though and developed a deeper level of respect for the material and my synthesis of the material has opened me up to new ways of thinking and approaching magic. Couple that with my readings on the grimoires lately and I have found such a commonality in the material in the Monastery, this wholly Gnostic approach (there is very little Voudon in these early stages, rather, work with Lwa, it's all voudon) causes an alchemical change I have not experienced in any other system I have partaken in.
My view shift has opened me up to seeing more clearly and observing phenomenon like I haven't before. I have really seen things for the simplicity that they factually possess and see the divine in much, which exasperated my sense of frustration in the last 2 years of my life wherein I haven't been able to get a foot hold on anything. My recent evocation of Orobas was a part of the answers I was seeking to life's problems at this time. Without the Monastery I don't think I would have pulled off the evocation as well as I did. I think, it would have been a failure.
I like this old school approach. I feel that in many ways the Golden Dawn further complicated the Qabalah with their additions to the system that weren't part of it beforehand. The Qabalah is in many regards a very simple system of magic and mysticism and on the other, when you get really deep into the source material, like the Sepher Yetzirah, the Zohar and similar materials, you come into a very deep, complicated system of mysticism and magic and the Golden Dawn just tacked more complexity onto it with their color scales, various pantheons that are incompatible, creating scenarios where magic would blow up in a practitioners face at worst and fail at best, because they would use different deities attributed to the same Sephira without thinking... Maybe Jupiter and Odin would conflict.
A part of this is the flawed notion of the "psychological model" of magic. This was popularized in an essay created by Ralph Tegtmeier, Frater U:.D:., to explain the ways in which magic works and also in Crowley's "Initiated Interpretation of Ceremonial Magic" where Crowley first posits that the Goetic spirits are a part of our subconscious. In Tegtmeier's essay he goes farther than Crowley by presenting 5 different models to explain the processes of magick. When I was younger I thought this essay was a great tool but as time has gone by I have noticed people saying they are "psychological model" or "energy model" and being quite bullheaded about their chosen model to explain spiritual phenomenon without really seeing the essay for what it truly is. RUACh masturbation, making something that sounds wonderful and like it explains everything and gratifying our ego, limiting us in our experiences to being only able to accept one paradigm of thought on a topic. I don't really think it was Tegtmeier's intention but it was the end result.
When Lon Duquette wrote "It's all in your head, you just have no idea how big your head is", he was absolutely right and absolutely wrong. Contained within each of us is a divine spark, we are all one with everything. It is solidly grounded in the Hermetic Axiom of "As Above, So Below" but misses the other side of that coin for "As Below, So Above" and this continues infinitely downward and upward, infinitely outward and infinitely inward. The real danger in all of this is Crowley's Black Brother. The "I am I".
By only accepting that everything is simply a part of our consciousness and ceases to exist or what ever one may be inclined to think, we fortify that tendency in ourselves to preserve the sense of identity. It is one thing to say we are all connected but according to psychology and I am all there is, we fail to acknowledge that Lucy might exist. In this I am using an extreme example because I don't think anybody really thinks in that manner aside from casual philosophical discussion but the flaw is this... we don't deny that Lucy exists in our material world but the Angels, Gods & Demons we deny their very existence by arguing for the flawed "models" of psychology, energy and information models. The other two models in Tegtmeier's essay are as tragically flawed but not as dangerous to spiritual development.
I am a fan of Jung as much as the next guy, his ideas of archetypes, shadow self etc. are just brilliant but the atheistic approach many take is not a scientific approach. Aetheism isn't scientific skepticism. If you are an aetheist great, but if you are an aetheist magician, I guarandamntee you one day you are going to have an experience, if you get into performing things like the Goetia, Angelic Invocations etc. that will rock your world like the first time you discovered what masturbation is and how to do it and then got caught behind the door or in the bathroom by your mom or dad. That "oh shit, I wasn't expecting that" experience.
This is what drives magicians insane, that things they thought weren't real just might be and they just might be subjective in existence.
In all honesty, I think both subjective and objective perspective must both be cultivated, the Relativistic model of science and the Quantum model of science co-exist and are very illustrative of subjective and objective perspectives of the Universe.
I really feel that the majority of magicians I have met exist in a comfort zone that they never challenge. They get into their chosen model and only perform magick that keeps that model from being challenged. Most of the models prevent these magicians, psychologically, from performing evocation or invocation per the grimoires. They fail to challenge their notions and assert "I am GOD" as opposed to "I am a GOD".
The nitty gritty in this latter part of my post, before you hamstring yourself with some model of magic to explain the processes you experience or what you do and what it is, usually magic as therapy, realize that just maybe... Asmoday exists in his own dimension and isn't some dark aspect of your consciousness. On the same token, he does exist as part of you and if anything I learned from the Monastery lessons that I haven't learned in the A:.A:. is that this which is below is that which is above. I am as much a part of Asmoday as Asmoday is of me.
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