The Dance Of Earth Spirits

While I was cleaning out my computer recently I happened upon several files that I created ages ago but had forgotten about. Before deleting them I thought I would post them here. 

This morning I drove my wife to our veterinarian. As I waited outside in the van I thought that I, being in a rather isolated mountainous area, would work with some earth energy (Franz Bardon style). After completing my meditations, I began to notice my surroundings more vividly and became more aware than usual of the living energy of the neighboring trees and grasses. While observing the scenery I got the impression of something playful weaving around the trunks of the trees. Shortly thereafter, I got the impression of something else dwelling near the ground, at the base of the trees. It was the impression of something very old. It was not a negative impression, but I did feel a little queasy in its presence. I then decided to observe the trees near me. The closest tree gave me the impression that it wanted to be played with. I instantly felt the desire to go up to the tree and feel its needles and bark. I wanted to climb into it. I thought that if I were a child I most certainly would have spent some time exploring this tree. A short distance behind this tree grew two others. The impressions I got from these two were somewhat mixed. They seemed friendly enough but rather preoccupied. They were of different varieties and their limbs were intertwined. The impression I got was that they were new lovers, too busy with themselves to be bothered by me. To their left were two other trees whose limbs were somewhat also intertwined. They too were a couple, but were not new to each other … they had grown old together. The biggest and dominant of the two partially obscured the smaller from my view (though I don't recall having this thought at the time, I think now that the big dominate one was the female of the pair). While I received no negative impression from this couple, I clearly sensed that they wanted to be left alone.

Making A Meal Of My Magic

The ingestion of sacred or holy substances has a long history in religious, magical and mystical traditions. Having been influenced by Bardon’s Initiation into Hermetics, I have been trying to come up with a way of utilizing a “sacred meal” in my daily life. The ritual below is what I have come up with. I present it here simply as an example of how I have devised a way of incorporating magic into my everyday existence. If it gives another some ideas of their own, so much the better.


Ritual of Increase

Preparation:

Bake some unleavened bread

and cut into wedges.

Take one of the wedges and break/cut into roughly ½ to 1 inch portions and place the pieces into an airtight container/wrapper. These broken portions will serve as the sacred meal (“Sacred Amplifier”) for the next few days. Place the remaining wedges in the freezer for future use. Remove a single wedge from the freezer as needed.

Ritual Proper:

Upon awaking from sleep or shortly thereafter take the Sacred Amplifier (a piece of the unleavened bread) from its container and face east. Hold the Sacred Amplifier in the open palm of your left hand. Your right hand should be open with palm supporting the left hand. Either stand or kneel while looking at the Sacred Amplifier and say:

From my hands you have been created…Earth from Earth.

You are bread, sustainer of body through the ages.

From my will you have been created anew…Spirit and Earth.

You are the Sacred Amplifier, promoter of magical increase through the ages.

With your ingestion my ability to transform myself and my environment according to my will becomes amplified.

Consume the Sacred Amplifier to complete the ritual.

Rethinking My Soul Mirrors

Photo by roseoftimothywoods available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial license

In the first chapter of Initiation into Hermetics, Franz Bardon offers a method for identifying and categorizing one's negative and positive qualities. As detailed by Bardon, the student is instructed to construct two “soul mirrors”: a black mirror forged from one's negative qualities and a white mirror forged from one's positive qualities. By engaging in this method, the student lays the foundation for techniques of self-transformation that are discussed latter in the book.

Several years ago I worked this method with, what I now perceive to be, limited success. Looking back upon my initial dealings with my soul mirrors I realize that I was too eager to get past this portion of my schooling to get to the more “magical” aspects of my training. Recently, I have been preparing to reconstruct my mirrors in the hopes that they will be more useful (note that I say “useful” and not “detailed”).

Why have I not yet begun the work? Unlike my first undertaking, I now perceive a problem that has delayed my progress. Initially, I just thought about all the negative and positive qualities that have manifested in my life. It was not too difficult and the lists became rather lengthy (though my black soul mirror was easier to build than my white). Today, however, I find myself perplexed over the very nature of “positive” and “negative” soul qualities or characteristics. What does it mean to be a “positive” or “negative” quality and who decides which qualities are positive and which are negative?

Now, two sources can be identified for the knowledge of positive/good and negative/bad. The first is a source external to the individual, whether it is one's particular culture, parents or religion. The other, is some innate sense of the positive or negative (because I do not ascribe to an innate sense of good and bad, I will have nothing more to say on this issue). From my experience, the transmission of the understanding of positive/good and negative/bad from an external source to an individual can (and often does) occur in such a way as to present the various qualities as either inherently positive/good or negative/bad. In this world, such qualities as anger, hatred, and jealousy, for example, are always identified as negative while qualities such as kindness, loyalty, and truthfulness are always identified as positive. Upon reflection, I now see that this is exactly how I understood the positive and negative qualities of my fist soul mirrors. In other words, I have for the most part, merely accepted the dictates of some external source as to what constitutes good and bad personal characteristics. Holding a given quality as inherently positive or negative clearly has its advantages when it comes to constructing one's soul mirrors. It makes identification of positive or negative qualities rather effortless. In my case, I simply brought to mind all the positive and negative qualities I could think of and then determined if I had experienced them in my life. If I had, they were included within their respective mirrors. I now, however, find this method to be uncritical, superficial, and in need of revision.

Recently, after some reflection, I find myself taking the view that a particular quality is situationally positive or negative rather than inherently so. Thus, for me, a quality becomes negative if it causes adverse, undesirable, or unpleasant consequences in one’s life and positive if it causes favorable, desirable, or pleasant consequences in one’s life. This view is very much akin to the prevailing Buddhist view of negative and positive qualities. Here, however, certain qualities are negative because they always lead to adverse consequences while certain other qualities are positive because they always lead to favorable consequences. In opposition to this view, I can see instances where a quality or characteristic can be experienced as either negative (adverse) or positive (favorable). Consider the quality/characteristic of someone who is jealous. Clearly jealous individuals can behave in ways that bring adversity upon them. For example, they may retaliate against the object of their jealousy and find themselves in legal trouble. However, when a person expresses jealousy towards someone who perceives such a response as a display of love and caring, then it becomes more difficult to see how this characteristic can, in this situation, can be classified as negative. Indeed, by not expressing jealousy in this case a whole host of adverse consequences may arise. Again, consider the quality of being angry. Anger can lead one who is in its grip to speak and behave rashly, thereby causing all manner of adversity. However, reflect upon a parent that displays a sudden burst of anger towards an uncooperative child playing in a dangerous street that, when confronted with the angry parent, removes him or herself from danger. Here I see the child's transition to safety as a favorable consequence of the anger. Therefore, anger should be considered positive here.

Unlike inherently positive/negative qualities, situationally determined qualities make the construction of soul mirrors a more difficult task. First of all, any quality may appear in either mirror depending on the situation. This would require the aspiring mirror-maker to determine if a given quality is positive or negative on a case-by-case basis. Secondly, qualities would be identified as positive or negative in a rather indirect fashion. One would first need to seek out instances of adversity or favorability in one’s life and then identify the qualities that engendered them. Moreover, situationally determined characteristics or qualities would make the process of removing or promoting a given characteristic/quality a more complicated task. How might one simultaneously promote and remove a quality that finds a home in both mirrors? For instance, I am well aware that much of my behavior is governed by the characteristic of insecurity or self-doubt. It is clear to me that my insecurity has created many adverse circumstances in my life and should thus be minimized, if not eradicated. Yet it is also clear to me that my insecurity or self-doubt has at times functioned favorably in my life. My insecurity has at times kept me out of harm’s way and perhaps has even saved my life on a few occasions. In such a case how might I eradicate my negative insecurity and preserve my positive insecurity simultaneously? Clearly a comprehensive banishment or preservation of any one quality will not suffice.

While there remain questions yet to be answered, my soul mirrors await to be rebuilt. This time around, however, I will be exploring those moments of adversity and favorability in my life in order to discover those qualities that precipitated those moments. Once identified, these qualities will be used to forge my new mirrors.

Magic at Work

I am a very heady person and have been so for as long as I have been on this material plane. I tend to live in a world of thoughts/ideas as opposed to a world of feelings or physicality. Such is the plight of a Gemini, I guess. It is no surprise then that my chosen life’s work was within academia. During my many years of study within those hallowed halls of learning, I came to acquire a vast knowledge about traditions belonging to “the other.” On account of my intellectual curiosity and love for these traditions, I eventually fostered a sympathetic understanding that lead me to feel as though I was somewhat of an insider (i.e., a practitioner or "doer of"). I mean, heck, I knew more about most of those traditions than the millions who belonged to their ranks. Yet, despite my feeling of belonging to these traditions, my relationship with them was strictly cerebral. I learned and thought about them.

Recently, the line between the “thinker of” and the “doer of” was made very explicit to me at work thanks to my practice of a form of mental magic that I shall call “mental compartmentalization” (a form of mental magic outlined in Franz Bardon’s Initiation into Hermetics, though labeled differently.) This form of mental gymnastics involves the flushing out of one’s mind any thought unrelated to the work at hand. I soon discovered that I could not (perhaps “would not” would be better) follow this practice to the letter if I did not want to be an asshat to the many coworkers who enjoy my company and wish to pass the unbearable time at work with such important topics of discourse as “who is banging who?” and “how drunk did you get last night?”, not to mention the fact that for several hours every night I engage in no work at all being that my share of responsibilities has been completed. Kind of hard to keep your mind on the job when you’re not doing anything work related (I fill this time by reading books. I sure hope my boss does not read this blog!). The practice would have to be modified. I would apply “mental compartmentalization” when I am working (rather than at work) and not engaged in trivial discourse with my work mates.

What I discovered very quickly with this form of mental magic was that my mind was slipping into thoughts about magic. These thoughts would have to be expunged from my mind. But wait… I gasped. How would I make any progress in magic if I stopped thinking about it for the amount of time I am at work? This was simply unacceptable. But then it hit me! I could either think about magic or do magic by removing magic from my mind. I chose to do magic.