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@hallow-adder
i don't use this blog ever bc against all odds all my occult discussion still happens on twitter
i could update this one (the name & icon are a bit out of date) but idk that i have that much to talk about/ppl to talk to on here
what are qualities you look for when you buy copies of ancient texts? do you look into specific transators? im currently looking for a good copy of the PGM and would like any tips!
Oh I pirate all this shit. I don't spend money on academic resources unless it's <20$. Knowledge belongs to all.
anon, it's not hard to find digital copies of the Betz translation of the PGM (The Greek Magical Papyri in Translation: Including the Demotic Spells by Hans Dieter Betz) at your local shadow library--there are some issues with his translation, but everybody i know working with the PGM in translation is using that one, pretty much. not really sure what other English translations are widely available. i did back a new interlinear translation project but it is quite far behind schedule at this point bc of COVID (though i think it moved into editing earlier this year).
also pretty easy to find is Stephen Skinner's Techniques of Graeco-Egyptian Magic, a staple supplemental reference which makes it easier to locate particular passages of the PGM based on their contents/techniques rather than their order in the original manuscripts. Skinner is an academic but also a magician, and I would say there are a few places his personal opinions about practice leak into his academic claims (e.g. his insistence in the absence of direct evidence that magicians in hellenistic Egypt worked standing inside of circles drawn on the ground) but overall the book is very useful for navigating the PGM & related historical sources.
probably worth pirating them, each book is $40+ used
might fuck around and write a line by line gloss of fictional scripture written in a conlang. i have got a couple of the pieces i would need for this lying around (magical language project i worked on for a few months and then mostly put down, lifetime of fascination with esoteric philosophy & religion, etc)
never not wild to be like dang even though i did my dream recall exercise before falling asleep for the first time in like a week* i didn't remember anything. and then get in bed and open up the recording app for tomorrow morning and see that i did indeed record something and the file title immediately reminds me of some of the content of the dream. it happens a fair amount which is i guess a good indication that the dream recall thing i do works for me, OR that i fail to recall dreams when i stay up too late, i guess. although it's almost certainly some of both, bc i can definitely get a good rest and still recall nothing if i didn't do the exercise
* (if i stay up way too late i usually just skip it since it takes a while)
the other thing is if i want to do that stuff. i should really learn aramaic. and hebrew, but there are more resources for that.
...and greek but let's not get even further ahead of ourselves
ugh hate to incidentally realize a symbolic framework i have been thinking about/assembling for years is. plausibly grown from a half-remembered seed from kabbalah of all places.
there's definitely an extent to which in studying magic i have tried to avoid stuff influenced by/taking from judaism (basically impossible working with european traditions, which is part of why i don't work a lot with like, historical grimoires) because idk, i feel weird as a 95% secular reform jew by heritage engaging with the religion without you know, fully embracing it, converting*, etc. and knowing me i'd have to be fucking meticulous about conversion or (....more like and) worry that i was doing it wrong/shouldn't be doing it.
really starting to feel like i should just get over that, though, i don't think it's deserving of special respectful deference simply for being a(n accessible**, non-christian***) religion practiced by my family or ancestors. besides all of which, like, functionally heno- or poly-theistic jews are clearly all over history, even postdating the standardization of monotheism (which actually happens later than i realized, also, maybe not until jews leave babylon)
anyway the takeaway is: three concepts i had been mentally defining the relationships between, displayed as a graph of three nodes, maps nearly identically (same positioning, even, i think) to one of the triangles of sefirot on the etz chaim; a cursory glance at the significance of the relationships between those three sefirot also lines up pretty well with conclusions i had reached, which i guess is validating sort of.
the real conclusion is: hekhalot literature/merkaba practices are super interesting, kabbalah is often very interesting (ime more if you get away from the post-Luria standardization that chasidism makes universal), i should just tell hashem to suck it up and deal with my refusal to accept the existence of a unified and anthropomorphic creative & motive force in the universe/embrace heresy. satisfies the teen edgelord in me, also.
* (my jewish family is on my dad's side, which would actually be fine in reform judaism, except that my upbringing was not exclusively jewish--went to sunday school and attended catholic services for a while, due to polish & irish family all being catholic. setting aside for the moment that reconstructionist judaism is probably the most interesting to me)
**as in not distant past/dead religions like prechristian european religions--no, obviously neopaganisms do not count
***have no real explanation for this bias. almost any grounded critique i have of christianity (homophobia, attitude towards magic & heterodoxy, recent history of colonial violence) could be leveled at judaism basically fairly. possibly just an aesthetic preference? vibes-based??
well I've got a nice new ritual blade i made myself (mostly, with instruction from a skilled smith).
the blade is a tool steel quenched in a mixture of flying rowan, foxglove, lightning-struck wood and P. tampanensis, with a chip of iron meteorite melted onto it; the handle is turned stabilized bog oak. there's also a little brass end cap on the handle.
blog overdue for a new name and icon. hm. been a tooad and a snake. will ponder.
Is there no connection between the female symbol and the anhk? Two symbols that are close in shape do not neccesarily have to be closely related (obviously). But I can see some connection between "female" and "life."
From my understanding, the ankh physically represents a sandal strap. The ankh is one of those symbols that every occultist and their mom wants to draw associations with, so I'm cautious about making concrete connections.
iirc you don't see the crossbar on the venus symbol until like, the 12th C or so, older versions just have the stem extending down from the circle, which kind of suggests to me they're not related.
Grail by Konstantin Korobov
transcribing these dreams into obsidian is fun in part because i can visualize the relationship of posts/dreams (white dots) to themes/tags (green dots). dream logs vary a lot in how many themes/items i can pick out, since some of them are like a single sentence, but some of them like that one in the lower left are long and detailed so they wind up with a lot of tags. many of these tags (e.g. "armadillo") are likely to never come up again, but i am trying to be pretty thorough to minimize how much i have to go back and add tags to things later, and some things (like "a specific kind of animal") feel important enough to tag just in case it comes up again.
9-21-22
Late to be recording, but I had a dream, just remembered details from my dream last night. I was talking to someone, some kind of hair care, hairdresser person, and they basically said "oh, yeah, I owe you that dye job". And I said "wait, could you give me a tonsure instead?" and I don't remember why I wanted or needed that, in the context of the dream.
trying a new technique for dream recall. 3/2 so far (recalled two dreams last night), having just recorded a lot of information from one tonight. i won't go into the details right now bc i need to go back to bed but this post should remind me to do it tomorrow
don't use this blog a ton, but musk's site continues to rot, so maybe i will pick it up more. might be time for a name and icon change if so, will consider it.
been picking up doing imaginal work again because a) maybe nothing makes me fall asleep faster and more consistently than doing the relaxation stuff i do beforehand, so doing it while i lie in bed waiting to sleep i either get to sleep (win) or imagine weird shit (win), b) i think the mental state, especially when it's kind of hypnagogic like how i have been doing it lately, it helps me work out creative stuff--things occur to me, questions resolve themselves, c) it's just very fun, actually
have catalogued three or four different ways my body will appear and behave doing these things, for instance, and enjoyed traveling in symbolic directions ("towards fire" or "into my dreams"--that one has been unsuccessful as a way to initiate lucid dreaming but in the moment i always seem to think it's a good idea) and just seeing what turns up
"i am the ways of my wanting"
this one came out less horny. here's The Primeval Slime Magical Time (in Excitatory Mode) by Devil Moonwatcher, compiled by cutout from Liber Null & Psychonaut by Peter Carroll and Ray Sherwin.
some thoughts and a version using the book-cover as the background (making it a bit less legible) under the cut
i wrote some extremely horny collage poetry today using a dialogue by Michael Psellos (11th century byzantine monk) called De Operatione Daemonum
be warned it does get pretty explicit! but i want to post it somewhere and somehow here doesn't set off my bashfulness as much. it's under the cut.
