#high magick

[blackcoffeedreams]

[ceremonialmagick]

Occult? Try upstairs! Inside the world’s weirdest library, now open to the public

It has folders marked ‘Grasping the victim’s head’ and now – after a £15m revamp and some help from Albert Einstein and the patron saint of

The Warburg library and its massive occult book collection is now open to the public! It is the home of Lady Frieda Harris´ Thoth Tarot paintings and other artwork related to Aleister Crowley and the Golden Dawn.

[cyrilau]

Pentagram Ritual Experiment:

At the heart of the crossroads, the spirit blooms into matter, on its tongue an alphabet pronounced in silence.

Over the past few weeks I’ve been working my version of the Greater Invoking Pentagram Ritual in the morning, and the Greater Banishing in the evening.

My intention was to strengthen my relationship with the cardinal directions and elemental energies of my local environment. The Earth element/Malkuth/Horizontal level is absolutely foundational to all practical and transcendental operations (in my experience). The upper and lower worlds are linked here. The Tree of Life diagram illustrates how every sphere focuses into Malkuth. What is right around you, here and now, is the beginning and end of the Work.

I used the classic Golden Dawn/Crowley elements and 5 pointed star correspondence; including the God-names, grade signs, and angels. This evolved and changed as the month and practice progressed which I’ll get into in a second.

At first the invocations were a lot. Throughout the first part of the day I was spacey, and felt disconnected. There was a lot of energy coming through. On one level it brought habits and behavioral patterns that were crossing me up to the forefront. This felt like the first layer of elemental purification/strengthening, it put the desire of fire, cognition and thought patterns of air, actions and behaviors in earth, and the emotion in the waters all under a microscope.

Middle Pillar and sitting style meditations after the invocations really helped ground the influx of energy and it helped me integrate the influences better. As the weeks progressed I felt way more evened out, like the core aspects of my being were rounding out.

I frame the “banishing” ritual as a refinement process. I like to use it as a way to purify, stabilize, and bind/ground the energies of the element(s). This ritual felt like a good way to close up and seal the experiences and insight gained throughout the day. The time after the banishing is where I found the time to develop and specify my own elemental correspondences as they appeared throughout the days and weeks. Sort of like I was digesting everything.

The practice noticeably shifted after the Full Moon. I have a general skeleton of a full moon rite adapted from the Azoëtia, and when circle casting at the beginning of the Ingress rite I incorporated the greater invoking ritual. I subtracted the grade sign and God-names, instead I used the Azoëtia’s directional invocations in conjunction with the drawing of the pentagrams. The experience was intense but exceptionally rewarding. I tried returning to the golden dawn/crowley method after the ritual and it didn’t have the same effect at all. It felt like the signs and formula were half-dead.

A couple things I’ve been doing since the full moon is developing my own “signs”, functioning as signals and postures sigilizing and encoding my combined experiences/gnosis of the elemental and directional spirits and energies. I’ve also adapted part of the Dragon Book’s method of projecting the upright and averse pentagrams to charge the directions. I found this section in the DBoE so fascinating and it definitely resonated with my experience:

(The Fifth Arcana of the Hendecarch, Dragon Book of Essex)

One of the most nourishing outcomes of this operation is the feeling of the spirit anchoring into the physical. Sort of like the vertical line of the spirit moving down and extending horizontally in 4 directions. The 4 elements/directions allow the spirit to find form and function. I’m not exactly sure how to articulate this part of my experience, but the “subtle essence”, or quintessence, feels more tangible.

The daily repetition and consistent meditation practices have also had a huge impact on my overall mood and rootedness.

Lastly, during a few of my meditations after the invocation part of the ritual (around week 3) Christ symbolism kept surfacing. This got me thinking about the central egress rite; the sacrifice of the 4 elemental vessels and the 5th vessel of the quintessence: the death and resurrection of the self. In the center of the crossroads, the body becomes the gate.

[bluepurpleviolatte]

"For me, magick is love. Whenever you bring in divine light to manifest one thing or the other in the world, what you’re actually doing is pulling in love. This is why real magick is never a dark or scary thing, because the very act of practicing magick brings you into harmony with the Divine, no matter what name you call it. When you practice magick in this way, you become a better person, and that makes the world a better place. Helping other beings is what love looks like in action. And practicing magick in a way that brings more divine energy into your life means that you help everyone you touch. When you send a thoughtform to someone — say, someone close to you who needs healing of some sort — what you’re actually sending them is love in the form of divine light. And the reason you do so is to make them whole, to make them happy.

What we normally think of as love is actually nothing more than attachment. In the core of our being, we know that true love is unconditional. True love doesn’t waver or disappear if our loved one screws up or goes off the rails. Going forward, it’s important that you distinguish attachment from love. The foundation of magic is all about living in harmony with love, manifesting love, and applying that love in the world. In this way, we become copartners with magick in the ongoing act of creation."

-Damien Echols, High Magick

[creature-wizard]

“If you think that being an occultist obligates me to esteem the opinions of ceremonial magicians, I think I am entitled to set your racist ass on fire.”

I’m so sorry I’m confused but I want to know 😭

Okay so, ceremonial magic, or "high magick" as we know it is loaded with cultural appropriation and antisemitism. And there's a bunch of people who espouse the view that the people who came up with this stuff were Very Serious Practitioners Who Knew What They Were Doing, and therefore You Have To Take Their Opinions Very Very Seriously.

Like... in reality, they were mostly a bunch of fairly upper class people with upper class prejudices, who weren't historically literate enough to catch where they books they were working from were full of crap, who made up and promoted entirely new crap. They keep getting presented as these Infallible Wise Mystical Elites when they really weren't doing any better than anyone else - including most of the "fluffy" practitioners that their fans love to hate on.

There's also this attitude that you have to care about their magical opinions even if you think they were hateful assholes - this whole "well yeah I know they were bad, but you have to admit they knew what they were doing!" Which like, is not only ignorant of just how ignorant these people were, but overlooks the fact that if you want to learn stuff, you can learn from people who aren't hateful assholes.

[graycloak]

“You can study and practice magick for the rest of your life and you will still never learn everything that it has to teach you.”

- Damien Echols

High Magick: A Guide to the Spiritual Practices that Saved My Life on Death Row

[khaosritual]

I summoned a demon

[therhetoricofmagic]

The Four Powers of the Sphinx: Know, Will, Dare & Keep Silent

Eliphas Levi, born as Alphonse Louis Constant in 1810, was a 19th-century French occultist and influential figure in the development of Western esotericism. Levi is renowned for his works on magic, the Kabbalah, and ceremonial traditions. Widely considered his most important work, “Dogma and Ritual of High Magic”, explored the synthesis of various mystical traditions.  Eliphas Levi also wrote…

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