#occultmagic

[talib888]

Problems and Some Solutions for the Beginning Sorcerer

I've been busy with banishing rituals, the Neither-Neither, and sigil magick for some weeks now. Picking up from my previous post on a chapter of Stephen Mace's Stealing the Fire from Heaven:

To Know Self

Mace recommends three books.

Journey to Ixtlan by Carlos Castaneda

Tales of Power by Carlos Castaneda

The Dream Game by Ann Faraday

To Control Mind

Mace recommends yoga although we aren't to pursue it as actual yogis, but as sorcerers. He also discusses yoga through the filter of Crowley's Book 4 and what I assume is Patanjali's formulation of the 8 limbs of yoga. Mace prescribes a practice of an hour a day for two years.

To Develop Will

To this end Mace again taps into Crowley's ideas, namely Magick in Theory and Practice. The practice itself can be briefly described as such: taking an oath to not do an arbitrary action that has no moral or emotional significance. The idea is to strengthen our will with "innocuous" denials and not corrupt it with desire. Later once our wills are stronger we can attempt to work this on our actual "dark nasties" and bind them.

To Enforce Prudence

Mace dedicated an entire to chapter to this, and once again takes his cue from Crowley. Several points from Liber AL val Legis or the Book of the Law are quoted in relevance to the stated aim.

My Own Intuition

Prior reading that I've done on writers like Castaneda and Crowley have probably poisoned the well a little, so to speak. But I'm open to trying new things and giving them half a chance. Having said that, I can't ignore my intuition when it's pulling me in certain other directions. I have a list of substitutions for the recommended practices. I'll discuss them in a later post.

[talib888]

Sigil Magic: Observation of Results

These past several days I've been experimenting with sigil magic as taught by Stephen Mace in Stealing the Fire from Heaven. Here are my findings so far.

Firstly, the method taught is not very difficult. Sigil creation is easy enough. Memorizing and repressing the sigil in my subconscious is also not hard. The charging method itself while not technically challenging takes a bit of time. Creating vacuity by performing the banishing ritual Mace taught is easy enough, but the practice of generating free belief from the Neither-Neither principle has me searching and reaching for juxtapositions of beliefs with strong enough emotional contents. That aside, imagining the sigil burning white hot in my field of vision as it charges is both a simple and stunning exercise in mental visualization.

Secondly, the results of this method of sigil magic is simultaneously impressive and disappointing. There are some things it's immediately good for: effecting change directly within myself, e.g. behaviors and thought patterns. There are some other things that it clearly has little to no sway over, generally things and people external to my mental environment. At least that's how it seems for now. The metaphysics of Mace's sigil magic method involve planting the sigil deep enough in my mind until it reaches the Mind of God. Maybe I just haven't learned how to go deep enough yet.

Back to the lab I go.

[talib888]

Sorceror Training

Continuing from my previous post, here is my personal plan for sorcery training and learning loosely based on Mace's recommendations. In later chapters of Stealing the Fire from Heaven, the reader is instructed to combine sigil magic, automatic drawing and astral projection to make contact with various entities in the psyche. That includes energy centers, personal powers, dark complexes, etc. With that in mind I've included training for astral projection and automatic drawing practice. I threw in remote viewing because my personal intuition tells me that while it's different from astral projection, the two are connected by a spectrum of states of consciousness - my consciousness. The Jocko Willink part feels a little... corny, but I'm also going to trust my intuition on this one.

[talib888]

Becoming a Magician: Problems and Some Solutions

There's one more chapter in Stephen Mace's Stealing the Fire from Heaven that I marked "For Now" (in contrast to "For Later"). It deals with troubleshooting common issues the would-be sorceror might have while traversing the forest to become an actual magician. It's meant to address problems like a difficulty in visualizing while performing the banishing ritual taught in one of the beginning chapters, for instance.

There's 4 points that Mace outlines in the main:

To know self

To control mind

To develop will

To enforce prudence

It reminds me of something I've previously read elsewhere, namely the 4 Powers of the Sphinx. I think it was Eliphas Lévi whose teat I was suckling from, and if I'm not wrong, Crowley picks up on that too in his own work.

This is one of those chapters that contradicts the stated aim of the book: to design a system of sorcery not dependent on the beliefs, metaphysics or symbol sets of preceding traditions. I'm personally not bothered by the thought of incorporating earlier thought and techniques into a personal bag of tricks, but if that's what we're doing, I'd rather not be told we'll be doing otherwise 😆 But meh, it's a minor quibble and I'm happy enough to continue.

[talib888]

Stephen Mace: Sigil Magick

So this is the process I learned for sigil magick:

Write a simple statement of desire. Cross out duplicate letters. Make a simple sigil.

Memorize the sigil. Then repress it in the subconscious. If it ever rises up in your normal stream of thought, actively repress it. This activates the sigil and prepares it for when you're ready to charge it with free belief.

You generate free belief by performing a neither-neither, i.e. you come up with one statement of 'truth' and then find all the ways in which it isn't true and oppose the two together.

You water your sigil with free belief and visualize it glowing white hot. When that dissipates, you repress the sigil in your subconscious again.

Repeat multiple times until the objective is achieved.

The point of repression is to 'make the desire organic'. Charging the sigil with free belief and burning it into the imagination is meant to push it deep into the sorcerer's psyche into the 'Mind of God'. That last part I guess is the underlying metaphysical rationale behind the magic, a kind of monism.

What I left out in the numbered list is the banishing ritual that's to be performed before and after any magical operation, since that depends on when the sorcerer has any free belief with which to charge the sigil.

I'm gonna experiment with this for the next few days on several objectives of varying orders of likelihood of occurrence and see how it goes. For science!

[talib888]

Free Belief and the Neither-Neither Principle

"The Neither-Neither principle asserts that there is no truth anywhere that is not balanced by an equally true opposite somewhere, and there is only perspective and circumstance to determine which seems more true at any given time. To apply this principle to conjuring, wait until you are absolutely positive something is true, then search for its opposite. When you find it, oppose it to your 'truth' and let them annihilate one another as well as they may. 

Any residue you should oppose to its opposite, and so on until your truth has been dismembered and the passion behind it converted into undirected energy—free belief. By applying the Neither-Neither we can gut the meaningless convictions that obsess us every day and use the power released to cause the changes we desire."

Stephen Mace, Stealing the Fire from Heaven

Mace gives the example of our homes as they stand and exist right now. We simply need to look ahead in time and see the house gradually becoming dilapidated and falling into ruin, and even further ahead in the future to a point in the next ice age maybe when glaciers slowly move over the place where our house once stood and absolutely erase any memory of it.

[talib888]

Charging Sigils

"Once vacuity has been attained, the sorcerer will muster whatever free belief he can and use it to visualize his design. He can fo­cus this into his will for his objective by closing his eyes, visual­izing his sigil, and using his imagination to fill it with power. The sigil should burn bright under this stimulus, white-hot against the hazy background, until the free belief is gone and the original emotion nearly forgotten. Then the design will fade away and the wiz­ard will turn it out of mind until a new source of free belief pre­sents itself and he calls it up for recharging. He will continue to soak his free belief into his sigil until his objective has been achieved."

Stephen Mace, Stealing the Fire from Heaven

This is so much different from my friends' "magic cum doodles" 😂

[talib888]

Vacuity, Free Belief and Sigil Magick

" ... when a sigil pops into the sorcerer's normal thought stream, he must deliberately push it out, forgetting it by an act of will. This activates it so it 'dominates at the unconscious'... In this way his sigil is planted, ready to be watered with whatever free belief he can pour into it. To perform this watering in actual practice, the wizard must enter a state of vacuity, generate free belief, and focus it into concentrating on his sigil. Vacuity is a state of no thought, a cleared space much like what a banishing gives... "

Stephen Mace, Stealing the Fire from Heaven

Mace reports that among the several things that Spare recommends for achieving vacuity is solitaire