Have you ever noticed that the things experienced with the Enochian angels are a lot different than any other angelic system? For those who have conjured the Enochians and the traditional Celestial Intelligences, you've noticed how different they are, right? I figured the Enochians were at best sub-lunar spirits based on my very limited experiences with them.
The way they adapt and meld to every belief system, and eventually begin playing and preying on the ego of the human doing the Work with them, all these things always struck me as weird. They behaved like Nepheshim, or "lower astral" spirits, not like any particularly ancient and powerful spirits of the apocryphal Book of Enoch would act.
Check out this link. I think this explains why Enochian Magic and Lovecraft Entity based Magic always seem so similar, always seem to match up so nicely with the expectations of the magician doing the Work.
Head for the Red: The ongoing adventures and insights of a magician's attempts to accomplish the Great Work.
Quick! Get your hat, RO! I see a comment storm comin'!
ReplyDeleteYeah, it's been so quiet here lately. :D I carefully took a non-adversarial stance, and stated my thoughts as simply thoughts, not as a "This is how it IS and MUST BE!!!"
ReplyDeleteIt's just my thoughts, I have reached no firm conclusion.
But yeah, the shit storm cometh, I'm sure.
I always found that the story about the "wife swap" was not that angelic...
ReplyDelete:-)
Ouch! Yeah, there was something a little fishy about the whole thing... too bad.
ReplyDeleteFra RO,
ReplyDeleteWell done, sir-something we can sink our collective teeth into.
I don't have any experience with the Lovecraftian entities (and who in their right mind would want to??) but my own experiences of the Enochians have been multi-varied. Certainly they've been different and appear to be more Earthly than the other Angelic entities (for lack of a better term), but they've done anything but meet my expectations and inflate my ego. Most of the Angels I've spoken to have never given me any "Savior of the world" nonsense that I've read about, and have stuck primarily to granting wisdom of their own natures and the forces that they represent. They do seem to have distinct personalities, with some of the Angels being cold and stand-offish, and others being almost warm and happy to converse. Makes it hard to categorize them easily, or to know what to expect. Their forms are always a surprise to me as well.
I've worked primarily with the Elemental angels at this point, and it makes sense to me that they would be sub-lunary, given their nature. They seem to be personifications of different combinations of natural forces. The angels of the Tablet of Union where different. They were BIG in a way the other angels have not been. Anyway, I expect the planetary Angels will fit within their proper Spheres. We'll see.
I think the effectiveness of the system speaks to it being more than simply created by Dee--I do think it's inspired. The Simon Necronomicon is a good comparison. Wholly created by Simon, if you work with it you'll still get results.....but nothing on the level of the Enochians. Not even close. (In my youth I summoned the Watcher, worked with that system a little bit, before moving on to more Hermetic pastures.) The sophistication of the system also makes it easier to see Enochian as inspired.
I wonder if the gents from the link actually worked any Enochian magic?
Sounds like a live action role playing game.
ReplyDeleteLet me go back to an old metaphor that might help cut out some of the ad hominems and other rhetoric posing as logic:
ReplyDeleteTake a second and go back to Kircher's Tree of Life. What if we've been drawing the 4 worlds a bit wrong: the physical world - the one we deal with every day - are the lowest 4 spheres, We have the things themselves, their time-bindings, the organized systems of thought associated with them as well as the sense-emotional representations - all wrapped up in one discrete package of this-here-now (THN). Anything that will be produced to be in the THN will also have causality in the THN. To produce $$$ or the plans to the Spanish naval strategy or love or time travel from a point in the THN requires something that's also existing in the THN,
Those "spirits" aren't angels in the sense of being higher than us as they're made of the same general stuff as us. When you ask one of them for an organized system of knowledge, you're still only going to get something from THN - just a different part of it and using a novel representation. And often, that's more than enough. Those 4 spheres, when linked together, form a tetrahedron - a 3D solid. This becomes a bit more important later...
What's outside of causality? In particle physics you have probability states. There's a range of events and a whole tree of divergences from any given point in the THN. I'm typing this with the understanding that RO will feel it's something that contributes to the conversation and will moderate it for inclusion. There is also the universe where he does not. At the point of me writing this, they both exist. At the point of him clicking the mouse and starting the code sequence between computers, the probability state collapses into a causality state - the wave has become a particle. Even though the universes of approve/not approve both exist as separate realities of probability, they are tangentially connected through states in the THN. Tipareth, Geburah and Chesed, seen this way, form a triangle - a 2D object. From down here in our meatsuits, all we can really deal with this way is the surface of that - not necessarily the actual probabilities hiding within it. We can engineer the THN in such a way as to make the probability fields around those parts of the THN try to flux our way... but still purple monkey dishwasher.
Beyond probability, things get weirder: instead of a cloud of chance that is constantly collapsing, we have a range of acausal and non-probabilistic events. Those universes where we have comment approval and don't have comment approval fall within a range are part of a larger line between connections. It's hard to express this in words, as the words are part of the THN and as such are limited to THN and occasionally skimming the probability 'brane. Range, in this way, is 1D - and quite outside of anything but a theoretical construct based on higher dimensional thinking.
Beyond that range from Binah to Chokmah, we have the crowning point of physics - singularity. 'Nuff said.
Applying to angels: anything that affects the THN is bound to the THN, thus it's like us - just made of slightly different stuff. Even when we work with things on the surface of that 2D 'brane of probabilty, we're still in the THN and working for results in the THN. Entities within the 'brane will be as alien to us as we are to them (cf. Flatland). They, in turn, are as alien to the 1D beings. And even then, no one gets The Point...
So: Enochiana, Bune, ham sandwich, grieving, maths, us - all the same stuff, relatively speaking. Expecting anything different sets up massive amounts of confusion. Which can be good - confusion is the intersection of multiple probabilities before manifestation. Taking the confusion and understanding it outside of THN structures and not identifying with it as part of the THN, then we can start to touch the surface represented by The Point.
{maybe I should've put this up on CoP instead... ;)}
Maybe I'm an odd Enochian magician or something, but I can't say that my experiences using the system match up with yours, RO. I've never encountered much of the supposed "weirdness" that a lot of people say accompanies the system, aside from Enochian entities being really good at getting practical stuff done. I do use the full complement of temple equipment and work with conjurations and such adapted from Dee's work rather than the GD attributions these days, but I did start out with the GD version and the main difference I found was just that it didn't work as well as what I could assemble of the original version.
ReplyDeleteA while ago (maybe a couple of years now) I posted an article on Augoeides asking if anyone had firsthand experience with the supposed "Enochian meltdown" phenomenon and none of my readers did. Is this something that you or someone you know has experienced? If so, I would be really interested in hearing the story - I was just about ready to conclude that the whole thing is an urban legend, since I know a number of magicians who work with the system here in the Twin Cities and none of them have ever had such problems with it.
As far as the article goes, if Kelley really did make the whole thing up he must have had an amazing memory for the Keys and other elements such as the Great Table to be as consistent as they are and so forth. But it is true that the quality of the communications varies a lot as you read through the diaries. There are periods where Kelley is accounting all sorts of remarkable stuff that would be hard to keep straight if it was being invented, but there are also many times when the communications are relatively mundane and seem to revolve around trivial matters that would be easy to fabricate.
I don't buy that links explanation; it works too well to be an invention. Also Kelley wasn't having very much fun, an examination of the workings show that it was rather straining for him. The way the calls were delivered was too tedious to be a scam.
ReplyDeleteJudging by the countless different Enochian experiences I've read about I'd say that the Enochian entities react to the subcon or overall mind of the Mage. Thus if they told you that you're a savior or what have you it probably means that buried deep in your mind is the desire to be that sort of hero. It's like taking drugs; your body chemistry will influence how you react to a drug.
ReplyDeleteI have worked with the Enochian system for over ten years now and I have never -ever- experienced the meltdown effect as described by the internet-urban legends abounding.
ReplyDeleteThe way I see it is that systems, aside from their specific entities also have an overarcing hive-mind, or, if you will, egregore. (Now, there are systems, 200 years older than kaosmagick that also work with egregores so don't diss the concept out right).
Each system's egregore, and all egregores for that matter, will have a specific feeling and behavior. At first, the experience will be a mix between your expectations of the egregore and its true flavour. Then, over time, if the practitioner is a mentally balanced person, the true flavour will emerge and the expectation linked experience will pass.
Compare this with a European left-wing person travelling to USA the first time after only seeing American sit-coms and you are on the right track, or the projections people to on their loved ones the first 6-12 months in a relationship.
Enochian has a specific feeling because the egregor IS a form of esoteric Christian amalgamation. Esoteric christians of all eras have understood the end times to be imminent from a myth perspective, because in a way they are, in the same way as the Logos is ever coming ever redeeming, and not a single reborn Christ. That myth image is just as ingrained in the enochian egregore as duality is in gnostic myths.
The truth is we are all Christ, as the emergence of the Christ-consciousness during some initiatory processes shows, but this doesn't mean we have also done the work needed to truly support this Christ consciousness. We can get megalomaniacal, or exhibit messias syndrome or believe that because we understood the one truth by reading page 75 in playboy magazine collected, volume 2, 1975 whilst drinking capuccino, then that is how everyone else will see the light and we end up a bit odd.
By communicatng with the angels of the enochian egregore, we assume the role of someone with a Christ consciousness, and as we know, by faking it you make it. No matter how unbalanced someone is, they will get that sense. If you combine this with a slightly unusual preconception of the egregore projected unto the angels, then you have what some people call the meltdown effect.
As to the nature of the angels, like many practitioners, myself included, usually say that the enochian “angels” are very strange “angels”.
However, if we look at how the enochian angels of the tablets behave like, feel like and what their place is in the enochian hierarchy, we’ll notice that they are what the universe is made of. In Martinez Pasqually’s system they would be the sentient angels who have entered the time-flow and created matter.
Even from a non-dualist non-gnostic perspective this makes sense. If we are all inside the mind of God, hermetically speaking, then everything in The Mind of God is a thought and “living” entities.
The Angels are thus the sentient building blocks of our reality, prison, or whatever you want to view the world as. Their job is to oversee the universe and they like to talk to us, because they love is and they want to teach us the things they can. The egregore is contactable stupidly easily. You don’t need more then the calls and a tablet on paper to start getting a very powerful connection.
Explore and try and see what’s there instead of what I or anyone else says and makes you expect. But keep the context and mythological setting of the system in mind when doing so.
Actually, no, I'm not fixing the "unintentional hoax." Kelley did make some shit up and stage events to keep Dee interested, and Dee did smooth over inconsistencies. They both wanted to believe they were part of something cooler than they were, and they came up with a system that is meaningful and useful anyway.
ReplyDeleteIf people can't accept that, whatever. It's a big old universe, lots of room for everyone's opinions.
damn, wrong post.
ReplyDelete