Mr. Cecchetelli's Latest

A long, long time ago, I worked in an organic new age grocery store produce department. Having lived and worked on an organic farm/hippy cult commune for a year qualified me in their eyes for the job. I know a lot about vegetables now as a result.

The employees tended to be into a lot of weird shit, and I fit right in. We'd be stocking the produce and talking about Eckankar and Soul Travel, or debating LSD vs. Ecstasy. There was an espresso and juice bar there too, so we'd do shots of wheatgrass and pound crowbars, and talk all kinds of weird shit, really quickly.

I worked with a guy named Zeus. His parents named him that. On purpose. I thought that was pretty cool, and hard to beat as far as having a bad-ass name from birth. And then they hired Abraxas.

Abraxas was an interesting fellow. His parents had named him after, he said, the God of Magic. My ears perked right up and I tried to have an occult discussion with him. I quickly learned that in spite of being named after the "God of Magic," he knew nothing about magick. He didn't know Peter Carrol, never heard of Robert Anton Wilson, Malaclypse the Younger, Anton LaVay, Donald Michael Kraig, Austin Spare, Israel Regardie, or Aleister Crowley.* 

So I started researching Abraxas, the God of Magic on my own. I hopped on Altavista, which seemed to have a lot more occult information than the other search engines of the day, and went to town. 

The first thing I thought I found was that it was misspelled. It was Abrasax. And while "God of Magic" is part of the story, it's not the whole story at all. I found myself reading gnostic texts, learning about the Archons and the Demiurge, Sophia and the Pleroma, and the role of Abrasax in different Gnostic sects. It was my first exposure to non-Christian mystical texts written in the first through third centuries, and it was mind boggling. I couldn't figure it out just by reading it, for the first time in my life. 

Mr. Cecchetelli, author of Crossed Keys,  has managed to wade his way through the morass and meet the God himself. He's been Working with him and writing up his next book, The Book of Abrasax. I can't wait for that one. It's going to be a really interesting read. My favorite parts of Crossed Keys were the personal anecdotes he provided. I love reading the experiences of other magicians doing magic, it confirms my own experiences, and I can pick up really neat little tips and tricks that other people have figured out. It helps refine my praxis.

Mr. C is now offering talismans based on his successful experiments with Abrasax. The talisman he's making provides both protection and prosperity. That's a brief summary, they do a lot more than that and he explains it in detail on his blog post. 

I happen to know the current of Jupiter Mr. C Works with regularly, and with that involved in the creation of any talisman that brings prosperity, I know these will be particularly powerful talismans, and I whole-heartedly encourage you to buy one for yourself. I rarely buy talismans, I prefer to make my own, but this is something I'm getting for myself as a treat. 

* This was in my Chaos Magick daze, and these authors were about the extent of my exposure to occult materials; I believed that Aleister Crowley's Book IV was the epitome of Western Magick, and that Peter Carroll had discovered the secret means to get around having to do all that Work to make your magick effective. It was the '90s, and I did a lot of drugs.