The Value of the Corpus Hermeticum to Hermetic Magicianss

With the GD posts, I've expanded my audience a bit. I got a message on facebook from someone who liked the post encouraging magicians to do magic (I'm being nice about what I actually said), and during the course of the conversation, I was reminded how little about actual Hermetic Magic the Golden Dawn teaches.

Don't get me wrong, you learn a lot of magic in the GD. All kinds of rites and rituals with cool anagrams, and they're all fundamentally founded on Hermetic principles. But you're not encouraged to actually read the source material for these basic principles, and you can't understand what you're doing without that key piece of info.

All the rites and rituals you learn in the Golden Dawn are based on some very old Hermetic tenets, practices designed to accomplish the Hermetic Great Work, taking you from the Black Phase of alchemy all the way through to the Projection Phase, where you're using the Philosopher's Stone to accomplish miracles and make the world a better place. The basic process is laid out in The Emerald Tablet of Hermes (yep, Hermes), and the Corpus Hermeticum.

But the core material gives you the fundamental framework you need to really understand what you're up to.

And really, you should understand the basics of Neo-Platonism to really grok the Corpus Hermeticum, but start with the Corpus, then go back to the NeoPlatonic basics.

I've actually written a handy guide to the Neoplatonic Basics, and I explain how the Corpus Hermeticum makes sense from there. You should read the posts, or you can read the eBook. The posts are on my blog, but you have to scroll all the way to the bottom to see the first post, then work your way up. The eBook is easier. It's all free.

If you read through the entire Corpus Hermeticum, you'll be reading the oldest documents your Order can claim. There's frequent kerfuffle about documents in your Orders, so I would think these would be pretty important to not only read, but actually understand. They were written sometime between the first and third centuries after Christ, long before the Kircher model of the Tree of Life was made, long before the Tarot card images were formed, reduced to the number of letters of the alephbeit and pasted to the paths of that Kircher model of the Tree. If you actually read through them, you'll know more about the Hermetic path to ascension and becoming a living, breathing god than most of the Outer Heads of the various GD and GD-based Orders available today.

But we only have fragments of most of the Corpus Hermeticum. The most complete chapter, and coincidentally the most important and useful for beginners, is the Divine Pymander. Read it. Read it today. Don't put it off, it's got every Secret of the Golden Dawn magical system laid out pure and simple for anyone to understand, and it's really beautiful.

After you've finished that, move on to The Emerald Tablet of Hermes. Remember what Pymander says the path to returning to the Source is, and read it as if it's an instruction manual, and a description of what you're supposed to be doing as a magician.

Read through this stuff, and note the lack of QBL involved. Despite what you've been taught, early Hermeticists had little to do with KBL. The integration of the systems came much later, around the time of DeLeon. Back in the Hermeticist's day, the KBL available anywhere outside the kibbutz was at BEST the Sefer Yetzirah. Hermeticists used Hebrew names of God, but it tended to look like it was copy-pasted in without any real regard to the source. Sort of like the worst of the early 90's Neo-Pagan descriptions of the "Celtic" gods and goddesses.

Once you've read through that stuff, and it really doesn't take that long, you should move on to Agrippa. REally read the stuff he has to say about magic, and the practice thereof. Keeping in mind the Hermetic Cosmology, study the Scales of the Numbers, especially the Number Ten. By the time Agrippa was writing, QBL and Hermetic magic had been pretty firmly wed together, so you'll recognize a lot of the stuff in there. Book 3 will seem most familiar to you, as it deals directly with Ceremonial Magic, but the first two books explain the framework a lot better.

Pace yourself, no one reads Agrippa through in a day. It's good bathroom reading material.

Once you start wading through the source material, a lot of what you're doing in the GD will begin to make a lot more sense. You may also find that a lot of what you're doing does not make sense in a Hermetic context at all.

If you find yourself wondering why the heck you're going through all the stuff of the GD, when the Hermetic Texts make the GD system look like a Rube Goldberg device with 100 extra steps just to make toast, you may find my courses in Hermetic Magic right up your alley. It's a straight shot through to whatever Grade in the GD establishes you as a living, breathing god, without all the drama. It's self-led, but there are forums for discussion available.

Please note, the courses are still in progress, years after I started them. There's a LOT of information to write up. Currently, about 90% of the Black Work course is complete, 95% of the White Work course is complete, and the Green Work... Well, it's in process, but it comes with all seven of the Gates Rites, which will let you get to work on the Green phase of the alchemical process.

I'm not trying to get you out of the Golden Dawn with any of this. The GD makes a lot of people happy, and provides them with the tools they need. Reading the Corpus Hermeticum and the Emerald Tablet will only add to your overall understanding of Great Work.

Battening Down the Hatches: Next Mercury Retro, I'll be Ready

So apparently I've bored one of my favorite audience participants with all the GD stuff. I understand, believe me. He reminded me to get back to the regularly programming.

Sigh. Regularly scheduled programming.

In the last month and a half, I've written twenty-five posts that didn't get published. Twenty-five. They're mostly Post Titles with an opening paragraph or two. Topics running the gamut from Black Magic and the Kings of Hell to health rites and Hermetic interpretations of chakra meditations. Quite a few were inspired by the Whisky Rants.

I just never got around to finishing them. I lost the inspiration, or got distracted. Mostly I haven't had time when I had the mental capacity, or the mental capacity when I had the time. At least part of that was influenced by Mercury Retrograde.

Before the comments come flooding in about Warnock and LaFonde's excellent efforts at reeducation, let me just say I know, I know, Mercury Retrograde isn't as bad as a lot of modern astrologers make it out to be, but that doesn't mean it doesn't have any negative effect at all on the things it rules. It's not teh end of teh worldz! every time we go through one of the Mercury Retros, but they do seem to impact me and my Work a lot if I don't do some kind of preparations ahead of time.

See, I see astrological influences on my life and magical practices the same way I see weather conditions and their effects on my daily activities in the mundane world. When it's rainy, you don't just stay in bed (most of the time), you take an umbrella and a coat, and you run through the worst of it on your way someplace dry.

Mercury Retrogrades are like hurricane season here in Maryland. Usually you get heavy winds and a fair amount of rain off and on throughout the season, and then every once in a while there's a really bad storm that comes blowing through with varying degrees of impact on your life. The degree of the impact of any given hurricane during the season depends on where you live.

The closer you live to the ocean, the more work you do at the start of hurricane season to prepare your homestead for the coming storms. You have to make sure your sump pump works and your drainage is set up right. You clear out dead tree limbs, and make sure your roof isn't going to blow away. You make sure you've got water, toilet paper, milk, bread, eggs, and lots of ice packs and a cooler handy to keep the cool stuff cool until the power comes back on.

I'm a Hermetic Magician. Hermetic means based on Hermes, specifically Hermes Trismegistus, but let's not forget Hermes is also Mercury.

So in other words, my sphere is beach front property when it comes to Mercury Retrogrades. A squall coming in that does little or no damage to the folks further inland can cause major flooding and power outages for extended periods of time in my sphere.

There are things I like to do in advance to get ready. While he's still Direct and hasn't started slowing down, I perform a reconsecration of my Mercury Talisman. It's the metal seal I use to conjure Raphael on my Magic Conjuration Box.

I perform the reconsecration ritual I outline in the Talisman Maintenance and Operations Manual, and ask Raphael to get my sphere ready to make it through the retro season with minimal damages, and to respond quickly and readily to my calls. I anoint the talisman during the rite with Aurora's Mojo Hand Feeding Oil, Abramelin Oil, and some Fast Luck Oil I picked up at the Turning Wheel.

I'm usually also cycling through the Gates Rites. I haven't been keeping up with it lately, and I can sure tell the difference. I feel uninspired, and powerless when I'm not doing regular maintenance magic on my sphere. It sucks. But running through the Gate of Mercury would have been a good idea.

The ideal result of this is that you strengthen your personal harmonic with the Direct forces of Mercury, and then when things start going haywire, you've got a pool of normal Mercury resources to draw from. It's like stocking up on milk and eggs a couple days before the storm is scheduled to hit.

This last retro period, I did none of these things. I could feel the difference, too. I'll be ready come next retro, though. I've got it scheduled in my google calendar, with a reminder set to go off the week before the night of the rite so I'll have time to check my supplies and make sure I'm ready to go.

The Secret Chiefs

Ok, so the last GD post was, admittedly, a little ... aggressive. The animosity comes entirely from my understanding of the Secret Chiefs of the Golden Dawn.

See, I read The Secret Doctrine, and I thought the Chiefs that were being debunked by Nick and company, and the Secret Chiefs that David and company claim to have met were the Secret Chiefs who are supposed to be the Shepherds and Stewards of the spiritual evolution of the entire Western Civilization.

Turns out I was totally wrong-o.

So, if the GD is NOT, in fact, claiming they are the best of the best, the ideal Rosicrucians, and the outer face of the Secret Chiefs who are supposed to be overseeing and shepherding us all from a place of omniscient omnipotence, then they can have their Magician Cards back.

If they're willing to admit they're a bunch of Hermetic philosophers with some neat magical tech Working on becoming the best godmen they can be, and not the Gatekeepers of the True Mysteries of the ENTIRE Western Occult Tradition, then good on 'em. There's a big difference between "We have SOME awesome Western Hermetic Magic(k) going on over here" and "We have the ONLY TRUE awesome Western Hermetic Magic(k) ever."

The way I see it now, both sides are presenting realistic versions of what the Secret Chiefs are really all about based on their own understanding. They've got a lot more in common than I thought, and they could probably hash out all their differences over a beer or twelve, if they wanted to.

And for the rest of the Occult Community, please note that the Secret Chiefs are not omniscient omnipotent awesome advanced spiritual adepts with wisdom and power galore. They are just people, in the flesh, with a magical tradition going back to the first through third centuries, just like anyone else with an internet connection. They've got tech that's unpublished, but it's not completely different than anything you can find with careful applied studies of the publicly available source material (the stuff from the first through third centuries, not the GD stuff that's publicly available). They've got an initiatory structure, they're a Secret Society, ok, but they put their pants on one leg at a time just like everyone else.

I'd still like to see Nick and David face off with wands drawn at high noon, last magician standing wins. I'd stand proud next to the winner. But neither side is interested in nuking anyone to prove a point to me. Except Fr. VL, who is a real magician.

In other news...

In other news, today's the last day for the Strategic Sorcery charity drive. If you haven't donated, you should. There's no better form of prosperity magic than charity.

An Open Letter to the Golden Dawn

Clean your fucking house, you fucking morons. You're supposed to be the fucking MASTERS of the Western Occult Tradition, and you can't even handle your fucking shit.

YOU ARE AS A WHOLE THE MOST PATHETIC MAGICIANS I'VE EVER FUCKING SEEN.

Wait, did I say Magicians? Fuck that. Your magician card is fucking revoked.