Magus Dads

Hey all you dads, hope your Father's Day was awesome. I got to speak to most of my kiddos, and to my own Dad, and that was pretty great. We had "good speaks" as Harper likes to say. Connected, joyful, in-jokes, self-deprecation, the occasional ayyyyyyy, and terrible puns. It was awesome. I can die tomorrow and trust I did my part to make the world better JUST by having the kiddos I have.

But today I'm thinking about another thing.

Dads have a power we don't like to own, because it's scary as shit:

Every dad is a Magus... to their kids.

Every word we speak is a seed, and it falls on the most fertile of soils, and it stays with them for the rest of their lives. I hear my dad when I work on a car, or go fishing, or every time I screw up in life's projects because I forgot to ask, "What do I do before I do this?" But I also hear him telling me how proud he is when I do well, even if he doesn't even know what I'm up to. I got lucky like that.

I've talked to people a lot over the years about how they view the idea of "God" as a divinity, and as I've gotten to know them, I've learned that every one of them have an understanding of "God" that aligns 99.999% with their understanding of their fathers, in real life.

We shape reality with everything we do, as dads. We make the next wave of feminism with our choices with our daughters. We shape the politics of our nation by example. We lay out the framework of the next generation's experience of the Patriarchal Archetype of Divinity, just by playing shitty guitar to them when they're falling asleep, fighting the system for them when they're being wronged, believing them, listening, and loving them because they are awesome.

So dads, and father figures of any type, don't forget to be cool.

It matters.

Interview with John R. King IV, a.k.a. Imperial Arts

Below you'll find a link to an interview I did this weekend with John R. King, IV, also known on the internet as "Imperial Arts."

John and I go back about 20 years, and have had our share of shenanigans. When we met he was mostly a chaos magician, and then 20 years later when we ran into one another again, he was still sort of a chaos magician at heart, but he'd applied it to his life and his studies, as if the tenets of Chaos Magick were for real.

And it worked out really well for him.

While I disagree with a lot of his interpretations of systems, and practices, I really enjoyed talking to someone with his depth of devotion and practice. I think his real-life views on the spirit-conjure path we travel will challenge many people's opinions, and also demonstrate a thing about the people who Work with grimoires has been proven true across the course of interviews with people I've done lately:

In the end, whether we consider what we are doing to be "going by the book" or not, we all create our own system based on our experiences, and its effectiveness, regardless of the opinions of detractors, is only going to be determined by one person:

The Magician doing the Magick.

Also, whoever said I should get some music intro involved, it wasn't a lot of fun.

So without further ado, here's the interview:

We Do (and are planning to do more) Magick to Stop Things Like Orlando

Nine or ten paragraphs in, I get to the point, sorry, but there's reasons.

This post is about what is best for the good of humanity. TL;DR - What's good for humanity is Magick, the Great Work, Gnosis, Illumination, Enlightenment, and getting together as practitioners to remind ourselves that WE DO MAKE A DIFFERENCE.

And we're planning an event related to that. And it's not the royal we. So, on with the first things:

At a recent O.T.O. event, I got to hear Dr. David Shoemaker say something that has stuck with me. He was discussing the Guf-Nephesh-Ruach-Neschemah parts of the soul, and he was talking about the evolution of consciousness over time. Specifically, he said in a couple thousand years, we'll look back at the people of our time as savages who lived primarily from the Ruach instead of from the Neschemah in the same way as we today judge historic peoples who acted from the Nephesh and Guf as savages.

Our society shows records of when our laws and customs were Guf (or the physical body)-based, primarily; clan warfare for resources, marriage that treated the participants like property, laws based on preserving the property of dynasties that provided for the well-being of the bodies of the tribe, and the leaders of the tribe.

Then the concerns about the Nephesh took prominence, and it was not just property that mattered, but the affairs of the heart, the emotions, the feelings that became of value to society in the Romantic periods. Divorce became functional and useful, because the welfare of the body was more of a given as we evolved socially. Marriage became an expression of the feelings of the heart, and the emotional wellbeing and safety of the participants with the introduction of the prenuptual agreement.

Today we live in a world that values the Ruach, the intellect that analyzes and determines the value and worth of our choices rationally, recognizing the needs of the body, and of the heart, but also the consequences of pissing everything away on a poorly-thought-out emotional decision.

Sometimes, and mostly. There are pockets of hold-outs, and sometimes we still screw it up, because this is a practice, a process, not a science that works out the same way every time.

But one of these days we'll be a society that is founded on the principles and values that come from the Neschemah. We'll be operating from that image-of-god part of us, or that god-particle consciousness, or that Enlightened/Illuminated state, and we'll all still have struggles, but not these struggles.

Not people getting murdered because of what they choose to do with their genitalia.

The whole hetero-normative thing is a hold-out from the guf-consciousness. We had to pass on genes to the next generation, we had to have 6 kids to make sure 2 survived to replace us and maybe grow more of us a few hundred years ago. But the global body-consciousness is over that genetic track, and we've overpopulated, and are killing our environment in ways that will kill us all. So we have queer traits popping up to control our production of offspring. It's natural and biological, and normative behavior in most of the animals on the planet. When a species overproduces, we get fabulous gays to make up for it. It's normal Guf-stuff, really, but our culture hasn't caught up yet.

And in truth, every culture that has thrived has eventually developed a normative queer aspect to it, guys, so let's quit pretending it's unnatural, and start maybe just culling the folks with problems with this fact from the herd? I'm down for a three-strikes-and-you're-out law for homophobes, for the good of humanity.

And that is what this post is all about.

The good of humanity.

I got a ping from Tony Silvia, a Gnsotic friend who hosts Talk Gnosis regularly yesterday, asking what we can do as magicians to stop this shit. I was all "Mars, Saturn, The Lightning of Jupiter!" when I read it at first, but I stopped.

And thought a bit.

And realized STOPPING the shit that happened at the Pulse nightclub is exactly what we're trying to do on a global scale for all humanity.

Tony does it with Gnosticism.

I do it with Hermeticism, and the Ecllesia Gnostica Catholica, within the A.:A.: and O.T.O. It is the purpose of the Great Work of the Rosicrucian systems, it is the outcome of the production of the Philosopher's Stone. It is the Panacea to all ills that plague mankind upon the Earth.

The idea is that as we raise ourselves, all those we interact with have an opportunity to be raised with us. It's the same boon extended to the demons by some medieval magicians, as I am raised, so shalt thou be raised, or peace between us forever or whatever. It's the boddhisattva vow to not go on until everyone else gets it, to be the tutor until everyone manifesting is on the same page with the same short cuts as everyone else, no one left behind.

It's the compassion for everyone else who suffers brutality, and also for those who suffer being brutes.

We do magick to make the world better. For us, through us, by us, yes, but not just that. Our lives, we see eventually, are better when everyone else's lives are better. So we magick for them. We solve (Salve) their problems, and let their solutions coagulate around them. That's what we do as magicians. We Solve the problems.

Tony is working on an Event. It will be Sunday June 26th. It will be geared towards getting the planet's human population to kick things up a notch, and to be better to one another. To fix the things in us plural that result in us singular being total fucktards. Including, but not limited to the kind of things that unfolded in Orlando.

So whatever belief you are, whatever path you follow, if you think the world could use some enlightenment, a little illumination, join us on Sunday the 26th. I'll post the details of the rite I'll be doing, he's putting together more stuff.

Anyone else interested in throwing other hats in the ring with the same aim, by all means, let's do this.

Kick the world up a notch, get the rest of 'em to catch up and lap us, so we're trying to catch up with them, instead of getting them to catch up with us.

Do your part, magicians, to change this world a bit. Add some momentum to the evolution of the population.

Sunday.

June 26, 2016.

Illuminate the World.

An Interview with Jake Stratton-Kent

This afternoon, Jake Stratton-Kent and I got to touch base on a couple of different topics, including the role of integrating post-1899 magical practices into grimoire rituals, and the state of the Occult Revival as it stands today, and where it makes sense to see it end up in the future.

I really enjoyed speaking with him about the state of "occulture" today. Jake's been a constant source of inspiration, encouragement, and has consistently challenged modern occultists to look beyond the easy texts on magical practice to the latest and greatest resources we have to inform our practice, hone our skills, and become better at this thing we do.

Hekate: When the Gods Show Up with a Skeleton Key

Tl;DR Click here

A couple of weeks ago, Harper and I got to go down to Indianapolis to talk about the Seven Spheres and the art of conjuration and scrying in general. It was awesome good times.

A couple long-time friends showed up who had been former pupils, but have long since become co-workers in this world-manifestation project we're all participating in to various degrees, and it was so much fun to hang out with them, and shoot the shit.

I noticed right away that they were both sporting some obvious Skeleton Key bling, and over some delicious Greek (and later Indian) foods, we got to talking about what it represented. It turns out they are both part of Jason Miller's Strategic Sorcery class, and had opted into his Sorcery of Hekate class. The Skeleton Key was a symbol of their particular Workings at the moment, and I was like, cool, neat.

But then they started talking about what it was they were experiencing, mutually, in their relationship with Hekate. It wasn't long before the hairs on my arms were standing up, and I felt this harmonic resonance between the two of them. It was pretty incredible.

Both these guys are on top of their games, socially, economically, and spiritually. They know what they want, and how to get it. They aren't afraid of doing the magic that it takes to change the world as they see fit. When you run into magicians/sorcerors/whatever who are actively doing the lines of reality-shifting that we do, you recognize it, and it resonates.

And they seem to have found a key to opening things in this Hekate system Jason's pulled together.

Jason talks more about it in his blog posts, and even more about it in the Strategic Sorcery group. In short, his Work with Hekate over the years has resulted in the development of a seriously potent system of working with the powers that manifest and maintain the material and spiritual worlds we work with. It's got elements of Goetia (in the Chthonic sense), but also taps into the psycho-pompic aspects of this Goddess, and her influences at the crossroads.

Man, honestly, I can't even represent it well enough.

But Jason's just offered the course publicly again, after a long period of capping it for further development. It's a great time to get into the current, adopt, adapt, and implement a modern system of underworld/overworld interaction that creates a thing that you want to create.

And it's friggin' potent. Sitting across the table from these guys when they were talking about it, I felt wave after wave of power radiating from them that "spoke" to me at some deep levels. I couldn't wait to let y'all know what's up with this stuff.

So here's the link with full information and the way to join:

http://www.inominandum.com/blog/sorcery-of-hekate-7-month-course/

This is not your average magick 101 bullshit. This is the next level stuff that people who have done the boot camp, seen the front lines, risen through the ranks, and taken command of their own troops should be working with.

Power, prestige, and potency.