I'm going to Crucible... and they're letting me speak!

Hey y'all! Happy Friday!

I'm going to be speaking at this year's Crucible in Princeton New Jersey. Jason tried to get me to submit something to them earlier this year, but I got all distracted and forgot until a month or two ago, and they had already filled all their slots by the time I got back to them. And I felt very stupid.

But then, conveniently, someone had something come up and they asked if I could fill in for them. "Hell yeah!" sez I. I'm all over that. I get 90 minutes of talk time. And there will be projectors and white boards. I can geek out to the max.

I'm in slot 6A, and I'll be doing a lecture on "Applied Hermetics: Conjuring a Better Tomorrow." I couldn't think of a better title. I wanted to call it "Applied Hermetics: Making the World your Bitch," but that's sort of disingenuous.

The overall theme is going to be the true business of the Hermetic Magician, specifically, the creation of the World. I figured no one's going to want to sit still for 90 minutes straight, so I broke it into two parts, and I'm aiming to keep each part around 40 minutes with a 10 minute break in between.

In part one, we'll be going over how we get the skills and power to rule as god-emperor of our world, the role of the Holy Guardian Angel/Supernatural Assistant, initiation into the Spheres, and a quick overview of the Great Work as seen through the lens of traditional Hermetics.

After the break, we'll move on to part two, putting it into practice. This is where we get into the nitty gritty of hands on magical manifestation of a better world. We'll cover the kinds of rites we need to do, and go into a little more detail about the actual process of creating the world we experience using a lot of stuff from the Gates series of Rites. By the end of the lecture, you'll be all set to take your rightful place as the Crowned Creation/Creator. At least, you'll know what you need to do.

So get your shit together and show up, goddamn it.

Oh, Christians!

The role of the Christian in the world, according to the bible, is to love god, to be kind, and to share the gospel. Do that, and you'll fulfill all the commandments. 

The Gospel is this: Jesus died for your sins and you're forgiven. That means you can sit down with God and talk to him. You can talk about your life and find out what your purpose is for being here. You can know and be known by your Source. There's nothing separating you. You don't have to be good and nice and kind to hang out with God, all that sin or bad behavior is not a barrier between you anymore. God can be a friend, like he was with Adam, and Moses.

That's what Christians are here to do. They aren't here to push the gospel on anyone, or to convert anyone. The Holy Spirit does that when you speak the gospel, if it needs to be done. You don't tell people what to do.

And Christians aren't here to run for political office. They aren't here to establish the Law of Moses as the Law of the Land. They aren't here to picket abortion clinics. They aren't here to deny gay couples the right to marriage. They aren't here to meddle in the things of the world.

Christians who do more than Love God, Love their Neighbor, and Speak the Gospel are exceeding their mandate, giving in to their evil natures, trying to dominate and control the world so we're safe, when god says to depend on him for our safety, not politics, not police, not the military. He places the government in place, and Christians are told to pray for the leaders of the land, not against them, and certainly not to try to become them.

If you're a Christian, read this and remember, God wants you, to spend time with you. Let the world go to hell if that's what it wants to do, God is in control. Pray for our fellow Christians to change their hearts and return to God. Pray for this message to spread through the Body of Christ like a prairie wildfire.

If you're not a Christian, please try to remind Christians that this is all they're supposed to be doing. They've been lied to, coerced by evil men, and they'll argue and fight with you at first. Sorry about that.

Again.

In the Mask of Zorro, there's a scene where Anthony Hopkins (Diego) is training Antonio Banderas (Allejandro) in sword fighting. Throughout the scene, as Allejandro gets better and better, Hopkins keeps saying, "Again!"

I tried to find the scene I'm talking about, but I could only find it in Czechoslovakian.

But anyway, that training scene is cool. Gaining proficiency in magic is a lot like that, a process of mistakes and gradual improvements, each time you get it right the universe hits you with "Again!" It takes practice to get good at it.

The first money spells I did were abysmal failures. I tried Jupiter, and had no success. The opposite of success, which is not failure, but actual regression. I tried Bune to win the lottery (cliche, I know), and failed. I changed my approach with him and found success, and failure. I tried the Solar Heptameron Angels, and failed, miserably. I haven't went back and tried them again since. I tried Och of the Olympik spirits, and had some success, and some failure. I tried Jupiter again, this time with some experience under my belt, and found bountiful success. I tried Mercury and found another kind of success. I put Jupiter and Mercury together and found still yet more kinds of success.

These days, I've got the knack of it. I have everything I need, and then some. I'm working on increasing that, too, aiming for an impossible goal by dividing the process into steps, and magicing each step to be a great success. Building my way up to the million dollar idea. Strategically.

And it's working.

But I wouldn't be able to enchant for success without having tried, again and again. I failed and was told Again! I succeeded and was told, "Again!" Each time I learned something new, learned the things that had to be in place to ease the transition from idea and thought to actual experience, learned how the forces manifest, learned how to apply them in ways that are better and more successful.

Magic doesn't always work. I mean, it always does something, but not always what you want or expect. That's because we don't know shit about shit going into this. Words don't convey the process adequately, and a lot of the people writing when my generation of magicians were learning were talking out their collective asses about things they hadn't experienced, advanced concepts of a system they had never been initiated into.

These days we've got magicians doing the magic and posting the results, and it's a beautiful thing. But still, my words can't convey the experience that brings skill. I can tell you about it, but I cna't make you feel it. Book smarts aren't hands-on smarts.

Do the magic, do it and fail, and do it again. Steps towards the goal. You can't change the world with your magic until you learn how to use your magic, and you can't do that reading about it.

I'm right, and you're wrong. And hammers.

The HGA conversation is making me think about ideas and interpretations of occult truth in general.

I'm a neoplatonist. I know that the things we experience are material reflections of the Idea. I know we are never going to experience every way the Idea can manifest in reality.

Hammers, for instance. The idea embodied by a physical hammer is not limited in manifestation to the things that I, or any person might happen to experience. A carpenter may never experience a claw hammer as a magical tool of banishing, or a magical tool used to shape a talisman the way I do, and I may never use a hammer to hang cabinets.*

I hope that's a clear analogy. I mean, I'll experience the hammer in every way that is appropriate to my context, to the situations I find myself in, and still not ever use it in every way it manifests for everyone else.

But that doesn't mean my interpretation of the manifestation of hammers is wrong. Different, not wrong. There's enough room in the universe for all the ways hammers will manifest to people in whatever situations they find themselves in. One person may never experience a hammer in exactly the same way as anyone else, not entirely. There are some hammers that I hold that make me feel like my dad. You know?

Subjective interpretations and personal experiences define the things we experience in unique ways.

But of course, all hammers are still hammers. There's an objective truth that is a hammer regardless of how it manifests in people individual lives. Hammers aren't scalpels, and brain surgery with one doesn't result in the same experience as brain surgery with the other. Even if it does get rid of the cancer either way.

When it comes to things like the HGA, or where our power as magicians come from, or how many heavens there "are," or how many teeth line the maw of Cthulhu, or how many Assistants any magician really needs, we can all be "right" in our context, in our experiences without it making anyone else "wrong" in theirs. Ultimately, we can only speak for ourselves, and even then the words barely suffice.

*If Jesus really loves me.

the thing about the HGA...

The HGA conversation rolls on, as it always has, and always will. I'm hesitant to continue to throw my cents in the pot, and hesitant not to as well. The discussion is heading the way it usually does, interpretations offered, categorizations of others' experiences are being made, and comments about the veracity of those experiences are being bandied about.

And now we have what looks like someone (John, I'm looking at you) thinking of conjuring their Evil Genius from Agrippa's third book, chapter 26 to serve as their chthonic version of the HGA.

And it might even work, who fucking knows?

You see? It gets complicated.

For me, the SA/HGA I work with is sufficient. It's a spirit with supercelestial, celestial, terrestrial, and chthonic attributes. It functions well across the spectrum of experiential existence. Some folks will doubt my experiences, others will validate them, and in the end, it doesn't matter for shit.

My biggest concern at this point is that all the conversation and words and terms and definitions will rob people of the actual experience of the spirit. It's happened before. I think it's a waste of time.

Figure out which spirit (or which interpretation of the spirit) you want to work with, and do it. That's all that matters. Onward and upward. Or inward. Or whatever.

Do magic. Be happy.