Review: Crossed Keys

Ok, since Conjureman Ali and Gordon posted their reviews, I figured I'd better get my ass in gear and post mine as well.

Judging the Cover

I think I got a better edition than Gordon did. Mine's covered in cloth, with the crossed keys imprinted on the cover in gold. You can see where the gold has rubbed off on my copy, but that was my own fault. I was looking at how they had printed the gold on the fabric, and I ran my thumb across it, flaking off the ink or paint. If you get the cool version, don't rub it!

See the little yellow ribbon poking out the bottom? That's right, it has a bookmark. Very cool. Mine is set to page 83 at the moment, where as Gordon noted, Michael mentions me.* The book is printed on good thick paper, using a heavy ink. Scarlet Imprint makes quality books, that's for damned sure. I'll need to read through it a lot to get it broken in.

Which won't be a problem, I assure you.

The Review

The introduction puts the reader in the perspective of the author, which I enjoy a great deal. I get more out of a book when I can identify with the author. Set and setting of the work reveal a lot about the nature of the Genius of the work, giving insight into the purpose behind the manifestation of an Idea.

Alright, so as you may know, Crossed Keys is two grimoires, the Black Dragon and the Enchiridion of Pope Leo III. These are the two Keys referenced in the title, and they are crossed because they are on the surface oppositional approaches to magical influence, one demonic, the other holy by Christian theology. They represent two ways of getting the same kinds of things that magicians are usually after, health and health maintenance, sex, and wealth, not necessarily in that order. And divine wisdom in various forms, but mostly to get stuff, to stay safe, and to feel secure in an unsafe world in spite of the many and brutal forms of death and suffering we face daily.

The Black Dragon

The Black Dragon is clearly laid out in this edition. You have everything you need to be able to establish a quick and ready access to the Demonic Kings of Hell.  Mr. Cecchetelli presents the information clearly and concisely. I love the anecdotes he provides, it's the best thing magician-authors can do for their readers to get a comprehension of the magic they're talking about. It makes the magic real, and sets the expectations of the readers so they know whether the results they're getting are typical or if they're failing. He doesn't exaggerate the results, and his experiences with the spirits is consistent with my own. I'm left knowing, as a magician who's worked with demons and angels, that Mr. Cecchetelli's experiences are real.

And, well, risky. It's demon magic. There's a risk. Be careful. This magic is intended for those who are magically mature, experienced, cautious, and wise. Don't do demon magic when you're scared, stressed, freaked out, or angry as hell. Don't do demon magic without giving proper constraints. Don't conjure up deadly entities without a circle of protection and the prescribed talismans that keep you safe, and you should be fine.

So did you hear me? I WARNED you. Demon magic is dangerous. Ok?

Good.

That said, this grimoire is fucking awesome. The Conjuration of the Book that it starts out with is great. There's a place for the Mark of the Spirit of the book. I can see it there, waiting for me to record it in the physical realm, waiting for me to conjure the spirit and go exploring the realms with it. Man. Tempting, I tell you, tempting as all hell. I'd like to see Scarlet Imprint publish this with another hundred or so blank lined papers to use in recording the images, names, seals, and characteristics of the other spirits you'll meet if you use this. The Black Dragon Spiritus Libri edition, bound in black leather embossed with the seals...

Heh.

The Enchiridion of Pope Leo III

As you may expect, I spent a lot more time going over this part of Crossed Keys in more detail than I did with the Black Dragon. Christian Hermetic Magician attending a Catholic Church, what? Yeah. That's me. This grimoire was made for me.

The Psalm magic is awesome. The Orison magic is awesome. The spirit names are fascinating, and I have their seals, and you can bet I'm going to be conjuring them. There's a handy quick and easy conjuration rite outlined too. I'll be including some Trithemian methods in my approach, but I'll go over it in detail as I go along. I'm really interested in a lot of the applications of the rites.

This grimoire has three sections, Psalm magic up front, the Orisons with a quick reference guide for what to use them for, and then a more detailed section on applications of the Orisons. Comprehensive instructions, and really good insights. It's just the kind of thing that I need to have on hand to get me thinking of new ways to do things. I'm loving it a lot. It's the kind of magic you need to know if you're going to be a magician. You should go through each of the Orisons some time and evaluate the purpose of each one. Ask yourself if you have a method of accomplishing the same goals, and if you don't, ask why not. I found out a lot in a few short hours that confirmed some of my practices, and encouraged me to pursue additional ones.

Conclusion

Altogether, Crossed Keys is definitely one of the best books I've read in a long, long time. I highly recommend it to everyone. There's something for all kinds of conjure magicians to be found. I wish all the grimoires were as easy to understand and came with the kinds of anecdotes he provides.

* Can I tell you how really good it feels to be mentioned like that? I mean, really really good. It's an honor, as they say, a weird sense of humbleness and pride at the same time. I may brag about it in the future.

Review: Second Person

Patrick Dunn, author of Postmodern Magic and Magic, Power, Language, Symbol: A Magicians's Exploration of Linguistics has recently announced that his first book of poetry, titled Second Person is available for pre-order. I have a great deal of respect for Mr. Dunn and his work, so I asked if I could get a sample for review.

I was looking forward to reading the poem he sent for a lot of reasons. He's a savant. I won't go into details, because he keeps his life private, but the man's a genius. He's a neoplatonist, and he knows what that means. He's a practicing magician, he's done magic and it's made his life better. He's got a postmodern philosophy, which I didn't understand before I met him and still barely grasp, but I appreciate his take on things. It meshes well with my own.

In his announcement about the availability of Second Person, Mr. Dunn says the work "concerns the mystical connection we have with our world as a “thou” rather than an “it.” It’s about not only the relationship between self and other, but between Self and Other."


In the work I've seen so far, this theme is presented subtly, nothing ostentatious or in your face, but implied, rather like the cover of the book. He's not heavy handed in his observations, but still the meaning comes through. 

The poem he sent was a scene out of many of our lives, the occultist contacted by the friend or acquaintance for a tarot card reading. I heard Mr. Dunn's voice as he spoke about the scene, as I heard his internal monologue as he related to his querent, and I heard her requests and understood what it was she was looking for. At the same time, I saw the part of Mr. Dunn who was also asking the same question as the querent as it pertained to his own life, expressing that universal need to know how we ended up where we did, what purpose it served, and why we aren't satisfied. I saw that he was reading himself as well as her in his observation, and in that moment saw that I was also being read.

I don't know how he did it. There's nothing in the poem that says, this is what this means and what it is all about. But there's a sense of knowing and being known that he captures well. He blends the line between observer and observed in many levels, not so much breaking the fourth wall as eliminating its relevance. I'm looking forward to reading the rest when my copy arrives.

To pre-order your copy, you click this link and scroll down to his book.

Update:

Mr. Dunn said I could post the poem he sent too, so here it is:

0=0

Secrets; Lost Knowledge; A Female Querent

Heather, your hair
was too black, your lips
too ready
to say that liquid word,
your body too young.

Books couldn't tell
you what the boys wanted
to hear, wanted to do.  And you
wanted the boys.

Wanted them to see
something rare in you, something
like an orchid unfolding in the steam.

Now you peck out messages to me, asking
if I have a tarot pack to read
where you went wrong, marrying
a good boy, having a fat baby.

How did you end up
here, unhappy still, with a good husband, a nice life?

This card is the Priestess.  It means everything
will be okay.  I promise.  Somehow, okay.

0=0

Spirits of Nature

Someone on FaceBook posted that they were writing some black magickal fiction short story, and it reminded me of Frabato the Magician, by Franz Bardon. An excellent story, though it reads like a Simon Iff story. I don't know why that minimalistic story telling style became so popular, but it's effective enough.

I was reading through it and came across the phrase, "the beings of nature are especially fond of the people who likewise feel close to nature." It immediately got me thinking of my youth, when I would go into the mountains of Colorado and hike trails and make friends with the local genii loci, without knowing that's what they were called.

I've always felt connected to nature. From the time I was a child, making mud soup in a five gallon bucket in my backyard, nature has spoken to me, called to me. I wandered in rural fields and sparse forests all my life, hiked trails and climbed granite walls, and more recently frolicked with the undines of the sea as they crashed against the shore. I had friends whose physical bodies were trees, colonies of insects, and streams that passed through counties and states I'd never visited. As I observed nature's processes, I'd hear a running narrative that sounded like a documentary, explaining what was going on and what it meant, how it all worked together in the ecosystem.

I never did anything to conjure these spirits, they were just sort of always there, at the periphery of my awareness. They still are. On the way home the other day, I was feeling stressed out and preoccupied with work on my commute home. I was at one of the last intersections before I reached my house, on a busy road lined with lots of trees to cut the traffic noise down for the residents with homes close to the road. I glanced up at the leaves on the trees, and a face formed, a great big laughing face. The spirits of the trees were getting my attention, sharing the joy they felt as the sun fell down on them and they swayed in their stationary dance in the wind.

I don't know how many other people have that kind of connection to nature. I like to feel special, so I pretend there aren't that many, but I suspect everyone has moments when they feel intimately connected to our spiritual brothers and sisters who incarnate in forms other than human. Our distant cousins who are as much a manifestation of the breath of God as we humans are.

Still, as Bardon says, I think the spirits of nature are especially fond of me, and people like me who take time to participate in that feeling of closeness to them. They are beautiful, and they seem to think we are too.

This evening I'm heading up to one of the highest waterfalls in our state. It's cut a stream through the granite hills (I've lived in Colorado, so I can't call them mountains) and there's a pool beneath the falls that is just deep enough to swim in. The falling water creates a cloud of negative ions that make people feel better. Crashing waves create the negative ions too, and you get a similar feeling of subdued awe and relaxed one-ness with the Earth on the beach. The falls are on a national park, and it's frequently filled with gatherings of teens, but the presence of the spirits of nature there are so thick, and the negative ions so calming that they behave themselves, carrying on conversations in hushed tones, playing diving games (there's a spot just deep enough to accommodate divers) and just having good old fashioned fun, without the cussing, fussing, and general angst they have everywhere else. While I'm there, I'll store up the negative ions in my bloodstream, and create a snapshot in my memory that I can return to in times of stress.

Before I leave, I'll collect some of the physical water, and make an offering to the spirits of place. I'll take the time to recognize and commune with them, as they have with me so many times before.

Hot and Cool in Magic

In a comment on Discussions on Y So Srs?, Girasol makes an interesting point about the hot and coolness of the magic that gets balanced in his experience in Palo. The magician does a lot of cooling Work leading up to the conjuration, then he does the hot magic, balancing out the heat ahead of time.

This is so very much in keeping with the grimoire instructions in the Key of Solomon that it isn't even funny. All that abstinence, the baths, the chanting of Psalms... It's got a really cooling effect on a person. You're not doing anything passionate leading up to the rite, except maybe some ecstatic mysticism that might get a little hot once in a while, but still in a cool way.

It got me thinking about my magic. I do a lot of cool magic. I do a little hot magic once in a while. When I do the Gates rites, it can be sort of in between, and influenced heavily by the heat or coolness of the planet I'm working with.

Agrippa gives the qualities of each of the planets in his lists of attributes. I wondered why that was necessary, before, but it makes sense. I tend to stay on the cool side of things in my practices, and it's been more intuitive, a quiet understanding of what needed to be done to achieve specific goals of ... uhm, stability in my life after a prolonged period of doing rather more hot magic in comparison.

You know how people talk about putting cayenne pepper in their spirit pot to heat up the spirit and make it more active? I've talked about it. I did it a few times with Bune. It seemed to give him the fuel to get things to happen more quickly and actively in my life. I put in a dash before my house burned down and I got that money I wanted from him, in fact.

That's called a coincidence.

No really.

Ok, whatever, think what you want.*

Anyway, think about how hot your life is before you start adding heat and hot magic to it. Maybe you can think strategically about fighting fire with fire, put out a financial crisis with some active new customer production magic or something like that, but in general, hot magic provides the Alchemical Heat of the Great Work in addition to everything else you're going through. Heat purifies by melting the good stuff so it flows together and burning away everything else that's of lesser grade.

Sound pleasant to go through when you're already stressed about something in your life? Cause that's what's likely to happen.

Strategize. Strategitate. Achieve strategizm. Think. Think about balance. Perfect balance is perfect stagnation, in my opinion, but if you go too far away from it, you'd better hang on for dear life, cause things are going to get rocky. I try to stay as close to balance as possible, without getting things too stagnant.

Cool magic leads you inwards and upwards. Contemplation about your place in the cosmos, ascending through the spheres, spending time in Mercury, and dipping your toes in Saturn once in a while are good ways to keep cool. Magitate. Keep calm, and re-lax. Aim for balance.

* You're probably right.

Discussions on Y so Srs

Ok, so comments on Y so Srs? have provided good feedback that I think should get more traffic than they'll see if they stay in the comments section. I've pulled together the highlights to give the audience members who only read the posts a chance to see that there's more going on than just what gets posted. And to give advice from others in case my ignorance is more dangerous than I think.

First, I might be totally wrong in all this. One indicator is that someone said I was "in line with Bertiaux's ideas."

Twitch.

But besides that, I've been thinking about my approach to danger, too. I've been through some traumatic stuff as part of my explorations and experimentations, and I'm a bit jaded. Maybe, just maybe, the shit I had to deal with would have been avoided if I'd received proper instruction. Maybe the danger I see as a normal risk of magic isn't really normal.

But I have kind of a mad scientist aesthetic to my Work. Sometimes the whole lab blows up when Igor flips the switch. It's sort of where we're at in this process of revitalizing the Western traditions. As Aaron Letich says in the comments:

Western occultism is currently undergoing a new kind of renaissance. We've come down off our "my mysticism is holier than thine" attitude and are finally saying "Ok, we've wasted centuries, so let's start doing this right!"

Are we going to make mistakes? You bet! Some of us will burn our houses down. Some of us will have our heads eaten by the spirits we try to keep. And you know what? That's just how you ATR folks learned to do it thousands of years ago (and still do today!) - trial and error. Eventually you got it right and developed a sophisticated tradition with full community support.

And there's a lot that I don't know, too. Conjureman Ali points out the following fascinating stuff that I really wish I understood better:

I must disagree with your speculation on the nfumbe of the Palero. The spirit that is placed within the Prenda goes through a nigromantic process that produces a powerful spirit that is akin to a non-blood ancestor, imbued with the power of the Rada and becomes a powerful force of magic and guidance. It is more similar to a HGA then the resltess dead.

So with that useful feedback, I'm going to go back and do some more research. Based on what I know about the HGA and the Supernatural Assistant of the grimoires and the Greek Magical Papyri, I have a better understanding, but I'm sure there's more to it that I'm missing.

And getting back to the subject of danger, Jason's comments about how there's danger, and then there's danger helped me understand what he was getting at:

Dispelling the dead who have been sent in a curse IS a fairly easy task. Dispelling the dead who have been sent in a curse where graveyard dirt has been planted on the victims person and home, and items from that victims person and home have been planted in said grave is more complicated. (BTW definitely don't do that. Unless you really don't like someone.)

Dispelling the dead who have been bound and chained into a pot and a persons life, in a mini universe overseen by a Nzambi, and given a full on superhero like transformation, not to mention their own familiar spirits (there is for instance almost always a dogs bones in the Nganga for hunting down targets) is a REALLY BIG DEAL.

Furthermore in some ways the victim of such a spirit would be LUCKY to have their house burn down. That is a huge wake up call. Most of the time it is slow and insidious and takes the health and persona in a long and twisted fasion that is obvious to everyone BUT the person they are doing it to.

So playing with the dead can be more dangerous than your average magic, and you should be careful.

And finally, there's Dhr. Balthazar's comment from this morning:

Well, it's not that all the dead themselves are necessarily outright dangerous by their very nature, R.O. Nonetheless, the way in which you work with them can get very dangerous. Our discussion was about putting together muerto pots, and as I have been saying, this is something that requires for special care to be taken.

Generally speaking, the dead are a specialised area.

Which is why in the diaspora and in Africa you often tend to find a class of specialists who work with them alone, or in separated sub-system, even though there are other spirits or deities whom are the focus of the religion, such as the Orisa.

In Cuba you might say these are the paleros and more broadly the muerteros/espiritistas. Whilst the Santeros take care of the Orisa. Although, most santeros are also muerteros out of necessity because of what happened in the Diaspora during slavery. However, in addition there are other entirely separate priesthoods for the Egungun (ancestral dead) and the deified force of death, Iku, specifically. One of my godparents is an initiate in this kind of priesthood, for instance.

Similarly, in South Africa you have Nyanga and Sangoma - the Sangoma specialises in the ancestor spirits, while the Nyanga on the other hand is a general magical worker with a focus on herbal magic and medicine.

What I am saying is that in many of these traditions the dead are their own kettle of fish entirely. They are worked separately and in an entirely different way. They tend to have their own set of rules and taboos even though they are almost always considered the corner stone or foundation of the ATR systems. In certain sense you are basically working with the principal of death which, you know, is kinda a big deal if you think about it a bit.

And he's right. I don't specialize in the dead. To me, necromancy is a part of the overall Hermetic Great Work, but not the entirety of the thing. In my practice, knowing how to commune with the dead is enough for my creative work with them, and knowing how to help them out the door when they've overstayed their welcome is the rest of it.

If you want to work the Dead through a spirit pot, you can experiment and take the risks involved, or hold off until you have someone you know and trust who can teach you and be there to clean up any messes you might make of things.