Color and Vault study 2000 (Part Eight) Jupiter Wall

This is part of a study of the color scales and the Vault of the Adepts that was done in 2000. It was not the world's best study, nor is it the best scan on earth. This is the Jupiter Wall of the Vault. Original is drawn in color pencil on the back of a large index card, and is part of my personal baseline (however wrong that is).

Occult price index

I was just reading a blog (Luke Sidewalker) and realized that I do not remember the last time that someone mentioned the consumer price index on the news. Sidewalker, whose blog is mainly about picking up loose change, is starting a new monthly feature on his blog where he tracks the price changes of twenty items. He feels that this is a better indicator of inflation/deflation than using car and housing prices.

For those who took economics, this is a "price index" and the set of items that is tracked every month is referred to as a "basket". (Yes, I took a couple of economics classes over the past couple of years.)

Reading his list, and the suggestions of his readers, I realized not only do I gauge the state of the economy like this, but I have some weird things in my basket. Besides the normal milk, eggs, bread, cat food and printer ink, I also have occult books, candles and incense that I also buy on a regular basis.

I know that I am using them in my own personal index, besides complaining about the rising cost of cat food all summer, I think everyone has heard my complaints about the rising costs of occult books.

But it made me wonder what type of things would end up in a basket for an occult price index. What types of things do all occultists pay for on a regular basis? Incense? Candles? Tarot decks? Lodge dues? Virgin chickens?

The world may never know.

Who is my audience?

Lately, I have been kicking around the question of who is my audience. A little bit more than I normally do.

Part of it is the fact that I am starting another semester of writing for Campus Connections, the student newspaper of the Community College of Denver. And we just switched editors, so it is time to refocus what the paper aims for.

Now, a lot of this refocus for me is cleaning up my astrology column based on what I learned last year. But some of it is simply trying to figure out who reads the college newspaper in the first place. Outside of myself and a couple of friends I do not know anyone who reads Campus Connections. (And I read anything, especially if I am bored, so I am not a typically reader. Plus I am a non-traditional student.)

But the question extends past the newspaper. Who exactly is reading my stuff?

I think the high point of pondering the mystery of my audience came recently when I was writing an article on money spells to post on Associated Content. Should I aim for people who know something about magic and money spells (why are they reading AC if they already know something) or should I aim for everyone who does not know the first thing about magic?

In the end, I tossed another item on the stack of beginner's material, doing just a simple money spell that in theory anyone can do. It boiled down to a pageview answer. I just don't think that there are that many advanced people out there to justify writing something complicated (I could be wrong).

What I would really like to see is a market study of the pagan/wiccan/ceremonial magic readership. One that does not rely solely on guessing the audience profile based on the number of books sold (if you go just by the numbers, only beginner pagan/wiccan and new age books and articles should be written). But I am betting that if such a study existed, it would be a trade secret. Alas, I can dream.

Affliation and bias

Recently, I was reading a post on the Golden Dawn Forum from someone involved in setting up a Golden Dawn group in Massachusetts. They want an unbiased explaination about the differences between the various branches of the Golden Dawn system.

They are not going to get one.

It is impossible to know the differences between the various branches of the system and not have a bias. If you have an association with a branch of the system, you are biased. If you are not affliated with a branch, but can percieve differences between them, you have a bias.

The reason that they want an unbiased opinion is so they can figure out what branch to associate with; they did not state that they wanted an affliation, but I suspect that they feel that they must have a connection to one of the existing branches of the system to be legitimate.

Now everyone who knows me knows my personal bias.

I feel that a group should actually start out without an affliation. Each Golden Dawn group (lodge) is different. Each group has their own working style. Each group has their own way of dealing with the hierarchy and administrative side of things.

And often, when left to their own devices, a group doing the work (working the system) will discover that they are happier not answering to anyone else. Or at the very least, that their opinions of the right way of doing things does not match any existing group.

Charters, Warrents and Affliations (Associations) come with rules. One should know what makes them happy before burdening oneself with a bunch of rules.

That is my opinion.

If a group decides after a couple of years of work that they want to affliate with one of the Big Name Orders, or even one of the smaller ones, then at that point they should feel free to do so. At least then, they will have a benchmark to compare the advantage (if any) of belonging to a Grand Lodge.

Color and Vault study 2000 (Part Seven) Side of Pastos

This is part of a study of the color scales and the Vault of the Adepts that was done in 2000. It was not the world's best study, nor is it the best scan on earth. This is one of the sides of the Pastos which contains the image of the founder of the RC Brotherhood. Original is drawn in color pencil on the back of a large index card, and is part of my personal baseline (however wrong that is).

Posted the last two astrology articles

Yesterday, I finally got around to posting the last two astrology articles I wrote last semester for Campus Connections, the student newspaper of the Community College of Denver. Outside of these, I only have one article left that I plan on posting on the web; and it is a Halloween themed one, so I am going to wait until October to republish it.

(There were a couple of other articles I wrote for the paper; but they are either really bad or very narrow audience, so I am not going to republish them.)

I definitely wanted to post these last two before I started reprinting the ones that I am going to be writing this year for the student newspaper.

One of the reasons that I have been at so many of the staff meetings for the paper is that I wanted some format changes in the way I was doing the astrology column. That and the little fact that I have already seen the schedule for the writers' meeting, and I am in class during them: hence I am going to miss a lot of meetings this semester.

The biggest format change that is going to happen is that I am no longer going to be writing an introduction (editorial) section for the astrology column: just the sun signs are being read according to my informal reader survey. There were other changes, but they were all print media related.

If anyone is curious, the last two articles were about pet peeves of college students and a sun sign career guide.

Geocities is closing

Geocities is closing in October and honestly I could care less, both as a writer and as the webmaster of my lodge.

There is the option of transferring the pages to Yahoo webhosting for eight dollars a month (a whole year at a time). But the lodge related pages never got any traffic, nor did my pages as a writer. That is why I quit adding pages to both sites.

No traffic=massive waste of time and energy.

I can find the geocities pages on a search engine, but only because I know what words to search with. No one ever finds these pages unless they are purposely looking for them.

And I have no idea why anyone linked to them (a couple of people did for some reason beyond my ability to reason out), despite the fact that my blogs right here on Blogger (or at least two of them) and the Bast Temple website (done with Microsoft Office Live) were better examples of the work being done by me and the lodge.

So let us wave goodby to geocities; I am sure not going to miss them.