Happy birthday Cthulhu

It is Cthulhu's birthday. Or at least, the anniversary of his first public appearance.

Cthulhu de Willendorf (MDE 2016)

While H. P. Lovecraft wrote The Call of Cthulhu in the summer of 1926, it wasn't until February 1st, 1928 that Weird Tales published the story.

Weird Tales--February 1928

Due to this little fact, some esoteric astrologers working with the mythos use this date as Cthulhu birthday when calculating certain figures.

[Shameless plug: You can buy a print of my Cthulhu de Willendorf on DeviantArt.]

Treating the rituals of Golden Dawn as a literary text

(Please remember that one of my majors in college was literature while you are reading this. I wrote this as comment in a Facebook discussion on associating the officers of Golden Dawn with various Tarot cards, and believe that some of my readers might be interested in this comment, even if they do not belong to that FB group.)

I think that a lot of the layers in the GD rituals are hardwired into the system by the Cipher Manuscript and the basic set of assumptions that eventually find their expression in the original Z documents. It does not matter if you use the Spirit model or the Psychological model or whatever other model you want. The Cipher Manuscript, the ritual scripts, and the Z documents are a piece of literature, and it can be analyzed though the lens of literary studies.

The Cipher Manuscript associates the Tarot with planets and deities. Once you bring in the idea that the officers, and other forces (places of potent power on the floor of the lodge) are associated with deities (in the form of god-forms), it is natural to make the link between the officers and invisible stations to the Tarot (though the planets and deities).

This linkage creates a situation that once the idea is put forth that (for instance) the Hierophant is the Sun, that we will also associate the Sun card with the office. Furthermore, it opens up the box that says the other six officers who move in the Neophyte ritual are associated with the other six classical planets, and their associated Tarot cards.

Because the creator of the Cipher Manuscript did this type of linkage, and the first generation of GD initiates read this type of linkage into the system, following generations have discovered that though a process much like literary analysis that they can puzzle out more linkages that have always been present, but invisible upon first reading of the text of the rituals. (Note that a performance of a ritual is a reading of the text, much like the performance of a Shakespeare play is a reading of the text of that play.)

What students of the system, such as Jack Taylor, Pat Zalewski, and myself, are doing is merely exposing the implications of what the original authors of the text (Cipher, ritual, Z docs) wrote into the text itself. Now what you do with it will depend upon what model you are using, but the task of literary analysis remains the same no matter what model you choose to use (just like in literature, you can read the same text using several different literary theories).

Homeric Hymn to Hephaistos

Sing, O clear-voiced Muse, of Hephaistos renowned for skill,
who along with the gray-eyed Athena taught fine crafts
to men of this earth; indeed before that time
they used to live in mountain caves like wild beasts.

Thanks to Hephaistos, the famous craftmen,
they learned crafts and easily for the full year
they lead a carefree existence in their own homes.

Have mercy on me, Hephaistos; grant me virtue and happiness.

---translated by Apostolos N. Athanassakis

[Haphaistos---Greco-Roman; Hephaestus---Roman; Vulcanus/Vulcan---Roman: god of blacksmiths and metal-working.]

QoD Marie de France about storytelling and study

Ok, this quote is not about magic, but rather about story telling and the study of the classics. Nevertheless, I think that there is something to be learned from it.

Anyone who has recieved from God the gift of knowledge and true eloquence has a duty not to remain silent: rather should one be happy to reveal such talents. When a truly beneficial thing is heard by many people, it then enjoys its first blossom, but if it is widely praised its flowers are in full bloom. It was customary for the ancients, in the books which they wrote (Priscian testifies to this), to express themselves very obscurely so that those in later generations, who had to learn them, could provide a gloss for the text and put the finishing touches to their meaning. Men of learning were aware of this and their experience had taught them that the more time they spent studying texts the more subtle would be their understanding of them and they would be better able to avoid future mistakes. Anyone wishing to guard against vice should study intently and undertake a demanding task, whereby one can ward off and rid oneself of great suffering.

Harry Potters Wand

Over on the Golden Dawn Group (yahoo forum), there is currently a discussion going on about wands and their use. Being the clown that I am, most of my thoughts about wands and their use are irrelevant.

Nevertheless, I am going to share some of them with you. Free feel to mock me in the comment section.

Before the current semester started, I was reading the Harry Potter books. In my defense, it is my first time reading any of them past the first two books; and considering that the Fall 2011 senior seminar in Literature is going to be Children Classics for Adults (The Hobbit, A Winkle in Time, Alice in Wonderland, and other books which titles escape me at the moment), I thought I would finish the series before the summer was over (I am only 23% of the way though book 5---Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix---so I do have a ways to go still). And during the course of my reading, I decided that I want Potter's wand (or one of the same family).

While we joke in ceremonial circles (or at least I do), that Harry Potter's wand is a wimpy wand (it is so small)---just look at the stuff that wand can do. My own wand can barely convince the cat to get off the kitchen counter. In fact, my cat thinks that the lotus is good for itching his face against. (I get no respect, I tell you.)

As for the amount of information about wand use that I have picked up in Golden Dawn circles, well before dealing with my current Advanced Adept Advisor, it mainly came from the Thelemic Golden Dawn (which I spent a year in). Or at least, the information that the rest of the Golden Dawn community would find acceptable.

(Hathoor Temple did have some teachings about the wands and their use, but the information is not the type that the rest of the Golden Dawn community embraces. It is one of those times that if you only know Regardie's stuff, then the practices of a working lodge look highly wrong and downright awful.)

Honestly, as I noted in a post to the wand discussion (whether it was true or just a joke is for the reader to decide), I picked up more about proper wand use when I was a kid and studying sleight-of-hand and stage magic. One of the things that has been said in the discussion is that a wand is supposed to be used without thinking about it (you know it so well it is an extension of you). That sums up what a stage magician would say about using a wand, if you ignore the bits about distraction and showmanship.

There is a section in one of the Potter books (it may be in one of the movies also) where part of learning a spell is practicing the proper swishing motion with the wands. Outside of practicing the Lesser Ritual of the Pentagram in a group setting, both in TGD and in a couple of classes at the local occult shops, I have no training in how to "swish" a wand correctly. (Or is it "swosh"?)

My current Advanced Adept Advisor has addressed some of these issues with me. (If you are curious, they belong to the awful and completely wrong version of Golden Dawn, especially if you think Regardie is the only way to do things.) I pass the information onto my lodge (which makes them completely and utterly wrong also).

Another thought about the wands in the world of Harry Potter: the core of the wands contain magical stuff. In the case of Harry's and Voldermort's wands, it is a phoenix feather (both from the same bird). This reminds me of two things.

First, the Golden Dawn Fire Wand which contains an iron rod that is magnetized (if you go by the literature). Second, it reminds me of the liquid condensors of the Franz Bardon school of magic. Make what you will of those two ideas.

My final thought about wands for today is how flashy some of the wands are in the occult shops and on the internet. Crystals wrapped with feathers wired to a tree branch. And all for the sweet price of a couple of hundred dollars. I am sorry...is it a cat toy? Or something else?

(And if you are curious, my wands, like my Enochian Chess set, are runner-ups in the world's ugliest and worst made magical tools. Blame it on me making them myself.)

Fallen Angel Lore

Last night, I was studying the reading from the literature class that I am taking this semester--John Milton's Paradise Lost.

Ok, maybe I was goofing off. I was looking up the fallen angels names in Gustav Davidson's A Dictionary of Angels, and in David Godwin's Cabalistic Encyclopedia. I mention this because Toni (my wife) pointed out that it did not look like I was actually studying.

I don't remember Professor Di Pablo mentioning any particular way that he wanted us to study it, other than he wanted us to have fresh in our minds Book I and II for the next class. And I was curious about these names since my first reading of the text. Being a member of Golden Dawn influences how I study and what I focus on; if it didn't affect us and our outlooks, we probably won't be members.

Toni told me that she didn't care what I was doing, as long as I didn't call any of them. (At this point in time, those people who have made their way though the same ZAM courses as I have will roll their eyes.) I told her I wouldn't. I failed to mention my past experiences in this field.

One of the things that some people do not understand is why the initiates of Golden Dawn were issued papers about the Qlippoth (properly "shells", but can be thought of as the fallen angels). It is not that the Order encourages us to work with them--summoning them up to do our bidding, things like that. It is that we have to work with them, or at least enough to be able to cope with them.

To illustrate what I am saying, let me use the ritual of initiation. One of the common experiences of members who have undergone initiation is that they end up having problems related to the sephiroth that they were just initiationed into. For instance, Zelators tend to have physical illnesses and money problems cope up.

Why? Quite often, the problems were there before; the ritual just brings them out into the open. We are surrounded by adverse forces everyday. Call them Qlippoth, fallen angels, or just bad luck--they are present. And we would be damn poor magicians and human beings if we did not learn to cope with them.

Occasionally, I will admit that the ritual is to blame. The problem is that when you bring into the manifestation the energies of a sephirah, you not only bring into our world the positive aspects of it, but also the negative ones. I would say that more members know that the initition rituals work because of the bad things that occured shortly thereafter than by positive manifestations.

It is not that the ritual intentionally calls down bad things; it is that the initiate has yet to learn to cope with the energies.

A fully trained Adept in the hot seat (quite often the Hierophant) can help ease the process. Which is why the system contains information about the qlippoth (there is also the fact that as inititates, we are getting trained to use the grimmoric tradition, which consists of books like The Key of Solomon).

We learn this material, so that we can cope with these energies when we encounter them in our personal lives. And can you really look around the world, and tell me that they are not there, no matter what you chose to call them. I think not.