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Post by Admin on Jun 4, 2021 18:46:30 GMT
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Post by Admin on Jun 7, 2021 12:09:00 GMT
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Post by Admin on Jun 10, 2021 19:18:06 GMT
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Post by Admin on Jul 4, 2021 15:10:36 GMT
“Chaos Magick does not use a concrete theoretical focus, the emphasis in Chaos Magick is on the Doing rather than the Explaining…Thus, in Chaos Magick a system of belief is a means to an end and is not an answer to the mystery of Life, the Universe and everything.” – D. J. Lawrence, The Chaos Cookbook The Gods are Dead. Long live the Gods. In Chaos Magic, beliefs are not seen as ends in themselves, but as tools for creating desired effects. To fully realize this is to face a terrible freedom in which Nothing is True and Everything is Permitted, which is to say that everything is possible, there are no certainties, and the consequences can be ghastly. Laughter seems to be the only defence against the realisation that one does not even have a real self. The purpose of Chaos Rituals is to create beliefs by acting as though such beliefs were true. In Chaos Rituals you Fake it till you Make it, to obtain the power that a belief can provide. Afterwards, if you have any sense, you will laugh it off, and seek the requisite beliefs for whatever you want to do next, as Chaos moves you. Thus Chaoism proclaims the Death and Rebirth of the Gods. Our subconscious creativity and parapsychological powers are more than adequate to create or destroy any god or self or demon or other "spritual" entity that we may choose to invest or disinvest belief in, at least for ourselves and sometimes others as well. The frequently awesome results attaining by creating gods by act of ritually behaving as though they exist should not lead the Chaos magician into the abyss of attributing ultimate reality to anything. That is the transcendentalist mistake,, which leads to the narrowing of the spectrum of the self. The real awesomeness lies in the range of things we can discover ourselves capable of, even if we may temporarily have to believe the effects are due to something else, in order to be able to create them. The gods are dead. Long live the gods. It takes only the acceptance of a single belief to make someone a magician. It is the meta-belief that belief is a tool for achieving effects. This effect is often far easier to observe in others than in oneself. It is usually quite easy to see how other people, and indeed entire cultures, are both enabled and disabled by the beliefs they hold. So welcome to the Pandaemonaeon wherein nothing is true and everything is permissable. Reject then the obscenities of contrived uniformity, order and purpose. Turn and face the tidal wave of Chaos from which philosophers have been fleeing in terror for millennia. Leap in and come out surfing its crest, sporting amidst the limitless weirdness and mystery in all things, for those who reject false certainties. Thank Chaos we shall never exhaust it. Create, destroy, enjoy, IO CHAOS!
Chaos Magic for the Pandaemonaeon. by Peter Carroll.
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Post by Admin on Jul 6, 2021 16:13:30 GMT
Anna Franklin Yesterday at 14:43 · ARE WE SEEING THE DEATH OF MAGICAL GROUPS?
"Get any group of middle-aged witches, ritual magicians or druids together, and they will lament the decline of committed working groups. Membership is falling across the spread of hundred-year-old magical orders, and even open Pagan groups and Druid groves have an increasingly elderly and shrinking population of committed members who do all the organisational work. I know priests and priestesses with a lifetime of service who are quitting in despair.
“But,” I hear you say, “Paganism is a growing movement; there is more interest in magic, witchcraft and Druidry that ever before!” True, but most of those interested people work individually for the most part, do things with a few friends occasionally, or just go to moots, conferences and camps when they want to celebrate with others on an ad hoc basis, if what is on offer looks interesting or fun. Part of the problem is undoubtedly a numbers game. I live in a village, and there used to be one shoe shop, and it did very good business. Then for some strange reason, suddenly there were six shoe shops, and not enough custom to go round – they all went out of business. There are so many covens, groups, moots, camps and conferences now, that the actual audience is spread increasingly thin between them.
And then there is the C word – commitment. Hardly anyone wants to make the commitment to a group; they want to dip in and out of all the myriad goodies on offer. Meanwhile, those of us who try to provide moots, camps or groves are under pressure, because we often have to do it without much help and keep them going with falling numbers. A friend who runs a well-known grove complains there are two people who do everything, and despite having a large list of people who count themselves members, few attend regularly, most only dropping in for rituals once a year. I recently closed down the Outer Circle I ran for 40 years, partly because despite having 120 nominal members, we often didn’t get the 25 needed to pay for the room, but mostly because the people attending didn’t actually want an Outer Circle (a committed teaching group which is a prelude to joining a coven) but simply a social moot which they could drop into occasionally, and I am way past doing that. The only groups that are growing are the ones that don’t ask for much in the way of commitment or work.
Does any of this even matter? After all, there are thousands of books available, and you can find any information you want online - there are no secrets. Is this not just the democratisation of information? I’m reminded of the computer in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which, when asked “what is the meaning of the Universe?” answered “42”. Information can only take you so far. Knowledge and wisdom live on separate shores, and that’s where a teacher who has already walked the path comes in. But no, we live in an age of anti-intellectualism, when experts who have studied a subject for thirty or forty years are discounted because all opinions are equally valid, even if they are only based on a few Facebook memes. It is a peculiarly modern Western view of spirituality, that it can be scavenged without much work or study, or that someone else should provide it without any conditions, or that it is there to support the desires of the ego, and even that it can be bought. We live in a society that expects instant gratification, big rewards for little effort, and most resist the idea that self-discipline, hard work, commitment, and giving service in return is necessary.
I sometimes wonder whether we have made it all too easy, whether trying to publicly provide service and teaching has backfired. In the old days, it was hard to find a coven, never mind join one. You had to decode messages on bookshop notice boards or attend vaguely spiritual groups that shielded coven members who might approach you if you looked likely. If you applied to join a coven, your first letters would not be answered, or you might be sent away for a year. These were tests of commitment and intent. And maybe secret knowledge is always more attractive…
Meanwhile what happens when the largely older group of people who currently run the moots, camps and groups die out? No doubt something will still run, but I have lost track of the number of people I have seen who have read a single book or been in their friend’s self-taught coven for a year and set themselves up as high priestesses, and pass on their garbled ‘knowledge’ to those who know no better; I could name a few fairly prominent ones right now. They may be all we are left with. The coven I have run for forty years is still going, but we are all over fifty now. I worry that unless the true teachings are passed on, which can only be done through experience and by experience, it will die out, and we will be left with something superficial, the palest glimpse of what was.
The work of a committed magic group is vitally important, sparks of illumination in a sea of ignorance. Public rituals always fail to reach the levels of achievement of those of a working group for obvious reasons; they merely touch the mental plane of ceremony. In contrast, a close-knit working group has trained together, knows and trusts each other on a profound level, shares a tradition, uses common symbols, mythology and ritual formats and over time, forges its connections with the Gods. It can draw on the knowledge and experience of each person, and can balance the energy of each person within the ritual, subsumed into the group-mind. The power that six or twelve people wielded this way creates something far greater than the sum of its parts. With public rituals, little or none of this is true. People who have only ever been to public rituals have no idea of what a ritual can be.
Those who give of themselves receive blessings in return, experiences beyond any that can be achieved alone, forging a powerful path, together to understanding, and bringing that back into the world. If ever we needed that, we need it now."
© Anna Franklin, July 2021
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Post by Admin on Jul 6, 2021 16:17:59 GMT
June 23, 2021 The Great Divide in Witchcraft Today rexnemorensis.com/the-great-divide/Over the course of the last several years, in particular, a growing rift has emerged in which a more liberal Wica has veered away from what it truly means to be ‘Gardnerian’ in the historical sense of the word. They have shifted the tradition away from its very natural binary of priestesses and priests into the very nebulous realm of social politick. In a traditional coven setting, priests and priestesses take on animistic roles representative of the archetypal god and goddess of the Wica. It is an absolute cornerstone of what we do: how we practice, honor our deities, and carry out our Magical Work. Under the guise of altruism, there is a growing movement working within the Craft itself to erode these immutable roles, previously held as sacred and irrevocably paired with an Initiate’s sexual biology [however crude, the common slang amongst Witches for decades has been ‘plumbing.’] They will either call their revisionism ‘inclusive’ or pretend that dissenters are far and few (we are not); insinuating vaguely in public forum discussions that those of us who honor our gods in the legitimate Gardnerian sense are bigoted or otherwise misguided. Here, also; they are wrong.
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Post by Admin on Jul 8, 2021 18:17:19 GMT
The goat headed deity known as Baphomet is not a GOD: He is the sign of initiation, the Azoth of the alchemists. He is also the hieroglyphic figure of the great divine Tetragrammaton. He is a hold-over from the Cherbus of the ark and the Holy of Holies. He is the guardian of the key to the Holy Temple. ℵ☉Ω
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Post by Admin on Jul 9, 2021 19:20:32 GMT
The white magician consecrates his life to study, meditation, and service, that he may know the law and may direct force to its appointed ends. He mods himself into the plan, becoming part of the divine rhythm by sacrificing himself and his wishes to the will of the Infinite, asking only to know wherein his duty lies and how he may be of the greatest service to the greatest number.
- Manly P Hall, Magic: A Treatise on Esoteric Ethics
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Post by Admin on Jul 10, 2021 12:55:51 GMT
THE WITCHES SABBAT abeautifulresistance.org/site/2021/7/9/the-witches-sabbat“The Sabbat arose as a conspiracy to destroy the rotten edifice of Church and State, meeting on the heath to avoid the gaze of authority, guised in anonymity and foreboding. This revolutionized the nature of witchcraft, regardless of the pre-existence of the Sabbat form. ~Peter Grey, Apocalyptic Witchcraft The moon is full. It hangs in a black sky, dominates it so that the stars seem muted in comparison. Does it always glow so bright? Is it me, or does it seem closer than usual? Questions I cannot answer, there’s nobody else to answer, tell me I’m wrong, am only imagining it. And besides, it doesn’t matter. I am distracting myself, I know. It’s always the same. I used to fight, you know. In the ring. Boxing and kickboxing, and though I chose to do so, enjoyed it even, there was always that feeling when stepping into the ring to stare down my opponent, always that voice whispering it’s not too late. You can turn back. You can say no. Why put yourself through this? It’s the same feeling I have now. It’s that voice that questions the moon, tries to talk me into returning to what is known, what is safe. The first battle is ignoring it. At this hour, the garden has a dreamlike quality to it. The light from the moon casts the garden in silver and black and a thousand shades in between. Even the shadows have shadows in this, the night garden. At first it’s frightening. The night garden is different to the garden in the daytime, when the noise of children playing, dogs barking and the roar and stink of traffic mask the magic of this place. The humdrum of mundane life pulls our attention to other places, other occurrences. You can sense some otherness at the periphery, but the reality of life distracts, so that it is a fleeting feeling, this sense of otherness, easily dismissed in the bright sunlit garden. Yet here in the night garden, the distractions are no more. The street is empty. The houses dark as their inhabitants slumber. It’s easy to imagine that nothing else exists beyond the bounds of the garden. There’s only me, the night garden and the moon. I used to be afraid, and even now there is a sense of anticipation. I leave the path behind and move further into the garden. The grass is cool and damp underfoot. I relish it. I’ve almost forgotten how good it feels. With each step, I become more feral. With each step, the memory of what it is to be wild grows stronger. With each step I discard the many masks I wear: mother; wife; teacher; neighbour; friend; worker. With each step they seem less real, less important. I am all of those things, yes, but in the daytime, I step in and out of those roles at will, wear whichever mask the situation demands until they take root and twist and merge with one another until the real me is overgrown. Here though, I am just me. I just am. I used to fear this process of becoming wild, the dismantling of myself and the revelation that follows, so fiercely do we cling to those roles that have come to define us. Like climbing into the ring, but this time the opponent is myself, the fight, untangling myself. Freedom is the trophy to be won. The night air is cool, enough to raise goose pimples on my bare arms, make my nipples harden and strain against the thin cotton of my nightdress. This I discard too. Just another step to my own rewilding but perhaps the hardest. Nakedness, the final barrier between myself and nature. Here in the night garden, it doesn’t matter that my thighs are big, nor that my stomach is not as flat as it once was, that my breasts hang a little lower. There is no shame here, no self pity either. This is me, as I am, the costumes of my daytime self discarded along with the masks. I unbraid my hair, the final step in reclaiming my wildness. My plait, symbolic of order, of restraint and self control, a symbol of my tamed nature. At last the plait is undone and the wildness of curls reform themselves, mirroring the reformation of the wild within. The night breeze catches at my hair and I close my eyes, turn my face skywards and relish the feeling of being utterly naked, totally free, before moving onwards, the wildness of the night garden calling to the wildness within me. Undomesticated and free, my spirit soars and mingles with the spirits of this place, the genius loci. This is why we enter the night garden. This is why we shed the layers of ourselves, the masks and costumes of our workaday lives, the shedding a ritual held once a month with only the moon as witness. The fear and pain of transformation, of becoming feral, returning to the wild, are worth it. This is freedom. It cannot be bought with riches, can only be gained through relinquishing. This is how we meet him. Unashamed and free. The night garden is alive. I walk beneath the canopy of the cherry tree, the last of the blossoms loosen their petals so that they catch the breeze and fall slowly, the creamy whiteness transforms in the moonlight so that it seems as though the stars are falling from the sky. The branches catch at my hair, but I pay no mind. Instead, I run my hands up and down the trunk in welcoming. This is an old friend, I know it well. I embrace the tree, pressing my body against the rough bark, feel myself melting into it, feel its energy flow into me, slow and steady but strong and vibrant. I stay like this, for how long I don’t know, until it is time to move on. There are others I must greet, and so I walk the same circuit I have walked many moons over, familiar but new. Spirit is ever-changing and yet always the same. Each time is familiar and yet new, ever-changing and yet always the same. I know what comes next, can feel the anticipation rising within me. I sit in the centre of the garden. I can feel the spirits of this place, have become one of them. I look up at the moon once more before closing my eyes. I lose myself in the sounds of the night garden. It is like the spirits are singing, and I feel my body begin to sway, following the rhythm of the spirit song. I hum along and beat out the rhythm upon the earth with my hands. The song rises in tempo and volume until the rhythm grows rougher, more wild, and the anticipation felt earlier becomes something else, a needful yearning of him. It grows stronger until it feels as though it will consume me. I let it. Only then does he come. I open my eyes when I feel his rough hand on my bare skin. He moves behind me. I can feel him. I don’t know how he appears to the others but for me, this is him, a wild thing, part man, all wild. His scent fills my nostrils. He smells of the earth and of the night breeze, of green grass and damp wood spice. He moves my hair to the side and I can feel his hot breath on my neck. He whispers in my ear and I say yes in reply. My voice doesn’t sound like my own. It rasps and cracks, sounds like the rasp of wood on wood, like the creaking of trees in high wind. My tongue darts between my dry lips and I can taste the night air. His hands on my skin, the merging of spirit. The moon is heavy and full. It dominates the sky so that even the stars are diminished in its presence. I lose myself in its silver glow, feel the ground beneath me, him between my legs. This is the way it ever is, has been since the first time, many moons ago. This is my sabbat, with only the moon and the night garden as witness to this secret coupling, the merging of spirit. The utterings of magic. This is me. My truest self. Wild and untamed, ecstatic. As we reach our climax, I feel myself open. To him. To the night garden. To the secrets of the universe. The spirit song of the night garden reaches a crescendo and I cry out, unable to keep it inside. I close my eyes and see the moon, its image burned onto the back of my closed lids. I feel him lay beside me on the ground. Trance comes next, almost like slumber, but not quite. Still, it is a deep state and I do not feel him as he moves away, do not see him as he slips away, perhaps through the wall of thick ivy, the wildest part of the garden where critters live and sparrows sleep. When I open my eyes, the moon has moved further across the sky. It seems dimmer than it did before, though perhaps this is an illusion, for the sky seems less dark. I sit up, cold and stiff and yet reluctant to move. But move I must. I retrace my steps, gathering once more the costumes and masks of my life. All too soon it will be time to dress in them, to re-braid my plait and put on my nightdress. But I linger a while longer, until the sparrows begin to chatter and the blackbird breaks the dawn with his loud, melodic song. The witch's sabbat is over, and yet it never ends.
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Post by Admin on Jul 11, 2021 13:49:53 GMT
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Post by Admin on Jul 11, 2021 16:28:23 GMT
"THE knowledge and power magical, and that faculty in man which acteth only per nutum, sleeps since the knowledge of the apple was eaten; and as long as this knowledge (which is of the flesh and blood, gross and material belonging to the external man and darkness) flourishes, the more noble magical power is lying dormant.
But because in sleep this outward or sensual knowledge is sometimes dormant, hence it is that our dreams are sometimes prophetical, and God himself is therefore nearer unto man in dreams, through that effect, when the more inward magic of the soul being uninterrupted by the flesh, diffuses itself on every side into the understanding; even as when it sinks itself into the inferior powers thereof it safely leads those who walk in their sleep by moving or conducting them, whither those that were awake could not surmount or climb.
Therefore we establish this point, that there is inherent in the soul a certain magical virtue given her by God, naturally proper and belonging to her, in asmuch as we are his image and engravement; and in this respect she acts also in a peculiar manner, i. e. spiritually on an object at a distance, and that more powerfully than by any corporeal assistance; for seeing the soul is the principal part of the body, therefore all action belonging to her is spiritual, magical, and of the greatest validity.
Which power man is able, by the Art of the Cabbala, to excite in himself at his own pleasure, and these, as we have before said, are called Adepts; who are governed by the Spirit of God. Thus we have endeavoured to shew that man predominates over all other creatures that are corporeal, and that by his magical faculty he is able to subdue the magical virtues of all other things; which predominance of man, or the soul's natural magic, some have ignorantly attributed solely to verses, charms, signs, characters, & c. by which hierarchy or holy dominion inherent in man, those effects, whatever they may be, are wrought, which some unlearned (who but too corporeally philosophize) have attributed to the dominion of Satan.
High and sacred is the force of the microcosmical spirit, which, as is evident in pregnant women, stamps upon the young the image and properties of a thing desired, as we have before instanced in a cherry, which, without the trunk of a tree, brings forth a true cherry, that is flesh and blood, enobled with the properties and power of the more inward or real cherry, by the conception of the imagination alone; from whence are two necessary consequences.
First, that all the spirits, and as it were the essences of all things, lie hid in us, and are born and brought forth only by the working, power, and phantasy of the microcosm. The second is, that the soul, in conceiving, generates a certain idea of the thing conceived; the which, as it before lay hid unknown, like fire in a flint, so by the stirring up of the phantasy there is produced a certain real idea, which is not a naked quality, but something like a substance, hanging in suspense between a body and a spirit, that is the soul.
That middle being is so spiritual, that it is not plainly exempted from a corporeal condition, since the actions of the soul are limited on the body, and the inferior orders of faculties de ending upon it, nor yet so corporeal that it may be inclosed by dimensions, the which we have also related to be only proper to a seminal being. This ideal entity, therefore, when it falls out of the invisible and intellectual world of the microcosm, it puts on a body, and then it is first inclosed by the limitation of place and numbers.
The object of the understanding is in itself a naked and pure essence, not an accident, by the consent of practical, that is, mystical divines; therefore this Proteus or transferable essence, the understanding doth, as it were, put on and clothe itself, with this conceived essence.
But because every body, whether external or internal, hath its making in its own proper image, the understanding knows or discerns not, the will loves and wills not, the memory recollects not, but by images or likenesses: the understanding therefore puts on this same image of its object; and because the soul is the pure simple form of the body, which turns itself about to every member, therefore the acting understanding cannot have two images at once, but first one and then the other.
He, who is wholly the life, created all things and hath said, nothing is to be expected as dead out of his hand. Likewise nothing can come to our view wherein himself is not clearly apparent or present; for it is said, "the spirit of the Lord hath filled the whole globe of the earth:" and, again, "that he containeth or comprehendeth all things," therefore there is nothing in being, no creature but what possesses a certain degree of divine fire and life, yet lying dormant or unexcited, till stirred up by the art, power, and operation of man."
~ Francis Barrett c.1770-1802. The Magus
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Post by Admin on Jul 11, 2021 17:06:11 GMT
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Post by Admin on Jul 11, 2021 20:54:07 GMT
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Post by Admin on Jul 15, 2021 13:07:41 GMT
No matter what system the magician chooses, in order to make it work most effectively he or she must first become attuned to that system's particular way of viewing of the universe.
~ Lon Milo DuQuette.
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Post by Admin on Jul 15, 2021 14:34:55 GMT
Magick is esoteric. Jesus was the master mage. Why else would magi/wise men/mages/sages/ occultists come pay their respects?
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