When I put together my practical magick schemas for the planetary, zodiacal, and elemental work my goal was to standardize as much of the procedure as possible. I based everything on the success I was having with the zodiacal work such as what you see here in the monthly elixir rites and so forth. Those in turn had been based on a planetary series that we did years ago working with the planetary angels. None of those rituals called on additional spirits, just the corresponding angels, and they seemed to work pretty well. This was especially true when adding in components like offerings and additional devotional work.
I've been working with a lot of different ideas lately for revising the forms, and that requires more probability testing. This last week I was playing around with some of the new planetary stuff I've been doing and testing it against my older forms that included calling directly on the Intelligence and Spirit. What I found maybe shouldn't be surprising, but I found it to be such as the time. If you call in the Intelligence and Spirit in addition to the angel, your planetary rituals are significantly more powerful.
How did I not notice that? Three entities should be better than one, right?
Part of the issue is that I have continued to get better at magick in general. Nowadays I can do things with just the planetary angels that I used to have to go through the whole hierarchy of angel -> intelligence -> spirit to do. The rituals I did seemed to be working and I didn't notice any red flags. But going back to the older forms now, I have to admit the spells I tested worked really well, better than what I'm able to do these days with just the angel.
I also was influenced for awhile by the "project management" approach to conjuration which suggests that the entity you call on can itself call on any other entity that it rules in order to accomplish your charge. However, my latest set of experiments appear to show that this may very well not be the case. There's some nuance - it seems like you can use just the sigil of the angel to get into the hierarchy as long as you call upon the angel to help you summon the intelligence and the intelligence to help you summon the spirit, but I'm still playing around with that a bit trying to determine the most effective structure in absolute terms.
So I'm going to be doing two things based on this new information. First of all, I'm going to do more testing to see if I can replicate these findings. The other thing I'm going to do is go back through my planetary work posts and add the conjuration of the intelligence and spirit to that of the angel for practical operations. Also, if anyone else would like to play around with testing the differences, I'd be happy to answer questions so you can get going on it. Maybe this last set was a fluke, but I figure I'm going to go ahead and update the planetary work anyway because it's not going to hurt your results and it might make them better.
Check the planetary work posts later this week and I should have the changes to the conjurations in by then. And, as always, keep experimenting!
I've been working with a lot of different ideas lately for revising the forms, and that requires more probability testing. This last week I was playing around with some of the new planetary stuff I've been doing and testing it against my older forms that included calling directly on the Intelligence and Spirit. What I found maybe shouldn't be surprising, but I found it to be such as the time. If you call in the Intelligence and Spirit in addition to the angel, your planetary rituals are significantly more powerful.
How did I not notice that? Three entities should be better than one, right?
Part of the issue is that I have continued to get better at magick in general. Nowadays I can do things with just the planetary angels that I used to have to go through the whole hierarchy of angel -> intelligence -> spirit to do. The rituals I did seemed to be working and I didn't notice any red flags. But going back to the older forms now, I have to admit the spells I tested worked really well, better than what I'm able to do these days with just the angel.
I also was influenced for awhile by the "project management" approach to conjuration which suggests that the entity you call on can itself call on any other entity that it rules in order to accomplish your charge. However, my latest set of experiments appear to show that this may very well not be the case. There's some nuance - it seems like you can use just the sigil of the angel to get into the hierarchy as long as you call upon the angel to help you summon the intelligence and the intelligence to help you summon the spirit, but I'm still playing around with that a bit trying to determine the most effective structure in absolute terms.
So I'm going to be doing two things based on this new information. First of all, I'm going to do more testing to see if I can replicate these findings. The other thing I'm going to do is go back through my planetary work posts and add the conjuration of the intelligence and spirit to that of the angel for practical operations. Also, if anyone else would like to play around with testing the differences, I'd be happy to answer questions so you can get going on it. Maybe this last set was a fluke, but I figure I'm going to go ahead and update the planetary work anyway because it's not going to hurt your results and it might make them better.
Check the planetary work posts later this week and I should have the changes to the conjurations in by then. And, as always, keep experimenting!
Hi Scott
ReplyDeleteI believe that in order to obtain practical results, especially in the world of Assiah it is much more direct to call the planetary spirit.
Some say that these forces are similar in power to an Archangel but its nature is sublunary and therefore its handling can be dangerous. Only the name must be pronounced -for example, SORATH, Spirit of the Sun, to feel an immediate change in the auric field.
Many times nothing happens, if you only call the Archangel, at the end and end they are very distant entities to this plane.
however when you call a spirit together through the Intelligence the Archangel, if things happen...
naming the entities that are going to participate is very important, I think
What got me thinking otherwise is basically that I have gotten to the point in my practice where I can get really solid practical results just by calling the angels. What I had not realized is how much better those results are when working with the spirits and intelligences in addition. So now I'm going back and reworking the forms to suggest that, or at least I will once I get around to it.
ReplyDeleteThe only "danger" with the spirits is that if you call them without the intelligences you get something akin to a blind force that is hard to control. It's like the intelligence is the mind and the body is the spirit. If you call the two together, though, I never have seen any problems there.
Wow so this is where it all started. You and some other magicians have come to the same conclusion of including all 3 spirits, at least that is how the GD did from the beginning.
ReplyDeleteWhen consecrating a talisman, do we give the charge collectively to all 3 beings? Something like 'Michael, Nakhiel, Sorath...fill this talisman with extreme power to achieve [ ] that even the Picatrix image talismans are given a run for their money'.
Or do we give the charge individually? I've only seen someone do it independently and I've been confused about this since.
Using the intelligences and spirits is not just Golden Dawn, it is from Agrippa and dates back to the sixteenth century. The Golden Dawn picked that up and ran with it to good effect.
ReplyDeleteI give the charge to all three. Not everyone does it that way, but I find that when I address it to all three the end result is more powerful.
Personally I haven't had a lot of success with the couple of Picatrix operations I've tried, so it's hard for me to compare the two methods. The planetary stuff generally works well in my experience.