Review - Modern Hermeticism by Erich and Alannah Brown

I originally met Frater Barrabbas back in 1999 when he was living in Minneapolis and coming around to Leaping Laughter OTO events. At that time he shared with me an unpublished manuscript detailing the system he had developed for his Order of the Gnostic Star entitled The Pyramid of Powers. The system drew elements from the Golden Dawn, Thelema, and Alexandrian Wicca, and represented a unique system of magick in its own right that was meaningfully different from its antecedents.

The Pyramid of Powers system was eventually reworked from that original manuscript and published as The Disciple's Guide to Ritual Magick and Mastering the Art of Ritual Magick, both currently available from Crossed Crow Books. While the Disciple's Guide is targeted at beginners, it still is an introduiction to a complex system of magick that may or may not make sense to rank beginniners without any background in magical workings. What the system still really needed was a sort of Modern Magick for the Gnostic Star system that would work for students who were just starting out.

I provide all this background because Modern Hermeticism appears to be exactly that book. It covers the system in a series of simple steps that build on each other, and thus makes it more accessible and approachable. Even so, it covers a lot of material, from the Qabalistic Cross up the full Pyramid of Powers ritual, which is not exactly analogous to anything in Golden Dawn/Thelema or Wicca. It also has a section on Enochian magick, which is explained in simple and straightforward language.

I don't personally practice the Gnostic Star system, so there are some points that I approach differently in my own work. The Enochian system, for example, is original but heavily employs the Golden Dawn arrangement of the system. As such, my approach based on Dee diary attributions is very different. Still, the Golden Dawn Enochian system and its variants are employed by many modern magicians who report good results with it. The system does not employ the Lesser Ritual of the Hexagram to open and close magical fields the way I do, but instead uses some original ritual forms to accomplish the same objective.

The book also includes a lot of Jungian material, which I criticize often, but it seems like that's currently the case whenever any book on magick touches on psychology. It should be noted that while psychoanalysis is based on an entirely inaccurate model of the mind and brain, Jung's work on mysticism in particular is pretty good regardless. During his life he sought out mystical experiences and writes about them from a firsthand perspective in works such as The Red Book. This likely explains its popularity in esoteric spaces.

I do very much appreciate the lack of "spelling" (pronouncing YHVH as YOD HEH VAV HEH when vibrating) in their rendition of the Lesser Ritual of the Pentagram, which is a bad instruction that gets repeated all over the place. Also, the material on working with the godhead and invoking godforms is excellent and gives great instructions for doing invocations. Finally, this is exactly the sort of thing that modern magicians should be doing - developing their own ritual forms and applications, and then subjecting them to peer review through publication.

If you are a fan of Frater Barrabbas' work, or just interested in seeing another way in which traditional ceremonial forms can be modified and worked with, check out Modern Hermeticism. It covers the material with impressive clarity without sacrificing any of the Gnostic Star system's depth and complexity. Even if you don't wind up working with the system, it also contains a lot of good advice that is applicable to magick in general and should benefit any practitioner.

Kim Davis Loses Forever

Poor Oppressed Christian icon Kim Davis has been rejected by the Supreme Court. Her bid to overturn same-sex marriage in the United States was declined by the heavily right-wing court, which leaves the appeals court decision against her bid in place. This was her last chance to appeal, so she now owes hundreds of thousands in judgements and legal fees. She has officially lost her case.

An appeal of a verdict against controversial former Rowan County Clerk Kim Davis, which also took aim at a 2015 decision that legalized same-sex marriage throughout the country, will not be taken up by the U.S. Supreme Court.The decision was issued Nov. 10 in an order list from the high court. No reason for the denial was included in the two-sentence ruling.

Davis, who drew international attention to her Northeastern Kentucky community 10 years ago when she refused to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples after the landmark Obergefell v. Hodges ruling, had called on the court to strike down a 2023 court verdict that found she owed $100,000 to a couple who she had denied a license in 2015. Her attorneys with Liberty Counsel had also pushed for the Supreme Court to use her case to overturn the Obergefell decision.

Davis is a cautionary tale about how far these extremists will go. She originally argued that due to her religious beliefs she should be exempted from having to personally sign off on same-sex marriage paperwork. At the time I didn't have a problem with that as long as same-sex marriages were approved in as timely and efficient a manner as opposite-sex ones. Multiple people without objections worked in Davis' office, so it was clearly possible. But I should have known better and I'll cop to that.

Via Solis Scorpio Elixir Rite - Year Nine

Today's Magick Monday post is a full script for the Scorpio Elixir Rite that we will be performing tomorrow, Tuesday November 11th, at the Ritual Workshop. We will be starting around 8 PM.

0. The Temple

The ritual space is set up with an altar table in the center. The bell chime, banishing dagger, and invoking wand are placed on the altar. In the center of the altar is placed a cup of wine for creating the elixir, within the Table of Art corresponding to Scorpio. The sign Scorpio is attributed to the power of “Necromancy." Note that this refers to work with the spirits of the dead, including ancestors, rather than magick involving dead things such as body parts and so forth. The Via Solis Elixir Rites were written by Michele Montserrat in 2010 for the Comselh Ananael magical working group.

I. Opening

All stand surrounding the altar. Officiant inhales fully, placing the banishing dagger at his or her lips. The air is then expelled as the dagger is swept backwards.

Officiant: Bahlasti! Ompehda!

Officiant then performs the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram. All rotate accordingly.

Officiant: We take refuge in Nuit, the blue-lidded daughter of sunset, the naked brilliance of the voluptuous night sky, as we issue the call to the awakened nature of all beings, for every man and every woman is a star.

All: MAKAShANaH

Officiant: We take refuge in Hadit, the secret flame that burns in every heart of man and in the core of every star, as we issue the call to our own awakened natures, arousing the coiled serpent about to spring.

All: ABRAHADABRA

Officiant: We take refuge in Heru-Ra-Ha, who wields the wand of double power, the wand of the force of Coph Nia, but whose left hand is empty for he has crushed an universe and naught remains, as we unite our awakened natures with those of all beings everywhere and everywhen, dissolving all obstacles and healing all suffering.

All: AUMGN

Officiant: For pure will, unassuaged of purpose, delivered from the lust of result, is every way perfect.

All: All is pure and present are and has always been so, for existence is pure joy; all the sorrows are but as shadows; they pass and done; but there is that which remains. To this realization we commit ourselves – pure and total presence. So mote it be.

Review - Glamour of the Spheres by G Antra

Glamor magick is usually thought of a niche discipline that involves projecting illusions into the minds of others in various situations. Whether to improve your overall general charisma, or to make yourself more attractive as a romantic relationship partner, the parameters of this art are limited to such circumstances. But this is false reductionism. Glamor magick is the magick of perception, and perception is the foundation of how we experience the world. As such, this art has many further applications that usually go unexplored.

Glamour of the Spheres by G Antra opens up the world of glamor magick to its full potential. G has presented on the subject at Leaping Laughter Lodge's Grimoire Bazaar in Minneapolis and the Babalon Rising festival in southern Indiana, and has considerable expertise in the field - along with an experimental, scientific approach to the work that I find many practitioners lack. It does no good to merely speculate on the effects of rituals, since as we all should know many "pretty patterns" in magick just don't work when subjected to real-world conditions. Emprical testing is essential, and as I have previously written I wish more practitioners would test their personal work like this and make it available for peer review.

Glamour of the Spheres mixes glamor magick with planetary magick, a refreshing combination that I have not previously come across. It covers the basics of planetary work, the attributions and powers of the planets, and glamor rituals for each of the planets. These are not limited to presence and appearance. For example, the "Lips of Mercury" spell that can be performed using lipstick or lip balm facilitates communication and helps each word that passes your lips be better understood and carry deeper meaning. This is perception, too, and goes far beyond mere surface attraction.

All these rituals are constructed using a system of energy work that I was exposed to when I first attended the Babalon Rising festival back in 2023. It focuses on energy going out from your projecting hand and returning to your receiving hand, which is an idea found in many systems of energy work. What's different, though, is how this energy work is integrated into the rituals themselves. A simple example would be holding your petition to the spirit (the energy you are sending out) in your projecting hand while you hold a talisman (which will receive the energy) in your receiving hand as you perform the ritual.

This is a very simplistic example and the rituals in the book make use of this technique in more involved ways. Having experimented with variations on this method over the last several years, I can confidently say that it has improved the effectiveness of my Qigong energy practice to a substantial degree. The traditional model of accumulating and then discharging Qi becomes far more effective when projecting/receiving becomes a more dynamic, flow-based process, like the difference between a static spark and an electric circuit. My practice did previously include application of some flow-based methods, but the version outlined in Glamour of the Spheres makes the process more explicit and deliberate.

For all these reasons I highly recommend Glamour of the Spheres. It is a fresh and expansive approach to a subject that is rarely covered in much depth, and even if you are a person like me who does not generally wear makeup or use cosmetics, the techniques can be adapted for rituals involving personal care products, articles of clothing, or even more traditional planetary talismans carried on your person. Pick up your copy today!

G Antra's Linktree can be found here covering Twitch, Instagram, Threads, and many other social media outlets.

Slapping Down The Simulation

I have written previously on what I consider to be the extremely dumb "simulation argument," the contention that the universe we live in could be some sort of computer simulation akin to the world of the film The Matrix. The argument itself, originally formalized by philosopher Nick Bostrum suffers from a basic mathematical flaw that for some reason never gets brought up - classic "gambler's fallacy." Bostrum's argument is essentially that if it is possible to build a true simulated reality, it is likely that a huge number of them would be created. Since that huge number is bigger than one, the number of "real realities," it is more likely than not that we live in a simulated universe.

This is pretty much the same thing as saying that if you do a hundred coin flips and get sixty heads and forty tails, it is more likely that the next flip will be heads. But this can easily be shown to be false with a simple experiment. Each flip is independent, just like each member of the collection of different realities would be. If this were not true, you could use something like Bostrum's math to, say, win a bunch of money at a roulette wheel. If anybody out there can experimentally show this is possible, I'll listen to what they have to say. Otherwise I completely fail to understand how anyone can fall for "the simulation" if they know anything at all about probability.

But according to this article, the probabilitic issues are not even the worst of it. According to a new mathematical proof, it is actually impossible to simulate the physical universe by computational means. It shows that the answer to the first question in Bostrum's argument, whether or not it is possible to create a simulated universe inside a computer, is no. The laws of physics cannot simply be generated by a computer algorithm, no matter how complex that algorithm is.

Dr. Mir Faizal, Adjunct Professor with UBC Okanagan's Irving K. Barber Faculty of Science, and his international colleagues, Drs. Lawrence M. Krauss, Arshid Shabir and Francesco Marino have shown that the fundamental nature of reality operates in a way that no computer could ever simulate. Their findings, published in the Journal of Holography Applications in Physics, go beyond simply suggesting that we're not living in a simulated world like The Matrix. They prove something far more profound: the universe is built on a type of understanding that exists beyond the reach of any algorithm.

Liber Shemesh

Liber Shemesh is a solar invocation combining elements of Aleister Crowley's Liber Resh vel Helios and liber V vel Reguli. Crowley explains in Liber O that following the general (that is, Lesser in his parlance) rituals of the pentagram and hexagram, the next step is to perform a Preliminary Invocation. Elsewhere he writes that this preliminary invocation step identifies the magician with the divine, and it is this identification that allows them to conjure spirits successfully.

Along those lines, Crowley experimented with modifying the Stele of Jeu from the PGM into the Bornless Ritual, published in the Crowley/Mathers edition of The Goetia in 1904. He would later adapt his Bornless Ritual into Liber Samekh, a similar ritual designed to be performed daily over a six-month period to facilitate the knowledge and conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel in a procedure that he believed to be analogous that of the Abramelin operation.

In the 1920’s Crowley developed Liber V vel Reguli, which he described as “an incantation proper to invoke the Energies of the Aeon of Horus, adapted for the daily use of the Magician of whatever grade.” When I first started looking into Liber Reguli, I was struck by its structural similarities to Liber Samekh and to the Greater Ritual of the Pentagram for Malkuth, the version of the GRP that employs all four elemental pentagrams.

As I discussed in my article on the Greater Ritual of the Pentagram, you always do the Greater Ritual of the Pentagram for something, either one of the four elements or the sephira Malkuth. The Malkuth version, which is often found in books describing the ritual, uses pentagrams for all four elements drawn to their corresponding directions. This version is specific to Malkuth and does not served as a "souped up" Lesser Ritual of the Pentagram, since the Greater Ritual of the Pentagram is alway specific and the Lesser Ritual of the Pentagram is always general and foundational.

Via Solis Libra Elixir Rite - Year Nine

Today's post is the full script for the Libra Elixir Rite that we will be performing tomorrow, Tuesday September 30th, at the Leaping Laughter Ritual Workshop. We will be starting around 8 PM.

0. The Temple

The ritual space is set up with an altar table in the center. The bell chime, banishing dagger, and invoking wand are placed on the altar. In the center of the altar is placed a cup of wine for creating the elixir, within the Table of Art corresponding to Libra. The sign Libra is attributed to "Works of Justice and Equilibrium." So those sorts of intents are most appropriate, and as this is a general and highly adaptable power, it can be used for many different purposes, from obtaining justice in the external world to balancing your internal magical energies and/or spiritual perceptions. The Via Solis Elixir Rites were written by Michele Montserrat in 2010 for the Comselh Ananael magical working group.

I. Opening

All stand surrounding the altar. Officiant inhales fully, placing the banishing dagger at his or her lips. The air is then expelled as the dagger is swept backwards.

Officiant: Bahlasti! Ompehda!

Officiant then performs the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram. All rotate accordingly.

Officiant: We take refuge in Nuit, the blue-lidded daughter of sunset, the naked brilliance of the voluptuous night sky, as we issue the call to the awakened nature of all beings, for every man and every woman is a star.

All: MAKAShANaH

Officiant: We take refuge in Hadit, the secret flame that burns in every heart of man and in the core of every star, as we issue the call to our own awakened natures, arousing the coiled serpent about to spring.

All: ABRAHADABRA

Officiant: We take refuge in Heru-Ra-Ha, who wields the wand of double power, the wand of the force of Coph Nia, but whose left hand is empty for he has crushed an universe and naught remains, as we unite our awakened natures with those of all beings everywhere and everywhen, dissolving all obstacles and healing all suffering.

All: AUMGN

Officiant: For pure will, unassuaged of purpose, delivered from the lust of result, is every way perfect.

All: All is pure and present are and has always been so, for existence is pure joy; all the sorrows are but as shadows; they pass and done; but there is that which remains. To this realization we commit ourselves – pure and total presence. So mote it be.

Poor Oppressed Christians - The Book!

The Wild Hunt has an article up about a new book called The Pagan Threat. I'm not going to post a link to the book because I have no interest in giving it traffic from the blog, but a simple web search should turn it up if you really want to check it out.

Basically the point of this book is to try and frame Paganism as some kind of existential threat to Christianity and by extension to America as a whole. That prompted me to re-use the graphic above, to point out that Christianity is by far the majority religion in America and is not even remotely under threat from the tiny percentage of Pagan believers in our population.

Back in 2017 I posted an article sourced from the Pew Forum Religious Landscape Study looking at the percentage of Christians in the United States. I further broke the current research at that time down to identify "Poor Oppressed Christians" - Christians who, despite being part of an overwhelming majority of the population, feel that they are somehow under attack by basic things like laws protecting civil rights for members of all religions.

Since I haven't covered this topic in a while, I'll clarify a bit. Being a Christian doesn't make you a Poor Oppressed Christian. I have no issues whatsoever with people adopting Christianity as their spiritual path if that's what works for them. What makes Christians count as Poor Oppressed is when they insist that they deserve special priviliges in civil society that they deny to anyone who believes differently than they do. This article, which shares this one's graphic, lays this out in more detail.

I haven't taken a look at Pew's research on religious identity since 2017, so it seems reasonable to give it another look for 2025. As this chart shows, it remains true that Christians are a large majority and, statistically speaking, Pagans are practically non-existent.