More Soccer Witchcraft

Apparently the world of soccer is crawling with witches. Last month a Congolese goaltender started a riot that resulted in eleven deaths and numerous injuries by attempting to cast a spell on the opposing team. Today two footballers were arrested in Dubai on charges of using witchcraft to help their athletic careers.

Two international footballers, including UAE's star striker Faisal Khalil, have been arrested here on suspicion of practising 'black magic' to influence their selection into the team, media reports said.

Khalil, who plays for Al Ahli club and Subait Khater of Al Jazira were arrested in Dubai with two Omani "sorcerers" at the end of last month as they were believed to have paid the Omanis to make spells in order to maintain their place in the national team.

"Khalil along with Subait Khater and two Omani spell casters, or magicians, have been arrested," a spokesman for Dubai CID was quoted by a newspaper on Sunday.

The article goes on to quote the Dubai Sports Council stating that they do not believe this incident is related to a wider problem of "black magic" in the footballing world, but considering the events of last month I have to wonder.

Basics of Daily Magical Practice

The best way to find out if someone is a real magician is to ask them about their daily practice regimen. If they look confused or stumble through their answer it means that you should take their practical advice with a grain of salt and defer to your own experiences. If they pompously proclaim not only that they do no daily practices but that you should do the same, you should dismiss them as an utter fool and ignore anything else they have to say. It's pretty much guaranteed to be worthless.

Magick is an experiential discipline. That means that you actually have to do it to understand how it works. Study is very useful in terms of pointing you in the right direction, but there's a big difference between knowing how something could in theory be accomplished and actually doing it. I'll repeat this analogy one more time - a magician who does no daily practice is like a professional athlete who doesn't work out aside from showing up to play on game day. Rare talents can get away with it, but the vast majority of us are not nearly so special. Furthermore, even if you can do no work and still get results, imagine how much better you could be with the foundation of a disciplined course of practice.

Most introductory books on magick cover the basic rituals, but in many cases they are vague and incomplete regarding a what constitutes a solid set of practices, so here are my suggestions. These are the standard Golden Dawn rituals that are used by many ritual magick groups, and while as a Thelemite my practices incorporate more of Aleister Crowley's ritual forms, the structure shown here follows the same framework as the sequence that I have been practicing for many years.

(1) The Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram. This is the best rendition of the ritual that I have managed to find online, though it does contain one point on which I need to comment.

The linked page calls this ritual "The Lesser Ritual of the Pentagram Banishing Earth" and has links to other "Lesser Rituals" for Fire, Air, and Water. This is incorrect - the ritual shown is simply the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram, which in its standard form uses the Earth pentagram. You don't use the Lesser Ritual of the Pentagram to banish or invoke specific elements - you use the Greater Ritual of the Pentagram to do that. The Greater Rituals of the Pentagram and Hexagram are used for specific ceremonial operations as explained in the text of the various spells I have written up on this site, not for daily practice.

The Thelemic equivalent for this ritual is the Star Ruby.

(2) The Lesser Invoking Ritual of the Hexagram. Using the invoking form of the Lesser Ritual of the Hexagram here opens the operant field so that your invocation of divinity and statement of intent will be more effective. It also does not shut down spells in progress, which is what happens if you use the banishing form here.

The Thelemic equivalent for this ritual is the Star Sapphire.

(3) The Middle Pillar Ritual. While the Middle Pillar was written after Crowley's death so he could not comment on it, in my opinion the Thelemic equivalent to this ritual is The Elevenfold Seal from Liber V vel Reguli and I have gotten good results using it in that capacity over many years.

(4) The Statement of Intent. When you are working magick you should always be trying to accomplish something. For daily practice, that goal should include spiritual awakening and the accomplishment of your True Will. A sample statement might be something to the effect of "Set my True Will in motion and bring me to the accomplishment of the Great Work, the Summum Bonum, True Wisdom and Perfect Happiness." Conclude the statement by vibrating a word of power such as AUMGN or AMEN.

Another possible Thelemic sequence would be:

(1) Liber V vel Reguli in full.
(2) The Star Sapphire.
(3) The Statement of Intent.

Liber V vel Reguli includes The Elevenfold Seal so you can go straight from the Star Sapphire to the Statement of Intent with this sequence.

Whatever practice sequence you decide upon using, you should do it at least once a day, generally when you wake up in the morning or before you go to sleep. You can also do both, which is great if your schedule allows it.

Meditation is another useful daily practice. I generally keep my meditation session separate from my ceremonial practices because while they complement each other in terms of how they work in your life magick and meditation are based on different mindsets. Meditation is more reflective and receptive, whereas magick is more active and expansive. Also, techniques that work with the body such as Pranayama, Yoga, Qigong, and Tai Chi are good for building up the more physical aspects of magical practice in addition to helping you stay in better physical shape. I figure if I'm going to work out anyway for health reasons, I might as well be augmenting my magical ability at the same time.

All this sounds like a lot, and it can be. It is very possible to go through periods during which much of your day is spent doing practices, and often this is difficult if you have to work a job and take care of a household at the same time. My recommendation is to start with a basic set, try to be as disciplined as possible about it, and once you have established a consistent practice you can add onto it one element at a time. There's nothing wrong with a simple set of practices if that's what you can stick to, and it's better to be consistent over a long period of time than it is to be "hardcore" for a short period and burn yourself out. However, you should also keep in mind that in magick, like any other sort of activity, the more practices you do the better you get and the faster you will progress.

UPDATE: A good point brought up in the comments is that Crowley considered the Star Ruby and Star Sapphire to be improved versions of the pentagram and hexagram rituals, so the term "equivalent" is inaccurate. I thought about this when I was writing up this post, but I wasn't really sure what the right term would be. I considered "corresponding" but that's not exactly correct either. So I'm going to leave the article as is, but with this additional notation.

Jesus the Magician

For a long time it has seemed to me that much of the Christian narrative about Jesus is more myth than fact. Unlike some occultists who think Jesus never existed, I do think there is enough historical evidence to conclude that he was a real person who taught something similar to what is recorded in the Gospels and could very well have been crucified by the Romans. However, I think that the theology that was built up around him starting with Paul's letters and later with the rulings of the Council of Nicea likely has little to do with the historical reality aside from a few basic facts and surviving parables.

An excellent book on what the historical Jesus may have really been like is Jesus the Healer by Stevan L. Davies. Davies argues that Jesus may have started out as a trance healer and exorcist who went on to develop a following. Such healers were common in ancient Palestine, so in order to accomplish that Jesus must have been especially proficient. Trance healers of the period tended to use "familiar spirits" that they invoked in order to accomplish their healings, but Jesus was different in that he identified his "spirit" as that of God. The similarity between this concept and the Thelemic description of the Holy Guardian Angel strikes me as quite noteworthy.

A new piece of archaeological evidence indicating that people may have thought of Jesus as a magical practitioner has been found in the harbor of Alexandria in Egypt. The piece is a bowl engraved with an inscription that may be read as "by Christ the magician" or "the magician by Christ." The bowl is dated between the second century BC and the first century AD, so it could have been made during the life of Jesus. If "Christ" here does indeed refer to the Biblical Jesus, this bowl provides an interesting glimpse into how the founder of the largest religion in the Western world may have really been viewed during his ministry.

Thoughts on "Nightmare Scenarios"

Llewellyn's New Worlds of Mind and Spirit has an article up by Donald Michael Kraig entitled Avoid the "Nightmare Scenario" in which he discusses the use of Tarot divination in order to avoid magick going terribly wrong.

While I have a couple of criticisms of the article, I want to start out by saying that the suggestion of doing a Tarot divination prior to engaging in practical magical operations is a good one, especially for beginning magicians, and Kraig explains how to do it simply and effectively. I don't do readings for my rituals very much anymore because after years of practice I have developed a pretty good sense of what will work and what won't. However, in the past I have found it to be a very useful technique for anyone who has not yet developed this intuitive sense of how magick works, and developing this sense does take years of dedicated practice. Kraig plugs a couple of different Tarot decks at the end of the article, but I don't think it matters which one you use. I like Aleister Crowley's Thoth deck the best because of the explicit Qabalistic symbolism and Frieda Harris' deco-style artwork, but I also know plenty of people who get good results with the Rider-Waite.

My criticisms are twofold. First off, in my experience "nightmare scenarios" as Kraig describes are actually very rare in magick if they happen at all. I've heard stories here and there but they are more like urban legends than verifiable cases. I do know of a few practitioners who have had mental illness issues, but if anything their practices have helped rather than hindered them in terms of dealing with such problems. From my own personal experience, I had issues with depression myself when I was younger and over the years my magical work has cleared that up without any therapy or psychiatric drugs. You're going to find mentally ill people in just about any group - in the United States approximately one person in four has some sort of mental illness - but I'm willing to bet that among genuine spiritual practitioners the incidence of such problems is much lower.

As far as practical work getting out of hand, I've done practical work for years and have never had anything of the sort happen, even as an inexperienced magician long ago. I'm convinced that this is because practical magick, in which the material world actually changes, is difficult enough that unless your entire being is behind the operation it will fail - and by "fail" I mean absolutely nothing happens. My basic working hypothesis is that for practical magick to work it must be in harmony with your True Will, your innermost divine nature, because otherwise your mind will be divided about the outcome and therefore the requisite "force" is not present to create the intended change. This hypothesis suggests a method of personal development that I have had great success with - evaluating magical successes and failures in order to gain insight into the nature of your True Will. A complete magical failure, in which no change or probability shift occurs, is likely out of harmony with your True Will in some key way.

My second criticism is related to what I consider to be Kraig's greatest failure - the recommendation that you should use the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram followed by the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Hexagram to begin and end magical rituals. It was published in Modern Magick and a lot of people who learned from Kraig's first book do rituals that way - and it's flat-out wrong. What is missing here is that if you understand how the banishing rituals work, no magical operation you send forth will ever get out of hand. The LBRP/LBRH creates what I call the "banishing field," which is a full magical shutdown. It stops all running spells, regardless of where they are in terms of accomplishing their objectives.

So in Kraig's example of "The Sorceror's Apprentice," all that would actually need to be done to shut down the wayward brooms would be to open a banishing field - they would fall over on the spot. Obviously, you don't want to be concluding your rituals this way because any influence you send out will similarly be stopped in its tracks before it has time to accomplish anything. My own recommendation, as I've mentioned a number of times, is to open practical magical rituals with an operant field, the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram followed by the Lesser Invoking Ritual of the Hexagram, and then close them with the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram by itself. This allows the macrocosmic portion of the spell to continue operating after the ritual has been concluded.

Lame Anti-Christ Attacks Roman Priest

The anti-Christ has been revealed, and boy is he pathetic.

Marco Luzi, a 25-year-old Italian man, has been arrested for stabbing a priest after watching the film version of "The Da Vinci Code" the night before. A note in Luzi's pocket read "This is just the beginning, 666." Another note found his apartment began with "I, the anti-Christ." So what can we conclude? It would appear that the anti-Christ is obsessed with mediocre film versions of pulp novels. Not only that, but he takes them seriously. Very seriously.

Apparently Luzi's dark omniscient mind must have missed the part where several of the main source documents for Baigent, Leigh, and Lincoln's The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, mined liberally for many of the plot elements of Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code, turned out to be complete forgeries. I mean, maybe Satan is the father of lies, but wouldn't you at least expect his representative on Earth to be aware of facts that any regular newspaper reader would know?

Also, should it disturb the forces of darkness that their all-powerful champion, charged with winning a global war against the powers of God and the Kingdom of Heaven, was unable to successfully kill an unarmed 68-year-old man? While the priest is in critical condition in a Roman hospital, he did survive the attack. I guess we won't be needing any tanks for the battle of Armageddon - against this loser sticks and rocks are probably overkill.

On the other hand, if Luzi truly is in league with Mickey Mouse and thus has access to the awesome malevolent power of the Disney corporation, all bets may be off.

UPDATE: More signs of an impending low-budget Apocalypse? Road signs bearing the number 666 (or variants like 66.6) have been disappearing all across the United States. Perhaps these will be the weapons wielded by the Armies of Darkness in preference to anything effective, like, say, guns.

UPDATE II: Another sign? The Virgin Mary appears in the window of an abandoned Massachusetts building, as opposed to someplace useful.

More Thoughts on Mantra

Recently I've been experimenting with using mantra meditation in conjunction with Western ceremonial magick techniques. My original idea was to use the Heavens of Assiah as mantras for each sphere and path on the Tree of Life, but I've done several rituals along those lines and now think a modification of the technique is in order.

My actual training in mantra meditation comes from the Tibetan Vajrayana Buddhist tradition. In Vajrayana, mantra meditation is divided up into two stages, generation and completion. In Western ceremonial terms, the generation stage builds energy and the completion phase grounds it. During the generation stage the deity's mantra is recited, and during the completion stage a shorter syllable is recited, such as AH or the Tibetan seed syllable associated with the mantra.

So my original idea was to use the Heaven of Assiah name for generation and AUMGN for completion. The main problem with this is that this confines the generation stage to Assiah on the Tree of Life, and that really is not correct. The generation stage should build energy higher up on the Tree and then the completion stage should ground it into Assiah once it has built to the appropriate level. AUMGN is not so much a grounding word as it is an integrative word, in effect combining the lightning flash and serpent of wisdom to create an esoteric circuit.

Here's the revised idea. For the mantra, use the godname or some short phrase including it. For the Qabalistic godnames the name itself is sufficient, as the name of God associated with each sphere is actually a word or phrase in Hebrew in addition to a proper name. For Egyptian godnames, my magical working group has used the following to good effect:

NETER NETJER (godname) WED NEH

It means "the perfect (or great) god [name] brings life." We've had good results with it for Heru (Horus), Seteh (Set), and Tahuti (Thoth) so far.

This constitutes the generation stage and the recitations should consist of a number of mala rounds equal to the number associated with the deity's Qabalistic sphere. For an evocation, the visualization that accompanies this stage should be like a clockwise whirling cone of appropriately colored light centered on the focus of the spell. For invocations, the same visualization should be centered on the magician.

For the completion stage, use the Heaven of Assiah name. One recitation should be made for each mala round in the generation stage. The visualization accompanying this stage should be that of the cone of light sinking and being absorbed into the focus for an evocation or the magician for an invocation. It seems like the Hebrew Heavens of Assiah work fine with the Egyptian godnames, but at some point I want to put together a translation so that I can do the whole thing in Egyptian.

Finally, the practice is concluded with a single AUMGN. The visualization for this is that of the light integrating with the focus or the magician and stabilizing itself in a balanced manner within its target.

More testing is slated for tonight. If anyone else out there would like to try it out and provide some feedback, go right ahead.

The Economics of Witchcraft Persecutions

Slate has an interesting article up about the economic factors that contribute to witchcraft persecutions. In agricultural societies prosperity is often tied to the weather, and comparing temperature records from Europe with the number of witch trials that occurred each year seems to support the notion that in bad economic times the persecutions became worse.

Emily Oster, an economist at the University of Chicago, has tried to gather systematic data on the link between witch trials and the weather. The results look striking: Between 1520 and 1770, colder decades go hand-in-hand with more trials. The link may be simply that witches were often blamed for bad weather. Or there may be a less direct link: People tend to lash out in tough times. There is some evidence, for instance, that lynching was more common in the American South when land prices and cotton prices were depressed.

In modern-day Africa, where many of the current killings happen, there may be a more direct motive. Suspected witches are often killed by their own family members who benefit by having fewer mouths to feed when resources are scarce.

Edward Miguel, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley, and co-author of Economic Gangsters, a book about the economics of crime, corruption, and war, has studied the Tanzanian situation. He argues that there is a direct economic motive for the attacks. Tough times in a Tanzanian household may well result in starvation, and the elderly—especially women—are at risk of being sacrificed to free resources. As evidence, Miguel points out that victims of witch attacks in Meatu district—almost all old women—tend to be from the poorest households. The murders are much more common during years of drought or flood.

It may be that solving the problem of witchcraft persecution has less to do with debunking folk beliefs and more to do with addressing poverty around the world. Maybe that's the real reason that these killings are so rare in wealthier countries. While there are Americans who believe in witchcraft and consider it evil, there is little economic motivation for them to act upon those beliefs.

Having local law enforcement take witchcraft killings seriously helps, too, as I commented in my article praising Kenya's response to the killing of 15 accused "witches" by an angry mob. It may be that witchcraft is seized upon as the supposed motivation for killing elderly dependents because in some places it prompts the police to look the other way.

"Witch School" Exposed in Malawi?

In Malawi, a nation in southeastern Africa, a school dedicated to teaching children witchcraft has apparently been exposed in the country's central district of Salima. The school is alleged to be quite large and according to the African Network for the Protection and Prevention of Child Abuse and Neglect it graduates 1000 students per year. So here's the question - is this for real?

Belief in witchcraft is widespread enough in Africa that it's not inconceivable that such a school could exist, and given some of the anti-witchcraft violence that sometimes happens in that part of the world the people running the school would have an interest in keeping it secret. However, the existence of the school is being reported by a single source with no corroborating evidence in a breathless "OMG the children!" sort of announcement. That undermines its credibility a bit right there.

I also wonder about the numbers quoted. A school that graduates 1000 students per year would be very large and would consume enough resources that it would be hard to hide. The graduating class from the private school that I attended was a little over 100 and the school was still a significant presence in its suburban community of about thirty thousand people. The school described in the article would be ten times that size.

Nonetheless, this portion is probably true.

There have been increased cases of people teaching children witchcraft, but efforts to deal with the issue are hampered by the constitution of Malawi, which does not recognise witchcraft and regards self-confessed individuals as "pretenders".

My question here is why this "issue" needs to be "dealt with." I certainly plan on teaching my kids magick if they are interested in learning it, and I don't see where the government should have any say in whether or not I can do that. The same should be true for people in Africa.