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.

A Christian Who Gets It

I recently came across an excellent article on a Christian site comparing the modern practice of "spiritual warfare" to ritual magick and finding little difference between the two. I've been telling people the same thing for years - this sort of results-oriented prayer is magick, plain and simple. The same is true of "green gospel" prayer that aims for lots of money, a nice house, or a Mercedes. It has a lot more in common with my magical practices than it does with the teachings of any major Christian sect.

There are two forms of spiritual practice that cut across all spiritual systems and denominations, magick and mysticism. Magick is the practice of directing one's consciousness outward so as to create change in accordance with will. Mysticism is the practice of looking inward so as to transform consciousness in such a way that an expansion of awareness and fundamental change in perspective is induced, what the Gospels refer to as metanoia. I've written elsewhere on this term and how it is poorly translated into "repentence" in English, a word that carries with it all sorts of connotations that the original Greek term did not.

The spiritual system that I practice, Thelema, embraces both techniques. However, most Christian churches teach that magick is forbidden but mysticism is fine. My belief is that this is an unnecessary restriction that does not automatically contradict the teachings of Jesus, but this is not a belief shared by most Christians. In fact, many of the "spiritual warfare" and "green gospel" Christians will happily explain that what they are doing is "prayer" and what I am doing is "sorcery," which makes them good and me evil. These people need a wake-up call - they are doing magick, and if their form of spirituality forbids magical practice they can't just use a different word and expect their God to be fooled.

Most of the "spiritual warfare" folks are also Biblical literalists, and it seems obvious to me that their practices are incompatible with Matthew 7:22-23.

On that day many will say to me, 'Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many deeds of power in your name?' Then I will declare to them, 'I never knew you; go away from me, you evildoers.'"

I mean, who else could this passage be talking about? I don't believe the Rapture is on the way or anything like that, but if Christianity is the one true religion and the correct interpretation of the faith is that of conservative theologians I'm smart enough to realize that I'm thoroughly screwed. The statement in the passage is that of people who think themselves to be devout but are surprised to find that God doesn't share their belief. I've seen commentary from Christians online implying that the "evildoers" here are liberal Christians, but a literal reading of the text renders that implication silly at best. What liberal Christian church teaches prophecy and casting out of demons?

Unlike a lot of magical practitioners, I have no problem whatsoever with Christianity or with individuals who follow the Christian faith. I explored it many years ago and just found that it wasn't for me. On the other hand, there are a lot of Christians who will happily condemn my practices while doing the same things themselves and calling their practice "prayer." This double standard strikes me as profoundly hypocritical or at the very least ignorant.

"Witchcraft" Sparks Congolese Soccer Riot

Say what you want about American sports fans, but the real crazies as far as that goes are the football (soccer) fans of Europe, Africa, and South America. I can't remember the last time fans were killed at a sporting event in the United States, but in the footballing world it happens surprisingly often. Sometimes these deaths are accidental, as in the case of fans stampeding out of a poorly designed stadium, but the rest of the time they are due to brawls and riots.

That being the case, you would expect the teams on the field to keep from doing anything that might enrage the fans, right? Well, apparently this player didn't get the message.

Nyuki football club was losing to its local rivals Socozaki in Sunday's game when the club's goalkeeper decided to intervene.

Radio Okapi, a local broadcaster funded by the United Nations, said the player dashed up the pitch incanting "fetishist" spells to weaken the opposing team.

The game, a derby match in an eastern province of the Central African country, quickly broke up into a brawl between the two teams of players.

A local police commander then tried to intervene to break up the fight, but he was pelted with rocks by the crowd.

Matters quickly got out of hand as fighting seized hold of some sections of the stadium. Police fired canisters of tear gas and spectators stampeded for the exits.

The charge resulted in carnage: 11 dead and several others injured.

The most important message to take away from this is that if you are a magical practitioner and athlete who wants to use your powers to help your team, the most useful thing to practice is casting spells without any visible words or actions. It's more difficult, but you can work at it and you will improve over time. Especially if your sport happens to be soccer.

Real Ritual Abuse

Most people now realize that the "ritual abuse" scare of the early 1990's was a bunch of nonsense. The vast Satanic conspiracy implicated by the therapists who relied on hypnosis to falsify memories was too large, complex, and powerful to ever exist in secret, and furthermore there have never been anywhere close to enough Satanists in the world to pull it off. Not only that, but actual Satanists are opposed to any sort of child abuse.

So that means the only "witches" and "Satanists" who are left to abuse kids are deranged followers of the practices outlined in the Malleus Maleficarum - you know, all three of them - and a handful of predators who use the belief in ritual practices to keep their victims in line. Like this guy. Assuming that the allegations are true, this is someone who should be showered with enough curses to kill a small elephant.

Joseph Gerald Hermary, 42 - a previously convicted child pornographer - was arrested several weeks ago in British Columbia on a Canada-wide warrant.

He is facing several charges stemming from incidents in late 2006, including two counts of sexual assault and breaching court orders.

...

Hermary is alleged to have told the boys he had special powers related to witchcraft and invited them to join a club he was starting, sources said.

It was during these meetings - which included bizarre ritualistic ceremonies - that the sexual abuse allegedly occurred.

When predators exploit magick and witchcraft to help them commit their crimes they hurt every magical practitioner out there. The last thing the magical arts need is to be associated with exploitation and abuse. Our enemies tried that once, and every case like this gives them more ammunition to try again.