A Portable Gnostic Mass Enclosure

The weekend of August 10-12, my local OTO body Leaping Laughter Oasis hosted the first ever Ecclesia Gnostica Catholica Conference in Bloomington, Minnesota. Since I'm pretty handy with regular tools in addition to magical ones, I built the main Gnostic Mass enclosure and altar that we used at the hotel.

There was a lot of interest in how I did it at the conference, so I figured I would put a post up here sharing my methods. The Gnostic Mass altar and enclosure is a large piece of magical furniture, and building a portable version of it can be a big impediment to performing Masses outside a dedicated temple space. This article is dedicated to the construction of the enclosure, and I'll put up another one in a bit dedicated to the altar itself.

Ideally each piece should be small enough to fit into a regular car and be light enough for one person to carry. You don't want to have to rent a truck every time you want to move your setup. We did do that for the conference, but that was mostly for convenience. The small 10' U-Haul was much bigger than we needed, so it was easy and quick to load. We could have moved our stuff in several cars, though, which makes the idea of doing more remote Masses possible without additional rental expenses.

This is the furniture that you need for a Gnostic Mass altar setup:

• A main altar measuring seven feet by three feet, 44 inches high.
• A super-altar consisting of three shelves that sits on top of the main altar.
• A "great veil" that entirely encloses the main altar and super-altar.
• Three steps leading up to the altar, painted or finished in black and white squares.
• Two pillars, one on each side of the altar, countercharged in black and white.

We already had pieces for the steps, pillars, and super-altar, so the pieces that I built for the conference were the main altar and the veil enclosure. The following describes how the enclosure is put together.

Enochian Master Class Now Available!

Back in April I participated in this Seven Day Enochian Master Class organized by Jason Augustus Newcomb. I am pleased to announce that this class now has a permanent home, and you can sign up and take it any time you would like. The link to sign up is here, or you can just click on the image above.

Assembled here are some of the greatest living practitioners and thinkers on the subjects of Enochian Magick. All of these teachers have strong personal opinions, strong track records of practical work, and strong research into the history and practices of occultism in general.

In today's world, what often passes for occult teachings is from people with little or any practical knowledge of what they go on and on about on YouTube or other social media. This is not going to be the imaginings of dreamers or charlatans but rather the intimate experiences of those who have walked these paths for decades.

You are going to get an intimate view of how these practitioners approach these practices in a way that will enrich you and empower to move forward in the best way for you! You are not going to see one point of view here, but rather the unvarnished opinions of a bunch of different magical viewpoints about these magical systems.

In this video class you will hear from myself, Jason Augustus Newcomb, and Aaron Leitch with our thoughts on the Enochian system. You can see where we agree, where we disagree, and what our perspectives are on how the system works and what it can be used to accomplish. The videos are a little raw because they were recorded live without editing, but that also gives them a sense of immediacy that you won't find in more polished presentations.

These are the only video presentations on Enochian that I have done to date, so this is a unique opportunity to hear my thoughts and experiences presented in this format. By signing up and taking the class you will also be helping to support the rest of my work here on Augoeides, and if you come away from the class with questions feel free to ask them on my Enochian Magick Forum page.

Alex Jones Off Social Media

Alex Jones has been banned from YouTube, Apple, and Facebook. This happened the week before last, but I've been so busy with convention preparation and convention cleanup that I haven't had time to gloat - until now. Jones is already in legal trouble over the whole Sandy Hook mess and was widely mocked for his Second Civil War declaration back in July. This latest blow to his online media empire has been a long time coming.

YouTube, Apple and Facebook have removed main outlets for conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and his Infowars website, citing repeated violations of policies against hate speech and glorifying violence. Infowars responded by accusing the companies of censorship.

The streaming service Spotify also expanded a ban imposed last week on some of Jones' content, saying Monday that "The Alex Jones Show has lost access to the Spotify platform."

On Sunday, Apple and iTunes deleted five podcasts related to Infowars and Jones. The other bans then piled up in quick succession. "Apple does not tolerate hate speech," the company said in a statement. "We believe in representing a wide range of views, so long as people are respectful to those with differing opinions."

YouTube and Facebook had previously warned Jones and Infowars that they were accumulating "strikes" by violating the services' community standards. Early Monday, Facebook announced that it had permanently removed four Alex Jones-related pages — the Alex Jones Channel Page, the Alex Jones Page, the Infowars Page and the Infowars Nightly News Page.

I'll freely admit that in one sense this is kind of a hard one. I'm strongly opposed to censorship, but there are two points here that need to be acknowledged. First, these are private entities deciding that they no longer want to give Jones a platform, which isn't the same thing as censorship. Censorship is when information is suppressed by the government. Jones has free speech rights, but so do the companies hosting his videos and podcasts.

Via Solis Leo Elixir Rite - Year Two

Today's Magick Monday post is a full script for the Leo Elixir Rite that we will be performing tomorrow, Tuesday August 14th, at Leaping Laughter Oasis, our local Twin Cities body of Ordo Templi Orientis. Going forward, we will be continuing to perform one of these per month, once for each of the twelve signs, in a ritual series called Via Solis (the way or path of the Sun). I will be posting the full scripts here on the preceding Mondays so people can take a look at them if they want to attend. Also, if you are in the Twin Cities (Minneapolis and Saint Paul, Minnesota) and would like to attend, let me or someone at the lodge know. This is a public ritual and all are welcome.

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 Leo. The sign Leo is attributed to "The power of training wild beasts." As I interpret it, this power is related to working with conditioning of whatever sort, yours or that of others, in accordance with your will. So those sorts of intents are most appropriate. This ritual may be performed with one, two, or three officers, who may alternate taking the Officiant role and divide up the reading from Liber 963. 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.

Bell chime.

Ecclesia Gnostica Catholica Conference 2018

Augoeides has been quiet since last week, and it's not just because of the issues with Facebook's new sharing policy.

Leaping Laughter Oasis is hosting the 2018 Ecclesia Gnostica Catholica Conference in the Twin Cities this weekend. This is a national-level Ordo Templi Orientis event, and it's been all hands on deck for a couple of weeks here to make sure that everything runs smoothly. I'll be at the conference all weekend and my next post will be the Leo Elixir Rite next Monday.

It probably is too late to arrange transportation if you live out of town, but if you are an active Ordo Templi Orientis member living in or around the Twin Cities (Minneapolis and Saint Paul, Minnesota) you can still register and attend. Click here to find out more.

If you will be attending the conference I'll see you there, and if not I'll catch you here on Augoeides next week.

Mummy Juice!

This is either one of the funniest things I've ever seen, or one of the dumbest and most disturbing. Petition-spamming site change.org has a petition up to, and I quote, "let people drink the red liquid from the dark sarcophagus." This is the same mystery sarcophagus that was recently discovered in Alexandria, Egypt.

According to archaeologists, the red liquid is a mixture of sewage water and the decomposed remains of three bodies that were buried together more than two thousand years ago. Why would anyone want to drink this crap? Well, I'll let the petition explain.

we need to drink the red liquid from the cursed dark sarcophagus in the form of some sort of carbonated energy drink so we can assume its powers and finally die

Truly, that's a compelling rationale right there. According to the page, more than twenty-seven thousand people have signed the petition. So this is either funny as hell, or there are more than twenty-seven thousand Darwin Awards sitting on the shelf, just waiting to be handed out. I think I'm going to go with funny as hell, since the alternative is pretty damn sad.

Yes, if you drink it, you'll get very sick and you might die. You're not going to be transformed into a supernaturally powered mummy who can wield the ten plagues of Egypt at will. Yeah, I know, that would be cool, but these bodies were buried almost fifteen hundred years after the alleged date of the Exodus. There's no connection there, and anyway it wasn't Egyptian magicians who summoned the plagues, it was Moses.

And it's not even clear that these bodies were mummified. So maybe what we're looking as is zombie juice instead. Or just dead body juice diluted with sewage. Drinking it might be a novel way to kill yourself, but other than that it's hard to see the appeal. It's not going to give anyone special powers, because we don't live in a comic book. Even we magicians who cast spells and the like live right here in the real world.

On top of all that, the red liquid is not carbonated and I'm sure it tastes nothing like an energy drink. It most likely just tastes like shit.

If You Build It, They Won't Come

It's been a while since I made fun of Ken Ham, Answers in Genesis, and of course Ark Encounter. Frankly, it's been too long. This recent article from Americans United for the Separation of Church and State points out that basically, the giant replica of Noah's Ark that took so much work to get built just isn't meeting the attendance projections used to justify the tax breaks Ham obtained from the state of Kentucky. Ham offered a bunch of rosy projections when he pitched the idea to the state, and apparently the attraction is having trouble meeting even half of its projected ticket sales.

To help cover the cost of emergency services the small town now must provide to the visitors of a large amusement park within its borders, city officials last year initiated a 50-cent fee on the tickets sold at the ark and a few smaller amusement venues in Williamstown. (This is the fee Ham and his company, Answers in Genesis, tried to avoid paying last summer by briefly switching the park’s status to nonprofit – a move that would have had a crushing long-term impact on property tax generation for the community but also nearly resulted in the park losing its $18 million state tourism subsidy.)

The local newspaper, the Grant County News, reported this month that Williamstown had collected about $374,000 in amusement fee revenue from the Ark Park during the first 11 months of the 2017-18 fiscal year. While that’s a nice chunk of change, it’s barely half of what town officials had been led to believe they would collect from the attendance projections submitted by Ham. “Last year, we based [our] budget figure on attendance at the Ark Encounter at 1,400,000,” Williamstown Mayor Rick Skinner told the paper. “This year, we are more conservative and using 870,000 visitors.”

Ham initially projected 1.2 million people would visit the Ark in the first year after it opened in July 2016, and that average yearly attendance going forward would be in the range of 1.4 million to 2.2 million people. On the first anniversary of the park’s opening, Ham said about 1 million people visited in the first year, about 16 percent fewer than expected. But, Ham said he expected the 2017-18 attendance to be “closer to the high end” of the projections – in other words, close to 2.2 million people.

The Secrets of Solomon

One of the really cool things about living in the Twin Cities is that the wonderful Joseph H. Peterson only lives a couple of hours away.

This last weekend, he came to Leaping Laughter Oasis in Minneapolis and gave a presentation on his latest book, The Secrets of Solomon: A Witch's Handbook from the trial records of the Venetian Inquisition. Peterson is one of the few authors in the grimoire field doing academic-quality research, and his books on the various texts and their histories are always illuminating.

I bought a copy of the book at the presentation and have not had a chance to read it, but I figured for today I would summarize a couple of takeaways from Peterson's presentation that are relevant to issues that keep coming up in discussions of the grimoires.

The Secrets of Solomon is a grimoire that is explicitly dedicated to working with chthonic spirits. It appears to be one of the sources used by the original author of the Grimoirium Verum, and it is clearly aware of the Key of Solomon. It positions itself as a grimoire for working with chthonics, whereas the Key of Solomon is dedicated to working with "aerial" spirits (which I usually refer to as celestial). Here are a few takeaways related to issues that have come up in the grimoire community that The Secrets of Solomon may help to shed some light on.

The text is clear that chthonic spirits are supposed to communicate visually, and aerial (or celestial spirits) do not. In other words, if you're charging up your Key of Solomon pentacles and trying to get the spirits to appear visually, according to the tradition you are doing it wrong. I doubt this is an absolute rule, and I also know from experience that the modern scrying techniques I use work fine, but it's a nice point to be able to pull out in those arguments over the whole visual appearance thing. It The Secrets of Solomon is to be believed, the celestials from the Key of Solomon don't necessarily appear and in fact are not supposed to.

According to the text, chthonic spirits can generally accomplish more than celestials. I can't personally say that I've found that to be the case, since I'm able to do about the same level of effects with both, but it's no surprise that the author of the text is going to say that the methods they are outlining are the best, whether or not that's true. The trade-off is that celestials can be "bound into a ring and carried with you" for performing ad hoc magical effects. This is an interesting idea for the Key of Solomon pentacles - what if you made a ring for one of the pentacles, enchanted it for general effects related to its function, and wore it around? It seems to me that could be a very useful technique.