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Here's last night's Ritual Night Talk on talismans. Linking a magical operation to a talisman is pretty simple. You create an object that has an affinity with the force you are conjuring and then instead of a straight charge like "do xyz" you charge the spirit to "empower this talisman to do xyz." There are several advantages to working with talismans this way.
Enjoy!
Enjoy!
21 comments:
Great video, I'm looking forward to the talisman write-up! I wonder if you'd get more numbers on the lottery with more talismans.
I have a couple of questions about the "link" part of the process though. When and how does the "link" process work? For instance, if you're going to spit on it to link it to yourself, do you just spit on the talisman right after engraving it, before starting the ritual? Do you say anything when you do that like, "I now link this talisman to me via the arcane mystery of saliva"?
Also, how do you link a talisman to another person? Say for example if you wanted to use Jupiter to discourage the electoral prospects of a certain orange politician...
Hypothetically, that would be a good way to test it out. Make one lottery-winning talisman, play for a while, and see how you do. Then make a second one, play for a while, and compare the two data sets. If you try this, I would be interested in hearing about your results.
There are two kinds of magical links, similarity and contagion. A contagion link works pretty much like quantum entanglement. You can link to something by interacting with it, or by putting it in contact with a part of yourself or a part of a target. Anything with DNA in it works this way, including the classic hair and/or fingernail clippings that are commonly recommended. This can be your DNA or someone else's.
A similarity link works by means of something with a similar form or shape. The classic similarity link is a photograph. Similarity links appear to operate by the mechanism of morphic resonance laid out by Rupert Sheldrake, which is not as scientifically well-founded as quantum entanglement but according to basically all magical traditions works. Part of Sheldrake's theory has to do with the connection between morphology and DNA.
DNA is such a good link because it works both ways - contagion from the body cells it contains and resonance with the DNA still in the rest of your cells. You don't need to do or say anything special for this to work. It's just a property of the physical/energetic world. There are spells that you can use to specifically link two objects if you have both of them in your possession, but that's more of a special case for specific operations.
The easiest way to link a talisman to a politician these days is to use a photograph as a similarity link, since photographs of politicians are very easy to obtain and anything requiring close contact is very difficult because of security and the like. But as Peter Carroll observed years ago, public figures tend to be especially hard to affect with magick. He thought it had to do with having followers who believed in them, though I personally have found the belief-powers-magick model problematic.
In a certain orange politician's case, it's pretty clear that people are doing spells for him. Sure, they call them "prayers," but they work just like less focused spellwork and make up for that to some degree with larger numbers of people. There are also a few conservative occultists who are probably doing the same thing - or least there were last time around.
Thanks! So if I understand you correctly, you could just put a picture of a person under the talisman during the ritual, and that would link it. Do you then need to keep the picture connected to the talisman forever, or can you discard the picture after the ritual and the talsiman will still be linked to that person?
One of the things I like to do is take a photograph and literally turn it into a talisman. You draw the characters directly onto it, including the character, angel seal, and intelligence and spirit seals depending on the operation. You get best results if you draw them in the proper colors.
The link should be maintained once the ritual is complete, though. You should be able to use the same photograph for multiple operations, for example. It doesn't need to stay in contact forever. To make sure, you can add something into the charge like:
"Empower this talisman and link it to [certain orange politician], that it will reduce his stature among his supporters, thwart all of his political aspirations, and remove him from office."
That should do it.
That was a nice bit about building into the injunction a charge to continually empower the talisman, I'm adding that to my template.
I commonly use a photograph as a link to the target and have found it effective. I place the sigil of the spirit in the containment structure, on top of that the photograph, and on top of that the talisman, which is generally a square of paper these days. I reference the photograph during the ritual (e.g., "protect NN, whose image is upon this photograph") and at the end I place the talisman and the photograph together in an envelope where they live together from then on.
Yet protocol > intent ;)
Of course. That is the case with everything else - why should it be any different with magick? It never has made a lot of sense to me that intent/belief is all that matters for magical operations. Magick is a technology that involves individual consciousness, but it's not the only factor.
Good intentions that are applied poorly and result in bad outcomes is a cliche for a reason, in magick as well as in life.
I'm not saying intent is all that matters, just that it's being discarded way to easily in favor of a series of prayers (wink). Whereas if you were to do those prayers right and formulate your intent in certain ways, you could do more harm than good. Nothing happening would be a good outcome in such a case.
Of course, as I see it, any prayer that you do for a specific outcome is the same thing as a spell. Not that most religious folks will admit it, though.
Can you expand on the idea of the magickal insulator? I'm stuck on the idea that covering it in plastic is preventing it from interacting with the environment outside the plastic, so in this case it would be ineffective at invoking spirits of Mercury (or at doing anything else). With the silk, you uncover it when you need it and cover it when you don't, but if it's effective in plastic it would also be effective in silk. This seems to conflict with the idea that you need to cover you talisman before the final LBRP if that's how you're closing the ritual. I'm having trouble distinguishing between the idea of plastic as an insulator (prevent interactions) and shrouding (prevent interactions/prevent energy dissipation), and the effects of each of these in different contexts.
The big difference between plastic and silk is that plastic is transparent. Silk insulates against both light and physical contact, whereas plastic just insulates against physical contact. There can be applications for both.
Magical energy such as it is - quantum information or chi energy or whatever you want to consider it - can be carried by light. So I can have a tablet attributed to a planet and pull it off a shelf to use it without worrying about touching the magical portion of it. But if I use it in a ritual, the magical force it's attributed to can emanate off it without whatever link or sigil or whatever interacting with it.
Technically you probably don't have to cover the talisman during the final LBRP. The LBRP is a microcosmic ritual, so according to the model it should only disconnect you from the talisman without affecting the talisman itself. I suppose I just sometimes do it as a nod to the tradition, since it doesn't take much extra effort.
Hi Scott, I have some long term spells from a few weeks back running at the moment.I didn't put a time frame on them. I've been having almost 100% success with all my workings of late (since I adopted your operant field paradigm). After watching this video however, it occurs to me that a long term working is more suited to a talisman, which would require me to cancel those workings (if that can be done). I am a musician and looking for employment is a never ending process which is why, even though both workings were successful, I want them to continue. One of the workings was to find a band with a vacancy, a week later I was auditioning for a band who lost a member (he quit) and I was asked to join on the spot.
My fear is that if I cancel that working, this job will go pear shaped. My question is; is there a way to cancel the long term workings without losing the good result?
With rituals like this, what is done is done. If you stopped your working now, the effect won't go back in time and change work that your spell has already completed. It would just stop working where it's at. They also generally end on a success, so they might be "done" at this point depending on how your charge was worded and no longer be running.
The latter is the simplest case. You just recast with a talisman, and word the charge so that the working is an ongoing process, to both find the work you want and to keep it once you have it.
Hi Scott, I'm a pro musician and I am going to make a talisman to boost my creativity while performing. I thought my main guitar would be the most appropriate object and I could program it to feed off the creativity of everyone that is on stage with me during a performance. My question is, could that actually lessen the creativity of my fellow musicians ? A performance is a collective effort and I wouldn't want anyone else to be less creative.
It would depend on how you worded the charge. If you just worded it to "feed off" the creativity of others, maybe. But you could do something else like tell it to feed off the energy of the crowd and covert that into creativity, or use something else related to performing as a source. You don't have to have a talisman feed off the same kind of energy it is producing. They are fully capable of transmuting forces. Talismans that feed off one kind of energy and produce another are quite common.
Hi Scott, very cool video on talismans. I have a few questions after watching...you say that you can stack talismans and increase the overall probability effect but does that mean you can call upon the same Kabalistic angel and make this request over and over? My thinking is that if you call on this same angel you are in effect "canceling out" your previous ritual so that everything starts over. If I call on the angel of Jupiter to empower a parchment talisman for "general luck and wealth" and then next Thursday call on him again to do the same thing but for a piece of tin or amethyst, wouldn't I just be overwriting my previous program? Similarly, if I call on this Jupiter angel to empower a paper talisman for general luck one Thursday and then call on him again next Thursday to empower a piece of tin to create a talisman to make me successful in a particular endeavor, which one succeeds? The most recent one? Hope this makes sense...
No, because the talismans are separate objects. You are calling on the angel to empower talisman #1, which is basically an instant effect. Then the talisman just runs. It doesn't "tie up" the angel or anything like that. Then you conjure them to empower talisman #2, which is also an instant effect. Then that talisman runs as well. If you're going to do this, you do want to make sure to include in your charge for the second talisman that it shouldn't interfere with the first, because that can sometimes be an issue if you don't specify it. Otherwise they both should just run.
The key concept is that the talisman is not the angel. Once it's empowered, it is its own independent object that is charged with a power that is presumably in the angel's sphere of influence. It is not in any way the angel itself, so having a talisman does not in any way limit other talismanic operations with the same angel.
Ohhh I see what you mean here. Since this is an external object that gets the magickal effect attached to it, rather than oneself, there's nothing "lingering" on you (or the spirit) and thus you're both free whereas linking something to yourself could create complications with using up energy. I guess in that example, if one does those two Thursday rituals without using any talismans, (based on what I've been reading on your site), the angel CAN do BOTH operations but it would ultimately result in the magickal power of both to be split in half (whatever integer that may be). So a work-around for that--depending on my issues to resolve and my time constraints, etc.-- is that I could do a talisman one week, and then a standard spell--one that is linked to me--and things should be fine in that regard. By that I mean, I wouldn't have split the power across two operations because one is linked to a talisman, but I could still achieve two outcomes. Though the talismanic one would suffer a slight reduction on its own, somewhere around 75-80% of its efficacy. And in both instances, it would be helpful to state that the 2nd operation shouldn't interfere with the first.
Am I understanding this correctly?
Oh, and before I forget, you mention that once the talisman is charged, it's up and running...meaning, the talisman doesn't need any extra "time to build up", I'm assuming... BUT the standard amount of time to achieve an effect is to be expected depending on the type of magickal shift your performing (elemental, planetary, zodiacal) just as you would expect had you done a "standard" spell. If I do a planetary ritual, and have the effect anchored to a talisman, the talisman is turned on in that moment, but I should still expect to see results in the normal time frame rather than any quicker than if I anchored the spell to ME...correct?
The key to remember here is that it is not one individual angel doing all of this. If that were the case, I would be affected by any other magician calling on the same angel. What is created when you do a ritual is an "instance" of the angel - a manifestation of it in a particular space and time.
Instances partake of spiritual power. So if you cast multiple spells with the same angel for the same effect anchored to you, you get the same result as one spell for the same effect. With two, each instance gets half of your available spiritual power to accomplish the same task. This is an identical situation to a single instance using 100% of your spiritual power.
Each talisman is separate from every other. So two talismans calling on the same angel to do the same thing have separate sources of spiritual power. There's the standard 0.8 reduction in overall power from using a talisman, but 0.8 + 0.8 = 1.6, so that's 160% of the probability shift from you anchoring to yourself. They can work together as long as you specific in the charge that they don't conflict with each other. This is also true of one spell anchored to you and one spell anchored to a talisman. An anchor is anchor - they all work the same.
Charging the talisman to perform a task is instant, but the talisman will then need the same time to actually perform the task as a spell anchored to you does. It's just that it is doing so independently.
Ok I see now...this is what I was thinking, yea
Very helpful and I appreciate it Scott!
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