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Here is the video of last night's Ritual Night Talk, with more information on pathworking and testing spirits.
I had a couple of questions come up over the last week related to my talk on pathworking, so this week I went into more detail on that topic along with more on testing spirits and/or entities that you might encounter while doing this sort of work.
Enjoy!
I had a couple of questions come up over the last week related to my talk on pathworking, so this week I went into more detail on that topic along with more on testing spirits and/or entities that you might encounter while doing this sort of work.
Enjoy!
14 comments:
hey scott! just curious what the Name was at 41:15ish you talk about vibrating to test a an entity? couldn’t quite make it out! Also appreciate the explanation of opening a space being pent/hex and tuning said space being hex/pent
This was a fantastic clarification! Answered all of my previous questions. But the curiosity never ends.
I had a question about both transliteration of Hebrew and pronunciation in general, I read in Chicken Qabalah that Hebrew is an ancient language, and the names can be pronounced any way you want. As a Chicken Qabalist, I don't worry about it, but I'm curious if you have a recommended method of transliteration for vowels? I can never decide whether to use an ayin, a heh, or a yod. I have similar problems with teth and tau, and cheth and kaph. Or zain and tzaddi.
My other question was a more personal one about daily practices. I often find I have trouble with performing consistent daily practices. I'll get motivated and do them for a week straight, but then they can become inconsistent or left for days at a time. Do you have any tips for how to keep up your practices when you lose motivation or your life becomes hectic? I've had fair success with both evocation and pathworking, thanks mostly to the clear arrangement of information on your blog, but I know I could do much more if I was more consistent.
Finally, I'd love to donate occasionally, but I'm assuming the link you mention is for your Facebook group where you post these first. As I don't use Facebook, would you be able to include the link in the blog post in future ritual night talks? The content here is fantastic and deserves support.
The name that you use for generally testing spirits is Eheieh, the godname associated with Kether.
While it is not really correct to say that the Hebrew can be pronounced "any way you want," it is true that the vowel marker system for modern Hebrew is much more recent than ancient Biblical names and so forth.
One of the things that you have to consider is that you don't transliterate letter by letter. You transliterate by sound. So for example, with my name Scott - that would be Samekh, Kaph, Aleph, and Tau or Teth. Even though the middle vowel is an O which is often transliterated to Ayin, the sound is an "ah" sound which is usually Aleph. As far as Tau or Teth, they can be the same consonant sound so you pick the one that gives you the best gematria value. Teth is 9 and Tau is 400. I wouldn't count the double T.
With schwa sounds you often don't transliterate a vowel at all. It can be implied by consonant pronunciation. So again, it doesn't necessarily work out as letter by letter.
For Teth and Tau - like with my name, I often use the one with the best gematria value. Technically Tau is a softer T than Teth, so I use Tau for a th sound, but either can be used for the English t.
For Heh and Yod - generally short-e is Heh and long-e and i are Yod.
For Cheth and Kaph - Cheth is ch and Kaph is k or hard-c. Soft-c is an s-sound, so it would be Samekh.
For Zain and Tzaddi - Zain is z and Tzaddi is x. X isn't a great sound transliteration for Tz, but it's the closest there is to the x-sound in English.
Ayin is usually used for long-o. Short-o, like in my name, is an "ah" sound which should be Alepth. Ayin can also be an "a'a" sound as in Da'ath, but that sound rarely shows up in English.
To my way of thinking persistence and consistency with daily practice is by far the most important application of discipline in magick. People can talk about self-deprivation or enduring hardship or whatever, but none of those are as effective as quiet persistence. The daily practices go faster when you get them down - I find that LBRP/LIRH/MP/QC can be done in something like 5-7 minutes. Those will keep your body of light fortified and all that, even if you only have that 5-7 minutes to spare once a day. Longer practices like meditation help too, if you can spare another 20 minutes or so.
In perspective, LBRP/LIRH/MP/20 min meditation/QC rakes about a half hour, shorter than a full-length TV show. But I know, it can be harder than it should be to keep them up, and I'm not sure why that is. Maybe it's just because it has to do with working with your consciousness and so forth. I guess the other thing I would point out is that it's better to simplify your practices on a day that's being hectic than it is to skip them all together - as in, if all you have time for is an LBRP, just do that. The fact that you're practicing every day is very important, and you should work on developing your will around doing something magical every day.
Here's the donation link for Leaping Laughter Lodge:
http://leapinglaughter-oto.org/donations-and-dues/
I can include that in the blog posts for subsequent talks.
Hebrew transliteration is more complicated than I thought. In modern magick, Donald Michael Kraig said ch sounds in Hebrew are pronounced with a k sound, as in loch.
Do you have a recommended source for what sounds the letters make and their pronunciation? Would mispronouncing a godname or the name of an an angel lower the probability shift of a successful evocation?
Yeah, I suppose the main thing is to do them every day so doing it becomes a habit. But I also worry the quality of the rituals would drop if I went through them on autopilot.
I don't know what it is, sometimes there's just a resistance to the idea of doing them. I enjoy their effects and once I've started it's really easy to continue through to completion, but sometimes the will to begin isn't there.
I was wondering about the underlying theory on the body of light, I haven't read much detail about it. I'm assuming it's a similar concept to a personal aura, but too many new age books caused my eyes to glaze over whenever it came up.
Why is it important to fortify it, and what are the benefits to doing so? Oh, and is pathworking utilizing it, in the same conceptual sense that an astral body is used in astral travel?
I do have to admit I don't quite grasp the idea of pathworking not being in an external location. An internal journey is subjectively experienced as a trip through a different space to your physical body, even if you are aware of your physical body sitting still while you focus on your inner vision.
I guess the MPR would have an even stronger fortifying effect than the LBRP/LIRH combo, but of course the tolerant field makes the MPR more effective.
This comment ran far too long, but the subject is too interesting to let the opportunity for answers to pass by.
In my experience the exact pronunciation is not that important for practical results. When you are working with a spirit, you also usually have a sigil that maps to the exact letters of the name. As far as Cheth being pronounced more like a K sound, I still would transliterate a word like "chariot" to start with Cheth even though it's an English ch because that's what's closest, like Tzaddi and English x. I can't think of an English word where ch is pronounced like a k off the top of my head, but you might want to transliterate that to Kaph instead. Or, you can look at the overall gematria of different spellings for a word starting with an English k sound and pick the one you like better.
Go through the rituals on autopilot anyway, if that's all you can do. It's always better to do them than to not do them.
Body of light, astral body, and aura are all the same thing. I see it as a field of consciousness corresponding to your nervous system with a center of awareness that can shift in a nonlocal manner and connect with external information by means of your psychic senses. Yeah, your eyes probably glazed over there.
One of the things I do with my Enochian books is that I limit the discussion of complex theory. Just like using any other technology, you don't need to completely understand how everything works in order to get good results with it. There's a place for theory, but I think it's a lot more important to become proficient with the method and then dig into theory when you have some specific experiment you want to do to test the limits of the method's effectiveness or modify it in some way. When you're starting out, just learn the practice and get good at it. Dig into theory later once you have a good handle on the method.
The main thing that fortifying the body of light does is to build your magical strength in general. You will be able to cast stronger spells with a stronger body of light. You also will become more resistant to magical influence of whatever sort, from human magicians and from spirits. It should strengthen your will and determination, and make it easier to maintain magical discipline. It also helps you connect with mystical states of consciousness.
Basically, it's a good thing, which is why we work at it.
My point about not going anywhere is just that the sense of traveling is subjective, not objective. Neither your body or your nervous system go anywhere. I mainly bring that up to address the dumb superstition that your astral body can be separated from your physical body and harm you in some way. That does not, and cannot, happen. You are connecting with and receiving information from an space external to your usual conscious awareness, but it's similar to walking through a virtual reality simulation. You are receiving information from your goggles that you are moving around and doing stuff, but your body and consciousness are still in the same place and one is not separate from the other. Substitute psychic senses for VR goggles in that example, and you should get the gist.
The reason that LBRP/LIRH/MP is more effective that LBRP/LIRH is that those two are foundational rituals that you use to set up your space. You don't have an intent that you're applying to that space until you do something else. The Middle Pillar aligns your consciousness with that of the divine, so it's an operation with intent.
So, the X in xylophone would use zain because it makes a Z sound, but the X in fox would be kaph and samekh? Or tzaddi?
The body of light seems straightforward enough, in what ways does it correspond with the nervous system? And what is a nonlocal shift?
I get what you mean about practice being paramount, personally I'm most confident in performing an activity when I have at least a vague understanding of its underlying mechanics.
If performing the daily rituals consistently will fortify the body of light, would not doing them cause it to decay or lose effectiveness?
And I understand that each person is different and experiences different levels of results in magick, but have you noticed a trend for how long someone needs to have been practicing before their practical operations begin getting good results?
I really want to dive in, but modern magick recommended that you practice the basic rituals for at least a month before trying anything, and to my mind any time I miss a day that month long wait gets reset.
Yes, you could transliterate it that way.
How it corresponds to the nervous system is one of those questions that will require a comprehensive theory of consciousness, but I think there is a lot of evidence that they are related. A nonlocal shift in simplest terms is when you consciousness is focused on something elsewhere while your body remains in the same place. You have to dig into consciousness research and quantum theory in order to elaborate on it more, but the good news is that you don't have to completely understand it in order to get results. Just do the work and trust that the results will follow.
Your body of light tends to just stay as it is when you don't do practices. Most people don't do practices, and their auras don't wither away or anything like that. You can build it up much faster by action than it will decay from inaction, at least in my experience.
The time it takes to get good results depends a lot on how much natural magical aptitude you have, just like every other human skill. The more aptitude you have, the better your results will be with the same amount of work.
There's nothing in the tradition that says you have to practice for a month before you do anything besides Donald Michael Kraig. I think it's perfectly fine to try this stuff out before then as long as you feel like you know the rituals and can do them from memory. It might take a month before you get really good at them, but based on your aptitude it could be faster (or slower) than that. The worst that you're likely to encounter if you try this stuff right away is that nothing will happen. You're not going to blow yourself up if you do something wrong, unlike what horror movies will tell you.
But on the other hand, if you're more comfortable practicing longer before you try practical work that's okay too. It really depends more on how you want to do it than what any "expert" tells you.
oh doy okay, just different hearing other folks say ahih out loud- thought i missed a name!
also, ive found doing dry runs of rituals is super useful when short on time since "wet" runs (strongly built visualizations, all breathing & vibrations to fourfold breath- slows things down but at least for me creates much stronger sensory input in vibrations/grade signs/calling down light & stronger sense of presence in invocation) definitely take more time. at least if you're literally just going through the motions youre drilling them further into becoming muscle memory which enables your cognitive & emotional attention to be on "enflaming yourself with prayer" or otherwise really engaging with your operation. like playing an instrument you only really gonna catch a vibe with it once you no longer have to give the whole of your active attention just to hitting the notes themselves. time spent making sure you can properly build your structures before you go to the effort & energetic expense of putting them into action for something cant be time wasted but building something shoddy and blasting off with no direction can be!!
Well, I've already got the rituals memorized, and I've done practical works in the past, a few of which got good results. Only hard part is memorizing the orphic hymns for planetary work, I can already recite the ones for Mercury and the Moon.
I think I have enough information now to jump right in! Thank you very much.
I remember reading in an old article of yours, there was something about you wanting to use an at-home brain scanner to see if activity in parts of the brain during ritual correlated to statistically relevant results, and that you were going to see if you could develop a quantum theory of magick from the results.
I've been interested in this since part 10 of your magickal models series, a new paradigm to view methods and results. How's that going?
I read the Orphic hymns when I use them. I still do not have them memorized and they work fine. Many of those texts were designed for reading. You can memorize them if you want, of course, but it seems like you can get good results regardless.
It turns out that aggregate brainwaves are not a very good measure of what is going on, or at least not precise enough to draw firm conclusions from. The problem is that it looks like you have firing at different speeds in different areas, and that all gets aggregated together into a single reading. So linking it back to quantum concepts hasn't been possible so far.
On the other hand, I think I may have worked out how to combine entanglement and morphic resonance into the quantum information model of magick, which would complete the theory. It assumes panpsychism, but other than that it seem to be sound - and I'm pretty convinced that getting magick to work without panpsychism probably isn't possible. Since magick works, panpsychism has to be the correct model of how consciousness and the universe interact.
https://ananael.blogspot.com/2020/07/the-missing-piece.html
So I'm working on the book - really! The cool thing about this final integrated version is that it's not just for magick, it's a general theory of all paranormal psychic phenomena.
Could you recommend a book that is exclusively about pathworking?
Particularly first hand accounts of experiences.
Thank you.
Unfortunately I have not ever come across a book like that. I do have accounts of experiences from the pathworking series that my magical working group has done over the years, so maybe I should write one at some point.
Yes, that would be fascinating. I do seem to recall in that massive tome simply titled "The Golden Dawn" that there indeed was subject matter tucked away in that book regarding pathworking.
When I first read about it 30 years ago towards the end of "Modern Magic," it fascinated me but I did not feel my astral senses or my level of expertise was sufficient.
Honestly, I was very enamored of the daily work of the LBRP,BRH,Middle Pillar and tarot contemplation that I felt quite fulfilled for a very long time. I never ceased to be amazed that after regular daily practice for a few months that I could literally see the bright blue energy from my Athame while tracing the Pentagrams. And usually upon retiring for the evening, I could see the movement of white light in a very interesting pattern moving up and down my body.
I think that book might have been "The Complete Golden Dawn System of Magic" that was put out by New Falcon. It had a bunch of additional material besides what was in Regardie's original Golden Dawn. There was some material in the original book, too - they called it "travel in the spirit vision" back in the day, but it's the same method that we call pathworking today.
Working with astral senses is tricky. You don't usually see things with the same vividness as you do on television, and if you're expecting that the practice can be disappointing. The best trick that I've found is to think "well, if I was traveling in the astral, what I would be seeing is..." and let your mind wander from there. Then, if you encounter entities, test them by asking for numbers or words of power that you can do gematria with. You'll probably have a few false starts, but when your numbers start lining up with the information you're getting that means it's starting to really work.
Kraigs description of pathworking is fine as far as it goes, but he misses (1) the Greater pentagram and hexagram rituals, which you use to tune your space to the path you will be exploring and (2) he could say a lot more about testing spirits and information received during pathworkings. I also find that the operant field method (open with LBRP/LIRH instead of LBRP/LBRH) is a lot more effective for all kinds of operations, including pathworking, but Kraig wasn't a fan of my approach.
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