Enochian as a Single Coherent Magical System

One of the ongoing arguments among Enochian magicians is whether or not John Dee and Edward Kelly's experiments produced a single coherent system of magick. Notably, many modern magicians separate the "Watchtower" material from the material in the Heptarchia Mystica, as there is some justification for doing so. The Heptarchial material was received substantially earlier, and the conjurations are structured differently. There are also other portions of the original diaries that don't seem to fit with anything else, like the Liber Logaeth communications and the round tablet of Nalvage.

Despite all of this, my own magical research suggests that the Enochian system is indeed a single coherent system, at least in terms of the Heptarchia Mystica and the Watchtowers.

Most of the evidence I have collected is related to two specific ritual practices that have produced good results for me over the course of many years. The first of this is the use of Enochian Temple Equipment (no, that's not my temple, but the setup shown is very nice)with all of the entities of the Enochian system. Benjamin Rowe has argued that the temple equipment is only used with the Heptarchial angels, and it is true that the instructions for the various pieces of furniture accompany the descriptions of those particular entities. However, reading through the diaries there is no instruction anywhere telling Dee to stop using the table with the later angels, and it makes little sense that they would have built the table and then stopped using it. It might be argued that the equipment was never built, but there is substantial evidence that the table was indeed constructed.

In the diaries, Dee keeps asking if he can put a drawer under the table (and the spirits keep telling him no), so that implies that he and Kelly did in fact build it and used it for their scrying sessions. There is a Holy Table in the British Museum as well that is reputed to have belonged to Dee, though I have not personally seen it and it is possible that it could have been built later. Importantly, it would be worth checking to see if the letters on the table match the actual instructions or if they match the diagram published in True and Faithful Relation, which for some reason is incorrect. Whether it is a mistake or something done on purpose to prevent anyone from using the magick is hard to say, given that Meric Causaubon who published the book was opposed to Dee and his work. If the letters match the instructions, the table might have been Dee's or it might have been built by someone like Elias Ashmole. If it matches Causaubon's diagram, it must date to at least the middle of the seventeenth century when his book was published.

There are also technical reasons to use the Holy Table. All of the evocatory systems of the Medieval and Renaissance periods use containment structures of some sort into which spirits are summoned. This is the function of the table. The design communicated to Dee has a lot in common with that of the Almadel - take a look at the diagrams there and compare them to Dee's Holy Table - you have the same square shape, a big hexagram in the center, and a border all along the edge. The main difference is that Dee's table includes the various words of power in the angelic script. The containment structure gives you somewhere to put the magical energy that you summon and then send it to a target using a similarity or contagion link, and is very useful in this regard since the full energy of the conjuration can be sent out cleanly. Invoking and then projecting the energy is messier, in that usually some of the energy will "stick" to you and you may wind up experiencing some of its effects.

The Holy Table, Sigillum Dei Aemeth, and Ensigns of Creation work really well for this, and even if they were not "intended" for use with the Watchtower angels I would still want to use them. I think it is more likely, though, that Dee and Kelly did keep using the table and as a result it is harmonious with the later angels and the Watchtower portions of the system. The argument has been made that you don't need them to get results, and that part is true - they are not strictly necessary. The Golden Dawn system does not make much use of the equipment and many magicians have found that system to be very effective. However, one of the things that I have found is that as I assemble and use more Enochian furniture and implements my Enochian rituals get better. I would suggest that if your Enochian rituals seem really powerful without the temple setup, you might want to try building a couple of pieces and see what happens - you might be surprised at how powerful your magick turns out to be.

Another issue related to this concerns the use of the Angelic Keys, also referred to as the Calls. Various systems have been proposed for their use, most of which have problems of one sort or another. One of the most basic conclusions that I have come to over the years is that the First Call ("I reign over you...") is for Dee and the Second Call ("Can the wings of the winds...") is for Kelly. That is, the First Call is for the Magus and the second is for the Scryer. Read them over from that perspective and I think you will see what I'm talking about. The First Call outlines the perspective of the Medieval Magus, ruling over the spirits in the name of God. The Second Call is more invitational, offering praises to the spirits, and ends with the odd phrase "make me a strong Seething, for I am of him that liveth forever." "Seething" is not a word that is used in modern English, but in the sixteenth century it was still in use. It essentially means a trance or an alteration of consciousness, and has the same root as the Norse seidr. This fits perfectly with the model Dee and Kelly used - Dee, the Magus, pronounced the conjurations and summoned the angels, and Kelly then entered an altered state of consciousness where he could see and communicate with them.

Over the last several months our ritual group has had excellent results using the Calls in this way with the Heptarchial Kings. The basic framework for our workings can be found in my Heptarchial Ritual Template, and most of the members of our group have found that when using the First and Second Call as shown has allowed for decent scrying sessions, even among those of us who in the past were not very good scryers. It certainly seems like there is some sort of effect that improves our ability to communicate with the angels, at least with the Heptarchials. In earlier workings years ago I found that sometimes the Heptarchials did not manifest well, but that was before I worked out using the Calls in this way. In addition, other magicians I have spoken with have commented that in their experience it is hard working with the Heptarchials because they are difficult to approach - but as far as I know none of those magicians used the Calls when working with them.

So does it really all fit together? I have yet to come up with any reasonable applications for the Logaeth material, but that doesn't mean I never will. In fact, we may direct some future operations toward figuring out Logaeth, and given our success with the Heptarchials I am confident that something of value will result.

UPDATE: The "Holy Table at the British Museum" likely referred to a Holy Table that was once held at the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford rather than the British Museum proper. A reader passed on a rumor that this table was lost in a fire, but I haven't been able to find any confirmation on that one way or the other so far.

EPA Considers Regulating Voodoo Practices

It's not exactly a proposal to license people who use magick or cast spells, but the EPA is considering regulating the use of mercury in Voodoo rituals. The article mentions that mercury is used in certain Latino and Afro-Caribbean religious practices, but there is no mention of whether or not it is used in African religions such as Yoruba which are the ancestors of Voudon and Santeria.

The use of mercury in these religions could make for some interesting historical research. European alchemical texts make frequent references to mercury, and if no link can be found between its use and Yoruba practices, this might indicate that European alchemy was one of the sources that contributed to the development of Afro-Caribbean religions in the New World.

Why We Need Skeptics

A lot of people in the magical community have a particularly low opinion of skeptics like James Randi and the folks who run The Skeptical Inquirer magazine. The feeling is mutual - skeptics have a pretty low opinion of people who work with any sort of magical or spiritual practice. Apparently anyone who believes in the effectiveness of ritual magick either (1) doesn't understand statistics or (2) believes in his or her paranormal abilities because of selective memory.

Robert Anton Wilson had some choice words for the skeptic movement in The New Inquisition, and I think that much of his assessment is accurate. A truly skeptical individual is open-minded rather than reactionary, and the idea that "fundamentalist materialism" is the end-all, be-all of human knowledge is itself a belief rather than a self-evident truth. Nonetheless, despite all of the skeptic movement's flaws, we need them.

From News of the Weird:

Of the 25,000 children homeless in the streets of Kinshasa, Kenya, more than half are believed to be there because their parents have disowned them as suspected "witches," according to an August Los Angeles Times dispatch. Said one 10-year-old: "They say I ate my father. But I didn't." [New York Times, 8-12-06] [Los Angeles Times, 8-29-06]

I've argued with a number of people over the years about whether or not it would be a good thing for mainstream science to recognize the effectiveness of magick. I know that my spells work - I have a degree in experimental psychology and have done plenty of statistical work assessing the effectiveness of my rituals. However, I think magicians are much better off if we are dismissed as harmless cranks as opposed to what I'm pretty sure that we are - people capable of shaping reality, at least to a degree.

In societies that accept the reality of magick there is a great deal of fear and distrust of anyone who might be involved in anything occult. Really, this is for the most part rampant paranoia. A person may be born with high magical aptitude, but the idea that a child could be a powerful and dangerous magician is laughable. It isn't that easy to influence others with spells, and most of us need years of practice and diligent training in order to make it work. I've been practicing in one form or another since I was 12 or 13 years old and it took me something like fifteen years before I could influence people and events reliably. Aptitude is only as good as the training that develops it, and that training takes a lot of time.

I've considered taking the "Randi Million Dollar Psychic Challenge" from time to time over the years, and I've even come up with a couple of experimental protocols that the Randi Foundation would probably accept. I might even be able to pass them, but I'm not really sure that doing so would be such a good idea. What would the effects be if I were to win Randi's million dollars and set in motion a series of events that would lead to a new round of witchcraft trials? Would the government decide that they needed to license magical practitioners, so that I wouldn't be able to engage in my spiritual path without their approval and oversight? I'd rather keep the mobs of peasants storming my "castle" in the old horror movies, thank you very much.

Honestly, I worry about people who seem obsessed with proving to the scientific community that magick is effective - what do they really hope to gain? In my experience too many of them are simply insecure about their practices and want some sort of external validation for what they feel like they should be doing. Honestly, in my opnion people who are that filled with doubt shouldn't practice magick - it's unlikely to do them any good.

Discursive Mind and the Face-Vase Illusion

Most of you at some point have probably seen a version of the Face-Vase Illusion, depicted above. It is a famous optical illusion that can be viewed either as two faces or as a vase, depending upon whether the dark or light field is taken to be the foreground. In addition to demonstrating how the human eye sees shapes, it can also be used as a valuable meditative training tool.

Ideally, in meditation you either want your mind focussed completely on a single idea or upon nothing at all. The former is usually referred to as insight-wisdom or concentrative meditation while the latter is referred to as calm abiding or formless meditation. Both techniques are very useful as part of a comprehensive spiritual practice. In either case, the goal of the meditator is to eliminate mental "chatter" that interferes with the goal of the meditation. The source of this mental chatter is referred to as the discursive mind in Buddhist teachings. As you become more accustomed to the chatter-free state of mind, your meditation will deepen and greater spiritual realization will emerge.

One of the key difficulties of this practice is recognizing when the discursive mind stops. You can't be sitting there on the cushion thinking over and over again "is my discursive mind stopped?" because, of course, if you're thinking such a thing it hasn't. The human mind is very good at learning to return to a given mental state once that state has been assimilated into consciousness, so it could be said that the greatest difficulty in meditation is recognizing what the mind feels like in its natural state, without any discursive chatter.

This is where the Face-Vase Illusion comes in. What the discursive mind spends its time doing is creating meaning. When you look at the illusion and see a face, your discursive mind is what is calling it a face. The same is true when you see a vase. Most people who look at the figure either settle on seeing one or the other, or switch back and forth between them creating a "flickering" effect. Try staring at the image for thirty seconds or so and you will see what I mean.

At the risk of sounding like the kid with the spoon in The Matrix, the key to using the Face-Vase Illusion as a training tool for meditation is to realize that there is no face and there is no vase. The image actually consists of regions of dark and light, nothing more. This is alluded to in the words of the Heart Sutra one of the principal texts of Mahayana Buddhism.

No eye, ear, nose, tongue, body, mind.
No color, sound, smell, taste, touch, object of thought.

Here's how to do it. Print out a copy of the optical illusion and place it at sitting eye level. I use a Tibetan cushion and sit cross-legged when I meditate but you can just as easily do it sitting in a chair. Just make sure that the optical illusion is in the center of your visual field. Then slightly unfocus your eyes and look forward. You will see one image first, then the other - but keep looking until you no longer see the face or the vase but a continuous image of light and shadow. When the discursive mind stops, the labels of "face" and "vase" will disappear and the image will no longer "flicker." It will just look like a flat pattern. This is how you can recognize the proper meditative state.

Usually this will happen within twenty minutes or so of sitting. The more you do it, the faster your state of consciousness should be able to shift. Once you are able to do it pretty much at will, try it at various points throughout the day and try to realize that everything you are seeing is actually just a field of color, light, and darkness. Part of being able to work magick is gaining conscious control over the meaning-creating function of the mind, and the first step in doing that is to become aware of its activity.

More With Letter Essences

My ritual group has been evaluating Patricia Shaffer's letter essences for the Angelic/Enochian language over the past several weeks and I've decided to post some of our results. The goal of this analysis is to see if there is any apparent difference in terms of coherent meaning between words obtained from Enochian operations and random collections of letters.

I have already posted the breakdowns from Jabberwocky in the previous thread, and they will be repeated here along with a collection of random words and a set of words obtained from one of our Enochian operations.

The basic methodology is as follows:

1. Take two sets of words, one random and one obtained from Enochian rituals
2. Analyze both sets using the letter essence system.
3. Determine whether or not the actual Angelic words have more coherent meanings than the random set. This is unfortunately somewhat subjective, which is why I am including the data here.

We actually wound up using two sets of words, one of which was a set of computer-generated random collections of letters and the other some of Lewis Carroll's "nonsense" words from the poem Jabberwocky. Unlike the random words, the words from Jabberwocky are contructed with vowel and consonant placement consistent with English and to a lesser extent Angelic.

Pluto No Longer a Planet

Astronomers just voted to downgrade the status of Pluto on the grounds that there are many similar-sized planetoids beyond the orbit of Neptune. This has some interesting implications regarding mapping the Tree of Life to the major planets.

Pluto has always been difficult to fit onto the Tree of Life and a number of different schemas have been proposed. Aleister Crowley originally wrote in The General Principles of Astrology that Neptune should be mapped to Kether and Uranus should be mapped to Chockmah. I have always preferred those attributions to Crowley's later scheme of mapping Pluto to Kether and Uranus to Da'ath. But then where does Pluto go? I have in the past mapped it to Da'ath on the grounds that the planet named after the Lord of the Underworld is a good choice for guarding the Abyss, but this is also not perfect.

There are some genuine reasons to doubt Pluto's status as a planet for the purpose of magical workings in addition to the political maneuverings of the astronomical community. Pluto is less than half the size of Mercury and has an erratic orbit that is more elliptical than that of the other planets. Its orbit is also tilted, whereas the other planetary orbits fall into the same plane. It is also remarkable that according to this definition there are in fact exactly 10 planets to match to the 10 spheres on the Tree of Life. For magical purposes, the Sun and Moon also count as planets bringing the total up to 10.

My book, Operant Magick, mentions the possibility that Pluto might be downgraded and promotes Neptune = Kether and Uranus = Chockmah. I guess it was ahead of its time, and I should probably update the section discussing Pluto with news of the downgrade for the final manuscript.

Angelic Letter Essences

The Angelic language, often referred to as Enochian, originated with John Dee and Edward Kelly in sixteenth-century England. This language is one of the key components of the Enochian system of magick and has proved very effective in my own magical work. It was communicated to Dee and Kelly as a series of "Calls" or "Keys" - short conjurations supposedly written in the true language of angels accompanied by pronunciation notes and English translations.

The only problem is that these conjurations are not long enough, and one of the frustrations of working with Angelic is the limited vocabulary. There are nineteen Calls, the longest of which is around 150 words. Furthermore, many of the words are repeated throughout the Calls, leaving the magician rather limited in what he or she can write in the language when constructing rituals. For exmple, there are words for Sun and Moon and the Earth but none of the other planets, no literal words for concepts like "invoke" or "banish," and a very limited number of nouns.

According to the Golden Dawn tradition, each letter of the Angelic language can be thought of as a force or energy in its own right, and there are sections of the diaries that agree with this supposition. If a method could be found to relate these forces to the definitions of words, it would be possible to translate just about any English word into Angelic and vice versa. Patricia Shaffer has proposed a system that she refers to as Angelic Letter Essences. She wrote a book entitled Tongue of Angels for Weiser in 1994 that includes the Letter Essence system, but unfortunately Weiser eventually declined to publish the book and it was never made available.

The Letter Essence system attempts to catalog the relationships between the forces corresponding to each letter and how those forces interact in groups of two and three letters and as subsets of words. Looking it over, I'm not sure what I think of it. Some of the associations seem to match the translated words pretty well, while other seem to correspond poorly. If it works or could be made to work effectively it would be a huge breakthrough that could improve Encohian ritual work immensely.

My ritual group is going to be testing the system out at some point by comparing words that we have received in the current series of Enochian rituals with their Letter Essence translations to see if there are any interesting correlations. If anyone else here has worked with this system and would like to post their results, feel free to do so.

Musings on Body, Speech, and Mind

Arcana is finally just about ready to send off to the literary agency. I'll be casting a Mercury evocation over the packet I send to help matters along, of course, so you never know - I might have a novel on the market one of these days.

As I mentioned in the article on Suggestion for Ritual Practice, I practice Tibetan Vajrayana meditation. Generally this consists of the visualization of a deity accompanied by the recitation of a mantra. The mantra is counted out using a mala, so one bead is moved with each recitation. This incorporates the action of body (sliding the bead), speech (the mantra), and mind (the visualization of the deity). In the course of working with the Vajrayana system I've become convinced that the simultaneous integration of these three factors is also very important to the Western ritual magician.

Visualization in Vajrayana is far more complex than in Western ritual magick. Tibetan iconography is complex because the images on thangkas include everything you should be visualizing. As a matter of fact, doing it perfectly is just about impossible, which may be by design. If there is always more for the mind to pay attention to, the risk of boredom or complacency with the visualization in minimized. One of the things that I've noticed from doing a lot of Vajrayana practice is that my ability to visualize Western magical forms has increased substantially. I now do a much better job with the full visualization of even simple rituals such as the Lesser Ritual of the Pentagram, and last night I did a ritual in which I used a visualization for the magical link. The visualization itself was excellent, and I could almost see a tiny three-dimensional version of the target of the spell appear in the middle of the Sigillum Dei Aemeth that I use for evocations.

Developing this faculty is not as difficult as it might seem at first. One of the interesting things coming out of modern brain research is that whether you are looking at a picture of something or visualizing it the patterns in the brain are the same. Thus, the Tibetan practice of meditating on images patterns the brain so that those images can eventually be visualized more easily. Aleister Crowley writes in Liber O vel Manus et Sagittae that the images of the gods of Egypt should be committed to memory for use in ritual, and one good way to do this is to meditate on the images themselves to pattern the mind and brain. Once the images are very familiar, you would then move on to visualizing without the images. Doing it that way is much easier than trying to "see" them forming out of the air right away, but in my experience that is how a lot of Western practitioners start out.

Western ritual magick makes use of formulas and words of power that are in many cases similar to mantras, but the main difference in Tibetan practice is that the mantra is repeated many times rather than vibrated a handful of times at crucial points in the ritual. This takes advantage of another brain mechanism called Assimilation. This is the process by which the brain teaches itself to perform complex tasks. When you were a toddler, walking was still difficult and modern robotics research spent years finding out just how difficult it really is to model. What the human brain does is assimilate a complex series of tiny motions into one big motion, so that when you think about walking you just point your mind in the right direction and go rather than being precisely aware of how you move your foot and leg when you take each step. Repeating a mantra thousands of times, especially quickly, assimilates the sound, and I'm still surprised at how quickly I can now say mantras that I know well compared to how quickly I could recite them when I was first learning them.

Coordinating the body with the mantra and the visualization requires sensory integration and increases the amount of concentration required for the practice. It also involves yet another area of the brain, the motor cortex. This increases mindfulness and the entire process conditions the mind to connect the mantra and the visualization of the deity. Malas can be used in Western practice along with mantras, and there are several different Thelemic rosary practices that I have seen online that explain how to do exactly that.

In your own practice, try experimenting with some of these ideas. See if you can integrate the vibration of a word of power with a motion and a visualization, all of which are related. I think you will find that the effect is remarkable.