Civil War Tomorrow!

Okay, I confess. I just can't bring myself to lay off Alex Jones.

At least, not when he's busy posting bullshit like the above. "The Democrats," by which he basically means "the boogymen," are apparently planning a full-on civil war for Independence Day. You know, tomorrow! Lock your doors and windows, folks. There'll be fighting on every corner and bloodshed in every street. Because it's a civil war, man - the last one killed a million people!

Note to Alex Jones - a million people killed is totally different than a million people yelled at on the Internet. And yes, Jones has shown himself capable of doing the latter all on his own. So is this his whole plan?

1. Accuse Democrats of starting a civil war.
2. When actual Democrats call him an idiot, insist that's exactly the same as a war.
3. Go on and on about how "I was right!"
4. Profit???

I know, I'm playing right into his hand if that's what's going on. The thing is that Alex Jones has a special and unique power. More than just about anyone else out there in the world, he's capable of behaving in such a way that you seriously can't help calling him an idiot.

And I suppose he may be in the one business - talk radio - where that superpower is an asset rather than a liability. Insults create controversy. Controversy drives coverage. Coverage drives listeners. And it sounds simple, but honestly, I don't think I could act as dumb and offensive as Alex Jones if my life depended on it.

So Alex Jones, you're an idiot. That's exactly what you wanted me to say, right?

The Greater Ritual of the Hexagram

Last week's post on the Greater Ritual of the Pentagram got a good response, so I figured I would go ahead and put one up today on the Greater Ritual of the Hexagram. The instructions for this one have not become quite as muddled as the instructions for the Greater Ritual of the Pentagram, but there are some differences between the material published in Aleister Crowley's Liber O (which is the version I use) and how the ritual is taught by at least some of today's Golden Dawn orders.

The biggest difference in that in Liber O, Crowley tells you that the Greater Ritual of the Hexagram is used for working with both planets and signs of the zodiac. At least some of the Golden Dawn groups don't do it that way, and instead use the Greater Ritual of the Pentagram for zodiac signs and the Greater Ritual of the Hexagram for planets only. Beyond that, there are some technical points regarding the use of the Keyword Analysis and how the Greater Ritual of the Hexagram fits into my operant model.

Zodiac signs are associated with both a ruling planet and a ruling element. So while you can work with the signs of the zodiac from an elemental "direction," in the operant model it makes a lot more sense to go with the hexagram. The pentagram is a symbol of the microcosm and the hexagram is a symbol of the macrocosm. Both planets and signs represent macrocosmic forces. I could see the idea that using the Greater Ritual of the Pentagram might get you the microcosmic aspect of the sign, such as associated personality traits, but the macrocosm includes the microcosm.

I have been quite successful affecting my own personality using the Greater Ritual of the Hexagram for zodiacal rites, so I know for a fact that even if you are only looking to work with personality traits the macrocosmic approach is entirely viable. As a result, I really don't see the point of working with the signs of the zodiac from a microcosmic-only perspective, and the Liber O method strikes me as the most effective way to work with zodiacal forces of whatever sort. That's what I use the hexagram, and not the pentagram, for the signs of the zodiac and the spirits associated with them.

Oh Wait, It's Next Month!

Wow, the doomers didn't even stop to take a breath this time. The apocalypse scheduled for last Sunday never happened, so now they're saying the real date is a month from now - July 27th. According to this article from the British tabloid Mirror, evangelists are now say that the July 27th lunar eclipse will mark the end of the world, really, seriously, for sure this time!

A spectacular blood moon is set to light up the sky next month - and it will be the end of the world as we know it, according to doomsday preachers. End-of-days religious leaders who have incorrectly predicted the apocalypse time and time again are back at it ahead of a lunar eclipse on July 27. The 21st century's longest lunar eclipse will last almost two hours and feature a blood moon where the moon has a red tinge.

While stargazers enjoy the dazzling phenomenon, doomsdayers will be preparing for armageddon. The hypothesis was originally made famous by Christian ministers John Hagee and Mark Biltz who said the ongoing "tetrad" - four consecutive lunar eclipses which began in April 2014 with six full moons in between - is the indicator of the end of earth as described in the Bible in Acts 2:20 and Revelation 6:12. However the tetrad ended in September 2014 and we're all still here.

Lunar eclipses aren't actually that rare. And ever since Hagee's blood moon apocalypse prediction failed in 2014, evangelists have trotted out their end times predictions whenever one comes around.

The bit about the moon becoming as blood probably does refer to a lunar eclipse, but so many of them have happened since the writing of Revelation that it's pretty hard to pick one. I figure the evangelists keep doing this because it would be really, really embarrassing for them if the one lunar eclipse they didn't mention turned out to be the End of Days.

But as a Thelemite who doesn't believe it's ever going to happen, I'm going to keep pointing and laughing. After all, they provide me with so many opportunities!

Not Raptured Yet!

Check it out! Nibiru is so gigantic that it's impossible to detect!

With all the ritual stuff going on last week and this weekend, I totally forgot to post this on Sunday. June 24th has passed, and still no Rapture! To be fair, the whole Rapture idea is Millerism from the early 1800's so even if the world does end, it probably won't happen. But the point is that the world didn't end. Again. I keep making fun of these would-be prophets, but they keep coming out of the woodwork.

This latest one was yet another version of the Nibiru nonsense, in which a completely undetectable extra planet in our solar system is supposed to appear without warning and collide with the Earth, or pass by the Earth and mess stuff up, or something like that. Seeing as no astronomer has ever found such a planet, one might think that means this whole set of conspiracy theories should be moot. But it's undetectable, see? Just like the invisible giant spider hiding out in your spare bedroom. Watch out!

Time is getting short for the Christian literalists. The last sign that had never happened since Biblical times was fulfilled after World War II, the founding of an official state of Israel. That happened in 1947. What the Bible tells us is that the generation that sees all the signs fulfilled will not pass away, but will see the end of the world before they die. There was speculation that the end of the world would come seventy years after the last sign (the founding of Israel), but that would have been in 2017.

Literalism has to break eventually. Once nobody born in 1947 is alive and the world is still here, that will constitute a hard break from the text. I have no illusions that will cause folks to abandon their beliefs - after all, in a lot of cases people keep following these failed prophets even though I have no idea why. Way too many people double down on their beliefs when faced with contradictory evidence, which to me is really, really weird. But it's been documented experimentally over and over again. I guess I just don't understand regular people and how they think.

Of course, it the Thelemic take on the apocalypse is true, my religion predicts that a physical rapture/cataclysm that ends the world in preparation for the return of Jesus is never going to happen. And let me add that so far, these so-called prophets have been wrong and we Thelemites have been right.

But at any rate, go ahead and celebrate surviving this imaginary disaster. One more apocalypse down, and who knows how many more to go. Probably a lot.

The Greater Ritual of the Pentagram

Last week I was corresponding with a reader who was trying to work out how to do the Greater Ritual of the Pentagram from online sources. Apparently, these are a lot more confusing than they need to be, so I figured that for today's magick post I would put up my own explanation of the ritual so that I can point people here and not expect that they can just work it out from other stuff on the Internet that I have no control over. I'll be adding this to my list of ritual instructions as well.

The first and most important thing that you need to understand about the Greater Ritual of the Pentagram is that, as I've written here in a number of places, "Greater" does not mean "awesome" and "Lesser" does not mean "lame." There's a lot of information online from people who treat the Greater Ritual of the Pentagram as a "better" Lesser Ritual of the Pentagram - and that is entirely wrong. The two rituals do two completely different things that should not be conflated.

The Lesser rituals are general or foundational. They are used to set up the base "field" in which you work magick, even when you are working from more traditional methods than my operant field technique. The Greater Ritual of the Pentagram, like the Greater Ritual of the Hexagram, is used to tune that magical space to a particular force or quality. The Greater Ritual of the Pentagram has five traditional forms, four of which correspond to the paths of the four elements and one which corresponds to the sephira of all four elements, Malkuth. Like the planets, the elements can be attributed both sephirothically and by path, but unlike the planets all four elements correspond to the tenth sephira.

This is especially important when you realize that some people use the version of the Greater Ritual of the Pentagram for Malkuth (that is, with all four elemental pentagrams traced to their corresponding directions according to the winds model) as an "upgrade" to the Lesser Ritual of the Pentagram. But this is not the case. The magical power associated with Malkuth is "The Vision of the Holy Guardian Angel, or of Adonai." The Lesser Ritual of the Pentagram is general and foundational, and therefore it is not attributed to a traditional power or vision.

This is not to suggest that the Greater Ritual of the Pentagram for Malkuth is a bad idea for daily practice. Aleister Crowley's Liber Reguli is basically a souped-up Greater Ritual of the Pentagram, and Crowley did teach that beginning students should focus on HGA work. This is very likely the intent of Reguli - to cultivate the vision of the HGA as a preliminary for doing the full HGA invocation found in Liber Samekh. The Greater Ritual of the Pentagram for Malkuth can be used in this way as well, but not as a replacement for the Lesser Ritual of the Pentagram.

Mass of Nuit and Babalon for 2018

"Babalon" by the amazing Kat Lunoe. Check out this and other works by her here.

Today is the Summer Solstice, and tomorrow we will be performing the Mass of Nuit and Babalon to celebrate it. This is the full script for the ritual, which we have been celebrating for a number of years now with some pretty impressive results.

This year the ritual will be taking place at Leaping Laughter Oasis in Minneapolis at 7:30 PM on Friday, June 22. This is a public ritual, so if you live in the Twin Cities area and would like to attend you are welcome to do so. Contact me or someone else from the Oasis for details.

0. The Temple

The ritual space is set up with the Holy Table and Sigillum Dei Aemeth in the center. The banishing dagger, invoking wand, and bell chime are arranged on the Table. The chalice containing the Eucharist is placed in the center of the Sigillum. Holy images of Our Lady Nuit and Our Lady Babalon, including the Star of Babalon, may be prominently displayed. The Lust card from the Crowley/Harris Thoth Tarot can be used as a meditation focus, if desired.

Yoga. Meditation, and "Ego Inflation"

The occult community tends to be a little behind the times with respect to modern psychology. As I've covered here before, the psychoanalytic model of cognition is still something that some occult traditions work with, or at the very least a model on which some esoteric ideas are based. The trouble is that the psychoanalytic model doesn't work. Not only has it been shown to be ineffective under controlled conditions, it is mostly rendered meaningless by what we now understand about memory and so forth.

One psychoanalytic concept that has a lot of staying power in occultism is the idea of "ego inflation." After all, who hasn't seen idiots going on and on about how awesome and powerful they are, especially on the Internet? And one of the ideas is that, in theory, spiritual practices are supposed to prevent this. The problem is when people don't really understand how egotism works, or where it comes from - usually because they accept one or more of the many incorrect assumptions that are endemic to the psychoanalytic model.

Today's story is a perfect example. Two Australian studies claim to show that practicing yoga or meditation leads to "ego inflation." This is an interesting area to look into, but it seems to me that both studies have significant problems. The biggest is that it appears the researchers have assumed that high self-esteem is the same thing as an "inflated ego." On the other hand, I don't think this is true at all. While it is possible to evaluate egotism from a behavioral perspective, treating "the ego" as a "thing" that gets bigger or smaller has almost nothing to do with how cognition really works.

In the paper, published online by University of Southampton and due to be published in the journal Psychological Science, researchers note that Buddhism’s teachings that a meditation practice helps overcome the ego conflicts with US psychologist William James’s argument that practicing any skill breeds a sense of self-enhancement (the psychological term for inflated self-regard.) There was already a fair bit of evidence supporting William James’s theory, broadly speaking, but a team of researchers from University Mannheim in Germany decided to test it specifically in the context of yoga and meditation.

As a point, yoga as currently practiced in Western countries does no such thing. It's not really even Buddhist. It's (sort of) Hindu, and the spiritual goals of Hinduism are different than those of Buddhism. Furthermore, modern yoga is not even a traditional Indian spiritual practice. It is a synthesis of poses illustrated in Hindu scriptures combined with European calisthenics that was really only assembled into a system in the 1960's. Yoga from before that time was very different than what we have today. Yoga was practiced during meditation, which is maybe where the authors' confusion comes from, but meditation is a discipline in its own right that was performed in addition to holding the poses for long periods of time.

Culture War Loses Southern Baptists

Remember back when Donald Trump signed an executive order signaling his intent to repeal the Johnson Amendment, which prohibits churches from endorsing political candidates or parties? And remember how I said that if it goes through, "non-political" will most likely become a selling point for Christian churches on par with what "non-denominational" has been for many years?

It's happening, folks. The Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), America's largest Protestant denomination with fifteen million members, has moved to distance itself from the Republican Party. According to The Atlantic, the denomination is shifting to accommodate younger members, many of whom reject the (fundamentally ridiculous) "culture war" rhetoric that the SBC has been pushing for decades.

“The generational shift happening in the SBC has thrust the group into the middle of an identity crisis,” says Barry Hankins, the chair of the department of history at Baylor University and co-author of Baptists in America: A History. “The younger generation thinks differently than the old-guard Christian right about culture and politics, and they are demanding change.”

To enact this change, young Baptists nominated 45-year-old pastor J.D. Greear from North Carolina to be president of the denomination. In a campaign video, Greear called for “a new culture and a new posture in the Southern Baptist Convention.”

Refusing to cede power without a fight, fundamentalist Baptists nominated Ken Hemphill as an opposition candidate. But Greear won with nearly 70 percent of the vote, becoming the youngest SBC president in 37 years.

Greear has promised to lead the denomination down a different path, which, he has said, must include efforts both to repent of a “failure to listen to and honor women and racial minorities” and “to include them in proportionate measures in top leadership roles.” If the meeting in Dallas is any indication, his vision is resonating with a large number of the next wave of Baptist leaders.

Of course, this doesn't mean the Southern Baptists will become liberal overnight or anything like that. Much of their membership is still quite conservative. But as I've noted here many times, there's a difference between being Christian and a conservative, and being a "Christian conservative." The former is a set of religious belief and a set of political beliefs. The latter pretty much means you're a Poor Oppressed Christian who is "oppressed" by the mere existence of different beliefs and doesn't see anything wrong with suppressing them - all the while claiming special rights and privileges for the Poor Oppressed only.