Riffing on the Qabalistic Cross
I've gone back to work the fundamentals of ceremonial magic as I enter into a new phase of my practice. This whole Covid-19 fiasco has put the firmest kibosh on group working so Sothis Lodge is on hold while we figure out what to do next. In the meantime, I've been having some pretty pleasant Saturday nights with my waifu and a friend of ours as we practice divination together and reach out to some of the more distant corners of magical practice that I've more or less turned my nose up at: Spirit guides and ancestry.
I've never felt a particular closeness to my family. Not that I don't like them or anything but my parents left home when I was quite young and we moved several hundred miles away from our extended family. And when we living in the eldritch wilds of New England, my dad worked pretty much all the time and my mom was extremely depressed and it put me in a spot where I basically took care of myself, in the absence of consistent parenting and a wellspring of positive emotion. Instead, I picked up all the worst habits of my parents and heeded the exceptionally bad advice of my mother and in the end, mostly thanks to my wife, I somehow ended up mostly okay but for a few dalliances with suicide and a brief period where I was psychotic and addicted to opiates and benzos. Oops.
This disconnect has always haunted me, though. I know a lot of magicians that hew very close to their departed family and draw on a lot of power and guidance from them. But, like, one of my grandfathers was a humongous bitch and the other was... well... he was a bad guy. The grandmother I was closest to as a child turned out to be pretty rotten and the other died when I was quite young. She seemed really nice, though. I only ever knew her by a nickname, though. I couldn't even tell you her real name. The rest of the family on both sides are drunks and basket cases and it's like, how the hell do I draw power from people that I kind of want nothing to do with? Going even further back into the distant past, I find out that some of the first colonists to set foot on this nation were members of my family and suddenly I'm turned off to that entire prospect. They barely survived the first winters, took over the landscape by so-called divine provenance, murdered the local natives, and kept slaves once things got really going. So, like, fuck these people, man!
But there's one photo at my parents' house that speaks to me. Two, actually, but the one that really strikes me is a photo of a hunting party taken somewhere around 1910 in either New York or Pennsylvania. Four men stand with rifles and in the center of the photo is my great great grandfather, seated on a stump. He wears a heavy jacket and a Stetson-style hat and looks directly into the camera lens while the rest of the party kind of looks off into the distance. The look is a little intimidating. His eyes seem narrow and his brow is furrowed, some. He has a bushy mustache and is almost glaring, but it's not so much a "don't take my fuckin' picture" glare as it is a look of supreme confidence. The whole thing is punctuated by the fact that as the picture was taken, he was loading a cartridge into a break-action rifle of some sort. It's all sepia-toned and old-timey and every time I look at it, it's like he's looking directly at me. Crossing the gulf of time to deliver some kind of message. Before now, I'd never really given the photo much thought beyond "bad ass!" but now, after the last divination session seemed to open a door that he could actually speak through, I'm fascinated beyond words and am dying to know more about him.
The other photo of him, by the way, is a photo of him and his wife that is significantly less Ron Swanson than the one above.
Unfortunately, like so many of these posts, I have to admit that in the time that I could have been raising my power level and getting my spiritual swole on, I've been sitting in my office chair playing Ghost of Tsushima (which is great, I'm on my second play through - Lethal difficulty, Kurosawa mode). But I've also been doing a lot of reading lately and the coincidence of some past-life work and what seems to be the one decent ancestor of mine reaching out to me has put me back on the path. So I got my basement temple back together and added a couple of new elements.
And just so we're clear, those Templar flags aren't some kind of fascist Deus Vult shit. Those fuckin' nazis don't know the first thing about Templar and would probably be horrified to learn what they actually got up to while out in the Holy Land and who they eventually got tight with before Christendom got the boot. I really need to build that tent around the temple like I planned to all those years ago. These photos make my basement look like the set of a snuff movie.
Recent reading has been pretty informative. I realized that I got a little lazy with some of my practices when actually in practice. Real basic stuff. So I cracked a couple books.
I watched the West Memphis 3 trials and tribulations like you wouldn't believe. That first documentary lit a fire in me. There wasn't much difference between me and Damien Echols back then. We were both misunderstood weirdos surrounded by normies that felt threatened by us. He unfortunately, had the distinct disadvantage of being extremely poor and lived in a community that took his black tees and heavy metal as solid proof of congress with The Devil. Proof enough to sentence him death for a crime that he absolutely did not commit and then stymie every attempt to prove his innocence when new evidence made the State of Arkansas' case weaker and weaker. But when he got out, I viewed his occult outreach with a bit of skepticism. I'd come around, eventually, but you can still see his Hermetic Reiki stickers stuck up here and there around Salem from when he briefly lived there. The fuck is Hermetic Reiki?
His book High Magick is some real basic shit. It's essentially the first degree lessons from Israel Regadie's Golden Dawn manual but it's a slim volume, written in a conversational tone in plain English that is easily the best introductory course in practical ceremonial magic that I've ever read. It washed away any cynical skepticism that I had of what appeared to be a dude trying to make a living off of his tragic past and Satanic Panic-fueled association with the occult. He also gives a positive nod to Damon Brand in one of these books, I forget which, and calls him one of the greatest living magicians. I've been critical of Brand before in some of these posts since the bulk of his work is shady get rich and get laid with magick books. I'm actually a little ashamed of this confession of mine because having now read his story it makes perfect sense that he's a walking encyclopedia of occult practice. Dude spent half of his time in prison in solitary confinement with nothing to do but meditate, study, and practice. His story is the perfect modern-day version of the Shamanic Ordeal. And I thought my story was intense. His solitary cell was basically a wizard's tower placed under federal criminal jurisdiction.
The biggest problem that you'll find with a lot of ceremonial magic manuals is that none of them ever take the time to explain why you'd opt for study and practice of theurgy. They just get right to the lessons, seeming to assume that you're either a practicing Freemason or a member of Societas Rosicrucis. Core manuals, like Regardie's Golden Dawn, get around to explaining it but you have to sift through a hundred pages of small-print introductions packed to the brim with Regardie's meandering purple prose. It helps no one. God forbid, you opt to read Franz Bardon instead. Damien's High Magick is clear as day. It gets to the practical with easily digested sidebars of theory as related to his stay in prison. For whatever reason, after getting through some preliminary exercises on meditation, breath work and energy direction, he leaps into The Middle Pillar. Personally, I love The Middle Pillar. I recently took up the daily practice of it again, every night before I go to bed. It's taught in High Magick before The Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram, which is an exercise that I find way more useful to the occult newbie than The Middle Pillar. Maybe it's because it's a shorter ritual to perform with less to remember and doesn't require much in the way of moving around or having to determine which direction you're facing. You can literally just stand anywhere and do it.
Echols' documents a great breakdown of the LBRP, but he includes details of his own personal practice which adds the Archangels Metatron and Sandalphon to the mix where most of us just place a hexagram above and below in our visualizations. Unless I'm just making this last part up. At least, that's how I do it. But it got me to thinking. How many of us have spent years practicing these basic rituals to the letter as learned in whatever book or website we picked them up from? At what point did you begin to riff a bit and customize the practice to your needs? I've posted articles here in the past about how my personal occult aesthetic takes on a particularly comic book and anime vibe. It occurred to me while performing the Qabalistic Cross, after reading Echols' version, which is basically the one taught in the LBRP section of Regardie's Golden Dawn. I do something different where most folks incrementally visualize the lighted arms of the cross extending out in all directions as they touch the shoulders and such. So I figured I'd get it down on paper as a demonstration of my own practice, but also as a means to analyze my own practice and maybe find the flaws or some spots that could be improved.
Face the East.
See yourself growing physically larger. Feel the sensation of growing, the rush of air around you as you rise above your ritual space, above your hometown, above the country, the planet. Further and further into space you rise, passing the planets, other stars, the galaxies shrink around you until you've grown to stand on the entire contents of the universe, the size of a pinhead at your feet.
Visualize the blinding light of the divine twisting and swirling above your head.
With either your right hand in the Sword Mudra (index and middle finger extended, other two folded with thumb covering them) or a steel dagger/athame, drive the blade into the light above and draw its lighted tip down to your Ajna Chakra. Vibrate the Hebrew word Ateh (ah-tah, "Thou art"). Imagine that it ignites a shining star where the blade touched.
Draw the blade down to your solar plexus and place the tip of the blade there, vibrating the word Malkuth (Mal-koot, "the kingdom"). Imagine that it lights a shining star there.
Draw the blade up to your right shoulder and touch it there, vibrating the words Veh Geburah (Vay Gay-boo-rah, "the power"), imagine that the blade lights a shining point there as you did the others.
Draw the blade across to your left shoulder and vibrate the words Veh Gedula (Vay Gay-doo-lah, "the glory"). As before, imagine that it lights a shining star on your shoulder.
Draw the blade away from you, holding the handle with both hands before your chest. Vibrate the words Le olam (Lay Oh-lahm, "forever"). Now imagine that a blinding white light surges inward from each of the lighted points on your body, meeting at its center, lighting up a blinding cross on your toso.
Once again, raise the blade to the divine light above, take a deep breath and draw it down to your third eye again, releasing the breath and vibrating the word Amen (Ah-men, duh). As you do this, imagine that the cross on your torso suddenly surges with power and explodes upward and outward in a giant column of light along the X and Y axes.