Beginner's Musings

Journals, Group Rituals & Free Readings
1

So… I’m an absolute beginner. I have no big spells on my account; no communions with deities, demons, or angels. In my whole life, I did exactly one ritual that could be called successful, and the effect was kinda inevitable — in the early 00s, I used a chaos magick sigil to get an obscure RPG rulebook, and indeed found it on some Russian server many months later. Aside from that, I only did tarot, with which I saw some interesting synchronicities (the sheer amount of Reversed Deaths that get into my spread when I’m reading for myself is astonishing).

Anyway, I started a regular practice, mostly doing stuff that I found in Paths of Wisdom and Modern Magick. Again, I have no astonishing success to brag about, but maybe someone can make use of what I found, or at least feel some nostalgia as they remember their beginnings.

LBRP

The first time I did the Lesser Banishing Ritual of Pentagram was weird. It was shoddy work: barely any visualization, because I was too focused on remembering the words; I had no idea what “vibrating” names even meant, and I wasn’t sure whether I translated the words into my native language correctly. Anyway, after fumbling through the second Qabbalistic Cross, I felt intense satisfaction that I did it, and then felt as if someone hit a reset button on my brain. There was a moment of confusion, and then I was completely purged of emotions in the span of a second. I spent around an hour muted, thinking stuff, but not feeling much about it.

It never happened again, even though nowadays I’m doing the ritual much better, and I still have no idea what that was.

Anyway, the sheer variety of the ritual’s variants on the web is overwhelming; it’s as if everyone does it differently. Some variants don’t visualize anything at all; some differ in the color of the flames of the pentagram (white instead of blue); some don’t visualize the angels at all; some differ in the things they hold (for example, in some variants Raphael holds a rod with a Caduceus; in some — a sword); in some the names of the angels are not vibrated; some use the sign of the enterer instead of the index finger to charge the pentagrams.

One thing I found out is that vibrating angel names not only feels better but also immensely helps with visualizing them. It also felt more right to use the Latin names for that instead of the “localized” ones in my home language. Before, I had to strain my imagination immensely to imagine them; as soon as I changed how I pronounced their names, it was as if they jumped into my mind at the right moment.

The most tiring part of the ritual is visualizing my expansion during the QC, but the hardest part is actually the pentagrams. I’m not sure why imagining a pentagram of blue flame is harder than an angel with orange and violet robes holding a sword, but somehow I botched the former more times than the latter.

As for the effects, I didn’t see much, except that my tarot divinations seem better. I get more cards that seem right for the situation I ask about. I also seem to worry less about non-consequential stuff (I’m an incredible hypochondriac) and react more rationally to the issues that actually need action. My tendency to doomscroll on social media also seems to have lessened over time. I have other addictive habits that didn’t get affected, but we’ll see.

LIRP

Some sources advise doing LBRP in the evening and LIRP in the morning. I’m not sure what the purpose of this ritual is, to be honest; it also seems harder because I’m simply more distracted in the morning.

Nevertheless, I noticed that someone would often contact me, sometimes minutes after I finished the ritual. For example, a neighbor who never talked to me (beyond the “good morning” when we passed each other) asked me to help him polish and repaint a corroded part of the banister in the exterior corridor of our apartment block. Similar things happened several times.

Meditation

I tried different methods of meditation, until eventually settling on two. The first one is the breathing meditation with the fourfold breath (just a preparation for the pathworking). The second is the card scanning method from “Modern Magick”.

The former is like squeezing the blood from a stone. My thoughts keep wandering; my body keeps doing its own thing, including salivating a lot and making me swallow. Including fourfold breath made me sweat like a pig and feel hot in general — especially the area in the middle of my back on the right, which feels as if I were resting on a fan heater. There were two times when I was happy with the result I achieved, which involved some focus on the breath.

The latter, on the other hand, was so effective that it surprised me. The meditation is based on scanning a card with your eyes, line by line, remembering it line by line, and then making the mental image disappear line by line. During the latter, the meditative state is achieved, and indeed it worked for me, four out of four tries. I’m not sure how it works, but I expected more problems.

Plans for the Future

Right now, I’m not touching anything too complicated, focusing on exercising my mental muscles. Next week, I’ll try to include the Middle Pillar, which should be a challenge enough.

I’m not currently sure how to touch more advanced rituals, including actually contacting spirits/demons/angels. There is an enormous amount of material, sometimes contradictory; different paths I don’t feel qualified to choose yet, and so. It doesn’t help that I’m generally suspicious whenever others are involved, so as soon as someone else is involved, I keep looking for traps. Hopefully, this will resolve itself as I gain knowledge.

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This is indeed the case. The reason there are more contradictions than consensus is because occultism is a self-exploration and self-practice first and foremost.

Even if you practice it in a group your practice still comes from ‘you’. Because it is a personal practice and personal exploration, and that everyone is different, everyone arrives to different methods, lines of thought, beliefs, even though the end result may be the same.

If you know about chaos magick, it’s obvious that all roads lead to Rome, as in, belief can be irrelevant or at least not so important in magic practice, and it is mostly about the intent and the projection of intent in a compatible (i.e meditative) mental and emotional state that matters, at least as I see it. Even labels are not so important. I practice chaos magick though I wouldn’t call myself a chaos magician as it would be very reductive.

A demonolater and a practitioner of the kabbalah wishing to evoke a spirit may have different methods and desires about evocation, but the end result is the same, they both evoke an entity. Then it is just about finding what method resonates with you more than the rest, or you can even create your own at some point.

RHP does evocations with heavy protection, some LHP do evocation without any sort of protection, rather, they use a belief in their own power, or a quick banishing that does not involve the LBRP. And it works just as well in my experience. Some even use laughter as a banishing method.

That’s not necessarily a bad thing as long as it’s healthy skepticism and not simple paranoia or solipsism/constant dismissal without the intent of verifying other’s claims. Personally I do it as well, I never believe or disbelieve something until I tried it out myself.

It helps you avoid pretenders and to find what works and what doesn’t work for you. Besides you know how the saying goes, even if you know every bit of theory about something, if you never tried it, then you know nothing about it. Something along those lines.

Welcome here regardless, and I wish you good luck on your journey!

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The lack of a compass is the hardest part because I come from a trade where things either work or don’t, and you have all the tools to figure out why (though the proliferation of AI has changed it a bit recently). Here, I have to think completely differently.

For example, did that sigil I did work? One could argue this result was guaranteed; only a year later I discovered Kazaa and other similar apps, where one could download pretty much anything. The charging of the sigil wasn’t impressive; I tried to do it by exercise, and it wasn’t even that much. Then again, I did get the result I wanted, and without using P2P to boot. So it would feel unjust to claim it didn’t. It didn’t help that it was the only time I got a positive result; the other times I tried a sigil, I got a nightmare, and that was it.

I do a ritual, and I have no idea whether it worked, other than a general feeling. It’s not as if I have a way to check whether the LBRP I did yesterday was better than the one the day before yesterday. It might just feel better.

This is a fascinating issue, because on one side you have people who claim that demons are horribly dangerous and you shouldn’t even think about working with them without ironclad protections, and on the other side there are those who consider them friendly, generous, and even benevolent. So either one of the two sides is terribly mistaken, or there are many different beings with the same names that behave differently. Or maybe even the same beings create different personas for each person who contacts them; who knows? When I read different journals, I’ve wondered a few times whether two people talking separately to Lucifer are talking to the same being.

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Everything is filtered through the human mind. A spirit’s “personality” is interpreted through the magician’s individual lens so of course people will have different experiences. You don’t interact the same way with co-workers as you do with your lover, do you? That would be silly. To make sense of our experiences, we strive to look for commonalities between the experiences of others but nothing will exactly match between magicians.

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Okay, I did my first Middle Pillar. I must say, I expected less from the first trial. I did the version from “Paths of Wisdom.”

As in, as soon as I started breathing around Keter (and AHIH), my legs got wobbly. Around Yesod with Shaddah al-Chai, my arms were shaking, too. The other part of the ritual is when I imagine Tiphereth getting charged from above, and then my breath flowing from Tiphereth to Malkuth was hard because I was partially concentrated on not falling. It got a little better around the Qabbalistic Cross.

Now I feel energized, euphoric, and hot. I’m not sure if doing this just two hours after going to sleep was a wise idea, but my concentration is better in the evening. Anyway, this was quite a brutal first time.

What makes me curious is the sheer number of Kabbalistic Crosses involved. There’s one at the beginning of the LBRP (which itself begins the Middle Pillar), then at its end, and then at the end of the Middle Pillar itself. The LBRP makes sense — you don’t want the astral gribblies and other beings to interfere as you connect to the divine. The Cross, however, is supposed to center you with the universe and make you one with Adam Kadmon; why do you need to do this so many times?

It feels a little like operating a machine where you’re supposed to reset the arm’s position after each operation, or maybe writing to a file where you’re expected to manually open and close it.

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Today is the fourth time in a row that I have done the Middle Pillar.

Interestingly enough, the more I do it, the less of an effect I feel afterward. The first one gave me a euphoric feeling all evening, but the next day I felt sluggish and drained until the evening. The second one didn’t give me euphoria at all, but I was tired the next day, too. The third left me only a little less able to strain myself than normal; we’ll see about the fourth. The knee wobbling also happens, but later each time.

This mirrors what I had with LBRP — the first time felt intense, but the more I did it, the less different I felt. The former definitely left some long-term effects: I’m calmer, more disciplined, less prone to distractions. I haven’t been doing MP long enough to feel differently, except maybe the occasional feeling of pressure or cold on my forehead. Hopefully it means I’m getting better at each ritual, not that I’m doing something fundamentally wrong.

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Experiments continue. Currently, I’m perfecting the Middle Pillar and the LBRP, trying to find the optimal version that’s both intuitive and feels right. I’m currently indecisive between continuing to use the pointed finger to charge the pentagrams and trying the sign of the enterer, Thelema-style. Turns out I also forgot to visualize a few things, like the circle connecting the pentagrams.

Throughout the last few days, I felt exhausted. This culminated yesterday, when I barely felt like doing anything but lie on my sofa and browse the Internet on my phone. At first, I blamed the Middle Pillar, then I wondered whether I’d overdone something. But then I remembered it started not in the morning, but after doing the LIRP. As an experiment, I omitted it today, and there—no exhaustion. Weird. On the flip side, omitting it caused much less weird tactile sensations during the day, like the pressure on my forehead.

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I may have found the reason LIRP caused exhaustion for me—botched visualization during the Cabalistic Cross.

As I introduced more and more visualizations, I saw a mention of the “LE-OLAHM AMEN” where you’re supposed to see yourself being bathed in golden light. But the way I imagined it, it was expanding away from me, like a shield, from my heart.

Then I realized that none of the books actually describe it like that. The golden glow, if it’s described at all, was supposed to sit in my chest, and most books just suggest concentrating on the cross of light. I have no idea where the idea of an expanding golden light comes from—maybe from the Middle Pillar description—but in retrospect it makes no sense. It makes it look as if I was charging the cross of light from my heart.

Today, I did the ritual correctly… no, wait, I did it with another botched visualization, because this time I imagined all four balls of light converging in the center. Again, I’m not sure where that came from, because I can’t find it in any of the books. But there’s no unnatural weakness, at least.

So, the lesson for me: what you imagine during the ritual matters a lot, even if it seems like fluff. I guess it’s a good thing I’m doing babby’s first Hermetic rituals instead of jumping straight to evocation.

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Continuing to do LIRP, LBRP, and the Middle Pillar.

On the flip side, my IBS started acting up pretty much the first day I started the Middle Pillar, and it is annoying. It might be a side effect of concentrating on my pelvic area while thinking about the Yesod center, a side effect of the increased energy, or just a coincidence. A Tarot spread suggests I’m overthinking and spiraling into health anxiety again, which I have a tendency to do.

But I feel like I get effects; recently, those rituals put me into a kinda ecstatic state for their duration, and when calling archangels, I actually feel some presence. I sometimes feel stuff on my forehead: cold, as if air was flowing there (especially if I’m outside), or a feeling of pressure centered there and in my sinuses. I can cause the latter by relaxing my face in a specific way.

The main reason I keep doing it is that I like it. I had no idea that trying to visualize colored balls would feel fun and satisfying. I’m kinda not sure how to go from this to actually working with entities, but I’d try a few different approaches and see what sticks.

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I’ve been modifying the rituals to test their effectiveness by following different approaches. Unfortunately, I don’t have a better way of figuring this out than “feels better/feels worse.”

For now, I can say with certainty that trying to introduce any sort of breathwork into drawing the pentagrams (like inhaling energy/grounding) doesn’t improve anything; it only breaks my focus. Instead, trying to make the pentagrams shake when vibrating names seems to do the trick. I haven’t tried the Sign of the Enterer yet.

The pressure in my forehead is getting a little annoying. It starts at the point just above my brows, but if I let it continue, it radiates to my eyes and the bridge of my nose. Trying to relax my face doesn’t help. It’s almost certain to start whenever I concentrate on Kether (the white ball visualized in the Qabbalistic Cross and the first step of the Middle Pillar), but it also appears semi-randomly during the day. In the first case, it’s usually managed by the euphoria that started accompanying it, but it’s purely unpleasant when it shows up uninvited. Googling shows that many people trying the Middle Pillar, Kundalini, and even meditation have similar symptoms, sometimes even progressing to headaches (which hadn’t happened in my case yet)

I’m seeing definite changes in my sleep rhythm since I started the practice. My night owl lifestyle got disrupted; the 12-minute meditation regimen makes me sleepy pretty much as soon as it finishes, so I go to bed before 1 AM. I’m also dreaming much more; intense dreams were a rarity for me before, but now they happen every other night. Recently, my feet started hurting right after I stand up from bed, and I have no idea why; nothing like that happens during the day. IBS seems to have subsided for now.

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As part of my practice, I keep a journal (as most books advise). Today, I had a dream in which I felt criticized.

I don’t remember most of it because my dream journaling still sucks, but its finale was my father calling me to help him with strawberries he grew in his garden. The strawberries were enormous, and I fully expected him to want me to help him gather them. Instead, he gave me a black marker, told me to draw a number on each strawberry, and then write a description for each one in a diary, including its shape, diameter, color, etc.

The dream also included a school teacher who was pissed off that I called her the wrong name (or incorrectly), but I woke up too groggy to write it down, and it was almost entirely forgotten.

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Besides my normal journal, I also keep a dream one. Again, “Modern Magick” advises this.

The problem I immediately encountered is that when I wake up at night, I’m often groggy, confused, and determined to fall back asleep as soon as possible. When I remember I have a diary, I just note down the important stuff, or whatever I remember. Hence, when I check it later, I encounter stuff such as (translated to English, not within a single night)

  • driving a truck through the tunnels
  • some occultists
  • mansion garden, containment breach, weird girls
  • talking to Voldemort about a house with some portraits (I don’t even remember a dream with Voldemort at all)
  • an exam (structured with answering questions)

Then there’s whatever the fuck happened last night.

  • a gate (also, a sigil) (Written in English, ‘sijil’ struck through and corrected to ‘cigil’)
  • Sitra Achra gloria (Written verbatim)
  • N. asking to distract her ? (Written verbatim)
  • Hackers encrypted my hard drive (Written in my native language)

I wrote the last part after a dream in which hackers took over my personal laptop and sent me a ransom message. The rest was after a dream I barely remember, and it involved being part of a Doom-like FPS game, which often appears in my dreams.

“Sitra Achra gloria” is less cryptic than it appears; it’s a direct quote from a metal song I listened to the day before.

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I’m fascinated by how bad my dream diary had become.

The entry from the latest night has gems such as:

  • “thank you for the version with mining”
  • “energy rises when seeing them”
  • “the root/canon of beauty” (the word could be either, as they’re similar in Polish)
  • “lives in [illegible]”
  • literally just this character: 生

It’s like the good old days of debugging a program by looking at the working memory.

14

I started to feel stuff during LBRP and the Middle Pillar.

Focusing on Keter creates the familiar pressure in my forehead, and the skin there feels tight and incredibly sensitive; touching it during the Qabbalistic Cross isn’t pleasant. Tiphereth feels like a warm sensation on my chest where my heart is. Da’at feels like a slight weight on the shoulder and stiffness in the neck; I actually started feeling it later than Tiphereth. Yesod feels completely inert, and I’m not sure whether that means something isn’t passing there or if it’s just subtler. Malkuth, I haven’t grasped yet.

During the QC, bringing up Chesed and Geburah feels like tingling in my shoulders.

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One of my anomalous dream diary entries reads, “Earth is a little flexible.” Which is curious, because days earlier I meditated on the element of earth (as the book on ceremonial magic advises), and one of my conclusions was, “Earth is rigid and inflexible.”

This is a meaningful correction, because what does it mean? In the Qabbalistic view, Earth symbolizes the entirety of the material world. Most people think of it as definitely a rigid thing — there are ironclad laws of physics and all the others that are their consequences, and outside of them, no one can do anything. There’s no place for magic in this worldview, except for the human mind. We can change our minds, but we can’t do anything about the world outside.

This view was rejected, but not completely. Earth was said to be a little flexible. Magic can change it, but not much. There are definitely limits to what can be done with it, and given that it tends to work best when out of sight, it might have something to do with perception.

EA Koetting claims that invocation works because the summoner effectively assumes the mantle of God. In the Kabbalistic view of the world, we are all God. But that means everyone who doesn’t use magic is God, too. The asshole tycoon oppressing people, the fentanyl zombie folding themselves in the middle of the street, the hard-working professional, the scientist discovering the laws of the world, the police officer, the social media influencer — all of them are God, and could potentially order spirits around.

How many of them want to live in the world where this is possible?

Everyone fantasizes about being a powerful wizard, but for most people it’s less fun if anyone else can, too. A thief could ask a demon to steal your laptop; an unattractive person you rejected could cast a love spell to make you reconsider; some psychopath could use a curse to rot your intestines because you cut him in line. And the existence of spirits is another can of worms; how many people want to deal with someone who can read their minds while they can’t read theirs?

There’s another problem. If anyone could theoretically get anything thanks to spirits and their willpower, then technically anything that happens to you becomes your responsibility. You could have learned more, applied your will more, approached the right spirit, and gotten that promotion/money/social life/popularity. If someone curses you, you could have defended yourself better. There’s no place for the victim narrative here.

Most people will reject magic. They don’t want to live in a world with it, and they’re God, too, which means that the beings that listen to the summoner must listen to them, too. Therefore, they can’t do anything when the God is looking.

That’s why I don’t believe in conspiracy theories about the rich and powerful employing mages and dealing with demons. If you’re at the top, you don’t want some loser getting uppity because they’ve read some books. You’re more determined to reject magic. If Richard Richman is weirdly resistant to curses, it’s not because he has the best mages on his employment, but because enough people (Richard Richman among them) don’t feel comfortable with the world where the powerful can be brought down just like that. It might also mean magic works best when the social order is calcified and enough people are unhappy to reject the status quo, and worst when people are genuinely enthusiastic and hopeful for the future.

16

Here is the report on the first petition spell I tried.

Background

I once had an incredibly scary dream which involved me descending into the ruins of an old laboratory and encountering a woman screaming a word that dissolved me. I experienced my consciousness getting deleted in real time, until only a panicked shred remained and then disappeared. I woke up, panicked and convinced that re-remembering the word would kill me. The dream was traumatic enough to cause a sympathetic nervous system response every time I talked about it, even to this day. It was over 20 years ago.

A few months ago, I heard the name ‘Naamah’ and started researching it, which led me to BALG. The research found some similarities between her and the being from the dream, although only in the Qlippoth-related context. I tabled this fact, not knowing what to do with it yet, but I decided to dive into the occult instead of limiting myself to an occasional Tarot reading.

Two weeks later, I performed a divination about the dream.

Tarot Divination #3

Method: Celtic Cross
Question: What was about that dream, and should I research it?
Card 1 (Center) — Present: 7 of Cups
Card 2 (Crossing Card) — Problem: Temperance
Card 3 (Cross, Left) — Past: 10 of Cups, Reversed
Card 4 (Cross, Right) — Future: The Fool
Card 5 (Cross, Up) — Crown: Death, Reversed
Card 6 (Cross, Down) — Foundation: Ace of Swords, Reversed
Card 7 (Staff, Bottom) — Querent’s Attitude/Advice: King of Cups
Card 8 (Staff, Center-Bottom) — External Influence: The Empress, Reversed
Card 9 (Staff, Center-Top) — Wish/Fear: Eight of Cups, Reversed
Card 10 (Staff, Top) — Outcome: The Moon

Working interpretation

5/10 cards are Major Arcana, so the event is significant overall. Minor Arcana are almost entirely Cups, suggesting an emotional issue. As of making the divination, the querent struggles with too many options (1); balance (of what???) is the key to success (2). The issue is strongly linked to a lack of happiness (loneliness?) in the past (3), and confusion (6). Querent thinks he’s stuck (5), but is willing to trust his instincts (7) and use unconventional means (4) to get through it. Afraid of leaving behind his structured life (9). The outcome is a further dive into the world of dreams and uncertainty (10).

The external influence (7), in classic interpretation, means a lack of creativity or some stifling force, but the gut feeling suggests a spirit. Empress suggests an Earth-related spirit; reversed might mean a spirit traditionally considered malevolent. Naamah, according to VK Jehannum, is strongly correlated to the Empress and Hierophant card. She remains a strong candidate, especially that the Moon card is also there. The complete lack of pentacles is an argument against it, though.

Background #2

Leaving the issue for a while, I returned to it by accident when driving to my therapist’s office. Spotify played Sinistral Kings - Nahemoth just as I was about to get there. This made me think about the dream; I also had a nightmare that day about being laid off, and it made me bring this topic up with the therapist. While she couldn’t say much about it, later that day I got an idea—why not make a petition asking Naamah whether she has anything to do with the dream?

Petition #1

It’s not the actual contents of the petition; it’s just a way I write them up in the journal.
Spirit: Nahema (Naamah)
Task:

  • Give me an answer on whether you had to do anything with the dream.
  • Give me an advice what I should do about it.
    Additional Conditions:
  • Make the answer come in a way leaving no doubt it comes from you.
    Time: 3 weeks, starting 08/31

Method

I modified the method I found in the petition tutorial, with a slight modification. Using a sigil seemed intuitive, so I visited VK Jehannum’s page and copied Naamah’s sigil onto a sheet of paper. Then I performed the usual daily LBRP and Middle Pillar, sat at the table, and wrote the petition on the pre-prepared sheet.

Unfortunately, I didn’t think to leave myself a copy of the text. In general, I tried to sound respectful, but not too deferential; my reasoning is that no one respects a beggar. I also still hadn’t decided what to do with demonolatry methodology; it seems to be veering into worship too much for me to be fully comfortable with it.

Having written it, I gazed on the sigil for 4 minutes, using fourfold breath. The lines started disappearing very quickly; if this counts as charging the sigil, this method seems very effective. Then I read the text of the letter of intent 4 times. There’s no particular reason for that number, except that I’ve already used fourfold breath and putting 4 into every other variable seemed intuitive; besides, I was born 4/4, and my birthdate number is also 4. It’s also a number symbolizing stability.

Having read the petition, I decided to dispose of it by burning it. This was the problematic part. I went to the bathroom, lit the paper with a gas lighter, and held it over the bathtub. It initially went well, but the flame spread faster than I anticipated, forcing me to drop the burning paper into the tub. I let it burn, noticing that the flames seemed to curve around the sigil, then I realized the bathtub was acrylic and definitely not flame-resistant. I took the sheet out and let it burn slowly in my hand, leaving a small fragment (which I flushed), but the damage was done: a yellow, crescent-shaped stain inside it, fortunately only surface-level.

Needless to say, it spoiled my mood, and I spent the entire evening berating myself.

Result

The first two days were filled with me obsessing over the petition and over the spirit herself so much that I was afraid to spoil everything with the lust for results. It didn’t help that I realized I’d set a hard condition to meet: is there a way to have no doubt about the source of the insight? Not really. Even if she manifested before my eyes, I could still convince myself it was just my imagination. And I had no astral senses, so the answer, if it came, would likely be more cryptic than that. By then, I half-expected the petition to fail.

Around the second week, I started to notice synchronicities associated with Naamah and the petition. For example, I happened to find a 4-year-old post on Reddit where a guy talked about a ritual with Naamah being the focus and claimed it was important to wait for 8/31 to do it; I looked to see whether the date was in any way significant, but I found no mention of it anywhere else. Stuff like that seemed to jump at me from many different sources; nothing that would convince a skeptic, though.

I also started a dream journal, because I’ve read it might be a vector of contact. Around day 9, the dream of strawberries (which I mentioned in this thread) appeared. This was the first dream that felt meaningful, almost like it was making fun of my journaling. I interpreted the message as “instead of immersing yourself, you’re just playing it safe by reading books, doing the mildest things possible, and measuring it up.”

Because I don’t tend to make a lot of sense when woken up in the middle of the night, my dream journal quickly became a mess, full of sentences that didn’t seem to mean anything, attached to dreams I no longer remembered. The shock came on day 11, when I found “Sitra Achra gloria” scribbled into the dream journal, along with “N asks me to distract her.” N was nearly certainly Nahema/Naamah, because the only thing I remembered from the moment of writing was being concerned that someone might read it (I live alone) and decipher her name. Still, I remained unconvinced.

The next night, I had a properly documented dream which was… not nice. It was nothing traumatic, just an embarrassing and very detailed scene where I had sex with a person from my past (with whom I never had anything sexual). The highlight of this dream was that I didn’t find her attractive at all, to the point where I couldn’t even get it up, but participated in it because I didn’t want to disappoint her. Then, in the same dream, I reconnected with someone who treated me badly in the past, just because she was nice to me, all the time trying to figure out how to make her go away without hurting her. All this happened in the multi-level ruins of a city for some reason, with the lower part flooded.

I also found the character for “sei” (生) in my diary, just before I wrote up the dream itself. It didn’t click at first; I’m learning Japanese, but I had no idea why I decided to write “life” in the middle of the night while recalling a dream. After a few hours, I realized that this character in kun’yomi can also be read as “raw” (like in 生卵 — raw egg), and then it’s spelled “nama”.

At this point, I started to get afraid. My first concern was that I had found a sure way to work myself into psychosis, and I was already halfway there. The second was that if this was a genuine experience, there was enough murk in my mind to get dredged up and make this particular dream look like a children’s story. At which point my inner voice, in a very amused tone, asked: “But didn’t you like the stories where the protagonist gets beaten into a pulp and humiliated before winning?” This was so unexpected that I laughed.

I ruminated on the dream a lot. I now remember it whenever I try to bury my discomfort after someone does something I don’t like.

Day 12, a thread appeared on BALG titled “what is the difference between real spirits, mental disorders, tulpas, and servitors,” and its author namedropped Naamah in a response to my post. Of course, it could be just a coincidence, or even a result of the author reading the previous posts in my thread and making an educated guess, but given so many synchronicities, I doubt it. I guess this blows one theory I’ve given in that very thread (“spirits are all in your head”) out of the water.

Day 13, more weird content in the dream journal.

  • “pain/join to open with たかた／なかた” (what is takata?)
  • zorientują/koncentrują się na [illegible] るる" (“they’re orienting/focusing themselves on ruru”)
  • irytacja ducha (“the spirit/ghost/soul’s irritation”)
  • śnie (“the dream/I’m dreaming”)
  • ziemia trochę rozciągliwa (“ground/earth is a little rubbery/flexible”) (days ago, when meditating on the earth element, I thought and then wrote in the diary that “earth is rigid and inflexible”)
  • dziwne rzeczy [illegible] gotując obiekt (“weird things”, “cooking the object”)
  • 200 akcji Wzmocnionej Mózgownicy (“200 stakes/actions of Enhanced Brain”) (*research brought me to BrainCo, a mind/machine interface-focused company whose Chinese name contains the characters 强脑 — Strong Brain. The company isn’t publicly listed, but they filed for an IPO in January. The funny thing is that one of the products the company sells is sleep-monitoring headbands.)

I have no idea what to even do with it. I wish I didn’t scrawl even when not half-asleep; it would certainly be easier if I didn’t have to look at each word for minutes to figure out what it might be. This is frustrating, because just a night before I had a nicely written-up (though largely inconsequential) dream, so I know I can do it. It would also have been a good idea to start the dream diary before the petition so I could figure out whether I do this normally, too.

Day 14. The day before, I put a tiny question in a dream journal under the date: “What should I do?” I remember writing a lot in the diary and expected to find an entire page there, but it looks like I dreamed about writing stuff in the diary, because there are only three short points.

  • praca nad umiejętnościami (work on skills) (I remember writing this and not being sure whether it didn’t actually come from me, but it seems like good advice overall)
  • kontakt (contact)
  • very eager

Day 15. I wrote the question “Where did the dream with the word come from?” This time, however, the answer seemed garbled, or I just don’t understand it.

  • trudne (difficult)
  • nie ma czemu (there’s no ‘why’, or there is nothing [to do with])
  • concave lens は necessary (actually written on the page for the day before. Concave lenses are used to correct myopia.)
  • sprawiał/wspaniałe (an illegible word, but might mean marvelous or made) wynalazek/wynalazki (invention/inventions)

Inspired by the mentions of inventions and lenses, I researched Tubal-Cain during the day. Turns out he’s heavily present, along with his brothers and sister, in Freemasonic symbolism. They were supposed to teach humanity skills: Jabal — astronomy, Jubal — music. Tubal-Cain — ironworking and smithing, and Naamah (the daughter of Lamech) — weaving “and other skills”. One of those other skills was, apparently, reading — there’s a relief in Orvieto Cathedral with Jubal working on his instruments, while Naamah teaches a child with a book in her hand. It’s hard to say, because Masonic texts I found seem to be paying as little attention to her as possible, sometimes even omitting her name and summing her up as “their sister.” This is similar to the Genesis 4:22 text, where she’s mentioned along with her brothers, but not assigned any craft.

According to the same sources, the siblings knew about the Flood beforehand and feared that all the knowledge humanity already had would perish, so Tubal-Cain built two pillars of stone and inscribed everything they knew on them.

Because he’s so loved by the Freemasons, Tubal-Cain is also very prominent in conspiracy theories, apparently represented by a crooked staff with two circles on each side; some say that the logo of Facebook is supposed to represent it. He also has an entire branch of witchcraft venerating him.

Also, I found a mention of Naamah (the demon) in the Luciferian tarot representing the Queen of Wands; there’s a mention there about the latter practicing “Dushuktha”, or “Evil Word”, which is planning one’s words to achieve the desired effect. This is just a single text, though, lacking quotations and posted by the same person on several social media about a month ago. I’m not sure how to treat such unverified sources in general.

Day 16. There’s only one abnormal entry: “weakness, looking 4 strength” (which I assume is describing me) followed by a normal dream that doesn’t feel meaningful (although there was a fragment I don’t remember, yet it’s written in the diary — “being torn to bits repeatedly in some interdimensional trap”. I hope this wasn’t an actual dream, because it would open the possibility of having regular dreams of torture and not knowing about it). It’s a little hilarious how fast I flip between the states: one day I think “this is real, what if it’s dangerous?!” then another day I’m all annoyed at myself: “I’m just LARPing with myself, there’s no way this was real.” Perhaps this is why every single book advises recording everything.

Day 17. At the beginning of my dream diary (I had a lot of those this night), there are a few anomalies:

  • sen znika szybko (dream disappears fast)
  • [illegible - zikra?] bliska zapamiętania (zikra close to being remembered) (*I checked. It’s Arabic for memory. I never even tried to learn Arabic.)
  • dwa krańce dzielą radość (two ends dividing the happiness)

Found C. Kendall’s “Infernal Saga” thread; Naamah’s section has a curious sentence: “This is our home, our nexion when a mortal is granted to enter these dark waters, the sirens hold the soul and tear it apart.” There was zero water in my dream, though.

Day 18. Aside from the “dream of being seduced” mention (which I don’t remember), there is nothing unusual.

Day 19. No anomalies. It’s possible I lost my chance after I stretched in bed too much and pulled a muscle in my back, which completely woke me up and gave me another thing to think about for the next five minutes, after which whatever remained from a dream was already forgotten.

Day 20. A slightly ominous anomaly: “someone was there”. Above it a quite lucid entry “Śniło mi się, że N. mnie pilnowała” (I dreamed that N. was guarding me). I don’t remember such a dream.

When I drive, I usually connect my phone, which turns on Spotify with my custom playlist and shuffle turned on. Usually, it starts from the place it was interrupted last time; sometimes it craps out, and I have to manually restart it. Today, when I was about to drive to my parents, it promptly loaded Spotify, hung while trying to start from the last played song, and automatically began playing the recently added song, which happens to be “Nahemoth” by Sinistral Kings. When I got back, it did the exact same thing, except it skipped “Nahemoth” and started with the second song.

Day 21. Anomalies are really murky tonight, and there aren’t many of them; I was too confused and sleepy to reach for the notepad fast enough.

  • “bardzo ciekawe pytanie [illegible]” (very interesting question)
  • “木を[illegible]” (something to do with trees)

I think I reached the limits of what this method of communication can do, at least with my current skills.

Conclusions

There are three possibilities here. One is that the contact failed, and I’m larping with a thoughtform (or even just with my mind). Another is that I contacted a parasite impersonator. The third one is that I did contact Naamah as I intended.

The first theory was already hard to defend after discovering BrainCo and was completely upended after I used a word in Arabic that makes actual sense. English and Japanese were easy to explain. Arabic isn’t; I never had contact with the language beyond a few words.

A parasite could maybe be indicated by the loopy, garbled communication in my dream journal. But nothing in what I received feels exploitative. The two dreams I remember were genuinely good, if harsh advice. The “what should I do” part is straight out telling me I need to hone my skills — a parasite, I’d assume, would rather praise and congratulate me, promising everything and delivering nothing. If I count my inner-voice interjection as a message, then I got an offer, but I also got warned it would be painful.

It’s hard to gauge someone I didn’t speak to directly, but Naamah seems both nice and stern. She has a playful, not-too-serious-about-herself side, but she will deliver her advice whether it’s painful or not. If I had to guess, physical pain or harsh demonstrations outside dreams aren’t outside the realm of possibility. Through the dream, I got a quite painful, but fair assessment of my most problematic character traits.

Her side as a teacher is something that people don’t mention a lot, but it looks like when it comes to negative, unhelpful character traits, it’s something she’s good at remedying, as long as one doesn’t mind it being painful. Given the masonic legends I found, she very likely could help with acquiring certain skills (clothing repairs, reading, and using words to the best effect seem all a safe bet). When I learn a better way to contact her, I’m going to ask, because it seems like a side of her that’s rarely talked about. It’s a shame that even in the story where she gets to do something cool, she’s glossed over so hard that it almost feels like an intentional snub. The text where every single one of her brothers is named, but she’s only mentioned as “their sister,” is curious, given that it’s not very hard to check who Tubal-Cain’s sibling was.

As evidenced by synchronicities before the ritual, Naamah seemed to significantly encourage the contact attempt in ways similar to the experiences of demonolatry practitioners. While I planned to eventually evoke Naamah and ask her the question, it would take me a lot of time to prepare myself, decide on a method, and prepare the ceremony. The laid-off dream and the song just before I drove to the therapist’s office were a perfect combo, which encouraged me to try a simpler method later that day.

The frustrating thing is that I can’t figure out a channel of communication that would give me a definite answer to my first question. The dream diary seemed promising, but the sheer amount of messages that don’t seem to mean anything makes this dubious. Dreams were much better, but aside from those two, I don’t have anything else right now.

Still, I got almost everything I wanted, although the answer is more complicated than I expected.

  1. I didn’t get a clear “It was I, Naamah, who scared you with a dream 20 years ago” yet. What I think I got is the confirmation that she could do it, and that nightmares can be used as targeted lessons. The “Dushuktha” mention seems pretty specific; the “where did the dream come from” anomalous entries are hard to decipher, but they seem to indicate corrective action?
  2. I did get a lot of advice, from “get good, contact me again,” through pointing out a particular character flaw and targeting it with a dream that makes me uncomfortable when I engage in it, to a potential lead with a company entering the stock market.
  3. I think I got enough confirmation to reject the “thoughtform” and “parasite impersonator” theories.

I also really need to figure out some balanced way of approaching magic, because the constant switch between “THIS IS REAL” (with researching the topic manically) and “What am I even doing?” (and feeling stupid for even trying) is mentally tiring. I also noticed I’m overtly prone to self-aggrandizing narratives. I guess that’s what that Temperance card was about.

The next step is training astral senses, followed by an actual evocation.

Journal of my path to Naamah
17

Addendum

After the petition ended, I did a divination (standard Celtic cross) to verify my plan. Its crux was to work on my astral senses while collecting materials for EA Koetting-style ceremonial evocation. I already have the knife and the cup; I’d have to make the circle myself; I’m still not sure what to do about the altar. But, I’m closer to have everything than I was a month ago.

The first thing that happened during the divination was that a card fell out of the deck during the shuffling. It turned out to be the Empress — the correspondence associated with Naamah. At this point, I got enough signals to assume she wants to be contacted.

Nevertheless, the spread itself was less optimistic:

Tarot Divination #7

Method: Celtic Cross
Question: Naamah — should I proced with the evocation plan?

Center — Present: Knight of Swords

Court cards represent people, and this one seems to represent me in a favorable light. Ambition, direct action, courage, drive. Well, I just finished my first work and feel on a roll, so that might even fit.

Crossing Card — Problem: Eight of Wands, Reversed

And it already goes to shit. This is the card of momentum; reversed, it means scattered energy, delays, and, in general, things feeling like swimming in motor oil.

Cross, Left — Past: Two of Pentacles, Reversed

I view this card as mini-Temperance, and here it means a lack of balance. I pointed this out in the report: keeping myself from immediately spiraling into obsessive research or jumping into spiteful skepticism was a little difficult; those were pretty intense three weeks because of it

Cross, Right — Future: Seven of Wands, Reversed

It’s a card of fighting against the odds, and getting it reversed likely means giving up and burnout.

Cross, Top — Crown: Page of Swords, Reversed

Someone scatterbrained, misusing words, more talk than action, maybe paranoid. Which is… um… a fair assessment, actually. I do have a problem with overthinking, which often leads me to convince myself I’ve lost before I even start.

Cross, Bottom — Root: Judgment

The second un-reversed card. I struggled to fit it into this position, but it apparently means my outlook has shifted irreversibly. Yes, the previous petition changed a lot there. It’s also the only Major Arcana in the spread, which is weird, given the topic — but not so when seeing the rest of the cards.

Staff, Bottom — Attitude: Five of Pentacles, Reversed

This one is one of the low-key bad cards and is better when reversed; here, it means accepting help and letting go of the victim mentality. Or maybe my paranoia and determination to do everything alone.

Staff, Bottom-Center — External Influence: Knight of Wands, Reversed

Either it means some asshole from the outside disrupting my plans, or just general chaos creeping in. I can see how something like that leads to the Reversed Seven of Wands.

Staff, Top-Center — Wish/Fear: Queen of Pentacles, Reversed

I guess it’s anxiety about not having what I need: equipment, a place to perform the ritual, knowledge, astral senses, preparation, and other things. The constant fretting to have the perfect evocation with perfect correspondences, perfect attention, perfect skill, etc.

Staff, Top — Outcome: Knight of Pentacles, Reversed

Stagnation, delays, a standstill, and lost momentum. Most likely, nothing gets actually done.

8/10 cards reversed. 9/10 cards are Minor Arcana in a reading about my first evocation. The outcome points to nothing getting done. Not the best outlook

At least I kinda see what happens here. I put the actual evocation off, always preparing. Not yet; I haven’t decided on the circle. Not yet; I don’t have a triangle. Not yet; the candles are the wrong color. Not yet. What about the neighbors? And so.

So, it looks like I have to change it completely. Continue with petitions, and in the meantime, make evocation as simple as possible. And then just try it. Nothing ventured, nothing gained.

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I really need to figure out how to burn petitions without becoming the butt of the joke every time.

This time, I brought a stainless steel bowl filled with water, rolled up the petition, and lit it from the other side while holding it over the water. I reasoned nothing bad would happen even if I dropped it accidentally; I also planned to do it anyway once the flame got close to my fingers, and it burned pretty anemically for the first 60% of its length.

Then, it suddenly lit up so fast in my hand that it almost looked like it exploded. I dropped it into the water, and my hand didn’t get burned, but the next day it turned out my fingers had those yellow stains normally associated with heavy smokers. The skin smells faintly of burnt paper, too.

I asked Gemini how long it takes for them to go away on their own, which coincidentally is 4-8 weeks, the latter being the length of my petition.

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The interesting thing is that doing LBRP and MP long-term seems to be working in a very slow, subtle way.

I used to ruminate on my health a lot and often took any deviation as a sign that something was wrong. I diagnosed myself with many different diseases a lot, sometimes even managing to work myself into real physical symptoms. For about two months, rumination has been rare and self-contained, and often doesn’t happen at all. Almost fainting during a ritual would drive me into a tour through medical specialist offices and blood tests in the past; when it happened a week ago, I managed to keep my head cool.