Choosing your Weapon

Too often I see fledgling magicians jump down some traditional path, abandoning the well blazed trails they’ve already created.

The ultimate outcome of your magic comes not from what things are supposed to mean, but what they mean to you. For instance, momentos and keepsakes are special because we attach additional meaning to them. That additional meaning is stronger than the mundane associations these objects already possess, and reliably leads back to the events that made them special.

The reality checks used for lucid dreaming work in a similar manner to those keepsakes and momentos, in that the user appends additional meaning to a specific “thing”, like looking at your watch or walking through a door. The repetition of doing that reality check over and over eventually strengthens the link to that new meaning, until it become the dominant path. Reality checks don’t work fresh out of the box, like Ikea furniture, they need to be assembled.

In my opinion, one of the main purposes of ritual is to strengthen specific archetypal systems and paradigms so that they are more reliable for use. The more robust and well defined an archetype is on a personal level, the more reliable it is for use.

You can alter your existing paradigms/archetypal systems through the use of

  1. Repetition
  2. Emotional Reinforcement
  3. Novelty.

You’ll see most of those in any good ritual. But those things happen outside of ritual environments as well. The majority of our systems were built without our consent. The key is then to recognize which systems we already possess that are well built.

If you’re trying to summon a demon you just heard about today, it’s almost guaranteed to be a weak ass archetype, and you’d probably be better off summon Elvis, who is an Egregore in his own right. The exception there would be a novel attraction to that demon.

When choosing components to work with in your spells or things to summon, you have to take careful measure of how strong those elements are, and also where they lead.

For instance, I once heard a woman on Coast describe a group intention experiment where the intent was to “Reduce Violence” in a certain area. It back fired and there was like 3 times more violence reported. Why? Just see what comes to mind when you think of the word “reduce”, not much, nothing clear. Do the same with violence, and vivid clear images come to mind. Violence is a much stronger archetype than Reduce, so Violence is the only one which had any effect.

In a situation where I needed to beat someone with a golf club or hockey stick, I’m not invoking a demon, I’m invoking Casey Jones. I’ve already given it a lifetime of devotion.

Let me lay out a Pantheon for a Math God. Grade school math like addition and subtraction are the saints. High school math the angels. College math concepts the archangels. Then take everything math related you know, and sum it up withe the math god. You don’t summon the math god to calculate the tip at a restaurant, you summon a saint.

Your demons are within you, just waiting to be named.

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Bump, necro’ing the thread