I haven’t been keeping up with this journal. I’ve been very busy over the summer. First, my son had camp and I spent my time writing up a huge essay about ethical issues (that I will not post here.) Then I went on a trip. When I got back it was really really hot outside. We had some terribly hot days here. One weekend we tried to go to the beach but it was closed because there were too many people. We did a few things, but not much because my car doesn’t have air conditioner (its old and the air is probably worth more than the car), so my son didn’t really want to ride in it with the awful hot weather. We also had a lot of rain. My husband lost his contracting job and is looking again. He had to spend a lot of time in the car repair shop because those long trips put a lot of miles on the car.
Naturally, having a five year old jumping on me did not give me much time to practice a bunch of spiritual stuff. I kept saying to myself I would get around to summoning OSE. Well, I did get to it. He is nice if you like a scary looking black snake looking like it is going to wiggle down from the ceiling. I thought I could use him to get people to fix the java code (update it to the new version.) but I guess his powers don’t actually work like that. I will have to ask him more questions about it.
I know I mentioned prior in this journal that I wanted to summon up egregores. Well, lets just say I was rather impressed with the power of one particular egregore. Not sure how much details about that I’m going to put up here. Despite what some people thing, yeah, egregores can possess people and it isn’t always pretty, even if they are “friendly.” I hate to think of what a hostile one would look like.
Then again, that one might be a bit more impressive than normal just because of the power of a bunch of left hand path practitioners working towards a common goal.
Finally, I got around to Belial. (again) . I know I need to evoke him at least monthly because he is my mentor. (who I ignore half the time no matter what according to my journal entries.) I make excuses. I am a lazy student. I’m surprised any demon would put up with me. Even after over a year of working with him and making progress, sometimes, I’m still afraid to call him up. I guess because I know the types of terrifying things that he can do. I know he tries to go “easy” on me, but his idea of “easy” is pushing my limits.
My primary worry about Belial used to be that he would “lead me astray” as in lead me away from myself, and draw me into being some sort of person who wasn’t in tune with my Holy Guardian Angel and would make bad decisions I would regret. Now it seems more like that isn’t the case, and its more a case of he really wants to push my limits of perception and what I think is possible.
So, I went ahead and summoned him up, the whole big ordeal. This time, it was like that piece of aluminum foil was so used that it just couldn’t show all of him in there. He started hinting that it might be time to replace it soon. I keep worrying that if I get a new one I won’t be able to see him there. (I know yeah right, I saw him in the ceiling a few times too.) So, anyway, I had these symbols for Belial familiars I had made earlier. Now that whole familiar thing is something I’ve always been real confused on this point. The goetia goes into how some demons can offer “familiars” but they don’t go into great detail about exactly what that means. Like, is it supposed to be like little mini versions of the demon who come whenever you want? Is it supposed to be like a pet animal (like a real animal) that helps you out with your spiritual practice? Are they like separate entities from the main demon, or like part of it? Belial likes to show a lot of different shapes and send a lot of different spirits. I know they go on about how many “legions” each demons commands and their “ranks” but I’ve read to many conflicting accounts about it. I don’t really intend to settle the debate here (or maybe it is all those things, as if there was “one” answer.)
So, I asked him about the familiars. He had me get three pieces of aluminum foil, one for each of them. I set it out in front of the old symbols I had prepared (probably like a year ago.) and then I just looked at it for a while. He asked me to ask him for the three people I want most for the Wogralld project to help me out and keep it going even without my intervention (so, meaning, I wouldn’t have to motivate them to work on it, they would be totally self motivated to work on it for internal reasons of their own, and would keep working on it even if for some reason I stopped working on it.)
The first person I wanted was someone with great marketing skills who will attract more users and developers to the project. The second was a C programmer who also was a game mechanics designer, and the third a Java programmer who would update my project to work with the latest Java.
I actually saw different spirits appear in each of the pieces of aluminum foil. Then he told me some things about each of the people he would attract, but I know he can be a tricky demon (like the time he told me I should do the whole project myself, I mean there is no way you can develop a whole MMORPG project yourself, because even if you did all the work yourself, it isn’t multi-player without other people, unless you populated the entire server with bots I guess, but still, realistically, it would take an awful long time to finish and be a lot less satisfying. At the same time, I hate to force people to work on a project they don’t even like. So, I’m hopeful, because I am amazed at what he can do. I used to be frustrated and figured no one else cared about it, but now I feel like those people are out there in the world somewhere, waiting, but at the same time it scares me because I know it is barrier a lot of open source projects do not pass, because even if they attract developers to the project, they might all leave and we might still be left with an abandoned project that goes nowhere.
Then naturally, my son and mom woke up to bother me so I didn’t exactly finish it, more like I put it away. At some point I might try evoking the familiars one at a time and see what I can find out. Maybe I won’t need to, though. I’d rather have actual stuff done on the game project than talk to “imaginary friends in pieces of foil” because I more or less consider it a waste of time activity that isn’t necessarily valuable in and of itself unless you think it is some kind of delusional role playing game.