I just had a few questions and would be grateful if someone could help, I have noticed that various books and Grimoires are often unclear with regards to taking precautions when engaging in sorcerous works. On the one hand I understand we do not want to be arm chair practitioners but magick is like bungie jumping, we still want to make sure that there is some protection and safety involved. This post was inspired by a specific experience after engaging in various rituals and then my conversation with a few more experienced practitioners. Here are my questions:
When astral travelling/ dreaming working, are there any recommendations as to how to protect the physical body?
with blood offerings left on a sigil or food, how do we make sure our essence (within the blood) is not tampered and how long should one keep it on the altar and how should we dispose of it?
These may seem like basic questions but I find alot of books do not even make this clear, and yet they explain every other details with all the elaborate information but miss the very basics. The main concern of course has nothing to do with Daemons or deities; it is with spirits or disincarnates, or psychic parasites.
@Darius777 Not Well versed in Protection Magic, specifically for Astral Travel since I don’t really do it [Referring to Astral Travelling, and it’s safeguards] my friend, but I’ll See what I can do. Alright some pointers, A good recommendation would be to not Astral Project too long, not sure about the often part but From what I’ve heard and understand, the longer one Projects the more likely you can get fucked over, another thing relating to this is that T a friend of mine talked about this once, can’t remember the entities or what they are but in short they don’t like it when people astral project too long out of their body, if you see a bird or birds that appear or follow you, that’s you’re que from them to GTFO back into your body unless you want a bad time to happen. A good tip which may be related or may not, you may see other entities or even the dead, DO NOT interact or even look at them, in short if you give them attention or look at them, you more or less signal that you are not dead, and still very much have a body, a body you are out of, and of course a body that they can hijack, so long as you don’t do anything radical or otherwise anything to signal that you are astral traveling, to them you are just another dead ghost or an entity without a form, and they will just pass by to wherever they go. If you are concerned about where you are, if you have any mirrors in your room cover them and remove them from the room that you will leave your body in if possible, and to clear the area use sage, that’s my best for recommendations for protection my friend.
For Blood offerings, there are a few things you can do, first make sure that whatever you are making the offering to is actually the entity you call out to, and of course if you are doing a blood sigil offering make sure the sigil actually belongs to the entity you plan to deal with. Yeah it seems like no brainer, but this applies more to variants of already existing sigils or sigils that incorporate more than one entity, for example there are sigils of Zazel which is a Saturn entity that has been confused with Azazel who also has Saturn affinity, they have similar enough alternate sigils to where those who are starting out with magic may accidentially confuse them interchangably. Another thing would be to keep it in a offering box as oppose to just on a altar, that way the box can be more directed with the entity’s sigil to direct the offering to them as oppose to just having it on the altar, and what I can recommend for disposial is since I only use Paper Seals or my Talismans, that once use call out to the entity give thanks, and burn the seal if it’s burnable, this may not apply to you or you may have another way to dispose but this is again what I can recommend. Maybe the more Experienced members of the Forums can help you with this, hope I helped you at least, well good luck with, well, whatever you’re trying to do Friend.
Thanks for that, it was more useful than you think. With regards to the astral projection that was great advice. I think the experience I had was more lucid dreaming. I practice eroto comatose lucidity and the effects have been as trippy as some psychedelic experiences I have had. My problem was that I had not noticed how much time had passed during a nap I took, and it was also possible I woke up in an exhausted state unaware of what had happened in the last 5 hours, then I went back to sleep. I encountered some entities perhaps during this lucid state. The experience was not negative just that the time lapse was strange and out of the ordinary. I supposed for lucid dreaming I could wear a protective charm.
With the blood offering, that was also useful. Normally I burn paper sigils with blood, but the box was a new one for me. Should I burn all sigils with blood after rituals immediately or after a time, or when a request has been fulfilled or not?
It’s more or less when it has served it’s purpose, for me I put time limits for how long a sigil is used, and I always charge my sigils for the whole process as oppose to just a once and done thing but that’s for how I got my shit set up, whichever is both convinent and beneficial for you is my best bet my Friend @Darius777
I think you’re worrying about this more than you really need to. I haven’t done too much out of body stuff, though I’m working on my dream practice, but you may be interested in the book Astral Dynamics by Robert Bruce.
According to him, when you astral project or lucid dream or whatever, you don’t really leave your body behind unoccupied. He calls this the “mind split effect.” I haven’t read the book in a while but from what I recall he’s had experiences where he was both out of body and in his body at the same time, like a sort of bi-location. So basically you don’t really “leave” your body, but copy and project out your spirit body while still remaining in your physical body.
If you are really concerned there are plenty of protection magick rituals out there you can do. The only times I’ve heard of people having problems with spirits are when they didn’t know they could banish unwanted entities very easily. If you get all worked up and spooked then they will feed off your fear, but if you don’t feed them they will go away. Generally speaking if you are relaxed and calm in your power the spirits won’t bother you. They’ll either ignore you or want to hang out or something.
And if you see a spirit that looks like a bird it’s probably an angel. I’ve seen angels do some pretty fucked up shit, but if you go around cowering in fear at everything that moves then don’t be surprised when something sees you as weak and decides to attack you.
I don’t do blood magick, though I have in the past, cause if my friends cut me every time I saw them I wouldn’t really want to hang out with them either. If you feel compelled to cut yourself and want to work with that magickally that is your decision. I could see it being sort of effective if you used it for special occasions, but to me it seems like relying on a crutch to get you into an altered state. Personally I just meditate. If I want to empower something, I just use my energy.
Sometimes it seems like you can’t disagree with anyone about the occult without people getting really upset. Personally I try to keep an open mind and avoid acting like a religious fanatic attached to their dogmatic orthodoxy, and I also try to respect other people’s practices and beliefs, or at the very least leave them alone to do their thing, but I’m not going to lie or censor myself, even for the sake of playing some team baseball.
Thanks for that I shall check that book out. I don’t really have any major fear about this, it’s just something that came to mind after a specific experience and my girlfriend and her friend who are experienced necromancers gave me some warnings with regards to blood offerings and also astral work. One tries to have a balance between applying too much protection and having no protection at all. I remember Asenath Mason mentioning psychic parasites in her books.