Hi everyone!
I’m not exactly brand-new, I had my first check-in with the Hermetic path starting in 2013, but this is my first time here and it’s something of second-hand result of my buying the Oraculum Leviathan (I’ve been checking out Bill and Asenath’s work for a while and was amazed to see that they’d built this deck).
I spent something like three or four years in a reading binge mode, while spending a lot of that period in both AMORC and BOTA. I’m increasingly getting the sense that magic, mysticism, and internal alchemy are tricky things to approach because there are so many variables - one is the magician’s natural ‘athletic’ ability in this area, the other I can’t say this a better way - there’s something to your neurological construct, how your subconscious works through it, that means it’s quite often highly individualized and even if the gods, goddesses, spirits, etc. are themselves independent beings the ways in which they can work with a person seems like it can vary person to person based on what angle of attack can actually yield meaningful communication in this sense.
From that I do find myself in the awkward position of being far more read than athletically talented so some of this for me is picking at the edges, working at the mystic practices (trying to engage my psychism a bit more - without psychedelics if I can manage it), and so I tend to be more on the lookout for more immersive workings or studies where I can actually re-gear myself rather than wanting to march into ceremonial magic for direct results at this point. I’m a bit of an empiricist at heart and if or when I can’t nail down that I’m actually dealing with an entity it feels off.
Something else I thought would be fun to share, I was on another forum for a while that seems to have gone ‘back to nature’. While I was on there and working with Lilith a fair bit I decided to make a bit of artwork, mostly just for my avatar, and in line with my name MagickAndBreakz (my twin passions - Hermetic mysticism and classic drum n bass) I decided to do something with one version of her seal that riffs a bit on SB81’s Future Point EP cover, sort of collate things a bit!
Anyway good to find a new community and I’ll enjoy looking around and learning as I go!
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Welcome to the Forum.
Do you know the hermetic works of Franz Bardon?
I do. I have IIH, took a few runs at it back in 2014 and the elemental part of the mirror was tricky to parse. I ended up buying The Universal Master Key, liked the inspirational aphorisms but there was still a ton of overlap in concepts. I’m actually debating with myself right now, if I were to take another run at a system, what it might be. BJ Swain makes A.’.A.’. sound pretty good, met someone from his lodge a few years ago actually who gave a presentation on her version of the Abramelin working and what it yielded.
I think if I were looking for another hill to charge it would have to be a) one that stops and waits for me at my level of progress (ie. if I spent my whole life doing Zelator exercises so be it - but lets stay there until I literally have the deliverables of that grade, points for A.’.A.’. on that philosophy), it would have to be deeply alchemical (A.’.A.’. and TOAF both sound like they have that), and I’d also want it to be a system that took the best of my core values - ie. the stuff that really makes me ‘me’ in the best ways - and expands their expression and reach of competence both into the ToL and Sitra Ahra.
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@MagickAndBreakz
Nice to see you have the IIH.
I have the first two volumes in german and
work after them, but I try to learn astral travel
right now and am not waiting for the exact bardonistic step to reach to learn it.
But I want to work through the whole first volume
with time. I don’t want to forget it to undergo that.
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I’ve heard all kinds of good things from people who’ve done the IIH ten steps and it sounds like if you can gel with it it’s an excellent route.
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@MagickAndBreakz
Are you experienced/interested in qliphothic workings? I am highly interested in the
Qliphoth and the Tunnels of Set (the Kalas).
There are a lot of reasons that I’m interested in the Qliphoth. I’m probably going to write a lengthy post about some of the particulars of my own situation and see whose coming at this from a similar place. A good concise way to put it is that, from childhood, my mindset and ways of interacting with the world have been insufficiently Darwinian and even knowing what I know about people and the world around me (ie. and plenty of helpful insights from John Gray) it’s like trying to align myself properly is an endeavor similar to turning a massive ship in a particular direction and it seems to just turn a degree or two every couple years and it’s never quite enough to stop life from being a perpetually grinding experience. I see the Qliphoth as both the tree of death and transformation but I also see it as the tree of atavistic power. I’m hoping that taking that in hand more directly will give me a route to having the tree ‘rooted in hell’ properly as Jung put it.
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@MagickAndBreakz
Do you know Kenneth Grant’s Nightside of Eden?
One of my favorite books. I devoured everything
from it about the Tunnels of Set.
Do you have any experiences with the Nightside?
Any practical work?
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That one (Nightside of Eden) I wasn’t familiar with and I may have to grab it up - TY for the mention.
The only formal work I have with the Nightside was doing TOAF’s Four Angels working. It gave me a good buzz of synchronicities but I didn’t see the return on the actual intent (and it could be that I as flying 180 degrees into something). I’ve done what I’d consider more scrying type of work on hallucinogens while attempting to work with Lilith, Naamah, Esheth, and a few other more informal figures that seemed to fit into my own shadow working.
I’m looking forward to actually open some doors properly, I’ve had plenty of interesting contact with entities (getting woken up in the middle of the night by that sort of spider-webbing energy), enough to be certain that there’s a ‘there’ there but never quite enough to be sure that I know who or what I’m dealing with. It seems like to some degree I can take it in faith that certain intuitions or trains of thought can be consigned as suggestions from that particular deity, and I’m still not 100% sure whether we’re always dealing with deities and how much of it is our own higher selves feeding us info, how much of it might be ‘guides’ using the gods, goddesses, Olympic spirits, etc. as metaphors for their own activities, it seems like an incredibly diverse ecosystem of occluded conscious agents/actors and let alone there seems to be all kinds of space for parasites to want to impersonate contacts to meet their own needs.
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@MagickAndBreakz
Look at this Nightside map.
There are the Kalas & the Qliphoth.
The Kalas are named by the entities ruling them.
And the Qliphoth are named quabbalistic & the
names of their rulers are registered there, too.
According to Kenneth Grant you have to vibrate
the names of the Kalas in a certain pitch.
Sometimes I want to try to evoke such an entity.
But it would be better to be able to astraltravel
until then. I want to experience these worlds.
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With BOTA I got to be quite well aquainted with the ToL paths so the good news is it’ll probably just be the Qliphoth I’ll need to focus on. I’m taking a wild guess on this - I’ll probably want to knock at the doors of Lilith and work with Naamah and the gate until something interesting enough happens to suggest that I’ve actually made my way in.
I don’t know if I’m thinking in too earthy a manner here but I’m getting the impression, to really sink into this stuff properly, there has to be a point - and relatively early in progressing up either tree - where you establish a sort of clairvoyant beachhead and can actually see some particular zone relatively easily. Short of that it’s like there’d be no way to tell when or if you’re BS’ing yourself and that’s one of the hurdles I’m really hoping to find a way to break through or climb over.
A good example of the way I don’t want things to go - I attempted a scrying contact with Lucifer (with psychedelics and with Asenath’s seal) and what I met, energetically speaking, gave me a huge lick like Odie from Garfield, which strongly suggests that it was a portion of my own interiority saying ‘I’ll play dress-up and be x entity for you’. IMHO that’s dangerous, the encounter with self-fragments is almost too benign and then, if you’re gullible enough, you can set off imagining that you have contacted that entity to them have massive embarrassment when that entity or deity actually does show up and is absolutely nothing like the self fragment playing dress-up.
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@MagickAndBreakz
Sorry, I forgot to answer while I
was curious when you would finally answer.
I’m not already able to astralproject but there is the evocative way, too, what’s something like a discharge. I would for the first times try to evoke from the Tunnels. I am really curious on the effects such magical work should have.
And maybe one of the entities I evoke can teach how to astralproject.
What do you mean?
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I want to keep running at this, as a project, and I’m tempted to say ‘until the doors open either by my own efforts or an entity’s help’ but that would really just be the beginning.
Again I might just focus on the sphere of Lilith, the gate into the nightside, and Naamah since that’s something like the atrium that leads into these mysteries.
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@MagickAndBreakz
I want to keep running at this as a project, too and I guess Lilith would be a good start for me. Let’s stay in contact about the Qliphoth.
Sounds good!
I’m mostly debating tactics with myself. One thing I’ve wanted to ask around about is whether there’s anything related to Lilith and the Qliphoth that’s anything like the Litergy of Hermes (something Mark Stavish brought to my attention). Bill and Asenath may have some ideas either on whether such a thing exists or whether one could retrofit the Liturgy of Hermes into something TOAF oriented in a way that actually works (per Lilith and Samael’s own input).
@MagickAndBreakz
What is the Liturgy of Hermes?
I don’t know if Lilith has such…
I don’t remember all of the details, I have it in one of Mark’s books but it’s something like a 35 to 40 day retreat where you give offerings to Hermes.
I know now what a Liturgy is.
Would be highly interesting if Lilith is such dedicated! We can ask others but I’m quite not sure to find something like this.
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