So I’m in a place where I’m assembling my temple gear and getting what I need to start working through Asenath’s Qliphoth trilogy starting with Qliphotic Meditations. I have a hendecagram that I created from a craft placard I bought with water color and acrylics and I’m looking at resin coating it in the next few fall-like days that we have before winter weather properly hits.
What I’m realizing is that if I’m going to be coating it right now would be a good time for me to personalize it. I’m still collecting my temple (had a BOTA adytum and am setting up something similar in line with this work) and I know there’s going to be a time gap between when I’d want to bless the hendecagram when when I’d be doing my opener for Qliphotic meditations. I also got a reminder this morning when I went out for taper candles that anything that doesn’t turn over on shelves immediately these days needs to be bought online - including red and black tapers, even tapers in general!
My question - I’m sure I could ad-lib something on the fly, I was just wondering if there’s any particular verbiage or quick rituals in this line that I might want to use for this? I know a lot of this is about creative exploration but I also see where there’s something to using well worn paths when you get started, Bruce Lee’s ‘way of no way’ isn’t day one advice. Also any additional thoughts on resin-coating or not resin-coating?
Thank you in advance!
2 Likes
So… my StackOverflow progress update.
I did get my candles in time, just waited a few days. I took some elements from the opening ritual in Qliphothic Meditations such as drawing the trident in the air and visualization on the hendecagram and then made anointing the hendecagram the centerpiece of the ritual. For my verbiage around this I just framed my intent as to what brings me to exploring the Qliphoth and thanking the regents for their presence.
It took me a while to get back because I wanted to wait until I could comment on how the resin coat on the seal turned out. I left it in a cooler to cure for a week and for some reason it still wasn’t completely hardened and I don’t know how much of that was just crap resin/epoxy vs. the weather getting colder for the back half of the week. I have it sitting upright on my altar right now with a gallon Ziploc as a dust cover - just so it can finish hardening at room temperature without collecting dust. There might be better stuff than I used - it was Castin Craft from Michaels and you needed to buy a catalyst to mix in.
Overall the seal turned out beautiful. I water-painted the whole placard black front and back, drew the hendecagram on the front, painted over that in gold acrylic enough to get some good ridging, then painted the corners around the circle, to imply a larger black/wood circle out to the edges of the placard, in primary red and then water-colored the interior areas of the hendecagram outside the star with red watercolor splitting the difference in color between the black and the red exterior.
Think I did that right at least! Please feel free to share any thoughts or comments on the above.
2 Likes
I’m also collecting objects to work with the Qliphoth (from Asenath Mason’s books). I’m going to use the pendant as a model. (here below) The 11-pointed Qliphoth star. (This object is made of gold metal) but I can’t afford to buy it. I’m going to use black cardboard and a gold Sharpie.
2 Likes
Have you started with Qliphoth? And how does it manifest for you?
Hmm… so for whatever reason I’ve discovered that I’m a ‘brick’, ie. if it’s not psychological I’m not getting anything at all.
I ran through Asenath Mason’s Qliphothic Meditations, in maybe 18 months, did the first Lilith / Nehemoth initiation and work for Qliphothic Invocations and Evocations which is about where I stopped and have just been working the imaginal.
Worth noting - I went to an ayahuasca a few weeks ago, three days worth of ceremony, and very little happened that wouldn’t have happened just as easily with mushrooms at home short of the harmalines giving me the opportunity to trip three times in three days and trip even a slightly bit harder, but no internal voices other than just the bare minimum of what one might think of as Freudian introjects or Jungian complexes - ie. no united advice, no speech that seemed to be coming from the medicine itself, just a bit of hypnagogia and afterglow.
I’m probably going to either need a) a very atypical path or b) admit to myself that I’m the kind of person who will have to treat spirituality as something akin to entertainment because the alternative is not having it in my life at all (not because I can’t think deeper than that but because nothing reciprocates).
Sorry, I didn’t understand. Did you feel like a brick? I wanted to know, when you started Asenath Mason’s Qliphothic meditations, did your knowledge of the sphere come to you through dreams or telepathy? If you opened a door, shouldn’t you have knowledge and trials to face?
No dreams or telepathy. Just rituals and imagination.
When I say ‘brick’ - imagine Kenny from SouthPark on heroin, or better yet Helen Keller on heroin. I see nothing in the spirit, hear nothing in the spirit, smell nothing in the spirit, taste nothing in the spirit, touch nothing in the spirit, or if I do there’s zero sensation to receive it (or… Jungian phenomena are all there is to be had - in which case I have ‘calls from within the house’ but nothing from outside).
So the trilogy of books about Qliphoth that Asenath Mason wrote is useless?
I don’t know how generally that can be applied.
There’s maybe three possibilities here:
-
It’s just my body and nervous system - ie. magic is like basketball where most of your ability to play well is genetic (and if you have the wrong genes, like trying to play basketball at 4’8”, effort won’t matter). That’s the ‘Asenath’s system’s fine - it’s just my genes’.
-
If other people have tons of spiritual experiences, consistently with other magical systems but just so happen to get nothing off of Mason’s system - then you could rule my general disposition out as the problem (ie. I wouldn’t have gotten benefit anyway because I’m me but no one else would have either). In that case Asenath’s system wouldn’t be fine but I’d be the wrong person to test whether or not it works anyway since nothing does for me.
-
I’m Kegan stage 5 (self-transforming) as well as level 1 autistic. Systematizers, especially those in late Kegan stage 4 (self-authoring) and beyond, tend not to see ‘others’ (ie. projected dream characters or hallucinated characters who aren’t them) in their psychedelic experiences, it happens more for people in Kegan stage 3 (socialized mind) where they don’t have an interior (they are the map / the environment, not standing back from it observing) therefor there’s no interior place to have a meeting with ideas therefor their subconscious minds have to create ‘others’ and thus magical systems work far different depending on personal wiring (ie. Kegan 3 get the whole Solomonic ‘deity in the crystal ball or shew stone because that’s what their mind has to do to reach back out to them, anyone else won’t get any of that) - this is the ‘magic is internal neurological phenomena’ or the ‘psychological magic’ possibility. That’s a situation though where anyone who doesn’t get freaked out on psychedelics about their grandmother coming through the wall with a chainsaw (or whatever wacky thing they see) and need other people to tell them that if they weren’t tripping that usually wouldn’t show up in real life - those are the only people who’d have vivid magical experiences from rituals and workings, based on their own wiring and having nothing to do with any actual external entities.
I don’t know what the case is, and the possibility that I’m just being honest and that all magic of any kind is just depth psychology (with some possibility for tickling egregores and getting some kind of reaction) - that’s what this vibes like to me because I haven’t seen anything in the world of ceremonial magic that would prove otherwise. The Holy Guardian Angel concept even seems like it could be vaporware or just a face we make for ‘the elephant’ in the elephant vs. rider context, which makes sense as to why Josephine McCarthy would hedge it as ‘personal daimon’ rather than ‘Holy Guardian Angel’. Really it seems like anything that’s supposed to break down the veil fails and for as much as I look around for people who are genuinely breaking through I haven’t been able to find anyone or anything that I could solidly confirm up or down.
Look up VK Jehannums Rite of Qlippoth Initiation and be brutally honest with yourself mentally and spiritually, are you ready to see them on their home by their rules?
I suppose that’s not a question I can answer until I get there.
It’s like my recent ayahuasca retreat where I was chatting with someone on the first day before the first ceremony and saying ‘Well - I’m either completely prepared or not prepared at all’ (ie. having no clue what order of magnitude it’ll come in on) and all three rituals came in underwhelming for ayahuasca’s reputation (maybe 1/3rd of us only got a little bit of hypnagogia, I was one of those, one guy literally had no visuals - not even closed-eyed).
It kind of sounds like if you see them in their own home living on their own rules - that’s the ‘orders of magnitude’ more for pretty much anyone and the question is less ‘am I prepared?’ and more ‘do I need to?’ in which case the preparation both isn’t really attainable and the lack of it won’t matter because it’s still what you have to do anyway.
1 Like
