Is the God of the Abrahamic religions the same as the God being invoked in Ceremonial Magick?

And can you practice Theistic Satanism if you invoke this “God”?

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I’ve been looking into Hermetic rituals and they use his names, but the intent behind it seems to be that they want to call on the Source (or the All, the Eternal Mind, whatever). BUT they also work with various pantheons like the Egyptian and Greek pantheon, so in a way they work off of archetypes…? This made me think lately:

This person had said that they saw no reason to use foreign pantheons in order to work their magic. Really? Hermeticism was started off by taking every single foreign pantheon there was back in the classical world and blending them together, calling on Moses, Jesus, Iao, Michael, Apollo, and Ra in the same breath. Cornelius Agrippa, Aleister Crowley, and Stephen Skinner have written correspondence tables that link just about every aspect of Western ceremonial magic to just about every aspect of just about every other system of magic, religion, philosophy, divination, and symbology (and, yes, usually knowing how those systems worked from the inside out before making those correspondences). It’s pretty much a given that all roads lead to Rome, that all spiritual paths lead to the Divine, that Truth is One but known by many names. Every system is different, and every system is like a set of tools; one might use one set of tools for one purpose but an entirely different set for another purpose, such as building a house versus building a computer.

From all the things I’ve heard you can initiate into multiple systems and work with them, but don’t mix them in one ritual setting - I’d go about this like doing rituals with one pantheon or current, banish and clean up and then work with the other, maybe have a different temple or altar set up for different traditions.

Also people seem to work just fine with both angels, demons, gods from classical pantheons, fairies and so on, others had horrible experiences with one or more type of entities, so I guess it depends on you and your relationship with those entities (they just might hate your guts for no reason and vica versa).

About ceremonial and mainly Hermetic stuff - the archetypal thing is like making correspondences between the Holy Trinity and for example the Horus-Isis-Osiris triad. This was done for other pantheons and myths as well I think. On one hand you can go about trying to understand the underlaying mechanics and substitute stuff, but it’s only a viable option if you really do your homework and research thoroughly - and thus you’d be able to personalize a lot of the ceremonial rituals to your beliefs. On the other hand I’ve seen this advice pop up many times that you should do the rituals of a tradition without any changes, just as they have it in their literature.

The wording in ceremonial magick puts the power and authority in the hand of an external source (not in all cases) and that kinda denotes your inner divinity. I think the Satanic perspective is the correct one - you ARE divinity and you don’t borrow power and authority, you just use what you already have. So it might be one point where those rituals could be reworked.

For the question, I think you can work with both, but you can’t forget the intention behind that invocation of the Abrahamic deity, that you’re trying to embody the Power of Creation Itself, so as long as you acknowledge that those 2 things are completely different, it could work out well.

Sorry for the long text, it’s just my 2 cents :sweat_smile:

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Also about divine names: every time I think I found a name for the All I find material on how it’s associated with a certain deity… In a way I think it’s fitting that it doesn’t have a ‘universal name’ otherwise it wouldn’t be “the Unknowable God”.

Opinions are very much divided. I asked the same question a number of times and got a variety of responses. Some, like @adalbertsen or E.A. Koetting, believe that yes, you can call on those names, focusing on “The Source.”

Others, like Bear Heart, for instance, believe otherwise, and that’s the reason why he published this Pagan version of the LBRP:

I have spoken to Satanists absolutely adverse to utilizing those Hebrew names of God. One of them, for instance, told me that the spirit of Yahweh could hide behind an icon of the Virgin Mary.

You will find rites to exorcise, banish the spirit of Yahweh/Jehovah on different LHP websites.

http://theisticsatanism.com/geifodd/exorcism.html

So… What I’m gathering is that it’s really up to each magician to decide, but for those who want to be sure not to unintentionally call forth the Abrahamic god, they may instead substitute those names w/ Ishvara (the Supreme God, the Supreme Cosmic Spirit in Hinduism), Brahma, Vishnu, Shiva, Horus, Set and so on depending on which name is more suitable.

https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Isvara

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I believe that would be Ishvara.

My experience with the Source was verified by V.K. Jehannum’s gnosis that it’s completely neutral and apathetic, “you can’t summon it and it’s got nothing to say to you” (that explains why Baphomet and Abraxas are it’s avatars).

It’s “a Living Machine” which is so transcendental, that it’s probably useless to give it a name or assign it human qualities (for example kind, loving, caring, etc. like the gnostics and hermeticists do) and try to understand it. In my opinion the best name for it is your own True Name that you can channel. I think every other name is “taken” and you could find something behind those name that’s not the Source, but parading as it would be.

I generally use an analogy, saying that God is like the internet, the magician is like a hacker, and the altar is like a personal computer.

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I like that! I used videogame-terms and a different analogy to wrap my head around this: imagine that you’re dreaming, for you it’s a dream, but for the inhabitants of that dream it’s reality. Although they’re NPCs for you, they’re also you, and even invisible forces inside the dreams.

I don’t like to call it God, because the word has baggage, so in my version it would be: the All is the dreamer, the magician is both an NPC and a lucid dreamer at the same time, the ritual space and everything the magician interacts with inside is an interface (the altar too), and at the same time the altar is a representation of the immediate microcosm.

I don’t know if I have this right but logically I explained the process of rituals this way: you make a symbolic gesture in your own microcosm, which is reflected in your own macrocosm, which is part of a collective macrocosm. If you manage to not be anxious about results, the collective macrocosm will accept the changes you made much easier and in turn reflects the changes in the collective microcosm. I might be wrong with all this, but we won’t truly know, only after we’re dead :sweat_smile:

Edit: you could also say that God is the power source, which you can experience and draw from, the magician is a projection and the ritual space is the terminal.

Edit 2: also the Qabbalistic Cross or it’s derivatives is simply typing sudo su :joy:

i can say that the god of the western religions is definitely not the supreme god, but a powerful god in the material realm.