Shadownomicon Notes
Rather than do a new journal for my Shadownomicon workings, I know I’ll find it hard to post diligently so I’ll just pop them in here.
I wasn’t really going to say anything, but they want me to. Legion wants me to. Being known is a thing they want, and for reasons… I’m not a writer but I’ll see what I can do.
So, taking a step back, I’ve been working with Samael for several months now. What started as a 90 day pathworking stalled at day 36. He gave me a pause and 4 books to read. With each book, it turned out I did’t have to read the whole thing - he stopped me when I reached the part he wanted me to see, or when I learned what he wanted me to learn. Quite unexpectedly, I’d be reading and he’d show up and go “there! that’s what I wanted you to see” and talk about that thing for a bit, and then I could move on from the book.
This was so much easier than trying to learn the same info my clairsentience. Reading the books provided swathes of language I would not have interpreted correctly without the book as framework.
It also meant I stopped counting the days. And it went quiet for a while while I practices some of these books ideas and techniques, and let it all sink in. Every so often I’d say, Samael, did I ditch and break the pact, do you want to continue? And he’s say, let’s continue - and what would happen is people would ask for help with the exact things I was learning, mostly about fighting parasites - so I got real time practice, which sometimes worked and sometimes didn’t, and I learned.
And then he brought me another book, D H Thorne’s Maelstrom, which seemed sort of basic, and was like, yeah ok that makes sense, but there’s nothing really new for me here. Well, that was just an awareness exercise for an author who’s energy I hadn’t worked with before. Then I suddenly felt drawn to the Lovecraftian current. I like the idea of the Simon Necronomicon that links the Sumerian deities with the Old Ones. I wanted to understand it… I didn’t link the two in my mind, not yet.
Samael then brought me to the Shadownomicon, also by Thorne. I’d seen this around before and thought the name cute but gimmicky and passed over it for that reason, not expecting something really serious. I still didn’t connect it with Lovecraft, for some reason - bit of a blind spot I guess. But now I’d liked the Maelstrom book and was more open to this one - clever Samael. He knows how to work around my foibles. 
And so as I’m reading it, we connect, and he suggests that I follow this work before launching into the Simon Necronomicon. Dense ol’ me assumes I should winkle out some more shadows before facing the “terrors of the deep”. Though I half - and still do - want to challenge my sanity at this point. I’ve typically played it safe, and never let my control slip, and I wonder how much this limits my experience.
Curiosity killed the cat: and that’s fine, I’m ready.
Then I actually bought the book. But before I start reading it, two days after I bought it our freind @anon39079500 posts his Shadownomicon pathworking, right here in Journals. It was his writing that clued me in on the connection between the Simon Necronomicon, and (the now-obviously, I realise, named) Shadownomicon. Fucking duh.
Funny how you’re encouraged through things sometimes. I might have easily forgotten it was in my Kindle otherwise, along with several others I didn’t make the time to finish yet. And Samael would have gone quiet, patiently waiting, and I’d have wondered why, while horrible things kept happening to the dates I tried to make, thier loved ones and thier friends literally dying so they cancel and instead of going out I find myself in ritual for lack of anything else to do and needing an outlet for the energy.
Word to the wise: if you commit to an entity like Samael to do ritual with him on a given night, go ahead and make sure you do it first, if you don’t like odd and unpleasant coincidences involving unexpected death, gently removed 2 degrees from you yet close enough to be disturbing.
Where was I…?
Oh right, so now I’ve read the Shadownomcon, I followed the white rabbit into social media connections to the larger group workings, and that’s where it started to get really interesting.
I’m not doing the Shadownomicon for me. I’ve done so much shadow work, I have been bored of me for years, so I’m happy about that. I’m doing it for them. I know these shadows, they are me and I’m them. But they want to be known by everyone.
Now, I’m not terribly altruistic. I’m on this planet for an altruistic promise I made to a freind and I’m quite cross with myself for it. I come up as the Hermit, or the Queen of Pentacles “will help if it’s not too much trouble”, neutral evil type. I know what I’m like, the terrible things I’ve done and wish I could do over, my mistakes, what I’m bad at and what I’m good at.
But a promise is a promise, and as it turns out, helping the shadows be know, working with them to open gates and help people work with them, directly helps me fulfill my promise: to give energy to humanity to help with ascension.
That is the point. There are many paths for a mage to know themselves, which is very important and needed to become adept. Know yourself, and you find, you know everything, for you might have already been or are being everything. This type of shadow working is very in-your-face and direct about showing you yourself.
It fits, as humanity is now out of time. Azazel told EA Koetting “get to the lifeboats”. This is one such lifeboat. A “lifeboat” is not a mystical gate, not a physical thing - it’s a metaphor, as things in magick usually are.
It’s a symbol of a last-ditch, brutal but potentially faster way to get enlightened, ascended, i.e. to know yourself as a fully realised entity incarnate as a human, capable of seeing how they are vast and everything at once, and a tiny, separate, blind and deaf being at the same time. Not a thoughtform aspecting another god, not a child of the gods, not an egregore incarnate or mere “human” trying to ascend - but as an entity that has accepted it’s sovereignty and will endure and remain form here on, separate and individual, while being connected to the rest of the occult universe.
Having said that, spiraling through more shadow work is never an effort wasted. Humans are easily complex enough to fuel a lifetime of this work. There’s much I can still do, and a thing Samael wants me to work on that will help his mentoring of me. Just writing this is part of my own work facing my desire to hide and not be seen. It’s all intertwined and everything means many things at once.
So I’ll pause here and screw up my courage to write more later. I guess I can hope noone reads it :)… and so it starts.
Do the spirits you work with actually talk to you with voices or do you just get a gut feeling for what they’re trying to communicate with you?