My opinion, based on personal experience, is that you don’t HAVE TO do anything - the ATR/ADRs are religions, they place the wants and desires of spirits first.
A magician places his (or her) own will first, and in so doing, violates and commits heresy against ALL religions.[/quote]
It is funny that you bring this up, because it is the same conclution that came to me when i stopped and started thinking about this, and after i saw EA’s videos on his experiences with the vodoun, it cleared things out for me.
First of all, i am not going to be devote to any relegion, i just came from one, and i will not get into one, i will treat them with the respect they deserve, but not as a active member, but more of EA’s approach to it, I dont think its the Religion itself thats calling out for me, because i dont see the slightest chance of me being OK with this.
However if Baron is calling out for me, i will answer HIS call, and hear him out, and if i decide to work with him per say, it is going to be just that.
I agree with you in the terms of relegion, it is my individual opinion that they hold back, that the limit the individuals free will, and free will was exactly what took me to this specific path.
i have seen the same things myself in adr and atr and some of the arguments can get really ugly - and frankly, some of them are also quite childish.
i’ve also met some very adept and powerful magicians that have worked with the orisha and don’t like them. one sorceror told me they are too ego’ed out for his liking and they tend to demand more than he thinks they’re worth to him. not wanting to work with orisha doesn’t affect their magick much at all, they still get shit done bc there are PLENTY of spirits out there that can do the same thing the orisha do.
needless to say, it all depends on what you want out of this whole deal.
do you want to serve spirits (which is the right hand path of service)?
do you want to overcome the spirit world and serve yourself (which is the left hand path of self-development)?
do you want to bypass the question entirely and view the world as a creative vehicle without worrying about whether spirits even fucking exist (which is the straight path of insight magick, and also of science)?
all three ways of travelling are valid. be careful what you agree to. easy to get in hard to get out, so caveat emptor
[quote=“the magician, post:22, topic:6791”]lady eva made some very good points
do you want to overcome the spirit world and serve yourself (which is the left hand path of self-development)?[/quote]
Bingo.
That is what im aiming for, even tho’ i understand that for me to receive assistance from an entity, to teach me, and help me in my ascence i have to serve them to a point, but ultimatly i wanna overcome this, jsut as in the book of azazel, as azazel told EA, ‘‘if u wanna become a King of your own, a Demonic King per say, obliterate all previous pacts and serve no one’’
When it comes to Religions and ATR, i belive that even among them the relegious aspects and rules serve to a point alone.
In voduon if you want to go for the ultimate goal and become a King Houngan or Queen mambo, you have to command the spirits and make THEM serve you, instead of you serving them.
It is what EA said in his Haitian Vodoun college lecture. If im not mistaken.
So what that means for me is that to archive the ultimate goal of vodoun ( not to say all other religions cuz im not familiar with all of them) Ultimately you will have to rip through the veil of serving them, and realize that you as a human hold power to overcome theirs, and make them serve you instead of the other way around… So even though is a religion, doesn’t that means that to overcome the Loa Gods, you need to implement the LHP to a point?, or doesn’t it means that, the ultimate goal of vodoun is for you to raise above the spirits you work with?
Even in the Gnostic relegion that i come from, SAMAEL AUN WEOR’s
The ultimate goal of things is for you to become a god yourselve, there are levels and levels of things, but if you take the ‘‘Direct Path’’ as they call it, you will eventually become a God yourselve in all sense of the word, you will be served, and if you SERVE others it is due to LOVE for humanity, since the main goal of this gnostic aproach is to erradicate all EGO from you, that means you will become extremely humble, and benevolent, and Serving others will be a plessure instead of a burden.
All paths lead to the LHP ultimately, if the individual thinks outside the box and sees the ultimate goal of things and human power.
not necessarily. erik’s system seems to me to be more of a chaos magick style of working demonology than a religion or system. my take on it is erik is using hypnotism and mesmerism with symbolic trancework as described by the rogue hypnotist in a few of his books. that’s pretty garden variety hypnotism, and it can work very well if you do it properly.
[quote=“Onyx, post:23, topic:6791”]but ultimatly i wanna overcome this, jsut as in the book of azazel, as azazel told EA, ‘‘if u wanna become a King of your own, a Demonic King per say, obliterate all previous pacts and serve no one’’
That right there, is my goal.[/quote]
you don’t have to serve ANYBODY. it’s your life and it’s your mind.
i don’t think that belief will help you in any way if you walk into vodun. if you want to force the loi to serve you, good luck with that. as i have said many times before, any beliefs you learn outside of adr and bring into adr or atr will NOT apply and in fact if you try to force them on the spirits, you could end up getting your feelings hurt. beware your ego. what you know is fine for you, but what you don’t know is older than you.
considering that marie laveau resurrected in her lifetime and after she died a 2nd time, she became a lwa, i wouldn’t even begin to pretend to know what the ultimate goal is in vodun. i have to swerve the entire conversation, sorry.
i don’t think that belief will help you in any way if you walk into vodun. if you want to force the loi to serve you, good luck with that. as i have said many times before, any beliefs you learn outside of adr and bring into adr or atr will NOT apply and in fact if you try to force them on the spirits, you could end up getting your feelings hurt. beware your ego. what you know is fine for you, but what you don’t know is older than you.[/quote]
Don’t get me wrong, i am not stepping into voduon, obviously anybody that steps in there with this being the initial approach will fail, i am just comparing the initial and ultimate goal of vodoun, which apperently is for you to RAISE above them, and once again that i know nothing about, i am just speaking for what i have researched.
I am just stating that, the initial approach will take you to a point, but for you to step beyond that point, the ultimate approach have to be diferent.
i have never heard any voduisant say that so i can neither verify or deny that. i’d strongly suggest you do not even try strongarming the loi. doing so might win you a darwin award in my estimation, but i doubt anything good would happen to you if you go throwing your weight around the orisha or laws.
your idea of magickal practice clearly has to do with ascent and overcoming a demiurge, which is an idea from syrian gnosticism. go back in time and study the syrian gnostics for your left hand path beliefs. also learn theravadan buddhist ascent for straight path ascent without gods. finally, you may want to learn the ontology subbranch of greek metaphysics as an underpinning of what you believe. understand that your belief system has little if anything to do with vodun, adr, or any atr. your mindset is a european way of thinking derived from the greeks, syrians, and east indians and informed by darwin and nietzsche and ayn rand. it has little to nothing to do with 21 divisions.
then again, divisions is not as strict with the rules of vodun as in haiti, so maybe there is a way for you to use the european side of divisions and get it to work for you. talk to your bokor before you write it off and again, caveat emptor.
on that note, i’m just about done with this thread. i feel as if you got the answer you were looking for and by now we’re just talking in circles.
I just wanted to add that the idea of man becoming godlike was a part of Egyptian belief and predated ideas about a demiurge - there was no cosmic force of ignorance etc which Pharoah had to overcome to walk amongst the ogds, since he was already a living god, channel of the divine blood within through the maternal side (which is why they were so hot for marrying their own sisters - well, that and there was no Netflix back then).
While the magician is correct that those ideas are the ones that have mostly informed modern-day LHP thinking, the core concept of the man-as-god - usually a concept of God King, with or without female coascendents, and often, Kings were women in disguise or treated for civic purposes as men - has long existed outside that, and within a framework that was devoid of the simple dualism that permeates our current culture.
I believe they also had God Kings in pre-columbian era south American cultures, but I’m less certain on that topic.
Anyway, it was a thing long before the heavy hand of monotheism appeared on our planet.
in the god-king cases, the rulers of egypt and china were considered to be sons or avatars of the gods and therefore their living embodiments. it’s a little different than erik’s satanic idea of man usurping god’s authority and becoming a god of his own. the antinomian way of viewing ascent is more along the lines of kicking the doors off of heaven, dragging god off the throne, and declaring oneself the new sheriff in town. i’m not so sure that way of viewing ascent would get anyone too far in adr or atr. even the lhp in the african traditions seem to me to be more along the lines of cutting side deals with the orisha and shades of the dead than outright challenging them to take their place.
but i may be wrong about that so double-check with a practitioner
and i find it kind of suspicious that NO adr or atr on this board has yet to say anything in this thread, but then again should i really be surprised by that?
Yes, they’d often be usurping (murdering even) the previous God King and kind of taking on that channel of energy, deserving it and owning it by right of conquest, but the extent to which they also had the idea that a very powerful person can consciously create their entire reality, we don’t know about that.
I suspect that the idea (which filtered via the Emerald Tablet, to the Kybalion & New Thought, LoA etc) was somewhere in their awareness, but I have no proof of that from archaeological records.
The inclusion of godnames into one’s own name, and as Wikipedia states, “The Ancient Egyptians viewed reality as multi-layered in which deities who merge for various reasons, while retaining divergent attributes and myths, were not seen as contradictory but complementary” indicates to me, and through the lens of personal experience, that they had some concept of the observer as being the prime source of creation, but that is personal speculation, only.
I actually want to ask the Netjer some questions about that, and will post the results if possible. I’ve been getting some interesting information about concepts like “the Belial (to choose one example) within so-and-so,” or (more intertestingly) the “so-and-so within Belial,” and things do get awfully fuzzy at the edges sometimes - spirits reply for one another, on occasion, even though there’s nothing to indicate they’re the same force in different masks of human awareness and so on.
plot twist: the netjer = the nigerians who served the orisha in ifa
the egyptians travelled to nigeria and southwest niger on emissaries across the sahel, through nubia to central african republic and cameroon (which they called the land of punt or pwenet), to nigeria (which they called ta-netjer), at the intersection of the niger/benue rivers where the igbo live.
that region of nigeria are where the netjer have lived for tens of thousands of years, and the entire time they have served the orisha.