On Coming Home: a Hermetic Parable (of sorts)

<There was meant to be talk about healing rites and my discovery on how awesome the Sixth and Seventh Book of Moses is, especially the Psalms bit. I will get around to it, however consider this post to be the start of the healing rites bit>

Do you remember the first time you hid something from your parents, something big and bad that you thought you could handle - but it just. Got. Worse.

The frustration, the anger, the shame and the fear. The shear dread of the look on their faces when they found out, what they would say. Oh the fear was the worst thing, it stopped your mouth, it shred your stomach into pieces and you couldn't sleep. You were walking around with this awful burden - a burden of bad decisions and you ended up lashing out at the smallest things, just making things even worse.

Then one day, you reached breaking point and told them. It might have been something small, the straw that broke the camel's back, but the pain was so bad that you needed their help, their guidance, because it was all a big mess and it was all your fault.

The love that came pouring back when they realised that you were in pain was such a relief. The anger they felt when they realised you had been shutting them out, that you were their child, made in their image and they would always love you, were always with you - even when you make stupid decisions.

They talked you through it - made you realise exactly where you went wrong and how to make things better. They perhaps suggested you talk to your Uncle Sol to help you out, he'd only be too happy to help. You are your parent's child after all and he adores you because he adores them.

When things get rough, and you feel completely stuck, try going back to The Source. You made in the image of God, or if you prefer, matter filled with spirit. You are not alone, and you are always Loved.


Holy art Thou, O God, the universals' Father.
Holy art Thou, O God, whose Will perfects itself by means of its own Powers.
Holy art Thou, O God, who willeth to be known and art known by Thine own.
Holy art Thou,who didst by Word (Logos) make to consist the things that are.
Holy art Thou, of whom All-nature hath been made an image.
Holy art Thou, whose Form Nature hath never made.
Holy art Thou, more powerful than all power.
Holy art Thou, transcending all pre-eminence.
Holy Thou art, Thou better than all praise.
Accept my reason's offerings pure, from soul and heart for aye stretched up to Thee, O Thou unutterable, unspeakable, Whose Name naught but the Silence can express.
32. Give ear to me who pray that I may ne'er of Gnosis fail, Gnosis which is our common being's nature; and fill me with Thy Power, and with this Grace of Thine, that I may give the Light to those in ignorance of the Race, my Brethren, and Thy Sons.
For this cause I believe, and I bear witness; I go to Life and Light. Blessed art Thou, O Father. Thy Man would holy be as Thou art holy, e'en as Thou gave him Thy full authority to be.

-Poemandres, the Shepherd of Men

Corpus Hermeticum

<Inspired by Frater RO's post>

On Bad Choices

March has been a difficult month for me. I don't do the whole 'celebrate the changing of the seasons' with any big ritual or anything, but I have to say if I did - I would go all out for the Spring Equinox. It has been gorgeous weather in the UK but this month I have the most challenging weeks yet. This year I spent day in bed, catching up on sleep.

My difficulties all came down to a series of bad choices, as most are want to do. My difficulties stemmed from poor management of resources - such as time, neglecting health, and unrealistic expectations of what I could achieve when at a low point.

I have learnt that a part of choosing the targets to shift in magick needs to include an assessment of what state you are in.

I had a very important presentation to give, but I didn't feel ready enough to do it - so I cast a spell to try and get out of it, basically asked for it to be postponed a week or two. That's a pretty big target to shift and I was not fulfilling my basic physiological needs - I wasn't getting nearly enough food and sleep to be tackling anything big and my efforts would have been better directed to getting myself into a state where I could achieve these things.

Needless to say I failed at moving the date of the presentation, and it was not exactly the best one I have ever done. My efforts would have been better
spent creating a field of charm and confidence around me, calling down a spirit to help me win my audience over, creating a talisman to help - and breaking out my mad NLP skillz.

So now I will take advantage of the waxing moon and the glorious spring weather to start building myself back up - sleep schedule is off, but I have access to more food and drink (today was the first day of the holidays and I have gone back home, I am currently writing this with a cup of tea and a box of flapjacks by my side).

Currently I am going through my books to find inspiration for tech to get my back to a healthy point where I can start battling again, expect posts to come about the results to come.

Update on what I am doing

I have been at work with many things and as many drafts and half written posts I have I thought I would condense things down:

• A couple of weeks ago I did a charity shop raid where I found wonderful pieces of clothes, office skirts, blouses, delicatey cardigan things and dresses for pittance (including a marvelous red dress which would have been £60 but I nabbed it for a tenner and it has been proven rather...lucky...shall we say) 
• I have also noticed the quality of my work improving when I change into work clothes instead of jeans (the piece of clothing I cling to the most). I also managed to overcome my fear of being mocked for wearing rather shorter skirts than I would have when I paired them up with a lovely blazer
• Because my lovely friends have been quite disgusted with the amount of time they have been locked up with cells and infection protocols there have been many invitations to clubs and pubs and the mojo I worked to get me more male attention worked! I was waltzed (literally - waltzed - off of my feet three times in the last month. These things never used to happen!)
• Spirituality wise I put my shoulder to the wheel and have almost completed my months offerings to the Angels who rule the Mansions of the Moon. It is a simple rite, totally stripped down because I have not the space nor access to proper materials to go full blast. It seems to be working though.
• Ancestor offerings have been kept on a regular update and offerings made to planetary spirits. Hekate gets her share as well.
• I have run into walls when I am doing exercises though, I have found myself getting rather sleepy or low on energy when I try something that should be rather easy.
• Mood wise, I am happier. So much so. I mean not everyday, not all the time. But I feel more me than I did this time three months ago. Not some empty shell. I'm not sure how long this will last, but I am grateful for how I am feeling now. I tend to get a different reaction from people now, relationships are a lot easier

One last thing. I am *hopefully* planning a trip to London soon. For my birthday last year I got a chance to see Much Ado About Nothing, playing in West London, there was a bit of a hoo-hah but I ended up spending the whole day there and I cannot begin to describe how utterly brilliant just being there was. I didn't get to see half of what I wanted to see (British Museum being the main thing) but I long to go back.

It is a city where stuff happened - still happens - and the inspiration I got from it was like jet fuel.

Anyways, it has been rather a sappy post filled with talk of dresses and boys and cities. But a post needed to be done.

Repeat after me: 'I am not Batman...I am not Batman' - NYNY Experiment

Hello, I haven't posted for a while, but I can assure you much has been happening and much progress has been made.

As well as new super secret goals I may reveal shortly (I pretty much live by the whole, review, analyse and and update model of goal setting) I thought I would start on this week's post

Deb is so right when she talks about synchronocities in this project, while I haven't been posting my work up here, I have noticed the similar energy levels thing she talks about.

More on synchronicities. A series of odd coincidences occured whereby my friend and I were discussing an awesome talk from TED on vulnerability and I ended up reading a poignant letter in this awesome advice column

However, the discussiong with my best friend on the TED topic brought up something I thought was relevant.

'You need to be less Virgo'  she said


'What do you mean? Virgos are awesome!'

'Yes, but your brand of Virgo-ism means you view your emotions and needs as messy, ugly things that need to be tidied away and never shown to anyone'

'Well I wouldn't put it quite like that'

'Well I would, last time you ended up crying in front of me you could not stop apologising for it'

Suffice to say, what she says is true and in the spirit of becoming more vulnerable I will explain. I have a stupid irrational fear of asking people for help or telling them what I want because fear they will think I am a selfish git and leave me, it is far easier for me to type this than explain - with words - to my closest friends.

But if someone calls me and asks me to do something? I will do it, because I feel I need to keep earning their friendship by helping them whenever I can. Truth is if I didn't have friends who were quite intuitive it could cause a lot of problems in our relationship, hell it has caused problems in the past.

Moral of the story: use your words, express your needs and let your friends help you, we can only grow stronger as a whole if we help each other up. I sure will try to remember to do this myself.

And in no way should this song be your theme tune

Idiocy: I haz it

So Eli over at Moody Tower has posted about symptoms about being under a crossed condition. Read it!

Crossed conditions can happen for a number of reasons, one of the most cited reason is being under a magical attack and these sorts of things can happen. You get the back up of a fellow mage, and they break out the crossing oil and poppy seeds, and calling down whatever spirits in their little black book to bring the hellfire to your doorstep.

Or sometimes your crossed condition is the result of your own stupidity naivety.

A lot of nasty coincidences started to build over the year, big and little things, which really started to add up to what could point to a crossed condition in my sphere.

Pshah! I thought to myself, crossed conditions only occur when someone else sends them on you! I have never spoken really to someone who practices magic enough to be sent a crossed condition. I only lurk on the internet blogs, I don't have much of an online presence, I can't have a crossed condition!

I started to blame it on initiations from rituals I was undergoing/trying to get in contact with my HGA/a predisposition to anxiousness and depressive tendencies. But it just seemed to get worse and I kept coming back to the idea that I could be under some sort of affliction.

Crossed conditions can be quite a hard thing to diagnose for yourself, so I decided to get a second opinion from a highly experienced reader.

Turns out I did have a crossed condition, however the source of my crossed condition was from a previous working with a spirit. I can't go into much detail suffice to say it was my fault for being overambitious and stretching myself beyond what I was capable of and then stopping abruptly when it got too much. Had I recognised the symptoms earlier and had been doing regular offerings and regular upkeeping, I could have curtailed it and it wouldn't be such a bugger to shift now.

So I started back doing regular offerings 2-3 times a day, petitioning my Genius and setting up a proper space for me to work in and doing regular practice of some sort - that seemed to improve my mindset huge amounts. Scale down and look at other I could try and develop. Things have started to get a little better.

On Jan 1st I did my regular reading for the New Year, specifically looking at that issue. The advice I got was to fight back the passivity I was feeling, that Eli mentioned in her blog, and to get a hold of my sphere and act like a ruler, but I am.

I'm not out of the woods yet, but there are babysteps being taken and I hope to see big improvements before long.

 So if you do think you could be under some sort of attack, I reccomend reading Jason Miller's fabulous 'Protection and Reversal Magic' for good ideas on how to protect and start the clean up yourself and going to get a reading from someone with experience. Personally, I reccomend Conjureman Ali, he was profressional, honest and very helpful when I e-mailed him.

New Year New You Prompt 4 - Relax

[Lush Honey Bee Ballistic]
So for Prompt 4, Relaxing and rewarding.

I'm can make idiotic choices in terms of choosing something to reward myself with, my most frequent choice for rewarding myself is putting off having to deal with something difficult ex 'I have dealt with x difficult task, now I can put off doing y'

No very productive, it would be fair to say.

However, I'm making the trip back up to uni and back into Dorm Life and more importantly, Life Without a Bath Tub. So I went shopping in Lush today and got a few little bits including the ever lovely Honey Bee bath bomb. It smells gorgeous and it makes the tub water turn yellow.

So, hot bath, a lovely cup of tea, and perhaps a few episodes of my newly discovered guilty pleasure - Mob Wives.

New Year New You Prompts 2 and 3 [Part 2]

Actual *actual* goals

Okay, as much as meditation will help me get out of the black hole and help me keep on track, I will need  to have a few things to aim for.

This year is a landmark year for me. I will be graduating in 6 months time and will need to get back home. From what I have been told, it will be difficult to get a job in the field I specialise in without a Ph.D., and I am not sure I want to continue with it anyway. So goals:

Thesis writing:
For the first month
1) I aim to write 100 - 300 words per day (start next week)
2) I aim to do at most 2 hours of reading (start next week)

I have a nasty habit of leaving things to the last minute, not something you can do with a thesis. So I plan to do this as early as possible in day - after I wake up. I get Wednesdays off and the weekend. If the words 'oh I can do it later, I have plenty of time' that is a signal for me to now it *now*.

Magical work
1) Sweetening my supervisor and the administration (start tomorrow)
2) Mantra to Ganesha for support (tonight)
3) Start collecting ingrediants for a study support mojo hand (tonight)
4) Create Crown of Success/King Solomon's wisdom vigil light (tomorrow)

Debt
Like most I have accumulate a bit of debt.
1) Finish bank stuff (tonight/tomorrow)
2) Appply for one of those top-up credit cards (10th January)
3) Start mapping out ideas for secondary stream of income - selling divinations/magickal products etc. (within two weeks)
4) Create a budget and stick to it (within three weeks)
5) Sell something to three customers

Magical Work
1) Ask Genius to provide help with this
2) Gather dirt from bank to work with
3) Experimenting with a few techniques gathered from Strategic Sorcery course - the Information/Causal/Etheric level
4) Invoke Sachiel/Jophiel/Hismael and ask them for assistance - inspiration for secondary income/wheels to turn in the bank
5) Invoke a couple of the Archangels from the Mansions of the Moon to help with business ideas