Tag Archives: blog

A Musing on Occult Blogging and the Distinction of Passions

November 11, 2022 By in news, whining Tags: , , , , , , , , , 2 Comments

That recent post I made was definitely a wild one, I admit.  It’s extremely rare that I use this blog as a platform for an outright call-out or attack on anyone or anything, and it’s not something I enjoy doing or want to make a habit of.  After all, what I enjoy most about blogging is blogging about the things I actively enjoy reading, writing, studying, and practicing, and me getting involved with drama or current events just distracts me from writing about that and my readers from reading about that.  When I make a post like that, it’s because I feel it’s part of my moral and ethical responsibility to do so.  Last time I did something like this, it was to call out the old admin of the now defunct Hermetic Agora Discord server, and after that, I mulled in a follow-up post about the social and esoteric implications of the underlying issues that led to such a call-out post to begin with.  Like then, I want to unpack and muse over this more recent call-out, too.

To be sure, November 7 2022 (when I made my call-out post about Gordon White and Rune Soup being a toxic and violent influence in the online occult community and having been so for years now) is now officially the most well-viewed day for my blog in its history, beating out the previous record set ten years prior to the day (November 7 2012) when this blog (quiet and meek as it was) was hit by an abnormally large botnet raid or scan or somesuch that sent my views skyrocketing into the many thousands.  While I’m glad that my call-out post earlier in the week was so well- and widely-received to get the word out (I’ve had dozens of friends and colleagues reach out privately to me thanking me for such a post, in addition to the many more who did so publicly at the risk of their being raided online), the absurd hit count I got earlier in the week (and which I’m continuing to get day by day to a lesser degree) is a stark reminder of something I’ve neglected about interacting with things online: “rage sells”.  Those two words are at the crux of so many problems involving all sorts of media that we have today, both online and offline, both social and static.  It’s why extreme polarization in large swaths of the population happens because of mere mainstream news banking on increased viewership from rage-inducing stories; it’s why we get far-right/alt-right terrorists merely by watching YouTube autoplay a series of videos that lead from Enya and Minecraft to Jordan Petersen and worse; it’s why social media platforms like Facebook or Twitter have warped to the breaking point the very conceptions of “relationship” and “community” for so many people that lead such companies to build algorithms to enflame people’s emotions.

“Rage sells”, and I admit, my last post was, in many senses of the word, rage (although I consider it a righteous rage against someone behaving harmfully and who is a detriment to the online occult community).  Did I want to get a good hit count on that post?  Absolutely; it’s part of me getting the word out.  Did I expect that much of an increase across my blog generally, whether that rapidly or that sustained?  Did I expect that much of an increase in my follower/viewer numbers, even after taking into account all the people that split from me (or from Twitter generally)?  No, actually!  And that simple fact serves as a reminder as to why some people act the way they do online.  Without wanting to harp on him too much (that was very much the point of the last post after all), Gordon White does just this very thing: lashing out and attacking anyone and everyone repeatedly and often who doesn’t fall in line with his conspiracy-addled rage.  Despite his encouragements to his readers that they should live their lives free from rage (which he calls “hate”—a difference I’ll get to later) in their hearts, he is still relying on preserving and cultivating such rage (both on his blog and his Twitter, projecting and deflecting the time to shift the narrative to suit his needs) in order to keep people engaged with him.  Of course, he’s far from the only one who does this, so it’s not fair (even to him) to paint him as some extreme outlier on this front.  Enflamed emotions encourage engagement; that’s basically a truth for social media nowadays, where you can find endless articles about how emotional engagement is the key to viral content marketing, study after study about what emotions trigger increased engagement and how strongly each kind of emotion influences engagement, and so on and so forth.

I mean…for a more humorous take:

I’m not about that kind of life, that kind of media propagation or content generation, and I don’t want to be.

As I said in the last post, and as I said above, I’m just here doing my thing, and my thing is writing about the occult, spirituality, religion, mysticism, magic, divination, and other kinds of esoterica, and even from its earliest days (although far more pronounced now) was centered on Hermeticism.  This blog has always been about that, and will always be about that.  And yes, to be sure, I do make a few ebook PDFs for sale as a sort of “intensely-produced content” for those who want to go beyond the abundance of stuff I write publicly, and while I’m still on hiatus, I do hope one day to get back to doing readings and consultations for people—but, all that said, I’m not really here to market myself.  I don’t go out of my way beyond a notification post when I come up with something new (which isn’t common) to sell a product, and I’m definitely not trying to corner a market or develop some sort of base of paying viewers to give me money on a constant basis.  That’s never been my goal, and never will be my goal.  My goal for this blog is to just do magic and mysticism and to share what I find in the course of studying, researching, and practicing that.  Being on social media in general is just a way to further that and emphatically not the purpose of me doing that—and that’s a distinction that a lot more people should bear in mind when they get into developing their own stuff.  It should always be remembered, after all, that “substance” is not the same thing as “content”.

As a lot of people clued into online events are aware, Twitter is going through something of A Time right now, what with Elon Musk’s recent takeover of the platform and quickly showing the world how hilariously bad he is at…well, everything that isn’t just spending money.  As a result, that’s leading a lot of people to consider different social media platforms, whether it’s returning to Tumblr, resuming interest in Mastodon or Counter.Social, or jumping to new platforms like Cohost (though, hilariously, I can’t find anyone actually mentioning anything about staying on or going back to Facebook).  I mused about social media a bit on Twitter a few days back, and realized that all that social media platforms do for us is the equivalent of each of us making our own website and us bookmarking each others’ websites, putting all those bookmarks in a folder in our browser.  Sure, social media platforms standardize, aggregate, and make convenient this whole process, but that’s basically what it is at heart.  When I made this observation on Twitter, someone commented their view that they don’t fully trust people involved in their circles who “don’t have a basic bloc, a place to put things outside of the algorithm”.  That’s a viewpoint that I wholeheartedly agree with, to be sure, and it raises a really neat distinction between someone who uses social media as a means for something that isn’t a part of it or built within it, and someone who uses social media as an end unto itself.

I admit that I enjoy seeing numbers go up (who doesn’t? it’s like points in a video game), and I do think it’s really neat that I have several thousand followers online across multiple social media platforms (including, if we go with a Web 2.0-based notion here of what qualifies as “social media”, this blog itself on WordPress).  Still, though, my main purpose for being on social media is an emphasis on being social (to communicate and relate to others online), rather than it being merely media (to share or propagate content); it’s a neat thing that I get to share my writing and project on Twitter or Facebook, but I’m not on social media in order to spread my blog.  That I have so many viewers is neat, but let’s be honest: I would still be writing about the things I do whether I had 10 followers or 10000.  I don’t write to get engagements, I don’t blog to get views, I don’t post to be famous; I write, blog, and post because I have things I just want to write, blog, and post about.  I write for the sake of writing, not just to keep myself in check with my own studies (and to give myself a reference and a record to look back on over the years), but also to help share things I find useful so that others might derive some benefit from my writing.

Still, exploiting emotion is a great way for people on social media to get numbers to go up in general, but that’s not what I want to do; if it happens, I want there to be a good reason for it besides benefitting my blog.  I mean, who am I to enflame people’s emotions in general?  While I claim that there’s a distinction between “righteous anger” and “non-righteous anger” in how it arises, can be expressed, and affects us as human beings, I still remember what CH XIII.7 talks about as irrational tormentors of matter:

This ignorance, my child, is the first torment; the second is grief; the third is incontinence; the fourth, lust; the fifth, injustice; the sixth, greed; the seventh, deceit; the eighth, envy; the ninth, treachery; the tenth, anger; the eleventh, recklessness; the twelfth, malice. These are twelve in number, but under them are many more besides, my child, and they use the prison of the body to torture the inward person with the sufferings of sense.

It’s that tenth one, “anger”, that I want to draw attention to.  The Greek word used here originally is ὀργή, which Salaman, Copenhaver, Mead, and Scott all translate as “anger”, which is an eminently reasonable translation for it.  However, looking up the full meaning and use of this word more generally, we can see that it eventually came to include notions of anger or wrath stemming from a meaning of “natural impulse, propensity, temperament, disposition, mood”.  To me, my understanding here isn’t of ὀργή to refer to what I’d consider “righteous anger”, which is a rational aversion to and desire to fix something that is morally and ethically wrong.  Rather, I’d see it as representing the anger that arises from thumos, the “emotional drive” (often discussed alongside epithumia “appetitive desire”) which is a baser, nonrational passion arising from body-centered ego (tellingly, the Perseus-Tufts online dictionary above notes that we don’t find ὀργή/ὀργάς in Homeric texts, who uses θύμος instead).

Consider a Stoic parallel: for most negative passions (πάθῃ pathē), there are also corresponding good feelings (εὐπάθεια eupatheia).  For the Stoic, there are four high-level categories of passions, a combination of whether they are valued as good or bad, and whether they relate to things in the present or future.  The passion of good things in the present is pleasure, and good things in the future is appetite/desire; the passion of bad things in the present is distress, and bad things in the future is fear.  These are inherently nonrational impulses and mistaken judgments that arise to cause us emotional disquietude, but there are also appropriate and rational impulses and correct judgment that serve to bring one to emotional peace.  Corresponding to the passion of pleasure is joy, to fear is caution, and to appetite/desire is reasonable wishing (though there is no rational correspondent to fear).  The difference here is that a Stoic may well wish for something to happen, but in a way appropriate to the thing itself and the Stoic’s relationship to it, as opposed to an irrational, mistaken mere instance of appetite/desire.

In a similar way, I claim that not all anger—one might even say not all “hate”—is the same, and that there are healthful expressions of what might be apparent as and equivalent to baser kinds even though they are nothing of the sort.  For my part, consider the line from the Headless Rite that says “I am the Truth who hates the fact that unjust deeds are done in the world” (Ἐγώ εἰμι ἡ Ἀλήθεια, ὁ μισῶν ἀδικήματα γίνεσθαι ἐν τῷ κόσμῳ Egṓ eimi hē Alḗtheia, ho misôn adikḗmata gínesthai en tôy kósmōy).  “Hate” here is just the word μισέω, which really just means “hate”, but what do we mean by “hate”?  Hatred is, at its core, a strong aversion or intense dislike of something, an unwillingness to suffer something.  Sometimes hate can arise from mere opinion and irrational desire, sure, but sometimes it can also arise as the logical and rational consequence of particular ethics and morals that one has cultivated and developed, and if those ethics and morals are well-founded, then hate of a thing directed by such ethics and morals must necessarily be followed as an extension of those ethics and morals.  In that light, while “hate” for some people may well be emotionally-driven, for others it may instead be logically- and rationally-driven.  And this is still something distinct from “rage”, which is merely an indulgence in one’s baser, lower, ego-driven emotions.

When I make a call-out post (as I did with DanKadmos from the Hermetic Agora, the Temple of the Hermetic One, the oppressive acts of the previous US presidential administration during the protests in 2020, racism and fascism and violence against movements like Black Lives Matter, or the like), is there emotion involved?  Sure; I’m still human and definitely no sage.  However, I don’t like wasting my time writing posts like this, and I don’t want to waste my readers’ time in reading posts like this unless there’s a reason that I think justifies the time; if I just want to bitch about something, I keep it to Twitter (if I think it’s funny enough to get a few people to laugh) or (far more commonly) I just keep my mouth shut.  I don’t write call-out posts just to get people upset and enraged, because that’s something I find abhorrent from a moral and ethical perspective, much less a Hermetic one that seeks to quell one’s temper and passions in order to attain higher and more refined states of spiritual development.  I write these posts to get people to act in a way I think helps the world and helps make the world a better place.  I write such posts not as a distraction from my usual writing here, but as a logical extension and result of the practice of living what I write about here.  It is as much part of the message and goal of what I do here as everything else.

As I mentioned in my last post, I fully expected that making such a post about someone so popular in the online occult sphere was going to be divisive, drive people away from me and my writings, cause my much-vaunted numbers to drop, and so on.  And yanno what?  That’s just fine with me.  As I’ve said before in no unclear terms, if people are willing to support horrible things, then I’d much rather they not read my stuff at all.  For all that some people might cry out about others being “hateful” towards them, consider what I said about what “hate” actually means: if you’re willing to suffer or tolerate (or even encourage or rejoice in) things that I make no qualms about being detestable or despicable to me (and with good reason!), then I’m not sure what I have to offer you or what you might hope to find here besides a few tricks nestled amidst my words.  If, after reading and considering what it is I have to say, all that still drives you away from me or makes you want to unfollow me on my blog or Twitter or what-have-you: good.  Go on with your life, and I genuinely hope you do better wherever you go than you are now.

I’m not playing this game to earn a name for myself or to build up a sycophantic echo chamber around myself; in truth, I’m not playing any sort of game at all.  I’m just here doing my thing, as I ever have.  That’s what I encourage others to do, too, both online and off: focus on what it is you want to do, for its own glorious sake as much as you possibly can, and let people rejoice at that and with you in that.  Just remember that, whatever you do, you should do all of it—and that includes the stuff that you might find distasteful but which goes along with all the rest.

On Oils as Offerings

March 18, 2019 By in internet, link, materia, occult Tags: , , , , , , Leave a comment

The following is an old post of mine from 2015.  I wrote it a as a guest post for the excellent Quadrivium Supplies, an oil-maker I turn to every so often when I need some real good stuff, and whose oils have never let me down.  She asked me at one point to write a guest post, and I did; it went up in early 2015.  However, she’s since moved platforms and went to a wholesale model, and in that transfer of platforms, her blog got nuked.  While the post went up, it’s no longer there.  I figure I may as well repost it now for posterity, and plus, reading over it reminded me of some good ideas I once had once upon a time.  I hope you enjoy this little relic of writing!

As a ceremonial magician, I go through a lot of supplies.  Yes, there’re the crafting supplies like wood and lead and gold leaf to make Tables of Practice and wands and talismans and the like, but I also go through a lot of consumable supplies like candles, wine, incense, and especially oil.  While I’ve got a grasp of crafting and making some of my own basic supplies, it certainly helps to have friends who can do these things better or who have access to more raw bits and pieces to make better things than I can; after all, while I can make oils for myself, I’d much rather get one of my friends who can expertly create and fine-tune them instead because, well, they know what they’re doing with better equipment and starting goods than I have.

One of my friends owns the lovely Quadrivium Supplies, and she’s an excellent oil-maker that I’ve pinged time and again for very well-made magical oils and advice on how to make a few myself.  My only regret with her work is that I don’t have quite enough income to get some of her oils in bigger quantities!  She knows her recipes well, uses real and natural ingredients that some might shy away from getting, and even makes a series of astrologically-elected oils that are without comparison.  These aren’t cheaply-made garishly-colored artificial oils with a bit of scent, but powerful tools and buffs in their own right.  Recently, she asked me if I’d be interested in writing a guest post on her blog, and I happily obliged.  After thinking for a bit, I figured a good intersection between her work and mine would be a good topic to write on.  Go read my entry there, On Oils as Offerings!

It’s rare that I get the chance to write a guest post for someone else; after all, I have plenty of writing already done and plenty more to do here at the Digital Ambler.  Then again, I’m also not opposed to doing so, since it also gives me a delightful change of pace.

Ceremonial magicians are known for using endless magical tools and magical materia in their works, and I’m no exception; one of the recent choices I had to make in moving to a new house was needing to find a place with a suitable room as my own temple room and magical workshop to house my shrines and altars, as well as providing storage for all my tools and charms that I make.  To be fair, unless tradition dictates otherwise, no system of magic strictly requires material means, but they certainly help, especially in obtaining material ends.  Having a material component in one’s magical work helps to bring down those astral and spiritual forces down, grounding them and giving them a means to work and effect themselves in our world of body and form.  Wands, crystals, talismans, mojo bags, drawn-out circles, engraved candles, and all the rest help in one’s magical works.  Oils are no exception, but they’re also something of a special case.

Not too long ago, I was conversing with one of my spiritual mentors, Saint Cyprian of Antioch, in preparation for a magical undertaking of the Arbatel operation, where one conjures and begins work and initiation with the seven Olympic Spirits associated with the seven traditional planets of Hermetic cosmology.  Saint Cyprian of Antioch, although a Christian saint, was also a powerful magician in his day, and over the centuries has become a steadfast ally to those who call upon him in matters of magic and sorcery of all kinds.  Seeking his advice, he recommended I go through with my plan and conjuration setup: the standard conjuration triangle, crystal scrying medium, incense, yada yada.  However, he suggested one important change: offer the Olympic Spirits a small amount of clear, good oil.  I was considering preparing wine or food, but Saint Cyprian of Antioch turned those down and rather emphatically suggested that I use pure, clean oil as an offering.  He explained that oil has a “volatile” nature, not in the same way as elemental Fire or alchemical Sulfur, but as a magical medium for housing things in a way stronger than water but less than crystal, more pliable than food but less ephemeral than incense.  For housing the soul or power of a spirit, oil would be an excellent offering, especially for entities like those from the Arbatel.

After thinking about this some, I realized that this makes perfect sense.  After candles and incense (and wine, though that’s usually for my own personal use), the material supply I go through the most is a variety of oils.  A full shelf in my supply closet, which is a miniature botanica in its own right, is packed with oils from a variety of distributors and craftspeople, some simple colored-and-scented artificial oils, some intricately developed from the purest extracts all manually taken from herbs and other natural sources.  Most workings that call for candles or talismans will, either due to the recipe or my own inclinations, use an oil in fixing things properly so that a particular power can be fixed.  Abramelin oil, specifically the German recipe, is one I use daily for my own strengthening by anointing my head and palms in prayer.  When using a traditional oil lamp, I’ll mix in some particular oil with the normal fuel for a particular end, like an older cognate to fixing a candle with oil.  I find myself using oils in pretty much any magical operation nowadays; such experimentation has often led me to find alternative uses for oils, sometimes in ways entirely unexpected.

Then again, there are more ways to use oils than in fixing candles or anointing heads.  Among all the oils I have, the one I go through most is common olive oil.  This has a rich history in Mediterranean magic and Western culture generally as a symbol of richness and power, both in this world and in most others.  Simple olive oil can be used towards pretty much any end, not having anything but the pure fruit of the olive tree involved, and when prayed over in a particular manner, can be used on the spot in lieu of any magical oil.  However, I don’t typically use olive oil as a “magical oil”, per se, but as a substance in offering.  For instance, whenever I make an offering to the theoi of the Hellenes, I always pour out an offering of wine with a dash of olive oil.  For one, the Greek gods like the offering of oil with their wine and prayer and incense, but it also suffices to cover the wine and prevent most forms of bacterial or fungal growth in their offerings.  (And yes, the wine still somehow manages to evaporate as the spirits consume it from under the oil, even though this shouldn’t normally be possible, but hey, gods do what they want.)

Of course, I don’t just offer olive oil to the spirits.  Some oils have histories and known uses limited pretty much to offerings, and I’ve taken that route with my own Three Kings oil when working with the Three Wise Men, though they’re also teaching me other methods of using such an oil when working with and under them.  When I need to empower a spirit a particular way, I’ll make them a normal libation but with a few drops of a particular oil that I feel is appropriate.  Household protector spirit needs to be buffed up for an incoming attack?  They’ll get an offering of strong wine with Fiery Wall of Protection oil.  Need to propitiate Aphrodite to help a friend smooth out their relationship?  Sweet wine with Reconciliation oil.  Cleansing a sad spirit who brings in filth?  Clear water with Van Van oil.  Want to placate an angry ancestor with a taste for food?  Good whiskey with turkey drippings (yes, really).  Just as oils can be used to fix a candle or prepare a talisman for ensoulment, oils can also fortify offerings to the spirits and empower them directly.  For that matter, oil can be dedicated to spirits alone for their own use, and if those oils happen to already be consecrated and empowered with herbs or other substances, it can empower the spirit just as strongly as it can empower a talisman.

In the case with the Arbatel spirits, Saint Cyprian of Antioch recommended I use the olive oil as an offering for them to consume, but also to help bring them into the world in their own way.  Oils on their own, according to Saint Cyprian, provide a flexible but useful means to contain the power or presence of a spirit, not unlike talismans or mojo bags, but in a more disposable or usable manner than a set object.  In the case with the Olympic Spirits, Saint Cyprian suggested that I give the spirit pure olive oil to consume and inhabit, then emptying that oil out into the world, allowing the power of that spirit to spread out in our world so it can do its work better in ways that I may not always be able to accomplish.  Oils don’t just evaporate into the air as waters or alcohols do, nor they don’t just vanish into particles like incense or smoke, nor do they stay fixed and firm within a solid containing body.  Oils leak and seep into the world, dispersing themselves and attaching themselves to objects and places, coating things with their powers and imbuing them with their own essences. Oils are much more difficult to get rid of and don’t simply wash away, but they’re not permanent fixtures, either.

Oils, in the end, are just as important a tool as anything else in a ceremonial magician’s temple, if not one of the most important ones.  Sure, not all traditions call for oils in their work, but almost all my workings in a variety of traditions have benefited from including their use for one purpose or another.  I would even rank oil as more important than candles or incense, because a properly prepared oil can take the place of both.  It’s important to remember that oils can be used for many more things than fixing or anointing, but that oils can be used in offerings directly as another method of working with spirits in a way that’s both profound and powerful.

Apologia

May 4, 2015 By in internet, news, philosophy Tags: , , , , 2 Comments

Being a WordPress user, I’m fond of the sometimes silly and sweet things it does for me like any overdesigned fun information system should.  Today, it told me that this is my four-year anniversary of joining WordPress.  Before that, I was using Blogger, and was envious of some of the bloggers who had fancier features than I did.  About that time, too, I was still getting my bearings in the magical world and was only just starting to practice conjuration.

What a wild ride it’s been in just a measly four years.  I went from talking about my mistakes in making natron to giving talks on theory at conferences, from showing off my first-ever woodburning projects to making them commercially, from reading about geomancy to teaching it to others.  It really has been a wild ride, and I’d like to thank you, especially, for sticking with me through all these times, no matter when you stepped in to pay attention to lil’ ol’ me.

To those who have stuck around longer than a few months, you’ll note that I haven’t been posting as much lately as I’m known to do usually.  I don’t apologize for that; after all, this is my blog, and I post when I want, what I want, and how I want.  That’s a good bit of advice for those who have blogs of their own or who want to start one; you’re beholden to nobody by blogging alone, and it is your platform, after all, so use it however and whenever you feel like you should.

The thing is, things have been slow lately.  My writing is tied to my activities, my Word to my Work as it were, and since I’m not doing much Work, I don’t have many Words.

My life is good.  There are always things to improve upon, and those are getting knocked out in slow but steady order.  I’m working towards my goals for this year day by day, but some days, just not a lot is happening.  I’m definitely on a plateau, but it’s not a bad one, and that’s okay; taking it slow is something I’m fond of, and things are going well.  The gods and spirits treat me well, and I try to uphold my bargains and offerings and honor to them; I have few pressing problems to worry about, and can spend my time in leisure and work without stress or concern.  I am blessed with good health, good friends, and good money, and I can’t complain for want of that.  I could always use more, of course, but that’s a matter for my own work.

But what work would that be, though?  I’m not afraid to admit that I’ve hit a slow spot, just as I’m not afraid to defiantly not post for longer than a few days at a time, but surely there’s work to be done, and there certainly is.  I’m a far cry from a master in any way of any art, despite how far I’ve come; after all, to someone still at home, a mile is a far ways to walk, but there’s a world of difference between walking across town and walking across the world.

Basically, I’ve been slow lately to the point of laziness.  For that, the self-made cause to the symptom of having little to write about, I apologize.  So let me get back on the ball, get back to working, get back to writing, and get back to the world I’m meant to create.  After all, that shit won’t do itself.

Minor Things and Updates

July 7, 2013 By in link, news, occult Tags: , , , , , , , , , , 5 Comments

Not much happening as of late; little conjuration work to be done, no big projects.  There have been some business requests made, in terms of readings and design work, which is absolutely fabulous; many thanks to those who have asked for them!  For those who are thinking of them, why not take a chance and spend some of that extra coin lying around?  I could always use the work, after all, and it keeps me busy.  But yeah, beyond the occasional reading and my normal daily practice, not much has been happening.  Which leads to me writing less, at least for my blog, which after all these months feels real weird.  Eh, I guess I needed the break.  Anyway, just a few little things I wanted to note lately.

First, as you may have heard from the rest of the interweb, Jason Miller of Inominandum and Strategic Sorcery fame recently released his newest work, Advanced Planetary Magic, a set of 49 calls to the planets based on pairwise combinations of the seven planets.  You may have heard of it somewhere else in the blogosphere, and I’ll keep my review short: it’s awesome, and I suggest getting yourself a copy of this awesome work.  He describes a system of planetary magic where one uses a particular short invocation or spell for each pair of planets (Luna/Sol, Sol/Luna, Venus/Saturn, etc.), to be used according to a particular situation and in a particular time (planetary hour and planetary day).  Nifty stuff, by any measure.  He’s starting a project called the Crying of Calls 49, where people who have the text are invited to perform 49 consecutive days of prayer, using each one of the biplanetary invocations each day in a particular hour on each day.  The first week starts tomorrow, July 8, with Luna of Luna in an hour of the Moon in the day of the Moon, Luna of Mars on July 9 in an hour of the Moon in the day of Mars, and so forth.  He’s set up a Facebook group for it, but as of this writing the group is still inoperational.  Quick, go get a copy for yourself and join in on the fun!

I’ve recently picked up my prayer beads again and started using them.  I’ve had this dark Indian rosewood mala with red thread for years, bought a long time ago when I was on a strong Buddhist kick, and though I used it for a while with some basic mantras (Avalokitesvara’s and Manjusri’s, to name two), I never really kept up the practice.  The prayer beads have just been languishing in their bag for years, maybe picked up once or twice out of nostalgia, and put back.  I figured I may as well augment my practice by using them again, though picking out the mantra or prayer to be used with them puzzled me slightly.  Then I remembered that I have my own magical motto, “Lautitia Laborum Lucis Laetor” (“I rejoice in the splendor of the works of the Light”), and since it rings pretty deeply with me, I figure I may as well use that as my mantra.  It’s pretty relevant to my own work, and is fairly devotional in and of itself.  I’ve gotten a good buzz from using my motto as a mantra, as I have the Trisagion and my Prayer of Light.  I’ve been experimenting with rhythms and numbers of circuits, and I like the preliminary results so far.  My goal is to do at least one motto circuit per day, twice if I have the time; doing this on the train works well enough, since I sit comfortably far back from the rest of the people in a quiet spot where others can’t easily bother me.

Speaking of daily practice, I’m also considering with toying around with my personal schedule.  Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays I go to work at the office, and I work from home Wednesdays.  On the days I go to the office, I normally get up around 5 a.m., hygeinate myself, do my prayers and meditation and other essential practice, leave around 7, then catch the train to work, then get home around 5 or 6 p.m.  Ideally, this allows me four or five hours of time once I get off work for more practice but…I normally just end up on the computer for the night instead.  Since I’m a morning person, and there is another train that leaves much later than I’m used to that can still get me to work on time, I’m thinking of shifting more practice to the morning, which gives me about two solid hours each day to really focus on my stuff: a half hour for prayers and offerings, a half hour for meditation, a half hour for energy work and other “kinetic” methods of prayer and practice, and another half hour for more meditation or astral work.  This should of course be backed up with more work in the evenings, but shifting more to the earlier part of the day is no bad idea.  I’m a morning person, anyway, so this should definitely help me out more in getting my ass in better magical shape.  I’d be getting home probably around 7 or 8, but that still leaves me enough time most evenings to relax and get at least another round of meditation again, not to mention any planetary work that happens in the evening.  I figure I can handle this fairly well; I’ll try it this coming week as a test round.

Anyway, time to finish tidying up my house and get to my prayers and offerings for the night.  How’s this past Mercury retrograde period been treating you?  Besides some minor holiday traffic, things have been delightful on my end.