Tag Archives: video

Interested in Greek alphabet magic and mysticism? Check out the 2020 talk I did on it!

June 19, 2022 By in internet, link, mathesis, occult Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Back in 2020, I participated in the Salem Witchcraft and Folklore Festival, which was a great time, even if was held online.  During the course of that, as I mentioned way back when, I offered my lecture Spelling by Spelling: Greek Alphabet Divination and Magic:

A variety of divination systems were used in ancient and classical Greece, ranging from oracles and prophets to common forms of sortilege. One of the more fascinating kinds of divination that was used in the ancient Hellenic world was that of grammatomancy, divination through the individual letters of the Greek alphabet. This lecture will cover the history of this useful and direct form of divination, and how it can build into an overarching spiritual practice of devotion to the Greek gods, theurgy, contemplation, and magic.

It was a great lecture (even if it had to be postponed from Saturday to Monday due to unfortunate internet/power outage issues), and I’m glad I was able to offer it.

And yes, you should definitely keep up on this year’s SWFF, too, because this summer will be its fourth year running and there is, as usual, a great lineup of presenters and talks being slated!  Jacqui Allouise at The Cauldron Black and Matthew Venus of Spiritus Arcanum (both of whom offer their own events and products the whole year round) do great work, and I definitely encourage checking them out in general on top of the yearly festivities planned.

Anyway, one of the neat things about being a presenter is that I get a recording of my own presentation, and I was finally able to get around to uploading my talk to YouTube!  If you’re interested in grammatomancy (Greek alphabet divination), the grammatēmerologion (Greek letter lunisolar calendar), and other ways to use the Greek alphabet in magic and mysticism for all sorts of ends, check out the talk I did!

In the lecture, I mention a handout for people to study and take home.  You can access the 12-page handout (with reference information and citations for further reading) here on Google Drive.  Likewise, if you just want to check out the slides for your own study, you can also access them at this link.

I thought this was a great talk to give, and a few of my friends thought it went well enough to offer some pleasant thoughts on it.  Hopefully you’ll also find it interesting, dear reader, and this might persuade you to look into this alphabetic system of magic and mysticism!  I’ve written plenty about it, not just as an ebook on the divinatory system of grammatomancy (De Grammatomanteia, available for US$10 through Etsy or through Ko-fi) but also on countless posts on my blog; just search “grammatomancy” or “grammatemerologion”, or just browse the Mathesis category of posts for more.

Now, obviously, while at the time there was a registration fee for the talk since it was a paid event, it being almost two years later, I see no reason to insist on further charging for this sort of stuff.  If you feel moved to contribute anything to my Ko-fi as a donation, I certainly wouldn’t stop you, but much like with my online video course Geomancy in the Reign of the Lady of Crowns, I would instead encourage you to consider donating to a humanitarian charity of your choice that can make a difference in the world, whether locally or globally.  Alternatively, even if I’m not presenting this year, you might also consider spending some of that money towards attending a lecture or five for this year’s Salem event!

Phos kai Sophia

June 28, 2012 By in internet, link Tags: , , , , , , , 2 Comments

In light of, er, all this light work I’ve been doing lately (which is fantastic bee tee dubs, but I’m starting to sense the price and risk associated with it all), a few lines of a song crept into my head this morning.

And through these doubts and through your confusion
Know that you are chosen to this fight
Look to find a soul filled with compassion
Look to see a living source of light

They’re from a song I heard…jeez, more than six years ago?  The guy I was dating then (we met in the most fantastic and silly of ways, and I need to get my ass out to the West and see him again when I’ve the leave and money to) gave me a mix CD from a gothy store once, and I immediately took a liking to a vast majority of the songs.  One of the songs was called Sophia, by the Crüxshadows, and it’s been one of my favorite songs for a long while now.  Not only did it get me more into EBM, dark dance music, and helped me out explore some of my more darker emotions and thoughts, but it’s been surprisingly fitting to my current work lately.

Despite affecting a very dark and edgy look, the Crüxshadows are very dominant with messages with life and light (which, I’d contend, is a mark of being a true goth).  Sophia is one of their big hits that made it onto several billboard records, but it also scored a big hit with me.  Now that I’ve started to work intensely with light as a force, I’ve started to rethink some of these lyrics in terms of my current situation.

After going through a small emo, ranty phase earlier, doubting pretty much what I was doing and only being told that I was doing things right even though I didn’t know what I was doing, I’m starting to see what the spirits and divination readings meant.  There is a purpose to what I’ve been doing, and even though it’s by no means complete, I’m just barely starting to get glimmers of what’s going on and how to get there.  And, to start with, this purpose consists of being a proper human being.  Right, human beings are animals, and we’re born into an animal dog-eat-dog (sometimes literally) world.  But as humans, we don’t have to kill, we don’t have to have packs and alphas, we don’t have to wage war on everything just to get our next meal.  We have the ability to help and share, right down to our emotion, minds, and spirits.

To be a proper human, we have to be able to act as light would in the darkness.  After all, we are descended ultimately from the Infinite Light, and even when we shut our eyes to it, the Light still shines around and within us.  It may be filtered through different crystals to form different colors, and sometimes it might be dimmed or warped or shifted to a degree that it becomes invisible to us but apparent in other ways or to other eyes; the Light still shines.  And it’s by knowing this Light, both outside us and inside us, that we know what we really are.

“How can I hope to be what’s inside of me?”  Look, and let the light guide you.

Litany of How the World Sucks

April 15, 2012 By in link, philosophy, whining Tags: , , , , , 1 Comment

I’ve recently been hooked on an artist called Janelle Monáe.  You may have heard of her: she’s a fantastic singer and dancer currently working on a four-part series of albums about her android character, Cindi Mayweather, being persecuted and then leading the androids of Metropolis to freedom.  It’s a pretty neat sci-fi theme, but is certainly rooted in real-world problems in black and other marginalized communities.  Anyway, one of her more fantastic music videos is the short film “Many Moons”.  It stars Cindi Mayweather as the prototype of the Alpha Platinum 9000 line of androids, auctioned off at a high-stakes high-class gathering of some of the bigger names in the Metropolitan community.  At 3:39, though, things go awry in her “programming”, and she sees what living in the world can really be like.

The fast-paced lyrics for this part of the song:

Civil rights, civil war
Hood rat, crack whore
Carefree, nightclub
Closet drunk, bathtub
Outcast, weirdo
Stepchild, freak show
Black girl, bad hair
Broad nose, cold stare

Tap shoes, Broadway
Tuxedo, holiday
Creative block, love song
Stupid words, erased song
Gun shots, orange house
Dead man walking with a dirty mouth
Spoiled milk, stale bread
Welfare, bubonic plague

Record deal, light bulb
Keep-back kid, now corporate thug
Breast cancer, common cold
HIV, lost hope
Overweight, self esteem
Misfit, broken dream
Fish tank, small bowl
Closed minded, dark hold

Cybergirl, droid control
Get away now they trying to steal your soul
Microphone, one stage
Tomboy, outrage
Street fight, bloody war
Instigators, third floor
Promiscuous child, broken heart
STD, quarantine

Heroin needle, coke head
Final chapter, death bed
Plastic sweat, metal skin
Metallic tears, mannequin
Carefree, night club
Closet drunk, bathtub
White House, Jim Crow
Dirty lies, my regards

In no time, in each line, Janelle Monáe describes whole scenes of day-to-day life for people in all walks of life, from the blissful and high-brow to the most vulgar and depraved.  Bringing up plights of the poor, the sick, the misguided, and the trapped, she drives home what is driving Cindi Mayweather onto freeing people from their own plights and leading them to a better world.  More often than not, it’s their own trappings that keep them trapped (“you’re free, but in your mind your freedom’s in a bind”), their own upbringing causing vicious cycles passed down onto the next generation, and the one after that, ad infinitum.

This is the crucial part of the song, I think, that really answers one of the central questions of the whole Archandroid project: why is she doing this?  Because the world sucks.  The world hurts, the world is unfair, and most importantly, the world is our creation.  The world is not the same as the Earth (the material realm we live in) or the Cosmos (the sum of all experiences, all places, all thoughts, all of which consist in the All).  The world, quoth Margaret Case in the comic series “Promethea”, is “our systems, our politics, our economies, our ideas of the world…it’s our flags and our banknotes and our border wars”.  The world is how we’ve decided to make use of the places we work in and the resources and people we work with.  And, frankly, we’re not doing a very good job of it.  When companies put profit of their CEOs before well-being of their clients, when countries fight in other countries instead of helping them build, when institutions degrade human beings based on superficial attributes like color or creed or orientation, when people fight or struggle against each other for anything but the common and shared good of themselves, we’re doing it wrong.  It leads to starvation, discrimination, murder, sorrow, grief, and despair.

We need to remember humanity, both that of ourselves and the others around us.  We need to remember that, no matter how much we may dislike someone, they have a mother who gave birth to them, dreams and aspirations that lead them, fears and worries that tie them down.  We need to remember our race, heritage, and value, and we need to reclaim these things.  That’s the entire goal, according to Plotinus, because once we do that we remember who we are, and we remember to work with each other instead of against each other.  Once we awaken to what the world outside our little bubbles can be like, once we get our freedom out of the bind we’ve put it in, only then can we really be free to start working in and on the world, making ours better, and thereby making the shared world we all have better.

I’m adopting that set of lyrics above as a personal litany, a reminder that the world is not perfect and this shows how.  This is a display of the symptoms, not the causes; it’s up to me to figure out what causes underlie why the world sucks and how I can fix the ones I can tackle.  That’s not just my job: that’s the role of any magician.  Hell, that’s the role of any human being.  This is our Job.

Get to Work.

Apropos Perfection

January 17, 2012 By in internet, link Tags: , , , , , , , 2 Comments

So, it’s not apparent to many, but I’ve got a goth streak in me.  If I had the money and the social skill back in middle and high school, you’d’ve seen me dressed in fishnets, spikes, and whatever dregs of the goth subculture was filtering down through Hot Topic down to teens about ten years ago.  Now that I’m halfway done with my student loans and will be free of obligation to pretty much anyone, I might actually explore more of that side of me, fashion and otherwise.  It’s on my todo list to take a walk through my dark side in contemplation before too long; I might just tack this onto my ever-growing list of NY NY tasks.  Also, I’m considering an industrial piercing in my right ear and a transverse lobe piercing in my left, and this is from the guy without any body modifications whatsoever.

Anyway, I recently got hooked on more industrial and EBM-styles of music again, and I just discovered Aesthetic Perfection.  Besides having the most awesome style ever, this song has very strong parallels to my current practice.  Talk about reclaiming one’s race, heritage, and value as a human being.

One day, I pray, I’ll be a human being; stay with me, and have faith that I can change for the world.  It almost sounds like something I could tack onto my nightly Headless Rite practice.