Banishing The Pentagram Myths

Awesome video and explanation about the use of lesser pentagram rituals in the original GD by Nick Farrell:

Magick not working?

I have noticed a lot of people who used to practice occultism are now against it, saying it doesn't work and it's all in our heads. I have already written an article about the psychology paradigm and its pitfalls so I would like to link you there. For the rest of this article I am going to write a set of conditions you should follow for your practice to have fruits.

Also, if your operation goes awry, write it to your journal as well, for example if you mispronounce some name, if you forget some move or simply when you are just not feeling it, write it all down. That way you will get doubts out of your head and later when checking results you can say: "Ok, I didn't do A and B and the operation failed" or: "I forgot to do A and I did B instead of C, yet the operation worked, so A and B might not be as important".

Keep a journal
I have written this over million times now, yet some people still don't get the hint. Journal helps you to remember things better, track your progress, track your results for later analysis AND it gives you important stimuli for times when you are in doubt. A journal is a must for every occultist.

Steady practice
People who quit Magick tend to have very intense, but shortlived practices. Hours of meditations for practiced for 1 month at most. It is better to meditate daily 5 minutes for a full year than meditate 2+ hours for 2 weeks. Steady practice is really important as you cannot boil water if you keep putting it off the stove.

Steady practice also allows to create a habit of doing Magick, that is also very important for the change of perspective I have mentioned in article "Defeating theory, part III". Also if you practice isn't steady, you shouldn't consider that everyone has the same problems you do.

Have fun
What I have noticed a lot in those who over-practice is they hate their practices. They hate doing the daily routine they chose for themselves. Your practice should be enjoyable, have fun. If your practice starts boring you, change it a bit, experiment with new things and always make sure to track it.

Integrate
People also claim they do not have time for steady practice. Of course you do have time, a normal person sleeps for about 7 to 9 hours, that still gives us 17 to 15 hours of waking time. Not only that, but also a lot of practices can be integrated into the mundane life. For example in the "Sex and Magick" article I have mentioned a practice you can do every time you sit. Similarly you can take a 5 minutes of your lunch time for meditation. During lunch you can also practice conscious eating and drinking (mentioned in Magickal Curriculum). During boring meetings you can practice telekinesis on your cup of coffee. The point is that Magick should become the integral part of your life, not something you add to your already existing schedule.

Avoid unneeded reductionism
I have heard that a lot from quitters. "I don't need to do the death posture, just focusing on the sigil does the work for me". Or "I don't need to draw sigils, I will just focus on my wish and via Law of Attraction the universe manifest my desires". They also tend to argue with others about using "pointless" rituals. Later such person quits and says that Magick doesn't work. Well, are you sure Magick doesn't work when you never tried it?

I am not saying that modification and reduction aren't needed, I am chaote, after all. But this method of working should be done AFTER you already had some visible and verifiable results, AFTER you got your feet wet in the rivers of Magick. I have it hard to look at, when someone claims about how many things are not needed in Magick, not much because of them, but because of their readers. These people tend to find followers quite quickly. People who believe them and believe in their words. Imagine the betrayal when such a person, person viewed as the spark of light in the moments of darkness, turns out to be quitter and claims that Magick doesn't work.

To explain this a little better I will return to my original "boiling water" example. Normal and educated reductionism says you do not need to salt the water and you can still boil it. Or you can omit the lid of the pot and still boil the water, it will take longer time and more water will vaporize and get lost, but you will boil it. Uneducated and inexperieced point of view usually leads to "you don't need the pot or the stove to boil the water", so in one case a cold water will keep sitting in the pot doing nothing and in the other you will pour water right on the stove, effectively putting of the flame.

Keep an open mind
Belief is one of the most important aspects. The belief in success of your operation is vital for your Magick to work. And such a believe must be limitless. Now, I am not saying you should believe whatever you want and don't have any doubts at all. All I say is everything has its time. Don't be negative before and during the operation. But during the analysis of results be a little skeptical, it's actually needed to avoid the comfirmation bias (the very same comfirmation bias that reductionists suffer during their early stages).

Sex and Magick

Sex in Magick and Magick in sex
Sex and Magick runs together for a really long time. There was always something mystical about sexual intercourse and the fact that we can actually make our own human descendants. Also considering some recent news (Kanye's debt for example), I think breeding should be something you have to deserve first.

Anyway, the use of sex in Magick was destined to come sooner or later. First of all, orgasm itself is a perfect mind-state for the operation, there is this tiny window where all thought processes get numb and you suddenly become concentrated at just one point, with no feeling of time. At that one point you exist just in the presence. Another asset is the physical exhaustion which gives the feeling that some energy was spent somewhere. This feeling allows you to believe some work was done towards the desired goal and more importantly that some potent energy was released toward the desired outcome.

Another great thing about Sex Magick is that most adults have sex (or masturbate), which means we do already have some opportunity to perform our Magick, we just have to use it properly. Who would say we could actually mix work with pleasure and even call it multitasking, right?

The scope of this article
I am going to try to be as general as possible so this article is useful for both men and women. Unfortunately I am just a man and my experience comes mainly from the male standpoint so I can e.g. describe the male retention practice but I don't know much about its female counterpart, sorry for that.

Something I do know about were e.g. Crowley's countless attempts to create hommunculi (artificial humans or humans with artificial souls) but I personally find this thing disturbing and I am not going to describe any of that. If you wish to know about it, it can be found in Liber Agape and I am pretty sure that K. Grant also wrote something on the topic as he inherited a lot of  A. Crowley's possessions.

The retention
The retention of sperm is originally a tantric practice (so called western tantra, maybe). The retention means that you are not allowed to ejaculate as it was believed the sperm contains vital fluids that would be lost otherwise. There were many methods how to avoid this loss including eating the white goo to let the energy re-enter the system. Well, I don't want to underestimate the drive of my male readers but just in case I will share another working method with you (despite celibacy).

It is possible for a man to have orgasm without the ejaculation thanks to the little muscles on the bridge between your genitals and your a-hole (or simply behind the balls to be more exact). It is the same muscle that allows you to interrupt the stream while you pee (this works for women, too, more about it later). If you press this muscle during orgasm you will stop your semen on the way out, meaning it will not exit your body, that's the simple way of doing this.

The harder way for the retention is to actually train the muscles. You should be able to stop your pee and the very same way to stop the stream is also the way how to train the muscle, just flex it and hold it as long as you can (not while peeing). Few weeks of training should be enough to strengthen the grip and allow you to stop the semen from exiting simply by locking it there. It is also needless to say that women have these muscles too, they are not very helpful for retention, but if a woman has trained these muscles, she will enjoy sex way more (or so I was told).

Another benefit of this practice is that it is nearly invisible, whenever you are sitting or standing in line you can simply lock in the muscles and hold, no one is going to notice (unless you stand really weird, in that case you look like you need to pee). Anyway, this allows you to practice anytime you want.

Using the sexual energy
This article wouldn't really be complete if I didn't add any way how to use this harnessed energy. The most simple way, of course, is masturbation. The prepared sigil of any kind is presented to the unconscious mind during the orgasm/ejaculation to embed desire into it. Of course how the sigil is presented depends on its type. Visual sigils are hold before the eyes, words of power are called out loud (or at least silenced), gestures are kept at the eye's level (don't try making the gesture with the same hand you are masturbating with, that would be weird).

Regarding visual sigils, some people recommend to let the load go right on it, I would rather say to keep them in the front of your eyes or visualize them and let the goo go somewhere safe. Only reason why you would want to stain the sigil would be a servitor or amulet creation, but for general work? Rather try to be tidy and reasonable :).

Working with the partner
Things I have mentioned above work with a partner, as well. It doesn't really depend whether during a traditional sex or what method of stimulation you use. You can also hide the fact about what you are doing, but frankly it is better your partner knows and you both focus on the same goal (sigils placed around the room can do the trick without exposing much).

I would also like to share one method of servitor creation for which you need a man and a woman (finally some occult reason to get social). A. Crowley has believed that a mixture of semen and women's secrets form a strong fluidum, a philosopher's fluidic condenser to be exact. Crowley also mentioned certain parameters a sex should have to make this condenser stronger. To name a few:
-long foreplay
-sexual intercourse should take 1 hour at minimum
-after all "work" is done, penis should be kept in vagina for about 15 minutes so keep the condenser in to make sure it's "baked" properly.

After that all is done you simply let it out on the prepared servitor's sigil to charge it or into a jar to store it for later use (here the knowledge of creation of fluidic condensers come in real handy).

Importance of dreams in Magick

There are still people who underestimate the importance of dreams in Magick so I am going to explain why are dreams really important and how to atually work with them.

Consciousness versus unconsciousness
There are many ways how to define this but let's just say that your personal reality is split into what you are conscious about and what you are not conscious about. The amount of influence of your conscious and unconscious parts on your life is about 50:50, and of course consciousness also affects your unconsciousness and vice versa.

Unconsciousness does a sort of a compensation work for your daily life, it's a very cleverly designed process, but sometimes the fragment of our psyche (usually traumatic one) gets supressed from the conscious and so transfers into your un-c where it becomes more or less autonomous. This then turns into neurosis and affects your conscious life (sorry I am simplifying so much).

Another work of unconsciousness is to gather and analyze details we are not normally aware of, it can be the most subtle mixture of various physical senses up to the metaphysical perception (e.g. telepathy). This allows our consciousness to be much less occupied with seemingly unimportant details but it can also inform us back if one or more of these "unimportant" details sum up to some important event or a piece of information, but for that to happen, it also needs a communication channel, a link between conscious and unconscious.

What are dreams
Dreams are the most direct communication channel between consciousness and unconsciousness. With their help un-c can actually give us its experience of our waking lives but from its perspective. Due to the nature of dreams we split them into following categories:
-compensating
-reducting
-prospective
-reactive

A compensating dream tries to inform us of something we are omitting even while it is important, it shows us what we should be focused on or what we are forgetting.

A reducting dream is a sort of a healing mechanism. It repeats a bad experience over and over again in a symbolic form till we get used to it and it doesn't appear as horrifying anymore.

Prospective dream can give us insight into the future. It is not a prophetic dream as in a prophetic dream all details would have to match with the real future event but it can still give us enough details to spawn a lot of curiosity.

Reactive dream is like a reductive dream, except in the case of reductive dream understanding the symbology and interpretation of the dream automatically stops the repetition. In case of reactive dreams there is no symbology af these are a direct copy of past traumatic experiences. Reactive dreams usually appear as the result of a traumatic experience from war, etc.

There are more categories and subcategories but I am going to simplify it on these four for now.

Why are dreams important
The health isn't just physical or psychological, both aspects are part of the sum and both aspects also influence the sum, so a psychological problem can influence our physical state just like a physiological problem can influence our mental state. Dreams as the direct output from the unfiltered unconsciousness give us a decent overview of both the mental and physical state and as such dreams are a very helpful aid for the introspection (practice of self-discovery). Introspection was heavily propagated by F. Bardon in his work but even nowadays many occultists do not care about its benefits.

How to interpret dreams
In case of dreams we have a double symbology, one is shared for all of us despite of our race or culture and one is individual for us and it's based on our personal lifes, experiences and character traits.

This could lead to the idea that by understanding just the symbology we can easily interpret our dreams, which would be false and gave us a very general meanings at best. Even the best dream interpreter in the world will give a wrong definition if he asks a wrong question.

The right question in dream analysis isn't what does the dream mean, but why did I have this dream and where should it lead me to. If you ask yourself these questions while analyzing your dreams, you will start to understand where I am going. The dreams try to either warn us, inform us or prepare us for something, that's why it's not important what does the symbology in the dream mean (well, it is sorta important but do not overestimate it), but why we had the dream to begin with.

Chaos Not 4 Kidz

A little project in development of mine, trying to teach Magick in an humorous form.