Magian Rumination

Contribute to the Arbatel Link Digest!

noreply@blogger.com (The Scribbler) — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 22:41:00 +0000

Many people come to this blog every day doing Arbatel research. It occurred to me that people scouring the Internet for Arbatel material might have some juicy juicy links I didn't manage to find during the several days I spent massaging the search engines diligently. I don't think there are a lot of strays out there, because I was thorough.

If this is the case, if you have found an interesting Arbatel link that I haven't mentioned in my Link Digest, please donate it to the Digest. Either write it into the comments, or send it to the email address in my profile.

I am offering a premium. I'm offering you some connectivity. If you donate a link, I will credit you with the donation in the Digest listing, including a link to your blog or business. My blog gets enough traffic that you'd get some hits from it. Deal?

Not an Apology

noreply@blogger.com (The Scribbler) — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 21:06:00 +0000

Or: the story teller returns!

I got over myself a long time ago. I don't suffer from delusions that people thrash about rending their garments in grief and suffering when they check their feed readers and discover that I STILL haven't posted new material on my blog. There are PLENTY of good magic blogs out there to take up the slack. God knows, I have a devil of a time even KEEPING UP with all the magic blogs I've decided to follow. And I haven't even subscribed to any new ones for at least half a year.

What can I say? I just didn't feel like I had much to tell. And whenever I did, there just wasn't time because of work or family.

So I'm not about to apologize for not regularly publishing since... what... last spring? Wow. That's quite a hiatus. Suffice it to say lots of water has flowed under ye olde bridge. Lots of water.

But! Now I have some tales to tell. And the writing bug has bit again! Hard. So... prepare yourselves. I am about to bend your ears with narratives of: Scribbler being unexpectedly kicked up the ladder into management; Scribbler using his sorcerous ways in the corporate workplace; Scribbler getting heavily involved with a magical Catholic saint; Scribbler dabbling in entheogens; Scribbler spending much time lurking about awesome Catholic churches and talking with above-mentioned saint... and much, much more!

Stay tuned.

Arabatel Resource Digest Becomes Search-Engine Magnet!

noreply@blogger.com (The Scribbler) — Mon, 01 Aug 2011 11:54:00 +0000

You don't have to take it from me. Go ahead: Google the term "Arbatel", and my Everything Arbatel link digest is number three on the hit list. Just goes to show you how many people there are out there (from all over the world, as my blog stats show me) who are scouring through the scant information on the Internet, trying to learn about the Arbatel of Magic.

My blog stats register a steady "thwack-thwack-thwack" of daily hits to this page. And there's a reason for it. You won't find this much Arbatel-related information anywhere else on the web. And you don't have to take my word for that, either. Go search! You'll see.

New Link on "Everything Arbatel" page

noreply@blogger.com (The Scribbler) — Thu, 21 Jul 2011 14:09:00 +0000

If you work with the Olympic Spirits, you might be interested in taking a look at a set of professionally rendered printable seals published by Asterion on his Asterion's Occult Art blog. The posting with these seals has been added to my "Everything Arbatel" links page.

By Jove! I think I've got it!

noreply@blogger.com (The Scribbler) — Thu, 21 Apr 2011 11:14:00 +0000

I am working with a group of magicians on manifesting the Jupiter vibrations in our world. The international group came into being, began working, and started manifesting like... like... well, like a bolt out of the blue. I've never seen anything like it. The Sky Father seems to like our style, and he's showering inspiration on us.

Everyone involved performs a Jupiter rite in their own respective sanctums on the day and hour of Jupiter, and we communicate over the digital aether concerning results and plans.

So this morning I wake up psyched, thinking: It's Jupiter day! Yes!

Although I dress fairly nicely for work anyway -- since I work in that sort of office, and this is Mitteleuropa after all -- I decided to be a little more elegant today, and put on my finely striped blue and white shirt with my blue blazer and a pair of pleated grey wool slacks. Feeling very noble, indeed.

As I walked to the bus stop, I drank in the beautiful blue dome of the sky and contemplated how blue became associated with the king of the gods, and how kings have used the symbolism to resonate with that (think: ermine-trimmed blue velvet cape trailing behind the sovereign).

On the bus I was reading a book (Rufus Opus's Talisman Maintenance, as a matter of fact) on my Android phone when I suddenly noticed we'd arrived at the stop where I transfer to the Metro. I quickly stuffed my phone in my pocket and bolted out the door before it closed. I heard a voice calling to me from a bus window, "Sir! Sir!" Once he saw he had my attention, he tossed the black leatherette pouch in which I keep my phone at my feet. I waved and thanked him as the bus sped off, and there was a genuine moment of connection as our eyes met. Amazing. Considering the usual demographic of Budapest bus riders, I was surprised it didn't just get pocketed. The man was moved to be of service to me.

I walked across the square on which the main downtown office of Citibank is located, and frowned, as I usually do, at the fact that there isn't an unpaved surface with 50 meters of the bank's front entrance. Since that's where I do my banking, I've always wondered how I can get some sort of dirt associated with the bank to use in financial spells, but I'm still stumped. So, there I was momentarily standing and contemplating the bank when my eyes wandered over to an employee entrance of the same building and I caught sight of the way the stylized numeral above the door looked like a Jupiter symbol. Dang! I had to take a picture of that.

The Gate of Jupiter?

Is it a mere "coincidence" that hours later I read that Frater RO had published an ebook last night called Gate of Jupiter? Hmmmm.

Walking further, I passed through a colonnade that I have traversed many times, but only now did the wrought-iron railings between the columns catch my eye.

Agrippa was here

"Bloody hell!" I thought, "If this keeps up, I'm likely to break my neck falling over a Leda and the Swan sculpture, and have my eyes pecked out by eagles." I jest of course. I was exceedingly pleased.

When the synchronicities are hitting this fast and hard, you know you're right on target.

What's a Man to Do?

noreply@blogger.com (The Scribbler) — Thu, 14 Apr 2011 16:21:00 +0000

It must be something in the air. An alignment of planets or something like that. Political frustration. The struggle between the free spirit and the mechanisms of control are intensifying. Even RO is not unaffected.

I’ve been working on another posting for some days now (OK, more than a week), but because of a passionate discussion I had with Very Aries this morning, I’ve decided to put that on the back burner in order to share something with you that’s boiling away like mad on the front burner.

As many of you know, I have lived in Hungary for nearly twenty years now. Various alarming things have happened over those years in politics, in the economy, and in the cultural sphere. On different occasions our more liberal friends, or those with greater material expectations or those with less opportunities have either emigrated or threatened to emigrate. I always maintained things weren’t as bad as people built them up to be (Hungarians are famous for their pessimism and skepticism), and said I’d still prefer to be here than anywhere else.

Last spring they elected a new government here that brought back a ruling party and a prime minister -- Viktor Orbán -- that had already governed for one term between 1998 and 2002. Even during that term Orbán’s opportunistic, populist nationalism and drive to consolidate his power at any cost was frightening, but his majority in parliament was slim and his coalition partners were unstable, so the damage he could do at that time was limited. And it was the late nineties: the markets were buoyant, everyone was making money, and nobody really cared.

But then the next election, that all the polls said he would win, he barely lost to the socialists. And that twisted him and his party a little.

The socialists were very accommodating to his plans and proceeded to be ineffective, incompetent and corrupt for the next eight years, bringing the country to the brink of financial ruin. All other parties had imploded by then, so the country voted overwhelmingly for Orbán and his party, as the only force that could take decisive action, giving him a two-thirds majority.

In Hungary it only takes a two-thirds majority to alter the constitution. Orbán went whole-hog and announced that they were going to write a new constitution. This is tantamount to creating a new state, shaped to one’s political vision, with no input from anyone else.

Imagine the Republican Party getting the chance to write a new US constitution from scratch, and pass it themselves. Scary, huh?

The document, which is due to be rubber stamped by parliament next week, is downright Orwellian in its bizarre self contradictions and ideological vagueries . Judges and prosecutors are going to be able to make shit up as they go along when it comes time to interpret it.

And the Orbanistas are going for broke: protection of life from conception, institutionalising Christian values, giving parliament influence over the national bank, declaring marriage to be purely between a man and a woman,... it goes on. And every day they pass more legislation that gives them more and more control over education, culture, the media, the courts, health care... it goes on. We’re heading towards a sort of soft fascism, and the EU is impotently watching as it happens.

For the first time since I arrived here in 1992, I am considering leaving. I don’t want my children to grow up in a totalitarian state, and it has become conceivable that things could go that way.

But I don’t want to go. First of all, I love this country. And I’m 52 and have a hard time imagining starting a new career elsewhere. I don’t want to go back to the USA, because there’s no opportunity there (ironically, once known worldwide as “the land of unlimited opportunity”), and civil liberties and political culture have been on a steady decline ever since Reagan. No, America is not an option.

And besides that, I’m a Rosicrucian. If you’ve read your Fama, you know that a Rosicrucian stands for using the mystical knowledge of the ages for a “general reform” of society. Sooner or later in life you have to decide where you are going to take your stand and make a difference in the world. You have to be involved with your community. An aikido teacher I trained with on several occasions in the 1980s once said something to me that made a deep impression. He said, “If you can’t find a way to get involved in the community you’re in, then you should find another one to get involved in.”

I have good friends and colleagues here. My kids go to a Waldorf school we love (which is threatened by proposed legislation). I am involved in the Rosicrucian Order here and serve in the temple. Twenty years is a long time. I use the powers I’ve learned from arcane teachings to promote all of these things and more. I visualize my neighborhood becoming more beautiful and harmonious. I try to nourish my colleagues with love. I’m committed.

But there are times one should admit it’s time to cut and run. It hasn’t reached that point yet, but it’s a real milestone that I’ve considered the time just might come. When they knock on your door at 3am, it's already too late. Time for some serious divination.

RIP Liz!

noreply@blogger.com (The Scribbler) — Wed, 23 Mar 2011 14:00:00 +0000

She'll always be Cleo to me, and Dick will always be Mark Antony. On this occasion, let me dedicate this silly spontaneous verse to the lady who played our favorite Greek-Egyptian monarch.

I'd readily clasp an asp
to my bosom for this woman.

Belief vs Willing Suspension of Disbelief

noreply@blogger.com (The Scribbler) — Thu, 17 Mar 2011 15:16:00 +0000

The latest meme to spread it’s viral fecundity in our blogosphere ghetto has been that very popular whipping boy of magicians who “know better”; the notion that belief is an essential element of success in magic. Oddly, I find myself (mostly) in agreement with the very adamant Patrick Dunn on this question. (Truth be told: having studied languages and literature myself, I find I am very often in agreement -- or at least in harmony -- with the post-modern magician’s views. But one is most often motivated to speak out when one disagrees, right?)

I have to preface this with the acknowledgement that what Patrick and others are often referring to as spells that work without believing anything are things like “Paint this sigil with guacamole on the door of a dyslexic taxi driver, at midnight on the second full moon after the first Dead concert of spring.” These things just work for some reason. What I’m going to address now is magic that involves visualization. I know some people cringe to consider visualization in the category of magic, but it indisputably fits Uncle Al’s definition, doesn’t it?

I do the magic that involves all the bells and whistles (wand, incense, sigils, incantation, etc.), but I also frequently use simple visualization, and have successfully employed it for decades.

I strongly suspect that this misunderstanding about belief comes from the New Age-y twist that the art of visualization has acquired in recent decades. As I’m sure nearly everyone reading this blog knows, visualization is a technique as old as the human race itself. It is a means of affecting forces flowing into manifestation, and it is a vehicle for the mind to transcend to “higher worlds” beyond the material realm. This is Henry Corbin’s Imaginal Realm.

In visualization you create a living, moving scene of the desired outcome, incorporating every psychic sense you can muster. If you are visualizing a vacation in a remote hotel with a beautiful garden, then you should smell the roses, hear the bees buzzing as they fly between the flowers, feel the soft grass under your feet, etc. And then there is one element of visualization that is very essential: adding emotion. You should feel the joy and pleasure of being in this desired circumstance.

This is where I think people get confused. Vividly experiencing your visualization and allowing your entire awareness to be absorbed by it, and electrifying it with your emotions has nothing to do with believing it will work. But there is something one has to avoid at all costs: allowing oneself to entertain doubts. To a great extent, a large part of magical practices are a form of theater. You perform a symbolic “drama” to create a pattern you want replicated in the material world. Visualization is an internal drama.

Theater and cinema require the audience to engage in “willing suspension of disbelief”. That doesn’t mean that you actually have to believe the guy on the stage with the skull in his hand is really the prince of Denmark. What it means is that you shouldn’t distract yourself with thoughts like, “Why am I watching a guy in a chintzy period costume recite lines in verse about something I know never happened or never will?” Hard to get much out of a play that way.

To effectively perform visualization you have to dismiss all other thoughts from your mind other than the visualization itself. So the opposite of disbelief is not belief. The opposite of disbelief is engagement, enthusiasm, abandon. Making yourself believe something is a hopeless endless mind game. “OK, I believe this. I guess. Although, logically I don’t really think it’s possible. But I have to believe it to make it work. So... I believe it. I DO believe it. I DO believe it. I DO believe it. Really. I do. I think.” Distraction City. If you really do it right, if you really work with one-pointed concentration, you don’t have time to consider whether you believe it or not. And if such thoughts creep into your mind, you dismiss them (this is where a bit of meditation practice is very useful), because you just don’t have time for that crap.

So don’t waste your time worrying about whether you believe the magic you are doing. Just throw yourself into it and “enflame yourself with prayer.”

And while you’re at it, enjoy the show.

Why magic is like learning to play guitar

noreply@blogger.com (The Scribbler) — Wed, 09 Mar 2011 23:47:00 +0000

A guest posting by Pseudogordon Budapestensis*

God was it embarrassing!

You have to picture this, all you magical dudes and dudettes: there I was ensconced at a table in the Cafe Angelica, playing my iPad and my Nexus cell phone with VanCliburn virtuosity, planning the next jet-setting, globetrotting, multimedia feat of awesomeness I will unleash upon an unsuspecting and largely undeserving world. I was basking in the glow of my worldliness and the admiration of the blond real-estate dealer at the next table, in her candy-apple red suit with a flashy orange and yellow neck scarf, who was was leading a pheromone-drunk Russian investor by the nose. I could see he was going to buy whatever she was selling. It was awesome.

Red Suit kept smiling approvingly as I was breezing through tables and graphics and typing text and binding them together into a formidable Gesamtkunstwerk of a presentation that would make Chuck Saatchi look like an amateur. I desperately wanted to unbutton the collar of the Yves shirt and loosen the Boss tie I bought yesterday, but knew it would put a dent in my look (you have to suffer to be awesome).

And that’s when it happened.

This fifty-something bloke in wrinkled black chinos and a blue and black herring-bone tweed jacket that had seen better days came shambling into the room with his tastelessly overstuffed black leather briefcase, and then crossed straight over to my table. He stood opposite me and fixed me with his black-ringed but very intense blue eyes and said, in his American-ish mid-Atlantic accent “PB, we gotta talk.”

“Do I know you?”

Bloke looked oddly familiar, but I couldn’t place him.

“You should. You’re my alter-ego after all.”

Bloke sat down at my table without being invited and banged me in the shin with his briefcase.

“Ouch! What do you carry in there? Bricks?”

“Look! I have some work for you.”

“But I have a presentation to give tomorrow!”

Bloke just waved his hand dismissively and went on.

“Fact is, I’ve gotten tired of the whole energy debate that’s been sucking up all the oxygen in our blogosphere lately, and my weekly deadlines are wearing me out. But I got a brilliant idea the other day, and I thought it was just the sort of thing you’re good at writing.”

I cast a quick glance over to the next table. They were examining floor plans together, and the Russian guy was artlessly using the opportunity to squeeze close to her and to “accidentally” touch her hand while pointing at things on the plan. She looked up at me, and a faintly quizzical expression colored her face, expressing the thought, “Who is that decidedly unfashionable codger at your table,” Oh, God. How unawesome! I prayed that someone would call from Paris right then so I could ostentatiously speak French on the cell phone and recapture some of my suavity.

Bloke was unrelenting.

“You see, my wife gave me a guitar for my birthday, and I’ve been doing internet tutorials, and...”

“And what’s this got to do with me? I don’t have time for this now. I have a presentation tomorrow at...”

“No you don’t. There is no presentation. You’re a projection of myself. Whether you like it or not, you have to do what I want.”

I felt like he had just poured a bucket of cold water over my head. Now I remembered this guy. He’s the one who uses me to fantacize about his lost youth. It’s humiliating to be created and used that way.

“...and while I’ve been learning and practicing” Bloke went on “it’s hit me that learning guitar is a metaphor for, well, just about anything. And I got to thinking about those cheesy, um, er, I mean ‘commercial’ service articles you’re so good at whipping out. You know: the kind of thing general circulation publications love so much, like ‘Three Ways to Recycle Leftover Paella,’ or ‘How to Politely Tell Your Boss He’s a Hopeless Weenie’. I was thinking of a posting called ‘Why Magic is Like Learning to Play Guitar’. What do you think? It’s just your sort of thing.”

I absent-mindedly moved some objects around on the iPad screen, half-heartedly pretending I was still “working”, while trying to think of a way to talk my way out of this lame project. Red Suit and the Russian had, in the meantime, ordered champagne. It seems a deal had been made and they were celebrating.

“Oh! I almost forgot” Bloke said, and began cramming around in his jacket. While searching the pockets he emptied their contents onto the table top: several crumpled tissues, a pen drive, a tube of lip balm, no less than two orthodontically correct pacifiers, a Lego brick, two small notebooks, a butane lighter, two tea lights (one partially burnt), a wood-bead rosary...

Red Suit was laughing raucously and starting to get physical with the Russian. A waiter appeared at our table with a small bottle of champagne and two glasses. “Complements of the gentleman” the waiter said, tilting his head toward their table as he popped the cork, after which he poured us each a glass and discretely disappeared.

“Ah! Here it is!”

Bloke produced a dog-ear piece of folded paper and began flattening it out on the table with the side of his hand. I impatiently gestured that he should remove all this rubbish from our table, which Bloke completely ignored.

“Now these are the notes I made while riding on the Metro this morning...”

“I haven’t actually agreed to...”

“I think you’ll easily be able to flesh them out.”

And then he slid the paper across the table to me, stood up, and began stuffing things back into his jacket pockets.

“You really don’t expect me to...”

He abruptly cut me off by thrusting his fist toward me with his index finger pointing straight up. He fixed me with those grey blue eyes and authoritatively whispered “Yes I do. By tonight at midnight. Oh. And one more thing. No black swans. They’re getting to be a cliché.”

At this he picked up his briefcase, took a quick sip of the champagne, turned toward the door and headed away. I heard the cell phone in his pocket play The Rolling Stones’ “Little T and A”. He stopped at the entrance to the room and pulled it out of his pocket.

“Hi sweetheart... Mmhhmmm... I just had a little business to attend to on the way home... Mmhhhmmm... a kilo of flour and a carton of sour cream... Anything else?”

He turned and fixed me again with his grey-blue eyes and menacingly mouthed “midnight”. Then he turned away and left. I could hear his voice trailing away in the distance.

So there I sat, alone. The only evidence that he’d been here was a half-empty champagne glass with lip marks on it, and a pacifier he’d missed while gathering up his things. Oh. And the wrinkled piece of paper with his scribbled notes.

Red Suit and the Russian were leaving arm in arm. As they passed my table, the Russian placed his business card on my table and gave my shoulder a friendly pat. So now I was all alone. I picked up the notes and read them. And like a dutiful alter-ego, set to work for my alpha personality. So, without further ado, here is:

Why magic is like learning to play guitar

So, Bloke (Hereinafter Scribbler, since that’s how you lot know him) seems to think this is profound. I’ll humour him and parse this out in the classic list of seven. (Cheesy! Commercial! Why, the nerve of him!)

1. The Danger of Getting Obsessed. The thrill of actually being able to play a chord or two and get the guitar to make pretty sounds that really “sound like something” infected Scribbler with the desire to sit for hours a day plinking away at the ol’ git-fiddle. But he was wise enough to realize that, not only would the fingertips on his left hand turn into minced meat, but he could easily burn out his enthusiasm and lose interest in a few weeks. One must pace oneself for the long haul. Learning guitar is a marathon, not a sprint.

The same goes for magic. It is all too easy to spend all your spare time reading “many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore”, and planning your next ritual, potion, incense, talisman, etc. But you have to be careful. Magic is like a strong spice. You add bits of it here and there into your life to make it into an interesting and delicious dish. Add too much at one time, and it can become unpalatable and inedible. And you become a bore. Nobody likes someone who always talks about the same thing all the time.

2. Daily Practice. For skating it’s school figures. For Japanese martial arts it’s katas. For the beginning guitar player it’s finger exercises, or scales, or strumming patterns. For magic it’s visualization, or memorizing god names, or pranayama, or basic rituals (depending on what path you are following). But you won’t get anywhere unless you do whatever you have set out to do with regularity. It can be boring. As a matter of fact, the person who succeeds in their given discipline is the one who works through the boredom by applying one-pointed concentration or finds a calm settling of the being in the regular practice.

3. Theoretical knowledge and practical. You can spend years in institutions of higher education studying musicology, even earning PhDs with dissertations that nobody but a handful of scholars with a similar interest will understand. Music is a bottomless subject. And there are many theoretical and abstract things (e.g. how half steps and whole steps make up the seven-note scale) that have great impact on how easily or how well you learn the guitar. And (in theory) the greater your knowledge of the structure and theory of music, the more subtle and nuanced your skill at playing will be. But the relationship is not one-to-one, and you begin to get diminishing returns for the time and effort you put into theoretical study (at least in the short run). But you also won’t get very far focusing exclusively on hands-on practice of technique. You have to decide on what is the right balance for you and your purposes.

Do you see the parallel to magic (think of a spectrum from high-minded armchair magician to spiritually shallow-but-deadly effective sorcerer)?

4. Expensive pass times. You can spend a bleeding fortune on the supplies for both of them if you aren’t careful. Let me see: capo, carrying case, guitar stand, electronic tuner, music stand, song books... And then there’s: herbs and oils, ready-made incenses, various papers and pens for talismans, metals for talismans, candles of all sizes and colors, dagger, notebooks, crystal ball, gemstones, books, tarot decks, wood burning tool...

5. As Plato said... They both quickly make you aware of how much you don’t know, and how much there is to learn.

6. Incremental rewards. Within a few days Scribbler learned a perfectly dreadful three-chord version of Bob Marley’s “Three Little Birds” that he’s willing to inflict on any family member who isn’t moving through the room fast enough. But the harmony between the vocal and the guitar when he switches from the A chord to the E chord in the verse gives him goose bumps every time, and the satisfaction that he is making music. If, during your early involvement with magic you sincerely engage in some sort of regular practice (not just reading) in your magical training, you will get some sort of result, however subtle, but still perceptible. And it will give you goose bumps.

7. Black Swan. I don’t care what Bloke says. If he wants me to write this for him, there’s going to be a bleeding black swan in it. And, I mean, there’s a black swan here as big as an elephant. The day before his birthday, Scribbler had no idea he was going to get a guitar. But look at him now! He’s rearranging his schedule to have a little time to practice every day. He’s surfing for videos of old songs he knows to see how hard the guitar part is. He’s stopping to watch street musicians and observing how their left hands form chords.

And he has no idea where this will all lead.

OK, Bloke. I’ve done my duty. I’m emailing this to you and then buggering off to another cafe where... I. Hope. You. Won’t. Find. Me.

By the way. The Russian placed his business card on my table face down. When I turned it over, just now, I saw a large long-necked dark-feathered water fowl in the upper right-hand corner. The name of his firm is Black Swan Investments.

I think I’ll give him a call tomorrow. Maybe I’ll show him my presentation.

*a posting à clef

Take Heart Energy Advocates!

noreply@blogger.com (The Scribbler) — Wed, 02 Mar 2011 13:19:00 +0000

There are still faint echoes of the Great Energy Debate reverberating around our corner of the blogosphere. A little over a week ago Patrick Dunn and Jason Miller took up the cudgels and duked it out. (Like gentlemen, of course. Marquess of Queensbury and all that. Though Jason did accuse Patrick of a shot below the belt with his straw man argument.)

Patrick is a real purist. Not only does he have quibbles with the semantics of the term “energy” – which many agree exists in some way, but shouldn’t be called by that name – but insists that it plays no part in magic whatsoever.

For all of the energy doubters out there, and perhaps to lend support to the energy-positive crowd out there, let me give you something to chew on.

Several years ago I discovered the Heartmath website, and have visited it many times since to read the many articles and publications available there. It has made a profound impact on the way I perceive the nature of the human vehicles, that is: our many bodies.

Although I’m not necessarily the biggest fan of scientific research to prove the truth of mystical doctrines (I am satisfied with the anecdotal proof that they work for me and people I know), I am highly impressed and appreciative of the work the Institute of Heart Math has done. Through their studies, these doctors and scientist are providing proof that the human heart is everything it is reputed to be in myth, art, folk wisdom and esoteric doctrines. And then some.

And this isn’t fuzzy pseudo science either. These are full-blown double-blind experiments using standardized scientific measuring instruments, analyzed with accepted statistical methods, and producing repeatable results.

In this posting I’m not going to cite every article or scientific paper I draw from. If you really want to check the sources, they’re all on the HeartMath website.

But, now, with that introduction out of the way, let me tell you some of the discoveries and concepts these folks publish on their site.

--- The greatest electromagnetic field generated in the human body does not -- as one might think -- come from the brain. Not by a long shot. That honor goes to the heart. As a matter of fact, the heart projects a field that instruments can detect several meters away from the body. The effects of this field on a glass of water can be detected several meter away from the body.
--- The heart is part of our thinking processes. The complexity of its neural system is second only to the brain itself. Not only does evidence show that there is some manner of cognition going on within the heart, research shows that the heart actually regulates the brain through its connections to the hypothalamus. These systems work best when the heart is in charge, telling the brain what to think, rather than the brain running rampant and making the heart malfunction. The brain is supposed to be the servant of the heart, not the other way around.
--- The rhythmic signal broadcast by the heart field serves as a clock to all the cells of the body. All cellular and organ functions react to the pattern of its electromagnetic pulse.
--- When two people are within one another’s heart field, the patterns shown on their EKG readings adapt to one another, that is: features of the one person’s heart rhythms show in the other’s.
--- Well-being is reflected by and induced by what is called “heart coherence”. That is: the more regular the interval between beats, the more regular the elements of the heartbeat, as well as the consistency of the amplitude of the pulses, the better all of the body’s processes function.
---This coherence is measurably induced by thoughts of love for fellow human beings, memories of happiness, and contemplation of beauty, as well as slow, rhythmic, deep breathing. This is the raison d’etre of the Heatmath Institute: to discover practical methods individuals can use to establish ever more coherent heart functioning and to teach these methods to everyone in need. Their track record with improving the quality of life of the people who use their methods is impressive. I have incorporated some of their exercises into my regular routines.
---The proximity of an individual with a very coherent heart rhythm has a measurably beneficial effect on the heart patterns of the persons they are near. But their research has revealed something even more amazing. They have measured this same effect at distances of many miles. They monitored pairs of individuals at great distances from one another. One individual would do exercises to establish greater heart coherence (mostly breathing, visualization and emotional manipulation) and then concentrated on the other individual. The EKG and other readings of the object individual would become more coherent and show elements of the sender’s heart signature.

This is where I ask how this phenomenon can be explained without resort to some sort of psychic “energy” theory. The effects of one heart on another at close range can still be explained by electromagnetism (which is still a very "physical" kind of energy). But 25 miles away? There’s some other kind of energy exchange going on here.

At this point I’d also like to introduce some -- albeit anecdotal -- personal experience.

There is an exercise I learned from Joseph Weed’s book The Wisdom of the Mystic Masters that I have used daily for years. It is simplicity itself, and I have adapted it to several uses and have developed more elaborate versions of it. It works like this:

1. Activate the psychic center of the heart (methods of your choosing).
2. Visualize and feel the heart center projecting a luminous rose-pink cloud around your body.
3. Through an act of will, separate a portion of that cloud and send it to the person/entity/body you wish to benefit. As you see the cloud surrounding your target, feel love in your heart for whom you are sending this heart “energy”.
4. Consider the goal accomplished. Get up and go about your business and avoid dwelling on the thoughts about the exercise you have done.

Depending on the severity of the person’s difficulties (health, financial, marital, etc.) I will do this exercise daily for someone/something (my object was once a kindergarten) for anywhere from one week to three months. Although I occasionally do this service without being asked, I usually ask a person if they would like my metaphysical help. Too much helping without asking is meddling. I have seen results that are nothing less than miraculous. I know one woman who feels undying gratitude for helping her turn her life around. And that’s often what happens.

It seems to “fortify” people. Whatever it was that they might have known (consciously or unconsciously) they really needed to do, once they get this extra boost of vital force/heart energy/love/whatever you want to call it, they seem to gain the strength to see clearly and screw up their courage to tackle their problems. At first I was willing to believe that it was all coincidence, but over the years it has become obvious to me that the odds are against people suddenly happening to get their lives together at the very time I am doing this exercise for them.

The point of this whole posting is that I have a really hard time explaining all these phenomena of the heart without seeing it from an energy perspective. And it’s not just a matter of explaining it or intellectualizing it. Energy is the way I perceive it. There are sensations - both physical and emotional - when the heart is activated and the rose-colored light radiates. There is a sensation of contact when the target is surrounded with the light. I’m not about the begin doubting my own inner perceptions of what’s happening just because someone has a model of what happens in magic that doesn’t take these aspects into account.

To give the Information Model its due: I am certain information plays a role. In order for information (a signal) to be communicated there needs to be a carrier (energy in the form of vibrations) and a pattern encoded into this vibratory energy flow. I’m certain that anyone with well tuned psychic senses, when sensing the influx of energy sent through my exercise, could easy detect that it came from me. That’s because the energy is imprinted with information that is unique to me. I think this is a vital key to the phenomenon.

This also keys into the Spirit Model. Spirits are also embodied in energy vibrating at a very high frequency. We can recognize various spirits because they each have a unique vibratory nature, i.e. they embody different information. The way spirits interact with us is to affect the part of us that vibrates at the same rate/level that they do, i.e. they interact with that particular “body” of ours that is most like them. But since they themselves are physically disembodied, and therefore don’t have the characteristics we are accustomed to associating with individuality and personality, their interaction with us is not subject to the sharp us/them me/it distinction we are comfortable with. This explains the whole “Are they separate from me or a part of my psyche?” debate. The answer is both: they are distinct beings, but when they are interacting with you, the line blurs a bit. The ramifications for the Psychological Model should be obvious.

I ask the ladies and gentlemen of the jury to accept this late entry to the The Great Energy Debate.

The Energy Thing (That's Going Around)

noreply@blogger.com (The Scribbler) — Wed, 16 Feb 2011 20:29:00 +0000

Those blind sages are at it again: grabbing different elephant body parts and variously declaring an elephant to be like a tree, a snake, a wall, a rope, a bag of pomelos (Whoa! Which part did he grab?). Sigh! Elephants are like elephants, guys.

To this day I don't really understand what the fuss is about. Energy model? Spirit model? Information model? Any time I need to explain some magical (or any other) phenomenon to myself, I pick up each of these (and other) lenses and take a squint at what I'm trying to understand. If one of them makes the subject come into clear focus, then that one's the most useful in that situation. Simple as that.

Mind you, "energy" seems to have become, to certain contemporary magical theorists, what "Dead White Men" and the dreaded "canon" have become to outre literary and cultural theorists. (I happen to still treasure a lot of my Dead White Men, such as Faulkner, even if I have greatly broadened my cultural horizons. Come to think of it, I'll be a dead white man some day.)

And I understand the need to deconstruct nineteenth century occultism to make sure we don't fall into some of the traps they fell into. But come on! Babies and bathwater, folks! I'm grateful for the realization that Crowley, Mathers, Waite, and a whole slew of others from that era were deeply flawed people, but I'm not so arrogant as to declare that I didn't learn anything worthwhile from reading them and trying to understand what they were attempting (and often succeeding) to do.

But that's sort of beside the point. We were talking about "energy". In case you're one of the two readers of my blog who don't follow the other blogs in this cyberneighborhood, this all started with this rant (yes, it was a rant) on Frater A.I.T.'s blog, followed by this counter-rant by Frater RO, that was responded to by Jason Miller in this posting, and then counter-posted by DHR Balthazar in this posting. And just in case that's not enough reading already, Jack Faust checked in with his thought-provoking observations in this posting, after which he and Frater A.I.T. (Remember him? He's the one who started this whole thing.) got into a regular yack fest in Jack's comment section.

After all that, I'll do my best to keep myself brief (that'll be the day!).

My basic observation is that your perspective on this will depend on which avenue brought you to magical/mystical practices. For instance, when reading A.I.T.'s blog I noticed his Twitter feed mentioned that he was watching his son's kenpo class, and that he'd trained in kenpo himself. Aha! For those of you who don't know jujitsu from Kawasaki, kenpo is the name of a Japanese martial art that was imported from China --whole cloth-- into Japan in earlier centuries. Some of the sets and moves are nearly identical to traditional forms of wu shu practiced in China to this day. I suspect A.I.T. picked up some of his respect for "energy" from these practices.

I have this background as well. I've learned tai chi, chi kung (which I practice daily), and learned (and taught) aikido for a number of years. I've experienced "energy" in a very real way through these arts. I regularly experience getting up in the morning feeling like death-warmed-over and having a chi kung session transform me into a wild man with sparks jumping off my fingers. When you incorporate these practices into your life, you can't just leave them behind when you shift into "magician mode". It's only natural to explore the ideas of how the circulation of various forces through the many levels of your being (your many "bodies") can affect the manifestation of your will. I have experimented with these things with varying degrees of success. And will continue to.

And, to respond specifically to RO, I don't see what's wrong with learning these things from humans and books. I can see why it would be special to learn them from spirits, but I don't have a problem with learning from people. Isn't that one of the reasons why we're incarnated together here? To learn from each other?

And part of my training comes from AMORC. The sixth degree is dedicated to healing. The Order teaches a method of charging the body to a positive or negative polarity using pranayama-like techniques, and applying that energy through the hands to specific nexuses on the body. I can make headaches go away very consistently. I can often bring down fevers and reduce inflammations. Am I supposed to forget this stuff when I do magic? Why?

To Balthazar I would say this: I realize that there is danger in recklessly combining everything in the world into a meaningless hodgepodge, especially when you are talking about spiritual practices. But that doesn't mean that one should avoid synthesizing altogether. If one uses reason, intuition and aesthetic sensitivity, one can find pieces of a puzzle found in one culture or one discipline that fit very nicely into other puzzles, almost as if the architect of the universe really meant them to fit together (or did he, really?). One has to discriminate, as one should in other aspects of one's life. I mean, whipped cream doesn't go with dill pickles, right? Or a pink and green paisley tie with an electric blue shirt? Some practices fit together. Some don't.

Regarding the diversity of experience in my life, I'm not that different than many other of my contemporaries. I have spent my life in several cities on two continents in three cultures (four, if you count California). I have learned Japanese and Chinese martial arts, read Latin literature and medieval German literature, learned to speak two foreign languages, and on and on... I find it frustrating when they seem to be separate, unrelated, isolated elements of my experience. I constantly try to integrate them, because that is a path to integrating myself. And that also means trying to figure out how my experiences with the energies connected with human life can be used in the practice of magic.

If you don't feel the need to synthesize that way, that's fine. Just don't try to tell me that I'm doing something wrong if I do.

Imposing Discipline with the Four-Banger

noreply@blogger.com (The Scribbler) — Wed, 09 Feb 2011 15:11:00 +0000

Sometimes things just come apart at the seams, don't they? It's OK to confess it. The Scribbler, of all people, understands your plight. You know what you should be doing to make your life work, but the siren calls of constant little obligations and incessant digital distractions that plague our lives in the early 21st century are getting the better of you, so you aren't sticking to The Plan.

Recently Our Man in Blighty, Gordon, gave advice on how to keep your ship afloat when the cosmic perfect storm blows through your life. I found myself reading his suggestions with one eyebrow sceptically raised toward my receding hairline until it dawned on me that the difference between his and my views on lifehacking during heavy existential weather is a matter of horses for courses (ergo, we will shift from nautical to equestrian metaphors).

Gordon, despite being an Aussie, is more your thoroughbred type: streamlined, fast and spry (even if he does indulge in the feedbag while in Florence and Paris). He wants to be in condition to do amazing sprints when he's called to, and to do them often for a few years while he's snatching up that prize money. Then they'll put him out to stud and he can spend his remaining years in the beautiful rolling meadows of western Kentucky.

But he's a fitting horse for his course. The things he recommends in that posting are good rules of the road if you are a young, single media executive living in London. Include him in any trifecta bets you make (Jason to win, Gordon in second, RO to place! Or maybe RO in second, Gordon to place.).

But me -- a dude in his fifties with a nine-to-five corporate job in a support position, five kids at home and a mortgage -- I'm more of a draught horse. I have to run my race pulling a wagon full of lumber or beer barrels, and I'm in it for the distance, not the big-prize sprint. And a lot of my habits were formed by martial arts training, and (as you've read before) deadline writing. Habits and regularity are the internal engine that make me a dependable beast for all the people and institutions who depend on me.

When life isn't quite working for me, rather than give in to the wave and surf, it's time for me to double down on the discipline.

That's when it's time to invoke the power of the four-banger.

Let me give you the nerdy history of that word, which will explain the old fossil I used as an illustration at the top of this posting. Back in ancient history, when I was in grade school, they came out with the first electronic calculators. They were clunky and ugly by the standards of even one decade later, by which time they were already small enough to operate on batteries (the first ones had to be plugged in!) and fit in your pocket (the first ones were about the size of a multi-line office desk telephone). And they couldn't do all the fancy operations a scientific calculator can do, such as square roots, cosigns and exponents. They could do four operations: add, subtract, multiply and divide. Once calculators started getting more sophisticated, the cheap ones they gave away with a fill up at the gas station, or that came with a bag of dry dog food (I kid you not!), were affectionately called four-bangers.

This was around the time that America began to import more smaller cars that had only four cylinders in a straight line, as opposed to V6s and V8s. Worshippers of the American muscle car (like the Mustang, the Camaro, the GTO or the Corvette) derisively referred to these more economical engines as four-bangers.

But humble as they are, the four-function calculator and the four-cylinder engine are the workhorses of the world. And when it comes to putting my world back on track after I've been overwhelmed by events, I call on another basic four-banger.

As mentioned above, I depend on habit and regularity. Between work and family, my day is so structured, I have to fit activities into every available free slot, or never get anything else done. I get up obscenely early in the morning (so early, I'm not going to tell you, because you'll think I'm bragging) so I can: 1) write down my dreams, 2) practice chi kung, and 3) meditate (plus, lately, do experiments for the Strategic Sorcery course). After that, it's time to get kids out of bed, pack lunches, shower, shave, etc. I figure I get more done by 6am than a lot of people get done by noon.

And getting up obscenely early means going to bed disgustingly early, too. Even then, if all goes to schedule, I still only get six and a half hours of sleep. If something interferes with bedtime, I either do with less sleep (argh!) or miss dream journaling, chi kung and meditation (triple argh!)

But shit can happen to this arrangement. And I allow for some leeway. I realize there are nights something -- a social obligation, a sick child, a surprise internet text chat with a friend oversees, watching a DVD with the kids on a Friday night -- throws things off schedule. I figure if I manage early-to-bed-and-early-to-rise five days out of seven, I'm doing well. Doing chi kung five days a week keeps me fairly healthy in body and mind. So I'm not a total hard ass.

However, even allowing for some slack, there are times that interference and distraction just seem to be ganging up on me. The late George Leonard -- prolific journalist and one of America's greatest promoters of aikido -- wrote a book (among others) called Mastery. In this book he reports the findings of his research into the common characteristics and behaviors of people who are masters of their disciplines, be it e.g. cooking, baseball, kendo, or management. Among them is a tendency to allow the goal to recede into the distance, and to patiently work on the tasks at hand that progressively lead to that goal, no matter how far away; a taking joy in the process and not focussing on the reward. This is a behavior that requires dedication, application, and long-term thinking. Leonard said that the contemporary world is "a conspiracy against mastery." One always has to react to immediate pressing demands generated by a world full of people and institutions that expect instant satisfaction. And our society tries to make us believe you can learn to do anything overnight.

So there are times I suddenly realize I haven't done chi kung in a week and had done it pretty infrequently the weeks preceding. Time for a four-banger! And it works like this.

I designate four days and then vow that for those four days, come hell or high water (or plagues of locusts, or two-for one night at the bar down the road), I will stick to a discipline I define beforehand. In this case, I will: get to bed at the designated time, get up at the designated time, do my dream journaling, do chi-kung, and meditate. No exceptions. Four days in a row.

The effect this has, I find, is that it establishes momentum. Anyone can do something once. It takes a little will to do it on the second day. You have to overcome resistance to do it on the third day, but you're happy that you do. And it might be hard to get started on the fourth day, but once you get started you're on a roll. I find that by the fifth morning, you don't even have to have that hell-bent attitude anymore. The thing just sort of happens by itself. Isn't that what habits are for? Once I do a four-banger, it takes much less effort to maintain my regimens in the following days and weeks.

Last night and this morning were the first round of a four-banger. I got a good night's sleep, had a good chi kung session, meditated, and even practiced something for the Strategic Sorcery course. When I got the kids up, I was all chirpy and positive (They hated it. Snicker, snicker!) And while I was making tea and lunches and listening to the kids' breakfast conversation, I was making plans for what I was going to get done today, rather than hoping I'd survive long enough to get home and go to bed again. What a difference!

The four-banger is a simple, humble little machine. But used wisely, it can move mountains!

Location! Location! Location!

noreply@blogger.com (The Scribbler) — Thu, 03 Feb 2011 00:57:00 +0000

It's not so much what's happening in Egypt this week that has me slightly freaked out as where it's happening. And I'm not talking about geopolitics or Israeli-Palestinian relations, or the price of oil being affected by access to the Suez Canal. I'm talking about the fact that this is happening in Egypt. Egypt! Stop just a moment, and think of everything the idea of Egypt means to you and everything it has ever meant to you.

Egypt.

I'll bet if I told you there've been some contentious and tense political protests in Albania recently, you'd feign interest ("Oh, really?"), but wouldn't think about it for too long. (I mean no disrespect toward Albanians. Your political struggles for liberty, dignity, and fair distribution of resources is legitimate and important. But, even you have to confess that you aren't Egypt.)

Bombs go off every day in various places around the world, but when two airplanes hit the biggest buildings in New York City, the whole world sits up and takes notice.

When the Berlin Wall went from being an an instrument of oppression and an object of fear to a wild party venue inside of 24 hours, the world watched in amazement, because this was happening in Berlin, for God's sake! Berlin!

And yet: as much cachet as New York and Berlin have in the race's collective visceral responses, they're not Egypt either.

If you consider yourself a magician, and especially if you identify with the Rosicrucian or Hermetic traditions -- or even if you're a freemason, or a member of one of dozens of other traditional orders -- Egypt is the source. Egypt is where you end up when you follow all the lines of the Western Tradition to their origins.

OK, I know I've lost a goodly percentage of my readers by this point in the essay. This kind of "mainstream" narrative of the origins of esoteric knowledge is considered "uncool" if not downright politically incorrect by some, the same way that young British archaeologists in the sixties and seventies avoided Roman sites (Romans were squares, and they were the dominant oppressor society) and preferred Celtic digs.

Title plate of Uncle Al's 777

Well, I'll confess: in my youth and early adulthood, I used to find the whole Egypt fetish among mystics and occultists really irritating. Why, I asked myself, did organizations and traditions try to legitimize themselves by claiming roots in Egypt, and how far-fetched was the claim that the Egyptian tradition had been passed on to Greece? AMORC lodges and teaching materials are covered in Egyptian symbols and themes. And let's not forget the Egyptian god forms used in the Golden Dawn, or the Egyptian-themed title pages of Aleister Crowley's books, or the Egyptian connections with his Book of the Law. It just seemed like high-faluting bullshit to me. I only cared that the teachings and knowledge worked. I didn't care where it came from.

AMORC's Rosicrucian Park in San Jose CA

But slowly, over many years of reading and experience, the clues kept accumulating, and slowly I became convinced that Egypt was indeed the mother of all Western Mystery traditions. The final piece of the puzzle that gave me a complete picture came while listening to an audio recording of Manly P. Hall lecturing on the subject of the Hermetic Tradition. After using the works of Clement of Alexandria and linguistic evidence to prove that the works of Hermes Trismegistus were actually written in Egypt several centuries before the Christian era, he goes on to talk about the fact that a number of Greek philosophers are known to have gone to Egypt to study in the mystery schools. Now the question is, he proposes: when these men came back from Egypt, why is it that they didn't start teaching things we typically associate with Egyptian culture? Why isn't there even a whiff of Egyptian mythology or religion in the teachings of these famous Greek philosophers? The answer is: because the mystery schools taught things that had nothing to do with the exoteric Egyptian religion and culture. The mystery schools were more ancient than Egypt itself. What they taught are the sorts of things you come across in the writings of Plato, Solon, and Anaximander.

So there you have it. The Egyptian connection. Greek philosophy was a new expression of the Egyptian mystery teachings.

If you look at a map of Cairo, you'll see that the epicenter of the protest movement -- the now famous Tahrir Square -- sits right on the East bank of the Nile in the downtown area. The Pyramids of Giza are approximately ten kilometers west-by-southwest from there. That means that on a normal day you could hop in a car at Tahrir square and be at the pyramids within twenty minutes. You could walk there within a few hours. The pyramids are part of the vibratory nature of that city.

Here's something else that has slowly developed in my life. Not only have I become convinced that the pyramids were an initiatory complex, rather than a funerary site, I am also becoming convinced that the pyramids are far older than Egypt itself. And if you've been following the reports of finds and analyses archaeologists and paleontologists have been making in recent years, you will have noticed that they keep pushing back the date at which something recognizably "human" appeared on the earth. And the beginning of civilization keeps getting pushed back farther, too.

At any rate, those pyramids are part of our heritage, as magicians, as members of the human race.

Egypt. Taste the flavor of that word on your tongue. Feel everything you have ever felt about Egypt. It's not just another country.

A struggle is going on there that concerns us all.

The other day I heard an interview with the Secretary General of Egyptian Antiquities, Zahi Hawass. He spoke about the threats the uprising has posed to the Egyptian Museum; there have been several unsuccessful attempts to loot the museum, but they have always been thwarted by volunteer guards. Hawass made a remark that I have pondered now and again in the days since. He said, "If the Egyptian anitiquities are safe, then Egypt is safe.

Make of that what you will

The Activist Mage

noreply@blogger.com (The Scribbler) — Wed, 26 Jan 2011 22:21:00 +0000

Sitting in a cafe at lunchtime across the street from my office yesterday, munching on a salad while reading the latest lesson in the Strategic Sorcery Course, my attention kept being caught by the scenes of political upheaval flashing on a muted TV tuned to CNN International. A restless spirit is stirring in the streets of Lebanon, Egypt and Tunesia. There are rumblings of imminent change in the southern Mediterranean. Reading about magic while being regularly reminded of the turbulent times we live in got me to reflecting on a subject that periodically occupies my thoughts: the relationship between esotericism and politics.

There are a number of authors in the occult field and a number of bloggers who feel the two don’t mix. Why does the juxtaposition of these two realms of endeavor makes people nervous?

First, I suppose, there’s the masonic-illuminati world domination conspiracy theory. People get uncomfortable at the thought of someone with the skills acquired from arcane schools occupying any sort position of power. And if they owe allegiance to some order or other, certainly they must be carrying out a dark secret agenda! Once people start to talk in this vein, the opera ain’t over ‘til everyone has trotted out their favorite CIA MK-Ultra/UFO/Kennedy assassination/trilateral commission/Federal Reserve/whatever story, and makes it sing. It’s enough to turn anyone’s stomach, really. And the truth is that these shaggy-dog stories all started as a smear campaign by the aristocracy against the Freemasons in 19th century, because the powers-that-were feared any organization that treated all men as equals. And they were still pissed off about the French Revolution.

Julius Evola

Then there’s the whole occultism-fascism connection. I won’t bore the well-read frequenters of this blog with stories they’ve already heard about the Nazi party growing out of a lodge of the Thule Society. And many esotericists with democratic/egalitarian convictions break out in hives at the mention of Julius Evola.

I also think attitudes toward politics are similar to people’s attitudes towards money: nice people don’t touch that stuff. It’s an extension of the outmoded idea that you have to be withdrawn from the world, like a monk, to be spiritual. In the Anlgo-Saxon world, and especially in America, this is partially a legacy of the sixties and seventies.

Things got a little intense in the 60s

In the sixties, everything was political. Everything. How you saw things and what you did was largely dependent on whether you were for or against the Vietnam war. And Nixon. It took so much upheaval to finally get the government to withdraw from the war and to get Nixon out of the White House, that once it was over with, the vast majority was just tired to death of it all. Nobody wanted to hear about politics. After the 1968 presidential election (which elected Nixon to his first term), voter turnout dropped from over 60% to just slightly over 50%, and did not hit 60% percent again until the last election that made Obama president.

So, yes, I think politics is an issue to magicians similar to money. Much has been made in this corner of the blogosphere about the fact that being a magician means taking control of your life. And that means, among other things, just getting over your money-related neuroses and dealing with your finances, because until you have your money trip together, you’re not gonna get much done in this world.

I think the same goes for politics. Politics is about power relationships: in your family, in your workplace, in your neighborhood, in your town, in you lodge, in your professional organization, in your internet forum, in your classroom... in any place you find more than two people interacting, there is politics. Get over it. If you don’t look at the big picture and take part in deciding what happens in the world, you will be a passive object that just gets pushed around by those with political power.

I don’t mean that you need to run for political office, or become involved in political campaigns. But you should be clear about how you see the various agendas and policies operating in the world. And when you see trends you think are either bad for society in general, or for your interests specifically, you should tell people about it, and support those people and organizations working to promote those interests.

An example. There’s a woman in Hungary, Agnes Gereb, who has been tirelessly working for women’s right to have children at home, since the early 1990s. She was present at the birth of four of my five children. The struggle to legalize home birth in Hungary is a political struggle, because its all about wresting power from the College of Physicians, who have exclusive authority when it comes to the birthing process in Hungary. They have used every lever of state power they could muster for many years, eventually stripping her of her licence to practice medicine, which she thwarted by earning a degree as a midwife. When there were some complications with a few births in recent years (although her rate of complications, both for mother and baby, are far below that of physicians who deliver in the hospital), the authorities jumped at the chance to charge her with malpractice and manslaughter. Finally, one night in November she was arrested.

A lightning protest was organized through social media the very next afternoon. The authorities were shocked to see several thousand people (with their home-born children!) gathered in front of the ministry in less than twenty four hours. Despite the fact that I suspected the police might be video-taping from a dark office across the street to identify people later, my wife, my children and I were there. People have to have the guts to stand up and be counted when there is something important at stake. We participated in several more demonstration during the subsequent weeks.

During her incarceration (she was released into house arrest at Christmas), I sent her prana every morning. This is a technique I have practiced every morning for many years now. I have a short list of people I support this way every day. I replace people on the list after a few weeks or months, depending on how serious their need is. The results have been miraculous at times. I have seen the lives of people aided this way transformed in unmistakable ways. It’s happened too many times and with too great an intensity to be a coincidence.

My point here is that my action was to a great degree political. This woman was a figure at the center of a movement. Yes, she is my friend, but I also did it for all of the people who look to her for spiritual leadership.

I’m sure this sort of thing goes on all the time. Don’t you think it makes a lot of difference when people “pray” for someone in jail? When people give a leader or a key figure in some group endeavor a boost of life force? Don’t you think magicians have been working behind the scenes throughout the ages to aid people who are working for the common good?

I occasionally do spells to help “promote” projects I am involved with. In Hungary, it occasionally helps to use a bit of behind-the-scenes-mojo to overcome bureaucrats who have their own political agenda, and are blocking approval of your group’s application for that reason.

Let’s go back to the similarity between the politics taboo and the money taboo. I’ll admit that politics is scary. Like money, it’s all about power. People’s issues around money often have to do with their own doubts about their capacity to handle wealth. That’s why lots of prosperity advisers recommend working your way up to a multiple of your current wealth gradually. Everyone knows (or should know by now) that people who win huge jackpots in the lottery are almost always ruined by it. Their life, their personality isn’t capable of handling that kind of monetary power. It’s like taking a circuit designed to handle 50 amps and suddenly running 100 amps on it. It’ll burn out. So a person has to upgrade his life, his “circuits” to handle more money.

Same with political clout. When I was much younger, I experienced the not-too-pretty phenomenon of being appointed to a position with a little more authority than I’d had before and not handling it well. It went to my head and inflated my ego, and I acted like an asshole. It affects people in different ways. They become greedy, or pushy, or cruel, or exhibit other aberrations of the human character. It takes a balanced and mature person to handle power well. The kind of materialist, greedy, quick-fix society we have nowadays doesn’t tend to cultivate balance and maturity. So, there are lots of people running around who can’t handle the power they have.

But that’s still not reason to put politics out of bounds for people pursuing magic and mysticism. Someone has to take the reins of power an run things, and it doesn’t make sense to me to leave that to men and women with little insight into the purpose of life in this universe.

In a recent interview on The Occult of Personality podcast series, Neil Kramer stated a view on the nature of public political events that I, frankly, had a hard time accepting. And after reflecting on that opinion, considering many of the things I’ve said above, I have to say that I don’t agree with him, although I don’t totally disagree with him either.

Kramer is concerned with exploring consensus reality, and equates enlightenment with liberation from the consensus reality. He posits that the power structure employs “systems of control” to keep us beholden to the consensus reality. Around the 59th minute of that interview he talks in kind of paranoid terms of the “empire” that has existed throughout all time and kept the masses suppressed by denying them certain kinds of knowledge. I realize, when listening to this, how silly I must sound when I am in my more paranoid conspiracy-mongering states of mind. You know: when you talk about “them” and “those people” who are controlling everything. But, be that as it may, he makes the statement, “You see these public pantomimes that are just socially engineered things to give the appearance of change, but at a higher level, nothing is changing. And what the empire is doing is just changing its robes, changing its language, changing its religion to accommodate the next evolutionary stage of its domination.”

If I understand correctly, he’s saying that all outward action is useless, and it’s only liberation of consciousness that makes and difference. But the powers in control, such as repressive governments, aren’t trying to control what people can have access to because they are afraid of their thoughts (though I can appreciate that transformation of consciousness already begins the process of loosening the consensus reality), they are afraid of what those “new” thoughts will motivate people to DO! Like, defy the police. Like, gather and make unauthorised plans. Like, organize themselves. Like, try to get outside help. Why is our mythology filled with all these stories of heroes if we aren’t meant to show our courage in battle at some point in our life’s journey?

I refuse to believe the Velvet Revolution of 1989 was just a "pantomime". There are genuine political triumphs in this world for the struggle for freedom that occur when brave men and women seize the moment and stamp reality with their collective wills. Sometimes their triumph is fleeting, but it was worth fighting for.

If your consciousness is transformed, it should motivate you to do things. And acting in the material world on the level of society, requires politics. Whether you like it or not.

The Painfully Mature Student

noreply@blogger.com (The Scribbler) — Wed, 19 Jan 2011 22:01:00 +0000

Ah! How fondly I remember my student years! I suppose the early 80s was Liberal Arts Heaven compared to nowadays. Near the end of every semester, the university would publish the catalogue of courses for the next semester in a tabloid newspaper format. You could see students huddled together everywhere on campus -- sitting under trees, gathered together at tables in cafeterias, sitting on floors in the hallways between classrooms -- perusing next semester’s delicious and alluring offerings.

“Oh, look! There’s a course on Caribbean Religions in the anthropology department!”

“Check it out, dude! There’s an advanced seminar on South American revolutionaries in the history department!”

“Oh man! Professor Smith is teaching his course on The Philosophy of Daoism next semester.”

And we all dreamed of the intellectual goodies we’d all be sampling in months to come. No matter that once the new semester was underway, even a subject like Egyptian history -- that initially seemed unbearably exciting -- soon became a serious chore when the reading load was more than fifty pages per lecture, and that was only one of seven classes you were taking. At the end of that semester we all became blissfully innocent again, and oohed and aahed at the at the new course catalogue, which included such delightful temptations as “Liberation Movements of the 19th Century” taught by that infamous poli-sci prof who almost got fired for leading a campus demonstration that got out of control, or “Progoff Intensive Journaling” led by that poet in the English department who everyone knows is some kind of occultist (or something).

I don’t recall how old I was when it hit me that the number of things I will still learn in this life is finite. You know what I’m talking about? There was a time I thought I would learn dozens of languages (To date there are really only two foreign languages I will claim that I speak. The handful of other languages I’ve studied at one time or another I won’t go farther than to say I have knowledge of them). And I thought I’d learn to play guitar, and half a dozen martial arts (I have a black belt in one and know a little of two others), and blacksmithing (I think pounding glowing iron must be so soul satisfying), become a master gardener (I’m so urban I haven’t had a garden in years), and... and...

The list goes on and on. And then I grew up, and the necessities of life bore down on me, and I had to earn a living and take care of a family, and I realized I no longer had the blessed life of a full-time student. And I also realized I couldn’t absorb things as quickly anymore either. Not to say that I gave up on learning; I am still a life-long student. But I realized I had to make my choices and focus my limited time and energy on that much narrower band of things I chose.

When Jason Miller decided to start teaching his One Year Boot Camp course back in October of 2009, I ached to sign up because I knew my magical technique could use some serious tuning up, but knew I was just too busy to focus on it. Then he started new cycles of it at regular intervals. Finally, when he announced a new cycle would begin on New Year’s Day of this year, I couldn’t hold back any longer. I decided that whatever it takes -- even if it means trimming back on some other activities for a year, I was going to do it. I signed up.

This week, lesson three (technically lesson four, since the whole thing was kicked off with “Lesson Zero”, which included a ritual to do), is the first time I’m beginning to feel the commitment I made, like the wide-eyed university student who realizes that even if the one-semester “Faust” seminar offered by the German department (Hey! I actually took that!), is really cool, the work load is a bitch. Lesson three has A LOT OF EXERCISES IN IT.

But I plan to stay focused. It took me a year to decide to do this course. I don’t want to be one of the folks who wrote on their blog, or confessed to me in correspondence, that they got a certain distance into the course and then got hopelessly behind. I remember that feeling from college, too. There’s a certificate to be earned for this course. I’m going to get it! Why? Because I decided I’m going to do it.

And I remember how I got through college: one day at a time. One foot in front of the other. Focus on what you have to do right now.

And then one day, to my utter surprise, my advisor said to me, “Hey, you’re graduating at the end of this semester!”

The Joy of a Simple Exercise (that rips the top of your head off!)

noreply@blogger.com (The Scribbler) — Wed, 12 Jan 2011 07:19:00 +0000

I'm a big fan of practical exercises. As a long-time AMORC member, I'm very used to being assigned some visualization, breathing technique, mental exercise, what have you, to do for a week until the next lesson. So when I started doing Jason Miller's Strategic Sorcery course on the first day of this new year, I fell right into the rhythm of weekly readings and assignments. I've been doing this for years.

And it doesn't matter that he starts out pretty basic, with things that veterans of the occult mostly already know (my mother's best friend started handing me books by T. Lobsang Rampa, books on Atlantis, and books on Buddhism when I was nine, and that was -- uh-- 42 years ago). As a former teacher myself, I believe only the arrogant and impatient are unwilling to benefit from review.

In my experience, there are five kinds of exercise:

--Ones that don't work at first, but start doing something after you've tried it a number of times.

--Ones that sort of work right away but are a lot of work to get more out of, or which only show their effect or benefit after practicing for a long time.

--Ones that don't work at first, and don't get any better with time (in spite of the fact that your instructors tell you it WILL work after a while).

--Ones that seem really easy right away.

--Ones that work so well the first time you try them, they rip the top of your head off and change your reality.

So, there I was, reading a printout of this week's Strategic Sorcery lesson (in the email inbox every Tuesday!), while eating lunch at a Chinese restaurant a couple blocks from my office.

View Larger Map

This lesson was about the subtle body, and assigned exercises in experimenting with drawing different types of energy into the subtle body and circulating them around. Jason remarked that when he drew earth energy up through his feet while walking, he got the sensation that he was standing still and the world was moving around him.

So, after finishing my lunch (stir fried tofu and veggies, if you must know) I unsuspectingly walked out onto Rákóczi street and -- deciding there's no time like the present -- started practicing pulling earth energy up into my subtle body through my feet while walking back to work. I took a slow deep inhale and felt the flow go up my legs. When it hit my perineum, I pulled it up the central channel and up to my crown.

I exhaled and did the same once again. This time, when the energy was about half way up my trunk, I got the distinct, unmistakable sensation that my feet were instinctively doing the walking motions, but that I was standing still and solidly rooted in place, while the world was moving around me. And it wasn't just that it was rolling past me front to back, it was also sort of swirling around.

The feeling was so wonderfully, sublimely absurd I had to cackle. Some passing university students cast a glance at the obviously deranged middle-aged man walking down the street. For a second I wondered if I looked like I was doing a Michael Jackson "moonwalk". Despite the occasional snicker of glee, I held my concentration and kept the phenomenon going for a city block. Then I figured I should balance it out, and breathed down the sky through my head.

When I got back to my office building, I looked at myself in the mirrored wall of the elevator. I looked much better, much more "vital", than I had before I went out to lunch. Hmmm.

Which of the five categories do you think I place this exercise in?

It's Wednesday: publishing day!

noreply@blogger.com (The Scribbler) — Wed, 05 Jan 2011 10:56:00 +0000

OK. I know a blog review is a poor offering for what I touted as a "weekly column". But if there's one thing I learned during my years in the paper and wire-service biz, it's this: professionals deliver the editor the agreed-upon number of words by the deadline. The amateur gives the editor fanciful descriptions of the article she would have written if only (insert lame excuse here).

So, without further ado...

Someone you might like in your "circle"

noreply@blogger.com (The Scribbler) — Wed, 05 Jan 2011 09:25:00 +0000

Filtering and focusing is so hard nowadays with the digital onslaught we all have to deal with. Despite being -- what I thought -- was selective and discriminating with my subscriptions, some days I have to be pretty ruthless when sifting through my RSS feed reader. Of course they're all subscribed because they are good value, but there are times I read the posting title, and perhaps the first sentence or two, and then quickly click the "mark as read" button while muttering the apology "sorry, no time for that today", and move on. So many good blogs, so little time!

So I feel a bit sheepish in recommending yet another blog to add to your reading list, but let me assuage your reluctance by assuring you that I almost never do this.

I rarely lurk Aaron Leitch's Solomonic: Secrets of the Grimoires Yahoo Group (See! Filtering and focusing!), because as fascinating as the discussions there are, it just isn't what I need at this very moment. Every now and then I drop by to see what the topics have been recently, and perhaps follow a few links posters offer.

Wow! Am I ever glad I dropped by the other day! This little foray acquainted me with a new poster in the group who goes by the handle Frater Acher. Initially I went to his website to see the Trithemian Table of Practice he made. Stunning! Such craft! People would pay a fortune to have one of these. I know I would.

From there I followed other links and discovered that he has recently begun a series of evocations of the Olympick Spirits; a subject any follower of my blog knows is near and dear to my heart. So far he has called Phul and Ophiel, so it seems he's working in the Hermetic order (or qabbalistically speaking, up the tree), as I did. He is a meticulous magician, and maintains a meticulously beautiful but elegantly simple temple, of which photos can be found on his site. His experience, learning and careful sense of craft show on every page.

What to my surprise, I found my Everything Arbatel Link Digest page among the resources he lists. He will soon find his site also listed in the Digest.

Frater Acher lives in Germany, and I assume is German, but is a very skilled writer in English (skilled enough that I suspect time spent- or even education in an English-speaking country). I am always delighted to find non-Anglo Saxons who are able to contribute to the English-language magic blogosphere. Every new point of view enriches us.

So, go check him out, and maybe even... perhaps... if you feel you can fit one more link in there... maybe... add him to your feed reader.

ANNOUNCING! The Scribbler Goes Weekly (again)

noreply@blogger.com (The Scribbler) — Wed, 29 Dec 2010 20:35:00 +0000

The new year is coming, and it's time to set some some strategies before the champagne corks pop and the fireworks dispel the accumulated evil spirits of 2010. After working hard for one and a half years to cultivate a readership (which I observed obsessively through my blog stats), I've become neglectful of my blog, and have posted less and less frequently. There are reasons for that, having to do with job and family, but I've decided that I have to stop the erosion and get back on solid ground. The solution calls for a serious commitment, but I've decided I'm ready to make it.

The Magian Rumination blog will henceforth be treated like a weekly column.

My decision will make perfect sense to you if I explain my publishing history. Fresh out of graduate school in the 80s, my first paid writing gig was writing monthly profiles of organic farmers in Northern California for the Davis Coop News. It was small-time, but I met some very interesting people, the paper paid mileage, and it footed the bill for the artsy black and white photo portraits I produced to accompany it. All in all, good experience for a young writer.

When I came to Hungary, because of my academic background I got a job as a weekly literary columnist for the (sadly, now defunct after fifteen years of publishing) Budapest Sun. Greatest job I ever starved for. The pay sucked, but it kept me supplied with beer, cigarettes, salami, bread, and raw vegetables from the corner market. I read a book a week and delivered a review on a floppy disk (remember those?) every Thursday afternoon, after which I'd go out and get trashed with the rest of the Sun staff. Saturday or Sunday I'd start reading the next book and the cycle would start again. The best thing about it was that I'd set myself the goal of finding out if I could support myself on writing, and I succeeded. And I learned to live by the deadline. Whatever it took, I'd be in the Sun office Thursday afternoon with a disk in my hand for the Style editor. I sweat blood to make that deadline on more than one occasion.

After two years of that, I moved on to editing jobs that paid better, and got my writing yah-yahs through other outlets; eventually through blogging.

These experiences made me a deadline writer. I do much of my best work when I know that a certain number of words on a certain topic have to be delivered by a certain day at a certain time. Ergo, the logic of treating my blog like a weekly column.

I've done this before. In my previous blog, I went weekly for a while and produced some of the best material that appeared there. Then a personal crisis struck that kept me from publishing for over a year, by which time I changed tack and started this blog. I also noticed that the regularity of weekliness had a positive effect on building readership.

Publishing day will be every Wednesday, come what may. If I fail to write a posting, it will be because I was run over by a car, in which case I will have my wife post a picture of the tire tracks across my chest. I'm that serious about deadlines.

Naturally, this doesn't mean I can't post on days in between, if the need/desire arises. But Wednesdays will still be sacrosanct.

See you next Wednesday.

Gordon's Givin' It Away!

noreply@blogger.com (The Scribbler) — Wed, 03 Nov 2010 22:03:00 +0000

Now how's that for a cheeky way to plug a prize drawing for magical goodies from Florence being run by that crafty little elf, Gordon, over at the Rune Soup blog. The guy knows how to create buzz, he duzz! Drop on by and learn how to enter. As they say: if you don't enter, you can't win.

The changes, they are a'timin'

noreply@blogger.com (The Scribbler) — Fri, 24 Sep 2010 20:23:00 +0000

The impression I've always gotten from magic books when the subject turns to the charges one gives spirits -- i.e. the demand/request you express at the point of the ritual where you're pretty sure all the things you've done up to that point have gotten their attention -- is that they should be really tightly expressed with little room for misinterpretation and no loopholes for them to play games with (the latter, I assume being more an issue with "demons" moreso than with entities of a more benific nature).

I work in a law firm, and though I am not a lawyer, I have to read an awful lot of contracts to assure that they are logical, unambiguous, and really say what the lawyer intended. So, I tend to think "contract" when I write out my charges, and I do really almost always write them out carefully. Then I look at them several times over a period of hours to make sure they really say what I want them to say.

One of the key elements of any contract is the deadline for performance. And the magic textbooks also tend to tout this element of a charge. It ensures you get what you want by the time you need it, and a metric to determine if your spell really worked.

Or so the theory goes. But,... well... I'm not really seeing it work out that way. I did a series of invocations of all seven of the Olympic spirits in 2009. With some of them I did not actually give a very specific charge. For instance: Aratron is said to teach magic, so I just asked to be taught magic. But from others I asked for specific things, and I said by when I wanted to have them. None of the of the things I requested by a certain time happened by that time.

Now, this might have something to do with the (much-debated) nature of the Olympic spirits. One school of thought says that they are actually very lofty spirits, all the way at the deity level. I'm leaning in that direction in my own interpretation of their natures, but I have to say that the jury is still out. But if that is their nature, it would figure that the changes they bring about would be subtle in the short run, but very thorough-going in the long run. And that seems to be how it's working out. Over time, I'm noticing that I'm getting what I asked for, but the process is incremental.

But that isn't at all what I expected when I asked for help from St Expedite. I mean: the guy has some impressive PR: Got a pressing desperate problem? No worries! Call Expedite and he'll fix it up lickity-split.

So, when I recently petitioned St Expedite, and gave him a hefty down-payment for his services, I included a date by which I needed the deed done. The date passed, and our problem had still not been solved. What's more, the binding I did to keep someone off our back didn't seem to be working either.

At this point I was considering handing in my Sorcerer's Union card, or turning myself in to the police for impersonating a sorcerer. OK. It wasn't that bad, but I'm sure many of you people out in readerland know that sinking feeling you get when you've done what you thought was a clever and powerful spell, and then the time comes when you have to say to yourself, " Well, shit! That didn't quite work, did it?"

I didn't really doubt Expedite. I mean all those happy customers out there can't be wrong. So, I figured it must have been my execution. I got to thinking that my mistake was relying too much on other people for the work in the physical world. There are other people working on these problems in the mundane world, and I thought my magic would give them a boost. But then I decided that I had to get into the mundane-world action myself.

Around this time is when I read Nora D's posting about working with lwa. She essentially says that in her experience they don't just solve your problem while you sit back, read novels and eat bon bons. They make you work for it. So I put myself to work.

I went to an experienced and powerful associate and asked for advice. He said this called for a well-connected lawyer. He recommended me someone. I wrote an email. I called the next day, and not getting a real person, left a voice mail. I followed up with a text message to make sure he had my phone number. Nothing. I called again the next day and left a voice mail. Nothing. I went back to my associate and asked for another name. He thought it over and mentioned a name. I could have been knocked over with a feather. It turned out to be someone I see every day and have a good relationship with, but never knew this person was knowledgeable and experienced in what I needed help with. Things started happening.

When the date I'd given Expedite had passed, I decided to take a page out of Gordon's book and start shoaling. At this point, as far as magic measures go, I had: worked with Expedite, buried an object from a binding ritual in front of our main harasser's door, and set up a Michael altar in the kindergarten to act as protection. Oddly, they just didn't seem to be working.

The morning of the day that I was given the good contact, I decided to do a bit of chaos-style sigilizing. I was at my desk at work. I haven't really done this much. I've read some of the core works by the Phil Hine and Peter Carroll, and taken a few of the ideas on board, but also recognized that a lot of it was sort of past its sell-by date. But sigiling was something I occasionally played with, with mediocre results. But this time I really got into making the sigil, and it had a wonderful "witchy" look to it (as Grant Morrison puts it). This I put under a folded napkin, on which I placed a decadent buttery, sugary oat cookie, and placed it in front of a Ganesh print I have on the pin board attached to the back of my desk. It sat there and "cooked" all day.

That day is when I had this gut feeling, and this sense of "energy" flowing through my reality, that said the spell shoal complex was suddenly heating up. But why nearly two weeks after I'd said it should happen? I was so energized I had a hard time sitting at my desk and concentrating on work.

At the end of the work day, I wrapped the cookie in the napkin and stuck it in my jacket pocket. I started chanting (silently when there were people within ear shot, aloud when I thought it was OK) the mantra for attuning to Ganesha: Om Gum Ganapateiya Namaha. I chanted it the several city blocks to a nearby park. This park is essentially a fenced in city block of downtown Budapest with tall old trees, paved paths and squares, benches, and a few tables where old men play chess. There's a quiet-ish corner where I sometimes do discrete ritualistic stuff, and occasionally do tai chi during my lunch break, when I need to calm down, or energize, or both (and sometimes gypsy kids laugh at me... from a safe distance).

Once there and seated on a park bench, I switched mantras to the one addressing Ganesh's role as breaker of obstacles: Om Vigna Nashanaya Namaha. I closed my eyes and pictured Ganesha and thought of the problem I want solved, all the while breaking off pieces of the cookie and throwing them out to the pigeons. Then I took out a lighter and burned the piece paper with the sigil while chanting the mantra out loud. When I was done, I stood up, stamped my feet hard three times and walked away without thinking about the ritual any more.

On the way home I saw some nice candles in the window of a florist's shop and bought one on a hunch that I could use it for further work on this project.

So I have lots of questions to answer about timing. It seems that even when you specify the time, it won't necessarily happen then. Could it be that spirits don't quite savvy our insane calendar system? Maybe there are better ways of expressing time to spirits, i.e. in terms of universal phenomena, such as: "This should happen by the next time the sun enters the sign of Scorpio," or "This should happen within three full moons." Who knows? Maybe that's more their context.

At any rate, I'm truly becoming convinced that whenever you do magic with resolve, fired up emotions, and sufficient links, something happens. The what, the how and the when are a bit harder to control.

The Lecso Revelation

noreply@blogger.com (The Scribbler) — Tue, 21 Sep 2010 10:57:00 +0000

(In which The Scribbler dubiously and dizzyingly engages in combining the genres of "magic blog", "gastroblog", cultural critique, and personal essay, desperately hoping that by the end of this high-wire act of an essay he figures out what the heck his point was. May the gods be with him!)

This is a summer story, and since summer is officially ending in three days, I figured I'd better hurry up and tell it.

I recall how - back when the earth was cooling and a crust was forming on the surface, and I was in graduate school at UC Davis - I used to relish the times I could take a break from the insane pace of being a grad assistant at that uptight type-A institution, and do some cooking. When life is too cerebral, too hurried, and too abstract, there's nothing like the visceral work of cutting up vegetables, measuring spices, and performing the subtle alchemy of combining and heating ingredients in a pan. There is a "meditative" state of mind you fall into while engaged in a good cooking session that can give rise to thoughts as profound as those encountered on a long walk through the woods, or while soaking in a hot bath, or while idly practicing darts by yourself.

But only when you feel you have time. When you're trying to get supper on the table with five screaming kids pestering you about when dinner will be ready, that's a different story. But I digress.

At the very end of August I took a week off and stayed home. There were things to tend to. My wife was finishing up a book she was translating, so I needed to cook and clean and take care of (the aforementioned) kids. The classroom at the Waldorf school our daughter attends needed painting. The new Waldorf kindergarten had lots of work needing done. And I just needed to get away from the office.

One evening, it seemed the perfect time to make a big batch of lecso (pronounced: lech-oh) for supper. To a Hungarian - and to a well established transplant like myself - lecso is a flavor of summer the way corn-on-the-cob is to an American. So I went to the store and scored a pile of these babies.

Behold the Hungarian yellow wax pepper! I'd never encountered this delicious form of capsicum before I came to Hungary, and it's hard to describe the flavor to the uninitiated. The green, the red or the yellow peppers Americans and most West Europeans are accustomed to pale in comparison. It's common among the working class in Hungary to eat hunks of these along with chunks of firm white bread and slices of ham or salami (washed down with wine or beer) for lunch. You see men eating this at lunch on constructions sites. It's common picnic food, too. I think you can get them in shops and at markets in big cities around the world that cater to ethnic clientèle. If you can't get them, you're screwed, because otherwise you just can't make this dish. For this dish I used a kilo.

Now, the first step of this dish is to cut the peppers in half, lengthwise, and remove the pith and seeds. This is the point of this cooking meditation that a revelation hit me, but I'm going to finish describing how to make this lovely dish before I circle back and tell you what it was that hit me like a twenty kilo bag of peppers when I was executing this step of the recipe. The afflatus was intimately connected with the knife in the picture.

Next you cut the peppers into half rings, as illustrated above.
After that, you peel several onions (this was five medium-sized), cut them in half lengthwise (that is: down the axis), and then into thickish half rings.

The final bulk ingredient is tomatoes, which you need to scald, peel and chop coarsely (this was about five medium-sized).
Heat up your pan and sauté the onions. OK. Here is where I went wrong going from the first style of cooking I mastered (Chinese) to Hungarian cuisine. Don't get the onions too hot. Just enough heat to turn them from raw to glassy.
Then add a heaping tablespoon of sweet Hungarian paprika powder. Do I need to tell you how badly you will screw this up if you use inferior paprika? When people come to visit us, we always recommend that they buy lots of paprika powder. They are always grateful when they get home. Real Hungarian paprika has a scent that makes you think of hot summer afternoons on the Great Hungarian Plain: blazing sun, drying hay, men with monstrous mustaches and herds of ruminants kicking up dust. Other stuff smells vaguely like pepper.
Heat control is also essential at this stage. Take the pan off the flame while mixing in the paprika. If you get it too hot now, the paprika turns bitter. Nasty. I know from experience.
Now you put the pan back on the flame and add the peppers, the chopped tomatoes, and some salt. You can apply more heat now, but don't go crazy. You cook it until the peppers are tender, but not until the outer peel starts coming off. When it's finished, it looks like the picture above.

This is the point where I commit sacrilege. Hungarians will either add pieces of sausage to the lecso, eat it with sausages, or as a side dish/sauce with meat (usually a pork cutlet). But the Scribbler household is ovo-lacto vegetarian. If Hungarians eat eggs with lecso, they beat them and stir them in when the dish is finished, giving the eggs a consistency like they have in Chinese egg-drop soup. That's just fine with me. But Very Aries, despite being Hungarian, thinks it's disgusting. So, me and the kids just fry up two-egg omelets and fold them in half on the plate.

Serve with bread and full-bodied red wine. Life doesn't get much better on the material plane.

But now back to the brain wave that assaulted me when I started cooking.

As I relaxed into my task - washing veggies and honing knives - I was rolling over various and sundry ideas in my mind that come from reading my favorite magic blogs. It's a bizarre 21st century phenomenon how much we bloggers occupy ourselves with these on-going seminars among our cabal in cyberspace. I know I often contemplate subjects I've read on these blogs to the point of almost having a continuing internal round-table discussion with the authors during the day. I consider what counterpoints there are to what they've said, or how one author would react to the ideas of another. It almost gets to the point of Hesse's "magic theater" ("for madmen only!"). (Aside: If you haven't read Hesse's Steppenwolf by this point in your life, consider yourself undereducated and read it. While you're at it, get copies of his books Journey to the East, and The Glass Bead Game. They're work to understand, but it's worth the effort.)

Kitchen knives. I could go on and on about kitchen knives. I've owned all sorts in my life. And the best ones weren't always the most expensive. Often the ones that would take and hold a good edge were old oddities I bought at garage sales. They had to be taken good care of because they weren't stainless; always kept clean and dried off or else they rust.

The knife in the pictures above ended up in my kitchen by chance, but it's become my favorite paring knife. When we vacation as a family, we often rent apartments, so I bring some of my own knives for cooking. When we were packing up I told one of my sons to pack up the kitchen stuff, and he mistook it for one of ours. I didn't send it back because I'm certain it had been left behind by another guest. It's mine now! It's an Italian knife, Kaimano brand. Takes a nice edge. Every time I use it I give it a couple swipes on the fine carborundum stone and then a few licks on the steel.

There's a theme that often weaves itself through various blogs, that involves identifying genuine magic as opposed to soft-minded popular stuff. And tracing the true tradition as opposed to a sort of concocted history or mythology of esoteric lineage. Jack Faust tries to hammer out his vision of what witchcraft means to him in terms of the European lineage. Gordon is continually feeding nineteenth- and early twentieth-century occult authors and organizations through a filter that removes white middle- and upper-class prejudices and tunnel vision. Rufus Opus is always trying to find the very essence of the Western tradition in the original Hermeticists and Neo Platonists (and giving the nineteenth-century occultists a few kicks while Gordon is holding them down). And then there's Miss Sugar plugging away at her soul-searching explorations of how-we-got-here-and-what-should-I-be-doing through the eyes of a Hindu-oriented kitchen witch. It's worthwhile reading these essays (remember that the word essay comes from the French essayer - to attempt), because every one of us realizes that you have to keep reworking the narratives we get; pulling them apart and putting them back together again and trying to fit new pieces in when you get new narratives, and slowly a picture begins to emerge for you of how things got to be the way they are, and what really happened behind the scenes as opposed to the official version of things, and what you are supposed to do now that you've figured that out. Like, for instance, me: I identify myself as a Rosicrucian. I can't tell you how many times I've read the Fama, and how many times I've pondered what happened in Europe during the Renaissance and - taking that all into consideration - what I'm supposed to be doing.

Now all this sort of thing was going through my head while I began cutting up those yellow wax Hungarian peppers. And I could feel all the years of practice expressing itself in my hands. I think you need to have children to appreciate this. On the one hand, you are supposed to encourage kids to help you in the kitchen. It develops important life skills and broadens their knowledge. But it's not until you hand a kid a head of broccoli and a paring knife, demonstrate for them briefly how to cut it into florets, and tell them to carry on, that you get supremely frustrated and understand how you take all your own kitchen skills for granted. You have to continually coach them in how to hold the knife, how to slice with or across the grain, how to hold the peel between your thumb and the blade when you are stripping the stem. All things you do automatically, without thinking, and that they are clueless about.

And it was while I was quietly appreciating the knowledge my body was showing of the peppers in my left hand and the knife in my right hand that I suddenly understood the chasm between myself and a 19th century English lodge magician. This knowledge of the knife and the pepper would have been lost on most of them. They had domestic servants who took care of such things. This was knowledge they didn't have.

The fact that this was a visceral experience - something that came through my hands, my muscles, my skin, my eyes -is making me struggle to put it into words. It wasn't the sort of thing you'd "think" or "understand" while quietly reading a book or a blog. It was something I knew to my very core because I was experiencing it.

That knife in my hand. Everything it means to me, as a physical tool, as a symbolic tool, is inextricably bound to everything I've ever experienced with a knife in my hand. What did a middle- or upper-class English white man (or woman) feel when he held a ritual dagger in his hands? What kind of things had they ever done with a knife?

In traditional European fairy tales - of which I've read thousands of pages to the the aforementioned children - there is a figure you can recognize the moment she appears. Typically it's the old woman who tends the noble house's poultry flock. When she turns up in a story, you can bet your gold teeth she's a "witch".

You have to remember that these stories were retold by countless generations before they were finally written down by prescient scholars to save them from the oblivion that would be their fate in the new industrial society. So, depending on how Christianized the telling of a particular tale had become over time, the "witch" figure in these tales could either be downright evil or the protagonist's benefactor. Interestingly enough, the versions most people know - the widely published Grimms' tales - are just about the most Western, Christian versions of these tales in existence. So, in Grimms' the witch is usually evil.

In my experience, once you start heading southeast, and especially as you enter Balkan territory, the tales become more magical in content, and the witch tends to be a more positive character. She is often the one who knows better than the wise men in the palace court, and gives the protagonists the "spell" needed to solve their problem: take this object/these herbs, go to that place at this time, and then perform this act.

Where did she get her wisdom from? Why does she know things they don't know in the palace culture? What does this woman associate with a knife? How is it different than the associations the noblemen have, due to the things she does with a knife?

I've read in various places (and have no idea whether it's true or just something authors repeat in subsequent publications) that European witches used household objects in their rituals, such as brooms, cauldrons, and wooden spoons, because they didn't have to hide them like they would things that had obvious ritual functions. Could be. Sounds good. But maybe, just maybe, the truth is that household objects held a different meaning for them than they did to other people.

A knife certainly means something different to me than it does to the people I know who place no importance on cooking. It's happened to me several times. I am at someone's house and I volunteer to cook something. Then when I start looking around their kitchen, I can't find a knife beyond a butter knife or perhaps a dull cheap serrated steak knife. Ever try to dice carrots with one of those? It's life endangering.

What's my point? I'm not quite sure. The momentary flash hit me so hard that I'm struggling to flesh it out. Perhaps what I felt in the moment of knowledge (gnosis? Can you experience gnosis while cooking?) was the realization that we need to validate our experience in the here and now, and have confidence in the significance of the things we know, even the "little things". It's not unimportant to know the feeling of a knife sliding on a whetstone. There is meaning to the knowledge of how it feels when you are cutting a pepper the right way. It is only a step away from the miracle of alchemy to know the proper heat conditions for adding paprika to sautéd onions. And knowing these things has an impact on the way you will and should pursue your magic.

Consider carefully what people did and how they lived when trying to understand their spiritual practices. What they did depended on who they were.

Know yourself. Know your skills. Know where they will lead you.

I forgot to give credit...

noreply@blogger.com (The Scribbler) — Tue, 14 Sep 2010 19:35:00 +0000

...to the artist who created the Michael image. Amishael writes about crafting it here on one of her many blogs.

When you have a little problem with dragons...

noreply@blogger.com (The Scribbler) — Mon, 13 Sep 2010 09:40:00 +0000

As I mentioned in my last posting, I am among a group of parents setting up a new Waldorf kindergarten in Budapest's notoriously proletarian Újpest district. And I also mentioned that some of the neighbors are hostile to the idea. Reasons vary. Some people just hate little kids. Others resent what they see as prissy middle-class families moving in on their turf. Others bear their teeth at anything "alternative" ("Why can't you just send your kids to the same state-run kindergartens that warped us?").

Whatever. We don't have the time to stick each and every one of them on the couch and heal their neuroses. We have a job to do. And an important job, at that.

Waldorf education is hard to describe to people who know nothing about it. And even if you are involved with it as a parent, it takes years to really understand what the teachers and the schools are trying to do. It's not just another alternative education system (like Montessori, or parochial school). The easiest way to describe Waldorf education is to say that its aim is to aid a child in unfolding its true nature as a human being. This is the exact opposite of standard education, which treats the child as a tabula raza. Standard education strives to make the child into a "product". In centuries gone by they wished to create the perfect bureaucrat. Now they want to create the perfect corporate employee.

Rudolf Steiner started his education theory on the basis of the Menschenbild, i.e. a nuanced spiritual, mystical understanding of what a human being really is. Going from there, his intention was to create an education system that aided the child to realize itself and to unfold all the phases of its being, and not to mold it into a product that happens to be what the Powers That Be want at that particular moment in history. I have half-jokingly (which means half-seriously) referred to it as "initiatory education," because it emphasizes teaching subjects at that particular time when a child's development is ready to assimilate it, rather than arbitrarily deciding when the system wants the child to learn something. This way of education, along with the emphasis on learning through doing and learning through creating, gives the child a series of awakening experiences, which build the learning into its being, rather than than just remaining intellectual concepts.

Waldorf graduates are truly a boon to any society. They are reflective, self-confident individuals who are not afraid of rolling up their sleeves and getting involved in a hands-on way wherever they find themselves. And they have self knowledge.

I'll be so bold as to say that Waldorf schools, like a proper esoteric school, bring more light into the world (please read that sentence carefully and understand that I did not say Waldorf schools are esoteric schools). And there are always opponents to the bringers of light: the forces of darkness. Now, the forces of darkness are not anything as romantic as Black Magicians weaving their evil spells to take over the world and enslave mankind. Darkness is simply ignorance. Ignorance is startled and threatened by the appearance of light. And it will often fight to keep things comfortably dark.

And I think this is a great deal of our problem. There are people who don't like what we are doing because... well... they just don't like what we're doing.

At board meetings and in conversations between parents, I sometimes noted a tone of exaggerated fear when we were talking about the neighbors and other obstructionists. "To what lengths are these lunatics willing to go?" I could tell people were especially nervous because their children were involved.

After wracking my brains for a more "magical" solution to this problem, it hit me: we should build a shrine to St. Michael! I pitched it to the board and to the kindergarten teachers and it was approved. I commissioned an artist friend to make an image. And this is what she finally created. (Click on it to see it larger.)

Yesterday I installed a shelf and hung the picture in the teachers' new office. I burned frankincense and performed an invocation of Michael, asking him to protect our project to bring more light into the world: to protect the kindergarten, to protect the teachers and parents, and especially to protect the children. There was a palpable hum in the air when I finished.

Here's how the altar looked when it was finished. (Also clickable)

If you wish to see what the just-finished kindergarten looks like, you can see pictures on the kindergarten blog (But the text is all in Hungarian.)

Expedite Phones Home

noreply@blogger.com (The Scribbler) — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 15:11:00 +0000

Since I live in Hungary, I dedicate a lot of my reality-altering techniques (I formulate it this way since I don't always use "magic" per se, but half the time just good old-fashioned straightforward visualization) to push through red tape and to get glacial public administration moving faster. For this purpose offerings to Ganesha, visualizations incorporating Ganesha, and chanting Ganesha mantras have often done the trick.

But recently, I have been presented with a nastier obstacle, with a shorter deadline. I am part of a group of people who are setting up a new institution in Budapest (I am being vague intentionally). A foundation was established, officers elected to the board and funds collected. We have been renovating a house for this purpose, with much of the work done by volunteers.

But there are those in the neighborhood who are opposed to the project. Most of the opponents have no reasonable grounds for their opposition, they are simply afraid of change. I have been operating in the background as this project's unofficial magician, with only two or three people knowing what I am doing (I wonder how often that's the case?). These neighbors are throwing wrenches into the machinery of administration to slow things down by: calling the cops when our renovation work gets "too loud" and; lodging legal challenges to our project with the district city council. We're also having troubles with inflexible and overly strict fire department and health department officials (possibly expecting to be bribed to cut us a break). There is a permit to operate our institution that we must have by the middle of September, or it will cause us lots of difficulties. And seen from the conventional way of looking at things, it doesn't look highly likely we'll get it.

Sounds like a job for St Expedite.

I've only worked with Expedite once or twice, and that was in his lesser role as a retrainer of procrastinators. While I was doing this, I got the impression that what he wanted more than pound cake or offerings to the poor, was to be in a church.

I could be wrong, but I am fairly certain that Expedite doesn't really have a traditional presence in Hungary, though sources say he was venerated in "German-speaking countries", which Hungary most certainly was until after the first World War.

There's a large brick Catholic church about five minute's walk from our apartment (I'm not naming it so it doesn't show up on searches, but that's it on the left). The outside doors of the church are unlocked all day, but the church proper is sealed off most of the time by doors and walls made of wood and glass. I go in on occasion to have a look inside from the vestibule. It's a sweet nostalgia for me since I was brought up very, very Catholic.

It occurred to me that it would be very easy to place a colored printout of Expedite in a little wooden IKEA frame, spread super glue on the back of the frame, and press it onto a chosen plaster wall. I know some people would find this to be distastefully subversive, even vandalism, but I choose to think of it as guerrilla decorating.

I explained my idea to my teenage sons, and they were quite willing to help. We devised a plan worthy of Ocean's Eleven.

I had the framed picture and glue in a cloth shopping bag (there are are two supermarkets within a hundred yards of the front door) and my eldest son and I had walky-talkies with earphones. He sat in a location where he could see the front door, and my other son stood at the corner the elder one couldn't see around, pretending he was waiting for a ride. This son is into prestidigitation, so he came equipped with a set of Chicago balls in his pocket. His job was to offer ten seconds of distraction by doing magic tricks if someone threatened to enter the vestibule at a critical moment.

My eldest son and I had code words worked out to signal by radio if someone was approaching the door, coming up the steps, or if the other son started doing magic tricks. ("Zeppelin" was the signal that someone was coming up the steps. Can you figure that one out?) He was cool as a cucumber, and I alway knew what was going on outside from his signals.

The operation went smoothly, except that I slathered too much glue on the frame, so it didn't dry as fast as I expected. But my boys had my back. We had a good laugh when we met at our designated rendezvous afterwards.

I was afraid that the picture was either not glued properly and would fall off (the wall was more porous than I'd expected) or that someone would notice the uncanonized intruder and remove him from the wall.

I've been back to visit him twice. After nearly a week, it is tightly on the wall. And it looks so natural where it's hanging, I don't think anyone's noticed it (unless some gypsies have recognized him and have started offering prayers to him).

I have the impression that Expedite is pleased. He's in a church where he can serve God. Where else would he want to be?