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I've found myself wanting to write some thoughts that don't really belong in the more fact-based and helpful-to-others Book Club thread:
wizardforums.com
So I figured I'd start this.
I'm not sure how interesting it'll be given I'm likely to keep the majority of my experiences private, but we'll see!
My Approach and thoughts on the 3x2 month structure
So one thing I noticed when reading The Sacred Book of Abramelin the Mage, Frater Acher's Holy Daimon (and his free essay, The Everyday Path to the HGA) (and also 21st Century Mage by Jason Newcomb) is the way they're structured
Abramelin has three sections of two months each, ramping up in intensity. In the first, you're just finding your feet, and not expected to really know what you're doing or have it all nailed, but you should be feeling it by the second stage.
Holy Daimon / Everyday Path also has 3 stages, called:
TRUST
JOY
DARKNESS
(followed by the final 1-week stage, ENCOUNTER, the actual invocation)
In Helios Unbound, there are 7 months, with the first two being "finding your feet with the rituals" and a month of elemental balancing rites
HD's TRUST is partly about trusting your Holy Daimon, releasing yourself into their hands, but it's primarily about trusting yourself - do I keep my commitments? Can I trust myself to generally handle my shit? Do I know how to act like an adult? Can I handle power responsibly? Do I own the choices I make when i exercise power? (one exercise in TRUST involves holding two eggs and making the choice to destroy one of them and protect and coddle the other one for the rest of the day - with resonance to the Orphic egg)
It seems to me that TRUST has the same goal as HU's elemental balancing: getting your shit together in Malkuth. The minimum age requirement in Abramelin is (optimistically) assuming you'll have your shit together too.
JOY, the second stage of HD, consists mainly of a kind of singing magic, first psalms, then to the planets, then just the sun, culminating with reaching out directly to the sun. Acher says that when you use meditation etc to empty yourself, it's not safe to remain an empty vessel, and you have to "seal the vessel with joy". The singing is meant to be a joyful practice. The purpose to me seems very much to be "inflaming thyself with prayer".
Month 3 in HU includes a month of vowel singing based on the PGM, activating your own energy centre's, then your Holy Daimon's,* then marrying them together. The power of the human voice is important in both HU and HD.
I won't get into the DARKNESS stage yet.
But these parallels are why I'm comfortable combining the Holy Daimon process with Helious Unbound: they're complimentary.
The requirements of Holy Daimon are not onerous - daily meditation, the singing, and occasional extra exercises like the day spent protecting the unbroken egg. So I'm currently doing both, and aligning them to the appropriate phase. Helios Unbound is the core rite, and the only one I've sworn an oath to complete - if life gets busy I'll drop the Holy Daimon exercises but not the HU ones.
* [note: Nick Farrell uses 'Higher Genius' and insists it's different from your HGA or Holy Daimon. But I think he's clearly interpreting them to the HGA to be the nativity angel, which they're not. I'm not sticking to his terminology because it doesn't inspire me]
Gallery of Magick's Mystical Words of Power and Magickal Destiny
I had already started Mystical Words of Power before I decided to begin HU so I'm seeing it through. It's not results magic - it's classic GOM "stare at a sigil" magic but to awaken qualities in you. There are 7 rites. By chance, they align very well with elemental balancing, which is why I decided to keep going
eg the GoM Healing Rite and Water balancing, 'Transformation' and Fire. They take like 60 seconds so there's no reason not to follow through
Having read Magickal Destiny, GoM's HGA book, I'm inclined to follow some of their protocols too (I could have titled this Journal "Spamming the HGA"). Again it seems like way too much but the protocols are actually super lightweight
Protocol 1 = "opening yourself and welcoming the presence of your HGA" which you really should be doing anyway.
Protocol 2 = asking your HGA for help with any of your "true needs" (things that will help your spiritual attainment). Again this is really just a reminder to stay attuned to the HGA even when you're outside of the temple and your thrice-daily invocations. Protocol 4 is "offering your pain to the HGA". It just means that throughout your day, your mind is continually turning to your HGA - when you're in pain, when you need help. I would say that rather than adding to the burden of Helios Unbound, Magickal Destiny protocols are actually a structure that makes it easier to keep your HGA in mind as you should be doing anyway
(the main reason for this is the fact that I'm currently unemployed. That's unlikely to last through the whole seven months, so I'm taking advantage of the time I have available now. While there's an argument to be made for "if you start out too intense, you'll have nowhere to go but down", I think it's also the case that work put into meditation and ritual when you have free time pays dividends when you're busy and already have your skills developed)
Emotions in Solar Invocation
Yesterday I was running a full-day workshop on newsletters (feel free to ask me for advice if you're starting a newsletter) which meant my noon solar invocation was done silently in a bathroom stall. I was just pleased with myself for getting it done at all.
But it occurred to me, what attitude did I bring to getting my solar invocation done? Really it was "I am determined to keep the obligations I promised I would keep". That's not a bad motivation. You could do worse.
But, I thought, what if instead i had brought the attitude of "I don't want to be apart from my Holy Daimon and I'll be sad to miss any opportunity to become closer to it, so I'm going to sneak away at noon and do my invocation" - an attitude of love and desire for the HGA, not one of obligation and duty. That would be better, I think.
So, thinking about keeping that attitude in focus: inflaming oneself with desire to complete the work, not just keeping your promises, as important as TRUST is.
Book Club - Helios Unbound: some helpful notes and Qs
First the helpful notes! I thought I might as well post my process overview notes. This is just the material from the front of each chapter, expanded a bit after reading the chapter in full Note that it took going through the text quite thoroughly to fill in all the extra info that wasn't...
wizardforums.com
So I figured I'd start this.
I'm not sure how interesting it'll be given I'm likely to keep the majority of my experiences private, but we'll see!
Post automatically merged:
My Approach and thoughts on the 3x2 month structure
So one thing I noticed when reading The Sacred Book of Abramelin the Mage, Frater Acher's Holy Daimon (and his free essay, The Everyday Path to the HGA) (and also 21st Century Mage by Jason Newcomb) is the way they're structured
Abramelin has three sections of two months each, ramping up in intensity. In the first, you're just finding your feet, and not expected to really know what you're doing or have it all nailed, but you should be feeling it by the second stage.
Holy Daimon / Everyday Path also has 3 stages, called:
TRUST
JOY
DARKNESS
(followed by the final 1-week stage, ENCOUNTER, the actual invocation)
In Helios Unbound, there are 7 months, with the first two being "finding your feet with the rituals" and a month of elemental balancing rites
HD's TRUST is partly about trusting your Holy Daimon, releasing yourself into their hands, but it's primarily about trusting yourself - do I keep my commitments? Can I trust myself to generally handle my shit? Do I know how to act like an adult? Can I handle power responsibly? Do I own the choices I make when i exercise power? (one exercise in TRUST involves holding two eggs and making the choice to destroy one of them and protect and coddle the other one for the rest of the day - with resonance to the Orphic egg)
It seems to me that TRUST has the same goal as HU's elemental balancing: getting your shit together in Malkuth. The minimum age requirement in Abramelin is (optimistically) assuming you'll have your shit together too.
JOY, the second stage of HD, consists mainly of a kind of singing magic, first psalms, then to the planets, then just the sun, culminating with reaching out directly to the sun. Acher says that when you use meditation etc to empty yourself, it's not safe to remain an empty vessel, and you have to "seal the vessel with joy". The singing is meant to be a joyful practice. The purpose to me seems very much to be "inflaming thyself with prayer".
Month 3 in HU includes a month of vowel singing based on the PGM, activating your own energy centre's, then your Holy Daimon's,* then marrying them together. The power of the human voice is important in both HU and HD.
I won't get into the DARKNESS stage yet.
But these parallels are why I'm comfortable combining the Holy Daimon process with Helious Unbound: they're complimentary.
The requirements of Holy Daimon are not onerous - daily meditation, the singing, and occasional extra exercises like the day spent protecting the unbroken egg. So I'm currently doing both, and aligning them to the appropriate phase. Helios Unbound is the core rite, and the only one I've sworn an oath to complete - if life gets busy I'll drop the Holy Daimon exercises but not the HU ones.
* [note: Nick Farrell uses 'Higher Genius' and insists it's different from your HGA or Holy Daimon. But I think he's clearly interpreting them to the HGA to be the nativity angel, which they're not. I'm not sticking to his terminology because it doesn't inspire me]
Gallery of Magick's Mystical Words of Power and Magickal Destiny
I had already started Mystical Words of Power before I decided to begin HU so I'm seeing it through. It's not results magic - it's classic GOM "stare at a sigil" magic but to awaken qualities in you. There are 7 rites. By chance, they align very well with elemental balancing, which is why I decided to keep going
eg the GoM Healing Rite and Water balancing, 'Transformation' and Fire. They take like 60 seconds so there's no reason not to follow through
Having read Magickal Destiny, GoM's HGA book, I'm inclined to follow some of their protocols too (I could have titled this Journal "Spamming the HGA"). Again it seems like way too much but the protocols are actually super lightweight
Protocol 1 = "opening yourself and welcoming the presence of your HGA" which you really should be doing anyway.
Protocol 2 = asking your HGA for help with any of your "true needs" (things that will help your spiritual attainment). Again this is really just a reminder to stay attuned to the HGA even when you're outside of the temple and your thrice-daily invocations. Protocol 4 is "offering your pain to the HGA". It just means that throughout your day, your mind is continually turning to your HGA - when you're in pain, when you need help. I would say that rather than adding to the burden of Helios Unbound, Magickal Destiny protocols are actually a structure that makes it easier to keep your HGA in mind as you should be doing anyway
Post automatically merged:
(the main reason for this is the fact that I'm currently unemployed. That's unlikely to last through the whole seven months, so I'm taking advantage of the time I have available now. While there's an argument to be made for "if you start out too intense, you'll have nowhere to go but down", I think it's also the case that work put into meditation and ritual when you have free time pays dividends when you're busy and already have your skills developed)
Post automatically merged:
Emotions in Solar Invocation
Yesterday I was running a full-day workshop on newsletters (feel free to ask me for advice if you're starting a newsletter) which meant my noon solar invocation was done silently in a bathroom stall. I was just pleased with myself for getting it done at all.
But it occurred to me, what attitude did I bring to getting my solar invocation done? Really it was "I am determined to keep the obligations I promised I would keep". That's not a bad motivation. You could do worse.
But, I thought, what if instead i had brought the attitude of "I don't want to be apart from my Holy Daimon and I'll be sad to miss any opportunity to become closer to it, so I'm going to sneak away at noon and do my invocation" - an attitude of love and desire for the HGA, not one of obligation and duty. That would be better, I think.
So, thinking about keeping that attitude in focus: inflaming oneself with desire to complete the work, not just keeping your promises, as important as TRUST is.
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