The last few Buddhism posts are still coming, but I’ve had a few health issues in the last two weeks, so for now enjoy some of the stuff I’ve come across online.
I just stumbled over a three year old paper in The Journal of Neuroscience titled “Purging of Memories from Conscious Awareness Tracked in the Human Brain” Now it was a very limited study with 18 people, so don’t draw too strong of conclusions from it, but basically it demonstrated the potential for people to consciously forget information. This also only applied to simple information, a sequence of words, you might not be successful forgetting your fashion choices from the eleventh grade with this. But, not only is this perfect for sigil magick when using the banishing/forgetting method…it’s pretty much what we’ve been saying all along. The method of forgetting was interrupting the thoughts. So if you’re trying to forget a word or image (like a sigil) every time it came up you immediately distracted yourself with another topic. Reminds me of my early training, where it was also said if the sigil comes back just laugh, laugh loud and hard until it goes away, and eventually it stops coming back. Interesting to see some research saying that method might actually work.
Now to counter this, Balthazar wrote a great piece on sigils from a more spirit based paradigm, having dropped Spare’s psychological theories, and how it works for him.
I have not been sharing my excitement about this enough, for which I apologize, but there is still time for you to get autographed copies of Star.Ships by Gordon White
I know when I get my copy, I’ll make sure to put a good curse on it, as was a tradition back in the middle ages. And you can find more examples in the book Anathema! by Marc Drogin
While not as exciting as Star.Ships, following in the trend of adult colouring books is the Occult Colouring book. With images like Lucifer’s Fall and Ishtar to colour in
A John Dee painting is shown now to have originally had him standing in a ring of skulls Personally I’d prefer it with the skulls. I agree with the article though, it shows the “confusion” on how to depict and relate to the man. Brilliant budding scientist…but also man who devoted years chatting with angels, and sadly our current culture has trouble holding both of those images at once, so something has to get covered up.
While I can’t vouch for the accuracy, and I’ve only watched the first part there is a compelling documentary on magick in Iceland.
Wednesday Webshare: Sigils, Star.Ships, and Skulls
