Failure a sign of a true magickian. Perhaps not by the literal meaning of the word, but more by my own ideals of what a magickian should embody. Some might wonder if an ideal magickian could fail, but to me the ideal magickian is not omnipotent or omniscient, meaning failure can and should be part of the picture.
To see why an ideal magickian fails, one must think about why a “flawed” magickian would not fail.
One reason why a magickian may never fail is a lack of critical or detached thinking. If one is too attached and/or lacks critical thinking, then one would be unable to view results as they are, or could convince themselves otherwise. This leads to another fault, the inability to be honest, perhaps with others, but more importantly the inability to be honest with the self.
Perhaps the most important reason for a lack of failure is a lack of ambition. The path of the magickian is one of change and growth. If a magickian attains a level of accomplishment where they no longer fail, it means they have stopped pushing their boundaries and abilities. A magickian without failure has stopped trying to climb the mountain, and merely enjoys their view.
The contrast to these faults makes up the ideal magickian; someone detached and critical enough to view the world and their results honestly; someone honest enough to admit their failures, even if only to themselves; and perhaps most importantly an ideal magickian does not stop trying to achieve more and attain higher and deeper levels of understanding.
“Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new.” ~Albert Einstein
So last time I rambled on the importance of specific languages in calculating the name of an angel. It had a lot of open-ended and circular problems. Are languages important, why, and which ones? It led to some interesting discussion in comments, twitter, and an email. (At first I was confused how this person got my email, until I remembered I put it on my About page, just so people could get in contact with me without having to post a comment. I guess my brain is too full remembering The Raven and Pi to 23 digits to pay attention to what I do with my blog.) This is more of me working out my thoughts in writing, and hoping for some good ideas.
Now the process of calculating an angels name surely complicates matter and if you just stick with already named angels and demons that will make it much better. I remember when I first got into spirit work I had this strong instinct that by knowing the name of a spirit I had influence over it, by knowing their Name I could control them. Over years I found this idea represented in Babylonian/Akkadian/Sumerian magick, in Egyptian magick, western Ceremonial Magick, even in Vedic and Buddhist magick. Names have Power. Along with this is the parallel idea that Sigils/Seals have the same control/influence. Simply I’d say a name is auditory and a sigil is visual but they are the same thing.
Traditions may argue how much power and influence the name or symbol gives you, but they largely agree that they do. So that makes this a lot simpler than calculating a name, here you have the name provided for you, and a seal, and that makes it simple… as long as you never look at another text. When I received my Goetia of Dr. Rudd I was surprised by how many of the names and seals were close but not the same as my Mathers version. I had come to understand a lot of this magick through the doctrine of names. But what did it mean when Halphas/Malthus and Raum have their names and seals rendered differently? If my power over Malthus or at least my ability to contact or communicate with em is based upon my possession of eir seal and name how did I accomplish anything if I had it wrong? I can’t reach you if I dial the wrong number, can you reach a spirit with the wrong name/seal? This preoccupied me more than some people’s focus and questioning of the inclusion/absence of the Shem ha’mephorash angels.
I was able to wrap myself around this, and that became less of a concern until I realized it wasn’t just names and seals changing, but spirits were being stolen, or split, and combined. This opens up a magickal can of worms on its own, but I want to focus on names here. If the name is the connection and control of a spirit, what happens when a name of one spirit gets applied to another apparently unrelated entity? Or more curious to me, when a spirit’s name and existence was completely a mistake? Halphas above is a good example, Halphas is the 38th spirit of the Goetia and Malphas is the 39th and they share similar abilities and may have been a scribal error initially. Or Berith the 28th spirit of the Goetia whose name is actually the Hebrew term for the covenant between YHWH and the people of Israel (Belanger 70) and was probably included in Christian occult texts because they knew this “Berith” had power, but didn’t know who (or what) it was, so obviously a demon.
So where do these entities and power come from? Is there something inherent in the word and what it represents? While not a demon the covenant between YHWH and the Israelites is arguably a powerful thing (if you believe it) and maybe the name taps into that? Maybe it’s the collective attention (fear) of generations of priests and magickians that give these names and seals form and force, even if they’re drifting off of the original. But how does that apply when the name of someone gets applied to someone else, or a name from nothing but a mistake? Is this an issue that transcends the language issue? Absolutely but it is the naming that has me wonder, because if names and seals matter, then how come they work when they’re wrong?
Again I have no answers to offer, but in traditions that value the power of names and seals, how can we reconcile the fact that these change, or are added, misappropriated, or scribal errors? I’ve been leaning toward the idea that it isn’t what you use, but the process, but I’m still working some of that out in my life and in my head.
Source:
Belanger, Michelle. Dictionary of Demons. Llewellyn, 2010. Print.
Language and magick; there is so much I could write and ramble about this combination that it will take several posts. Names, linguistic drift, spoken languages, dead languages, when languages have power and why; every time I sit down to write or think about this I come up with more ideas.
For now I’m going to focus on alphabets and names. I recently finished updating my Genius Name Calculator (more on it in an upcoming post) and I know what you’re thinking “Kalagni, you’re already a genius and you already have a name, what do you need this calculator for?” That’s not what you were thinking? Could have humoured me at least…
What I’m referring to is what gets called the Angel of the Nativity and is often connected to the idea of your Genius or Daemon. Renaissance magick has a method of calculating the name of this spirit from your birth chart. If you’re interested you can find it in Agrippa’s Three Books of Occult Philosophy, Book III Chapter 26, or wait for my post with the calculator. Traditionally this is done in Hebrew, so I made my calculator in Hebrew. After all, it’s a magickal language isn’t it? I shared the calculator in this early form on an elist and people were appreciative, but asked for other languages. While Hebrew is traditional it isn’t uncommon to see this done in Greek and two different methods of doing it in English are popular too. Now for the rest of this post to matter you’re required to assume this method works, that you can find out a valid and workable Angel name from this process, so at least keep that idea in mind for now, if you assume the method has no validity than this is just a moot ramble.
So now you have one method, which you can substitute four different languages for and you end up with four different names. Using the time of this writing as an example the name of our Angel is Kavatzalah in Hebrew, Gochochopa in Greek, Xaqedije in English, or Majihats in another way of doing it in English. Which is correct? Are they all correct? Will any language work? I had someone ask for this in Sanskrit, which while representing a totally different culture, philosophy, and magickal system, I can’t give a reason why Sanskrit isn’t just as valid as Greek, Hebrew, or English. Especially as Sanskrit is also seen as a very magickal language.
Now one theory is that all of these are correct, loosely it is like brother, frère, frater, bruder, four words/names but one meaning. If that’s the case I can stop wondering, go home, and sleep soundly, it just means Kavatzalah is the Hebrew from of Majihats, simple. While I don’t deny the possibility of this answer it does seem a bit too easy to me and I don’t like that. (I tend to make life difficult by rejecting the simple initially)
Do we make languages magickal? I’ll touch on this in a later post, but the two most common languages for this process are Hebrew and Greek, languages that the magickians who used this system didn’t speak natively and associated with the magickal traditions they studied. Is it their investment in the magickal tradition of the Jews and Greeks that make these the languages magickal to use rather than English, German, or French? So is it the case that Greek and Hebrew aren’t inherently magickal, but the amount of time, both personally and historically, spent investing the languages with magick give them power?
With both Hebrew and Greek the alphabets are used in order when doing the calculations, yet both English methods don’t use the alphabetical order. Is that because English is too mundane and everyday to us as it is and requires some mystery added to it to become workable? (While the 26 letters of English and the order we have now is actually from the last two-hundred years most of the alphabet existed in roughly the same order before then, so I doubt that’s a factor) Perhaps it is something about our religious upbringing or ancestors, the languages important to our religion (in the Christian age of Europe that would be Greek, Hebrew, and Latin) or what our ancestors (however you view that) spoke, that this connection gave them the magick.
I don’t know, sorry if folks reading thought I might have a conclusion. I alternate between all languages are valid and there is something that makes one language more valid than the rest, but I don’t know if that language is always more valid or if it is personal. Perhaps Tibetan would work best for me, but Greek better for a friend and Enochian for another? Maybe the language doesn’t matter, but it is the process and effort that gives strength and reality to the Angel of the Nativity? The effort and process matters more than the tools? I don’t know, but I’d love to get thoughts on this. Hopefully in time I’ll have a follow up, as I’m strongly suspecting some friends are going to get roped into an experiment with this. I see myself distributing a bunch of Angel Names (and fake names) in my future.
Oh, and a hoax…
Going with the flow. I have two posts that I wanted to put up this week, but I’m going to hold back because there is something I want to address.
Copper and lead books tell the most contemporaneous account of Christ’s life!
Or so they say. This story has been getting spread about the internet the last week or so. I’ve seen it pop-up several places, everywhere from magick blogs to the facebook page of a friend who is a Catholic priest and very excited about this. So I decided to put aside some time this afternoon and rant and analyze this.
So if you don’t want to read the link above, let me summarize it. A British couple are currently hiding out in Gloucestershire (but don’t tell the Jordanian hitmen) after recovering a collection 70 books believed to contain an early account of Christ’s life written sometime in the first century by early Christians who fled to Jordan in the 70s.
A lot of people are getting into this story, but there a lot of little problems with it that add up to bigger questions. I’ll start with a reading of the news story before I expand my discussion. Yes, I could just link all the data and other people doing the work, but part of my issue with this is that anyone can pick up some of the concerns with the text with reading and googling.
First thing I noticed is the couple are described as archaeologists and David, the hero of the story is also an author. Yet there are no credentials. Granted this could be an oversight, but in pretty much any news story when you mention an expert you put their credentials, where they studied, where they work, what they degrees are, etc. Every expert the Elkingtons consulted within the article have their credentials mentioned yet the Elkingtons are left blank. Where did they study, what is their area of focus, and who is sponsoring this dig? Why is he sometimes called Dr. but often not? Archaeologists, despite the media image of Croft and Jones, don’t fund their own digs, they don’t decide to pack up, go to some random dirt pile and start digging. No, a museum, university, or government branch has a location site, permissions, equipment and hires people to excavate and analyze the findings. The article mentions none of this, and quite frankly if this were real what museum or university wouldn’t fight to get that information included in the press release that they just uncovered the real story of Christ? Suspicious point.
David (who gets all the press, despite the idea that it is a husband/wife team) is also an author. Of what? Well two books, first is In the Name of the Gods, a book about Templars and an energy-sound-spirit connection, and an upcoming book based on how awesomely exciting and dangerous his current quest for these early Christian books have been (this will link up to Feather later). Not only is he writing a book on it, because it is so much like Indiana Jones (his own admission) but Robert Watts, producer of Raiders of the Lost Ark has contacted them about making it into a movie. Amazing how this story is just coming to light and already a book deal and a movie proposal. Don’t worry folks, it gets more suspicious. (Also the constant reference by Elkington to how much like a movie it is seems odd. The researcher was like Ms. Marple, the owner is like a mafia boss, then he’s like Gollum…) But suspicious point two.
The books are written in ancient Hebrew, a fact we’ll touch more on later, which is odd. Aramaic was more commonly used (and probably Jesus’s mother tongue) though Hebrew and Greek were both widely used in that area and time frame in different circumstances.
The article lacks anything primary. All the research that is done is relayed by David, not cross-referenced to the experts; he’s talking for them, they’re often unnamed, who tested the metals? So that’s the issues with the news story just as it is, time to go down the rabbit hole?
Dr. David (or Paul?) Elkington. An archaeologist, author, real-life Indiana Jones, curious where did he study and get his credentials? Turns out he studied as an artist at the Bath Academy of Arts. Nothing against artists, trained or otherwise, but I prefer my archaeologists making ground breaking discoveries to have some relevant degree in history or archaeology. So not an archaeologist, historian, or anyone qualified for such a dig. Suspicious points abound.
When investigating the source of the books, where they were found and by who, two stories emerge, sometimes on the same website or paper. Five years ago they were uncovered in a flash flood in Jordan, or they were uncovered in a flash flood and in the Jordanian trucker’s family for a hundred years. New stories once you branch past the telegraph (which I’m dealing with because it was the first I came across and the most widespread) don’t always agree. The language it is written in is is often mentioned as Hebrew as well as an unidentified Phoenician language, and then rare occasions in Greek. The name of the man who owns the books changes, not drastically, but enough to be suspicious, then again David Elkington is sometimes Paul Elkington, so many everyone on this adventure have multiple names. Whether there were found in Jordan or Egypt changes. The story shifts more than the sand it was apparently buried under. Now just because news papers disagree on stories doesn’t mean they’re wrong, but it does start to make the story questionable as we have to wonder why are these mistakes present, why aren’t they corrected? 5 years, 100 years, big difference. Jordan, Egypt, big difference. Hebrew, Greek, Unidentified, big difference.
Now one Peter Thonemann, MA, DPhil, lecturer on Ancient History at Wadham and Keble Colleges (look credentials!) was an expert that Elkington asked to help with the translation of the texts a year ago, yet he isn’t mentioned in the news articles generally for some reason. He translated the Greek on the cover (wait, wasn’t this written in Hebrew, or an unidentified Phoenician language?) and came up with an odd sentence fragment that made no sense, but mentioning a name Abgar. A bit of research on Thonemann’s behalf turned up not just the name Abgar, but the entire fragmented sentence on the cover of the book. What profound Judeo-Christian source did he uncover? A Roman tombstone for Abgar from Madaba Jordan c. 108 CE and on display in the Archeological Museum in Amman. Thonemann let Elkington know this, but Elkington, with the academic insight of his art degree, went public anyways.
What makes the story more amusing is that the books were previously discovered/released by Robert Feather as an early Qabalistic text with the location of the treasures of the Temple of Solomon. At that time there were only more then 20, now the number is 70. At that time the Israel Antiquities Authority said they are useless and a hoax because they contain a horrible mishmash of languages, images, and sentence fragments that really don’t match up. Letter soup that is grouped together to look intriguing until you start translation. This was denounced as a hoax, and then a month later with a much better back story Elkington arises with the same documents.
The only thing lending any credibility to this is that apparently the corrosion on the metal dates back about 2000 years (but again not properly cited who did this research, sometimes it was an “initial” test, other times seems more of a proper study) and the fact that the Jordanian government apparently wants them back.
Recently some more data came to my attention while writing this as Ananael posted on it in the process of my editing, and a friend knowing what I was doing sent a link.
The image of Jesus on the codex is considered currently to be Helios, but there is also a theory that it is The Mona Lisa of Galilee. I’m not totally convinced by this, but it makes an interesting case, and if all the data from the author is right it means this forgery is less than 30 years old.
From Ananael’s post there is a link showing how the letters themselves show the age of the books is wrong as some of them are from a form of Aramaic that is from the second and third century it also contains so far to my knowledge the only article so far pointing out that Elkington doesn’t have credentials to be involved with this sort of thing.
When I saw the title of the article I was curious, after reading it I was suspicious after some googling I realized it is a hoax. I can’t say by who or for what end, but all signs point to hoax.
Some good reading for those wanting more information on this: Heavy metal secrets from a Mid-East cave
Now I don’t mean magickians with a Chaos Magick bend who are using Pokemon, in fact I’m probably more on their side than the group I refer to as Magickal Pokemon Trainers. We’ve all seen them before, they come in all shapes, sizes, and traditions; people who treat spiritual beings, trainings, initiations and similar things, as collector’s items.
I see them a lot in relationship to Mahayana and Vajrayana Buddhism, generally –but not always– by western Newagers who are using/appropriating/incorporating Buddhism into their path. Within Mahayana and Vajrayana Buddhism there is a ritual called an Abhisheka, translated often as Empowerment, in which a trained Lama implants or awakens the Seed of a specific Boddhisattva. The purpose is (traditionally) to introduce the student to the current of the Boddhisattva or “blessing stream” as my one Lama says, to offer a Seed of their enlightenment to work from, and the Boddhisattva can become your Yidam, a personal figure used in your meditations. It’s a beautiful tradition with a lot of depth and nuance. Unfortunately now it seems like it is a Pokemon game. When I received my Abhisheka to Vajrapani, I was surprised to hear several of the initiates in the temple boasting about past Abhishekas “Well, I’ve received White Tara, Black Tara, Green Tara, and Hayagriva.” “I got Chenrezig, Chakrasamvara, and Padmasambhava.” Is there a benefit of receiving more than one Boddhisattva? Yes, different practices can require different Yidams, but most people who collect aren’t undertaking these other practices (though may take some basic training to brag about later). There is more to it than just getting a Boddhisattva shoved into your brain, and I might argue there is a large aspect of diminishing returns, after a while you can only do so much, no matter how many Boddhisattvas you have placed inside of you.
You see it in the Santeria-Family of religions, people who go about getting multiple crownings and actually go out of their way to receive more from other houses or even traveling to Nigeria to receive more, when really they should only have one, and sometimes the multiple crownings involve Orisha who may not want to be in the same head. I see it in the Newage community a lot, probably more than anywhere else; people who brag about repeated workshops, initiations, trainings, cleansings, guides, healings and such. I see it less with Ceremonial Magickians, we have less of a structure that enables this, but occasionally you’ll come across a magickian whose great accomplishment is summoning all 72 Goetic Demons, or all 49 Heptarchy Angels.
Gotta catch them all, Pokemon!
Back in early High School, when Pokemon first arrived in North America I played it, and enjoyed it. I loved the world, and all the different Pokemon (at that time a mere 151) but was always saddened that I was limited to six. In fact for a good 80% of the game, at least, I used the same six Pokemon. Sure I had 151 (potentially) to choose from, but only six at a time. As I’d battle with specific Pokemon they’d get stronger, so that if I tried to switch to another Pokemon they might not always work, because they are too weak, I don’t have the experience with them, and don’t know how to use them. So I stuck with the same six, and while sometimes there were weak against Pokemon I was battling, usually I could find a way to make them work, and only in the extreme cases would I pick another Pokemon to use because it was far better suited.
Forgive the nostalgia, but I think it makes my point. When you receive a Yidam, they are to be your personal meditation deity; you devote yourself to them to awaken their Seed within you. If you have many Yidams then you probably can’t give any of them the devotion required to really make use of the gift you’ve been given. If every Orisha or Lwa is a relationship, and you have more than you can easily name, then you probably won’t be providing a strong relationship for them, and they can’t provide for you. Magickians whose accomplishment is just summoning all 72 Goetic demons, rarely have much to say accomplishment-wise about what the demons have done. I’ve been using the Goetia for six years now, seriously for four, and in that time I’ve only ever used about a dozen of them, and only five of them I use repeatedly. Why? Because it isn’t about how many Seals I’ve drawn up, how many entities I’ve trapped in my triangle, but it is about the results from them. The five Goetia I’ve used multiple times, I do so because they’ve worked multiple times and I have no need to spread my efforts to a spirit that I don’t have a relationship with if I don’t have to. Why undertake conjuring a new spirit that may not work in the way I need them to, if I don’t have a reason to. “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”
Even from a mundane perspective collecting becomes counter-productive when you become more focused on collecting than the collection. Eventually you’re grasping at so many shining things that you will be unable to enjoy or use anything you’ve already grabbed. The act of collecting becomes a distraction, or an excuse, from actually working and getting things done.
This isn’t to say don’t explore, don’t experiment, don’t try something new, but there is more to these trainings, initiations, and spirits than just the bragging rights of receiving them. It is less about how many Pokemon you collect, and more about how experienced you are with the Pokemon, how strong they are, and how effective they are. Try new things, take the occasional new training or initiation, but realize that isn’t the point or benefit in and of itself. Sometimes you’ll learn something new and useful, sometimes it is new and useless, but if you spend all your time getting initiated and training, and not doing, not living, then you won’t find out what works best for you, who your strongest Pokemon is.
