Tag Archives: Theurgy

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Banishing: Whatcha gonna do without an Elburp?


Source:

Head For the Red

http://headforred.blogspot.com/2010/04/banishing-whatcha-gonna-do-without.html

This past weekend, I got hit with a wave of sadness, a deep and sorrowful sadness that made me want to just sit down and cry. Being the self-aware magician that I am, I quickly realized there was absolutely no reason for feeling that way. I had slept really well the night before, I had been doing chores that make me feel good, like I’m fulfilling my roles and responsibilities as a man, and there hasn’t been anything going on in my life that would leave me depressed.

Random mood swings are one of the things I’ve learned are usually caused by a spiritual attack. Especially random feelings of anxiety or depression. Most spiritual attacks, in my experience, are caused by wandering nepheshim,* the shades of the dead. These spirits are supposed to fade away around 6 weeks after the body of a person dies. Some of them learn to survive on the extreme emotions of other humans, and they learn to trigger these extreme emotions in their vicitms, floating around causing depression or anxiety.

Note that I am NOT saying all depression or anxiety is caused by a spirit. Most of us have valid and real reasons to feel depressed and frightened at times in our lives. I’m talking about feelings that come out of nowhere when we should be happy, or were happy just a second ago.

What happens is a wandering Nephesh does whatever it does to attack. You feel a wave of fear, anxiety, or nostalgia about something that makes no sense in your current context. Your mind will likely go looking for some “subconscious” reason for the feeling and chances are good it will find something plausible; this is a trap. You will justify your feelings of sadness, pin it on some real event that legitimately makes you feel sad, and the false sense of sadness has now been replaced with a real source of pain in your life. By your own brain. And then you’re generating real depression, or fear, or whatever, and the spirit gets to feed.

Now, people die every day. I figure there are a few hundred fading nephesh per square mile, especially around graveyards, hospitals, and the cities where people die in accidents, gun fights, stabbings, etc. In old neighborhoods there are more of them, and the longer a place has been around, the more nephesh gather that figure out ways to survive.

So when the wave of random bad feelings hit me, I quickly analyzed whether or not it was legit, and finding no ready reason for the feeling, I started to banish.

Since I have publicly aired my opinion of the LBRP (pronounced “Elburp”), you can bet I didn’t use that. Instead, I went with something more in keeping with my own context. There are echoes of the Elburp in the rite I did, but only because I’m working from the same traditional sources as the Golden Dawn, but with a different overall intent and cosmology.

I was in my bedroom in the basement. I’ve found that basements seem to have more nepheshim, must be a chthonic thing. I sat down on my bed, and closed my eyes. I called out to my HGA, and pictured myself within my Altar Glyph, standing in the center, surrounded by the Four Princes of the Angles of the World, and the Seven Intelligences of the Planets. Beneath me were the bound Demonic Kings, hostile in the Elements, and above me was my HGA. Looking up far enough, I caught a glimpse of the Source pouring down like a fountain through the spheres in a long chain tha ended with my own manifestation.

This reminded me of my “Race and Value,” that is, my divine heritage and my position within the framework of eternity. Reclaiming this relationship is the cornerstone of Neo-Platonic philosophy, according to my understanding of Plotinus’Enneads.

Next, I said aloud, in a low voice, “Nephesh, be gone now in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. [HGA name], remove this offending spirit. Michael, Raphael, Uriel, Gabriel, consecrate this ground for our defense; let no wandering shade or spirit of ill intent pass within this home.”

I then called on the Archangels of the Seven Planetary Spheres to consecrate the home and keep it cleansed and safe as well. I called them by name alone and kept the charge pretty simple: “By the powers of the Seven Spheres, I consecrate this house for our defense.”

The air in the room cleared noticeably, and the feelings of sadness dissipated. I noticed a marked improvement of the general tone of our familial interactions from that moment, and I was reminded forcefully that I hadn’t done any cleansing or banishing in the temporary house since moving in. (My altar is in storage, along with my Holy Water and Sage.)

So if you were wondering what I do to banish or cleanse on the fly, that’s about it. It’s short and sweet, and it works wonders.

*Quick refresher: humans have four (or five) “souls,” the Guf, which is the Mortal Body, the Nephesh, the Ruach, which is the Immortal Mind, and the Neschemah, which is the Immortal Spark of God (and some say the Chiah, the Life Force, or Breath of God, similar but not equal to Prana). The Nephesh is the soul that handles the amygdala response to events, and runs the autonomous nervous system of the body. It’s the emotional memory soul, it’s your cellular memory that remembers to form scar tissue where you were cut when you were 10 even 26 years later, it’s the survivalist, the main maintainer of our daily existence. This soul is also Mortal, like the Guf-body. It survives by feeding on the processes of your physical body, but when your body dies, it begins to starve to death. It takes 6 weeks to die and return to the ashes of Sheol, give or take, and it’s this part of the soul that sticks around after you’ve died, popping up in the passenger car seat when your loved ones are sitting at red lights thinking about how much they miss you. It feeds on extreme emotions, like grief, panic, rage, or ecstatic bliss. This soul can be kept “alive” by making regular offerings, like libations or burning incense and candles to your ancestors. Most of them just die, but some seem to feed off of geomagnetic forces, or become vampire spirits. They seldom remember much about the lives they lived, but they can generally recall the moments of their lives that were traumatic, or were extremely emotional. That’s why “ghosts” are seen walking the places they’ve died, or where they were murdered or whatever. They’re reliving their emotional memories, and are usually kept alive by some “energy” source they’ve managed to adapt to feed on.

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Paradoxical enough, if one takes Left Hand Path to mean basically the same as the Tantric “Vamachara”, the most LHP i could do would be ritual incorporating the 4 Gospels and authors, “Our Father” and Christian prayer.


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Theurgy


Dore´

Theurgy (from Greek θεουργία) describes the practice of rituals, sometimes seen as magical in nature, performed with the intention of invoking the action or evoking the presence of one or more gods, especially with the goal of uniting with the divine, achieving henosis, and perfecting oneself.

Theurgy means ‘divine-working’. The first recorded use of the term is found in the mid-second century neo-Platonist work, the Chaldean Oracles(Fragment 153 des Places (Paris, 1971): ‘For the theourgoí do not fall under the fate-governed herd’).[5] The source of Western theurgy can be found in the philosophy of late Neoplatonists, especially Iamblichus. In late Neoplatonism, the spiritual Universe is regarded as a series ofemanations from the One. From the One emanated the Divine Mind (Nous) and in turn from the Divine Mind emanated the World Soul (Psyche). Neoplatonists insisted that the One is absolutely transcendent and in the emanations nothing of the higher was lost or transmitted to the lower, which remained unchanged by the lower emanations.

Although the Neoplatonists were polytheists, they also embraced a form of monism.

For Plotinus, and Iamblichus‘ teachers Anatolius and Porphyry, the emanations are as follows:

  • To En (τό ἕν), The One: Deity without quality, sometimes called The Good.
  • Nous (Νοῦς), Mind: The Universal consciousness, from which proceeds
  • Psychè (Ψυχή), Soul: Including both individual and world soul, leading finally to
  • Physis (Φύσις), Nature.

Plotinus urged contemplations for those who wished to perform theurgy, the goal of which was to reunite with The Divine (called henosis). Therefore, his school resembles a school ofmeditation or contemplation. Iamblichus of Calcis (Syria), a student of Porphyry (who was himself a student of Plotinus) taught a more ritualized method of theurgy that involved invocationand religious, as well as magical, ritual.[6] Iamblichus believed theurgy was an imitation of the gods, and in his major work, On the Egyptian Mysteries, he described theurgic observance as “ritualized cosmogony” that endowed embodied souls with the divine responsibility of creating and preserving the cosmos.

Iamblichus’ analysis was that the transcendent cannot be grasped with mental contemplation because the transcendent is supra-rational. Theurgy is a series of rituals and operations aimed at recovering the transcendent essence by retracing the divine ‘signatures’ through the layers of being. Education is important for comprehending the scheme of things as presented by Aristotle, Plato and Pythagoras but also by the Chaldaean Oracles.[citation needed] The theurgist works ‘like with like’: at the material level, with physical symbols and ‘magic’; at the higher level, with mental and purely spiritual practices. Starting with correspondences of the divine in matter, the theurgist eventually reaches the level where the soul’s inner divinity unites with The Divine

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Invocation


An invocation (from the Latin verb invocare ”to call on, invoke, to give”) may take the form of:

These forms are described below, but are not mutually exclusive. See also Theurgy.

AC as Osiris

Aleister Crowley as Osiris (in “Sign of Osiris risen – A 5-6 degree LVX sign, Golden Dawn)

A FORM OF POSSESSION

The word “possession” is used here in its neutral form to mean “a state (potentially psychological) in which an individual’s normal personality is replaced by another”. This is also sometimes known as ‘aspecting’. This can be done as a means of communicating with or getting closer to a deity or spirit and as such need not be viewed synonymously with demonic possession.

In some religious traditions including Paganism, Shamanism and Wicca, “invocation” means to draw a spirit or Spirit force into ones own body and is differentiated from “evocation”, which involves asking a spirit or force to become present at a given location. Again, Crowley states that

To “invoke” is to “call in”, just as to “evoke” is to “call forth”. This is the essential difference between the two branches of Magick. In invocation, the macrocosm floods the consciousness. In evocation, the magician, having become the macrocosm, creates a microcosm.

Possessive invocation may be attempted singly or, as is often the case in Wicca, in pairs – with one person doing the invocation (reciting the liturgy or prayers and acting as anchor), and the other person being invoked (allowing themselves to become a vessel for the spirit or deity). The person successfully invoked may be moved to speak or act in non-characteristic ways, acting as the deity or spirit; and they may lose all or some self-awareness while doing so. A communication might also be given via imagery (a religious vision). They may also be led to recite a text in the manner of that deity, in which case the invocation is more akin to ritual drama. The Wiccan Charge of the Goddess is an example of such a pre-established recitation. See also the ritual of Drawing Down the Moon.

The ecstatic, possessory form of invocation may be compared to loa possession in the Vodou tradition where devotees are described as being “ridden” or “mounted” by the deity or spirit. In 1995 National Geographic journalist Carol Beckwith described events she had witnessed during Vodoun possessions:

A woman splashed sand into her eyes, a man cut his belly with shards of glass but did not bleed, another swallowed fire. Nearby a believer, perhaps a yam farmer or fisherman, heated hand-wrought knives in crackling flames. Then another man brought one of the knives to his tongue. We cringed at the sight and were dumbfounded when, after several repetitions, his tongue had not even reddened.

Possessive invocation has also been described in certain Norse rites where Odin is invoked to “ride” workers of seidr (Norse shamanism), much like the god rides his eight-legged horseSleipnir. Indeed, forms of possessive invocation appear throughout the world in most mystical or ecstatic traditions, wherever devotees seek to touch upon the essence of a deity or spirit

 

AC as Foo Hee

Aleister Crowley as Pinyin 拼音 ,”The luaghing Buddha

 

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Evocation


EVOCATION IS THE ACT OF CALLING OR SUMMONING A SPIRIT, DEMON, GOD OR OTHER SUPERNATURAL AGENT, IN THE WESTERN MYSTERY TRADITION. COMPARABLE PRACTICES EXIST IN MANY RELIGIONS ANDMAGICAL TRADITIONS.

EVOCATION IN THE WESTERN MYSTERY TRADITION

John Dee and Edward Kellyevoking a spirit

The Latin word evocatio was the “calling forth” or “summoning away” of a city’s tutelary deity. The ritual was conducted in a military setting either as a threat during a siege or as a result of surrender, and aimed at diverting the god’s favor from the opposing city to the Roman side, customarily with a promise of better-endowed cult or a more lavish temple. Evocatio was thus a kind of ritual dodge to mitigate looting of sacred objects or images from shrines that would otherwise be sacrilegious or impious.

The calling forth of spirits was a relatively common practice in Neoplatonism, theurgy and other esoteric systems of antiquity. In contemporary western esotericism, the magic of the grimoires is frequently seen as the classical example of this idea. Manuals such as the Greater Key of Solomon the King, The Lesser Key of Solomon (or Lemegeton), the Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage and many others provided instructions that combined intense devotion to the divine with the summoning of a personal cadre of spiritual advisers and familiars.

The grimoires provided a variety of methods of evocation. The Spirits are, in every case, commanded in the name of God – most commonly using cabalistic and Hellenic ‘barbarous names’ added together to form long litanies. The magician used wands, staves, incense and fire, daggers and complex diagrams drawn on parchment or upon the ground. In Enochian magic, spirits are evoked into a crystal ball or mirror, in which a human volunteer (a ‘seer’) is expected to be able to see the spirit and hear its voice, passing the words on to the evoker. Sometimes such a seer might be an actual medium, speaking as the spirit, not just for it. In other cases the spirit might be ‘housed’ in a symbolic image, or conjuring into a diagram from which it cannot escape without the magician’s permission.

While many later, corrupt and commercialised grimoires include elements of ‘diabolism’ and one (The Grand Grimoire) even offers a method for making a pact with the devil, in general the art of evocation of spirits is said to be done entirely under the power of the divine. The magician is thought to gain authority among the spirits only by purity, worship and personal devotion and study.

In more recent usage, evocation refers to the calling out of lesser spirits (beneath the deific or archangelic level), sometimes conceived of as arising from the self. This sort of evocation is contrasted with invocation, in which spiritual powers are called into the self from a divine source.

Important contributors to the concept of evocation include Henry Cornelius Agrippa, Francis Barrett, Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers, Aleister Crowley, Franz Bardon and Kenneth Grant. The work of all of these authors can be seen as attempts to systematize and modernize the grimoiric procedure of evocation. Only more modern authors, such as Peter Carrolland Konstantinos, have attempted to describe evocation in a way independent enough from the grimoiric tradition to fit similar methods of interaction with alleged supernatural agents in other traditions.

However, the most enthusiastic and romantically inspired figure in the field of evocation/invocation arts and overall a devotee of the Western mystical tradition is known today by the name of Carol “Poke” Runyon, the Grand Magus of O.T.A. and the author of several books, who attempted to describe particularities of ceremonial working in order to summon spirits to “physical appeareance” and even provided a video as an example of going through a real process of “Solomonic Magick” which is an alternative name for Goetia or simply a complex of techniques to conjure lesser deities of a lower astral realm (demons) to the temple of the magician.

Native American ”conjuror” in a 1590 engraving

Conjuration in traditional and most contemporary usage refers to a magical act of invoking spirits or using incantations or charms to cast magical spells. In the context of legerdemain, it may also refer to the performance of illusion or magic tricks for show. This article discusses mainly the original and primary usage, describing acts of a supernatural or paranormal nature.

The word conjuration (from Latin conjure, conjurare, to “swear together”) can be interpreted in several different ways: as an invocation orevocation (the latter in the sense of binding by a vow); as an exorcism; and as an act of producing effects by magical means.

The word is often used synonymously with terms such as “invocation” or “evocation” or “summoning”, although many authors find it useful to maintain some distinction between these terms. The term “conjuring” is also used as a general term for casting spells in some magical traditions, such as Hoodoo. In that context, amulets and talismans are often kept in a “conjure bag” and “conjuring oils” may be used to anoint candles and other magical supplies and thus imbue them with specific magical powers.

Alternatively, the term “conjuration” may be used refer to an act of illusionism or legerdemain, as in the performance of magic tricks for entertainment.

One who performs conjurations is called a conjurer or conjuror. The word (as conjuration or conjurison) was formerly used in its Latin meaning of “conspiracy”.