On New Year's Resolutions

So, it's December again. What the heck? I was almost tempted to write that old cliché about time flying so fast. But of course, we all know that unless you travel to another part of space with a significant amount of gravitational time dilation (thank you, Interstellar), time remains the same. It is this adult life that has gotten so fast - we want to do a lot, own a lot, achieve a lot, that even humanity's longer lifespan isn't enough for us now. What am I babbling about? I don't know. Maybe I'll just talk about resolutions. Many people have given up on making new year's resolutions complaining that they don't work anyway. The problem is that people look at it like a Christmas wish list. The key is in the word itself: resolve. People write...

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Enochian Journal 7: The Last Five Days of Initiation

"...I am become a seer in the light of your countenance. I see your shining angels and magnify your name among them. Adonai Sabaothאדני צבאות, I, C.F.F., call upon the power of your Name. In the power of your mighty Name this work of invocation is well and truly fulfilled. Amen. Amen. Amen." I called upon Enochian Gods, seniors, kerubs, and now it's finally time to meet the entities at the lowest level of the angelic hierarchy - the ones I will probably work with most often. The servient angels may be the clerks and desk jockeys of the Enochian world but that doesn't make them any less wondrous. Maybe it's my "new-improved" psychic powers, but they actually felt more visceral to me than the entities I've met before. Most of the time, I...

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Enochian Journal 6: The Choir of the Cherubim

It's now down to the Cherubim after praying to the Gods and the Seniors of the Watchtowers. The books call these entities "kerubs" or "dispositors", but I like to use "cherub" for now because it looks more romantic. Of course, the creatures that have shown themselves in the visions are far from the classical cherubic images of babies with angel wings (those are putti, not cherubs, by the way). My skrying skills are getting better after weeks of practice. I have learned not to focus only on the visual details of the entities and the landscape; I have also been trying to be aware of the sounds, the smell, the feel on my skin (warmth, coldness, humidity, dryness, etc.), as well as what I am feeling internally. I still have to work on my memory...

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Enochian Journal 5: The 24 Seniors

Continuing the 19-day working and going a bit further down the hierarchy. After the God names, its now down to the seniors, which come to my mind as the twenty-four elder beings surrounding the heavenly throne in the book of Revelation, Donald Tyson grouped the seniors by four, so it is a six-day working for all of them. I prefer to use the Golden Dawn planetary correspondences for the Seniors and their assignment in the Great Cross although Tyson clearly has no love for Golden Dawn stuff. The creatures that I encountered were more willing to converse, although I wasn't able to make sense out of most of what they were saying. Perhaps it's my abilities, or perhaps I haven't yet attained a level of wisdom to understand them. There were creatures...

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Paper Mage

The older I grow as a magician, the less I'm interested in owning stuff. I have been giving away a number of my books and magical items keeping only those things that I actually put into use. I now own less than I have five years ago, and sometimes I feel I still have too much. I give. I don't sell. I don't think I would gain much profit or satisfaction from selling my old stuff anyway. I think giving (or doing an act of kindness for that matter) without expectation of return is an exercise that every human being should do. Own, own, own. Grab, grab, grab. This materialistic, consumerist, cosmopolitan way of life gets very tiring easily. Trees get to be pruned, snakes shed their skin, people must undergo some kind of death in order...

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Banaue - Stairways to Haven

"Good morning", an Ifugao elder said to me while I was taking pictures around the village. She was carrying a baby, lulling her to sleep. I could see that the woman's teeth was already reddened from years of chewing betel leaves, a favorite pastime in these areas. I wasn't able to greet back. I was waiting for something that comes after the "good morning". Maybe she'd sell some merchanise, or offer tourist services. But no. It was a genuine, cordial, neighborly greeting - so rare these days that I was taken aback. I felt so ashamed of myself. Look at what the world has done to me: I have become suspicious of friendly greetings. Finally, I managed to smile and belatedly respond: "Good morning din po". I got up just before sunrise...

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Enochian Journal 4: Praying to Enochian Gods

I have finally completed my portable Enochian magic kit just in time for the Lenten break. I decided to start immediately on Donald Tyson's 19-day working from his book "Enochian Magic for Beginners". The 19-day working is a set of prayers geared towards each group of the Enochian hierarchy, beginning from highest (the Secret God names) to the lowest (the servient angels). It's a great way to practice the ritual procedure and familiarize myself with the all the entities of the hierarchy. After the 19-day working I expect to be more familiar and more confident with Enochiana, and only then will I call my angel of choice (to do my bidding and such). During the entire Lenten break, I recited invocations for each of the God names of the four Watchtowers....

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Enochian Journal 3: Completing the Temple - the Lamen, the Ring, and the Round Tablet

"Magick is not something you do, magick is something you are"  - Donald Michael Kraig My temple is finally complete - just in time for Good Friday, which is today (as I write this post), and which was about the same time Dee and Kelly received the Holy Book from the Archangel Raphael. I'm not going to start immediately with calling a specific angel though. I plan to work through Donald Tyson's 19-day working in his Book of Spirits: a set of invocations that addresses all the angels of the four Watchtowers, from the highest in the hierarchy to the lowest, as you go along. I think it's a nice way to properly introduce myself with the entities as a whole, and consecrate my tools in doing so. "Adonai Sabaoth, Lord of Hosts,...

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Hail, Hermes!

I don't usually talk to gods, much less to Greek gods. I feel they're far too distant and alien to me. But the more I learned about Hermes, the more I feel a sense of familiar comfort with him. Basically, he governs most of those things that I do and love: travel, languages, magic, athletics, the Internet...even my job as a software developer. I've also always had some sort of affinity with child-like trickster gods being a goofball myself. Last year, Aldrin and Kaye invited me over to celebrate Hermaia Eriounia, the feast day of Hermes as the luck bringer. Being a sucker for luck and pagan rites, I joined, of course, bringing with me four votive offerings I made in the form of animals sacred to Hermes. Each offering is for each quarter...

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Enochian Journal 2: Seven Ensigns and Five Sigillums

The Ensigns of Creation The Ensigns of Creation should be the easiest to produce since I have just decided to print them out. The hardest part actually is deciding where to print them on. I went to the nearest National Bookstore branch and asked around for something like a cardboard with a metallic color - to represent tin, the material which the ensigns were originally made of. All three salesladies I asked said they had no such thing, so I settled for a white, high-quality, Italy-made, 270gms board paper. I was already going to pay at the counter when I decided to go back and check again. And voila, they do have metallic cardboards - and they were just on the opposite shelf. Darn these salesladies. I chose the one with the light silver...

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Enochian Journal 1: Creating the Tabula Sancta

I've finally gone through Lon Milo Duquette's "Enochian Vision Magick" taking notes on the way. Now I have decided to re-read Donald Tyson's "Enochian Magic for Beginners". I will still be applying LMD's approach but I believe reading other books will give me a more well-rounded view of the Enochian system, Golden Dawn or non-Golden Dawn. Duquette is known for his non-BS, down-to-earth, easy to understand manner, so Tyson's hoity-toity, self-assured tone of writing will take a bit to get used to. And then there's his Enochian Apocalypse theory, which is really hard for me to buy. I find Tyson to be pretty good when it comes to objective research, but I would take his personal conclusions - in this book especially - with a grain of salt,...

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