{"id":748,"date":"2012-07-17T23:44:55","date_gmt":"2012-07-18T04:44:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.wordpress.com\/?p=748"},"modified":"2012-07-17T23:44:55","modified_gmt":"2012-07-18T04:44:55","slug":"my-year-of-ceremonial-study-the-view-from-month-11-of-12","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/2012\/07\/17\/my-year-of-ceremonial-study-the-view-from-month-11-of-12\/","title":{"rendered":"My “Year” of Ceremonial Study: The View From Month 11 of 12"},"content":{"rendered":"

It occurred to me this evening that the year I set aside<\/a> to study the Western Ceremonial Tradition will come to an end in fewer than thirty days.\u00a0 I wrote the first post on my experiments<\/a> a year ago yesterday.<\/p>\n

Holy fuck.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s been a wild ride.\u00a0 What started as a vague (almost childish) intention to study \u201cceremonial magic\u201d has wandered across Chaos Magick, the grimoire traditions, traditional astrology, the qabalah, the Golden Dawn, and quite a few things I don\u2019t even know the proper names of.\u00a0 I\u2019ve experimented with the Qabalistic Cross and the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram.\u00a0 I\u2019ve conjured my Natal Genius, and am planning to conjure my Natal Demon, as well.\u00a0 Although I have struggled with my maintaining my visionary practice, I\u2019ve gone on visionary quests to the Temples of Malkuth and Yesod, striven and failed to reach Hod, and visited the Elemental Realms of Earth, Fire, and Water.\u00a0 I have made Planetary talismans of Jupiter, Venus, the Moon, and Mercury.\u00a0 I have discovered the Greek Magical Papyri and incorporated the Stele of Jeu into my Lunar devotions at both the Dark and Full moons.\u00a0 I have discovered the magical value of the Orphic Hymns.\u00a0 I As my studies progressed, they focused increasingly on Hermeticism and astrological magic, with a bit of grimoire magic on the side.<\/p>\n

Shit has been intense.\u00a0 The rituals have been elaborate, effective, and exhausting.\u00a0 Although I\u2019ve been fighting it, I\u2019ve been falling into the trap of armchair magicianhood because, as much as I\u2019ve enjoyed a lot of it, there are parts of my nature that I have to fight to do this sort of Work.\u00a0 And because I\u2019ve been having so much fun getting caught up in the theory<\/em> that I\u2019ve been loosing track of the practice<\/em>.\u00a0 Now, don\u2019t get me wrong: I\u2019m not done with the Western Ceremonial Tradition by any stretch of the imagination.\u00a0 But I think that, when my year is up, I\u2019m going to switch streams.<\/p>\n

This coming year is going to be dedicated to Chaos Magick. Stephen Mace and AO Spare. Phil Hine and Peter Carrol. Gordon White and Jason Miller. And probably lots of authors and bloggers that I haven\u2019t even heard of yet. Hopefully some of them ladies.<\/p>\n

Lots of things have been pointing me toward Chaos Magick over the last year, anyway.\u00a0 I mean: y\u2019all have<\/em> noticed that Gordon White<\/a> is just too damn cool to ignore, right?\u00a0 There\u2019s been this whole post-Chaos thing<\/a> that Jason Miller\u2019s been talking about, though I think Gordon<\/a> and Skyllaros<\/a> have the right of that in a lot of ways.\u00a0 And, even if Chaos Magic really isn\u2019t what he seems to be doing anymore, I\u2019ve picked up a serious torch for Phil Hine<\/a>.\u00a0 So \u2026 I\u2019ll come back to Agrippa, the Picatrix, and the Corpus Hermeticum sooner rather than later.\u00a0 Hell, I\u2019m probably going to keep working on planetary talismans and my illustrations of the Picatrix images of the planets even as I change trajectories, because they\u2019re pretty and they make me happy.<\/p>\n

Any recommendations?<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It occurred to me this evening that the year I set aside to study the Western Ceremonial Tradition will come to an end in fewer than thirty days.\u00a0 I wrote the first post on my experiments a year ago yesterday. Holy fuck. It\u2019s been a wild ride.\u00a0 What started as a vague (almost childish) intention … Read More<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4,5],"tags":[43,46,93,134,203],"class_list":["post-748","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-scholarship","category-witchcraft","tag-ceremonial-magic","tag-chaos-magick","tag-goals","tag-keeping-score","tag-planetary-magic"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8kUcm-c4","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/748","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=748"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/748\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=748"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=748"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=748"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}