First let me congratulate the OTC members and non-members who successfully performed the Ghost Flower ritual during the Black Moon Eclipse! I'm elated at your successes and am even more elated to tell you that completing the ritual is only the beginning of an even greater and more empowering process.
Your next step is to bond magically with the flower spirit you made contact with during the Ghost Flower ritual. It's an easy process. But before you do it, you should be aware of a few things: 1) Your life is going to really change and you may wind up having to lose people, or leave places that you've grown accustomed to. 2) Your flower spirit will want to work quickly. That's its function. It's here to give you the stuff that's most available to you right now from the higher dimensions. The creativity, healing, magic, love, and joy that's trying to get to you will come fast and it can be overwhelming. If you start to feel the Hallelujahs just try to give it voice through creative expression. 3) Your flower spirit will want you to break bad habits. Some big, some small. Some you know; some unknown. The more you follow along, the greater the magickal results. 4) While making contact with your flower spirit is crucial and is the point of the Ghost Flower ritual, maintaining contact with Jophiel is just as important. In fact, once you perform the bonding ritual with your flower spirit, you may find that you pretty much become united. If you start feeling like devoting more ritual time in other directions, it's not that your flower spirit is disappearing; you're becoming one. 5) Follow your fascination. Follow your joy. 6) All you need to invoke your flower spirit is its name. The sigil can help. 7) Don't brag. You're a magus now, act like one. (And, yes, I suck at this rule!) 8) The bonding ritual is just for you. In reality, you're already bound to the flower spirit. But you still need to do a bonding ceremony! 9) The Archangels have absolute knowledge. If you learn to read the aether, you can know anything. 10) The way to perform the bonding ceremony is: anyway you choose! But take care to consecrate your tools, banish, and give thanks to magick, the spirits, and the angels. I wear a ring to commemorate my Eudeamonia ceremony. On the first anniversary of it, I lit a tea candle when I went to bed and when I woke up, it was still burning. It kept burning for over 24 hours, in full view of friends and family... Whatever you choose to do, make it special like preparing for a wedding, but one with just two participants, who leave the wedding as one. If you want to discuss these matters in further detail, learn more about Eudaemonia, or get some advice about how to do the bonding ceremony you'll have to join the OTC.
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If you'd like to help support me and this blog, it won't cost you a penny. If you apply for a Capital One credit card through the link below (or click the pic), I'll get a referral bonus when you're accepted. Please consider supporting the blog by using the link to apply. If you apply and are accepted, email me and I'll give you a free one-question reading based on a super-secret divination method. Thanks! Categories All Without going into too much arcane detail here, the current Black Moon cycle we're experiencing offers a good opportunity for ritual work that I want to mention.
It's not the best time for spell work or manifestation, but this is precisely because the energy is too available and too easily directed. What happens is, novices and adepts don't feel the extra energy and get weird results not only because of the Black Moon but because of the eclipse. Think of this moon as a way to construct new goals and new rituals while you let everything else you've done materialize and manifest. It's a good time to set intentions, to prepare for new rituals and spells or even to create them. It's even a good time to test new spells if you're not worried too much about odd results. The big problem is if you match an urgent need to the wild and unpredictable energy of this Black Moon. I'm using this moon to refine the Ladder of Love ritual. I'll be posting the full ritual and its theory during the next moon cycle. It's a great tool for manifestation and it's easy to learn and use. This Black Moon is a good time to perform the Ghost Flower ritual, so if you plucked a flower during the new moon, you should be in very good shape on May 16th when the Black Moon is full. I think you're quite lucky to do the ritual under this moon. Meanwhile, I'll be sending out the Ladder of Love ritual to OTC members as a pdf first, and then I'll post it here on the blog. If you want to successfully perform the Jophiel youth ritual, you'll need to understand a few principles before starting out. Consider these points the elementary "DNA" of the ritual. If these points don't interest you or don't make sense, you probably won't make it through the ritual. But that's OK because there are easier, less complicated rituals you can use if you like, but they will likely have fleeting effects.
The three most important principles of the Jophiel ritual are: 1) The material basis. This means you must give the magick a medium through which to work. Magick works best when you match it to your mundane efforts. So basically, you need to put the same effort into a makeover or self-care regimen that you would do without magick, but you're going to use the Jophiel ritual to give it an extra shove -- one that will blow you away. 2) Setting intentions. You have to ritualistically set your intentions. This means using banishing and cleansing ceremonies along with the main ritual. 3) The law of Occult Silence. If you start bragging about the ritual or its results, you'll lose everything you gained. Or worse. In fact, you must disavow any "credit" personally for the effects of the ritual and give all glory to the angels and spirits. That's it. To start. Here are the implements and tools you'll need: 1) A pillar candle. It should be able to burn for at least 4-6 hours. 2) Two tea-light candles for every ten years of your life. If you're under 30 you don't need to perform this ritual. 3) Sticks of incense. 4) A plate or tray. 5) A silk or cotton handkerchief. 6) A lighter or matches. 7) A tin or metal lid like a cookie tin cover. Anything metal that reflects your face without turning it upside down. Not a glass mirror. You may also want to compile a playlist of songs that hit you very hard with nostalgia, but don't listen to them outside the ritual. You may also want to find one or two small, but meaningful, relics of your youth that you can incorporate into the ritual, but they aren't necessary. If you use them keep them away from the normal stream of life and only interact with them during the ritual. Once you've gathered all of the materials, choose a time to start the ritual. It must be during a new moon. Then perform an LBRP and consecrate all of your ritual items. The next step is simply starting to cast the spell. Here's an easy way to look at demons and angels. Consider a beautiful flower, a rose, growing in a park. One day a lonely poet comes by, stands captivated for twenty minutes scribbling in a notebook and writes a poem about the Universal imagination that transcends all races, classes, and faiths. It's a great poem that's destined to be published and bring joy and inspiration to thousands of people. Later that same day, two retired ladies, both amateur gardeners, happen by the same flower and have dispute over the kind of rose the flower is. They have a heated argument over its name and wind up not speaking to each other for several days. That evening, the groundskeeper of the park comes by and sprays pesticides all around to stop the slugs and aphids from eating his flower. After hours, when the park's closed, a drunk comes along and steps on the rose, crushing it to bits without even noticing while cursing his ex-wife for cheating on him decades past. Think of the flower as Angelic inspiration. Think of the interpersonal entanglements that obstruct hearing or seeing this inspiration as the noise of earthly life, the entanglements that demons are obliged to immerse you in because -- without them -- you can't fulfill your earthly desires. So, if demons are dangerous because they lead you away from Angelic inspiration, are angels dangerous in any way? Yes, they are. The reason angels can be dangerous is that when we're filled with Divine inspiration, we're less bound by the gravity of life and we reclaim the joy of experiencing a glimpse of Divine unity and our own unimpeded will. Playing spoiler here: the angels are happy to serve our earthly desires, but their real job is to guide us to a Higher Life. So, one of the dangers in working with angels is that they, by necessity, try to point you to and immerse you in this higher plane of being at all times, and this sometimes can make regular life seem twice as heavy and lethargic. There's a way to deal with all of this, to balance out Angelic and Demonic forces in your life, and it's actually not as difficult as it may seem. I'll blog on a topic soon called the Ladder of Love, which is a magickal spin on Diotima's Ladder of Love analogy in Plato's Symposium. This is the esoteric version of that. It's not as egg-heady as it sounds. So stand by! But my next post will once more be on demons. This time literally answering all of the questions and comments I get about them, one by one, in as concrete as possible way, so that I can refer future commenters and questioners and those who are fascinated by demons to these blog-posts. CategoriesPeople's interest in demons is generally quite narrowly focused: they're fascinated by the capacity for temptation, destruction, and damnation that's typically associated with demons. If an uninitiated person warns of the dangers of working with demons and tells you that you're in peril for your mortal soul, ask yourself a simple question. Would that same person help you carry your groceries in on a rainy day? Listen to your life story? Help you through a break-up? Pay your overdue electric bill? They're not concerned with you or your fate; they just want to put themselves in a position of moral and spiritual superiority to you and everyone else. And that's what many people want. Including many of those who work with demons. They just happen to also want to appear dark and dangerous as they go about doing it. The truth is: everything is a Divine emanation and therefore at the deepest level of being All is One. Dealing with Angels tends to remind us of Divine Unity through exaltation, epiphany, and revelation, while dealing with demons tends to remind us of Divine Unity by exhausting our earthly desires. Demons both excite and repulse us because we're excited and repulsed by our sensual experiences. When we see a demon we see the illusion that the Divine is divided. Anything less than Divine Oneness will be less than the Most High and is therefore, by definition, "fallen." Demons represent our will to fall and to experience the illusion of disunity -- and with that comes struggle, passion, power, karma, and desires. There is a real danger in dealing with demons, but it's a bit trickier to understand than "God will send you to Hell for eternity." Here's the danger. Think of Angels as the Mind, as inspiration and creativity; think of demons as the muscles, the body, the earthly tools that translate inspiration to action and manifestation. Now, consider that when most people find inspiration, or learn new talents, or explore fresh creative capacities, they're in a place that's free of struggle, interpersonal strife, and so forth. Not always, clearly, but often enough that we all instinctively know that, to find your genius you need "alone" time and lots of it. In fact, it's even more precarious than that. If someone merely "dings" you emotionally in the morning at work or on social media or elsewhere, this single incident can block your creativity and inspiration. Temperamental artist and all that... Well, demons are here precisely to get you involved with earthly desires, imbroglios, and ambitions. You'll be mixed up in the world, but good. The noise of your earthly involvements interrupts your ability to hear the Angels of inspiration. This is what typically happens to people who "sell their souls" for fame and fortune. They get a bunch of earthly stuff and lose the creative inspiration that made getting it possible. This is also what's meant when adepts and even some masters warn that demons can "steal" your abilities. They aren't stealing anything; you're just so involved in earthly life that you stop listening to the Angels of inspiration. Furthermore, it's hard to get out of these earthly, karmic entanglements: hence the metaphor of the "burning pit of fire" that never ends. So the danger's quite real. So much so that I'll blog some more on the topic soon. CategoriesThe reason I'm presenting the Ghost Flower ritual and the Jophiel Youth ritual together is because the Ghost Flower ritual is a healing ritual and the Jophiel Youth ritual will have fleeting results for anyone who's deeply wounded, which, sad to say, is most of us before the ritual! Jophiel is a feminized version of "Jove" or Jupiter -- or jovial. There's no true beauty or youth in this life without joy and expansion. In fact it's growth and joy for life that define youth and, in youth-obsessed cultures such as ours, beauty. You can cover over your wounds with materialism and still appear attractive to people from a distance. But the Jophiel Youth ritual will actually restore you to the levity, lightness, and inspiration that's the true source of beauty and youth. The problem is: the ritual isn't easy. The mechanics of the ritual and the tools you need are rudimentary, but the knowledge and dedication to personal transformation necessary to make it really work are best suited for adepts. That's why I suggest you perform the Ghost Flower ritual before beginning the Jophiel Youth ritual. But you don't have to do so. Do consider that the Jophiel Youth spell requires a series of eleven eleven-day rituals. The rituals only take about 5 mins and every other eleven day period is a "rest" period, but you still have to make a long-term commitment to make this thing work. But it does work. Once you feel you're ready to start the Jophiel Youth spell, the first thing you need to do is absorb a bit of background information and magickal theory that I'll blog about in my next post on the topic. Eventually I'll post the whole ritual on this blog so feel free to follow along. Meanwhile, if you haven't done so yet, consider reading up on and perhaps even performing the Ghost Flower ritual which will increase the results you get from the Jophiel Youth ritual by a hundred percent or more. Use the button below to get started.
Demons are sexy. Demons are dangerous. Demons are forbidden. Demons make us do what we wouldn't otherwise do. Demons trick us, bind us in deals, drag us away from God and the Holy Light of Salvation. And yet, when you mention magick or the occult to people, the first thing they want to know about is usually demons. Why? Because demons represent our earthly ambitions and desires. They excite us because they promise entanglements, liaisons, battles, and even power. Most of us are more interested in earthly entanglements than Salvation -- after-all we're alive and we're sensual, ambitious creatures made of flesh, blood, and fire -- and so much more! What I want you to do is to simply consider that someday you'll have no earthly ambitions. That day may be soon, it may be far, but some day, even if the moment is only seconds before your death, you'll lose your earthly ties. The earth is about ties. It's about imbroglios, intrigues, and desires. Believe it or not, you're free to cast off your desires anytime you like and when you do, you'll feel -- light as air. You'll start to soar, you'll start to see that All is One and that love binds the Universe in a single Holy Light of never ending Creation. And once you see that, you'll be exalted beyond any earthly gratifications. You may start to value only spiritual things. But then at some point, you'll feel the pull of Earth again and you'll fall back / rise up to pursue sensual desires. Because the Oneness of Creation is the only wholly fulfilling experience, all others, no matter how momentarily gratifying will someday reveal themselves as less than the experience of Universal Oneness. In oneness, there are no desires, hence no demons or angels. But here on earth, both demons and angels serve our desires; the trick is they know our desires eventually lead us back to God, to Oneness, to a place where our desires no longer bind us to karma and gravitas, a place we're free to return to any time we like, because we've never actually left it. CategoriesIt's my contention that, despite the public record, Yeats eventually succeeded in performing the Ghost Flower ritual. I also think that he made contact with Jophiel and this is how he obtained his famous "second adolescence" which enabled him to write and live passionately into old age. After-all if it were "monkey gland" implants and injections of other biological/animal extracts, everyone would be taking them by now. So why did so many people fail in performing the Ghost Flower ritual? And how did I figure out how to make it work? The answer is actually pretty simple. Those who followed Yeats's original instruction to perform the ritual failed to consecrate the items, make contact with the Archangels, and time everything to the proper moon cycles. Also, they were all looking for an apparition at the end of the ritual, rather than understanding that the initiate enters into a magickal bond with the flower perhaps even before beginning the ritual. I failed the first time I tried the ritual as well. The second time, I was careful to consecrate everything, time it all astrologically, and I knew what to look for in the "down time" between plucking the flower and burning it. Also, Yeats states that the purpose of the ritual is to see the ghost of a rose. This is a nice poetic gesture, but the real point of the ritual is to bond with the spirit of the flower. It's a form of spirit-bonding that was once called "eudaemonia" or -- you could say -- the esoteric meaning of the word eudaemonia is more or less the substance and result of the Ghost Flower ritual. While its mundane, Aristotelean meaning is quite noble, the esoteric meaning of eudaemonia is much more profound. As such it's like a minor bonding with one's Holy Guardian Angel. The difference is: this nature spirit is here to specifically to lead you through obstructions to your True Will, to heal you from trauma, and give you unending creative inspiration and vitality. To clear a path for your earthly life and ambitions that leaves you joy and energy to spare. It's a daemon rather than a demon. So, I intend to reveal the youth ritual I believe Yeats found via Jophiel. Though this ritual requires a greater devotion of time and a greater degree of knowledge of magick, it's something that I plan to make available just as I made the Ghost Flower ritual available. If you want to know more about Yeats and his second youth click the button below. If you want to see me before (and after) I performed the Ghost Flower and Jophiel youth rituals, click the other button. CategoriesWhen you mention magick to someone, particularly in America, it's usual to hear the words "Satan," "demons," "Lucifer," or "black magic" within seconds. There are reasons for this that I'm not going to get into right now, (I will later) but I'd like to take some time in this short post to make a couple of comments about the nature of Demonic and Angelic intelligences. Typically, when an initiate avoids working with Left Hand paths, or with the Goetia, it's because they fear doing so, they've been instructed not to do so, or they simply see no need to do so. This latter point is the default position of the Golden Dawn. Any magickal system that directly descends from Golden Dawn practices is therefore likely to work primarily with the Archangels. By the same token, the great majority of aspirants who start a magickal path find working with the Angels to be slow, incomplete, and often very weak. This is why so many people turn to the demons of the Goetia to fulfill their desires. The problem Westerners seem to have is understanding that they're all the same entities. The demons of the Goetia are former Gods and Angels of Canaan. They'll tell you this themselves if you make pacts with them or scry. In Magick in Theory and Practice. Crowley states: "In evocation, the Magician, having become the macrocosm, creates a microcosm. You invoke a God into the Circle. You evoke a spirit into the Triangle."1 What most people miss is that it's the means of summoning that determines the means of manifestation. If you turn to a spirit with the intent of focusing your will on an earthly goal, a solitary goal, then you don't need God to do this, you need only a lower emanation. So you turn to a demon, which in happier times was known as a daemon. If you're trying to reach a higher plane of being and knowledge, you call God into your circle. This is where magick will take you, life and existence will take you, no matter what you do, so why not just do it now? That's the Golden Dawn pov. But you can also call on Angels for earthly things and demons for salvation because they are the same entities. It's your intent that determines the kind of interaction you'll have. When summoning spirits, angels or demons, it's quite usual for demons to appear right away, ready to make a pact, while angels often make a momentary apparition in your scrying glass at the close of a ritual. This is because angels provide guidance and growth first and give earthly things (like beautiful apparitions) when you're ready for them. Demons give you what you want right up front and let you experience the often very painful lessons and growth after the fact. You want to see evidence: check out any celebrity that's worked the Goetia for fame and fortune. That's the only real difference. Either way, the lesson is going to be: "forget your earthly desires and seek God" but you don't want to hear that, you want to know about demons and devils. And now you know slightly more than you did before. 1. Crowley, Magick in Theory and Practice, p. 12. Archives |
Daniel E. BlackstonWriter & Occultist. Archives
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