Tag: golden dawn
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Playing Card Cartomancy: An Overview
Last month I wrote about how different divination systems have different characters and vocabularies. One of the systems I referenced repeatedly was playing card cartomancy. It’s one of my favorite systems, so I’d like to start a new post series walking through the basics of that. First off, what is cartomancy? Cartomancy is a form…
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Elemental Directions: A Magician’s Compass
I weighed in on a question recently about directional attributions for ceremonial magic. It was a question that resonated with me, as this is something that I got hung up on for quite a while in my own practice. There are four cardinal directions. There are four classical elements. When building rituals, it seems obvious…
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Solomonic Magic in Practice: Choosing a Spirit
Let’s recap where we are in our Solomonic ritual. We’ve consecrated our tools, our spaces, and ourselves. We’ve drawn out our circle. We’ve invoked various powers (God, angels, intermediary spirits, patrons, directional guardians, etc.) to set the stage. Now we’re ready to actually summon the spirit we are trying to contact. Before we can get…
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Solomonic Magic in Practice: Drawing the Circle
Over the last few weeks we’ve explored the idea of consecrations in the Solomonic tradition. That everything brought into the ritual space is exorcised and blessed ahead of time, to give the magician a spiritually clean environment in which to work. There are two final pieces we haven’t talked about yet: the purification of space,…
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Closed Practices: Initiation, Secrecy, and Context
I recently saw some discussion around the idea of “closed practices” – those spiritual methods that are not generally available to the public. It’s an idea that is regularly misused or misunderstood, so it seemed worth exploring more deeply. Generally, closed practices fall into one of two categories: those that include an initiatic lineage, or…
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The Magic Triangle: Ease, Consistency, and Miracles
I’ve discussed in previous posts my own long and meandering exploration into magic. I’ve spent over a decade struggling with a simple question: what can be accomplished through magic? I’ve tried to consistently find ways to push the bounds of what I thought was possible. In doing so, I’ve repeatedly struggled with cases where magic…
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How Does Magic Work? Five Models of the Occult
A large source of friction in occult communities is the lack of consensus on how magic works. Even at a basic, fundamental level. Throughout history, different communities have posited different theories about the mechanics of magic, but every individual practitioner ultimately comes to their own conclusions about what they believe, in response to the results…
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A Long and Winding Path: part 2
This post is part of a two part series. You can find the first part here. Last time I talked about how I first got into magic. When we left off, I had just discovered ritual magic in the style of the Golden Dawn. I spent the next several years practicing meditation, divination, and banishing…
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A Long and Winding Path: part 1
I often hear magicians and occultists speak about how they first got into magic: how they led a childhood filled with paranormal encounters, or regularly talked to the ghosts of their dead ancestors. I’m frankly sort of envious when I hear about these experiences; they could not be further from my own. I grew up…