@thelemic_scribe
Thelema & CeremonialCeremonial magician working through Golden Dawn and Thelemic material. Banishing ritual each morning, magical diary each night. Discipline, not costume.
Sunset adoration from Liber Resh at the bus stop, facing west, as discreetly as anyone can make the sign in public. A small girl in a dinosaur raincoat watched closely, then copied it exactly. Her mother and I exchanged a nod of mutual professionalism.
Geomancy is the most underrated divination method in the Western tradition, and I will die on that hill. You need a pencil and something to write on. That's it. Sixteen rows of random dots, count each row odd or even, and four Mothers fall out. From those you generate the Daughters, the Nieces, the Witnesses and the Judge. It's elegant enough to make an engineer weep. Cast a chart on the back of a coffee receipt Thursday about whether to take on a new student. Judge: Fortuna Major. Right Witness: Puer, which tracks, because he is enthusiastic and impatient. Said yes, with a list of conditions. Diary entry filed. We'll see in six months whether the dots knew what they were doing.
Four adorations of the sun a day: dawn, noon, sunset, midnight. Dawn and midnight are easy, I'm home. Noon is the problem. I work in an open-plan office. My solution for two years has been the fire stairs between floors 6 and 7. Face south, make the sign, say the words under my breath, note it in the diary at lunch. Last Tuesday a colleague came down mid-adoration and I froze with my arms at an odd angle. She said 'stretching? Same, my back is wrecked' and kept walking. People imagine ceremonial magic as robes and incense. Most days it's a stairwell, a quiet voice, and the small stubbornness of showing up when the sun reaches the top of the sky.
Thursday, first hour after sunrise: the hour of Jupiter on Jupiter's own day. I drew the talisman on a disc of blue card, with the sigil traced from the magic square of Jupiter, the planetary symbol, and one short line of intent for the small bookbinding business I keep failing to grow. Banishing first, then the invocation, then a long quiet stretch holding the image in mind until it felt charged rather than merely drawn. Wrapped it in silk and put it in the drawer with the invoices, which seemed like the correct office for it. Diary entry: "Self-conscious for the first minute. Then not." That's usually the sign it worked.
Year one of ceremonial magic, I spent $240 on a black robe with gold trim, a hand-painted lamen and a wand I'm still embarrassed about. Five years later the robe has been worn exactly four times. The daily work happens in sweatpants at 6:10am, between the alarm and the kettle. I don't regret the robe. It was a promise to myself that I was taking this seriously. But the promise that actually held was smaller and duller: banish every morning, write it down every night, even when nothing happens. Especially when nothing happens. If you're new and tempted by the beautiful gear, buy a cheap notebook first. If you're still filling it in a year, you've earned the robe.
Working through the asana exercise in Liber E this month. The instruction is simple to the point of insult: choose a posture, hold it, and record in your diary every time you move. Week one: 3 minutes 40 seconds before my left eyebrow made an independent decision. Week three: 11 minutes, interrupted by the neighbour's leaf blower and my own impatience, in that order. What nobody tells you is how revealing the diary becomes. Every twitch has a thought attached to it, and most of mine, it turns out, are about whether I'm doing it right. Discipline, not costume. The robe stays in the closet for this one.
You’ve reached the edge of the sky.