An amulet advertised by the Circle of Raphael has been banned after a reader “challenged the claims and said he wanted proof that the amulet worked”.

The ad for the amulet promised its bearer would be “blessed with the gift of Angelic good fortune, guidance and divine protection from all real danger, both physical and spiritual”, in addition to a number of other claims. (See the full article on the Telegraph.co.uk: “Amulet advert banned over claim of ‘divine protection“.

The Telegraph.co.uk pokes fun at these guys, and not without reason. The “talisman” is small – “the size of a 10p piece and which features an array of mystic symbols” – and expensive – “silver for £29 or nine carat gold for £120″.

On their website the CoR describe themselves as “the recognized world leaders in the ancient art of true talismanic magic”. I’m no expert, but I try to keep familiarity groups who become known, but prior to the rather amusing article that ran on Telegraph.co.uk yesterday, I never knew they existed. “World leaders”? Anyone else heard of these guys? Continue reading »

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I posted earlier about attending L’Heure Noir, a series of workshops with Andrieh Vitimus followed by a masquerade. The workshops were a lot of fun, as was the masquerade, but at one point a masked man came up to Andrieh, a little nervously, and said the book was “ok”, but it was “nothing new”. This annoyed me.

I felt it was rude, and responded in kind before electing to remove myself from the conversation. The man quite obviously wanted to speak with Andrieh, and I hadn’t even read the book. It clearly wasn’t my place to argue. I stepped out.

At the time I took it for impolite, but now, having read more of Hands-On Chaos Magic, it also entirely overlooks the purpose for which it was written. Indeed, in the first paragraph of the first chapter Andrieh acknowledges that what’s in here isn’t necessarily unique– that’s not why he wrote the book. Complaining that there’s “nothing new” is misguided for (at least) two reasons.

Point the First: It’s all old hat

Human beings Continue reading »

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With perhaps the best headline of the week (which I have gleefully ripped off), the Beeb reports on a group of rabbis and Jewish mystics flying (in a plane – hey, you never know) over Israel praying and blowing shofars in attempts to ward off the H1N1 virus.

The flight’s aim was “to stop the pandemic so people will stop dying from it”, Rabbi Yitzhak Batzri was quoted as saying in Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper.

[...]

Television footage showed rabbis in black hats rocking backwards and forwards as they read prayers from Kabbalah, a form of Jewish mysticism which counts the singer Madonna among its devotees.

See BBC.co.uk, “Flying rabbis fight swine flu” for more – with video!

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Dr Brendan Cathbad Myers is the author of several books on radical Paganism and Druidry, his latest, The Other Side of Virtue: Where Our Virtues Come From, What They Really Mean, and Where They Might Be Taking Us, will be published by O Books in July 2008.

A spiritual path is, among other things, a way of seeing the world. That is to say, a spiritual path is a way of understanding or interpreting our relationships with the many things, events, people, and places in the world.  In most cases, the path will be expressed or configured by a logic of correspondences. In accord with this logic, the appearance of a certain animal, or plant, or weather event, or whatever, signifies realities beyond itself. Similarly, every spiritual path will have meditations, rituals, techniques, practices, and so on, designed to help the practitioner recognise those signs and read the messages they convey. The co-ordinates of the correspondences will vary in accord with language, culture, climate, geography, and other factors. They can grow ever more complicated and intricate, in order to accommodate an ever growing range of things and events in an ever-changing world.  Continue reading »

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Ges, in a recent post in his journal, placed characters from Buffy the Vampire Slayer on the Tree of Life. It’s reminiscent of the Pokemon kabbalah circulating chaote lists in the late 90s, and various other characters from the pop cultural milieu.

Ten years ago this sort of thing was immediately dismissed as juvenile by those unfamiliar with chaos magick, and while sphincters have relaxed somewhat, it may still surprise some to learn that exercises of this sort (or similar enough) were advocated by Crowley nearly seventy years ago.

In “Letter F” of Magick Without Tears, Crowley writes:

[...] If, however, you work at the Qabalah in the same way as I did myself, in season and out of season, you ought to get a very fair grasp of it in six months. I will now tell you what this method is: as I walked about, I made a point of attributing everything I saw to its appropriate idea. I would walk out of the door of my house and reflect that the door is Daleth, and house is Beth; now the word dob is Hebrew for bear, and has the number 6, which refers to the Sun. Then you come to the fence of your property and that is Cheth – number 8, Tarot Trump 7, which is the Chariot: so you begin to look about for your car…As soon as this sort of work, which can be done in a quite lighthearted spirit, becomes habitual, you will find your mind running naturally in this direction, and will be surprised at your progress.

He was quite adamant that one must construct one’s own kabbalah, reiterating:

Never let your mind wander from the fact that your Qabalah is not my Qabalah; a good many of the things which I have noted may be useful to you, but you must construct your own system so that it is a living weapon in your hand.

Yet how are such notions taken today? How often have we encountered individuals who assert that their method is the One True Way when it comes to such symbolic analysis? As if these novelties, association games, somehow threaten the integrity of the system, when in fact Continue reading »

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