A short thought on spiritual growth

If you're looking for something fun to add to your full moon celebration of the Crow Moon, here's a divination idea based on an old 15th century British poem.

The crow moon is so named as during this period you will hear murders of crows cawing to herald the coming spring. This moon also signifies a highly intuitive period which is perfect for divination.

 So when you hear the crows caw, refer to this poem to determine your fortune this spring…

     One for sorrow

     Two for mirth

     Three for a funeral

     And four for birth

     Five for silver

     Six for gold

     Seven for a secret, never to be told

     Eight for a wish

     Nine for a kiss

     Ten for a bird, You must not miss

If you're too impatient to wait for a murder of crows to show up, you can always take up a tarot deck, pick a suit and shuffle numbers 1 to 10 and draw. Enjoy the season! Goodbye winter...

As we will it, so it will be

Lord Wulfrun

Growing up around Christians and atheists and a healthy cynicism towards anything metaphysical, I can hear my family snigger at the thought that I might consider myself capable of magick! And not the rabbit from a hat kind either! So I thought I would write this blog entry to explain some of what I believe magic entails, and answer the question can we really do it? (perhaps in some way to answer cynics who may find themselves here).

Let’s begin by giving ourselves a simple definition of magick:

“Magick is using the force of your will to affect change in the material universe.”

Taking us back to the very first Blog entry we looked at what is reality, and taking Ervin Laszlo’s new paradigm view we discussed its division between a material-state reality and mind-state reality.

Everything we perceive through our senses, including our surroundings, the stars and planets, and our physical bodies exists in the material-State reality. Metaphysical entities, including our higher selves, our imaginations, god-forms and dreams exist in the mind-State reality. The material state reality while it may appear to our senses as solid in form is in fact comprised of waves and energy. We are as much a part of the air around us and the chair across the room as we are a part of ourselves. the two states of reality are equal and intertwined.

We know through science how energy transfers in the material universe, F=MA etc. but what science cannot explain is when, if and how mind-state reality impacts the material state reality.

Personally I believe I have seen it both in my own works and everyday life and it is not as alien as you might think. In fact I think we all do it all the time!

Let’s throw out some fairly commonly held day-to-day notions

1. Self-fulfilling prophesy - whether or not you believe you will win or lose, you are right
2. Power of prayer - asking god to assist us in our every day lives
3. Self healing - willing yourself to be well when you have something important to do
   
4. Attaining athletic goals - working through personal limitations to achieve new heights

These are all common concepts where we readily accept the mind’s influence over the outcome, “mind over matter”. We believe the outcome will be attained and it happens. The above are first person examples. What about 3rd person?

1. Leadership skills - a team reflects the example of its leader
2. Sales and Marketing - using imagery and sensory inputs to implant in our subconscious a need for a product or service
3. Charisma - personalities that are cultivated to influence others

In each case you are defining a desired outcome in the material-state reality, focusing on that outcome in the mind-State, and ultimately arriving at that outcome. In other words, in each case we are penetrating the subconscious to affect a change which ultimately manifests itself in the material-state reality. The difference for me between these activities and what is referred to as "magick" are to do with method and linguistics alone. In principle, magick is these things and is very normal.

Let’s take an example:

3 people, we’ll call them Rob, Jane and Freddy, all decide on New Years Eve that they are going to lose 20lbs before the summer so they can enjoy a holiday together.

Jan 1 each of them separately comes up with a plan. They each choose a diet. Rob chooses a low calorie diet, Jane chooses low fat, Freddy chooses a low fat and low carb diet. They all sign up at a gym and begin attending twice a week doing a roughly equivalent workout.

At this stage all intentions are equal and all material state plans of attack are equal. However, Rob is a Christian, Jane is an occultist, Freddy is neither and they all also formulate a mental approach.

Rob as a Christian prays regularly and he introduces into his regular spiritual activities prayers that Jesus will help him fight off temptation, to stay on his diet and keep up his gym attendance. Rob is a devout Christian and believes strongly that Jesus will keep him on his path. He focuses on lent as the period he will use to give up any bad food habits and lose the weight.

Freddy goes to the gym and follows the diet and believes in himself. He has been an athlete in his youth and knows how to drive himself, he also has the voice of his father and his high school athletics coach loudly ringing in his ears. he has a structured routine to exercise, he drafts up a training plan to follow.

Jane plans a ritual and the creation of a sigil. This sigil will be kept on her person to ward off temptation. She spends many hours researching the best sigil design incorporating astrology, tarot, Kabbalah and words of power to invoke it with the maximum potency, she crafts it with complete focus and meditation and charges it under a full moon calling for the assistance of her spirit-guide to aid her in her plight. The imagery of the sigil is emblazoned on her subconscious, she knows that every time temptation calls she will recall her sigil, and act according to her goal.

They are all assisted by a healthy dose of competitive spirit!

So now you all want to know who succeeded! Well, as you can imagine it would be very trite of me to now invent the paths ahead and predictably (given my persuasion) show that Jane won and that’s why magick is awesome!

What we should focus on here is not the outcome but the different methods. Are these approaches really that different?

1. Each has a statement of intent
2. Each has a mind-state entity to commune with for assistance
3. Each has a ritual approach to the task
4. Each has empowered themselves to believe in the outcome

Success will come for each based on the depth and quality of the self-belief which follows. The point of this narrative is not to promote magick over other approaches, but to normalize the concept of magick and to overcome a stigma around the word. It is to say that Magick is not some far-fetched Disney-esque wand waving claptrap. It is ritual method to influence your subconscious in order to affect the universe around you.

Do we do it? Absolutely! Does it work? Well, I’ll leave you with this:

In February 2017 I was in dire physical condition after 4 back surgeries, a year in recovery but still unable to do much more than hobble about. I decided that in order to get my mobility back I had to exercise, if I wanted to exercise I would have to lose weight. I created and charged a Temperance sigil (based on the Temperance tarot card and the corresponding path between Yesod and Tiphareth on the Kabbalah tree of life). I created it to assist me in weight loss by reminding me to “temper” my appetite for good food and beer! 200 days later I had lost 50lbs and I am not lying when I say it was effortless. In January 2017 I couldn’t run, in November 2017 I ran 20 miles in a week.

This activity was proof positive that this method would work for me and so it has become part of my practice of “magick”. This is what magick is and it can be done by anyone.

This was a fairly modest and local piece of spellwork, my mind is now on bigger goals - I will keep you updated! Our magickal ability is only limited by what we believe it can be capable of. My hope is that everyone can find a way to perform magick that works for them and that we all work to make the human experience a far better one!

As we will it, so it will be!

I'm currently reading a great book about the Wiccan belief system which opened my eyes to a really important line of thinking when it comes to the occult and innovative theism. Belief identity. What am I?

The book is "What thou wilt: Traditional and Innovative trends in post-Gardnerian witchcraft" by Jon Hanna. It's a great read. The writing style is fluid and it has an authenticity to it, like you're reading someone's personal research notes. My kind of book!

I picked this book up as part of my current study of Wicca, but it has done a great job of opening my eyes to "Traditional Wicca" views on innovative theism, syncretism and for the first time I've come across the notion that it is possible to be "fluffy" in one's practice. Being fluffy is a negative label given by "traditional wiccans" to those who fail to follow a set order and regulation in their practice, either through the complete absence of anything that resembles worship or by innovating and using a pick-and-mix approach to theism that becomes a nonsense to those who follow stricter pathways.Ultimately, the book has challenged me to ask myself "what am I?" with a particular intent to satisfy myself that I am not "fluffy".

To answer this for myself I have taken pen to paper (actually finger to cell phone) and below are some thoughts I have come up with about my own belief identity:

1. I am an OMNIST . An Omnist is someone who believes all faiths hold some value in their attempts to explain the universe, who we are, why we're here and how to live a life of right action
2. I am a PANTHEIST . A pantheist rejects the notion of a personified God replacing it instead with the notion that the universe itself is the greater force and that we are one with it. See blog God, Gods or Goddesses for more on this.
3. I am an innovative SYNCRETIST who sees value in drawing together aspects of multiple belief systems. This to me is the natural progression from being an omnist and pantheistic. (Allegedly this is where my practice may be viewed as "fluffy" by some. I'll come back to that in a second).
4. I am a HUMANIST . I believe that in the absence of deific guidance in the form of physical gods or goddesses telling us stuff we as a species can take credit for all the good that is done in the world and that we will always recognize where opportunity lies to do better, and we will aspire to do better.
5. I am an EMPIRICIST . I believe in scientific method, hypotheses and testing and repeatable observable outcomes.
6. Lastly I am an ALIENIST . Ok I made this one up. There doesn't appear to be a single word in the English language that describes someone who believes in the existence of extra-terrestrial sentient (non-deific) beings. So I'm going with Alienist. And I hear you cry, "You just said you're an empiricist, so where's your proof of alien life forms?!". For this I rely on basic mathemetics. I highly recommend "Probability: 1" by Amir Aczel.

I am finding that I reside outside of other words people use to define themselves. I have to avoid Pagan, neo-pagan because of my approach to deity, I'm not a witch, I don't follow Traditional Wicca. I'm guessing many others face similar challenges, I would love to hear below in the comments what other people call themselves and why. Outside of the above I currently describe myself as an ECLECTIC OCCULTIST , occasionally I will also refer to myself as a CHAOS MAGE although I find this title a bit Harry Potter, it doesn't seem to hold enough academic weight for me.

So there it is. That is the "what am I?" and I am informed by Traditional Wiccans this all makes me "fluffy". In part as I'm a syncretist and also because I stand outside some of these other dogmatic boundaries larger established groups have created.

To me, this is strange. Being innovative and breaking rules should not be assigned unflattering labels because lets face it, the line of knowledge between now and the original practices we are emulating and drawing from is more than broken, it is shattered into a million pieces and shrouded in fog. We are all historians, philosophical archeologists and truth-seekers in a lost kingdom. "Tradition" is no more that the accepted paradigm in a chain of innovative theories of right practice.

To me "fluffy" is not about what you practice but how you practice. If you occasionally light a candle, go to new age stores, drink herbal tea, you've heard of calling the corners and you call yourself a kitchen witch, well you may be fluffy however you may also call yourself a NEOPHYTE , someone on the very first step of their occult journey, which is nothing to be sniffed at.

To move from NEOPHYTE to INITIATE or ACOLYTE is then just about increasing your study, keeping a regular journal, memorizing and performing ritual and dedicating yourself (in whatever fashion YOU choose) to YOUR practice. There is no authority in occult.

Provided you can define your belief identity, your methods are recorded and are repeated and you have an observable practice, ain't nothing fluffy about you! Creativity is the very key to us recapturing the ways of our ancestors. We shouldn't pay any heed to anyone who calls their practice a "tradition".

As it is wilt, so mote it be!!

Lord Wulfrun

How an idea for a landscaping feature turned into a journey into the occult

You've got different gods from me! Who's right?

If you're looking for something fun to add to your full moon celebration of the Crow Moon, here's a divination idea based on an old 15th century British poem.

The crow moon is so named as during this period you will hear murders of crows cawing to herald the coming spring. This moon also signifies a highly intuitive period which is perfect for divination.

 So when you hear the crows caw, refer to this poem to determine your fortune this spring…

     One for sorrow

     Two for mirth

     Three for a funeral

     And four for birth

     Five for silver

     Six for gold

     Seven for a secret, never to be told

     Eight for a wish

     Nine for a kiss

     Ten for a bird, You must not miss

If you're too impatient to wait for a murder of crows to show up, you can always take up a tarot deck, pick a suit and shuffle numbers 1 to 10 and draw. Enjoy the season! Goodbye winter...

As we will it, so it will be

Lord Wulfrun

Growing up around Christians and atheists and a healthy cynicism towards anything metaphysical, I can hear my family snigger at the thought that I might consider myself capable of magick! And not the rabbit from a hat kind either! So I thought I would write this blog entry to explain some of what I believe magic entails, and answer the question can we really do it? (perhaps in some way to answer cynics who may find themselves here).

Let’s begin by giving ourselves a simple definition of magick:

“Magick is using the force of your will to affect change in the material universe.”

Taking us back to the very first Blog entry we looked at what is reality, and taking Ervin Laszlo’s new paradigm view we discussed its division between a material-state reality and mind-state reality.

Everything we perceive through our senses, including our surroundings, the stars and planets, and our physical bodies exists in the material-State reality. Metaphysical entities, including our higher selves, our imaginations, god-forms and dreams exist in the mind-State reality. The material state reality while it may appear to our senses as solid in form is in fact comprised of waves and energy. We are as much a part of the air around us and the chair across the room as we are a part of ourselves. the two states of reality are equal and intertwined.

We know through science how energy transfers in the material universe, F=MA etc. but what science cannot explain is when, if and how mind-state reality impacts the material state reality.

Personally I believe I have seen it both in my own works and everyday life and it is not as alien as you might think. In fact I think we all do it all the time!

Let’s throw out some fairly commonly held day-to-day notions

1. Self-fulfilling prophesy - whether or not you believe you will win or lose, you are right
2. Power of prayer - asking god to assist us in our every day lives
3. Self healing - willing yourself to be well when you have something important to do
   
4. Attaining athletic goals - working through personal limitations to achieve new heights

These are all common concepts where we readily accept the mind’s influence over the outcome, “mind over matter”. We believe the outcome will be attained and it happens. The above are first person examples. What about 3rd person?

1. Leadership skills - a team reflects the example of its leader
2. Sales and Marketing - using imagery and sensory inputs to implant in our subconscious a need for a product or service
3. Charisma - personalities that are cultivated to influence others

In each case you are defining a desired outcome in the material-state reality, focusing on that outcome in the mind-State, and ultimately arriving at that outcome. In other words, in each case we are penetrating the subconscious to affect a change which ultimately manifests itself in the material-state reality. The difference for me between these activities and what is referred to as "magick" are to do with method and linguistics alone. In principle, magick is these things and is very normal.

Let’s take an example:

3 people, we’ll call them Rob, Jane and Freddy, all decide on New Years Eve that they are going to lose 20lbs before the summer so they can enjoy a holiday together.

Jan 1 each of them separately comes up with a plan. They each choose a diet. Rob chooses a low calorie diet, Jane chooses low fat, Freddy chooses a low fat and low carb diet. They all sign up at a gym and begin attending twice a week doing a roughly equivalent workout.

At this stage all intentions are equal and all material state plans of attack are equal. However, Rob is a Christian, Jane is an occultist, Freddy is neither and they all also formulate a mental approach.

Rob as a Christian prays regularly and he introduces into his regular spiritual activities prayers that Jesus will help him fight off temptation, to stay on his diet and keep up his gym attendance. Rob is a devout Christian and believes strongly that Jesus will keep him on his path. He focuses on lent as the period he will use to give up any bad food habits and lose the weight.

Freddy goes to the gym and follows the diet and believes in himself. He has been an athlete in his youth and knows how to drive himself, he also has the voice of his father and his high school athletics coach loudly ringing in his ears. he has a structured routine to exercise, he drafts up a training plan to follow.

Jane plans a ritual and the creation of a sigil. This sigil will be kept on her person to ward off temptation. She spends many hours researching the best sigil design incorporating astrology, tarot, Kabbalah and words of power to invoke it with the maximum potency, she crafts it with complete focus and meditation and charges it under a full moon calling for the assistance of her spirit-guide to aid her in her plight. The imagery of the sigil is emblazoned on her subconscious, she knows that every time temptation calls she will recall her sigil, and act according to her goal.

They are all assisted by a healthy dose of competitive spirit!

So now you all want to know who succeeded! Well, as you can imagine it would be very trite of me to now invent the paths ahead and predictably (given my persuasion) show that Jane won and that’s why magick is awesome!

What we should focus on here is not the outcome but the different methods. Are these approaches really that different?

1. Each has a statement of intent
2. Each has a mind-state entity to commune with for assistance
3. Each has a ritual approach to the task
4. Each has empowered themselves to believe in the outcome

Success will come for each based on the depth and quality of the self-belief which follows. The point of this narrative is not to promote magick over other approaches, but to normalize the concept of magick and to overcome a stigma around the word. It is to say that Magick is not some far-fetched Disney-esque wand waving claptrap. It is ritual method to influence your subconscious in order to affect the universe around you.

Do we do it? Absolutely! Does it work? Well, I’ll leave you with this:

In February 2017 I was in dire physical condition after 4 back surgeries, a year in recovery but still unable to do much more than hobble about. I decided that in order to get my mobility back I had to exercise, if I wanted to exercise I would have to lose weight. I created and charged a Temperance sigil (based on the Temperance tarot card and the corresponding path between Yesod and Tiphareth on the Kabbalah tree of life). I created it to assist me in weight loss by reminding me to “temper” my appetite for good food and beer! 200 days later I had lost 50lbs and I am not lying when I say it was effortless. In January 2017 I couldn’t run, in November 2017 I ran 20 miles in a week.

This activity was proof positive that this method would work for me and so it has become part of my practice of “magick”. This is what magick is and it can be done by anyone.

This was a fairly modest and local piece of spellwork, my mind is now on bigger goals - I will keep you updated! Our magickal ability is only limited by what we believe it can be capable of. My hope is that everyone can find a way to perform magick that works for them and that we all work to make the human experience a far better one!

As we will it, so it will be!

I'm currently reading a great book about the Wiccan belief system which opened my eyes to a really important line of thinking when it comes to the occult and innovative theism. Belief identity. What am I?

The book is "What thou wilt: Traditional and Innovative trends in post-Gardnerian witchcraft" by Jon Hanna. It's a great read. The writing style is fluid and it has an authenticity to it, like you're reading someone's personal research notes. My kind of book!

I picked this book up as part of my current study of Wicca, but it has done a great job of opening my eyes to "Traditional Wicca" views on innovative theism, syncretism and for the first time I've come across the notion that it is possible to be "fluffy" in one's practice. Being fluffy is a negative label given by "traditional wiccans" to those who fail to follow a set order and regulation in their practice, either through the complete absence of anything that resembles worship or by innovating and using a pick-and-mix approach to theism that becomes a nonsense to those who follow stricter pathways.Ultimately, the book has challenged me to ask myself "what am I?" with a particular intent to satisfy myself that I am not "fluffy".

To answer this for myself I have taken pen to paper (actually finger to cell phone) and below are some thoughts I have come up with about my own belief identity:

1. I am an OMNIST . An Omnist is someone who believes all faiths hold some value in their attempts to explain the universe, who we are, why we're here and how to live a life of right action
2. I am a PANTHEIST . A pantheist rejects the notion of a personified God replacing it instead with the notion that the universe itself is the greater force and that we are one with it. See blog God, Gods or Goddesses for more on this.
3. I am an innovative SYNCRETIST who sees value in drawing together aspects of multiple belief systems. This to me is the natural progression from being an omnist and pantheistic. (Allegedly this is where my practice may be viewed as "fluffy" by some. I'll come back to that in a second).
4. I am a HUMANIST . I believe that in the absence of deific guidance in the form of physical gods or goddesses telling us stuff we as a species can take credit for all the good that is done in the world and that we will always recognize where opportunity lies to do better, and we will aspire to do better.
5. I am an EMPIRICIST . I believe in scientific method, hypotheses and testing and repeatable observable outcomes.
6. Lastly I am an ALIENIST . Ok I made this one up. There doesn't appear to be a single word in the English language that describes someone who believes in the existence of extra-terrestrial sentient (non-deific) beings. So I'm going with Alienist. And I hear you cry, "You just said you're an empiricist, so where's your proof of alien life forms?!". For this I rely on basic mathemetics. I highly recommend "Probability: 1" by Amir Aczel.

I am finding that I reside outside of other words people use to define themselves. I have to avoid Pagan, neo-pagan because of my approach to deity, I'm not a witch, I don't follow Traditional Wicca. I'm guessing many others face similar challenges, I would love to hear below in the comments what other people call themselves and why. Outside of the above I currently describe myself as an ECLECTIC OCCULTIST , occasionally I will also refer to myself as a CHAOS MAGE although I find this title a bit Harry Potter, it doesn't seem to hold enough academic weight for me.

So there it is. That is the "what am I?" and I am informed by Traditional Wiccans this all makes me "fluffy". In part as I'm a syncretist and also because I stand outside some of these other dogmatic boundaries larger established groups have created.

To me, this is strange. Being innovative and breaking rules should not be assigned unflattering labels because lets face it, the line of knowledge between now and the original practices we are emulating and drawing from is more than broken, it is shattered into a million pieces and shrouded in fog. We are all historians, philosophical archeologists and truth-seekers in a lost kingdom. "Tradition" is no more that the accepted paradigm in a chain of innovative theories of right practice.

To me "fluffy" is not about what you practice but how you practice. If you occasionally light a candle, go to new age stores, drink herbal tea, you've heard of calling the corners and you call yourself a kitchen witch, well you may be fluffy however you may also call yourself a NEOPHYTE , someone on the very first step of their occult journey, which is nothing to be sniffed at.

To move from NEOPHYTE to INITIATE or ACOLYTE is then just about increasing your study, keeping a regular journal, memorizing and performing ritual and dedicating yourself (in whatever fashion YOU choose) to YOUR practice. There is no authority in occult.

Provided you can define your belief identity, your methods are recorded and are repeated and you have an observable practice, ain't nothing fluffy about you! Creativity is the very key to us recapturing the ways of our ancestors. We shouldn't pay any heed to anyone who calls their practice a "tradition".

As it is wilt, so mote it be!!

Lord Wulfrun

How an idea for a landscaping feature turned into a journey into the occult

You've got different gods from me! Who's right?