Path: typhoon.sonic.net!feed.news.sonic.net!HSNX.atgi.net!headwall.stanford.edu!newsfeed.stanford.edu!postnews1.google.com!not-for-mail From: bloodofenoch@goddamnfruit.com (Andralphus) Newsgroups: alt.magick Subject: Re: A Sense of Direction? Date: 4 May 2002 12:18:11 -0700 Organization: http://groups.google.com/ Lines: 74 Message-ID: References: <8c26d7cc.0205040349.7760e5c5@posting.google.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: 168.122.15.84 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-Trace: posting.google.com 1020539891 21112 127.0.0.1 (4 May 2002 19:18:11 GMT) X-Complaints-To: groups-abuse@google.com NNTP-Posting-Date: 4 May 2002 19:18:11 GMT Xref: typhoon.sonic.net alt.magick:299115 dragul@cradleoffilthonline.com (Dragul) wrote in message news:<8c26d7cc.0205040349.7760e5c5@posting.google.com>... > > I'm wondering if someone can point me in the direction of a site that > at least describes in some detail the different paths of magick... > like enochian, hermetic, etc. I'll do my best to answer it here. Hermetic - There are a number of manuscripts that have survived from Late Antiquity (2nd-4th centuries AD or so) attributed to Hermes Treismegistos (Hermes Thrice-greatest, i.e. Thoth). They are kind of a mixed bag, but generally contain the doctrine that the soul of man is divine and give some hints as to how it might go back to its source. Hermetic magick generally refers to magick in which the goal is to re-integrate oneself to the Divine, the True Will, etc. Golden Dawn - A British Victorian occult order. They came up with a huge classification of almost all imaginable Western occult concepts (see Crowley's 777) and some very useful rituals (the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram, the Banishing Ritual of the Hexagram, etc.) that have become the de-facto standard in magick today. Many or most of the "paths" below have a basically Hermetic goal and most of their practitioners use the basic Golden Dawn ceremonies and framework, or a variant thereon. Enochian - A method of contacting angels discovered in scrying sessions by John Dee and Edward Kelly in the Elizabethan era. Significant parts of this method were incorporated into Golden Dawn system. Goetia - The title of one chapter in a late-Renaissance grimoire called the Lesser Key of Solomon. Describes 72 rebellious spirits (demons? djinn?) and how to summon them. The Goetia is probably the most-worked form of grimoiric magick, but there are others. The Lesser Key has chapters called Ars Paulina and Almadel which give methods of summoning angels. There is a Greater Key of Solomon which details the 'Olympic Spirits' of the planets and how to summon them. The Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage - Another Renaissance grimoire. Details an involved method of contacting one's Holy Guardian Angel. Thelema - Aleister Crowley's own personal magico-religious system, concerned with obtaining knowledge of one's True Will. Crowley and his students have produced variations on GD rituals. Pathworking - Meditation with the goal of ascending the 'paths' on the Kabbalistic Tree of Life. Franz Bardon - German-Czech magus who came up with his own system with little or no debt to the GD. His first book, Initiation into Hermetics, has some *crazy* theoretical sections where he talks about channeling electric and magnetic forces, etc. and then a very useful practical section, with techniques for developing clairvoyance, clairaudience, astral projection, etc. Try doing a Google Groups search and look for some of Gnome's old posts on him. Scrying - Staring into a mirror, crystal, or whatever to induce visions. I'm sure there are plenty of other things I've forgot, but those are some of the chief points. Note that some of the above (Hermetism, Thelema) describe goals for magick, some of them describe techniques (scrying, pathworking), and some of them describe spirits to contact with those techniques (e.g. Enochian). Some of them have a mixture of all three (the grimoires, Golden Dawn). > PS. If I could just throw in some *really* general questions: What do > you do with magick? Talk with angels, demons and gods. Whatever those are, whether they exist or not.