chaotopia

This post and some that will follow are about my experiences of working with the spirit or demon Andromalius, number 72 in the Goetia. (To cut to the chase, yes, I find Andromalius to be a very useful spirit.) Over a few months I have started to forge a working relationship with him, and it has been a very interesting learning curve as well as useful to me. So here are a few thoughts about spirits in general and Goetia #72 in particular. So what do we mean when we talking about working with spirits? Some magicians use the idea that there are four (or five) basic ways of apprehending magic - Psychological, Energy-based, Spirit-based or Information-based. (The fifth is the meta-way of slipping between those four at will.) That makes a  fair amount of sense to me; not perfect sense, but a good contribution to ways we can view our magic. Now look at those four approaches to magical effects: they aren't all of the same level of cultural unfamiliarity, are they? Or to put it ano

http://sevensecularsermons.org/ Any old Aeon Any old Aeon Any any any old Aeon - From a song by Barry Hairbrush If you are reading my weird writings you have probably heard of Aeonics, various philosophers' and magicians' ideas of how civilizations undergo great big shifts in their central ideas. You will have come across Crowley's Aeons of Isis the Mother, Osiris the Dying God and Horus the Crowned and Conquering Child. You may have come across Peter Carroll's more pragmatic extension of this into a five-Aeon scheme. We start off in Shamanism, proceed to Pagan Polytheism, to Monotheism and then to Materialist Modernism, before slipping off the edge of the model into the current rather Postmodernist PanDaemonAeon. Most of those older Aeons produced artworks which promote meditations which explicate the spiritual worldview of that Aeon. Take ancient Egyptian religion and its gorgeous polytheistic splendour. Or the mediaeval cathedrals in their breathtaking d