Thoth: You know he belongs to me, right?
Baron Samedi: You don’t mind if I fuck with him awhile?
Thoth: *grumble grumble* Okay, he’s kinda worthless to me right now with his back all fucked up. He can’t sit in a chair and write for hours.
Baron Samedi: sweet…
Me: Can one of you assholes do something about my back?
Month: December 2017
I think the Baron is up for some tarot reading. Are you?
As we come to the cusp of the year, I would like to let all my new followers know that I do tarot readings. I charge $10 for a three card reading. Also, I offer a deal of one three card tarot reading a month for a year for $100. You can always gift them to a friend, or start out the new year with some perspective for yourself.
For every reading I set up an altar properly banished and blessed.
Working with spirits well known to me, I pull three cards and divine their personal meaning for you. You can ask a specific question, or just ask for a general reading.
At the end, I pull a Portals of Chaos card to find an entity that can help you with any tasks or obstacles described by the cards.
You can contact me through tumblr or through the contact page at the Scroll of Thoth website.
Please reblog if you think your followers would be interested.
I didn’t want to go down this path. I wanted to keep looking for spirits within my ancestry. I claim no initiation. I do not practice Vodoun. But he spoke to me, he really did.
Yesterday I earned some serious weird motherfucker points. The Baron spoke to me on Christmas day through a statue that a friend had given me. I knew I had to do this right. I knew I had to call on Papa Legba first to open the gate. For this I needed candles but using my credit card at the small, local Mexican grocery seemed wrong. But the next day I put on a coat I hadn’t worn in a long time and found four dollars in the pocket, so I took it as a sign. At the store, the nice young lady saw me staring at the candles. I asked if they had Saint Peter. They did not. But Saint Lazarus would do. They did not have Saint Expedite. But strangely they had a black and a purple candle sitting side by side. Three candles would be five dollars. But the voice came again. “I think you can give up that lucky two-dollar bill you’ve been carrying around.” So I did. The cashier gave me a sideways glance as I checked out with just the three candles. He knew what was up.
Later, I took the change and a fifty cent piece I had been saving and drove past my local graveyard. A place I have been haunting lately, leaving offerings at the older graves. It sits at a crossroads. I think the guy behind me was quite perplexed as I chucked the change out my car window in the middle of a snow storm as I passed through the intersection.
I lit my candles. Offered rum to Papa Legba and a pipe loaded with tobacco. For the Baron, more rum and a cigar.
I get the feeling he is now contemplating what to do with my white ass, and how much more he can get from me. Which is a lot, if he keeps talking.
baron samedi · loa of the dead
He is the head of the Guédé family of Loa, or an aspect of them, or possibly their spiritual father. “Samedi” means “Saturday” in French. His wife is the Loa Maman Brigitte. He is usually depicted with a top hat, black tuxedo (dinner-jacket), dark glasses, and cotton plugs in the nostrils, as if to resemble a corpse dressed and prepared for burial in the Haitian style. He has a white, frequently skull-like face (or actually has a skull for a face), and speaks in a nasal voice. He is noted for disruption, obscenity, debauchery, and having a particular fondness for tobacco and rum. Additionally, he is the Loa of resurrection, and in the latter capacity he is often called upon for healing by those near or approaching death, as it is only Baron who can accept an individual into the realm of the dead.
requested by: @anon
Strange Angel
Hermetic Library Fellow T Polyphilus reviews Strange Angel: The Otherworldly Life of Rocket Scientist John Whiteside Parsons by George Pendle.
Strange Angel is the second full-length biography of Jack Parsons I have read. The first, Sex and Rockets, was a book about an occultist who happened to be a rocket scientist. George Pendle’s “angel” is instead a rocket scientist who happens to be an occultist. To be fair, both accounts discuss the congruence of Parsons’s various passions, rooted in a lust for exploration and experiment. But Sex and Rockets is looking to be shelved with occultism, and Strange Angel with history of science.
Author Pendle is clearly no occultist himself, and he occasionally errs in attributing idiosyncrasy to Parsons in his embrace of received Thelemic doctrines, which is not to say that Parsons wasn’t idiosyncratic. But Pendle’s treatment of religious organizing by the followers of Aleister Crowley is on the whole fair and accurate, and benefits from consulting key repositories of primary sources, including O.T.O. (i.e. the Crowley estate, a continuing religious body). In no way does he marginalize Parsons’s occult activities within the general scope of the biography. Perhaps the most vivid anecdote of the whole book is Parsons declaiming Crowley’s “Hymn to Pan” at Aerojet social functions, urged on by his boss Andrew Haley.
But, as I observed at the outset, Strange Angel is really about the science, chiefly the inception of practical rocket science in the US during the 1930s and 40s. Pendle gives an exciting and detailed narrative of the Pasadena rocketry crew (the “Suicide Squad”) , the GALCIT rocketry project at Caltech, the founding of Jet Propulsion Laboratories and Aerojet Corporation, and the effects of war and commerce on the progress of rocketry from science-fiction pipe dream to common technology. I had never really paused to consider it before, but it turns out that the word “jet” is nothing more than a euphemism for the word “rocket.” Scientific consensus was hardened against the idea of using rockets in transport, and Frank Malina and Theodore von Kármán hit on the idea of coining a new word to smuggle the technology into practicable research (157).
Another valuable feature of the book, and one which attracted me to it, is the responsible way that it details the intersection of technological experiment and science fiction, within the frontier field of rocketry. Pendle describes a variety of fascinating milieus and their development: the scientific scenes mentioned above, the Los Angeles Science Fiction Society and early SF fandom, Agape Lodge O.T.O., and the “Parsonage” at 1003 Orange Grove that Parsons established to be an O.T.O. Profess House, but which evolved on its own bohemian trajectory.
The first chapter of the book details Parsons’s untimely death in the explosion of his home laboratory in Pasadena, starting with the phenomenon of the explosion itself as it would have been perceived in the moment by locals. After returning Parsons to childhood and working through a full biography, Pendle seems to strongly support the most pedestrian explanation of the tragedy: it was an accident due to haste and awkward circumstance.
Parsons was a notable figure who has been unduly neglected, as Pendle observes. So there’s no reason to consider this biography the final word on this fascinating man, but it is a significant contribution and a pleasure to read. [via]
Originally posted on The Hermetic Library Blog at https://library.hrmtc.com/2017/12/27/strange-angel/
the God Thoth (ibis-headed) purifying with the sacred water of Life.
Detail from the “Palace of Maat” of the Great Temple of the God Amon-Ra at ‘Ipet-Sut’ (“Karnak”), ‘Uaset’-Thebes
Scribe of the gods, herald of Ra, head of the Ogdoad, wondrous to behold. All magick pleases Thoth! I am that writing palette, oh Thoth, and I have brought unto thee thine ink jar.
the Nile-God Hapy of the highly sacred city of Khmoun/Shmoun, kneeling and bringing a table with offerings, lotus flowers, two hanging ‘Ankh’-signs (Life) and the ‘Uas’-scepter.
Khmoun/Shmoun (Ḫmnw, Hermopolis Megale, in the XV nome of Upper Egypt) is “the City of the Eight” (the eight Gods of the Ogdoad, the “Ancestors of the Gods”) and the principal seat of Thoth (Ḏḥwtj, whose egyptian pronunciation preserved in Coptic and attested also in the Greek transliteration is “Thoth”/“Thouth”; it is important to remember that “Djehuti” is simply the conventional reading invented by the scholars that does not reflect the real pronunciation of the Egyptian language, as it is written at the beginning of every grammar of hieroglyphs).
Detail from the “Temple of Millions of Year” of King Ramses II at Abydos
detail from the “House of Eternity” of King Sethi I, Valley of the Kings, KV17, west ‘Uaset’-Thebes:
King Sethi I offering wine to
“Hathor Who presides over ‘Uaset’-Thebes, the Lady of the Sky and the Queen of all the Gods” (translation of the hieroglyphs on the top right and above the Goddess, Ḥwt-Ḥr ḥryt-tp W3st nbt pt ḥnwt Nṯrw nbw).
Hathor is represented wearing the Solar disk with the Uraeus and cow’s horns, and the earring with the Uraeus