Again, instead of going over my process, let’s go over some basics.
My best suggestion to you, when beginning ancestor work, is to start with ancestors that you knew personally and remember fondly. Light candles in their name. Call out for them by name. Ask them to attend you and your ceremony. Yes, do this out loud. But don’t expect them to make the trek for nothing. Find their favorite snacks, foods, or objects. Put them out on a table set for them. Offer these things up, these pieces of life and connection. Feed them not only with food, but with drink and smoke. Offer them their favorite drinks or a drink that you think might suit them. Burn herbs for them, making smoke they can both consume and give messages through. Tobacco, mullein, dandelion, and the like are all good for this purpose.
Different cultural traditions dictates wildly different ways to dispose of offerings of food or drink, so follow what yours tells you. One thing I can tell you is that if you’re in North America, I highly suggest to not pour out alcohol on the ground. Many indigenous people teach that doing this is disrespectful to the land.
Be as formal or as informal around your family members as you normally would. You’re speaking to the same folks you once knew. Once you establish a connection with those ones, move down the line and meet older members. That way, you minimize the possibility of a mishap.
You can ask favors of them, but remember that this will always be a trade. Many of the jobs you ask of them could be taxing and they might need some motivation. If you happen to practice the same religion as they did, you can offer to pray for them. If not, you can offer them food, drink, smoke, or other gifts they might want.
It’s always interesting to see people start to do ancestor work. The results are almost always noticeable, even if you didn’t ask for anything. Luck seems to perk up and it often seems as though you ‘have someone watching out for you’. That is, of course, because you do.
All three major religions of the Western world, Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, as well as virtually all of the world’s other systems of religious belief, include celestials in their cosmologies. Their scriptures all contain references to angelic interventions. Angels, like people, belong to families or clans. Many names have been given to them, but in the opinion of a number of angel historians, the most familiar can be arranged in three categories, or spheres, starting at the top with those closest to God, and moving down to those who are connected to the physical world.
The word ‘angel’ itself is used both as a generic term to refer to all heavenly beings, and as a specific term to refer to the members of the third sphere, those closest to the physical. So, too, the word ‘archangel’ is often used as a generic term to refer to all the high orders of heavenly beings, although they are in fact but one of the higher orders.
According to Abigrael, there are four orders within the heavenly hosts that particularly concern us now: angels, archangels, principalities, and thrones. …
While it looks like there is a higher and lower echelon, it’s more accurate to visualize all these orders in a great circle, with the highest and the lowest holding hands. For example, seraphim, who appear to be closest to the Creator, also serve the God in us.
~Gregg Prescott
I have always been loathe to work with angels, because I have viewed them as “yes men” for the demiurge. But I have been seeing a lot of interesting perspectives on them lately. Maybe they’re not all a bunch of goons and hit-men. I need to explore this more.
The Practitioner, a bonus card included in the 88 Card Deck of #ShadowLightTarot 👁 A modern study in the practices that evolved ones knowing to further explore the health of mankind. Providing foundation towards future integration of holistic health practices., this card represents the beneficial outcome of scientific pursuit & the overall relation of understanding the body, in all its layers.
Learn a proceedure. Do the procedure to the letter. If it works, do it again. Do this enough times and with enough different proceedures, and you’ll have a working knowledge of what is effective and what is not.
Then, synthesize all your knowledge and do something new. But don’t pretend the proceedures you followed to figure this shit out were your invention. And don’t pretend that you’re the only one who could do it. Proceedures exist to pass knowledge to each other because anybody can do magick if they learn the right skills.
My counter to this would be from my own personal experience. Whenever I follow a procedure to the letter it seldom works for me. When I adapt a procedure to my own paradigm and personal experience, I have a much higher rate of success.
I would say that doing the exact procedure was beneficial, and I learned from doing it. But I am not sure if it is absolutely necessary.
This observation comes from someone who has a few years of experience. Not saying I’m some great magus, but Iv’e done some work. Others may have a different experience.
Overall, I think people are better off learning as much as possible about any given magical operation before trying any version of it.
Yeah I mean, I definitely am not saying “do every proceedure ever”. You don’t need to try every operation.
I think it’s a very useful exercise to comb through different types of proceedures and analyze them. What’s the purpose as a whole? What does each step do? What are each of the tools for? Are there parallels to other proceedures? Are they exact, or are there extreme points if distinction? And on and on. That way you know what these things are for and why you’re doing them.
Over the years, I’ve definitely done some things to the letter that didn’t work. I put those in the “revisit later” pile, and not the “garbagefuck trash” pile, though. But I don’t know if I can buy that those things didn’t work because of who I am inherently, y’know? I think they didn’t work because I missed something, and have to go back and annotate and compare again. I think most things, if they’re grounded in a solid foundation, ought to work. If that makes sense lol
The thing is your reality is the foundation in which things grow. That which doesn’t fit into the paradigm gets ignored or attacked which creates dogma.
The “best” designed rituals are those which are universally understandable on an inherent level. Meaning that no matter which culture or symbolic tablet is your preferred, it somehow still has the ability to speak to the individual performing the ritual. This is where I think archetypes come into play.
Each ritual in this sense has a personality/spirit to them. Some people jive better with different people, yet some people are just some people just know how to get along with almost everyone. I figure in this sense, magic and ritual is a sort of dance with the individual and “the other” which sometimes is nice and choreographed, other times improvised and flowing and other times something that resembles a mosh pit with no ethics for people who fall down.
I just want to say that this is what a magical discussion on tumblr should look like. I respect everything people are saying and it obviously comes from the point of view of someone doing the work.
To paraphrase Crowley, I’ve never hated the Law of Thelema. I have only hated Horus because war gods are dicks.
“Many would also argue that we just haven’t given Horus a chance. All this bloodshed is just the growing pains of a new aeon. We only have to wait a bit more before his illumination shines upon us.
I’m sorry. I just don’t trust a warrior god, especially one with his numbers. No aeon in our history directly coincides with its revelation. The prophecy either comes before or after the event. In this case, The Book of the Law comes woefully too late to act as a warning. It is only an explanation, a window into a change of gestalt towards infantilism. Only this child does more than pluck the wings off butterflies.
Hindsight pegs the start of the Aeon of Horus at the Enlightenment. An age that culminates with the rise of Napoleon, who introduces us to the citizen army, so that whole nations can participate in the orgy of bloodshed. Since then we have had:
The Napoleonic Wars: 3.5 million dead. The American Civil War: 750 thousand dead. The Russo-Japanese War: 136 thousand dead. The Franco-Prussian War: 167 thousand dead World War I: 16 million dead. World War II: 60 million dead.
And the accompanying Holocaust with over 10 million dead. None of this includes the colonial genocides of indigenous people or all the other wars before, between, or since. This is not a hiccup. These are not growing pains. This is a record indicative of a world gone mad. While war was certainly a constant in the ages before, seldom were they mass slaughter. Ancient wars are characterized by ceremonial combat and fighting between the warrior classes, with the occasional sacking of a city. The main characteristic of modern warfare is the deliberate targeting of civilians for strategic purposes. From those filled with the bloodlust of the Falcon of War, no one is safe.”
Learn a proceedure. Do the procedure to the letter. If it works, do it again. Do this enough times and with enough different proceedures, and you’ll have a working knowledge of what is effective and what is not.
Then, synthesize all your knowledge and do something new. But don’t pretend the proceedures you followed to figure this shit out were your invention. And don’t pretend that you’re the only one who could do it. Proceedures exist to pass knowledge to each other because anybody can do magick if they learn the right skills.
My counter to this would be from my own personal experience. Whenever I follow a procedure to the letter it seldom works for me. When I adapt a procedure to my own paradigm and personal experience, I have a much higher rate of success.
I would say that doing the exact procedure was beneficial, and I learned from doing it. But I am not sure if it is absolutely necessary.
This observation comes from someone who has a few years of experience. Not saying I’m some great magus, but Iv’e done some work. Others may have a different experience.
Overall, I think people are better off learning as much as possible about any given magical operation before trying any version of it.
