I have encountered plenty of Hebrew during my magical studies but I don’t think I can say I ever “studied” it. In fact, for a long time I eschewed anything associated with Kabbalah seeing it as a product of repressive monotheism. I’ve gotten past that but I’m still not enamored with it.
I consider myself a chaos magician first and foremost. With that in mind I have decided in order to further my magical development, I must seriously immerse myself in a magical system and train myself mentally and physically. In this endeavor, I thought it would be helpful to join a magical order to keep me on task. Sometimes you need a teacher to make sure you do your homework, and it doesn’t hurt to have their perspective. With the Thelemic paradigm containing what I need and being the most accessible. And by accessible I mean not being a flakey magical order that has no consistency and may actually have a member or two living anywhere close to Indianapolis, Indiana. So I picked the A.’.A.’.. Which, by the way I have not yet committed to. I’m sure I will have some words to say on it once I finally get that sorted out.
So I’m studying Hebrew because it is the core of Kabbalah which is the core system of correspondences used in Golden Dawn based magick and its offshoots.
Your second sentence has strange wording and I’m not sure what you mean by it. I am having difficulties right from the start because so many of the Hebrew letters look almost identical. Also, because there are more than a few variations of the alphabet and Aleister Crowley himself seems to switch which version of the alphabet he’s using depending on which book you’re reading. Which may be a fault of the editors or the typesetters, but the results are the same. Confusion. It’s making my transcription of 777 to Excel format a pain in the fucking ass.
But your question, “is it working for you?” That requires an examination of exactly what is the Hebrew supposed to be doing for me on a magical level. Development of a magical language helps the magician remove the object of desire and thus the lust of result. By burying your meanings behind layers of symbols it moves the actual meanings deeper into the subconscious mind which is better at doing magick. At least that’s one theory and the one I happen to like. Check out this article on Ouranian-Barbaric http://home.comcast.net/~max555/rites/obessay.html for some good explanations behind magical language.
There is a danger in all this, however, and I agree with Peter J. Carroll when he says too many magicians get wrapped up in learning and developing correspondences that they never get around to actually doing some fucking magick.
We can all start arguing about white magick and black magick or high magick and low magick and that the systems are there to prevent you from going down the “wrong” path, but I am in the camp that believes magick is magick, and that all of it is a road to your spiritual development. If you end up taking a wrong turn into the bad part of town that’s just part of the fun, right? Or as Peter Grey puts it, “real magick has no safety net.” No one told you this shit was gonna be easy and harmless.
