Hi there, just thought I’d do a good turn for my fellow author Maria Savva by plugging an interview she did with me for her Goodreads page. In it I reveal some of my influences and the background to my stories. Although, readers of the interview get a chance to win a free short story. Click this link to read the interview.
Cognitive Dissonance: It’s Not Just For Pagans!
Reading Caroline Tully’s paper Researching the Past is a Foreign Country: Cognitive Dissonance as a Response by Practitioner Pagans to Academic Research on the History of Pagan Religions the other day, it got me thinking about the subject of “Cognitive Dissonance” generally and I quickly realised that it applies throughout the Occult, and is not just limited to neo-pagans experiencing problems with people looking a little too closely into the origins of their so-called “tradition.”
You can click on the above link to read a pdf copy of the paper but, as it is available for free, it is probably not worth doing so. *
It is not surprising that CD has general application in the occult, as the first academic to write about the subject did so after investigating the behaviour of a cult of whacked-out nutjobs. So here is my personal survey of topics generally covered under the CD-banner, with parallels drawn to the general magical community. See how many of these examples you can recognise from your own personal experience!
Effort-Justification, or: I belong to these weirdos why exactly?
A fairly well-known character on the occult scene, who is the head of an even more well-known magical order (amongst other things) once explained to a packed audience about how his organisation worked. For a start, he made sure that nobody joined the order until after they had jumped through hoops to do so. The explanation given was that this filtered out the time-wasters, making sure that only those properly suited to join would do so. He then admitted that, in his opinion, the study of magic would not necessarily make one a happier person.
Why then do people continue to belong to this magical order? It is what in CD-terms is known as “Effort-Justification” i.e. because they have gone to so much trouble to begin with – and perhaps they continue to go to trouble once in – they have to invent a reason in their own mind why it is worth it when the benefits are not discernible. By comparison with the example cited on the Wikipedia page, one may speculate that had the same magical order offered the exact same content, but not made the barriers to entry so high, the initiates would not enjoy remaining members as much, and would be more likely to leave.
We may laugh at the example given, but think for a moment: how many orders do you know that demand that their initiates work hard, but shy away from producing discernible results for their members? Given the fact that the bloke mentioned was so upfront and honest about his situation, I must assume that at least he was not being deliberately manipulative.
Belief-Disconfirmation
You’ve heard the story before. A cult-leader professes high moral values. The said cult-leader is exposed, quite often in a big-way. Do all of his followers desert him? Quite often, the answer is No – at least not all of them. Very often a hard-core of followers will deny the accusations, and quite possibly launch vehement ad hominem attacks on the people doing the exposing, accusing them of lying, having an agenda, etc, on the basis that because “Napoleon Is Always Right
This type of thinking has been used in the world’s religions to justify things like genocidal massacres in the Abrahamic religions, to Tibetan Monks being absolved from quite brutal rape charges. Because the followers do not like to have their Belief Disconfirmed, they invent some convoluted reason to justify for their own minds why what is wrong is, in fact, right. It is also the reason why it is ultimately futile to discredit the leader of a magical order by showing that their claim to legitimacy is based on lies. One is never going to cause their order to collapse, and this being the case, there would be no point in me going to such effort, unless one liked bashing my head against a brick wall. Or of course one liked Blackmail for its own sake, as opposed to the money! (An example of Effort Justification, hehe 😉 ).
The Belief-Disconfirmation paradigm has wider application than just explaining why magicians put up with utter scoundrels running their magical orders. Take for example the line I wrote at the end of the section on Effort-Justification.
Given the fact that the bloke mentioned was so upfront and honest about his situation, I must assume that at least he was not being deliberately manipulative.
Thought: am I being objective, or am I making excuses for the fellow??? 😉 On the other hand, there are other instances which I have observed in person and people talking about across the interwebby-type thing.
“… but right now, the End of the World is cancelled.”
The classic example
This is not just reserved to small cults: prior to the turn of the Millenium, the Y2K bug was supposedly a big-issue! When it did not happen, was it because the explanation that the computer boffins had done their job was true … or was it a case of Belief Disconfirmation? What indeed will people be saying when December 23rd 2012 comes and goes?
The unfortunate fact is that currently many magicians who ought to know better are disrupting their usual work by being overly concerned with the end of the world. The Mayan 2012 phenomenon may be a boon to new age publishers, but it is a complete pain in the arse to those who have to put up with the credulous.
Then again there is the phenomenon of prophecies which do not come true. I remember when I was a Kid, it was believed that Nostradamus’ reference to 1999 was thought to be to the end of the world. Post 1999, this all changed, with people explaining that the coming of the King of Terror did not refer to this at all. On a less spectacular scale, astrologers and tarot readers are everyday coming up with reasons why their predictions are not wrong just because they did not literally come true – and yet they still practice it. Cognitive Dissonance is causing them to accept shoddy quality in Divination, instead of challenging them to improve their skills.
Which leads on to:
Spell Failure
Ah yes, the unfortunate moment when the hot chick refuses to get naked for you, even though Sitri
- A small number of spells which were spectacular successes;
- A large number of spells which had no discernible result;
- An even larger number of spells which had a result, but not necessarily the intended one.
Common sense ought to tell you that one should lump the third class in with the second, i.e. as failures, in order to learn and grow as a magician. Cognitive Dissonance, however, can cause some magicians either to lump the third class in with the first, i.e. as successes, or to invent a whole load of egregious reasons why the reason for the spell’s failure is not your fault.
Kids! The only way to improve as a magician is to take ownership of your failures – all of them. Ceremony disrupted by someone else? BULLSHIT! If you were a Master Magician, you ought to have prepared for that disruption and neutralised it. Stars against you? BULLSHIT! The whole point ofHermetic magic is that ultimately you can rise above the influence of the stars and planets! You are solely responsible for 100% of your failures, even the ones that seem to have been caused by someone or something else – because a Master Magician ought to be able to deal with that someone or something else.If you want to kid yourself otherwise, you are preparing for mediocrity. Conversely, when you do take ownership of your failures, only then can you rightly take credit for your successes.
* NB: This is a cognitive dissonance joke, if you hadn’t guessed. 😉
Filed under Licence To Depart, Supernatural
Secret Chief Sweep-stake!
Nick Farrell has unearthed a hastily suppressed post by David Griffin claiming that the latter is going to name the secret puppet-master behind the Golden Dawn, but tantalisingly not revealing the name until the next post. Ooh, the anticipation! I was almost seriously tempted to subscribe to Griffin’s blog to find out more …
… But then I had a much better idea! It is (drum-roll) THE SECRET CHIEF SWEEP-STAKE. We each come in by picking whom we predict DG is going to name as the Capo Di Tutti Capi. The prize for winning is that everyone else has to buy a copy of one their books.
Nothing personal against DG, but because he actually knows the answer he is excluded from the competition. 🙂
I go first: I bags Bob Gilbert.
Filed under Supernatural
The Assumption of God Forms
This post is a reply to a comment of Facebook by Sorita D’Este regarding the Assumption of God Forms – specifically, how this is done in the Golden Dawn tradition. My position is: the assumption of a God form is a combination of both Invocation and Evocation – my reasons for saying so being as follows:
The actual technique in use in modern GD temples is confidential information, although a greatly simplified version is sort-of-alluded-to in Self-initiation into the Golden Dawn Tradition
This amounts to more than just “porting” an entity from one area of the individual’s consciousness to another, in that one of the peculiarities of the Golden Dawn (specifically the Neophyte ceremony) the God-forms are evoked by one set of officers (the adepts) to be worn (invoked) by another (the floor officers). You might well think this is overly-sophisticated, but going through the whole procedure of building up a God-form and then assuming it does produce a palpable change in mental state, a magical state of consciousness, which cannot be dismissed lightly.
In my opinion, the old cliché about “invoking” being about calling something into something or oneself and “evoking” being calling something out of oneself is based on the fallacy that the Inside and the Outside are somehow detached from one another. In a Golden Dawn ceremony one can both Invoke an Evoked Power and Evoke an Invoked Power in the same ceremony, even switching between the two (e.g. the way that the Hierophant and Past Hierophant juggle god-forms during the Neophyte ceremony). I really think we should abandon the phrases Invoking and Evoking, and just call it “Voking.”
Filed under Supernatural
Shall We Kill The President? Available on Amazon Kindle
Artwork © Copyright 2012, the author.
You can now dowload Shall We Kill The President?
Jet-setting modern-day wizard Guy Shepardson takes a trip to Washington DC where he encounters a group of Vampires who come to him with an unusual request! However, enemies both old and new have plans of their own, and would dearly love Guy Shepardson out of the way. Can Guy escape from their clutches and use all his magical powers to stop a plot to assassinate the President of the United States?
NB: You don’t need a Kindle device to read Kindle ebooks!
“Shall We Kill The President?” is also available in other Ebook formats from Smashwords.
Filed under Books, Shall We Kill The President?
What the stars have in store for The Sun On Sunday
Rupert Murdoch and his son James
The world was in mourning yesterday when Rupert Murdoch, to absolutely no-one’s surprise at all, confirmed that The Sun newspaper would be launching a Sunday edition. Vigilant web-observers had reported that the domain name had been registered the very day after the closure of the News of the World was announced last year. What is news however is that the date of the first issue has been confirmed as Sunday 26th February 2012.
I have therefore taken it upon myself to cast a horoscope for the paper, in order to see how Murdoch’s latest enterprise will fair. As the paper is based in London, and will be available from midnight onwards, I have taken 12am London, UK, on Sunday 26th February 2012 as the time, date and place for the chart.
Birth chart for The Sun on Sunday courtesy of Astrodienst.com
The genesis of the idea
Rupert Murdoch probably decided the launch date for the Sun on Sunday two weeks previously (12th February) – which just so happened to be the date the Sun announced that he was due to fly into London (Moon is two degrees past Venus in a Cardinal sign and a succedent house). No surprises that it comes about as a direct result of the trials he has been going through recently (Moon opposite Saturn). That the Moon is in the fifth house AND in conjunction with Venus indicates that Murdoch was probably being over-dramatic in doing so, acting from romantic notions about what should become of the new paper.
“Birth-chart data”
The paper has Sun-Pisces and Scorpio-Ascendant. The latter indicates that the face the paper presents to the public will be overly concerned with both Sex and Death, whilst the former indicates that its attempts at factual reportage will be marked by flights of fantasy, wishful thinking, and a tendency to adopt a dreamy view of the world as opposed to one which is strictly accurate. The fantasy / wishful thinking aspect will also be evident through its writing style, and the editorial will be forthright in putting forward the paper’s “beliefs” (Mercury in Pisces).
The paper’s sun sign, being on the IC, indicates that its primary focus will be to establish a safe and solid house style which will see it through the long-term. Given that its sun- and mercury- are both trine to the ascendant, this indicates that the paper will be successful in integrating its fantasy / wishful thinking style with its Sex / Death subject-matter.
Prospects for the future
The paper will generally do well at least for the first twenty-one months of its existence, but will face a severe crisis in November 2013, which is when Saturn transits the paper’s ascendant. The edition of Sunday November 24th 2013 will be a time of particular difficulty for the paper. The paper will be forced to face up to its responsibilities and adopt a serious tone – a significant number of staff will be forced to leave as the paper tries to slim down. This does not necessarily entail fatal consequences for the paper, as it will be able to put across its position to the general public very well (Mercury is transitting the paper’s ascendant at the same time).
Conclusion
The stars are all lining up to suggest that the new Sun on Sunday will conform to everyone’s prejudices of how it is likely to turn out!!! Generally speaking I predict that if the paper can survive the crisis in November 2013 it will mostly do well. The circumstances of its birth – i.e. the memory of the closure of the News of the World and how its journalists were treated by Murdoch – and are being treated by the Leveson Inquiry at the moment – will affect the general atmosphere in the news room for a long time.
Filed under Comment, Supernatural
Live! At The Witch Trials
Burn her anyway!
I read today in the Daily Telegraph of how authorities in Germany are reviewing the 400 year old case of a woman burned for witchcraft. What gets me though is that instead of just giving her a posthumous pardon, they are actually “resuming her trial.” 😮
Why??? As I said in a comment to another post, if modern standards of justice were applied to all those of accused of witchcraft in the past, they would all be acquitted, or their cases would never have come to trial in the first place, because (a) their acts would not nowadays be classed as crimes; (b) their confessions were obtained by torture (and hence would be inadmissable as evidence); and (c) it is doubtful that the allegations would be treated with anything other than scepticism anyway. I suppose that because of (stereo)typical German efficiency they have to go through the rigmarole of re-trying the woman in order to exonerate her.
However, before Wiccans start rejoicing, one should note that the present case is taking place not because of the efforts of a pagan activist but those of an evangelical pastor and religious education teacher. Therefore his agenda is not to prove that as a pagan she was not guilty, but as a Christian she was not guilty. The argument being that – like almost all of the 25,000 people accused of Witchcraft between 1500 and 1782 – they were almost all not Pagans, but Christians who had been wrongly accused.
Filed under Comment
The Quadruple Goddess
Quadruple Goddess?
The “Triple Goddess” was an idea first proposed by Robert Graves in “The White Goddess
- In the first stage of her life, a woman is a chaste virgin (Maid);
- Then as she enters adulthood, she becomes a dutiful wife and home-maker (Mother);
- Then she becomes a nice old Grandma (Crone).
Seen in this way, the Triple Goddess, far from representing the ideal of womanhood, represents the apotheosizing of a patriarchal, sexist and chauvinistic male idea of what womanhood should be.
If, however, The White Goddess had been written by a woman, i.e. a woman living in the twenty-first century, I suspect that the idea of a “Triple Goddess” would not have been proposed at all. Rather, she would have come up with the idea of a “Quadruple Goddess,” to wit:
- Maid;
- “Whore”;
- Mother; and
- Crone.
I.e. to represent the fact that in between being a Maid and settling down to become a Mother, most young women – and certainly all those of my acquaintance – want to spend several years going out and having a good time.
I appreciate the fact a lot of people might attach stigma to the idea. Indeed, I was wracking my brains to find an appropriate word to describe stage two: most of the epithets of which I could think have been or are used perjoratively. So in the end I just said to hell with it!
Now before I start getting criticised by the fluffy-bunnies for coming up with an idea at such variance to their cherished beliefs, I would like to back up my claim with some evidence, to wit: the phenomenon of the “Love Spell.”
I read a lot of neo-pagans say “Oh you cannot cast love-spells! It’s dangerous! It’s unethical! It would saddle you with lots of bad karma! It would mean interfering with someone’s free will! Think of everything that could go wrong!” Etc etc etc. So if Love Spells are so bad, how come they exist at all??? Unless the old village wise-woman – who existed to service the needs of the Maid, Mother and Crone – also serviced those of the “Whore” as well.
Herodotus writes about “sacred prostitution” or rather “sacred-random-sex-encounters” taking place in temples of Aphrodite, whilst even the Old Testament uses the word “Qadeshah” in some places to describe prostitutes – a word which literally means “a consecrated woman.” (The context was a mitzvah prohibiting women from being Qadeshahs, but at least it points to their existence.)
Thus there is a historical precedent for claiming that the Goddess has a “Whore-aspect,” yet a lot of neo-pagans are still buying into the Robert Graves inspired paradigm, thereby helping to stigmatise an aspect of feminity that many women want to indulge in.
Filed under Supernatural
Adeptus Major
Today I am going to do a survey of the grade of 6=5 Adeptus Major, by examining how the various different offshoots of the Golden Dawn – the Alpha et Omega, the Stella Matutina, the Holy Order of the Golden Dawn, and the Fellowship of the Rosy Cross – decided to deal with the subject. The one thing they all have in common is that they agree the grade has to do with Geburah – in the same way that 5=6 Adeptus Minor is to do with Tiphereth – but there the similarities end. Each different faction went off in their own direction, having different ideas about what the Adeptus Major was actually meant to do.
As far as I am aware, none of the published Adeptus Major rituals are used by modern day Golden Dawn orders – they have gone on to use different or modified versions.
Alpha Et Omega
The Book of the Concourse of the Watchtowers, by Sandra Tabatha Cicero
The Alpha et Omega 6=5 so-called Ritual has now been published: as an appendix to Tabatha Cicero’s new publication, “Book of the Concourse of the Watchtowers.” I say so-called because the version published is not a real ritual. It does not have an opening or closing, nor does it have any drama in it. It consists of one chief officer, the “Conferring Adept,” teaching the signs and words of the grade to the Aspirant, who is prompted throughout the ceremony by a conductor. The explanation of the Tarot cards is brief. If anything, it is more of a fragment of a ritual – perhaps part of something that remains unpublished, or a work-in-progress.
The only interesting thing, IMHO, is that the brief explanation of the nature of the signs gives a tantalising glimpse into what Mathers might have imagined the work of an Adeptus Major to be – i.e. the use of Geburah-force to subdue evil entities – although no detail is given about the Adeptus Major curriculum itself. It is also interesting in that the symbolism anticipated the ideas the Crowley expressed about the nature of the Adeptus Major grade in the latter’s John St John.
Stella Matutina
Now the Adeptus Major ritual of the Stella Matutina is a far more interesting affair. An incomplete version of the ritual was published by Pat Zalewski in his book Secret Inner Order Rituals of the Golden Dawn
This ritual lays much emphasis on the Shekinah – the divine presence of God – who is here portrayed by a female officer. Why the Shekinah? I believe the answer must lie in the fact that in Gematria, “Geburah” is equivalent to “Debir,” which is the Holy of Holies, where the Shekinah was said to reside upon the Ark of the Covenant between the wings of the two kerubs. The aspirant is therefore the High Priest, who goes into the Holy of Holies (actually the Vault of the Adepti which has been re-dressed for the occasion) and after a period of meditation discovers the Shekinah, who first comes to him (or her) like a light-bearer in darkness.
An interesting feature is that the Aspirant remains completely silent throughout the ceremony, until formally released at its climax. It is worth noting that quite separately Wynn Westcott did indeed describe the Adeptus Major grade as:
“…a degree of death and solemnity—referring to the precedent stage of obscuration, during which silent study and meditation may be considered as the typical condition…”
One is tempted to speculate that in this respect the Stella Matutina ceremony is probably more to what Westcott intended than that of the AO! Unlike the AO ceremony, which is nothing but signs and an explanation thereof, the Stella Matutina 6=5 mentions two signs (“thou shalt avert thy eyes from evil as did Isis on the right … thou shalt withdraw from evil as did Nephthys on the left,”) but does not really demonstrate what they are: obviously part of the esotery that was only transmitted from person to person.
The lacuna in Zalewski’s ritual amounts to three-fifths of the oath being omitted (the oath of an Adeptus Major is in five parts), as well as an instruction that the Aspirant is censed in the form of a Pentagram, before being led out temporarily before the next point in the ceremony. When read in full, the oath of the Adeptus Major reveals that the duty of the new initiate is to apply the severity of Geburah to his or her own moral nature, whilst emphatically being merciful to the faults of others.
I found one mistake when I first read Zalewski’s version, however: when I checked, I found that the mistake had been in the original ritual! Namely: the wrong passages of the Sepher Yetzirah are quoted when the aspirant is given the teachings of the Paths of Mem and Lamed.
A sort of curriculum has emerged as to what the Stella Matutina envisioned for the Adeptus Major grade. Although on first reading it does not seem much, from my own personal researches I believe that additional papers were also issued to the adepts which suggested ways in which the Adeptus Major practices could be extended to achieve extremely sophisticated results. In any event, the lines “try to find your own Path for the Inner Life,” and “now is the time to fill in gaps of the 5=6 syllabus and to choose your special subject in which to qualify,” conceal more than they reveal: I get the impression that Felkin, the author of the Stella Matutina 6=5 ritual, believed that if the Adeptus Minor grade was equivalent to a Bachelor’s degree in Magic, then the Adeptus Major was equivalent to a Master’s.
Holy Order of the Golden Dawn / Fellowship of the Rosy Cross
Whaddaya mean, I’m not the prophet of a new aeon?
The Holy Order of the Golden Dawn Adeptus Major Ritual has now been published in Regardie’s Complete Golden Dawn System of Magic
After the Holy Order of the Golden Dawn closed, Waite founded the Fellowship of the Rosy Cross. The grades are named after those of the Golden Dawn – but Waite finally took the opportunity to abandon the last vestiges GD dogma of which he disapproved and finally do his own thing. Nevertheless, the FRC Adeptus Major ritual still displays certain similarities to the version he wrote for the Holy Order of the Golden Dawn. There is a sojourn within the sanctuary, the Shekinah makes an appearance – but the insistence of silence is strictly removed. Needless to say, any references to Horus and Nuit have been removed.
As far as I know, there was no curriculum per se for the FRC grades – I believe that Waite intended the ceremony itself to be both the initiation into and the teaching of a given grade. In this sense the FRC is rather like a masonic version of Rosicrucianism. I did hear one senior esotericist say that this being the case, an initiate could theoretically be advanced through each grade at successive meetings, or slightly less than a year if they met every month, although I doubt very much that this would happen in practice.
Filed under Supernatural
Sol Ascendans - The Website of Alex Sumner 
Witchcraft: Punishing The Innocent Along with the Guilty
In which I vlog about how the conviction of Eric Bikubi and Magalie Bamu for the murder of Kristy Bamu has been portrayed in the press.
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Filed under Comment
Tagged as daily telegraph, Eric Bikubi, kindoki, Kristy Bamu, Magalie Bikubi, Vimeo, wicca, Witchcraft