The cards say it all

In a recent post, I talked about using a new deck for some of my space/time tarot work. Last night, I finally got around to using it for myself and working with the spider goddess of time again, though as a curious note, since I'm currently letting someone borrow the book, she wasn't as present, which suggests that the book itself is magical artifact or talisman for connecting with her. Anyway, I set up my usual circle and invoked my future as well as my space/time deities and XAH. As I mentioned I didn't feel the spider goddess as strongly, but her silver web was still present. I asked my future self for help in continuing to navigate the current economic situation. Then I shuffled the elemental hexagon cards for a while.

First three cards presented myself and my obstacles.Vanadium- the Seeker was definitely me...and how interesting that for the metaphysical world it's described as void. That certainly fits my emptiness working. The two cards above the seeker card were apt as well. The one on the right was Fluorine-paranoia and the one on the left was Nickel - cost of living. Certainly the current environment is one of paranoia in general...and that fear can be infectious. The cost of living is an issue as well, given my current economic circumstances.

The next two cards are resources in myself to rely on right now, both for myself and my business. The card on the left, above Nickel is Hydrogen - Building blocks. It's an excellent reminder that I know how to build a business and also know how to use those building blocks effectively. Strontium was the card above flourine. Strontium is Luminescent Self and what it tells me is to use my meditation, my discipline practices, etc. to work with my fears, but not let them become paranoia...sit with the fear, but not fight it.

The next two cards presented external factors, people, etc. that could help me in this process. The card above Hydrogen is Silver, the moon goddess. I'm pretty sure this is a person and I'm pretty sure I know who this person is and how this person would relate to the cost of living and building blocks aspect, given some of the help she's already given me. Interesting to get confirmation on this person's presence and role not only as a helper, but also other ways she's manifested in my life.

The card above Strontium is Chlorine - Chaos in order, magic. On the superficial level its the reminder to use magic, but on a deeper level, could be more. Too early to tell, but if it's more then it's the vector of another person's path crossing mine...we shall see. Regardless it's a useful reminder that magic is always one of my most potent tools and actually points to the fact that it's time to work with Apophenia.

Final card, the outcome as it were is Argon or completion. A light bulb, but also a filament...Everything coming together to provide illumination, wealth..It is the trump card for the world. All things and none, everything and nothing, becoming complete...it's an interesting theme that continues to play itself out in a myriad of ways.

I'll be working with Apophenia next.

An interesting reading. Below's a picture of the reading:

Review: The Art of Memory by Frances Yates

This is pretty much an exhaustive coverage of the memory mansion technology, where a person creates a virtual space and symbols and associates information with each symbol. Yates traces the technique to pre-socratic Greece through Rome and the medieval and Renaissance era. There's some intriguing overlay with the occult history of Giordano Bruno. I'll admit, however, I was actually looking for what I hoped would be detailed information on how the memory technique is done. While Yates does provide some information, I didn't find this book to be as useful as I hoped. It's useful as a history about memory techniques, but not really for a description of those techniques.

4 out of 5 mnemonics.

Latest space/time Tarot Experiment

At Pantheacon, I had the good fortune to barter one of my books for a very intriguing Tarot deck, the Elemental Hexagons Deck. Tonight I broke the deck in with a space/time tarot ritual working for a friend of mine. I used the voyager deck to create the magical circle and invoked the future version of my friend into my hands so that he could shuffle the deck. I asked him to provide me information and/or magical work to help him with a situation in his life. The reading itself was interesting, but I won't post details as it is confidential information. What I will note however is how tactile and intuitive using the elemental hexagon deck is. I was able to easily intuit a pattern that made perfect sense for the information, but what I really liked is how the cards fit together. You basically attach one hexagon to another. It really helps make the relationships very apparent and seamless.

I'll be experimenting more with this deck for space/time workings, especially with the spider goddess of time, in the near future, so expect further posts, and some pictures in the near future!

A day of ritual work

Right now Portland is experiencing an unexpected snow storm, which has pretty much shut down the ability to travel in the city. I'm not one to spend my time idly, however. So I decided to do some ritual workings today and have another I'll be joining astrally later tonight for the solstice. I first decided to the second invocation of Atem from Meta-Magick: The Book of Atem by Phil Farber. In the second invocation you create a magical circle in which you anchor specific attributes of attention, passion, fitting, trance, language, and making into the formation of the circle. These attributes are used to form the entity of ATEM. By anchoring the attributes into a physical space, the magician not only creates ATEM, but also utilizes a physical space for Atem and the associated entities of the attributes to reside in. It's a clever approach. I like how it ultimately utilizes the physical environment of the person to create a space where ATEM resides, strengthening the connection it has with the person working with it.

I also did another space/time Tarot invocation of my future self, as well as the evocation of Thiede, Purson, the spider goddess of time, and Xah. I've thought about the role those entities have in this type of working. Thiede is my Space/Time guardian spirit, Purson is finder of potential, and the spider goddess is the weaver of those possibilities into reality. Xah, as my personal Daemon, is both the future self I invoke and also the fox spirit that walks alongside me whenever I walk the silver strands of the web of time. With this working I did my invocation and evocations and then invoked Xah, entering into a trance wherein I could interface with all of the entities while letting my future self shuffle the cards of the second deck. It felt odd to shuffle the cards and yet be in a trance...the movement was much less directed, so the shufflking continued for a while...It actually helped increase the trance. The working itself showed me the steps I needed to take...a lot of it being confirmation of some situations in my life...so I think for the meantime, I'll likely hold back on doing further space/time tarot work until those situations are fully taken care of.

Tonight, I'm going to take a ritual bath and use music, chanting, and trance work to synch in with the solstice working...and enjoy relaxing in the comfort of my home while doing it.

Space/Time Tarot/Deity experiments

I decided to do some space/time work with tarot cards after finishing A Brief hirstory of Time by Oryelle Defenstrate-Bascule. In his book he'd explain some of his own space/time tarot techniques and it reminded me of some of my experiments with space/time tarot, which I'd done a year or so back. As good as any reason to break out the cards and do some further experimentation as well as deal with a few gnawing situations in my life. As Oryelle points out and I have pointed out as well, tarot isn't just for divination. It's also for conjuration. A reading provides you more than a glimpse of the future...it also provides you an opportunity to manipulate the possibilities presented to you. I used the voyager deck to create a magical circle and an evocation triangle. The magical circle and triangle is based off the book Portable Tarot by Donald Tyson, but the technique described here is an extension of his concepts into my own style and experimentation of magic. Here's what it looks like (Note you can also click the link to see the full picture):

The aces are in the center. They form the elemental foundation. On top of them is the card, which represents my current self. My presence is the Hanged Man. The outer circle is the trumps cards used to create the magical circle or tarot temple or whatever else you want to call it.The row of cards above are trump influences I am relying on. All of them were appropriate as gateways and power providers.

The summoning Triangle is the Priestess, the Fool, and Space/Time. Normally the Hanged man would be part of the Triangle, but I replaced him with the Priestess card, thinking it appropriate, plus the Hanged man is the presence of me. The Master of Worlds is the Future self I picked for myself. I thought of going to the usual card, the Woman of Crystals aka the Gaurdian, but I realized that didn't feel right, so I randomly stirred the voyager cards until my hand came to that card, which said I am the future of you. I realize now that the Guardian card is no longer representative of me. She was the guardian of my lies, illusions, and delusions which Babalon stripped away from me this last year. The presence of the Hanged Man is that which stares into the emptiness of zero seeking answers while submitting to the suffering necessary for achieving those answers. That suffering, for me, is really the emptiness work and the work with my past, with the roots of all that has haunted me in this life. The Master of Worlds is also the Master of time, but to master anything, you have to submit to it first, surrender to the flow in order to understand the force and manifest a movement that goes in sync with others. The master has surrendered to the emptiness and so understood it. He is me after this year is finished, or at least a possible variant of me.

I did the activation of the circle as well as the invocation of the future self into my present self, asking him to guide my hands for the reading I was going to do. I evoked the spider goddess of time, Purson demon of time, and Thiede the Dehar of space/time. I also evoked Xah my Personal Daemon and fox spirit and guide. Each of these beings are essential to my mythology of time. I wanted their presence and guidance in the working I was doing, because I wasn't just doing a divinatory reading, but actually a conjuration across the silver web of time. Below is a picture of me meditating with the forces that I'm working with:

I felt my older self lay his hands into mine and I shuffled my Alchemy deck and created a reading specific to circumstances in my life, both present circumstances, but also seeking for the person(s) who are part of a very specific magical working in my life that is yet to come, which this emptiness working and the love working has been a prelude to. Below is the cards pulled for the alchemy deck (Note you can also click the link to see the entire picture):

You can see most of the cards, though one got caught in the glare of the light. The Three in One, in the center, are present situations in my life. The two cards above and below the three card spread are current potential factors I can use that also involve what it is I'm seeking for. The card to the left is the past, and aptly reflects who I was. The cards to the right is an action to take as well as the desired reality. This not justr a reading...it is actually a specific working, a conjuration of reality, which utilizes the principles of the cards to manifest specific goals. The last time I did this type of working, was for Leisa Refalo's Podcast on Tarot and the magical working I did has come to fruition and continued to manifest since then. I mention that because I want to emphasize the dynamic nature of this working. It isn't a divination...It it a conjuration of potential that is manifested into reality. It does provide necessary information for how the conjuration will manifest, while also aligning the realities into one. It's also a kind of retroactive magic, because I'm using my future self to guide my presence in manifesting this potential into specific reality.

After I did this reading, I then spent some time working with the spider goddess of time in particular. I asked her to show me how to weave webs of potential into reality. I put my hands together as if in prayer, but as I looked at my hands, I felt the Astral fingers of each hand go through the other hand, so that I held my physical fingers in prayer, but held my astral fingers in a kind of V and used both sets of hands to weave the silver strands of time into reality. She guided my weaving and as I looked into those hands, I began to see a flickering of images that represented different potential realities. I started weaving the images into the silver webs and then cast the webs into reality. The webs of time would take the images of the possible future and meld them into reality. Below is a picture of the prayer pose I was doing. Obviously you can't see the astral fingers, but it gives you an idea of what I was doing on a physical level:

When I finished with the meditation, I thinked each deity of time and then thanked my future self. I recorded the cards and the specifics of the reading in my personal journal and then undid the temple, releasing the silver webs into reality. I'll be experimenting with this technique in more depth and there will likely be an article about it in the future, but I also wanted to show a work in progress as it were as well as how I do some of my space/time magic work. This post will likely end up in my book on identity and magic, as a lot of my research and experimentation is involving a lot of space/time work. This is a small example of that work.

***********

Review of A Brief Hirstory of Time by Oryelle Defenstrate-Bascule

For any chronomancer out there, this book is a must read. Not only will it put you in touch with the Spider Goddess of Time, but it also demonstrates experimental magic at its finest. Oryelle presents some very intriguing concepts and ideas about time magic. I found it hard to put this book down as I was enthralled by his ideas, as well as noticing some intriguing synchronicities in our work (which isn't surprising as this seems to be common amongst Space/Time magicians), most notably the silver strands of time. Oyrelle artfully blends poetry and art into a discourse on space/time magic which is revolutionary for what it offers, namely a non-linear perspective on time as well as methods for practicing some potent space/time magic. I'll definitely be utilizing some of this techniques and experimenting with them, because I know the process described within the book works. I've already started working with the spider goddess of time and she is a very real presence. I highly recommend this book. You will get a lot out of it and also be supporting and artist and magician in his work.

5 out of 5 silver webs of time.