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Still catching up on other blogs. A friend is visiting this week, so this is the perfect time to let other bloggers do my work for me. :)
Today: Mr. Black of The Razor’s Edge
Patience is a Virtue
A heavily-anonymized case study of a mage who became mentally unstable. Mr. Black blames that instability on learning magick without pursuing a spiritual practice, though I think that might just be correlation: Anyone who wants to pursue magick strictly for power is probably a bit unstable already, and will be more likely to work with malicious spirits and mages who promise power, to their own detriment.
The mage also tried to “hack” the system of magick that Mr. Black practices, without first learning the basics. It didn’t work:
Anyone who has ever “hacked” anything knew the basics or fundamentals before even getting started on hacking a system.
Take Bruce Lee and his Jeet Kune Do for example; Bruce Lee was already a martial artist before he decided to revolutionize the way we look and train in martial arts. Peter Carroll was already a magickian before Chaos Magick was created to counter the antiquity of the state of magick at that time.
I totally agree, even though I’m somewhat of a counter-example. I developed this style of magick (the one I blog about here) without learning a traditional style first, and by the time I was old enough to become initiated, I wasn’t interested. In essence, I’ve been hacking magick from the beginning.
And yet, I wouldn’t recommend it to most people. It’s slow, and difficult, and takes a long time before you get anything useful. I explored magick out of curiosity, and had a lot of luck in winding up with a good model. And even now, 20 years in, there’s still so much I don’t know.
Mr. Black’s point, I think, is that there are no shortcuts. You can’t just skip the initiation, figure magick out for yourself, and expect to save time. Hacking magick is a longcut, and a rewarding one if you want to put in the work, but it’s definitely not a shortcut.
Read Mr. Black’s full post.
Conjuration Case Study
A case study of a conjuration to get a job. Two things of particular interest:
- Mr. Black got sick shortly after the work, and explains how he dealt with it. A request: I don’t practice your style, so I couldn’t follow all the steps you took to deal with the sickness. What’s a mala, and is there some technique to siphoning off the energy on your altar? And did you siphon energy off yourself, or just your altar?
- The second half of the post covers a technique Mr. Black uses to check if his magick worked. This was neat to see, and seems like a generally useful technique. I’ve done similar work with energy healing, asking for psychic intuitions before the healing session to make sure I’m taking the right approach, and afterward, to make sure it worked.
Read the full post here.
To Be Continued…
Wow, Mr. Black writes a lot. I’ll finish catching up with him tomorrow.
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