Three Questions of Initiation

I’ve always had an aversion to “magic as a religion”. I even cringe and complain when people insist on telling me magic is about (their version) of spiritual development.

I am Neither Religious nor Spiritual, but…

The elves watching me from the shadows and from within the woodgrain images on my study door would of course chuckle here, given the inescapably quasi-Theurgic approach I tend to employ fore planetary magic. “The guy thinks he’s a priest of the seven spheres!” they might be heard to scoff.

What can I say? I had ample religious training growing up as a Protestant Christian and certain tendencies stick with one.

However just because my rituals involving Mercury, Saturn, and the rest of the gang may sound like prayers, they in fact are not so much the same as the former. I channel forces and energies from the planetary powers using various names, symbols, and incantations and I set those forces into programmed motion towards my intention.

Perhaps a few courtesies and good manners are part of the process, but I am not asking humbly or hoping to supplicate. Rather, I am conjuring, directing, and sending (then releasing).

What had Happened was…

Enough of the sidetrack, I’m posting here about three particular inquiries I either brought into one of my later initiations or, if I’m honest, questions that partially provoked the initiation I’m referring to.

What do I mean by “later initiation”?

I mean I have been faithless and distractable during the course of my life. When I was younger I occasionally got discouraged and left or fell off the path.

At a certain point x number of years ago I found myself at the end of roughly four years of practiced, determined agnosticism. I don’t just mean I was unsure if god existed, I mean to say I was pretty sure anything beyond the materialist paradigm was bullshit.

A series of profound events, synchronicities, coincidences, revelations, as you wish had shaken me up sufficiently to warrant another look at things. That’s the merciful and short version of things.

My Three Questions

I was heading back in. One more deep dive into this metaphysical, magical search was due but not without clear objectives, said I.

I would, I told myself and maybe one or two others, really dig in and give everything I had to the effort and my quest would be a simple matter. Simple, yet not easy or even trivial to my mind.

I sought answers to the following questions and only if I truly found answers would I decide whether or not to proceed another step down the path. My questions (p[paraphrased) were…

1. Is there God or something similar?
2. Do we continue consciously somehow after bodily death?
3. Is objective reality truly malleable under magical and mystical pressure?

Allow me a quick unpacking of each:

1. I didn’t require the divine to have a certain name or be any specific way. I only wanted to know if any such damn thing actually existed in a manner at least recognizable through any of the many standard attributes we tend to assign notions of deity, great spirit, god, goddess, et al.
2. I just wanted to know if it’s lights out and done or is there more? Bonus points for clarification on whether or not loved ones reunited and remembered, etc. but a plain yes/no is all I really hoped for.
3. On this one I meant screw the watered-down crap about interpreting results for personal growth and dammit is the shit real or isn’t it?

How’d All That Go?

I’m willing to bet ten shillings you’re expecting some lame epilogue where I perform intellectual gymnastics and try to frame utter disappointment as some kind of profound lesson. It turns out, I would say, knowing all that stuff is somehow beyond our worthiness in this life and really, well gosh golly really it’s the asking and the wonder* that matters.

I’d Never Disrespect Your Time with a Crappy Post Like That!

In fact the next fourteen months blew my mind. I had tentatively given myself a year with the plan of assessing any potential answers and deciding thereafter if it was worth continuing or time to knock it off.

I remember vividly my recorded answers and I think that journal still lives around here somewhere. I may dig it up sometime and get a bit more specific on my findings.

The answers I found, in the same order as the questions above, are…

1. Yes.
2. Yes.
3. Hell Yes.

To be clear, I am not telling you I know anything. I am not claiming to have the answers per se.

I am simply telling you that I found, quite to my satisfaction through various “experiments”, as the old grimoires used to call magical operations of inquiry, the above answers. I may blog in more detail on the matter in the near future.

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