The Eighth Sermon to the Dead

Here in the west, it's quite dry. There are a lot of fires. The drought in California has been going on for some time, and even in rainy Oregon we've had unseasonably early dry weather and low snow pack. Most of Oregon's water needs are met by snow melt water, so having a low snow pack is not a good situation. I am a magician. I have had great success with individual and group workings combined with real world efforts to change my circumstances. However, I am a skeptic, and always approach new workings with a healthy dose of 'can this work?' Which brings us to Rain Magic. Meterology is a relatively new science.  People have been making observations of the weather since before there was writing, and we know Aristotle wrote on it in 350 BC.  However, most of the work before the 18th century was done via observation. As the scientific era dawned, new measuring tools brought that observation into the realm of measurable and predictable science. Certain things a...

Gnosticism has several different ways to approach our mythological figures. The Son of God can be approached as a preacher in Galilee, or a cosmic principle of The Word (Logos). Mary can be the mother of Jesus or the Mother of God, Queen of Heaven, Sophia, or even an embodiment of the Divine Feminine Principle. What's interesting to me is that neither of these approaches is wrong, or even mutually exclusive. The personhood of Jesus makes him approachable, understandable, and valuable in a moment of crises. The transcendence of the Logos provides a way to work with timeless concepts, timeless forces, and to move beyond the crises into the realm of the eternal. Where many people fall down with teaching gnosticism, is they try to jump right to the concept. We place more emphasis on the concepts rather than the people. This works for a subset of people, people we gnostics can talk to on this conceptual level: Occultists, Freemasons, other Johannites, etc.  To the vast majority of h...

I've now officially met more neighbors in my country house than I ever did living in the city. There's the YardGuy* and his lovely wife, the Conversationalist. They live up the hill from us, and are delightful people. The Conversationalist gave Paddy a number of lovely plants, which are now merrily growing in our cottage garden. There's the Mule Guy. He is what we call around these parts, a character. He goes to the local fairs with his mules, and has a mustache that simply will not quit. He's got that way of speaking that is at once incredibly odd and endlessly fascinating.  There's a bit of curmudgeon in there as well. There's Elk Jewelry Girl and her German Beau. Interesting folks who are renting the property that simply has a great big garage/workshop on it, and living out of their RV. Yesterday, we met Terminal Preacher and her husband. She runs a home church for terminally ill people, and has cancer herself. We had a fascinating conversation, about t...

The fourth volume of Joseph Wolf's series on the Shem ha Mephoresh is now available on Amazon for kindle . This fourth volume goes past angel summoning 101, and into deeper contacts and ties with the entities in the Illuminated Circle. You'll read the results of Mr. Wolf's explorations here. This is the final volume of the series, completing the elemental correspondences of the zodiacal signs. The books will be updated with further explorations of the angels as they become available. We are also working on a print version for people who prefer text that is not electronic, so stay tuned! And don't forget to check out the other works in this series, here .