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Using Asteroth as Patron
Any questions about using Asteroth as a patron in theurgy? Ah yes, did you get to that? I did, but only in part. I described the connection, but this is how you use it. You know your inner dialogue? You won’t actually start hearing voices, and that isn’t necessary. Asteroth is related to you as…
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Special Memory
Tonight, we are doing another in the applied theurgy series, specifically on the god Shiva/Rudra. But first, what would you call an influence that spans individual beings awareness, influencing them all? Transcendent? Meme or archetype, I guess, are technical terms. We have many of those in the realm of human experience, and often they seem to…
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Dance of Shiva
Shiva is a very mysterious deity like many if not all of the Hindu deities. Shiva seems to behave more on the cosmic level in a universal context than anything else. We often don’t get a chance to see all the politicking, so don’t as citizens really know how competent he might be. “Cosmic” as…
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Originators of Your Flesh and Blood
Accepting the gods from one point of view is just accepting reality. Following the gods is learning their ways and habits. Is there any way you can get to know someone better than by living with them? Sometimes you only learn what someone can share with you by simply accepting them in your life and…
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Practice the Memory of the God
I may get a little Gnani here, non-devotional. From one point of view the purpose of ritual is to honor the gods, and I won’t deny that. People tend to get caught up in what might please the gods. I guess because we like to make people we care about feel good, happy. But as…
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Dwelling on Shiva
So ritual, the prescribed offerings, the chants, incense and dance, the symbolism and works of charity, each selectively and deliberately undertaken, serve as memory cues. When you see or smell Shiva’s offering, even before you begin the ritual, you can feel the presence of Shiva as you have built up that awareness in your mind.…
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Sainthood
So shall we discuss sainthood? It may not be what you think. Deep and prolonged devotion, even passionate commitment to devotion, one can become changed. It changes one. Mental force has been proven to rewire the human brain, if only slowly, but I wager simultaneous activation of many regions of the brain can speed up…
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Small Blessing
To use applied theurgy as it regards healing practice, it’s not necessary to achieve full unity with the divine to accomplish some of the things saints are known for. Even just a strong intuition, at different stages of deepening understanding, even just an innate gift, one can come to understand some small facet of what…
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The Star Child
Tonight is another installment of our applied theurgy classes, specifically dealing with Sutekh also known as Set. To understand Set best for this purpose, you would need to consider him from the point of view of the teachings of heka. Heka is the Egyptian word for magick. In Egyptian metaphysics, everything that exists shares in…
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Set’s Relationships
As Egypt came to interact with surrounding cultures, they became more and more xenophobic. That coupled with the adoption of Set by foreign powers that for a time ruled a part of Egypt, Set would come to be demonized rather than being a god of exploration, trade and progress. Originally, if it weren’t for the…
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Path of Set
If one chose to follow the path of Set, this would involve progressive thinking, open social interaction, avoidance of partisan politics, and strong individualism. Another thing about Set that threw many Egyptians off, and may have added to his “evil” image, was that most of their gods seemed to live in close relationship with each…
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Protector of the Sun
What is the meaning of being the guide of the sun through the underworld? Every force in the order of the natural world was thought to exist for a purpose whether human beings were comfortable with it or not. The fierce heat and winds and sandstorms that darkened the sky were thought to serve the…
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The Gods Move
I will describe things in a way that some traditionalist may object to. I don’t mean to offend anyone by it. I’m just drawing from my general sense of the cross cultural meaning of these things. How do you feel about time? About time in general? Yes. It moves too fast, and moved too slow…
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Kali Unites
Kali is seen as a destroyer not because of any evil in her. She is well above the potential for evil. What they observe is that many things in life are unstable. They can’t persist for very long. So Kali is the destroyer of evil because with time weakness inevitable emerges. Ah, time is the…
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Kali Is In You
Shall we move onto practice? Have I described the nature and character of Kali? Well, besides serving as a model to understand the natural world, the gods can serve as a locus for one’s personal understanding. Remember how earlier I said in order to be able to handle information people have to structure it into…
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Right Place, Right Time
We are talking about Ganesha today, as well as some other things. Male or female Ganesha? Well, Hindu devas tend to be sort of fractal, so in a sense both but most typically seen as male. The name stems from the native language that doesn’t much follow English language forms. In fact, it’s actually a…
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Elephant in the Room
Neuroscience has been forming some interesting ideas, and they have the potential to be very useful if not literally true. Our concept of self is imperfect. Neuroscience is exploring how and why this might be so from a physicalist and mechanical point of view, but there have been schools of mysticism that have understood this…
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Blind Man’s Elephant
I have seen people use silence as a way to get someone to say things they don’t want to. They just ask a question and stare at you, not saying a word and letting you stew in the silence. That is the way of Ganesha also, and the way of the genuine guru. If you…
Category: Applied Theurgy
The ultimate goal of all theurgic practice is to advance spiritually, to draw closer to the divine, become more God like, and any spiritual gifts are seen as secondary to the pursuit of the exalted state of harmony or even oneness with the God. There is a functional framework to theurgy. Their practice involves a walking in their Gods footsteps. It’s believed that by acting as the God acts and performing the functions the God performs, you advance along the path they set out.
There is a caveat as far as practice goes. You can only embrace the full path of a divinity you can literally imitate, because theurgy parallels imitative magic. You can respect other theurgic practices as a whole, but still have to have one that you yourself could follow.
So theurgy is as broad a study as magic, and if it’s of interest this can become a series where I touch on the theurgy of different deities, even of different divine or spiritual forces.
Open the Chapter on: Asherah | Eros | Asteroth | Shiva | Sutekh | Kali | Ganesha | Bast
“When we know what God is, we shall be gods ourselves” George Bernard Shaw (Irish literary Critic, Playwright and Essayist. 1925 Nobel Prize for Literature, 1856-1950)