The mystic title of the Golden Dawn grade of Zelator, associated with the Sephirah Malkuth and the element of Earth, is the odd term Periclinus de Faustus, which after twenty-plus years, I have only recently looked up. In feminine form it would be “Pericline de Faustus,” the term I used.

There is a blind in Hermetics which is not the actual secrets — they are all hidden in plain sight — but the capacity to piece everything together while still doing the magic(k) with a few other magicians similarly functional.

Thus one of our WHIPPETS opines that the Golden Dawn only ever achieves perfection in the afterlife. But oh how!

The Golden Dawn had to move mostly into AIR — how can one assemble the ritual team and the congregants? — but we old timers recall the lushness of a truly great Hermetic temple. The nemyss, the robe, the Caduceus wand of the Kerux. The thrilling calls in Coptic and beneath it all, a magic(k) we little understood. Meditation and scrying alone will never convey that.

* * *

It is now clear to me that the Golden Dawn was the natural outgrowth of centuries of work with western art magic(k). They knew the energy work that came in with the quarters, the elements, the tools, the RUBRIC. The Zelator WORLD is a summation of the findings of a thousand years.

“Pericline” is a type of crystal. Perhaps they are pointing to the Order’s use of the actual mineral pericline as a skrying implement, while winking at the alchemical concept of THE STONE OF THE WISE, which Paul Case maintains is the pineal gland that eventually develops the capacity for the lucid dreaming work that was done and is now being rediscovered in a wonderful way by the contemporary magicians. A clever student would, no doubt, obtain such an object and use it for the grade.

“De Faustis” refers, no doubt, to the Faust myth, a tale of what happens when you enter the old-school DAMIEN work. There is a pact, a powerful underworld spirit in classic demon togs that helps you attain your earthly goals, and an obligation for a present and afterlife serving the DAMIEN energy world. Who knows who the actual DAMIEN is — it could also involve Gramma with her rosary. AS USUAL. Who else would know how to get things done or care about a stupid WHIPPET like you? As SKIP loved to comment, Yeats’s motto was DEDI: Daemonium Est Deus Inversus, “The devil is God inverted.”

You are promised not to go to Christian heaven like everyone else but stay in the work and, no doubt, help others who come along. Dragged to hell is supposed to be painful and scare you, and they did come cut off your head postmortem and use it as a divinatory instrument. AS WAS RECENTLY DONE IN PALO. Now let’s see these Middle-class Americans try that!

It is speculated that THE GAME avows itself of these works to a certain extent in vision, but not through the same sort of physicalization. Teaching the old spirits the new tricks is something I would very much want, but we do need to get past the terrible two’s.

THE DEVIL was never an easy GAME.

Now, what does it mean in its greatest wavelength to SEAL your soul to the devil? I am not speaking of calling on real demons to hurt people — that can happen with JESUS! There is no doubt some of that, but it is also a sign pointing the way to a different spiritual life. Anyone with the gumption to call up the Devil might get trained in some of the more risky types of magic(k).

Each person has certain talents and certain structures that have to be factored in to their total life potential. Probably in most cases, the best bet for optimization is a Middle Way that calls the best from all spiritual avenues.

There are times when an individual is stymied, often by things outside their control, and they decide to have a better life by sacrificing perhaps some longevity — as we see in the classic DAMIEN pact that upshifts the life for a few years and then ends it early.

These uncontrollable factors could be one’s own faults, family situations, culture, race or gender, sexual orientation, political or class structures, scarcity in the region, you name it. These can often be gotten past by powerful magic(k) but there is a cost to departing from the mainstream, and that cost must be paid by oneself, not by parasitic downshifting of others, is how the DAMIEN work is rightly done.

As a playwright, I always say that when you write a new play, you can’t help but write an old one — and vice versa. I am not an adapter of the classics except unconsciously. When I find the root myth, I have to fathom it.

One of my plays threw up the Faust myth, so I had to read my way through a lot of that material. Someday I will write a post on the building of bridges. They are very much the case in point with the Devil.

Most of the time the operator makes the pact, gets a lot of good things, then is dragged to hell in due time. The dominant paradigm doesn’t like it when the middle class gets in the way of the rich or the power workers functioning in their necessary ways. The middle class is a magic(k) of its own, and it must be moderate, for it commands the world in normalcy. That is a lot of the Faust myth, because Dr. Faustus does not start out poor. He is a literate fellow whose magic(k) lacks the earthy punch of the village witches but is not wealthy enough to command through the astral thoughtforms of the lords and ladies whose dimension itself is command magic(k).

So he calls up Mephistopheles and trades the rest of his life for an altered potential.

Goethe supposedly did the finest job of this; at the very moment when it was no longer possible as magic(k) but needed to live yet, he turned it into a supreme ART, which is how our work lives as horror.

OWLS.

So naturally we are going to just futz about a bit with Christopher Marlowe and notice the power-seeker with extreme talent who can’t get past the conditions of the world. He has gone as far as he can, and if he doesn’t make a break for it, his life potential will be wasted.

Some alterations can be made in destiny, and sometimes the underworld gods require the service of certain occultists to salve that. I’m afraid it may be that a NICE LIBRARIAN LADY would have to be tricked into working with the DAMIENS.

This is a structure that lodge work in Rosicruciana always throws up, and here is where we are calling in with THE PENTACLE.

The conflation of business magic(k) with mysticism is a MELTDOWN WAITING TO HAPPEN matter that has to be undertaken with the greatest delicacy, and I lament the missteps that were taken relative to me.

The grades of the outer order are of supreme importance, because they must be functioned in forever as both neophyte and adept.

When someone comes into the lodge and works very hard, they get noticed and assisted and worked — and often struck.

I had a carpenter friend in the B.O.T.A., which operates by a correspondence course that has a weekly snippet of four to five pages to work over twenty years, who said that when he applied to the Golden Dawn, he was handed a hundred-page booklet and told to memorize it and come back in six months ready to pass a test at 85% for entry into the next grade. He refused. It was not how he processed the work. I respect his decision to stay in the Masons and do the studies through the movement of the body and by osmositic conversation with others who relate beneficially with that hundred-page booklet while he powers them in the great world of actual masonry. I myself have done many studious things while also GEEK STUNTS, and that is part of the journey of classical occultism. Try reading Don Quixote sometime. It is not a farce.

Now, at Zelator, with its glorious world of EARTH, PAN, and the mating with the DEVIL, we are asked, What do you want? Hopefully that can be upshifted quite considerably.

I recall PDR giving the rundown on what happens when we lose people at the various grades. At Zelator, they get lost in fixing their lives and we never hear from them again — except in power. I think you should walk away from the Golden Dawn able to function fully in the disciplines THAT ARE NOW OBSOLETE and have mapped out how I think that should best happen, but since I don’t command a RUBRIC, too bad.

I don’t remember the classic meltdown of Practicus, the grade I left the Order itself at, but I do know that the Samothracian mysteries are about the gods of the underworld, and if I wouldn’t do it in Golden Dawn proper, I was required to take THE UNDERWORLD JOURNEY of 3=8 called SOLOMONIC MAGIC(K). It took ten years.

Now I am doing 4=7 by writing this blog.

I recently tried to reunite with my old chums whom I love so dearly, but too much time has passed, we have all gone different directions, and I have another world. I participated briefly in every Golden Dawn line extant in the United States and still didn’t get my badges. What a shit. CALLING IN FROM GENGHIS KHAN I SEE. DIAMONDS. I revere the work and will have to do it anyway!

The shtick is that if you make it through Zelator, you do enter a PACT with the DAMIENS. The lodge world has to evaluate what is wanted, what is possible, what are your magic(k)al ethics, and what are you willing to do? It is part of how the entire world functions.

We are all Faust.

Going back to the great hiccup of ~2000, the conflation of business magic(k) with mysticism AND SCHOLARSHIP was not handled precisely as it ought to have been as the lodges were under a planned BOARDING and kind of a chop shop. I don’t dispute that a lot of energy went into the ATR as it should and that a lot of people have gone that direction with great gusto, self-actualization, and a wonderful community. An exciting new magic(k) is what we long for — especially if the spells work like kaboom. In the words of St. Paul, “For all the Athenians and strangers which were there spent their time in nothing else, but either to tell, or to hear some new thing” (Acts 17:21). That is all the lodges seem to do, say some.

But no means no.

It seems to me that most of the time, people who are accounted worthy of investigation for entry into a certain cult of THE GAME are able to hear and respond to the magic(k) and that the divination works. That is not the case with me, it seems.

Nor do I dispute that the original Golden Dawn of Victorian London was not the most extreme GAME imaginable!

WE JEW THIS.

At the same time, the innate conservation of the entire western art magic(k) tradition as it was is present in the Golden Dawn but only transmorgrified in Thelema, while Thelema is an important gateway to THE NEW AEON. For that reason, I must account myself in many ways involved in a Thelemic sort of Golden Dawn and BE ABOUT MY FATHER’S BUSINESS.

* * *

I was contemplating BIFRONS the other day.

The evocatory speech of the Lemegeton reads, “and by the Chief Prince of the Seat of Apologia in the Ninth Legion” (Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers and Aleister Crowley. The Lesser Key of Solomon or Clavicula Salomonis Regis (Handbook of astrological sorcery for summoning instructions and seeking of 72 demons) – Annotated The History of King Solomon . Kindle Edition.) When I was winding up to perform my first evocations in New York, I used to walk around reciting some of these speeches to be able to evoke from memory. It is deucedly difficult to memorize — well nigh impossible — and I have decided that this particular rite should be performed from a book like a Catholic mass. It is not intended to be memorized.

I recall working through this phrase and thinking of myself having coffee with the Chief Prince of the Seat of Apologia of the Ninth Legion.

Now Peterson’s version holds that this is not the Ninth Legion but the Ninth Region, which makes sense from a Cabalistic Sense as the Qlippoth of Yesod, and there is much sense in that sensibility.

TO THINK OF TIME. The MAR-MONS say that you can only function in GAME as far back as the graves and urge a 19th-century approach. THE PIONEERS. When women can read. There’s your scholarship hiccups.

At the same time, when we take the dramatic approach of Samuel Liddell MACGREGOR Mathers of the clan MacGregor — oof dah! — we are solidly in the territory of ROME with its unforgettable legions that would have been so very much a part of Graeco-Egyptian magic(k). Any convenient sword.

So I arrange to have coffee with the Chief Prince of the Seat of Apologia of the Ninth Legion, and who shows up but my DAD.

As usual, in the afterlife, Dad knows more than one would expect about calling up devils partly because he was very good at the research called going to all the parties and being fun. And hearing the gossip.

So he gives me the lowdown on my Solomonic magic(k).

You did it in the old school way IN ROBES, which is only practicable by old money, and they don’t like you in it because you are not wealthy, are a bit slatternly, and haven’t done all the research. You don’t have a reasonable energy world of it with Enochian magic(k) or Thelema, either. You won’t work it in AIR on entheogens so that the Modern Masters can be of assistance without injuring their wealth. You turned your nose up at Druidry, being too fine at magic yet not far enough along, so your line of greatest capacity was not healed. You don’t do it like the Latinx contingency with altars and paper seals. You are a female in the middle of a man magic(k) takedown of all witchcraft. You are too intelligent, artistic and powerful to be completely ignored while also inept, incomplete, and full of poverty energy — like all your family ever.

I loved hearing my Dad say this, and I can yet see THE SOLOMONIC MAGICIAN and his power partner DIAMONDS a phase shift away: Janus is how we LIKE it.

I will listen to this WISE COUNSEL.

ENOCH without the body is where THE GAME is trying to be. The only part of Osiris they will accept is the part that is dead: the phallus.

ENOCH assures me that the Golden Dawn is incomprehensible without its seamy side WELTANSHAUUNG and that my eventual practice of Enochian magic(k) will not obliterate SOLOMON but heal the rift.

SKIP is weighing in — no doubt — it looks like he won. (I only worked with SKIP for a year before the entire Golden Dawn egregore imploded, WHIPPETS.) He probably did the daemon work OWLS HE WOULD HAVE DONE IT ON ACID, but the Golden Dawn was physicalized.

I keep hearing the peanut gallery glaring because I don’t do acid and they can’t work in it. Who ever looks at the Thoth deck? It is the hippie shining, and you’re not an INDIGO CHILD.

I may be and probably am wrong. I have, however, worked in morning glory seeds, and the entire thing landed me in the hospital somehow, while THE SOLOMONIC MAGICIAN killed my salvia plant. So there are some signs for you. I think I’ll stick it out in ROBES and ALTARS.

With lodge chops, it may not be a “most favored nations” world of astral functionality in the contemporary rubric of the Buddhist ATR — which is a great STYLE mosaic of many tribes of magic(k).

But we’ll FUND it.