Back from the camp of holy guardian angel

I’m back in the city from an international school’s camp where I worked for three days. The shamanistic workshop that I had created for the occasion in nature went fine. I am confident that a good number of students succeeded to send some signals through drumbeats in the spirit of the workshop into their subjective universes. Those signals are most likely returning to them at proper times in future.

Those three days in nature worked well for me in the spirit of my first book’s chapter on the magic of travelling – stepping outside of my everyday environment with an open mind shed some useful light to my routines. I have some new ideas and energy. If you don’t have my first book at hand and would like to read about something similar though, pick up John Symond’s The Great Beast and read about Crowley’s reasons for sending his students in isolation for a while in their search to acquire conversation with one’s “holy guardian angel”. If you don’t have these books at hand (and even if you have them both) I suggest you to go camping anyway. By doing so with proper mental preparation you actually have a fairly good chance to be inspired by your “holy guardian angel” (or hamingja/fylgja, if you prefer Nordic/Germanic magical context as I do) in a non-verbal numinous way. Maybe you could even acquire a “conversation” with that entity. Go and try.

One of the means that Magus of the Word Thelema used in his search for acquiring a conversation with his “holy guardian angel” was that of the magical operation of Abra-Melin. I am currently in process of translating the classical grimoire involved into Finnish and also writing an introduction to the tome in an effort to put the book in a useful and fresh cultural/historical/magical context. The book is going to be published by Voimasana at some point the early next year.

Now that my first book The Left Hand Path is out of my hands in its full English draft and under checking of the team of my proof-readers, there is also more time to my other writing projects. The most important of these to me is the manuscript for Aletheia: In search of Self-Remembering. My schedule in writing this book has changed and might change again. As writing this text is sort of conversation with my “holy guardian angel” that can be called Aletheia, I can’t dictate a strict deadline for myself in the process. The text gets ready when it gets ready, when the numinous manifests itself in words within the context of the book to me.

Three days away from keyboard means tons of unchecked emails. It makes huxleyan in me to raise my eyebrows. Is technology really serving us or are we serving technology? Are all these technical devices really giving us more time to focus on essential matters of our lives, liberating us from necessary time-consuming routines of daily life, giving us a chance to have more time to be free, self-expressing persons? Or are all these devices part of a technological current of Western culture that has started to live life of its own that we need to work for? Is this technological culture paradoxically tending to support culture that has more quantity on this and that over quality of essential things and experiences of life? How Max Weber’s iron-cage of Western rationality and George Ritzer’s McDonaldization of Western society are present in your life? What kind of good and less good dimensions they have for you? As most of things, this is not a black and white-scenario, but more a gray one. Technology is means for something and as such it is a neutral, just like a knife or a pen. Interpretation and experience of tools use is another matter then.

Back in 1991 CE emails didn’t exist. I used hours to typewrite a letter to Don Webb and others I corresponded with. After writing a letter I needed to go to a post office and pay for a letter to be sent to the States. It took about a week to arrive there, and then some time from Mr. Webb to write me back. The quantity of posts shared back then was very small when compared to what I am getting nowadays via email, but quality back then was generally speaking much better back then to what it is now. It really made you to think what you are saying and why if it took a week for a letter to arrive to its destination and another week or two to get response.

If you ask from me, the vision of Max Weber and George Ritzer is undoubtedly true. This doesn’t mean that we are in some huxleyan nightmare, though. Tools are tools, nothing more, nothing less.

Do what thou Wilt shall be the whole of the Law.

Love is the Law, Love under Will.