I think I posted all of this in 2003 under a different account (Bloody Chiclitz), but Google’s not helping me find it, so here it is again:
I grew up in a fairly religious household. My mom, at least, was Seventh Day Adventist and took me to church, and she wouldn’t let me play D & D or with Ouija boards because she was afraid it would summon real demons who would possess me. She also would tell the story, corroborated by my aunt and grandmother, about how she used to levitate tables when she was in high school, placing her hands on the top of the table and then lifting all four legs off the ground just by raising her hands. Supposedly she couldn’t do this in rooms that contained a crucifix, so she got freaked out and thought it was demons giving her the power, and she stopped doing it.
When I was around 13, I decided that I no longer believed in God, though I was still interested in religion (in particular mystic religions like Gnosticism, Sufism, and Kabbalah). I was also always interested in magic, and in high school I got into the yijing, casting the coins for my friends sometimes with startlingly appropriate results. When I was about 16, for some reason I started having a lot of night terrors, though I didn’t know what they were at the time. I would wake up in the night, paralyzed, with the sense that something ineffably evil was beside me, whispering in my ear. This went on for about two weeks before I randomly started doing this weird “ritual” before falling asleep, envisioning opposed hemispheres passing through me along x, y, and z axes to form three protective spheres around me after they’d all passed completely through (I’m not sure if that description gives a visual idea of what I mean or not, but I guess it’s not important). Anyway, the night terrors ceased from the moment I started doing this.
My natural instincts have always been fairly in line with the principles of sympathetic magic. I’ll take a piece of something and vaguely try to use it to influence the whole. No system, just instinct, and I can’t say I’ve had any concretely measurable results from this sort of thing, but it’[s the way my mind works. I also tried a sigil once and got better than the result I was hoping for, though it’s a case where I can’t positively attribute the result to magic.
Lately, no idea why, my old interest has been renewed. When I sit and reflect, I’m a skeptic, but as I said before my natural instinct is towards a vague sort of mysticism. I’ve been trying to invoke Mercury lately, seeing if I can get him to show up for a chat, so we can see if the two of us might be able to work out some sort of mutually beneficial relationship, but I’ve still had very little measurable success. The first attempt was the most promising, when a book arrived in the mail with a section about Mercury in chapter one on the same day that I first invoked him. The next few attempts didn’t give me much to go on (one was an attempt at meditation while running, since he and I are both runners, the other was an all day vision quest around Manhattan, leaving coins at various crossroads and trying to follow my instincts). The only promising result after the first was a few nights ago when I did a little research on the Tarot and found that Trump 1, the Magus, is associated with Mercury, so I decided to mentally identify myself with that card. I shuffled, cut, and had my wife lay the cards for me, and was pleasantly surprised when that card came up as representing the querent (me). I suppose I’ll see where this road takes me. |
