Haus der Luege : Noli Evocare Quod Reprimere Non Potes

Divination by groundhog has been a tradition in Pennsylvania for more than 120 years. Every year on February 2nd, Groundhog Day, handlers in the little town of Punxsutawney consult the world's most famous groundhog, Punxsutawney Phil. The legend goes that if the groundhog sees his shadow on that particular day there will be six more weeks of winter. This year the weather forecasting website StormFax posted a roundup of more than a century of Groundhog Day predictions from the various rodents who over the years have served as Punxsutawney Phil (which, as you can imagine given 122 years of predictions, is more like an office than a single individual). What can we learn from the list? First of all, Phil usually sees his shadow, and second of all, he's right only 39% of the time.

When German settlers arrived in the 1700s, they brought a tradition known as Candlemas Day, which has an early origin in the pagan celebration of Imbolc. It came at the mid-point between the Winter Solstice and the Spring Equinox. Superstition held that if the weather was fair, the second half of Winter would be stormy and cold. For the early Christians in Europe, it was the custom on Candlemas Day for clergy to bless candles and distribute them to the people in the dark of Winter. A lighted candle was placed in each window of the home. The day's weather continued to be important. If the sun came out February 2, halfway between Winter and Spring, it meant six more weeks of wintry weather.

The earliest American reference to Groundhog Day can be found at the Pennsylvania Dutch Folklore Center at Franklin and Marshall College:

February 4, 1841 - from Morgantown, Berks County (Pennsylvania) storekeeper James Morris' diary..."Last Tuesday, the 2nd, was Candlemas day, the day on which, according to the Germans, the Groundhog peeps out of his winter quarters and if he sees his shadow he pops back for another six weeks nap, but if the day be cloudy he remains out, as the weather is to be moderate."
One of the problems with traditions is that they sometimes do not adapt to changing conditions. It would seem that the European weather on which the tradition was based is not similar enough to North American weather, which is both harsher and more unpredictable due to more of North America being situated far from any oceans along with its location on on the cold side of the Atlantic conveyor current that makes Europe substantially warmer than its latitude would otherwise suggest.

As far as this year goes, in Minnesota we've barely had a winter. There's hardly any snow left and the temperature has been above freezing for at least the last week. But the groundhog saw his shadow as usual. I'm guessing from what I've seen so far that this will be one more year he gets it wrong.

Over the course of the last month there has been some discussion in the magical blogosphere of Lon Milo DuQuette's maxim, "It's all in your head, you just have no idea how big your head really is" along with other statements of his to the effect that all a magician changes is him or herself. Articles related to this topic have been posted by Jason Miller, Patrick Dunn, Rufus Opus, Frater Barrabas, and a number of others. On the surface, DuQuette's statements would imply a psychological approach to magick, but at the same time he has written about various magical operations he performed that certainly seem to have produced results in the material sphere. As a result, speculation on the true meaning of "how big your head really is" abounds.

As it turns out, I'm in a good position to help resolve some of the ambiguity, as Lon DuQuette lectured on this very topic at the last National OTO Convention. Based on his comments, I can say with some certainty that DuQuette does believe that practical magick in which the material world is directly affected is for real, and that what he is proposing is essentially a discrete model of magick that fundamentally differs from those generally discussed in the magical blogosphere. To recap for new readers, those models may be summarized as follows:

• Psychological Model: According to this model, the function of magick is changing states of consciousness at will, limited to the individual mind of the practitioner. This model does not explain the success of most forms of practical magical work.
• Energy Model: According to this model, magick is accomplished by directing some form of subtle energy with the mind. This model works well for "energy work" systems such as Qigong, but has the problem that the supposed "energy" is hard to define and has some, but not all, properties in common with "energy" as used in physics.
• Spirit Model: According to this model, the changes related to magical operations are accomplished by spirits external to the magical practitioner. This model explains some systems such as grimoire evocation extremely well, but is less effective at explaining operations in which no external spirits are called upon.
• Information Model: According to this model, the changes related to magical operations are produced by an exchange of information in which magick is treated as a form of communication. The primary weakness of this model is that it does not explain the experiences of "energy work" practitioners.

My own thoughts on these models are best laid out here and here. In those two articles I think I did a reasonably good job of assembling a sort of "hybrid model" that combines the strengths of the energy, spirit, and information models and addresses their primary weaknesses.

Lon DuQuette's model is something else entirely, which I'm going to dub the "reality selection" model for the purposes of this article. According to his comments in his NOTOCON address, DuQuette's take on practical magick is that the way you change the events of the world around you is that you transform yourself into the sort of person that the outcome you want happens to. See the difference? Rather than trying to take an impersonal third-person perspective on magical operations, DuQuette directs his attention to the experiences of the individual practitioner. It's much like the perspective shift that you find in philosophy with Immanuel Kant's "Copernican turn" relative to the worldviews of Plato and Aristotle.

The idea of reality selection is a strong theme of the work of both Robert Anton Wilson and Antero Alli, writers with whom DuQuette is quite familiar. However, he explicitly takes this concept beyond the psychological realm, with the contention that you could, say, win a lottery by transforming yourself into the winner. Or, more specifically, selecting the possible future for yourself in which you will win. This idea pretty much hinges on the many-worlds interpretation of quantum physics, in which every statistical possibility happens and in some manner our consciousness selects only one of those outcomes to experience.

Ontologically, this is pretty much identical with the one-world approach that I personally tend to work with. To my way of thinking, a magician builds up a desired probability shift within his or own sphere of consciousness, and then transfers that shift to the target of the operation via a magical link with or without the assistance of spirits depending upon the specific structure of the ritual. Using the reality selection model is more like looking at numerous different possible "reality tunnels" and then directing your consciousness towards one in which your objective is successfully achieved.

So by transforming yourself, you transform the world around you. Microcosm meets macrocosm. The role of spirits is not that well defined in the reality selection model, but if they are treated as beings that can help the magician guide his or her consciousness in the proper direction it seems to me that they can be integrated quite successfully. There are some oddities in terms of how you wind up having to define partial successes with the many-worlds model that I think are handled better by one-world probability shift modeling, but Lon's model certainly provides some food for thought. And it is anything but psychological, at least in the sense that the term is normally defined amongst magicians.

Here's a bizarre story from the early days of modern science. George Washington is best remembered as the hero of the American Revolutionary War who became the first President of the United States. But according to a new book by Holly Tucker called Blood Work: A Tale of Medicine and Murder in the Scientific Revolution he nearly became our nation's first zombie following his death in 1799 at the age of 67.

But Washington's body was not buried immediately after his death. The president may not have feared death, but he did fear being buried alive. Before he died, he commanded his secretary, Tobias Lear, to make sure that he would not be entombed less than three days after he died. In accordance with Washington's wishes, his body was put on ice until it could be moved to the family vault.

That's where the story gets a little strange. The morning after Washington died, his step-granddaughter Elizabeth Law arrived with a family friend, William Thornton. History best remembers Thornton as the architect who created the original design for the Capitol building, but he was also a trained physician, having studied at the University of Edinburgh. Although he did not practice medicine for much of his life, Thornton always had a keen interest in the workings of the human body, and he suggested a novel method for resurrecting the fallen warrior. Thornton told Washington's wife Martha that he wanted to thaw Washington's body by the fire and have it rubbed vigorously with blankets. Then he planned to perform a tracheotomy so he could insert a bellows into Washington's throat and pump his lungs full of air, and finally to give Washington an infusion of lamb's blood. Friends and family declined Thornton's mad scientist offer, not because they thought his solution impossible, but because they felt the nation's first president should rest in peace.
"A little strange" seems a mild description under the circumstances. If these were really the sorts of ideas floating around the medical community at the time, it would seem that the novel Frankenstein, published in 1818, was more firmly rooted in the scientific ideas of the day than is often recognized. It certainly is true that Luigi Galvani's discoveries in the 1780's and 1790's regarding the effects of electricity on dissected animals suggested to the popular imagination that resurrection of the dead might not be a far-off scientific achievement.

But the real question horror fans want answered is a simple one - if Washington had been successfully reanimated, would he have developed a taste for human brains?

Demolition supervisor Robert Johnson got a surprise when reviewing photographs he took of a building that he had just demolished in the English city of Kendal. In one of the photographs, he saw a figure standing in one of the windows. Furthermore, the apparition was identified as that of the deceased previous owner by her son, David Grimshaw.

The 59-year-old was stunned and added: ‘I’m totally convinced – no one else looks like that. She had glasses and big earrings and she used to wear a dress with a bow at the front.’

While some may think the ghost is just a mere reflection, Mr Grimshaw remained convinced. He said: ‘She used to stand in that room for hours on the phone – it was the guesthouse reception and she took bookings from there.

‘She would have been horrified if she had known the house was being demolished because it was beautiful, so maybe that is why she’s turned up.’

The demolition team had felt an eerie chill at Meadowbank House. Worker Stuart Shan said: ‘The day before we took the photo, I noticed the chandelier swinging on its own.’
In my opinion the figure's precise features are hard to make out, so Grimshaw's identification may be due to the mosaic effect. However, it is pretty clear to me that this is the image of a woman, and you can see what looks like a necklace and an earring on the side of the woman's head that is visible.

This is one of the better ghost photographs that I've seen. It does not look like a reflection to me, but rather like a person standing inside the building. In fact, it's so good my immediate thought is that it's just a picture of somebody inside the building who wasn't supposed to be there. But if the demolition crew thoroughly checked the interior and nobody was there, it may be that something paranormal was indeed happening at the site.

I've long been of the opinion that the ritual of infant baptism as practiced by many mainstream Christian denominations is essentially pointless from a spiritual and magical perspective. My reasoning? If we assume that the Christian concept of salvation is based on spiritual realization, we must also take into account the basic truth that nobody else can do spiritual work for us. The problem with infant baptism is quite simply that while participating in a religious ritual led by another person can help speed one's spiritual progress, an infant really has no idea what is going on. Some babies just cry through the whole thing and find the water used unpleasant, which seems to me as about as far from a genuine spiritual awakening as I can imagine.

While baptism does serve a social function, it seems to me that people could get their socialization in clubs or organizations that are not religious in nature. This strikes me as a better state of affairs on the grounds that it would ensure that human politics and spiritual realization do not become conflated with each other. I'll add that this is not limited to churches, and the same point could be made about many magical orders and societies. There's a reason that when Aleister Crowley first put together his plan for A.'.A.'. he forbade socialization among its members. He had seen firsthand what political struggle had done to the original Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, and had played a significant part in it himself acting as Mathers' representative in London during the "revolt of the Adepts."

Several new websites are now offering "de-baptism" certificates for those who wish to formally leave their Christian Churches. While requesting a certificate from a website is at least as pointless as an infant baptism ritual from a spiritual perspective, its political significance cannot be overlooked.


The idea of getting "de-baptized"-- or having your name officially deleted from the baptismal registry-- is relatively new, but one which the Catholic Church is beginning to take seriously, and with grave concern.

The movement may have begun just a decade ago when Terry Sanderson, head of the National Secular Society in Britain, posted an unofficial "de-baptism certificate" on the society's website, mostly as a joke. To date it has been downloaded at least 100,000 times.

"It was a joke to begin with, but now it has taken on a new significance because there are so many people who are anxious to leave the church that they are actually taking it seriously now, and they want some way to make their break with the church formal," Sanderson told VOA. "Often the church won't acknowledge their desire to leave."

Many disenfranchised ex-parishioners have begun to take it a step further, seeking official, legal acknowledgement for de-baptism. For instance, 71-year-old Frenchman Rene Lebouvier recently filed a lawsuit against the church after his initial request to have his name crossed off the church's baptismal registry was denied. Last October, a lower court in Normandy ruled in his favor, making him the first man to be officially de-baptized, though a local bishop has filed an appeal.
The very existence of de-baptism demonstrates the extent to which people have become angry with the Roman Catholic Church in the wake of ongoing scandals and the continued embrace of political positions very much at odds with those of the modern world. It remains to be seen if the current surge in de-baptisms represents a trend, or if it is simply the latest Internet craze that will fade as quickly as it emerged.

The islands of the Bahamas in the Caribbean Sea have a fascinating paranormal history. In the early 1900's psychic Edgar Cayce predicted that evidence for the existence of the continent of Atlantis would be found in 1968 or 1969 near the island of Bimini. It so happens that in 1968 an unusual formation was discovered off the coast of the island, usually referred to today as the Bimini Road. This formation consists of a line of flat rectangular stone blocks that suggest the possibility of human origin. However, a number of geologists have also pointed out that similar stone structures can occur naturally, as the stone of which the road is composed tends to fracture along flat and rectangular lines giving the appearance of an ancient pavement.

According to this latest story from the region, ancient Atlanteans are not the only paranormal forces that may be loose in the Bahamas. According to Bishop Neil Ellis of Mount Tabor Full Gospel Baptist Church three demonic spirits are also plaguing the islands. In a recent speech Ellis described these demons and their evil intentions.

"Sexual immorality," he told the large crowd, "is the oldest of the three. It's been assigned (to The Bahamas) since the early 1800s. "It has taken root in the lives and psyche of Bahamians." The demon's task - sexual immorality - he said was designed to "keep God's plan for you, from you, destabilise the Bahamian family" and "replace God with himself (the demon)".

He said that the demon of sexual immorality was evident in our society when one saw the high level of "promiscuity going on". Fornication and adultery, he said, are "literally glamorised". Speaking of the "sweetheart syndrome" - one of the three sub-assignments under the main assignment of the sexual immorality demon - "has striven and now become accepted as our normal way of life". As for homosexuality and incest, it was "rampant and ragged in the Bahamas", he said.


Calling up the second demon --financial instability -- Bishop Ellis said it was a demon "sent directly from hell primarily to enslave the people of the Bahamas. "It was designed," he said, "to keep you working, but keep you broke."

"The majority of the people in The Bahamas are one pay cheque away from poverty", he said, adding that there is an agreement between the first two demons. Poverty, caused by demon no 2, "allows demon no 1 to driver persons in poverty to sexual immorality".

The last demon, he said, is widespread throughout the Bahamas, as many are operating in "obeah and voodoo. It has been full blown in our country and it has been for some time." The demon of witchcraft, he said, is designed to "manipulate, intimidate, separate, segregate and control", he said. "It is not assigned to kill you. It is designed and assigned to terrorising until it drives you insane."

Bishop Ellis said this "demon" uses confusion as one of its major weapons. "This spirit will try to bring confusion to the home, the marriage and the family. There are divorced and separated people who love each other, but can't live together. Witchcraft!"
Or in the latter case, maybe they just can't live together without being constantly at odds. That happens all the time, demons or not, in many parts of the world besides the Bahamas.

As a ritual magician, my first thought here is that in order to truly banish a demon you need to know its name. Evangelicals often name demons according to what they do, such as "demon of witchcraft," but in the Bible even Jesus needed to know a demon's name in order to cast it out and I certainly hope that Ellis does not consider himself a better exorcist than the Son of God. My next thought is that social problems can arise on their own without the help of demonic forces. For example, why propose demons as the root of financial instability when oligarchs around the world time and again have proven that they can do it on their own?

Bishop Ellis claims that God has given him a special prayer to banish these "demons," and I sincerely hope that it works, especially in terms of improving the Bahamanian economy which has suffered a lot from the global financial crisis. I just think that even if paranormal forces are involved, there's also a lot of practical mundane work that's going to need to be done to really help improve peoples' lives.

After a busy couple of weeks I'm looking back over some of the topics that have come up on the blogosphere during this last month. One of these is the discussion of visible manifestations during evocations. The discussion was started off by an article from Frater Ashen, which was followed by two others from MC and one from RO. The general consensus is that visible manifestations of spirits do occur in the course of the work, and usually people who say otherwise have little experience with working grimoire magick. I would agree with this, which may seem a bit surprising at first in the context of my published work. On page 112 of Mastering the Mystical Heptarchy you will find the following:

The determination of a ritual’s success or failure should depend on only one factor – whether or not the objective of the operation is achieved. It should not make any difference whether or not you see the spirit, whether or not you hear unexplained sounds, or even whether on not your spell focus explodes as you complete the conjuration. Such things are side phenomena unrelated to the operation at hand, and obsession with them can lead to a profound misunderstanding of the nature of the magical arts.
To clarify this a bit, with the Enochian angels you generally have to use some sort of scrying device like a mirror or crystal in order to see them. This lines up perfectly with the the history of the system, as this is how John Dee and Edward Kelley originally communicated with the angels and I assume this method would not have been necessary had the visible manifestations associated with those angels been more strongly perceptible. Furthermore, I would not necessarily characterize an interest in evoking spirits to visible manifestation as "obsession." While such manifestations are rare when working with Enochian angels, I also know from experience that they do occur when working with other grimoire systems.


The first Goetic ritual I was involved in was quite different from the Enochian work I was more familiar with, at least in terms of visible effects, as the Goetic spirit we evoked was visible without a mirror or scrying device of any sort. We were using a triangle suspended vertically from the wall, and once the conjuration was complete there was a definite visible form that seemed to manifest within it. It looked like the rough image of a face constructed from the shadows of the room, except that I was able to move my head from side to side, change position, and so forth and still see it, as though it were physically drawn within the triangle.

I was impressed enough by the image that after the ritual I tried playing with the lighting and so forth in the temple to see if I could duplicate what I saw, but after a whole lot of experimentation found that I could not. Furthermore, during the ritual the visible manifestation did appear following the conjuration and seemed to vanish along with the license to depart, so I can only conclude that this was in fact the visible manifestation of a spirit. For the ritual we had carefully followed the instructions from the grimoire, and so I have to say that like Ashen, MC, and RO my first question for somebody who did a Goetic evocation and didn't see anything would be how carefully those instructions were followed. It seems that adherence to the source material has a lot to do with whether or not you get a visible manifestation at all, as most authors on the subject suggest.

The thing about that ritual, though, was that other than the manifestation it was a complete bust. The information we got from the spirit was inaccurate and the charges we gave it were not carried out. So here's where I differ from some practitioners - I don't consider that a successful evocation even though the spirit was clearly successfully evoked. To me magickal success is about the results, not the phenomena, and I have yet to see much evidence that there is a direct correlation between the intensity of a spirit's manifestation and the successful achievement of measurable magical objectives. That's what I mean when I say that I judge magical rituals from their results.

In this regard it seems my perspective is quite different from that of practitioners like Frater Ashen, who considers the experience of evoking spirits profound and well worth the effort for its own sake. I don't see it that way in the context of my personal magical practices, but its also true that from the standpoint of magical practice as a whole visible manifestations are certainly an area in which there's a lot more research to be done. I'd be interested in seeing if the intensity of a manifestation corresponds to any sort of physical measurement, like an EMF detector, and whether or not the images can be photographed or recorded like some ghost phenomena can be. If anyone's done that sort of work and is willing to discuss it, feel free to share.

I've often commented that I'm glad to be living in the United States instead of Africa, particularly those countries where belief in witchcraft and magical practices is widespread. As a practicing magician I put a lot more stock in the effectiveness of magick than most Americans do, but at the same time it's clear to me that in societies where most people share those beliefs the results can lead to witchcraft accusations and vigilante actions against completely innocent individuals. Because the effects of magick are subtle it can be hard to tell who might or might not be using it, so a sort of cultural paranoia can arise surrounding such practices. This recent article from Kenya advises readers on what to look for in order to spot people who might be using magick in the office, and is a perfect example of the sort of thinking this paranoia engenders.

Do their moods change inconsistently without reason, sometimes friendly, other times incredibly hostile? Do they fall asleep on their desks, looking dazed, as the boss waits for that time-barred assignment?

Do you have workmates who carry the same bag everyday, mostly yellow or brown in colour even if it is dirty and torn and belongs in the dustbin? And why has this other one been wearing the same green coat for the last ten years, or that greyish old sweater the whole year, whether it is hot or cold?

Do they reject a hug or handshake all the time?

Do they refuse to take office tea and always remove their shoes and walk around the office bare foot? Do they visit the toilet more than three times a day? Do they sneeze whenever the boss summons a colleague to his or her office? What about the male colleagues who never wear socks?

It could be a coincidence, but chances are one or all these people have been visiting a witchdoctor and the witchdoctor has given them strict instructions on what to do to survive at the office.

Instructions may include the colours to wear to work to please or confuse bosses and what to put under his or her carpet to earn promotions, office trips and excessive per diem at the expense of others.
See the pattern? In effect, anything even marginally unusual or out of the ordinary in terms of one's office behavior can constitute "proof" of witchcraft-related activities. This includes financial trouble of whatever sort, since maybe the person in question is just not doing well enough to replace his or her coat or bag with a new one. Even if many people here in the states think I'm crazy to believe in, let alone practice magick, I'll take that over my co-workers scrutinizing my every quirk for evidence of magical manipulation any day.