4.4 Ritual Magick

      My experience with ritual Magick has been fairly successful, but I have never had the opportunity to break away from my responsibilities working as a physicist long enough to perform a ritual with all of the isolation and concentration that characterizes a proper invocation or evocation. To one degree or another, however, I have been successful at evoking the following archetypal entities:

1. Asmodeus (see Figure 6 in Section 3.2 of this proposal and Slide No. 2)
2. Astarte/Asherah/Ashtaroth (see Figure 6)
3. Isis
4. Mercury/Thoth/Hermes
5. Amen-Ra/Jupiter/IAO-Pater (see "777", Aleister Crowley, p. 79)
6. Sytry - The 12th Goetic Demon Of The Descending Hierarchy (see "The Book of Ceremonial Magic", p. 199, A.E. Waite, and Figure 58 in Appendix E)
7. Beelzebub

1. Lamashtu (see "Amulets and Talismans", E. A. Wallis Budge, p. 104, 123)
2. The ancient European trinity of the Moon-Woman, Star-Son, and Serpent-Father (see "The White Goddess", Robert Graves, p. 388, 389; also see Example 3 in Section 4.3)

      The only two of these evocations and invocations that were accompanied by the use of dedicated talismans were the evocations of Asmodeus and Systry. All of the other rituals were accompanied by some form of abstract/symbolic art work. The climax of the ritual for some of these evocations and invocations occurred while I was dreaming. The climax for some of them occurred while engaging in sex.

      Consider the case of the evocation of Astarte (see Section 4.5 for a parapsychological event associated with this evocation). After working for about three weeks on the ritual, She came to me when I was in a semi-dream state of consciousness. In fact, I was just waking up from a night's sleep. In the dream I was standing on the porch of an old two story house. The upper floor was supported by columns. My protective spirit was behind me. Along came a friendly old Woman who walked with a cane and who wore a large stone about Her neck. As She walked by She nodded and said, "Good day, sir". I nodded and said, "Good day, Madam". Then as She continued on around by the side of the house, She turned into a Demon and attacked me with great rage. The transformation occurred when Her image came between two of the pillars supporting the upper floor of the house (see the symbol for Ashtaroth in Figure 6, and note the two upright vertical columns astride the pentagram). As my protective spirit and I struggled in combat with the Demon, he was ready to kill Her, but I told him that if we simply applied pressure to Her jugular veins then She would calm down. This in fact we did do, and She immediately transformed into a mellow Lady.

      I took the meaning of this encounter to be the following. The old woman who first appeared was a form of the old Mesopotamian fertility Goddess variously called Inanna by the Sumerians, Ishtar by the Babylonians, and Asherah by the Canaanites. The demon was Ashtaroth*. The act of pressing the jugular veins instead of trying to kill the Attacker was my symbolic expression to the Goddess that I was not one of her persecutors, and that I worshipped Her as a valid representation of that feminine aspect of the Deity dealing with the sexual energies required for the preservation of the species.

      My efforts to evoke the Goddess Isis resulted in Her coming to me in a dream and wrapping Her glistening, blue/silver cloak around my legs. I had been having some degree of difficulty with my legs due to arthritis, and I can clearly report that the improvement in my arthritic condition following this event was quite noticeable. If I had taken the good advice that She gave me in the dream, I am sure that my improvement would have been very dramatic. This comment should be analyzed in the same manner that the following comment by a typical college student would be analyzed: "I am sure that if I had studied for another five hours my score on this test would be better." This comment would probably be analyzed as follows. The student would have done better on the test if he had studied harder for two reasons. One, his confidence would naturally have been higher, and so his mental energy would be operating in a more positive atmosphere. Two, he would have learned more.

      Appendix D contains a poem I wrote to be used as a mechanism to transform me from my everyday, societal self to that of an Occultist preparing for a ritual of High Magick. I use it as a preliminary gesture at the beginning of all invocation and evocation rituals. It is very effective for setting me in the proper frame of reference for ritual workings.

*It took about 1000 years after the initial conquest of Canaan by the Hebrews, who worshipped a masculine deity, for the fertility Goddess worshipped by all of the early Eastern Mediterranean agricultural peoples to evolve into the archetypal form of a masculine demon in the collective unconscious of the Hebrew people. (See "When God was a Woman" by Merlin Stone and Vol. 1, p. 142, 144, "Man, Myth, and Magic" edited by Richard Cavendish.) It was inherited from them by the Christians.