Friday, March 27, 2015

How to REALLY be Ready to do Seven Spheres in Seven Days

TL/DR: I'm going to be doing live broadcasts for each of the Course Lessons, sign up at the link at the bottom of the page!

For the rest of you with patience and attention spans: 

Getting the Most out of the RO Approach to Hermetic Magic

In the last post about doing Seven Spheres in Seven Days, I talked about the mistakes I made in setting up a public group to do the SSiSD, but I've been thinking more about getting people properly prepared to be actual magicians like me.

I tend to assume that anyone who purchases my books does so because they know me and have been reading my blog for years, and they think I'm awesome as a result of watching all the shit I've been through as I learned how to use Hermetic Magic to make my life amazing. I've been blogging here for ... shit, going on nine years now. I started soon after attaining K&CHGA and right around the time I got to working through Agrippa and started using the Trithemian approach*  to conjuring spirits.

As a result of this assumption, I expect people who buy Seven Spheres to have a really thorough understanding of the Hermetic Cosmology, who they are, why they're here, what they are supposed to be doing with their existences, and the proper application of the Great Work to their lives. I went through all that shit in great detail as I went through the process of getting here today, and I just assume if you're doing what I'm doing, you've been through what I've been through.

But the thing is, you haven't. Most of you, anyway. A whole bunch of people have bought my book and have none of the background education, framework, and experience to actually perform the work effectively, and that concerns me.

I laid out the basic process of what you should do to integrate the forces you can contact with Seven Spheres in the last post, but really, that's not likely going to be enough to get you the fullness of the potential experiences off the bat. You really need to understand the Hermetic Theology and Soteriology that forms the core of the book to use it effectively. 

Don't get me wrong, though. Using the book will lead you to this understanding, but it will take you there via the bumpy and sometimes rough road of gnosis, the school of hard knocks. There's nothing wrong with that, for sure, I went through it and came out great, and eventually you'll reach the appropriate conclusions you'll need to reach in your path. That's just how the magic thing works.

But I spent a long time, about two years, coming up with a shortcut for people so they wouldn't have to go through and make a bunch of mistakes getting to the point where I'm at now. Or at least, not the same mistakes I made. I put together a series of courses that teach the principles of Hermetic Magic that I learned and use in my Work. These are the Red Work Series of Courses.

The Red Work Series of Courses

This series of courses are based on my understanding of the phases of the Alchemical transformational processes of the Great Work. The alchemists took some fundamentally flawed base material, subjected it to a series of refinements, or chemical processes, and when completed had a purified final form. Think of refining gold from ore. You get the ore-containing stone, you put it through a series of heat-based or chemical based processes in a particular order, and when complete you have extracted the pure gold. 

A similar series of processes was postulated for the spiritual refinement of human beings. The process became known as the Great Work. You start with a human being as the prime material, you go through various stages of the Work, and you come out refined and purified, able to reach your true potential, and able to project healing and longevity into the world around you. 

The phases of the Great Work began with the Black Work, in which you cooked the Prime Material, or let it decompose, and it turned black. The base impurities of the substance rose to the surface, and the basic materials that had been combined in an impure whole are broken down into their component parts. The next phase is the White Work, where the substances are heated further, or otherwise treated until the impurities in the mix are consumed and turned to pure ash, turning them from black to white, or the chemical equivalent. 

In some systems, the Green Work (or Peacock phase) followed, a series of processes you performed on the remaining material to further refine the component parts and begin to properly reintegrate them into the final whole. As the material passed through the Green Work, it turned various hues of blue and green and gold, like the colors of a peacock's feather. Then the materia went into the Red Work, the phase at which the materia recombined into a single, pure and holy object, the Philosopher's Stone. This last phase consisted of a great deal of applied heat over time. The Final stage of the Work is the Projection phase, in which the Stone is ground up into powder, which is used as a medicine to heal the world.

I based the courses on each of these phases. The Black Work is the most intensive, and provides the most comprehensive information necessary to understand the Work we do. It's based almost entirely on Agrippa's Three Books of Occult Philosophy, and my own experiences. By the end of this course, you will understand more about the neo-platonism of the Hermetic Cosmology than you ever thought you'd need to understand. You'll have a solid foundation to do the Work of any of the grimoires, and a full comprehension of how you relate to the universe at large, the spirits we conjure, and ultimately your own divine nature.

After that comes the White Work course. This course is based on my studies of the Holy Guardian Angel, and the forms it took within the belief systems of the Zoroastrians, the Greek Magical Papyri, and into the Rennaissance grimoires. I explore what it is, what it means, and the various methods of contacting this spirit. I also provide a series of preparations and rituals designed to facilitate contacting this spirit. Attaining Knowledge and Conversation with the Holy Guardian Angel or its equivalent is not a necessary thing in most of the traditions of the West, at least officially, as such. It is implicit in all the systems though, and it never hurts to have a Solar Spirit at your back ready to help you conjure, feed, and direct the forces the spirits and intelligences represent.

The Green Work course has been temporarily discontinued, because I never finished it properly. The Seven Spheres book accomplishes the same thing, especially when combined with the Seven Spheres course.

I never decided whether I should write a Red Work course or not. If you do the Work of the Black, White, and Green Work, I believe you cannot help but finish the Red Work. Also, I feel like I'm always in this phase in some aspect of my life, and I don't know whether I can really write a course on it. I think it varies from person to person, and within each lifetime it varies for each individual. The Red Work I do today is different than the Red Work I did five years ago, two years ago, or last month.

And Projection... well, that's going to look however you want it to look. It is the creation of your world.

Standard Correspondence Course

If you want to take the standard courses, you can order the courses at the regular prices at this link below. These come with all the lessons in PDF, and a membership to the yahoo group where you can discuss the lessons with other course members. Here's the link:


Live Lessons for the Black Work Course

I had so much fun doing the Seven Spheres courses live, that I've decided to go ahead and do a live broadcast for each of the Black Work course lessons, and eventually for each of the White Work lessons too. For right now, I'm only taking orders for the live Black Work lessons. With this order, you'll be getting all the standard correspondence course materials, plus an hour long discussion of the topics in detail once a week.

That's SEVEN HOURS OF MY LIFE, PEOPLE! 

Jesus, wait a minute. Let me think about this.

Ok, yeah, I'm sure. But it's going to cost you extra, for sure. I know you saw that coming. 

If you'd like to participate, it's $200 for the Black Work, that's an extra $75, which isn't too bad, in my opinion for that much of my time. I'll be doing these on the weekends, and if you miss the class, I'll be recording them and posting them to a private channel on youtube, which you'll get access to super-secretly. you'll be able to go back and watch them if you miss them, or re-watch them if you fell asleep, went to the bathroom, or got shit-faced drunk and forgot about it. I'm limiting the number of people who can join to 50, but don't worry, that's a relatively large number and I doubt I'll get that many people to join.

If you CAN order, it means class is NOT FULL. If you try to order and you get a "Sold Out" page, then you'll have to wait until next time I run this.


I'll be putting out an announcement this weekend for the next live Seven Spheres course, and when I'm about a month or so into those I'll announce a live White Work course, so keep your eyes peeled.

* As far as I know, I am the first modern magician to make extensive use of this technique, and I am completely comfortable saying that the reason The Art of Drawing Spirits into Crystals has gained a huge amount of popularity in the last few years is because I told everyone I knew how cool it was. It's a simple method of conjuration, and to make it even easier, I wrote up a neat little tech spec manual that put its simple practices into modern language (The Modern Angelic Grimoire). This method is sort of authentic and traditional, even though my version technically isn't either of those things according to grimoire purists, but everyone who uses the technique finds it super-effective.

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