Magic Monday

[ecosophia]

It's getting on for midnight, so we can proceed with a new Magic Monday. Ask me anything about occultism and I'll do my best to answer it. Any question received by midnight Monday Eastern time will get an answer. (Any question received after then will not get an answer, and will likely just be deleted.) If you're in a hurry, or suspect you may be the 143,916th person to ask a question, please check out the very rough version 1.0 of The Magic Monday FAQ here. 

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With that said, have at it!

***This Magic Monday is now closed. See you next week!***

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

Do you know of any reason why some people advocate pronouncing AGLA in full as Attah Gibbor Le-Olam Adonai when doing the LBRP?. Are their any benfits/detrimental effects on the ritual from doing it this way? Also, do we actually know what the original members of the Golden Dawn did?

[ecosophia]

As Robert Heinlein has one of his characters say, some people insist on pissing in their coffee because they think it improves the flavor. There are all kinds of people ringing all kinds of changes on the LBRP or, well, any other magical practice you can think of, since our culture fetishizes originality and making little tinkering motions like that is a way of pretending to be original. It doesn't seem to do a lot of harm, but it doesn't do any good. Yes, we know what the original members of the Golden Dawn did; here's an online copy of the first knowledge lecture, word for word as it appears in copies given to the original members. (I've checked.) The LBRP instructions are toward the bottom.

[(Anonymous)]

I would add one thing to our esteemed host's assessment.

While I am not a proper ceremonial magician, I did spend some time studying the Cabala and spent some time discussing something similar to this with a Rabbi. The acronyms were chosen as much for sound as for their meaning. Secondly, many of the expansions are more theoretical than actual; they usually encapsulate parts of the meaning but aren't identical, and sometimes not even comparable.

Most of the formulae feel very different when used alone versus expanded. ARARITA is the only one I know of that seems to benefit from the expansion. AMEN & AGLA most emphatically aren't.

To quote Rabbi Weisse: When somebody says that a certain word actually stands for this or that, smile and walk away slowly; at least if their tongue isn't firmly in their cheek.

[(Anonymous)]

These are probably the same kind of people that put "Répondez s'il vous plaît" on their invitations, and usually misspell the first word as "Respondez". :D

I'm no expert, but it seems to me that a Word of Power like AGLA that has been used in that form for centuries is a meaningful word in and of itself. It's nice to know where it comes from, but actually using the full phrase in practice strikes me as silly as insisting on saying "radio detecting and ranging" instead of "radar", or "self-contained underwater breathing apparatus diver" for "scuba diver".

Taupe O. Raccoon