Posted by So, I talked a bit about the immediate effects of the Gold Ritual and the Silver Ritual, designed to help acclimate the unconscious mind to the idea of manifestation.
I used these techniques, sort of off-the-bat, figuring that I had enough of my issues handled that I’d be more or less fine.
I was, more or less. After the initial results within the first 48 hours, however, I was confronted with spiritual issues I didn’t know I had. In the spirit of full disclosure, I’m including them here for anyone who might be tempted to engage in this work.
Gnosis-Intensifying Ritual Intensifies Gnosis
Increased intimacy requires increased trust and increased processing. Interactions that are more powerful than the level of trust you have with a person (mortal or divine) will cause freaking-out.
I’m coming to appreciate that the level of psychic sensitivity that a person has is a choice made on a higher level for reasons.
Forcing greater sensitivity brings you face-to-face with what those reasons are, and this can cause upheaval.
The first 48 hours after the ritual were very positive, but the next 48 hours were hellish.
What if I’ve been decieved? What if Hermes is going to use this added power over my life to crash my car?
This is a deity I have known for 17 years. He has never, not once, in any of that time, given me even the slightest reason not to trust him. He has been nothing but gentle, kind, loving, benevolent and patient to a degree which almost makes me question his sanity.
All in all, despite the prankishness and occasional thieving, he’s the sort of enlightened, circumspect being you’d expect an entity would be after nine thousand years of life experience, six thousand (or more) of which was spent giving humans spiritual guidance.
I am poorly behaved, as mortals go. I try my best, but I’m a passionate Mediterranean woman. My outward restraint is mostly because I don’t know how to express my emotions without overwhelming people. Careful with my speech inside of my head where there is no filter? No. I am not. And it lands me in hot water with deities all the time.
Yet, when expressing his displeasure, Hermes has always taken the position that I could be reasoned with, and tried to explain to me why the thing I did was dumb. When feeling excessively annoyed at my pig-headedness, he’s mostly resorted to playing hilarious pranks on me, which even *I* laughed out loud at. Pranks. Stolen objects. Things that are pedagogical and funny. Not physical injury.
My fears did not reflect so much what I thought Hermes would do, but what, on some basic level, I felt I deserved. That is the sort of thing that will color your gnosis and pollute your intuition.
I had no idea that I was thinking of myself in this way. Bringing deities into closer proximity, inviting them to be more manifest around you, makes you immensely vulnerable. That vulnerability, and the specific fears it evokes, can really illuminate implicit, unspoken, or even unconscious beliefs that stand between you and the spirit world.
Ritual to Make Things Manifest Will Manifest Things
Your thoughts and intentions manifest. This is true for everyone to varying degrees. Some people have a lower threshold than others for which things they think will actually manifest, and those people need to be way more careful about their thoughts than people who have a higher natural barrier for manifestation.
My barrier for manifestation is naturally pretty high, actually. Acts of magic usually require me to actively summon up energy and give it a real, solid push. I use rituals as leverage, to get a better angle on stuff. I never understood what a blessing this natural resistance was until it was (thankfully, only temporarily) gone.
Having a high barrier to manifestation means that it’s hard for spiritual beings to push you around, unless they are actually deities. Things that aren’t deities rely on psyching you out, or essentially tricking you into using your own power to cause manifestation on their behalf. Having a high barrier means that idle, self-sabotagey thoughts do not manifest before you have time to recognize them and say, “Oh, glad I caught that.”
While my intention was to reduce the barriers to Hermes manifesting, and I was really very specific and explicit about that intention, nonetheless, what happened was that the barriers to everything even vaguely Hermes-related were reduced. This really boned me when I was traveling recently.
It started with picking up a friend before going to the airport for a trip. He wasn’t where he said he’d be, and wasn’t really ready to go even when he showed up.
We’re late! Everything is taking too long! We are never going to get there on time.
Fairly natural thoughts. Under most circumstances, totally harmless. But when we got to the airport, the plane had been delayed by unexpected weather while in transit to us. It had been delayed so much that we were never going to make it on time for our connection.
They gave us two options: a red-eye leaving at midnight, or going to a hotel and waking up at 4am.
Great. I’m going to get basically no sleep.
I opted for a flight to Chicago, a hotel stay, and a flight out in the morning. But when we got to Chicago, the flight we had expected to take had mysteriously not been booked, so the only option was to fly to a different hub in the opposite direction of our destination at 11pm, and then have a two hour lay-over, and take a flight that landed us at our intended destination in the wee hours of the morning.
Then, the last plane, after we had boarded, was stuck on the tarmac because of unexpected repairs that needed to be made.
Finally, in desperation, I called out to Hermes, “Whatever I did, I’m sorry, just get me off of this tarmac!”
Instantly. INSTANTLY, we were ready for take-off.
This wasn’t Hermes causing me hell, of course. It was my own pessimism immediately manifesting. The flip side was, the instant I asked Hermes for help, he was able to oblige me.
If you engage in this work, be very careful about what goes on in your head. Idle pessimism may cause some unexpected problems.
The Happy Ending
As a result of having my negative patterns of thinking viscerally illustrated, I was able to work on them.
I don’t think I can live without kvetching. I’m going to have to develop some method of more tightly controlling how long the effects of these rituals last. Four days is WAY too long. In the meantime, I’m going to try simply stating an expiration with the spoken part of the ritual, until I think of something more clever.
Magick From Scratch 