Well i've stayed away from the computer for a day and a half or so, read the whole thing from start to finish in the right order and i've had so many things happen it's unreal.
I'd just like to say before i start that if anyone's reading this who hasn't read the whole thing yet and is about to, i strongly advise you not to read this thread until you've read the whole thing yourself.
In other words : spoilers.
Also it's best to experience it for yourself first.
So many things happened to me whilst reading it that i'm lost for words to describe it. It was definately an initiation experience for sure. Just one more thing before i begin : this was how i interpreted some of the experience myself and obviously in no way do i think that any of my ideas are correct, it's just the way a few of the things where shown to me as i read it.
The first thing that hit me was when Jack saw Barbelith after jumping off Canary Wharf with Tom. When he was riding the bike and he saw the planet, i percieved it as Barbelith being Saturn, the first sphere past the abyss in the Kabballah. It was like it was telling me through the book that the Barbelith entity was pure understanding without the duality of the abyss and it had a deep affect on me, as if i was connecting with the hypersigil in a new way, it was pretty amazing.
Then as the story went on i felt like i was getting insights into the art of Sorcery, partly from the story about the history of Lord Fanny, but mostly from the journey of Jim Crow as he went to visit the Scorpion Loa. When he first started leaving our world for the journey i felt like i understood new things about the Nagual's interaction with the Tonal in the way that Jim felt his body solidifying. I'll have to try some work with this though before i say anything else about it just incase i'm off the mark.
The end of book 1 was when things went totally off the scale for me. I was expecting to have to get at least half way through series 2 before i started really feeling the effects but as soon as Miles got into the mind of King Mob and he says : "I'm in his mind, good God look at it!" That's when the combination of the story and the artwork started having an effect. From that point on it was as if the story had pulled me in completely, i was concerned for the characters as i was reading and seeing things unfold, i could 'feel' some things happening to me as they happened, it was as if i'd was on a mild dose of key 17 myself and the initiation had started.
From then on i was seeing the horrors of the Outer Church and the actions of the Invisibles cell appear in my minds eye as i read and my mind was Magic Mirror fighting the Archons and Demons as i read. I get really deep into stories sometimes and on this occasion it was having wild results.
The height of this was when Miss Dwyer got changed by the King of all tears in preperation for going after Kind Mob and Lord Fanny. I could feel my own body changing as she did, mirroring the change, but then as it started getting hairy and some type of negative energy actually started taking advantage of what was happening to my body, Barbelith or Magic Mirror kicked in and gave me an opposing energy that cancelled out the effects of what was happening. This also came to me again as the Archon and Dwyer where heading towards each of their battles and reality grids and nano viruses came up.
Either Barbelith, the Hypersigil, or something else was giving me insights into how a reality grid could be infected and how i could defend myself with certain types of freindly nanobots, astral shields and energies to combat the nanofactories of negative energies.
Reality and fiction had fused at this point. It didn't matter if what was coming into my head wasn't real, what mattered was that some higher energy appeared to be showing me how i could use the things shown to me in my own reality once the spell had worn off. My nagual had me and my tonal just had to do it's best to keep up.
At one point i had a short break from reading for a while and i fired off a sigil for 'greater understanding of magic'. After about five minutes i felt like i was halfway in another plane being shown part of the Tree Of Life and i was seeing Hod and Netzach in such detail that i couldn't believe it. I felt like i went from just above Yesod to Tipareth and was veiwing the whole thing unattached, watching the meeting place of the energy of the two spheres on the Tower path and seeing how they work with each other, it was unexplainable in words to be honest, but the Invisibles had helped my mind to be in this lighter state, removed from Malkuth to the point where i thought that any type of magical work would of had a better chance of positive results and would of manifested a lot faster than usual.
Anyway, after that i carried on reading through and took a walk to get some fresh air for about an hour towards the end of reading it. As i was walking around in the dark i felt like i was floating. It felt like i'd moved into another dimension and reached some type of fifth circuit, hedonic experience from Cybercraft whilst being on some type of new drug that fused acid and ecstacy. I was having insights on how the Invisibles and the Archons where just two sides of the same energy creating a new universe. How in the end maybe we'll all be the one thing that's a perfect balance of creation.
You know how it is those times when you have a Magical experience and you feel like you know the answer to the mystery but you can't put it into words after you've come down? Yeah it was one of them, but totally cool nonetheless.
I felt like i was on E after that for a while and then i went in and read the rest of it and went to sleep shortly after, exhausted from reading for so long and the combined effects of the madness, but it was a great set of experiences that i won't forget. The sheer number of influences in the story and the quality of the storytelling help to bring about magic and i also have an idea that the new language that was spoken by cell 23 contained sigils that furthered the effect of the Hypersigil.
Mind blowing stuff, i'll post back if i do any rituals/invocations that have good results. |
