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Goetia

09:15 / 23.10.01

Anyone had any experience working with the Goetia or from any other part of the Lemegeton?

15:13 / 23.10.01

Yes.

16:57 / 23.10.01

There was an extensive thread on Goetia on a earlier pre-crash version of the board.

Did anyone happen to save that thread before the relaunch?

19:25 / 23.10.01

Bill...I'll pick your brains and grill them over a beer next time we hook up...

I've wanted to try some 'cold, distanced' Ceremonial magick for a while. I guess maybe to balance up the more freestyle shamanic stuff i usually do. Came across a recent edition of the full Lemegeton edited by J.H. Peterson recently and it seems just the thing.

Had one of the guys pop up in a dream a couple of nights after i got hold of the book. In the dream i was photographing modern buildings (tripod etc) such as schools etc. I turned around and behind me was a large white 'posh' car...may have been a Rolls...don't know...Standing next to the car was a tall man in a totally white suit with a cats face...I think the door of the car may have been open...not sure...He didn't move or say a thing...I felt no inclination to get in the car or anything so i just went and took Photos of them...The woke up...

For some reason i didn't connect the cat man in the dream to the Goetia until the next night and then looked through and came up with 'Purson'
'...like a man with a lions face....and riding upon a bear'

Well i guess a bear could be a posh car.

Not sure who to evoke first but i think i'll do it 'by the book' Right day etc...

any more thoughts?

20:09 / 23.10.01

And any thoughts on the 'danger' side of it would be appretiated...The couple of experienced magicians i've talked to about it have warned thats it's 'pretty heavy stuff'

'You shouldn't try Goetian Magick until you've 'had at least 10 years of experience practicing Ceremonial Magick'...'

as one web-site put it...

I guess this is when it's interesting to compare the 'Spirit' and 'Psychological' models of magick. It proberly falls somewhere between the two to my mind. I'm quite aware that a 'psychological' demon is as dangerous as a 'spirit' one.

15:59 / 24.10.01

Sure it was a Rolls and not a Stuts Bearcat?

21:51 / 25.10.01

[The usual expressionless disclaimer: I have no direct experience with this stuff at all]I seem to remember thinking this sort of thing probably isn’t a very good idea when the subject came up originally. Everything I’ve read makes them sound bad ass, always waiting for the magician to slip up, making it a pretty dangerous exercise regardless of whether or not the experience has external reality outside of your head. [/The usual expressionless disclaimer: I have no direct experience with this stuff at all]

I’d be very interested to hear why you want to give this a shot.

10:31 / 26.10.01

Not sure that i think of them as bad ass or evil really. I tend to think that they tend to reflect, to a certain extent the attitude that you bring to them. If you work with the idea that these 'evil deamons' are just waiting to fuck you up thats proberly what you're going to get.

I agree with Crowley when he said someting along the lines of 'If you hold a mirror up to muck you get muck' as a bitchy response to Waites' writing about the Goetia being evil.

If you go around evoking these things to cause havoc on an ex-girlfriend or some bloke who spilt yer pint then it's proberly you not the goetia who's evil or bad-ass...(oh boy!!Gun Law discussion coming up...get Heston on-line now!!!)

Having said that i think that any spirit work needs an element of respect. I guess the way i'm approching it is somewhere between the 'Spirit' Model and the 'Psychological' Model...

As to why i'm interested in this...You havn't met my ex-girlfriend...The bitch.

11:30 / 26.10.01

Mm, definately worth discussing over a beer, but if you're around a bookshop then My Life With The Spirits by Lon Milo DuQuette is a very good, and very, very funny account of year's of Goetia experience. A Thelemite with a RAW sense of humour and a balanced view of the system, basically.

Dave Lee in Chaotopia says that in his experience, the Goetia is the worst system when it come to 'unintended effects'.

IME, I've had more of the 'unpredictability problem' with more 'fluffy' systems. The Goetia stuff I've been involved with had a relatively low success rate, but that may have been the group as a whole rather than the system at fault somehow.