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A Year of DMK?

 
  

Page: 12(3)

 
 
Trijhaos
15:10 / 15.06.02
Go's away?

Go's away??!

If only that were true. Kraig tries to stick a mention of grey magick in at least once per page.

I think I'll just ignore his whole, "Do a tarot reading before you do anything, you don't want to fall into doing black magick" thing. I'll be damned if I let Kraig ass-rape my magickal creativity
 
 
Perfect Tommy
15:13 / 15.06.02
I forgot to mention: I've been perusing Modern Magic and Liber KKK side by side. And I tell ya, I strongly believe that Liber KKK will be a much, much richer experience if we've done our homework with Modern Magic first. Hope you're still with us, Riz.
 
 
Perfect Tommy
15:16 / 15.06.02
Heh. I guess I meant "goes away" in the sense of "yes, I know it's really thick right here--soon that part of your brain shorts out and you will hear only soothing music."

Seriously though, I've read some really bad newage (rhymes with sewage), and the earliest black/white/grey could put someone off the book, when it's not that grotesque the whole way through by any means.
 
 
Trijhaos
18:47 / 15.06.02
You're right. It's not like Kraig is saying, "Now take your cutsie, wutise bunny idol and hold it up to the sun, after five minutes, it should be charged with happy fairy power"
 
 
Strange Machine Vs The Virus with Shoes
19:13 / 15.06.02
I just need a tarot set and a couple of diary books then I'm ready to roll. The first problem for me might be the dream diary. Like a lot of people I wake up and have about 5 minutes to get ready and go to work, but I'm sure I'll persevere( I have been doing a little training on this aspect).
 
 
Trijhaos
19:15 / 15.06.02
You could get a little tape recorder and dictate your dreams when you first wake up and then write them down later when you get time.

I wish time were my problem. Whenever I set out a notebook so I can record any, I don't remember crap. This is going to be a very difficult exercise.
 
 
Strange Machine Vs The Virus with Shoes
20:04 / 15.06.02
Thats a damn good idea Trijhoas.

One thing I tried for a while was a excercise in a book called The way of the artist. On waking you write 5 pages of what comes into your head, I would usually remember my dream about half way through and write that.

Alot of the time I can remember a dream but cant seem to write it, when I get the pen in my hand the dream seems to evaporate from my mind, however there is the get out clause of writing that you can't remember the dream , it will probably come with time.
 
 
solid~liquid onwards
08:10 / 16.06.02
im still in ^_^

ive just finised school and im working 5 days a week, 9 hours aday, from 12 to 9 :P

oddly this seems to be beter for magic and such practices, cos ive got so little free time, im making the most of it. ive already got a dream/magic diary, but the poor thing hs been a bit neglected...but the past few days ive started practicing OBE/astral projection again (the long mornings seem best for me) so my little paper friends getting more nourishment :P
 
 
The Return Of Rothkoid
11:57 / 16.06.02
OK. I want to get in, but need some tips. What I'm needing is this, right?

1) Tarot deck. Got.
2) Modern Magick : Eleven Lessons in the High Magickal Arts by Donald Michael Kraig.
and
3) which Carroll books for later?

PM me, someone. I'm an idiot, and just can't seem to glean exactly what I need. I'll go to Watkins and pick up what's needed ASAP. With money I don't have, but - maybe some Gek work will help out sometime.

I'm up for this as part of my life alteration. It's two days after my appeal at work, so I should be cleared - I'll at least know what's going on then... though I'll be participating from Australia...

Also, I was just wondering - I flicked through a copy of Cicero's this. It's Llewellyn and gets so-so reviews.. but I don't know. I've some Hine: is that a better start?

Sorry for the rot.
 
 
ghadis
14:56 / 16.06.02
The Peter Carroll book with KKK (which it seems people are planning to move on to) in is Liber Kaos...

Don't know about the Cicero book. The only thing i've read by them is the lenthy and annoyingly bad commentries to Israel Regardies' classic book on Qabala 'The Garden of Pomegranates'

Do you really want to get into the Goldan Dawn tradition anyway? Whilst it's based on sound occult practices and traditions such as Qabala, Tarot, Astrology etc it does seem to pad everything out so much that you end up spending much more time memorizing stuff that doing any actual magick...

If i was you i'd stick with Hine and Carroll and this Modern Magick book (which i haven't read but does seem like a good all round introduction to the more traditional stuff...again ignore all the black and white tripe). I'd also recommend getting a cheap copy of Crowleys' 'Magick' from Ebay. They often seem to have copies going for around a tenner and it's about £50 in the shop.

If you're starting from scratch on the Tarot try and get a good book on it as well. Theres so many shit Tarot books around and you don't want to looking out for a 'Tall dark haired man over 40' every time you pull a Knight of Swords...Mind you you can proberly leave the Tarot book out as the Barbelith Tarot is one of the best thing i've read on the subject!!
 
 
Boy in a Suitcase
15:57 / 17.06.02
Anybody who actually wants to study tarot and qabalah, with no bullshit and a near-chaos (for emphasis on personal technique and interpretation) approach should get Gareth Knight's "A Practical Guide to Qabalistic Symbolism" which is in one volume in the States.
 
 
Boy in a Suitcase
02:42 / 18.06.02
By the way, four more days, right? Everybody got your book and you tarot cards??
 
 
betty woo
13:20 / 18.06.02
Book: check (although tracking the bloody thing down became a quest unto itself, including a very painful bike ride up a steep hill in the rain...)

Tarot: Uh, I have a Thoth deck that I've been using for years, but I feel as though I ought to pick up a new deck for this project. But then, I also think the Rider deck is ug-ly. Anyone have suggestions?
 
 
Trijhaos
13:39 / 18.06.02
Book? Tarot cards?

Crap! I knew there was something I forgot

I have the book, two notebooks for the ritual and dream diaries, and I have a thoth tarot deck. Yes, yes, I know. Kraig says that the thoth tarot deck isn't acceptable because its "too complex in symbolism", but it's all I've got.
 
 
Perfect Tommy
14:58 / 18.06.02
You're specifically avoiding reading ahead, right Ms. Woo? Somewhere in Lesson 1 Kraig suggests that the Golden Dawn Tarot, the BOTA Tarot, and the Hermetic Tarot are the most appropriate, anything based on the Rider-Waite is acceptable -- basically, he just wants you avoiding anything with a non-standard number of major/minor arcana.

I think the Rider deck is pretty ugly too. But it seemed the most like an archetypal "I AM A TAROT DECK" tarot deck to me, so I got that one instead of the Alice-in-Wonderland set I thought was more fun.
 
 
paw
15:11 / 18.06.02
got the book cheaply on e-bay, purchased the rider deck on the advice of the magick posse. I am fully functional and ready for combat
 
 
betty woo
17:36 / 18.06.02
Thanks, Thomas. I'm thinking I'll go with the BOTA deck, if I can find it - it's still not very pretty, but at least you get to color it in yourself.
 
 
Stone Mirror
22:15 / 18.06.02
Ms. Woo writes I also think the Rider deck is ug-ly. Anyone have suggestions?

I like David Palladini's Aquarian Tarot Deck, which is based (more or less) on the Rider, but with much nicer artwork. I also like The Spiral Tarot...
 
 
Trijhaos
22:25 / 18.06.02
Check out this site. It's got pictures and reviews of a number of decks.
 
 
Boy in a Suitcase
22:55 / 18.06.02
Here in the US, "U.S. Game Systems" (which is the country's main source of tarot cards) stocks most major bookstores with a sampler display of their decks, with sample cards from each one speared on d-rings for perusal. Borders and Barnes & Noble [conspiracy factoid of the day: both of these chain stores are owned by ONE company, which also owns Ingram, the only real book distributor in the country!] should have this.

The main problem with the Thoth deck is that Crowley, being Crowley, tried to bend the whole thing to fit his system when he helped design them. Specifically, he switches out the positions of the Emperor and the Star (which can evidentally be supported qabalistically and was prompted by a section of the Book of the Law where AIWASS says "All those old letters in my book are right, but Tzaddi [Hebrew letter corresponding to path 28] is not the Star." However this throws things all out of kilter unless you're doing specifically Thelemic magick, and although Modern Magick incorporates some Crowleyan ritual (specifically his "Liber Resh" exercises), it's mainly the rituals of the Golden Dawn–so using the Thoth deck would be very confusing.

Personally, my first Tarot deck was the Rider-Waite. I shoplifted it from a mall bookstore in white-trash mecca Santee, California when I was 14 and still wearing a trenchcoat in 90º weather. I looked at it a bit, decided it really was an ugly piece of shit, and sold it to a friend at school the next day for five bucks and went and bought a pack of Skittles and a Dr. Pepper. The next time I decided to buy a deck was when I was 16 and decided I really wanted to do da magick, inspired by old Hellblazers and Colin Wilson's "The Occult." Modern Magick was the first real book I picked up (my friend Andrew had bought one and traded it to me for some others books because he didn't like it–since it was, in his words, "Jew magic." Ahh, SoCal) and it said to go out and buy some cards, so I had to go out and actually buy the Rider-Waite again because I'd developed at least some inkling of a conscience by that time, and then convince my parents that "I only liked the art..." Of course this excuse was flimsy because, yes, the art was utter shit and I hated the things so much that I never learned tarot and rejected the whole Modern Magick system, which led me to the evil clutches of "Liber Null & Psychonaut," but that's another story... four years later, I found myself in the exact same position of "well, I'm really going to have to learn some tarot now," so, digging the same ganky, geeky pack out of the closet, I proceeded to learn the fuckers for once and for all, only to discover–hey! The art is still shit but it doesn't matter, these things rule!

The best thing to do, anyway, is to learn a pack first and then design your own. Everybody seems to agree that the art is all arbitrary, is founded on questionable tradition, and is usually butt-ugly. What I want to do, now, is learn the Rider-Waite fully, navigating the symbols of each card to the specific esoteric meaning of each so that I can then filter that specific meaning back out through my consciousness and my own mental symbol-set and create a pack that perfectly suits my own consciousness... this is the kind of thing that everybody should have enough knowledge to do after doing "Modern Magick." You can always make a pack without any qabalistic structure, just off the top of your head, also–Spare gives some instructions for this in his "Zoetic Grimoire of Zos."

Anyway, I guess the point of all this is that I would think of learning a basic tarot deck like the Rider-Waite as a preliminary step towards making your own; but that the underlying structure should probably be learned first, and the Thoth Deck is working off a structure that doesn't work with Modern Magick.
 
 
Trijhaos
23:52 / 18.06.02
So basically:

thoth = bad
rider-waite = yay!

Well this is going to be fun.

I'll see if I can come up with 10 dollars for the mini rider-waite tarot deck, because I don't want to totally mess up before I really get started because I used the thoth deck instead of a "traditional" one.
 
 
paw
00:50 / 20.06.02
Trij. are still on for at least giving general/go as fast as you can on your own time/read this chapter for this week etc. pointers? please? is this thread gonna be ground zero for discussions, progress etc. etc.


o.k kids not long now. on your marks, get set
 
 
Trijhaos
01:48 / 20.06.02
This thread will certainly not be ground zero for discussion and the like. Do you know how unwieldly it would become once we started getting up to lesson 6 or so?

Someone suggested, I believe it was grant, that this be structured like the tarot and rune threads and I'm thinking that's the best way to go. One thread per lesson and once we start getting up to lesson six or so, an index thread can be started.
 
 
Wrecks City-Zen
03:13 / 20.06.02
My 2 cents on the Aquarian Tarot...

Honestly, I have used the same Aquarian deck for 8 years and I am constantly amazed by the new images I find in the cards each time I look. For example: The Star (17) and The Lovers (6) connect together ( You have to see it to believe it...The law of 23) The King of Pentacles and The Knight of Pentacles when together form a third image...not to mention the Chariot, and...I'm giving away too much. I have tried other decks but I return within hours to my original partner in divination.(I have never really gotten into the Toth deck, like others I know.) As well, in the Aquarian deck, the journey of the FOOL is more apparent as s/he constantly appears in each card, in one form or the other.

My 2 cents.
 
 
Wrecks City-Zen
03:16 / 20.06.02
PS: Does it have to be the Second Edition?

I can't wait.
 
 
Perfect Tommy
04:25 / 20.06.02
The only difference between the first and second editions is the addition of a FAQ based on questions he's gotten -- nothing crucial.
 
 
Trijhaos
12:06 / 20.06.02
Yep, the only differences is the faq at the end, and maybe the cover. I've never seen a first edition. Does the first edition have a funny cover too?

The faq really isn't all that great.

"I don't feel anything when I do rituals. Does that mean they are not working"

"I'm a wiccan. Aren't ceremonial magick traditions and the Kabalah patriarchal"
 
 
Wrecks City-Zen
21:59 / 20.06.02
Yeah, the cover is pretty funny
...hee hee....
 
 
The Return Of Rothkoid
00:09 / 21.06.02
Well, I've got my copy now. I'm still in two minds - largely because of the atrocious cover art - but I figure it's a good way to break on through... so bring it on!

(I may be a little slower on the uptake because of my relocation, but I'll be there...)
 
 
Melissa & Ev
00:10 / 21.06.02
Hi, sorry for the late response but I'd also like to join the group. I have a copy of Modern Magick, an Aquarian Tarot deck and two journals ready and am looking forward to beginning in the morning.
 
 
Trijhaos
00:23 / 21.06.02
I just picked up a rider-waite deck today. I'm horrified by it. It's so damned ugly. Of course, I suppose the way it looks shouldn't matter as long as it does the job.
 
  

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