“Second Person” Now Available for Preorder!

I am very pleased to announce that my first book of poetry, “Second Person,” has been published by Finishing Line Press and is available for preorder now. Please click the above link and scroll down to “Dunn,” where you can find it.

Preorders determine print run, so if you can preorder, it’d help me out quite a lot. Moreover, you get a discount on shipping, I believe, if you preorder from the publisher.

This book of poetry concerns the mystical connection we have with our world as a “thou” rather than an “it.” It’s about not only the relationship between self and other, but between Self and Other.

Heads, In and Out and Inside Out

Jason Miller writes on the current bloghaha about whether or not magic is all in your head.

Lon Milo DuQuette has asserted, for some time, that it’s all in your head . . . but you have no idea how big your head is.  The myriad misinterpretations of this statement surpass imagining.

Let me try to have an epigram as pithy:

It’s all in your mind, but your mind isn’t in your head, because your head is in your mind.

Or is my head in something else?

Domesticated

You know you’ve become a domesticated magician when you see a post about “Buying a New Deck” and you immediately think “Oh, cool, I wonder if they hired a contractor or built it themselves . . . “

Happy 2012

I am peeking out from my stack of books to wish you all a happy 2012.  The holidays are over, and now it’s nearly time to get back to work.  Of course, I have been at work, hard at work on a new book.  It’s extremely exciting stuff and I’m kind of twitter-pated about the  thing.  I think it’ll be tremendously useful when it’s done, and it’s sure to annoy all sorts of people in the magical community — annoy them productively, I hope, because it’s about a branch of magic that has been all but ignored in modern ceremonial and pagan magical traditions: theurgy.

The best part about being an occult author is that each book acts as an incentive to learn.  You have to pull together what you know, revisit old experiments you haven’t done in years, try new things you’ve never done so you can write about them, and so on.  Right now I’m busy memorizing barbarous words of evocation from a spell in the PGM (yes, you have to memorize them — sorry, but it’s where I get strict.  Others harp on visual evocation, but for me, it’s this: you have to memorize.  The notecard is not a magical tool). Even the act of preparing for some of these rituals is powerful.

Of course, because I’m committed to banging out 1000 to 2000 words every single day, on top of all my other work as my winter vacation ends, I don’t have much time to blog.  But I’ll try to keep a bit more active now that the holidays are over.

Sacred Geometry Workshop

I had the great good fortune to take a workshop this weekend with John Michael Greer on sacred geometry.  I think it was incredibly productive.  I learned a lot, and JMG is one of relatively few contemporary magicians who doesn’t set off my bullshit detector at all.  Considering the topic of sacred geometry is a minefield of absolute bullshit, that says a lot.

I’ve found several new ways to incorporate sacred geometry into my practice.  I find it very productive so far, and hopefully will continue to do so.

If you get a chance to take a seminar with Greer, do it.

Ephesia coincidence

So after posting on the Ephesia grammata, I find that my beloved has given me a reproduction of the famous statue of Artemis of Ephesus for our anniversary.  Purest coincidence.  But a pretty cool one.  I think she must approve.

Ephesia Grammata

From diverse ancient sources, we know that on the cult statue of Artemis at Ephesus, there were six words inscribed in Greek script:

askion kataskion lix tetrax damnameneus aisia

What these six words mean is a matter of considerable speculation, if they mean anything at all.  They may simply be barbarous words of invocation, devoid of meaning, although their use is clear.  They were a spoken phalactary, a protective spell, an alexipharmika.

Chester McCown suggests that they may be the names of six separate and distinct daimones.  I’m not so sure, other than in the sense that a magical word is often treated as a being in its own right by classical magicians.  If they are a list of magical beings, then perhaps they represent six daimon servants of Artemis.

If you wish to experiment with the grammata, they are pronounced as follows (at least, approximately — it’s hard to describe another language’s pronunciation without using IPA):

askion (/a/ and /i/ as in Spanish, short o, accent on the first syllable)

kataskion (same as above, accent on second syllable)

lix (short i)

tetrax (short e, accent on final syllable)

damnameneus (short e, eu like a blend between an eh and the French u, accent on last syllable)

aisia (vowels as in Spanish, accent on first syllable)

Signs of Success

DMK, as usual, has an interesting post on his blog about the signs of success in ritual: not that you get what you want, but hints that you’ve done magic before anything manifests at all.  He describes two signs: a change in temperature, and a change in time perception.

I have never experienced either of those things in ritual.  No, not even the warping of time perception, which is common enough in day-to-day life.

What I have experienced that lets me know I’m on the right track is a subjective sensation of intense euphoria.  It’s similar, but not quite the same, as the euphoria I feel at having finished a creative project.  I think it might be related to the idea of Flow.  But again, I’ve experienced Flow while writing or hiking and this isn’t quite the same.

The other indicator is a striking coincidence.  Usually it’s not so direct as do a spell for money, find a crumpled up twenty on the sidewalk.  That’d make me think maybe I didn’t specify quantity clearly enough.  But say you do a spell for money, then immediately turn on the radio and hear this:

It’s not unusual for people related to the purpose of the spell to call out of the blue, or for objects somehow related to the goal in my house to fall or end up in odd places.  Once, a wand I was working on for a friend fell from a table during a ritual invocation; on another occasion, after a particularly intense invocation, I heard a person talking on their cell phone in such a way that everything they said was exactly relevant to what I had asked for.  Obviously, these things can be coincidences.  Vibrations from the nearby train may have jostled the wand from the table.  I might have noticed a conversation that seemed relevant, but not noticed the ones that weren’t.  Confirmation bias seems a likely cause.  And yet . . . in the midst of it, it’s hard not to see a link.

So — temperature changes?  Nope.  Time stretching or compression?  No.  Visual manifestations?  Almost never.  Not for me, anyway.  For me, it’s synchronicity and euphoria.  What is it for you?

Ngrams are Addictive

Google has a new Ngram tool, which searches Google Books as a corpus of English.  An Ngram, if you don’t know, is a graphic plot of the frequency of tokens in a corpus.  From it, one can draw — oh, all kinds of conclusions, some valid, some ridiculous.  But you can point out interesting correlations.  For example, take a look at this one:

Magic Energy

Notice that “magic” stays mostly steady at the bottom, and “energy” rises dramatically in the middle of the twentieth century?  What does that tell you?

Or how about this one:

Wicca

Now, of course, if you read this closely, you’ll see those numbers on the left-hand side are small, so don’t make much of this statistically, but it’s an interesting toy.

Magick

See that little tophat right there in the line, around 1900?  Who do you think is responsible for that?

ETA:  As a commentator points out, this is a little early for Crowley’s publications.  Yet there is a bit of a spike.  You can search for specific years, and in doing so, I found that they were mostly citations of some of the older stuff.  I wonder — could a young Crowley (about 25 at the time) have run into such citations and been inspired by them?  Meh, it’s all speculation, but it’s kind of neat anyway.

Serendipity

You know, now that I look into the nature of the plant mimosa, the more I think “accidentally” burning it during my ritual of Mercury wasn’t a mistake.  It’s one of the few plants that can move in response to stimulus: is that Saturnine or is it Mercurial?  Mimosa teniuflora is used in Ayauasca brews, according to Wikipedia.  Again: there’s Mercurius as psychopomp.

Since we like to use lavender for a lot of day-to-day applications around this house (it’s a wonderful antiseptic), I’d like to find a different scent for Mercurial magic.  But then what do I use for Saturn?  Any suggestions?  Ideally, something in the Morning Star line, because it’s such good incense, but failing that I’ll just find some myrrh.

One way or ‘nother, I want to find something by a week from Saturday, since that’s when I’m scheduled to evoke a particular Saturnine Olympick spirit.

Smelling Good

I used to make my own incense for magic, and while it’s nice and all, I have a job now.  So I’ve been looking around for planetary-appropriate incenses.  I like to find readily available, common scents, rather than pre-made blends, so that I can grow to associate particular scents with particular planets or elements.  My favorite brand is Morning Star.

A lot of tables of correspondence for the elementary perfumes are — old.  I’m not going to burn tobacco as a perfume of Mars, and I’ll be if I’m going to muck about with charcoal for a simple ritual.  Perhaps something elaborate and impressive and once-a-year, but I do magic all the time.  I don’t want to deal with the headache of charcoal every other day.  I’m an American: I want stuff prepackaged and easy to find, please, so I can get on with it.

My current personal correspondences for scents and planets are these:

Moon — Gardenia

Mercury — Lavender

Venus — Rose

Sun — Cinnamon

Mars — Pine

Jupiter — Cedar

Saturn — Mimosa

These are all easy to come by and more or less evocative of their planets.  I’m not entirely pleased with Mercury or Saturn (in fact, yesterday, I accidentally burned Mimosa rather than Lavender and didn’t even notice until today, when I looked at the box — maybe that explains why yesterday’s ritual took so long, although it was successful in the end).  I really like myrrh for Saturn, but that’s hard to find.  They used to make an opium incense which worked great for Mercury, but it’s hard to find and Morning Star, as far as I can tell, doesn’t carry it.

What are your correspondences?  And where do you get your incense?