20♱C♱M♱B♱20

By Frater S.C.F.V.

Last year, I published a detailed article on a variety of folk magical traditions and rituals surrounding the blessed Feast of Epiphany.

Today, I celebrated the Feast as per tradition, with the doorway chalking ritual, house exorcisms and blessings, and offerings to the Lord to commemorate the Gifts of the Magi to the Holy One Who Was And Is To Come.

I spent the day in service to the poor and people with cognitive and physical disabilities and illnesses to symbolize Christ’s Gifts to the least fortunate members of society.

In addition, I took this hallowed opportunity to clean my dedicated Temple and exorcise, bless, and reconsecrate all of the water goblets I use for Offerings to the Most High on behalf of my spiritual Court.

Thereafter, I made fresh Offerings and took time for communion with the Divine and reconnection with my Ancestors, Patron Angels, and Olympic Spirits. Stepping out of the business of daily life to stand in the Holy and Eternal space of the Spirits with nourishing and inspired a deep sense of peace in the tumult of the day.

Finally, I used this sacred Epiphany to exorcise my Pentagonall Figure of Solomon, about which Joseph H. Peterson’s (2019) edition of the Lemegeton’s Goetia states:

“This figure is to be made in Sol or Luna and worne upon the brest with the seal of the spirit on one [the other] side of itt. It is for to preserve [the Exorcist] from danger, and allso to command by &c.“

My own Pentagonall Figure was finely crafted by Adley’s Magical Art out of gold-plated brass. Since the grimoire allows “Sun or Luna” and the Day of Epiphany fell on the Day of Luna this year, I exorcised, blessed, and consecrated it on the Day of Luna.

How did you spend your Day of Epiphany? I’d love to hear from you in the comments below.

Benediction:

As the Magi gifted Christ with Myrrh, Frankincense, and Gold, may the Lord bless, increase, gift and guide you and all you care for out of the infinite riches of His Grace. SHEM YESHUAH, Amen!

An Untraditional Golden Dawn Banishing Dagger

Hello dear friends,

I hope you are all doing well! After 7 years since I joyfully served as Ceremonial Magic Moderator here at our beloved Occult Corpus, I’ve finally found my way back home to OC. It feels good to be back and see these insightful posts from all of you again!

During my time away, I was studying the Eastern traditions and was initiated into Zen through Myokyo Zenji, into Advaita Vedanta through Swami Omkarananda and into Kashmir Shaivism through shaktipat diksha from Swami Swarupananda Mahamandaleshwar Maharaj. I was also continuing my studies in therapy and social work and working with survivors of the Holocaust and older adults in palliative care; social work is, for me, my focus of Rosicrucian healing work and service. Finally, after doing some extensive Jungian ‘active imagination’ work, I’ve returned to the Western Mystery tradition to study and practice Qabalah, magic, astral alchemy, tarot, skrying, and pathworking once again.

Now, onto the topic of this thread: Have any of you created any unconventional or untraditional implements of your own in your ceremonial work?

If so and you would be willing to share them, I would love to see what you’ve created and hear about the rationale behind it.

To begin the conversation, here is a dagger I recently created for use in banishing and invoking Pentagram and Hexagram work in the G.D. tradition. As you may know, in the G.D., a dagger with a simple black handle is generally used for this purpose, unadorned with symbolism. This is what I used in the past. Recently, however, I felt inspired to push this teaching a little further. Chic Cicero is the only G.D. adept I know of who sometimes adds symbols to his banishing/invoking daggers; he uses the Eye of Horus because Horus is the Godform of the Hiereus in the Outer Order and the Banishing dagger is symbolically linked to the Hiereus Sword.

I accept that idea and integrated it as well, but I wished to go further by bringing in pentagrammatic elemental alchemical symbolism (for Pentagram work) and planetary hexagrammic symbolism (for Hexagram work) as well as some Enochian and Grimoiric aspects.

As you can see in the pictures, the front side of the dagger handle features the pentagram with the sigils of the alchemical elements, the hexagram with the sigils of the planets, the Eye of Horus, the word LVX, and my own version of John Dee’s Enochian PELE Solomonic ring, with the PELE letters translated into Enochian instead of being written in English.

The back side of the dagger includes the first letters of my magical Motto written in Enochian script. The use of Enochian is untraditional, but the writing of one’s motto on the dagger handle is fairly traditional. What is very untraditional here, but works well for me, is the use of two sigils, one from the Black-Handled Knife of the Key of Solomon and one from the White-Handled Knife, symbolizing banishing and invoking powers respectively to balance these dual aspects of ritual work that I intend to use the dagger for.

The result is an elementally, planetarily, and Solomonically balanced ritual implement for general planetary and elemental banishing and invoking work.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this untraditional approach and see examples of your own untraditional implements if any.

In LVX,
Frater S. C. F. V.