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This was fantastic, I loved it, you have enlightened me!!!Hi, Soror Epihania!
Darn it! I had hoped I could just drop , in full, the "Neoplatonic / Orphic Wrathful Buddhas" and nobody would ever ask. I never want to take away people's own discovery and explorations. This is my shorthand for part of what they do.
OK, this is following wordy mess is my attempt to find a way to describe what they seem to do on a spiritual level. This is only one of their aspects and it took me a long time to see it. Other aspects of theirs very much maps to Hellenic underworld sublunar daimons who grant wishes. Why? I have no idea except that they too have sublunar bodies and have ' mixed' natures, like all things in the tempestuous astral flux. (And also why you can help them have cooler / calmer bodies by what you give them to stabilize their form around)
So yes, the GV daimons can be used for sorcery, which is what I did for many years. I did not know the daimons have a spiritual dimension until many years later, seeing how I'd changed for the better.
OK, to describe that spiritual effect, I'm drawing on the combined lenses of Neoplatonism, Orphic myth, Vajrayana Buddhism, and 15th-century Catholic theology. The demonolatry folks call this spiritual aspect "a Tower Moment" (for the tarot card), and for me the effect it seems similar to the effect you get from the Headless Rite, which functions as an exorcism ritual. In each case the fierce beings called are soteriological - they are an instrument of deliverance, operating within a specific theological economy of salvation or liberation.
Again, this is my best attempt to map my experiences and those of others - not to build a new religion, not to claim historical accuracy, but simply to give language to something that happens, to me, to others.
In the Orphic tradition, this "Titanic soot" is the ashen residue of the primordial dismemberment left over from when the Titans tore apart Dionysus Zagreus, consumed his flesh, and were summarily annihilated by the thunderbolt from Papa Zeus. Humanity was born from their smoldering remains, so we carry within us both a divine fragment — the undying spark of Dionysus (or Christ / Logos, in another mythic framework) - and a heavy, obscuring crust or soot of Titanic materiality ("Original Sin" in Catholic spirituality). This "soot" is the sediment of aeons composed of raw instinct, unexamined pride, and accumulated trauma, and it always pulls us back into the primordial soup of unconsciousness and dissolving us into unthinking, bestial and reactive impulses.
If we look at this through the Vajrayana lens, this soot / sin corresponds directly to karmic obscurations and the five poisons - attachment, aversion, delusion, pride, and envy. The Dionysian / Christic spark, by contrast, is the Tathagatagarbha, the indestructible Buddha-nature, which in Western terms is the Imago Dei, the image of God in our soul. The soot is accidental to one's true nature, an accretion, not essence.
I see the Orphic Dionysus as a refigurative type of Christ. The Titans tearing Dionysus apart translates directly to the Passion of Christ - the soldiers tearing His flesh, the breaking of His body on the Cross. The "Soot" is not just your sin, it's your participation in the primordial betrayal. You are also the Titan who consumed the divine flesh.
This brings us to the Grimorium Verum daimons, which we can see as Wrathful Herukas and a manifestation (in part) of the Thunderbolt of Zeus / God. (FYI, Herukas are fully enlightened Buddhas. They are not demigods, angels, or intermediate beings. They are Buddhas - fully awakened ones - who choose to manifest in wrathful form for specific compassionate purposes.) Remember the daimons are also are more than this, so this is just part of the package deal.
The daimons of the GV don't conform at all to the medieval Christian narrative of petty, malicious spirits. They are best understood, I feel, not as devils but as intermediate hypostases- precisely as Iamblichus and the Chaldean Oracles describe them: shards of the Divine Intellect (Nous) dispatched downward to shatter "crust" or burn off the hardened "soot" of our soul. (This is also not to erase pure animist nature-based models, but to extend them to the real of consiouness, but without 20th century psychology.)
I like calling them Neoplatonic - Orphic Wrathful Buddhas, it softens the Catholic language , which is usually not done justice in modern occulture for it's mystical sophistication.
For those operating within the Western current we can translate the theological language of the culture that produced the Grimorium Verum, the Hellenic-influenced Catholicism of 14th- to 16th-century Italy. Using a Catholic Hermeneutic they 'are' (or can usefully be thought of) the Angels of Penitence and the Fire of Purgatory. (Again they are also sublunar being so have "mixed natures" like all of us. They are just good at seeing who we are in our soul, under our egoic shells. I think they benefit from buvring it off and having a newly minted divinitized human friend, but that is my personal gnosis. And to be clear you still have more growing, integration , and some work to do after they clear the soot from your eyes. The Underworld Inititation just means a begininng, here. It took me a few years after mine. )
OK, a GV daimon is not a fallen angel or hellspawn. The GV was born in Late Medieval / Early Modern and very Hellenic Catholic frame, I think they (or some?) can be mapped to a "lower "manifestation as an Angel of Penitence, a Virtus Ignis Divini (Power of Divine Fire), permitted by God to act as a scorching minister of purification. This is the same order of being as the Angel who wrestled Jacob at Peniel, dislocating his thigh and als blessing him with a new nature and a transformed identity. We might think of that angel as a Wrathful Buddha of the Old Covenant.
In Catholic theology of this period (Aquinas, Cajetan, Bellarmine), the "soot" is not a metaphor, it is the Fomes Peccati (the kindling or fuel of sin) - the disordered concupiscence (as disordered desire, inordinate appetite, and unruly passions - the main no-nos of Catholicism and Buddhism alike.) but here, in this mythic framework, it "is" the left overs from Original Sin. Furthermore, it is the Macula (the stain) that obscures the Imago Dei (Image of God) in the soul.
The purifying fire corresponds to the Active Grace of the Holy Ghost in the form the Pentecostal fire. Saint Thomas Aquinas designates the Holy Spirit as the Ignis Divinu, a fire that gently warms the humble but burns the proud. Believe me, I was that proud. Again this is not to say they are they same. The daimon serves as the proximate instrument, the Holy Ghost remains the Primary Agent.
In this interpretation I'm drawing on Saint Catherine of Genoa the 15th-century Italian mystic who taught that the fire of Purgatory is nothing other than the love of God, so intensely loving that it incinerates everything in the soul that is not God.
To be clear, they will still do all the sorcerous things like destroy your enemies, but you then just might grow out of it. Such evocations then work as an invitation for the fire of Purgatory to operate within your own very temporal life. (Rather like the classic vampire they have to be invited in, heh! ) You are taking an Underworld journey here, with the GV . It all just goes with the territory, and the Catholic and Orphic ideas work very well as a conceptual handles for the practice, and to be aware of what you are getting into.
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OK, I know this will sound crazy. You might just be "taken" , healed and given weird powers. I keep meaning to write about this, but it makes me look insane , on drugs, or I like am lying. But also note I also never plan to sell books and occult courses, so nobody is being herded. I just hope to encourage others to take up the GV as a practice.
One of the weird thing they might give you is Discernment of Spirits and Perceptual Acuity (the "Vajra Eye") - a heightened sensitivity to the "density" of persons in space-time. You can see where an individual carries ancestral or karmic weight, and discern how their soul wrestles with it's moral choices. And you can see which course of action they will take, even while you'd hope they take the better path.
This was handy when I was working at one of the largest and most famous tech companies in the world, when I could see what people would do when they wrestled with the Angel of their Better Nature (not literally here) or if they even did at all, or if they we're thoroughly vile and evil. That was very weird at first, but strategially handy when surrounded by psychopaths.
You also become very calm. Crises no longer trigger a reflexive fight-or-flight response very much. You become calm and compassionate.
There is also a third effect that surprised me: a loss of the fear of death. It was just... gone.
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Gah! That is all a bit heavy-handed. The problem with articulating all this is it gets tuned up to 11 in people's brains. Remember, they are still sublunar beings... and are of mixed natures. They will still do all the magic and sorcerous things. They'll make you a better person along the way, I have found.
Many things to ponder and research. Thank you!