Through The Grapevine

[Pyrokar]

Im on the hunt for juicy magick/occult anecdotes
Both from your personal experiences and/or those you read or heard about known occultists or a friend of a friend type thing.
Hell even fictional is fine, as many as you got. Gimmie that good stuff i know you've been saving.


In my example i remember hearing about a girl who kept plants in her room and named each after her close friends
When any of the plants would look wrong she would call the friend in question and usually be right about them being in some sort of distress

Post automatically merged: Nov 12, 2023

This also applies to any funky magick-y events that happened to you without openly trying to achieve it
like signs omens or something that turned out relevant later

I count my first communication with an entity as an accident, i was sitting in my room and thinking
"Ok so without the bs, if a (insert spirit) were actually trying to reach me what might be stopping them?"
Without skipping a beat to my mind came an image of a browser, and it focused in on the url section
The mouse, as if by a teamspeak/phantom hand casually double clicked, backspaced and typed
"I have no where to sit..."
I blinked, look around at the mess and thought, damn that's facts this is a pigsty.
-Ever since i always do a quick clean up before i start anything. Works everytime.

 

[DiLoco_DelEted]

I went to evoke Lucifer one night.
I opened the sigil, had a yellow candle and frankincense burning, and waited.
No sign.
I blew out the candle and snuffed the incense. I laid down on my bed.
I was instantly pulled halfway down my bed and obviously startled.
I don't recall issuing any charge.
The next day did my usual banishing routine and did not try Lucifer again.

 

[Xenophon]

The response is surprisingly sparse thus far. I'm tempted to recycle an old episode of "Baywatch Nights" where Mitch exorcises Satan himself by fistfighting His Dark Eminence... Durn...tipped my hand.

The one good anecdote I have is, unfortunately, fraught with ambiguity. After all lots of people have heart attacks simply through natural means. Mine followed the conclusion of a (I now see, slipshod) working against what I 'spect was the wrong guy to mess with, much as his ilk merits it. But said Anfall also followed some years too indulgent a diet and a propensity for hard white liquors. So, once one figures in all relevant detail, he has a lame ass story left over. A big "maybe."

 

[Roma]

Long ago I had the idea that I had no personal karma - without any obvious reason.

And I thought that motor vehicle accidents were karmic.

So I asked in my meditation: If I have no personal karma, how come I have had some vehicle collisions?

They replied instantly: You will observe that everything you hit was stationary at the time. That is not karma. That is carelessness.

And when I reviewed the various accidents they were right.

I was impressed that they had all my history at their instant access.

 

[Xenophon]

Long ago I had the idea that I had no personal karma - without any obvious reason.

And I thought that motor vehicle accidents were karmic.

So I asked in my meditation: If I have no personal karma, how come I have had some vehicle collisions?

They replied instantly: You will observe that everything you hit was stationary at the time. That is not karma. That is carelessness.

And when I reviewed the various accidents they were right.

I was impressed that they had all my history at their instant access.

Yes, poor old karma gets blamed for a lot of avoidable mistakes. I knew an old NCO in the Army who professed marvel that, in his youth, "It was always the stoners who never saw trip-wired."

 

[8Lou1]

i once, well several times actually, got attacked by spirits that found the fact that im white not so funny. i got so angry i pulled out my husbands mardigras pearls and called for skull and bones to ask where they are any different than any black people voudou group and bush jr. declares on tv hes from the netherlands and we are game on telling sex stories, tobi was his name if i remember the game correctly.

after a certain time i get to meet papa legba. he asks what do i want and i say his stick. he laughs so hard, sends me back and i get to play with the ghede. after a while i turn into a huge WHY??????? and start searching for papa legba again. i find him and ask him why he did that. the bugger then says: cause you are better at it then them. and he walks away laughing...

i am the big cosmic joke to him.

 

[Pyrokar]

I don't think the response is sparse Xeno - more so that the Thread was badly set up
We all go off on tangents and anecdotes by association 'round these parts, like every single thread ever.
So when someone stops you and just says gimmie anecdotes you're left without
a reference as if you had never heard a story in your life.
It's there. Ya'll just being lazy

 

[Robert Ramsay]

Two stories. Both of unintentional consequences.

1) I used to be in a band. We were doing a short tour. Morning of the last night of the tour, everyone in the band (plus friends of ours who were at the previous night's venue) got phoned up by the drummer, who was in an angry panic. He'd realised some of his gear was missing from last night's gig. He's threatening not to play that day if he can't get it back, etc. So, as I'm being driven to that day's venue, I thought "Well, this would be a good time for some magic to work". I did the working in the car, completely internally, so that no-one noticed, and then banished it from my mind. Lo and behold, when we get to the venue, the drummer's stuff had been found, tucked away in a corner at the previous venue.

So far, so dull.

It was the next morning as we were preparing to return home that our singer happened to tell me that Osama bin Laden had been caught and killed yesterday.

This stuck with me, and later, when I checked it, his death had occurred at roughly the same time as my magical act had completed (me finding out that the stuff had been found).

Now, I am not suggesting that I caused Osama bin Laden's death. What I am suggesting, is that when you engineer coincidence, it can be like a stone thrown into a pond, generating other coincidences. I also think that this is why clearing your workspace, banishing etc. is important, to try and minimise these unasked for coincidences.

2) I was at a meal. One of the guys there was another musician, a keyboard player. He was extremely annoying and clearly thought of himself as a big deal. (SPOILER: He was not a big deal)

Partway through the meal, he leans across me to (clearly) try to chat up the woman opposite me. I say (slightly sarcastically) "Oh I'll just get out of your way then", at which point, he puts his hand on my thigh to intimidate me, to which my reply, in a sweet and reasonable voice, is "Move it or lose it". He moves it.

He spends the rest of the evening being annoying, and as we part, he says to me "You're a very challenging individual". I say nothing, but I am of course thinking "Yeah, and you're a **** too, mate".

He didn't come to the group meals again, and me and my friends laughed from time to time about how annoying he was, in his "I am a big shot" way.

I perfomed no magic against him at any time.

Fast forward a few years. I am at the group meal again, and the guy who runs it says to us "Did you hear about X?" X being the annoying guy. He then tells us that X caught necrotising fasciitis somehow, and lost all the fingers on his left hand. The same hand that he put on my thigh.

 

[Pyrokar]

That's what im talking about. Great read sir.
There have been times where i also had to stop and go "did i do this?"

 

[Roma]

The same hand that he put on my thigh.

How do you test causation?

 

[Xenophon]

How do you test causation?

Fair question indeed. I used to go with whatever explanation made for the best story to retell. With time passing, I suspect more and more that the cosmos is not necessarily paper for me to author my gratifying tales on.

Post automatically merged: Nov 21, 2023

That's what im talking about. Great read sir.
There have been times where i also had to stop and go "did i do this?"

I've often said that on bleak bleak mornings following Jose Cuervo nights.

 

[Roma]

I suspect more and more that the cosmos is not necessarily paper for me to author my gratifying tales on.

It seems to me that even when I appear to do things, I, and the circumstances, are being managed to achieve outcomes that I do not understand

 

[Robert Ramsay]

From my research, I look at it like this: When you succeed in magic, you end up in a set of universes where your desire was fulfilled (with the usual monkey's paw caveat). However, you have no control over the other parts of those universes that you didn't have any information about, so when you take that magical step to the left (and then a jump to the right) the events in those parts can be subject to changes, either influenced or not influenced by things in your subconscious.

As I always say, "You don't change the universe, you end up in the place where it is changed"

And as the Discordians say, "Do not meddle in the affairs of wizards; it makes them soggy and difficult to light"

 

[Ziran]

"I have no where to sit..."
I blinked, look around at the mess and thought, damn that's facts this is a pigsty.
-Ever since i always do a quick clean up before i start anything. Works everytime.

~thumbs-up~

 

[Roma]

As I always say, "You don't change the universe, you end up in the place where it is changed"

I find peer review useful in magical/occult interventions.

Sometimes the review is in real time, and sometimes by projecting back and forth on the relevant timeline to compare before and after. With one intervention there are before and after photos of the scene that capture the energy change.

Having a passive observer can give another perspective

 

[Xenophon]

From my research, I look at it like this: When you succeed in magic, you end up in a set of universes where your desire was fulfilled (with the usual monkey's paw caveat). However, you have no control over the other parts of those universes that you didn't have any information about, so when you take that magical step to the left (and then a jump to the right) the events in those parts can be subject to changes, either influenced or not influenced by things in your subconscious.

As I always say, "You don't change the universe, you end up in the place where it is changed"

And as the Discordians say, "Do not meddle in the affairs of wizards; it makes them soggy and difficult to light"

I had a 6th grade science teacher who always interrupted simple anecdotes saying stuff like, "The sun does not rise. Rather the earth rotates causing the sun to emerge into view at some point or points on the earth." On the one hand, who could deny what he said was true? On the other, who'd hang around to talk to him?" Same-samey feeling about the bold-face above. Sure you can work out a system where all that is true. Why should I want to? There are other fish to fry in this collapsing world.

 

[Robert Ramsay]

I had a 6th grade science teacher who always interrupted simple anecdotes saying stuff like, "The sun does not rise. Rather the earth rotates causing the sun to emerge into view at some point or points on the earth." On the one hand, who could deny what he said was true? On the other, who'd hang around to talk to him?" Same-samey feeling about the bold-face above. Sure you can work out a system where all that is true. Why should I want to? There are other fish to fry in this collapsing world.

Because it means that you don't need to break the usual chain of cause and effect for large scale magic to occur. And by 'large scale' I mean anything big enough to see.

 

[Xenophon]

Because it means that you don't need to break the usual chain of cause and effect for large scale magic to occur. And by 'large scale' I mean anything big enough to see.

So...you're worried that if you break the chain you'll have to pay for it or something?

Personally I go with what Roma said elsewhere. "Magick" is a natural event that obeys rules most are not privy to. Kind of like the lawyer finding you a loophole. It's not called "arcane" knowledge for nothing.

 

[Robert Ramsay]

I agree with you that magic is natural and most people are not privy to how it works. And 'loophole' isn't a bad word to use. To IT people, I normally say "magic is an edge condition of normal human consciousness'.
My whole starting point, thirty years ago, was "If it's natural, and it has rules, then there must be a connection with our most successful scientific theories"
One thing I've noticed though, is that a lot of magicians don't want magic explained, because they think that if you have an explanation, it will stop being magical. The parapsychologists are worse. They want it validated but not explained, despite the fact that explanation would be the best way to validate it.

 

[Caliban]

I have a few. This one requires some set-up, so stay with me.

For years, I worked as a card-reader at Renaissance festivals around the country. This kept me sitting in one spot, people-watching, when I wasn't busy.

To connect with other faire workers, and also so that passing patrons would see me doing something other than sitting and people-watching, I had a deal for anyone working the faire: If you come by, in costume, and I am not busy, I will happily give you a reading for free.

I also made a practice of spending freely to improve my booth, as a means of encouraging a relaxed attitude toward spending as an act of sympathetic magic, which is beside the point except for explaining that wandering rose & flower vendors knew I was usually good for an early morning sale.

So I made friends with a fair number of rose girls.

One slow morning, I was sitting and socializing with one, who I will call Sabrina, who I usually bought orchids from (they could last for weeks) and it was early so we were neither of us in any hurry.

Down the fairway, a few yards distant, we notice the same guy - cute, wearing snug denim jeans. As he ambled passed, I muttered under my breath - far to low for him to possibly hear although Sabrina did - "Drop a dime."

LO AND BEHOLD, just as he was far enough past to make the view scenic, he stopped, and bent over to pick something up off the ground, then without any notice of Sabrina or me, went on his way.

Sabrina turned and looked at me, but didn't ask. I just smiled sheepishly, and shrugged. Sometimes, people believing we are magic actually makes it so.

Post automatically merged: Dec 2, 2023

Another anecdote from the same job:

Sunday afternoon, slow, no business to speak of. Up stumbles a fellow, clearly inebriated, to demand rudely, "Tell me something you couldn't know."

Now, I am a genuine reader, and moreover was in the habit of using my time off at faires (5 days out of 7, for a couple of months at a time) as a magical retreat, reading, studying, meditating and pursuing my personal practice, and my intuition and awareness of unseen guidance was pretty sharp.

But I don't as a rule do tests.

I was just opening my mouth to tell this guy so when a Very Strong Hunch tells me, very clearly, "DO IT."

So I hand him my cards and say, "Shuffle and make me three stacks." He does.

I turn over the top card on each: The Empress, reversed. Nine of Swords, reversed. Ten of swords.

I think to myself, "Oh, shit!" But what I hear myself actually say is, "A woman central to your life, a wife or a mother and my instinct says mother, is not doing well. You are very worried and wonder whether she will get better. I am sorry to say so but no, she will not."

He stares at me not at all happily, says, "You're an asshole, buddy," and stumbles away.

Two weeks later on another slow Sunday, same guy, grey-faced and horrible sober, wanders up a bit hesitantly. "Um, a couple of weeks ago I was pretty rude to you. I just wanted to say my mother died of cancer last week, and I'd like a reading, please.

So I gave him a reading.