When Was the Last Time Magick Cracked You Open?

[FireBorn]

When was the last time magick left you in wonder, in awe?

What was it? A ritual? A spell? An experience? What cracked you open most recently?

What did you walk away with? How did it change you, or didnt?

 

[StarOfSitra]

I especially remember one event that you could say was canonical. It happened about 13 years ago. I was rigorously practicing from Franz Bardon's manual, Initiation into Hermetics—which, for those who don't know it, is a book of daily exercises, a theoretical-practical guide divided into phases. Every day, there are physical, mental, and psychic exercises that must be practiced until mastered, for weeks, months, years...

I was practicing psychic exercises on the transmutation of consciousness into inherent objects (it sounds spectacular, but it's almost at the beginning, which shows the high level of commitment required). I collapsed from exhaustion and went to sleep; well, the strange part came when I woke up. I started to feel as if my consciousness was connected to my body by a thread, with me being distant, like a puppeteer controlling a body—or, to use a modern example, as if I were playing a video game and controlling my body with a controller.

That made me ponder many things about the reality we live in, but it also produced tremendous paranoia in me. I stayed like that for several days until, finally, I decided to burn the book. I know it wasn't a super wise decision because it was a good book, but at that time, it seemed very dangerous to me.

 

[FireBorn]

This is the kind of answer I was hoping this thread would pull. Thank you for that!

 

[AbammonTheGreat]

I'm currently in the middle of an initiation into Thoth-Mercury which is involving a lot of kabbalah, astrology, and spirit conjuration. Slowly I have been collecting sigils for this multiplicity of celestial spirits and my medium has been doing a lot of autowriting in which she hands me symbols that just randomly come to her. I don't really "try" to crack any codes I just record the information that comes to me and her in our sessions.

About two months ago I was looking at a star map and noticed a star cluster that looked a lot like one of the sigils I had collected and overlaid it onto the star map. It was a perfect match, and not only a perfect match but in the exact place in the sky the relevant planet had to be in in order to conjure the spirit that gave me the sigil. This kicked off a little bit of a manic episode where I spent a few days digging through our grimoires and overlaying all the sigils I had collected onto a star map. I found that these sigils I had been, and my medium had been, collecting were actually star clusters based around Arabic indicator stars. This really kind of floored me as even in accepting the reality of spirits these kind of experiences are like being slapped across the face with the strangeness of the cosmos. It messed with me psychologically a little bit and during the comedown a friend forwarded an 11th century Arabic grimoire on talismanic alphabets. Within the grimoire I found many of the same sigils we had been collecting, which further pointed out to me that not only were we extracting some kind of communication with the stars during our sessions but that other magicians in history have had the same experience as us.

Its a combination of beautiful synchronicity, being smacked by the hermetic axiom, and also this strange mixture of awe and fear at the magnitude of just what exactly we're engaging with in magic. These experiences reinvigorate and humble me on the path. Something I like to say to people is "if your magic doesn't scare the shit out of you, are you even doing magic?".

 

[Fr. Maximagus]

well this doesn’t seem real earth shattering but reading it was a huge lightbulb moment for me (Though for the life of me can’t remember where I read it)
“An advanced practitioner of magick has his intent synchronized with manifestation. Thus they are as much a product of magick as the magick they perform“

that blew my mind and has continued to since, when you realize you actually BECOME your magick lol pretty cool imo

 

[FireBorn]

First, I want to thank you all for sharing what you shared. This is awesome, and super interesting. Real experiences, and it matters.

My turn to step into the circle. I had two experiences that left me in awe very recently. One not sharing openly, the other is as follows:

I was meditating one day, moving my energy (my fire) through my body as one does. I start with heart and go up, then back to heart and go down (this helps me avoid stirring Kundalini energy by accident). Anyway, I moved my energy up and light up my throat, 3rd eye and crown, really got em humming. Before I could think about it, my energy went lateral. Out from my heart to each side, like all by itself. I didn't do that. I'm not saying it was like wings, just fire burning over my head on each side (wings would be cool though lol). I cant visualize, I just felt my energy hot af on each side. Just a full circle of fire around me that I could see with my minds eye. Then it dawns on me, this fire IS me. Speechless. Total awe. Finished moving my energy down to the root and my whole body was light up, I mean really lit up! It felt like nothing else. Like I am the fucking magick. Hard to put into words without sounding ridiculous (or more than I already have).

I looked it up later to see wtf it was. Oh cool. Its a thing (thank fuck, I'm not losing it). What do I do with this awesome thing? No clue, I dont follow a system of what do with this sort of thing. Downside? I have no fucking clue. Up side? I dont have any stupid rules or dogmas blocking me. Luckily I have group of friends decades into this stuff from different currents who can tell me where I'm retarded and what it is, we have a good laugh and its helpful.


I am constantly amazed how magick works in my life. I am not super interested in how it works mechanically, just enough to keep doing it.




Lastly, for the Real Ones out there, I know you are there. This thread is for you, respectfully.

 

[Morell]

I especially remember one event that you could say was canonical. It happened about 13 years ago. I was rigorously practicing from Franz Bardon's manual, Initiation into Hermetics—which, for those who don't know it, is a book of daily exercises, a theoretical-practical guide divided into phases. Every day, there are physical, mental, and psychic exercises that must be practiced until mastered, for weeks, months, years...

I was practicing psychic exercises on the transmutation of consciousness into inherent objects (it sounds spectacular, but it's almost at the beginning, which shows the high level of commitment required). I collapsed from exhaustion and went to sleep; well, the strange part came when I woke up. I started to feel as if my consciousness was connected to my body by a thread, with me being distant, like a puppeteer controlling a body—or, to use a modern example, as if I were playing a video game and controlling my body with a controller.

That made me ponder many things about the reality we live in, but it also produced tremendous paranoia in me. I stayed like that for several days until, finally, I decided to burn the book. I know it wasn't a super wise decision because it was a good book, but at that time, it seemed very dangerous to me.

What was the name of the book? Sounds worth having.

 

[StarOfSitra]

What was the name of the book? Sounds worth having.

Initiation into Hermetics from Franz Bardon.

 

[Morell]

Initiation into Hermetics from Franz Bardon.

Wow, I was actually guessing that it could be that one. Never dreamed though, that it could get so out of hand. Were you skipping lessons? (I know I would to get to the cool stuff)

 

[StarOfSitra]

Wow, I was actually guessing that it could be that one. Never dreamed though, that it could get so out of hand. Were you skipping lessons? (I know I would to get to the cool stuff)

No, I wasn’t skipping any of the classes, and I was practicing everything strictly. If you skip classes and go straight to the “interesting” or more advanced parts, you won’t get anywhere; daily training is what allows you to build the level needed to progress. Going straight to the advanced stuff is like asking a random person on the street to lift 300 kilos — they won’t be able to, no matter how much they want to, because they don’t have the training for it.

 

[Morell]

No, I wasn’t skipping any of the classes, and I was practicing everything strictly. If you skip classes and go straight to the “interesting” or more advanced parts, you won’t get anywhere; daily training is what allows you to build the level needed to progress. Going straight to the advanced stuff is like asking a random person on the street to lift 300 kilos — they won’t be able to, no matter how much they want to, because they don’t have the training for it.

Well, in that case I must say that you are pretty good to get that far with Bardon, even though it went astray in the end. Impressive work.

 

[Fr. Maximagus]

No, I wasn’t skipping any of the classes, and I was practicing everything strictly. If you skip classes and go straight to the “interesting” or more advanced parts, you won’t get anywhere; daily training is what allows you to build the level needed to progress. Going straight to the advanced stuff is like asking a random person on the street to lift 300 kilos — they won’t be able to, no matter how much they want to, because they don’t have the training for it.

what would you say you learned from it or what is the most valuable thing you learned?

 

[StarOfSitra]

what would you say you learned from it or what is the most valuable thing you learned?

One of the most revolutionary and remarkable conclusions I experienced is that our true Self is not inside the physical body as if it were made up of layers of energetic bodies, but rather outside of it, controlling the body through a kind of cord that connects to the pineal gland. This differs greatly from all esoteric beliefs that depict the human being as a layered entity, from the physical body to the spirit. This leaves a great mystery open: if I’m not here, then where am I? Who am I?

 

[sahgwa]

These are not HUGE CRACKED OPEN moments but those very deep kind of razor sly moments when you feel things outside of the norm that make you feel interesting or that you have made The Connection with the Other Side beyond the mundane.
A few times in just normal hygienic rituals like LBRH especially there have been these moments lately:

The feeling that I am outside of my body looking in, not in a full OBE projection sense, but that I am not 'in' the body, it is moving on it's own. The full sense that it is not me.

A physical sense of being held up by my wand. While I go about drawing the circle and hexagrams, the divinities that are present are moving me along just as much as I am moving myself. Not in a negative puppet sense, but elevating me. It's not just a banishing, its a connection.

Another session gravity was all off. At each quarter it was as if I was standing on a slope, and there was no real up or down, but more like I was going to fall physically through a portal through each hexagram. Like THEY were the floor/down maybe, and I was on the 'wrong side'.
Very interesting.

Then the other night I had a great 'vision' or evocation of PAN during the Star Ruby. I felt like I was him and giant, and all the Earth and forests of this planet were my legs and limbs, and all the elementals like gnomes etc were bowing down at my feet . I was Nature.

The lucky sessions are when there are those connections, or sensations. Then there are those we are all familiar with where you just feel heavy mundane and going through the motions. That is good training too I think.

And of course @StarOfSitra I agree with you, I have felt it too, our Higher Self/ HGA is MOST DEFINITELY outside of us. However , I feel a physical connection and conduit at heart/anahata chakra/tiphareth , and also in the 3 higher ones, especially anja and crown/sahasrara. Those are like the places we meet and download to our true self. Especially the heart. I think .

 

[MorganBlack]

Two of my major ones:

A full theophanic manifestation of the Goddess, and being abducted by a daimon from the Grimorium Verum and healed.

The Goddess now manifests for me as a sweetness and kindness within me, that makes life beautiful, and which will attenuate over about two weeks if I stop saying if her prayers . Not that she goes away, but the astral-etheric manifestation level is not 'hooked-up' without them . After saying her prayers, and others in that 'mythstream' She will occasional manifest as a fragrant odor of citrus and roses that lingers in our home , and that my beautiful girlfriend and I can smell and enjoy.

The healing-by-daimon-abduction, I shared , badly I admit, in the section I posted under my Joshua Cutchin book recommendation here (below) This is what an extreme theophanic manifestation can look like, if one steps into ritual, when it's time for you to, and When The Stars are Right.

Book Club - Recommended Reading List for Chao-Animist Necromancy

Chao-Animist Necromancy, my half-joke fancy name for just Traditional Western Magic and Witchcraft, with some modern adaptations. For newcomers who have not yet ambered in cruft their personal operative myths... I say start with Chaos Magic, then move into practices that make you calm and...

wizardforums.com

 

[Queenofallwitches]

When was the last time magick left you in wonder, in awe?

What was it? A ritual? A spell? An experience? What cracked you open most recently?

What did you walk away with? How did it change you, or didnt?

Magick hasn’t persay. Dealing with other people who were completely unhinged or trying to work in particular groups that contained group rituals that were off balance energetically were the things that broke me, especially when there were group egregores.
The worst case scenario being online “magical groups” in which people could not be vetted appropriately before joining or participating.
I can’t think or a specific ritual or ceremony that has caused any specific mental health or psychological instability outside of the first time I had to recite psalms repetitively as part of a group rite, mixed in with a lot of other traditions. I’m breaking a lot of that programming down and realising the magick wasn’t actually just magick as much as it was magick fused with some cult methods that occured during lockdown over the internet.
Long and complex situation which I will save for another time.
It wasn’t the rituals or methods persay, as I had the necessary backbone of my own traditions. It was the individual (s) who destabilised me and the amount of work I had to do. Coupled with intense sleep deprivation and some drugs that came along with this “temple” (online) and an insane amount of study and magickal work when I was promised “high priestess” position that destabilised my psyche. I thankfully only lost 4 years of my life in that scenario.


it was incredibly unhinged, I say no more.

 

[Lucien6493]

Magick hasn’t persay. Dealing with other people who were completely unhinged or trying to work in particular groups that contained group rituals that were off balance energetically were the things that broke me, especially when there were group egregores.
The worst case scenario being online “magical groups” in which people could not be vetted appropriately before joining or participating.
I can’t think or a specific ritual or ceremony that has caused any specific mental health or psychological instability outside of the first time I had to recite psalms repetitively as part of a group rite, mixed in with a lot of other traditions. I’m breaking a lot of that programming down and realising the magick wasn’t actually just magick as much as it was magick fused with some cult methods that occured during lockdown over the internet.
Long and complex situation which I will save for another time.
It wasn’t the rituals or methods persay, as I had the necessary backbone of my own traditions. It was the individual (s) who destabilised me and the amount of work I had to do. Coupled with intense sleep deprivation and some drugs that came along with this “temple” (online) and an insane amount of study and magickal work when I was promised “high priestess” position that destabilised my psyche. I thankfully only lost 4 years of my life in that scenario.


it was incredibly unhinged, I say no more.

When was the last time magick left you in wonder, in awe?

What was it? A ritual? A spell? An experience? What cracked you open most recently?

What did you walk away with? How did it change you, or didnt?

I only ever did one ritual by the book. It was a simple consecration of the elements out of Starhawk's The Spiral Dance, and after performing it I went into my ritual space, lit my candles, cast my circle, and called down the power like I had done many times before. I had no expectations going in at the time, and no reason for doing the ritual apart from "practicing" magick. The effect was completely out of all proportion to what the ritual was intended to accomplish though. Looking back on that night, some thirty years later, the most I can say about it now is that what happened to me, standing there in my circle, was an existential non sequitur. I can’t relate it to anything that came before let alone to what came after in (my) spiritual life. In the evocative deadpan of Zen-poetics...a frog jumps into a pond and somewhere a star explodes or a world is born or a man looks up from his newspaper, takes a sip from his morning coffee, scratches his arse, looks at his watch, and then continues on with his life never realizing that everything is the same as it was the moment before and everything is irrevocably and completely and forever different because at that moment I was taken without so much as a howdy-do let alone any sense of transition into a dark space between the worlds, or through a certain quality of awareness perhaps, whose single characteristic was its lack of any characteristics or reference points whatsoever; seemingly empty of structure, content, dimension, or form, like the still point of Hadit in the glyph of the alchemical Sun.



One minute I was in my ritual space and then I simply wasn't. In what I at first conceived of as deep interstellar space I felt the touch of something that I thought of as an ion wind which was blowing through that infinite vastness that I could feel all around me. Its gentle, intimate buffeting was so unspeakably exquisite that my arms stretched out of their own accord in the sign of Osiris Slain (as I became the intersection of two infinite planes, one vertical and the other horizontal, each bisected by a stream of light that met, comingled, within my heart) followed by the sign of Apophis and Typhon as I blew apart and probably lost consciousness, only to return in the sign of Osiris Risen wherein I remained until I opened my eyes a few moments later. And that was that. I returned to my body and my ritual space only to see that my candles had burned down completely, and that my apartment was flooded with morning light. My clock radio read 10:30 so evidently I had been gone for a good twelve hours, which was what really impressed me the most back then. It was like waking up one morning, looking into the mirror and seeing only the back of your head. So, bye-bye. No more shaving with Ockham's razor.



But that mash up of the Rose Cross? It wasn’t personal. Perhaps it was the echo of another life. Some business left unfinished, accomplished pro forma. Just finishing up what once I started in the long ago. So let’s just say that I was given a profound respect for “applied metaphor” forever after, even as I understand it now as one wing of that strange bird that I am, the other wing being my life in the world. I hold the two as equal, the one informing the other, but neither having any bearing on what lies beyond the mirror of truth. And there is no going back from that vision, so in a very real sense that ritual was at one and the same utterly meaningless in personal terms and the only important thing I ever did in my life, precisely because I wasn’t there. It was an epistemological reset that made for an ontological difference, in just the way that Castaneda conceptualized it.



But, you know, I was in full blown spiritual emergency at the time. Three days later the bottom fell out of my life completely, and turning to the one book I hated more than any other I opening it at random and read, "I call heaven and earth to witness against you this day: I have put before you life and death, blessing and curse. Choose life, that you and your descendants may live!". And I surrendered. Unconditionally. And to Christ/Lucifer I offered my life and my pain. And like I said, that was some thirty odd years ago. Thirty years spent trying to understand emptiness through form, like one crucified on the rood of space and time. And for all that came after, that radiant, silent darkness of my Queen and the ritual that may or may not have taken me there lost all significance if it ever had any to begin with. Trying to live that vision; to hold it, to carry it, to make it real within myself as a human being without blowing my life to shit in the process is what it came down to for me. It still does. I never came out of that ritual. And I’m still saying yes to life – that no matter how bad it gets I will never stop saying yes.​

 

[Swampdweller900]

I'm not a strict practitioner of any magick school, per se, but that's due to an eclectic path in life.

Remote viewing sessions can get very emotional because that's what the practice taps into. Also why it's so hard to get things like names and numbers, those are rational not motional, and easy to pick up on emotions from an interaction between two people, for example.

I was blind to the target, which was set by some random person online for practice. It immediately felt just otherworldly, like something between dimensions. Like being in a sinking ship caught between worlds, glitching out. Drowning, stress, heaviness, crying for help, anxiety, hopelessness, desperation. I kept trying to go back in and get anything coherent for my notes, thinking I was off target, and every time I went back in, it would just Fing ruin my day. Literally. It was like the feeling of waking up from a nightmare so intense that you get up and start running and doing panic-fueled things in real life.

Turns out the target was "my mind and its problems" posted by a schizophrenic young guy. Totally blew me away because yeah, that's probably a tiny sliver of what it's like to be just consumed by one's own mental health issues. But that surge of all the worst feelings will never leave me. It's been 6 or 7 years maybe, still one of the most overwhelming experiences of my life. Definitely counts as a "cracked me open" moment.

Close second place - cleansing a house that I knew was genuinely cursed and I had always guessed but never confirmed was built on the site of an older small house where 1 or 2 children had died (1 came to visit on occasion, but stayed by the front door). I had to make the sage smudge myself. Lines of salt, the full ritual. As I entered the last room where whatever was the agent for the curse had progressively fled, things got very intense and hot. Then the smudge burst into flames in my hand. I would sort of smother it back to smoke in a bowl, and before I left the room it caught flame twice more. Forced the room empty and everything went calm. House felt soooo much better after that.

 

[AlfrunGrima]

This a little double posted, but fits in two discussions. One day I walked with the dog to the forest, 3 kms from my village and had a appointment with hubby to pick me up at a certain time because I didn't want to walk back. It gave me time to connect with local spirits over there, had some foods baked for that. Been there, doing my thing and hubby did arrive just in time on the parking. He was like, well we can walk a little route together so I can have some fresh air too. We started the route. You have to know that it was a Dutch forest and only a square km. Dutch forests are no jungle, they are planted by humans. Somewhere on the route suddenly we both saw a path on the left. We both couldn't remember that path. It was never there before. And I know that part of the forest since a was young. But we decided to go left and walk that path. After e few minutes we got lost. It took us more than an hour to find our way back to the car.... Later on when walking again in the forest, we never saw that path on the left anymore. We must have stepped in a parallel universe or in a enchanted part of the forest.

 

[sahgwa]

I grew up in Limburg and I miss Dutch forests very much. It is a part of my heart forever, with the Heide. I am American but raised there for elementary school and half of high school. Ich spreche Deutsch aber kein Nederlandse. oh well hup hollland !
I saw a gnome when I was a kid down there. By a big big beech tree.