Category: Enochian Info

This post offers a review of the Brighton groups activities so far as we move into a new series of workings and an initial protocol for those new workings.  The first section is the review, the second the protocol of practice.

Looking back

The small group of us in Brighton have come together through the activities of the kabbalistic meditation group that was originally set-up in May 2007 as a place of regular group ‘recharge’ activity.  There are some notes on this in earlier posts, some of which also track the changes that take place as the group developed and moved.  Towards the end of last year we once again made a shift to a new phase of work after focussing for a while on practising the SIRP .  The decision we took was to try and practice the Enochian magick that Lon Milo DuQuette had made so accessible in his recent book, Enochian Vision Magick. The start of the new year therefore found us shifting focus from the practice oriented sessions we had been involved with to a series of study sessions in preparation for the Enochian work.

We have now had four sessions.  The first was an initial planning session for how we were to approach things.  This operated as a kind of overview and then a talking stick session, with a view to maintaining the strengths we had whilst we explored a new practice.  Our first issue was working out how to move into a whole new type of practice without losing what we had so far built.

In the previous set of practices we had taken a decision very early on to make the sessions very similiar each time in order to establish a simple routine, rather than to have an eclectic mix of activities that shifted and changed every time we met.  In part this came from the initial impulse to form the meditation group, which arose out of a group of magicians, most of whom were ‘chaos magick’ inspired and already meeting in a local CM cell.  In many CM sessions the format is for participants to each bring a rite and then for the group to go through a whole series of different activities during the session.  This can be extremely exciting and vibrant but also quite draining and so the meditation group was almost a reversal of this, with a format that was fairly fixed.  We would meet, do the Qabalistic Cross (x3), an LBRP, the QC again (x3) then a series of Middle Pillar chants, 5 as a round and 5 unified.  After that we would have a silent meditation of 20 mins followed by a pathworking.  This basic format was adjusted at times but in effect the same thing would occur each time, the main difference of content being in the pathworking.

Gradually we adjusted elements as we developed.  We moved our pathworkings further up the tree, we took it in turns to do these pathworkings and then we shifted from the LBRP to the SIRP.  We did a slightly more organised set of pathworkings (the 3 Letter workings) which aimed to establish a personal contact on the tree for each participant.  One of the participants was an experienced Chi Qung practitioner, so we added some CQ into the beginning of the meetings.  Each change was small and built on the established routine of the sessions.The strengths of these practices lay in their regularity.  This regularity meant we all knew what was going to happen each time we met, or at least the basic outline.  The coherence of the rites was easier to build, energy easier to raise and a sacred space faster to establish because there was little or no need to discuss what we were doing each time we would meet – we simply met, did the work and generated the space in which we existed for that time.  So our first job in planning the new work was to once again build on what we had.

We had a long chat about what it was people got form the existing work, what stage of development people were at magically and agreed a few groundrules for the new practice.  Some of these are obviously private to the group but I think most importantly we agreed to continue the meditation sessions as ‘energy gains’ in between the Enochian work.  So we will be doing 2 session of Enochian, followed by a 2 session break during which time we will have meditation session.  We also agreed that for the first half dozen or so session of the Enochian practice we would all be there for the session to go ahead.  In our meditation work it usually didn’t disrupt things greatly if one person couldn’t get along for one week, they would simply slip back into it the week after.  In this new practice it seemed sensible to ‘all be new together’.  Once we’ve overcome the initial ‘shock of the new’ together and have a shared vocabulary of experience we can again continue with a session even if one participant isn’t able to get along that week.

Having established some ground rules we then met again three times to do some study sessions on DuQuette’s book and get a rough, shared familiarity with the material we were going to work with.  The first session looked at the Sigillum Dei Aemeth and everyone drew one out from the various tables and sources.  The second session looked at the Ring, Lamen and Holy Table and then a third session spent time looking at the Holy Tables, clarifying the work in the Aethyrs with the symetrical characters of the Governors and the work in the Elements, with the Golden Talisman and the Elemental squares.  Lots of material, lots of discussion, lots of fun – but all very school-like in many ways.  Last night we finished off this initial set of preparations and sketched out the basic outline of how we’re going to begin the work.

Looking forward

In general we’re going to follow DuQuette fairly closely.  Our own flavour of things will probably be most noticeable in the form of Middle Pillar exercise we do, the chanting in the round.  After some discussion, however, this is the agenda of activity for the sessions:-

1) 3x Qabbalistic Cross, LBRP, 3x Qabbalistic Cross

2) Middle Pillar Chants

3) Temple Ceremony ( the Heptarchical operation)

4) Elemental working (the Scrying session)

5) Close

We begin in two weeks (initial session planned for 17th March) to give people time to adjust their practices in preperation.  In particular this means maintaining or renewing regular Qabbalistic Cross, Middle Pillar, and LBRP activity (having been focussed on the SIRP, the shift back to the LBRP will be interesting for people).  It’s a good time to look at the Whare Ra documents again, which you can find over here.  The DuQuette book is the reference for the activity.  He gives a classic form of the LBRP at the start of Appendix 1 (page 191) , the main differences to our previous practice being the triplicity of the Qabalistic Cross (‘Ateh, Malkuth etc’) at the beginning and ending  and the way we pronounce the first pentagram, YHVH.  The Temple Ceremony is what DuQuette calls the ‘ceremony of preparation’ (page 193-195) and the place of  the ‘elemental working’  is indicated on page 193 but the content is effectively given on pages 179 – 181 (this protocol was one of the study session hand-outs).   The content of the elemental workings are the subesctions on pages 179-181 in DuQuette’s book, titled ‘The Call(s)’, ‘Addressing the Hierarchy’ and ‘Calling your target angel’.  DuQuette gives an example which you could work through, replacing this with our first point of activity, one of the the four basic Earth of Earth angels.  I will prepare the Calls and the Address to the Hierarchy for our first session but this is a task that will land on everyone at some point.  For the first session the Scryer and the Recorder have been decided (you know who you are) and the set of questions we use as the base from which to work is given in Enochian Vision Magick on pages 173-174.

We can use the comments thread here to discuss any initial adjustments we might feel we want to make to this protocol.