A course in magic rituals: prepare your body

Before we begin let’s remember: tarot is not a magical activity (lesson 1). As much as some readers pretend to wear a supernatural aura, tarot is a discipline with methods that require study and therefore is available to everybody. Some people, indeed, have an extraordinary ability to read the cards without having studied them formally or informally but that is a hyper developed intuition which for some reason, unknown as is the case in most intuitions, is triggered by a deck. It is a special gift, but not magic.

Curiously, those who having that gift use it unscrupulously begin to lose it. I would like to say that is a divine punishment for acting improperly, but the truth is more prosaic: intuition requires concentration. When the magician diverts his energies to the farce, intuition doesn’t have enough fuel. If they do this long enough they’ll lose contact with their gift as the brain adapt to new requirements, such as making money and pose as the reincarnation of Merlin.

Magic is a discipline like a sporting event, is the celebration of human capacities, the most extreme ones, the least used, but available to everybody since the main instrument is the body and everybody has one. And just like a tennis player can get a boost from hi-tech shoes, racket and even steroids if he wants to cheat, that will only give advantage over a similar opponent: if that opponent is an Olympic champion and the owner of the NASA racket is a weekend player then hi-tech is not a safe bet at all. So it doesn’t matter if you buy expensive oils by catalog, bring your candles from the Basilica of Lourdes and buy the robe wear by the hierophant of the Orphic mysteries three thousand years ago; if you don’t treat your body properly and prepare yourself for a major effort, which can lead you to exhaustion, I strongly advise you not to waste time or money in rituals.

To produce energy we need to be in the right physical condition. I don’t mean you have to join a gym (although in extreme cases it might be necessary) but watch your diet before and during the ritual.

There’s no special scheme, all religions have been concerned about the food. Personally I have always wondered, why the same God who gives us the recipes needed to reach a happy eternal life also created animals which he put out out reach afterwards in spite being delicious meat rich in protein? It would be a lame and mean joke. Behind alimentary approvals and taboos there are historical and public health considerations (rather than divine, which enhance them in my eyes, because they give meaning to the prohibition different from to see if we can resist temptation) and a fundamental message: "Eat healthy."

It is advisable to start preparing yourself a week before the ritual. No junk food, no alcohol and reduce the consumption of red meat without removing it completely form your diet (unless you are vegetarian), eating natural fruits and waive any drug unless it is included in a medical treatment: only if the pain prevents you from acting prefer these days tolerate a headache or use naturist substitutes instead of taking an aspirin. I'm not encouraging you to abandon modern medicine nor am I implying that there is something wrong with synthetic medicines, I’m simply saying the fewer foreign substances in your body the better. Now, psychotropic substances, synthetic or natural, must be banished these days unless there are medical or religious reasons and you are not using them as recreational substances. If you want to dodge this point invoking precedents like the Sibyl of Delphi and the priestesses of Kali be my guest but I kindly suggest you go to have these learned discussions elsewhere, with an opium pipe if you want to honor the shaolin deities, but you shouldn’t engage in a ritual.

During the twelve hours before the ritual do not eat refined sugar or refined flour; prefer whole wheat bread and honey. Do not smoke. Do not have sexual activity, including masturbation. A clarification is necessary here: this is not a moral prohibition and I am not implying that sex is bad in any way or that masturbation is sinful. Sex just release a major amount of physical energy you will need, so if you can refrain from sexual activity throughout the whole previous week, the better.

Your ritual begins with the bath the night before (or at dawn, unless otherwise specified) At that very moment your body, with all that it contains, becomes the instrument of your work. This bath is not a soap and water one; if you need a bath like that take it before. You will need some salts and herbs but sea salt suffice if you don’t have anything else. If possible use a tub where you can dip, if you do not have one do your preparations in a container that can be easily pulled over your head to pour the water.

If using a tub: as unpleasant as it seems, prefer cold water. Pour the sea salt into the tub and put the herbs and salts in thin cloth bags as an infusion (a bag for salts, another for herbs) and put them in hot water not boiling. When the vapors are released, pour the still hot water in the bathtub. If standing in the absence of a tub, you pour the contents of the container where you put the salts and herbs over yourself. While doing this think all the time about the objective you want to achieve with the work you’re starting.

Does the bath have some mystical power? Is the spirit of the sirens living in the sea salt? Well ... no. But is not less useful for that. The bath, the candles and oil and the whole preparations will notify your body, mind and brain that the next days there will be some minutes radically different from usual and they’re exempt from ordinary logic. It’s not enough that you believe it: you need to do things. In fact, it is easier to get results from the ritual by performing small acts with discipline even if you have doubts (there’s a difference between having doubts and being incredulous; if you’re are in the second type and are doing this to demonstrate it doesn’t work spare your time and money: it won’t, I’ll concede the point) than if you believe blindly but only do meditation, for as though your mind produce energy, and I use the term knowing it is inaccurate for lack of a better one, it needs the body to conduct it.

In the next post we will discuss general accessories, if the series keeps interest. Then we’ll discuss time of day or times of the month or year more appropriate. And then we’ll be ready for some examples of rituals

The mythology of Taurus (I)

Leaving behind the baby Aries we now find a chubby smiling and happy child of one or two years, who hates change and although he has a lot of energy, has learned he can get things without putting much effort

Taurus is solid and firm and rarely let anything affect his peace of mind: you can throw hot water at him, hit his chest and slide needles under his fingernails and Taurus will not move. Not an inch: once taken his position he quietly crosses his arms, sits on his heels, sigh... and to hell with you.

He rarely let anybody running over him. Bother him and he’ll turn his back on you hoping you get lost. Push him and he will get more stubborn. But when you put on his back that last blade of grass he’s not putting up with, the Bull will unleash a violent rage and charge against everybody and everything, whether or not is related to the cause of his anger.

Taurus is sensual, appreciate perfumes, good food, elegant and sober clothing, and when conquering he is not pursuing his preys, since he prefers to attract people to him. And the best part is that often get away with it.

Taurus is a bull, but what bull and how it became a Constellation?

The bull of Mesopotamia

The hero of the Sumerian civilization is Gilgamesh, who once had the not very good idea to reject the advances of the goddess Inanna. I do not know if Innana was particularly ugly but the Sumerians, with a twisted sense of humor, made her goddess of sexual love, fertility and war at the same time. Considering the unpredictability of a goddess with such diverse patronage, one understands that Gilgamesh had prefer to abstain

Now, even without being God, what makes a woman scorned? That’s it: gets revenge. And if you are a goddess you have special resources available, so she took the case to the assembly of gods and with their permission she borrowed from her sister, the queen of the underworld, her husband, the bull Gugalanna that made the earth tremble at every step. Earthquake and everything, Gilgamesh dismembered the monster while Inanna watched from the walls of the holy city and the hero's faithful squire tore the insides of the divine bull and threatened Inanna to do the same to her if he reached her, which is why the gods killed him soon after: one is to win in a fight and another to threaten a goddess who had already suffered a rebuff.

The "European" bull

Europe was a Phoenician maiden, so beautiful that Zeus, king of the gods, fell in love with her. Having the king of the gods falling in love with a mortal may sound like a great honor, but let’s say Zeus fell in love easily with anything and anybody, meaning he was shamelessly promiscuous, which degrades the honor a little.

Europe had a habit of going to the sea coast. Not far from her favorite spot the cattle of the king, his father, used to graze and one day a white bull of docile aspect separated from other animals: it was Zeus, determined to seduce the girl (let's be a little generous with words: "seduce" included kidnapping and rape)

The girl, attracted by this beautiful animal, adorned his horns with flowers. Then he had the idea of sitting on its back. Who would seat on the back of an enormous bull just because it is pretty I do not know, but that gives new meaning to the question of what the woman made to be raped: Zeus seized the opportunity to run, plunged into the sea and showing that one is god for something, he arrived to the island of Crete where he finally stopped.

Zeus abandoned her after she gave birth to his three children (the myths do not elaborate much on the logistics of these things: if Zeus spent three years with her, if they were triplets, if he came and went and specially if Zeus gave up his bull disguise, although he told her who he was) and Europe married the local king, which would adopt the children he had by Zeus, including Minos

To prevent you to say that Zeus was a damn chauvinistic male, let’s remember he left Europe some gifts: a necklace made by Hephaestus, the god of metallurgy; Talos, a giant of bronze who was the first guardian of Crete, forged by the Cyclops, one-eyed giants that made the thunderbolts of Zeus; Laelaps, a hound who always caught his prey, and a javelin that never failed its target. Considering it was a kidnap, one would say he didn’t behave so badly.

The Cretan bull

The most famous ruler of Crete, author of its constitution and creator of their naval power was King Minos (not existed), which is not surprising, considering that his father, Zeus himself, taught trade and constitutional law.

To ensure his ascent to the throne over his brothers, who he was eager to banish, Minos asked Poseidon, god of the oceans and his uncle, to show Minos was his favorite by making a white bull come out of the sea so Minos can sacrifice the animal to the god. Despite the absurdity of a god sending a superb land animal from the water so it can be killed in his honor, Poseidon accpeted.

The people were convinced, Minos could banish his brothers and reign... and decided that the animal was too beautiful to kill him, so he sacrificed to Poseidon a less pretty one. This is a comedy of errors already, but it got better when the god managed an extraordinary revenge by making queen Pasiphae fall in love with the bull.

Considering that Minos was the son of another bull, maybe the queen, seeing her father in law, thought that stranger things had happened in that family. So he called Daedalus, something like the scientist of the court, and asked him to invent something that would allow her to mate with the bull. Daedalus invented a kind of cow where Pasiphae came in to see if the bull idem her. Things worked out smoothly so to speak and for such a love was born the Minotaur, a monster with human body and head of a bull who fed on human flesh and was confined in a maze, but that is a myth for another day (Minotaur's father, the white bull, was released and Hercules had to catch him, another myth for another day)

The bull in the constellation is the Phoenician or Greek one, in both cases is the same group of stars for the Greeks knew the Sumerian astrology. In any case, the Bull holds for those born under its sign its grandeur, the joy of living, the sensuality, the docility, the nobility and the quiet way of seeing things, in spite of knowing he has been born for slaughter

Voyage to the magic: Cathedral of Chartres

There is a small town some sixty miles southwest of Paris, Chartres, barely forty thousand inhabitants; around the Mediterranean there are thousands of similar villages. But Chartres... is something else. It is a town of which tons have been written about the mysteries of its cathedral

The first mystery of the Chartres Cathedral is the cathedral. The town's name comes from Civitas Carnutum, city of Carnutes, “Carnutes” being a Celtic people in the heart of the Gaul’s portion independent of Rome, something like the Asterix comics. That gives this place a long tradition of pagan Druids, with its colorful legends of astronomy, medicine and human sacrifices and, of course, one of the most important temples left in this place.

Then a Christian temple was built upon the Celtic sanctuary. According to legend, Charlemagne gave the town a robe of the Virgin Mary and, when the temple caught fire, after three days emerged from the wreckage several monks carrying the Holy Shirt intact. It was a miracle and to accommodate it, the church was rebuilt in the new Gothic style: a magnificent cathedral begun in 1195.

And so the questions begin. Chartres Cathedral is a titan: it has the world's most voluminous vault, a maximum height of 377,3 ft. and the cruiser has 364 ft. (compared to 426,5 ft. of Notre Dame de Paris). It could accommodate 40,000 people snugly, the current population of Chartres, more capacity that many rock concerts. The cathedral is visible six miles away, it was the first example of Gothic, and for some experts neither Notre Dame nor Cologne is the best example of this style, but Chartres.

The measurements of the cathedral are full of symbolism, to give a few: the 110.7 meters of the cruiser are related to the 1107 kilometers traveled by a point on the earth's crust over a year around the sun. The mean measure used in the cathedral was the "elbow of chartres" which is the one hundred thousandth part of the parallel where the church stands. And in the most famous phenomenon, on 21 June, the day of the summer solstice, Celtic sacred date, enter a stained glass window a ray of sunshine that illuminates a slab different from the others.

The truth is that ever since when Louis Charpentier in 1965 popularized the issue of the slab beam in a fun but not very rigorous book about Gothic art many questions have arised and the most curious one is: why nobody had thought of that before?

To build a building like that today would take a respectable amount of time. Now imagine building it in the thirteenth century in twenty-six years, with so much mathematics in its design. We are talking about an army of carpenters, masons, wheelwrights, sculptors, painters, glassmakers and put in the mix food, accommodation, families etc. All other cathedrals were built over literally centuries; Chartres never lacked money or labor. All this in a town that had absolutely nothing and a population of barely five thousand souls; even putting all the people in the cathedral it still looked empty. Why such an effort in this place, while Paris had to stop his church for lack of money, having comparable relics and much more political importance? Why bring to this remote place the best minds from far away lands to raise such a monument, where no taxes nor nobility would pay for it?

Here are the Templars. And the constellation Virgo

Lets burst the balloon of the most famous mystery, the summer solstice. The fuss is because the level of medieval mathematics made it almost impossible such an accurate calculation and therefore some kind of superior intelligence (aliens are a favorite) must be involved. On the one hand, the Druids built Stonehenge thousands of years before Christ and that pile of stone makes more interesting things than calculating the summer solstice (if you say Stonehenge itself was built by aliens I’ll have to ask for proof). The most important is that the stained glass and the slab of Charpentier’s story were set in 1705, not in the original building, when astronomy was far more developed. But the rest of the mathematics of Chartres, while less spectacular, is more challenging.

Now, here are the Templars. Those bankers-monks-warriors were the patrons of the cathedral. According to legend, in their excavations at the Temple of Solomon they found the remains of the Ark of the Covenant, the tablets of the Ten Commandments or something like that and learned the "perfect" measures the divine mind used: in other words, measures used by God when he created the world.

Without going that far, the church was built in Chartres because there was the Temple of the Carnutes. What has to do a Christian church with the Celtics? The modern interpretation says the church built its temples in places of heathen worship trying to reduce the negative reaction of peoples determined to protect their ancient customs so the christianization would be easier. There’s something of that, but in this case is not the whole explanation.

There’s a constellation with a curious history: Virgo. Most civilizations linked it to the "Great Mother" provider of food and fertility. This is true for Celts, Egyptians and Greeks, the latter being the ones who bequeathed the constellation to us in the zodiac. While other constellations changed their names or configuration, Virgo remained unabated.

The truth is the Templars did not want a Christian church, in the strict sense, but Marian. And they wanted it in Chartres because the Celts had their temples located so they mimic exactly on land (or at least as much as the topography and the Roman legions allowed) Virgo settings. Paris was doing its job already, Reims was the site of coronation of kings ... if the Templars wanted to replicate the star map they would have to do the work at Chartres, that god forsaken town. And they undertook the task with its endless coffers.

Why was it important to reproduce the cosmic map? Here again comes in the legend for nobody knows for sure. The idea is found in an ancient mystical text: "As it is above, so it is below" and there are similar configurations of buildings in Egypt or Persia or India and the Templars surely knew. The most well-worn argument is that there are underground energy currents in the earth and these buildings stimulate them, just like acupuncture needles would do, but it has also benn said they were on points marking portals to hell or airfields for angels (now UFO). What is clear is that the work was done and it is impossible to consider it a coincidence when comparing the astronomical maps and layout of cathedrals.

In a future post, if you find this interesting, we talk about the iconography of the Ark in the Cathedral, the holy well and its mysterious labyrinth of penance