Section X

Advanced Magic

Astral Hacking

The difference between a good witch and a great witch is in the covert operations — not getting caught.

If you can tweak the your spells until they cannot be seen or felt by other clairvoyants, then they won’t be noticed, and thus can’t be picked apart and broken. You do this by changing the frequency of the energy — a lot like the difference between a lifeguard’s whistle and a dog whistle. There’s still sound — you just can’t consciously hear it. This sort of thing can only be perfected through experience. (Reread the chapter on vibrations for a refresher on harmonics.)

It’s also standard practice to clean up after yourself, drawing out your own odor from the spell, so that no smell of your essence remains. Otherwise, it’s easy to piece together the fingerprint of your personality and link to it, tracing it back to you. It’s a bothersome, and sometimes pretty nasty, to have to deal with retaliation spells from witches who are just as good as you. (I’ve even heard of one instance of a witch being traced back and contacted through his own ouija board).

Summoning spirits

You have probably heard many dramatic references to summoning spirits (calling angels, invoking demons, etc.). For all of the grandiose gesticulations and elaborate symbol-drawing you’ll find in ceremonial books on summoning, it’s actually one of the easiest advanced magics to pull off. It’s basically the astral equivalent of sticking your head out of a suburb window and yelling for your neighbor.

Calling spirits is not something you should do unless you have a good reason (say, having a problem that is beyond your ability to solve without spiritual help). After all, they have a life too (so to speak) and you are a complete stranger to them (unless you’re calling, say, a deceased relative). You wouldn’t want to walk up to someone on the street and engage them unwillingly in an hour-long conversation — it’s just not polite. And since a lot of the popular spirits to call are more powerful than you, you should treat them with nothing but respect. They have no good reason to help you unless you have an honest one to offer.

A good method of finding your spirit is by using his seal (see Section VII). Print off or draw the seal on a sheet of paper. After going through your usual ritual process until you’re balanced, draw excess energy and paint it along the lines of the seal, tracing it in the air from the picture. Then pass your hands gently over the energy design, feeling out the glow it gives off. Once you’re certain of the feeling it’s meant to express (make sure you get “the big picture,” not just an aspect), you can flesh it out by adding more energy to the design programmed with the same essence. Now you’ve got an excellent idea of who you’re contacting — or what they “smell” like, anyway.

Now take a few moments to drop a little deeper into gnosis. Spread your consciousness out, searching, until you locate a feeling that matches the one you just drew in the air. (Remember that distance has little or no meaning in the astral plane — it may only take you a few seconds to find him). Send a link out in that direction — connected to the essence gently and temporarily, but not binding it to anything. Make the link a welcoming one — the spirit is being invited to where you are. Vibrate his name a few times down this line, politely, until you notice a change in the atmosphere. The air might become suddenly colder, or thicker, or charged with static; and the feeling of essence will become much more intense. That means that your spirit has arrived. If he’s based powerfully enough on your own frequency, it will register on your third eye — you’ll actually see him. If not, there could be dozens of reasons; don’t worry about it. You only need to talk to him, not see him. If you haven’t already, dissolve the link in a show of good will.

First of all, thank him for coming. Then explain the reason why you wanted to call him. (If he seems uninterested, thank him again for coming and let him leave). If he seems sympathetic, offer to use a pendulum to ask him questions you might need answered. You could use an ouija board or several other methods of divination, but the pendulum is one of the fastest and most accurate methods of translating his responses. (Still, if you’re clairvoyant enough you might not need to use a pendulum at all — I’ve conducted entire conversations through nothing but feeling-out and vibrating. It’s not as hard as it sounds). Remember, he has a life too — he may want something in return for helping you (even if it’s something as simple as praying for a blessing for him). When you’ve gotten your problem as resolved as possible, thank him for his help and wish him good leave.

Cleanse the area thoroughly, afterwards, so that the attraction of spirits will not continue. You might burn incense or an herb of some sort, telling the smoke to carry away the energy you had painted in the air. You might strew salt about the floor, as it tends to “soak up” the programming of energy and leave it in its raw, pure form. Or, you might just ground the energy of the whole room into the Earth, draining away any residual magic. Chaos mages like to “banish with laughter” — laughing until you’ve filled the room with fresh personal energy (and you’ve forgotten what you were worried about banishing in the first place).

Making a familiar

A lot of modern witches will just walk out of a pet store with a “familiar” — and they usually give it a kitty litter box right next to their ceremonial broom. Just like references to the third eye, most recent literature has completely lost sight of how magical a familiar is supposed to be. Having a black cat is by no means comparable.

Making your own familiar means writing the ultimate energy program — a sentient being. This isn’t as hard as it sounds — you’ve actually been doing this to a small extent already, in telling your spell energy to perform tasks. How hard would it be to give energy the tasks of being self-aware and thinking for itself? There are a few minor differences to pay attention to, though.

First of all, it takes a huge amount of energy to pull this off correctly. The energy has to be dense enough to hold together for a short lifetime. You’ll need to store energy from at least a dozen sessions of drawing energy (no more than one session per day). Instead of programming the energy and putting it to work, just paint the raw energy into a storage container, compressing it for later use. This could be a box that you’ve set up a storage shield around, or a large pure crystal (or whatever works for you). (It’s good to have something like this ready for large spells, anyway.)

You need to have determined exactly what you need your familiar for. If you just want to make one to be cool, then forget it. Having a familiar is a lot like raising a child. It’s a life-changing commitment. The original use of a familiar involved much more than wishy-washy “companionship” and “protection.” A familiar was intelligent enough to understand vibrated requests and carry them out (for example, attacking your nemesis in the dead of night) and help in the execution of a spell (drawing in additional energy, chasing off curious spirits, etc.). They grow and evolve; a familiar is not your mindless servant, but an apprentice.

Compile a list of all the attributes you want your familiar to have. This includes personality, loyalty, intelligence (genius for its species is the maximum level if it’s going to be an animal), long-term duties, and the like. The more time you spend on this, the better. Take your time drawing out the energy you’ve stored, programming it with each concept on your list, rolling it back up together, and compressing it for storage again. You’ll need to do this for about one-fourth of the time it took you to store the energy (for instance, four sessions of programming if you’ve had sixteen sessions of storing energy). (One of my friends calls this the Raoris Ratio – I believe it came from a text on chaos magick, but I’m not sure).

You need to decide if you want a physical familiar or an astral familiar. If you want an astral familiar, you’ll be able to feel him when he’s near, and mind-reading will be easier than in physical. If you want a physical familiar, though, you’ll have the notable benefits of someone who can be an extra set of eyes, ears, and hands (er, paws) for you. In either case, you need to spend some time preparing a home for him in or near your house, where he will be comfortable passing the time until you need him.

To create the new soul, do one last ritual to draw raw energy, and mold it into the shape you want your familiar to have. Draw about half of the programmed energy from your storage container and integrate it into this new form, at the same time refreshing the programming one last time. Next, use the crown chakra method of drawing energy, but then slow, stop, and reverse the flow — you’re going to project your own energy out of your crown and into the shape of your familiar. This is that spark of divinity — a little taste of his God — use it to program in your familiar those last two, most important tasks: self-awareness and the ability to think for itself. Give the familiar a name now (and a seal, if you want the future convenience — if the familiar will be physical I suggest getting it engraved onto his collar).

If your familiar is going to be physical, pull the whole thing into the womb of its mother and tell it to become alive, and be born to fill your wishes for it. Make sure to time his creation within the first week of being conceived. You’ll need to put the storage container you programmed the energy into inside of his mother’s bedding or nearby; program it to slowly release the programming daily into the one, newly-created soul in her womb; a refresher course of sorts.

If you feel your familiar has reached the end of its ability for service, then absorb its energy back into your own. This is the sort of coming-home a lot of us hope for with our own God. Otherwise, you might want to set him free, wiping away any binding you might have between you. Make absolutely sure that he’s not trapped to you unwillingly.

There are other techniques to making familiars, but most of the ones I’ve seen involve the storage container method. Thus, I have pulled the basic theory together here as best I can.

No Boundaries

That concludes the section on advanced magic. By no means are these the only advanced techniques that can be used. They’re just mentioned often enough in occult literature to deserve some explanation. Modern innovations in metaphysics prove that there’s really no limit to the creativity you can apply to this science. Some witches have been experimenting with influencing time as well as space. Another recent invention is “cybermagick” — using computer concepts such as “copy” and “delete” to manipulate energy. The possibilities are endless.

Section X Exercises

1. Wait until you have a good reason before you summon a spirit.
2. I’d practice witchcraft for at least a year before attempting to create a familiar. (But you can start storing up energy now for similar large spells). Send the familiar out to complete one task for you every day until you feel he is well-trained.

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