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Quotes from John Michael Greer on Prayer
Sep. 16th, 2020 10:18 amMostly from Magic Mondays and other blog posts.
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23 July 2018
I haven't written much on [prayer]; there's a short chapter on the subject in my first book, Paths of Wisdom.
14 May 2018
I haven't written extensively about prayer, but there's a chapter in my first book, Paths of Wisdom, that discusses it.
10 December 2018
My daily prayer practice is integrated into my ritual and meditative work, and focuses on two specific deities. I'm not particularly gifted at prayer -- that's one of the reasons I'm a mage rather than a mystic -- and the form it takes is a period of silent freeform prayer ending with a traditional Druid prayer spoken aloud...I finish my meditation, then pray.
[What would it mean to be gifted at prayer?]:
Like being gifted at anything else -- it's quicker to learn and you get good results easily.
17 August 2020
Prayer is simply talking to a being you can't see...It is very simple. Dogmatic religions tend to make it more complex than it is, to discourage people from making their own personal contacts with deities.
28 September 2017
Prayer is a conversation. You treat the other Person involved the way you’d treat someone else you respect, i.e., it’s not about “gimme-gimme-gimme,” nor droning flattery; it’s also equal parts talking and listening. I recommend that beginners try it sitting down rather than kneeling — you’re not there to grovel, you’re there to have a quiet conversation with a very wise Friend.
1 October 2018
Prayer is a conversation with a deity. [A good prayer ritual] depends on the religious tradition you're following and the deity you're working with. If there isn't any specific framework for prayer in your tradition, the first time you pray, light some incense, saying, "I offer this incense to (say the name of the deity here)." Then simply talk to the deity; introduce yourself, tell them why you would like to pray to them, and ask them for guidance in learning how best to pray to them. Then simply spend some time every day praying to the deity, and listen inwardly for the response.
24 July 2018
Go ahead and pray as though the god you're invoking is listening. Do it daily -- talk to the god and then listen, and pay attention to what you hear. Praying for help becoming an un-dunce is a really good place to start, too!
16 July 2019
Prayer is always your best bet when dealing with a deity; that's how humans communicate with gods and goddesses. Remember that the sort of prayer that involves cringing and groveling on your knees and babbling about how awful you are is purely an affectation of certain monotheist faiths, and not something Druids do. Sit down, clear your mind with a little relaxation and rhythmic breathing, then mentally speak to the goddess, asking her politely to attend to your prayer. Then speak to her as you would to a much older and wiser friend. You may or may not sense an answer; it may or may not be in words. Let the practice of prayer itself teach you what works for you and how central it should be in your life.
14 January 2019
[On Jenny's relationship with the God Tsathoggua in the Weird of Hali]:
Jenny's practice of reflective prayer is a real thing. How dramatic the results will be vary from person to person -- I based her experiences on the sort of thing that happens to people who have a lot of talent for that work -- but the basic sort of relationship is something that happens fairly often. (That's why I put it in the book.)
29 May 2018
I don't do prayer to get things from deities -- that approach has always seemed rude to me. I pray to be close to deities with whom I have a relationship, in much the same spirit that I spend time with anyone else I care deeply about, and the benefits are similar.
29 December 2017
It also interests me that people in ancient times didn't clasp their hands to pray, and they didn't kneel. They stood upright, with arms raised in a curve, almost as though they were offering the god or goddess a hug. The difference between that open and expansive posture, and the cramped, crouching, closed posture of modern prayer, says a great deal to me about the differences in the traditions.
The Druid Magic Handbook (2007)
Many spiritual traditions use indirect methods to awaken the centers. Ordinary prayer, for example, uses a specific posture - head bowed, hands pressed palm to palm at heart level — to concentrate nwyfre at centers in the heart and throat. Sounds that resonate at specific points in the body, such as the mantras of Hindu and Buddhist traditions, have effects of the same kind.
29 October 2018
[What religious experiences can be had in multi-faith chapels?]:
Depends on who you pray to. The gods are always present everywhere, and bland modern architecture won't keep them from listening to you if you call on them.
15 July 2019
There's no fixed order for the elements of a prayer. The important thing is to find a sequence that works well for you and is received well by the beings to whom you pray, and that's best done through personal experience. You can do all the sentences you've described, in whatever order seems to work best; give it a try, and pray for guidance!
18 February 2019
Prayer is unaffected by astrological conditions -- that's why so many traditions recommend it as a basic practice; you can do it at any time.)
22 July 2019
[On working with oneself beyond the mental plane]:
The mental plane is as high as you can go, since you're developing a mental body at this phase of your evolution; you can orient it toward the spiritual levels by meditation and prayer, which is useful.
24 October 2019
[Prayer] can have powerful protective effects; I recommend that people who aren’t comfortable with ritual magic consider daily prayer instead.
17 December 2019
[What is the difference between a banishing ritual and a prayer?]:
It's a different kind of activity. You pray to direct your mind, heart, and will to God. You do a banishing ritual to cleanse yourself and your surroundings of everything that is not in keeping with the will of God. If you're a Christian, prayer is essential -- but a daily banishing ritual is very helpful in addition.
1 June 2019
From an esoteric standpoint, monasticism is a potent source of positivity in any society that fosters it -- to have groups of people devoting their lives to prayer, meditation, and ritual balances out a lot of noxiousness.
28 October 2019
[On changing the astral surroundings of a person by visualizing protective light, or attacking them by visualizing negative energy around them]:
Of course. That's one of the ways that nasty magic works -- and it's one of the reasons that a daily banishing ritual such as the Sphere of Protection is as essential to magical hygiene as bathing is to physical hygiene.
Prayer can have the same benefit; there's a reason why "deliver us from evil" is in the Lord's Prayer, for example.
18 February 2019
[On communicating with the higher self]:
Most of any serious system of magical spirituality is aimed at opening up the connection between your lower self -- the personality you think of as "yourself" -- and your higher self -- the enduring spiritual reality of which your lower self is a temporary projection. (In the cosmology of the Dolmen Arch, these are called the hunan and the elaeth respectively. Bringing the two into contact with one another is far from easy; prayer is one traditional way to go about it, and the regular practice of magic and meditation will also move in that direction, but don't expect instant results (and if you get what look like instant results, be very careful, because the hunan is very good at tricking itself.)
14 September 2020
You can always pray to your guardian angel.
8 October 2018
Every human being has a spiritual protector of the sort that Christian mystics call a guardian angel. Yours will reveal itself to you when you're ready for that. In the meantime, the occasional prayer of gratitude is a good idea.
17 August 2020
[How do you address a prayer to your Guardian?]:
The classic advice from Renaissance magical handbooks is that you call on your guardian by his title, not by his name. Only after you make contact will you learn his name, and the names of those other spirits who will work with you...The best way is for you to come up with your own title and prayer, based on your own experience of the presence you're addressing. Repeating a set formula won't do it -- you need to address the being personally, as you would an older and wiser relative, say, who had helped you many times with letters and favors but whom you'd never actually met.
22 July 2019
[On preparing before a potent magical working]:
Have you done serious divination, meditation, and prayer to determine whether this is the right thing for you to do? That's the essential first step, because something like this is not something to do lightly, and if it's a mistake -- if this isn't what you should be doing with this life -- you can quite possibly mess yourself over for lifetimes to come.
4 May 2020
[On praying to the archangels]:
You can certainly pray to them; many people do. If you do so, spend time listening as well as talking to them.
31 December 2018
[On establishing contact with and beginning a relationship with a deity using a statue]:
Daily reflective prayer is the basic practice in this kind of work. Once you have the statue, consider getting a couple of candles and something scented -- incense is fine, or you could use a potpourri of appropriate herbs and resins, which can be renewed with a blend of essential oils. Light the candles, do whatever needs doing with the scented stuff, recite a prayer you've chosen -- the same one every time, please, as it helps you attune to the practice -- and then listen inwardly, with your mind. Give that five or ten minutes either once or twice a day, and the relationship will develop from there.
(...and, yes, if you've read a certain novel of mine, the resemblance here is the opposite of accidental...)
21 October 2019
[On a magical path versus a mystical path with Hesychasm]:
That's a valid question, of course, but the answer has to come from within you. To put things in Christian language, each soul is called to God along a different path; mystical paths such as Hesychasm, magical paths such as the Golden Dawn, and the path of ordinary service in everyday life are among the countless options. Since I'm an occultist and not a mystic, I'm not really qualified to compare what I do with Hesychasm, or any other mystical path.
What I'd encourage you to do is read books from various paths that appeal to you, and read biographies of people who've committed themselves to those paths. Ask yourself: are these practices the sort of thing I want to spend my life doing? Is this person the kind of person I want to become? Combine that with prayer -- lots of prayer -- and you'll find the right path for you.
Circles of Power: A Handbook of Hermetic Magic (1997; 2017)
The heart has also been central to Western spirituality, in both orthodox and esoteric forms. Catholic devotions to the Sacred Heart of Jesus are one manifestation of this; another is the potent system of meditative prayer called hesychasm, practiced in Eastern Orthodox monasteries for centuries, in which controlled breathing and the constant repetition of a short prayer bring the awareness into focus at the heart center and open the door to mystical experience.
31 December 2018
[Is exhaustion with metempsychosis coupled with a desire for ascension into the divine a healthy sign?]:
It really does vary. In some cases, yes, it's an indication that you have a call to the mystical path; in other cases, it's an attempt to run away from life, or more specifically from some kind of karmic debt you don't want to deal with. How do you tell? Lots of prayer -- specifically, the kind that involves listening to the divine rather than talking to it -- is generally a good start.
4 March 2018
Ritual magic isn’t for everyone, and if you don’t feel it’s appropriate for you, then by all means don’t do it. The way of prayer is also a valid path; if that’s the path that calls you, then go ye forth and do that thing. As far as what other practices to add in, that’s very much a personal matter; since you don’t belong to a specific religious tradition, your best bet is to pray for guidance, and then be attentive to the responses you get. These may take subtle forms — your gaze happens to fall on a book, and you get an inner nudge saying “read this” — or it may not be so subtle — I’ve had books literally drop on my head from the top shelves of used bookstores when I wasn’t looking in the right place…
5 August 2019
A method that requires all your waking hours is one of certain kinds of contemplative prayer, which are done constantly -- when the books say "pray without ceasing" they mean it.
Magic Monday FAQ
If you’re pregnant or nursing, prayer, meditation, and maybe a little light divination is as much as you should do. You’re busy with one of the most powerful magical workings a human being can engage in—the rite that summons a human soul into physical incarnation—and that’s what you need to work on for now.
26 March 2019
[On practices safe for those with heart conditions]:
It's a traditional caution in occult studies that people who have heart conditions should avoid practicing ceremonial magic, other than such very basic techniques as the Sphere of Protection. Meditation, prayer, and contemplation of nature are entirely safe; an occasional Sphere of Protection would be okay, and so is celebrating the solstices and equinoxes -- but the Grail Working and other energy work, no, not until and unless she gets a clean bill of health from her health care provider.
18 February 2018
[Is a prayer the same as a spell?]:
Prayers aren't spells. In a prayer, you say, "Thy will be done," and in a spell, you say, "My will be done." Not the same thing! (Now it's only fair to say that people muck up the distinction. A lot of people who think they're praying spend their time telling God what to do, which is not what prayer is supposed to be about. Prayer is about communing with a deity, not handing over a list of goodies to Santa Claus.)
28 September 2017
Prayer relates to magic as violin music relates to orchestral music generally. It’s one way of relating to spiritual beings; it’s incorporated in some forms of magic — the ones I use, for example — and not in others. It can also be done on its own.
21 April 2018
[On liturgical prayers for heads of state as public magical workings]:
Collective prayer, as magic, is very weak magic. Did the regular prayers made by Orthodox monks, priests, and laity for the well-being of Tsar Nicholas II, for example, prevent him from ending up in a shallow grave with a Bolshevik bullet in his brain? I'm quite prepared to believe that the working we're discussing will do just as much to harm Trump as those prayers did to help the Tsar -- but then, any competent theologian can explain to you why you're quite mistaken to think of prayer and magic as being the same thing...
Oh, and I should have added: remember that the reason that publicizing this working was a bad idea, and guarantees its failure, is that other people are going to do magic to counter it. I'm not saying that public magic, as public magic, is doomed to failure; I'm saying that in a magical combat -- which is what we're discussing here, you know -- letting the other side know all about the timing, intention, and ritual structure of your working is a very foolish thing to do.
29 June 2018
The Druid tradition I follow doesn’t propose a specific understanding of prayer. It suggests that you might consider trying it, and see what happens. One thing about Druidry — and it’s something I’ve adopted from that source, as you’ve probably noticed! — is that Druids don’t worry much about understandings, interpretations, and theories, since they know that these will change over time and have much more to do with intellectual fashions than with the things they supposedly discuss. Put another way, the only understanding of prayer that matters is the one that comes out of the experience of prayer.
1 August 2018
One of the crucial skills of prayer is the one you learn by making the transition from talking to a deity to listening.
10 April 2018
[How do gods and spirits communicate to you?]:
When I get an answer to a prayer or the like, it comes in wordless form, as a kind of cognitive feeling -- it's hard to express this in words -- and I can, while that condition persists, feel which words are the closest fit to what I'm perceiving.
4 November 2016
One thing everyone agrees on about the gods is that they take their own sweet time, and they don't respond to demands or to pressure. If you aren't experiencing anything as a result of prayer, you might want to reflect on what your expectations are, and if necessary, give it a rest for a while.
30 September 2017
The ancient Greeks used to put up altars dedicated “to the unknown god” when they figured out there was a spiritual power present somewhere, but didn’t know who or what it was. Their prayers still got answered. Just as you can approach someone in a social setting and say, “Hi, I’m Ragnar Hairypants, I don’t think we’ve met,” and shake their hand, you can approach the divine world and say, “I believe and hope that there is a god or goddess who is interested in working with me, and I would like to come into contact with that deity.” Don’t expect miracles, shining rays of light, etc.; listen for the very quiet sense of a response, or simply of your prayer being heard. Be patient and persistent, and if you suddenly start running across references to some particular deity, pay attention to that!
7 September 2020
[On distinguishing between a demon and a god, and how can one avoid praying to the wrong entity?]:
This is one of the reasons why it's helpful to practice a daily banishing ritual. That will help keep your state of consciousness at a level that keeps you safe from malign spirits. Daily meditation also helps with this.
14 September 2020
What determines the grade of entity you contact is your own state of consciousness. If your mind's in a grubby place, you're not going to contact anything less grubby, while if you raise your state of consciousness through spiritual practice, you end up keeping a better grade of company. That's what leads people to think they're serving gods when they may be hanging out with something considerably less positive.
6 September 2019
[If a person prays to a Celtic god regularly then how could a demon interfere?]:
It depends on the spiritual state of the person who is praying. If you're full of hatred, envy, and other negative emotions, say, and you don't make an effort to turn away from those emotions when you start to pray, you're not going to reach a god -- you're going to reach a demonic entity who is the dim reflection of that god in what Cabalists call the realm of empty husks. That's why traditions that use prayer tend to put a good deal of emphasis on preparatory practices -- say, reading Scripture before you pray, or confessing your sins, or working with an established set of prayers intended to reorient you to the higher levels of being... Most Neopagans tend to neglect such things, and they also lack the sort of morality that would lead them to recognize that wallowing in rage, hatred, and barely concealed envy isn't a useful habit, especially when it comes to relating to the gods.
14 September 2020
The things to look out for, when you're trying to assess whether a person might be in contact with a malign entity (or simply a low-grade spook pretending to be something much more important) are these. Flattery is the first; false predictions are the second; and the third is that the entity parrots the person's political or social agenda. Any one of those signs is reason to back away fast.
27 July 2018
You get what you pray for. If you pray for a god of peace and love to show up in answer to your prayers, you’ll very likely get that, and if you pray for a god of vengeance and harsh moral judgment to show up in answer to your prayers, you’ll very likely get that, too — and what name you assign to that god may not have that much to do with what shows up.
27 September 2015
...a curious phenomenon I've noticed very routinely: the deity one worships shows in personality traits. In your case, you've got the classic antinomian streak, thus would likely worship one of the oppositional deities — but not Loki; every Loki's man I've ever met had a sneering, petty, adolescent quality to their personality and posts you don't seem to have. In the same way, worshippers of Satan always have a pompous streak, worshippers of Coyote are playful and annoying, and so on. I only know of one oppositional deity whose followers have a certain earnest seriousness about them, as you do, and that's Set — so that was my guess.
The same thing applies to other deities, by the way. If the followers of love goddesses were alcoholic beverages, Aphrodite's would be champagne, Freya's would be mead, Erzulie's would be 152-proof dark rum, and so on. For that matter, I've long felt that different Christian denominations worship different Jesuses (Jesii?). You get worshippers of a pale, wrathful Lord of the Dead at war with biological existence — rather like Odin, but without the earthy qualities and the quirky sense of humor that make the Allfather endearing — but then you also get people whose Jesus overflows with compassion and life. As a polytheist, I have no problem making sense of this, but I suspect it gives hiccups to others.
21 May 2017
Religious experience? In the broadest sense, that’s what happens when someone engages in religious practice and gets a response. The nature of the response varies with the type of practice, and it also varies with the deity to whom the practice is directed. Despite the efforts of the one-size-fits-all sort of monotheist to insist that every religion is directed toward only one god (i.e., theirs) and results in only one kind of religious experience (i.e., also theirs), the literature of religious experience suggests otherwise. It suggests, in fact, that there really is a difference between (say) the presence of the living Christ experienced by a devout Christian in prayer, the state of enlightenment experienced by a devout Buddhist in meditation, and the medicine power experienced by a devout Lakota Native American on a vision quest.
28 February 2018
[If All is One, why should we pray?]: If all is one, all sex is masturbation; that doesn’t keep lovemaking with a partner from being a lot more fun than doing it on your own. In exactly the same way, all may be one in a mystical sense, but until you’ve attained perfect enlightenment, you’re here with the rest of us in the world of appearances, so yes, you should pray.
1 June 2020
[On visualizing a goddess of love or sexuality during masturbation]:
You'd have to ask the goddess. Prayer is the usual method; divination is also a workable option.
23 June 2018
[On whether gods prefer certain visualizations during rituals]:
The best way to settle that is to pray to the gods in question and listen for their response.
2 December 2019
[On repeating a prayer request many times or only praying for it once]:
Pray to your deity and ask! As with individual humans, individual gods have their own preferences where that's concerned.
8 June 2018
[On Buddhist prayers to benefit all sentient beings]:
It's mostly going to affect those beings within a city block or so of you, but it also has good effects on your own microcosm, of course.
14 January 2019
[On prayer for a reader's father who had recently died]:
It's important not to interrupt him too much while he goes through the early phases of the after-death process; he has a lot of work to do. Your best bet at this stage is to pray to the deity you worship, and ask that deity to help your father. That's something deities know how to do, and they're good at it.
2 March 2020
[On a reader's mother with dementia, in a nursing home]:
What I'd recommend is that you pray -- to a deity if you have a relationship with one, to the universe if you don't -- and simply ask that the situation will be resolved as soon as possible in the best way for all concerned.
11 November 2019
[On a reader's father who had died]:
I don't recommend using mediums. There are some honest ones, but the great majority are dishonest and use various tricks to establish and maintain their clienteles. M. Lamar Keene's book The Psychic Mafia, by a corrupt medium who finally couldn't live with himself and spilled the beans on the spiritualist racket, is worth reading in this context.
What I'd recommend is to simply maintain the shrine you've created, and talk to him when you feel like it. He'll be working his way through the afterlife process, absorbing the lessons of the life just past, and your love will help him in that process. If you have a relationship with a deity, prayer is another really good way to help a dead person work through the process. Closure isn't really an option in our world; the best you can do is to help, and let things unfold.
7 January 2019
[On helping someone in an abusive situation]:
In a crisis situation, I don't recommend trying any kind of magical working you haven't already practiced extensively. Ordinary prayer, if you have a relationship with a god or goddess that involves that, is one good choice if you don't have a lot of magical background; if not, it's probably best to stick to helping out on the material plane.
10 September 2018
[On protecting someone from an energy vampire]:
Okay, to begin with, it's a basic principle of magical ethics not to do magic for another person without their consent. Does the other person know and approve of what you're doing? If so, there's quite a bit you can do; if not, prayer is an appropriate tool...
Praying for someone's conversion, against their will, is one thing; simply praying for someone to be protected from supernatural harm, to my mind, is another.
21 January 2019
[On how to help a reader's father who doesn't believe in an afterlife when he dies]:
It can be really rough. There you are, outside your physical body but with no way of understanding your condition, unable to communicate with incarnate people, unwilling to communicate with discarnate beings (or even acknowledge their existence) -- and that can go on for quite a while. One thing you can do, if you have a relationship with deities, is to pray for them to help your father when he dies. It can really help, once the initial terror and rage passes off, for something obviously much bigger and smarter than a human being to sit down next to him and say, "Look, I get it that you thought death was the end of everything. You were wrong, okay? Come with me -- there are many more interesting places to be, now that you're dead."
5 March 2019
[On helping some young nephews]:
Doing magic for people without their permission is a violation of magical ethics, and should be avoided. I'd encourage you instead to use prayer -- deities are good at handling such things.
A World Full of Gods: An Inquiry Into Polytheism (2005)
Several studies also suggest that intercessory prayer – that is, prayer for another person – has measurable positive effects on health conditions ranging from leukemia to heart disease, even when neither the patients nor their health care providers are aware that the intercessory prayer is taking place.
Circles of Power: An Introduction to Hermetic Magic (2017)
Amen, which is little more than a kind of verbal punctuation in modern prayers, was in earlier times one of the most important words of power, related by sound to the Hindu Aum or Om and the Druidic Awen.
23 July 2018
[The Lord's Prayer] is a good solid prayer with protective effects. Most schools of Christian occultism advise saying it at least once a day, and that strikes me as a very good idea.
2 September 2019
[On standardized prayers like the Lord's Prayer and Gloria 'keeping the line open' when you have nothing to say]:
That's one reason for them. They also teach the mind how to think in a religious context -- there's a great discussion of the structure and internal symbolism of the Lord's Prayer in Peter Roche de Coppens' The Nature and Use of Ritual along these lines.
17 June 2019
[Would you categorize praying a rosary as meditation or as prayer? Do you think it's a beneficial practice?]
It's right on the borderline, and yes, it's an immensely beneficial practice. If you're a Catholic I would strongly encourage you to pray the rosary daily.
15 October 2019
[On changing the words in the Hail Mary prayer]:
If you change the prayer you're going to get a different result, but since you want a different result, you need to change the prayer. Yes, it'll probably be less powerful at first, but the more you pray using your own prayers, the more powerful they will become. I'd encourage you to pray to the Virgin Mary in your own words first, letting her know what you're trying to do and asking for her help and blessing, and then rewrite those prayers and get to work.
23 December 2019
What I'd advise, since I gather you're Catholic, is to pray the Rosary every day. That's a potent invocation, and will balance the masculine Christ current of the ritual with the feminine Mary current...You might want to say the Lord's Prayer in Latin also, so as to have that at the same voltage.
8 October 2018
[On names of God in the Golden Dawn tradition]:
If you're working with Paths of Wisdom, all the Hebrew names of God given in that book are names of the deity that Christians call God the Father. Jesus in his human incarnation will have learned and prayed to every one of these names -- they're all found in the original Hebrew version of the Old Testament.
29 January 2019
[On using the Orphic Hymns]:
The classic practice -- and I know people who do this, with great benefit -- is to recite one planetary Orphic hymn per day, using the relationship of days to planets:
Sunday: Sun
Monday: Moon
Tuesday: Mars
Wednesday: Mercury
Thursday: Jupiter
Friday: Venus
Saturday: Saturn
If you really want to be traditional, burn some incense to the planetary deity while you recite the Hymn, and then follow with an extempore prayer. Done regularly, this is a potent practice that will have significant positive results in your life.
12 August 2019
I've read about Centering Prayer but I wouldn't consider myself familiar with it. I have no idea how it would interact with standard magical practice; the mere fact that they're both Western is not a guarantee of safety.
17 May 2015
There have always been Christian occultists, people practicing various kinds of ceremonial and natural magic in the name of Christ, but that's been frowned on (and, when the legal climate permits, subject to savage persecution) by mainstream denominations. There's also been a great deal of “it's not magic, it's prayer” magic being done on the fringes of those same mainstream denominations. What might come of that as we proceed into the new sensibility is an interesting question.
14 January 2019
It's very common in modern magical spirituality for people to cultivate a relationship with one deity, who becomes their patron deity, and to work with other spiritual powers in other contexts. It's perfectly fine to focus on one divine being for your prayers, while invoking other beings in magical workings or the like.
14 June 2018
Dion Fortune was a devout if heterodox Christian — she drew a sharp distinction between Jesus the person and Christ the cosmic principle, which IIRC would have gotten her burnt at the stake not too many centuries ago — who, like a great many Christian esotericists before and since, saw no contradiction between praying to Christ and invoking the Pagan gods and goddesses of nature.
24 September 2019
Over the three centuries since the Druid Revival got going, a solid majority of the Druids in that tradition have invoked Jesus as well as the various Druid gods. It's not at all uncommon in the tradition, in fact, to identify Hu the Mighty with God the Father, and Hesus the chief of tree-spirits with Jesus the son of God. So in working with both Christian and Druid deities, you're actually in the mainstream of the tradition, and I'm kind of over to one side! ;-) The broader point worth making here, of course, is that what gods you worship is up to you and Them. If other people get their knickers in a knot over that, that's their problem, not yours.
14 September 2020
[On working with a preferred pantheon]:
I find it easiest to work with a single pantheon, and as a Druid working in the Druid Revival tradition, it makes sense to me to work with the rather odd mix of Welsh and ancient Celtic deities that Druid Revival traditions generally work with. (You can find these discussed in some detail in my book The Druid Magic Handbook.) Any reasonably complete pantheon has gods or goddesses who correspond to anything you might need to pray for or work magic for. So, like old-fashioned Druids for the last couple of hundred years, I invoke Hu the Mighty, Ced the earth mother, and Hesus chief of tree-spirits as a matter of course, and then call on other deities from the same pantheon for workings specific to their natures.
26 March 2018
[On picking a pantheon to pray to]:
As with so much else, there are many ways to go about it, and different people find one or another approach more satisfactory. Me, I'd start by getting a good book of myths dealing with a pantheon, the sort of thing that used to be written for older children -- those tend to be highly readable, and to have the vivid incantatory quality you want. See which pantheon has stories that really resonate with you, and go from there.
22 August 2018
My Muslim friends tell me that they have every reason to believe that Allah exists and answers prayers, and I have no reason to doubt their sincerity, so on that basis, yes, I believe that Allah is a god, and that those who worship him will receive his blessings. It seems quite reasonable to me, likewise, that Muhammad did in fact receive a series of true revelations from Allah; gods speak to prophets fairly often, and the gods of the Middle Eastern desert peoples seem to do it more often than others.
I really don’t know enough about how Islam is practiced in different places to be able to tell for sure whether different sects worship different deities under the same name, though it seems pretty clear to me that the takfiri sects that engage in atrocities worship something that is neither merciful nor compassionate! As for the vitality of Islam, well, it got started six hundred years later than Christianity; religions have a life cycle, and 600 years ago Christianity was very vital indeed. It’s not at all surprising to me that Islam, being so much younger, still has the vigor and enthusiasm of youth, while Christianity is getting noticeably old and gray these days…
24 September 2019
Do you ask permission of the people for whom you pray, before you pray to them? Consent is as essential in magic as it is in sex.
23 July 2018
I've been prayed at by Christians trying to convert me -- in one case, by a whole church of them -- and it was indistinguishable from any other kind of magical attack meant to control someone's will. (The energies from the church in particular felt dank and slimy; I don't know what they were praying to when they thought they were invoking Jesus, but it wasn't a power I'd want anything to do with.) Always ask permission before invoking spiritual forces for anyone else.
27 April 2015
There's a lot of malefic magic passing as prayer these days. A few years back, there was a fad in fundamentalist Christian circles for creating “avenging angels” via visualization and whipped-up emotion, and unleashing them on Pagans and occultists. Nasty stuff if you don't know how to counter it!
[To counter it], the standard trick in the magical community of the time was to construct an angel trap. Apparently the visualization being used by the teams of “prayer warriors” involved sending their avenging angels plunging through the middle of a pentagram to demolish whatever lay immediately beyond it; since a lot of people in the Pagan scene in those days wore pentagram necklaces and the like, that was a pretty blatant piece of death magic.
So you'd take a piece of cloth and draw a pentagram on it, with some ornate but meaningless occult-looking symbols around it; you'd take a glass jar and coat the inside with kosher salt, using any of a variety of sticky things to make the salt adhere; and then you'd carefully put a very sharp steel nail or large needle, point up, in a blob of wax or clay at the bottom of the jar, cover the mouth of the jar with the pentagram-decorated cloth, and use a rubber band to fasten it into place. You'd pierce the cloth in the center of the pentagram with a pin, making a tiny hole, put it in the room where you practiced magic, and then you'd call the magical equivalent of “Here, kitty-kitty-kitty!” to the avenging angels.
Since the avenging angels were nearly mindless artificial elementals — basically a blob of life force charged with a single image that defined their purpose — one pentagram was as good as another to them, and one that wasn't guarded with protective energies was more attractive than most. So they'd dive through the pentagram, hit the sharp iron, and pop like bubbles; the salt absorbed the spare energy, and that was the end of them. Everyone I knew who used an angel trap had to replace it every few months or so, because the salt would turn the most disgusting colors, take on an almost tangible psychic funk,and finally liquefy and turn slimy. I assume the “prayer warriors” were dumping a lot of overripe and rancid sexual energy into their angel-making activities.
I know that didn't turn the spell back on the sender, but I'm not too fond of such exercises; among other things, the other guy can simply swat it back to you, and then you're playing astral badminton, which I find almost as dull as the physical kind. I find it much more entertaining to set things up so that the other guy knocks himself out, pouring more and more of his own vitality and will into the assault, and the result is a damp squeak and some discolored salt.
9 April 2018
[On dealing with negative reactions to mind-emptying meditation]:
A lot of people these days are getting this kind of negative reactions from vipassana and other mind-emptying forms of meditation, especially when they're practiced outside the traditional monastic disciplines that give them framing and direction. What occultists call the inner planes -- the mind-side of the cosmos, the part of it we experience through our minds rather than our bodies -- are not all well-behaved sweetness and light! In the present time, in particular, there are a lot of discordant energies and entities out there, and that makes meditation challenging, and even potentially harmful, when it's not combined with other practices.
I'd encourage you, if you find that occultism appeals to you, to learn one of the basic protective rituals (the Sphere of Protection or Lesser Ritual of the Pentagram) first, and practice that every day. When you've done that for a month, then, yes, discursive meditation should be fine. I've never had a student have significant trouble with the kind of experiences you've had, so long as they stuck with regular protective rituals and discursive meditation on occult topics.
One other thing that helps a great deal is prayer. If there's a deity you feel comfortable invoking, call on that deity before you begin to meditate, asking for him or her to protect you and grant you wisdom. I know a lot of people back away from that sort of thing, but the inner planes are inhabited, you know, and there are plenty of beings in them who are wiser and stronger than our species; establishing a good working relationship with such beings is basic common sense.
10 February 2020
That practice -- Christian ritual, prayer, and Bible study in the morning, and Hermetic ritual and meditation in the evening -- is what several Christian occultists of my acquaintance practice, and they have excellent results with it. I see no reason why you can't do the same thing, and so long as you're willing to invest the time and effort, your results will likely be as good as theirs.
10 February 2020
The Christian banishing ritual is meant to be combined with the other spiritual disciplines of a Christian life, which ought to include a lot of invocation (that's usually spelled "prayer" in the literature) as well as Bible study, the practice of charity and the other virtues, etc. As for the rosary, were you aware that there's an Anglican rosary? It's got 33 beads and is used with a wide range of prayers in the Anglican tradition...
25 August 2018
[On a woman who had remarkably good energy after meditating on the Bible daily for decades]: The only people I know who’ve gotten that result have used a religious text and combined it with meditation and prayer. Still, it may be that they’re the only ones who’ve tried it…
20 August 2020
Every tradition has its saints. I've met elderly Christian ladies who have no religious function other than member of a congregation, who radiate clear light so strong I practically had to blink looking at them. (One of these days I'll do a post passing on the advice about daily prayer and Bible study I got from one of them -- if you happen to belong to any religion that has a sacred scripture, it's first-rate stuff.) So, yes, there are saints of that sort all through Western spiritual traditions; I've never encountered one in a leadership or clergy position in a religious organization, but they do exist...
Here's the simple version.
Every morning, set aside 15 or 20 minutes first thing, before breakfast, and if all possible right after waking. Begin by reading one chapter out of the Bible. (The woman who taught me this insisted that you should never begin with Genesis, but should start with Chapter 1 of the Gospel of Matthew and go through the whole New Testament before going onto the Old Testament. Most people who try to read the Bible daily and start with Genesis, she said, bog down in "the begats" and never get any further.)
So you read one chapter, and then you think about what you've read, turn it over in your mind, see how well you understand it, see what questions it raises in your mind. Then you pray to Christ for the grace of the Holy Spirit to help you understand what you've read, and finish by repeating the Lord's Prayer. Then you go about your day. That 15 or 20 minutes daily, combined with Sundays at church, gave her an extraordinarily rich spiritual life and the brightest and cleanest aura I think I've ever encountered.
18 August 2020
The elderly Christian lady who taught me her method of Bible study prayed to Jesus, not to any abstract Source, and she experienced him as a person -- a man who had worked long hours as an apprentice carpenter, walked on dusty roads, dealt with all the awkward details of life in the world, and finally died an excruciating death. To judge by what she said to me about that part of her life, her prayers were dialogues with a real being; that's why I've believed since then that the god that Christians worship is unquestionably a real being.
2 September 2019
I'd like to suggest the advice I received from one of the most remarkably spiritual people I've ever met, an old lady I knew via lodge connections many years ago. Her advice was to read one chapter of the Bible every day, first thing in the morning, beginning with the Gospel of Matthew. ("Never try to start with Genesis," she liked to say. "You'll get to the begats and quit.") There's a specific way to do it. You start by getting out the Bible, opening it to the chapter you're going to read, and then praying briefly to the Holy Spirit, asking for insight. Then read the chapter. Then stop for a while and think about what you've read, what it teaches, and why it matters. Then pray -- about that, or about anything else that moves you -- finishing up with the Lord's Prayer. Then close the Bible and go on with your day.
The point of faith, after all, isn't about joining a church or becoming part of a tradition. It's about establishing a personal relationship with the god you worship, and that's best done in private. Once you've established a practice of Bible reading and prayer and kept it up daily for a couple of months, you might consider looking for a church in the Liberal Catholic tradition; you might also consider picking up Gareth Knight's book Experience of the Inner Worlds, which is a guide to Christian Cabalistic magic. Bible study and prayer come first, though!
[For Pagans]: Choose a sacred text and do the same thing, using prayers from your tradition. It ought to work just as well.
...the woman who taught me this was one of the most deeply spiritual people I've ever met; she's a good part of the reason why I got over my youthful notion that there wasn't anything actually spiritual in Christianity. (In my own defense, I came to that conclusion from encounters with the kind of fundamentalists who think that Christ died on the cross to give them the right to feel morally superior to everyone else, on the one hand, and reading an early and astonishingly vapid book by Matthew Fox on the other.)
[after you finish the New Testament, do you move on to the Old, or repeat the New?]:
It really depends on what you're up for. There are little mini-Bibles that contain only the New Testament and the Psalms, and my teacher insisted that those are really well suited for people who don't have high-end reading skills and a tolerance for begats. She did the whole Bible, but admitted to me that most times she skimmed the begats and also the long legal enactments in Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy, what she called the "Thou shalt not eat bats" passages.
If you belong to a church that has a daily sequence of Bible passages, of course, you could just do the reading for the day and call it good.
12 August 2019
the usual order in Christian tradition is...you start with a reading from the Bible or another suitable text, meditate on the reading, and let the meditation culminate in prayer. Still, experiment and see what works for you.
2 September 2019
Prayer, to begin with, is anything but obvious or instinctive -- it's something that even the great mystics have had to learn. It's going to feel contrived, fake, worthless, stupid, fill in the blank -- at first. You have to keep on trying, and bit by bit get past what the old Rosicrucians called "material inclination," the tendency of the unawakened soul to fixate on the sensory life and discount the life of the heart, mind, and spirit.
Establishing a practice of Bible reading and prayer will probably be the hardest thing you will ever do; the payoffs are commensurate. The best advice I've ever received is to simply talk to God, daily, and also listen.
With regard to a concept of God, well, there's a term for that: idolatry. Don't try to decide what God is. Open yourself to him and let him show you what he is, knowing that it won't happen quickly, and it won't happen all at once. That was another reason why my teacher in these matters insisted on beginning with the Gospels; if you start with those, you start with Christ, who is the bridge between you and God.
You're fighting your entire background, you know -- and you're fighting for your life. Take that seriously, and recognize that it matters just as much as it feels like.
September 2018
1. Every day, first thing in the morning, read one chapter out of the Bible. Don’t start with Genesis; the lady in question said that even if you make it through the “begats,” which you probably won’t, you’ll grind to a halt somewhere in Leviticus and never get any further. Begin instead with the Gospel according to Matthew and go from there through the New Testament; then read Genesis and Exodus, skip the next three books the first time, pick it up again with Joshua and go straight through, one chapter a day, to the end of the Old Testament; go straight on from Matthew through Revelations as before; then do the whole Bible again from the beginning to end, including the three books you skipped, and keep doing that, reading the whole Bible one chapter at a time, for the rest of the time the Lord gives you on earth. (That’s the way she put it.)
2. Each morning, when you read your chapter, pay close attention to it; don’t just skim. When you get to the end of the chapter, you should have at least one thing you don’t understand, or one thing that applies to your life, or just one thing that strikes you as being important or interesting. Right away, as soon as you finish the chapter, pray about that. It doesn’t have to be a long prayer; just talk to Jesus about it in your own words. Then finish up with the Lord’s Prayer.
3. Keep doing it, every morning, first thing. Make your fifteen minutes of Bible study and prayer the day’s first priority. Don’t worry about how well you’re doing, or whether you’re doing it right, or anything of that sort; you’re not the one who’s doing the work that matters. You’re putting yourself into a state where the Holy Spirit can act on you, and it’s the Holy Spirit that does the work of spiritual development. All you do is read the Bible, pray, and do your best to live a Christian life; it’s God who does the heavy lifting.
28 September 2018
As a Catholic, you might consider taking the basic prayers and creeds of your faith as your first meditative themes, and going from there to meditate on the text of the Mass, taking it line by line.
September 2018
the one prayer that’s widely heard in Druid circles is the so-called Universal Druid Prayer, which (Druids being Druids) appears in many differing versions. Here’s the one that’s used in the AODA tradition:
“Grant, O holy powers, your protection
And in protection, strength
And in strength, understanding,
And in understanding, knowledge
And in knowledge, the knowledge of justice
And in the knowledge of justice, the love of it
And in that love, the love of all existences
And in the love of all existences, the love of Earth our Mother and all goodness.”
AWEN.”
Other than that, people in the Druid scene mostly come up with their own prayers.
Druidry Handbook (2006)
[On the Universal Druid Prayer]
Recent versions have been all over the theological map, and the form given above draws from one of these. Yet though different Druids invoke a remarkable assortment of spiritual powers, the things they ask for remain the same: protection and strength, understanding and knowledge, the ability to know what is right and to love it, and ultimately love for all existing things.
https://www.ecosophia.net/
https://ecosophia.dreamwidth.org/
23 July 2018
I haven't written much on [prayer]; there's a short chapter on the subject in my first book, Paths of Wisdom.
14 May 2018
I haven't written extensively about prayer, but there's a chapter in my first book, Paths of Wisdom, that discusses it.
10 December 2018
My daily prayer practice is integrated into my ritual and meditative work, and focuses on two specific deities. I'm not particularly gifted at prayer -- that's one of the reasons I'm a mage rather than a mystic -- and the form it takes is a period of silent freeform prayer ending with a traditional Druid prayer spoken aloud...I finish my meditation, then pray.
[What would it mean to be gifted at prayer?]:
Like being gifted at anything else -- it's quicker to learn and you get good results easily.
17 August 2020
Prayer is simply talking to a being you can't see...It is very simple. Dogmatic religions tend to make it more complex than it is, to discourage people from making their own personal contacts with deities.
28 September 2017
Prayer is a conversation. You treat the other Person involved the way you’d treat someone else you respect, i.e., it’s not about “gimme-gimme-gimme,” nor droning flattery; it’s also equal parts talking and listening. I recommend that beginners try it sitting down rather than kneeling — you’re not there to grovel, you’re there to have a quiet conversation with a very wise Friend.
1 October 2018
Prayer is a conversation with a deity. [A good prayer ritual] depends on the religious tradition you're following and the deity you're working with. If there isn't any specific framework for prayer in your tradition, the first time you pray, light some incense, saying, "I offer this incense to (say the name of the deity here)." Then simply talk to the deity; introduce yourself, tell them why you would like to pray to them, and ask them for guidance in learning how best to pray to them. Then simply spend some time every day praying to the deity, and listen inwardly for the response.
24 July 2018
Go ahead and pray as though the god you're invoking is listening. Do it daily -- talk to the god and then listen, and pay attention to what you hear. Praying for help becoming an un-dunce is a really good place to start, too!
16 July 2019
Prayer is always your best bet when dealing with a deity; that's how humans communicate with gods and goddesses. Remember that the sort of prayer that involves cringing and groveling on your knees and babbling about how awful you are is purely an affectation of certain monotheist faiths, and not something Druids do. Sit down, clear your mind with a little relaxation and rhythmic breathing, then mentally speak to the goddess, asking her politely to attend to your prayer. Then speak to her as you would to a much older and wiser friend. You may or may not sense an answer; it may or may not be in words. Let the practice of prayer itself teach you what works for you and how central it should be in your life.
14 January 2019
[On Jenny's relationship with the God Tsathoggua in the Weird of Hali]:
Jenny's practice of reflective prayer is a real thing. How dramatic the results will be vary from person to person -- I based her experiences on the sort of thing that happens to people who have a lot of talent for that work -- but the basic sort of relationship is something that happens fairly often. (That's why I put it in the book.)
29 May 2018
I don't do prayer to get things from deities -- that approach has always seemed rude to me. I pray to be close to deities with whom I have a relationship, in much the same spirit that I spend time with anyone else I care deeply about, and the benefits are similar.
29 December 2017
It also interests me that people in ancient times didn't clasp their hands to pray, and they didn't kneel. They stood upright, with arms raised in a curve, almost as though they were offering the god or goddess a hug. The difference between that open and expansive posture, and the cramped, crouching, closed posture of modern prayer, says a great deal to me about the differences in the traditions.
The Druid Magic Handbook (2007)
Many spiritual traditions use indirect methods to awaken the centers. Ordinary prayer, for example, uses a specific posture - head bowed, hands pressed palm to palm at heart level — to concentrate nwyfre at centers in the heart and throat. Sounds that resonate at specific points in the body, such as the mantras of Hindu and Buddhist traditions, have effects of the same kind.
29 October 2018
[What religious experiences can be had in multi-faith chapels?]:
Depends on who you pray to. The gods are always present everywhere, and bland modern architecture won't keep them from listening to you if you call on them.
15 July 2019
There's no fixed order for the elements of a prayer. The important thing is to find a sequence that works well for you and is received well by the beings to whom you pray, and that's best done through personal experience. You can do all the sentences you've described, in whatever order seems to work best; give it a try, and pray for guidance!
18 February 2019
Prayer is unaffected by astrological conditions -- that's why so many traditions recommend it as a basic practice; you can do it at any time.)
22 July 2019
[On working with oneself beyond the mental plane]:
The mental plane is as high as you can go, since you're developing a mental body at this phase of your evolution; you can orient it toward the spiritual levels by meditation and prayer, which is useful.
24 October 2019
[Prayer] can have powerful protective effects; I recommend that people who aren’t comfortable with ritual magic consider daily prayer instead.
17 December 2019
[What is the difference between a banishing ritual and a prayer?]:
It's a different kind of activity. You pray to direct your mind, heart, and will to God. You do a banishing ritual to cleanse yourself and your surroundings of everything that is not in keeping with the will of God. If you're a Christian, prayer is essential -- but a daily banishing ritual is very helpful in addition.
1 June 2019
From an esoteric standpoint, monasticism is a potent source of positivity in any society that fosters it -- to have groups of people devoting their lives to prayer, meditation, and ritual balances out a lot of noxiousness.
28 October 2019
[On changing the astral surroundings of a person by visualizing protective light, or attacking them by visualizing negative energy around them]:
Of course. That's one of the ways that nasty magic works -- and it's one of the reasons that a daily banishing ritual such as the Sphere of Protection is as essential to magical hygiene as bathing is to physical hygiene.
Prayer can have the same benefit; there's a reason why "deliver us from evil" is in the Lord's Prayer, for example.
18 February 2019
[On communicating with the higher self]:
Most of any serious system of magical spirituality is aimed at opening up the connection between your lower self -- the personality you think of as "yourself" -- and your higher self -- the enduring spiritual reality of which your lower self is a temporary projection. (In the cosmology of the Dolmen Arch, these are called the hunan and the elaeth respectively. Bringing the two into contact with one another is far from easy; prayer is one traditional way to go about it, and the regular practice of magic and meditation will also move in that direction, but don't expect instant results (and if you get what look like instant results, be very careful, because the hunan is very good at tricking itself.)
14 September 2020
You can always pray to your guardian angel.
8 October 2018
Every human being has a spiritual protector of the sort that Christian mystics call a guardian angel. Yours will reveal itself to you when you're ready for that. In the meantime, the occasional prayer of gratitude is a good idea.
17 August 2020
[How do you address a prayer to your Guardian?]:
The classic advice from Renaissance magical handbooks is that you call on your guardian by his title, not by his name. Only after you make contact will you learn his name, and the names of those other spirits who will work with you...The best way is for you to come up with your own title and prayer, based on your own experience of the presence you're addressing. Repeating a set formula won't do it -- you need to address the being personally, as you would an older and wiser relative, say, who had helped you many times with letters and favors but whom you'd never actually met.
22 July 2019
[On preparing before a potent magical working]:
Have you done serious divination, meditation, and prayer to determine whether this is the right thing for you to do? That's the essential first step, because something like this is not something to do lightly, and if it's a mistake -- if this isn't what you should be doing with this life -- you can quite possibly mess yourself over for lifetimes to come.
4 May 2020
[On praying to the archangels]:
You can certainly pray to them; many people do. If you do so, spend time listening as well as talking to them.
31 December 2018
[On establishing contact with and beginning a relationship with a deity using a statue]:
Daily reflective prayer is the basic practice in this kind of work. Once you have the statue, consider getting a couple of candles and something scented -- incense is fine, or you could use a potpourri of appropriate herbs and resins, which can be renewed with a blend of essential oils. Light the candles, do whatever needs doing with the scented stuff, recite a prayer you've chosen -- the same one every time, please, as it helps you attune to the practice -- and then listen inwardly, with your mind. Give that five or ten minutes either once or twice a day, and the relationship will develop from there.
(...and, yes, if you've read a certain novel of mine, the resemblance here is the opposite of accidental...)
21 October 2019
[On a magical path versus a mystical path with Hesychasm]:
That's a valid question, of course, but the answer has to come from within you. To put things in Christian language, each soul is called to God along a different path; mystical paths such as Hesychasm, magical paths such as the Golden Dawn, and the path of ordinary service in everyday life are among the countless options. Since I'm an occultist and not a mystic, I'm not really qualified to compare what I do with Hesychasm, or any other mystical path.
What I'd encourage you to do is read books from various paths that appeal to you, and read biographies of people who've committed themselves to those paths. Ask yourself: are these practices the sort of thing I want to spend my life doing? Is this person the kind of person I want to become? Combine that with prayer -- lots of prayer -- and you'll find the right path for you.
Circles of Power: A Handbook of Hermetic Magic (1997; 2017)
The heart has also been central to Western spirituality, in both orthodox and esoteric forms. Catholic devotions to the Sacred Heart of Jesus are one manifestation of this; another is the potent system of meditative prayer called hesychasm, practiced in Eastern Orthodox monasteries for centuries, in which controlled breathing and the constant repetition of a short prayer bring the awareness into focus at the heart center and open the door to mystical experience.
31 December 2018
[Is exhaustion with metempsychosis coupled with a desire for ascension into the divine a healthy sign?]:
It really does vary. In some cases, yes, it's an indication that you have a call to the mystical path; in other cases, it's an attempt to run away from life, or more specifically from some kind of karmic debt you don't want to deal with. How do you tell? Lots of prayer -- specifically, the kind that involves listening to the divine rather than talking to it -- is generally a good start.
4 March 2018
Ritual magic isn’t for everyone, and if you don’t feel it’s appropriate for you, then by all means don’t do it. The way of prayer is also a valid path; if that’s the path that calls you, then go ye forth and do that thing. As far as what other practices to add in, that’s very much a personal matter; since you don’t belong to a specific religious tradition, your best bet is to pray for guidance, and then be attentive to the responses you get. These may take subtle forms — your gaze happens to fall on a book, and you get an inner nudge saying “read this” — or it may not be so subtle — I’ve had books literally drop on my head from the top shelves of used bookstores when I wasn’t looking in the right place…
5 August 2019
A method that requires all your waking hours is one of certain kinds of contemplative prayer, which are done constantly -- when the books say "pray without ceasing" they mean it.
Magic Monday FAQ
If you’re pregnant or nursing, prayer, meditation, and maybe a little light divination is as much as you should do. You’re busy with one of the most powerful magical workings a human being can engage in—the rite that summons a human soul into physical incarnation—and that’s what you need to work on for now.
26 March 2019
[On practices safe for those with heart conditions]:
It's a traditional caution in occult studies that people who have heart conditions should avoid practicing ceremonial magic, other than such very basic techniques as the Sphere of Protection. Meditation, prayer, and contemplation of nature are entirely safe; an occasional Sphere of Protection would be okay, and so is celebrating the solstices and equinoxes -- but the Grail Working and other energy work, no, not until and unless she gets a clean bill of health from her health care provider.
18 February 2018
[Is a prayer the same as a spell?]:
Prayers aren't spells. In a prayer, you say, "Thy will be done," and in a spell, you say, "My will be done." Not the same thing! (Now it's only fair to say that people muck up the distinction. A lot of people who think they're praying spend their time telling God what to do, which is not what prayer is supposed to be about. Prayer is about communing with a deity, not handing over a list of goodies to Santa Claus.)
28 September 2017
Prayer relates to magic as violin music relates to orchestral music generally. It’s one way of relating to spiritual beings; it’s incorporated in some forms of magic — the ones I use, for example — and not in others. It can also be done on its own.
21 April 2018
[On liturgical prayers for heads of state as public magical workings]:
Collective prayer, as magic, is very weak magic. Did the regular prayers made by Orthodox monks, priests, and laity for the well-being of Tsar Nicholas II, for example, prevent him from ending up in a shallow grave with a Bolshevik bullet in his brain? I'm quite prepared to believe that the working we're discussing will do just as much to harm Trump as those prayers did to help the Tsar -- but then, any competent theologian can explain to you why you're quite mistaken to think of prayer and magic as being the same thing...
Oh, and I should have added: remember that the reason that publicizing this working was a bad idea, and guarantees its failure, is that other people are going to do magic to counter it. I'm not saying that public magic, as public magic, is doomed to failure; I'm saying that in a magical combat -- which is what we're discussing here, you know -- letting the other side know all about the timing, intention, and ritual structure of your working is a very foolish thing to do.
29 June 2018
The Druid tradition I follow doesn’t propose a specific understanding of prayer. It suggests that you might consider trying it, and see what happens. One thing about Druidry — and it’s something I’ve adopted from that source, as you’ve probably noticed! — is that Druids don’t worry much about understandings, interpretations, and theories, since they know that these will change over time and have much more to do with intellectual fashions than with the things they supposedly discuss. Put another way, the only understanding of prayer that matters is the one that comes out of the experience of prayer.
1 August 2018
One of the crucial skills of prayer is the one you learn by making the transition from talking to a deity to listening.
10 April 2018
[How do gods and spirits communicate to you?]:
When I get an answer to a prayer or the like, it comes in wordless form, as a kind of cognitive feeling -- it's hard to express this in words -- and I can, while that condition persists, feel which words are the closest fit to what I'm perceiving.
4 November 2016
One thing everyone agrees on about the gods is that they take their own sweet time, and they don't respond to demands or to pressure. If you aren't experiencing anything as a result of prayer, you might want to reflect on what your expectations are, and if necessary, give it a rest for a while.
30 September 2017
The ancient Greeks used to put up altars dedicated “to the unknown god” when they figured out there was a spiritual power present somewhere, but didn’t know who or what it was. Their prayers still got answered. Just as you can approach someone in a social setting and say, “Hi, I’m Ragnar Hairypants, I don’t think we’ve met,” and shake their hand, you can approach the divine world and say, “I believe and hope that there is a god or goddess who is interested in working with me, and I would like to come into contact with that deity.” Don’t expect miracles, shining rays of light, etc.; listen for the very quiet sense of a response, or simply of your prayer being heard. Be patient and persistent, and if you suddenly start running across references to some particular deity, pay attention to that!
7 September 2020
[On distinguishing between a demon and a god, and how can one avoid praying to the wrong entity?]:
This is one of the reasons why it's helpful to practice a daily banishing ritual. That will help keep your state of consciousness at a level that keeps you safe from malign spirits. Daily meditation also helps with this.
14 September 2020
What determines the grade of entity you contact is your own state of consciousness. If your mind's in a grubby place, you're not going to contact anything less grubby, while if you raise your state of consciousness through spiritual practice, you end up keeping a better grade of company. That's what leads people to think they're serving gods when they may be hanging out with something considerably less positive.
6 September 2019
[If a person prays to a Celtic god regularly then how could a demon interfere?]:
It depends on the spiritual state of the person who is praying. If you're full of hatred, envy, and other negative emotions, say, and you don't make an effort to turn away from those emotions when you start to pray, you're not going to reach a god -- you're going to reach a demonic entity who is the dim reflection of that god in what Cabalists call the realm of empty husks. That's why traditions that use prayer tend to put a good deal of emphasis on preparatory practices -- say, reading Scripture before you pray, or confessing your sins, or working with an established set of prayers intended to reorient you to the higher levels of being... Most Neopagans tend to neglect such things, and they also lack the sort of morality that would lead them to recognize that wallowing in rage, hatred, and barely concealed envy isn't a useful habit, especially when it comes to relating to the gods.
14 September 2020
The things to look out for, when you're trying to assess whether a person might be in contact with a malign entity (or simply a low-grade spook pretending to be something much more important) are these. Flattery is the first; false predictions are the second; and the third is that the entity parrots the person's political or social agenda. Any one of those signs is reason to back away fast.
27 July 2018
You get what you pray for. If you pray for a god of peace and love to show up in answer to your prayers, you’ll very likely get that, and if you pray for a god of vengeance and harsh moral judgment to show up in answer to your prayers, you’ll very likely get that, too — and what name you assign to that god may not have that much to do with what shows up.
27 September 2015
...a curious phenomenon I've noticed very routinely: the deity one worships shows in personality traits. In your case, you've got the classic antinomian streak, thus would likely worship one of the oppositional deities — but not Loki; every Loki's man I've ever met had a sneering, petty, adolescent quality to their personality and posts you don't seem to have. In the same way, worshippers of Satan always have a pompous streak, worshippers of Coyote are playful and annoying, and so on. I only know of one oppositional deity whose followers have a certain earnest seriousness about them, as you do, and that's Set — so that was my guess.
The same thing applies to other deities, by the way. If the followers of love goddesses were alcoholic beverages, Aphrodite's would be champagne, Freya's would be mead, Erzulie's would be 152-proof dark rum, and so on. For that matter, I've long felt that different Christian denominations worship different Jesuses (Jesii?). You get worshippers of a pale, wrathful Lord of the Dead at war with biological existence — rather like Odin, but without the earthy qualities and the quirky sense of humor that make the Allfather endearing — but then you also get people whose Jesus overflows with compassion and life. As a polytheist, I have no problem making sense of this, but I suspect it gives hiccups to others.
21 May 2017
Religious experience? In the broadest sense, that’s what happens when someone engages in religious practice and gets a response. The nature of the response varies with the type of practice, and it also varies with the deity to whom the practice is directed. Despite the efforts of the one-size-fits-all sort of monotheist to insist that every religion is directed toward only one god (i.e., theirs) and results in only one kind of religious experience (i.e., also theirs), the literature of religious experience suggests otherwise. It suggests, in fact, that there really is a difference between (say) the presence of the living Christ experienced by a devout Christian in prayer, the state of enlightenment experienced by a devout Buddhist in meditation, and the medicine power experienced by a devout Lakota Native American on a vision quest.
28 February 2018
[If All is One, why should we pray?]: If all is one, all sex is masturbation; that doesn’t keep lovemaking with a partner from being a lot more fun than doing it on your own. In exactly the same way, all may be one in a mystical sense, but until you’ve attained perfect enlightenment, you’re here with the rest of us in the world of appearances, so yes, you should pray.
1 June 2020
[On visualizing a goddess of love or sexuality during masturbation]:
You'd have to ask the goddess. Prayer is the usual method; divination is also a workable option.
23 June 2018
[On whether gods prefer certain visualizations during rituals]:
The best way to settle that is to pray to the gods in question and listen for their response.
2 December 2019
[On repeating a prayer request many times or only praying for it once]:
Pray to your deity and ask! As with individual humans, individual gods have their own preferences where that's concerned.
8 June 2018
[On Buddhist prayers to benefit all sentient beings]:
It's mostly going to affect those beings within a city block or so of you, but it also has good effects on your own microcosm, of course.
14 January 2019
[On prayer for a reader's father who had recently died]:
It's important not to interrupt him too much while he goes through the early phases of the after-death process; he has a lot of work to do. Your best bet at this stage is to pray to the deity you worship, and ask that deity to help your father. That's something deities know how to do, and they're good at it.
2 March 2020
[On a reader's mother with dementia, in a nursing home]:
What I'd recommend is that you pray -- to a deity if you have a relationship with one, to the universe if you don't -- and simply ask that the situation will be resolved as soon as possible in the best way for all concerned.
11 November 2019
[On a reader's father who had died]:
I don't recommend using mediums. There are some honest ones, but the great majority are dishonest and use various tricks to establish and maintain their clienteles. M. Lamar Keene's book The Psychic Mafia, by a corrupt medium who finally couldn't live with himself and spilled the beans on the spiritualist racket, is worth reading in this context.
What I'd recommend is to simply maintain the shrine you've created, and talk to him when you feel like it. He'll be working his way through the afterlife process, absorbing the lessons of the life just past, and your love will help him in that process. If you have a relationship with a deity, prayer is another really good way to help a dead person work through the process. Closure isn't really an option in our world; the best you can do is to help, and let things unfold.
7 January 2019
[On helping someone in an abusive situation]:
In a crisis situation, I don't recommend trying any kind of magical working you haven't already practiced extensively. Ordinary prayer, if you have a relationship with a god or goddess that involves that, is one good choice if you don't have a lot of magical background; if not, it's probably best to stick to helping out on the material plane.
10 September 2018
[On protecting someone from an energy vampire]:
Okay, to begin with, it's a basic principle of magical ethics not to do magic for another person without their consent. Does the other person know and approve of what you're doing? If so, there's quite a bit you can do; if not, prayer is an appropriate tool...
Praying for someone's conversion, against their will, is one thing; simply praying for someone to be protected from supernatural harm, to my mind, is another.
21 January 2019
[On how to help a reader's father who doesn't believe in an afterlife when he dies]:
It can be really rough. There you are, outside your physical body but with no way of understanding your condition, unable to communicate with incarnate people, unwilling to communicate with discarnate beings (or even acknowledge their existence) -- and that can go on for quite a while. One thing you can do, if you have a relationship with deities, is to pray for them to help your father when he dies. It can really help, once the initial terror and rage passes off, for something obviously much bigger and smarter than a human being to sit down next to him and say, "Look, I get it that you thought death was the end of everything. You were wrong, okay? Come with me -- there are many more interesting places to be, now that you're dead."
5 March 2019
[On helping some young nephews]:
Doing magic for people without their permission is a violation of magical ethics, and should be avoided. I'd encourage you instead to use prayer -- deities are good at handling such things.
A World Full of Gods: An Inquiry Into Polytheism (2005)
Several studies also suggest that intercessory prayer – that is, prayer for another person – has measurable positive effects on health conditions ranging from leukemia to heart disease, even when neither the patients nor their health care providers are aware that the intercessory prayer is taking place.
Circles of Power: An Introduction to Hermetic Magic (2017)
Amen, which is little more than a kind of verbal punctuation in modern prayers, was in earlier times one of the most important words of power, related by sound to the Hindu Aum or Om and the Druidic Awen.
23 July 2018
[The Lord's Prayer] is a good solid prayer with protective effects. Most schools of Christian occultism advise saying it at least once a day, and that strikes me as a very good idea.
2 September 2019
[On standardized prayers like the Lord's Prayer and Gloria 'keeping the line open' when you have nothing to say]:
That's one reason for them. They also teach the mind how to think in a religious context -- there's a great discussion of the structure and internal symbolism of the Lord's Prayer in Peter Roche de Coppens' The Nature and Use of Ritual along these lines.
17 June 2019
[Would you categorize praying a rosary as meditation or as prayer? Do you think it's a beneficial practice?]
It's right on the borderline, and yes, it's an immensely beneficial practice. If you're a Catholic I would strongly encourage you to pray the rosary daily.
15 October 2019
[On changing the words in the Hail Mary prayer]:
If you change the prayer you're going to get a different result, but since you want a different result, you need to change the prayer. Yes, it'll probably be less powerful at first, but the more you pray using your own prayers, the more powerful they will become. I'd encourage you to pray to the Virgin Mary in your own words first, letting her know what you're trying to do and asking for her help and blessing, and then rewrite those prayers and get to work.
23 December 2019
What I'd advise, since I gather you're Catholic, is to pray the Rosary every day. That's a potent invocation, and will balance the masculine Christ current of the ritual with the feminine Mary current...You might want to say the Lord's Prayer in Latin also, so as to have that at the same voltage.
8 October 2018
[On names of God in the Golden Dawn tradition]:
If you're working with Paths of Wisdom, all the Hebrew names of God given in that book are names of the deity that Christians call God the Father. Jesus in his human incarnation will have learned and prayed to every one of these names -- they're all found in the original Hebrew version of the Old Testament.
29 January 2019
[On using the Orphic Hymns]:
The classic practice -- and I know people who do this, with great benefit -- is to recite one planetary Orphic hymn per day, using the relationship of days to planets:
Sunday: Sun
Monday: Moon
Tuesday: Mars
Wednesday: Mercury
Thursday: Jupiter
Friday: Venus
Saturday: Saturn
If you really want to be traditional, burn some incense to the planetary deity while you recite the Hymn, and then follow with an extempore prayer. Done regularly, this is a potent practice that will have significant positive results in your life.
12 August 2019
I've read about Centering Prayer but I wouldn't consider myself familiar with it. I have no idea how it would interact with standard magical practice; the mere fact that they're both Western is not a guarantee of safety.
17 May 2015
There have always been Christian occultists, people practicing various kinds of ceremonial and natural magic in the name of Christ, but that's been frowned on (and, when the legal climate permits, subject to savage persecution) by mainstream denominations. There's also been a great deal of “it's not magic, it's prayer” magic being done on the fringes of those same mainstream denominations. What might come of that as we proceed into the new sensibility is an interesting question.
14 January 2019
It's very common in modern magical spirituality for people to cultivate a relationship with one deity, who becomes their patron deity, and to work with other spiritual powers in other contexts. It's perfectly fine to focus on one divine being for your prayers, while invoking other beings in magical workings or the like.
14 June 2018
Dion Fortune was a devout if heterodox Christian — she drew a sharp distinction between Jesus the person and Christ the cosmic principle, which IIRC would have gotten her burnt at the stake not too many centuries ago — who, like a great many Christian esotericists before and since, saw no contradiction between praying to Christ and invoking the Pagan gods and goddesses of nature.
24 September 2019
Over the three centuries since the Druid Revival got going, a solid majority of the Druids in that tradition have invoked Jesus as well as the various Druid gods. It's not at all uncommon in the tradition, in fact, to identify Hu the Mighty with God the Father, and Hesus the chief of tree-spirits with Jesus the son of God. So in working with both Christian and Druid deities, you're actually in the mainstream of the tradition, and I'm kind of over to one side! ;-) The broader point worth making here, of course, is that what gods you worship is up to you and Them. If other people get their knickers in a knot over that, that's their problem, not yours.
14 September 2020
[On working with a preferred pantheon]:
I find it easiest to work with a single pantheon, and as a Druid working in the Druid Revival tradition, it makes sense to me to work with the rather odd mix of Welsh and ancient Celtic deities that Druid Revival traditions generally work with. (You can find these discussed in some detail in my book The Druid Magic Handbook.) Any reasonably complete pantheon has gods or goddesses who correspond to anything you might need to pray for or work magic for. So, like old-fashioned Druids for the last couple of hundred years, I invoke Hu the Mighty, Ced the earth mother, and Hesus chief of tree-spirits as a matter of course, and then call on other deities from the same pantheon for workings specific to their natures.
26 March 2018
[On picking a pantheon to pray to]:
As with so much else, there are many ways to go about it, and different people find one or another approach more satisfactory. Me, I'd start by getting a good book of myths dealing with a pantheon, the sort of thing that used to be written for older children -- those tend to be highly readable, and to have the vivid incantatory quality you want. See which pantheon has stories that really resonate with you, and go from there.
22 August 2018
My Muslim friends tell me that they have every reason to believe that Allah exists and answers prayers, and I have no reason to doubt their sincerity, so on that basis, yes, I believe that Allah is a god, and that those who worship him will receive his blessings. It seems quite reasonable to me, likewise, that Muhammad did in fact receive a series of true revelations from Allah; gods speak to prophets fairly often, and the gods of the Middle Eastern desert peoples seem to do it more often than others.
I really don’t know enough about how Islam is practiced in different places to be able to tell for sure whether different sects worship different deities under the same name, though it seems pretty clear to me that the takfiri sects that engage in atrocities worship something that is neither merciful nor compassionate! As for the vitality of Islam, well, it got started six hundred years later than Christianity; religions have a life cycle, and 600 years ago Christianity was very vital indeed. It’s not at all surprising to me that Islam, being so much younger, still has the vigor and enthusiasm of youth, while Christianity is getting noticeably old and gray these days…
24 September 2019
Do you ask permission of the people for whom you pray, before you pray to them? Consent is as essential in magic as it is in sex.
23 July 2018
I've been prayed at by Christians trying to convert me -- in one case, by a whole church of them -- and it was indistinguishable from any other kind of magical attack meant to control someone's will. (The energies from the church in particular felt dank and slimy; I don't know what they were praying to when they thought they were invoking Jesus, but it wasn't a power I'd want anything to do with.) Always ask permission before invoking spiritual forces for anyone else.
27 April 2015
There's a lot of malefic magic passing as prayer these days. A few years back, there was a fad in fundamentalist Christian circles for creating “avenging angels” via visualization and whipped-up emotion, and unleashing them on Pagans and occultists. Nasty stuff if you don't know how to counter it!
[To counter it], the standard trick in the magical community of the time was to construct an angel trap. Apparently the visualization being used by the teams of “prayer warriors” involved sending their avenging angels plunging through the middle of a pentagram to demolish whatever lay immediately beyond it; since a lot of people in the Pagan scene in those days wore pentagram necklaces and the like, that was a pretty blatant piece of death magic.
So you'd take a piece of cloth and draw a pentagram on it, with some ornate but meaningless occult-looking symbols around it; you'd take a glass jar and coat the inside with kosher salt, using any of a variety of sticky things to make the salt adhere; and then you'd carefully put a very sharp steel nail or large needle, point up, in a blob of wax or clay at the bottom of the jar, cover the mouth of the jar with the pentagram-decorated cloth, and use a rubber band to fasten it into place. You'd pierce the cloth in the center of the pentagram with a pin, making a tiny hole, put it in the room where you practiced magic, and then you'd call the magical equivalent of “Here, kitty-kitty-kitty!” to the avenging angels.
Since the avenging angels were nearly mindless artificial elementals — basically a blob of life force charged with a single image that defined their purpose — one pentagram was as good as another to them, and one that wasn't guarded with protective energies was more attractive than most. So they'd dive through the pentagram, hit the sharp iron, and pop like bubbles; the salt absorbed the spare energy, and that was the end of them. Everyone I knew who used an angel trap had to replace it every few months or so, because the salt would turn the most disgusting colors, take on an almost tangible psychic funk,and finally liquefy and turn slimy. I assume the “prayer warriors” were dumping a lot of overripe and rancid sexual energy into their angel-making activities.
I know that didn't turn the spell back on the sender, but I'm not too fond of such exercises; among other things, the other guy can simply swat it back to you, and then you're playing astral badminton, which I find almost as dull as the physical kind. I find it much more entertaining to set things up so that the other guy knocks himself out, pouring more and more of his own vitality and will into the assault, and the result is a damp squeak and some discolored salt.
9 April 2018
[On dealing with negative reactions to mind-emptying meditation]:
A lot of people these days are getting this kind of negative reactions from vipassana and other mind-emptying forms of meditation, especially when they're practiced outside the traditional monastic disciplines that give them framing and direction. What occultists call the inner planes -- the mind-side of the cosmos, the part of it we experience through our minds rather than our bodies -- are not all well-behaved sweetness and light! In the present time, in particular, there are a lot of discordant energies and entities out there, and that makes meditation challenging, and even potentially harmful, when it's not combined with other practices.
I'd encourage you, if you find that occultism appeals to you, to learn one of the basic protective rituals (the Sphere of Protection or Lesser Ritual of the Pentagram) first, and practice that every day. When you've done that for a month, then, yes, discursive meditation should be fine. I've never had a student have significant trouble with the kind of experiences you've had, so long as they stuck with regular protective rituals and discursive meditation on occult topics.
One other thing that helps a great deal is prayer. If there's a deity you feel comfortable invoking, call on that deity before you begin to meditate, asking for him or her to protect you and grant you wisdom. I know a lot of people back away from that sort of thing, but the inner planes are inhabited, you know, and there are plenty of beings in them who are wiser and stronger than our species; establishing a good working relationship with such beings is basic common sense.
10 February 2020
That practice -- Christian ritual, prayer, and Bible study in the morning, and Hermetic ritual and meditation in the evening -- is what several Christian occultists of my acquaintance practice, and they have excellent results with it. I see no reason why you can't do the same thing, and so long as you're willing to invest the time and effort, your results will likely be as good as theirs.
10 February 2020
The Christian banishing ritual is meant to be combined with the other spiritual disciplines of a Christian life, which ought to include a lot of invocation (that's usually spelled "prayer" in the literature) as well as Bible study, the practice of charity and the other virtues, etc. As for the rosary, were you aware that there's an Anglican rosary? It's got 33 beads and is used with a wide range of prayers in the Anglican tradition...
25 August 2018
[On a woman who had remarkably good energy after meditating on the Bible daily for decades]: The only people I know who’ve gotten that result have used a religious text and combined it with meditation and prayer. Still, it may be that they’re the only ones who’ve tried it…
20 August 2020
Every tradition has its saints. I've met elderly Christian ladies who have no religious function other than member of a congregation, who radiate clear light so strong I practically had to blink looking at them. (One of these days I'll do a post passing on the advice about daily prayer and Bible study I got from one of them -- if you happen to belong to any religion that has a sacred scripture, it's first-rate stuff.) So, yes, there are saints of that sort all through Western spiritual traditions; I've never encountered one in a leadership or clergy position in a religious organization, but they do exist...
Here's the simple version.
Every morning, set aside 15 or 20 minutes first thing, before breakfast, and if all possible right after waking. Begin by reading one chapter out of the Bible. (The woman who taught me this insisted that you should never begin with Genesis, but should start with Chapter 1 of the Gospel of Matthew and go through the whole New Testament before going onto the Old Testament. Most people who try to read the Bible daily and start with Genesis, she said, bog down in "the begats" and never get any further.)
So you read one chapter, and then you think about what you've read, turn it over in your mind, see how well you understand it, see what questions it raises in your mind. Then you pray to Christ for the grace of the Holy Spirit to help you understand what you've read, and finish by repeating the Lord's Prayer. Then you go about your day. That 15 or 20 minutes daily, combined with Sundays at church, gave her an extraordinarily rich spiritual life and the brightest and cleanest aura I think I've ever encountered.
18 August 2020
The elderly Christian lady who taught me her method of Bible study prayed to Jesus, not to any abstract Source, and she experienced him as a person -- a man who had worked long hours as an apprentice carpenter, walked on dusty roads, dealt with all the awkward details of life in the world, and finally died an excruciating death. To judge by what she said to me about that part of her life, her prayers were dialogues with a real being; that's why I've believed since then that the god that Christians worship is unquestionably a real being.
2 September 2019
I'd like to suggest the advice I received from one of the most remarkably spiritual people I've ever met, an old lady I knew via lodge connections many years ago. Her advice was to read one chapter of the Bible every day, first thing in the morning, beginning with the Gospel of Matthew. ("Never try to start with Genesis," she liked to say. "You'll get to the begats and quit.") There's a specific way to do it. You start by getting out the Bible, opening it to the chapter you're going to read, and then praying briefly to the Holy Spirit, asking for insight. Then read the chapter. Then stop for a while and think about what you've read, what it teaches, and why it matters. Then pray -- about that, or about anything else that moves you -- finishing up with the Lord's Prayer. Then close the Bible and go on with your day.
The point of faith, after all, isn't about joining a church or becoming part of a tradition. It's about establishing a personal relationship with the god you worship, and that's best done in private. Once you've established a practice of Bible reading and prayer and kept it up daily for a couple of months, you might consider looking for a church in the Liberal Catholic tradition; you might also consider picking up Gareth Knight's book Experience of the Inner Worlds, which is a guide to Christian Cabalistic magic. Bible study and prayer come first, though!
[For Pagans]: Choose a sacred text and do the same thing, using prayers from your tradition. It ought to work just as well.
...the woman who taught me this was one of the most deeply spiritual people I've ever met; she's a good part of the reason why I got over my youthful notion that there wasn't anything actually spiritual in Christianity. (In my own defense, I came to that conclusion from encounters with the kind of fundamentalists who think that Christ died on the cross to give them the right to feel morally superior to everyone else, on the one hand, and reading an early and astonishingly vapid book by Matthew Fox on the other.)
[after you finish the New Testament, do you move on to the Old, or repeat the New?]:
It really depends on what you're up for. There are little mini-Bibles that contain only the New Testament and the Psalms, and my teacher insisted that those are really well suited for people who don't have high-end reading skills and a tolerance for begats. She did the whole Bible, but admitted to me that most times she skimmed the begats and also the long legal enactments in Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy, what she called the "Thou shalt not eat bats" passages.
If you belong to a church that has a daily sequence of Bible passages, of course, you could just do the reading for the day and call it good.
12 August 2019
the usual order in Christian tradition is...you start with a reading from the Bible or another suitable text, meditate on the reading, and let the meditation culminate in prayer. Still, experiment and see what works for you.
2 September 2019
Prayer, to begin with, is anything but obvious or instinctive -- it's something that even the great mystics have had to learn. It's going to feel contrived, fake, worthless, stupid, fill in the blank -- at first. You have to keep on trying, and bit by bit get past what the old Rosicrucians called "material inclination," the tendency of the unawakened soul to fixate on the sensory life and discount the life of the heart, mind, and spirit.
Establishing a practice of Bible reading and prayer will probably be the hardest thing you will ever do; the payoffs are commensurate. The best advice I've ever received is to simply talk to God, daily, and also listen.
With regard to a concept of God, well, there's a term for that: idolatry. Don't try to decide what God is. Open yourself to him and let him show you what he is, knowing that it won't happen quickly, and it won't happen all at once. That was another reason why my teacher in these matters insisted on beginning with the Gospels; if you start with those, you start with Christ, who is the bridge between you and God.
You're fighting your entire background, you know -- and you're fighting for your life. Take that seriously, and recognize that it matters just as much as it feels like.
September 2018
1. Every day, first thing in the morning, read one chapter out of the Bible. Don’t start with Genesis; the lady in question said that even if you make it through the “begats,” which you probably won’t, you’ll grind to a halt somewhere in Leviticus and never get any further. Begin instead with the Gospel according to Matthew and go from there through the New Testament; then read Genesis and Exodus, skip the next three books the first time, pick it up again with Joshua and go straight through, one chapter a day, to the end of the Old Testament; go straight on from Matthew through Revelations as before; then do the whole Bible again from the beginning to end, including the three books you skipped, and keep doing that, reading the whole Bible one chapter at a time, for the rest of the time the Lord gives you on earth. (That’s the way she put it.)
2. Each morning, when you read your chapter, pay close attention to it; don’t just skim. When you get to the end of the chapter, you should have at least one thing you don’t understand, or one thing that applies to your life, or just one thing that strikes you as being important or interesting. Right away, as soon as you finish the chapter, pray about that. It doesn’t have to be a long prayer; just talk to Jesus about it in your own words. Then finish up with the Lord’s Prayer.
3. Keep doing it, every morning, first thing. Make your fifteen minutes of Bible study and prayer the day’s first priority. Don’t worry about how well you’re doing, or whether you’re doing it right, or anything of that sort; you’re not the one who’s doing the work that matters. You’re putting yourself into a state where the Holy Spirit can act on you, and it’s the Holy Spirit that does the work of spiritual development. All you do is read the Bible, pray, and do your best to live a Christian life; it’s God who does the heavy lifting.
28 September 2018
As a Catholic, you might consider taking the basic prayers and creeds of your faith as your first meditative themes, and going from there to meditate on the text of the Mass, taking it line by line.
September 2018
the one prayer that’s widely heard in Druid circles is the so-called Universal Druid Prayer, which (Druids being Druids) appears in many differing versions. Here’s the one that’s used in the AODA tradition:
“Grant, O holy powers, your protection
And in protection, strength
And in strength, understanding,
And in understanding, knowledge
And in knowledge, the knowledge of justice
And in the knowledge of justice, the love of it
And in that love, the love of all existences
And in the love of all existences, the love of Earth our Mother and all goodness.”
AWEN.”
Other than that, people in the Druid scene mostly come up with their own prayers.
Druidry Handbook (2006)
[On the Universal Druid Prayer]
Recent versions have been all over the theological map, and the form given above draws from one of these. Yet though different Druids invoke a remarkable assortment of spiritual powers, the things they ask for remain the same: protection and strength, understanding and knowledge, the ability to know what is right and to love it, and ultimately love for all existing things.
