Category: Quimbanda

The Age of Black Magic: Step Thirteen

Posted on by Clifford Hartleigh Low

Summoning Uncle Joe

In addition to the inclusion of blood relatives on a dedicated altar for ancestors, one may also provide offerings to the spirits of those who you admire or seek to call upon for aid. Saints are only one example of the Mighty Dead who one can call upon for help; calling upon the spirits of mighty magicians like Agrippa, Merlin, King Solomon, and Moses for wisdom and assistance is an ancient tradition.

Settings for Presidents such as George Washington and Abraham Lincoln are also well-established and useful. Roman emperors and Egyptian pharaohs were deified and venerated. Images of Martin Luther King, Jr. and John F. Kennedy hang in many homes for reasons far beyond the sentimental. They are appeals for aid—usually for help in matters related to their authority, fame, tutelage, and skills.

But you can go further than this. And a lot darker.

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Buy a Soviet-era memento of Josef Stalin from eBay, or a similar source. The older, the better; the more closely associated with Stalin or the Communist Party, the better. You want the strongest possible tether to him. A printout will just not cut it.

Place the personal concern in a shot glass on your ancestral altar and feed it curse materials like goofer dust, dead black widows, and other things of death and destruction. The rarer and the more dangerous, the better.

Make a spirit cocktail: any grain alcohol in which has been steeped thirteen cayenne peppers, thirteen guinea peppers and thirteen black peppers. Offer this every week until you are ready to make requests. Feed a dedicated shot glass with this to nourish and compel the spirit into fury and action.

I devised the following incantation for this purpose. You can alter it and improvise, but recite it at least once a week when you make offerings to the spirit of Josef Stalin.

Attend me at this hour of night! I [name] call into the open grave, into that silence profound, and draw forth the terrible and mighty spirit wherever he may be so that he may answer my prayer:

I call upon you, shade of Josef Stalin, by all the rights and privileges I possess. I speak for the humble and the broken that seek your intercession. The world above is in turmoil and only you can set things right. Not even death can temper your vast power. We all conjure you.

Awake in Spring! Awake in Summer! Awake in Fall! Awake in Winter! Awake by day! Awake by night! Rouse yourself from slumber, mighty Stalin, and forge the world anew by your power and your eternal name. The revolution is at hand! Awake, and slumber no more! Sentinel of dread, bringer of cold, hunter of men, seize every enemy of the cause and drag them down to deepest Hell in your iron teeth.

Mighty Stalin, supreme in wrath, arm yourself for war and cloak yourself in judgement; you slew the Nazis, and crushed the exploiters and the wealthy, and punished the many traitors. You tore out the tongues of those who spoke against you, and you made the greedy sup on ashes. Now is your time again.

In life you were an Angel of Death; in death may you live again. May all the lives you took give you power. Rise up from your grave and stretch the shadow of your mighty fist across the world; crush my enemies with your hammer, dismember them with your sickle, and fertilize the soil of the hopeless with red red blood!

I bind you to my command, hurting not me nor mine but diligently those whom we hate and will destroy! (Repeat the concluding binding thirteen times.)

It would be particularly appropriate to direct the wrath of the spirit of Josef Stalin at the Trump Administration and its supporters and enablers. That’s what I’ve been doing, in part.

If this is your goal, you may wish to be more specific about your desires in your incantation. I do advise that you not pull your punches. You don’t call up Uncle Joe for anything but the coldest, most brutal, most heartless of sorceries. Let his worldly acts inspire you. Impress him.

Nevertheless, regardless of your objectives or your personal political beliefs, having a working relationship with the spirit of the man who likely killed more people than any other in human history is highly beneficial to the work of a black magician and necromancer.

The Divine and Demonic Absurdity of Names

Posted on by Clifford Hartleigh Low

The divine and demonic absurdity of names.

This was a topic raised elsewhere, but I want to highlight it here while also avoiding getting into anything which could be construed as personal with people I respect.

Astaroth and Astarte are completely different beings.

It is historically correct that the name Astaroth (a male, aggressive demon) was probably derived from Astarte (a female, seductive goddess.) This was also obviously done to defame Astarte and eliminate competition. That does not mean that under the mask of a nasty, aggressive soul-eating monster there is a friendly sex goddess waiting to be your nekkid playmate on the astral plane.

Perhaps your experiences diverge from mine, but with respect I think you’re being conned. Demons are dishonest bastards. They invented lying. After a few trillion years of practice, they’re quite good at it too.

I think it’s entirely likely that an ancient nameless parasitic entity took the opportunity of the name variance to absorb offerings given to Astarte to set itself up as the demon Astaroth. Sometimes you try to order Dominos over the phone and get one digit off by one and end up talking to a strange guy in a Utah call center. People also sometimes acquire calls from the prior owner’s pals when they get a new phone number.

A name is sometimes just a name, just like your phone number is usually an arbitrary number. My old phone number used to spell out (201) TED-BUNG. I am not Ted. I am not Ted Bung. Nor do I know anyone named this. This is arbitrary information.

Now, this whole Astorath = Astarte thing begins to fall apart pretty rapidly under inspection. And that’s what I want to talk about.

Firstly, it wasn’t just ancient gods being turned into demons as a means of Christian defamation of pagan religions. Many ancient gods were turned into saints and angels. Hermes was an angelos ton theon, a messenger of the gods. Ficino and the Renaissance Neoplatonists thought all of the benevolent pagan gods were probably archangels who had been misunderstood, but they didn’t come up with that idea themselves. Brigid became Saint Brigit; you know that drill. This shatters the notion that there was a concerted effort to demonize all pagan gods. Pagan gods of noble virtues who made sense as angels were cast as angels or the holy dead, and the gods who demanded human sacrifice and orgiastic behavior were the ones who were thought to have led mankind astray and thus were demons.

However, it wasn’t just the Christians doing this. The pagan polytheists attempted to redefine foreign gods as beings in their own local pantheons. And some of this was just bonkers.

The Romans identified Venus with the Greek Aphrodite, but virtually anyone who has studied the Classics knows that there were huge differences between the two goddesses. There were also numerous local versions of both goddesses with pretty variable attributes. We all know by now that Zeus had many epithets but these were often understood to be distinctive beings. Venus was also associated with the goddess Ishtar and she with Inanna, but while the latter two were thought to be the planetary Venus the Romans only transferred the name Venus to signify the planet but didn’t believe the planet was the actual goddess. A name for Venus was Lucifer, and yes some early Christians thought the connection wasn’t accidental either.

It gets crazier.

Osiris was identified with Dionysius. Both were identified with Jesus by Hellenistic pagans. That may have been wishful thinking. It should be obvious that a castrated god of vegetation, a feral god of drunken underworld antics, and a magic Rabbi who got executed have precious little in common. Yet many believed they did.

This one isn’t discussed a lot; the pretty boy god Adonis and the Hebrew Adonai are the same guy if you go back far enough. But the Jewish version doesn’t even have an appearance at all, doesn’t get killed by a giant pig (though that might explain why I’m not supposed to eat bacon), and isn’t in a polyamorous relationship with Aphrodite and Persephone– though He’d probably win points with me if He did. Can we switch back? Never mind.

Here’s another one. The Egyptian god Aten– the semi-monotheistic Sun god that Akhenaten was so into– was identified in the ancient world as Athena, wisdom goddess and patroness of Athens. And Aten was probably Jehovah, or the inspiration for Him. So Jehovah is Athena. So, owls.

I may be hurting you. I’m sorry. Not enough lube?

Alexander’s parentage opens the door to another wacky conflation. He claimed to be the son of Amun, the Egyptian Sun god. One of them, anyway. (They had a lot of Sun gods, didn’t they?) In Greece that became Zeus instead, though in the form of a snake banging his mom. Because Zeus was the original furry. He deserves credit for that. And then Amun later became a demon Amon. Who is also evoked in Amen, in prayers.

Do you need a hug? I won’t turn into anything weird, I promise.

My point is actually very simple. Don’t trust these identifications. Don’t trust these appropriations. They were all done for political reasons and the names we use to call up a spirit, god, demon or whatever depend enormously on context. None of that shit is unique like DNA.

Because if you’re going to be stupid about this, it means every time you say “Amen” you’re giving a shout-out to a demon.

That is absurd. Use your brain.

The spiritual universe is almost certainly full of beings of immense power. It behoves you to figure out who you are actually talking to, but also whether they’re your awesome super pal, a nut, a sneaky brain-eater, or just a cosmic heroin pusher. The books of history, mythology and theology will only get you so far.