The Brass Goggles Occult Society...The Esoteric Order of the Brazen Dawn...

[Clym Angus]

Hello all.  I've been doing little more than lurking for a while now, but thought I might join.  I was born on a Friday the 13th, under a full moon, and have always been drawn to the occult.  I know how to scry and dowse.  I am currently working on a scrying apparatus consisting of a pendulum suspended over a plate of sand.  When swung the tip of the pendulum draws in the sand.  With a little engineering I've been able to cause it to draw a pentagram about 40% of the time.  All that is left of the build is the suspension for the pendulum.  I was involved in a bigfoot sighting, I was the bigfoot sighted. (it was a drunken escapade involving a stolen bearskin rug)  And I am working on a steampunk voodoo necromancer costume for Halloween, so any ideas for paraphernalia for such a costume would be welcomed.

I do remember one particularly entertaining glamour that an old friend of mine used to cast. It's more of a trick than the occult although it is very Victorian in its execution.

1) Have a nice roast chicken dinner. collect a good number of the small bones, clean, heat in the oven for about 10 minutes at around 80 degrees, put them in a good strong cup of tea (no milk 2 bags) for about 20 minutes, return to the oven for another 10. Remove and leave to cool.

2) Get a nice round bit of belly leather or cotton sacking. Stitch a draw string around the top. Find a nice bollocks occulty symbol from the internet (NOTHING DANGEROUS) paint this on the inside of the round circle. This is your prophesy bag.

3) At the party seat yourself apart from most people open the bag take out the bones, shake them 3 times in your hand and drop them gently onto the circle. Pretend to read the bones, take the one that's nearest to the centre and place it somewhere "significant" on the design. Throw the bones again. And on ad infinitum.

4) People will arrive. Get the idea that there is some method going on and try to work it out. It the mean time they'll hang on your every word as long as you keep it fairly general. Don't get trapped into specific yes no questions ask more questions than you answer.

This technique was used by Rodger (TM) a Bournemouth goth around 1993. To date (last in contact 1997) it had resulted in 6 shags and over 50 free drinks. I now pass this cheeky little trick onto you. Use it wisely.
   

[Khem Caigan]

Hi, Dan ~

The walnut ink can be discarded after each viewing, into
running water. And the bowl can be supported atop a
block of beeswax.

Here are a few more links that may be of interest:

Lekanomancy

~ in ~

Greek Divination: A Study of its Methods and Principles
by William Reginald Halliday, page 145.
(Read/Download @GoogleBooks)
http://tinyurl.com/2f4b8m7

The Saucer Divination of Aphrodite

~ in ~

The Greek Magical Papyri in Translation, Including the Demotic Spells,
Volume 1, edited by Hans Dieter Betz, page 100.
(Preview @GoogleBooks)
http://tinyurl.com/28h96fc

The Splendor That Was Egypt
by Margaret Alice Murray, page 114.
(Preview @GoogleBooks)
http://tinyurl.com/26s46rs


The Art of Drawing Spirits into Crystals
by Johannes Trithemius
@EsotericArchives.com
http://tinyurl.com/ln73ep

And if you do decide to drop in on us at the Esoteric Archive,
be sure to say 'Hello!'

[tophatdan]

 khem, why bees wax if i may ask?

also using the equipment i have described how do you feel about vibrating or stirring with a branch or wand in order to induce visions of the past, i have been told that the use of a live branch will give visions of the present and a dead branch visions of the past, in your studies have you found any mention of this? if not what method would you employ to view the recent and distant past.

i wish to use this new bowl not to tell me the future but to help me better understand things which have already passed.

[darkshines]

I have never used ink or magic mirrors so I cannot help you. I scry using a different method but my problem is that I do notknow how to interpret what I have done! I draw. I auto draw. And these beautiful, organic, interlinked shapes come out. But I have no idea what it means!

[tophatdan]

 affirmative and negative are easy enough to interpret its more specifics which are harder to determine, just takes practice and trust.
i am accustomed to viewing in bodies of water which is why i feel that ink will work better for me now that i have decided to move this practice into my house.

the nice thing about viewing in lakes or ponds is thatr anything which comes through stays there, large bodies tend to 'hold' the visions and spirits of visions more effectivly than other methods, so if something gets a little strange all one has to do is say a prayer and walk away. when you bring this practice into your home you have to exhert more controll over the situation.
this is why i have chosen the method which i have, by having made my bowl i already control its form, by having made my ink i control the formula, byensuring that it holds my energies and only my energies i can be sure that there are no external influences.
i am very carefull of what i bring into my home and i undertake this new practice only after having become confident that i can keep everything in its place.
i personally find that auto-writing is a little too open a forum for my tastes, i am not a fan of trances, they tend to allow anything that wonders by to come through on the paper and once it is on the paper it is in your life and your home (if you are practicing at home) at which point you have to be quite carefull that you put away your toys when you are done.
  i did a little auto writing and auto drawing when i was very young without much success but then moved to "book skrying" with a king james bible. by going only into a momentary trance you can pluck 8 numbers and 8 words easil andy from the other world and come back quickly without any open doors. take those numbers and words to a bible and seek their locations, sometimes the number is the line and the word is the location sometimes the word is the key and the number is the location, in this method as well you have to use your intuition very precisely, but in my opinion it is a very 'safe' method of viewing and can produce some very precise results. i prefer book skrying to terot cards, so much so that i do not even own a deck of the terot anymore.
again, i am quite 'safe' when it comes to these matters, a less carefull person is free to enjoy the various arts but myself i take a note from honorius when he insists that you never undertake a task having not first ensured that your other tasks are complete.

[Khem Caigan]

i wish to use this new bowl not to tell me the future but to help me better understand things which have already passed.

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.

~ T. S. Eliot, Burnt Norton.

"Find your home in the haunts of every living creature;
ascend above any height, descend further than any
depth; bring together in yourself all opposites of quality
- heat and cold, dryness and fluidity.

Think that you are present everywhere: in the sea, on
earth and in heaven; think that you are not yet begotten,
that you are in the womb, that you are young, that you
are old, that you have died, that you are in the world
beyond the grave; grasp in your thought all of this at
once, all times and places, all substances and qualities
and magnitudes together."

~ Corpus Hermeticum VI

The Subliminal Self
by F.W.H. Myers
Chapter VII: The Relation of Supernormal Phenomena to Time
Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research,
Volume 11, 1895, page 334.
(Read/Download @GoogleBooks)
http://tinyurl.com/3x4h9bp

An Experiment with Time
by John William Dunne
(Read/Download .PDF)
http://tinyurl.com/277mf79

[Khem Caigan]

Another text from the E.'.O.'.B.'.D.'. Archives :

Angels Around the Crystal:
The Prayer Book of King Wladislas
and the Treasure Hunts of Henry
the Bohemian
by Benedek Lang
( 1.6 MB .PDF )


The file is down as of 11/10/2010EV.

If anyone would like a copy, please
feel free to message or email me.

[Khem Caigan]

Austin Osman Spare: Fallen Visionary
September 2010 to Sunday 14 November 2010
@TheCumingMuseum

"The fascinating rise and fall of Austin Osman Spare, who
lived and worked in Southwark in the early twentieth century,
is charted in a new exhibition this Autumn at the Cuming
Museum... The exhibition will feature Spare's work from the
Southwark Art Collection and loans from many private and
institutional collectors.  It will be the largest showcase of his
work in a public museum since his death in 1956."

[Khem Caigan]

The witchcraft confessions given by Isobel Gowdie
(in Auldearn, Scotland in 1662) are widely celebrated
as the most extraordinary on record in Britain. Their
descriptive power, vivid imagery, and contentious
subject matter have attracted considerable interest
on both academic and popular levels.

This book, written by Emma Wilby, author of the
critically acclaimed Cunning Folk and Familiar Spirits ,
provides the first full-length examination of the
confessions and the life and character of the woman
behind them.

The author's discovery of the original trial records,
deemed lost for nearly 200 years, provides a starting
point for an interdisciplinary endeavor to separate
Isobel's voice from that of her interrogators, to identify
the beliefs and experiences that informed her testimony,
and to analyze why her confessions differ so markedly
from those of other witchcraft suspects from the period.

In the course of these enquiries, the author develops
wider hypotheses relevant to the study of early modern
witchcraft as a whole, bringing together for the first
time recent research into Amazonian 'dark' shamanism,
false-memory generation, and mutual-dream experience,
along with literature on marriage-covenant mysticism
and protection-charm traditions.

Emma Wilby concludes that close analysis of Isobel's
confessions supports the still-controversial hypothesis
that in 17th-Century Scotland, as in other parts of Europe
in this period, popular spirituality was shaped through a
deep interaction between church teachings and shamanistic
traditions of pre-Christian origin.

She also extends this thesis beyond its normal association
with beneficent magic and overtly folkloric themes to
speculate that some of Europe's more malevolent and
demonological witch-narratives may also have emerged
out of visionary rites underpinned by cogent shamanistic
rationales.

The Visions of Isobel Gowdie: Magic, Witchcraft and
Dark Shamanism in Seventeenth-Century Scotland
by Emma Wilby
(Preview @GoogleBooks)
http://tinyurl.com/24fxm73

[Khem Caigan]

Irreducible Mind

Current mainstream opinion in psychology, neuroscience, and
philosophy of mind holds that all aspects of human mind and
consciousness are generated by physical processes occurring
in brains.

Views of this sort have dominated recent scholarly publication.
The present volume, however, demonstrates--empirically--that
this reductive materialism is not only incomplete but false.

The authors systematically marshal evidence for a variety of
psychological phenomena that are extremely difficult, and in some
cases clearly impossible, to account for in conventional physicalist
terms.

Topics addressed include phenomena of extreme psychophysical
influence, memory, psychological automatisms and secondary
personality, near-death experiences and allied phenomena,
genius-level creativity, and 'mystical' states of consciousness
both spontaneous and drug-induced.

The authors further show that these rogue phenomena are more
readily accommodated by an alternative 'transmission' or 'filter'
theory of mind/brain relations advanced over a century ago by a
largely forgotten genius, F. W. H. Myers, and developed further
by his friend and colleague William James.

This theory, moreover, ratifies the commonsense conception of
human beings as causally effective conscious agents, and is fully
compatible with leading-edge physics and neuroscience.

The book should command the attention of all open-minded persons
concerned with the still-unsolved mysteries of the mind.

Irreducible Mind: Toward a Psychology for the 21st Century,
With CD containing F. W. H. Myers's hard-to-find classic 2-volume
Human Personality (1903) and selected contemporary reviews.
by Edward F. Kelly (Editor), Edward F. Kelly (Author) , Emily Williams
Kelly (Author), Adam Crabtree (Author), Alan Gauld (Author), Michael
Grosso (Author), Bruce Greyson (Author)
Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2009.
(Preview @GoogleBooks)
http://tinyurl.com/343k4zv

See also:

Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred
by Jeffrey John Kripal, page 37.
(Preview @GoogleBooks)
http://tinyurl.com/263j948

[Khem Caigan]

Another text from the E.'.O.'.B.'.D.'. Archives :

The Book of Enoch
revealed to Dr. John Dee
by the Angels
( 45 MB .PDF )

The file is down as of 1/1/2011EV.

If anyone would like a copy, please
feel free to message or email me.

[Khem Caigan]

Another text from the E.'.O.'.B.'.D.'. Archives :

48 Claves Angelicæ
Anno 1584, Cracow, Polonia.

Liber Scientiæ Auxilii et Victoriæ Terrestris
Anno 1585, Cracow, Polonia.

De Heptarchia Mystica
( 34.82 MB .PDF )

The file is down as of 1/14/2011EV.

If anyone would like a copy, please
feel free to message or email me.

[B.Greco]

Count me in, I'm still in the middle of my research on Alchemy and magic circles, so count me as a novice t the inner circles of the steampunk-arcanum.

regards

Toji

I simply must recommend Catherine MacCoun "On Becoming An Alchemist"

It opened my eyes to so much, including the fact i'd been a practicing alchemist for years without knowing it.

[Professor Griffiths]

The Occult fascinates me to no end. So much so that a good portion of my interests include the Occult and Paranormal studies.

I want to seek the answers to what exists beyond.

[Khem Caigan]

Welcome to the E.'.O.'.B.'.D.'., Professor Griffiths!

And I would like to take this opportunity to invite
everyone here to join us at the Esoteric Archives
for some real-time Chat, anytime at all!

[Professor Griffiths]

Where on that site is the Real Time Chat?

[Khem Caigan]

Where on that site is the Real Time Chat?

The Envolve app should appear somewhere
on the lower right of your screen.

[Khem Caigan]

Another text from the E.'.O.'.B.'.D.'. Archives :

Blagrave's Supplement to Culpeper's
English Physitian, 1674
( 16 MB .PDF )

The file is down as of 5/14/2011EV.

If anyone would like a copy, please
feel free to message or email me.

[Khem Caigan]

Another text from the E.'.O.'.B.'.D.'. Archives :

Cryptomenytices et Cryptographiæ
by Gustave Selenus, 1624.
( 113 MB .PDF )

The file is down as of 5/21/2011EV.

If anyone would like a copy, please
feel free to message or email me.

[Khem Caigan]

I have uploaded my painting of Yeats' design for the
Tables of the Four Jewels here:

Castle of Heroes: ShowHide

Moving clockwise from the top left:

Findias- Air -     Spring -    Red -   Sanguine
Gorias - Fire -   Summer -  Yellow- Choleric
Falias -  Earth - Autumn -   Black - Melancholic
Murias - Water - Winter -   White - Phlegmatic

It becomes one Table, when all four Tables are put
together.

[rovingjack]

I'm tinkering with a few custom made things myself. I'm going to make a custom set of cards for some cartomancy. There's nothing wrong with tarot cards, it's just a need to use archetypes and symbolism with a richer feel to me.

The other is an idea I had a while back when I first started looking at the meaning of runes. The idea that in our world we have certain symbols and logograms that are so ubiquitous that we can't even think of them off the top of our heads. But these symbols can have significant meaning when pulled out in sequence an reguard to events or people on our minds.

The idea for the latter involved a technique for crafting (of all things) tiny picture frame magnets for refrigerators out of bottle caps. And so I began collecting individual bottle caps from places I'd been and people I knew. No rush.

It's sort of a found object art project, and modern primative divination tool. I have my list of symbols that I will use. They do not directly correspond to the runes or ogham system either. I chose the symbols for their ability to represent as many influance on life and people as they can without being a clutter of too many. I settled on 21 that I feel depending on interpretation and context can be used for most everything. I can always tweak things if there comes a realisation that something more is needed or one is redundant but I'm fairly satisfied with the ones I have now.

[Prof Mellifluous Plinth]

I do remember one particularly entertaining glamour that an old friend of mine used to cast. It's more of a trick than the occult although it is very Victorian in its execution.

1) Have a nice roast chicken dinner. collect a good number of the small bones, clean, heat in the oven for about 10 minutes at around 80 degrees, put them in a good strong cup of tea (no milk 2 bags) for about 20 minutes, return to the oven for another 10. Remove and leave to cool.

2) Get a nice round bit of belly leather or cotton sacking. Stitch a draw string around the top. Find a nice bollocks occulty symbol from the internet (NOTHING DANGEROUS) paint this on the inside of the round circle. This is your prophesy bag.

3) At the party seat yourself apart from most people open the bag take out the bones, shake them 3 times in your hand and drop them gently onto the circle. Pretend to read the bones, take the one that's nearest to the centre and place it somewhere "significant" on the design. Throw the bones again. And on ad infinitum.

4) People will arrive. Get the idea that there is some method going on and try to work it out. It the mean time they'll hang on your every word as long as you keep it fairly general. Don't get trapped into specific yes no questions ask more questions than you answer.

This technique was used by Rodger (TM) a Bournemouth goth around 1993. To date (last in contact 1997) it had resulted in 6 shags and over 50 free drinks. I now pass this cheeky little trick onto you. Use it wisely.
   

Well done, that man! There's a lot of this sort of thing in a branch of magic called "bizarre". It's to do with storytelling and dark places. Lovely stuff with some lovely props to match. In fact, I'm giving a talk to the Doomsday conference in Whitby next Friday night. It's a full house, too, which should be fun.

If there are still places open, I'd very much like to be included in the Esoteric Order of the Brazen Dawn. May I present my bona fides: I'm the seance master every Halloween at a friend's party and have read the old tarot cards since I was 14.

[neon_suntan]

Can anyone recommend a good book on symbolism?

I'm particualrly intrigued by all aspects zodiacal and alchemical attributed to the Scorpio symbol.

e.g.

[Lord Nicholas Horsethorn]

Can anyone recommend a good book on symbolism?

I'd recommend 'The Lost Language of Symbolism' (2 volumes) by Harold Bayley, or possibly the Routledge 'Dictionary of Symbols', for an overview.

Specifically for Zodiacal symbolism, I can't help - but I'm sure Khem can!

Cheers
Lord N

[Khem Caigan]

Another text from the E.'.O.'.B.'.D.'. Archives :

Ars Notoria,
    or,
The Notory Art
Englished by Robert Turner, 1657
( 8.5 MB .PDF )

The file is down as of 6/11/2011EV.

If anyone would like a copy, please
feel free to message or email me.