Here’s this week’s tidbit from Jason Miller’s Magick Monday newsletter:
“A reader picked up a pack of Solomonic seals somewhere that they were hoping to use in a simple “candle and prayer” kind of modality. They then reached out to some Solomonic magicians who informed her that to use them properly requires shit-tons of ceremony and kit to do it right. She was upset and reached out to me and a few others for advice. This is not an uncommon problem, and one I had to deal with myself. But before I answered directly made her suffer through a ham-fisted analogy…
“A guy goes and takes up Mixed Martial Arts for health and fighting chops. He learns that the style evolved out of Bruce Lee’s Jeet Kun Do, which itself is also a mixture of different arts, but has Kung Fu at its root. This guy then thinks “well, maybe I should take Kung Fu instead…”. So they start Googling kung fu and find that it comes from various traditions that require monastic discipline and that there are in fact whole monasteries where people live their whole lives based around this training. Suddenly taking MMA seems like a shadow of what a Shaolin Monk does and so maybe they should just avoid the whole thing….
“But of course, in 2019 MMA is proven to be very effective art on its own, and fitted to the lifestyle of the westerner. Also Jeet Kun Do arose specifically to push against the traditional forms that Lee saw as burdensome and baroque, so to run off to join a Shaolin monastery is perhaps not optimum after all. It all depends on what you want.
“So lets get back to the Solomonic seals that were purchased. I used to buy packs of seals from the 6th and 7th Book of Moses at a conjure shop as a kid and the proprietor, They printed in red on parchment paper that could accept oil easily, and were easy to whip out at a moments notice. Walter, the proprietor of the shop, used to tell me how to use them in Mojos, how to plant them with powders, or pray over them with psalms and put them in my hat or tie them to my arm. All of which was a lot easier than the instructions in the 6th and 7th books. But it was effective and had by this point become a tradition unto itself.
“So whether it’s Solomonic seals or any other Sorcery, you need to ask yourself what level you want to engage these on? Is your goal to be as effective as possible? as easy as possible? as traditional as possible? These are not mutually exclusive of course, but knowing what you want is key. If you want a spell that you can pull out of your wallet and plant on the fly, then that is your main goal and tradition and effectiveness take a back seat to utilitarian concerns. If your goal is straight up short term effectiveness then perhaps a ceremony at home that you time astrologically and anoint and consecrate with psalm and oil is the way to go. If tradition is your goal then get deep in the kit and dremel that shit out on appropriate metal and do the whole shibang.
“Just remember… Whatever you do, if you share it, people are going to line up to tell you you’re wrong. If you do it easy traditionalists will bitch. If you do it hard, others will tell you “but you don’t need all that….”. Just smile and nod and do what you were going to do anyway.”
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