I'm going to undertake a six-month occult ritual - ask me anything

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
141

Re Hermetic Kabbalah

The Hermes here is NOT the Greek guy with winged sandals. Not quite, anyway.

So, we’ve got a tradition based on a deity who is a combination of a Greek god and an Egyptian god. If that is who you want to worship, okay. If you want to combine Jewish mysticism rooted in the belief that there is no God but the God of Abraham, with worship of deity who is a combination of Greek and Egyptian deities, that makes no sense what so ever.

Yeah, that would be one of the textbook forms of cultural appropriation.

My cousin Rob is also very curious about other religions. Hanging on one wall is authentic dreamcatcher. It was made and used by an actual shaman. Because Rob asked so many questions and clearly respected the traditional culture, the shaman gave him the dreamcatche.

In the 90’s, native American spirituality was a fad. Big business cashed in on that fad. Real dreamcatchers are hand made. There are reasons for this. Big Business had dreamcatchers being made by machines in factories. Real dreamcatchers use natural materials. The mass produced ones were made of plastic. Real dreamcatchers have a hole in the center, to let good dreams through. The mass produced ones lacked that hole.

Cultural appropriation can be in that form. Somebody takes and authentic piece of another culture, leaves off any context, and mass produces the result for profit.

It can also be making crap up and claiming it is actually an authentic piece of another culture so people believe it.

Carlos Castaneda wrote books claiming that he received guidance in mystical traditions from a man named Don Juan. The first book was The Teachings Of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way Of Knowledge. That would be fine except for a few bothersome facts. Nobody was ever able to find Don Juan or any proof that he ever existed. People who knew about Yaqui mystical traditions all agreed that what Castaneda describes has nothing to do with them.

That is also cultural appropriation. The only difference between that and the 15th century book in question is age. ‘I will make up some crap and claim it is ancient and from another culture.’

142

Guess what? You don’t own a culture. Nobody owns a culture. You practice a culture. Anyone who wants to practice any part of it and make it meaningful to themselves gets to do so without your finger-wagging.

143

That is simply factually incorrect. You can argue that cultural approprition is just fine and I have no moral authority to wag my finger. But, anytime I see cultural appropriation, I will wag my finger.

144

There is a right to say something and not have it analyzed or criticized? I’m sure Espera Oscar de Corti would have agreed with you wholeheartedly.

145

Why, though?

146

Oh how Big Book of them… is there a “to the wives” chapter too?

147

Why not? I feel it is a bad thing. It falls in the large group of ‘I think it should be legal. But, people should not do it.’ I am aware that cultural appropriation has been happening for a very long time. I am aware that many people still do it. I am aware that some of them feel it is not immoral or bad. None of that changes my view that it is immoral and bad, and that people should not do it.

148

He has made his point now many, many, many times. He seems to be unable to drop something until he has complete compliance. Maybe he could move on now that he’s made his point?

149

But why? What’s bad about it?

Well there is a third possibility, of course, which is that you do the ritual in Hebrew and follow all the rules and it’s still a waste of time.

If this makes the OP happy to an extent that exceeds the opportunity cost of spending six months on something, it’s not a waste of time. If it doesn’t, then it will have been a waste of time. It sure isn’t my thing, but neither is watching opera, reading romance novels, or doing acid.

150

Do you mean in this thread in particular or in general? If you mean specifically this thread. It has not been that many. I have also commented on other thjngs mentioned in this thread besides the ritual.

It wasn’t until Hajaro said

That the thread became completely derailed.

If you feel this is not a valid question or if you have a good reason why I should sit silently while that happens, please let me know.

I also said

I find it to generally be an expression of both ignorance and disrespect.

Of course.

If you are an atheist, Judaism still offers food, culture, a sense of community and many guidelines on ethical behavior. Things like “Thou shalt not commit murder” are just good rules.

I did say “you are at best just wasting your time.” If you accept the premise that Kabbalah contains actual mystical power, not following the rules tends to result in hideous disasters of various kinds. Things like death, insanity, and demons eating your soul. So, we’ll wait and see.

On a more serious note, if you do not accept the basic tenets of Kabbalah and do not follow the ritual exactly, why do this particular ritual? There are plenty of other things he could do. Why pick this one?

151

Moderating:

What needscoffee said.

@DocCathode , you have made your point, and continuing to argue it has become a hijack of this thread. The SDMB rules allow a poster to talk about their kabbalistic experience. They allow you to mention that you feel it’s cultural appropriation. But they don’t allow you to hijack the thread with that discussion. If you want to continue along that path, please take it to the pit. If you want to continue discussion in this thread, please drop the topic of cultural appropriation and the importance of exactly following the rules of the ritual.

Thanks.

152

I don’t know, and his interest remains a bit vague to me, but I also know that all these sorts of things are completely alien and mystifying to me - I really, really, don’t get the appeal of this kinda stuff - and yet millions of people do get something out of it despite the fact that nothing supernatural happens. I must therefore conclude that people quite often derive inner peace, self-reflection, mindfulness, renewed zest for their other pursuits, less anxiety, or any number of other benefits from such things, and so it is wholly possible Smapti will get something positive out of this just as millions of others have from spiritual endeavours.

153

Title changed from “kabbalah” to “occult” at request of OP

154

Day 80

I’m at nearly the halfway point of this process. So far, I feel like I’ve learned a lot about myself. I’ve especially learned a lot about how to stay calm in the face of stressful situations, which is something I’ve been needing for awhile now.

I decided to set the Youtube videos I made to private, and not make any more. In the other thread that was spun off from this one, there were people who accused me of “aggrandizing” what I was doing and of committing cultural appropriation. I don’t want people to think that I’m doing any of this for the sake of personal glory. I was just trying to document something that was important to me, but I can see how people might have read things wrongly. I’m trying to remain humble. If there was cultural appropriation committed in the Abramelin, it happened at least 400 years ago.

My prayer sessions have increasingly become a way to center myself and experience a sense of awe about my place in the universe. Saying the amidah hasn’t really worked for me - I feel like as a non-Jew (for now, anyway) I have no right to say parts of it, and the parts about rebuilding the Temple and resuming animal sacrifice don’t work for me. The shema, on the other hand, has proven an amazing addition. I feel a chill down my spine every time I say “Hear, o Israel; the Lord is our God, the Lord is one”. I’ve started incorporating some of the other traditional Jewish blessings into my orations as well. The shehecheyanu and modeh ani have become part of my morning ablutions. The asher yatzar, a post-bathroom prayer in which you thank God for giving you the right number of orifices and not sealing them or making new ones, seemed absurd to me at first, but it now makes sense to me - it’s good to be content that your body works the way it’s supposed to, because for some people it doesn’t and it’s only an accident of fate that you aren’t one of those. I’ve learned that the “Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram”, the pre-bedtime ritual for keeping away bad dreams that I described above, is actually just a bastardized version of a Jewish bedtime prayer, and so I’ve started saying a version of it that’s closer to the original. (For now, all of these prayers I’m reciting in English - the Abramelin insists that you should only pray in a language you understand, and I don’t know a lick of Hebrew.) I like how so many of the blessings begin the same way - “Blessed are you, Lord our God, King of the Universe”.

My Bible reading has progressed from the Apocrypha into the Pauline epistles. I found the apocryphal novellas - Tobit and Judith - to be very interesting insights into how Judaism was evolving at the time from a henotheistic national cult into a mystical religion based on Greek ideas of Divine Wisdom, and the books of Maccabees make for very entertaining storytelling - I never knew Alexander the Great was in the Bible!

Despite my upbringing having been nominally Christian (my dad was Catholic and my mom was raised evangelical, and they compromised by never talking about religion or taking me to church at all), I never really dug Jesus. I still don’t. Being saved just because you believe makes no sense to me. It’s better that you should earn your fate. It’s interesting, nonetheless, to see how the Gospels present him differently and with different agendae. Mark’s Jesus is the most human - his story starts with him meeting John the Baptist, he can feel his power leaving him when the hemophiliac woman touches his robe, he begs God to take the burden from him and asks why he’s been forsaken as he’s dying, and the story ends with his tomb empty and the women telling noone what they’d seen. Matthew focuses on presenting Jesus as the fulfillment of prophecy and a successor to Moses. Luke tries to present a full biography that depicts him as both divine and human. John goes full Gnostic and makes him the Old Testament concept of Wisdom (a feminine deity) made flesh, scourging the Temple at the beginning of his ministry instead of at its end, and proclaiming all along that he is the son of God come to save all those who believe in him. You can really see the evolution from an apocalyptic Jewish cult into a Greek mystery religion.

My only real opinion of the epistles so far is that Paul is a self-aggrandizing jerk.

Fasting - not as bad as I thought it would be. It’s a cruel joke that the timing works out that I should have to start sunrise-to-sundown fasting right at the time of year when the days are the longest. I don’t want to argue with those who say that I’m not really fasting because I’m still drinking water. If my options are “fast with water because I still need to work” and “don’t fast at all”, I choose the former. I’ve managed to time things out so that right around when the sun goes down in my area, I can take a 10-minute break and get a light meal, and being able to look forward to that has been one of the things that’s kept me going.

Judaism as a Civilization is one of the most amazing books I have ever read. It’s really only partially about Judaism - it’s a treatise about the very nature of religion, civilization, the psychological needs of human beings, and how the needs of man change as the world around him does. It’s a very long book - the old, waterlogged, paperback copy which I bought secondhand from thriftbooks.com is over 500 pages of small type, and its prose is complex and dense, but it’s well worth reading thoroughly. Though it was written nearly 100 years ago, its main theses remain strongly relevant to the present day. Kaplan presents the crisis which he saw Judaism going through in his time - between the Industrial Revolution, the rise of capitalism, political emancipation for Jews, and advances in science and archaeology, it was no longer viable to believe that the Torah was of supernatural origin or possible to live in the traditional ways that Jews had done for centuries. He examines the forms of Judaism that existed in his day, which he calls “Neo-Orthodoxy” and “Reformism”, and finds them both lacking. He examines the very nature of what it means to be a civilization or a nation and provides some insights that had never occurred to me, such as how patriotism/nationalism fulfills the same need in the human psyche that religious affiliation once did. Only once he’s spent the bulk of the book on this philosophical manifesto does he lay out in the last hundred pages or so what he believes modern Judaism ought to look like. Looking back, you can see that many of his proposals have come to pass, while some haven’t. His vision of a Jewish International made up of regional blocs with governing authority over their members, or leagues of Jewish bowling alleys and dance halls, obviously never came to fruition. He mentions the rise of antisemitism in Germany, but he couldn’t possibly have forseen that within a decade of his publication that a third of world Jewry would be exterminated. Nonetheless, his description of “the God-idea” as being that which inspires people to be the best possible versions of themselves, both for their own sake and that of their kin, really speaks to me, and his belief that ritual and tradition can still foster right belief and right action while not being literally true makes a lot more sense to me than the half-baked God-idea I got from my grandma when she would babysit my sister and I and take us to Salvation Army services on Sunday morning.

Additions to my reading list include;

  • The Meaning of God in Modern Jewish Religion, also by Kaplan.
  • Why Abraham Murdered Isaac, Rabbi Tzemah Yoreh. Yoreh, a humanist rabbi now leading a congregation in New York, purports to reconstruct the Elohist Source of the Torah, in which Abraham carried out the sacrifice of Isaac, Jacob was his nephew rather than grandson, Moses only presented seven commandments instead of ten, and he lived to reach the Promised Land.
  • Choosing a Jewish Life and Living a Jewish Life, Anita Diamant. Guides for converts. I’m not saying I’m going to convert. I’ve decided that I’m not going to decide whether I want to convert until the end of the ritual. I’m trying to educate myself right now as to whether or not that’s what I really want to do. When I get to the final week and get to talking to the Holy Guardian Angel (which, for the record, I 100% believe to be a part of myself), that’s what I intend to figure out.
  • Kav HaYashar, Rabbi Ẓebi Hirsch Kaidanover. A 1705 book of Kabbalistic philosophy.

I read a saying the other day from an 18th century Polish rabbi that a man should keep two slips of paper in his pockets. One should read “For my sake the world was created”, and the other should read “I am only dust and ashes”. Earlier tonight, I wrote those down on two slips of paper and stuck them in my wallet. There’s multitudes of meaning there. You are special, yet you are nothing, and yet for the sake of nothing the world exists.

I’m not really sure where the next three months are going to take me. When I first decided to undertake this I had absolutely no intention of converting to Judaism. Now, I think it’s almost certainly where I’m going to end up. I’ll know soon enough.

Next update… in a few weeks? Or a month or so? We’ll see.

155

Now that you’ve gotten to the midway point, the rest will go, or feel like its going, faster.
Like the old question-how far can a dog run into the woods? Halfway; after that its running out of the woods.

156

The year that i was nursing on yom Kippur i drank water. Not a lot of water, but i knew i needed the water both for my health and that of my son.

157

Day 103

All is well. My dreams have been bothering me again, but not in the way they were before. Last night I dreamed I was bitten by a raccoon while waiting in line for nachos, and when I went to the hospital for a rabies shot they gave me the runaround and kept making me take tests and fill out forms before they’d give it to me. A few days before that I dreamed I was a security officer on the starship Enterprise, Taylor Swift had been kidnapped by Romulans, and I was on an away team Mr. Spock was leading to rescue her. (That’s only the second weirdest Taylor Swift dream I’ve ever had, to tell the truth.)

Because I haven’t been getting enough sleep, I’ve taken advantage a few times this week of the allowance to occasionally say my morning prayers in bed. I’ve got them memorized at this point except for my daily psalm readings. I’ve been working to incorporate more blessings into my daily activities - grace before meals, the asher yatzer after using the bathroom, and so forth. Mostly in English so far. I’ve got Baruch atah Adonai eloheynu melech ha-olem down pat, but that and the beginning of the Shema are the only Hebrew I’ve been able to wrap my head around so far.

I’ve signed up for an Intro to Judaism class sponsored by the state rabbinical association. It starts next month and meets once a week, via Zoom, through until June. This is the class that our local Reconstructionist temple requires as a prerequisite for conversion, and its rabbi is the head of the program and one of the teachers. If I do decide to convert, my plan is to start attending services once I graduate from the class and schedule an appointment with him sometime next summer or fall. Part of that is because I want to take this slow to make sure it’s what I really want, and part of it is practical - it was hard enough getting my boss to agree to give me every Sunday off for nine months, so I’d like to get that out of the way before I start asking him to let me observe the Sabbath.

The Thirteen-Petalled Rose was a short but very interesting read about Jewish mysticism and the Kabbalistic conception of God, which seems less like the bearded guy I imagined as a kid and more like a benevolent version of a Lovecraftian elder being. It also answered a lot of questions I had about gilgul (reincarnation), a concept which I only learned existed in Judaism a few months ago and asked about on here to find out that very few of our board’s Jews were familiar with it. I’m not sure I believe in it, but it’s a fascinating concept nonetheless - as Steinsaltz puts it, every soul is brought into existence with a specific task to perform that only they can carry out, and if they don’t manage to achieve it in one life, they’ll be born again and again until they do. It’s the kind of thing to make one ponder what one’s purpose is and how many lives they’ve lived before trying to get it right.

Other additions to my reading list include;

  • A Treasury of Jewish Folklore, Nathan Ausubel
  • Antiquities of the Jews, Flavius Josephus
  • The Exodus: How It Happened and Why It Matters, Richard E. Friedman. In this book, Friedman, who previously wrote Who Wrote The Bible? about the documentary hypothesis, argues that the historical basis for the Exodus was a migration of several thousand Canaanite Yahwists from Egypt into Midian and then back into Canaan, where they assimilated into an already-existent Israelite culture, became the tribe of Levi, and introduced monotheistic ideas inspired by Atenism that lead to the merger of Yahweh with El and the transformation of Judaism from henotheism to monotheism. Tzemah Yoreh’s book that I discussed previously also mentions that the Elohist source proposes an exodus of no more than 3,000 people, which dovetails nicely into this hypothesis. The evidence he provides isn’t quite what I’d call substantial proof, but it’s definitely possible.
  • Teyve the Dairyman and the Railroad Stories, Sholom Aleichem.
  • Essential Judaism, George Robinson

I recently watched a movie called Menashe. It’s an indie dark comedy from A24, set in Borough Park, Brooklyn and filmed in Yiddish with English subtitles, about a Hasidic widower trying to bond with his ten-year-old son who’s living with his brother-in-law’s family after his wife’s sudden death along with his unborn second child. It’s a pretty interesting look into Hasidic life, as most of the actors are actual Brooklyn Hasids and the plot is loosely based on the real life of the actor playing the title character. I have absolutely no intention of becoming anywhere even near that kind of orthodox, but it’s a fascinating look into an insular culture dedicated to tradition.

Tomorrow night and Sunday is Tisha b’Av, the day of mourning for the destruction of the two Temples, and a general day of remembrance for various expulsions, pogroms, and outrages committed against the Jewish people over the centuries. I’m not yet ready to attempt a full 24-hour fast, but I’m going to do the best I can to observe the day in solitude. I’ll eat and drink as little as I can, reread the book of Lamentations, and watch a documentary or two.

In about two more weeks I start the third and penultimate phase of the operation. During this time you start praying three times a day instead of twice, burn incense every time you pray, and wear your white robe whenever you enter the prayer room. (For days when I work I’ll have to say my midday prayer on my lunch break.) This is also the period where you increase the degree to which you isolate yourself from others and spend as much of your free time as you can stomach on spiritual matters - if it were possible for me to take the entire next two months off work I would, but I’ll just have to settle for avoiding unnecessary socializing and staying home on my days off. It’s suggested but not required that you emulate the fast of Daniel, I.e. vegetables and water only. I don’t think I’m up to going fully vegan, but I’m going to stick to water as far as beverages go (though I will sorely miss my diet soda). That phase lasts until just after the end of Sukkot, when the final week of the operation takes place. Since I’ll be missing my mother’s birthday next month and the book calls for a celebratory banquet once the operation is finished, we’ve agreed that once I’m done we’re gonna go down to Portland for a weekend and have an expensive steak dinner at El Gaucho. The end of the operation also happens to line up with when I’ll have finished paying off a major debt I’ve been paying down for several years, so all the more reason to celebrate when I get there.

I’ll update once more once I’m a week or two into the third phase, again just before the final week, and then again after I’m finished.

Shabbat shalom.

158

Day 148

The third phase has been more trying than I expected. The bad dreams started up again for awhile. Remembering to say my prayers three times a day has been difficult- there’re been times I completely forget to pray during my lunch break at work and found myself hastily uttering psalms under my breath while stocking shelves. Fortunately I’ve got everything memorized at this point. Most of the berakhot I’ve added to my liturgy I’m saying in a blend of Hebrew and English based on which Hebrew bits I’ve memorized so far. I’ve removed from my daily routine most of the non-Jewish prayers I was saying at the beginning and have incorporated more specifically Jewish ones.

I started an Intro to Judaism class last week. It takes place on Zoom and meets every Sunday through to June. It’s sponsored by our state association of non-Orthodox rabbis, organized by the rabbi of my local Reconstructionist temple, and has a different rabbi teaching every week. My long term plan right now is that once I finish Abramelin I’m going to start attending Saturday services at the Reconstructionist temple while I continue taking the class, and if I decide I want to formally pursue conversion I intend to wait until about a year from next month, at which point I’ll be out of debt and more financially stable and prepared to take on that level of commitment. (Turns out that between temple membership, tzedekah, books, and other Judaica, being Jewish can get expensive. $75 for a lemon you’re not allowed to eat? Picky fellow, that Hashem.)

Additions to my reading list:

  • [I]The Ark Before Noah[/i], Irving Finkel. A scholarly look at the pre-Biblical origins of the flood myth.
  • [I]The Talmud for Dummies[/i], Arthur Kurzweil. Found this one browsing at Barnes & Noble while killing time before a dentist appointment.
  • [I]The Yiddish Policeman’s Union[/i], Michael Chabon. Not a religious book, just some light Jewish-themed detective fiction I’ve been meaning to get around to.
  • [I]Legends of the Jews[/i], Louis Ginzberg. A compilation of the aggadah (I.e. legends and folklore) collected in the Talmud.

I’ve also signed up for a Daf Yomi program, in which participants study one page of the Talmud every day, but I’m waiting for the next tractate to start before I try to jump in.

I’m about a month away from the final phase of the operation. This is the strictest stage in which you isolate yourself completely from human contact for six days and spend sunrise to sunset fasting, meditating, and commuting with your guardian angel before summoning the four kings and eight dukes of Hell and commanding them to obey you. As I mentioned back at the beginning, I don’t expect to literally consort with angels and devils - I interpret all of this symbolically and see it as a way of confronting my internal demons and negative emotions, and based on what I’ve learned, the Jewish conception of “demons” in general is both much less menacing than the Christian conception, and is largely understood these days to be fiction which got borrowed from Zoroastrianism and pre-Islamic Arab folklore about genies during the centuries when the heart of Jewish civilization was under Babylonian rule.

I expect to complete the operation on October 22nd. That’ll probably be when I post next. See ya then.

159

Nitpick: many people do eat it after the holiday. Well, i think they typically candy the skin.

Best wishes.

160

I’m enjoying these updates, it’s such an unusual thing to do and interesting to follow along.