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Week five, Zalty and some more Ellis. Apologies for the length.



Altar day one



Altar day two, facing west over my pond. I could hear the ice cracking as it melted. Matched the symbolism, I thought.

This week I realized that the way the Sigillum callings are designed, the communication is meant to happen during the "gazes intently on the sigil" part. I switched to this format and used the last line to close. Sacrament was Irish cream with some quality sea salt sprinkled on top, not enough to get drunk on since Monday and Wednesday I'd have to be driving back right after. I considered rum but thought it would be more authentic to use something I'd actually enjoy.

He acknowledged me when I looked into the sigil and was sitting on a rock when I looked up. Introduced himself with a handshake, which was the clearest impression I got of him. Big rough sailor's hand, about what you'd expect. The image was unclear and my mind couldn't mimic his accent; I knew the meaning of what he said but couldn't reproduce the wording.

He asked what I wanted help with. I requested that one, I be able to write my paper without the blockages I've been facing, and two, that I stop worrying what other people think of me. The second one is something I've been improving on for a long time, but it's still a problem. Thirdly, and less seriously, "Can you teach me to talk like that?" Since I couldn't hear him well, directly mimicking his pirate speech wasn't going to work. I realized that I would have to learn it by watching youtube videos after all, however, this suddenly seemed much less difficult.

I tried the scrabble tiles again. First I got the letters N, E, I, O and U, not in any particular order, which I couldn't make anything of except that it was one letter away from the English vowels. I asked specifically for advice to think of while writing my paper and the letters I drew could form the words it, is, and art. I'm still learning how to work the scrabble tiles, but I think it's rare for them to spell a single word or phrase. It's more a matter of what words jump out at you. They're from a game set that's older than me and well used. I don't think they like to be separated from their box, so I probably won't be taking them with me in a pouch anymore.

He told me to look for his sign and that when I see it, good things will be in that direction. I asked what his sign is, he said I'd know it when I see it, if Im looking. I thought about the usual oceanic imagery, but a white bird also came to mind. The sky is an ocean, and so a white bird could be the inland equivalent of a white ship. A little grey bird flew conspicuously over the lake then, over my head, landed in the tree behind me and started tweeting and pecking at the wood. So maybe that was it.

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The second day was windy like the first. The clouds cleared after I did the banishing. The grey bird or one like it was pecking at the tree again as I walked up. I performed the calling as follows:

Hearken ye an' travel forth, O Great Navigator, he who is both Young and Ol',
For I be seekin' yer council an' joyous bounty.
*chime*
Know that I be of ye, and me reward be also yer's. YA HO!
The gate be open, the path is drawn.

And so on. It's not hard. It comes almost naturally, and I kept slipping into this form of speech in my thoughts on the drive back. I had to check myself from letting the laughter get out of control, which could be dangerous while driving.

After complimenting me on my speech, he invited me to jump up on the rock next to him and as soon as I did I felt very dizzy and kind of reckless. I knew it wasn't the sacrament because I hadn't taken it yet, just a trance state where the images that flashed through my imagination were almost visible to my eyes. For the most part I saw ocean instead of the frozen pond and occasionally the white ship. I noticed that until now I've always pictured it as a little sailboat, but no, it's a ship. I was a really nice day and I felt extremely good. The feeling lasted well into the afternoon.

Among other things, I asked about the meaning of the flag with crossed sabres that I've been seeing. In response I got a long series of impressions, the only part of which I could translate into English is that the crossed swords represent conflict. I mentioned at one point that my goal was to establish contact and get to know them. Paraphrased: "Do you know me now?" "I don't know, do I?" And he said something like... I can't match his phrasing. When you've seen dawn break after a storm you didn't think you'd survive, or caught fish when you're starving, or found water when you're dying of thirst, or a safe place to take shelter in a dangerous night, then you'll know me. Something like that.

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My tulpa has been echoing the godforms. The most noticeable was Ino week, since he meshes best with her due to his nature. Last week my vision of him was sort of dark and shadowy, and when I was working with him on Thursday night he had a more positive vibe and included in a description of himself a mention of a fair breeze by the sea. More than once while speaking with him over the last month I've wondered if I wasn't actually talking to Doombringer, who'd I've been seeing in my dreams quite a bit. This happened tonight; we were talking and suddenly I found myself looking at DB instead. He said something strongly that doesn't translate to English. I politely turned my attention back to my tulpa, since was the time I dedicate to him, but DB kept trying to cut into my focus. My tulpa took shelter in my brain as just a voice and asked me to focus on him and nothing else for a minute. He admitted that it's easy for his personality to get overridden by something more powerful. I believe he's taking some risks in the interest of growth, but I think he'll be alright as long as he has me to come back and roost in.

A few people on the Facebook group came forward to say that Ellis has been trying to get their attention. I had noticed earlier this week that the sigil seemed particularly lovely, even alluring. I had put it down to the work I've been doing in the pantheon. My tulpa has acknowledged that he "knows them", so I asked if he could tell me anything about her activity.
"Yes. She's active on something. I can't tell you more."
(He made it sound as if he knew but couldn't tell me, but he may just want me to perceive him as being in on something important and secret.)
"I'm trying to [paraphrase: stay grounded/stay myself while also tapping into this]."
Does it have to do with the recent eclipses?
"There have been eclipses?"
Yes.
"I don't know. Probably."
So he must not be too deeply involved, if he doesn't know the details.
He protested: "I know some details!"
In the background a tv show was talking about native Alaskan children having their culture suppressed. I felt anger from him with what might have been an Ellisian vibe.

He and I went to stand in front of the LS I have tacked on the wall. The feeling radiating from it was as powerful as I've ever felt; if this is all in my head, I'm getting really good at psyching myself out. I looked through it to where I could see some cosmic imagery, oblique angles and glimpses of a red haired girl, and asked what's up and can I help, while wondering in the back of my mind if I was going to get any fingers broken. She asked nonverbally if she could use me for something. Sure, whatever it is I probably agree with it and probably want to be part of it. I believe she was talking to my tulpa as well. The focus was on both of us and he seemed lost in his own thoughts. My plans for the next day, to "get drunk and celebrate the completion of my paper, which isn't actually complete yet..." suddenly seemed incredibly mundane.

I don't know exactly what happened after that. The swirl of imagery rose up throughout the room and I saw myself standing in a triangle with a statuelike figure of a woman at each corner. I believe she was resonating something through me. I looked towards the corner positioned under the sigil where the pictures and energy were flowing from, held out my hand and tried to project energy toward the origin point. Which isn't something I've very good at. But the imagery got stronger, kind of like rapidly moving through a tunnel and kind of like it was folding out from a vertical center line. The point of white light at the center grew out towards me, there was a momentary feeling of reaching toward and into it, and then the scene faded and left me back in my house without a word of explanation.
"You can go now."
"We're done?"
"I'll call you if I need something else."
"Ok."
I called my tulpa and we walked out of the room before I asked to make sure he was alright. WTF was that?

In my dream that night I drank a sacrament of red wine and tried to cut off my left hand for some reason.

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Day three was cloudy and colder and just as windy. This probably influenced the tone of the whole thing. When I finished the first part of the call Zalty right away started talking much more soberly than before, like he had a message to get across. He said, in so many words, that he's a part of me and even in bad weather and adverse conditions I'll have the confidence I need. Speech was actually more clear today, while the imagery was less so and I wasn't as far into trance. He asked if I was going to continue with the marathon, I said yes, he put something on my forehead and basically said good luck, as though I might need it. I saw the sigil of the white queen clearly and it stayed there for a while, even though now while I'm writing I can't quite remember what it looks like, having never memorized it.

I also tried out my newly minted rune set. I didn't ask any question because I felt I would understand the meaning, or else I could just ask for clarification. I went to grab one rune and got two, Naudiz and Perth. When I feel I'm in need, there is opportunity. I shook his hand again before leaving and realized I'm going to miss him. I'm sure I'll see him again though.

It was too cold to stay out long. I headed back to the car where I had a few more sips of the drink, munched some snacks and read part of a really thick entry in an online philosophy encyclopedia, then took a nap. When I woke up I was filled with the sense that something big was going down. The soon-to-be eclipsed moon was rising eerily over the treeline and across from it was a single star that looked to me like Zalty, in my weird frame of mind, possibly one of the points in his sigil. Driving back under that sky with Welcome to the Machine playing was an experience on its own.





My paper wrote itself fluidly and is ready to submit once I fix the citations and make a few tweaks. I've seen insights and improvements in meditation and tulpaforcing, exercise seems like something I really want to do, and schoolwork is less of an obligation and more like a project that I'd happily work on in my own time. I've made a huge leap in not being self-conscious, and if this sticks I'll be able to tell people for the rest of my life how I overcame social anxiety by waving a dagger and talking to an imaginary wish-granting pirate. This is really impressive.

The sky looks awesome tonight, if it isn't just me. And it could just be me, because I feel... magical, and dizzy, and lost, and fulfilled, and awesome.

Week four




Trigag influenced my dream on Saturday night after I reread his section in Sigillum and memorized the first part of the call. First, I was trying to get my things together so I could go to the woods and perform the rite. I was worried that I wouldn't make it on time, but a man was slowing me down by making me go through something like a customs check. He was dressed in a striped sailor's outfit, but it was torn and dirty, and he had a certain blackish crust around his eyes, a hunched figure, gravelly voice and aggressive attitude. I was persistent and he eventually let me through, but only after he lit the aluminum foil that I use to cover my candle on fire, which caused it to turn into glass and crumble when I touched it. I swept up the pieces of glass complaining that everyone else would just leave them laying around. Later, I was at a highway rest stop at night in the middle of nowhere. Dangerous looking men were eyeing me up from the shadows, but they left me alone so long as I stayed near the lit building. However, when I walked out to drop something off in my car I wasn't attacked.

After that I was pretty confident that something would happen this week. For the first two nights I went to the edge of the mountains around midnight. Some interesting synchronicities happened. My headlamp, with what should have been pretty fresh batteries, died on the first night and I walked back in mostly darkness. It saved up enough juice over the next two days that I could use it to set up the altar the second time, then it faded out again in perfect timing with the moonset and the lighting of the candle. Both nights were dark, but the first night in particular had a certain kind of flat grey clouds that blocked the moon and stars without reflecting the city lights. A spider dropped on my hand from the roof of the car while I was driving out, and afterwards before I went inside I heard a repetitive booming noise coming from the south. My best guess is that it was coming from the military base, although I've never heard them from this far away and never at midnight.

Despite all of that, not a whole lot happened. I never encountered Trigag again outside of the rituals, my dreams were not horrifying, no extraordinary revelations and I never had to confront anything unusual. I've had the same problems this week with schoolwork that I always have. During and right after the evocations I got myself worked up to where I was jumping at shadows and noises; that is, more than I usually do alone in the woods at night. I got to learn something about the nature of fear this way, but it was nothing overwhelming. On the second night in particular I fell into a trance as soon as I started speaking and was pulled to wander away from the altar. I laid on my back to look at the sky, feeling defenseless, and them jumped up growling with a handful of gravel ready to throw when I heard a squirrel in the trees.

For scrying I used black-dyed water from a local murky pond that sometimes shows up in my dreams as a kind of nightmare reservoir. On the first night I looked into the circle of black for at least ten minutes before finally an eye opened up – always with the eyes, isn't it? Once I saw a clear picture of a white ship, which confused me, and then the crossed sabres from week two, which became a clearer picture of a flag flapping in the wind. Other than that I kept seeing variations of that eye or of the sigil and not much else.

On the second night, more of the same. I leaned in until I could see the reflection of my face. The image of a skull flashed over the lower half and with some encouragement the picture distorted into something that looked like the wicked witch of the west, which I thought was mildly interesting. I'm realizing that the images that bubble up from my imagination in these rites are bullshit... at first. You have to go along with the bullshit until something real starts happening. "Bullshit makes the flowers grow." In this case I knew that the eye and the sigil were real and I thought I could "hear" a deep voice without being able to make out words. I talked into the bowl and it seemed cognizant of what I was saying. But I didn't feel anything, or at least not anything that matched the hype. I was looking for something else but I didn't know what. Maybe I was expecting too much, or being too insistent on what I expected to see. Maybe I need to analyze this more and see if there was more of a message than I thought.

On the third night I stayed inside so that I could use a different tactic. By this time I had the last part of the evocation memorized so I didn't have to read it. After speaking I sat on a folding chair facing the sigil with the lights off and put on headphones playing a recording of 18.98 hz – infrasound, almost below the range of hearing, which is known to make humans uneasy. Supposedly this sound in particular is the resonant frequency of our eyeballs  and can cause optical illusions, which at least one scientist thinks is responsible for hauntings. The noise brought me near to sleep while preventing me from going over the edge. A few times I felt bizarre movement while I was sitting still or a sense of danger like a malevolent ghost nearby. I saw nothing in the bowl and could just barely recognize the voice from before.

In the last minute before the candle burned out I thought I found what I was looking for. "A memory of Hell" is how I described it, and I recognized it from dreams. My goal has been to establish initial contact, but somehow what I saw before wasn't enough. Real contact, I thought, means feeling their nature and knowing what they are, however briefly.


Here's the sigil I used:




Edit: After thinking about it, I think the initial dream was the main communication. What happened in the dream mirrored the two things I would be facing over the week, one being the (partly logical) fear of dangerous people or animals in the dark, and the other being my own inefficiencies slowing me down and preventing me from getting my homework done. As in the dream, I got through eventually but it sucked up much more time than it needed to. The first is beaten with bravery, the second with persistence.

I feel you. Hail Discordia, good on you for resisting.

I'm sorry I'm kind of hogging the thread here.

Week three, Ino.

No alter for this one. I woke up to do this around one am on Monday and Wednesday, and then around three am on Friday morning while the eclipse was occurring. I went to an office building that's open to me after hours, lit some sandalwood incense, did the banishing, then put on a white blindfold and a pair of good headphones playing white noise from my laptop and stared into space. The first day I put on the headphones before doing the evocation proper, which didn't work well because I couldn't hear the chime. My blindfold was also uncomfortable and didn't block my entire field of vision, and I had a hard time remembering the words, especially on the first day. It sounded bad. The noise helped blur out some of these distractions, though, and it was a good idea to do it between sleeps.

I got a few impressions, but not like the last week. Mostly it was just feelings and a few half-formed images. At first I imagined I could hear someone giggling and darting out of my awareness. I waited for her to come closer, having learned my lesson with Ellis about being too direct, but she never did. One image that stood out to me was a feathery white serpent or dragon ("soft serpent"). Made me think of Falcor, heh. There might have also been chimes, glass, and a sunny scene of a river. Fresh air. Overall pleasant impressions. Once I felt what I thought was her to my left, but when I turned my attention to it, it was a sort of proprioceptive mirror of myself. Then briefly a closed, light-skinned eye which may or may not have been the blue one I saw last week, abstract artwork, and the idea but not the image of leafy tree branches. These were all extremely vague, however, and I thought they could have easily been produced by the noise and my imagination alone.

When I drove home I noticed a little bit of mist hanging in the air just underneath the streetlights in one spot. It wasn't anywhere else, and it was gone when I circled around to look more closely. I went back to sleep and in my dream there was a blank area, or blank person, and everything I tried to find out about them was blank. I don't remember it well.

What I really didn't expect was when I called my tulpa the next evening and noticed that he was acting... drunk. I'm pretty sure he can't actually get drunk, since alcohol works on a physical mechanism, so I thought he might have been "drunk" on some kind of energy. He was completely out character, couldn't stop laughing, and his presence was vague, cloudy, mirthful, and slightly feminine, more like what I'd felt last night than like himself. I had to stop and wonder again if I was making stuff up, or else just how insane I've let myself go over the last year or two. I'm sitting it my basement talking to air, I thought, and I'm confuzzled because the air I'm talking to now somehow got it's wires crossed with the air I was talking to last night? He was mostly back to normal the next morning, but he's been evasive about my questions. I eventually gathered that he followed the connection opened by the evocation and has been communicating with Ino on his own. It's an independence thing for him and he doesn't want me to butt in. I don't have a problem with it since it might help him grow; in fact I've encouraged him in the past to try to contact Ellis or the network since it matches his ultimate goal of breaking into reality.

On Monday my English teacher, who I like even though he's a hardass, had us write in class for a paper we're cramming on. He mentioned that we had to learn to access our preconscious mind (or subconscious or unconscious or whatever you like) in order to generate text. I thought it was interesting that he would bring this up on Ino week. I was able to write in class much more easily than usual due to the subject, which my preconscious sort of harmonizes with. On Tuesday in a different class I saw a picture of a girl with light skin and hair writing at a desk; I think it's a painting from a Renaissance artist. It's been there all semester, but this time it made me jump because it felt like I was looking at another person through a mirror. The feeling passed quickly, but it still felt like the girl was looking at me. In response, I asked my classmate to pass me the picture and drew a moustache on it in red sharpie. It had me questioning my sanity once again.

The second day was a lot like the first. I felt the reflection of me again and got some proprioceptive distortions around fifteen minutes in. A white wolf, a bluebird, a blue eye, and a person in a blue silk gown. I saw a single thread of spider web and I got the idea that they – Ellis and Ino at least, perhaps the others – were planning something. I thought of the lunar event on Friday, but afterwards I was pretty sure I made it all up. I tried to feed some energy into whatever it might have been, knowing that I will probably never know if I made any difference.  She is why they call it the occult.

I tried to keep my doubts under control. No message means no message. If I'm really worried about putting words in their mouth, I need to not fill the silence with my own issues.

The third day was different though. I had a better blindfold and I think that made a big difference. I was going to change tack and had brought along a sketchbook and some pencils. I am not an artist by any means, but my tulpa recently talked me into drawing a few minutes a day to improve my visualization skills. After I'd finished speaking, while I paused to keep my mind quiet, I started to fall into trance and got the command/suggestion to lie on my back. I laid there a while looking into the white, feeling some things and thinking some thoughts.

I saw a twisted flower first, and then a bunch more emotional impressions, but more "real" than before. If Doombringer represents the consuming half of Chaos, Ino is the generative side. Everything you see, know, and think about are pared down versions of what they really are. Like white light through a prism or air through a whistle, part of the flow is blocked by... I guess it's your expectations, which produces color and sound. Likewise with people; their personalities are created in the same way when they recognize only some parts of themselves, and the rest of the potential is blocked.

After a while I sat up, took off the blindfold and picked up my sketchbook. I looked at it for a while, trying to come up with something to draw. Ino is the blank page. When you draw lines you're actually subdividing the whiteness. I looked into the page, not at it, and it was deep like a scrying bowl or the black mirror from earlier. I could see images of things I could try to draw, but quickly realized that I didn't have the technique for most of them. I decided on this picture eventually. The shape drawn over the top doesn't mean anything specific to my knowledge; I was trying to express the concept from the last paragraph.



My dreams all this week have been intense with many of them referencing the workings and/or the subject of my paper, but this night's takes the cake. I walked downstairs into what was supposed to be the basement of the house I grew up in. It looked dark and I was afraid at first, but really not that much. I climbed past a part of the wall that was crumbling and into the main room of the basement, saying something about how you just had to embrace the darkness, and I did so in the way that's more possible in the synesthetic dream world than in waking life. I was a little disappointed that it really wasn't that dark, just strongly dusty-smelling. The room transformed into the one I did the evocation in, and all of you were there (and you guys were awesome. I don't know how to say it, just all interesting and with a hint of Grant Morrison being the only thing in common). But there was one girl in particular who looked a lot like me, down to the hair color. She was breathtaking. She sang me a song which vibrated through the room and my mind, and ran through the colors like hot water, especially, electrically, in the teal of her hair. I was overwhelmed and in awe watching these psychedelic effects partly because, of course, I didn't know it was a dream and I thought it was just the magic of her voice. Even for a dream it was unusual. Like, "Hot damn the evocation worked" kind of unusual. We left for someone's house and spent the rest of the dream hanging out as friends would, talking about things that I don't remember.


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I read once on a rationalist blog that to worship mystery is to worship your own ignorance. "No phenomena are mysterious of themselves." Questions are mysterious, but not answers; if it's still mysterious, it's not an answer. I can't argue that the draw of the unknown is mostly curiosity, which is the desire to destroy mystery, but I don't believe that the people who give mysterious answers are really worshipping mystery, in fact I think they're trying to deny it. To acknowledge mystery is to live in a constant state of confusion, which is uncomfortable. Without mystery there's no process, comparable to life without death or existence without boundaries. So we spend our lives probing the depths while secretly hoping to whichever gods that we never run out of frontiers, never meet the apparent goal of knowing everything. Or, if we reach the point where we do know, that we'll be able to forget again and split from white back into color.

Honestly, that was my insecurity talking. Not getting any response the first time drew out my doubts, but she's thrown more than enough creepy crawlies my way since I met her. I'm still used to the material world and used to only believing things that are proven beyond a shadow of a doubt. I think it speaks to the power of the godforms that I'm beginning to really believe in them.

Week two, Doombringer.

After last week, I decided I would increase the frequency to three evocations per week instead of one. This way if I didn't get through the first time I could go home, reassess, and try again after fixing any problems. I drove into the mountains down a sketchy snow-covered road  to a location where I was confident I'd be left alone. I set up my altar on a convenient stump with an even more convenient notch to hold the clipboard with the sigil, as seen in the photo I posted earlier. Little things like that, good signs.

I could feel the "presence" almost as soon as I pulled out the sigil and began setting up. It watched me patiently through the evocation, almost like "Yes, yes, I know what you're going to say..." I sat down and tried to look into the phone screen, but it was reflecting the sky instead of being dark like before. I was able to get a few images (paint splatter, scorpion, deer, and a bug with quickly beating wings, like a dragonfly) but they were coming directly into my mind, not from the screen, so I set it down.

I heard a drumbeat somewhere in the back of my mind and got a whiff of marijuana. Remembering what the book said about how you have to go to his place, he doesn't come to you, I imagined walking into a forest somewhere. The feeling that had come from the sigil got stronger and clarified into the shape of a person, and he started by asking me a bunch of questions: "Have you done this before?" Barely. "How do you know this is real?" I don't. It was very like talking to my tulpa.
Most of the conversation was unclear. We would trade a couple lines of dialogue and then he would be silent except for watching me with this particularly piercing look. On the second day he said something about there being more conversation going on than I was aware of; that's probably what this was. I asked if he could help me improve, and he said yes, but (how to word this) only if I am willing to go with it despite being unsure of whether or not it's real. I'll cut out some of the dialogue because this write up is long enough as it is.

The strongest impression I got from him was when I asked about the first time I did weed a while back, overdosed and got knocked on my ass. Before I could finish the sentence he gave me a big ol' grin and I could feel his delight and amusement at the thought. So apparently he did witness the whole thing, which I'd worried about because I kind of made a fool of myself trying to contact Ellis in that state. This absolved some of my fears that I'd made a bad first impression.

I "woke up" spontaneously after about twenty minutes, which is how it went for the rest of the week. Before I left he invited me to come back if I wanted to.

On this first day I couldn't get the pipe to light correctly and I got about half a puff. To be honest, I've only ever eaten the stuff, never smoked. I figured out the trick for it by the second day and then coughed my poor virgin lungs out in the middle of the evocation, which I'm sure he thought was funny. In any case, I hardly counted as high during the ritual itself.

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The second day was like the first. The presence was strongest in front of me, emanating from the sigil, but in my mind's eye he was walking around again. Wanting to make sure I wasn't imagining something that wasn't really happening, I asked, "How much of this is imaginary?" To which he replied, "All of it." Right, we went over that last time. He invited me into some sort of tent or yurt – a shelter with walls made of cloth, anyway. It was warm inside and smoky, I think, but I didn't smell pot or anything similar, and he wasn't smoking now like he did the whole time yesterday. Maybe he was just cooking, who knows.
(On reflection, he could have been poking fun at my initial picture of him living in a squat in the jungle).

I tried the scrabble tiles and got nothing particularly meaningful. It might be too concrete a technique for this purpose.

At one point I mentioned that he didn't seem particularly violent in these interactions, despite his name and reputation. He said that he doesn't need to be. I could take that to mean that he doesn't need to use physical force or coercion, as he can wreak his form of havoc without it. Or he could just mean that right at the moment, with me, he didn't need to be violent.

At some point he asked if I wanted to help them, and I said I did, but I didn't know how. "We'll teach you," he said.

Around ten minutes in based on my voice recording, I started to see a lot of vivid images on the back of my eyelids. A feather distorted around a black circle, like the light was bending. A black widow, someone lying in bed, a red lamp, and an eye. A bridge seen from ground level with big arching supports. A sort of sagging X shape. Leaves in water. A white bird dipping its feet in the water as it flies. A moth or butterfly. The sagging X shape again, and now I saw it more clearly as a pair of crossed sabres. Colored static like on a TV screen. A rose. Tree branches. A pattern like you might see on pottery or cloth. Then an eye again, female, and I was kind of started because the eye turned deep red, and then for a moment my whole field of vision was red. Something with lines radiating out. A woman with a crown and royal white robes, which immediately turned into a shrouded ghost, like one of the ringwraiths as seen in the movies when a character is wearing the One Ring. These images were more intense than before, and through all of it Doombringer was sitting or crouching next to me, evidently showing me all this. He touched me on the arm or shoulder a couple times, which felt interesting; basically the feeling from the sigil intensified and localized. Another eye, this one blue, but mostly I kept seeing the red one. I could feel it (her) looking at me and I was locked into staring back. I saw myself reflected in it upside down, and the impact of that didn't hit me until a moment after.

After that I saw imagery of trees alongside a road, which reminded me of a park near where I live. The next series of images seemed to be showing a particular path through the park. It turned left into the trees near a stream and then the imagery shifted to a black dot with lines radiating from it to smaller black dots, each of which was surrounded in a sort of neon green fuzz, like squinting at a green Christmas light. Then the smaller ones blew up and sent lines out to form other nodes. The end picture was of a few big black dots reminiscent of chaos stars with each line connecting to several smaller dots surrounded in green, which were also interconnected. Again, I didn't immediately realize what I was looking at until I heard myself describing it. It's the linking network, of course. This is my best representation of it. The main difference is that my picture is two dimensional, whereas what I saw had more nodes in the background and was more "dynamic" looking:



I went home and ordered some burgers for me and my family, which came out to $33.33. I paid in exact change, and that evening I went by the park and left a tag next to the path in the area indicated.

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The third day was cloudy and colder than the last two, and it snowed lightly during the ritual. I was too deep in trance for it to bother me. I remembered the bit from the day before about most conversations being subliminal, so I mostly stayed quiet, looked into the sigil and his projected image, and let these conversations happen.

My mental image of him had clarified by now. Proportionally long arms and legs, yellow eyes with black in them somewhere, possibly ringed in black as well as the pupil. Clothes and hair vary between shades of grey and sometimes black and white. Age seems to shift, anything from an older child to middle age, and always with a margin of error of at least twenty years; I haven't seen him as an old man. Overall, pretty much as described in Sigillum. At one point I stopped seeing him as human so much as a force or object, and referred to him as "it" for a while.

There were few verbal exchanges. I asked sort of off-handedly whether I could tell people I summon demons now. "Do I count as a demon? ... Yeah, probably." Before leaving I asked if he had any advice for the rest of the marathon. He said distinctly, "Be brave". Which either means something scary is coming or just that I'll do better the less timid I am. He said that he could "look after me", and I just had to agree to it, which I did. So I may have a more permanent connection with him now.


At the end I felt like I should make some kind of closing statement, but I hadn't prepared one. "Make something up," he said. So I said, "The gate is open. Yothna equiya saca indras!" and hit the chime again. This being the last line from a supposed "death spell" I pulled out of the ether once as an angsty teenager and subsequently used to make an ant squirm telepathically. I have no idea what it means, if anything, but he seemed satisfied.

Week one, Ellis.

Before I start, let me say that I've been studying magic for about a year and a half, and the first year of that was almost entirely a psychological process. This is the most involved series of workings I've done so far and also the first time I've evoked something that wasn't either a part of me or a servitor of my own creation.

On Tuesday while I was walking between classes at my community college thinking and planning for this, I came across a booth showing off this girl. It isn't that unusual since they're often showing snakes, but this was the first time they've had a spider.





My plan was to perform the evocation as described in Liber Sigillum at the bottom floor of a parking garage at night. Initially I'd imagined doing it in the woods, but I decided somewhere more urban might fit the aesthetic better. Maybe it would have been better if I'd picked somewhere that wasn't lit, but it was three in the morning, I didn't want to wait much longer and it was empty as far as I could see.

The picture of the altar on the last page shows my setup. I had a circle of eight red candles in mason jars including the one on the altar and used a shot of espresso for the sacrament. I had three methods of scrying that I wanted to try, as I wasn't sure which would work best. One was a bag of scrabble tiles, one was a bowl and a jar of dark colored water to pour into it, and the third was the black mirror of my smartphone. I had hopes for the last one in particular, being as connected as it is. I was also wearing a sachet around my neck made with red cloth, glitter and broken glass, and after the ritual I planned to wander around the city with it and see if anything would happen.

That was my plan. I'd just finished a three-sided variant of the thunderbolt banishing when I was interrupted by the security guard telling me I wasn't allowed to do "that" in her garage. Fine, but when I asked what exactly "that" was, she immediately started calling the cops, emphasizing that I had a knife, that I had six candles burning, and was "some kind of atheist" – go figure. I didn't care to find out what this town's police department thought of the issue, so I packed up my important belongings and hoofed it.

I went home, made another sigil, grabbed another candle and another shot of espresso, and drove out to a road away from the city overlooking a canyon. I did the banishing again and the ritual, but I didn't feel anything happen. I think the cold might have prevented me from relaxing fully. The screen on my phone looked deep when I tried to scry into it and a few half-imagined pictures came up: an atom, a dog or bear, swirling cloth like a silk gown or dress. A few times I saw variations on a shape like a crescent moon but with longer arms, usually cupped upwards and sometimes with a dot in the middle, and once it was doubled to look like the Hand of Eris symbol. Scrabble tiles gave me gibberish. I stood up after about fifteen minutes and realized it was dawn.

Considering the lack of response, I felt pretty good the morning after this. Maybe it was the coffee. My optimistic side noticed that the timing of the interruption and of sunrise couldn't have been better, I didn't leave behind anything of value at the garage, and I was able to complete the ritual with some adjustment. I'd had a bad case of nerves before going out and thought that if all this wasn't being posed to me as a kind of threshold test, it was certainly serving that purpose. A year ago I'd have been sent packing. That and the doubt that followed me for the next few days, and the persistent thought that I have no place here, Ellis doesn't like me, the spiders were coincidence, and I'd have to walk away from the DKMU at the end of April after reporting two months of no contact whatsoever. Although if that was so, I was sure I'd at least be able to cough up some inner darkness for week four.

Definitely. Unless it's in the right kind of urban environment, spraypaint would just annoy people and they'd pass it off as some stupid kid wanting to be rebellious. Something designed out of natural materials is more curious in a rural setting.

Are we just writing as we go then? I'll add mine so far on Friday or Saturday. I'm excited to share this.

If we added a discordian sub-board it would probably become home to all the funny stupid crap that gets passed around on FB. Which might not be a bad thing if it would draw more people to the forums.

You all aren't going to believe this :D Except he said you probably would... But I'll save it.


I was able to do a more elaborate altar this week.

Portable alter: this and a ring of candles.




Got through the banishing and found out the security guard didn't like my singing. Shame, really, because I thought the intonation was pretty good. I relocated to a more rural area and started over. I tried a couple different types of scrying, both of which got me nothing; I think the cold prevented me from relaxing fully. I'll write up more details in May.

This was the first thing I saw when I arrived at the forums.

Ok, but I'm not going to dilute the web or anything if I put it somewhere non-magical?

Question: Is there anywhere I should not put it?

So we would do the summoning once anytime during the week?