boccaderlupo

The Father remains beyond, elusive, enthroned eternally within the deep recesses of the cloud covering the mountaintops, the divine darkness, essentially unknowable, his secret counsels forever shrouded.

He can only be sought by way of the Son, the incarnate, the proximate, the flesh-and-blood reality we recognize in our everyday lives. He is the Word of the Father, God made audible, whereby all things are brought from the mind of God into realization, conveying the message of Heaven to Earth, bridge across the unfathomable gulf between mortals and the Absolute. He is, too, Christ, the redeemer, insofar as everywhere there is an intimation of the Divine he offers the promise of salvation to those estranged from their Source, in various guises prompting recollection of our heavenly home, every sibyl a signpost on the Way. Thus, the Son reveals the Father.

As both these two are equally Divine and of one substance, their holy breath pours forth from the Father and the Son, one imperishable Spirit that is in all things, giving life and drawing all up into the cosmic mystery.

By the LORD’s word the heavens were made;
by the breath of his mouth all their host.

Psalm 33:6

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All multitude participates in a certain respect of the One. —Proclus

The most potent anti-magic I have found is the invocation of the name of the Lord Jesus Christ. (So potent is it, in fact, that the first sentence there has probably lost me a substantial portion of readers. If that's not you, friend, read on.) This should not be surprising, as John tells us the name is integral in the discernment of spirits: "This is how you can know the Spirit of God: every spirit that acknowledges Jesus Christ come in the flesh belongs to God, and every spirit that does not acknowledge Jesus does not belong to God." (1 John 4:2-3)

Some more passages regarding the Holy Name (emphases mine):

These signs will accompany those who believe: in my name they will drive out demons, they will speak new languages. They will pick up serpents [with their hands], and if they drink any deadly thing, it will not harm them. (Mark 16:17-18)

And whatever you ask in my name, I will do, so that the Father may be glorified in the Son. If you ask anything of me in my name, I will do it. (John 14:13-14)

Then John said in reply, “Master, we saw someone casting out demons in your name and we tried to prevent him because he does not follow in our company.” Jesus said to him, “Do not prevent him, for whoever is not against you is for you.” (Luke 9:49-50)

Who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God something to be grasped. Rather, he emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, coming in human likeness; and found human in appearance, he humbled himself, becoming obedient to death, even death on a cross. Because of this, God greatly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend, of those in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father. (Philippians 2:6-11)

You will protect them and those will rejoice in you, who love your name. (Psalm 5:12)

We could go on and on with these, of course, but you get the idea. Suffice it to say, the Holy Name has tremendous power. I have personally known people who were demonically obsessed/oppressed who have uttered the name in desperation and found immediate relief. Which makes sense, if we regard Christ as the one who lives, who holds the keys to death and the netherworld (Rev. 1:18).

I spent more than seven years practicing a type of planetary magic...for simplicity, we can loosely categorize it as "Ficinian Orphism." It was effective, albeit misguided; conducted in an heterodox Catholic context, it demanded a fair degree of orthopraxy and personal piety from the operator, and that included the diligent use of the Our Father/Lord's Prayer. I suspect the latter was employed as a way of protecting the operator from the spiritual forces at play, but interestingly, this prayer does not pronounce the Holy Name, although it alludes to it ("hallowed be thy Name"). In my experience, however, the actual use of the Holy Name itself was enough to shut off the effects. It was like pressing the mute button on your remote control; I'd never experienced anything like it.

Especially potent is the Prayer of Jesus: 

This simple invocation of faith developed in the tradition of prayer under many forms in East and West. the most usual formulation, transmitted by the spiritual writers of the Sinai, Syria, and Mt. Athos, is the invocation, "Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on us sinners." (Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2667)

This calls to mind the "Kyrie eleison" and "Christe eleison" pronounced during mass. For the Orthodox: "Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner." 

Of particular interest to those who have some knowledge of qigong: Symeon the New Theologian, in his text "The Three Ways of Attention and Prayer," in discussing prayer, advises:

Then sit down in a quiet cell, in a comer by yourself, and do what I tell you. Close the door, and withdraw your intellect from everything worthless and transient. Rest your beard on your chest, and focus your physical gaze, together with the whole of your intellect, upon the centre of your belly or your navel. Restrain the drawing-in of breath through your nostrils, so as not to breathe easily, and search inside yourself with your intellect so as to find the place of the heart, where all the powers of the soul reside. To start with you will find there darkness and an impenetrable density. Later, when you persist and practice this task day and night, you will find, as though miraculously, an unceasing joy. For as soon as the intellect attains the place of the heart, at once it sees things of which it previously knew nothing. It sees the open space within the heart and it beholds itself entirely luminous and full of discrimination. From then on, from whatever side a distractive thought may appear, before it has come to completion and assumed a form, the intellect immediately drives it away and destroys it with the invocation of Jesus Christ. (Emphases mine)

Despite the "mechanical practice" described above—which is reminiscent of certain "qi" practices, as far as I understand them—the focus remains on the Holy Name itself. I believe the mechanism, therefore, remains incidental and fundamentally different from that employed by those cultivating qi (those knowledgable in that discipline are welcome to weigh in one way or another here), despite some intriguing parallels. Suggesting, to me, that although all cultures seem acquainted with spiritus, they interact with it in diverse ways.

Via Dante, a virtuous pagan may lead you through the depths of hell and to the summit of purgation.

But when it comes to Paradise, Love must be your guide.

Consider this a working hypothesis for how spiritual influences come to be manifest in the sublunar world (our "everyday" lives).

Loosely speaking, there is an unseen world populated by myriad spiritual entities. These extend in hierarchies, the nature of which those far wiser than I can speculate about; the main idea, however, is that those entities lower down in the hierarchy are subject to and participate in those above them.

The material world of our everyday experience, matter, the regularities of which are ably captured by the standard model of physics and the other branches of science, is not adjacent to the spiritual cosmos, but is downstream from it, inasmuch as the spiritual gives rise to the material.

The spirits—daemons—are intelligences with wills much like ours, but are disincarnate and have limited purchase over matter.

If we imagine the EM spectrum, however, we consider the various energies going from shorter wavelengths (gamma rays) down to longer wavelengths (radio waves). We might regard matter, the brute particles that comprise our bodies and the physical objects we interact with on an everyday basis, as a further extension along that spectrum—mass energy that moves with velocities less than the velocity of light. These gross substances, then, are not fundamentally different than the radiant energy farther "up" the chain.

If we deem us mortals as having souls, spirits, and bodies, it is in this way that the "fine ether" of spirit (ultimately being manifest, say, as neural connections) bridges the gap between our souls and our physical bodies.

It is in this sense that theories of spiritual rays and their corresponding sympathies with "incarnate" substances hold. Although we might try to distinguish between spiritual magic (magic explicitly invoking spiritual intelligences) and "natural" magic (which merely tries to manipulate and align those sympathies), they are fundamentally both the same: they are attempts to align correspondences so as to manifest spiritual action in our mundane lives...incarnation, effectively. (Ex. The color red, part of the spectrum of visible light, resonates with Martial spirits; the operator singing or vibrating a particular note; etc.)

Some of the anecdotal phenomena associated with, say, haunted places suggest the limited action that spiritual intelligences have in the sublunar world. For instance, there may be disruption of electronic devices (visible light, fairly "high" along the EM spectrum), or knocking (sound waves). Some devices may even pick up faint sounds of voices, etc. Spiritual sensitives may be more apt to feel the "vibes," but the more manifest disincarnate entities become, the more they are able to produce physical effects.

I argue that disincarnate spiritual entities have a greater purchase over shorter wavelength features, such that they are more readily able to produce optical or auditory manifestations; this is why many "paranormal" events leave scant to no physical evidence. In those instances where one does find spiritual intelligences having a foothold in grosser material substances, you will find haunted objects, places—and people.

This is where the will comes into play, because in the case of a magician, the operator's will is instrumental in attempting to exploit the aforementioned correspondences. The alignment of sympathetic substances and symbols is enough to precipitate action, but the involvement of the will is critical to the operation.

It's in this same sense that the Church warns against magic, because the will is the door by which disincarnate intelligences can overtly (rather than distantly) impact the physical cosmos. As Padre Pio notes, the demon has only one door—the will.

Given the nature of free will, a person can deliberately shut this door and cast out any unwanted spiritual influence (including, I suppose, the benevolent (CF atheists)).

Returning to the magician, the operator must cultivate both knowledge and the will to action. In a Christian context, the operator may think that he or she is in some way controlling these influences, but, given the nature of participation, things "higher up" the chain will most likely prevail over the will of things "farther down" (us mortals). The operator can produce haunted objects that allow spirits greater purchase in the material; likewise, the operator's will may gradually become captured by and subject to those intelligences, commonly called possession. This is often a gradual process whereby spiritual actors, welcomed into the will, gradually overtake the mortal, who may, despite his or her best intentions, become unable to dispel them. (Think of an addict who may halfheartedly wish he or she could quit their addiction, but find themselves unable to cast out that lingering urge that continues to burn within; alternately, the wills of some psychopathic killers and cult leaders may become so subsumed by the spiritual intelligences they have invited in that their original personalties are not discernible.) At such a point, only an appeal to a higher actor along "the chain" can do the trick (exorcism).

Malignant daemons ("demons" proper) tend to be more obstreperous than benevolent spirits, which is why the Desert Fathers, many of whom had serious battles with the demonic in the wastelands, advocated against trying to visualize spiritual entities or discourse with them altogether, since even malevolent intelligences can masquerade as "angels of light," as it were. Thus we have stories of monks who effectively ignore the charisms afforded them, in their ardor not to be led astray by bad spiritual actors, and, so it is said, thereby obtain greater virtue.

Grazie, Altissimo,
per Frate Sole,
Sorella Luna e le Stelle,
Frate Vento, le Nuvole, il Cielo,
Sorella Acqua, Frate Fuoco,
Madre Terra, e Sorella Morte Corporale...

"...ka la morte secunda no 'l farrà male."

Leggi in Inglese

I may have written about this before, but when I was younger, I had a vision of the Christ upon the cross.

It was during the summertime, maybe after sixth grade. It was like a dream, but more than a dream. I saw him. Between us there was a gulf, almost infinite; you could not rescue him if you tried. But the key was that he was allowing this gulf. He hung suspended over this terrible abyss for all eternity. His face was one of infinite sorrow for the whole sorry human race, as he was bearing the sins of the many.

It seemed to me, then, that this was Hell: a void, a total absence of Love, infinite loneliness. The gulf was a black and purple hue, and alone the Savior in the midst of it, cut off from all lovingkindness—and yet he had taken it upon himself to put himself there, for who else but God could select infinite alienation? My thought was that he had chosen to experience the human condition, in its worst way...its estrangement from Love and the Divine. I wept, because we could not save him. And the paradox was that although he had caught himself off from redemption, he was in fact the source of lovingkindness himself, and the source of redemption himself.

This then was the paradox of the crucifixion—part of its mystery, perhaps, and how Love could transcend death and Hell itself. The sorrow struck my heart, and I could not forget it, even all these years later. It made me quite redoubled in my formal religiosity for a time, but then I drifted away, as a person cannot be good all on their own without divine aid. In some ways, perhaps, I may have been deliberately trying to forget—a search for the relief of Lethe. I drifted, like Dante lost in a dark wood, until the call again came to take up the Path of Return.

May the Divine keep you safe, dear reader, and may the Uncreated Light shine in your heart.