Getting Back on the Horse and Killing Your Dragons

Ouroboros 16 x 20 digital image. copyright 2016 Dee Rapposelli

A few night ago, I was feeling discouraged about my creative endeavors and pondering existential thoughts about being and purpose. Teary-eyed, I fell asleep shortly after the witching hour and had a bad dream that included a continually recurring scene in which a small bird or bug-like creature with talons kept clamping into and piercing my upper lip--the focus of expression and nourishment. I kept struggling with and then dislodging the little monster by carefully withdrawing the talons from the piercings--all the while being careful not to harm the creature--as if it were some kind of vicious little pet. I drifted into another, quieter stage of sleep before fully awakening. When I did wake, I did not feel an emotional charge.  I felt profoundly quiet and stilled in my mind. Completely in the present moment. I slept peacefully for the remainder of the night and into morning. When I awoke, I put aside all the misgivings I had had about spending time doing the things I do. I got back on the horse, and that day was probably the most productive day I had had in years....

Turning opposite the sun’s westward arc, she could see a clearing. A tattered and huge pine tree with tortuous bows loomed from the middle of it. Lumie took a few steps closer but was startled to detect movement within that alcove. People were there. She wasn’t sure whether she should approach. Then Rodney came into view. He smiled brightly and waved his hand for her to near.

“Took you long enough,” he said.

She was about to ask him what he was doing there when she realized where she was. An ancient pine tree was at the hub of this highpoint and the full moon in daylight was directly overhead. She had alighted on Lunarium Hill. Zosi was there, too. He was squatting beside the tree and hammering something into the ground.

“What’s he doing?” Lumie mouthed.

“Killing mini-dragons,” Rodney replied. “Bite-size.”

“Is anyone else here?” she asked.

“No, there too busy being fuck-ups,” Rodney replied.

“The Lord Consul Tau-Bridge is going to give Dade a job,” Zosi uttered in a wondrous voice. It was jagged with breathlessness because of whatever he was hammering away at.

“What?” Lumie replied, not because she hadn’t heard him but because the idea was crazy.

“Tau-Bridge Sortiar is offering Dade a job at this very moment. He should take it; otherwise, he’s going to end up like me,” Zosi said.

“A job doing what?” Lumie exclaimed.

Rodney shrugged. Zosi continued to pound the ground. He made an “I don’t know” gesture with a smirk and lit-up eyes.

Lumie insisted that he and Rodney be serious and tell her what Zosi was doing.

“He’s killing dragons,” Rodney repeated.

As Lumie stepped closer to the professor, she saw that his hands and clothes were caked with brackish, sanguineous gunk and that he was smooshing small dragons into a sigil gouged into the dirt. The dragons were pot-bellied and about the size of golf balls. They were fiery-bright colors and had tiny claws and cute dragon heads with bulging eyes and cock’s combs on their chins and heads. The creatures were mindlessly rutting around the dirt and dragon-blood mud and sniffing and nibbling at the remains of their sacrificed and macerated brothers and sisters until their own time came to be snatched up by Zosi and pummeled.

Lumie was astonished and nauseated by the sight. She felt sorry for those little dragons.

“You want one?” Zosi said and tossed a bright, winged, fiery-colored creature at her. It immediately clamped its jaw onto Lumie’s index finger and deeply pierced the digit with its fangs. The sting and burn made Lumie hiss and wail and flail her hand. She gouged the creature’s eyes and crushed its head with the fingers of her free hand to dislodge it. Then her own hands were full of gunk but there was no pain—or even a wound—in her finger.

Zosi snickered in a way Lumie had not heard before. “You wanna’ do one?” he asked, and held out the gooey rod he was using to beat the creatures into his sigil.

“No,” Lumie said abruptly and was crying.

“It’s not like they’re real,” Rodney disdainfully commented.

“The real ones don’t look like this,” Zosi said, continuing with the slaughter.

“The real ones are ‘metaphorical,’” Rodney crassly added.

“The real ones don’t look like dragons,” Zosi asserted.

“Why are you doing this anyway?” Lumie screeched.

“Someone has to,” Rodney remarked.

“Sure you don’t want to smoosh one?” Zosi asked.

However appalled and terrorized, Lumie thought she ought to. This was a very special and eventful journey, and if Zosi said so, then . . . But she couldn’t get herself to do it.

“I was saving yours for when you showed up in case you wanted to kill it yourself,” he said. “I’ll do it for you; it’s not a problem,” Zosi assured her.

“Didn’t I just kill one?” she asked.

“Dade’s,” Rodney piped in.

“I killed Dade’s dragon?” Lumie exclaimed.

“Well, you did, and now you did,” Zosi cryptically quipped.

“The real one and the metaphorical one,” Rodney chimed in.

“Thank you, Rodney. I got that,” Lumie griped.

“Alright, Lumie. I’m going to kill your dragon now. Come over here,” Zosi announced. The tone of his voice had changed. He was not goofy or spaced-out but professor-like. A breathless specialness inflated Lumie’s lungs. Rodney gently and soberly smiled as if Lumie was now in for a great moment. He hung back as Lumie stepped closer to her teacher.

“Magianism is good for girls, but if you’re too mooshy and watery, you need to do something else,” he told her and added in a mood infused with annoyance that Dade should have been killing her dragon. “But he’s too busy.”

Lumie bit back her tears and vowed to become a little darker and more sorceress-y. Fighting repulsion about the violence and gore about the little dragons, she tried to let curiosity take over.

Zosi grasped one that was serpentine, with webbed claws and fin-like structures instead of wings. It was a very sticky-bright turquoise blue. “This is your dragon,” he said and held it by the tail so that it flailed and twisted to spring up to nip Zosi’s fingers.

Lumie merely tried to remember that it wasn’t “real,”but she was feeling queasy and macabre—panicked in fact. Zosi braced the thing in the bloody mud on the sigil and took hold of the rod.

“You know what a Pyr Sacra empowerment is, Lumie?” Zosi asked.

“Yeah,” Lumie replied. She was about to tell him that she seemed to have gotten one from an old mage just before. Then she felt her head open up to a massive nova of adamantine light as the rod crushed the dragon’s tiny skull. There was only light and space of a quality that was deeper than the taste the old turbaned man had given her to get her up the hill. It was not like those EMA trips that Zosi was so generous with. No. There was something very spacious and clear about this experience. She felt very safe and soothed in the effulgence, and she knew that it would be lasting. 

An Excerpt from Chapter 16 Killing Dragons from The Savior at the End of Time by Dionesia Rapposelli(click on book title in the header of this page to visit it at the Kindle store on amazon.com)

A hostile magical practice—the Conus magus charm--excerpt from fantasy novel La Maga

Leonard could now clearly hear his father griping to someone that the “folk-woman” (“Reverend Lady” Professor La Maga, that is) was in for it and that Leonard should be told to join his father in Dr. Bruno’s office on the other side of the pavilion. Dr. Giordano (Danny) Bruno was the dean of the graduate school and chief administrator of the secondary school.

Then, as if beaming with pride, Professor La Maga announced: “Mister Leonard de Lux, Junior. Can you explain to the class the origin of the term the ‘Conus magus maneuver’?”

As if awestruck, Leonard uttered, “Yes.”  He had spent the summer studying its legend and swimming in fantasies about how he had discovered its lost key.

 “Go ahead, then, Leonard. Please tell us,” the professor coached.

“In common parlance, the term ‘Conus magus maneuver’ means that a sorcerer or mage has pacified a foe, but the meaning, mostly among  sorcerers, is that the sorcerer has paralyzed his opponent—that the opponent is too mystified to act,” Leonard began.

“It’s an insult,” the professor announced to the class, “mostly uttered by ‘sore winners.’

Continue,” Professor La Maga requested.

“It’s a figure of speech,” Leonard said, “about a hostile magical practice—the Conus magus charm—which involves striking and then absorbing energy from an opponent.”

“And when is this hostile practice typically used?” questioned Professor La Maga.

“All the time, but no one ever admits it,” Leonard responded.

 “Indeed, it’s rampant even among Commons in the Outer Plane,” the professor confirmed. “Go on, Mr. Junior de Lux. We’re waiting to hear about the legend.”

“The term ‘Conus magus charm’ refers to the legendary charm of the same name, which is much more intense than the charm used today,” Leonard said. “According to legend, the original charm was discovered by a sorcerer named Mare Maré who lived around 250 BCE. He was a Melanesian sorcerer who was very familiar with venomous cone snails of the South Pacific, particularly the snail that millennia later would be christened ‘Conus magus’ by Outer Plane marine biologists,” Leonard explained.

 “He was a sea-charmer,” Professor La Maga interjected, adding that sea-charming was how Mare Maré “managed to cross great expanses of ocean long before the invention of luxury cruise liners. The name Mare Maré means ‘Nightmare of the Dark Sea.’”

The professor magically materialized the tapered shell of a cone snail. Grasping it between her thumb and forefinger, she held it out so all could see how harmless it looked: white with brown and tawny bands and dapples. Red, needle-like claws jutted out of the shell’s opening.

 “But this is only the tip of the proverbial iceberg, isn’t it, Mister de Lux, Junior,” she said and lobbed the deadly creature into her audience. Students ducked and screeched, but the snail vanished in midair. 

Excerpt from Chapter 1 The Conus Magus Maneuver from La Maga A Story about Sorcerers and Magi. Available at amazon.com

Enlightenment and the Nature of the Self

Although I’ve spent the past several years delving into folk magic, Neopaganism, and the Western Mystery Tradition, my primary spiritual orientation is Advaita Vedanta. Advaita Vedanta is a form of Hinduism that I was introduced to nearly 40 years ago. It is a system that dates back to about the 7^th century and is primarily founded in the Upanishads. The Upanishads are the philosophical portion of a set texts called the Vedas, the earliest written record of Hindu thought and praxis.

When I first began writing La Maga A Story aboutSorcerers and Magi in 2004, I was absorbed in Vedanta and related Eastern philosophies. And so concepts distilled from my then spiritual practice are represented in the work and intermingle with fanciful as well as some authentic motifs about magic.

The spiritual journey in Advaita Vedanta is, in part, about intimately realizing the connection between one’s own true nature and the Divine and also realizing that “the world is in the mind, like space in a jar”—as stated in a text called the Yoga-Vasishtha—which I worked into the very last chapter of La Maga. Advaita Vedantist philosophy is concerned with the idea of projection—the problem of not experiencing reality as it is but as dreamlike mental projections—colored by bias, fears, ignorance and automated habits and conditioning. For this reason, my characters sometimes contemplate the nature of reality and illusion. They also ask the question: What is it to wake up from the idea of yourself? To paraphrase thoughts I attributed to the antihero of the series, the sorcerer Leo de Lux:

Becoming truly real, conscious, and capable of free will begins by realizing the whimsical and fabricated nature of one’s own being—the idea of self—and then detaching from the automaton (the robot) of its personality, habits, and conditioning. Then the person who is the life beneath the mask of selfhood opens his eyes and watches himself reveling through the motions of daily life like a dreamer reveling in lucidity and exercising free will in it.

In the last published book in the series, The Savior at the End of Time (available in Kindle format), I have the main character of that story--a whacky Christlike figure who is a chaos-magic-practicing sorcerer named Aurelio Zosimo--deliver a sermon that basically crystalizes what I’ve come away with from my exposure to Eastern spirituality and spirituality in general, including magical spirituality:

Excerpt from Chapter 20 of The Savior at the End of Time 

About 42 days after his confrontation with Lord Consul Tau-Bridge, Zosi began to be spotted in flamboyantly full ceremonial regalia within the Mercury Gardens. He would wear a tunic of thick raw silk and tightly fitted, black leggings that were made of tanned leather and full of straps and whips of lacings. Over this, he would wear high boots that matched a mottled, purple-black tanned leather cope embossed with images of ourobori, moondragons, and griffins. His hair was meticulously plaited and decorated with pins and ribbons. His head was topped with a black double-cone hat that was rakishly crimped and folded over so that the tips of the horn-like cones, embellished with opalescent jingle bells, menacingly flounced and jangled in front of his face. He wielded a rather large and tall staff, the core of which was made of slender poles of cedar and fennel stalks. It was wrapped in embossed leather that matched his ensemble. Like a sinister maypole, the staff’s leather sheath was itself wrapped in a filigreed design of cords and leather straps on which gadgets and flotsam were affixed and that dangled, flail- and cat-o-nine-tails-like, from the staff’s finial, which was a gold spearhead in the shape of a fish with an acorn protruding from its mouth.

Like that, he would stroll about the Gardens and then stop here or there to deliver a sermon that attracted larger and larger crowds as word of the spectacle grew. He would begin the rant in a gentle voice with the words, “See the illumination at the center of being,” and materialize some small sparkly object that would fascinate and mesmerize onlookers.

“The body and all phenomena arise causally and provisionally within absolute being,” he would continue, yet still in a very meek and quiet voice. It would be trembling and barely audible despite his ferocious appearance. “There is no time and no dimension to space, both being mere adaptive projections of mind. The personality is an interdependently arising construction of circumstances and experiences, driven by reactivity bred by conditioning devoid of awareness or true will. What is it to wake up from the idea of yourself? Heaven, hell, God, the Adversary, pleasure, pain, and all the pairs of opposites are projections of your own consciousness. You project ideas out of yourself. Treating them as independent entities, you go into them, fear them, and allow them to have power over you although they are your own creations. No one is there to deliver you; you must deliver yourself. Glimpse self-effacement and the root of your existence. Reality is silent, blissful, self-composed Being. This is the Redemptive Principle, the Christos, the Ground, and the Life beneath the mechanism.”

Sofia La Maga The Heroine of the Sorcerer and Magi Series

Leonard’s father repeated that Sofia La Maga was a fake. He said that the heroic tales about her were hoaxes. He stressed that she was the bastard spawn of a wayward woman who had died under suspicious circumstances. He reminded Leonard and his friends that this one Sofia La Maga also had been kicked out of the H. Trismegistus Mystical Arts Academy School of Graduate Studies in her junior year of college. She was a trouble-maker who almost took the school down because of her political extremism. A terrorist, Leonard’s father insisted. Furthermore, rather than applying herself to unusual scholarship in the Terra Mysticus as was claimed about her, she had been running some sort of silly “New Age” cult among the Commons in the Outer Plane for the past 15 years . . .  

Available through amazon.com. See tab at the header of this page. 

On Sirens: An Excerpt from The Fallen Fairy

Sirens were creatures that were half-bird, half-woman, in origin, perhaps like the Egyptian ba. To the ancient Egyptians, the ba was the surviving part of a person that flew to the Underworld when a person died, but sirens were renegade creatures. According to classical myth, they lived on treacherously rocky isles off the coast of Sicily. They wanted nothing more than to entice passing sailors. Being lured, these sailors, thinking they’d get good head, instead found themselves in listless, dumbfounded stupors from which they languished and died.

It was portended that if a ship passed in which the occupants were resistant to the sirens’ song, the sirens, in frenzied dismay, would kill themselves. Thus, it is told in the Odyssey that these creatures leaped off cliffs when the epic’s hero, Odysseus, and his crew sailed by.

The sirens descended to the Underworld where they continued to sing, this time in mourning for the dead. Their imagery became mixed up with that of mermaids who themselves, in lore, were the mystical remnants of disposed-of women, who taking vengeance on the violence done to them, lured men to their deaths with the promise of sex through the sweetness of their song.

It all meant something metaphorical about men, women, ecstasy, sense control, and, of course, sex and death. One had to ponder it and trace the theme and imagery across cultures and time. 

--Excerpt from Chapter 2 .[The High Priestess] The Legacy of Lunaris Dracon from The Fallen Fairy by Soror ZSD23

About the Sorcerers and Magi Series --Listen to the Podcast

I started writing the Sorcerers and Magi series in 2003, which was the time that the Harry Potter series was gaining a lot of momentum.  I knew very many 30- to 60- year-olds who were very enthusiastic about the series.  Honestly, I never read the books, but I really enjoyed watching the movies. They—especially the earlier ones in the series—coddled me in the sweetest nostalgia of childhood and holiday movie extravaganzas—of treats from grandma and Christmas tinsel and that sort of thing.

One day in the late summer of 2003, I found myself watching a DVD of the second movie in the series, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, every night for a week. I was particularly fascinated with the villainous Lucius Malfoy character, played by Jason Isaacs. I kept hoping that, as the series winded down to its denouement, that character would emerge as an antihero. That was not the case, but it inspired the development of my own antihero Leo de Lux. He starts out as a caustic and villainous but complex character and becomes an ambiguous hero and maintains that role throughout the series.

 So, after watching the second movie over and over again one week and wanting more stories but not managing to read the books, I started to make up episodes in my head so I could be entertained in between movies. I realized that I had built up a completely unique story. I dithered about whether I should write it down, because I was reluctant to invest the time in a writing project only to then beat my head against a brick wall trying to get someone of influence—an agent or publisher—to give me the time of day.  I couldn’t help myself, though, and got it into my head that I should simply pursue the  project for my own entertainment and insight.

Listen to me discuss the series and the writing life in podcast #36 The Savior at the End of Time at EatSleepWrite.

The story I was entertaining was not a children’s story. It was a magical fantasy fiction story for adults. My aim, however, was to maintain a tone similar to that found within classic children’s fantasy fiction. My target audience was adults who like classic children’s literature—the work of C. S. Lewis, for example.  I did not initially intend to write a series, but as I completed the first draft of the first book La Maga A Story about Sorcerers and Magi, another story popped into my head, which I originally gave the provocative title.The Sex Lives of Sorcerers but renamed The Fallen Fairy. I ended up linking them in the progression of an underlying apocalyptic theme introduced in the first book that culminates in the third book, titled The Savior at the End of Time. I intend to write at least 2 more books in the series. One will be a prequel and one will begin where book 3 ends.

My story takes place in a parallel universe called the inner plane. It has a look and feel like our own. The structure of government is loosely based on the classical Roman paradigm. The same sort of powermongering and dog-eat-dog kind of stuff that goes on in our world also happens in this Inner Plane, with the idea that Inner Plane strongly influences how things roll in the Outer plane (our world, that is).  People from our world can enter the inner plane through dreams, trance or altered states of consciousness and through forbidden dabblings in the occult and sometimes they transition from the Outer to Inner Plane in my stories.

The term “Inner Plane” comes from a writer within the Western Mystery Tradition named Gareth Knight, who is an apologist for a type of Hermetic magic originating in the medieval era, called Magical Christianity, which is a type of gnostic—or self-revelatory (as opposed to dogmatic)—Christianity . The Inner Plane is basically the world within the mind. It is a place of archetypal forms, dreams, and ideas in general. This place is more commonly called the astral plane, referring the realm of thought and feeling.  In a sense, it is in incubation place where thought becomes paradigm and Reality.  Reference to the Inner Plane is also a tip of the hat to a form of philosophical Hinduism called Advaita Vedanta, which I have followed for very many years. A strong influence from this philosophy and Buddhism permeates the series.

I’m using fiction as a creative and playful way to express my long-time interests in spirituality, magic, and mysticism. The work is a product of my research, practice, and hands on experience.  My writing is a way to feed information back to myself—reaffirm and integrate it and also to entertain myself.

The main character of the first book, Sofia LaMaga, is something of an alter ego—or maybe someone who I would like to be. At the beginning of La Maga A Story about Sorcerers and Magi, we learn that Sofia has been living in political exile in a parallel plane coinciding with Tibet. Having received amnesty, she returns to her hometown where she becomes a high school teacher and wreaks havoc by forming a friendship with the juvenile delinquent teenaged son of the place’s governor, Leo de Lux. Because Sofia has been living in the environs of India and Tibet, she comes back steeped in the spirituality of those cultures.

When I was writing LaMaga, although I had all long-time background in eastern spirituality, I was also interested in folk magic and had been reminiscing about one of my great grandmothers who was said to be a stregona—that’s Italian for “sorceress.” Another word for that is “maga.” I began to explore Italian folk magic, and so that is why there is a lot referencing to Italian folk culture and evil eye lore in La Maga. My interest in folk magic led to interest in aspects of Western Occultism, including the work of Dion Fortune and Aleister Crowley—big names in relation to the so-called Occult revival that took place at the turn of the 20^th century.

By the time I got to writing the second book, The Fallen Fairy, I had become interested in philosophical alchemy and medieval magic, and so we have underlying themes about alchemy and spiritual transformation as well as reincarnation, fairy lore, and sex magic in that book. When I got around to writing the third book, The Savior at the End of Time, I had become an enthusiast of a current in postmodern occultism called Chaos Magick and a related counterculture scene called Discordianism.

No, Really, listen to me discuss the series and the writing life in podcast #36 The Savior at the End of Time at EatSleepWrite.

That story, which recently became available as a Kindle ebook and will be available for download through smashwords.com—and also as a print edition—in the late fall,  is about a character named Aurelio Zosimo who  is being set up to be the poster boy of a utopian political movement, introduced in book 1 of the series. What inspired me to launch that story was the rock opera Jesus Christ Superstar, which is my all-time favorite theater piece. It was around Easter time in 2006 and I was coming out of the winter blues. I was on a roll watching film and live theater versions of Jesus Christ  Superstar and got the idea to adapt the template of the gospel story to the third novel of the Sorcerers and Magi series. The premise is similar to that of The Who’s rock opera, Tommy or Jerzy Kasinsky’s novel Being There, in which a person who is a little “off” is haplessly fashioned into a leader or cult hero.

 We are told that Aurelio Zosimo has a plaque on his office door that says “Nothing is true, everything is permitted.” This is a famous slogan among  Chaos magicians that was picked up from the cult classic novel The Illuminatus! Triology, which is a wild-ride parody about conspiracy theories, secret societies, and the immanentization of the eschaton—that is, the hastening the end of the world—the apocalypse. There is an apocalyptic thread running through my series that culminates in this third book, and we find characters discussing the immanentization of the eschaton and Zosimo’s potential role in it in the third book.  

The Savior at the End of Time 3rd in the Sorcerers and Magi Series now Available in Kindle format

Chaos Magic meets Jesus Christ Superstar. The Savior at the End of Time, the third book in the Sorcerers and Magi series, will be available in Kindle format on July 4, 2013.

The tale is a veiled take on the Christ-story in which the unassuming and disheveled but oddly charismatic iconoclast, Professor Aurelio Zosimo, introduced in book one, is haplessly rendered into a new messiah for the Lions of Light agenda and the “Immanentization of the Eschaton.” The novel references the post-modern magical counterculture current of Chaos Magic. In this installment of the series, Leo de Lux and Sofia La Maga are at odds about their designs regarding Aurelio Zosimo. Both find themselves in over their heads as plot line of the series progresses toward an apocalyptic showdown and the revelation of portentous secrets.

The Sorcerers and Magi series offers thought-provoking ideas about finding oneself and one’s true purpose in the context of mystical magical fantasy and will be interest to adult fiction readers drawn to magia, mysticism, and spiritual philosophy. Book 1 in the series, La Maga A Story about Sorcerers andMagi, introduces us to the Inner Plane and its fragmented society of sorcerers, magi, and folk practitioners. There, the binding quality of love, transforms a father and son, shifts a paradigm, and gives a jump start to a utopian movement The Lions of Light. Magical fantasy is deftly woven with Eastern mysticism. In Book 2, The Sex Lives of Sorcerers, a hapless fairy incarnates as a woman in the world of “Commons” in the Outer Plane. Sorcerers from the Inner Plane swoop in to vie for her affections in the interests of love and occult power and opportunism. . As savior, a redeemer, and a siren, the story’s heroine circumspectly aids the Lions of Light and sets the stage for radical and illuminating transformations of all who come into contact with her. References to alchemy, medieval occultism, steganography, and sex magic permeate the text.

La Maga Gets a Citation from Midwest Book Review

Sometimes it may seem like we need magic to find happiness. "La Maga: A Story about Sorcerers and Magi" is a sensual fantasy novel following lady mage Sofia la Maga as she returns home to help a troubled teen, who happens to be the son of a renowned sorcerer. A tale marked by sorcerers' exotic charisma as well as social unrest against injustice, and the repercussions of an unruly system of magic, "La Maga" is tempestuous soiree into mystic mysteries. A sequel, "The Sex Lives of Sorcerers", is forthcoming.

--Midwest Book Review, March 2013




If you would like a complementary ebook--especially if you would like to review the book--drop me a line at sorcerersandmagiebook

Follow me on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SororZsd23

Some Reviews for La Maga

Sorcerers, Magi and Mystics
Starry Vere

Format:Kindle Edition

Ah, the inner planes. I love to visit there myself, but never have I imagined a world filled with characters like these. Magicians and sorcerers with powers and personalities that clash and express all the best and worst of our familiar human condition. I absolutely loved this book. I must naysay the person who said it's not like Harry Potter. It is, to me, only better! La Maga captures the otherworldliness of Harry Potter but tackles larger political, spiritual, and emotional issues. Soror's writing style drew me in from Sofia's awkward walk down the school hallway through her complicated relationship with Leo De Lux and a life-or-death magical battle and all the way to hope for what today might be called Occupy the Inner and Outer Planes! And I wanted more. I've had the luck to preview the two other books in this series, of which the second is actually my favorite (The Sex Lives of Sorcerers). La Maga is an engaging read for anyone who refuses to think that what we see is all that exists, a trip into a parallel universe that gives unique, playful form to the concepts of Shaktipat, Buddhism, folk magic, mysticism, the occult and adolescent rebellion all mixed together into a brilliant, poignant and ultimately timely story

Skillfully rendered sensual work.

By L. Skutch

Format:Kindle Edition|

La Maga is an initiation of sorts for me, I don't usually read magical fantasy fiction and I've never seen a Harry Potter movie! I am however, drawn to anything which makes me shift my perception, makes me think and gives me "aha" and "mmm" moments. This book did this on many occasions. I am also incredibly impressed with the depth of knowledge that the author appears to have for various mystical and spiritual arts from the mainstream to the more obscure. It's a smooth read, peppered with layers of deep spiritual teachings and references should the reader's interest be piqued. The mystical and spiritual details read like poetry, not preaching. It's a skillfully rendered sensual work about magical beings that inhabit their world, and more surprisingly, our own.

Follow me on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/SororZsd23

The Glory of the Goddess

Durga Puja, an important Hindu festival, is coming up in October. It commemorates the victory of good over evil, order over chaos, and reveres the Great Goddess as the Redemptive Principle and Savior of the Universe. During this time, a section of the Markandeya Purana  known as the Devi Mahatmyam, or Chandi, which relates heroic exploits of the Goddess, is ceremoniously chanted in the context of elaborate ritual. Images of the goddess are constructed for the event, worshipped as representations of the Goddess, displayed in pageants, and then sunk in the Ganges or other waterways in locales outside the “Motherland,” such as the USA.  See the Wikipedia entry on Durga Puja here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Durga_Puja

I had been dedicated to the goddess Durga for very many years. I was (and continue to be despite my perhaps incongruent immersion in Western occultism and contemporary Paganism) a long-time adherent of reformed Advaita Vedanta.  I was obsessed with the aforementioned text Devi Mahatmyam for at least a decade. The title translates as “Glory of the Goddess.” It has been dated to the 3rd century and is a trilogy of mythologies in which the Goddess, personifying the combined power of the gods, defeats various demons in battles and, thus, restores the order of the Universe.

The full text, which takes more than an hour or three to recite, is chanted in the context of devotional ritual (puja) and is prefaced and followed by several auxiliary prayers, chants, mantra, and ritual gestures. It is generally done as a thaumatergic exercise in which the Goddess is thought of as a beneficent entity who is being addressed for the sake of gaining favors and for protection from both supernatural evil and the nasty world-at-large. In working with the text, I ultimately took a more Gnostic and literal approach. After all, Advaita Vedanta is jnana yoga, the discipline of spiritual integration through contemplativism and gnosis. In addition, the translations of the names of the demons that the Goddess is battling in the Devi Mahatmyam include The Great Deceiver (Mahahanu), The Aimless One (Parivarita), The Hypocrite  (Bidala), Anger (Kruddha), The Savage (Ugrasya),  He Who Gives  Way to Temptation (Durdhara), The Vicious (Chanda), The Malicious (Munda), Conceit (Shumbha), and Self-deprecation (Nishumbha). And the most famous demon celebrated in the scripture is Mahishasura—the “Buffalo demon” of egoism, the depiction of the slaying of which is an important piece of Hindu iconography.

So, the demons that The Goddess is protecting you from are not oogah-boogah things “out there”; they are negative qualities within yourself that the Goddess battles with a barrage of weapons: the sword of discrimination, club of articulation, bow of determination, arrow of penetration, pike of attention, rod of restraint, axe of right action, net of unity, trident of harmony, and discus of revolving time. Then she cuts off the head of your ferocious ego. And, frankly, this is why, philosophically speaking, “bad things happen to good people,” because they are not “bad things”; they are transformational and transitional things. Or else, they are just stuff happening in the grand drama of life.

The Dragon Dieth Not Unless It Be Killed by Brother and Sister at Once

Excerpt from Chapter 6 [The Lovers] The Sun and the Moon in  by The Fallen Fairy 

The “Law of Karma” posited three lines of force: sanchita karma, prarabdha karma, and agami karma. Sanchita karma was the momentum that had originated in some mysterious and distant past. It had built up over eons like a snowflake becomes an avalanche as it accumulates compacted snow, ice, rocks, twigs, shrubs, small animals, then big ones, all kinds of crap in the path of its ferocious trajectory. Wherever the exponentially building mass was as it fell was the present. That was prarabdha karma—fate, destiny—where the past caught up with a person, dictated the present, and set the direction for the future.

Then there was agami karma, which was where the avalanche might be headed and how its structure might change because of it. It was the potential future, predicated on both where it had been (sanchita karma) and where it was (prarabdha karma). Even though the residual effects of the past were relentlessly barreling from the present to the future, the present still could modify the future’s course.

Bellaluna Drago was a fallen fairy because having had the ill-fortune of becoming some sinister Renaissance necromancer’s pet (and Michael knew who that fiendish bastard now was), she had haplessly done something despicable that led to the necromancer’s and her own ruin. She was now clawing through lives and worlds in atonement. Her redemption had come. Michael felt privileged to play a role in it.

“There is a saying in the alchemical texts that goes like this,” Michael murmured. “The dragon only dies when he is killed by his brother and sister at once; not by one alone, but by both at once. That is, by the sun and moon.’ You and me,” he said.

“We’re compelled to create stories for the whys and wherefores of things in an attempt to trump a wild card, which is existence itself. And existence happens despite us and also is a product of our own making. It’s a bit of a paradox,” Michael continued. “You dream of being attacked by a man who would pull you down to Hell with him. This is all the fluff of the mind—a subterfuge for some other vexation that is limiting you. But even that is a mere projection of mental noise. We torture ourselves with it for no good reason.”

Michael told Bella this to console her, even though it was and wasn’t what was going on. Nevertheless, he continued.

“In creation mythology, we talk about the world forming from chaos and void by the will of a conscious entity—God. But the chaos—the so-called prima materia—is not matter, nature, or the world; it is the human psyche full of convoluted impressions, habituations, and the conditioning of nature and nurture. This is the seven-headed dragon that must be slain by the hero who is none other than the divine spirit within asserting itself. It rescues the damsel, which is the soul.”

The path of inner alchemy and of mysticism in all the great traditions founded in gnosis, Michael contended, was to transform the human creature, who was nothing more than a helpless gear of the world machine, into a real person with real will, intention, and creative abilities.

“Some persons call this enlightenment; some call it ‘being like unto God’; some call it the Great Work, which is magic,” he said.

Follow me on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/SororZsd23

Ouroboros : Excerpt from The Savior at the End of Time

“It is formed out of a serpent called the ouroboros, which is the karmic wheel. You’re always in the loop of the circle but you have to think about the space inside of it and the space around it. One is contained, the other is infinite. Then you have to pull the tail out of the mouth of the serpent or else hack it in two so that the enclosed space and the all-around space are the same. There is no finitude there, no boundaries and so there are no thoughts, judgments, or expectations. Then things are just as they are.”
Chapter VI from the.The Savior at the End of Time by me, Soror ZSD23  Available as a ebook through amazon.com

Little to a brief excerpt/mashup with gong music (long version from more abbreviated version featured in the AIN 23 Seconds of Time Project).





Little to the podcast about this book and others in the series at http://EatSleepWrite.net   Podcast #36.

Leonard de Lux --the Young Hero of Novel 1 of the Sorcerers and Magi series

Leonard had been fantasizing about being Sofia La Maga’s apprentice. It was an absolute impossibility, of course. He felt increasingly bitter about it, but who could he blame? He was a fuck-up after all—but so was the professor, according to his father.

Impossible fantasies about becoming her apprentice gave way to dreams about being her sexual friend. How weird to have a crush on that woman, but, man, was he filled with a strange fire when he jacked off to the thought her. Part of the thrill was desiring someone who his father hated.

Now Leonard would have to slither home and wait for his father to notice that he had gotten in trouble at school again. The wrath that de Lux junior would incur from de Lux senior would be silent and seething. Leonard was trying to figure out how the rigmarole would go without admitting that his “crime” was related to a dispute about participating in an illicit Phaeton maneuver match. That would be a monster. That would be a lot more than what his father could endure, even if the moral of the story was that Leonard had come to his senses about it.

Leonard didn’t go home after the codes and keys class. He did not leave the school premises. Rather, he skulked around the second floor corridor, keeping clear of hall guards and teachers—especially Professor Lossius whose classroom was at the far end of the floor.

He was waiting for Professor La Maga to wander by in her usual way, limping along with a burden in her arms. He was braced for a bold act, considering that he would not be able to see the professor for another two weeks. Or perhaps he would never see her again, depending on what his father did to him when he found out what had happened and why. So it was important for Leonard to find the professor and make an impression on her before departing to be crushed by fate.

At about a quarter past three, moments before the close of school, Leonard caught her. She was carrying a huge stack of overstuffed hanging file folders and limping along as if hoping that the awkward toting of heavy, slippery things would at last lead to calamity. Leonard emerged from a hiding spot in an alcove and sidled beside her.

“Professor La Maga!” he uttered robustly. She turned slightly. The folders flipped out of her grip and splattered yards across the floor. Both he and she placidly watched this occur. Leonard even slightly nodded when his gaze met the professor’s. 

“You do this on purpose, don’t you, Professor?” Leonard said.

The professor looked away at the mess and seemed to distantly smile. What folks around her—even other professors—were too dumb to see, was that she was engaged in a magical act. It was a set up—this behavior in the halls.  It was a deliberate link in a chain of events related to the activation of a magical spell. That’s what Leonard thought. He had helped her accomplish a magical act. That must’ve been worth something to her.

Available from amazon.com.  See tab at the header of this page.

Thought-Forms, Tulpas, Servitors, and the Like

Thought-forms are important tools in sorcery. What are they? They are purpose-directed thoughts that are so strong and well-defined that they seem to manifest as concrete objects or otherwise take on a life of their own. In post-modern magic, they are often referred to as servitors. To this American, “servitor” sounds like a great dystopic term coined by a sci-fi writer, but it is simply a synonym for “servant,” more commonly used in British English (and coopted by the patriarchs of Chaos Magic and used as part of the lingo). A great essay on servitors that has been web-accessible for decades is Sigils, Servitors and Godforms at http://www.chaosmatrix.org/library/chaos/texts/servitors.html

 The idea of making concrete objects appear out of thin air and of conjuring purpose-directed phantoms not only exists in fantasy and sci-fi and magic that, in part, draws inspiration from pop culture memes, but in the reality of sorcerers and shamans the world over.  Yogi “godmen,” such as the late Sai Baba (1926-2011), for example, have been reported to miraculously materialize objects (although episodes are often revealed to be hoaxes). I was once close to a very pious elderly Hindu lady who, although a devotee of Sri Ramakrishna (1833-1886), found herself miraculously covered in rose petals at the conclusion of a group devotional to Sai Baba that she attended at her daughter’s home. She was the only participant at the event who was showered in rose petals but did not come away with a one because, according to her, every scrap was scarfed up by devotees who felt entitled to hoard the miraculously manifesting flotsam.

Probably most noted in discussion about thought-forms are Tibetan yogis, lamas, and shamans for which the phantom or materialization is sometimes referred to as a tulpa. It is an extension of the sorcerer/shamans consciousness. Virtually no discussion about tulpas in Western pop lit on the subject goes without mention of the 19^th-20^th century explorer and esotericist Alexandra David-Neel (1868-1969), who spent several years roaming Nepal and Tibet as a “lady lama.”  In her memoirs, David-Neel occasionally relates anecdotes about sorcerer-lamas who communicate with each other over long distances by dispatching fancifully shaped phantoms to deliver news or else simply surround themselves with servant-like creatures almost reminiscent of the genetic designer in Blade Runner, F. Sebastian, who created comical little beings to keep himself company. David-Neel also frequently reports episodes in which lamas  miraculously make things appear out of thin air (which also was a popular topic of doctrinaire discussion when Soror ZSD23 was involved with a Nygmapa [Dzogchen] Buddhist sangha about 10 years ago).

 David-Neel warns that, sometimes tulpas can turn rogue—completely independent of their creators—and go off to run amok. She relates an anecdote in Magic and Mystery in Tibet, in which she, as an experiment, created a tulpa—a “Friar Tuck-like” fellow who began to be sighted within her traveling party. Over time, though, his appearance began to change, becoming sinister-looking, according to David-Neel, and it took some effort to dissolve the thing.

I haven’t come across any anecdotes of servitors in material form among Chaos or other modern/post-modern magicians—and, in fact, a Tibetan Buddhist practitioner mentioned to me that you don’t hear much about tulpas ala David-Neel’s take on them because it does not capture the true idea of a tulpa and what is really going on.  Nevertheless, some servitors are legendary, such as the time-warping entity Fotamecus (http://www.chaosmatrix.org/library/chaos/texts/fotamec2.html or the "Red Queen" Ellis, the use of both of which went viral until Fotamecus and the linking sigil Ellis, like Pinocchio, seemed to become conscious and independently operating forces. A current project in the occult community is the egregore-like manifestation of Atem, “a self-created entity that human minds participate in” for the purpose of being empowered to create more mimetic entities—new godforms to interact with in a new paradigm. (see Philip H. Farber, Meta-Magick the Book of Atem. San Francisco: Weiser Books. 2008).

I have attempted servitor creation with mixed results. The very first one she ever created took the form of a lion and was meant to be a type of protection. It came through for her at party in which a young woman was treating her in an amazingly rude fashion presumably because she wanted the attention of my companion. The girl ultimately put me in danger of physical injury and so, the otherwise long-suffering, patient, and polite me unleashed her lion servitor, which took a bite out of the nasty girl’s ass.I then watched the girl’s expression drop. Her face turned away from where she stood before my companion. The girl and her entourage abruptly walked to the other side of the room, after which the girl kept great distance from me whenever we happened to be in the same environs.

Excerpt from Chapter X A Very Reluctant God -- La Maga A Story about Sorcerers and Magi

Leo spent a great deal of time in his uppermost studio—the turret of his tower. He needed the quiet. He needed the sublime and took solace in gazing into the shallow, round, crystal-lined tank that he had installed up there.

Sometimes the water within it was clear and still. Sometimes it was rippled by the wind and marred by leaves, drowned insects, pollen, and dander. Sometimes raindrops plunked into the tank to make designs before merging with its contents.

Whatever the condition, the tank was a source of fascination and mental calm for Leo. It helped him know his mind, the contents of his mind, and the difference between the two. Magical prowess depended on acuity of mind. It depended on thriftiness of thought, unambiguousness of motive, and unwavering momentum.

It was this presence of mind that made Leo a master of materializations. Unless he specifically willed it, his thought-forms were not affected by instability or decay. They were not flimsy or slight. There were creations like those of an artist—or like those of a god.

But the person who could create things of substance on a whim and with ease was tasked with maintaining sobriety, self-restraint, and self-censorship. For this reason, Leo was a subdued person, although his subtlety went unnoticed and unappreciated, as already mentioned.

As he matured, however, he increasingly wasted his gift on small entertainments and the manufacture of collectibles coveted by Outer Plane folks. Whether because he enjoyed the extra income or taking advantage of Commons and their vulgarities, his manufacture of objects precious to them had become a robust hobby over the years.

Was that newly discovered van Gogh by van Gogh or Leo de Lux? A slew of Tiffany lamps, Venetian glass and Goebel Hummels, Mesopotamian seals and Mayan gold, Black Madonnas from Romanian grottoes, excavated Buddha icons from jungle ruins—even dinosaur bones.

When Commons marveled at such objects and muttered that they were “out of this world,” they might have been right. Unlike replicas and forgeries crafted by Commons, the true origins of things materialized by Inner Plane peoples and planted in the Outer Plane were somewhat untraceable. Hence, stories (woven with fascination charms) given about their history were unopposed.

True masters of this art, like de Lux, engaged in high-end antiquing and lucrative museum acquisitions. Amateurs and mischievous dabbling young adepts deposited supernatural creatures and phenomena in the midst of Commons: sea monsters in lakes, neo-cavemen in snows, and little green men that went bump in the night, not to mention mermaids and unicorns, and various other apparitions. Unlike entrepreneurial schemes, mischievous materializationalism in the Outer Plane was outlawed but hard to enforce.

It, like Phaeton maneuver offenses, fell into de Lux’s jurisdiction. This meant that Leo had to engage in public lectures and news briefings in which he spoke on the danger of introducing inexplicable phenomena into the world of Commons. It confused and perverted their cultural and spiritual beliefs, he contended.

“Such sadistic practices result in long lapses of instability, conflict, hardship, and intellectual decline among these lower peoples. We are tasked as a more evolved race to treat these peoples with tenderness rather than disdain, for their plane is valuable to us and the eventual home of Outer Plane denizens is with us,” Leo would say. Meanwhile, placard-carrying college students and Expansionist Party sympathizers would protest outside wherever he was presenting. They continually accused him of hypocrisy and double-dealing and also demanded an end to the entrepreneurial oppression of Commons.

This was Leo’s lot as a resident and magistrate of the North Atlantic Sovereignty, Terra Novit, Inner Plane Regions. It was wearing on him.

In addition to his job, another heavy burden was parceled with his gift. It was another element that demanded flawless control. Being an entity who could create anything, Leo had the power to destroy anything as well—not merely his or another’s thought-form, but all forms, any entity, all of which were essentially some expression of thought.

La Maga, the first book in the Sorcerers and Magi series

The third book in the series:  Chaos Magic
meets Jesus Christ Superstar

                                      

Follow me on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/SororZsd23

And just for fun: A clip of the Fantasia Sorcerers Apprentice.