Monday, January 25, 2010

Romania's Purple Flame

Following Romania's recent contentious election in which the Social Democrats won a second term in office, the party has been accused of using magical practices in order to manipulate the election - specifically, an occult force called the "purple flame."

The purple flame is said to be:

one of the blessings that God granted to the humanity. It is the ideal tool to help us in the physical, material, emotional and spiritual problems. Also called flame of the Pardon and of the Mercy, the PURPLE FLAME represents the vibration of the Holy Spirit. When invoked, its cosmic action is complete, transforming our karma healing our body, spirit and soul, elevating our conscience.

It seems odd that such a general spiritual force would naturally favor one political party over another, but by applying a series of strategic magical actions it seems that the Social Democrats may have in fact formed some sort of link with this force that allows them to draw upon its power.

In December 2009, in the immediate aftermath of the presidential elections, Viorel Hrebenciuc, the main political strategist of the losing team, made a series of statements which many of us treated with skepticism at the time but it is not creating a true hysteria in Romania. He claimed that he did not agree with the final presidential debate to be broadcast on a Thursday because that is when the purple flame hits its strongest moment. And that Traian Basescu, the man who won a second term in office, was clearly favored by the purple flame.

While I'm not familiar with Romanian magical traditions, purple is the color that you would want to use to elevate yourself to a political office using the Western ceremonial system, being the King Scale color for the path of Jupiter attributed to "political and other ascendency." Thursday is also the day with the strongest affinity to Jupiter, and the purple flame's affinity with the quality of mercy suggests the Qabalistic sphere of Chesed, again ruled by Jupiter.

To make things even more complicated, around the time of the presidential elections, most of Basescu’s staff was in fact seen wearing purple ties, shirts, coats or sweaters and the same happened with some of the notable social democrats leaders. Basescu later dismissed the accusations and stated that purple is the color of the year which technically raised more questions than solved the issue.

This methodology is actually quite clever - align yourself with an occult force that favors you in politics and then go out of your way to keep yourself and your political staff associated with that force through simple magical links like color matching as you go about the mundane activities of running your campaign. One wonders if one of these folks has a copy of Jason Miller's Strategic Sorcery. This sounds a lot like the sort of methodology that Jason would endorse.

One month after the presidential elections were over, the wife of Mircea Geoana accused the purple flame of making his husband lose the presidential elections. On January the 16th she said that: “I think that [during the last presidential debate] he [Mircea Geoana] was energetically attacked a great deal. The people who were causing those attacks were in the room that day. […] It wasn’t like that all the time. It just happened in the critical moments which made the attacks decisive. […]. I want to say that this is something I also felt at a personal level. I felt tired, I couldn’t do things, I couldn’t focus, I wasn’t myself.”

So finally, as one more piece of the overall strategy, you target specific magical attacks at your opponents during key moments of the race, likely determined by some form of divination. This passes the practical magick test with flying colors - the practitioners of the strategy won the election and thus achieved their goal. The main improvement to the strategy that I can imagine would be some way to keep it quieter, as it seems that media storm surrounding it has been building since the election and has yet to let up. It remains to be seem if this media attention will cause problems for the government in power.

As that was not enough, key party leaders from all over the Romanian political spectrum endorsed the possibility that various rituals and negative esoteric forces can affect politicians’ lives. In the meantime, a book on the purple flame was published in Romania, various “esoteric experts” are offering seminars on the purple flame, and some of the witchdoctors openly practicing the “white magic” are adapting to what appears to be a growing demand for “purple flame services.”

So following its successful application in the election, the purple flame now appears to be a legitimate esoteric fad in Romania. Whether or not it will prove particularly useful outside the political arena remains to be seen, but Jupiter is a good planet to invoke when you are trying to cast a spell for good fortune or prosperity.

This purple flame hysteria has to some extent taken astronomical proportions involving the president, the prime-minister, the leader of the main opposition party and various other politicians. The only political figure who openly dismissed the purple flame theory is former president Ion Iliescu who had this to say: “Are we going back to Nostradamus? We’re in the 21st century for the Christ’s sake.” Whereas other people appear to share that view with him, many of his colleagues have started wearing purple ties and shirts.

As with all effective practical magicians, you can go ahead and denounce all you want on the basis of science or logic or whatever - but when something works it's hard to deny that it works.

Wednesday, January 20, 2010

New Promotional Website

While I've been recovering from surgery I've set up a new website using WordPress and Yahoo! Groups to promote Arcana and my writing in general. The idea is that once folks are used to looking over there for information about book signings, readings, and so forth I won't need to be duplicating those announcements on Augoeides and more of the site can remain dedicated to the discussion of magick and related topics.

I've been enjoying working with WordPress and I think it does look a little more professional and full-featured than Blogger does. At some point in the future I might consider moving Augoeides over, but I won't be doing so any time soon. After all, I just got the archives from the old Scoop site copied over the week before last and that's been down for several years. I don't have much interest in doing all that work again with 3+ years of posts, and besides Blogger works great for the kinds of things I want to discuss here and how I want the site to look.

My new promotional site can be found here. Check it out and let me know what you think.

Sunday, January 17, 2010

I'm Back, But a Little Bit Lighter

Some of you are probably wondering where I went over the last week, with no new posts or updates despite having a new book out on the shelves and plenty of reasons to drum up publicity. While I wasn't hit by house fires, earthquakes, or Pat Robertson being his usual dumbass self, I wound up spending this last week in the hospital without any access to the blog or e-mail. I'm finally back home, or at least most of me is.

The part that's now missing is my gallbladder, which had to be removed because of problems with gallstones that I've been dealing with for about nine years. 31 is quite young to develop gallstones, so clearly I must have been born with the economy model or something. When I was first diagnosed and offered the surgery I decided I was going to try a combination of supplements and healing spells - and they worked. The problem seemed to resolve itself and didn't show up again until about two months ago. This time around my alternative remedies failed, so I checked myself into the hospital a week ago to get the operation done.

A few random observations:

(1) I know that some Western ceremonialists look kind of funny at the Asian chackra model in which the Manipura (abdominal/digestion) is attributed to Fire and the Anahata (heart) is attributed to Air. But if you've ever had a serious abdominal problem you know why - nothing knocks out your Qi like an abdominal problem.

(2) When your Qi is knocked out by an abdominal problem it's really hard to keep up your practices. I wound up slacking for two weeks, and sure enough had some internal bleeding from the surgery. When my practices are solid I'm the opposite of Murphy's Law - if something can work, it will.

(3) While getting yourself addicted to anything is a bad idea, I now really understand why folks like Coleridge loved their laudanum so much for composition. Thanks in part to post-surgical morphine I made what still seems like a significant breakthrough on putting together a story that I've been working on for awhile. I'll be interesting in finding out where that one leads.

(4) I do feel like I'm recovering well at this point, but healing spells and the like are always welcome if you feel moved to do them.

As I mentioned I have been out of e-mail contact for the last week and am trying to catch up everything. If you sent me a message and have not received a response don't worry, it was nothing you said. I will do my best to get back to you as soon as possible.

Friday, January 8, 2010

Archives Are Now Up

I have now finished posting my archived articles from the old Scoop version of Augoeides. The Scoop site went online in June 2006 and ran until August of 2007, so any articles with those dates are archived articles that were transferred to the new platform. The blogger version of the site went online in November of 2007, which is why when you look through the old articles there are none for September or October of 2007. During that period I was busy working on trying to get the site back up in some capacity and settled on blogger as the easiest way to do it.

The Scoop system supported a number of different features that this site does not. Among the archives are various magical records that we posted on the private section of the site and also articles by authors other than myself that were posted on the "front page." I do have copies of those even though they have not been added to this site, so if anyone would like them for their own records or to post on their own personal blogs let me know and I should be able to get them to you. I miss the Scoop system for its vast array of features, but I have to admit that a regular blog like the current system takes a lot less time to administer.

If you never were on the original system and feel like taking a look at how my writing has evolved over the years, check out the articles from 2006 and 2007. There's some good stuff there, and while some of it no longer reflects my most current thinking on various topics it still is useful to keep a record of it for future reference.

UPDATE: I'm now realizing that I neglected to add the "archives" tag to the articles I uploaded during the last several days. For now clicking on that tag won't bring up all the archives, though I should be able to get that rectified relatively soon.

Tuesday, January 5, 2010

How Not To Do It

Yesterday Jason Miller put up a post about a reader who found success with love magick through the methods outlined in his latest book, The Sorcerer's Secrets. Jason makes the excellent point that overcoming your own fear of rejection is one of the best places to begin this sort of magical work, and that for this particular reader doing so proved quite effective.

In this case he recognized that his major problem was fear of rejection, and using the "Summoning of the Seducer" ritual, and the meditations on rejection he got over his fear and started approaching women.

Well, it seems that the universe craves balance, in that today I came across this article which clearly demonstrates how NOT to deal with rejection. It also shows how not to use magick in order to be successful in love - as a threat.

The victim called police Christmas Day and said the 42-year-old man had been calling since 5 a.m. the day before, estimating she'd received 110 calls on her cell phone.

"The victim claims the suspect to be harassing her because she refuses to date him," the report states. "The victim stated that the suspect has told her he is going to put witchcraft on her, beat her up and blow up her home."

I cannot begin to explain how appalled I am at the abject stupidity of this guy. Is there any possible twisted alternative universe in which this strategy could ever be a good idea? Let's say this poor woman agrees to date him because she's scared to death - does he honestly expect such a situation to produce anything other than a horrible relationship?

I really want to know what kind of "witchcraft" this guy studies so I'll know to stay away from anyone working the same tradition. It obviously rots the mind, whatever it is.

UPDATE: While we're on the subject of how not to be successful in approaching women, here's another strategy I came across today that's pretty much certain to fail - go out to a Twilight movie and bite somebody!

Erin Westrate says the 30 or 40-year-old man [was] sitting in front of her at the 5:00pm showing of New Moon on Friday. She says he was acting creepy from the movies' opening scene.

"Every so often if I said something or my friend said something he would lean back and make a sexual comment that was very unnecessary and not needed," says Erin.

Once the movie was over she tried to leave the theater but the line to leave was slow.

Erin then says he grabbed her by the back of the hair and pulled her down and bit her on the neck. The bite did not break the girl's skin.

It just goes to show that there are plenty of abusive creeps in the world, and most of them are also unbelievably stupid.