The Hedge Druid

Posts Tagged ‘magic’

Appropriating the phrase that Bruce Lee made famous I am seeking within the small confines of this post to express an idea that is a little reflexive. That is – I want to write about the limitation to the power of the creative media to express the full impact and experience of magickal processes.

I was made aware, when writing recently about the futility of convincing sceptics - that one of the main reasons why I no longer try to speak to sceptics about magick is that I have rarely got enough time to be able to tell the fullness of the experience in a language that comes close to expressing the content, especially the emotional content of the moment.

I am aware that great literature of capable of creating within us a powerful and even life-changing set of emotions. i am aware that given enough time and space in any work a truly great artist can begin to shape the medium to produce something that may rouse and engender within the audience (at least some of them) a similar response to the original experience. Yet, a blog is a poor medium for such stories as ours. Even poetry is a mere snapshot of words who symbolism is of limited depth, despite the resonances of language and its complex structures.

Emotional ripples through our words and deeds

So what is missing from these tales of magickal adventure? The emotional content, the synchronistic ripples in time whose echo sweeps you off your feet when it hits, that turn your world view upside down to its rightful position. What may be missing is the heavenly glory of the light and shade of the meanings within the moment, and the full impact of the realisations. Remember your first birthday gift of real significance? Remember the impact that had upon you at the time? The joy, the potential!

Now bring that forward into adulthood, into a time where all of the magick is systematically removed from life through processes of levelling, uniformity, reason and ridicule…. and what remains is scant reward for life on a daily basis. Imagine now, that the magickal is re-inserted into your life’s adventure. Imagine that the joy and potential are rediscovered, but now they are no longer simply superficial joy and potential, now they chime within you  - the symbols, the links with other cultures around the world, the harmony, the knowing at a deep level of being which overtaken reason’s faltering jigsaw and shows the full picture  in one shot.

When I fail to recount the emotional content in the blog, when I fail to deliver the magickal feeling that comes with all of my work on a weekly basis… know that this post is one of my poor attempts at a reminder about the power of this druidical work. Let the magick of the year begin again!

In the previous post I told of how, with a friend, we were in the process of investigating a poltergeist haunting. A fascinating experience in and of itself but as often is with the world of the mysterious our paths take unexpected turns. Expect the unexpected!

So I was in the throes of some last-minute dowsing, using the excuse of going to the rest room when my intuition kicked my butt back in time four years and some few months…

Back then I had my home in which me and my wife had lived. We had separated and divorced some 3 years prior to the time of which I speak. It had been a really traumatic time for me and I’m sure for her too. I learned a lot about life and emotion during those three years. But that is a private story. My point is this at this time (4 years ago) I was using the rods for everything (like I don’t know) but back then both Gwas and I were new to rod dowsing so we were keen to use this tool on any and everything.

Feng Shui is something that I have taken up on and off over the last 15 years, even been on the odd course. So I was familiar with the notion of house energies even before I brought dowsing rods into the equation. Well one late Winter I decided to do some serious house dowsing. I had just finished a contract of work and had the time to explore the energies of my home. If I were to guess I would have said that my house had virtually no threshold left. I didn’t consider it my home (since my marriage had concluded) fortunately or not I didn’t know much about threshold energies at that time so I wasn’t worried about it.

Anyway, one day I came home and broke through the barriers that exist in dowsing ones home (what barriers you ask? Try and dowse your home and you’ll see). Taking advantage of this break I dowsed the house from top to bottom and found some amazing discoveries…

My house was a 3 up two down with conservatory at the back and front and back gardens. What I found was some serious negative energies flowing throughout the house. Beginning (oddly) in the back garden the flowed through each of the rooms in the house. In each room they pooled (spiralled) into a deep power centre of negative energy. Was this the cause of the negative things that had happened in that house?

Interesting questions.

Personally I am a Response-Able person. I have learned to never shirk excuses onto the shoulders of others, events or as in this instance, energies. Nevertheless at that time I was close to being convinced that the energies in that house (how had they got so negative?) had had an influence. Gwas and I had many theories as to the potential cause of this darkness (on a scale of 1-10 it was 7) that flowed through all of the house.

For the purposes of this tale it doesn’t matter so much about the how’s, why’s or indeed how I cleaned up that mess. A truly powerful bit of magic that I am still learning from today. What is important is this. The fragrance that I mentioned in my last post had reminded me of the dark energies in my own home. Question: Was Karen’s home infected with similar dark pools of energy as was mine? Surely I would have felt it (Yes, I am that good). I didn’t want to ask the questions. What would I do with the answers?

Certainly the way the energy pooled in the rooms was reminiscent of the way it had in my house. But this was a beautiful loving home that, as I mentioned before, had a fabulous threshold energy. All of these questions were flickering through my mind as fast as lightning, I was on fire. Time for leaving was a foot and there were too many questions.

• Was this dark energy like there was in my house all them years ago? No. Relief!
• Is there a connection between the energies of my house and this house? Yes.
• Has someone cast a spell on this house? No (Gwas and I suspected some such foul play in my instance).
• Was there something for me to learn here? Yes.
• Was there some work for me to do here? Why hadn’t I asked this question before? Yes.
• Important work? Yes.

Thinking back to these questions I wonder who determines whether (a) there is some work to do and (b) that it is important. I digress. I could hear movement downstairs and knew my time was up. Just one more question my intuition was begging me. But what? I needed a clue. A clue, I thought. Then, okay go for it. Can you give me another clue as to what this all means? The rods where off again. I swear I have never seen them so enthusiastic, or maybe it was my own need for haste. I dashed through a couple of corridors and a room and there at the back of the room was a little chest. My heart sank. Not another chest. What is it with chests?

Even though my rational and intuitional mind was shouting that I should check for traps (sorry I’m regressing to Dungeons and Dragons youth). I pulled open the chest and peered in. Yes, I know. I am in someone elses home and I am peeking into private things. Sorry. They had given me permission to dowse throughout the house. That’s my excuse and I am sticking to it.

Anyway, do you want to know what happened next or not? I am coming to the end of this post so you better let me get on. So I shoved open this chest and my eye was immediately caught by something. I stood still staring at it.

A shout from the doorway brought me back to consciousness and I slammed the chest shut and rushed down to the door. I confessed (truthfully) that I had got lost. Rob, Sylvia (who seemed very huffy) and I said our thank you’s and good byes and got into Rob’s car. The car wheels span on the gravel and I just had to stop Rob. Hang on a minute.

I jumped out of the car and ran back up to the door. I had to ask, just had to. Only Karen and Charlie were left at the door. I rushed up to them and Karen asked if I had forgotten something. I stopped.

This is where it all matters of course. Following a path with a heart? It’s easy to do all the dowsing, the communing, all ‘that’ kind of stuff. Where it matters is at moments like this. When you are a question away from making an ass of yourself, where every rational neuron tells you not to be daft and walk away. Where it screams ‘are you crazy?’ My friends, it is these moments wherein the real magic lies…

Sorry, I said, but a couple of rooms down from the toilet there is a room with a yellow and pink striped chest. What is the stuff in there?

Kal Malik

Crystal Layout Pattern

I was in a situation. Sorry, I can’t go into the details but a situation had been slowly looming in the distance and threatening to arrive on my doorstep and last Monday it did. I was worried, concerned and in the dark as to what to do about this situation.

I know, sounds really cryptic, unfortunately I can’t tell you what the situation was but I do want to tell you what I did. It was Monday night and I was in bed, wide awake, as I mentioned worried, concerned and in the dark (literally). Or was I? As I looked across the bed covers I saw a white light shining in through a crack in the curtains. Curious as to what was making it, I looked out and saw a full silver moon shining opposite my window. I opened the curtains some more and lay back looking at the moons pattern on my bed.

A thought came across my mind, could I do some energy work to alleviate my situation? My procrastinating, lazy and warm bedded self answered with a “Yes, maybe, lets investigate tomorrow” I was about to turn over and let sleep take me when a thought occurred to me. “This is the time to do it” I think it was the moon shining that brought the intuitive knowledge. Reluctantly I got out of bd and grabbed the dowsing rods.

• Is there anything energetically I can do about my situation? YES
• Is now the best time to do it? YES
• Is that because of the moon? YES
• Do I need anything else to do this work? YES
• I was taken to my crystal store box (which has about 100 crystals in it)
• I was also taken to a draw that had a large candle in it.
• and I was pointed to my house plant in the corner of my room.

I lit the candle and placed it in the dowsed for place. I then began taking out crystals from the box and placing them on the floor at the foot of my bed. 1, 2, 3, 4…28, 29, 30, 31. I had taken out 31 distinct crystals and placed them on the floor by my bed. The shape of the final pattern was concentric circles but with bits missing. A bit like the pattern of the crop circle above.

I finally asked and intendedthe help of the plant into the pattern and was ready to do some intention work. I asked the rods a series of questions about what should I be intending and arrived at the odd answer of nothing. Just go to sleep and let the magic work.

Okay. I did just that. About 4 hours later and still in the dark I felt the urge to get up and clear the patter away. Which I did. Morning arrived and I had put the Crystal Magic aside as a night-time musing. I did my usual morning stuff and sat in front of my computer to do some work. Checking my email and replying to a few I looked into the junk folder. Now normally I would just clear it out without a glance, however this time an email caught my eye. I opened it and it seemed to have some relevance to my situation. The chances of success were so remote that I almost didn’t reply to the email. However, almost unconsciously, I typed out a quick reply and sent it.

I had forgotten all about it until that afternoon an email returned with an I’m interested in your situation response. I was surprised but a thought occurred to me, perhaps this was the magic happening? So I pursued this thin thread for a few days and quite literally by the following Monday. One week later, my situation had been completely resolved. Remarkable, unexpected and I would swear, magical.

Kal Malik working crystal magic

I have been re-visiting some of the essential elements of the magickal work that I do. Sometimes when working I forget various parts of these elements that I have found to be essential components to the success of such work. When I forget to employ all five of the elements in the process of doing energy work or interacting on a magickal level with nature then the likelihood of the success of that work, or rather, the strength of the outcome, is compromised by relative degrees. Often it can cause such work to fail altogether.

Usually one puts failure down to any number of other factors such as tiredness, low energy levels or some other personal or environmental failing. On reflection the work has failed because one of the following five essential elements has been missed out or performed as a gesture.

Five essential elements

Here are the five essential elements that I have found contribute to the proportional success of natural magick.

1. Prepare for the work by becoming humble and sincere in attitude
2. Set your intent clearly at the outset, before performing actions or visualisations
3. Engage with the surrounding or called-in spirit forces and negotiate their co-operation in the work. This is another reason why clear intent is useful.
4. Provide your own energy into the work at a frequency that we associate with the feeling of love.
5. Give thanks to the forces that interacted in the work when you have completed the intention or energy exchange

Every time I work I will try to keep these five elements in mind during my work. How hard can it be?

Gwas.

This is a follow-on post from the Black Altar at Karnak Temple post that I did recently. In this post I recount the last thirty minutes of my free ‘un-guided’ time in which I did a little more dowsing for some of the features of the temple. Little did I know that things were about to get weird.

Meeting with the Spirit of Place

I asked if there was a Spirit of Place in the Karnak Temple and the dowsing rods suggested there was. I asked them to take me to it and they were kind enough to oblige. Sometimes being a stranger in a strange land is a useful disguise and I felt no feelings of cultural weirdness about walking around the temple grounds with a copper rod directing my path, despite the curious stares from just about every single tourist in the place. Sometimes it’s liberating to be a stranger.

I was led back to the end of the Hypostyle Hall – a room of some 134 massive columns one of whose ends marked the third pylon. At a small gap in the main path through the temple the dowsing rods swung off to circle around a small roughly circular pile of insignificant looking small blocks of stone. This, apparently, was the resting place of the Spirit of Place. Time to learn a little more about what this spirit was, so I did my usual preparations – I protected myself, put my rods away, and began to connect in to the energy field of the spirit upon whose place I was standing.

Spirit of Place located outside Hypostyle at Karnak

I felt a connection with something, something powerful. I re-doubled my protection, and then introduced myself to the spirit using my druid name and then asked if this spirit was prepared to give me a name. I waited in silence and a name soon emerged loud and proud – “Tutmosis III“. I am not an Egyptian history scholar. At school my preference was for studying the Greek and Roman mythologies, rather than the Egyptian. Even in my magic research I have largely avoided the subject. I don’t know why. To top it all off, I had been pretty much ignoring the guide as he did his tour today because the heat was baking my noodle, frankly! I had had several days of being crammed with lists of Pharaonic lineages and stories about this and that god. Therefore I recognised the name – he was one of the pharaohs – but I had no context in which to place him.

The Gigantic Pharoah and the Supermassive Druid

My ignorance seemed to be interpreted as a lack of respect. No sooner had I connected than Tutmosis was keen to demonstrate the enormity of his powers. Within me I felt a rush of magical energy and suddenly the life-sized image I had of the pharaoh was now gigantic, towering over me as though I were an ant to a human! I saw him laugh at me, drunk with the feeling of power and might.

I think I was supposed to have been over-awed. I think I was supposed to have been frightened. Certainly it made me jump – like someone slamming a door behind you when you didn’t expect it. He was trying to show me who I was dealing with. Well, two could play at that game! I acknowledged his gigantic size, and then summoned as much magical energy as I could, pushing my aura and size upwards with all my power. Now I was as big to him as he had been to me seconds ago. I looked down on him from way above, my head just below the clouds and I laughed at him like a god in Olympus. I quickly re-sized myself and he did the same. He looked at me and acknowledged that his stunt now seemed foolish. I was on a level playing field, I felt. Perhaps now we could begin to talk?

Tutmosis is an angry spirit. As I was tuned into his feeling he was exuding rage . I asked why he was so angry and my eyes were directed to look at the passing human traffic trampling around the ancient monument. I guess many of us were transgressing on areas that old Tut considered were too holy for our un-pious persons. I understood – I had seen the same thing with other Spirits of Place in my own lands.

Serpent Power

I made the angry pharaoh an offer – I would upload to him my stories of place and experience, and in return I asked if he had any gems of knowledge that I didn’t already know about. What he showed me made me think. He showed me the power of the serpent energy coming out of the forehead of the Pharaohs via a golden crown. The serpent acted like an antennae or focal point for energy coming into and going out of the ‘third-eye’ chakra.

Now I would need to do some reading and some experimentation to determine exactly what this means – whether it is symbolic or actual in effect?

In later reading I found out some important things about Tutmosis III. He was responsible for the building of the Hypostyle column room outside of which I had found his spirit of place. He was also responsible for the sixth and “seventh” pylons in the temple – the bits the included the small temple with the black granite altar! Wow – suddenly things were beginning to make sense, and the sense of dark magic that I had felt from him, and his antics, suddenly seemed quite consistent with the historical records.

This is the end of the events in Egypt. I was there for Beltane and managed to do some work at Dendara Temple, but that’s not blog-worthy. It’s time to move on to my experiences in Ireland.

Gwas.

Karnak Temple

Karnak temple is only a few miles outside of Luxor. The temple is connected to Luxor temple via a row of hundreds of carved sphinxes – nothing like the size of the famous Giza sphinx, but with each one being at least man-sized or slightly larger that makes for one hell of an impressive sight when you see them lined up in a vast avenue. There is a dowsable energy ley line linking the two temples of Karnak and Luxor along which the sphinxes are placed.

Talking of impressive, the Karnak temple complex covers a vast area in itself. With several generations of pharaoh adding their own impressive extensions to the original temple there ended up being six distinct “pylons” or gates before an invasion of Persians then Romans put a stop to the proceedings. In addition to the huge main area dedicated to Amun-Re (the Precinct of Amun-Re), there are smaller satellite temples dedicated to the female deity Mut, and their son Montu. This makes the place sound quite simple – in fact it is incredibly complex having been presided over the at least thirty pharaohs.

View along the main Karnak temple aisle

The Aura of the Scarab Statue

The final touch is the inclusion of a sacred lake, and a scarab beetle statue which has a myth attached to it concerning it being a wishing status. The idea is to walk around the statue seven times in an anti-clockwise direction and your wish will come true.

I started the dowsing in the middle of a crowd of tourists at the scarab beetle statue. M wanted to walk around the scarab, so I let her. She was the only one doing this at first, but within two circles she was being joined by others who were copying the idea. By the fourth time around she had about 20 people circling around with her! I began to dowse when she started the perambulation. Was she generating any energy doing this, I wondered. She was, it seemed. I took a reading of the aura of the statue at that point. It was about ten feet wide.

As she continued to circle and more people joined her I could feel the aura expanding. I kept taking readings all the way through her walk. The aura seemed to be expanding faster than I could take dowsing readings! The more people that joined in, the faster the aura expended. Soon I had to stop at the lake that was 20 feet away because the aura was heading out into the water! She came back to join me. I didn’t ask what she’d wished for. It was for her to find out if such ideas came true.

Read the rest of this entry »

I have recently found out something that I had begun to suspect but that I had never actually confirmed until now. My year is based upon an affinity with each of the four elements as the year cycles around, and some times of the year I am more in tune with certain elements than others. I suspect this is the case for many of us on a yearly cycle, but how many of us have gone to the trouble of working out what that affinity is, and thus beginning to tailour our druidic practises towards this affinity? Now may be a good time to do this work. Of course, you may intuitively already know this information, you just may never have actually formalised it in any way. Let me show you how my year works out, and you will see what I mean.

EARTH TIME : February to May

As the male energy begins to enliven the earth again and the plants begin to stir in the soil so the earth comes alive, infusing the earth spirits with strength and rejuvenation. The seeds feel the force of the male energies and wake from their slumber in the earth in response to this.

• work with earth spirits and elementals
• earth magic is more potent
• Underworld voyages are easier
• a time to venture deep within myself and return with knowledge

FIRE TIME: May to August

The sun is at its peak and the fire elementals respond to this by being most active at this time. The land is filled with light and warmth, and the earth is slowly drained of water. The time is associated with strength, light and activity. The male and female energies in the earth and sky begin to combine to produce a flourish of growth.

• work with fire spirits and elementals
• fire magic is more potent
• remote viewing and sending energies remotely is easier
• a time to use the energy available to progress
• healing energy is abundant

WATER TIME: August to November

As the fire begins to leave the plants and the heat drains from the earth so water is called upon to facilitate the decomposition process. The rains and storms come over the land clearing the channels of Summer vegetation, and cleansing the soil. In response to the weakening male energy of the sun the plant spirits make the most of their harvest producing fruits containing the seeds of the next crop to demonstrate the successful union of male and female.

• work with water spirits and elementals
• water magic is more potent
• interactions with spirit forms is easier, especially human
• clearance work and spirit release is common at this time
• re-balancing of energy is more frequent and often necessary

AIR TIME: November to February

With little sun, often frozen (imprisoned) water and solid earth this time is the playground of the air elementals. High winds race across the land in full flow, and the weather is unpredictable and changeable. The air spirits love the freedom of the winter, when they alone rule the elemental domains. With very little male energy available nothing gets done and the spirits dis-engage from the plants to leave them to sleep until the new year.

• work with air spirits and elementals
• air magic is more potent
• aura shaping/nemeton work is easier at this time
• remote communication occurs more readily
• weather patterns can be easily changed
• knowledge and lessons are easily integrated

This is how I have come to understand the forces of the year and how my own interactions with the elemental forces is now tuned. I would welcome your own feedback on this. Are these timings similar for you too? Do you find that you work with elements at different times to me? How does this impact your work and the kind of places you visit? What stories do you have of your work with the four elements?

Gwas.