Another Abramelin Season Ends…

October 4th, 2010

Greetings aspirants!

Well, another Abramelin season ends. Anyone who performed the Rite *by the book* should have celebrated their spiritual birthday late last month. I observed mine by offering white roses, white wine, bread and honey, milk, wax and incense to my Guardian Angel.  I would upload a picture of the Altar decked out with all the gifts – but She won’t allow photos. 😦 

Those of you who undertook Abramelin this year should just recently have come out of your post-Rite seven day rest. No doubt some of you were very disappointed by the immediate results of the process…

When I was performing the Rite back in 97, Ocha Ni’Lele would tease me about my expectations for the completion of the work. He would exclaim in a high-pitched cartoonish voice: “Whaaat?!? No puff of smoke? No flash of light? No deeeeeemon?!?” Having taken the Ocha initiation himself, and witnessed a few more besides, he was in a good position to speak – and to poke fun.

Sure enough, the big day came and there was indeed no puff of smoke, no flash of light and no demon! I had a few meager visions of my Angel, paltry visions of the spirits (at best) and a general feeling of anti-climax to the whole thing. Sure, the visions I did have turned out to be vastly important – foundational in fact to everything that followed – but at the time they didn’t seem so impressive to me. (Thank the Gods I perservered and completed every part of the Rite!) I think I was a bit numb for a few days – maybe thanks to the shock of the Rite itself as much as anything else. After that wore off, I got mad. After all, Abramelin was a last-chance option for me, and I had no clue what I was going to do with my life if I had failed.

Thankfully, I kept quiet about my feelings and decided to ask a few questions first. I chose three people whose experience and opinions I highly respected. The first was my Santo friend/teacher, who had been through Ocha. The second was a Golden Dawn chief who had been through Abramelin. The third was a Hermeticist who had no Order affiliation, and no particular experience with Abramelin or anything similar. I approached each of them individually. I told them nothing about my experience or doubts, and simply asked them each a question. To the Santo: what should one expect after completing Ocha? To the Abramelin initiate: what should one expect after completing Abramelin? And to the Hermeticist with a totally outsider-perspective, I asked for a Tarot reading about my results in the Rite.

To my astonishment, their answers were pretty much all the same. The Santo told me that Ocha exhausts the Orisha, so it will sleep for months afterward. After a year, they perform specific offerings and ceremonies to re-awaken the entity. The Abramelin initiate told me “you and the Angel have just been born, and are just babies. It will take some time for _both_ of you to grow.” The Tarot reading was fairly explicit: Things are calm and quiet at the moment, but hang on because a big explosion of energy is coming. (I distinctly remember the Judgement Card as the final outcome of the reading – with the Solar Archangel Michael calling a newly-awakend soul from its tomb like a phoenix.)

With these answers, I decided to calm down and wait things out. I offered prayers to my Guardian every day, and continued the weekly observances as prescribed in the grimoire. Then, just over a month later, the big day came for me – at a large Samhain Sabbat hosted by a local Wiccan coven. Being Samhain, divination was the major theme, and they invited any card readers to bring their decks and offer readings after the Sabbat. I decided to go for it.

During the ritual, everyone who had brought a Tarot deck was called into the center of the circle and a blessing was called down upon us. After opening the circle, we retired to an ajacent room to read. What happened was incredible. Something about that blessing must have awakened my Guardian Angel. My aura was glowing like a sun, I was giving readings like I had never given before (complete with flashes of vision), and I had a rather long line of folks who demanded a reading from “that guy!” lol  That night, my Abramelin adventure truly began – and I had *no idea* what kind of fireworks were just around the corner! Where I am now, compared to where I was then, is like comparing the lives of two different people.

So to all of you who are fresh from your Oratories and wondering “what now?”, I hope the above has been helpful to you. Stick to the book, pray every day and keep going into that Oratory every Sunday (or Saturday if that is your Sabbath) to burn the lamp and incense while you pray. Make sure you recite Psalm 138 every time you approach the Altar. And be patient! If you did things right, you can expect big things in the future.

LVX

Aaron