Empowering Your Rituals

I consider activating the energies within me before performing most of my rituals essential. Most of the authors that I've been recommending in this blog usually will tell you you don't need to, and that's true, but in practice my rituals always work better when I do something to activate and strengthen energy.
Since I was really young I've been practicing energy manipulation and nowadays I like to toy with it from time to time. I learned to pay close attention to it while not trying to consciously control it, but observing it perform my will. Like with your hands, you don't consciously will it to move, but you know it will when you want it to. And like you won't be able to play guitar unless you took the time to learn it, you won't be able to move objects with your energy unless you practice. But that's not what I want to talk about today.

Before any magickal practice I will raise awareness of my energy, toy with if somehow, or do whatever I want, but I always expand it just a little and create some sort of movement.
After that a may choose to follow none, or all of the following steps in the order I feel like:

• I remember how it's such a privilege to have acquired the knowledge of all this and to be able to access such powerful forces and use it to benefit me and my loved ones and feel happy to perform the ritual I'm going to, then do a prayer to a chosen deity.

• I use the 24th God name from Zanna Blaise's The 72 sigils of Power. She calls it Chaho and, in this case, it's meant to connect me with magick and allow me to create a new reality. Her method of chanting the name while scanning the letters is nice, but I mix it with Baal Kadmon's method in The 72 Names of God, which involves more visualizations. His use for the same names are mostly different from Zanna's, but I resonate with her's more. This process puts me in a desired state of mind. You might want to research more about names of god since there's so much about it on books and online.

• Next I do a Middle Pillar Ritual and the Circulation Ritual from New Avatar Power. It's great to keep your energy in movement. Practicing it will give you great control over your energy over time. If you're more into the oriental practices, you could use some sort of chakric activation and still do some kind of circulation ritual after that.

• The Qabalistic Cross is almost always included in my rituals. Donald Michael Kraig has a great blog post explaining it in detail. When you read it you will understand why I like it soo much.

• Banishing. It's been years since I last did the LBRP, I do the one from Damon's Magickal Protection. It's really to the point and effective. In the few occasions where I felt I needed a banishing during or after a ritual this worked wonders.

• If you know planetary the references to what you're doing or the entities you're working with and can work on the correct moon cycles, do it. You will notice the difference in the energy and, most importantly, in the results. Not caring for it won't usually screw up your ritual, but won't add anything to it. Even when you're just meditating or doing creative visualization, it will help. Anytime you're working with energy it's a good idea to take these things into consideration.
  There's this site to calculate planetary hours according to your location. If you want to delve into planetary magick, I highly recommend David Rankine and Sorita d'Este's Practical Planetary Magick and Melita Denning and Osborne Philips' Planetary Magick. I consult these two a lot.

When I start the ritual itself, I'm already in an altered state of consciousness and have my astral senses open and active. It's good to add a more emotional, and a meditative and relaxing step to your ritual.

I hope you find this post useful and apply some or all of it to your practices.

Another Experience With Astaroth(Goetia)

I'm posting this working with Astaroth because it was unique in a way and I want to point to something that should be taken more seriously - at least I should.

For two consecutive days I just activated my energy by moving it and becoming aware of it - it's something I always do in a minute or less -, meditated on Astaroth's seal for just a few minutes until I felt that contact was made, and followed with an invocation, request, and license to depart. I always follow my intuition and talk to the daemons like I would talk to Don Vito Corleone if I had to ask him something. Really respectfully, but I don't follow a script. I let my need or desire show and that has been working. When I can't feel the desire for what I'm asking, even though it's there, I tell them. And nothing went actually wrong this time either. I'm trying not to get into personal matters here, so I'll use a metaphor: Imagine that you asked for a pack of cigarettes after you finish the one you have, and for some reason - I know it makes no sense - you smoked only 90% of your last cigarette, put it's remains back in the pack, stored it and forgot about it.You didn't finish it, Astaroth could wait forever. I did something similar and, even though I knew she had agreed to fulfill my request, it seemed like she wasn't going to as days gone by and there was not much movement towards my goal, even though I'd been working on it to the best of my ability. When I was really close to actually needing what I asked for, I still didn't feel or notice her help on that matter at all, and then I just called her again and told her how I felt about it - at that moment I was very disappointed. Later that day I noticed that I was making a huge mistake and that it was my fault because I didn't take care with my wording on that request. I deeply and sincerely apologised for my mistake and thanked her for making me see it instead of kicking my ass, and it didn't take much until I had what I asked for and even some surprisingly good luck on the following day.

Now, I understand that I can't make the same mistake again, at least not with her, and I believe that she was nice to me because she is really good natured and I've developed a good relationship with her. If it happened with another entity it might have gone terribly wrong. I trust Astaroth and I like to write about her, and I'm glad that once  again she was reliable and kind to me. 

I will copy my book recommendations from another post here for if you feel inclined to start doing this kind of extremely simple but effective invocations. Notice that even though I get no visual manifestations of any kind - and don't expect to when working this way - the daemons communicate with me in ways that I can fully understand and to me it feels more natural. I get the results that I expect without using a lot of tools nor doing lengthy rituals. I'm not saying it's best, it just suits me.

I can personally recommend: Hidden Secrets - There are dozens of spells and rituals here, and they work, as well as a little section on Goetia that reminds you of the importance of being respectful and puts away a lot of that superstition that will only draw you back;

New Goetian Power Chants - If you know The Miracle of The New Avatar Power, you're already familiarized with the system contained in this book. It's simple and effective;

Goetian Pyramid Power - Another interesting and effective system to make contact with these great Daemons.

I own quite a few books by Carl Nagel and these are the ones I own and recommend when it comes to the Ars Goetia, but he has quite a few other titles on this subject.

Another great resource is Rufus Opus' A Modern Goetic Grimoire, but I don't know where you can get it nowadays, so I'm linking to his blog and there you can find a way to contact him if you really want it.

Before you do anything, research as much as you can. Google is your friend. Forums like Studio Arcanis and BALG are great for this. Remember: When you're researching about a daemon you intend to work with, you're already familiarizing yourself with it, thus you're more likely to be successful. I hope you enjoyed reading. If you have anything to add or any questions, please leave a comment.