Other Allies
There is something quite crude about trying to fit overviews of gods into one or two chapters of occult books. If divine concepts could so easily be apprehended then there would be no need for occult books in the first place. It becomes even more difficult when attempting to convey some notion of Trickster beings or those that preside over High Strangeness and synchronicity.
As such, the following beings are representative. Much can be gained from further study of any or all of them. Not everything you read about needs to end up on your altar.
Anansi
Our Lady of Fatima Manu
Loki Rabbit
book has been personally, thoroughly road-tested over a number of years, I have to tell you that the ritual as it stands requires the Johns Hopkins University Press translation of the Orphic Hymns.55 As other writers have found, this publisher is somewhat challenging to get quote clearances out of, so you will have to seek out the full version yourselves. (I suggest from a library.) In the interim, there are some excellent classical mentions and invocations found on the extensive theoi.com that may provide a standin. But a ritual is more than a random assortment of words and funny smells, so I will not do you the disservice of simply making up a hymn while carrying on with a different one in my personal practice.
Once you have sourced a satisfactory invocation or hymn to Tyche, simply light some frankincense incense, and if performing this outside, dig a small hole in the ground and pour in milk, honey, and wine. Repeat for each bead of the chaplet.
Like so much magic, you can really only tell if it is working when it is working. Expect curious synchronicities and chance encounters on the way to your goals. The general idea is to position yourself somewhere where there are greater probabilistic ranges of outcomes and find an ally who will help more than hinder you. Call it the portfolio strategy of religion: you just need to win slightly more often than you lose.
As for identifying potential losses, that is the subject of the next chapter.
[contents]
50 Serena Roney-Dougal. The Fairy Faith. Green Magic, 2003.
51 George P. Hansen. The Trickster and the Paranormal. Xlibris, 2001.
52 John Kay. Obliquity: Why Our Goals are Best Achieved Indirectly. Profile Books, 2011.
53 Carroll, The Octavo.
54 Jake Stratton-Kent. The True Grimoire. Scarlet Imprint, 2009.
55 Apostolos N. Athanassakis and Benjamin J. Wolkow, translators. The Orphic Hymns. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013.
6
The Magnificent Game of the King
One of the most interesting findings of precognition and presentiment research is that people seem to be influenced by themselves in the future, rather than by objective events. Precognitions are like memories
of the future. Presentiments seem to involve a physiological back- flowing from future states of alarm or arousal, a flow of causation
moving in the opposite direction to energetic causation.
THESCIENCE DELUSION, DR. RUPERTSHELDRAKE
Dedicated to the most powerful woman on earth at the time—Catherine de Médici; the Florentine princess who became queen of France—a book appeared in Bologna in 1551. It was called One Hundred Liberal and Ingenious Games and contained rules and instructions for various dice and card games, both of which were extremely popular in northern Italy. One was listed as the Magnificent Game of the King, wherein the four suits of the traditional Italian playing cards represented the four cardinal virtues of prudence, justice, temperance, and fortitude. Here was a game that was also more than a game. It was a pastime that told the players something about the wider universe.
In what is a mildly amusing circular metaphor, precisely dating when the tarot appeared in Europe is something of a Fool’s errand. Western esotericism’s current views of the tarot are shaped more by late-eighteenth- and early- nineteenth-century French mystics seeking to tie everything back to Egypt. (This was easier to do in a time before hieroglyphs had been translated.) Subsequent Victorian occultists then overlaid Christian kabbalistic concepts and the Hebrew
alphabet over the astrological correlations developed by their French predecessors. Whilst this is a pleasingly coherent system—reaching its apogee with Aleister Crowley’s Book of Thoth—it lacks any historical veracity further back than its creators.
The broad consensus appears to be that card games had arrived in central and southern Europe by the 1300s from the Near East, if the admonitions of various holy men at the time are anything to go by. These games typical had four suits including mirrors, acorns, swords, and plants but had yet to coalesce into today’s recognisable set of playing cards. Different regions had different variants and it was only later that the trump cards were added. (Early trumps contained a female pope which is now the High Priestess, and much of the religious concern about the cards may have sprung from this blasphemy.) These trumps appear to be based on the popular medieval mystery and morality plays that travelled Europe promoting Catholic and biblical eschatology to a mostly illiterate populace. Paul Huson, in his excellent Mystical Origins of the Tarot, suggests that the presence of Death in the trumps, as well as the general movement of the trump story from the physical to the metaphysical may have served as a memento mori for the wealthy of Europe when it was being ravaged by the Plague. In any case, the imagery that would have been instantly understood by the medieval mind became obscure and “mystified” only a few centuries later as the Renaissance blew away what it saw as the cobwebs of the ignorant worldview of the Dark Ages.
Sortilege—from the Latin sortilegium—as opposed to cartomancy has been around since mankind developed toolmaking capabilities. Dating back to the rise of Christianity, cards were used to generate random numbers referring to phrases in the Bible, Virgil, or Homer, for instance. So we have two behavioural streams, gaming and divination, coming down to us from the distant past in a way that is now impossible to disentangle.
And why would we want to? As we saw in the probability chapter, a mathematical understanding of risk and probable outcomes is an extremely late development. The difference between a game and a forecast was far less defined for our ancestors than it is for us. Both dealt with a future event that, at the time,
was entirely out of your hands and in the hands of Fortune. (“Oh, I am Fortune’s Fool!”) Would she favour you or no? Thus we find ourselves once again in the realm of the trickster, in that liminal space between what is real and what is a game. Divination in general and cartomancy in particular can only ever have emerged in an environment of illegal tavern games, marginal cultures and forgotten fears of Plague death. Those eighteenth-century French occultists were correct in saying that the tarot contains the highest secrets of magic, just not in the way they thought.