The Magician s Shade: A Conversation

Part One By Keith J Jim Louis bent over the circle of salt lining the evocation area where they were about to perform a conjuration. He was a young man in his twenties: a man with hair like straw fields, a beard warming against the north wind s icy breath, and a figure worked from heavy labor. Another man, Aldus, old from the passing of the earth through time quickly, was arranging a triangle in front of the circle. His crimson robes draped on his slender body with a hood concealing his eyes from the strands of sunlight shining through the foliage of birch trees. -Generally, spoke Aldus, those of our path don t have protective barriers in our evocation circles, in this case the salt and words of power. However, your will is not sufficient enough to allow you to control or absorb the demon properly without a barrier. What we are doing here is to familiarize you with the process of summoning. See it as a flight simulation before you take on the actual airplane. -But as I have read, isn t any form of summoning dangerous, ask Louis. -Yes, quite so, although, most of those individuals have no control of their minds who dip their hands into the pudding of these operations. Your training has gradually prepared you for work of this grade. Keeping your awareness, collective mind, and will focused is a necessary prerequisite of summoning: light or dark. Beginning light magicians are obsessed with barriers that they don t conquer their fears or self to engage a demon directly with will only. They use barriers all the time, even into higher grades, that the protective aspects reveal a fear unconsciously to themselves. But I do advise a barrier on the dead unless you know the soul well. The souls of the dead summoned could be quite filthy from content of their pervious lives that one might absolve their murderous, greedy, or deranged appetites which would be useless to the aspiring adept: once again light or dark. If I was performing necromancy, I would chose only a corpse that I knew well enough, for the man could have died in rage that only the emotion would be attached to the body. When he wakes he would no doubt try to vent his anger on the conjurer. -If I am correct, aren t souls or the minds of the individual fragmented upon death as one reads into the Upanishads? With the dead, am I getting the whole person or just a fragment of what he was? -Good thought, the common man s mind fragments when he dies, just as a man s body decomposes into pieces when he dies. People have the misconception that their mind is an indivisible unit. The mind is a component of parts like the body is composed of cells or smaller organisms. If a person would understand that his collective organism, which is made of smaller ones, appears as a single whole, than he should not have a problem seeing his mind as made of parts too appearing as a single whole. Unless he is gifted, unified his psychology, meditates well, or is an adept, generally a man s mind will not hold together upon death, by that keeping one s awareness. Few get to hold their awareness together, supposedly a gift from the Eagle in Castaneda s ideas. Now the fragments can go anywhere. Some fragments are reincarnated in different forms of life, like a tree, animal, or human. Other parts may wonder to personal objects of the deceased that he held dear. Another part might find its way to a rock or a relative s home, in short an environment. Such is the case of haunted houses. Lastly some remain

in the astral plane. A person who retains awareness is the only person who can consciously direct where he ends up, provided his mind is directed when he dies. If he is lusty when he dies, he ll end up in something lusty along that stream of consciousness, which easily could be something other than human. The energy of a man s soul could end up anywhere in death. -Such, stated Louis, is somewhat the reason why we are in this forest I imagine. Considering the number of plants here, I would think that the prana, chi, or energy of the collective whole of plant life would be very, very powerful in our work. But wouldn t a city work too? -One would think that by that logic, commented Aldus. The problem with the city is that even though there is a lot of energy to make witchcraft work better, like a huge conduit, the minds of all those people get in the way of a grand performance. It is much like a muddy river when one wants the drink of fresh water or driving through rush hour. It creates stagnation. Notice how people feel more focused or relaxed when they are away from large social settings like a metropolis? The environment is not clouded from the mind contents of all those people. Also heritage wise, large cities are only a bleep in human evolution. The wild invokes a nature reaction in us that our ancestors had known for many years. The forest is not clouding the astral world or will by thinking about what to make for dinner. It allows the magician to have a more malleable effect in his workings. Hence, as you said, the reason we are evocating in the forest. We will have a better conjuration because of the forest s collective chi and absence of other mind influences on environment, which allows our will to work better. End of Part One