Monday night conjunction

It's been a while since I've gone out to do any work in the desert due to a herniated disc, but it looks like I'm going to have to break that curse on Monday. There's going to be a conjunction of the Moon, (at 15%), Venus and Jupiter - Lilith and both her aspects. It sounds like it'll be well worth a little pain to take advantage of that!

Lilith Spirit Vessel

And so to the next stage of the grimoire of Liber Lilith - the spirit vessel.

This one's really going to test my artistic talents, and even the first step's proving to be a challenge! The Spirit Vessel is a clay figure model of Lilith with a hollow center. Into the center, the 'True Image of Lilith' must be inserted, drawn in 'special' ink on Papyrus. Luckily(?), I happen to live two blocks from the only shop in L.A. that sells blank sheets of Papyrus. They got them in only two weeks ago from Egypt as a special order for a local artist. I spent an evening drawing a re-drawing the design from Tyson's book. It's the first time I've tried drawing with a calligraphy pen, (really just a nib on a stick dipped in ink), so three or four early attempts were lost to blotches and smears. When I finally figured out how to keep a line going, it took another three or four attempts to get something even remotely resembling the design. Anyway, this is where I ended up. It's about three inches square. Hopefully She won't hold the artistry against me!

This weekend, it's on to the real challenge - my first attempt at figure sculpting...

Invisible Worlds

A thing happened at work today that made me think.

I'm pretty lucky in that sometimes my job involves hanging around on film sets with some interesting people for six or eight weeks at the start of a project that I'll end up working on for one or two years. It's my job to add the visual effects after the main shoot ends. Right now I'm working with one of the Directors people think of as a visionary, and perhaps one of the most creative minds in the business. You've all seen his films. I can't say who he is, but they're usually fairly unusual, fairly dark pictures.

Anyway, for this project we've put together some relatively new technology that tracks what the film camera is doing and can add a computer generated environment and characters in real-time. Usually you don't get to see this until long after the shoot, and by then its too late to change anything, (it helps if you know where the castle's supposed to be behind the actor who's out there standing in an empty stage in front of a green screen). It's pretty cool. The weird thing is, he doesn't want to look at it.

He sits in front of two flat-screen monitors, one with the empty green background and the other with an entire virtual world. He only ever looks at the green one. He says he finds the rest 'too distracting'. The trouble is, if he only looked, he might decide to put the camera in a whole different place so you could actually see that castle... he might get the real actor to look at where the computer generated characters are instead of somewhere too high/low/back/forward of them.... hey, he might even shoot a shot wide enough to see them in the first place!

So here's the philosophical part. This virtual world we're making isn't real, but does it affect this Director's movie? You bet! If he took notice of it, would it change some of his decisions? Absolutely! It could make his movie better, cheaper and more believable, but to him it just isn't REAL.

But it's there.

I think the same thing goes for 99 percent of us. We only see the world that's right in front of us. If we hear there might be something else, something more than that, its easier to dismiss it than to change our way of thinking to incorporate it; even if one day its going to bite us in the ass! Just like our Director, we only have a certain amount of time in a day so we tend to spend it on things that are familiar - our job, paying the bills, taking care of the kids. Beyond that, nothing much matters. Then one day we retire. The kids leave home. Our pension/401k is all the money we'll ever have. At that point, our life is effectively... over.

So let the Director carry on looking at his green monitor. At the very least, I'm going to walk away with the lesson that even though I spent another day at work - that's not all there is.

The Seal of Lilith

My first experience with engraving! Using a blank medal I created the seal as described by Tyson. It's not consecrated yet, so it should still be able to be 'gazed upon', plus this is just the first pass. I'm going to get it silver plated, and/or make another one out of pure silver. Yet another thing that's not perfectly by the instructions in the grimoire on the first pass.

I also ordered all the materials to make the Spirit Vessel - a 9" figurine of Lilith. This is going to be a challenge too, as I've never sculpted anything before!

Yesterday, I spoke the Prayer of Lilith on my way to buy some light globes for my lamp and while I waited in line at the checkout there was a crack of lightning so loud everyone in the store thought that something outside had exploded! All that night, the animals in our household behaved like they were spooked by something. SHE is coming...

Runes

On a side note to the Lilith work, I finished a set of Runes as part of the Dragon Rouge curriculum. The process was to spend a night in the wilderness under a tree in a Swedish ritual called 'Utesitta'. I went to the place in Griffith Park that I've used for a lot of ritual practice. It's got a great feeling to it, as well as an amazing view! I spent the night under an oak tree and in the morning, following the teachings of Castenada, asked it for permission to cut off a branch with my dagger.

All it took was some sawing and sanding to produce these. There's a a 24 rune set symbolizing the 24 paths between the spheres of the Qliphoth, and another seven Adul or Noble runes.

There's a lot more work to do still. The process of Rune creation is to Carve them, to learn to Read them, to Color them red, and then to test, to ask, to offer, to send and to sacrifice. More on this, (I hope!), to come.