Banishing Pentagram: A dramatic reenactment

So why have I been missing for the past few weeks? The reason isn’t a very sensible one, but it is the reason.

Many of you know that I’ve been a practicing magician for over a decade, long before I discovered that my comic book idols Alan Moore and Grant Morrison were both magicians.

This guy? A magician? No, how can it be?

I really don’t feel like getting into the common misconceptions about magic here. Fireballs, lightning bolts and so on. It’s getting light out and I’ve been busy playing video games, watching Discovery Travel and Living, and eating since midnight. I’ll deal with that some other time.

Saturn is the planet (and no, I don’t mean that ringed thing in outer space, but the concept it symbolizes) that governs limitation, boundaries, contraction. It’s the end of the party, it’s that point on the road where the bridge has gone out. It’s how much time is left on the clock before the game is over.

A Saturn rite is a period of asceticism to free you from your attachments, and to give you a clearer idea of your limits.

Mine lasted 4 weeks. See, magic depends to a large extent on the idea of “Did you do enough for it to work? Did you try hard enough?”

Apparently I’m a masochist. Masochistic enough to adopt the Saturn Rite formulated by Frater U.’.D.’. verbatim, instead of devising my own.

SCHEDULE:
Week 1: No sex, masturbation, or sexual fantasy.
Week 2: No solid food.
Week 3: No entertainment, no stimulants.
Week 4: The Grand Finale — Combination of the 3 Previous Weeks

Here is my account of those harrowing 28 days.

Week 1: Avoid sex, masturbation, and sexual fantasy.

This was WAY harder than I thought it would be. No sexual fantasies. This means if I looked at something like this:

For instance.

Never mind the first two, just avoiding sexual fantasy was murder. I never realized just how often each day I have quick, almost instantaneous thoughts about sex. To say nothing of the morning male condition.

I would walk down the street or surf the net or watch tv or read a comic and then BAM! I was on the Moon.

In such situations, I was to perform the Small Universe energy circulation, drawing energy away from THAT area, up the Governing Vessel, and down the Conception Vessel to the energy point two inches below the navel.

Which is not exactly your first reflex when you’re turned on.

It kept getting worse and worse each day, until the 5th day. This was the day something in me clicked, and realized, like the dog in the Pavlov’s experiments, I was responding to the Button, and the world around me kept pressing it to call my attention, except in this case, it was the Sex Button, not the dogs’ Food Button.

And I could simply look at an attractive woman, feel a rush of energy, and walk on without fixating.

Not all the time though. I would often still get so charged that I had to do the damned energy circulation thingy. But instead of getting more difficult to endure, it got easier. Not easy, just easier.

I am not going to tell you what happened when Week 2 hit and the No Sex thing was finished. Suffice it to say I took advantage of the reprieve before the Grand Finale.

(Continued in Part 2!)

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