Occult Resources

Purpose

This working is used when one has lost their way. If you’re lost in the woods, you should probably use a compass or a map. But if you feel lost and aimless in life, this working can show you the way. For use when one needs to find meaning or consider alternate pathways.

Materials

+ A labradorite rock.

+ Cherry blossom or strawberry incense, essential oil, or scent.

+ This should preferably be undertaken in a cold climate during the winter when it is snowing or there is snow on the ground.

+ A lantern, flashlight, decorative light or other small light.

+ A particularly beloved blanket, coat, or other piece of fabric that one has a personal attachment to.

Set-Up

In the winter, head outside and construct your ritual space. If it is not winter and you do not have access to snow, marking your ritual space in a different way is sufficient. Walk in a circle around the perimeter of your ritual space and cut this shape into the snow; a circle is a particularly ideal shape for this working. Place the blanket with the light and labradorite rock in the center of the circle.

Ritual

Go to the perimeter of the ritual space and stand on the lines in the snow that you just made. Look up to the sky and hold your intention firmly in your mind. You are looking for meaning in a certain topic, perhaps in your art or a personal relationship, or you are considering alternate pathways. As you slowly walk in a circle along the line, think about your desire to live life in a way that is personally meaningful to yourself, and perhaps think about what this may mean for you.

After completing 3 clockwise turns, turn to the light and the piece of labradorite. Move towards these objects and sit in the snow in front of them. Use the feeling of cold to disconnect yourself from your body.

Pick up the labradorite and reflect on it. Allow your entire world to become that piece of rainbow rock. What do you see in it? What immediately jumps into your mind, what does it reveal and bring forward in the back of your thoughts? Take inventory of what the patterns in the rock remind you of, and of what you are thinking of in the back of your mind.

Then, direct your thoughts towards your subject that you wanted to reflect on. Now what do you see in the ambiguous features of the labradorite? Does anything immediately come to mind? Does this trigger any thoughts for you?

Purpose

This ritual is performed to find the truth of something. This can be used to investigate many things - betrayal, theft, poisoning, alternative paths, how unseen circumstances may be changing. Opal and diamond are more powerful substitutes for opalite in this ritual.

Materials

+ Neon, iridescent, metallic, pearlescent, or other nonstandard color of either: chalk, crayon, paint, or other art material.

+ A material surface to paint or color on; pavement, paper, canvas, and so on.

+ A candle, incense, or light for each point of the ritual.

+ An opalite crystal

Set-Up

Choose the topic you wish to investigate. To give an example - let’s say your diamond ring has gone missing. You want to investigate what happened to it.

You choose the shape of your ritual. The shape you take is determined by how many alternative paths you choose to investigate. It is important to always leave an alternative path for the contingency that all of the directions you chose to investigate are wrong.

To give an example - you live with three roommates. You choose a star shape for your ritual. Each point of the star represents a different possibility you are choosing to investigate, or trace using the energy of your opalite crystal. Three of the points of the star represent the scenario where one of your roommates stole your ring. One of the points represents the contingency where a situation you haven’t chosen to investigate has occurred. A final contingency represents the scenario where you simply misplaced your ring and is represented by the final point in your star.

It is time to design your ritual space. If you are practicing outside and chose to use paint or neon chalk, draw the star shape to represent the directions of your investigation. Leave a candle, incense, light, figurine, or other significant object at each point. If you cannot draw on the floor of your ritual space, leave a picture at each point of your shape and fill the rest of it in mentally - or leave colored yarn along the path of your intended shape.

Ritual

Stand in the center of the star. Hold the opalite to your heart. Feel the smooth, cool surface in your hands as it warms to your touch. Hold it up to your face and memorize its appearance, internalizing it within your mind’s eye. Hold your investigation inside your mind.

Repeat the words:

There is no investigation greater than

the tracing of the oceans of reality,

never erased or undone.

Stand to the first point of the star. This point represents the possibility that you lost your ring. Look into your opalite crystal; hold it to your eye, looking into it as thought it holds the answer. As you peer into the crystal, imagine a reality where this is true. The world you imagine should be constructed of opalite.

Turn in each direction of the star, holding the opalite crystal to your eye and imagining yourself playing through each contingency you have chosen to investigate. The more scenarios you choose to investigate, the more accurate you will be.

When you have finished imagining your final scenario, turn to your original point in the star. Stare into the opalite crystal, imagine yourself in a version of the room you are in now that is made of opalite. Look at this opalite room; turn to each point of the star. Try to sense if anything lays in the opalite reality in the direction of each contingency, and make note of it. After you have trialed each direction, look at the crystal in your palm. See if you can feel the essence of or see the faint shadow of any numbers. Any numbers reflected in the crystal corresponds with the scenarios assigned to each point in the star. 1 would correspond with the first scenario you imagined, which is the one where you lost the ring yourself.

Purpose

This ritual is to be repeated before bed to solidify your intention to astral project or to have a lucid dream. After a few weeks of performing this ritual, it should be much easier to attain lucidity during dream states.

Materials

+ Lavender, lilac, or strawberry incense;

alternatively: lavender, lilac, or strawberry essential oil or scented candle.

+ A bismuth crystal;

alternatively (for people who are cheap like me): high-definition image of a bismuth crystal.

+ Yoga mat;

alternatively: a comfortable blanket.

Ritual

Lay down the mat or blanket. Place the crystal in front of you in a place that is easy for you to see. Ideally, you should be able to reach out and touch/manipulate the bismuth crystal. Light the scented incense. Deeply inhale the scent and focus on it.

Sit down on the mat and begin to meditate. As you are meditating, hang onto your desire to become lucid during your dreams. Focus entirely on this idea and hold this focus for 3 minutes.

Focus on the bismuth crystal. Stare at it intently, taking in every detail. If you have the actual crystal, reach out and touch it, feeling the texture and weight in your hands.

Hold the bismuth crystal in one hand and hold your other hand, empty, beside it. Visualize a copy of the bismuth crystal in the empty hand. Model the weight, draw in the iridescent sheen.

If you are using a visual image of a bismuth crystal, perhaps on your phone, hold both hands out together and visualize the crystal in your hands. Model the weight and color as best as you can.

Project your intention to be lucid during your dreams into the crystal. Feel this intention like energy or light flowing into the crystal, imagine it imbuing the crystal with a faint glow.

Set the crystal down and extinguish the incense or candle.

Put away your materials.

Onyx primarily refers to the parallel banded variety of the silicate mineral chalcedony, which is composed of quartz mixed with other minerals. Agate and onyx are both varieties of layered chalcedony that differ only in the form of the bands: agate has curved bands and onyx has parallel bands. The colors of its bands range from black to almost every color. Commonly, specimens of onyx contain bands of black and/or white. Sardonyx, a variety of onyx, is known for being red.

Onyx is good for workings involved in changing your mind or feelings about something, or changing someone else’s thoughts or feelings. It can be used to pull off workings involved in changing the appearance of an entire situation.

The ancient Romans entered battle carrying amulets of sardonyx engraved with Mars, the god of war. This was believed to bestow courage in battle. In Renaissance Europe, wearing sardonyx was believed to bestow eloquence. A traditional Persian belief is that it helped with epilepsy. Sardonyx was traditionally used by English midwives to ease childbirth by laying it between the breasts of the mother. [wikipedia]

Quartz is a hard, crystalline mineral composed of silicon and oxygen atoms. The atoms are linked in a continuous framework of SiO4 silicon–oxygen tetrahedra, with each oxygen being shared between two tetrahedra, giving an overall chemical formula of SiO2.  Quartz is the second most abundant mineral in Earth's continental crust, behind feldspar.

Quartz belongs to the trigonal crystal system. The ideal crystal shape is a six-sided prism terminating with six-sided pyramids at each end. In nature quartz crystals are often twinned (with twin right-handed and left-handed quartz crystals), distorted, or so intergrown with adjacent crystals of quartz or other minerals as to only show part of this shape, or to lack obvious crystal faces altogether and appear massive. Well-formed crystals typically form in a 'bed' that has unconstrained growth into a void; usually the crystals are attached at the other end to a matrix and only one termination pyramid is present. However, doubly terminated crystals do occur where they develop freely without attachment, for instance within gypsum. A quartz geode is such a situation where the void is approximately spherical in shape, lined with a bed of crystals pointing inward. [wikipedia]

Quartzes are used in magick for anything that involves changing perspective or leading someone else to see something in a certain way. All transparent minerals/crystals are good for this purpose. The color of quartz- and there are many different colors- should match with the type of working. Warmer and pinker quartzes are good for changing someone else’s perspective. Black and white and translucent quartzes are good for changing yours- or someone else’s- feelings or perception about something in a particularly strong way. Purple quartzes are good for detecting magickal workings or spirits. Blue quartzes are good for evading detection or spells involving the concept of invisibility.

The Psychonaut Filed Manual by Blue Fluke.

Bismuth is a chemical element with the symbol Bi and atomic number 83. It is a pentavalent post-transition metal and one of the pnictogens with chemical properties resembling its lighter group 15 siblings arsenic and antimony. Elemental bismuth may occur naturally, although its sulfide and oxide form important commercial ores. The free element is 86% as dense as lead. It is a brittle metal with a silvery white color when freshly produced, but surface oxidation can give it an iridescent tinge in numerous colours. Bismuth is the most naturally diamagnetic element, and has one of the lowest values of thermal conductivity among metals.

Bismuth was long considered the element with the highest atomic mass that is stable, but in 2003 it was discovered to be extremely weakly radioactive: its only primordial isotope, bismuth-209, decays via alpha decay with a half-life more than a billion times the estimated age of the universe. Because of its tremendously long half-life, bismuth may still be considered stable for almost all purposes.

The collected works of Alice Bailey.

Moonstone is a sodium potassium aluminium silicate ((Na,K)AlSi3O8) of the feldspar group that displays a pearly and opalescent schiller. An alternative name is hecatolite. Its name is derived from a visual effect, sheen or schiller (adularescence), caused by light diffraction within a micro-structure consisting of regular exsolution layers (lamellae) of different alkali feldspars (orthoclase and sodium-rich plagioclase). Moonstone, in many cultures, has represented a sense of wonder, the exploration and understanding of space/astrophysics/astronomy and astrology, and desire to learn.

Moonstone has been used in jewelry for millennia, including ancient civilizations. The Romans admired moonstone, as they believed it was derived from solidified rays of the Moon. Both the Romans and Greeks associated moonstone with their lunar deities. In more recent history, moonstone became popular during the Art Nouveau period; French goldsmith René Lalique and many others created a large quantity of jewelry using this stone. [wikipedia]

Amethyst is a violet variety of quartz. Amethyst is a purple variety of quartz (SiO2) and owes its violet color to irradiation, impurities of iron and in some cases other transition metals, and the presence of other trace elements, which result in complex crystal lattice substitutions. The hardness of the mineral is the same as quartz, thus making it suitable for use in jewelry. Amethyst is traditionally used in workings to prevent/ward off illness and poisoning, particularly intentional poisoning.

The color of amethyst has been demonstrated to result from substitution by irradiation of trivalent iron (Fe3+) for silicon in the structure, in the presence of trace elements of large ionic radius, and, to a certain extent, the amethyst color can naturally result from displacement of transition elements even if the iron concentration is low. Natural amethyst is dichroic in reddish violet and bluish violet, but when heated, turns yellow-orange, yellow-brown, or dark brownish and may resemble citrine, but loses its dichroism, unlike genuine citrine. When partially heated, amethyst can result in ametrine. Amethyst can fade in tone if overexposed to light sources and can be artificially darkened with adequate irradiation.  It does not fluoresce under either short-wave or long-wave UV light.

Of very variable intensity, the color of amethyst is often laid out in stripes parallel to the final faces of the crystal. One aspect in the art of lapidary involves correctly cutting the stone to place the color in a way that makes the tone of the finished gem homogeneous. Often, the fact that sometimes only a thin surface layer of violet color is present in the stone or that the color is not homogeneous makes for a difficult cutting. It can even cut crystal quartz, which is one of Earth’s sharpest gems. [wikipedia]

Postmodern Magic: The Art of Magic in the Information Age by Patrick Dunn.