Magick Mondays

Magick Mondays are our regular Monday night study group/teaching coven/magick class. Attendance is open to anyone who has an interest in learning magick, particularly in a participatory, hands-on style. If you wish to sit at the feet of a guru, being spoon-fed drops of enlightenment, this is not for you. There are no gurus here. The basic philosophy is, we are all learning together, regardless of degrees or levels of adeptship. Lectures aren't ruled out, but they are a last resort -- the preference is, and always will be, to learn by doing, by actually working the system(s) we are using.

Subjects of interest

Potentially, anything magickal is up for grabs, though Qabalah is something of a focus currently. The intention is to concentrate on practical Qabalistic magick every other week, with the remaining weeks filled by other subjects that are of general interest.

Format

• 7pm: Arrive, chat, pot luck dinner. Please bring (real) food to share (not just chips & dips!).
• 8pm: Start of working
• 10pm: Approximate end of working

Location

Cupertino, CA. Please email for address/directions/contact details.

Required reading

For the Qabalah workings, it would be appreciated if you could get hold of copies of the following two books:

• Gareth Knight, A practical guide to Qabalistic symbolism, Weiser Books, 2002 [Amazon]
• Israel Regardie, A Garden of Pomegranates - Skrying on the Tree of Life, Llewellyn, 2005 [Amazon]

Also useful are:

• Dolores Ashcroft-Nowicki, The Shining Paths, Aquarian Press, 1983
• Aleister Crowley, 777 and other Qabalistic writings, Weiser Books, 1977
• Lon Milo Duquette, Understanding Aleister Crowley's Thoth Tarot, Weiser Books, 2003
• Aryeh Kaplan, Sefer Yetzirah: The Book of Creation, Revised Edition, Weiser Books, 1997

As a general note -- if you've not managed to do the reading or other work beforehand, please still show up. We won't scold you for being busy, because we are pretty frequently guilty of that ourselves.

Knight is a good technical foundation, though sometimes it is necessary to squint at his homophobia and his liking for Hubbard. Garden of Pomegranates is an excellent text and will be the source for most of our path workings -- it has a decided Golden Dawn flavour, which is perhaps unsurprising given the author. Nowicki makes a great second source, because she comes at the material more from the perspective of witchcraft.

Our approach is inspired by the Sefer Yetzirah itself. The aim is not to examine the sephirot and the paths -- rather, our aim is to examine with the paths. Go there and see what it feels like, then do some stuff to see what that feels like. From Kaplan (pp. 40),

"Once an individual is able to experience the Sephirot, he must make use of them to examine and test them. The author does not say, 'examine them,' but 'examine with them.' The Hebrew word used here is Bachan, and it means that one is to test things for their intrinsic quality as they are at the immediate moment.

Schedule

Further workings to be announced. Contact Us for more information.

Acknowledgment

Lon Milo Duquette's infamous Monday Night Magick Class is something of an inspiration here. Reading Duquette's various descriptions of that group in his books always made me feel that I wished I lived closer, so this is partly an attempt at making something like it happen here. All good ideas should be stolen. -- AM