Blessings and Curses

How do you compare one curse with another?

Is a painting a blessing or a curse?

What is anathema to you?

Do you think this grimoire is associated with a book curse?

Have you ever been trapped in a tower?

Do you spend your life observing shadows and weaving your imagination?

Have you ever been trapped in a philosophical cave?

What have been the blessings in your life, and how do you know?

What have been the curses upon your life, and how do you know?

From where do blessings and curses arise?

How do you distinguish between natural phenomena and non-natural phenomena? 

Do you regard it as a blessing that you currently have access to this grimoire?

Where do your ideas about blessings and curses arise?

Many centuries of human imaginings have shaped your mind.

You may associate blessings with good luck and/or good consequences.

You may associate curses with bad luck and/or bad consequences.

How often do you associate randomness with fate?

How often do you associate carefulness with good reasoning?

Adequate carefulness requires adequate knowledge and adequate measures to implement it.

But does anyone possess adequate knowledge?

And is it ever possible for humans to be adequately careful?

What do you most often take for granted, and why?

What do you never take for granted, and why?

There is much to learn, even from Hydra and the history of snake worship and serpent symbolism.

Perhaps you think you are cursed by the sins of your ancestors.

Perhaps you think you have been blessed by the sins of your ancestors, especially if your ancestors acquired great wealth and you have been a beneficiary of that acquisition.

Regardless of your ancestry and your beliefs about curses, blessings and mythological animals, how do you reflect upon the meaning and expression of virtue?

Do you usually regard invocations as blessings or curses or as quite neutral?

Perhaps such questions make you feel uncomfortable.

From the Bronze Age to the time beyond the Hellenistic period, literature, politics and urban life have shaped opinions on nature, peace and justice.

What is your acquaintance with the writings of Cicero, particularly De Natura Deorum and Tusculanae Disputationes?

What is your acquaintance with cult images, fetishes and icons?

Do you ever wear brocade on clothing and/or footwear?

Perhaps you have cursed the purchase of an uncomfortable pair of shoes.

Perhaps you feel blessed to have comfortable footwear when you most need it.

What is your acquaintance with Hera, Astarte and the mythological origin of the Milky Way?

How do you interpret claims of supernatural powers?

When, in your view, is a supplication no more than an expression of superstition?

Perhaps you regard nature as a goddess.

Perhaps you regard nature as cursed.

What is your acquaintance with the resource curse?

What is your acquaintance with ancient views of drought and famine?

What do you believe it means to live in harmony with nature?

Perhaps you regard ignorance of nature as a curse and knowledge of nature as a blessing.

You are unlikely to associate invocations is ineffability or inevitability, at least if you are reasonable.

This grimoire is mainly dedicated to testing and improving your knowledge, awareness and caution, whatever your current acquaintance with nature and the history of cultures.

Have you ever believed yourself to be possessed by a spirit more powerful and/or wise than yourself, or at least your usual self? 

Have you ever been a practitioner of Twaklinian thaumaturgy?

How do you compare a dragonfly with a phoenix?

How do you compare a fact with a belief?

Ignorant people may believe that someone with the ability to predict a lunar eclipse may actually have power over the moon.

Accurate predictions may be based on knowledge or they may be based on nothing more than a lucky guess.

What do you know about Aglaonice?

What is your acquaintance with the orbit of the moon?

What is your acquaintance with the solar cycle?

What do you know about theurgy?

Perhaps you believe that ritual purification is necessary in order to experience blessings.

Yet people of good faith are already purified if they are also in possession of good evidence and good reasoning.

How do you investigate the natural world?

What are sea monsters and lake monsters, and who has mapped dragons? 

Who understands the natural world?

How well have you observed it?

Have you cursed the arrogant?

Have you blessed the kind?

What is a pest?

What is a weed?

What is necessary?

What is greed?

How often do you ask such questions, even of yourself?

What is your acquaintance with the Naturales Quaestiones of Seneca?

What have you written about nature and morality?

Are you a person of much naïvety or are you more like Pierre Gassendi?

What do you know about atmospheric optics?

What do you know about the magnetosphere?

Have you ever seen an aurora?

Have you ever observed bioluminiscence?

It is easy to admire nature when feeling comfortable and reasonably safe.

Do you regard yourself as experiencing a blessing when feeling comfortable and reasonable safe?

When, if ever, has someone's idea of a joke has been your idea of a curse?

For night's swift dragons cut the clouds full fast,
And yonder shines Aurora's harbinger;
At whose approach ghosts, wandering here and there,
Troop home to churchyards. 

Have you ever been cursed or fooled by Puck?

Have you ever been blessed by Shakespeare?

Have you ever been completely out of luck?

Have you ever had much to fear?

When conflicts between good and evil are shaped by evil to the demise of the good, who is cursed?

How do you account for malice?

Do you feel blessed to be alive? 

Do you feel cursed through your inability to prevent harm to innocent people in various parts of the world?

How do you interpret The Quarrel of Oberon and Titania?

Why are innocent persons accused of witchcraft when they have no power over fairies and nature?

There has never been poetic justice for victims of cruelty, in any part of the world.  They are cursed by the irrational fears and arrogant demands of their tormentors.

Are you acquainted with the Wigtown Martyrs?

Are you acquainted with the White Rose resistance?

Have you ever participated in a rebellion?

Wonderful witches are aware that peaceful rebellion against cruelty and hypocrisy is a sacred act.

Innocence is always sacred.

Conscience is sacred whenever it is in harmony with reasonableness.

Fantasy is not sacred yet it is the unreasonable source of many beliefs about the sacred, and the non-sacred.

Would you prefer this grimoire to be written in a sacred language?

There is nothing sacred about ideologies and obfuscation.

How clear and reasonable is your cultural framework?

Do you bless the reasonable and curse the unreasonable?

Do you regard reasonableness as a magic word?

Are you sure you have a reasonable view of reality?

Although stage magic and fantasy magicians and fictional magic may be entertaining to some people, what is metaphysical truth?

Do you regard this grimoire in much the same way as a grail?

Are you acquainted with The Love Potion and the Holy Grail?

Have you ever been a member of a magical organisation intended to be entirely devoted to good?

There is no maleficium in this grimoire.  It is a text entirely devoted to making the world a much better place.

Such an outcome would certainly be a blessing.

Say the words:

"Heal the world."

Encourage reasonableness.

When does a gala require a galdr?

Do you read runes?

Do you have a magical worldview or an enlightened worldview? 

Perhaps you find an enlightened worldview disillusioning.

Perhaps you find a magical worldview frightening.

Is it possible to experience enlightened magic? 

Perhaps your worldview is neither magical nor enlightened.  It may merely be disillusioned and confused.

This grimoire expresses, and encourages, an enlightened worldview.

Wonderful witches are often enlightened seeresses.  They have the ability to prepare well for any possible eventuality though they only communicate their predictions when the evidence is overwhelming.  They are much like enlightened sibyls.

Wonderful witches are a blessing to any society, even though they are likely to be regarded as curses in corrupt ones.

Wonderful witches always keep in mind the five main questions of enlightened philosophy:

Is it possible to know what is real?

Is it possible to know what is good?

Is knowable reality ever good?

Is knowable goodness ever real?

How should an enlightened being respond to the unknown, the unknowable and the known?

Wonderful witches have much in common with Madame Geoffrin.

Perhaps Madame Geoffrin was a wonderful witch.

You may regard her as one of the 18th century embodiments of Twaklin.

Perhaps you regard yourself as a 21st century embodiment of Twaklin.

Enlightened beings are well aware that correlation does not imply causation.

Wonderful witches are enlightened beings though they are not supernatural ones.