Locus Focus
What does your memory say?
Who lifts the veil of Isis?
Who pays attention to locality?
What do you know through culture?
Is this an evocation?
Chant Abracadabra softly.
Say Zu-buru-dabbeda carefully.
What is your mental health?
Do you juggle with objects and/or ideas?
Speak of the weird and uncanny.
What is the power of kotodama?
What is the power of zagovory?
Who believes in hocus-pocus?
Is all culture preternatural.
Would you prefer Carnivale or Carmen Arvale?
Do you require assistance of the Antikythera mechanism or a powerful owl or a series of sonnets?
What is the difference between a true name and a nonsense word?
Who are the barbarians?
Who are the Australians?
In the beginning was the Wyrd.
Who would sing the Carmen Saliare?
How do you interpret ethnic religions?
What does it mean to have acuity within a locality?
Do you interpret with verse or paint or silence?
Have you ever witnessed an ambarvalia?
Have you studied the nature of sociality?
Do you know much about limnology and liminality?
Are you acquainted with the Nemi ships?
Are you familiar with Diana Nemorensis?
Have you ever joined a Nemoralia?
What is your locus of control?
There is a time and place for a carmen or carmina or carminative.
Where is Prometheus?
How do you interpret human settlements?
How do you interpret the delusions of a king?
How did Shakespeare interpret those delusions?
What are the societal consequences of crazy leadership?
Who knows what is beyond the left-hand path and right-hand path?
Who follows Vamachara?
Who follows Dakshinachara?
Which way did the Three Witches go?
How did they choose the locus?
What did they know about locusts?
What did they know about coronaviruses?
What did they know about corvidae?
What did they know about quorum sensing?
What did they know about quantum mechanics?
What did they know about the persecution of pagans in the late Roman Empire?
What did they know about the rex Nemorensis?
What did they know about intelligence?
How did they interpret songlines?
What do you know about the suburbs and localities of Australia, including the Blue Lake at Mount Gambier?
Do you know much about the importance of water?
Do you know much about golden boughs?
Do you know how to define importance in relation to surviving and thriving and contributing to the continuity of a peaceful culture?
Have you thought much about the meanings associated with the words evoke and invoke and conjure and manifestation?
What do you know about the anthropology of magic and religion?
How do you reflect upon patterns of human behaviour?
Perhaps you wish to perform an invocation to seek help in answering these questions.
Or maybe you want to perform an evocation.
What does the word evocative mean to you?
What does the word provocative mean to you?
How do you prefer to examine and interpret cultural meanings?
What have you discovered from the history of invoking assistance?
What is your acquaintance with the Latin word manifestatio?
Perhaps you are reading this grimoire as a member of the ordinary, global public.
What is your acquaintance with the English word manifesto?
How do you currently interpret the words incantation and enchant?
What do you know about trees in mythology?
Do you always examine cultural meanings in their local and historical contexts?
Do you always distinguish clearly between beliefs and facts?
Do you always have a local focus when examining beliefs and a universal perspective when examining facts?
The only valid universal perspective is based on accurate evidence and good reasoning.
What is your acquaintance with practices associated with attribution?
A grimoire is a textbook. It is a book of magic spells. It is a book reflecting beliefs and how to express them. It does not necessarily explain beliefs or their source(s).
What do you know about sacred kings and their association with fertility rites?
Beliefs are often a reflection of myths, not facts.
How do you distinguish between a god and a spirit?
How do you distinguish between Satan and Santa?
How do you distinguish between a demon and a devil?
How do you distinguish between the sacred and the holy?
What does the word monde mean to you?
What do the words bestiary and sybarite mean to you?
What appears to be manifest is not necessarily perceived accurately, in anyone's mind.
How do you define the secular?
What does the Latin word saeculum mean to you?
And what does the word mean in English?
How do you interpret Dante's Dream?
How do you trace the development of ideas from one time in history to another?
.jpg){kind=link}
How do you reflect upon the timeless?
What do you know about La Vita Nuova?
How do you currently compare The Oathbound Book of Honorius with The Grimoire of Pope Honorius and the Necronomicon?
How do you compare yourself with Publius Vergilius Maro, otherwise known as Virgil?
How do you compare a national epic with pseudohistory and real history?
How do you compare physiognomy, metoposcopy and demonology?
How do you compare a frontispiece with a shamsa and a mandala?
How do you compare this grimoire with other grimoires?
How do you compare one place with another?
Where does your imagination usually reside?
What is your fictional universe?
Perhaps you mistake your imagination for a factual world.
Who were the Cimmerians?
What is your acquaintance with Aricia and Ariccia?
What is your acquaintance with Cumae and the Cumaean Sibyl?
Sometimes, a focus on the local is sensible. At other times, it is very dangerous indeed.
Experiences of politics, whether local or global, have always had much in common with being a rex Nemorensis.
Perceptions of the sacred have often been intertwined with the brutal.
The retelling of stories may not necessarily be an accurate reflection of the originals.
But what, in various situations, is the purpose of retelling stories?
And what, in various situations, is the purpose of rewriting history?
What have you discovered about the relationship between myth and ritual in various cultures?
How carefully have you attempted to distinguish between mythology and religion?
How carefully have you attempted to distinguish between politics, religion and the occult?
How do you respond when religion-based opinions oppressively influence politics?
How do you respond when greed-based opinions oppressively influence politics, religion and every other aspect of culture?
How do you respond to claims about the past when the associated history is difficult to ascertain?
There are many facts to acknowledge, too.
The initiation practices associated with this grimoire are entirely peaceful.
While historical revisionism is often the most important task of respectable historians, disrespectful and deluded persons tend to prefer historical negationism.
What, though, is the most important task of wonderful witches?
Wonderful witches respect the truth of history and science. They are not deluded.
What is your acquaintance with the Alban Hills to the south of Rome?
What is your acquaintance with the Campanian volcanic arc around Naples?
How do you reflect upon the influence of nature on beliefs?
Do you regard yourself as a relatively general reader or as a specialist scholar and expert, possibly even on the subject of grimoires?
Are you already quite well acquainted with the works of Giordano Bruno, Petrus Ramus, Jean Bodin, John Milton and William Blake?
Do you have an acquaintance with Caligula?
Do you have an acquaintance with the Camorra?
Have you compared William Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience with John Milton's L'Allegro and Il Penseroso?
Have you read Bulfinch's Mythology and/or any works by Hélène Adeline Guerber, Helen Zimmern, Hilda Ellis Davidson, Edith Hamilton, Ella Young or E. E. Evans-Pritchard?
How do you usually attempt to acquire an understanding of the psyche of a culture from a particular time and place?
What do you know about the work of Thomas Cole and his sister Sarah?
What is your acquaintance with Mount Etna and the other Decade Volcanoes?
What do you know about volcanic gases?
What do you know about greenhouse gases?
What is your acquaintance with the carbon budget?
You may know something about the Global Carbon Project.
You may know about the Deep Carbon Observatory.
You may know about the Deep Earth Carbon Degassing Project.
You may know about oracular statements from Delphi.
You may know about the dangers of rumours and gossip.
You may be acquainted with the dangers associated with criminal organisations, corrupt bureaucracies and self-serving lobbyists.
How do you compare The Golden Bough with The Bower Meadow?
What have you discovered about the world through ethnography?
How have you compared Ramism with Lullism?
What have you discovered about Avernus, Lake Avernus and the Phlegraean Fields?
What have you discovered about government failure and market failure?
Perhaps you mistakenly believe that wonderful witches focus on otherwordly matters.
Instead, they have a focus on preventing harm, locally and globally. They form a benign, international secret society and work anonymously, undercover through numerous local activist networks. They are widely hated as they carefully document evidence of good practices and wrongdoing.
How have you compared your efforts with Paradise Lost?
How have you compared your efforts with Milton?
How have you compared your efforts to L'Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato?
How have you compared your efforts with Divina Commedia?
How have you compared your travel options over the past eighteen months with travel in classical antiquity?
How have you compared views about witchcraft in various societies, and for what purpose?
Who attempts to control the supernatural, and why, and how?
Who attempts to control the political, and why, and how?
Who attempts to control the greedy, and why, and how?
What have you discovered about the evil of environmental crimes?
What have you discovered about the evil of coercion?
What have you discovered about the evil of undue influence?
How do you address environmental crimes, coercive practices and undue influence?
How do you attempt to conduct comparative research in relation to perceived wrongdoing and the persecution of alleged wrongdoers?
Instead, they seek the justified prosecution of known wrongdoers, particularly charlatans, hypocrites and bullies.
Perhaps you associate witchcraft with money and glamour.
Perhaps you associate witchcraft with Malleus Maleficarum and/or Daemonologie.
How do you currently compare witchcraft, sorcery and magic, and why?
The historical images in this grimoire are mainly associated with European cultural practices.
How do you compare images of Lake Nemi?
How do you compare religions?
How do you compare various cultural perspectives on witchcraft?
What have you discovered in an academic library?
The history of European witchcraft prosecutions is well documented.
Women were burned as witches in Europe. Women were burned as Hindu high-caste widows in India.
How do you compare biographical representations of alleged witches with artistic representations.
Perhaps you mainly associate witchcraft with the grotesque and macabre.
Was Beatrice enchanting to Dante?
Was Laura enchanting to Petrarch?
Perhaps you are attracted to places such as the gardens of Bomarzo.
Perhaps you are interested in the life and career of Marie Euphrosyne Spartali and/or her husband, William James Stillman.
Perhaps you have been thoughtfully examining the career of James George Frazer.
Or perhaps you are more interested in the career of Dante Gabriel Rossetti.
Have you ever thought about social influence as a form of magic?
Have you ever thought of particular times in history as magical?
Have you ever thought about cultural influences, impacts and consequences as magical?
Have you ever though about economic influences and impacts as expressive of magic?
Have you ever thought of spectacle as a form of magic or enchantment or deception?
Have you ever thought of love as enchanting?
Have you ever thought of joyfulness as magic?
Perhaps you regard romantic love as an enchanted garden.
Perhaps you have developed a beautiful garden, and possibly even a secret or secluded one, as an enchanting retreat from disillusionment.
Perhaps you have developed an enchanting location, with or without buildings. You may have done so to attract tourists and/or other financially attractive visitors.
Perhaps you have made enchanting pictures and/or music and/or sculptures and/or clothing and/or jewellery and/or meals and/or videos for financial purposes.
Perhaps you regard ephemeral desires as more enchanting than eternal truths.
How do you respond to Love's Messenger?
How do you reflect upon the meaning of delight?
How do you reflect upon the meaning of allure?
How do you reflect upon the meaning of sacrifice?
How do you reflect upon the meaning of resentment?
How do you reflect upon the meaning and influence of attractiveness in terms of emotions, reasoning and decisions?
What do you know about seduction as a form of sorcery?
What is your acquaintance with the male gaze?
What do you know about art movements as enchantments?
What do you know about art periods in relation to politics, economics and religion?
Perhaps you regard Venus as one of your ancestors.
Whether you do or not, are you familiar with cultural neuroscience and bioculture?
Perhaps Taweret, Eileithyia, Artemis and Diana are familiar to you.
What have been your experiences of cross-cultural studies?
What is your acquaintance with The Allegory of Good and Bad Government?
What is your acquaintance with The Mill?
What is your acquaintance with the philosophy of culture?
What is your acquaintance with intercultural relations?
What do you know about religion in Ancient Rome and how do you compare it with other religions?
What do you know about cultural landscapes and cultural mapping?
How do you interpret social spaces?
How do you interpret the meaning of chthonic?
How do you interpret the meaning of the ethereal?
What is your acquaintance with quintessence?
What does understanding the impossible mean to you?
What is your acquaintance with cultural universals?
How do you respond to classicism?
What is your acquaintance with classics and the humanities?
What is your acquaintance with allusions and illusions?
What do you know about anti-humanism and the picturesque and the Rococo and Neoclassicism and Romanticism and Illusionism and Realism and Symbolism and the Pre-Raphaelites and Aestheticism?
Perhaps you know something about Maria d'Aquino and A Vision of Fiammetta.
How do you reflect upon the meaning of historical developments and cultural evolution?
What is your acquaintance with a political incantation for peace and justice?
What is your acquaintance with myths about the origin of death?
What is your acquaintance with dying-and-rising deities?
You may be aware that disenchantment has nothing to do with the diminishing influence of religion but with the growing influence of economic sources of persuasion, in private lives and in public life.
The secularisation of societies, away from religions towards other purposes, is not desecration. Views about consecration and deconsecration are always associated with cultural values.
What do you know about Love Among the Ruins, as a poem and as a painting?
Even when knowledge is secularised, it can easily remain enchanting when the ethical and aesthetic are combined. It can also re-enchant the disenchanted.
Much cultural dissonance arises through abuse, not good reasoning.
What have you discovered during and after experiencing part three of the series on the enlightened re-enchantment of the world?
What have you been finding beguiling, and why?
What does the Arthurian character of the Lady of the Lake have in common with the Roman triple goddess of the hunt, the moon and the underworld?
Comments
Post a Comment