I asked Joseph about the services he performs for his clients.

“You name it man. Anything you want done for you I will do it. If you want a visa I have something for that. If you woman leave you I can get her back for you. If you have a court case I will deal with that too,” Joseph pounded his fist into his palm as he spoke and his eyes widened with excitement. He explained that $14,000 will get you a visa to any place in the world you’d like to visit and if the love of your life was silly enough to think she could leave you and go cavorting around town with another, he would get her back for you for a measly $7,000.

I asked Joseph how he got into the white magic business in the first place.

“Well, when I was 15 somebody try work science on me. Dem put a powder in my hymn book at church and it make my head feel like it was going to tear off! I was sick bad. I decide that I wouldn’t want anybody to have that power over me again so I start to read all kind ofbooks. My father was a great science man himself as well so I learn from him and carry on the tradition. I was the only one of his children who carry on the teaching and the work for him,” Joseph said.

Full Story: Jamaica Gleaner.

(via Padre Engo)

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Paul Green’s audio drama of rocketry, passion and magick, performed by Travesty Theatre in London 2005 and directed by Alison Rockbrand. The play explores the life of Jack Parsons - godfather of the American space programme and acolyte of the magus Aleister Crowley.

Part 1.

Part 2.

More by Paul Green.

His novel, The Qliphoth.

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“…the ancient Hebrew word for Cannabis is Kaneh-Bosem, also rendered in the traditional Hebrew as Kaneh or Kannabus. In Hebrew the root word kan has a double meaning of Reed or Hemp and Bos translates as Aromatic.” Google “Kaneh Bosem” for insight on this. It’s a few different places in the torah supposedly -makes sense considering the historic value of the plant everywhere else. Here are some quotes from an article that might explain things a bit. (I don’t know who is best qualified to explain things of this nature, I think we all have to do our part to help and mine seems to be to inspire open minded thought.) ”

(via The Crop of The Future. Hat tip: Cannablog)

(Related: “Marijuana in the Holy Oil?”, and The Church of The Universe)

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(Via Ikipr, who’s also uploaded some more esoZone stuff).

More Outside the Box.

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No, not VALIS. VALS. It used to stand for “Values and Lifestyle System,” but it no longer stands for anything. It’s the primary market segmentation system for market researchers.

More info: Introduction to VALS.

(see also: An Introduction to Spiral Dynamics).

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The “over and over” part is the key to understanding the “why” of what investigative journalist Steve Salerno calls the Self-Help and Actualization Movement (SHAM). In his recent book Sham: How the Self-Help Movement Made America Helpless (Crown Publishing Group, 2005), he explains how the talks and tapes offer a momentary boost of inspiration that fades after a few weeks, turning buyers into repeat customers. While Salerno was a self-help book editor for Rodale Press (whose motto at the time was “to show people how they can use the power of their bodies and minds to make their lives better”), extensive market surveys revealed that “the most likely customer for a book on any given topic was someone who had bought a similar book within the preceding eighteen months.” The irony of “the eighteen-month rule” for this genre, Salerno says, is this: “If what we sold worked, one would expect lives to improve. One would not expect people to need further help from us–at least not in that same problem area, and certainly not time and time again.”

Surrounding SHAM is a bulletproof shield: if your life does not get better, it is your fault–your thoughts were not positive enough. The solution? More of the same self-help–or at least the same message repackaged into new products. Consider the multiple permutations of John Gray’s Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus–Mars and Venus Together Forever, Mars and Venus in the Bedroom, The Mars and Venus Diet and Exercise Solution–not to mention the Mars and Venus board game, Broadway play and Club Med getaway.

Full Story: Scientific American.

(via 43 Folders).

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The Gematriculator is a service that uses the infallible methods of Gematria developed by Mr. Ivan Panin to determine how good or evil a web site or a text passage is.

Basically, Gematria is searching for different patterns through the text, such as the amount of words beginning with a vowel. If the amount of these matches is divisible by a certain number, such as 7 (which is said to be God’s number), there is an incontestable argument that the Spirit of God is ever present in the text. Another important aspect in gematria are the numerical values of letters: A=1, B=2 … I=9, J=10, K=20 and so on. The Gematriculator uses Finnish alphabet, in which Y is a vowel.

Experts consider the mathematical patterns in the text of the Holy Bible as God’s watermark of authenticity. Thus, the Gematriculator provides only results that are absolutely correct.

Gematriculator.

(via GPOD)

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Expose of Madonna and Britney Spears’s school of Kabbalah:

The Bergs’ luxurious lifestyle, in stark contrast to the bleak four-to-a-bedroom conditions and $35-a-month stipend they offer the full-time volunteers who cook and clean for them.

The bizarre scientific claims made by the Centre’s leaders on behalf of Kabbalah Water, ranging from its ability to cleanse the lakes of Chernobyl of radiation to its power to cure cancer, AIDS, and SARS.

The Bergs have come a long way since 1971, when Philip, then known as Shraga Feivel Gruberger, began preaching his version of Jewish mystical enlightenment to a small group of students in Israel. A onetime insurance salesman who left his wife and seven kids to marry Karen, his former secretary, Berg has become a man so revered that some of his followers believe he has the power to resurrect the dead. In the process he has created a multimillion-dollar brand out of a bastardization of an arcane branch of Judaism, larding it with pricey accessories and bold-faced names. His followers have been promised that Kabbalah can find their lost children, cure their illnesses, replenish their pocketbooks, and bring them true love. Berg himself is so above it all that even his wife refers to him, at least to the press, only by an honorific. He is “the Rav.”

Link (via Boing Boing).

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Click link below for full image.

Metachor’s mapped the sephiroth, the Chakras, and the Leary’s 8 dimensions of consciousness to each other.

Link

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I think this is nicely written.

In Hermetic, magickal, Qabalah in contrast, the ten sefirot (”sephiroth”) pertain to ten aspects of what could be called the astral or magical world. In contrast with dualistic theism, but in keeping with a neoplatonic and emanationist understanding, they are the ten intermediate stages between the indescribable infinite or Absolute (En Sof, or “Ain Soph”) and the mundane reality. They are identified with ten grades of magical initiation, the seven planets of traditional astrology (with the lowest sefirah, Malkhut, representing the Earth, and the two highest the fixed stars and the sphere of God) and with a numerological analysis of the numbers one to ten. The twenty-two paths which link the ten sefirot are identified with one of the twenty-two Hebrew letters and twenty-two Major Arcana tarot trumps). Thus, not only each sefirah has a particular archetypal meaning, but each path as well, making thirty-two archetypes altogether. By the proper means therefore it is possible to invoke any of these fundamental essences. To this end, the Golden Dawn occultists from Mathers on drew up long and elaborate tables of correspondences, listing the precise colour, animal, perfume, precious stone, mythological beings, and so on. Crowley’s book “777″ (which appears to be a plagiarisation of a manuscript circulated by Mathers, with Crowley’s additional notes) give a comprehensive list of these tables of attributes.

Link (via Digital Raven).

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