Resh vel Helios

Thoughts on Six Years of Practice

Dome of the entrance hall of the Széchenyi Bath, Budapest, Northern Hungary

Hail unto thee who art Oriens, most shining and excellent King who reigns over and commands the Eastern regions, whose Kingdom began with the founding of the World and shall endure unto the End of the Ages. You who holds dominion over the Kingdom of Fire and its Secrets, I give my thanks unto thee. Come now forth, clothed with all thy Glory, by the power of our Lord and by the virtue of virtues. Hail unto thee from the Abodes of Night! For I, your prophet, invoke and conjure thee by the power of the Emperor Lucifer your Sovereign Lord and by the obedience that you owe unto him, by Prince Belzebuth, most mighty potent, and by great and ancient Astaroth, that you grant me your aid in all things.

This month marks the six year anniversary of my practice of Liber Resh vel Helios. Making a conscious effort to sit down to write about it all is a little intimidating, but I promised myself I would do this, so here we are.

The following is a recounting of my experiences and thoughts. It is not exhaustive or a final word. Now I have accomplished six years of daily practice I am not sure I can stop, as the momentum to continue is so ingrained into my daily life, stopping now would feel like an abandonment or a negligence. Still, things have continued to evolve and change significantly in the way I practice Resh, and I think now is a great time to review, take stock and share what I have been though.

“O glorious Spirits of the East and of the Dawn, may the light of your flame burn brightly within my heart this day and may its light shine forth from behind my eyes to illuminate the World!”

Early 2020 was very similar to early 2006. I had reached a point in my practice where I felt there needed to be a big change. Not because I wasn’t doing well in my mundane life, I was doing quite well for myself. In 2006 I was in my second year of University, working two side jobs, one at a pub on the weekends, and at a club on Friday nights. I was also experiencing one of the most creative and artistic phases in my life. I was painting, film-making, editing, creating spaces for people with shared hobbies, going to and organising music events and moots, dating, reading, and of course, practicing magic. I’d been a huge fan of Peter Carroll and Phil Hine throughout collage, and after seven years of often extremely intense work I realised that I would never be really content picking at bits of magic here and there, and that I couldn’t practice Chaos Magic properly unless I actually fully and completely learned and implemented a system of Ceremonial Magic.

By 2020 I was in a very different place. I had already read all of Jake Stratton-Kent’s works at the time, The Serpent Tongue, True Grimoire, Geosophia, Cyprian the Mage, and Pandemonium. His perspectives and insights had blown up my entire understanding of magic. At the time I had been living in Japan for 11 going on 12 years, in a long term relationship, recently landed one of the best paid Teaching positions available in the city, curating online spaces, experimenting with writing, and still working magic, but my understanding had lead me to the conclusion that Ceremonial Magic as presented by the majority of what was published at the time had taken me as far as it could. I wasn’t even a fan of it as a defined category anymore and found myself interested far more in the spaces between learned magic and intuitive, animistic sorcery. Besides, what I had learned from Jake’s writing had in effect, radically recontextualised my practice and justified my tendencies towards the grimoires and necromancy. The old way in which I approached and understood magic as a subject had been completely re-written, I realised that actually I didn’t really know anything at all despite my earlier confidence, and that, despite what modern system such as the Golden Dawn, Thelema, etc, might claim, the historical practice of sorcery was an entirely different beast. And so my interest in the grimoires and necromancy were affirmed by Jake’s writing. My personal intuitive approach was given context, a history, a narrative and a methodology; Goetia.

The grimoires were always my main interest. Right from the very beginning as soon as I realised they were a thing that existed. They were the least talked about though, and finding good books on how to apply their content was rare. That changed once I’d found Jake’s work, and I decided to commit to working the Grimorium Verum. That wasn’t enough though, I was also committed to initiating into the mysteries of the E∴Q∴, a system I had become rather fluent in and wanted to develop further. I was lucky enough to have a gang of like-minded people who were all interested in undergoing the same initiation together, the SUN-VENUS.

To spur me onwards I created a bedrock for my approach. First I founded an online space, The Grimorium Verum Study Group. This became my launching pad, for a start, it would attract like-minded people to the project and I could post my progress, my findings, and see other people doing the same. This would be the impetus to drive me forward and also create community, something I love facilitating. Second, I took all my notes that I had built up from five years of practicing E∴Q∴ and began laying out my thoughts and findings. One of the members of the gang of sorcerers I was spending a lot of time with online knew of the process of initiation as he had access to Jake’s articles from The Equinox: British Journal of Thelema, a group of essays which were later published as Thus Spake Magnus Dictus, a now quintessential document for people interested in the practice of this modern form of Stellar Sorcery. Cath Thompson’s work on the subject, House 418, was still unpublished. We set about working out how to perform our Initiation together, which required we all learn astrology more fluently, which was no simple feat, but I had enough understanding of Planetary Magic that I knew most of the basics.

May your flame ignite my Voice that it too may be carried to the four quarters, and that all Spirits, Men and Beasts that hear it shall bend their knee in supplication of thy will.

We planned our respective rituals and found our moment in Time to begin the Initiation, the union of the Sun and Venus, also known as the 107, being the value of those two words combined. We had time to prepare, it was several months away at the time, so we set about applying ourselves to the process and learning the ropes. Three of the base practices I decided I needed to master was memorising the Prayer for Success, the Stele of Jeu, and Resh vel Helios. These I would perform daily. This would be the foundation of my initiation in practical terms, the Prayer for Success, otherwise known as the Astrachios, was utilised to align with the Spirits of the Grimorium Verum, the Stele of Jeu to Enflame myself in prayer and call upon the highest authority, while Resh would be four daily reminders to centre myself on the Work. Small, simple steps. I would do them for six months as is recommended, then re-evaluate.

That was six years ago now. I endured my Initiation, my Ordeal X, which took me through the alchemical process of the 418 which begins in Libra and concludes in Capricorn. I also formed and signed my first Pact. The whole process was made possible because of these foundational practices established at the beginning of my work. Having the structures there to build upon is what got me to the place I am in now, but first the process of Initiation had to break me down. Having the bedrock of the Astrachios, the Stele, and Resh, meant that I could land on this rock and perform magic no matter what I was going through, collectively they became the roots of my practice in a way that has utterly transformed my life.

---

All this said, there is a creativity and artistic expression in Magic which is not static or rote, but fluid, dynamic and evolving. We must, by necessity, adapt to the shifting nature of time and the world. The structure of Resh was the first thing I adapted. This was largely because, while I consider myself to be somewhat Thelemish, I personally think Thelema is in dire need of fresh new air and thought, it needs an injection of youth, vibrance and joy to reinvigorate it for the modern day. What’s more, the rituals of the old time may be black, but they Work. I am not inclined to believe that this necessarily means that we must purge all the old systems of thought to move forward, and I find the current crop of “modern” forms of magic to be rather sterile, possessing a teleology I am uninterested in pursuing. Instead I think we should absolutely be informed by the past, as the roots of our shared heritage draw rich waters that sustains and feeds our modern engagement with sorcery. We must understand the past to strive towards tomorrow. So why not seek out meaning and context, finding what has been lost to history, and breath fresh new life into it in a modern context? We have reached a point of critical mass in our understanding of the source materials that a reignition of a tradition, hell, even the formation of a New Tradition based on this knowledge is possible. The Spirits have responded well as they are being given a new lease on life, their Names are being called upon once more, and this pleases them greatly.

I chose to adapt Resh and instead make calls of a similar nature, not to abstract concepts as described by Thelema, but to each of the Four Kings, those great Regents who reside about the Circle, at the thresholds of the Gates of the Seasons, whose dominion reigns from the depths of the Infernal, to the Sublunar Elements of the Terrestrial, through to the realm of the Signs of the Zodiac.

Oriens, as depicted in Clavis Inferni

Where is your Herald, Temel? Come now forth for I know your True Name and attend unto your King.

Today these Spirits are beginning to reclaim their role in the European Grimoire Tradition. You won’t find much mention of them in anything modern, as they were either misunderstood, ignored or deliberately whitewashed away. Modern magical systems in the “west” aren’t very comfortable with Demons and Necromancy, but despite all their attempts to escape from these themes, they are fighting a losing battle. We are making serious headway now in reclaiming what the occultists of the 19th and 20th centuries would have gladly discarded to legitimise their practices. My Resh was adapted, but I kept the framework of its structure. The goal was exactly the same, but there was a two pronged approach which I would like to describe fully here.

Firstly, the system of E∴Q∴ is very much a child of Thelema. While Peter Carroll’s Chaos Magic was attempting to bury astrology, Cath Thompson, Jim Lees and Jake Stratton-Kent, et al, were doing their damnedest to reinvigorate it, and while everyone knows about Chaos Magic, not many know about the ground breaking work done by those wonderful British sorcerers who cracked the code in Liber AL vel Legis and discovered an astrological key to the working of magic which remains potent and largely untapped.

Much as the Golden Dawn and Thelema tried to suppress necromancy and failed, we find that Chaos Magic is in the same boat today, it turns out everyone loves astrology! The gematria the early sorcerers of the E∴Q∴ laid out and developed is a vital aspect of the practice and allows us to consider the relationships between words and their shared values throughout any given text. Resh contains a lot of WORDS and NAMES which are utilised and analysed in the documents of the E∴Q∴ via this gematria, and so I felt that I needed to make sure I kept to this in my own work and adaptation. As a result, the Names and Words selected in my personal version of Resh were well considered before being applied. The values of these Words and Names were crafted to hold coherence and significance as they were spoken, meaning that while one thing is spoken out loud, a plethora of meanings and values are expressed and can be explored for deeper meanings if one were to analyse their content.

Secondly, the adaptation needed to be populated with a meaningful and historically legitimate set of Spirits, mapped to the Sun, the axis mundi and the cardinal nature of the Circle. It was here that I returned to sources such as the Clavis Inferni, A Book of the Offices of Spirits, Agrippa’s Three Books of Occult Philosophy, as far back as the Summa Sacre Magice, and the as then untranslated work of Cecco d’Ascoli which Brian Johnson and I have recently published through Hadean Press as, ‘An Exposition upon the Sphere of the Cosmos’.

I created a carry bag for my tools made from an old leather headphone pouch. I got myself a Red Book in which all my conjurations, calls, prayers and adorations were written, and a diary into which I would write four times a day, every day. I also carried some other tools with me, a small velvet red pouch which had a heliotrope stone inside upon which was painted the First Character of the Grimorium Verum, created under the exact astrological conditions described therein. Some other small and easily carried items were added over time. No matter where I went, I had my little bag of tricks. I could practice on the go no matter where I was in the World.

Oriens! whose crown shines with the light of the first Star, bedecked as you are in your colours of Gold, White, and Red.

I swapped out the Thelemic God Names for the Kings, learning as much as I could about them as I did so. There was a lot of confusion in the source materials, but after significant study, I landed on a set of correspondences which fit and made some sense. These were shaky at first, and the sympathies and coherences went through a few renovations. It didn’t matter that my first few months of practice were “wrong”, what matters, as it should with all our magic, is that I formulated something from my understanding which was viable according to my knowledge and understanding, and then stress test it in the field. Practice, practice practice.

My dreams changed, and I found that I was once more in a similar state of being that I experienced as a young teenager, where I felt this great reservoir of potentia boiling up inside my soul. That sense has returned to me again recently. It means things are about to change. These dreams I was experiencing informed me on how to change things in my practice. I started enacting them to see what would happen. It was like a door being unlocked inside me, and my sorceries started to snowball.

I found great inspiration in Legard & Cummins’s An Excellent Booke Of The Arte Of Magicke, as well as Al Cummins’s online class on the Four Kings, and it was his work and advice on the Thrones which took my practice to the next level. Creating Seats for each King was married to a series of conjurations, both inspired by astrology and the structure of hierarchy found in A Book of the Offices of Spirits. This was nestled within my work on the Grimorium Verum, as well as my love for the Heptameron and Hygromanteia and was so fruitful that I wrote an entire book on the concept of Time which came from my work, The Hours: The Καταρχαί of Hygromanteia. It’s only now that we have translations such as Aaman Lamba’s L’Art Magique that my experiments in this area have been proven to be historically verified and not my own modern invention.

---

As I mentioned earlier, the initiation into the E∴Q∴ begins with a ritual to the union of the Sun with Venus, but it doesn’t truly start until the Sun entered the 418 complex, that being the time in which the Sun passes from Libra through Capricorn. These four zodiacal Signs are each part of a process of spiritual alchemy in which the individual first balances themselves and takes stock, then finds themselves confronted with death, burned to ash in fire, then what remains, the seed, is planted within the cardinal earth to be reborn. And so, like clockwork, as the Sun entered Scorpio my father, who had been suffering from recurring brain cancer since I was 14, took ill again. This time the doctors couldn’t do anything about it, and the previously small and benign tumour, which they had attempted to remove fully three times already, metastasized and became extremely aggressive. They gave my Dad a week to live. I immediately booked a flight home to the UK for the next day.

---

This was my Underworld journey, my encounter with the Silence of Kephra and the midnight Sun. Covid was at its peak, and Kansai airport was a filled with ghosts. Where normally there are long lines and crowds of people, I was alone. Even the bus I had to take from Matsuyama was empty. I went to check-in and I was the only person amid rows of empty conveyer belts and security booths. I had a long wait, and watched the Sun set before my plane was scheduled to leave at 11pm. Flying back towards the UK, the night was long, and I slept through the next day to awake in the darkness again. Despite it all, I performed my Resh with an alarm set.

O you who rides upon the flaming steed and bears the blazing sword which divides the Horizon with the cacophony of Dawn!

My Dad died the day after I got home. It was peaceful, we were in our home, the flat me and my Dad has redecorated and refurbished together several years earlier. My Mum and Brother were with us, and we held him as he went at 5:07 in the evening. The last people he saw were his two best mates who had only just gotten the chance to come see him themselves. As the Sun set I made my adoration to Paimon in the West.

I didn’t call anyone to come pick him up or move him. Instead I spent the night with him. We watched a movie and shared a bottle of his favourite whisky, then talked all night. I told him how I was, my goals, my ambitions. I sat in silence and listened. The next morning, when the undertakers came, I finally began to grieve.

I organised the funeral and made the invitations, informed the newspapers, he was a local councillor, had run the youth club with my mum for many years, and had even been invited to become mayor at one point but declined. He meant a lot to people, and had been a big character in my hometown since he was a boy. People we didn’t even know came out and lined the street as we left in the hearse to the funeral. All this time, I had my practice, my little bag and my Red Book on me. I excused myself at the correct moments and went to practice in a bathroom or somewhere private. It became a rock to hold on to, so the waters didn’t carry me away.

When I returned to Japan the structures I had developed in my practice of Resh continued to evolve. That next Spring I began conjuring the Messenger of Oriens, Temel, and set myself to learn as much as I could about this Spirit. I learned their Seal and a significant amount of details concerning their function, and was told quite explicitly that from now on the Spirits sharing Temel’s rank desired to be known as Heralds. The explanation for this was entirely based on gematria, but also in the nature of language and how it’s used by the sorcerer to engage with Spirits of a certain class. While the historical documents may call them Messengers, they are much more than that and have a very unique role in regard to the manner in which we approach and work with the Four Kings. Calling them Heralds was sort of a new lick of paint to set them apart from their peers, and once you see them in action, the title is extremely apt.

May my Name be written within your Book as yours is written within mine!

The Heralds informed me on how to conjure the Kings. Some say the Kings shouldn’t be called alone, but the Book of the Offices clearly describes them as beings that can be worked with, with offices and methods of conjuration. Why not call to them? They certainly positioned me in a place that encouraged me to try, so I saw no reason not to. They taught me of their natures, the names of the steeds that carry them, the nature and names their weapons, the members of their entourage, and much more. With each conjuration I adapted my work with Resh. It became an organic process. Applying what I learned to the next sequence of conjurations improved my ability to work my sorcery, and taught me how to then learn more. I completed four cycles of these conjurations in as many years, hitting each first Sunday under a Waxing Crescent Moon after the Sun entered into each of the four Cardinal Signs. As I was making adorations to them at each station of the Sun, this became fairly easy to accomplish as there is this proximity and momentum which makes establishing a connection far simpler.

A bit longer than a year after my Dad passed away I lost my job. As my relationship with my boss deteriorated, as had my health. She didn’t want to employ me anymore because what we had thought was stress induced epilepsy had spiked significantly after my father had passed away. She made working at the company a nightmare, only increasing my stress and worsening my seizures. Despite the hell she put me through, I continued to fall back onto my practice. It centred me, gave me focus and allowed me to keep my head on. I still lost the job, getting fired from my position the night before Christmas eve. I was told not to return in the new year. At the time this felt like the end of the world, but in retrospect it was one of the best things that ever happened to me. It pushed me to become independent, to seek out my own means of income. And I have, thus far anyway, done fairly well.

Despite initially being terrified, I managed to land on my feet with the help of some amazing people and wonderful friends. I got married, and then over the last two years I have been blessed with two boys. When my eldest son was born I was by my partners side, helping her though the pain. I had my small bag with me, my Red Book, stone and other small items. At noon I made my call to Amaymon in the South, and at 1am my son arrived. I have never felt such a raw sense of wonder, terror and love. My son was born within the bounds of Leo, where the Sun is domicile. I chose his first name to reflect that, and gave him my father’s as his middle name.

By this time my practice had become vastly different from what it had looked like when I began this project. It has become an animal, not a detached sequence of actions I performed, but something that has been won via direct application of sorcery. It has formed itself into a living thing which reacts and responds. The catastrophic events which brought me here were awful, but necessary for me to exist as I do today, truly an Ordeal that I had to fight through. My initiation and my contact with the Spirits brought about the pain, but it was a pain that lead me somewhere beautiful. It was the pain of transformation. I had to face challenges and see them through. I had to sacrifice my stability and take a leap of faith over the void to find happiness. And all the while, the Spirits walked with me and informed me, guided me towards a position where I could do greater honour to them. Even the house I live in now came about through this work, and I have a dedicated space to work my magic in, a Spirit Room and a small garden to grow my herbs in, something I had always longed for.

May your virtue and element move through me, lymph, marrow and blood, inspire me, and may all things that I do this day be done in your Name and in your honour!

What have I learned from committing myself to this sorcery?

I have learned that magic when applied does indeed have the ability to change one’s situation in life for the better, although what one wants and what one needs are vastly different. This change is often painful and scary, and the results can take a great amount of time and reflection to appreciate. I have also learned that magic repays tenfold what you put in, but the rewards can often be imperceptible from the outside. The bigger picture of one’s life and the direction it is taking come to the fore. What I can say with confidence is that the Spirits respond well when you commit yourself to working with them. This needn’t be a pact in the sense that one works with forming allegiances with Spirit allies via the Grimorium Verum, but a commitment to working magic in a way that centres on small daily acts. When we find ourselves in a tight spot, often a quick, “I need help”, is all that is needed. In this regard I have had an entire plethora of results, often accomplished within moments. This intimacy comes from continuous daily routine. The channels are open, the snowball keeps rolling and our momentum continues to grow.

What is the price of all this though? Well, for a start, your time to a degree. You have to organise your day around hitting the stations of the Sun. Once a week on Tuesday mornings at dawn I have a much larger version of my adoration which I perform. I make offerings to Spirits, specifically to Scirlin, to the Spirits I have Pacts with, and to the Spirits of my tools. Noon, Sunset and Midnight take all of five minutes to perform. This process wasn’t taught to me by my superior in the A∴A∴ as Liber Resh describes, but instead by the Spirits themselves after years of daily work, conjurations and countless rituals and spells. It didn’t all come in an instant either, it has taken six years of daily work to get where I am now, and I imagine it will continue to evolve as the years go on.

The main thing I have been asked to do specifically is get better at writing. When my Dad died it was like someone lit a fire under me. The Spirits asked me to write them a book and that’s how my as yet unpublished text on the E∴Q∴ came about, this process continued and produced my other two books, The Hours and An Exposition. These Spirits want me to talk about them to those interested in listening. The creation of a Book is a magical act, and the Names within the book are possessed of a linguistic virtue, the medium through which the Sorcerer interfaces with reality. I have, throughout all this process, been writing another book dedicated entirely to the Four Kings, including my experiences, how I engaged with them, and how you can integrate them into your life in a similar way. It began three years ago now but The Hours happened as a side project that took on its own shape very quickly, and after that my very old and long burning project regarding Cecco d’Ascoli launched up to suddenly take up all my attention. In each case the Spirits were there, happy that I am fulfilling my end of the bargain, which to be honest fills me with great joy. As the books are written I find I am, more than anything, learning a great deal more about the subject I am most passionate about, and I think this might be the goal of the invisible hand moving me. I need to study before I commit to writing their Book, and there are tasks that must be accomplished before that is possible.

I could never have imagined I would be in the position I am in right now, in a stable place able to work on this material for the members of my Guide, to all of you who read my work and listen to my podcast with Hadean Press, I am truly grateful.

What comes next? I am really not sure. I’ve been in uncharted territory for a while now. I intend to continue working my sorcery and writing, I still have a deal to fulfil, but my life continues to be absolutely and most wondrously blessed by the arrival of my children whose shining light is the most beautiful magical success of my entire life.

All hail the Sun

O glorious Spirit, Oriens, come now forth and without delay, and may the calling of your Name reveal all secrets and remove all obstacles from before my path. This I ask of you, O Spirit, for I, your prophet, shall write your Book, and work your magic upon the face of the Earth.

🜨

For more like this follow the link below to join our community as we explore and practice the sorceries of the Grimorium Verum.