Hello everybody,

I've been looking for an online forum suitable for my interests, and I found this one by accident while doing a Google search on vibrating god names. I don't really believe in accidents these days, though...so, here I am.

I'm not new to magick by any stretch of the imagination, but I've also never had a very organized or structured practice. I was introduced into magick by a friend when I was 12 or so. He did something which, at the time, seemed pretty remarkable to me. We'd been walking and talking one afternoon, and it was quite hot outside. We came to a drinking fountain, and the water it offered was even hotter. I decided to run the water for a while, figuring that the hot water was simply that which had been sitting in the pipes of the fountain all day, but after several minutes, the water wasn't getting any cooler. My friend plucked a leaf from a nearby tree, said some incantation over it, touched the leaf to the stream of water, and the water instantly became ice-cold.

Looking back, I can definitely see that this could have been a coincidence; but this friend of mine, if not possessed of some kind of power, was at least very good at arranging some interesting coincidences. The night he took me on officially as a student, I remember the way he raised his staff in the air, and said "Let the wind rise", and rise it did, in a powerful gust, on an otherwise still and quiet night.

He never taught me about ritual, about symbols, about astrology, or any of these things. What he taught me was, I would learn years later, far more important to an aspiring mage: He taught me to believe. He taught me to fool myself into letting go of the consensus reality just long enough to make nifty things happen.

My practice, if you could call it that, was very haphazard, owing, most likely, to the way I was taught. My friend taught me a kind of "magic" that involved chanelling energy through the body, storing it in crystals and such. This kind of magic had its limitations, but was performed on-the-spot. No circle, no preliminary work to speak of. As a result, even as I began to study magic on my own, I tended to completely disregard all mention of casting circles, etc. I made one attempt at ritual, using an alphabet I created myself to spell out names and words indicating my intent on a talisman of my design. It was a very negative intent, and I channeled a lot of anger and disgust into those words as I placed them. I never even got to activate the talisman. A source of guidance I had at the time recommended that I burn the talisman and disperse the energies in it before I did something I would regret. I refused. That night, my house burned down in a fire that, according to my mother who witnessed it, started right near my backpack--where the talisman was being kept.

I had one other, less destructive mishap, also involving a talisman I'd created....this one done more as an expression of something, a depiction of something already going on, rather than an agent in a magickal working. I viewed it as a piece of art. Nevertheless, it seemed to hold in place the circumstances which it was meant to depict. Despite every concievable effort to leave the situation, it wasn't until that talisman went into a fireplace that the situation was able to disperse.

After this long-winded introduction, the point is this: I have a desire to enter a constructive and rewarding magickal practice, and after a long break from attempting any kind of magic, I've decided I need to start at square one, and act as one who is totally new to all of this. I have some reservations, due to my previous experiences. For a long time, I've had the idea of simply beginning to practice the LBRP daily, and to keep a magical diary. However, I've also felt that before I begin, I need to work on myself: Build some discipline, get rid of old baggage, and become more positive. I don't want negativity introduced into my work. I've already proven that negativity and attachment can lead to disastrous results when they lay at the roots of magical work. After several years, I finally feel that now is the time. I'm very glad to have found this community, and I look forward to contributing what I can.