Hello everyone. New member interested in evocation and other aspects of western magic. I'm a psychiatric nurse and uni student, studying Latin and Classics at the moment. I play the harpsichord and am more interested in the Solomonic side of things. I was a member of a Thelemic order in Sydney back in the eighties and oh gods, what a disappointment that was!

I nearly started a fire in a pine forest when I was 16. Being a good Catholic boy, I bought a copy of the Goetia and some other stuff but didn't realise that when it says, burn incense on charcoal, they meant charcoal blocks which I would have known about if I'd been an altar boy. So I bought sticks of charcoal from an art shop and took a bottle of metho, sulphur, the Goetia, a cup, wand, dagger and pentacle and rode my bicycle out to a pine forest with a view to evoking one of the Goetia spirits. When the charcoal stopped glowing and the demon hadn't arrived, I poured some metho onto the charcoal (with the intention of burning some sulphur) and the whole bottle caught fire.

I dropped the bottle with a shriek and the pine needles on the ground started to burn. I did a completely unmagical dance, put out the flames and did the License to Depart, packed up and scurried off home, very glad that no one else had been wandering about out there.

I've done a few other experiments and had convincing results but been laissez faire about it. "Oh yeah well magic works, good! I'll do some in the future!" Well, the funny thing about the future is, eventually it becomes the present, so I'm carving a wand, making some pentacles out of pewter, doing LBRP and Middle Pillar and getting ready for some evocation.

It's nice to find a forum like this which seems uncontaminated by arrogant fools who boast about their alleged successes and score points off each other with snide puts downs and bitchiness; like another forum which I will not name and certainly will not join.