Robert Podgurski - The Sacred Alignments and Sigils

Copyright 2019 by Robert Podgurski. All rights reserved. No portion of this book, except for brief review, may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any meanselectronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwisewithout the written permission of the publisher. For information contact North Atlantic Books.

Published by

North Atlantic Books
Berkeley, California

Cover art by Robert Podgurski: Grid Sigil, India Ink on white LetraMax 2000 Board, 10x10, 1981.
Cover design by Jasmine Hromjak
Book design by Happenstance Type-O-Rama

Printed in the United States of America

The Sacred Alignments and Sigils: Angelic Magick, Renaissance Thought, and Modern Methods of Sig-ilization is sponsored and published by the Society for the Study of Native Arts and Sciences (dba North Atlantic Books), an educational nonprofit based in Berkeley, California, that collaborates with partners to develop cross-cultural perspectives, nurture holistic views of art, science, the humanities, and healing, and seed personal and global transformation by publishing work on the relationship of body, spirit, and nature.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Podgurski, Robert, author.

The sacred alignments and sigils: angelic magick, renaissance thought, and modern methods of sigilization/Robert Podgurski.

Description: Berkeley, California: North Atlantic Books, 2019. | Includes
bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019010043 (print) | LCCN 2019013565 (ebook) | ISBN
9781623174224 (e- book) | ISBN 9781623174217 (pbk.)

Subjects: LCSH: Sigils. | Enochian magic.

LCC BF1623.S5 (ebook) | LCC BF1623.S5 P63 2019 (print) | DDC
133.4/3dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019010043

This book includes recycled material and material from well-managed forests. North Atlantic Books is committed to the protection of our environment. We print on recycled paper whenever possible and partner with printers who strive to use environmentally responsible practices.

In loving memory of Ken Warren and Gerrit Lansing

As if I could handle this pearl that touches

upon every imagination of what

I am

wrong about the web, the

reflection, the lure of the world

I love

Robert Duncan, Where it Appears, Passages 4

I would like to extend my gratitude to all those who have helped in one form or another with the actual magickal operations that brought about my discoveries and the final finished work as it now stands. Over the course of more than thirty years this text has undergone a series of transformations, so if I have omitted or forgotten any individuals who have assisted in the process I hope they will accept my sincere apologies. I would like to thank Barb, Ken Warren, Charles Kunkle Jr.a.k.a. Frater Kaos, Chuck Stein, Gerrit Lansing, Ken Irby, Richard Grossinger, John Murphy, Walter Strauss, Tony Naylor, Ben Fernee, Stephanie Wenzela.k.a Soror Padad, Peteris Cedrins, Dorota Czerner, Horace Bush, Linda Falorio, Fred Fowler, Zack Strowd, Jay Strowd, Margaret Sloan and The Robert Duncan the Jess Collins Trust, Bud Murcek, Todd, Gary Kleiner, Stevie, Ray, and my parents, Eleanor and Harry Podgurski.

A re qliphothic entities redeemed through the magical operation that is the manifest world? Is there a turmoil in the divine nature that, if not primordial, is nevertheless coeternal with the creation of the Good? Jung and Corbin thought such things and derived their respective doctrines from inner roilings and texts that carry magical theophanies. But the magicians in whose lineages Robert Podgurski labors explore the turmoil itself. There are methodologies for explicit engagement, and Podgurski limns a living intellectual tradition for casting intelligence itself as a magic circle to manage it.

These questions, though not Podgurskis particularly, rumble in the shadows that indeed are his proper concern. For in Podgurski the realm of the magical that emerges from the depths or even plummets below/beyond them constitutes a region where the phenomenology of the spirit, in a very non-Hegelian sense, comprises the magical as such. To experiment in magic is to work upon Being, or correlatively, its apparencies. Everything that Appears Appears to Be. Whatever-can-be-conjured-toward-apparency is linked to Being, and that link defines the Magical: Magic is pragmatic, or better performative, phenomenology. But phenomenology is the magic of ontogeny. Let Be be the finale of Seem, says Wallace Stevens. Again, if late metaphysics abjures phenomenology in favor of that which cannot come to presence, what does come to presence yet invokes the sphere of the magical.

The qliphothic entities par excellence are beings in a turmoil regarding their own apparency and its ontological appurtenances. In this they are not unlike us. Their being is questionable being, since they are given over to the occultation of that which, ultimately intensive and true in them, is eclipsed in its apparency. To tease the being of the qliphoth into the light is to relieve them of this turmoil by allowing Being as such to manifest as apparency in their being, too. Hence the similarity, not only with ourselves, but with all apparency and, through that, with any calling on or calling from the ultimacy of What Is. The pitiless logic of the Fury of Being (Herbert Guenther) knows relief only through a mythographyor ontographyin which the Ultimate wields existence to expel its own darkness from the manifest; an exigency only, perhaps, observed in Crowleys formula, 0=2. The will-to-Good coengenders its shadow. That which relieves pervasive turmoil is apparencys intimacy with the Unmanifesta paradox, no doubtand the very ether upon which the paradoxical commerce between sigil and entity thrives. The false is the Form of the True. The sigils are drawn from the same waters as the entities that they conjure.

This was true of the Chaldaean Oracles, the Dee-Kelly revelation of the Enochian system, of Crowleys reception of both the Liber Legis, and The Vision and the Voiceand most recently, Podgurskis Grid Sigil. They arrive in practices that they themselves enable. The logic of revelation is intransitive and, again paradoxically, nevertheless broaches a history of conjurings that shows a certain progression.

The most intensive reaches of contemporary thought have begun to wonder about the ontological status of the entities configured in visions (and not only schizophrenic visions), under entheogens, for instance, and, before long, one might expect, those conjured in such controlled environments as ceremonial magic. For the questionable (as opposed to the assumed-to-be-illusory) ontological status of the qliphoth follows from the questionable ontological status of ourselves: a circumstance almost commonplace in serious thought since the middle of the nineteenth century.

The publication of Podgurskis Grid Sigil in an accessible format should be welcomed both by practitioners and aficionados of ceremonial magic, and all fields of inquiry where the ontological status of nonhuman persons quite generally is of concern.

Charles Stein

Barrytown, New York

June 2019

The use, not the reading, of books makes us wise.

from Geoffrey Whitneys A