by Jason Miller
Think of it this way: If you asked a stranger to loan you 50 dollars, they would probably say no. If you asked someone you worked with for 50 bucks, they may lend it or they may not, depending upon your experience with that person. If you asked your best friend for 50 dollars, it's almost certain that they would lend it if they had it and ask if you needed anything else. They would also probably not be concerned about the date of payback because you have a long history, likely making gestures of goodwill to one another for many years. These gestures of goodwill are offerings, and making them regularly will put the whole universe just a bit more in your corner when you need something.
I follow a pattern of offerings inspired by Tibetan Magic during which I burn incense (which flows upward) and pour water, tea, or whiskey to the ground each morning (flowing downward), all the while acknowledging four classes of recipients.
The first and highest classification of guest are the deities as well as those beings that can be considered enlightened such as Buddhas, ascended masters, and if you like, the universe itself. This type of guest doesn't in any way need the offerings that we make; the benefit is strictly ours. By making offerings to such beings, we remind ourselves what we constantly strive toward, and in turn build a connection to beings that have achieved that level of realization. It is an exchange of energy like that between a parent and child. Your child may give you something that you neither want nor need, but you not only accept it, but go out of your way to enjoy it fully, because you know that it cultivates certain qualities in the child. In a similar way, we can say that the Gods do not need our offerings, but that doesn't mean we don't need to make them.
The second classification of guest are the protectors, guardians, Saints, and lesser deities of a tradition. These are beings of great power but who are not fully realized beings. They do enjoy the substance of the offering that is made, but do not depend upon them.
The third classification is simply all regular beings. This can include all nonphysical entities such as nature spirits and ghosts, as well as the spirits of all currently incarnated beings. In short, everyone, but most especially those beings in your local area—the woods near your house, the lake or ocean nearby, the trees in your yard, the winds that blow through. The spirits on the land and all that is upon it.
The fourth classification singles out beings to whom you owe debt. This debt could be problems that come from this life or a previous life. It may have to do with specific ways that you have dealt with Magic or just how you live your life. The most common example is a spirit of nature that you have run afoul of through your ordinary human actions, like driving through a certain area or dumping trash. A good portion of the traditional shaman's work was keeping the balance between our world and the world of the spirits, a role that the Sorcerer will sometimes be asked to fulfill. Being a Magician, you are even more able to trample upon the turf of spirits or powers that you may not even be aware of. Making offerings to this class of beings can act as a type of uncrossing that can, by itself, make life start to run more smoothly.
Types of Offering
It's true that the real substance of an offering is in spiritual substance, not gross physical matter, but the use of physical offerings is a good way to materialize your result. A good physical offering draws the spirit and powers a bit further into our realm and gives them more of a connection to our lives. The physical offering is also more pleasing to those beings whose presence reaches into the etheric level such as ghosts and some nature spirits. So, although some people want to visualize offerings or make only the barest of visible efforts, an actual physical offering should be present as a basis, even if it is then multiplied through visualization.
Some examples of offerings include:
Incense: The ascending smoke is not only said to carry one's prayers to the higher realms, but to be literally consumed by classes of beings called “scent eaters.”
Light: A nearly universal symbol for wisdom, light is appreciated by most spiritual beings and is thought to be literally consumed by certain beings. Whatever you use as an offering should be separate from your work lights, the lights you use to illuminate your temple.
Water: Symbolizing purity and washing clean. Water is an extremely attractive and calming substance for many spirits to linger near, especially spirits of the dead.
Fruit: Symbolizes the fruit of Gnosis and the surrender of something valuable of yours to the spirits.
Flowers: A symbol of beauty and impermanence, some spirits absorb their beauty, some their scent, and still others value their very impermanence.
Meat: Valued most by strong, wild, and wrathful spirits, meat is a potent offering. It was the smell of the burning flesh that was offered to YHVH in the Bible, and is still a powerful incense today. Already prepared or even raw meat can also be offered to beings that like that kind of thing.
Money: Money is enjoyed by spirits of departed humans and by certain beings of the second classification that value your sacrifice. It can be also a powerful offering to those beings who govern money matters, but its offering must be handled properly. In some cases, burning of money as an offering to the spirits of the dead might be appreciated, which is why you see “hell notes” for sale in Chinatown often. At other times, this might be considered offensive to the spirits of money itself.
Symbols: Certain beings have various symbols and tools that they are associated with. Love Goddesses seem to enjoy perfume and sometimes even sex toys, war deities love swords and even guns, and wealth spirits love hoarding jewels and money. Spirits of dead Magicians seem to like talismans and Occult bric-a-brac. Use your knowledge and intuition to choose.
Charitable donations: There are small sacrifices that you can make that can be used as offerings. Money and personal objects are also a way to give of one's self, but be sure that you are ready to let whatever it is go. Your own blood is an excellent offering to some spirits, as is the pain that is released when you draw it. Pain itself can be offered to spirits. I have worked with Magic involving BDSM at times in the past, and have made an offering of the pain from whipping a willing submissive as a sort of “human sacrifice.”
Animal sacrifice: Obviously animal sacrifices are a common offering to the spirits both throughout history and in many religions throughout the world. I don't do them or encourage them, and certainly don't advocate for them to anyone who is not in a tradition where they are already done. With training, context, and skill, it can be a moving and sacred gesture to spirits and Gods that appreciate that kind of offering. Done without skill, it is an unholy travesty. My rule of thumb is that if you grew up killing your own meat and can do it quickly with little pain, then it's not such a huge jump to include animal sacrifice in your rites—especially if you are in a tradition that already practices it. If you are doing it because it's forbidden or somehow “dark” in your mind, then skip it, please. To people who live a little closer to their food source than the local supermarket, animal sacrifice is no “darker” than getting supper ready.
Disposing of Offerings
If you do choose to make an offering other than incense or a libation poured into the ground, you will be quickly confronted with a problem: What do you do with the offerings afterward?
The answer is a little complicated and depends upon what you are offering and whether you are making the offerings at a permanent shrine in your own home or making a temporary offering at a crossroads or something like that.
In the case of offering food, flowers, or anything that spoils in your own home, you should keep it there as long as it's not stinking up the place, attracting bugs, or looking shabby. Those familiar with Tantra might point out stories of Mahasiddhas making rancid offerings to reveal the inherent purity of all things. That's okay if you are a Mahasiddha, but if you can't fly or make imprints of your hand just by touching solid stone, then do yourself and the spirits a favor and stick to nicer presentations, unless a spirit specifically asks for something gross.
Whe
n disposing of food offerings, I do not throw it in the rubbish with common waste. Instead I try to find a place in the woods or on the side of the road to leave it. If you are making a food offering in the wild, then the problem gets handled for you; whether its animals in the forest or homeless people in the city, you can consider that the guests consume the best part and leave the rest.
In the case of objects like mojo bags, jewelry, bottles of perfume, and so on, or other permanent objects like money, the rule is to leave it be. If you are leaving money or another object in public, don't worry about what happens to it; just let it go and don't look back. In the case of a shrine or altar in your own home, you should only offer those things that you are prepared to leave permanently. Every now and then, someone will get so addicted to making physical offerings (and thus train the spirits they work with to expect them) that their living space becomes overcrowded. Don't let this happen to you. Make offerings of energy and astral objects all you want, and certainly things like incense, light, and libations should be regular if not daily, but leave the permanent physical offerings for special occasions.
Whatever you do, do not take the offerings back. If you offer money, that money is no longer yours. Do not ever spend it. If you offer whiskey, don't consume it as part of the offering. You can consume it along with the spirits, but not their portion, unless that is what the tradition calls for, and it sometimes does.
Also know that spirits do not always relate to size the way that we do. Often a small dagger, or even a toy-sized sword will suffice as an offering to a martial being. Just a couple dimes or even pennies will be just as enjoyable to spirits as larger sums. Leaving hundreds of dollars on an altar is just foolish and pleases no one. Donate some money in the name of the being you wish to please, just don't let that amount of money go to waste.
A Daily Spirit Feast
The following is a short general-purpose offering that I use on a regular basis. It has three parts: Purification of Offerings, Inviting the Guests, Making Offerings, and License to Depart. Spoken parts are in bold.
PURIFICATION OF OFFERINGS
Gather some incense. I recommend juniper, myrrh, and frankincense, or Tibetan Riwo Sang Cho as an all-purpose incense, but you can alter this as you need. You will also want some liquid such as tea or water as a libation for daytime offerings. Nighttime offerings should have light and whiskey or another alcohol.
Sound the word ISTUM and imagine the offerings on fire. You can pore breathe fire if you have time, but it is not necessary if you are in a hurry. Sound the word ANNA and imagine a gust of air blowing out of the fire. Sound the word NINA and imagine that a flow of water emanates from you and washes the offering.
INVITING THE GUESTS
Category One
To the Gods and Goddesses, angels and avatars, most especially to [name your most important patrons and divine beings that you wish to acknowledge by name], and to the overseeing powers of this land on which I dwell, I give offerings of respect.
Category Two
To my ancestors, protectors, and allies, I give thanks and offerings, most especially to [name your most important ancestors, protectors, and spirit allies that you wish to acknowledge by name], I give offerings of gratitude.
Category Three
To all beings of the sky, the land, the underworld; to all sentient beings in all the ten directions and three times, most especially those who dwell in the area upon, above, and under the earth, I give offerings of substance and nourishment.
Category Four
To all beings to whom I owe a debt, and who I have angered by mistaken or ignorant action, I give offerings of supplication and pacification.
MAKING OFFERINGS
Make the gesture of offering, flourish your incense, pour your libation on the ground, hold aloft your light, set out your cups of alcohol. Do whatever you do as a signature of offering—truth be told, it doesn't matter. It's a signal to the spirits that the offering is made. Add in your own visualization of the offerings multiplying and filling all space. Spend some time actually looking at what the spirits do with the clouds and how they manifest.
Nadan ma-qlu—enjoy the offerings. Ela ma-qlu—be pleased and fulfilled.
LICENSE TO DEPART
Put in your own license here, or don't and just let it hang. If I am doing the offering indoors, I always do one; if not, I often let it hang. When you leave, bow in respect just as you would if you left a party.
A Word of Warning
As with any advice, there is a word of warning—three, in fact:
1. Do not offer the finest and most expensive things to the spirits. Save those for times when you need special help. Just like a date, if you start off with very expensive restaurants, that is what becomes the norm, and you go broke. Save the Johnny Walker Blue for when you need the big promotion. As a day to day, the Johnny Walker Black will do just fine.
2. Making offerings to pacify spirits that can be pacified with offerings is wonderful. That does not mean all spirits that are upset or causing problems can be pacified thusly. You may need protection and exorcism from time to time.
3. If you have the ability to communicate with spirits, either directly or through a medium like a spirit board or pendulum, you may get asked for bigger and more elaborate offerings. It is okay to say no. See Key 21 for more on this.
The Take-Away
The problem that this key seeks to solve is one of relationships with spirits and the world around us. Some traditions spend a lot of time on offerings but many of us who come from a Ceremonial Magic, Wiccan, or other type of Western background have been neglecting this important tool. Offerings get things done, and even broad offerings to the world at large can grease the wheels of your Sorcery. In this key's comic, Harold has been making a lot of demands on Salphegor, but hasn't made any offerings yet. Maybe if he spent some time making offerings, things would go a bit better for him.
The ritual here given as an example is something you can institute daily or weekly, and is meant as a regular practice. If there is a specific spirit or class of spirits who likes something special, then do the research and make sure that you are not serving something that they don't like. Keep in mind, though, that you will find conflicting approaches and rationales even within the same tradition. The world is not neat and tidy, and the world of the spirits is even less so.
Key 9:
DIY Is Over-Rated
You have heard it many times: There is Magic in the act of creation. You hear it a lot because it's true. Lovingly crafting a tool, an image, or an invocation is a Magical act that changes the creator as much as it does the base materials he is creating with. A long time ago, a teacher told me that the value of making something yourself cannot be overstated. Therein lies the problem—I think the value of doing it yourself can be overstated and often is. Maybe you have heard one of these nuggets:
“Nothing will ever have the power of a tool that you make yourself.”
“Tradition is fine, but never as good as your own beliefs and rituals.”
“Write your own rituals; they will always be more potent than anything you read in a book.”
This sounds really neat and appeals to the go-my-own-way streak that brought many of us to Magic in the first place. It also appeals to the lazy, I-don't-feel-like-studying part of ourselves. The problem is that ideas like these fail to take into account anything other than the power of creation. What about the power that a skilled craftsman brings? What about the power of time-honored rites? Doing something yourself can be wonderful, but doing everything yourself, and doing it well, is impossible.
The Power of Tradition
Recently a student wanted to start doing St. Cyprian work. I asked what prayers she would be using, and she said that she wanted to write her own because it would be more powerful and personal that way. The problem is that she had never done work with Cyprian before and had only heard about him recently because of all the press he has been getting in the Occult world. Wh
y wouldn't you avail yourself of the many prayers and novenas that already exist? By all means, I think there is power in writing one of your own—I even put one together myself—but why wouldn't you try out one or more of the traditional approaches first, so that you could at least get to know what they are about? It's kind of like writing a sonnet about someone that you have never met.
Furthermore, when you think about it, it's more than a little disrespectful. I think of traditional methods for contacting spirits similar to established approaches for contacting people. If someone completely ignores the protocols I have set up for contacting me, and instead shows up at my house, I will refuse to talk to them. Some spirits take this view as well. Before writing any rites to Hekate, Padmasambhava, Cyprian, Jupiter, or any other being I work with, I try to avail myself of methods that have already been established and then go from there. It's polite and grants a better understanding than if you just wing it.
And you know what? Even after I write my own stuff, I still use those other methods quite often. There is a power in creation, but there is a power in tradition as well. These two, creation and tradition, feed off each other. Creation divorced from tradition quickly degenerates into wild fantasy or reinventing the wheel. Tradition divorced from creativity can lead to dead rites that no longer serve.