Several years ago, on a forum I no longer support, I worked through the Book of Gates by Josephine McCarthy. There were (and are) some very large disagreements I have with McCarthy and her opinions, but the Book of Gates is pretty solid. I decided to start it again last night and plan on documenting notable events in this blog.
My first go around, I did get some things right and I plan on using some of those same methods. First, I project to the scene. The book has 12 gates with 100 scenes. Last time, I felt that I should read the scene to get an initial place as a “destination” and then project either mentally/astrally to that scene. This moves the book from a pictoral scene to an active scenario and has more value and insight.
I feel I need to use my projection methods of choice, rather than the Quareia methods – even if they arrive at the same scenery. While some influence from it is unavoidable, I want as little of it as possible. I may refer to some of the materials that are relevant on the site, but if this system is as old as it appears to be, it is workable without needing the more Christianized frameworks and morality that Quareia (and the books) frequently use. It’s simply a preference of mine and why I don’t use their methods if they can’t be done agnostically. There’s only been one exception to that – the Vision of Judgement. I felt it needed done. It was almost a compulsion, but was still my decision. I simply HAD to do it. That was about a year ago.
The second was using a guide. I have to admit, it wasn’t my idea to do so. I got into a dicey situation with a snake and Ma’at came to walk/guide me through the path. I had done some work with Ma’at (as an entity) trying to…right some wrongs involving minors when the perpetrators had seemingly gotten away free. I really wasn’t expecting her to show up and she was my near-constant companion from then on. I wish I could say when she came into the scene, but I did this work many years ago at this point and my notes were largely electronic-only and not available.
My guide this time around is – Anubis! Not what I was expecting. I had been feeling the call to rework the Gates and Ma’at came to then hand me off to Anubis. I’m not an Eqyptophile. I don’t feel called to or have much interest in the pantheon, but have a passive interest in their magic that I haven’t really looked into. I had impulsively downloaded an Occult book about Anubis the other day when sick, but don’t feel that the download caused the handoff, but do believe it was a foreshadowing of it.
The third “keeper” is that I continue to make notes of this journey. Last time, I had them in a forum I broke ties with for a variety of reasons. This time, I will be putting them here and will eventually archive them so it doesn’t matter which device/forum/host, etc… I initially was writing those entries down by hand, but stopped doing that when I was separated from my book, but was being encouraged to do work in that moment.
The fourth is that I will largely let the entities involved set the pace. Sometimes, this may mean doing none or several scenes in a day, depending on what they feel is best. The Holidays will probably make things a little hectic some days and I will still be working. I may island hop to one of the other islands here around Christmas, but haven’t decided yet. Depends on the timing and the price. Still waiting to get paid, despite the reopening of the USG. Naturally, the people responsible for it were getting paid the entire time. We’ll see. Not having privacy and being on the go all day long makes things like this harder.
So, here we go again! Hopefully there will be a substantial amount to report back. The dream work was really heavy last time, even with the projections. In fact, I was put to work in some of the projections, too. There will be some tired days and a lot of questions in my future.
