Asking for More

So I have encountered something that I hear a lot of magic users encounter in their practice at least once : not asking for enough. I tend to make large offerings daily or weekly. I go all out. Using bread, milk, alchohol, left overs from dinner you name it. I have huge shrines outside of my apartment that are hidden in plain sight because I use everyday things found outside. I take each specific thing and bless them all for a week.

I charge them with power for the local spirits and the Gods to use. To focus their energies onto the land and aid not just me but everyone here in general.
From the animals and plants to the people also renting here. And I realized that part of the reason that not everything goes my way is that a lot of that energy is being redistributed. And not enough of it to me.

I do this because, I believe in aiding people and making a Community. I like to build, to create. In Hellenizmos, one of my Patrons is Haphaistos, the Black Smith of the Gods. Building is sort of my thing. Heck, my priest in the Temple even looked up my name in real life and in Hebrew it mentions building in it’s origins as well. I tend to think of everyone else but not enough for myself.

So, I over extend myself to high hell. Part of the reason that not all of the energy goes to me is because I am not thinking of myself. I was taught as a child to always think of others. The thing was, it was my family that wanted me to put them above everyone and everything else. As a child they demanded that obedience.

Whenever I wanted to help others or build social movements to help the poor they told me it was a bad idea. I had to be “loyal to Jesus” and them of course as my family. I spent time as a socialist working during my teenage years to fight for a better tomorrow and my Cuban family hated it. Not just for the obvious reasons that Cubans are the most reactionary of the Spanish speaking communities. But because they were so rigid and believed that you had to put yourself and family first and everyone else last.

A sort of Neoliberal family structure. No room to care for others. I stood up for the only African American child in my high school because I was his friend. The white Cubans and even darker skinned people in my school went after him. I went through hell defending him in middle school.

Not just against students or even racist teachers. But my family as well. I remember My Mother said,

“You’re becoming a bad person! You’ll end up being a terrorist like Mandela or a dictator like Fidel!,”

Yes, my Mother literally equated Nelson Mandela with terrorism. She doesn’t believe that anymore. But her far right upbringing with her father, a Batista soldier, hardened her. That was before my socialist years. I had never heard of Mandela before.

This was in the 90’s. So I researched him and right away I admired the man he was. I wanted to be just like him. It steered me towards socialism. It also helped that Cubans call everything from Liberals to Civil Rights groups “communist” they kept mentioning it so much that I had to research to find out what it meant.

I found that the values they embraced were not mine. Their values were destroying life while claiming to pursue freedom. Cubans have even been involved in CIA operations to destroy Democracies elsewhere. Cuban Exiles were in South Africa defending the Apartheid government while Che Guevara was with the African National Congress fighting against it. Say what you will about Castro, he ironically, fought more for freedom in other countries that he did in Cuba turning it into a Dictatorship.

I wanted so badly to help the world rather than burn it to the ground in some hypocritical zeal for “freedom” like my Community has and still does. So, I made my life about service. For the first few years of being a Pagan magician, I worked as an exorcist and a healer. I actually performed 25 exorcisms in the first 6 months. It usually takes years for people to get that far.

And I was doing it as an apprentice to someone else. I healed people that had body aches and head aches. I was proficient in taking away colds which also led me to study Mountain Medicine and Powwow. I was the healer of my Community. For years, I refused payment of any kind because I believed it was wrong for me to do this work for money.

Later on Facebook and MySpace, I met a lot of people who had the same opinion. It solidified my position on the matter. For a while. Except that I was being woken up early in the morning by people in other states. Asking me for help because they were experiencing a haunting of sorts.

Even online when I was writing occult blogs on Myspace, I had a lot of people that turned to me for help. I ended up getting requests from people farther and farther away from me. At first other states, then other countries. After a while, I was forced to become good at Remote Work. Doing magic from long distances.

I learned to use the energy outside of my body to send the needed help to other people. I found out I wasn’t the only one. Though sadly, there were charlatans. Lots of them. I called a lot of them out in my day.

One of these nut jobs called themselves demon busters. They would take donations from unsuspecting people who really thought they had the power to remove demons. Another guy from Argentina claimed he could remove all ills and black magic through detoxifying shakes that he would give his clients to drink. I spent time exposing them all and helping people to be safe from predators like that. I joined for a time, a national society for the Paranomal and I was working hand in hand with people who could do a lot of what I could do.

Most notably I worked with an initiated Native American Shaman named Michael Robishaw. He was like my brother. Still is. We worked on Remote Rituals together where I would do infiltration, that is to say, I would spy on the negative entity with divination. He would initiate open warfare on the spirits and obliterate them.

We were able to help a lot of people. We helped each other too. But as the demands of our job increased, the rewards became little. More and more time was taken away from our families. And when I asked for donations to buy my supplies because I couldn’t foot the bill anymore, I started to get angry emails. People calling me a charlatan or implying that I was taking advantage of their pain.

Something I had never done before.
People who once I looked on as friends, began to show me their true colors. Michael hadn’t had a good experience either. He asked for a donation for his work and the wealthy person who he helped never paid him. He was supporting a whole family. He needed that money.

One day….my magic wouldn’t work no matter what I did. I tried but nothing. They thought that I was making it up. But nothing was coming out. I went to my Madrina in Santeria for help. And she informed me that my Eggun (Dead) not just my ancestors but all of the Dead, as well as the various other spirits I work with had, had enough.

They refused to help a single person more if they did not start to compensate me. They went on strike. I had no idea that spirits did that but yes, even they can stop altogether if one isn’t measuring up. In addition to that, Yemaya and the other Orishas were concerned with my well being. So an overall concensus was made without me knowing of it, and they stopped the power flow.

They meant to scare me to shake me up. The irony is it did scare me. When I was a child up to when I became an apprentice to a few masters, I was scared of spirits and magic. I looked on my gifts as “the devil’s gifts” because that’s what my staunchly Christian family had taught me. It took me until my early 20’s to finally come into my power and accept that I wasn’t going to be living a normal life no matter how hard I tried.

Because when I ignored the power, it attracted things to me. Or unintentional things would happen like me healing people and taking their pain away and I was left with the negativity. Or I would look into people by mistake and know things about them and it scared them. They hated me for it. My life as a Christian was miserable because most churches don’t offer any real help.

Just prayers, and deliverances because everything is either Satan or God with them. And they engage in a “blame all ills on yourself” mentality. They claim it’s your fault you have gifts (from Satan of course) because you aren’t a good enough person. Or you don’t have enough faith etc..even when you’re a child they tell you this. I’ve heard it all.

It took me years to find Liberal Christians who weren’t bigoted and were open both to my new religious beliefs and to what I do. Some of them I found in the Paranormal. Others in Universalist Churches. But now the very power I was scared of for so long was cut off. And for the first time ever I felt so lonely.

So not like myself. I wasn’t me anymore. It was amazing how much I was able to feel with the ability. Energies from plants and animals and people and spirits.
It was claustrophobic.

Like being sucked inside yourself. So I realized, it wasn’t a curse but a gift. You don’t realize what you have until you lose it. And what I lost was a gift from the Divine. I shunned it for so long and now I begged to have it back.

They must have felt my pain because slowly the power came back on. They told me they didn’t mean to have that effect on me but I needed a wake up call. Because I was well on my way to poverty and insanity dealing with other People’s darkness all the time and nothing to show for it. So, as soon as I made it clear I needed to be compensated, everyone stopped asking for help. On the one hand it sucked because I was so naive I thought hey, that shouldn’t be a problem right? You do good work you get compensated.

Even Churches ask for donations for their works. But on the other hand it felt great to not deal with people and their issues all of the time. I rested and regenerated. In the end I discovered pretty quickly how many of them were false. One lady wanted me to protect her from DEVILS.

“HELP! THE BLACK ARTS ARE COMING FOR ME!!!”

And as soon as I mentioned compensation she went away. I guess the Black Arts took a vacation. After that I started to wonder how many of these people had looked for their own problems. Had they really been cursed by Warlocks? Or had they done something bad to warrant bad spirits and witches hexing them? I started to really look deeply at the people I was helping and became cautious with people. Even those who were ready to pay me.

I wasn’t going to help someone who didn’t deserve it. And, as if the Ether heard my thoughts I realized that one of those people who came to me for help was an unscroupulous and immoral man. He was screwing over families that he rented to. I not only did not help him but told everyone in the community not to as well. Later, factions within the society had me removed.

I was sad but sometimes blessings come in disguise. I started doing Community work again and then started getting clients that paid and sometimes handsomely. One woman who was a Hoodoo Worker and a Gambler sent me $500 for the removal of a Generational Curse that plagued her family for years. She gave it to me of her own free will.
So again, we arrive at the present.

The same issues coming back to bite me in the ass again. Which has led to the creation of this overly winded blog post : I have spent so much time trying to improve other people’s lives that I am having trouble improving my own.
In my zeal to be a better human being I managed to partially make my family’s rigid distrust of others and serial narcissism true. I needed to re-shift my focus back on to myself. My Madrina and another Temple priest recently told me that I need to start asking more, not less, from God and spirit alike.

That for all the huge offerings and devotional prayers that I do, I need a balanced exchange. Not to be afraid of demanding my rights or my blessings because the Gods want us to question them. Not just follow blindly like sheep.
So yesterday, I took the step of going before my Ancestral Altar and asking not only my ancestors but all my spirits for more. I needed them to give me more to make the exchange of energy equal.

More of everything good that there is in life. I think I need to get used to asking for more. But in the meantime, I have already asked that they balance things on their side. They told me to make them one big offering to set it in motion.
To give them the left overs in the fridge on the outside altars.

No one was going to eat it anyway, but it would serve as a feast for them to finalize the request. I felt it go into motion once I did.  Then, I asked the Gods for more right after. And last night, I felt Hestia answer my prayer. I gave her the final offering of the day, a long candle stick that I consecrated with the spirits.

And finally, I lit it and felt something move Spiritually. Don’t know how else to describe it. But I have already started to see the results for myself. In Santeria we have a saying : Don’t give your light away to those who don’t deserve it. When we give our Ashe or Grace or Light whatever you want to call it away; to people who don’t deserve it, you deplete your own blessings.

You essentially give your good fortune away to other people. And not only are your hurting yourself but you are enabling people to do harm to others.
You might as well be putting a knife in their hands. Because you don’t know what they do with that light. Medicine is good; but if you are taking meds you don’t need it can harm the body.

If you spoil a child you ruin them as they say. So with that said, I will no longer give my light away to people who do not deserve it. Only a fool does that and I am not a fool. Not anymore. On the next few posts hopefully I will start talking about Light Restoration and how it has worked for me.

Stay tuned everyone. Sincerely,

Your friend, M.

Consultations

Hello everyone, I’m about ready to take in New clients again. I just finished helping my last client with something really nasty (I have permission to write about her experience later) and after a few days of rest, I will be ready to take clients again. Next Friday specifically, is not only Dr. John Dee’s birthday, but also Friday the 13th! A double wami! This after a New Moon and Solar Eclipse the Day before. So that Friday, Saturday, I will be available. Sunday I will be busy. But the whole week of the 16th I will be available for readings.

A reading with me is $100 per hour. I make charms or I simply charm Jewelry. Gris Gris Bags, European Charm Bags including a magical Catholic version that I make. I also give advice on how to ward your home with everyday things you have lying around your house. I teach you how to charm things etc. Cleansing and healing as well.

I don’t promise you that I can “make the blind see!” I am not a deity or saint. But I can help the body’s natural healing process with Pranic infusions, Reiki, Ancestor Healing, Bio Feedback, and  what I call Orisha Healing. This is a term I coined myself, it’s not a traditional Santeria ritual.  I ask the Yoruba Gods (Orishas) to show me what kind of ritual or offerings must be done by the person or by me to aid in their healing. I also do Work for Paranormal Groups who need another perspective on a case or just want a heads up on a case they are about to go to.

I perform these services for any that also want my help. To make an appointment, email me at hyoseif13@gmail.com have a great day!

– M

Honoring Elegua on Father’s Day

This Father’s Day I am at my uncle’s house. This is a  picture of his Elegua altar. In Santeria, Elegua is the Yoruba God of the Crossroads. Altars like these are placed behind the front door. Or in this case next to the front door.

This is my Uncle’s altar to Elegua. Unlike my parents who abandoned the traditional faith, my Uncles on my mother’s side (as well as myself) continue the tradition. Elegua, must be honored first before and after dinner. And before and after all rituals much like Hestia in the Greek faith. Elegua loves candies and toys, for he is the child of the Gods.

He loves children. On all his feast days, a person honoring Elegua must throw a party for the neighborhood children in his honor. Giving them all the sweets and toys they wish. The number sacred to him is three. Coconuts are sacred to him.

You cannot eat raw coconuts. That is taboo. You can eat Coconut candies and such things from a coconut but not the raw stuff. Coconuts are his head so that is like eating his head. He also loves mangos and guava.

I have personally given him honey cookies and candies from the middle east that I bought at a dollar store and he seems to like that too. And of course Rum and a Cigar.

 

For my first readers

Hello new reader, This is my brand new blog. To tell you a little about me. I’m a Gnostic Magus, pretty much that means I believe all religions come from one source. My own view of Gnosticism is very different from the traditional version. But I’ll talk about that another day.

I believe all Deities and their spirits are real. I am a practitioner of African, European, and some Native American magic. I also study Christian and Jewish Mysticism among the magic and religions I study. I worked for years in the Paranormal trying to help other people. I believed that it was the mission of every magic user to help people in every aspect of life.

Especially in Spiritual Warfare. To say that I was disapointed was an understatement. I learned that most people in the Paranormal were out to get money. Even if it meant faking Para Activity at locations. Sometimes performing experiments on clients to make Activity worse for the sake of documentation.

I learned the Paranormal had an ugly side. A lot of Christians, mostly of Protestant denominations, were fanatical zealots. They enjoyed talking down to Pagans or other faiths in some of these groups. I had a position in a group as an organizer and moderator and I found that I constantly had to tell so called “Para Christians” to stop being nasty to Hindu or Wiccan members. Whenever I did my job, the other moderators (You guessed it, all Christian!) decided to jump on me and tell me I was being sensitive.

One time, I started making Christian jokes to see how long it would take for me to get called out (not even a minute). I was prepared with screen shots of what I was being “sensitive” about and then asked if my jokes were as bad as what they were saying. Every Pagan jumped on that Facebook thread and called out the hypocrisy.  After that, those moderators stopped jumping on me while I seemed to be one of the few actually moderating. But  I was also marked.

I got called out whenever I stepped out of line and that was it.  I was eventually made to leave because I refused to unblock a moderator that was being abusive and speaking ill of me behind my back (the irony was, this  guy was a Wiccan). I learned before I left that sadly there are just as many power hungry and greedy magic users as there were Christian zealots. People who claim to be love and light in public, and are hexing other users that they saw as threats in private.

Later I found out that he was messing around with the then, leader of the group. So I said, to Hell with it. Then later I worked with good friends on an amazing blog that is no longer really posting anymore. Again I was the one trying to keep another project alive and working while ignoring my own vision. For a time, I was also part of two different Paranormal Crisis Teams.

A group of Wiccan US Army Veterans formed Covens that were dedicated to Exorcism and Curse Reversals. We tangled some of the nastiest cases you could imagine. Even one with a Haunted Painting that someone had cursed to kill children. There was change in the group structure and a faction from the same group led by another soldier made his own group. He invited me to join and for reasons of my own I did.

But soon I found that it wasn’t for me and I left two weeks later. At the same time, the rest of that new group fell apart. I felt so alone. And so confused. I realized my life was taking me somewhere else.

I began to take apprentices. I taught some very promising new students in different states. I started to go into hermit mode. A group of investigators and I were supposed to get a show on ScyFy about the work that we did. And that hadn’t panned out either.

I suffered from a horrible disease that left me doubled over in pain most days because I couldn’t afford the operation I needed. I looked into the skies one night crying and I said “If you can’t heal me, kill me then,” and I meant it. Suicide had finally become an alternative in my mind now. One day, I was studying magic, for that was one of the only joys I had left at this point and something kept happening. I kept thinking about the Crossroads.

I started looking up my old spell books and I found a pact to do with Papa Legba for knowledge on the Crossroads. That anything you wanted to learn ever, you would do this pact and “things would come for you,” that they would teach you things. If you want to learn Hoodoo? They’ll teach you Hoodoo. You want to learn some other kind of magic? It’s yours. I just needed a specific item and I had to leave it in the Crossroads at Midnight on a Wednesday. So I did as I was told.

I expected it to be like the movies where you see creatures so lucidly that they become physical. I expected it to happen right away. I was disapointed but decided on patience. After almost month I started realizing that I had learned new things. I had no idea where I had learned this magic from.

It wasn’t in any of my books. I hadn’t learned it from my mentors nor did I learn it from podcasts or online articles. I just knew. I finally realized I was being trained in my dreams. But I couldn’t remember my dreams and had no idea how long I was being trained and by who.

I knew though, that “they” for I knew it was a They, had the power to answer my questions in real time. That they could actually manipulate the world around me to give me my answers. Whatever they were. Sometimes I would get a random phone call from someone with my answer. Other times, my human masters would check up on me and advise me.

And sometimes it would be the Cosmic Masters themselves as I learned they were called. I started doing research and found that in the Spiritualist movement there were people who believed that there were transdimensional entities. And that these entities could speak to a Medium and teach them things. Doreen Virtue claimed she was a Cosmic Medium and that she could channel these creatures. I don’t claim to somehow be possessed by these entities.

Or that I am the chosen one who will reset the Matrix! Pazzah! No, I’m just a regular Magus. But I had learned to develope psychic gifts I didn’t have before. I learned things from many cultures that only later I would discover were in books or taught by people in other traditions. Like I said, I view it all from the perspective that it’s all the same common knowledge. So I use many methods in my work. The Masters also sent me human mentors to aid me in my work.

And my disease was slowly being weakened. I still suffer from it, but not as bad as I once did. I began to treat people in my Community for Paranormal issues once again.  I started connecting with people of communities like the Vodunsi and the Vodunon of West African Vodoun. The Hellenic communities of Greek Pagans, Native American Shamans, Powwowers and Yarb Doctors from Pennsylvania and the Appalachian Mountains, and even the Witches of the West Country in England.

I also like to study with Celtic practitioners of the old Faerie religion. Both from this country, Canada, and the UK. It has been quite a journey. A journey I never would have thought I would ever have had so many amazing experiences. The final piece of the puzzle came when I visited a Hindu Guru’s house here in Miami.

Her home had many disciples everywhere. I met a Cuban Criolla (Creole) woman who was dedicated to not just Hinduism but also Buddhism. Specifically, to Kuan Yin. I felt an instant repport with this woman. I ended up telling her most of what I have already written here. She then went on to tell me something similar about her.

The Gods eventually told her that she needed to leave the city for a while and go to the mountains. She said,” but how will I help anyone?” Kuan Yin herself told her that she needed time to herself and that the Gods would send her people that needed her new set of skills. When she asked what skills she was talking about? The conversation abruptly ended. So, she spent years living the life of a literal Hermit and became powerful from the knowledge she had learned during her years of introspection. She told me that from what I had told her, I was also being put in a similar situation.

A rebirth she called it. And so I finally realized why nothing that I tried before was working. I wanted all the wrong things and wasn’t appreciating what was being offered to me. I no longer had clients from other states or countries, but I had enough here. People who seriously needed help.

They taught me the value of being paid for my work. Not all of them paid with money, some paid with groceries, my electric bill, and even the occasional movie ticket. But they refused to allow me to help if I didn’t take something. They said it wasn’t  right for a Pueblo’s Brujo (village or town sorcerer) to be helping people without a reward. So, I started charging.

And behold my life became more satisfying. I now have the ability to pay my bills and gasps* not starve! I had secular jobs including cleaning places and washing dishes. But thanks to the economy going under, more and more millennials like me were being fired instead of hired. I even had to drop out of college because I could not longer afford it. We were told to return to college to get degrees that would help us get work. Yeah didn’t happen.

I even went to a trade school but my instructor died, and the school decided to only have teenage students. They effectively terminated the adult student program. So I was without work and without school either despite all the advise the older generation was giving about picking up a trade instead of a degree and blah, blah, blah. Of course they were right about one thing : degrees are worthless. After doing  my daily Road Opener rituals with Elegua, the Yoruba Orisha (Deity) of the Crossroads he asked “Why don’t you just make your own blog? Expand your magical business,”

And that’s what I did. I had believed that my business in magic was only temporary. But, as my Madrina (Godmother) in Santeria had already told me, from the very beginning, “Your true career is in magic. Stop wasting your time with these other endeavors,”. So here I am.

Trying to do my business and to help where I can.  I’d like to give a shout out to T.P. Ward who was one of the many who believed in me and helped me on my spiritual path. So, I hope to get to know all of you and to help you all on your path, whatever that may be.