/x/periment #3: The Apple and the Mirror

The Apple and the Mirror (Performed 11/23/12)

            Divination, as a whole has been a varied and constant part of magic for the history of mankind and the Celts, and later the Irish and Scots, seem to have used food in many different ways to foretell the future, such as this ritual used originally by young ladies to see the face of their future husband and in subsequent times to answer questions through Scrying. The ritual itself is very similar to many others, most notably the Victorian ritual of Stair Walking (discussed in the scrying link) but some sources say this may be an early version of the Western Bloody Mary ritual, so what better place to kick off my series of Thanksgiving Food Divination?

Apple and the Mirror

            The Apple and the Mirror, is a simple ritual involving only a participant, a chair, a mirror, a candle, an apple, and a knife. Before Midnight, the participant sits with his or her back to the mirror, with the candle lit between the mirror and the participant, and he or she carves up an apple into nine pieces, consuming eight of them and throwing the ninth over their shoulder. Then he or she stares into the mirror over the same shoulder until their vision blurs and the image in it becomes distorted to answer his or her question.  Other variants specify that the ritual needs to occur on Halloween, or that the apple’s juice needs to go on the mirror, while others argue that the participant needs to be combing her hair during the process, yet others suggest that the nine pieces be held in nine separate knives over the left shoulder and the participant gazes over their right.

            When I attempted it earlier this evening it took about 30 minutes for me to see heavy distortion in the mirror. For the sake of continuity with other games I asked to see the face of my future lover. I saw what appeared to be a skull over my face, and a waving blue line almost like a serpent or river. Now according to legend seeing a skull in the mirror means that the individual will die before marriage but the legends never mentioned the blue serpent. Although I’m much in love now I suppose we will see if I get married in the long run. I’ll be comparing this result to the other divinations I’ll be trying out this week leading up to Thanksgiving. As for what was seen in the mirror, while a supernatural option is possible, many others also exist most notably apophenia as a result of my general pallor, the low light, and my blurring vision to form some kind of optical illusion of a very symbolic and 2Spooky sign. When analyzing the ritual, the two most important aspects are the symbolism of the apple, which in many cultures is seen as a sacred fruit and heavily involved in both knowledge and love making it a great candidate for romance divination, and the combination between the mirror and the flickering candle flame itself. This age old technique, utilized in dozens of ritual games, was recently studied by an Italian psychological team, their paper, with the ultimate conclusion that gazing into a mirror in low-light conditions results in a distortion and feeling of dread or otherness in the participant, sometimes accompanied by hallucinations, as a result of a brain failing in interpretation of the progressively slowing eye movements and manifesting the image from an amalgam of previously stored memories of the image in different contexts, the incoming visual data, and the idea of what it should resemble.  Sort of takes the steam out of Bloody Mary, now doesn’t it? But the study and others has not suggested why this may occur to the brain in these conditions nor has it explained why this technique has been used throughout time for a myriad of uses from divination to communication with the spirit world.

Perhaps this is an instance of a phenomenon being understood by science but it still retaining some of its mystery in its execution. This was a highly subjective experiment, with no images I witnessed in the mirror, showing up in the camera but that does not mean that all future mirror gazing ritual games will be unable to yield objective visualizations. If you try this at home please let me know what, if anything, you see, as well as your thoughts on divination, this ritual, staring into a mirror, and the rest of it.
As an update, I have kept the Yokai for five nights and so far I have been unable to recall a single dream even with varied amounts of sleep and times of going to sleep. I will continue to report as it is for another two nights until I remove the wax, in theory releasing the spirit, on Tuesday (11/26) and will report any phenomenon after that. As for the Devil's Toybox no new phenomenon or audio recordings have been captured. 

Stay tuned for more Food Divination  and Three Kings in the next few days.

Hope to hear from you /x/philes! All the Best.

HospitalCowboy

/x/periment #2: Invoking and Capturing a Yokai

First off, sorry I’m late guys. Stomach bug, work deadline, love of my life’s birthday (Hello Sweetie, Happy Birthday) and then I was trying to plan things out for the next few weeks. I found an alternative to the Elevator Ritual, on the lovely Saya’s blog, so the former will be delayed for a week or two until I can ideally try them both out together just need a black rotary phone. As for this and next week to get into the spirit of the Thanksgiving Season I’ll be doing a couple of small food divination games outlined here, here, and here and lumping them into one video. As promised in last week’s poll I’ll be trying out and filming Three Kings sometime this weekend or early this coming week (Doctor Who 50^th, and Hunger Games might fill up my dance card but it’ll get done eventually). For the beginning of December I’m a bit more hard pressed for festive ideas but I’ll be trying out some rituals including: “TheThird, “One Man Chit Chat” “The Creature in Your Mind” and “Summoning a Watcher”. Closer to the holidays the plan is to play the “Storytime” game that was floating around the /x/ board of 4Chan for awhile with “A Christmas Carol” or “The Turn of the Screw” and to burn a Yule Log to divine deaths in the coming year. If anyone has any ideas for festive games, please as always, feel free to contact me or post a comment below. Now to the meat and potatoes:

Invoking and Capturing a Yokai (Performed on 11/19/13)

Introduction

            Like a lot of rituals, I came across this one on 4Chan’s /x/, the paranormal board, but it is the first and only released lesson from the now defunct EsotericAmerican.com that opened in April of this year and was gone by June. No one actually knows why the website, claiming to be run by a European turn American classical occult mystery school, shut down but as you can see their page, while live, has been scrubbed of all content. According to later reports like this thread and this one, their plan was to provide a complete occult education to everyone over 24 online lessons. The first, and only lesson, was supposed to teach that “void is not empty” by having the participant summon and bind a Yokai, otherwise called in their terminology a Q7, who would communicate through their dreams and reveal great personal insight and wisdom. Now I haven’t been able to find anything on the term Q7 but I have found a LOT on Yokai specifically on some classic literature and not all of it fits with their description of the group. The great diversity and the presence only in dreams seems to suggest that Esoteric American lumped multiple spirits from around the world into this category but that they are believed to be weak (very contrary to some Japanese myths) from some scattered writings attributed to the site. The second lesson was supposed to be the banishing of such entities, as well as Q6s (whatever those are), but it was never released much like many of the Yokai that were summoned are still today.

            Before trying this ritual out I wanted a baseline so I recorded my sleeping patterns and dreams for seven nights of which I was able to remember dreams on 5 nights (with no correlation to how long I slept).

How to “Invoke and Capture a Yokai”

This is the image that is downloaded and colored in for this /x/periment. This version lacks the numbers shown on others but it was the most clear I could find. The first portion is the top five symbols from the "tree-like" to but not including the second "tree-like", then the second "tree-like" onwards, and ultimately third the crescent moon and sun.

Step 1: Gather materials include the print out (shown above a bit bleached for lack of red ink), a glass container or bottle with lid/cork, markers, and wax (total cost <$6). As well as a pillow and place to sleep. (NOTE: The brass charm you guys see on the bottle isn't a requirement. It's a Japanese Lion charm that I found when I was making this and I included because it felt right and to keep records - not to mention it makes a ton of noise if the bottle moves)

Step 2: Color the first series of symbols (I chose to use multiple colors because it felt right but the directions do not specify to do this or contrary to it). Place it underneath your pillow and sleep for an hour or more. If you move in your sleep, like I do, I'd recommend you place it in your pillowcase.

Step 3: After sleeping a period of time color the second set of symbols like this and replace the sheet underneath (or in) your pillow and sleep for at least an hour or more again.

Step 4: When you wake up color the remaining central symbols (not depicted) and quickly roll the sheet and stuff it into the sealed bottle as the Yokai is summoned. While not a requirement, the original lesson highly recommends sealing the container with wax, so I melted down two taper candles (and had plenty wax left over) in an improvised double boiler of two pans and water on the stove and then dipped the corked bottle in it repeatedly.

Step 5: Enjoy your newly summoned and bound Yokai in your dreams and keep an eye out for paranormal occurences. If you do this ritual and get anything, please let me know!

After having the Yokai for two nights, and talking to it before bed as suggested, I have not been able to recall any dreams so far even with these steps. I will continue like this for 5 more nights, after which I will crack the wax on the lid and uncork the bottle to release the spirit (something that was strongly warned against in the lesson but something I promised the spirit). After that I may or may not expose the bottle to pets, water, or bury it depending on how things go up to that point but I will keep you posted (also prohibited by the lesson). Because of the highly subjective nature of this experiment, I will only consider it to have worked if a new, and subsequently recurring, anthropomorphized object or animal character with meaning but without external environmental prompting occurs three or more times in a row during the process and is remembered in the morning or if some sort of external phenomenon including the bottle manifests.I’ll update you guys in my weekly blog post if there are any changes.

            Speaking of updates I have had theDevil’s Toybox for nine days and thus far I have not caught any auditory phenomenon but did notice the box moved about 1cm on the plastic cutting board (with grid) I keep it on. Whether this is the result of the legions of undeath coming to destroy my home and family to release the trapped spirits or one of my three cats is yet to be determined but it isn’t positive proof, yet. The box itself seems to have a good amount of friction making it difficult for a cat to move without some intent, or thumbs, and I keep it on my desk where they don’t usually go but it isn’t conclusive so all I can say so far is I’ll keep you all posted. Expect at least one more post from me soon so stay tuned.

            Hope to hear from you /x/philes! All the Best.

            HospitalCowboy

/x/periment #1 The Devil's Toybox

Devil’s Toybox (Built 11/12/13)

Introduction

The Devil’s Toybox is a cube made of inward facing mirrors that has been sealed off and purportedly carries paranormal properties including discarnate growling and the box moving on its own – some claim these stem from its function for the capture of spirits. This claim was most recently put into practice by the TV crew of Ghostland Tennessee in their premiere episode, 02/24/13 on Animal Planet, who traversed a reputedly haunted location with the box and proceeded to explode it off site to get rid of the trapped spirits. While this latest application was showy there isn’t a whole lot of information widely available on the Devil’s Toybox before Joshua P. Warren brought the technique to light post 2010 and after that most sources repeat the same text verbatim. The first ever recording of the sounds alleged to occur inside the box, taken by Warren himself with a stick on telephone microphone, were first heard on Darkness Radio in February 2012 (Original Audio at 19:30, Touched Up Audio at 23:20 and Reversed Touched Up Audio at 39:35). These effects are supposed to happen the box is exposed to areas or items of high paranormal activity or naturally after 6 months.

 Warren himself has alternatively claimed that its roots go back to the Greek concept of the mirrored room, or Psychomanteum, and later that the Wiccan religion adopted the tool, but he also said he may have invented the technique from his personal experiences and is unsure. Many rumors online, stemming from Warren as well, claim that this tool was also the inspiration for Clive Barker to create the Lemarchand’s Box (aka the Lament Configuration) of Hellraiser fame.

Well there definitely seems to be a demon here, but it’s the devil in the details I’m afraid. Firstly, the Grecian Psychomanteum is much older but would operate very differently form the Devil’s Toybox is proposed to. I also skimmed through assorted works of Wicca’s founders and high rollers, Gardner, Valiente, the Farrars, and Buckland, but found no references to a mirrored box, let alone one with the same name. In case it was more modern invention, I consulted two friends, the first, a Gardnerian Wiccan High Priestess for the past 13 years, and the second was a Dianic Wiccan Solitaire for the past 4 years, and neither had ever heard of nor used a similar device. On top of that Hellbound Heart, the first novella of what would become the Hellraiser series, was published in 1986, over 30 years before Warren brought this technique to the public and Clive Barker has not once mentioned it as a source of inspiration in any interviews.

            So what does all of this mean?

            Well it seems that a lot of what is being circulated about the Devil’s Toybox is not accurate but that in and of itself does not discredit it as potentially working on some magical level (albeit the physics principles are faulty too) so I elected to build one as my first experiment.

How to Build a Devil's Toybox

Step 1: Gather Materials 6 square mirrors of equal size 

and duct tape. I bought them from a Craft Store for under $10.

Step 2: Clean the mirrors well. Mine had little foam pads glued to the back that were removed.

Step 3: Begin duct taping the exterior corners but make 

sure to use an  object with a square edge to guide you 

or will  may have a lopsided cube.

Step 4: Secure Final Mirror on top and duct tape the surface 

of the cube to insulate against light getting in or 

spooks getting out.

Step 5: Enjoy your newly made Devil's Toybox and keep an eye out for paranormal occurrences. If you built one and get anything please let me know!

            And then we wait.

            For six months.

           That’s the reason this was my first experiment of the many more to come. I’ll keep all you /x/philes up to date on the occurrences with my Devil’s Toybox but I'd love to hear if anyone has made one themselves.
           This weekend I will also be performing Exercise 1 from the now defunct EsotericAmerican.com “Invoking and Capturing a Yokai Spirit”, specifically tomorrow morning, and then the Asian Elevator Game or “Another World” Friday or Saturday night so expect more blog posts and a video soon.

            Hope to hear from you /x/philes! All the Best.
            HospitalCowboy

UPDATE: Sorry for the wait guys. I got a bad stomach bug and haven't had a chance to leave my place. I'll be doing the two promised experiments tomorrow or Tuesday at the latest as well as a third early this week to make up for it. Stay Tuned.