It seems like wars today change little except names. They still cause massive death and destruction, most often to people who wanted nothing to do with such wars. One set of leaders is ousted and another put in power. They often turn out not much better or even worse than those who came before them. This was not always the case. The Western world was dramatically changed by WWI and much of the entire world was changed by WWII. After the attack on Pearl Harbor at the end of 1941, there were only a few minor attacks on 48 U.S. states during WWII. As a result, the knowledge of what war is like for Americans tends to be quite different than for people of Europe. For the past century, to the

I read an interesting blog post by Leigh-Ann Anderson called Choosing a Magickal Name. It give some interesting ideas on how to choose a magickal name, but it doesn't approach the topic historically. Magickal Names in the Past Anciently, there's no evidence that people used magickal names. While this may be because magickal and mundane lives were one and the same, I'm more inclined to believe that they simply weren't needed. The need for a magickal name developed as the military might of the Christian Church expanded. If you were caught doing magick, you could be imprisoned, tortured, or killed…but not before you revealed the names of your "co-conspirators." So people would take on

One of the things that has always intrigued me about the Kabalah is the focus by many Kabalists on the Sephiroht of the famous symbolic image, the Tree of Life. The Sephiroht (the ten spheres shown in the image of the Tree below) are less than 1/3 of the 32 aspects of the Tree, the others being the paths between the Sephiroht. Why focus on only ten rather than on the other 22? (That's like some people who focus on the 10 Commandments of the Jewish bible and ignore the more than 600 others.) Many books on the Kabalah and the Tree of Life, such as Dion Fortune's famous Mystical Qabalah, spend almost their entire length covering the Sephiroht and ignoring or at least slighting the