Friday, December 31, 2010
Thursday, December 30, 2010
A SOLITARY APPRENTICESHIP
Throughout my adolescence, I carried on reading about the subjects that interested me and, in particular, I gathered information on occultism. Some 12 years ago now I got hold of a copy of the Petit Albert and the Grand Albert, volumes of magic spells highly respected in the country. These were the first books of their kind I owned, bought using the pocket money I earned helping my father, acquired in secret and hidden at the very back of my desk. I would wait until I was alone in the evening and read them in the dim light of a lamp.
The books specify the times when you should and shouldn’t read them, which must be obeyed at risk of suffering unpleasant consequences. By respecting these recommendations, I felt I was entering another universe where I had every right to be. I had no trouble distinguishing between the ‘normal’ world and the world of occultism, and to me it seemed totally natural for the two to exist side by side and for me to pass between one and the other. I wasn’t looking for an escape into a different world - I just wanted to experience new sensations.
Wednesday, December 29, 2010
We are soon to say goodbye to the year 2010 and hello to 2011, in retrospectively looking back at the events of this year, what do you feel? Was it a good year or do you think it wasn't good at all? How would you like 2011 to be? What are your wishes for this year? Personally I would like people to come together much more and communicate, dare say what's on their mind, calmly without to much emotions, be more forgivingly with themselves and of course with others, I would like people to be less aggressive, more gentle and friendly, even with strangers, even with their families, because some are worse with their loved ones. Anyway, I do wish, for all of you, a wonderful new year 2011, please start preparing your wishes, maybe they will come true.
At home during term time, despite having no passion for reading, I became very interested in books. It was an interest I developed alone, since no-one around me read: my parents never had time. By the time I was a teenager I was devouring books. I liked adventure stories and cartoons, but my favourites were about ancient and modern history, biographies, anything about men in action in their times. It was a way of studying human nature and learning how to ‘read’ people. Through my observation of them in everyday life and in books, I felt I came to understand them. Better, in any event, than my friends of the same age who had little interest in what was going on outside of their world. Friends often came to me for advice because I seemed to be streets ahead of them when it came to personal relationships and how to negotiate them. Adults and my teachers, on the other hand, found me rather shy and self-effacing. Even as a small child I was interested in other people, I liked to watch them and work out what was going on behind their words, gestures, attitudes and the vibrations they gave off. I put myself in their shoes and worked out whether they were feeling happy, or upset, whether they were ill or worried… I didn’t attach too much importance to this habit until I started to see my observations regularly confirmed by events. At that time I didn’t think of it as a gift of clairvoyance or premonition, I was just happy to see things work out the way I’d thought they would…It gave me confidence in myself.
It was my unruliness that led me towards the practice of magic! When I was eleven I dislocated my foot jumping off a high roof on a farm. My grandmother took me to a bonesetter she knew. Later, he told me that when he touched me to set the muscles and nerves back in the right place, he felt the potential within me and, without saying anything, made certain gestures to gage my interest and attention.When he realised I had intuitively understood what he was doing, he asked me to come back and see him another time. That’s how he started to teach me some of what he knew, without words, by showing me how it worked and, over the course of time, he revealed more and more to me. It wasn’t luck that caused us to meet and I wasn’t compelled to take up magic. I had the conviction that, like others, I had been born with a ‘magical soul’”. It was by knowing when to hold my tongue and listen to others, by learning to dare, by broadening my education and testing my will that I developed that particular sensibility. I have had magic in me at every stage in my life. Throughout my entire childhood I had experiences that brought me closer to the universe, and that’s because I was ready to have them.
Tuesday, December 28, 2010
One day, my grandfather, who was suffering from a fatty cyst, took me with him to see the healer. In the waiting room as we waited our turn there was a pretty birdcage that contained several birds some of which were completely still while others chirruped and flapped their wings with great spirit. There were little canaries and coloured parrots, making quite a lovely sight. The contrast between the lively birds and the ones that seemed frozen with fear fascinated me. When the healer came out of his room to collect my grandfather, he opened the birdcage and, with a couple of gestures, awakened the birds that had quite simply been in a light hypnotic state. He used to make each of them in turn sleep just so he could demonstrate his power to his customers! And as an impressionable seven-year-old child, I was indeed amazed.
Monday, December 27, 2010
It was in Normandy that my relationship with magic started to become very intense. At that time, country people often chose to see healers, bonesetters and hypnotists over doctors, vets or the pharmacist who perhaps lived in another village. They were recommended by word of mouth, and one person would tell the next how a neighbour’s bad back had been cured, or a mare’s sprained leg healed. All types of country magic were very common and frequently practised: the evil eye, sorcery, negative vibrations, but also the prayers that cured and the ones that made for a good harvest...
Sunday, December 26, 2010
Children, our future, are so marvellous and I love to observe them during Christmas, they are capable of believing in the magic, in the fantastic, in the beauty, they transcend the atmosphere we try to create for them even though we, as adults no longer "see" the magic ourselves, into Christmas, that's why we need to be near kids to really appreciate this period of the year
My grandfather used to lead us to isolated shacks where we could play in safety all day long, but which seemed haunted as darkness came. Words whispered by the other children about mysterious goings-on there would come back to us then, and we would be edged into a supernatural world. Grandpa made us listen to the noises of the night, so different from those of the daytime. All this created an atmosphere of equal fear and pleasure that sent shivers down our spine although we didn’t dare show it until we were tucked up in bed.
Thursday, December 23, 2010
The house where my grandparents lived bordered onto a country lane. If you walked down that lane at night, the leaves on the trees cast strange shapes on the ground. The darkness that fell changed the silhouettes of familiar objects. It was a time when the daytime world was transformed into a sinister place no longer under the control of man, taken over by the spirits of the night, phantoms and genies…
Wednesday, December 22, 2010
All my childhood memories are closely linked to nature and animals. Much has been said, since the seventies, about communion with nature…and it’s a term that perfectly describes how I felt back then and still feel now: a need to speak to plants, to trees, to animals and the intense feeling that they respond to me.
I was definitely an introspective dreamer by nature, right from the outset, but I also think our lifestyle drove me to observe things and people with a curious and analytical mind. I felt very different to other people. I wasn’t a sad or withdrawn child though! Like all kids of my age, I got into my fair share of scrapes and played happily with my friends.
Tuesday, December 21, 2010
My grandfather also loved to walk with us as at dusk as the light faded, at that time of day when the animals that inhabit the daytime hours seek shelter just as the nocturnal ones start to stir. And so we discovered an ever more fascinating universe, our senses heightened by the feeling of mystery of the night.
I had a wonderful time in forests and fields, whatever the time of year. I always loved nature just as much in winter as in summer and, for as long as I can remember I felt the passing of the seasons and time very intensely. What’s more, our grandparents taught us about the cycles of nature: what time of year the fields were sown, when the first shoots appeared, when they were harvested, when they withered… We knew the taste and colour of butter changed with the seasons, depending on what the cows had been eating, that baby animals aren’t born just whenever, that you can cook some types of mushroom but not others, that bees may sting but we need them for pollination … All that knowledge that city kids don’t learn till later. When I went back to the city I had a library of sensations and images that ensured I never saw looked at the objects of day-to-day life in the same way again.
I had a wonderful time in forests and fields, whatever the time of year. I always loved nature just as much in winter as in summer and, for as long as I can remember I felt the passing of the seasons and time very intensely. What’s more, our grandparents taught us about the cycles of nature: what time of year the fields were sown, when the first shoots appeared, when they were harvested, when they withered… We knew the taste and colour of butter changed with the seasons, depending on what the cows had been eating, that baby animals aren’t born just whenever, that you can cook some types of mushroom but not others, that bees may sting but we need them for pollination … All that knowledge that city kids don’t learn till later. When I went back to the city I had a library of sensations and images that ensured I never saw looked at the objects of day-to-day life in the same way again.
Monday, December 20, 2010
As a little boy from the city, I had a chance to find out about nature in a quite extraordinary way that had a profound impact on my character. It was in this little village in Normandy where my grandparents lived, between Falaise and Pont-d’Ouilly, that I had my first contact with nature and animals. My grandfather opened my sister’s and my eyes to the world around us. He showed us the glow-worms that ‘lit up’ as night fell, the hares that ran towards the safety of shelter, the bird’s nests hidden in the hedgerows, the insects that buzzed… He taught us to listen to the noises instead of just hearing them, he attuned our ears to the gentle whistle of the wind in the leaves, the chirruping of the birds, the rasping noise some insects made, the rustling of small animals scurrying through the grass…I realised that life was swarming around me, I imagined myself as a butterfly on a flower or a mole burrowing in the earth...
Sunday, December 19, 2010
Saturday, December 18, 2010
Friday, December 17, 2010
What do you wish to accomplish in 2011? Do you have any special wishes? Like find a new job, win some money, find love, make some friends, loose weight, start a spiritual path, whatever wishes you have, you can realize them in believing in yourself, my job is to help my clients, get rid of the bad energies and let in the good ones, then they can achieve anything.
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