two

Your Homemade
Magical Motto

Halt! Who goes there?

There’s no time like the present. (That’s more than a cliché, it’s a cosmological fact!) It’s time to give yourself a magical motto. But before you go changing things, I want you to first take a moment to appreciate the magick of your given name, because in actuality it is your first and most powerful magical motto.

I’m lucky. I like my name. Right up until the time my father died, he insisted that I never change or even alter the spelling of my name. As a child I complained to him about “Lon Milo” being so weird and different. “You have a magic name,” he insisted. “Don’t ever change it. Don’t even change the spelling or capitalization.” Dad certainly wasn’t a qabalist or mystic, so I’m not sure how he was defining the word magic, but he was very serious and insistent.

Your given name is profoundly magical. Your name is the magical incantation that evokes you! Think about it. The sound of your own name brings you alive to the awareness of yourself. When you are in a public place or a room full of people and you hear your name being called, what happens in your mind?

“Here I am,” you say in your soul. You remember you are you! You identify yourself to yourself. You acknowledge your presence, your life, your existence. The sound of your own name wakes you up, and that’s precisely what a magical motto should do.

If you already have a magical motto, you might consider coming up with a new one. Go ahead. Don’t be shy. Think about renaming yourself. Make it something that sounds cool and perhaps even a little pretentious. The best magical motto is a word or phrase that represents your current understanding of the universe and reality, or expresses the loftiest goals and aspirations you have right at this moment in your spiritual evolution. As time passes and you grow wiser and more insightful, you will most likely want to trade in the old motto and choose a new and improved one—one that more accurately reflects your increased level of enlightenment (not to mention your expanding capacity for pretense).

So, are you ready to start pretending you know who you are?

Then get serious (or very silly) for a moment and think of the absolute highest spiritual concept or aspiration you can dream up. It doesn’t have to be short. Go ahead and name yourself Frater “All the Power in the Universe Is Inside My Head” (A.T.P.I.T.U.I.I.M.H.), or Soror “The Archangels Grovel and Bow Down to My Awesome Coolness” (T.A.G.A.B.D.T.M.A.C.), or Frater “I Don’t Care What You Think About My Tie I’m Going to Wear It” (I.D.C.W.Y.T.A.M.T.I.G.T.W.I.).

You’ll probably want to choose something less silly than these examples, but don’t worry about it sounding too audacious, corny, or pretentious, because chances are, anything you think of right now will be profoundly inadequate. For the time being, however, you just have to be temporarily comfortable with identifying yourself with that word or statement. Just pick a motto and stick with it until you outgrow it.

I can always tell when Constance has changed her motto. A new little sign appears suddenly in the kitchen on the altar of our refrigerator door. Her first motto was Beauty, Growth, Balance. A few years later she became Sister So What! For years after that she simply identified with the prime number 83 because of something she read in an Aleister Crowley essay on numbers, where he wrote: “83: Consecration: love in its highest form: energy, freedom, amrita, aspiration. The root of the idea of romance plus religion.” 8

Our refrigerator altar. Most everyone decorates the refrigerator door. Constance’s choice of objects includes her past and present magical mottos and sacred images and aphorisms.

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Fruitless Love and Aimless Toil was the next motto to appear on the refrigerator door, followed a couple years later by the disturbingly profound (and oddly capitalized) statement iAM FINISHED. Presently she is Glory to God.

My first attempt at a magical motto wasn’t a motto at all but a number. My father’s admonition to never change my name got me thinking about the qabalistic virtues inherent in the letters of my own name. I converted the letters into their Hebrew equivalents using a chart I created similar to this:

A	1	N	50
B	2	O	70, 6
C	8, 20, 300	P	80
D	4	Q	100
E	5	R	200
F	6	Sh, S	300, 60
G	3	Th, T, Tz	400, 9, 90
H	5	U	6
I	10	V	6
J	10	W	6
K	20	X	90
L	30	Y	10
M	40	Z	90

L	=		=	30
O	=		=	70
N	=		=	50
M	=		=	40
I	=		=	10
L	=		=	30
O	=		=	70
D	=		=	4
U	=		=	6
Q	=		=	100
U	=		=	6
E	=		=	5
T	=		=	9
T	=		=	9
E	=		=	5
				444

There are other ways to use Hebrew letters to spell out “Lon Milo DuQuette,” but to me, this was the simplest and most straightforward rendering of the name. I was absolutely thrilled that my magick name added up to such a cool-looking number. (It was like a poor man’s 666!) I consulted a table of important qabalistic words and their number equivalents and, to my disappointment, discovered that 444 was not a number to get too excited about. Multiples of 111 are always nice, and there are many ways to play with 444 that generate material to meditate on, but the most important thing I got out of the whole exercise was a certain sense of identity and the simple realization that it was “my” number and one of the reasons my name (and my life) was magical. It is the reason that I’ve always used my full name on anything and everything I publish. It is my stage name when I perform and my artist name when I record.

I chose my first formal magical motto in 1976 on the occasion of my reception as an A∴A∴ Probationer under the mentorship of Phyllis Seckler McMurtry. I chose for my motto a phrase that incorporated the initials of my name, L.M.D. I chose the three words “Liberty. Mastery. Dignity.” To further abet my magical pretensions, I thought it would be extra elegant if I said it in French: Liberté. Maîtrise. Dignité. LMD is also the full spelling of the Hebrew letter Lamed ,9 which is traditionally assigned to the Tarot trump Justice. I felt my life could use the balance and discrimination that card represents.

One year later, when it came time for me to advance to the grade of Neophyte, I had grown more thoughtful (and a little less pompous). The ordeals and challenges of my probationary year had humbled me a bit, and my quest had become seriously personal and almost painfully simple. In what was becoming for me an increasingly complex universe, I realized that my only refuge, my only defense and protection, my only hope for survival, my only hope for eventual self-mastery, rested on my ability to make and keep my spiritual aspirations as innocent and pure as possible. I chose the motto “Purity of Aspiration.” Again, I rendered the phrase in French: Pureté de l’aspiration.

My subsequent mottos were Hoathe IAIADA, “True Worshipper of the Highest” in the Enochian Angelic language. Perhaps my favorite motto, and one that I thought might last me for the duration of this incarnation, was Adeo Sat Bene, Latin for “So far so good.” Two years ago I accepted a new motto, “Only Love Is.” Nostalgically I returned to French, Seul l’amour est.

Before we go any further, I would like you to pause now and settle the matter of your magical motto. If you already have a motto, fine. If you don’t, I want you to create one right now. I’ll wait …

Got it? Good!

Now, I want you to use your new motto to formally give birth to yourself as a homemade magician. I’m serious. Do you think you can become a magician just by reading about it? No. You actually have to do stuff yourself, stuff that nobody else can do for you. Sorry. This is your show. In order to give birth to yourself, you need to be your own mother, father, midwife, and baby. So please, listen up!

To illustrate their condition of spiritual blindness, candidates for initiation are (or at least have been since time immemorial) first blindfolded (hoodwinked) and bound hand and foot at the beginning of the ceremony. This is obviously a disturbing and uncomfortable position to find oneself in, and that’s exactly why it’s done. It’s supposed to be disturbing and uncomfortable.

Before initiation, we dwell in the darkness, blind to the light of the greater reality that is enjoyed by the more spiritually enlightened. The candidate is unable to move forward effectively in this blind and ignorant state, unable to help himself or herself (let alone others) while in this sorry condition. As the ceremony proceeds, the bound and hoodwinked candidate “travels” (is led around) the temple or lodge room and is “taught” certain lessons. Eventually, as the candidate grows in knowledge and wisdom, the fetters are gradually removed. The climax of this part of the initiation ceremony is when the hoodwink is removed and the candidate is “brought to Light.” But before this supreme moment, the candidate must first take an oath.

It is a scary thing being obliged to take a solemn oath in a ceremony like this. After all, you are making some very serious promises to people you can’t even see while being tied up and completely at their mercy. In a temple or lodge room ceremony, the candidate must do a little soul-searching. Pragmatically, it is clear that unless he or she goes ahead and takes the oath, the initiation will not continue. The blindfold will stay on, and he or she will be removed from the initiation chamber and sent back into the outer darkness. Almost always the candidate dutifully proceeds to repeat the oath (no matter how it is worded), because in truth he or she is mildly confident that nothing too bad will happen.

Unless you’ve read ahead in this book, you’re not sure exactly what you’re going to promise in the oath you’re about to take. But hey! Don’t you trust me? (I hope you said no.) Come on! Even though you think it’s silly, take the first step in your homemade initiation. It’s disarmingly easy, and it will only take an eternal moment.

Start by taking a deep breath and pretending you are in the presence of the Supreme Intelligence of the universe (because you really are). Now recite the oath out loud with full magical intent. Then, if you don’t see anything in the oath that you object to, sign it (right here in this book) using your new magical motto. If you don’t like this oath, cross it out and make up another homemade oath, then recite it and sign it.

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OATH

I, [Your magical motto],

in the presence of all I hold sacred, do hereby accept
absolute responsibility for my own condition of darkness and ignorance
and solemnly acknowledge and declare that ultimately
only I can bring myself to Light.

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There! Wasn’t that easy? It has only taken you countless incarnations (plus the number of years, days, hours, and seconds of this current lifetime) to get to this moment. Congratulations! The hardest part is over!

You are off to a good start and are now properly pretending to know who you are. You are now ready to undergo the ordeal of initiation.

Where do you go to be initiated?

How about initiating yourself—right at home!

[contents]

8. Aleister Crowley, 777 and Other Qabalistic Writings of Aleister Crowley: Including Gematria and Sepher Sephiroth (York Beach, ME: Weiser Books, 1986), p. xxv.

9. Throughout my magical career, “L.M.D.” has continued to serve me well. When I was consecrated Archbishop in the Ecclesia Gnostica Catholica (Gnostic Catholic Church), I took the ecclesiastical name “T Lamed.” Also, I took the name Rabbi Lamed Ben Clifford (Lamed, Son of Clifford—Clifford was my father’s name) as my nom de plume for my book The Chicken Qabalah of Rabbi Lamed Ben Clifford (York Beach, ME: Weiser Books, 2001).