Spiritual Alchemy: Scrying, Spirit Communication, and Alchemical Wisdom - Jenny Tyson 2016

My Previous Experience
My Training and Initiation

I had a frustrating start to my attempt to learn the arts of spirit evocation and mediumship. In fact, you might even say I fell flat on my face. I initially had little to no psychic perception, though it was not for lack of discipline or effort. I worked very hard on meditation and other exercises that were supposed to open those abilities, but I could not perceive anything at first. This is the story of how that changed. In this book I will disclose the system of establishing spirit communication that was taught to me by the spirits who helped me and acted as my teachers. I believe it will help those facing the same difficulties I experienced early on in my experiments.

FIFTEEN YEARS AGO

My quest for spirit communication started a few years before I came to Nova Scotia. I was living in Maine at this time. It was a difficult time in my life financially, physically, and spiritually. I felt lost and alone and was heading down a self-destructive path. I was in crisis and trying to find my way out.

This crisis was the turning point that led to my marriage to Donald and moving to Nova Scotia. It was a period of closing old doors as new ones were getting ready to open. I was isolated, stripped of material wealth, and emotionally detached from my social roots and networks. I suffered severe emotional wounds, and like a wild thing I sought solace in lonely, isolated places as I started to heal.

I wandered down to Booth Bay Harbor one day as I was exploring the coastal towns and beaches of midcoast Maine. I found an interesting bookstore called Enchantments. This bookstore is the most complete Pagan and New Age bookstore on the face of the planet. I do not think that a tarot deck or book that has ever been published was missing from their inventory. It was a perfect place for someone who was spiritually searching. I sought a way to get a handle on the slippery slope that I found myself on. I picked out the book The Golden Dawn by Israel Regardie. It looked substantial enough to keep me busy for awhile. I picked out the book based on its physical size and because it appeared to be complex and meaty. I had never heard of the Golden Dawn.

It was through Regardie’s book that I first learned about evocation. I worked on the exercises, following the directions as precisely as I could. There was no Internet in the location where I lived, so I had no opportunity to seek out answers to my questions online. After a year or so, I attempted my first evocation in the woods of an island off the coast of Maine, where I was living at the time. The ritual did not succeed. I felt as if nothing had happened. There was no sign or sense that any spirit was present with me during the ritual. I was very disappointed. I closed the circle in tears, wondering what I had done wrong.

I went back to the bookstore as often as I could, seeking books that might provide answers to the question of how to evoke and converse with a spirit. It became my personal quest. However, I lived on an island. Trips to the mainland were infrequent and required significant preparation, especially in summer. A ferryboat trip was required to take the car to the mainland. In summer, spots were mostly taken up by tourists, requiring island residents to wait in line for days to obtain a spot on the boat.

Wintertime was also difficult, as the storms that racked the Maine coast often closed down the ferry service. Trips in winter on the boat with the car were risky. Storms came up quickly and often without much warning. Maine does not have kind winters by any stretch of the imagination. My trips were limited to once or twice a year.

Eventually I moved back to the mainland. I was healing and moving forward in my life again. By now my book collection on spirit evocation had grown to fill a modest bookshelf. I made attempts at scrying, tarot, dowsing, and other means of interacting with spirits. In spite of my increasing knowledge, my lack of psychic ability was constantly creating a stumbling block.

The breakthrough started in the spring of 2007. I had not had access to the Internet for nearly ten years. I bought my first cell phone, a necessity for work. I could access email using the phone. I had the opportunity to ask questions that I had never been able to ask.

I purchased a book called Familiar Spirits by Donald Tyson. I had been following his work, and at that point he was my favorite author. I watched the mail order catalogs for new books coming out and grabbed them up as fast as they were published. I felt like I was making a little bit of progress with the information I was using from those books, or at least that the sense of failure had lessened a little bit. I had many questions about evocation still unanswered, but I felt the answers were closer at hand than they had been before.

I decided to try mailing a letter to Donald. The publisher offered to forward the mail to the author in the books that they published. The letter was a work of art. I used illuminated lettering and embellishments. Donald still has that first letter, and yes, it did get his attention. I followed up a few months later with an email. I was on the island doing some work at the time. The email exchange that day changed both of our lives.

In three months’ time we were dating, and in seven months we were married. I moved up to Nova Scotia. I had found my love and healing in the new relationship. I wondered if my one-way communication with spirits had exerted a positive effect.

When I first came to live in Canada, in 2007, it was six months before I was able to work in my profession of nursing. I had to take a series of competency tests and sit for the College of Nursing exams. During this time I was not allowed to work, and Donald and I were not yet married.

I occupied myself doing illustrations for Donald. Before moving to Canada, studying art was one of the few hobbies that I enjoyed. One of my coworkers was an accomplished painter and offered lessons in her spare time. I had only a small number of illustrations to do for the books he was writing at the time, which were the Fourth Book of Occult Philosophy and The Thirteen Gates of the Necronomicon. This left me with time to do some heavy-duty spiritual work.

Donald encouraged me. He said to use the books I had studied as a guide and allow my intuition to lead me along my own path, rather than following the instructions in the book verbatim. This excellent advice eventually led to my incredible experiences with Edward Kelley that I describe in these pages. His advice led me to grant myself the freedom to find the path to success.

I owned a copy of Dr. Dee’s Five Books of Mystery, edited by Joseph Peterson, a well-known and respected occult author. I had always wanted to explore this earlier part of the Enochian system of magic described in Peterson’s book. Dr. Dee called it the Heptarchy. It is a complicated book, written in a mixture of sixteenth-century English and Latin. Before the move to Canada, I had been too busy to sit down and work with the material. I decided to follow in Dr. Dee’s footsteps and try to communicate with the angels using the same methods he had used.

I spent about two years exploring the Five Books of Mystery, which make up the first half of the Enochian diary material. The experience was worthwhile. The angels seemed interested in my attempts to communicate with them. I was not able to hear or see them, but sometimes I could feel a touch, like a hand laid on my shoulder or arm. I had dream encounters where I would wake up knowing something that I had not known when I went to sleep. The results were subtle and laid the groundwork for my work with Edward Kelley. I could feel something as I worked through this grimoire and realized later that I was starting to open a little at this point. The sparks of perception were present, even though I did not recognize them until much later.

It was also at this time that I had a lucid dream encounter with Dr. Dee. It was in a beautiful green English grove. Dr. Dee sat under the trees. He looked much the same as he looks in his portrait, except that his appearance was younger. His beard and hair were brown rather than silver. He was not wearing his iconic scholar’s skullcap. He wore a plain green robe. I asked him if he was Dr. Dee, and he told me yes, he was. I realize now that this was an astral projection, not an ordinary dream, and that it foreshadowed my later work with Dr. Dee and Edward. Beyond the greeting, I do not remember anything else.

I attempted to invoke all the angels listed in the Heptarchy. I did not see them, but I was able to work through intuition. The angels did not appear to my intuition as Edward described them in Dr. Dee’s diaries (Edward scried them in a crystal and described them to Dr. Dee, who wrote down their descriptions in his books). I was mildly surprised at this. It made me a little uneasy at first.

Later I came to understand that the nature of spirit vision is such that every seer’s vision is unique. Each seer will see spirits in different ways. Edward’s vision was relevant to his culture and time, and my intuited perceptions were relevant to me. Angels have no physical appearance of their own. Their interactions with Edward’s mind are what created their appearances as described in the diaries.

One notable experience that occurred during my early experiments with the Heptarchy is that my strained relationships with members of my family were healed. I returned home after a long estrangement from my parents, accompanied by my new husband. We rediscovered our bond, and our family became strong and whole once more. I believe the angels played a major role in this recovery, even though I was not able to determine at that time exactly how they were working with me. I only knew that they were there, and my trust in them began to build.

After two years of working with the angels of the Heptarchy, there was a misunderstanding on my part that caused me to think that they did not want to continue to interact with me. The incident happened during an astral projection. I dreamed that I was shot and killed in my sleep. I astrally projected from this dream, and the experience became lucid. I thought I was dead and tried to call Bynepor, one of the angels of the Heptarchy, for help. He came and explained to me that I was not dead but only dreaming. I was confused and did not want to return to my body. I started to argue with him. I left and tried to run away.

When I woke up, I felt ashamed of what I had said to the angel. I was unable to contact the angels of the Heptarchy after that incident. I stopped the work with the Heptarchy at that point. I felt as though I had been on the verge of success but once again had fallen flat on my face.

After the experiments with the Heptarchy, I still felt frustrated with my lack of ability to make the critical spiritual connection. I decided to try a different approach. I had read a book called Magical Use of Thought Forms by Dolores Ashcroft-Nowicki and J. H. Brennan, and was interested in the evocation of the Yidam, a Tibetan deity, and the story of Pema Tense, a Tibetan Buddhist monk who is seeking enlightenment. He finds a teacher and is sent to a cave to perform a ritual to conjure one of the fierce Tibetan deities. He accomplishes the goal of the exercise and then learns from the deity he has conjured. After a period of time, he realizes that he is generating the entire experience. Upon gaining the insight of the true nature of the evoked entity, he wins control over it and develops a true understanding of the illusional nature of the universe.

This account inspired me. I believed if I could accomplish this kind of ritual, I would be able to gain true insight to the spiritual and physical world. I felt that the deity would be the most competent teacher on the path to seek spiritual truth. In 2012 I decided to attempt a variation on this ritual. I had also studied accounts of tulpa making and incorporated the concepts into my own experiment.

I worked for several months on the evocation. I attempted to evoke the Norse god of the sea, Njord. The deity fascinated me, and I thought he would be an interesting spirit to interact with. I have a strong ancestral connection with Norway through my mother’s side of the family, and that connection was a major influence on my faith at that time.

The ritual met with little to no success. Occasionally I had a glimmer of a connection or sense of a presence with me. Day after day I stared into the darkness with an ever-growing frustration and belief that I was a psychic dud.

This was the eve of the great breakthrough. The years of frustrated failure were about to end.