Working with Gäap: philosophy, the liberal sciences, love and hatred, and travel between places
Who Gäap is, in the tradition
Gäap, also given as Gaap in the Grimoire Companion material, is a President in the Goetia tradition, and his office is a wide one. He teaches philosophy and the liberal sciences. He moves love and hatred. And he transports the practitioner between places. Those three parts, taken together, describe a spirit for movement in every sense: movement of thought, movement of feeling, and movement of the body from one place to another.
That width is both the strength and the difficulty of Gäap work. A spirit whose office covers philosophy, feeling, and travel can be called on for many different matters, but a working that tries to cover all three at once will be vague, and vague work tends to produce vague results. The first discipline in a Gäap working is therefore to choose: which movement, in your life, is the one you are actually asking for? Is it a movement of understanding, a movement of feeling, or a movement of place? Name it, in one clear sentence, before you begin.
Write that sentence down, leave it overnight, and come back to see if it still reads true. That pause is part of the work, not a delay in it, and for a spirit of philosophy, it is a particularly fitting pause: philosophy begins with a clear statement of the question, and with a willingness to examine that statement, rather than rushing past it to an answer.
Philosophy and the liberal sciences
Philosophy, in the old sense, is not a single subject. It is a way of thinking: asking what is true, what is good, and how we know, and following those questions carefully, even when the answers are uncomfortable. The liberal sciences, joined with philosophy in Gäap's office, are the broad fields of learning that a free person was expected to study: language, number, measure, music, and the study of the heavens and the earth, in the old ordering. A spirit who teaches both is a spirit for a practitioner who wants to understand, broadly and deeply, rather than to learn a single trick.
That breadth suits a particular kind of student: someone who is not only preparing for an exam, or learning a single skill, but who is trying to put different kinds of knowledge together, into a coherent picture. If your work is of that kind, Gäap's office will fit, in a direct way. If your work is narrower, a narrower focus may serve you better, and it is worth saying so plainly, rather than stretching a broad office to cover a narrow need, or stretching a narrow need to fill a broad office.
Judge a philosophy working, afterwards, by plain signs, over weeks: whether questions became clearer, whether arguments became easier to follow, whether different fields of study began to connect, and whether you were willing to examine your own conclusions, rather than simply defending them. Those are the signs of philosophical learning, in practice, and they are worth recording, in plain language, after each study session, rather than judging the working by a feeling on the night itself.
Moving love and hatred
The second part of Gäap's office, moving love and hatred, is the part that most needs careful, specific reading. Love and hatred, in this tradition, are movements of feeling: feelings that draw people together, and feelings that push people apart. To move them is to change the direction of a feeling, in yourself or in a situation, from one direction to another. That is powerful work, and it is work that requires specificity, because feelings are rarely simple, and rarely move in only one direction at a time.
Be specific about what you want, in your own words, before you begin. Which feeling, between whom, in what situation, moving in which direction? A petition that names a feeling clearly, and names the people and the situation clearly, is a petition that can be observed afterwards, and learned from. A petition that asks, in general terms, for love, or against hatred, without naming the situation, is hard to judge, hard to follow up, and hard to learn from, and it risks moving a feeling you did not intend to move, in a direction you did not intend.
Reflection about being specific about what you want is, in this kind of work, not an extra. It is the work itself. Ask yourself, plainly, whether the feeling you want to move is your own feeling, or someone else's, whether it is a feeling that should be moved, or a feeling that should be understood first, and what would change, in the ordinary world, if the feeling moved in the direction you are asking for. Those questions, answered honestly, before the bath and before the petition, will make the working clearer, and its results easier to read, whatever they turn out to be.
Transport between places
The third part, transporting the practitioner between places, can be read in more than one way, and it is worth holding those readings together. In the old grimoire world, transport could mean literal travel, swiftly and safely, from one place to another. In a modern practice, it can also mean a change of place in a wider sense: a move, a journey, a change of scene, a passage from one situation, or one stage of life, to another, with the same sense of being carried across a distance that would otherwise be hard to cross.
Either reading calls for the same discipline: name the place you are leaving, name the place you are going to, and name why the passage matters. A journey without a destination is wandering, and a move without a reason is restlessness. A Gäap working for travel, in either sense, begins with those two namings, in one clear sentence each, and with a petition that is specific about the passage, rather than general about travel in the abstract.
That specificity also helps afterwards, when you judge the working. Judge it by whether the passage happened, whether it happened safely and in good order, and whether you arrived in the place you actually named, rather than in a different place that merely felt like movement. Movement, by itself, is not the goal. Arrival, in the place you meant, is the goal, and a record kept in plain language, of departure, passage, and arrival, is what lets you tell the difference.
Why a bath, for this kind of work
A magick bath is a preparation, not a shortcut. That matters for a working like this, because a bath is a whole-body preparation. You are not anointing one point, or fumigating one tool. You are immersing yourself, for a time, in the materials of the working, and letting that immersion mark the boundary between ordinary time and working time.
For Gäap work, that boundary is especially useful, because Gäap's office is about movement, and movement needs a clear starting point. A bath taken deliberately, before a working, says, in bodily terms, that this time is set apart, that you are leaving ordinary time behind for a while, and that you are preparing to move, in thought, in feeling, or in place. That preparation does not guarantee anything about the result of the work. It does change the state you bring to the work, and in practice, that state is half the working.
Water, in a bath, is also a fitting image for movement itself. Water moves, carries, and changes shape, and a body immersed in water is a body that is, for a time, held and carried by something other than itself. Keep that image in mind as you prepare, and let it shape the petition you speak afterwards: a petition for movement that is carried, in good order, from one place to another, rather than forced, in a rush, without direction.
How to use the bath
Add the bath to a pot of water, approximately one litre or so. If you pour everything in, including the bits of herbs, use a strainer to get the chunks out after your bath, or one of those fish tank nets, or a bird catching net. That is a homely, practical detail, and it is there for a reason: herbs in a bath are pleasant in the pot, and much less pleasant in the drain, or caught in your hair afterwards.
It is best to take each bath each day for three days in a row. That three-day rhythm is the other practical point, and it matters more than it may seem. A single bath, taken once, can be a pleasant preparation. A bath taken three days in a row becomes a discipline, and a discipline is what philosophy, feeling, and travel all require, in different ways. Philosophy requires returning to a question. Feeling requires time to settle and to be observed. Travel requires preparation, day by day, before departure. Taking the bath on three consecutive days mirrors that return, in a small, bodily way, before you do the actual work.
Prepare the room and yourself around the bath in the same spirit. Clear the space you will use afterwards. Set out the seal, if you are working with one, and any book, notes, or travel preparations you will need. Bathe, change into clothes you do not wear for ordinary errands, and know what you are going to ask, in your own words, before you begin. A clear head is a working tool, just as much as a bath, a seal, or a book is.
Working with the seal alongside the bath
A seal for Gäap can be held, placed under a candle, anointed with oil, carried with you, or worn as a pendant, and each of those ways of working suits a different part of a Gäap working. Holding the seal while you study is a way of keeping the purpose in your hand, literally, while your eyes are on the page. Placing it under a candle during a working centres the working on the seal, and lets the candle mark the time of the working. Anointing it with a matching oil marks it for the purpose, deliberately, naming that purpose in your own words.
Carrying the seal, or wearing it as a pendant, extends the working beyond the study table, and beyond the bath. If you are travelling, in either sense, the travelling itself is the working, and a seal carried with you is a reminder of the purpose of the passage, and a prompt to keep noticing, rather than to forget the work as soon as you set out. Showing the seal to a desired person is also part of the general seal-working guidance for this site, and for Gäap work it can be read plainly: show your thought, your feeling, or your intention, clearly, to the person who needs to hear it, rather than keeping a movement of feeling private and untested.
Afterwards, write down what you did, when you did it, and what you noticed, in plain language, over days and weeks, not just on the night itself. Note what became clearer in thought, what moved in feeling, and whether the passage, in place, happened in good order. Do the work properly, once, observe, and then decide, calmly, whether a second working, a different approach, or no further working is the right next step. Repetition without reflection is not persistence. It is noise.
Gäap Goetia bath
If you are preparing for work with Gäap, the bath is for preparation, in the way described above.
This bath is made from 100 percent pure roots, herbs, and sometimes essential oils, with no synthetics used, for a magick bath for work with Gäap. It is used by adding it to a pot of water, approximately one litre or so, straining out the herb pieces afterwards, and it is best taken each day for three days in a row. I make no promise about what it will do for you. That wording is about the magical work itself, not about delivery dates for physical items.
If you want a Gäap bath made in this way, this is the one I offer: Gäap Goetia bath, $44 CAD. View the product
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