Many people who think they are communing with the gods are simply reacting to crap that their subconscious slings at them. This may or may not have therapeutic value, but it is not magic, since metaphysical forces cannot be psychologized away just so someone can have the safe thrill of believing outside of consensus reality while also appearing sane.

And this is where a fine line needs to be trodden. If on one hand we have the excess of trying to rationalize everything and reduce it to consensus reality, on the other hand irrationalism is just as destructive, and the idea of believing in crap exactly because it is absurd (credo quia absurdum) can lead us down really dark paths, and not the curling-up-with-a-vampire-novel type of dark.

Sometimes I get outraged messages by people who whine that there is no recipe for magic, so I should let them believe what they want. People are absolutely free to believe what they want, but I am also free to call it how I see it. Those people, it is worth noting, tend to be of the soapboxing-on-social-media variety who constantly try to educate others on what’s right and what’s wrong, yet they often fail to realize that they nurture a worldview within which there is no space for right or wrong, true or false.

This type of worldview, in part, is due to the fact that there is no space for magic in our current worldview, and so as soon as one dabbles in it, they immediately find themselves outside of all current definitions of what is reasonable, and so they end up embracing the role of the crazy ones, often subconsciously. And hey, being crazy can be fun at times, and sometimes it can be a good front to protect ourselves, but it needs to be done with some awareness.

Plus, if we take the time to research the history of occultism, both in the West and elsewhere, we find that there are different paradigms that are fruitful from a magical standpoint without having to give up rationality, which is a part of the human make-up, and as such is worth cultivating.

An occultist, a hermetician, a magus, in so far as they act in their magical capacity, are more spaces than individuals: they are liminal spaces between worlds. In order to become that space, we often need to let go of certain convictions, and many of our limits of all kinds will be pushed. This is where working on oneself can be useful and complement occult training.

But this need to go beyond our initial limits (the old adage “you cannot seek initiation and remain the same”), could lead us to believe that irrationalism is simply the last frontier: that reason is simply just another limit to overcome, just another trap of our ego. This, by the way, is what’s behind the kind of zealots who poke snakes with sticks because God told them he would protect them.

Traditionally, in most schools, aspirants to initiation are taught how to screen the perceptions they have during their experiments to see if they are talking to something outside of themselves or not (and if the thing outside of themselves is benign).

One of the first things to apply is logic: if the thing tells you to jump off a window and they will catch you, it’s either a larva with a sense of humor or, more probably, your cupio dissolvi hard at work. If the thing tells you something that goes against reason or contradicts what cannot be doubted (“you won’t fall if you throw yourself from a bridge”), that’s also a red flag. If the thing tells you stuff you know or if it flatters you, it’s just you.

I’m not one to try to scare others unnecessarily: many times, nothing dangerous happens, in part because existence is not as dark as some make it out to be (nor as light as others make it out to be), and in a much larger part because we are often shielded from danger by our own incompetence.

That being said, getting rid of one of your human faculties (reason) instead of cultivating it sensibly can be something you end up paying for dearly. Irrationalism may appear like a way to get read of the ego, but it is often just the last refuge of the ego that cannot stand to be corrected, since reason is so good at countering its poppycock.

MQS