Category Archives: Occultism and Esoterism

astrology, Cartomancy, Divination, Divination Master Post, Fortune-telling, Geomancy, I Ching / Yi Jing, Occultism and Esoterism, Playing Cards, Tarot, Vera Sibilla

Flexibility in Divination (and Other Occult Branches)

Leave a comment

In my latest reading, an interesting phenomenon happened: I had to partly go beyond the basic rules of the oracle (in this case the tarot) in order to interpret its message.  Specifically, I had to get past the rule that only the Wand figures represent the querents and accept the Queen of Cups as an alternative version of the subject in question.

There is always a reason why something happens, and in this case I believe the possible reasons were 1) that I was asking about my mother, so the cards described her not only as the protagonist of the reading (Wand) but also as mother of the person asking the question (Cup) 2) the reading was, in part, about her still viewing herself as wife, even though she is widowed, so not only is she the protagonist (Wand) but also a wife (Cup).

I am pretty sure this sort of things (that is, the need to apply the ground rules with discretion) can happen in different respects with any deck. In fact, I think it can happen with any oracle. The late Robert Zoller often showed that good astrologers need to be guided by what the chart is saying, which often requires one to start from recorded knowledge and then stretch that knowledge to cover each individual case. William Lilly, possibly the most important horary astrologer in history, often repeated that one must “mix discretion with art”, that is, understand the rules and then apply them intelligently.

The thing is, divination is not an assembly line type of work: it’s a Hermetic art (where the word ‘Hermetic’ is understood in its classical sense, not the Kybalion-style crap). If even the rules of biology need to be interpreted smartly by doctors in order to cure the human body, then how much more flexible do we need to be to interpret a device whose permutations can give us the blueprint for anything that could happen?

Anything goes vs informed pragmatism

My understanding of divination is a never-ending journey. The way I currently see the rules of divination is as posts along the way in a thick snowstorm. If a post has been put somewhere, that means someone was there before and has figured out something. We do not discard such knowledge lightly, unless the contingent reality of our current situation makes us prefer another route.

This approach is very different from the ‘anything goes’ non-method used by so many, which is almost expected and even bragged about, largely due to the widespread rejection of rationality in our milieu. Too many people who dabble into esoteric subjects today seem to believe that throwing overboard logic is the first step on the journey. In part this is due to mistaken orientalist fantasies, in part to a post-modern Zeitgeist that sees all structures as dispensable, reactionary dead weight only good for restraining us– who wants to be restrained?

The way I currently see rules in the esoteric arts is neither reactionary nor revolutionary. It is an attempt at appraising reality through lenses as simple as possible and as complex as they need to be, a kind of pragmatism that is informed by the past but future-oriented in looking for concrete solutions to concrete issues.

As far as divination is concerned, it is a language, but it is a language with no native speakers, and for which no Rosetta stone exists, except the tentative hypotheses of those who have grappled with the language before. We don’t need to vest them with our superstitious awe, but we do owe them a serious, dispassionate look at the conclusions they have reached before either accepting them as they are, discarding them or expanding them with discretion.

MQS

Occultism and Esoterism, Spirituality and Psychology

Stuff You Don’t HAVE To Believe: Reincarnation

Leave a comment

We talked about Karma and manifestation. Now let’s tackle reincarnation. Unlike manifestation, which is based on pure New Thought superstion and is indefensible from all standpoints, logical, philosophical, moral and practical, reincarnation does have a noble tradition behind it. Still, the magical inheritance of Victorian occultism has made it almost so as if reincarnation is another one of those compulsory beliefs that come with the Spiritual Outsider starter pack.

Reincarnation reentered Western occultism largely through the many misunterstandings of Eastern doctrines perpetuated by the Theosophists. Yet, contrary to what some may think, reincarnation is not an exclusively Eastern belief, and it is found in many parts of the world, including in pre-Christian (and sometimes even Christian) Europe. In fact, the idea of reincarnation is probably suggested to the mind by the observation of the cycles of nature, so it is, in a way, a somewhat valid inference, at least from an analogical standpoint.

But analogical inferences do not reality make. If that were the case, you could slap four wheels on your grandma and call her a Ferrari. Regardless of how reincarnation may be suggested to the mind of ancient civilizations, let us ask ourselves why it is the go-to belief of many self-styled independent thinkers.

I would submit that, once the average Westerner abandons the idea of Heaven and Hell as expoused by our main religions in order to approach the occult or magical worldview, they find themselves wanting for another destination for their great hereafter, so they grope around for the first purple-covered book in the local esoteric library, where they invariably find reelaborations of reelaborations of reelaborations of the same Victorian metaphysical dogmas, they mistake them for something new, refreshing and forward-looking that goes well with their new crystals and adopt it.

I don’t want to crap on reincarnation, because, as I will shortly discuss, I do believe in some version of it. What I want to drive across is that independent thinking starts with challenging dogmas, both the mainstream and the counter-mainstream ones.1 It is perfectly legitimate to examine, question and argue and to reach other conclusions, just as it is legitimate to adopt the belief in reincarnation, or some variant of it.

As for me, I would believe in reincarnation if I believed in individual souls. To me there is only one universal soul which is present as a whole within each part of existence. That soul definitely reincarnates. I may even go further and argue that, since this universal soul reincarnates continuously through endless amouts of beings, at some point some of the beings that are born are bound to have some semblance of continuity with some beings that have died before, and since the individual being who dies loses its ability to distinguish time t1 from time t2, from the standpoint of its individual perception its death and its rebirth are contiguous. Needless to say, there is nothing karmic or retributive about this view of reincarnation.

These are my two cents, very succinctly explained. Feel free to take them, leave them or add them to your collection of two cents.

MQS

  1. Not to mention the ability to know when and how to question and when how not to. ↩︎
astrology, Cartomancy, Divination, Divination Master Post, Fortune-telling, Geomancy, I Ching / Yi Jing, Occultism and Esoterism, Playing Cards, Spirituality and Psychology, Tarot, Uncategorized, Vera Sibilla

Intuition – Do You Need The Gift of Prophecy?

Leave a comment

I received a really sweet message from a fledgling occultist who wants to pick up some form of divination, but has been put off so far because they have been convinced that they don’t have “the gift”, as they put it, by which I think they meant intuition.

It is a fact of life that a certain predisposition can give you a head start. My high school chemistry teacher could explain to me every single step of how to balance a formula, and I would sort of understand it, but then, left to my own devices, I would still get it wrong. I certainly didn’t have the gift for it. But that doesn’t make chemistry hoplessly outside of my reach. If I had persevered instead of throwing my hands up and saying “oh well, at least I can read Plato in Greek” I would have definitely made some progress. It’s just that in life you’ve got to pick your battles, and I knew I wasn’t the next Marie Curie, and I did like Plato, so Plato it was.

The same holds true for the various esoteric disciplines. The kind of gift that is required to practice them is not different from the predisposition toward high school subjects. Yet there is this widespread belief something more is needed. Well, it isn’t needed.

Oracles, i.e., the various forms of divinations, are languages, and like all languages they require study and practice. The idea that all it takes is intuition is a result of the loss of understanding for occult practices that resulted from the scientific revolution, which confined anything that wasn’t understandable in terms of the rising empiricism to the realm of irrational superstition.

This new designation was either consciously or unconsciously accepted by those practicing divination, so divination became something irrational that requires non-rational tools to be practiced. This, in spite of the fact that, wherever you look around the world, and even in the West before the Enlightenment, divination is considered to be primarily made of rules to be studied and applied with intelligence.

True divination, like all parts of magic, is hopelessly technical. It has nothing to do with following your heart, much less your intuition. Speaking of which, actual intuition is a much more sacred thing than the “I can’t prove it but I know it’s true” that many make it out to be. “I just feel this is how it is” is how cults get started, which is probably why so many people who describe themselves as intuitive are so up their own asses and so full of unconscious prejudices.

That is not intuition: it is personal bias subtracting itself from scrutiny. Actual intuition is the prerogative of the great saints, and only to a lesser extent of people who are on a spiritual/esoteric path. It is rare and cannot be commanded. It is the result of brief moments of perfect union with the source of all, and for that reason it comes from outside the limitations of the individual vessel. What many call intuition are simply personal hunches that they cannot trace back to any line of reasoning.

And mind you: hunches ARE a thing. They can work, and sometimes they can help. They can also fail. Many people seem to believe that ‘intuition’ is never wrong. And fair enough, the intuition I talked about is in fact never wrong. But personal hunches CAN indeed be wrong, in the same way that a logical inference can be wrong: hunches, like reason, the senses and all other channels humans use to gather information, are fallible. The fact that many think their hunches are never wrong is simply the result of confirmation bias: if they concentrated on how often their hunches let them down on a daily basis they’d be crushed.

Another use of the term intuition is simply a cooler way of describing the facility that comes from experience. The experienced doctor comes in, eyeballs you, listens to a couple of your complaints and knows with a high degree of probability what is wrong with you. The experienced mechanic listens to the purr of your car and knows immediately it will break down in two weeks if you don’t do something about it.

That’s also not intuition, although it is far more valuable than what average psychics do. It is simply the result of having gone through the same process so often that you can skip some of the steps, at least consciously. It is the intellectual version of muscle memory.

So, can anyone become a diviner? Let me answer with a question: can anyone become a chemist? Well, no. If we all could, the human race would go extinct. But the only thing keeping you from studying chemistry is your decision and perseverance. So is with divination.

MQS

Occultism and Esoterism

How To Know The Witch You Hired Isn’t Good

Leave a comment

I had a chat with a reader of this blog about her experience ordering a spell on Etsy and being disappointed by the results. She asked me what are some pointers to follow in choosing a witch and how to know if he or she is good or lying, etc. Here are some red flags:

Their Mouth Is Moving

This may sound harsh, but by and large, actual magical practitioners who accept commissions from others don’t waste their time on social media blabbering about their own prowess. Blabbering is a marketing strategy, and as we’ll see in the next point, magic cannot have a market in the same way that toilet paper or grilled cheese can.

Actual magical practitioners may very well choose to record their experiences online, and you may even find the occasional one who offers some kind of magical service, but you’ll not find them screeching at others on socials or competing with zeal in the attention economy.

The practice of occultism, whether it is folk occultism or “high” occultism (and I don’t believe in this distinction) changes people. If they are clearly worse than you would be if you were in their position, they haven’t changed, so they don’t practice magic.

Taking Orders Like A Pizza Place

Magic is a preindustrial, pre-assembly line thing. A magical work is a complex convergence of personal and cosmic aspects and it cannot be done over and over with no end in sight. Finding ads that say something to the effect of “Make him come back to you, last 5 spells available” is an immediate red flag. An actual practitioner cannot seriously follow more than a very small handful of operations at a given time.

Of all parts of occultism and magic, divination is probably the more marketable, because one can perform it more freely and continuously, but even divination has its limits: if the diviner is not feeling at peace or concentrated, or if their are feeling tired, it is perfectly futile to fan out the cards. If something goes wrong during the reading, it is best to postpone the session. This may inconvenience the modern customer who expects results, but it is what it is.

There’s No Good And Evil, Harry

This is an exceedingly fashionable belief, because it fulfills a wish, on many people’s part, to believe that it is possible to obtain the results of evil actions while remaining neutral and respectable.

There is no need to be an old-fashioned, moralistic curmudgeon in order to understand that good and evil very much exist. Good is what fosters life and growth, evil is what stands in their way. In astrology, Saturn is not evil because he is satanic in the 80s satanic panic sense, but because he stunts, corrupts, breaks down, makes suffer, stands between us and our will, and no amount of whitewashing it as “the planet of working out karma” can change this fact. Jupiter is not good because he is the astrological equivalent of Santa, but because he nourishes and protects.

Many in the magical community choose to believe that everything is what you make of it and it all depends on your intention. This is the inheritance of the excesses of Crowleyanism.

In reality, the difference between white and dark magic is quite obvious: dark magic is a magic of command. As such, it is almost always illusory, in that the recoil for it makes it always clear that no true command over the summoned force is possible. And there HAS to be a recoil (although it is possible to discharge it on someone else). But dark magic gives very quick results when worked properly.

White magic doesn’t work by command but by petition, which is an esoteric extension of prayer, it is slower, safer and less spectacular in its action, because it doesn’t subvert the order of things, but rather harmonizes the target with it so that the best that can be obtained by a situation is obtained. But the best that can be obtained is not always what the target wants. Sometimes all that can be obtained is peace of mind. And that’s not nothing.

Furthermore, white magic doesn’t bend another’s will. You can petition an angel or a God-name to get you back with your ex all you want, that force will not intervene, and if you do get back with your ex it’s because it was on your path already. Dark magic is always a perversion of the natural path, which is what originates the imbalance that causes the recoil. It is also what gets you the quick hit.

Light and Love

This has to be the most ironic part of it. You always see fake magical practitioners spewing platitudes about light, positive vibes, manifesting abundance and all that nonsense, when what they want is often to bend other people’s autonomy, either directly (“let him come back to me”) or indirectly (“let the product I’m selling explode on the market”, which means forcing other people to like it), and this is the opposite of light and love.

Magic is made of light and love. It is also made of shit and blood and broken bones. And it is also made of all the very mundane experiences that sit on the continuum between light and love on one end and shit and blood on the other. Talking about just one side of the experience is intellectually dishonest, especially since it is aimed at winning over customers.

Witchy Aesthetics

This is the last point I’m going to talk about, but it alone would be enough to bury 99% of magical practitioners found online. Actual magic is not pleasing to the eye. It doesn’t have the aesthetic kick that the average girlypop found on TikTok or Tumblr is looking for to fuel the fantasy of being not-like-other-girls. It is not a bunch of symbols thrown together with endless amounts of colored candles, pentagrams and store-bought incense. Broadly speaking, the more the pictures you find look like what you would expect magic to look based on movies, the more you can be sure it isn’t going to have any effect.

MQS

Card Meanings, Cartomancy, Divination, Divination Master Post, Everyday Oracle, Fortune-telling, Occultism and Esoterism, Sibilla della Zingara, Vera Sibilla

Vera Sibilla Cards That Indicate Spirituality and Occultism

Leave a comment

Pretty much every card in the Vera Sibilla has some connection with spirituality and occultism, especially when that’s the topic of the question. However, some cards are more pronounced in the kind of indications they give. The unfortunate thing about this sort of topics is that people tend to use them as a substitute for real life. So, for instance, once someone wrote that the Queen of Clubs can indicate a psychic vampire, and then everyone started reading that card primarily as that for a while (becuase, of course, you are such a wonderful person that everyone wants to leech off of your energy). In reality, unless the question is about spiritual or occult topics, such interpretations are best kept rare, and even then, the surrounding cards need to be kept in mind.

Ace of Hearts – The Conversation (Conversazione)

This is not an especially esoteric or spiritual card, but I’ll talk about it to show how easy it can be to expand a card’s regular meaning to cover those topics. The Conversation card is about words and people meeting or living together. In a spiritual or esoteric reading it can therefore indicate prayers (communion with the divine), exorcisms or spells (the spiritual or esoteric use of words). It can also indicate a group of people operating a ritual or praying together.

Four of Hearts – Love (Amore)

Again, not an especially esoteric card, but it is one of the possible cards indicating the soul (winged, heart-related). It can also indicate that one has the otherworldly tendency to attract certain types of happenings into their life. This has nothing to do with the law of attraction, but merely a statement of the fact that certain people simply tend to end up in specific situations.

Seven of Hearts – The Scholar (Letterato)

The Scholar is connected with the constructive use of the mind. It can therefore indicate plans, including esoteric plans, mostly tending to be good ones. It can also show the divine plan, providence etc.

Eight of Hearts – Hope (Speranza)

The Hope card is the main significator of faith, though not necessarily religious faith. It is heavily indicative of our psychic connection with the divine. It is also involved in those situations where the person has prophetic dreams, psychic powers and all those abilities witches on WitchTok pretend to have but really don’t. Reversed, it can indicate atheism (lack of hope in the divine) or, with very evil cards, it can indicate negative faith systems, such as satanism (we’re talking O9A, not the coastal post-crowleyan, occult-flavored performance art that passes itself off as satansim).

Nine of Hearts – Faithfulness (Fedeltà)

The Faithfulness card is one of great protection and support, whether from worldly friends or from otherworldly ones. As such, it can indicate angels (the Messenger is another possible card for angels, but in a more neutral sense). More commonly, it can indicate devotion to a belief system.

King of Hearts – The Gentleman (Gran Signore)

Obviously, God is the esoteric and spiritual gentleman par excellence, and this is usually what this card can represent. It indicates great protection from the divine (the female counterpart would be the Maiden for the Virgin Mary, or the Girlfriend for a female saint or goddess).

Two of Clubs – The Peacock (Pavone)

The Peacock is one of the cards we look for in sequences about magic and spirituality. When upright, it represents the god-power which unfolds at its own pace, like the peacock’s tail, creating opportunity for marvel and salvation. Esoterically, it shows magic in a neutral to positive sense. It represents oaths and religious vows. Reversed, it is the card of the devil (the one who was doomed by his pride), demons and dark magic.

Three of Clubs Reversed – The Journey (Viaggio)

When reversed, the Journey has a specific connection with white magic in its ability to interrupt any negative trend, harmonizing us with our path in life.

Five of Clubs – Fortune (Fortuna)

In itself the Five of Clubs is the card of destiny, of one’s path through life, whether good or bad. It can represent protection, though not necessarily divine, from magical forces. It can be present when a magical attack is aimed at modifying a person’s natural destiny.

Four of Diamonds – Falsehood (Falsità)

The Falsehood card is the card of negativity in all contexts. Esoterically, it shows negativity in the person’s aura and/or the evil eye, but it usually doesn’t represent heavy black magic.

Six of Diamonds – Thought (Pensiero)

Our thought is where past, present and future coincide and gather in the form of memories, plans and inclinations. It can give us hint as to the person’s inner life, their religious beliefs, their inner and esoteric talent, etc. Reversed, in addition to indicating negative thoughts, it can have a connection with subonsciousness and the powers that are buried within it, or with thought-forms and spirits.

Three of Spades – The Widower (Vedovo)

The Widower is one of the primary culprits we look for when discussing rituals, whether religious or magical. This is especially true when the card is reversed. It is also the card of graveyards and graveyard magic, and it can indicate sects (mostly in a negative sense).

Five of Spades – Death (Morte)

The Death card is always very incisive. It can talk about the person’s aura being out of wack, and it is one of the possible cards representing the summoning of dark forces, especially when reversed.

Eight of Spades – Desperation and Jealousy (Disperato per Gelosia)

The Eight of Spades is strongly connected with magical attacks, whether upright or reversed. It is indicative of demonic presences or dealing with dark forces in a negative sence. Being the card of envy, it can indicate the ill will of the dark magician. Spiritually, it can herald a crisis of faith or beliefs, either leading to loss of faith or to conversion.

Nine of Spades – The Prison (Prigione)

On a positive note, it can indicate the taking of religious vows (which bind us). More commonly it indicates feelings of guilt or feeling limited. Magically it represents the creation of magical bonds.

Ten of Spades – The Soldier (Militare)

Another strongly esoteric card, the Soldier is the card of the night, and therefore of the occult (which means that which is hidden). Because it is the card of attacks, esoterically it can show the tackling of the problem, or more commonly the psychic attack.

King of Spades – The Priest (Sacerdote)

Just like the two Enemies, the Priest can represent a magician. However, it usually signifies the magus in a more neutral and high sense, unless the card is reversed. Spiritually it can indicate spiritual institutions and religions, but also divine justice.

MQS

astrology, Cartomancy, Divination, Divination Master Post, Fortune-telling, Geomancy, I Ching / Yi Jing, Occultism and Esoterism, Philosophy, Playing Cards, Spirituality and Psychology, Tarot, Uncategorized, Vera Sibilla

Calling Other People’s Demons By Name

Leave a comment

In many supernatural movies about exorcism, the priest trying to free the victim needs to discover the demon’s name. This is actually founded in (part of) the real practice of exorcism and does have its roots in the magical belief of the power of names. For instance, there are certain practices in folk magic in Italy that require the magician to go to the christening of a child whose name translates to the effect he or she wants to achieve.

But belief in the power of names is not just found in Italy and it probably goes back to the most ancient and elemental relationship that humans established with the things around them in their attempt to dominate them. Traces of this fact are found in the doctrines of many Greek philosophers, sophists, poets and playwrights, and I have also found some similarities with Chinese Daoist literature. A wonderful fictionalized account of this belief is found in Ursula LeGuin’s Earthsea saga, which anyone interested in magic should read, in my humble opinion.

I am not one who seeks to psychologize occultism, although I believe that psychology is not at all a useless discovery and can be part of a modern magus’ training. I think that the attempt to reduce occultism to psychology is just as misguided as the attept to condemn anything that modernity has brought us as a deviation from an ancient splendor.

That being said, as someone who practices divination for others, there is also a certain sense in which naming works in a cathartic way. Most of the people that consult me are rather upfront about their problems, especially since I don’t ask for money and therefore feel no guilt in telling them to go sit on a cactus if they are trying to waste my time.

But people can be reticent about their issues for a variety of reasons, and malice is not always the motivation. Among the many possible reasons is the fact that people sometimes feel the need to have their demons driven out of them by someone outside of their regular field of experience.

Having someone discover our particular demon’s name without us feeding it to them can be a powerful and cathartic experience, because it smokes the demon out of the dark recesses of our subjective experience and into the light of objectivity, where it can be addressed as a definite and therefore limited issue, rather than being consumed by its overwhelming lack of contours.

Not every divination session calls forth such existential experiences, nor should we as diviners try to turn each session into a catharsis. We are not therapists and our duty is not to give people advice, although advice can certainly be given if required. Our role is to provide information, whatever that may mean in the context of each particular reading. For this reason, our language and that of our divination tool needs to be earthly, concrete and objective.

But sometimes informing the querent can mean gathering the diffuse knowledge that they already have festering inside of them and turning it into useable information by giving it its proper name.

MQS

Occultism and Esoterism

Musings on Magical Tools

Leave a comment

One of the great myths about magical tools is that magic has always used four of them: the wand, the cup, the sword and the pentacle. This is actually a rather modern consolidation of the magician’s toolkit. Throughout history (and even more throughout geography) many different implements have been preferred. Especially pentacles, at least in the modern understanding of them, seem to be quite new.

There is nothing wrong with newness and innovation, but it is good to know that something is new. Some traditions of magic didn’t even contemplate the use of tools, and were wholly talismanic in nature, while there are strands of folk magic (like some traditions of Italian witchcraft) that use many everyday items as tools (chairs, dishes, needles, dolls, brooms, etc.)

One recent-ish idea about tools that has essentially crystallized into a dogma is that the implements are simply extensions of the practitioner. This is largely a consequence of our current egocentric view of magic and of the world, and its helpfulness escapes me. I ain’t crap. Why should an extension of the crap I ain’t be of any value?

I also started out with that idea, partly because it was the most readily available to me, partly because it was taught to me by some of my mentors. But the more I study, practice and move forward, the less I see the implements as tools and the more I see them as thresholds on otherness.

Otherness is the forgotten component of our magical worldview. The idea of tools as extensions of the magus shrinks otherness by inflating the role of the magus’ self through those extensions.

But quite on the contrary, tools as thresholds become meeting spaces between self and other, between the magus’ consciousness and the powers he works with. In this sense they are also filters through which those powers come to us in ways that are fruitful and measured.

The magus himself is a good magus in as much as he becomes a (discerning, filtering) threshold, and in this sense, one’s magical consciousness is one’s most important tool. This is not to say, as is often repeated today, that our consciousness changes the way the universe is.

But the way we approach the universe does change the results we get, simply because it changes the shape our filtering system, of our inner threshold. It is akin to an app or computer program: software programs allow us to use certain functionalities of the computer that would be inaccessible by using another software. If you keep trying to write an email on the pinball minigame you’re in for a world of problems.

MQS

Occultism and Esoterism, Spirituality and Psychology, Uncategorized

Stuff You Don’t HAVE to Believe: Karma

3 Comments

I talked about manifestation, now let’s tackle karma. This is one of those things that grind my gears about the spiritual community, largely because it unveils how derivative, unoriginal and moralistic it often is.

To understand this we need to remind ourselves of one of Nietzsche’s criticisms of his philosophical predecessors, who, according to him, were trying to safeguard religious morality even after doing away (overtly or covertly) with the concept of God.

This exact same thing happened to the spiritual community, which often reacts allergically to Christianity, yet seeks to safeguard the moralistic notion of hell (“if you do X you will be metaphysically punished”) by transfering its role to a vaguely defined “universe” whose task is, somehow, to uphold the believer’s social, political and spiritual views and punishing those who contravene them by causing bad things to happen to them.

Let us grant that this is somewhat of a misunderstanding of the original concept of karma found in some Eastern philosophies, even though it is not THAT much of a misunderstanding. The fact remains that, as used by most Western “alternative” thinkers (who somehow always end up believing the exact same crap), karma is just a lazy excuse for maintaining the holier-than-thou attitude they accuse traditional religion of: hey, enough with the badly understood Christian superstition! Time for the badly understood Oriental superstition!

Except that at least traditional religion has something grandiose and awe-inspiring about it (some passages from the Bible could be turned into a cool metal opera). The alternative spirituality of many girlypops has a way of pettifying everything: wow you left your girlfriend via message? That’s bad karma! What? You acted like a douche your whole life and suffered no consequences for it? That’s for another life then! If this is not the epitome of bitchy passive aggression I don’t know what is.

As many silly beliefs, this, too, has its glimmer of truth hidden in it. The Platonic myth of the soul, according to which our soul chooses what to incarnate as, offers much food for thought and meditation on the nature of our choices and how we must then live with the traces that those choices invite into our soul. There is no need to add metaphysical burdens on top of it.

MQS

Occultism and Esoterism, Philosophy, Spirituality and Psychology

On The Esoteric Meaning of Meditation (and Where Magic Power Comes From)

Leave a comment

Often people associate meditation with the quest for aha-moments. There is more than one kind of meditation. While realizations can come from any kind, the one that tends to produce them is discursive meditation, where attention is fixed on a symbol, image, phrase, prayer or problem.

Meditation, understood as simply sitting somewhere, catching one’s attention in the act of wandering off and bringing it back, does not necessarily entail the reaching of any conclusion on any particular subject, although it can foster clarity, which is conducive of finding solutions.

Many occult schools and spiritual organizations recommend meditation, and even though I am no longer part of any of them at the current stage, I think it is for good reason. The stilling of the “monkey mind” before ritual work is only the most obvious of the benefits of meditating.

Deeper than that is the fact that meditation is not a state we get into. It is a state we get out of and must return to consciously. Our attention’s natural place is here, next to us. Our attention is like a blade: it belongs sheathed on our belt, ready for action when needed. Instead, we spend our time swinging it about maniacally, blunting it by hitting it against anything that crosses our path.

There is tremendous power in keeping our attention by ourselves, in the present moment. Here and now, being and changing coincide one with the other, and together they coincide the the state of initial void from which the power needed for magic comes.

All too often I hear phrases like “you are the magic” or “the power comes from you.” Although these are supposed to be empowering statements and they mean well, they are founded on an egocentric misunderstanding typical of our age, where old ideas that would otherwise be dismissed as superstitions, like magic, seek to survive by psychologizing themselves.1

But Magic is the art of creating vessels for spiritual forces to dwell in. We, too, are vessels. Magic comes through us, not from us. In meditation, with our attention sheathed by our side, we slowly make room from something other than our ego to incarnate through us.

MQS

  1. This is not meant to discredit psychological work, which can and often is necessary in our line of work. But psychology is not spirituality or occultism. ↩︎
astrology, Divination, Divination Master Post, Fortune-telling, I Ching / Yi Jing, Occultism and Esoterism, Playing Cards, Spirituality and Psychology, Tarot, Uncategorized, Vera Sibilla

Exploring the Present Or Scrying the Future?

Leave a comment

As a diviner, I have no objection to making predictions about what is likely to happen. I see the current taboo about the future as a mix of delusion and ignorance. Our current culture comes at the tail-end of the myth of the self-made man that has animated much of our recent (and even not-so-recent) past. This myth has strongly influenced the Zeitgeist of the current occult wave, which started at the end of the XVIII century and continues, though declining–putrefying, even–to this day.

The occult developments have in turn trickled down into pop spirituality and have fostered the belief, now extremely popular, that all it takes to change one’s reality is to tune into the wavelength where one’s delusion corresponds to objective facts, and that nothing about one’s identity is more than a socially-conditioned self-identification that can be simply deconstructed and cast off like a cloak in favor of something else as the whim of the day dictates.

This implies the idea that the future is a completely blank slate and that therefore divination can only be used as a tool for self-reflection on the present to facilitate this process of self-making and self-remaking. Unfortunately, the self-reflection in question regularly resolves itself into simply telling the querent what they already think or would like to think of themselves, but packaged in empowering language within a context in which they assume they are communing with divinity. “Wow, the Gods think exactly the same as I do! How wise!”

Anyone who lives in actual reality and has spent five minutes reflecting on it know that this view of existence is demonstrably false (although, like many false things, it contains faint traces of truth). Each of us has a path in life that is unique, containing specific challenges and opportunities, possibilities and impossibilities. Divination is good at detecting these patterns and their likely outcome in the near future.

Still, I find that there is value in employing traditional divination in exploring the present. The language of traditional divination is frank, crisp and concrete, as it comes from a deep understanding of the fact that, if what is above is as what is below and what is within is as what is without, then what is above or within cannot be a metaphysical soup of saccarine inanities, but must correspond to the complex interplay of pleasure and sorrow of the below and without.

In other words, if a tiktok psychic might tell you that you always end up with the wrong guy because you have a soul contract that stipulates that you need to come into contact with your inner queen, traditional divination is more than happy to let you know that it’s because you are a basic harlot who chooses basic idiots.

This is not to say that there is a god or a spirit judging the querent through us or through the oracle: it is merely a dispassionate look at your life from a dispassionate observer on a simple example of causality. It also does not imply that we, as diviners, shouldn’t learn to speak with tact and diplomacy. However, the employment of actual divination techniques allows us to shed light on the querent’s present in terms that might actually be helpful to them.

We never leave a divination session unaltered. The knowledge we gain changes us necessarily: me knowing about X is not the same as me not knowing about it. If X is in my hands, then knowing about it can give me some power over it. If it isn’t in my hands, then knowing about it gives me awareness of the limits that define my unique path through life. That’s growth, too.

MQS