Category Archives: Spirituality and Psychology

Occultism and Esoterism, Spirituality and Psychology, Uncategorized

Stuff You Don’t HAVE to Believe: the Kybalion

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It is probably one of the ironies of history that nowadays, many who become curious about Hermeticism bump into the Kybalion as their first text, either directly or indirectly through reelaborations of the same ideas. This in spite of the fact that the Kybalion has nothing to do with Hermeticism.

There are a couple of reasons for this: for one, because whoever wrote the Kybalion managed to fool some leading Occultists into believing it was an authentic text (most notably Paul Foster Case, but not only); for two, because the so called laws that are discussed in the text have become embedded into pop-alternative-spirituality since the late 60s. They are like invasive weeds that one can never truly get rid of.

Many people, even today, buy into the Kybalion in different ways. The first line of defense is asserting that it is an authentic text. As few people now can truly believe this in good faith, a more apparently reasonable approach has been to assert that the text is a forgery but its contents are an authentic distillation of Hermetic principles.

This is also demonstrably false. If you read any of the authors who are considered part of the Western philosophical or esoteric canon, you will find no similarity with the Kybalion’s ideas until, perhaps, well into American transcendentalism, unless you are desperate to force the texts to say what they don’t.

Certainly those ideas are not found in the Hermetica. True, there are superficial similarities of vocabulary, on occasion. For instance, you will often read the author(s) of the Hermetica ramble on about “the Mind”, so it would seem that the Kybalion’s emphasis on the mind would place it in the Hermetic tradition.

Too bad that the ancient concept of ‘mind’, as used in philosophical and magical texts, had almost nothing to do with the psychologized concepts of it that fall under the same name and that clearly show that the Kybalion is a modern text both in its authorship and in its content. In fact, it is pretty much a condensation of very fashionable late XIX century ideas, and little more beyond that.

Broadly speaking, no one with some level of historical awareness can believe the Kybalion is anything more than a rather straightforward summary of Victorian beliefs.

This is what leads another group of people to say that the Kybalion is neither an authentic text nor an authentically Hermetic text, but its principles are still valid. Of course you can believe what you please, but there is no necessity of believing in its “laws”, which are often either not laws at all or are simply superficial and partial observations about mental phenomena cast in a glamorous esoteric light. Nothing of what is described in that book is either self-evident, clearly logical or practically useful.

All in all there is nothing of special interest contained in the Kybalion. That it hasn’t been forgotten like the mass of esoteric booklets produced in the same period is largely due to the way it marketed itself and was marketed by others.

MQS

Occultism and Esoterism, Spirituality and Psychology

Stuff You Don’t HAVE To Believe: Reincarnation

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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?

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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

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

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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, Spirituality and Psychology, Uncategorized

Stuff You Don’t HAVE to Believe: Karma

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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

Spirituality and Psychology, Uncategorized

Same Behavior, Different Motivations

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In Enneagram work, what matters is not so much what we do, but why we do it. Each type is characterized by a core motivation, and even though each core motivation tends to produce, on occasion, similar behaviors across different individuals, relying too much on the what instead of the why can lead us astray.

A Type Two, for instance, might very well be constantly distracted by ideas on how to make themselves useful to others as a way of eliciting love, affection or appreciation. Fives may also try to make themselves useful, but this is usually done in order to boost their sense of being intelligent or capable, that is, of proving to themselves that they are not inept. Of course, the style in which the help is delivered also varies: Twos tend to be personable and warm, while Fives are generally concentrated on giving others facts or conceptual tools.

In many Enneagram groups, a useful exercise is simply that of settling into a meditation, with one’s attention kept on a short leash, and then becoming aware of where the attention naturally drifts to. Our core mechanism is so ingrained in us that it often takes conscious effort to act contrary to it, and even then, the mechanism that we push out of the door comes back through the window (the typical example is that of a Two who consciously tries not to be helpful, and ends up justifying it to himself or herself by saying “so I can catch my breath to be more helpful in the future”).

This exercise is very useful, but we need, again, not to concentrate too much on the what. Sometimes our attention is caught by thoughts that appear random, but once the motivation behind those thoughts is questioned, the Enneatype becomes clear. For instance, a Three’s attention during meditation may drift toward some kind of task that they need to complete, or even simply to what they are going to eat for lunch. There is nothing inherently specific in any of these thoughts, but often the Three will have these thoughts as a reflection of their mechanism, e.g., they may think about what to have for lunch so they can cross that item off their mental to-do list and optimize their schedule.

That being said, there is also another risk, and that is of becoming so fixated on catching ourselves in the act that we forget to live life. Our character is not a curse. It can become one if we wrap it too tightly around our life, but as long as we learn to wear it loosely and see it with some irony, it actually affords us gifts, tools and opportunities.

MQS

Occultism and Esoterism, Philosophy, Spirituality and Psychology

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

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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?

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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

Occultism and Esoterism, Spirituality and Psychology, Uncategorized

Stuff You Don’t HAVE to Believe: Manifestation

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When someone decides that conventional spirituality just doesn’t cut it and takes the logical next step, namely they start being told what to think by the Mind Body Spirit section of their local library (or its social media equivalent), they are often presented with a starter pack of beliefs and practices: lighting candles, burning sage, rubbing crystals, gazing mystically at their daily tarot card, manifesting. 

These are often handed out as some kind of miraculous tool for breaking free of the matrix (while in fact they are so commonplace that you scarcely find anyone in the corporate world who doesn’t practice them. You know you’ve become stagnant when corporations agree with you).

The concept of manifestation is especially popular, possibly because several popular aspirations find some type of answer in it: 1) the wish for a solution to one’s problems that is just one thought away; 2) the wish to be seen as doing something magical while not actually doing anything; 3) the wish to gain some sense of control over one’s life. Most of all, manifestation is often presented as the great inner secret™ practiced by successful people and taught by all great religions and philosophies.

In reality, through thousands of years of recorded magical practice there is no mention, explicit, implicit or implied, of the principle of manifestation as we understand it today, unless we stretch and misinterpret everything we read.

I have several objections to manifestation, some logical, some philosophical, some magical. I also think that, like many ideas I consider wrong, it does capture a fragment of truth, even though it twists it until it’s unrecognizable. Maybe I’ll explore all this in the future. But that’s not the point here.

I’m not in the business of telling people what to think. But always remember that there is a universe of teachings, practices and beliefs outside of the 1960s repackaging of Victorian esoteric fads that animates the current spiritual-but-not-religious community, and it’s fine to question, explore, expand, revise. Just because a belief is popular doesn’t imply you HAVE to accept it. If that were the case, you’d be served much better by conventional religion.

MQS

Occultism and Esoterism, Spirituality and Psychology

Love Is Just A Chemical Reaction (And This Is Just a Bunch of Pixels)

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I was having one of my philosophical discussions with a friend, and she was venting about how she doesn’t believe in love anymore, and that, at the end of the day, love is just a chemical reaction of the brain.

I thought this was an interesting take, not because it hasn’t been done before (it’s a cliché for a reason), but because it is ripe with philosophical (and magical) presuppositions that are worth exploring.

Usually, by saying that love is only a chemical reaction, we are trying to decrease the power or importance of love. This in turn implies that we consider chemistry something inferior to feelings, since we are trying to reduce feelings to chemistry.

Yet why should such a statement make us believe that love is less than we think it is, instead of opening us to the idea that chemistry is more than we give it credit for? After all, if love = chemical reaction X, then saying ‘chemical reaction X’ instead of ‘love’ is just a rebranding excercise: we are merely giving a different name to the same experience. It doesn’t change one iota of how love works, its effects on us and on existence itself.

So love *is* a chemical reaction we experience. It isn’t *just* a chemical reaction we experience. And who does the experiencing anyway? Is it the same biological substance that is subject to the chemical reaction or is it something further beyond it, an observing consciousness which can become aware of it, as well as being aware of its own awareness?

Even if we choose the first route (i.e., it is the same biological substance) , we are still saying that the chemical reaction has awareness attached to itself. So we are saying that same substance subject to chemical reactions is capable of developing awareness of them. That’s no small fit. And yet again, we are still left with something that polarizes into two aspects: love and awareness of it. In this majestic self-aware process there is plenty of space for wonder, and love is once again restored to the status of powerful driving force.

The Greek philosopher and magus Empedocles considered love/friendship one of the two great powers setting existence in motion, together with hatred/enmity, because they fuse the four elements together and then disintegrate them. Magicians ever since have worked with the links of sympathy and antipathy (of love and hatred, of compatibility and incompatibility) that animate everything. Empedocles was, at heart, a naturalist, who didn’t try to introduce extra principles into his philosophy. Be he, too, saw that the fusion and disintegration of the elements (chemical reactions, one might say) is something so universal and so fundamental that without it nothing can get done.

MQS