Tag Archives: Hermeticism

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

Musings on Magical Tools

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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

Cartomancy, Divination, Divination Master Post, Fortune-telling, Tarot, Uncategorized

Tarot Is Not Deep (and Its Limits as a Tool for Self-Reflection)

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I always bring up poor Rachel Pollack whenever I need to give a paradigmatic example of someone who utterly ruined tarot divination by turning it into a heap of psychobabble, though in reality the list is quite long. At some point, it was decided that 1) divination could not be a serious undertaking in an age of reason, and 2) we still wanted to think our illustrious predecessors who bought into it were not poor saps. The compromise therefore was that there was something deeper to divination, and so divination had to be reassessed and purged in accordance to this new ideology of ‘depth’ or *shudders* ‘wisdom’.

The reality is that in the “I’m too special for religion but wouldn’t it be fun if there was something more to life” community, where most people tend to think exactly alike in spite of how different they think they are, depth is a misunderstood concept.

Something is considered deep if it will allow them to talk themselves or others silly while giving them plenty of safe thrills and predictable a-ha moments by hurling around the latest buzzwords (try finding a tarot reader who doesn’t talk about narcissists, gaslighting or inner truth).

Thankfully, the tarot is not deep, just like playing cards–and tarot cards ARE playing cards–or tea leaves or dice or geomantic figures are not deep, which is what makes them marvellous divination tools. Even astrology is not deep by today’s standards, if by astrology we mean astrology in its traditional forms (Hellenistic, medieval, Chinese, etc.)

But the depth that is found in divination, just like the depth that is found in all other branches of magic, has nothing to do with finding abstract meanings or deep doctrines that move us beyond real life. Although there can be space of deep philosophy, the real depth is found in the shift in our consciousness of existence and of our place in it as we practice it concretely and see its concrete impact on real life.

I will forever be grateful to my GD supervisor, who always insisted that I practice tarot in real life and not as a mere metaphysical plaything (people will be surprised by how concrete the GD tarot system is, in spite of its metaphysical underpinnings). Traditionally, in magical practice, people are advised on how to recognize when they have established contact with an entity other than themselves.

The risk is sometimes that of contacting parasites masquerading as great beings, but the even higher (and more common) risk is that of simply contacting one’s ego. Psychic onanism IS a thing, and a much worse vice than the physical counterpart.

This is what limits, in my view, the potential for tarot as a tool for self-reflection or meditation or scrying. Granted, most symbols can be used as doorways for these aims, and therefore also the tarot. There is some value to it, especially when done under supervision or with the proper frame of mind. There is also some value in allowing symbols to bring certain aspects of oneself to the surface, if one has the necessary detachment.

Wisdom is a great thing, and it is something that can be pursued on the path of magic, including divination. But more often than not, those who are too good for simple divination and want to discover the “deeper layers” of the tool simply end up massaging the shallower parts of their own psyche without realizing it, and often even thinking they are making some kind of psychological or occult progress when in fact they are simply digging themselves a deeper hole in their own ego.

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

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

Creativity, Fiction

The Soul’s Journey

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From the Microcosmicon, 33:

The Explorer III reached the end of the Suctan system eight months after departure.
But when the ship was about to trespass, it… bumped into the sky?

Suddenly a slit of light tore across the vastness. Then it yawned open, revealing not the outer universe the Suctanians had observed from afar, but an endless contortion of titanic interlocking mechanisms, each feeding into the other with impersonal, meaningless coherence.

Finally, a voice echoed from the reddish depths.
“Welcome back, souls. Now that you have spontaneously gained consciousness of the nature of things, you are fit to enliven us. We’re one again.”

MQS

The Soul’s Journey
Occultism and Esoterism, Spirituality and Psychology

Do Occultists *Need* Meditation?

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A reader contacted me and we started chatting a little on magical training. One of his observations, which I found quite interesting, is that most schools require learning meditation as one of the first steps in occult development, and he was wondering if meditation is really necessary to occult development.

The first thing we need to clarify is what kind of meditation we are talking about. The influence of Blavatsky’s orientalist flavor of Theosophy has made it so that, when we say “meditation”, we tend to mean Eastern techniques. In reality, most cultures developed some form or other of meditation.

Western Platonism, for instance, developed its own form following Plotinus’ doctrine (already implicit in Plato) of “remove everything!” (aphele panta), whereby one strips naked of every specific determination of mind and soul, until he reaches a state of peaceful union with the divine.

This doctrine has been developed by some Christian mystics, especially of the German school, and is still very much present in all the iterations of Neoplatonism that have occurred throughout history (for instance in the Renaissance period). I am currently translating Robert Fludd’s treatise on geomancy, and his advice on how to prepare for divination essentially boils down to Plotinus’ aphele panta doctrine.

This is not just “high magic” stuff (I don’t believe in a high/low magic dichotomy). Even in folk magic, such as certain strands of Italian witchcraft, discursive forms of meditations are used (reciting the rosary, for instance, or using certain mantras). Let us also not forget that all religions have their own forms of meditation.

So why does most occult training start with meditation? In itself, meditation does nothing. It serves no necessary purpose outside of itself, in the sense that it is a sovereign technique. One can simply practice it for its own sake, as a form of spiritual dignification.

However, magic is largely about becoming fit vessels for a power higher than our own. Aside from its intrinsic benefits, meditation, in its various forms and with its various possible aims, is one of the techniques that shape our personal vessel to become more fit receivers.

Many times, within a ritual setting, meditation is practiced as a preparatory step, especially to visionary magic (but really, most magic is at least in part visionary). It is a way of starting the operation with a blank slate and to create an interruption between our daily preoccupations and the ritual.

Finally, meditation famously trains the “monkey mind”. Since our mind is one of our most important tools, we don’t want it running around, slinging crap at passers-by and hurting itself by sticking a finger in a wall socket.

Occult training is a balancing act, and while it is not true that anything goes, there is space for adaptation (if there weren’t, there would be only one occult path in the whole world, which is patently not the case). Meditation is NOT necessary, just like prayer, offerings, divination and many other things. But it is a tried and true set of tools for the journey.

MQS

Divination, Divination Master Post, Fortune-telling, Geomancy

Robert Fludd’s Geomancy – Book I Pt. 2

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Fludd discusses how the diviner should prepare to a geomancy reading.

The Preparation of the Soul of the Diviner Prior to Making a Figure

Since this knowledge is founded on [an operation of] the soul,1 it is certain and manifest that no truth can be guaranteed in it, except in so far as the soul permits it.

Therefore it is required that he who wishes to be versed in this art, before he begins his operation, should have a good and clear conscience, and that his body and spirit should be governed without disturbance, and that he should not think worse of another than of himself,2 nor should his mind be spare in judgment, and not tend to negation more than to affirmation. He should be a just judge of the question proposed.

Finally, he must trust in God almighty, who is the author of all knowledge and truth,3 and pray to him that through this knowledge he will be allowed to find the truth that his heart longs to know.

All of this having been properly considered, and with a soul well established in the proposed matter, he will immediately make the projections of the points.

Hence it is that so much fallacy and uncertainty arise in this art. This is also the reason why the same art is immediately regarded as nothing, namely, because some, falsely ascribing the name of artists to themselves, neglecting God, and not being moved in the least by the pacification of their souls and of the pleasures of the body, falsely judge of the things proposed, and by this reason render this secret and very profound art so despised, that it is also commonly regarded as the most falsified of all.

The fault, then, is not in the science, but in those who profess it: the science is doubtless most truthful, but its proponents are often hindered by ambiguities and difficulties because of their vicious dispositions.

For who can doubt that the soul can direct any part of the body to the true knowledge of the future more easily than the whole body itself?4

When we perceive that she governs her whole body in such a way that she foresees the future every day and every hour, that is to say, that she will arrange such a business the next day, and ride to this or that city, and do other things the following week, or even that she will marry at this or some other time, or that he would carry out his purpose and plan at such or such an hour, etc.5

MQS

Footnotes
  1. As established in the previous chapter. ↩︎
  2. To the modern reader, these tips may seem to have a moralistic taste, but we should keep in mind that, aside from being in part a product of the times, they may be boiled down to the very sensible idea that a diviner, as intermediary between the querent and the divine, should purify himself of that which keeps him away from the divine. One cannot be a bridge between A and B without being capable of reaching both sides. Aside from being against Christian morality, “thinking worse of another than oneself” also implies being engrossed in outside world nonsense. ↩︎
  3. A fundamental truth of all divination is that its knowledge does not originate within the diviner. ↩︎
  4. That is, the soul is more capable of the body of considering the future. ↩︎
  5. This remark may appear odd, but from an occult standpoint it does make sense: our soul is capable of conceiving the future because it is integral part of an inner world (which opposes and complements the outside world, of which our body is an integral part) wherein the normal rules of time don’t unfold as they do outside. ↩︎