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Occultism and Esoterism, Spirituality and Psychology

Magic Beyond the Will

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When one sets out on their magical journey, they are bound to come across views of magic based on the concept of Will. This is largely due to Aleister Crowley’s famous definition of magic as change according to the Will. But Crowley didn’t happen in a vacuum,1 and premonitions of his views are found in the cultural and philosophical atmosphere that preceded him. On the other hand, one would be hard pressed to find any mention, implicit or explicit, of the relevance of Will in pre-modern magic.

Let us keep in mind that every age’s view of magic is intimately bound to the philosophical paradigm of that age. Premodern magic is the efflorescence of a worldview where the universe is ruled by coherent forces that go beyond human control, and partly beyond human comprehension. These forces do not require human understanding or cooperation. It is inevitable, therefore, that most premodern views about magic require humans to simply conform to those outside forces.

Primacy is given to the universal source of power, which is seen as external to the individual, at least in our everyday understanding of individual life. Modern (and even more postmodern) magic, on the other hand, is magician-centric. This is because, in the old view of the cosmos, humans are nothing but an epiphenomenon of the interplay of objective and binding cosmic forces to which they must learn to conform. On the other hand, the modern (and postmodern) worldview is founded on the primacy of the individual’s subjective interpretation of the world and their ability to conform the world to this interpretation.

This shift mirrors the shift from ancient and medieval philosophy, where humans are largely tasked with apprehending reality as it is, without creative input, to modern philosophy (starting slowly with the Renaissance and Humanism), where humans project themselves onto the outside world as they come into contact with it, and finally to postmodern philosophy, where objective reality plays no role anymore, and the individual’s own inner world becomes the only one that matters.

PhilosophyOrientationHumans
Ancient PhilosophyObjectivist Humans as witnesses of a preexistent order wherein they must find their place. Intellect is exhalted as the tool to understand this order. The Will of the magus means little, acting merely as an instrument in motivating him or her.
Modern PhilosophySubjectivistHumans become increasingly aware of the difference between the objective qualities of the outside world and those qualities they project onto reality; become aware of their role in creating certain aspects of reality. Intellect and Will are at odds.
Postmodern PhilosophyNihilistHumans dismiss all notions of a preexistent order to which to conform. Everything is the result of a creative act of the subject. The Will is exhalted, while Intellect is relegated to an instrumental role in forming strategies to reach the aims of one will.

This tripartite distinction is rather rough (and, if taken too seriously, imprecise), but it will do for the purposes of this article.

The question is if the postmodern view of magic can seriously be the last possible view, or if there is something beyond it. My belief is that postmodernism must necessarily be overcome, together with its magical appendix, not because it is desirable to overcome it, but because it has within itself the seed of its own overcoming, just like every age and worldview before.

It is within the premises of postmodernism to to deny the existence of a self-consistent, objective reality. This is why it is usually accompanied by the deconstruction of all certainties, all values, all meaning, all views.

Obviously, this view is itself self-contradictory: in order to seriously assert itself, it has to deny itself as one of the certainties or views to be denied. This implies that the only way for postmodernism to realize its promise of suppressing all meaning is for it to even suppress itself in the end, in order to avoid becoming the meaning of reality. If this argument holds, then it is inevitable that postmodernism, together with its magical appendix, be overcome.

Far harder it is to imagine what will take its place.

One route that cannot be travelled is that of directly going back to the past. It is impossible to simply ignore hundreds of years of historical development to retreat into the safe haven of a glorified past. History, despite its ups and downs, has only one direction, and that is forward.

And yet, if we take the postmodern approach of denying all self-consistent realities beyond the magician’s will and take it to the extreme of even denying postmodernism itself, what we are left with does look very much like the old view of the cosmos, where the Will once again has little relevance. It is a form of going back by moving forward.

Magic, in this new and old sense, has nothing to do with having power to exert in conformity with the Will, and becomes the art of staying out of power’s way as it works itself. Intrinsic in this view is the notion (which all great occultists generally agree with) that the Magus does not have power, as in so many egoistic views of magic, but merely recognizes its currents in order to best position himself with respect to them.

MQS

  1. Furthermore, to be fair, Crowley’s notion of Will does not strictly correspond to that of individual volition, although it does encompass it. His idea of “pure Will, unassuaged of purpose” is very close to that of a transcendental Will sitting at the bottom of all individual acts of volition. Ultimately, though, it is merely Crowley’s way of incorporating the blind vitalism typical of his age into his system of magic ↩︎
Occultism and Esoterism, Spirituality and Psychology, Uncategorized

On Papal Elections and the Power of Rituals

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Regardless of what one thinks of the church as an institution, it is hard not to be impressed by the sheer power and majesty of its rituals and customs. As a non-Christian, or rather as a post-Christian, I am still convinced that the Catholic mass, especially in its older forms, is one of the best-constructed rituals in the history of humanity (I was reminded of it during my dad’s funeral last year).

When I talk about power I am not talking about political or social power, which are undeniable. I’m talking about the power to create a ritualized experience of reality that mobilizes real forces.

This, I’ve noticed, is something many people are not willing to concede, partly out of spite toward the institution (which I may understand), partly as a result of the typical view underpinning modern esotericism that anything goes, and so the rituals of the church have no particular quality compared to the ones anyone could make up on the go, except maybe that traditional religious rituals, being older, have become more powerful through engramming.

Let us leave aside for now the memetic esoteric aspect, which however is certainly present, especially with how Leo XIV’s election has literally been turned into one of the biggest memeplexes I’ve seen in recent times.

I think that the fundamental misconception that is at the root of so much esoteric junk is that something becomes true simply by way of repetition. Yet, in spite of the dogma, reality is not merely what we make of it, as anyone who tried to fly off a skyscraper won’t be able to testify.

True: just like the small mind (the human mind) the great mind (the larger universe) is endowed with a certain level of plasticity. Just like the small brain can be impressed with habits, so can the great brain be impressed with certain forms or procedures that wouldn’t naturally arise. That’s because there is a difference between different gradations of reality: my reflection in the mirror is, from a physical standpoint, just as real as me, but in another sense, being completely dependent on the form of the mirror and my own form, it is subordinated and can be changed, to a degree.

But good rituals are not powerful simply because they have been repeated enough times. While repetition does engram rituals with an authentic foundation, if we take the time to study various magical traditions, we notice that they often utilize the ritual blueprint of the dominant religion of their area, but bending it in other directions.

The spiritual “aeon” within which they operate is their source of authentic power, because most major religions and philosophical currents do capture something of the universal life and its might. Authenticity is the keyword.

In addition, there may sometimes be certain powerful experiences that allow different traditions to fuse together into new ones (take for instance some of the magical traditions created by the descendants of African slaves converted to Christianity).

But the root of magic is always an authentic source of power, which is ultimately always the same, but which is channeled and shaped through the form of the religious or philosophical tradition, and regardless of the how corrupt or unlikeable the representatives of that tradition become. Lacking it, the most one can conjure, if anything at all, are some cheap tricks of lower esoteric jugglery.

This is also why it’s important to take the time to soak into the traditions we want to work with. Eclecticism is pure vanity if it is divorced from understanding. If I had a euro for everytime I saw someone on social media simply plucking formulas left and right, one from the magical papyri, one from esoteric Daoism and so on, without understanding their philosophical contours… Well I wouldn’t be able to buy much, because I’m not often on social media, but a nice coat would probably be within my price range.

MQS

Occultism and Esoterism, Spirituality and Psychology

Mentalism in Hermeticism vs Modern Occultism

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Following up on yesterday’s post about the Kybalion, I felt the need to clarify a bit further the difference between the panpsychism or mentalism of traditional Hermeticism as opposed to that of modern occultism, as espoused in books like the Kybalion. It is actually a topic that deserves a much longer discussion, and maybe one day I’ll start that discussion. This is just a short collection of incomplete notes.

The trouble with philosophical terms is that they often originate in ancient times, but they develop additional or alternative meanings as history goes on. The term psyche, for instance, is usually taken in a psychological sense today, but in most older philosophers it was just the term for ‘soul’. The idea of soul, in turn, was somewhat different in pre-Christian pagan philosophy than it ended up being after Christianity took over.

When we read in texts like the Kybalion statements like “the universe is mental” (in the sense of part of the mind, not in the sense of crazy, which would be understandable) and compare it with assertions found in the Hermetica about the nous (usually translated mind) revealing itself as the ultimate principle; or even when we compare it with the great presocratic philosophers that certainly inspired the mysteries that later merged into the Hermetic tradition (take Heraclitus’ “the limits of the soul you could not discover”, or Anaxagoras’ assertion that the mind/nous is the principle that orders all things), then we would at first think that this person writing the Kybalion must have been exactly in the same tradition.

But between the ancient notion of mind and the Kybalion’s notion of mind there are two millennia. Two millennia during which Christianity essentially reinvented the concept of soul to mean something much closer to what we understand it to be; then modern philosophy radicalized the subject-object and mind-world distinction; then Idealism mashed everything together again into a new panpsychism that is only an echo of the ancient one; then philosophical decadence set in, leading to the gradual dissolution of all great philosophies; during which time the notion of psyche or mind was slowly appropriated by people attempting to treat it according to the scientific method (those who would later become the first psychologists), as well as by irrationalists of the vitalistic trend.

Against this background, it is unreasonable to think that the concept of mind would remain the same, especially since XIX century occultism is largely the product of the post-revolutionary (as in French revolution) desire for the exotic and strange that the revolution had wiped away together with the old regime.

When there is a historical paradigm shift, finding ourselves in the new paradigm usually estranges us from the old one, and since we operate from the new paradigm, we tend to apply its categories in our attempt to understand how the old paradigm was. This, for instance, is also what led people after the French revolution to look at the tarot as an incomprehensible artifact with arcane meanings, even though it was perfectly understandable within the medieval framework in which it was created.

Well, the cultural paradigm from which the author of the Kybalion talked about the mind is evidently modern. This, in itself, is not bad. No one says that old Hermeticism had all the answers and everything past that is junk. I am not a reactionary who believes all that needed to be said and done has been said and done in times of yore and now all that is left is to go back to it.

The problem arises when the author of the Kybalion is so clearly ignorant of his own paradigm that he uses it to concoct a philosophy that is just a mediocre expression of its own Zeitgeist but uses enough words of the old Hermeticism to make it seem as though he is just summing up millennia of history in a pamphlet. This, in itself, is clearly un-hermetic.

Again, creating new philosophies is not in itself a problem. The problem is that modern occultism (of which the Kybalion is an expression, and not even the best one) is intellectually stuck in that period and has turned into a philosophical and spiritual cul-de-sac of misunderstandings.

In that cul-de-sac, mentalism is simply the triumph of the subjectivistic view of the mind that was en vogue at the time, and that forms the framework of today’s nonsense (see law of attraction, for instance); whereas in the old philosophy, the mind was generally seen as a superior ordering principle of which humans could partake (when they were reasonable, that is, reason-like) but not exhaust.

MQS

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