One thing that never ceases to amuse me is how so many of the people who try to sell courses in ‘wisdom’ or other metaphysical services, who pretend to have had access to the ultimate secrets of the universe, all seem obsessed with increasing the weight their own name carries. There they are, engaged in cock fights with one another, vying for the attention and legitimation of a small number of clapping seals.
I’m not one to rain on other people’s parade, but if anyone reading this is on any sort of quest for ‘development’ (let’s use the shallow, non-descript term), you can safely forget fame. There is nothing wrong with wanting your merits recognized, but realize that you will be forgotten. Even the greatest of the greatest, the Shakespeare’s and the Einstein’s, will in the fullness of time be forgotten.
I understand the allure of an above-average level of recognition. I was raised by a mother who thought the only way for her to have a meaningful life was to birth and raise the next great genius of humanity. It took me years to distinguish my own aims from hers, to recognize that I am smart but not a genius, driven but not obsessed, and that my desire for recognition was actually hers. To this day I have to remind myself of that on a daily basis because the old education constantly rears its head within me.
I’m also not willing to reject humanity’s drive for recognition out of hand. I see that it has been the fuel behind some great accomplishments. But what I do find funny is that exactly the field that we might broadly speaking define as spirituality should be so full of egomaniacs of the shallowest, most recognizable sort.
As someone whose magical motto is ‘I shall neither lead nor follow’, I am not necessarily looking for a guru. But I know that there are people who look for a teacher, and in itself that is alright. But do be careful. Recognize them by their fruits. And some of their fruits include their actions. If they are screaming on socials at the top of their lungs, they might not be a great example to follow.
This is not to say they can’t have something to say or to teach. As a deeply flawed individual, I have learned a lot from deeply flawed individuals. But don’t put them on a pedestal. Don’t be a groupie. If you are on a path to wisdom, you cannot afford that.
I keep coming across people on the Internet who dabble either in magic or spirituality (generally alternative spirituality) who lament that after a while they still feel miserable. Although my heart breaks for them, I think there is great confusion surrounding the place of spirituality and, let’s say, alternative practices.
One of the very few perks of rigid orthodoxy is that it exists beyond individual’s will, so that each practitioner needs to adapt to it rather than adapting it to themselves.
Once the idea of orthodoxy crumbled, at least in the West, spiritual and other practices became a supermaket of parts that each person could adapt to their own whim, picking and choosing what currently fit their mental narrative.
Although with some discernment this power of personal choice can yield great results, what in practice often ends up happening is that spirituality is reduced to a crutch for personal prejudices about oneself, others and the world.
In the end, each individual flavor of postmodern spirituality is more an inkblot test of what the person would be better off discussing with a therapist than a workable spiritual path.
What’s more, the expectation of finding a definitive cure for life is always dangerous: firstly, because life is not an illness; secondly, because spirituality is not a good substitute for therapy or other forms of support; and thirdly, and most importantly, because anything that promises to turn our life into happy trip is always to be looked at with skepticism. No serious spiritual or magical doctrine can promise that.
The life of someone who always smiles and is always happy is not balanced. If anything, it’s creepy. There is a time for happiness and there is a time for sorrow. A balanced person is someone who responds to life in an adequate manner depending on the concrete situation. Look at the traditional descriptions of wisdom in Daoism or ancient Western philosophy, and you’ll always note that the wise person is the one who always reacts in the adequate manner, with as little influence from their personal demons as possible.
It is unfortunate that these practices are often the go-to for people who would benefit from other types of help. Sometimes they simply cannot afford official help, and this is another conversation, so they simply look for something they can afford and promises them miracles.
I don’t know about you, but at the ripe old age of 35 I’m an old fart who remembers the wild west days of the Internet, when people tried cool stuff just because they could. In the last few years I’ve noticed a shift, which probably started in the early 2010s when governments and corporations decided the internet wasn’t something to be vilified as they had done up until that point, but a space to be sanitized, homogenized and monetized.
I am not one to decry money as evil: money is simply an equivalent for one’s work that may be exchanged for the equivalent of another person’s work. In this sense, money has deep metaphysical properties and implications.
What I did notice, however, is that now, wherever I go, someone is trying to sell me something, even if it’s just a free, safe, “binge-worthy” series of videos designed to hook me in so that they may make money out of my attention.
And the more safe formulas get proofed and tested for grabbing people’s attention as quickly as possible, often with AI to provide the missing accelerationist flavor, the more the content that is peddled can be identified as slop. The existential ennui of someone who browses the internet in the year of our Lord 2025 with a smidgen of self-awareness is not to be undererstimated.
I’m bringing this up because I recently received an (automated) email on the account I use for my youtube channel where I was invited to take a course for blowing up my channel, which included such thoughtful advice as “make bad content” (their words, not mine). And honestly, that might very well work, if it wasn’t for the fact that I don’t give a rat’s tutu about drawing big numbers and am perfectly happy with my little corner.
Essentially, slop has been acknowledged as the fastest and most effective way to plug oneself into a premade template of ‘Internet success story’. This, in itself, is not a revolutionary discovery: crap has always existed and has always had success, and the reason why we often don’t know about the crap that existed in the past is that crap tends to be forgotten in the long run, unless it’s so bad it becomes an acquired taste.
What is new is the psychotic speed at which this is happening as attention spans get shorter, the number of people competing for them gets higher and the tools for achieving the result get more powerful.
From a metaphysical and esoteric standpoint, slop is simply the elevation of the lower aspects of the human consciousness to the status of aim to be pursued, with a result that might very well be seen as a form of anti-initiation.
The word initiation tends to conjure images of hooded figures bestowing grace on a supplicant. While the ritual aspect of it is not insignificant, the idea of initiation is far broader and it applies to many fields, not just esoteric, as a path that forces the person’s spirit to acquire, develop or balance certain qualities that allow it to adapt to the ideals of that path.
An anti-initiation, in this sense, is a process whereby the human spirit ossifies, rots and collapses in on itself, having lost any semblance of a guiding light and being only stirred into motion by the gravitational pull of its own ass.
I am not a prude and I am not a no-fun Fräulein Rottenmeier. I enjoy some of the products of our current age, and I accept the rest with some irony (what else is left?) I am merely observing an interesting trend. It is often repeated that initiation (any initiation) is for the few, but it seems to me that is becoming something for the fewer.
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.
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
Not to mention the ability to know when and how to question and when how not to. ↩︎
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
