Magick

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Also I have to laugh, back when I was Roman Catholic and reading the parts of the bible that made warnings against occult magic; when someone suggested we're already doing it every day a great example of sigil work is company logos. Technically whenever you start a company and make your own version of the Nike swish and make some clever clip-art for your business cards, outside signage, and website that's essentially what you're doing.

Something I wanted to mention, having just gotten back from a theurgic meeting, is that if you ever find some people who are pretty seriously involved with something like Golden Dawn, Servants of the Light, or any of that sort of Kabbalistic Hermeticism who would let you participate in a ritual - to experience the power of it helps explain its value. To say the least we tend to really undervalue what kinds of subjective experiences are possible as well as the health and wellness effects they can deliver.

In some cases it's a bit like explaining the value of psilocybin mushrooms to someone who hasn't tripped or the value of pranayama to someone who hasn't meditated - it won't logically make sense to them in conversation but it will if they try it for themselves and experience their own reaction to it. To an extent, on sort of a funny side note, it makes me realize that a lot of our culture's problems seem to come from us confusing should's with are's, maps for terrains, and plans on paper with executed actualities - it's part of how so many of us (including myself for a long time) dismiss things out of hand that we haven't explored well enough to properly vet or dismiss.

I saw this interview with Robert Anton Wilson about Crowley and thought of you, techstep.

I have been studying neo-paganism for the past 6 months. It's really just about meditation, and conditioning your mind with deep introspection. The gods and goddess are just simply metaphorical archtypes, based on real things.

Yeah, Crowley seemed to do a good job of trying to walk through it and draw together a repeatable path that other people could follow. I also think his constant pressing of following one's own highest will is very congruent with a very John Stewart Mill type of classical liberalism - something I'd love to see our culture go back to more. I'd considered even broaching the philosophical topic of whether there's good grounds for connecting pantheism/panentheism with an analytical liberalism of that type. As for RAW I've only listened to a few of his lectures but he reminds me of something of a blend between Terrence McKenna and George Carlin.



It's that with a possible plus, or at least a plus that starts getting experienced by a lot of people who've been in it for a while.


I might have brought Mark up before but his lectures and books tend to be particularly good and I had the good fortune of attending a lecture of his several months ago. I'm working through Israel Regardie's One Year Manual right now and I'm hoping actually, when I'm done with that in a few months, to jump on Mark's Between The Gates workbook.

In your opinion. Many pagans believe in literal gods. I am a Celtic polytheist. And I have never meditated.

P.S. There are many people who practice magic and are not pagan.

What if it is realized.

Using "just" and "simply" together here seems a bit redundant as both words seem to convey the idea "merely" or "nothing more than."

In combination with "metaphorical archetypes," the result seems almost oxymoronic. Archetypes and metaphors in myth are often on the complicated side.

It's not something I can explain in words. I believe the gods and goddesses are both literal and metaphoric at the same time. In our physical reality they are just ideas, or concepts. In the realm of thought, or the astral realm I suppose, they are real. It is an oxymoron, but I have no other way to explain it. Metaphysical things are always contradicting.

^^ Alan Moore is big on that particular description, I can't remember who else though.

Thinking of the Servants of the Light school iin particular Dion Fortune and Gareth Knight left it open-ended, later heads of the order like WE Butler and Dolores Ashcroft-Nowicki seemed quite certain that they were real things. WE Butler in Lords of Light almost seem to lay out a Franz Bardon-like case for thought forms, elements, and larvae (William Mistele had a couple interesting books on his working with the elemental kings and queens from PME so it seems like higher fauna and deities would be real in that zone under this take), and with one of the last Ascroft-Nowicki interviews I heard she was saying something along the lines that mostly the order (Servants of the Light) has masonic aims of making good people better or functional people even more functional, just that a lot of the crap occult books out there bothered her and she felt that if some of these so-called authors actually did run into something real, of the variety that is out there to be run into on rare occasion, they'd run so fast they'd just about leave a trail of smoke.

That last part was interesting, similar to how Nick Farrell said something about how so many magicians try to strictly psychologize magic and, well, if a person has the right luck with a goetic evocation good luck telling yourself that the demon whose choking you out is 'all in your head'.

If the above is true, ie. that we're dealing with a significantly powerful realm of beings that by and large ignores us and a wide gap of competence or audacity needs to be crossed to run into the 'real thing' that does I think seem to suggest something about the nature of this stuff. IMHO it does have at least panpsychist implications, something along the line that the shared ground of consciousness for most people is something they can't consciously access, they can possibly see it in dreams and it's quite likely that their individual cells have aspects of awareness that are directly from it but the modern cromagnon brain is something new enough, in evolutionary terms, that it's a ways away from holding itself together well enough in an entangled state to be able to go back to the unified field as a full entity - this is where that barrier comes in perhaps that some people can do it, some can't, or that people just starting to gain that competence are in a sort of danger that they'll do something as stupid as they've done before and get spectacularly bad results on something.

That last hypothesis is also I'm guessing highly oversimplified. Most people who can 'get out into the astral' for a while are just wrapped in a sheath of their own delusions or their own thoughts and it takes them a while to figure out how to break out of that hall of mirrors. Similarly there are lots of people who, the way Manly P Hall put it, have delusions of grandeur, are given the idea that ascended masters are giving them initiation after initiation, you can't talk reason into them while this is happening, eventually as it occurs to them that nothing seems to be changing in their life or that none of these initiations were of any real value they start to suspect that something's deceptive about it, and then they go down a long dark path of increased paranoia thinking everything's out to get them, thinking people are cursing them, and finally they end up in a state where they're alone and dealing with phantom aches and pains and all kinds of bizarre things that aren't in the medical books and pretty much amount to psychosomatic illness in overdrive.

The relationship between whatever real or coherent self-existing state there may be where divine contacts, heavenly or chthonic, may come from and the conscious and subconscious mind trying to work together have a stable platform to function on is apparently quite complex. I'd have to guess that it's still the subconscious sowing together patterns in data and being able to decode the right ones to be able to climb Jacob's ladder, the giant beanstalk, or whatever you will.

I'm unable to watch the video. I noticed there is an eye (the Eye of Horus?) in a pyramid on the man's head.

My question is, do any of you have any associations with that? What is your interpretation of it? I notice the illuminati are obsessed with it. No judgements, just an observation.

The eye in the pyramid is connected with occult mumbo jumbo around "ancient Egyptian mystery schools" of recent pedigree and weird reinterpretations of Egyptian symbols and deities in pseudo-Christian mythology around the "Illuminati" and supposed satanic cult activity, an idea you seem to have bought into.

Crowley was a highly skilled psychological manipulator, cult leader and con artist, who liked to shock and surrounded himself with mummery and flim flam of all kinds including loads of signs of evil. The video is not a presentation of Crowley's ideas or methods, but an oblique discussion of them with Robert Anton Wilson, a writer and performance artist who enjoys playing with the same ideas in his fiction and has some astute observations about the psychological impact of those practices.

A conspiracy minded enthusiast working in a Christian framework would immediately recognize all this as the work of the Enemy, designed to trick weak minds. A serious Christian would recognizes that this is just another kind of flim flam that conspiracy minded folk bamboozle themselves with.

Any student of ancient Egypt can tell you that the eye n the pyramid is NOT the wedjet, the "Eye of Horus" and the Horus that's part of the mythology of Crowley's Thelemites has nothing to do with actual ancient Egyptian religion, but just uses some graphic and symbolic elements from Egyptian art as part of the costume and set design for their theatrical activity.

At least, that's my marginally informed take on it.

It's going into muddy waters to inquire as to whether such a thing as the Illuminati exists in the way conspiracy researchers tend to think of it. I say that mainly because there are so few clear facts, so many pranks, so many people skewing their data to fit religious eschatological convictions. My best answer - I don't know, because the name Illuminati seems to be defined by people who want to throw everything secret society into one basket of world domination, so the definition is a mess to begin with.

The Bavarian Illuminati of the 18th century seemed to have the idea that the world needed to be ruled by virtue and that virtue was needed for human progress - boring I know. There seems to be quite a collection of rich and famous gentleman's clubs across the US and Europe, including college fraternities such as Skull and Bones and then the ways politicians meet such as the formal Builderberg Group or the informal Bohemian Grove, Order of the Garter, etc.. I can tell you that Franklin Delano Roosevelt put the pyramid and All-Seeing Eye on the back of the dollar bill, however he was a 32nd Degree Scottish Rite Freemason. One of the best places to research and gain insight into the Freemasonic ideal for America is Francis Bacon's short story The New Atlantis. A lot of the street and sculpture symbolism around Washington DC is related to their hope to go out and build the New Jerusalem of Revelations 22, I'm not sure just how literally they took that but try to understand how weary they were while in Europe of despotic monarchs, tyranny of organized religion, royal and religious wars on a regular basis, and the stultifying of free inquiry and scientific endeavor under the weight of such things you can understand their temptation to use this as a rallying cry and set of motivational propaganda for members hoping to change the world for the better.

Would one call the Freemasons the Illuminati? I don't think I would, someone who believes all such organizations are human organized arms of Satan or see every other religion than their own as a deliberate plant by Satan would have a very different view on this - but then again I wouldn't be likely to use the word Illuminati to describe a kleptomaniac group of politicians meeting behind closed doors if that's the thing to be concerned about, such groups may very well be secret they may every well be societies but they're not Freemasons in any formal sense (even if they tried using such a structure to hide out in) and they don't seem to be in any way shape or form illumined. Personally, I'd really rather call those organizations by their names, by their agendas, and not romanticize them as different tentacles of some world-ruling group. Power tends to draw psychopaths and it's no wonder that they've formed themselves a nice Celtic knot in Washington DC.

Sorry if that was a little bit long.

As for the meaning of the Eye - it's a symbol. It's been thought of as the Eye of Horus and equated with selective attention. It's been equated with the Eye of God and signified from there as God seeing everything. Some people try to argue, with all the royal pine cones in exalted positions of Royal European art that it's the pineal gland - that sounds a bit Youtube new age to me but considering the palace that the Louvre is in it may not be all that surprising considering the Hermetic beliefs of those who had the palace commissioned.

I've posted a video below that actually does a decent job on looking at some of the Washington DC, Paris, London, Vatican, etc. stuff - it's probably one of the best at illustrating a lot of very deliberate street symbols or things like the palace I mentioned earlier being a dead-ringer rip of the Temple of Luxor. At the same time though it does weave in some BS - ie. I'd ignore anything he said about Sitchin, I'd ignore what he mentioned about the peak of the DC pyramid marking out something as far as Scotland, and the whole thing about all numbers sitting under 81 or the powers of 9's in numerology needs to be ignored since I've personally experimented and found that to be an artifact of any numbering system's last digit. Regardless there's a lot in here that's indesputable. I'd suggest just looking at it as a historical map of belief - religious and philosophic rebels, Bourbon Monarchs, various esotericly inclined Catholic Popes, etc.. and pay attention to what looks like worthwhile investigation and discovery, ignore anything that sounds fantastic.

A nicely comprehensive and inclusive review of all this from a certain Christian perspective:

That doesn't mean that other people haven't made their own interpretations of those symbols though. You say I've bought into this conspiracy, but when I say obsessed, that's from my own observations. If you look up "pyramid" and "Eye of Horus" and type in a bunch of celebrity names in Google Images, a lot of them wear clothing with the pyramid and the eye on them, not just once but multiple times, their music videos have the eye or pyramids in the background, they do the eye gestures, devil gestures, including politicians. They are obsessed with those symbols, whether you want to call them the illuminati or whatever. They are everywhere. Drake for some reason wears the owl hieroglyph too.

One minor objection:

The main reason his Thelema is still around or even talked about much today is that he did do his homework on comparative religion, did his homework on various kinds of eastern meditation, wove it together with the Hermetic tradition as it was brought forward by the Golden Dawn, and usually when people with some understanding of this stuff start diving into his work they realize that he was far from being a hack - he understood the concepts modern esoteric authors still talk about today and had enough authentic interest to spend his life contemplating them. Odds are significantly better that he was authentically interested in exploring what he explored and was by and large candid about his own goals in this research.