Magic Monday

[ecosophia]

It's getting on for midnight, so we can proceed with a new Magic Monday. Ask me anything about occultism and I'll do my best to answer it. With certain exceptions, any question received by midnight Monday Eastern time will get an answer. Please note:  Any question received after then will not get an answer, and in fact will just be deleted. I've been getting an increasing number of people trying to post after these are closed, so will have to draw a harder line than before.) If you're in a hurry, or suspect you may be the 143,916th person to ask a question, please check out the very rough version 1.0 of The Magic Monday FAQ here. Also: I will not be putting through or answering any more questions about practicing magic around children. I've answered those in simple declarative sentences in the FAQ. If you read the FAQ and don't think your question has been answered, read it again. If that doesn't help, consider remedial reading classes; yes, it really is as simple and straightforward as the FAQ says. 

The image? I've decided to trace, as far as I can, my own occult lineage in photos. We're still tracing Juliet Ashley's end of the lineage. Two weeks ago I posted an image of her fourth teacher, Arthur Edward Waite, the Golden Dawn alumnus who passed onto her the rituals that became the foundation for the Fellowship of the Hermetic Rose. Waite, in turn, got his knowledge from the founders of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Last week I posted an image of one of these, the redoubtable William Wynn Westcott; this is Westcott's partner and rival in the project, Samuel Liddell Mathers. Another Freemason with a passion for the occult, and like Westcott a genuine scholar and mage, Mathers didn't have the organizational skills to keep the order together once Westcott stepped down from the leadership, and the Golden Dawn promptly blew itself to pieces in the squabbles that followed. Mathers remained in charge of one of the fragments thereafter, and he and his branch of the order will appear again once I get into some of the other ends of my lineage. 

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I've also had quite a few people over the years ask me where they should buy my books, and here's the answer. Bookshop.org is an alternative online bookstore that supports local bookstores and authors, which a certain gargantuan corporation doesn't, and I now have a shop there, which you can check out here. Please consider patronizing it if you'd like to purchase any of my books online.

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***This Magic Monday is now closed--as in, no further comments will be put through. See you next week!*** 

Comments

[ecosophia]

Hmm. No, the systems known to me don't equate kundalini with a soul transmitted through sexuality, though doubtless you can make that equation if you want to.

As far as I know -- I don't have any kind of contact with their leadership, you know! -- the magic-resistance brigade is getting into abortion rituals for two reasons. The first is that they know they can get a Donald Duck-style saliva-spraying frenzy from conservatives by doing that, and like most spoiled children, they love acting out if they thing that'll get them attention.

The second is that, yes, there seems to be an increasing overlap between the magic resistance and some of the Satanist groups out there, notably the Temple of Satan. I can remember when Wiccans and Neopagans would angrily reject the idea that they had anything to do with Satanism, and shunned Satanists accordingly, but there's been an astonishingly rapid ethical collapse in many parts of the Wiccan/Neopagan scene; even before politics sent them raving and foaming, quite a few leading figures in the scene cashed in their ideals and started getting into demonolatry and evil magic of various kinds. Not coincidentally, that's when I dropped the Neopagan scene like a hot rock and stopped having anything to do with the people in question.

[(Anonymous)]

Do you have any ideas what caused this ethical collapse? It's been fascinating but deeply troubling to watch it unfold, given that it affects many people I know and (in some cases used to) care about...

[ecosophia]

I'm still trying to figure it out. It stunned me to watch people who seemed to have some ethics turn on a dime and plunge headlong into demonolatry and evil magic. That was the second time in my life I've watched something similar happen -- the first being the collapse of the sustainability and appropriate tech movements of the 1970s, when a great many people who seemed to be enthusiastic about building a sustainable society chucked it and sold out to the corporate system -- and then there was the third, the way that so many people who used to use alternative health care and question the corrupt corporate health care system pivoted on a dime to insist that the Covid vaccines were salvation in a syringe and anyone who questioned them had to be shouted down or worse.

It's very troubling to me. Put it down to my Aspergers syndrome, but I tend to think that if you believe something, you should act accordingly, and not just shrug and do the opposite the moment a little peer pressure gets applied...

[(Anonymous)]

As someone who was involved in the scene, it was worse than that for me: a good many of the people diving headlong into evil magic were my friends, my mentors, my family. They had ethics, they were thoughtful and considerate people, but then something changed. I don't know what it was, I don't know why they were hit by it and I was spared, but something dramatic happened.

This wasn't a simple matter of peer pressure: something else happened, and I wish I knew what it was so I could at least understand what happened to the people I used to love, and why I was spared.

[ecosophia]

Please accept my sympathy. That must have been a hideous experience. The second and third times I witnessed such a thing, I was safely on the outside, and it was ghastly enough.

[hippieviking]

"I tend to think that if you believe something, you should act accordingly, and not just shrug and do the opposite the moment a little peer pressure gets applied..."

WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

PREACH BROTHER!

I have to say that the covid fiasco is the first time in my life that I've been able to watch something and be aware of this phenomenon. The above quote seems like it sums things up perfectly. It just doesn't seem all that complicated to me, but the wholesale rejection of supposed values has been a shocking thing to witness. I find it fascinating that you liken it to the abandonment of the sustainability movement in the 70s.

I am certainly still struggling to understand exactly what happened, but what I have realized is that if your dearly held convictions can flip around like the proverbial well oiled weather vane, they really weren't your values, were they? This of course leads to the disquieting truth that dang near everyone around me doesn't share my basic values, including those who I feel like instilled those values in me.

It isn't all that comforting of a thought that you feel like this is the third time you've witnessed this.

HV

[ecosophia]

No, it's not comforting at all to me, either!

[(Anonymous)]

The statement

“You can’t truly call yourself “peaceful” unless you’re capable of great violence, if you’re not capable of violence you’re not peaceful, you’re harmless”

has seduced people of all types over the years into false strength. Dealing with ones darkside is not an easy path. But failing that one can be seduced by vanity and arrogance - IMHO

[ecosophia]

That's a good point. That statement's a lie, of course; you can be perfectly peaceful without the capacity to engage in violence, if you have the capacity to stop violence. In the material world that's difficult; in magic, it's a lot easier -- it's much easier to overcome hostile magic if in fact you don't practice it yourself, because practicing benefic magic exclusively gives you access to higher planes of existence and therefore sources of energy that people who practice evil magic can't touch. Ultimately, evil magic can only affect you if something in you resonates with the evil.

[(Anonymous)]

In July's open post on the main blog, Florida Druid brought up Scott Alexander's post about the difficulty of getting an AI to learn to distinguish outcomes one would have actually wanted from outcomes one wouldn't have wanted, in situations where the AI might find it easier to learn to distinguish outcomes one might have been fooled into wanting from outcomes one might have been fooled into not wanting:

The basic problem is that we want to teach it to accomplish a particular goal (e.g., “guard a diamond from potential thieves”) but we’re really training it to “get warm fuzzies / avoid cold pricklies from the human trainers” instead. If the easiest way is to collude with a would-be thief to trick the trainers into thinking the diamond is still there, that may be what we get.

But trying to train or select people to have ethical beliefs has the same problem. Instead of giving your training examples or screening tests to an "alien" intelligence, you're giving the examples or tests to inborn human nature. Human nature is in fact plenty "alien" itself, once you really see the discrepancies between the things it's doing and the things an untrained introspection might have told you to expect it to be doing. During the formation of a person's character, the person sometimes experiences rewards (intrinsic or extrinsic) for supporting an ethical principle. At those times, what features of the ethical principle is the person's brain picking out as the things to build up a commitment to?

My working model is that some people's brains tend more to build up commitments in terms of an underlying structure of principles of morally-valent justification and meta-justification. The features those brains pay more attention to are tests for whether or not a principle derives support from particular other abstract principles. Other people's brains tend more to build up commitments in terms of particular morally-valent categories of people, and in terms of the actions that mark one as a member or non-member or ally or opponent of those morally-valent categories. The features those brains pay more attention to are tests for whether or not supporting a principle would tend to cause one to be positioned as a member or ally or opponent of one of those categories.

The thing about these two sets of features is that it's hard to distinguish how much a person's brain has set up their commitments in terms of the one set of features versus the other, even to the person themselves. As long as the same social groups stay positioned as supporting the same principles, it's hard for someone whose commitments are social in nature to imagine supporting different principles. They just voice support for the principles and imagine that they're actually supporting the principles, rather than doing some sort of abstract social mimicry, because they never had any experience in terms of which the two motives could be distinguished. It's only when the person's brain receives visceral confirmation that the social groups have changed their principles that the person gradually finds betraying their old "principles" and voicing new ones to be the most natural thing in the world. And in the process, they also start finding it natural to join up into coalitions to shove the actually principled people out of power; left to their own devices, after a few key swings of principles, they've made sure that every source of political and social power is only held by people whose only deep intuitions about the idea of "principledness" are in terms of how voicing principles relates to motivating coalitions.

And, indeed, sometimes those power-holders are sociopaths. Like the thief in the example analogy, who is colluding with the AI to put up a picture of a diamond in front of the surveillance camera, a sociopath can consciously collude with a coalition's social reward processing to make them feel good about taking the right side while indulging their drive to directly or vicariously exercise punitive power. They don't even have to be sociopaths; a normopath who's developed their intuitions enough in that direction can do the same thing without having to engage in any conscious bad faith.

This problem would be so much more morally convenient to think about if the people who were actually capable of principledness could be better trusted to pick the right principles, but inconveniently, they're comparably fallible in a different direction. Usually it's the socially oriented people who push an impractical principle out of power. And sometimes there are pathologies built using the worse aspects of both kinds of people. Ultimately I suppose the two kinds of fallibility are instances of the same thing, whatever that is. Something for those who like conceptual alchemy to investigate, maybe.

I don't understand how to relate to a world where human nature is like this. There's a bit of poetry somewhere that goes something like, if you are a human, be good; if you are a beast, just be beautiful, with the implication that if you try to be good like a human you'll just hurt yourself and give people false semblances of safety (like half-dog half-wolves who confusedly lash out to instinctively seek dominance in their cohabitating humans' moments of weakness), without actually producing enough global benefit for it to be worth it. If I can't tell someone who uses the social style of justification to be good, what can I tell them? It feels like degrading them to the status of an animal. But then sometimes I have to do things that feel like degrading someone who uses the conceptual style of justification to the status of a malfunctioning robot. Sometimes it feels like I myself am only barely grasping what humanity would even mean in the metaphor, and having to purposefully fall short rather than become overextended and collapse and do worse damage in the long run. And perhaps that kind of knowing acknowledgement of limitations contains the first adumbration of something essential to the next stage.

I have read that these considerations relate to the distinctions between Robert Kegan's developmental stages 3, 4, and 5, in which successive layers of motivation that were previously involuntary subjects become voluntary objects.

[boccaderlupo]

I'm purely speculating, since I don't run in any particular circles whatsoever, but perhaps it was a failure to discern the nature of spirits? Malicious daemons may masquerade as angels of light, as they say. Perhaps these folks who succumbed, already "open" to hidden influence through their practices, were unwary (or failed to adequately protect themselves) and unwittingly consorted with malign entities...?

Axé,
Fra' Lupo

[(Anonymous)]

If this were the only cause, I'd expect that the collapse would have happened more gradually than it did; and it also wouldn't explain why people worshipping the same entities would, in some cases, get dragged off in the collapse, and others would see it clearly and walk away.

[ecosophia]

Based on what I saw, there was nothing unwitting about it. People who a few years previously had been chattering about the Wiccan Rede suddenly started chattering about invoking demons and how stupid it was to think that there could be any negative consequences to practicing evil magic. Politics played a significant role in it -- the first great wave of nasty magic in the Neopagan scene I saw centered around group magical workings to curse individuals who had been labeled Bad People, and yes, this was before Trump -- but I don't think that's all it was.

[boccaderlupo]

As they say in the trade: Oof!

Fra' Lupo

[illyria2001]

Their attitude seems to be "It's ok if OUR SIDE does it"...whether it's evil magic, doxxing, or threatening/actually committing acts of violence.

[(Anonymous)]

Did you find that it got started in the wake of the failed 2021 Apocalypse?

[ecosophia]

If you mean 2012, yes, but I'm not at all sure there's a connection. I knew next to nobody in the Neopagan scene who paid the least attention to that, except to laugh.

Still, it's an interesting synchronicity...

[(Anonymous)]

There seems to be an incredible about of overlap between people who feel entitled to do malefic magic and the social justice / woke crowd.

How much of it do you think is blow black? I used to hang around a discord server of witches where the words “don’t curse shame” were used without irony and I was encouraged a few times to curse others over frankly very petty stuff (which I obviously didn’t). The attitude among this group seemed to be that blowback wouldn’t be an issue or didn’t exist because they weren’t Wiccan, or didn’t believe in the rule of 3 or the Rede, or they didn’t believe in karma or whatever.

These same individuals were always unsurprisingly going through repeated periods of bad luck and interpersonal problems. The group as a whole went absolutely hardcore into social justice and Covid craziness. I don’t associate with them anymore at all but things didn’t look pretty before I cut all contact.

It just seems to me that there’s got to be some sort of connection between groups of people who believe on one hand that the government is constantly trying to systemically oppress them somehow and that on the other hand they can do whatever nasty magic they want to dominate and control people around them and there won’t be any negative consequences for their actions simply because they’ve chosen not to believe there will be any. It’s like people who feel justified to oppress others then become deeply paranoid that society is oppressing them. Could this in itself be a form of blowback? Either way the drive to curse and the obsession with oppression both seem to speak to a deep fascination with and hunger for control.

[ecosophia]

I think you're onto something very important here. "Social justice," after all, has nothing to do with justice -- it's an ideology of hatred in which the practitioners claim that the virtue of their cause is so obvious that anything they do, no matter how sleazy or brutal, is justified because their victims are so bad. The Covid true believers screaming that anyone who didn't get vaccinated should be rounded up and put in camps were engaged in the same sort of thing: blind rage and hatred directed at socially approved targets. The craving for control is part of that, but I suspect another part is the toxic ideology of mandatory niceness that's been enforced so strictly in the corporate world: huge numbers of people are frantic for an opportunity to vent their suppressed rage and hatred, and social justice, Covid craziness, and the mania for curses are all opportunities to do that.

[(Anonymous)]

Yes, and I think what you’re talking about may also help explain why this woke stuff is so incredibly popular among women. After all, it’s mostly women calling themselves feminists who complain about the “patriarchy” forcing women to be nice and submissive who then turn around and behave as though women being exclusionary, or refusing to accommodate people, or not just passively accepting what we are told are all mortal sins. Look how JK Rowling has been treated, among many other examples.

Modern feminists often blame men for all violence but in my experience women can be psychologically brutal and are just as prone to bullying behaviour. This fake social justice keyboard warrior stuff is the perfect outlet allowing women (and men too) to bully and abuse from a position of physical safety while still telling themselves they’re just being nice or being kind of being open minded or standing up for people. All the bullying is just “holding people accountable”. It’s honestly terrible.

It disappoints me and part of me will always be shocked by how pervasive this terrible and, yes, hateful ideology has spread even though I was pretty brainwashed by it when I was younger. I feel like faith in the Gods and study of philosophy and deeper spiritual and magical practice helped save me from it years ago now and yet I see so many spiritual people and occult practitioners falling deeper and deeper into it all the time. Their magic and faith and politics are all so entwined and that’s why I wondered about the role of blowback. I think this is going to get worse before it gets better as things socially get more and more tense. It’s going to go very badly if the magical resistance actually convinces a wide number of people that occultists can curse and/or kill using magic with seeming impunity.

I’m just glad this forum exists where I can say “hey cursing people and summoning demons actually isn’t super cool” without it being a super controversial statement.

[ecosophia]

Anybody who thinks that hierarchy and bullying are purely male phenomena has never watched an old-fashioned women's lodge in full spate. It's incredibly vicious -- and yes, social justice culture is a very close equivalent.

[(Anonymous)]

Oh, yes, they are definitely going to try to get much worse in the very near future. Fortunately, their time is coming to its close, so they won't be seeing much success from here on out. Soon enough, our ever-increasing disobedience to their self-conceived divinity will be more than they can even bear to contemplate. Since we impudently refused to play our assigned role as their worshipers, they will simply withdraw their "divine" blessings from us... and our world will suddenly improve considerably!

They will quickly find reality to be far too disobedient to their whims to go on paying any attention to it whatsoever -- let's face it, many of them already have. That's when they will turn fully inward in their uncontrollable rage and protective insularity. With their wagons then fully circled, they will go on cursing, killing, and summoning against their own exclusively. After all, we unworthies defiantly refused to play by their rules (based order).

For those of us on the outside with any interest in their bizarre antics as they implode, it will make for quite the spectacle. Hopefully, someone will document their denouement for posterity's sake, as there will be much to learn about the precise mechanisms by which magical blowback destroys those who foolishly dabble with demons, offend the oracles, and LARP the gods.

- Christophe

[stcathalexandria]

They were flying lighted drones over Philadelphia that spelled out "Abortion = Freedom" last night. It was supposed to get out the vote for the election. It made me sick to look at it. A thousand different things they could do with lighted drones and choosing that was some kind of choice.

The time, Faramir! The time!

[francis_tucker]

Okay, my jaw hit my sternum when you said that the demonolatry predated the political raving. I first tripped over Wicca in 2004 when Starhawk was stumping for John Kerry, and the sources I was looking at were still (seemingly) firmly in the "We're not Satanists, we don't BELIEVE in Satan!" encampment. If you wouldn't mind, kindly indulge my timeline fetish, and please attempt a coliseum estimate of the developments you're talking about. If I correctly recall, Wicca first went public in England around 1955, "Uncle Bucky" and others brought it to America 10 or 12 years after that, and the whole Neopagan free-for-all started to go viral in the fateful year of 1979. Correct? About when did you notice the demons and nasty magic start to creep in? Approximately what time after that did the political poke-nosing begin in earnest? And when, more-or-less, did JMG bid Hwyl Fawr to the Neopagan scene? Again just curious about round figures.

Re: The time, Faramir! The time!

[ecosophia]

Witchcraft went public in Britain about ten minutes after the Witchcraft Act of 1735 was repealed in 1951. (The 1735 act defined witchcraft as petty fraud, and replaced the earlier laws that made it a capital offense.) There was a quiet witchcraft scene in the US well before then, but yeah, Raymond Buckland and a few others brought the English version over in the mid-1960s, and October 31, 1979 -- the joint publication date of Starhawk's The Spiral Dance and Margot Adler's Drawing Down The Moon -- saw it go pop-culture mainstream.

As I recall, I first started hearing (and being horrified by) the influx of malefic magic and demonolatry into the Neopagan scene around 2009; I cut back sharply on my involvement in the scene thereafter and was out of it completely once I stepped down as Grand Archdruid of AODA in 2015. (Before then I still had to show the flag from time to time.) The toxic politics were creeping in well before 2009, but it didn't take over the scene until 2010 or so.