Episodes
The Nineteenth Enochian Call; the relevance of its description of the Earth to current events; suspicion of its description; implications of governance of a whole by its parts; how one part can never be an answer to the condition of the world; the truth of the world reveals itself in times of discord; the possibility of two different worlds; the nature of these different worlds; the rearrangement of the dominant way of understanding the world; the importance of naming things and of the...
Published 11/04/23
Published 11/04/23
A tale of receiving cash from a demon; the result of the working having the same character as the working; a tale of summoning Lucifer; the danger of nothing seeming to have happened; the urge to teach Lucifer a lesson; appreciating the multiple facets of manifestation, including the experience of self; the contrast with the manifestation of the divine; the dilemma of leaning into the demonic; total manifestation and the redundancy of magick; warnings against demon magick; breaking free from...
Published 07/22/23
Different types of discarnate entities; the nature of the entity defined by our relationship to it; distinguishing between different types of entities and relationships to them; elementals; the dead; demons; the pros and cons of experimentalism; “helpful elementals” and the problem of psychologization; two types of psychologization; power animals; ancestral spirits; the relationship to higher entities; how the divine demands everything; techniques of connection to higher powers; attention and...
Published 07/08/23
Our recent podcast hiatus; the relevance of reputation to magick; the use of reputation by spiritual teachers (Crowley, Gurdjieff, Milarepa); the indispensability of dissuasion; contrasts between this and modern spirituality; warnings against reputational damage; reputational contagion; why and how reputation will not survive the Great Work; the reputational disaster of The Baptist’s Head material; why we might want to stand by this regardless; the antidote to these problems in Magia;...
Published 04/12/23
Leaving the occult; the growing popularity of orthodox Christianity; what orthodoxy offers: not a lecture but participation in a ritual; symbolism and literalism; finding a spiritual orientation without institutional support; overcoming relativism as a first step; the dismissal of truth by postmodernism; a story about someone finding their direction in the Jehovah’s Witnesses; recklessness encouraged by our culture; the allure of occultism described by a convert to orthodox Christianity;...
Published 01/21/23
The presence of a stalker; previous experiences of stalkers from our Open Enlightenment project; well-intentioned stalkers and stalkers with a malevolent intention; confrontation with the current stalker; this person’s tactics: fake accounts, on-line harassment, smears, and misattribution; the assumption of good faith; the actual indifference of the stalker to the ideas they pretend to care about; the stalker’s participation in a magical working to contact the Third Order / Great White...
Published 12/11/22
Worrying trends in world affairs; how magick and spirituality offers no refuge; the Knights of Chaos versus Vladimir Putin; the likely fate of contemporary occultism in times of crisis; why magick inevitably deserts us; "nothing is asked of you"; the delusion of needing to do something; the nature and drama of sacrifice; fear and loneliness; self-sacrifice as an escape route; the sacrifice of the self to the self; self-sacrifice distinguished from self-sacrifice to the herd; the nature and...
Published 11/06/22
Magick as a spiritual tradition in its own right; all wisdom traditions as inseparable from magick; all that is needed to understand Aleister Crowley is The Book of the Law (TBOTL) and one’s own comprehension; Crowley in the role of a prophet and what this entails; the origin and form of TBOTL; the redundancy of commentaries on TBOTL; TBOTL without commentary or interpretation; the revelations of Nuit, Hadit, and Ra Hoor Khuit; divinity and the relationship of human beings to it; how the...
Published 10/01/22
A new branch of the Arcanum Arcanorum; two kinds of connection to the lineage: institutional and inner; how the conflict of institutional and inner played out in Crowley’s life; union with the Holy Guardian Angel (HGA) achieved by a vision and by inner means; the necessary uniqueness of the ritual to achieve connection with his HGA; the role of extraordinary loss in awakening; the expression of this connection to the divine through his magical order; the primacy of the inner work; parallels...
Published 08/29/22
The first time we met; both of us doing the same thing in a chaos magick guise; a chaos magick mentor who suggested Thelemic magick; from magickal power back to something more traditional; influences from Daniel Ingram and Aleister Crowley; different ways of describing what was unfolding for us; The Viking Youth Power Hour; paranormal experiences as the beginning of the awakening process; suspicion of the self and the spark of the divine; a pretence at a career in music; being groomed by...
Published 08/11/22