Here’s an excerpt from Jason Miller’s Magick Monday Newsletter. Cheeky stuff ’tis!
If you follow me on Facebook or Instagram you know that I have been having a good time posting “testimonials” from famous dead occultists. It’s a bit of fun to break up the book promo grind but there are real lessons behind each.
Let’s start with Crowley:
To be fair, Crowley expressed contradictory views about the reality of spits throughout his life, but many Thelemites seem to gravitate towards the “Spirits are parts of the brain” model. Lon DuQuette tries to thread this needle with his “It’s all in your head, you just have no idea how big your head is” axiom, but even that falls flat because it presupposes that it’s in YOUR head.
The Spirits are not in your mind, but that doesn’t mean that they aren’t linked to your mind. Certainly you only know anything through your mind, so to some extent everything is filtered through your mind. Beyond your mind personally though there is the way that spirits are linked to Humanity, to culture, to geography, etc. I don’t think spirits are confined to what people think about them, but that doesn’t mean they are not heavily influenced or patterned by it. Aren’t we all influenced and patterned by those around us?
The point I make in the book is that our experience of living people is very complicated and nuanced. We never really know the whole picture of who and what another person really is. Spirits are MORE subtle than people, so why do we insist on reducing them down to these Pokémon sized nuggets of who and what they are? Doesn’t make sense to me.
This references an incident when Edward Kelly, acting as seer for John Dee, relayed that the angel Madimi insisted that they share wives. Jane Dee was particularly appalled by this and John Dee at first objected, but then came to see it as a sacrifice. Surely if Abraham was willing to kill Isaac for God, he would be willing to swap wives with Edward Kelly to further their “philosophical partnership”.
Sadly, you can still find examples of this kind of thing today. Unscrupulous people claim that spirits or god is demanding something that benefits the person relaying the message all the time. Sometimes its not a fraud and really what a god or spirit demands. Sometimes there is not even a third party involved, and the spirit is telling you to do something directly that you think is damaging or harmful or just ill-advised. In my book I suggest you maintain sovereignty over your own life. If the spirits are forcing you to do something you find odious or dangerous, maybe its time to find new spirits to work with.
Dion Fortunes, can go right next to H.P. Blavatsky’s
There has been a ton of bunk written, by magicians and occultists, about how evil things are. Dion Fortune doesn’t just think Africa is full of evil practices. but even makes disparaging comments about Southern Europe. Any sort of magic that actually was aimed at actually getting a result beyond vague spiritual improvement was largely cast as evil.
Needless to say, I don’t buy it. There has been as much evil committed in plain sight during the light of day as there has in the shadows of night, and I feel confident in saying that more injustice has been perpetrated in the name of the Church than that of Satan.
“If you want to read more thoughts on spirits, spirit skills, and assorted strategies and sorceries, my new book comes out MAY 1st. CONSO”
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