So Close, But Still So Far

Exotericism is my term for magick demystified. At some point here I am going to be doing some writing on that topic over on substack and adapting some of the material here from Augoeides for a different audience. That audience is made up of people who work with "manifesting" and other New Age techniques that have a lot in common with magical practice. In fact, I would say that they basically are the same thing as what we magicians do, just along more intuitive lines and with less formal structure.

I sometimes describe formally structured magick as a martial art for the mind and by extension psychic abilities. The advantage of a formal structure is that it lends itself to scientific investigation by empirical means, at least up to a point. It is also far more optimized than general intuitive fixing of thoughts. As a practitioner for many years, I am fully capable of shifting probabilities just by fixing a thought on my intent for about 20-30 seconds. While I see measurable results using that method, the probability shifts I can throw are a lot bigger with formal rituals.

I recently came across this video of one of these manifesting teachers talking about Aleister Crowley's Magick: Book Four in the context of the general New Age manifesting model. He gets some of the basic points right, but misses several key things that are essential to performing truly powerful magick. In fact, magical practice offers a remedy for the exact problem that he identifies, and this is a remedy that I know works from personal experience. However, because of some of his initial assumptions, he just does not see it.

New Age manifesting is mostly based on "New Thought," an incorrect model of the universe that presupposes the universe is actually mental and your thoughts deterministically produce your experiences. This idea shows up in Napoleon Hill's Think and Grow Rich, Christian Science, The Kybalion, Norman Vincent Peale's The Power of Positive Thinking, and most recently Rhonda Byrne's The Secret. The problem is that there are all sorts of goofy ramifications of this model that do not bear out in physical reality.

Programming the Universe - Babalon Rising 2026

This is my fourth and final presentation from the Babalon Rising Festival this year. This material will be included in my new book Thelemic Sorcery, which I am currently in the process of writing.

There is a long history of new technologies serving as models for magical and spiritual processes. When electricity was first discovered, for example, energy work was sometimes explained as the interaction of the electric and magnetic forces. In the 1970’s the new technology was computers, and today the new technology is the Internet. Both computer programming and networking have a lot in common with how magick is generally explained, since they rely on symbolic manipulation and the transfer of information structures.

Many different models of magick, and by extension sorcery, have been proposed over the years. Some models are based on spirits doing all the work. Others are based on personal psychic abilities. Still others are based on the idea of some sort of subtle energy that magicians direct to accomplish their goals. Paranormal skeptics treat the whole process as psychological, though in my experience most people who work with practical magick do not have to do it for very long before they encounter paranormal effects of some sort.

The problem with each of these models is that they try to reduce magical effects to a single mode of operation. I have found that I can make magical operations work using only my own psychic abilities, but I get bigger probability shifts when I also call in spirits. And when I employ energy work techniques, generally Qigong in my case, it enhances the effect further. I do often describe practical magick to students as a martial art for psychic abilities, but at the same time you will not get the best effects relying on personal psychic ability alone.

Revisiting the Equations of Magick - Babalon Rising 2026

This is the third of four presentations I offered at the Babalon Rising Festival this year. It is based on a updated version of this post from back in 2008. This material will also be found in my new book Thelemic Sorcery, which I am currently in the process of writing.

Decades ago, I once asked a much more experienced magician who I had a lot of respect for what the limitations of magick were. The answer I got was something to the effect of “Well, does it have any limits?” There may be a sense in which that answer is true, since given nearly infinite time the probability shifts created by magick might allow us to do almost anything. However, it was an answer I found entirely useless. Real things have limits – this is precisely the point of the physical sciences – and understanding those limits is how we understand all phenomena. We cannot assume the omnipotence of the mind without any evidence, and likewise we cannot fall into the common skeptical assumption that if you can do anything paranormal you must be able to do everything that could possibly be described as paranormal.

That conversation proved valuable in motivating me to embark on my own exploration of magick’s exact practical limits One thing we do know is that numerous factors go into figuring out how successful a magical operation will be. One of the early attempts to quantify those factors was a series of equations published in Peter Carroll’s 1992 book Liber Kaos. The chaos magick movement in the 1980’s and early 1990’s represented a significant step forward for practical magick. Peter Carroll and Ray Sherwin first broke magick down to what they considered its essential components. They then approached magical experiments in a scientific way – or at least as scientifically as was practically achievable. Liber Kaos was released around the same time as my fateful conversation, and it proved to be a good starting point for my paranormal research.

Peter J. Carroll passed away on April 22nd of this year at the age of 73. I submitted the proposal for this talk prior to that date and had no idea that he would have passed by the time I would be presenting it at Babalon Rising. While the central thesis of this presentation has to do with places where I disagree with his formulation of magick, it is important to note that he was a true pioneer in this area. Prior to Liber Kaos nobody had ever even floated the idea of probability equations for magical operations. Without his work I would have had nothing to build on, and might never have arrived at any of these revisions.

Too many modern practitioners talk about the “chaos” in chaos magick as something akin to “anarchy.” But while the chaos magick system does reject hierarchy, the original meaning of the term referred to chaos theory, an emerging branch of mathematics. Chaos theory describes systems with arbitrarily large degrees of freedom, independent variables that are nonetheless loosely interlinked. Phenomena that conform to chaos theory principles operate as if any point in this network can act as a critical point, at which a small probabilistic influence can propagate itself into a much larger overall effect.

Obviously a Chaosphere

Does anybody else think this infrared image of an unidentified flying object is obviously a chaosphere? I sure do. If so, there's nothing all that mysterious about it. It's just magick. Chaospheres don't necessarily wander through the atmosphere like this one is apparently doing, but it could produce a heat variation with its eight-pointed shape acting as an attractor. That might show up on an infrared camera if it was sensitive enough.

Mysterious footage released in the Pentagon’s UFO files on Friday appeared to capture a bizarre “eight-pointed star” streaking across the sky several years back.

The infrared clip, submitted by US Central Command personnel, showed the strange-shaped object appearing to float around in 2013, according to the newly released files.

The footage, which lasts nearly two minutes, was apparently shot from “infrared sensor aboard a US military platform.”

“This video depicts an area of contrast resembling an eight-pointed star with arms of alternating length,” a description on the UFO files website reads.

A note on the site later warns that the video description is for informational purposes and that “readers should not interpret any part of this description as reflecting an analytical judgment, investigative conclusion, or factual determination.”

I criticized J. D Vance back on April Fools' Day for asserting that UFOs are demons, but my criticism has nothing to do with the possibility of some UFOs being spiritual or magical phenomena. The issue is with the reductive Christian framing that everything spiritual is a "demon." The spirit world is way more complex than that. It's not just "good angels" and "evil demons." There's a lot else out there.

Because if this is a chaosphere, it's not a demon. It's a spell, most likely cast by a human magician. I have no idea what it might have been charged to do because that's impossible to tell from the shape. As a central technique in chaos magick, chaospheres can be used for almost anything. The Chaosphere was invented by the late Peter J. Carroll, and the most recent expanded edition of his book Liber Kaos includes a new version of the ritual.

So maybe that means more of these will be flying around out there in the near future. I wonder how many UFO sightings they might cause.

RIP Peter J. Carroll

Peter J. Carroll, one of the founders of chaos magic, passed away earlier this week. Carroll was the author of Liber Null and Psychonaut in 1987 and Liber Kaos in 1992, two books that would define the chaos magic system for a whole generation of practitioners. Carroll's death was announced on his blog Specularium on April 25th.

The Wizard has gone.

The celebrated occultural author, teacher and innovator Peter J Carroll passed away unexpectedly in the early hours of Wednesday 22nd April 2026. He was a star whose books and ideas changed the lives of millions. He was instrumental in the birth of Chaos Magick, one the most significant new magical/philosophical streams of thought of our times.

He is survived by a wife and two daughters. Pete will be cremated in a simple private ceremony for close friends and family. He leaves a great legacy which will be the subject of a longer eulogy and memorial in due course.

An online memorial page will be hosted on this site in coming days.

Chaos magic brought an innovative, experimental approach to magick theory based on chaos theory and the manipulation of quantum uncertainty. Liber Kaos in particular was a big influence on several key aspects of my approach to magick. It highlighted the importance of experimentation and exploring magick in as scientific a manner as possible.

On this blog I have written about my operant equation, a calculation adapted from Carroll's work. As you can see from my explanation of its terms I do not agree entirely with Carroll's version, but the original idea was his and it was Liber Kaos that first got me thinking about the factors that go into a successful magical operation in this particular way.

Another big influence chaos magic had on my work is in how I structure rituals when using the Thelemic or Golden Dawn ritual forms. I open a space, invoke energies, build my intent, and then disconnect from it in order to release it into the universe rather than banishing my way back "down" following the operation. This structure is inspired by the vortex - sigil - banish by laughter structure from chaos magic, and in my experience it works a lot better than the traditional method.

Finally, chaos magick brought the discussion of chaos theory and quantum physics into esotericism. While I realize many New Agers throw "quantum" around these days like a synonym for "awesome," I am of the opinion that (A) magick must operate by manipulating probabilities and (B) these probability shifts must occur at the quantum level of reality. Liber Kaos introduced those ideas to my model of magick, and they have served me well ever since in my attempts to unravel that nature of the paranormal.

Unto Peter J. Carroll, from whose eyes the veil of life hath fallen, may he be granted the accomplishment of his will, yea, the accomplishment of his will.

No More James Arthur Ray

I am pretty late to the party on this story, which actually took place January of last year. Self-help author James Arthur Ray passed away on that date at the age of 67. Ray was famous for being convicted of negligent homicide for three deaths that occurred at a "sweat lodge" retreat that he ran - and charged students big money to attend. I covered that story here on Augoeides back when Ray was found guilty in 2011. Ray would go on to serve two years in prison and resume his self-help industry career.

The sweat lodge deaths occurred after dozens of people traveled to a scenic retreat just outside Sedona in October 2009 for Ray’s five-day “Spiritual Warrior” event. The sweat lodge was the culminating event, touted as “hellacious hot” and a chance for participants to have powerful breakthroughs. Two people — 38-year-old Kirby Brown of Westtown, New York, and 40-year-old James Shore of Milwaukee — died inside the sweat lodge and 18 others were injured. Another person, Liz Neuman, 49, of Prior Lake, Minnesota, fell into a coma and died after more than a week in the hospital.

At trial, prosecutors said Ray ratcheted up the heat to dangerous levels, ignored pleas for help, and watched as overcome participants were dragged out of the sweat lodge. A jury acquitted Ray of more serious manslaughter charges and convicted him of three counts of negligent homicide, for which he served concurrent sentences for the deaths. He was released in July 2013. Ray had acknowledged that he was responsible for the deaths but offered no excuses for his lack of action as the chaos unfolded at the sweat lodge.

After leaving prison, Ray remained active in the self-help industry. He frequently posted videos on social media of himself and his wife, Bersabeh Ray, offering advice. The couple also hosted a podcast, Modern Alchemy, and maintained a website where Ray offered one-on-one video sessions up to 90 minutes for $2,500.

I also recall seeing footage of Ray in a documentary on the self-help industry, pitching his trainings to audiences for the low, low price of $45,000.00 - with financing in the back. Knowing Ray's history, it amazed me that he was back to grifting so hard. His basic pitch was that he had lost everything and made it back again, so he was the guy anyone looking to succeed should study with. When he "lost everything" because he killed three people.

Waffle House Teleportation

According to online memes, Denny's is Waffle House for people who don't know how to fight. Living in Minnesota where Waffle House does not exist, I have no personal experience suggesting this is necessarily true. However, I am assured by friends who grew up in the south that the statement is one hundred percent accurate. Apparently fights at Waffle House are common to the point where jokes about them have become cliche. And according to a top Fema official, fights aren't all that happen at Waffle House. Teleportation does too.

Gregg Phillips, who in December was appointed to lead Fema’s office of response and recovery, has spoken on “multiple podcasts” about being teleported against his will, CNN reported on Friday.

On a January 2025 podcast appearance, Phillips claimed that his car was “lifted up” while he was driving and transported 40 miles (65km) away into a ditch near a church. And in another instance on the same episode, Phillips said he was teleported 50 miles away to a Waffle House in Rome, Georgia, CNN detailed in a deep dive into Phillips’ past public statements.

“I was with my boys one time, and I was telling them I was gonna go to Waffle House and get Waffle House. And I ended up at a Waffle House – this was in Georgia, and I end up at a Waffle House like 50 miles away from where I was,” Phillips said on the podcast Onward, co-hosted by rightwing activist Catherine Engelbrecht.

Phillips added: “And they said, ‘where are you?’ and I said, ‘a Waffle House.’ And: ‘a Waffle House where?’ And I said: ‘Waffle House in Rome, Georgia.’ And they said: “‘That’s not possible, you just left here a moment ago.’ But it was possible. It was real.”

But Phillips did warn about the dangers of teleportation. “Teleporting is no fun,” he said “You know it’s happening, but you can’t do anything about it, and so you just go, you just go with the ride. And wow, what just an incredible adventure it all was.”

One of the rules I practice magick by is that if something can happen, it can be done with a spell. In particular, if a person can randomly be teleported to a Waffle House, it stands to reason that a "Teleport-me-to-Waffle-House" spell must be possible. I totally want to learn it. It's not as useful as it could be if I lived someplace other than the Upper Midwest, but I do visit places with Waffle Houses when I travel. The spell could save me half of the trip even if I need to get back home by mundane means.

General car teleportation is more useful, since driving anywhere involves a car or truck by definition. But if the landing is so imprecise that my vehicle could end up in a ditch, the effort would be wasted because there's no point in doing forty miles of a road trip in an instant if your transportation is disabled moments later. Maybe with a formal spell the control would be better, but that likely will require significant experimentation to get right.

Let me tell you, I don't believe in magical secrecy. So if I ever figure these spells out and get them to the point where I can teach them to others, all my readers will be the first to learn. If not, maybe Phillips is just out of his mind. And I say that as a guy who casts spells.

The Magick.TV Interview

Yesterday I sat down for an interview with the folks at Magick.TV. We talked about my experience with Enochian magick, the approach I take to teaching it in my books, and the differences between how common ritual forms are traditionally taught and my operant field method.

My thanks go out to the folks at the channel - it was a fun interview and hopefully one that will prove informative to viewers as they develop their magical practices.

Enjoy!

Spell Failure

These days I don't put up many articles about African witchcraft. For a while I did, but the same basic themes kept coming up - some poor outsider in the community who was accused of witchcraft for no clear reason, and then run out of town or killed by an angry mob. I also put up a few posts about lawmakers trying to rectify the ongoing situation, and how fundamentalist Christians were usually the ones egging the mobs on. It got old, and it got sad, and it was hard to say how much things were really changing and how quickly.

But here's a story out of Kenya that's more embarassing than tragic. A woman accused of stealing money from her employer went to a professional magician for a spell to keep her from getting arrested. Unfortunately for her, the spell was a bust. Police showed up in the middle of the ritual and hauled her off to jail. When police arrived, the magician kept up his chanting so that they would be unable to see the suspect (who was right there in the room) but this likewise proved ineffective.

Detectives have arrested a woman suspected to have stolen Sh4 million from her employer three weeks ago. The suspect, according to the Director of Criminal Investigations George Kinoti, was nabbed at a witch doctor's house in Gachie, Kiambu County, during a ritual to help her evade arrest. She was accompanied by her husband as she sought protection from police arrest. "The detectives arrived in time as the suspect was being immersed in a basin containing a concoction of blood drawn from a dead fowl, whose features resembled those of a cockerel," Kinoti said.

"Upon noticing the detectives, the elderly witch doctor pronounced endless incantations in an attempt to keep them at bay, but that did not deter the sleuths from executing their mission much to the bemusement of Mwelu, who had closed her eyes expecting the sleuths to vanish. She couldn’t come to terms with reality after the in-charge of the operation told her ‘mama bado tuko hapa vaa nguo twende (We're still here, put on your clothes and let's leave)."

This is a good point to segue into a word about how invisibility spells work. They are sometimes misunderstood as magick that bends light around a person and makes them impossible to physically see. The truth is that they work by directing the attention of others away from you or your target. With an effective invisibility spell you really can walk through a crowded public space without anyone taking notice of you. They physically see you, but the spell prevents them from paying attention to or remembering you.

On the other hand, these spells won't fool a security camera because they don't affect the light around you or how it refracts. They also won't generally work in a situation where the people you are trying to disappear from know where you are and specifically come looking for you. A really good invisibility spell might have worked if the suspect had actively tried to hide, since these spells can influence others to overlook particular hiding places, but otherwise the suspect was pretty much guaranteed to be caught.

Learning Daily Practices

This article is an expansion of a comment I wrote to a reader regarding some unexpected issues coming up while working on learning daily practices. I think much of what I'll be talking about here can be found elsewhere on the blog, but I wanted to put it all in one place.

The daily practice regimen that I usually recommend to students is:

1. Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram

2. Lesser Invoking Ritual of the Hexagram

3. Middle Pillar Ritual

4. Meditation

5. Qabalistic Cross

For Thelemites like me, the following is analogous:

1. Star Ruby

2. Star Sapphire

3. Elevenfold Seal (from Liber Regului)

4. Meditation

5. Qabalistic Cross (Star Ruby version)

In my personal work I usually employ a mix of those two sequences, opening with the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram followed by the modified Comselh Ananael version of the Lesser Invoking Ritual of the Hexagram and then the Elevenfold Seal.

The function of each step is as follows:

1. A banishing lesser (or, more properly, general) ritual of the pentagram is a microcosmic ritual that "cleans up," aligns, and purifies your sphere of consciousness. Rituals of this sort do not affect anything beyond the bounds of your personal aura (or body of light or whatever other term you prefer) and act primarily upon you personally. Some people erroneously use these rituals to clear or banish ritual spaces, which doesn't actually work well. Yes, there is a connection between microcosm and macrocosm so you might be able to get a small or limited effect, but it's like blowing air at a heavy object in order to move it and not even remotely efficient.

We Must Say What We Mean

Nick Farrell recently posted this article in which he unpacks some of the ways in which magicians all-too-often obfuscate the truth and sometimes outright lie. While this list, along with an earlier one that was specific to Golden Dawn, is presented in a tongue-in-cheek manner, many of the entries are also far too recognizable from my experiences in the larger occult community. I will say that both posts are amusing - go check them out and see how many of Nick's obfuscating statements you recognize. My guess is that it will be more than a few if you've spent time among fellow occultists.

I have stated repeatedly that one of my goals in writing about my work and my practice is to develop magick as a technology and improve it along similar lines to what we see in the physical sciences. I also have pointed out that secrecy and gatekeeping and the like has set us back centuries. While it is true that there are more issues involved in measuring a state of consciousness than in measuring how long it, say, takes an object dropped from a high tower to hit the ground, it also is true that modern science began to develop in the 1700's, and it wasn't until Aleister Crowley's Equinox in the early 1900s that "secret order teachings" were offered to the public in a comprehensive manner.

That the physical sciences had a head start of almost 200 years, meaning it's no surprise that magick today is about where the physical sciences were in the early-to-mid 1800's. Given the availability of information and speed of communication in the modern world, I think it is possible to catch up, at least to a degree. But when people misrepresent magick and what magick entails, when they misrepresent their results, and when they put out misleading information about their own practices to make themselves look better on social media or whatever, those people are doing a lot of harm to the cause of subjecting magick to meaningful scientific investigation.

The problem today is not too little information, but too much. Online, true and false information commonly mingle together, and to a degree this is unavoidable. But we do ourselves no favors as magicians by contributing to misinformation, or by refusing to accurately answer questions - at least according to our own experiences. We don't have anything like a generally accepted theory of magick at the moment, and more accurate data that can be subjected to peer review can only get us closer to how all this stuff really works. There will likely be false starts and proposed models that turn out to be at odds with the data, but testing to determine those is exactly how the scientific method is supposed to work.

And we all want better magick, don't we? Better probability shifts. More effective expansion and elevation of consciousness. A faster path to enlightenment, as it's commonly understood. I remain convinced that testing and compiling data can get us there - but only if the data we are working with is as accurate as it can possibly be.

Interrogating Many Worlds

The "many worlds" interpretation of quantum mechanics is an idea that gets thrown around a lot in physics. It also has made it into models of magick and how magick works, such as Lon DuQuette's famous statement "it's all in your head, you just have no idea how big your head is." As I pointed out a while back, DuQuette is not putting forth a purely psychological model of magick with that statement. Instead, he is proposing that practical magick works by means of a sort of "reality selection."

The many worlds interpretation of quantum physics is a way of modeling quantum interactions without employing the "wavefunction collapse" of the Copenhagen interpretation. In Copenhagen, until we measure a quantum event it exists in a superposition that includes all possible values. This superposition is shown to be wavelike by simple experiments such as the slit experiment. When the superposition is measured, this wavelike superposition "collapses" into a single value.

In many worlds, on the other hand, every possible value in the superposition happens in its own "world," or really "universe." By measuring a quantum event, we select which of those worlds we wind up inhabiting. But they all are out there - a practically limitless number of universes, each of which "cleaved off" from the others based on single quantum interactions. Many worlds resolves the issue of what wavefunction collapse "really is" by asserting that it doesn't exist. It only looks like it does because we only perceive the universe we end up in.

DuQuette's idea exploits this concept by viewing magick as a way to "direct" which universe you wind up in, or maybe "navigate" through the various possibilities. He explained in one of his talks that in order to make something happen, you transform yourself into the sort of person that those things happen to. This frames his model of practical magick as a sort of magnetizing influence that results in you experiencing the world that you want to experience - or in Thelemic terms, the world that is in harmony with the change you are casting for.

My model of magick uses a single-world interpretation simply because it is easier to represent "near misses" in single-world where something more like a wavefunction collapse happens. This is more conceptual than mathematical, since many worlds returns the same mathematical results as a single-world interpretation. From a magical perspective, though, it's problematic. Let's say that you cast for a thousand dollars and get a hundred dollars. How does the universe in which you would have gotten the full thousand relate to the universe in which you only got the hundred?

Revisiting Magical Metaphysics

I'm finally starting in on the process of reworking my Operant Magick manuscript for publication. Back in 2006 around the time I started this blog I put the finishing touches on the original version and started sending it out. The occult publishers I sent it to jerked me around for years and never actually published it because it was "too advanced" for beginning readers. At the time I thought that was terrible - there was already plenty of beginner material and I was of the opinion that the market could use at least a few intermediate and advanced works.

When I finally got my Enochian books published and saw real sales numbers I started to understand the reality of the situation better. Magick is pretty much the definition of a niche interest. The reason that occult publishers favor beginner material over everything else is that there's barely enough of an audience to support that, let alone the subset of that audience who reads those books and then goes on to become more "advanced" practitioners. This of course creates something of a vicious circle - no advanced material means that there's likely to be less of an advanced market, and so forth.

But I will say that to some degree I'm glad the original version didn't make it out there. A lot of the ideas in that manuscript were good, and I've tried to elucidate those here on Augoeides. At the same time, the book suffered from working with brain science that is now twenty or more years old. Brain science moves fast - between 2000 and 2010 there are a lot of significant breakthroughs that Operant Magick version one would have entirely missed. Also, many of the ideas, while good, were not developed how I now feel they should be at this point in my magical development.

This post is one example. In the original Operant Magick I proposed a slightly modified version of Kant's metaphysics that I dubbed "Hermetic Metaphysics" as the metaphysical basis for magick. I wrote up a post about my "Hermetic Metaphysics" that you can find here. In revisiting the material, though, I found that in fact Kant doesn't need any changes at all to account for paranormal phenomena. I also am glad I didn't throw something out there called "Hermetic" that is about as "Hermetic" as The Kybalion, but that's a whole other conversation.

The Missing Piece?

As I have mentioned in some of my previous posts, I consider the last big "missing piece" of the quantum information model of magick to be a unified theory that combines contagion and similarity - that is, entanglement and morphic resonance. As magicians, it is clear that both contagion and similarity links work. Contagion links can be modeled relatively easily by quantum entanglement, bolstered by recent findings related to quantum events scaling up to the macroscopic level and new records being set for the number of entangled particles within a single quantum field.

Similarity links are fuzzier. They seem to be based on a mechanism akin to the morphic resonance hypothesis proposed by biologist Rupert Sheldrake. Sheldrake has spent years compiling data and published numerous books supporting morphic resonance, and it is clear that what he is talking about is basically how similarity links seem to work. But finding the mechanism by which similar things can connect with each other has remained out of reach.

At least, that is, until maybe now. I recently came across an article on something called the resonance theory of consciousness could close the gap. I have yet to dig into this further, but if it proves plausible it means that I am finally at the point where a "1.0" version of the quantum information model of magick can be laid out that should cover all magical operations and processes. As longtime readers of Augoeides know, I've been working on this idea for many years now.

 

All things in our universe are constantly in motion, vibrating. Even objects that appear to be stationary are in fact vibrating, oscillating, resonating, at various frequencies. Resonance is a type of motion, characterized by oscillation between two states. And ultimately all matter is just vibrations of various underlying fields. As such, at every scale, all of nature vibrates.

Something interesting happens when different vibrating things come together: They will often start, after a little while, to vibrate together at the same frequency. They “sync up,” sometimes in ways that can seem mysterious. This is described as the phenomenon of spontaneous self-organization.

The "coming together" is the trick for objects at the quantum level. The resonance model of consciousness depends on the panpsychism hypothesis, which isn't really a problem for me because much of what I have already laid out in my model does as well. Panpsychism is basically a more scientifically rigorous version of animism that treats consciousness as a fundamental property of quantum information and therefore matter and energy. The difference is that the complexity of the object or system determines how much consciousness it has.

Cursing the Moon?

Over the last few days social media has been going nuts over a group of witches on the app TikTok who claimed to have "cursed the Moon." How that makes any sense at all is anyone's guess, aside from these folks being inexperienced with real magick. It's one of the dumbest ideas I've ever heard, but I will say that one thing these witches did manage to do is troll very successfully, stirring up a whole bunch of nonsense in response to their nonsensical cursing. Cracked gives the whole fiasco about the level of snark it deserves.

These be dark time, fellow pilgrims. In every commune are the frightened whispers of mutuals who speak o'er what ought to be left unspoken: witches. Some claim that foolish young waifs have banded together in the grove of copyright-free song and dance to perform dark Satanic rituals, cursing the moon and bringing damnation upon all our heads! Hark! Ye can near hear their mad cackling carried in the winds. Sksksks. Sksksk.

With witches ditching their spellbooks for smartphones, a lot of witchcraft now happens online. And what better place for these covens to congregate than on TikTok, the one social media app specifically designed for chanting and dancing under the pale light of the moon -- or some dorm room LEDs. The platform is particularly popular with "baby witches," the first generation of puka-shelled neophytes to be learning the craft who are actually younger than the movie The Craft.

But with youth comes recklessness and rebelliousness. Recently, online witches started flying about social media cursing (but not actually cursing) a small coven of rogue WitchTok witches. These baby witches had posted videos of them casting foul hexes not only on the Fae, the ancient and fickle fairies of folklore, but the moon itself. And this was no accidental and I oop. These VSCO witches sought out to challenge their elders as if to call them out for being a bunch of dusty old c-words (crones) too scared to clap back at Mother Moon and her Fae boomers.

I also have since heard that this whole idea was posted online as a joke, which makes me feel a little better about the intelligence of these folks. To be clear, it's not that I think what they are doing is dangerous or will invite some sort of retribution, I just think the whole thing is pointless. The intent behind it doesn't make sense and it's not clear how you would even measure success or failure. I expect it will do absolutely nothing to the Moon.

Macroscopic Quantum Effects

Here's another new quantum physics experiment that is highly relevant to magick, and especially my quantum information model of magick. According to this article from The Independent, physicists have worked out a way to scale tiny quantum fluctuations up to measurable effects on the macroscopic world. The mathematics of quantum mechanics predicts that this should be possible, but up until now it had never been observed experimentally.

Scientists have seen "spooky" quantum behaviour happening to objects at the human scale, according to a new paper. Researchers have seen quantum fluctuations "kick" large objects such as mirrors, moving them by a tiny degree but one big enough to measure. Such behaviour has previously been predicted by quantum physicists. But it has never before been measured.

The movements are the result of the way the universe is structured, when seen at the level of quantum mechanics: researchers describe it as a "noisy" space, where particles are constantly switching in and out of existence, which creates a low-level fuzz at all times.

Normally, that background of quantum "noise" is too subtle to detect in objects that are visible at the human-scale. But the new research shows that scientists have finally detected those movements, using new technology to watch for those fluctuations.

Researchers at the MIT LIGO Laboratory saw that the those fluctuations could move an object as big as a 40-kilogram mirror. The movement pushed the large mirrors a tiny amount, as predicted theoretically, allowing it to be measured by scientists.

The researchers were able to use special equipment called a quantum squeezer that allowed them to "manipulate" the noise so that it could be better observed.

According to the quantum information model of magick, manipulating these sorts of fluctuation is how magick goes about affecting the physical world. So in a sense, you could say that these effects were produced by a technology that imitates one aspect of magical manifestation. We practitioners just do it with consciousness rather than machines - and I would expect at least a few radionics practitioners to point out that machines and consciousness can work together if you have the right kind of machine.

A New Quantum Entanglement Record

One of the points I make in discussing my quantum information model of magick is that if consciousness is indeed a manifestation of higher-order quantum information structures, the creation of such structures must be physically possible. So far, what we've found is that it is possible to create quantum entanglement within relatively small sets of particles. That's significant because in effect, a set of entangled particles is exactly the sort of higher-order structure that I'm talking about. The greater the number of particles involved, the greater complexity of their entanglement links, and the greater resilience those links have, the more likely it is that consciousness could indeed be such a structure.

A recent physics experiment scaled up the number of entangled atoms that can be observed into the trillions. This is an important finding for the quantum consciousness model and by extension the quantum information model of magick. If this sort of large scale entanglement had been shown to be impossible, it would probably have been back to the drawing board for me and my model of magick, spirits, and pretty much everything else esoteric. The researchers also discovered that the entanglement links created were more robust than previously thought - another key finding supporting the notion of higher-order quantum information structures.

Quantum entanglement is a phenomenon that’s as bizarre as it is fragile. Entangled particles are thought to lose this inexplicable link when exposed to outside factors. But now, physicists have managed to produce hot clouds of trillions of entangled atoms, breaking quantity records and showing that entanglement isn’t as fragile as previously thought.

Pairs or groups of particles can become so intertwined that measuring the state of one will instantly change properties of the others, no matter how far apart they are. That sounds weird enough already, but the implications threaten to undo our entire understanding of physics. Somehow, information seems to be sent between them much faster than the speed of light, which is meant to be impossible.

Einstein himself didn’t believe it at first, deriding it as “spooky action at a distance” and instead blaming hidden variables. But decades of experiments have shown that quantum entanglement is indeed the real deal, and we’re already starting to exploit the phenomenon for new technologies, such as faster and more secure communication networks.

Modeling Magick and Remote Viewing

Any time you want to do parapsychology research, skeptics do their best to make you jump through all sorts of hoops. To be clear, real skepticism is important to any scientific endeavor. However, capital-S Skeptics take that a whole lot further. Thanks to their influence, most psychic research that sees the light of day is focused on "proving" whether psychic abilities exist at all, over and over again. Government agencies like the CIA don't bother with that sort of thing. When they find something that works, they exploit it for all it's worth.

The CIA ran a "remote viewing" program up until it was shut down in 1995. Basically, they trained people to function as psychic spies and developed a protocol that helped many people develop what is essentially a form of clairvoyance. They called this method Coordinate Remote Viewing or CRV. And they compiled plenty of evidence that it worked, as revealed in declassified documents from the program. The big question is how, which so far has not been worked out. This is also the big question surrounding magick and paranormal abilities.

According to a CIA document declassified on 08/07/2000 titled “Coordinate Remote Viewing (CRV) Technology 1981–1983,” submitted to the organization August 4 of 1983, coordinate remote viewing “utilized through the methodologies that have been developed…works with remarkable precision,” but the individuals who submitted it admitted that they were “unable to explain in conventional terms why it is that the co-ordinate serves as a stimulus in the manner it does.” Nevertheless, they were convinced that David Bohm’s model of quantum mechanics provided a potentially plausible explanatory hypothesis for the mechanisms that make it possible.

David Bohm was a controversial yet brilliant luminary in physics who argued that the entirety of the cosmos is populated with quantum black holes that lead from the “explicate order” of spacetime to a realm that transcends space and time which he referred to as the “implicate order.” These black holes were termed “holospheres,” and hypothesized as the mechanism which connects the implicate order to the explicate order. From the perspective of the remote viewer, it is possible that the signal line we acquire is mediated by these holospheres, which connects us with an implicate order that is conceptually more or less identical to the Eastern concept of “Akasha” or the “Akashic records,” as articulated in the work of writers such as Swami Vivekananda. The explicate order in which we ordinarily live and move and have our being is “unfolded” from this implicate order and houses the world of ordinary objects and consciousness, which includes what remote viewers known as the liminal, subliminal and subconscious orders.

Microcosmic and Macrocosmic Ceremonial Forms

A question came up over the weekend regarding the pentagram and hexagram as lineal figures and their relationship to microcosmic and macrocosmic aspects of magical work. The confusion surrounds my discussion of the pentagram as a microcosmic symbol and the hexagram as a macrocosmic symbol, and it was pointed out that surely there are macrocosmic aspects to the elements and microcosmic aspects to the planets and signs - even though elements are invoked with the Greater Ritual of the Pentagram and planets and signs are invoked with the Greater Ritual of the Hexagram.

As I've pointed out in a number of other places, the so-called "Lesser" rituals of the pentagram and hexagram do entirely different things than the so-called "Greater" rituals. A Greater Ritual of the Pentagram is NOT a "better" or "enhanced" Lesser Ritual of the Pentagram. Likewise, a Greater Ritual of the Hexagram is NOT a "better" or "enhanced" Lesser Ritual of the Hexagram. The "Greater" and "Lesser" rituals perform entirely different functions. "Lesser" really means "General" and "Greater" really means specific.

So the "Lesser" rituals are used to set up your magical field, the space in which you will be performing your magical operations. A "Greater" ritual is used once that field is set up to "tune it" to the specific quality that are working with. Then, once the proper environment is created by the space tuning, you either (A) use your own magical power to focus on your specific intent, (B) conjure a spirit to perform the desired function using conjuration/charge/license to depart, or (C) do both, which usually results in the largest probability shift.

Trump Wizard's Easy Spell Succeeds

Here's one from the level one spell books, or maybe level zero. In the lead-up to Donald Trump's impeachment trial in the Senate, "prophetess" Amanda Grace called on an "angelic army" to protect the president from being removed from office. That is, she conjured thousands (or more) of incredibly powerful celestial spirits in order to make sure something that was basically mathematically impossible didn't happen.

In a Wednesday night appearance on The MC Files, “prophetess” Amanda Grace told host Chris McDonald that she has called on God to unleash an “angelic army” featuring “warring angels with flaming swords” to protect President Donald Trump from the ongoing impeachment trial that’s currently taking place in the Senate, Right Wing Watch reports.

Jay Sekulow, the right-wing religious attorney who’s part of President Donald Trump’s legal team, was the first topic of discussion. Grace predicted he “will be a beacon of light on the hill, speaking with wisdom that only comes from Almighty God.”

“The den of lions will not touch him, for I have marked him and positioned him for such a time as this,” Grace claimed, speaking for God. “I will give him vision and I will expose to him what is being plotted behind closed doors. Revelation will come forth and he will emerge an incredible witness and mouthpiece for my glory. For I, the Lord, have already ruled in the courts, the gavel has dropped.

Later in the broadcast, she offered this prayer:

“We ask in the name of Jesus Christ, Father God, your army, your angelic army, your warring angels with flaming swords be dispatched, Father God, to shred, destroy, and put down every plot, scheme, contract, assignment, hex, vex, spell, and attempt of the enemy against the president, against those with him, against those praying for him, and against your people. We ask that you send, Father God, the captain of the army of the Lord of Hosts to lead that team right now — that legal team of the president’s — to lead them to victory and to expose and shine your divine light on what is hidden.”