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.

Via Solis Cancer Elixir Rite - Year Ten

Today's post is a full script for the Cancer Elixir Rite that we will be performing tomorrow, Tuesday July 21st, at the Ritual Workshop. Doors will open at 7:30 with the ritual to start around 8 PM.

0. The Temple

The ritual space is set up with an altar table in the center. The bell chime, banishing dagger, and invoking wand are placed on the altar. In the center of the altar is placed a cup of wine for creating the elixir, within the Table of Art corresponding to Cancer. The sign Cancer is attributed to "The power of casting enchantments." As I interpret it, this is related to the ability to magnetize or draw things into your life in accordance with your will. So those sorts of intents are most appropriate. The Via Solis Elixir Rites were written by Michele Montserrat in 2010 for the Comselh Ananael magical working group.

I. Opening

All stand surrounding the altar. Officiant inhales fully, placing the banishing dagger at his or her lips. The air is then expelled as the dagger is swept backwards.

Officiant: Bahlasti! Ompehda!

Officiant then performs the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram. All rotate accordingly.

Officiant: We take refuge in Nuit, the blue-lidded daughter of sunset, the naked brilliance of the voluptuous night sky, as we issue the call to the awakened nature of all beings, for every man and every woman is a star.

All: MAKAShANaH

Officiant: We take refuge in Hadit, the secret flame that burns in every heart of man and in the core of every star, as we issue the call to our own awakened natures, arousing the coiled serpent about to spring.

All: ABRAHADABRA

Officiant: We take refuge in Heru-Ra-Ha, who wields the wand of double power, the wand of the force of Coph Nia, but whose left hand is empty for he has crushed an universe and naught remains, as we unite our awakened natures with those of all beings everywhere and everywhen, dissolving all obstacles and healing all suffering.

All: AUMGN

Officiant: For pure will, unassuaged of purpose, delivered from the lust of result, is every way perfect.

All: All is pure and present are and has always been so, for existence is pure joy; all the sorrows are but as shadows; they pass and done; but there is that which remains. To this realization we commit ourselves – pure and total presence. So mote it be.

Christian Nationalism a Theological Error

That was the determination made by the latest General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in the United States. It's about time mainstream Christians started saying this out loud. There is literally no way to reconcile the Christian Nationalist project with the actual teachings attributed to Jesus Christ. I could go through a whole bunch of Bible citations to support that point, but let's just say I wholeheartedly agree with this determination.

Commissioners to the 227th General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) voted overwhelmingly to declare White Christian nationalism and similar ideologies “a theological error” incompatible with the teachings of Jesus Christ, advancing a proposed constitutional amendment that would add that language to the denomination’s Book of Order.

Erica Nelson speaks on behalf of the Advisory Committee on Social Witness Policy The Advisory Committee on Social Witness Policy (ACSWP). Photo by Jonathan Watson. The assembly also approved a denomination-wide policy statement condemning White Christian nationalism, directed church leaders to expand public opposition to the movement through ecumenical partnerships and public witness, and declined to commemorate Presbyterians’ role in the American Revolution, citing concerns that such a celebration could elevate nationalism over the church’s gospel witness.

By a vote of 458-18, commissioners approved RUS-01, which asks the denomination’s 164 presbyteries to ratify new Book of Order language affirming the church’s commitment to justice, peace, mercy and human dignity while rejecting “any ideology that seeks to establish Christianity as a privileged or dominant force through the power of the state, or that conflates religious identity with national, racial, or ethnic supremacy.”

The apparent lack of faith shown by Christian Nationalists is utterly bizarre to me. If you honestly and sincerely believe that everybody who disagrees with you will be tortured for all eternity, why do you care about making their brief time on Earth harder by weaponizing the legal system against them? The easiest answer I can think of is that maybe they don't have faith at all, so they're doing everything they can to punish their supposed enemies here and now.

Psychic Ability Versus Intuition

Back in April, Vice posted an article about a recent study in which almost one in five American claimed to have psychic abilities. I actually don't find that number particularly surprising, since the question was about psychic ability in general. Lots of people have experiences that seem psychic, which is why paranormal beliefs exist in the first place. Psychic abilities are "real" in the sense that people keep experiencing them. The debate is over what their actual nature is.

A new survey of 2,000 adults from Talker Research found that 19% of respondents straight-up believe they have psychic abilities, another 71% lean on intuition at least some of the time, and over the past year, the average person logged around 18 moments they’d describe as psychic. Only 11% said they don’t buy into it at all. So what’s actually happening?

Nobody was predicting earthquakes or lottery numbers. The experiences people pointed to were more like: knowing something was off before anyone confirmed it (33%), clocking that someone was lying (28%), or just feeling like it was time to leave a situation (26%). Twenty-five percent had a bad feeling about something before it went awry. Twenty-four percent thought of someone right before that person texted. Psychic or just paying attention? Depends on who you ask.

Adam Dickinson, a former FBI intelligence analyst, didn’t dress it up. “Intuition is your body compressing years of experience and pattern recognition into a clear signal you can feel right now.” The people who sensed dishonesty before it surfaced, or finished someone’s sentence before they got there—they’re reading data. They’ve just been doing it long enough that it no longer feels like work.

The part of the survey that deserves more attention is the anxiety overlap. Thirty-five percent of respondents said they genuinely can’t tell the difference between a real gut feeling and anxiety spiraling. Dickinson’s way of separating the two: get still, get neutral, and notice whether the inner voice feels steady or frantic. “That urgent, demanding tone is usually anxiety trying to control uncertainty,” he said. Not intuition. Just the nervous system doing its thing.

While this is a skeptical take that assumes psychic senses could not possibly exist, otherwise I don't really disagree with most of it. There is a difference between psychic awareness and intuition, but a lot of the time what is happening when you get "a feeling" about something is definitely the latter. Psychic abilities aren't called "paranormal" for nothing, after all.

Poor Oppressed Christians Target Prayer Group

No, not a Christian prayer group, a Jewish prayer group. That's the entire point here. Daniel Grand, an Orthodox Jewish man living in University Heights, Ohio wanted to hold a prayer group with his friends at his home. No big deal, right? Most Christian churches start out as Bible study groups or prayer groups that meet in members' homes, and this goes on all the time with nobody saying anything about it. Extending that same privilege to a member of the Jewish faith, though, was not something that the Poor Oppressed Christians in the community could stand. The city targeted Grand, insisting that he could not pray with his friends in his home without a special permit establishing it as a "place of religious assembly." Then, when he tried to do just that, the city turned him down.

Attorneys with Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe and Alliance Defending Freedom represent Daniel Grand, who, in January 2021, e-mailed a dozen friends to invite them to his home to pray as a minyan, a “threshold requirement for the most sacred acts of Jewish communal worship,” that upcoming Sabbath. But when city officials found out about the e-mail, and before any minyan convened, the city demanded that Grand “immediately cease and desist any and all” uses of his home as a “place of religious assembly” unless he first obtained a special use permit, which the city requires for houses of worship in residential districts.

When Grand filed a lawsuit, federal courts closed their doors because Grand had not completed the permitting process—even though successfully obtaining a permit would have required Grand and his family to leave their home. “Every American has the right to host a prayer gathering in his home, and he certainly doesn’t need a city permit to do so. When government officials forbid that, courts must hold those individuals accountable, immediately,” said ADF Senior Counsel and Vice President of Appellate Advocacy John Bursch. “The city’s actions underscore a troubling trend of weaponizing zoning laws against people of faith while allowing other gatherings of the same size, like book clubs or poker nights, to meet without issue. We’re pleased the Supreme Court will hear this case.”

The reply brief filed in May in Grand v. City of University Heights explains that city officials targeted Grand because of his religious practice. He was never trying to establish his private residence as a synagogue; he was simply hosting a prayer gathering with friends. City officials went so far as to order police to spy on Grand’s home and encouraged his neighbors to file complaints if anyone visited. The city then issued unfounded property violations, unlawfully withheld his certificate of occupancy and tax abatements—which cost him thousands of dollars in additional taxes—regularly failed to collect his trash, and engaged in a broader pattern of harassment that went far beyond ordinary zoning enforcement.

The brief further notes how Grand canceled his planned minyan as ordered and tried to comply with the city’s directive by submitting a permit application. But neighbors opposed the permit with letters protesting, “I am not Jewish, and I do not want our neighborhood labeled as Jewish.” The city then broadcast a public hearing marked by overt hostility to Jewish religious practice.

This is the playbook that these Poor Oppressed Christian snowflakes always use. They feel oppressed by the mere existence of any religion but theirs, and will stop at nothing to stamp out anyone just trying to exercise their religious freedoms. A group of friends getting together to pray is not a synagogue and should not be treated as such. City zoning codes are intended to deal with, for example, large numbers of people converging on a place of worship that could stress city infrastructure. But this minyan was a quorum of about a dozen people. That's the same size as a regular house party, which as far as I know is still legal in Ohio.

This case is now before the Supreme Court, which will decide whether or not to take it up. I would like to think that would be a good thing, since it seems to me that religious expression is explicitly constitutionally protected and any reasonable person would see that. I would also hope that the Christians on the court would realize that allowing a city to harass a Jewish prayer group would allow it to do the same to Christians. With today's court, though, I have no idea what their ruling might be. They seem so in line with the Poor Oppressed Christian agenda that their recent religious rulings make little sense.

Mass of Nuit and Babalon for 2026

This Tuesday, June 30th, we will be performing the Mass of Nuit and Babalon at the Ritual Workshop. This is the full script for the ritual, which we have been celebrating for a number of years now around the Summer Solstice with some pretty impressive results. Doors will open at 7:30 PM with the ritual to start around 8 PM.

0. The Temple

The ritual space is set up with the Holy Table and Sigillum Dei Aemeth in the center. The banishing dagger, invoking wand, and bell chime are arranged on the Table. The pitcher containing the Eucharist is placed in the center of the Sigillum. All present should have their own cups or glasses. Holy images of Our Lady Nuit and Our Lady Babalon, including the Star of Babalon, may be prominently displayed. The Lust card from the Crowley/Harris Thoth Tarot can be used as a meditation focus, if desired.

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.