Cognitive Dissonance?

In the past I have been highly critical of "meltdown stories" involving Enochian magick. The story goes that there is something specific about Enochian that makes it highly dangerous to a person's mental health, and many people allegedly develop mental health problems after working with it. I personally have worked with the system for decades using the methods published in my Mastering Enochian Magick series and never have encountered anything like that, and I can't say that any of my students have either. But I recently heard a bit of information that might suggest something about what could be going on with those narratives.

Magick and mental illness have very little in common. Despite some superficial features - for example, schizophrenic auditory hallucinations versus communicating with spirits - it is not the case that magicians are in some sense working effectively with states of consciousness that might otherwise be pathological. If you spend any time at all with schizophrenic people, it becomes pretty clear that the famous Joseph Cambbell quote, "The psychotic drowns in the same waters in which the mystic swims with delight" is not even remotely accurate. About the only thing psychosis and mysticism have in common is that they both involve altered states of consciousness, and all alterations of consciousness are not the same.

It is also difficult to build causal relationships between mental illness and any sort of practice, spiritual or otherwise, because between a quarter and a third of our population has some form of mental illness. While there are of course mentally ill people in the magical community, I have never seen any valid statistical evidence pointing to the incidence being anywhere near as high as a quarter to a third. If the rates are the same between magical practitioners and the general population, you can't conclude that magick of any sort somehow causes mental illness. This is the main reason I remain skeptical of the alleged Enochian meltdown narrative.

What is true is that people who develop delusions generally develop them in the context of their lives and activities. A person who practices magick and develops paranoid scizophrenia is likely to have delusions about magical ideas, like evil magicians or spirits attacking them. A fundamentalist Christian is likely to have the same delusions about demons. A person who grew up around UFOlogists is likely to have those delusions about aliens. And a person without exposure to any of these alternative communities is probably going to develop them about secret government agencies or law enforcement.

As you can see in all those cases the commonality is the paranoid delusion itself, not what the delusion is about. The persecution narrative is the same, whether it's about wizards or demons or aliens or CIA agents. So the connection to magick really makes no sense, and the connection to a specific system of magick makes even less.

Now it is true that everyone with mental illness doesn't run around being mentally ill all the time. If even a quarter of our population did that the results would be catastrophic. Mental illness episodes can be triggered in mentally ill individuals by environmental factors, so this is a case where magical practice and pretty much anything else that causes cognitive stress could potentially explain the "meltdown" idea. But is Enochian more stressful than other systems of magick? If so, why would that be? For a long time I assumed that there was no way this could be true based on my own experiences and those of my students.

The bit of information I mentioned above might offer an explanation. What I heard is that the two magical texts that seem to be linked to mental illness are John Dee's Enochian diaries and the Zohar, a medieval Kabbalistic work. If this is true, these two texts are so dissimilar any commonality between probably explains the effect. Identifying that commonality would suggest a potential mechanism, and I think I may have figured out something that may point to one. If that truly is the case, it suggests how to study and work with both texts safely.

What many occultist do not understand well is that Hermetic Qabalah and Jewish Kabbalah are profoundly different. That's the reason I generally spell them differently. Hermetic Qabalah is descended from "Christian Kabbalah" that was developed in the late 1400's. It is literally as different from Jewish Kabbalah as Christianity is from Judaism, and it has developed separately for over 500 years. The Zohar is a Jewish Kabbalah text that does not connect with, has little relevance to, and in a number of cases directly contradicts Hermetic Qabalah.

Nonetheless, the text is studied and taken seriously by some modern Qabalists. I personally have never seen the point because the two systems are so different, but let's say that someone became obsessed with combining the two into a single system. This is literally impossible because of all the contradictions, so attempting to do so could wind up causing significant amount of cognitive stress. In psychology this is called cognitive dissonance, and it has been shown to contribute to mental illness episodes.

Enochian magick has the same issue. When the Golden Dawn founders developed their version of Enochian, they heavily elaborated on the system and introduced a number of ideas that are entirely at odds with the material in Dee's diaries. Modern authors have gone so far as to distinguish "Neo-Enochian" from "Dee Purist" Enochian due to these differences. And many authors do try to combine the two systems. My system is based on diary attributions, but in my books you will also find instructions on how to use modern forms like Thelemic pentagram and hexagram rituals. Lon Milo DuQuette's Enochian Vision Magick, also an excellent book, works with Golden Dawn attributions but also incorporates some practices from the diaries.

I know many people in OTO who work with Lon's book and have no mental problems. Likewise, I never have come across anybody working with my books developing them. But that might just be because we both are doing it right. If cognitive dissonance is the issue, problems would arise when trying to combine Golden Dawn and Dee Diary attributions into a single coherent system. These attributions are contradictory, so this is literally impossible. Obsession with accomplishing it might indeed prompt a level of cognitive stress that could trigger a significant episode in someone who already has some form of mental illness - which is a pretty large percentage of people, as I mentioned previously.

I'm not saying this is necessarily the mechanism, but I will say it's the first idea that I have ever come across that makes much sense. If it's true, working with both the Zohar and the Enochian diaries safely is pretty simple - understand that they contradict modern Qabalah and Golden Dawn Enochian respectively. When you realize that, you won't spend a bunch of time and analysis trying to do the impossible. I will add that I have never come across complex intellectual analysis of Hermetic Qabalah or Enochian magick that adds anything to its practical effectiveness. Magick is a technology, and it works the way it works. Whether or not you understand how a microprocessor works, for example, your computer will run just as fast.

Now I know that other software developers like me might argue with that analogy, in that understanding the workings of a particuler microprocessor can help you write slightly more efficient code. The key, though, even then, is "slightly." To run programs significantly faster, you generally need a significantly faster machine. Maybe my understanding of Enochian symbolism has made small differences in how powerful my spells are, but I have never come across anything that has caused a dramatic enough increase in my probability shifts to be noticeable. This means that spending time chasing such things is usually wasted effort even in mentally healthy individuals.

What does make your magick significantly more effective is doing it. You generally get better over time as you practice. If you allow fear to make you think that you have to understand everything before you do anything, you will never get around to starting and you will remain exactly how you are. That's no path to magical mastery. If this information about cognitive dissonance helps dispel that and get you doing the work, then this article has done its job. Just start practicing in the way that resonates with your will, whether you go with my books, Lon's book, or any other source. Just keep in mind that too much mixing and matching between different versions at best doesn't work, even if you never have a "meltdown."