Kimberly Steele

Consequences of the Craft

It serves me right to be the recipient of anyone's ill wishes because I used to wish ill upon others. Not only did I used to engage in the prideful sin of throwing curses, I was good at it. Of course I could be wrong, but I believe I was able to rain hell on people. My secret weapon was my perception of any given target's Achille's heel. In order to nail someone to the wall on the astral plane, you must be able exploit their primary weakness. In most cases, people wear their primary weakness upon their sleeve and do not even bother to try and hide it. If you can intuit someone's worst choices and tendencies when pressed, you can influence them to choose the worst of all options offered. If someone is a reckless idiot and an attention whore, you can push astral forces to make their stunts more dangerous. If someone is a bad driver with road rage, your ill-wishing will make them more likely to be stuck behind a slowpoke. They will be more likely to overreact and speed through a yellow-going-red light, potentially T-boning a car full of sixteen year olds. You can push a lazy hedonist towards more of the same, and lo and behold he will give himself cirrhosis of the liver from his hard drinking or his husband will leave him and he will be destitute. This is what may happen if you were as good at it as I am. If you're not good at it, and most people don't have the talent, you'll do the magical equivalent of pooping where you eat. All of the above results may happen to your enemy, but like a grenade, you'll detonate your own life, worsen your own weaknesses, and generally bring nearly immediate misfortune to you, your family, your pets, and your circle of friends. You will create an invisible miasma around yourself that others, despite the endemic condition of spiritual retardation, will sense and draw away from.

In the days before scientific rationalism when astrology and astronomy were one and Western doctors addressed the subtle and material bodies as one larger ecosystem, people were often labeled as witches and summarily tortured and/or executed. If you look in old books about superstitions, you will find a wealth of charms against the evil eye both in cultures around the world. Christianity has often been a religion of hysteria, and the persecution of so-called witches was often waged for faulty reasons such as grabbing the witch's resources. Nevertheless, sometimes it was a matter of punishing someone who was throwing his or her horrible energy around and making life hell for the locals. In spite of Christian ignorance, the masses used to have a higher overall sense of the spiritual ecosystem than they do now, hence their awareness of the evil eye and the use of magic to combat it.

Malefic Witchcraft: You're Soaking In It

Magic is the formation, process, and reverberation of intention. We all do it, and by "we", I don't just mean humans. Everything on this planet, including the forces we humans cannot perceive or see, possesses intention and in that way has its own life. The wind has intention to blow in a certain direction and it is countered by the intentions of objects standing in its way like trees and houses. The tree has intention to drink sunlight from above and water and nutrients below while exhaling oxygen. The human has intention to drive his car to work and the car has intention to be recognized for its labors as it hurls through space. Intentions cooperate, bump, and clash all the time. No intention exists in a vacuum and there is no being outside of a god who understands the multiple symphonies of intention going on at any given time in any given place. The world is no less magical than it ever was, it is that we humans, especially those of us in the industrialized West, have become utterly retarded when it comes to sensing, recognizing, and controlling intention.

Enter the people who think of themselves as clever: politicians. Politicians are clever because they force proxies to do harm on their behalf while walling themselves off in fortresses. They dwell in luxurious bubbles, which is the first clue they do not operate on behalf of the common man. The most powerful politicians are infamous for sending hitmen to literally kill their enemies. Most politicians would not be caught dead without a toothy grin on their faces. This is to hide the price of being a politician, which nowadays is to sell one's soul (not literally) and to claw one's way to the top of a pile of bloody and messy grifts. The politician wishes harm upon all while pretending to operate as a "public servant" LOL for personal gain and power. The average citizen has the urge to see the politician's head on a pike like the average Christian had the urge to see the local Karen put to death in 1600.

Magic has always been the weapon of otherwise powerless people. Hatred can be weaponized on the astral plane, otherwise known as the plane of images and imagination. Those who say the astral plane does not exist are morons who have yet to contemplate that an airplane does not just appear from nowhere: it was invented by men who put images in their mind of a flying machine and combined enough images on the astral plane to make a flying plane. Back in the day, women were far more powerless and were more often doing witchcraft. Intention is neither septic nor clean by default. It is what it is. The same sorts of images that make planes fly can load them with working bombs. The people who are good at malicious magic often feel disenfranchised and have a great deal of stored hatred.

I used to be amazing at weaponizing my hatred on the astral plane -- I was a prodigy and a natural. I had the aim, the power, and the temporary ability to dodge immediate consequences. Bad, bad things happened to people I did not like. I stopped and I am glad I did. There is an energetic state one has to occupy to be the equivalent of a torturer/assassin on the astral. It's not a happy place. It's also not a grateful place. There is little room for gratitude when you are constantly worried about your own Achille's heels and are constantly focused on the faults and vulnerabilities of others.

Another reason I stopped is that I got tired of worrying about causing collateral damage. Let's say I believed my enemy deserved his accident or his diagnosis. No matter who I was targeting, the ultimate result impacted his or her loved ones and dependents. When I was still fully atheist, I had the urge to curse someone and then realized she had lots of pets who depended upon her. She was a good pet parent and probably still is to this day. For once in my ridiculous life, I stayed my hand and just let her be, not for her sake, but for the welfare of her pets.

You're a Witch! She's a Witch!

Unless you are genuinely sweet to your core, you have likely aimed some of your own bad intentions at others and gotten results. This is a mere fact of life. Perhaps the intentions of others got in your way, perhaps you suffered immediate consequences, and perhaps you got away with it. The hard truth is that you have people aiming their bad intentions at you right now and you are likely suffering the consequences of the bad energy that made it through. I have been a writer for a long time and a jerk for even longer, and I reliably field would-be witches attempting to assault me on the astral with their malefic energy.

When you have malefic energy being thrown at you, you have choices. In the case of normies, they do not know bad energy is being thrown at them at all because they deny it exists, they deny it has power, and they deny the astral plane of images it comes from because they are too deliberately ignorant to attempt to research occulted knowledge. Let's call these people the ignosophers -- they love ignorance and we will leave them to it. They are dismissed because the grown ups are speaking now.

When you are an Evangelical normie, you believe that all bad energy thrown at you comes from Satan and that those throwing the energy are agents of the Dark Lord. You are wrong. The friction produced may be coming from within you and your own uncontemplated dissonance and misunderstanding. Some of it comes from the fractured spiritual ecosystem in which you dwell and some of it comes from other would-be witches trying to hex you. Because you produce malefic energy yourself, you will attract it on the plane of images as like attracts like. Your invocations of a deity you make pretenses of serving while acting in the opposite manner of what that deity stands for will likely invoke other things that are not Divine.

When I was an atheist witch with no banishing rituals in place, I believed that I was immune to the bad energy being thrown my way and exempt from consequences. I was wrong. The more I threw hatred in response to hatred, the more lathered-up and vulnerable I became on the astral plane. The astral plane is the same one we encounter in dreams. My dreams were full of drama, hags, and shadow men, the last two being parasitic entities who are attracted to malefic energy and feed off of drama. By reacting like a clueless idiot to various stimuli, I painted a kick-me sign on my butt on the astral plane and dragged my energy lower than it needed to be.

Most people are somewhere between atheist and Evangelical. I would call them the casually religious. When bad energy gets thrown at a casually religious person, she often does not know it explicitly. She senses it. She knows something is not right. Perhaps she knows who it is coming from and will react in her mind with hatred, wishing the person would just go away. This sort of impotent energy has almost no effect on anyone or anything except for her as it makes her sad. If she is a bit more towards the feisty end of the spectrum, she will wish harm on the person in her mind, seeing them step on a rake in her astral replay or hoping they'll get a good and hefty dose of what they are owed. This more focused energy will disrupt the hated person's life if she is a natural witch. If she is actually into ritual magic and does ritual magic against the nuisance person, she can deal out a great deal of harm because of the added power a physical ritual lends to the force of images. Those on the more religious end of casual cause harm by praying for others without their permission. Prayer is really, really gross when aimed at people who do not want or ask for your prayers. A prayer aimed at the unwilling is the equivalent of camping out on someone's lawn and pooping on it and then throwing that poop in their open window. No sane person makes that kind of effort, and to add insult to injury, the prayerful moron tries to invoke great power in order to throw crap.

In my own case, I have been public about having done the Sphere of Protection every day without fail for the last seven years. The Sphere of Protection is a banishing ritual that takes about 5-10 minutes and acts as an astral shower or bath. I also tend to bathe every day, so it's no surprise that I fell into the habit of the same sort of thing on the plane of images. The Sphere of Protection is great on its own for cleaning up one's astral plane existence, but when combined with the mental plane practice of discursive meditation and serial attempts to get the advice of the gods through regular divination (Ogham in my case) it lends a powerful set of shields when someone tries to hex me. I also pray to several gods and I never, ever pray on someone's behalf without their express permission. This is also protective.

She Hexed Herself LOL

When a would-be witch tried to hex me recently, a few of her blows landed on me despite my walls of astral, mental, and spiritual defense. I was able to figure out what she was up to via divination. It is highly unlikely she consciously knew what she was doing. As a result of her malefic energy, I had a couple of klutzy moments and a day that had every opportunity to turn septic had I let it. A loved one who does not have a banishing ritual suffered a minor flesh wound that needed a Band-Aid. In other words, it was a nothingburger that I easily handled. By throwing her crap around, I'll bet she had a string of terrible days. I'll guess she made herself sick or did the same to her loved ones, and overall ended up worsening her personal relationships and causing herself far more worry and anxiety than she was able to project onto me.

If you want to defend yourself against the bad energy of conscious or unconscious would-be witches, I suggest at the very least a daily routine of prayer to gods and discursive meditation. Obviously the Sphere of Protection or another banishing ritual such as the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram is advised as well. Once this routine is in place, it is fairly difficult for the average semi-skilled witch to get through. By being unlike the witch, I sent her energy glancing away from me and towards the Unmanifest that Dion Fortune talks about in the Cosmic Doctrine. I was unlike the witch because I refused to react to her with hatred. I don't hate the witch because I don't care about her. When I see her in my mind's eye on the astral plane, I see a sad, desperate, anxious person who doesn't deserve my contempt or my compassion either way. In her vain pride and self-importance, she sent blows that sailed past me. The banishing ritual I do ensured it along with my lack of interest in her and her life. Her problems arose when the energy blew towards the void and found their mark in entities that feed on human drama. We call these entities demons in our lack of understanding. By trying to hit me with her best shot, she painted an All You Can Eat sign on her house and opened the door to whatever nasty thing from the lower astral who wants to walk in. Demons cannot get in without an invitation.

The most repulsive and defensive part of my wall is my gratitude. Whenever I have anxiety or begin to covet a thing or situation someone else has, I play the Glad Game and imagine A. How my situation could be worse and B. Why I am lucky and grateful. Somewhere along the way in the last seven years of banishing rituals, discursive meditation, prayer, and divination for myself and others, I became a more grateful person. Gratitude is trust in the Divine. I trust the gods to provide for me and I am not worried or anxious like I was when I was actively hexing other people as a stupid atheist ignosopher. I am not at all afraid of death and I am certainly not afraid of some piddling little wannabe witch.

To notice other things is to escape programming.  Nobody is as programmed (without knowing they are programmed) as a teenager. I don't remember starting out in life as a materialistic, paranoid, insecure twit but I certainly became one. Ironically, certain teachers (I believe it may have been Social Studies class) warned us that television and advertising was evil. In one of the study units, we were tasked with identifying specific methods TV was using to brainwash us: bandwagon, emotional appeal, association, repetition. It got me anyway. By my 20s, the names of Hollywood actors and famous supermodels were more familiar to me than those of my second and third cousins.

Soap Opera Life

The term "soap opera" spells it all out rather plainly: the soap opera is clearly not an actual opera, but it is designed to sell soap. In the case of those TV shows I used to watch so religiously, like soap operas, they appealed to the basest and most melodramatic instincts of women: cattiness, perverted lust, lying, and cheating against the flamboyantly bogus backdrop of materialist gluttony as normalcy.  Since their inception, soap operas have been used to indoctrinate women into general dissatisfaction as a lifestyle and to trick them into blowing up their lives. Does anyone remember when Luke raped Laura in a 1979 episode of General Hospital? Or the messed up "everybody hooks up with everybody" mess that was Melrose Place? Now that daytime/primetime TV is basically no longer a thing and the soap opera crowd has long since aged out, we have the Hallmark channel, which supplants cookie cutter prurience with Happily Ever After stories. The trouble with Hallmark is there is no darkness -- instead there is Mary Sue and Marty Stu, predestined to find each other and pair off in towns with no Walmarts or McDonalds. Said romances are sandwiched between copious Big Pharma commercials that always end in the phrase "Ask your doctor" with a list of terrifying side effects that are worse than whatever disease they were meant to treat. Also, it is always Christmas.

I once knew a woman who grew up in an awful, fundamentalist Christian setting. She hated cats and most likely abused them when she owned them, though the reports were hearsay, so I won't go as far as to incriminate her. At any rate, her hatred arose because as the victim of violent sexual assault herself, she had major issues with the imprudence of animals. She hated the way cats stretch, arching their backs and sticking their butts out. She saw this as obscene. She could not see beyond the fact that cats are animals: everything she perceived was tainted by her dogmatic upbringing and multiplied by her warped, stunted sexuality. I once knew another person, a man this time, who constantly judged others by their appearance, including the elderly. He did not seem to notice his own failures in deportment as much as the failures of others. It struck me as odd that someone of his advanced age at the time would care about the stain on someone's shirt or an unzipped fly. In the case of these two people, they had no ability to get out of their own heads. In the woman's case, she was forever locked in the trap of sexual abuse, unable to free herself from the notion that sex is dirty and abhorrent. In the man's case, he was not able to perceive other human beings beyond the most superficial of appearances, and his capacity for meaningful thought was amputated as a result.

Voice in Your Head

Talking to the disembodied beings generally called spirits is all about noticing other things. By paying attention and ignoring the outrage du jour, sensitivity and awareness increases. I believe anyone can talk to the spirits. I am not special. If you have ever talked to yourself, and this includes talking to yourself both silently and aloud, you have most likely talked to spirits. I don't mean to freak anyone out here, but you've probably spoken to at least one dead person. The difficulty is not in talking to fairies, elementals, dead people, demons, gods, and everything in between. No, the hard part is discerning who you are talking to and when you are doing it. Mostly via discursive meditation, I have discovered how dumb I am, and to a lesser degree how smart I am. Too little sleep and I become irate, depressed, and nihilistic. Too much caffeine causes delusions about how great things will be in the near future. My own voice is recognizable by the jokes, a habit passed down from my late Dad despite not having the benefit of heredity (I am adopted). I am always making jokes at inappropriate times, which invokes my father but also is because I was a traveling court jester in one of my more memorable past lives. Just as you can learn the tolerances and symptoms of your body, you can learn to pick out your own voice in the crowd of voices in your head if you work at it hard enough. In my own experience, my own voice is only dominant twenty percent of the time. The other eighty percent of it is the crowded ecosystem of entities I speak with on a daily and nightly basis.

Who You Callin' Pollyanna?

In the 1913 novel Pollyanna, a young orphan girl is taken in by her grumpy aunt and made to sleep in a threadbare room in a forgotten area of the aunt's house. Instead of sulking, Pollyanna teaches the denizens of her aunt's town a game of her own invention, the Glad Game. When someone, including herself, starts getting down on their situation, Pollyanna gets them to consider the positive aspects and to build upon them by focusing on the good. Pollyanna's Glad Game soon gladdens her town and her aunt, inspiring love, acceptance, kindness, and grace. Pollyanna was a popular bestseller in its era with lasting legacies: it was made into two films and its message preceded the 1952 book The Power of Positive Thinking. To play the Glad Game, you must first understand that humans are biologically wired to remember and fixate on the negative. This evolutionary mechanism helps us to physically survive. In the meantime, however, our evolutionary feature eats at the mind, causing misery, drama, and mayhem. Enter looking at the bright side. True occultism is Pollyannism. The bright side is often the most occulted and hidden thing. Negativity? That's obvious.

I was atheist for twenty five years. Atheism is nihilistic. As an atheist, I believed in the Void. The Void was the thing that swallows all humans up when we die, erasing our sins and feeble triumphs. Atheism made it easy to see humanity as a failed and unworthy project. I viewed the Earth itself as horrible, brutal, and essentially dead. There is hardly a leap from not being able to see the good in human existence and not wanting humans to reproduce. When we look at the members of VHEMT, the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, we see plenty of angry atheists who are not content for the human race to end naturally. They would rather see the process sped up.

I believe televangelists are atheist materialists because only an atheist materialist cold fail to notice the awfulness of McMansions. The worship of one god in a dead, human-centric system that flows towards whatever the worshipper wishes to be resembles atheistic Satanism than it does traditional Christianity. The televangelist says GIMME GIMME GIMME until he disappears into the Void. His ungratefulness makes him into a Wendigo of consumption and greed; the more he eats, the more hungrier he gets.

Pollyanna is often used as an insult: to be Pollyannish is to suffer naivete and credulity. I disagree. An entity that I swear was not me because I am simply not this bright said to me that gratitude transforms everything it touches by the power of seven. Generosity that comes from the heart sublimates on seven planes and is returned with seven times the power with which it was sent. By getting others to play the Glad Game, Pollyanna got people to see the beauty all around them. Beauty of the true kind (not the surface kind) is hidden where ugliness seems plain.

The most occulted truth of all is the silver lining to the cloud. To take an example from my mundane and average life, let's say I have to go grocery shopping. I can easily find a hundred reasons to make grocery shopping into an unbearable burden. If I play the Glad Game, however, I can be grateful for all the people who produce the food, bring it to the store in a truck, load it onto shelves and into bins, and stand all day at a register so I can buy it. I can be grateful for the honest work I did to get the money to buy the groceries. I can be glad for the working infrastructure, town, and country management that enabled me to get to the store without having to cross a minefield or dodge bullets to get there. I can be grateful for my generous donors at various sites who are the reason I can afford little luxuries and perks such as bubble tea and gourmet cat food for my kitties. Finally, I can be grateful for the bountiful Earth herself, which is anything but dead and without a voice. The Glad Game is exceedingly difficult until you get used to it. Like its negative counterpart, it is an invocation. The Glad Game is a constant choice, and because of the way evolution works, it is very much an exercise. It is a muscle that starts out flabby and atrophied, but when nurtured and challenged, becomes a force to be reckoned with.

There is a famous celebrity who shall remain nameless who I believe has sold her soul to a demon and has become ensnared by demons as a result. She is not young. She recently had her umpteenth plastic surgery. She can now be mistaken for young at a distance or in photographs, but she does not look even remotely look like her younger self. Her existence at this point is a study in diminishing returns: the more she ruins her own legacy with a freak show of bad behavior and enfant terrible antics, the less attention she draws year after year. She made her deal as a young woman and now enters the first phase of hell: old age.

Bob Dylan reportedly sold his soul to an entity he thought was Satan as a young man. He directly admitted to it in an interview and he did not seem to be joking. John Lennon gained a similar reputation when gullible überfan and biographer Joseph Niezgoda misconstrued a woe-is-me quote he made during a trying time to mean he literally sold his soul. Dylan is obviously still alive and has made it to a ripe old age, without the formerly mentioned celebrity’s tendency to freak out about the aging process. Lennon, who most likely did not sell his soul, died in his prime while the rest of the Beatles outlived him. What of their souls? Were they for sale?

Atheist Misperceptions

Atheists like to say “I believe in one less god than you do” to monotheists. Atheism and monotheism are closer than their adherents like to think. They both see the material world as a dead and dying hulk of matter in the indifferent ocean of empty space. Atheism simply replaces Heaven with Progress: a future where everyone can be uploaded to the cloud after they die at a freakishly extended age (thanks Science!) and a life spent in fully automated luxury communism. For monotheists, evil is a grinning devil who takes convenient responsibility for all the horrors of the world. For atheists, the devils are those pesky servant classes who don’t understand intellectual refinements and the inevitable march onward and outward to colonize space. The celebrity who sold her soul probably doesn’t know it happened. I can only speculate she sold her soul because of the way she acts. Her crazy desperation is my only clue; that and her fondness for Satanic imagery. Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? Maybe she is with Lucifer.

I was an atheist only six years ago. I’m not an expert on demons and I don’t pretend to be one. For two decades, I thought the entities I experienced during astral travel (I was not calling it that at the time) were ‘trans-dimensional bleed’. Had my atheist self been more prone to believe in aliens, that’s the direction I would have gone: nightly alien abductee. Never would I have thought I was being tormented by demons. I didn’t know what they were.

Little Voice

After a few years of discursive meditation, I learned that I am not clairvoyant, or at least not in the way one expects. I don’t typically see anything in a typical day that isn’t fully incorporated in the flesh. Instead, I feel it. I am extremely sensitive to the etheric plane. Messes bother me because I can feel them. Sometimes my senses get so jacked up from being bombarded, they shut down and I am numb and unable to perceive anything. The Sphere of Protection has been a lifesaver for me. It has enabled me to discriminate and choose which non-corporeal manifestations get through. I am no longer at the mercy of a non-corporeal crowd shouting at me to get my attention. My senses have become subtle enough that I can communicate via the astral plane to my surroundings and to their inhabitants.

Not long ago, people on John Michael Greer’s Ecosophia blogs said they heard a little voice saying “Just get the vaccine, it will be OK”. The old atheist me would have just shut down the dialogue with FIGMENT OF THE IMAGINATION as if imagination is not important. If I could go back in time to talk with my atheist self, I would ask “If imagination is not important, why are governments, corporations, and religions all trying to take complete control of yours and mine?” Look at our human vision and how little of the spectrum we can see — if we don’t use our mind’s eye, we are nearly blind.

I saw, or more accurately I felt the nasty thing whispering things to me (and presumably other people). My mind's eye pictured him as a little waif, sly and gray. His hatred for humans was epic. He was a wee Rumplestiltskin looking to make deals and bargains.



Cui bono?

Vaccines, lockdownism, and masks tend to benefit the salary class and its aspirants. Unlike slaughterhouse workers, Amazon delivery drivers, and small business owners scrambling to avoid going under, the salary class largely no longer has to work or go to school when they catch a random cold or flu. A mild case of the sniffles is now an opportunity to work from home in perpetuity and/or to virtue signal about protecting others by voluntary quarantine. That is why it is common to find the highest vaccination rates in countries like Israel, where the salary class is the only accepted form of existence: If you’re not salary class in Israel, you might as well be Palestinian. Did members of the salary class sell their souls to demons in order to continue the gravy train of Covid-paranoia benefits? I believe they did. They did not do this quickly or consciously; it happened over time. They eased into the bargain like a frog relaxes in a pan of warm water over a Bunsen burner.

The legacy media was a bit more obvious about the soul-selling process. Self-appointed scholar commentator Reza Azlan took a trip to India for his CNN show Believer in 2017. For the very first episode, he hung out with the Aghori, a sect that makes special pains to debase its adherents by having them wallow in filth and death. Aslan ate part of a corpse’s brain as part of a (hazing) ritual in order to hang out with the Aghori equivalent of the cool kids. It is my opinion that he and CNN were literally damned after that. His unholy communion was the beginning of the end for CNN. Aslan was later fired for his anti-Trump tweets but CNN did not seem to escape blowback. Their ratings of their most popular programs are far lower than a Twitch user or Tik Tok-er of middling popularity any given day. Let’s hope CNN and all of its hysteria goes the way of the passenger pigeon soon.

Around the same time, breakout director Ari Aster released his first feature film, Hereditary. Hereditary is the story of a family that is broken apart via the posthumous actions of an evil grandmother who works from beyond the grave to put her grandchildren in the service of the demon Paimon. Hereditary is a straight-up demon summoning presented as a film. If films are any form of identifier for societal trends, Hereditary’s success indicates Paimon is the current era’s Hollywood It Boy. The film relentlessly emphasizes the futility of resisting Paimon’s anti-human agenda. At every turn, its characters are beaten, demoralized, beheaded, and bested. In the end, Paimon gets exactly who and what it wants. I suspect Hereditary, Believer Episode 1, or the multitude of other Satanic capitulations in media vastly helped to put us in the astral mess we are soaking in right now.

The mask, as I have explained many times, is a Satanic symbol. I have to resist the desire to cross myself when I see a mask wearer (I was a devout Catholic in a past life and old habits die hard) because I can feel the pain emanating from them. Any Christian who wears the mask ought to seriously think about what it means. Jesus would not have worn a mask. He hung out with lepers. The guy was (is?) fearless.

Sayonara, Reality, We Barely Knew Ye

Demonic obsession is often marked people who abandon all connection with reality in order to stay in favor with the demons controlling them. People who cannot have a rational discussion about Donald Trump, pro- or anti-, or who seem to have forgotten that Trump was the original pusher and promoter of the vaccines. On the other side of the political spectrum, there are significant numbers of would-be armed militia members who believe in a globalist conspiracy to transhumanize the world.

Sometimes the abandonment of reality is just garden variety mental illness and sometimes demons step in. Some of the raving lunatics flailing on the ground on a forgotten city sidewalk are possessed; others are not. The vaccine is a door-opener. Like any first foray into drugs, it has the potential to be a gateway. There is also the good chance that it isn’t.

Soul Trafficking

Nobody can be coerced or tricked into selling their soul. Selling one’s soul to a demon is an act of will. The invitation must be voluntary. If it is rape, it’s not a sale, it is theft. For this reason the majority of the souls who got the vaccine will not pay a price beyond the banquet of vaccine enhanced illness that awaits. They were tricked and coerced. Prostitution utilizes trickery and coercion — the youngest and most nubile are regularly raped and drugged into the prostitute life. The vaccinated are the victims of a form of human trafficking, unless we are talking about a special subset who gleefully volunteered for the vaccine and continue to this day to push others to get it. They act this way in light of obvious, easily-attained, undeniable evidence there is something terribly wrong with the vaccines.

I don’t have a great deal of hope for current vaccine enthusiasts. They are in trouble. Not only do I suspect they face a multi-lifetime karmic backlash that will include causing the deaths and injuries of potential billions of vaccine-injured, they will also be the first to face blame here on the material plane as the nascent blowback against the vaccine mandates builds to a molto fortissimo crescendo in the coming months and years. For those who are still virtue-signaling that they are vaccinated, they should enjoy what remains of their time and expect a long sojourn in hell.

We are currently standing in the wreckage of a flaming dumpster fire and it is up to idiots like you and me to save what can be saved. A wise non-corporeal entity once said something to me about the subject of demonic possession: “In order for the exorcism to be successful, you need to love the boy more than you hate the demon who possesses him.” The vaccinated are and were our friends. For instance, I have an ex-friend who spent the last five years in a fit of Trump Derangement Syndrome pique. I walked away from the relationship before the vaccine rollout. I do wonder if he got the vaccine because he has pre-existing problems with his immune system. Though I don’t have it in me to attempt to re-kindle the friendship, I can focus on the good times we shared and wish him no ill as he continues on his journey for the rest of this incarnation. It’s very tempting to hate him and all he represents to me. He has acted like an ass and doesn’t have the self-awareness to realize it. I don’t love him anymore, but I can acknowledge the love I felt and use it to mitigate the friction I now feel towards him. My gratitude for all the hard times he helped me through and all the lessons he helped me to learn eclipse my wish for him to be apologetic and humbled.

I know I’m going to want to say “I told you so” as the cascade of Vaccine Enhanced Illness becomes more apparent. I’m going to do my utmost to steer clear and I would urge you to do the same.  Tear yourself away. I have always battled with my own arrogance and it is readily triggered by schadenfreude. I believe the unvaccinated will have every reason to feel schadenfreude as Winter and Spring open a can of adverse effects on the vaccinated. I know some vaccinated people have been horrible. I know some of them have called to put us in camps and to ostracize us from society. We need to ignore them and try to work with the vaccinated people who never stooped that low.

My Body My Choice

I believe the reason a whole lot of this garbage is happening is because of what happened in the 1980s as Evangelical Christianity reached a zenith. The 1980s were a horrible time to be a young person. Christianity had a last great hurrah, squelching the opposition with the seemingly God-sent scourge of AIDS, terrorizing a generation of young women into either compulsive promiscuity or nihilist frigidity, and bubbling over into the world of television with the rise of televangelist preachers. When I was a teen, it seemed the nature-hating dominance of Evangelist psychos would never end. Yet end it did, and unfortunately, because the lessons were not learned, they have come back to haunt us in the form of forced vaccines.

The Christian fixation with unborn babies was always about the control of women and girls and the hatred of femininity. The Bible never mentions an abortion of which it does not approve, from dashing “the little ones against the stones” in Psalms 137:9 to Hosea 9:14’s “give them a miscarrying womb and dry breasts”. I am not the only woman whose sex life was destroyed by paranoia and guilt. I was one of the lucky ones — I never had an abortion nor was I ever forced to carry a baby I did not want. Christianity, Islam, and to a lesser extent, Judaism cannot help what they are: patriarchal religions that value yang more than yin. To squelch life before it gets a rollicking start is very yin and not out of sync with the cruelty of Nature herself. One out of four pregnancies naturally ends in miscarriage, but members of our civilization don’t do a particularly good job of coping with that either. At any rate, the insane prohibition of abortion by Christian fundamentalists in the Handmaid’s Tale lite era of the 1980s morphed into our current dystopia of vaccine pressure. What comes around goes around. Energy doesn’t die, it just changes form.  The controlling Father archetype who wished to coerce every girl and woman into having an unwanted baby became the controlling Mother who insisted she could provide for a world commune of thought slaves.  In either case, they both lied about their competency as providers. Christian fundies were slightly better than vaccine enthusiasts of the current era: they mainly sought to control young women. Lunatics in high places are fixing to vaccinate children and babies as I write this article.

If there is a moral to this story, The only way to stop the cycle of fear porn from inevitably popping up in the future is to refuse to play into it. Demons are hungry and it is up to us to starve them.

The question "Why won't God heal amputees?" is a rhetorical one and is meant to shut down discussion. The forgone conclusion is that God cannot heal amputees because God does not exist. I know this because as of five short years ago, I was an atheist. I understand where atheists are coming from. My husband, raised in a strict, apocalyptic Christian faith, is still atheist. I was also raised in a Christian household and confirmed at age twelve, however, the Christianity of my upbringing was nowhere near as strident or as well-observed as my husband's. For him, I believe atheism is a reaction to the way he was raised. As for me, I experimented with Wicca in high school and college and was a full blown atheist by the age of 25. I was atheist all through my thirties, quoting Bertrand Russell and Christopher Hitchens. It was only at age 44 that I started to emerge from atheism, because of the example of one John Michael Greer, who presented a sane, rational example of devout, non-Christian, non-Eastern religion in the form of Druidry.

At any rate, after only three years of religious practices of daily discursive meditation, prayer, the Druid Sphere of Protection, and divination, I consider myself as religious as they come. What an odd state for a former atheist! Being raised in a materialist Christian household of the type that is quite common in the middle and upper-middle classes, I feel obliged to try to answer the question "Why won't God heal amputees?"

Why won't God heal amputees?

1. Because Meat World sucks. HARD. What's Meat World? Meat World, my friend, is the material plane. It is absolutely awful here. Yes, it can be a place of stunning beauty and kindness, but most of the time, it's harsh and brutal. For instance, there once was a mallard duck who was raped to death by a gang of male mallards, after which she was pulled apart by raccoons and hawks, feasted upon, and finally done away with by maggots and ants. Did she deserve it?

No. Did the amputee deserve it? I'm going to say what any rational person would say -- I have no flipping idea, and if he did, it's not my place to make that judgement! 

Let's look at how a Christian would answer this question... "The Lord works in mysterious ways."  To that, I say NOT GOOD ENOUGH.  The problem with a Christian excusing their God's capricious cruelty is that many of them presume their dogmas contain everything one needs to know about the world.  I am not making excuses for God's cruelty if that is what is really going on here.  What I am saying is I don't know.

Now let's take a look at how atheists answer the Did He Deserve It? question.  They are going to say absolutely not, the event was random and chaotic as goes the world we live in.  With this equally thoughtstopping answer, any further curiosity as to the forces working in the amputee's life are summarily dismissed. 

Instead of looking at the amputee's plight as a binary -- it's either A or B -- maybe we can try looking at a third possibility.  As horrific as it is to have a limb amputated, there just might be lessons to be learned not only for the amputee who has no choice but to live without his limb/limbs but for the people around him who have the choice either to act as harmers or helpers.  It's almost as if the world sucks because it is a school or testing ground.

A matrix, if you will. Speaking of matrices, remember that part of The Matrix when Neo and Agent Smith have a chat about the state of the world? Agent Smith said that a perfect Matrix where nothing bad ever happened had been tried and that the experiment utterly failed.

The reason we have amputees, guinea worms, and pedophiles is because we are all being tested at every moment of material existence. Those of us who are lucky to have no encounters with amputation, guinea worms, or pedos have a duty to help those who have been harmed by the aforementioned terrible things as well as all of the other afflictions of the material. What we are not to do is gloat about how sweet we have it in comparison or the opposite, to pretend that nobody has it worse than we do.

We humans begin to fail the tests of the material plane the moment we hoard a bunch of goodies for ourselves and refuse to share what we have, whether that is in a small way such as getting mad that a family member wants a bite of our food or a large way such as holing up in an environmentally-devastating, fully gentrified McMansion while virtue signaling to all of the rich neighbors with a shirt that claims Black Lives Matter.

Every moment of our material life represents an opportunity to make the best of what we are given, and that's true for McMansion dwellers and guinea worm victims alike. Is it fair? No, or at least's it isn't fair on any level we can possibly understand. The atheist rejects such an explanation because atheist thought always has to run one way or the other towards the ends of a binary: If God exists, and the world is a testing ground, then God is cruel and I've already failed!  Might as well do whatever I want! If God doesn't exist, then it explains everything, because everything gets to be chaotic and random and I can do whatever I want because I'll never be judged by my actions by a superior being!

Yes, some gods are cruel. Some are dying out, like the Christian one (my opinion, anyway), and other gods and demons have often sprung up in their place to grasp the consciousness of would-be Christians. The unseen world is an ecosystem, just like the visible one is an ecosystem. The ecosystem self-regulates and balances in a way that we do not yet understand.  Humans don't understand ecosystems.  We are easily terrified by nothingburger viruses, dumb enough to use RoundUp in our lawns, and have yet to create a working biodome. Though our scientists like to think they understand how nature works, the proof is in the pudding that they don't. We know even less about the unseen world than we do about the material one.  Our scientists are so arrogant and dimwitted, they can't be bothered to study occult phenomena that practically smack you in the face, such as the etheric value of food in relation to the way it is prepared.   If we take the arrogant attitude of knowing it all, for instance by trying to micromanage the weather via nanotechnology, we see disastrous results.  Dumb humans attempt to force an ecosystem they don't understand into a proscribed mold.  The unseen ecosystem also cannot be understood by trying to force it into a proscribed mold, and one of the proscribed molds it is shoved into is the atheist's "it's all chaos and coincidence" theory.  The other is the monotheist's "it all works the way God says it does in my religion's holy book." 

2. Because God isn't what you think it is.

There are many atheists who are natural mages/witches of exceptional natural talent.  I was that atheist.  Some of them have figured out that they are naturals and have proceeded to become bad karma grenades, flinging around their bad intentions with glee and never putting two and two together when blowback hits them with a rare cancer, severe depression, or a bully-terrorized child. 

I am a natural witch, and it's not just the hair or the black cat that makes me that way.  When the gods took me on a few years ago, they had plenty of raw material to work with, but they also had to school me repeatedly on why it's a bad idea to do hostile magic.  Every time you wish someone would suffer and/or die (including when you do it subconsciously), you are flinging around hostile magic.  It is only when you wake up and say "I don't do that anymore" that you have a chance at a worthwhile deity working with you.  If you enjoy flinging around hostile magic (including subconscious hostile magic) and have no plans to stop, you can still work with non-embodied entities, but you're more likely to get the attention of demons, and at that point, the joke is on you, Dr. Faust.  If you fool yourself into thinking the entity granting you favors is a god, by all means, go right ahead.  Some people can only learn the hard way and if you're that person, I wish for you to be blessed because you'll need it.  The sad part is that if you are naturally talented as I was/am, if you go the cacomagic route, you'll miss out on forms of happiness that are deeper that anything that could be granted via material prosperity or ego gratification.  If you can put your pride and your preconceived notions of what God is supposed to be aside, you are suddenly in the position to listen to what God has to say to you.  

I believe in many gods.  I have had the honor of talking to them.  I talked to one today.  It was my day off.  I stole the opportunity to take a long, solitary walk down to one of my town's many forest preserves.  While I was on my walk, I talked to one of the Greek gods.  We had a brief conversation about the folk tunes I have written to accompany the Orphic Hymns.  I also talked to three different dryads or tree spirits.  It's not a big deal and I'm not special.  Anyone can do this.  This is my normal now.  I'm far less crazy than when I was atheist, calmer, and more easygoing.

If you've ever had a close relationship with a pet, you're already aware that it is not difficult to communicate with a non-human entity.  The difference is that we cannot physically see gods, goddesses, and dryads, or at least I cannot see them.  I'm occasionally clairaudient, meaning I can hear birds chirping in the middle of the night that aren't technically there or a voice will make itself heard randomly -- this happened when I was fifteen when I heard a ghost exclaim "Oh my lambs!" in a retail store I was working in at the time -- but I'm no clairvoyant.  I can feel the presence of non-corporeal beings though, and because of my Druid practices, I can discern the array of feelings in order to identify what is going on around me.  Occultists call the unseen world the subtle planes for a reason.  I don't want to freak you out, but you are surrounded by an array of ghosts, spirits, elementals, manatus, gods, and potentially demons right now.  If I was in the room with you, it's likely I could communicate with one or two of the beings around you.  If you're sensitive, you can sense them wherever you are, like on the train or in your apartment.  Most of these creatures are harmless.  Just as we tend to see more squirrels, sparrows, and raccoons out here in the suburbs and people in the city encounter rats, cockroaches, and pigeons, certain non-embodied entities go with certain territories.  Some of the entities are parasitic and riding you and/or someone you know.  You're more likely to have a direct experience with a fairy or an elf in the hinterlands, the more remote the better.  You can absolutely attract "good" entities to your domicile.  Cultivating a garden, whether outdoors or indoors, is an excellent way of doing this.  

Or you can be like the atheist and the Christian, clapping your ears and screaming LA LA LA when someone mentions the inhabitants of the non-physical planes.  The Christian believes in a boring universe that in my opinion does not reflect reality.  This boring universe is divided into three parts: Meat World, minus the unseen ecosystem, Heaven where all the good repenters go after they die, and Hell, where the majority of the unsaved will burn, including those who lived upright and charitable lives while believing in the wrong gods.  The atheist believes only in the humanity-dominated Meat World and an endless gaping void afterwards. 

I reject both of these outlooks.  I think the reason so many people throughout history have believed in gods and spirits is because gods and spirits are present and accounted for, we just lack the ability to see them.  Atheists especially like to think humans are the smartest creatures on the planet.  I used to share this belief.  We're not the smartest beings on Earth and we never will be.  Atheists also think that if a creature is hyper-intelligent, then it must be physical and from outer space.  The atheist lacks the creativity to entertain the notion that perhaps some beings are far smarter than humans while also being body-less and from Planet Earth. 

The Christian dismisses the idea of non-embodied intelligences so she can return to the comforts of her usual submission programming.  God is what the Bible says.  There aren't potentials beyond what the Bible describes and the condition of being saved is that you squelch any disagreement with Christian dogma.  Furthermore, your job in life is to go out and recruit others to believe in your God exclusively because the Bible instructs you to do so.  You are to remain unconcerned about the ethics of forcing conversion to your faith because you must convince yourself they are damned without it.  I have only met a handful of Christians who didn't have these sleazy sentiments lurking within them.  I would like to be proven wrong about Christians.  Actions speak louder than words.  By their fruits I shall know them.  I hope that in the future, Christians devote more of their energy to emulating Christ than to their current routine of being confused in all things except the drive to gain more converts to their confused cause.

I don't believe in an omnipotent God, or at least if there is an omnipotent God, I highly doubt there would be a book that could inform my tiny human brain about things he said.  I vastly prefer to strike up relationships with gods who never claimed omnipotence if they will have me.  I believe in Jesus Christ, but I also believe in Allah, the Buddha, the entire Greek pantheon, and too many more to mention.  I think people who are like my former atheist self find themselves unable to talk to gods because they are a combination of too arrogant, too preconditioned, and to blind to know what to look for.  

When I was an atheist, I remember the desperation I sensed in the faithful, including that of Occidental exotic fetishists  who obsessed over various gurus or fawned over the Dalai Lama.  Their supposed inner peace proved only that religion truly was the opiate of the masses.  To be atheist is to declare oneself an island separate from "all that nonsense" which starts looking like mumbo jumbo if you achieve the goal of lumping it all together in one steaming pile of woo.  Never mind the series of odd synchronicities in the lead up to Trump's election.  Never mind the kid in Dr. Ian Stevenson's patient archive who remembered every detail of being a fighter pilot in his past life to the point of knowing his old Air Force buddy's names.  Nothing to see here, folks...

3. Because of Reincarnation and That Old Chestnut, "I Could Be Wrong"

The gods I believe in don't seem to be spontaneously healing amputees, though I think that many people who are amputees now will not be amputees in their future lives.  I believe I was an amputee in one of my former human lives, though I'm not sure why I was an amputee in a previous life.  John Michael Greer says that in his ecosystem-centric view of the Universe, one shared by many occultists like him, people who are human in this incarnation have been through billions of years of incarnations as gradually evolving animal forms on Earth.  We became human at a literally glacial pace, and every human soul has spent quality time going through various animal incarnations, all the way from single-celled parameciums to fuzzy mammals.  Becoming human represents a jump in intelligence along with specific challenges in order to proof us for the next phase, which is the non-embodied state Druids call Gwnfydd, "the luminous life".  After that, there are more complex states we all have the possibility of achieving.   

I haven't the remotest idea what they specifically entail because I am not a god.  Supposedly I can also screw up and end up going through my animal lives again -- this is the karmic equivalent of having to repeat kindergarten.  If I make an absolute mess of my lives, I have a shot at being stripped down to my basest non-physical elements and being swept away by a passing comet, never to return to this solar system again.  For me, this seems like a decent incentive not to go down the Chairman Mao or Jeffrey Dahmer route and to attempt to continually refine my compassionate and thoughtful parts instead.  

But I could be wrong.  Who am I to say how the Matrix works?  I know at this point you were waiting for me to take some cheap shots at Eastern religions, and here goes: Buddhism and Hinduism were both extremely wrong when they created caste systems around their beliefs in reincarnation.  I've never understood how two religions that fully acknowledge karma can invent a giant civilizational bad karma generator in the form of a caste system.  Just... dumb.  Institutionalized snobbery does not belong to god, that's strictly the domain of the other team.  I know a very smart vegan guy who once said of children who die of horrific cancers that they "probably raped a thousand women in a former life" to me while I was an atheist.  This didn't sit well with me.  I suppose there wasn't time for him to communicate the short novel I've gone into above, but the problem with his statement was the missing idea that he could have been wrong.  I'll never know because I walked out of the conversation that day, condemning him as a fool.  I don't think he is a fool anymore; I do suppose he had a point but I wasn't ready to hear any part of it.  

I can only speak for myself, but I think the moral of the story is that I should strive to be the most balanced, kindest, and thoughtful person I can be every day whether I am faithful, faithless, or somewhere in between.  That's not the easiest prescription when in Meat World, especially when times get tough.  Nevertheless, I am going to try and I hope you will too.

 

When I was sixteen, heartbroken from my first failed romantic relationship, I turned to witchcraft with desperate hopes that I would gain the coolness and perspective of a sage adult.  My relationship with religion had always been complicated despite having an average suburban upbringing and average attendance at the local church.  I was confirmed in the usual way.  Truth be told, I never much felt adoration for the Christian god except for when we sang his music.  The music wasn’t enough to hold my interest.  At sixteen, frightened of my increasing hypnogogia and suicidally depressed, I dived into Gardnerian Wicca. 

 

In my opinion, Gardner is the type of occultist who is like a broken clock: he’s right twice a day and wrong the rest of the time.  His version of Wicca is more empty pomp and circumstance than substance — his rituals weren’t all that user-friendly to the sole practitioner, his explanations of what magic is and does were completely obtuse, and his frantic need to grant authenticity to his brand of witchcraft undermined its intention as a revival religion, which I would presume to be reviving a religion, to state the obvious.  I got myself a Tarot deck and it was the Thoth deck.  I love the Thoth deck to this day and I’m grateful for my early study of it, however, because of it I jumped from the frying pan into the fire.  I started delving into the works of Aleister Crowley.  Crowley, like Gardner, had no practical advice for other occultists and, like a bad music teacher, assumed every student was starting out with a basic working knowledge of the field's principles.  Crowley also was simply an awful person.  He’s a man who started out with everything in life: good looks, wealth, intelligence.  He squandered all of it, most likely molested children, and died broke and friendless in a fleabag rent-a-room.  His reputation as the “evilest man in the world” is somewhat of a joke, because shouldn’t a thoroughly evil man have bottomless sources of wealth and power?  Nevertheless, to dismiss Crowley’s labors, especially his magnum opus (the Thoth tarot deck) is to skip over a secret key to a vast storehouse of knowledge.  I bumbled through my late teenage and early college years, gaining a reputation among Christian paranoids at my city university because I dared display my esoteric books on an open shelf.  Yes, a small but rabid Christian constituent in my dorm tried to stop me from displaying 777 and Tarot: Mirror of the Soul.  Christians can be real asshats, and they don’t do their waning religion any favors by acting in such a fashion.

 

By the time I was leaving my 20s and college behind, I came to a watershed.  I was on anti-depressants because at seventeen, I voluntarily started taking antidepressants so I would stop thinking so seriously about killing myself.  As an adult, I decided the drugs had done their job.  My psychiatrist, a vacuous, incompetent, rich, comfortably numb boob, insisted I was nuts and that I would have to be on tricyclic antidepressants for the rest of my life.  This conflicted directly with me becoming an adult, and at the time depression was considered a pre-existing condition which could prevent me from getting health insurance.  I fired my shrink and weaned myself off of antidepressants.  My hypnogogia waned along with my antidepressant dosage, and it felt natural to stop thinking so much about Crowley, Tarot, and magical rituals that didn’t seem to do much of anything, let alone improve my life.  

 

By 30, I was atheist.  I still had hypnogogia and encountered odd things while in that state; I just chalked it up to the undiscovered scientific truth of inter dimensional bleed.  I still did magic, meaning, I threw my intentions in certain directions and uncanny stuff happened as a result.  Like any good atheist, I was a solipsist, trusting that I was God of my own mind and no other forces could possibly be at work there.  I condemned all forms of belief in God as various manifestations of the fear of death.  I ignored any and all beings who tried to talk to me; hidden deep down was the fear that my shrink was right, that I was crazy and soon enough the voices would prove I was insane.  I was gleefully nihilistic in my atheism.  Though I suppose it bothers some atheists that death is a one-way trip into a permanent void, that didn’t bother me at all.  In fact, I wrote my first novel, Forever Fifteen, as a look into the horror of being forced to exist in the flesh for a thousand years or more.  The protagonist, Lucy, longs for the black, permanent void of death, as boring as that may seem.  I have always loved tedium and the atheist version of what happens after death is about as tedious and boring as can be.  

 

Oddly, my atheist self also wrote a decidedly non-atheist music album, the Dream of Flight, which is an entire, programmatic album about what I only now belatedly understand to be the astral plane.  Occultists see human existence as the simultaneous manifestation of the soul or Individuality on approximately seven planes ranging from the lightest, the spiritual plane, to the densest, the material plane.  The astral plane, otherwise known as the plane of emotions and daily and nightly dreams, is somewhere in the middle.  Despite having written an album about dreams that talked about “bringing a whole world to life” via the dream world, I puttered on, quoting Christopher Hitchens and Bertrand Russell and not believing there was any such thing as a disembodied spirit, non-corporeal being, or god. 

 

Fast forward to around age thirty-seven, when I went vegan for the animals.  Veganism gets accused of being a religion for good reasons, one of which is that it takes tremendous will power and dedication to ignore opposing forces who would have you conform to their animal-eating and abusing ways. People in our anti-religious culture believe that sort of dedication can only come from belief in a higher power, but I would argue that humans are naturally religious and if the Christian god cannot fill spiritual needs, actually living ones values as a vegan rushes into that spiritual void.  Most vegans I know are atheists who suffer from the binary delusion of either having to have one God (usually the Christian god) or no god at all (atheism).  Most are not willing to hear (at least in my opinion) they’re both wrong.  When I went vegan, suddenly all that bilge I used to spew as an ova-lacto vegetarian about not wanting to take on the energy of suffering and sad animals by eating them actually made sense.  When you go vegan, the weight you lose is mainly spiritual.  I was one of the lucky people whose health benefitted from going vegan — it helped that I already cooked most of my own meals and didn’t subsist on junk food — however, the feeling of clarity and purity that happened when I stopped eating animals and their secretions was one I wouldn’t trade even if being vegan gave me cancer, so there’s that.  

 

Around the same time, my absolute hatred of the suburbs and car obsession led me to an author-blogger named James Howard Kunstler.  Kunstler is devastatingly witty and because of this, I became a constant fan of his podcast and writings.  Every now and then, he featured a guy on his podcast named John Michael Greer.  I began to read John Michael Greer’s blog The Archdruid Report, which ostensibly was not about Druids or their religion but about the same subjects as Kunstler wrote about: peak oil, people, and politics.  I quietly ignored Greer’s “other” blog, The Well of Galabes, which was about magic.  As an atheist, I hardly cared about woo-woo interests I had abandoned along with antidepressant drugs and childhood.  I’m not sure at what point I decided to read Greer’s other blog or the many books he had written at that time about magic, but I did.  Unlike so many religious people, Greer was high on the reliability meter and low on the hypocrisy and narcissism meters.  I read the Well of Galabes and just like the Archdruid Report, it contained pragmatic, well-rounded perspectives about the world, and it made its points about religion with no obvious or subversive aims to convert the reader.  When Greer brought Archdruid Report and Well of Galabes to an end, he began a new blog called Ecosophia, I followed it eagerly.  Comments on Greer’s blogs were always lively and fun, with many smart people throwing around provocative and intriguing ideas.  The Greer essays that gave me the most to think about were The Next Ten Billion Years, which over time got me to rethink my belief in short term human extinction: yes, that’s what Extinction Rebellion is blathering on about.  I no longer believe the human race is going to cause the end of a livable climate in the next 300 years, and I think the reasons why I used to believe that would happen is because the thought allowed me the luxury of thinking nothing I do matters.  Once he was on Ecosophia, Greer wrote an essay people had been asking for about reincarnation.  If there is a such thing as a life-changing essay, I believe Greer’s A Few Notes on Reincarnation was it for me.  That particular essay explained mysteries about my own experience and also helped me to understand the chaotic world around me.  I started considering the possibility that I was the reincarnation of a chain of people behind me and that I had many more human lifetimes to go.  I became nascently aware of realities I had considered impossible as an atheist.  

 

At this point, I started looking into Druidry, because as a long time writer of Celtic-sounding music and long haired tree-hugger, I figured, why not?  Druidry (and other magical paths) required three things on a daily basis:

1. Discursive meditation, which is not the mind-emptying Eastern kind but rather a disciplined form of rational thinking invented in the ancient West. 

2. Divination, which I already had some experience in via Tarot cards. 

3. The Sphere of Protection, an approximately 20 minute bit of solo performance that involved memorizing a script of invoking and banishing elemental forces (once you’ve got the elements down, you graduate and assign a pantheon of existing gods to each part of the ritual) designed to shape and master one’s thoughts and actions via unseen forms of energy.

 

I have no problem committing to a daily routine — as a highly-functioning autistic, routines are my bread and butter.  I began the Sphere of Protection on January 1, 2018 and did it every day without fail. The SoP has always felt helpful even when I was bumbling through it, barely memorized and doing it without a pantheon.  By about six months in, I chose to assign the Druid god pantheon because for me, John Michael Greer’s system outlined in The Druid Magic Handbook was the appropriate fit.  I would often be so overcome with emotion during certain elements that I would cry.  After the SoP would be discursive meditation, which I prefer to do while writing in a journal as it allows me to jot down thoughts as they occur.  I first started doing a daily three card Tarot divination, which gave me much insight into the old Thoth deck, however, I changed to Ogham as it is part of the Druid Magic Handbook course of study.  

 

The last two years have been the oddest and best of my entire life.  I now consider myself deeply religious.  I pray every day and I highly believe I am in near constant communication with deities and spirits.  Furthermore, I believe I may have always been talking to the non-corporeal entities without realizing it.  I think many people who talk to themselves don’t understand they’re actually not talking to themselves but a non-corporeal entity.  All I know is that the interactions I have with non-corporeal entities are of a far higher quality than they were when I was first experimenting with Wicca, and that’s due to the SoP and the discernment that accompanies discursive meditation. 

 

I’m not sure what we are to the gods we are working with.  As far as I can tell, they are super-beings who were wisely worshipped by the ancient Greeks, Egyptians, Indians, and Chinese and if you’re sensitive and kind to them, and if you ask them politely and respectfully, they just might mentor you and give you their excellent advice.  However, if you’re disrespectful and you do stupid human things like:

 

A. Arrogantly presume they can’t possibly exist because Jesus/Allah says you’ll burn in hell

B. Use and wear their name for a pair of overpriced sneakers

C. Curse them for not helping your lazy, regressive butt to win the Lotto 

 

You can expect to have a bad time, or at the very least, you can expect the gods not to care about you.  If an annoying hamster was biting my ankles, shouting at me in a high, squeaky voice to make it King of Hamsterland, I’d probably ignore it too, despite my soft spot for hamsters.  

 

In my two years of becoming religious, I became calmer, stronger, and more sanguine about everything in my life.  I have begun to understand that limits are the key to a happy life and that our culture has an insane disregard for them, most likely because of the absurd amount of petroleum wealth we have enjoyed for the last 200 odd years.  I became far more detached from money, that is to say, I began to look at it as valuable in terms of keeping me clothed and fed, and as far as having loads more than that, I have seen the benefits of rejecting the infinite perversions and complications that come of having too much.  I have come to understand why throwing your unexamined bad intentions around inevitably drags you into being a crappy person with rotten luck, no matter how much you insist you are one of the Blessed & Good People.  I have made the affirmation that I am a better person tomorrow than I was today, if only by the slightest amount.  

 

In this strange dialogue with gods, I have apologized for my pathological fondness for dad jokes (I simply must be reincarnated as a father, because I have WAY too many dad jokes to work out of my system) and I have heard birds singing in the middle of the night in winter, which is also known as clairaudience.  I have had conversations with dead people before they moved on to the next cycle of reincarnation.  I have discovered my past life as a traveling musician in an era of bards and my past life as an alcoholic Scottish laird.  I have felt my tensions drain away as I walked through a forest where the beings patiently wait for me to visit.  I had the privilege of talking to a few Greek gods (they seem to be the same as the Roman ones, for what it’s worth) as I arrange melodies and harmonies I’ve composed to flesh out the Orphic Hymns. What a fantastic journey it has been.  I certainly look forward to the remainder.