kimberlysteele | Entries tagged with occultism

Ten years ago when I was still atheist, I bristled at any mention of the occult planes of existence. Like a good Christian fundamentalist, I rejected any bit of knowledge outside my preordained bubble, presuming it was trying to program me. The truth was that I had already been programmed.

The planes of existence are not OTHER. They are all right here, right now. They work in cyclical patterns and the phenomena on one plane becomes the phenomena of the next in a different form. I have made analogies in the past in an attempt to help people think their way through them: one is the Gobstopper analogy, which has the added benefit of being Everlasting:

“If each human’s existence is likened to the Everlasting Gobstopper/Jawbreaker, the material plane is the sour candy shell on the outside. One layer in, there is a different flavor called the etheric plane. This plane of energy is what Chinese people call “chi” and Indians call “prana” and is what feng shui, acupuncture, and Ayurveda works with. The etheric is invisible to us humans while we are awake in our stodgy plane, but some sensitive people can see it and most can feel it whether they realize it or not. The next candy layer in is the astral plane, which is most easily understood as the world of dreams you go to when you sleep. The dream world is part your own brain and part collective, meaning, other peoples’ dreams are part of your world/vice a versa and you can interact with them and they with you. Dreams are not what you choose them to be: just like other people’s emotions or the weather, they aren’t controlled by the dreamer. There are rules and limits to them just as there are rules and limits on the physical plane. Of course these rules and limits are different than the ones on the physical plane. The next layer in is the mental plane, which is the plane of learning and mastery that separates humans from other animals. For instance, being able to figure out how fast an object falls to the ground because of scientific laws falls under the mental plane category. Another layer into the Gobstopper is the spiritual plane, which is the primary reason you were incarnated and is the core from which all of the other layers of the Gobstopper emanate and cannot exist without. Take note that all the planes are the same Gobstopper, they are just different layers of a whole candy.”

The second analogy I like to use is the Stick Figure Family analogy:

If you are familiar with the kind of sticker that shows up on SUVs depicting family members and their pets, that is what I am talking about. On the physical plane/Meatworld, the window cling film is made of plastic, which is the long-decomposed parts of plant and animal matter we have processed into a sticky film. The etheric plane is where the sticker gets the static electricity that gives it the ability to stick. Though static electricity is invisible, we recognize it as present and we can feel it if we shuffle across the carpeting in a cold and dry room. The next plane "upwards" or "inwards" is the Astral Plane, the plane of ideas and images. When we see a crude stick drawing and associate it with a family of four with a dog and a cat, it is our Astral Plane development that enables us to perceive the drawing as a depiction of a family. Non-human animals do not have the same ability to translate that sort of visual symbolism, and that is the main thing that separates us humans from them. The Mental Plane is the concept of family and the ancient force that causes humans to band together in the first place. Humans do not understand this level of existence very well, but the few who do are often perceived as masters, gurus, or yogis. The Causal Plane is the divine force that created all of this stuff to begin with, and I won't even pretend to understand the first thing about it except that it is there.

I am going to add a third analogy in hopes of breaking through the same wall of obtuseness I faced as an atheist. I will call this one the airplane analogy; this one is very special because it actually has a plane in it... You see what I did there?

Airplanes do not just appear out of thin air. In order for an airplane to exist on the material plane, we have to trace it all the way back to where it came from. The airplane is a construction of metal powered by petroleum. It is actually several inventions in one -- refined crude oil, engine, ailerons, wings, steering, wheels. The energy it is given by the oil and the resistance given to it by wind currents and gravity are etheric plane phenomena. Without the etheric plane's energy, the airplane would not be able to be made, let alone fly. The next subtlest plane the airplane comes from is the astral plane, otherwise known as the plane of images. The airplane began as images in a person's (or a few people's) heads. If there had never been an image of a flying machine, the flying machine would not have been invented or "made real" with metal and fuel. The minds that invented the airplane also did not get the idea from nowhere; on the mental plane we have the mechanics of birds and insect wings that illustrate the concept of flight. Only when the concept of how that happens is understood do we get men capable of making an airplane. The spiritual world is the force we call Divine that seems to have created birds, flying bugs, wind currents, and flight in general.

In The Rosicrucian Christianity Lectures, Max Heindel says:

A little thought will soon make it apparent to any investigator that we live in a world of effect which is the result of invisible causes. MATTER and FORM we see, but the FORCE which molds the form and quickens it is invisible to us. Life cannot be cognized directly by the senses; it is invisible and self-existent independent of the varied forms we see as its manifestations.

Let us quarantine some images that are better off put aside for now. One is the American Buddhist notion of nonexistence, which acknowledges reincarnation and seeks to supplant it with the ultimate turn off/tune out. The Buddhists I have met seem to confuse it with an unsullied afterlife realm of bliss. This innocent land for "good" Buddhists sounds like Christian heaven with the tags removed. The last time I checked, heaven may be a nice place, but it is definitely still existence. Speaking of Christian heaven, there's another farce explored in countless television shows and movies, though not as often as Christian hell. Long story short is all the interesting people go to Christian hell, leaving Christian heaven a fairly boring place. Even ancient Greek concepts of the remote lands of Hades and Mount Olympus should be put aside for the time being, or at least until you can use them to train your mind instead of inform it.

There were a spate of episodes of the cheesy, oversexed vampire TV series True Blood that featured the worst of New Age misconceptions about the realm of fairies. Of course fairies or Faeries were depicted as having their own dimension, and this dimension was a literal forest with chandeliers hanging from trees. White Ren faire gowns were the official dress code of the True Blood Faeries. Just... NO. This sort of Tinkerbellish conception of fairies is exactly what landed me in hot water when I tried to invoke them as a teen and ended up with night terrors. Fairies aren't nice creatures; in fact, they are often brutes. John Michael Greer speculates in his book Monsters that gray aliens and fairies are probably the same thing -- both like torturing and raping humans and occasionally mating with them consensually. From my experience, I believe he is correct.

When I say fairies dwell upon the astral plane, and I believe I have said those words before, what I mean is they are non-embodied beings. They are strongest in the realm of images whereas humans are strong in the physical plane, and we have the oil rigs and strip malls to prove it. Because fairies and other astral creatures are more active in their comfort zone of the astral level of existence, they can manifest on the next plane "down" towards the material known as the etheric, but if you put up a defense, such as a bent piece of iron in the form of a nail and salt amulet, they are easily prevented from taking form. This is useful knowledge if you have a house that is prone to orbs, bad smells, weird noises, stressed out pets, and misplaced objects. The defenses of natural magic are often enough to completely remove mild poltergeist phenomena from a living space.

Humans have become more materialistic as our populations have swelled. I believe the average person in 1924 saw more ghosts, shadow people, saints, and other paranormal oddities than the average person of 2024. The further you go back, the more they saw. In 1624, witches were taken seriously because it did not require hallucinogens to see what they were doing on the etheric plane. This is why so many regular people made witch bottles in 1624. A witch bottle is a device designed to trap and torment the etheric body of a would-be witch assailant. In the year 124, dragons were real because the average peasant could perceive the etheric plane (I believe dragons, ki'rin and ki'lin are etheric plane phenomena) like modern humans perceive the physical plane. Isn't it interesting that ~~fairies~~ ahem I mean aliens tend to haunt rural areas and the more remote, the better. I's almost as if they take shelter where non-human ecosystems are in charge. When there is a human lucky or unlucky enough to encounter them in the wild, they are anything but friendly.

They saw it coming...

The material plane is extremely crowded at the moment. The era in which we dwell was labeled the Kali Yuga by ancient Indians. Nostradamus burned all of his collected knowledge in order to prevent it from falling into our bumbling hands. Ancient Mayans and Incas tried to prevent our era from happening via blood sacrifice and a hell of a lot of it. When white guys showed up in boats, they folded their empire like a paper napkin and let a few hundred Conquistadores take their empire. Why? They knew. They knew this era would be materialistic, crass, ugly, and depressing. They knew we would be utterly blind to things they saw.

When you have a buttload of humans in incarnation, it follows there are lots of former animal souls being flipped into human existence. I myself have distant past life memories of being a goose and later a cat. It's not easy being a cat. One of the reasons I treat my cats so well is because like Pepperidge Farm, I remember. So the next time you, my gifted and intelligent reader, have the urge to throw your hands up (or a particular finger) at one of those dolts known as the Stupid People, please keep in mind that the Stupid Person may have been a squirrel, cow, or a dog all of eighteen years ago. Be patient, for they are doing the best they can!

We are at peak population, peak Idiocracy, and peak materialism. The bad news is that you are HERE. The good news is there is no place to go but up.

If there is one habit I can recommend to foster gnosis of what on earth is happening (shout out to Mark Passio) it is discursive meditation. For 5-15 minutes every day, you sit in a chair with your feet on the ground. While you sit, your job is to unpack a single phrase, thought, picture, or symbol like a ZIP file. Mine it for its information, its insights, its tangents, and its flights of fancy. This limited focus becomes your rabbit hole. For instance, you could meditate on deceptively simple statements like this:

I am a spirit in the material world.
The planes are separate and all at once.
Time and space are illusions.

When I started discursive mediation, the above statements would have been too much for my feeble brain (well let's face it, they probably still are) and I would meditate on simple objects such as a window or a pencil. Even a window or a pencil can present deep rabbit holes. In our common situation of constantly feeling trapped and stymied, discursive meditation can offer an infinite adventure of discovery. Plus it is cheaper than therapy.

The second thing I recommend is being more openhearted about Divine influence. My formerly atheist self dismissed prayer as God-bothering. I believe this was an instinctive overreaction to mainstream religions where congregants act like annoying, entitled beggars when it comes to their attempts to communicate with God. The first thing I sensed was the etheric. When I began to be grateful for little things like a cup of tea or a safe trip across town, the energy or vibe improved around whatever I was thankful for. Gradually I became more sensitive to other people and I began to be slightly less stupid via the virtue of not opening my mouth whenever I felt the urge to speak. When I went for my solo walks in the forest or prairie, I began to feel my surroundings on a deep level. Over time I began talking to trees, streams, and larger spirits of the land in what we crudely call "their language". I risked becoming a God-botherer, but I like to think my approach to asking for Divine guidance is less annoying because I try to be humble about it and I don't ever feel it is owed to me. I am not, nor will I ever be the smartest or most special of people. It was only when I could admit my lowly position that the Divine began throwing me a bone here and there.

The Divine powers are smarter than us humans in the way humans intellectually outclass hamsters. Why they choose to help or pity us humans at any given moment is a mystery. As occupiers of the spiritual plane, they are all around us, as are ghosts, fairies, demons, astral pyramids, egregores (group spirits), land spirits, and beings too diverse to name or contemplate. We are the ones with severely limited perception living through the least-spiritual phase of human existence. Only through our willingness, humility, openness, and entreaties to smarter beings than us can we help to remedy the situation.

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.

TikTok has been a thing for years and I paid it little to no attention. I'm not sure at all why I suddenly decided to put up a TikTok channel calling myself the White Witch of the Prairie (sounds like a Young Adult novel from 1987) with the mission of injecting a dose of sane occultism into the astral grime. I started the channel about two weeks ago, on a Wednesday of course, during the hour of Mercury. I have maintained a schedule of posting one new video a day, and there are many days when I don't feel like posting. I try to interact a little with some TikTok "friends" in order to not be so completely unidirectional as a content producer.

True confessions: I don't like TikTok and I never have liked it because my preferred length for videos is about 12-20 minutes long. The short video format is annoying and far too many vain and insecure people use it as a digital mirror to pout and preen. The pouters and preeners are mostly women, and of course any celebrity worth her weight in crap has a TikTok so she can out-pout and out-preen other celebrities and attempt to steal the thunder from good looking plebes who didn't have to trade sexual favors on a casting couch. The TikTok preening Olympics are not my cup of tea, and despite it having some good content, I have managed to scrupulously avoid it for most of its existence. What Facebook is to Gen X and Millennials, TikTok is to Zoomers. They love it and aside from video games, it is one of the only ways to reach them. So TikTok it was... ugh.

I thought I was doing pretty good getting about 200 views on each new video I posted. My discursive meditation video has over 200 views, the Druid Tree ritual one is nearing 500, and my various videos about the subtle planes have a few hundred views a piece. Imagine my surprise when a video I recently posted about what I believe happens when someone commits suicide hit 8000 views overnight. Though a seasoned TikTok veteran would likely not be impressed, I was taken aback.
Here is the text version of the video I posted:

Traditional occultists believe it is a terrible idea to take your own life because you end up in an astral holding pattern for as many years as it would have taken for you to die a natural death. From my experiences talking with dead people, I strongly believe the holding pattern hypothesis is correct. When people die, their etheric bodies stick around for anywhere from 3 days to several months, and that is why the loved ones of the recently dead so often see their ghosts. The Second Death is the term for when the etheric body dies and the rest of the person, including their soul, goes off to deal with the process of the afterlife. When you take your own life, your etheric body dies on schedule, but the astral body is forced to linger as it has literally left its evolution unfinished and dangling like a cliffhanger in a soap opera.

When I was in my teens, I wanted to end my own life despite having talked to the ghosts of dead kids who actually went through with what I only planned. Back then, I didn’t have enough experience talking with dead people to know about the specific nature of astral holding tanks, but nowadays I gather it is much like being trapped in mundane dreams of the sort where you’re anxious, melancholy, bored, and frustrated. I am REALLY glad I did not end my own life as I am fairly certain I would not have escaped a single one of my problems. From what ghosts tell me, all of your unsolved problems are waiting for you in your next incarnation if you are foolish enough to end it. It doesn’t matter if you spend a good 75 years in astral boredom… all you do is delay the inevitable.

If I could go back in time and talk to my severely depressed 15 year old self, I would tell her to do discursive meditation every day and get to the root of her problems instead of running away and projecting the shadow. I would also tell her to pray to multiple gods and to take regular cold showers or baths. Cold water cleanses the etheric body, which helps one to think clearly.

As I have said in past videos, this era is not an easy one in which to be alive. The collective astral plane is basically the bog of eternal stench right now. There are a lot of people in a certain industry that shall remain nameless who profit from mental illness, and often these people think they are helping because it is the blind leading the blind. Depression is to be expected... That said, if you are feeling as bad as I did at 15, I hope the gods bless you and give you the assistance you need.

There was lots of butthurt over the video. Suicide is a sensitive subject. I knew I would trigger some people, but I did not expect it to get a great deal of attention. The video got its share of troll comments, including the usual assortment of atheist-materialists demanding that I provide proof and more than one uncritical thinker trying to thought police me for daring to voice an opinion. Nevertheless, I was willing to field all sorts of trolling because I remember how I felt when I was suicidal and I feel I could have saved myself a great deal of trouble had I taken the advice from future, middle-aged Kimberly. I hope there is a TikToker out there (a fellow TikToker, ughhhh) who looks at the suicide option and decides not to employ it. If that happens, every single video from now until whenever will have been worth the annoyance, irritation, and inconvenience.

I had a good time making this into a video for TikTok:

https://www.tiktok.com/@whitewitchoftheprairie/video/7219909657559584046

A is for Astrology Astrology is the OG Myers-Briggs personality type indicator, except way more specific and thorough, long before it was cool. Astrology isn’t just good for human psychoanalysis though — there are entire fields of astrology devoted to predicting and understanding world events, plus you use astrology to profoundly understand other systems, such as Tarot and Kabbalah.

B is for Helena Blatavatsky was a mystic born in Russia in 1830 who founded the Theosophical Society, an organization that had a huge part in reviving Western occultism. Madame Blatavatsky’s organization exists to this day, providing libraries and resources so people can understand the evolution the world’s religions and the pursuit of spiritual awakening.

C is for Cosmic Doctrine The Cosmic Doctrine was written by Dion Fortune a.k.a. Violet Firth, another woman occult mystic who lived between 1890 and 1946. Dion Fortune’s masterwork about how the Universe operates is very difficult to understand and takes a great deal of discursive meditation, but is completely worth every second of effort.

D is for Druidry Druidry is the modern take on the ancient practices of the Celtic Druids, who never wrote anything down and of whom very little is known. Druidry is generally acknowledged to maintain three pillars: a daily banishing ritual, daily divination, and daily discursive meditation. Other than that, saying that Druids are all over the map would be the understatement of the century.

E is for Eliphas Levi Eliphas Levi was the nom de plume of Alphonse Constant, a French author and ceremonial mage who made the occult cool again after centuries of persecution. His masterwork The Doctrine and Ritual of High Magic, published in 1854, ushered in the Renaissance of European occultism.

F is for Freemasonry Freemasonry is a semi-secret lodge that only admits men with various oaths and initiation rituals.

G is for Golden Dawn The Golden Dawn was a group of European intellectuals who developed a complex system of magic called Hermeticism, building upon Eliphas Levi’s writings. The Golden Dawn’s members included Aleister Crowley, W.B. Yeats, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

H is for Hoodoo Hoodoo is a form of traditional folk magic that developed in America but originated in Africa. It was created by blacks during the time of slavery and is part magic, part prayer, and part medicine.

I is for Israel Regardie Israel Regardie was a pupil of Aleister Crowley who acted as Crowley’s secretary when Crowley had his own occult order. Crowley refused to teach Regardie magic or yoga, so Regardie took matters in his own hands and studied magic on his own, penning the masterworks The Garden of Pomegranates and the Tree of Life.

J is for John Michael Greer John Michael Greer or JMG is the J.S. Bach of modern occultism. He is an occultist and prolific author of approximately 100 books varying from magic to culture to speculative and occult fiction.

K is for Kabbalah The Kabbalah is a system with a symbolic map known as the Tree of Life at its heart. Though it is considered to be an ancient Jewish sect, some speculate the system is much older. The Tree of Life is said to contain all the meditations one needs to become an ascended master.

L is for Liber Legis Liber Legis or the Book of the Law was written by Aleister Crowley, who claimed to have dictated it from his Holy Guardian Angel, Aiwass.

M is for Manly P. Hall Manly P. Hall was a Canadian 20th century occultist, polymath, and polyglot. He was best known for his inspiring lectures and his book The Secret Teachings of All Ages. He founded the Philosophical Research Society.

N is for Neoplatonism Neoplatonism is named after the last school of Greek philosophy in 3rd century AD and is a form of Monism that melds Greek polytheism and Oriental mysticism. Neoplatonists believe there is essentially one God or ruling force with plentiful smaller gods, angels, and other non-embodied beings.

O is for Orphic Hymns The Orphic Hymns are a collection of 87 poems dedicated to the Greek gods and goddesses translated into English by Thomas Taylor. In 2019, I began to turn them into songs.

P is for Joseph Peladan Joseph Peladan was a Victorian era French Rosicrucian occultist whose vision was to understand initiation through through the beauty of art and work of being an artist.

Q is for Queen of Sheba The Queen of Sheba was a monarch in southwestern Arabia who traveled to Jerusalem to meet King Solomon. Both Solomon and Sheba were known for their magical powers.

R is for Rosicrucian Order Rosicrucianism is a combination of Hermeticism, Jewish mysticism, and Christian gnosticism. The Rosicrucian movement got its start in 17th century Europe.

S is for Emanuel Swedenborg Emanuel Swedenborg was an 18th century mystic Christian genius with unique visions of what happens to humans after they die.

T is for Thoth Hermes Trismegistis The ancient Greeks combined the god Hermes with the Egyptian god Thoth and made him the deity of magic, arts, sciences, and writing.

U is for The Unicursal Hexagram This six pointed star that can be drawn in one continuous line is a symbol of infinity, as above so below, and spiritual evolution.

V is for Visconti-Sforza Tarot The Visconti-Sforza Tarot is the first known Tarot deck, originally used in the Renaissance as a card game.

W is for Wicca British occultist Gerald Gardner introduced Wicca to the public in the 1950s. Traditional Wiccans organize in matriarchal covens and worship a Triple Goddess and a Horned God.

X is for Christian Occultism It’s a common misconception that the occult and Christianity do not mix. Some of the greatest occultists of all time were churchgoing Christians, including Eliphas Levi, Dion Fortune, and Emanuel Swedenborg.

Y is for Catherine Yronwode is a hoodoo master and founder of the LuckyMojo shop. She has a popular hoodoo correspondence course, dozens of books, a forum, and multiple podcasts to her credit.

Z is for Oberon Zell is a modern-day jack of all trades, master of most wizard and artist who specializes in bringing magic down to Earth. His theories and writings can be found in books, periodicals, and online.

The person whose channel is referred to above is actually serious -- he conflates clown symbolism (pale skin, red hair, circuses) with Satanic conspiracy. His leaps of unexamined, random illogic and projection of the shadow are impressive even for a Truther. I have deleted the channel name and the link URL because he does not seem entirely there and I would not put it past him to personally target people who disagree with his views.

The Trouble with Truthers

One of the reasons I don’t care for non-mainstream social media alternatives such as Bitchute, Rumble, and Telegram is the amount of anti-Semitism tolerated on those platforms. Bitchute is especially guilty, with any random video playing host to astonishingly offensive comments about how Jews must be responsible for all the evils of the world. I’m not sure if the anti-Semitic comments that proliferate on Bitchute, Rumble, and to a lesser extent, Youtube are real or if they are posted by bots in order to tarnish the platforms in question and drive away intelligent conversation.

Truthers also like to target Freemasonry, insisting that every elite and well-monied person in history is and was part of an ongoing Satan-worshipping conspiracy to ruin the world of normies. They try to play both sides, taking their grandkids to see a Disney movie and buying its related merchandise and the very next hour ranting online about the grotesqueries of Christina Aguilera and her strap-on dildo performance. One of these things is the natural result of the other, and you cannot have your Disney princess cake and eat it too.

There is a person in one of my many online groups who posts Truther propaganda, usually in the form of black men exposing what they perceive as Satanism in the media, politics, and entertainment. These black men are uniformly American and either purport to be born again Christians or a long lost tribe of black Jews. I came at this person pretty hard and I have come close to outright banning her from my groups. Perhaps she will earn a ban in 2023. Sadly, she is far from the only one of her kind. Her post of a Telegram video attempting to smear Freemasons by revealing pentagrams, hexagrams, and a Freemason compass symbols as part of a Satanic plot earned this retaliatory screed from me:

"Do you know anything about the occult? Do you know that the word means "hidden"? Did you know that one of the main traditions of serious occultists like myself is the practice of discursive meditation, which comes from medieval Christianity? Do you know anything about Freemasonry that you haven't learned from Bitchute, Rumble, and Dan Brown novels? I'm getting VERY tired of seeing all of this unanalyzed projection of the shadow in this group. If you're looking for the evilly evil Satanists, you might try rooting out the Satanic crap in your own life first before casting stones at 80-something year old lodge members who donate huge chunks of their retirement money to charity. Let me guess: you're probably not fit to throw stones because you live in a glass house..."

Projection of the Shadow and Other Acts of Avoidance

I believe the Truther movement, as much as it claims to be about responsibility, prosperity, and faith, is actually about running away from hard limits, gaining and holding on to unearned wealth, and blaming other religions for the increasingly undeniable failures of Christianity. When leftists project their shadows, they are trying to avoid saying “I am full of hatred. When I get up in the morning, my thoughts are dominated by rage towards someone who i am convinced is oppressing me and people like me.” Truthers, for all their claims to the contrary, COULD SAY THE EXACT SAME THING.

Truthers think of themselves as the Good People just as frequently as their enemies think of themselves as the Good People. The truth is somewhere in the middle: there are good people and bad people on both sides, and actually most people are a mix of good and bad, present company included. The religious Christian Right forgets that it is just as elite and elitist as the atheist and pagan Left. Forty years ago it was the pathetic parents of Gen X who bought into Tipper Gore’s hysterical policing of dirty, profanity-laden music CDs. The Christian Right started the US down the path of thought police. Furthermore, Pray the Gay Away camps not only do not work, they are what led to the backlash we see today of Big Pharma getting in bed with its woke sympathizers to trick children into surgically mutilating themselves out of natural puberty. I may have only learned one thing from the study of The Cosmic Doctrine (hopefully there’s more than that but I will be the first to admit the inferiority of my brain to retain knowledge) but it is, like I say in my Ogham readings, a doozy. That thing is Dion Fortune’s statement that if you want to rise above hatred, you must hate the hatred more than you hate the object of your hatred. This means looking inward and recognizing the despicable enemy inside yourself before you project the shadow upon the evilly evil Freemasons, or the Big Bad Patriarchy/ whiteppl/ meanie deadnamers.

The Limits of Human Power

The amount of mysterious power attributed to Masons, occultists, Jews, and other random non-Christians would be very funny if it wasn’t used as reason to start the Spanish Inquisition reboot in the current millennium. Truthers who fetishize an Apocalypse that never arrives are prime candidates for the same sort of Stalinism they allegedly rail against. Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale is just as prescient a vision as George Orwell’s 1984, and both books had plenty of true historical situations from which to draw when painting their pictures of dystopian futures. The desperate urge to project villainy on That Drag Queen Over There is convenient for the former Tipper Gores and original Karens is psychologically interesting.

When we look at the lifestyle Truthers are protecting, a large number of them are comfortable suburbanites in enviable positions. Not all on the Right are in depressed areas in flyover states. Some are the same big boys with big toys who made the 1980s a living hell for anyone with less money, power, and influence. How many of them are still the clueless elite, throwing money willy-nilly at Big Pharma and its minions instead of taking responsibility for their health, buying Chinese made crap at Costco and enriching Jeff Bezos with their Amazon Prime memberships, and going to the big box church on Sunday so they can feel better about worshipping materialism in the company of other materialists?

Speaking of their churches, they’re mostly a sham. I don’t go into a place that looks like a corporate hotel to worship and I think it is a good guess that Jesus would also avoid such a place. If I have a demon, and I would argue I do, the last place I expect to get that demon cast out is a Christian church or any place of mainstream faith. They still wear masks at the Buddhist temple near me, in fact, they force that Satanic symbol on children. I don’t like places where religious leaders resent occultists like me for knowing what they are supposed to know. How is it that an ex-atheist (it has been fewer than 10 years) has more of a gnosis of the ecosystem of the non-material world than some religious nerd who purports to have spent their whole waking life in church or temple? Yet I am not trying to be arrogant here when I say I am more literate about those things than the average preacher. That said, when I compare myself to such an “expert”, it is like a kid who just learned to read in the first grade comparing herself to a deliberately illiterate adult who failed to learn to read out of ignorance and sometimes spite.

Bless You for Reading This, You Must Have Lots of Patience...

For those of you still reading this, I thank you, as my rants have taken on the seeping darkness of our times lately. On a more positive note, I saw something I never thought I would see last week. For those of you who do not know him, Mark Passio is a firebrand occultist who has a large following. He does livestreams and speaks in public. He also occasionally performs with his band because he is a musician. Mark has dedicated his life on lifting people out of ignorance and promotes the Great Work. For those who do not know what the Great Work is, in the occult vernacular, it is the term of the “many paths, one destination” a soul takes as it returns to the God who created it. As the term implies, the process involves a great deal of hard work on oneself and the world one occupies. I was shocked when Greg Reese, an intelligent and thoughtful contributor to Alex Jone’s Infowars, did a segment from Mark Passio on De Facto Satanism. De Facto Satanism is what John Michael Greer refers to as the sleepy, materialist trance that most people spend their day to day lives within. Greg Reese is a person who I would consider to be a Truther, and to see him promoting the diligence required for the Great Work instead of the same old lazy excusetarian, scapegoat-oriented Christianity was extremely refreshing.

Another strange and (I think) good sign was a performance of the Orphic Hymns I did in the odd setting of a burger bar in Naperville at an Open Mic. It was a foggy night and almost no people attended the Open Mic in the heart of Naperville, one of the most affluent and elite suburbs of Chicago. Because there were not enough performers, I somewhat reluctantly went on stage to fill in the blanks. The Orphic Hymns — my adaptations of the ancient Greek worship poems — were actually well received. Among the three or four other performers, they seemed to be the obvious favorite. People were tapping their toes, humming along, and a small group actually started dancing in the empty bar during the Orphic Hymn to Hermes and Apollo. I don’t think this had a snowball’s chance in hell of happening in the Naperville of 10-20 years ago. Of course it may mean absolutely nothing, but it certainly made me think twice.

Music is one of those basic things that ideally should be good for humans. The music that has evolved from the classical versus pop fracture and the music of advertising is not good for humans. If anything, it is anti-human. Marketing jingles and the popular songs that sound like extended versions of them are designed to implant in the brain like parasites. We call them ear worms because they burrow deep into the consciousness and the soft tissues of the brain. Once they are there, their function is to poison by immersion. Instead of being able to hear our own thoughts, we hear the pop song or the jingle’s more direct sales pitch.

Pop songs sell desire, or more specifically dissatisfaction with one’s own appearance and circumstances in order to create desire that makes the host into a good customer intent on collecting all the accoutrements of modern life. Advertising jingles do this in a straightforward way: they plant a catchy tune that lasts far longer than the appeal of the product in question, for instance McDonald’s “duh-dum-duh-duh-duh, I’m lovin’ it”. In the case of longer format jingles, try finding a hip hop song that makes no mention of the accumulation of large amounts of money or contests in which the artist declares themselves superior to others in terms of their sexual appeal.

The hook of any given hip hop tune is designed to convince young people that they need to compete with each other by becoming narcissistic, greedy copies of the artist’s image as presented in the song. In other corners of the pop music world, we find whiny It Girls and It Boys crooning about their broken hearts. The image created in this case is the beautiful martyr who struggles prettily while wearing the latest fashions and taking designer drugs. Once again, the point is to create desire to mate with the star or to be like him or her, constantly advertising one’s status on social media while looking great, of course.

Music is Prayer

Music is and always was a form of prayer. Music is holy and to use it for mass advertising campaigns or by deliberately crafting ear worms to pimp commercialized images defiles it to some degree. This is not to say that all pop songs or even advertising jingles are inherently bad. They’re not. The point is that music has become degraded and debased like many other parts of modern life.

Science has shown that music uses more parts of the brain than any other human activity. Music is a way of accessing parts of the brain and improving them via exercise. Merely listening to music has been shown in studies to improve overall cognition; performing it and improvising it take brainpower to whole new levels of achievement. In other words, music often acts as a highway to the divine.

Nevertheless, not all prayer is good. Prayer is a means of contacting and communicating with incorporeal beings. There are many, many incorporeal beings who are not gods. Praying to them as if they were gods is what most people do, like when I was a child and prayed to the Christian God and Santa Claus at once because I was confused and spiritually illiterate. There are also the ethical issues of praying for someone else, and music can easily become part of that mess. When someone forces you to listen to loud music, whether this is the blaring commercials of a TV program or the twenty-something in his car with a modded out stereo system blasting autotuned swear words to thudding bass, they are attempting to drag you into worshipping what they worship. This practice is not exactly the same praying on someone else’s behalf without their permission, but it is well within the ballpark.

Music is powerful because it is a connecting force or a bridge. Music conjures up a state of mind, for better or for worse. I can no longer bear to watch Midnight Diner, a TV series from Japan that got popularized on Netflix, because of a song played at the beginning and the end of each episode. The song is a plaintive, sad number called Omoide by Tsunekichi Suzuki. I watched the first couple of seasons of Midnight Diner when my cat Kiki was in her last few weeks of life and the song viscerally puts me back in that time. I become overwhelmed with emotion as if I have traveled through time.

Music: The Best Part of Church

Religions have known the power of music for a very long time. Many Christmas songs are Gregorian chants that have been with us since the Dark Ages. The Hagia Sophia, built over 1500 years ago in the city of Istanbul, was clearly designed at least partially to provide beautiful acoustics for singers and perhaps instrumentalists of old.

Music creates structures within the imagination. The imagination is one and the same as the astral plane. I have a peculiar predisposition to synesthesia, or “seeing” sounds and music in my imagination as a series of colorful lines and shapes. The truly odd part is that I believe I can teach other people to be synesthetes and that becoming a synesthete helps singers especially to improve their vocals. Visualizing a pitch as a color makes me far more likely to hit the pitch accurately, especially if it is extra high or low or embedded in a difficult passage of music. When I tell my voice students to do the same, it works like a charm. It is as if the structure of the music exists on a plane other than the one where the sound is heard and that by paying attention to it (by colorizing it within the imagination) we can capture it and hit it like an expert marksman shooting a target.

When I listen to music, I see all sorts of artistic representations of it in my mind’s eye. If the music is crap, such as a commercial jingle, a pop song, or any form of atonalism, it is extra irritating. The shapes are ugly and they linger for a long time as earworms. It is for this reason I rarely attend concerts, and that includes “classical” music concerts. Much of classical music is garbage, especially when listened to as recordings. Mozart, in my opinion, was nowhere near as perfect as his fans presume. I find that much of his music, especially from his early periods, is trite and syrupy. When I listen to music, it is well-chosen and curated. Beautiful music creates kaleidoscopes of color, pattern, and structure and uplifts my imagination often for days afterward.

When a Bach chorale is sung inside a church, it creates a structure within a structure. Astral structures are amplified and reflected by similar astral structures, but can also be affected by physical/etheric structures. Beautiful churches attract and amplify symmetrical, beautiful, harmonious energies. Ugly churches do the opposite. Most religious buildings in the US are hideously ugly and badly designed, so often the music is the only thing redeeming the structure of the building. When a psychically sensitive person walks into such a religious building, he or she will often be deluged by the conflicting and dissonant currents of astral energy pervading the building, not the least of which come from the parishioners and clergy themselves.

If occultism is to experience a renaissance, I believe it will happen largely because of a resurgence of folk music and the study of astral shapes. There isn't much I can do to affect an entire musical and magical renaissance as an individual. Nevertheless, I can at least attempt to play my part (ha ha) by performing and in my case, writing religious music and by teaching others to recognize a musical shape when they see it in their mind's eye.