[Opinion] The Goetic Debate: Psychological Illusions vs. Objective Entities

[Robert Ramsay]

After reading through all of these responses (you fuckers are really smart), I can't help but feel the urge to scream a little. Not because the discussion is wrong, honestly, it's fascinating, but because I think sometimes we try so hard to explain a mystery that we forget to actually experience it. Good luck putting lightning in a bottle.

I am reminded of a quote from Tommy Kelly: "Some mysteries are to be experienced rather than solved."

Some minds cannot help but build castles and cathedrals around a mystery. We construct systems, models, philosophies, and explanations. There is nothing wrong with that. Those things can be beautiful and useful. But we should be careful not to mistake the explanation for the thing itself.

Sometimes the magick is in the mystery. Read that again if you need to.

The presence of a spirit does not become more real because we finally found the perfect words to describe it. The experience does not become more profound because we built a perfect container for it. Some things refuse to be contained.

Stand in awe of it. Let the encounter change you. Let it challenge you. Let it burn away what needs to be burned and teach what needs to be learned.

Maybe the mystery is not a problem to be solved. Maybe it is a relationship to be entered.

Experience is always greater than description. The terrain is not the map, and it never will be. You can spend a lifetime studying the ink, the paper, the lines, the cartographer, and the mathematics of the map, but eventually you have to step onto the land.

Don't let your desire for a box to contain the mystery become an excuse to never enter it. And don't let your attachment to one answer become the very thing that blinds you to what is actually happening.

What the hell do I know. I'm just another voice in the void. But I think sometimes the greatest wisdom is not having the final answer. Sometimes it is standing before the unknown and just saying: "Teach me."

Oh absolutely! Remember, though, that the castle building is usually a result of the experience - how you interpret your experience decides how you interact with it. You're going to need some kind of interpretation to get a handle on it, and you need to remember that all interpretations are transitory and should be replaced the minute you get a better one. I've always been instantly suspicious of anyone who claims to have that "final answer".

I don't think anyone no-one goes on about the map and the territory more than me As Robyn Hitchcock put it: "Wisdom cannot be transmitted".

Leaving yourself open to new stuff is the only way to go. As Isaac Asimov put it: "Scientific progress doesn't start with 'Eureka!', it starts with 'that's funny...'"

Post automatically merged: Tuesday at 7:21 AM

Guard the mysteries!
Reveal them constantly!

 

[MorganBlack]

I can't help but feel the urge to scream a little.

heh.

It's tough being a Daimonic Idealist. That time I tried to summon a cosmic entity beyond human imagination to ask about the nature of reality, but it just put me on hold and asked if I tried turning my universe off and on again. Buh-boom-buh-smash!

Models work best as tools for us to think and share our experiences in magic - after having them. Or just become sterile intellectualism that will waste your entire life ruminating over. Unless you want to.

There is only the Mystery (by many names). House Awe is the only house that really matters, in the end.

And to quote myself at the start:

"OK, when you encounter a spirit you conjured standing in front of you that you really didn't believe in, all this debate falls away. But until you get there, you sort of have to lift yourself up by your own bootstraps. Most of the online discourse does not help. And now the internet debate culture makes everyone think too much and feel too little. Let's see if we can use some other thinky ideas to get past thinking in locked-down ways."

I am calling this "Daimonic Idealism" partially to honor the people who helped me articulate it, and because 'Neoplatonic-Orphic Daimonic Idealism' is getting a bit long and excludes more houses than I like.

My current ur-model (as a way of thinking about it) is built on top of time and place of Gen-X magical experimentation, testing specific parameters of how the various magic systems interact with perception and intent. The elevated status of a "model" here was reached only after rigorous stress-testing against raw data. Without real lived evidence, it remains just a hot take or a "faith."

So this is my personal ur-model for magical practice I'm articulating, drawing on other models. It is not supposed to be thought of as a stand-alone religion or "faith" - but for us to use in a practice, to think about and reintegrate all the crazy things that happen in traditional magic. Not to dismiss them as hallucination, which is silly. It models the experiences of many magicians, using my own as a baseline, but not only my experiences. I did not find the models first. I did grimoire magic first and was like... HOLY FUCK!! There really is no point in becoming another crazy schizoid talking about loony wack-a-doodle stuff most people don't care about.

Gen-X magicians DIY'd the FUCK out of western magic and the grimoires, very much in relative isolation in the 1980s and 1990s, and found what worked for us, then met up in Yahoo Groups, finding surprising similarities of experiences among us from many different personal backgrounds and ethnicities. Then many published books, spawned interest in pop-occultism, and it was all downhill for 15 or 20 years or so. (I blame the Neptune in Pisces transit as everyone threw off any Saturnian discipline for identity politics and dissolved all ritual precedent. "Do whatever you want" magic mostly failed. See Neville for the good stuff here.)

This Idealism also "fixes" the tendency in Analytic Idealism to float back into Secularism, and the Animist tendency from being grafted on to materialism. "Spirits = energy" is a pet peeve of mine. It funnels downstream back into paganism, vampirism, and other "faiths" with their materialism-adjacent magical electricity as the only causal agent for magic, so people waste time trying to set paper on fire with their fingers rather than becoming powerful. (not enough minds behind that idea to be a "thing" )

The true "mechanism" of magic, in this model, is not magical electricity, but immersion. The real engine is not found in intellectualized left-brain frameworks or rigid categorical thinking, but in total psychological and environmental surrender to the frame. (House Islam, House TradCath, and House Artist actually get this right, but the word culd needed upsating for the modern age - which is why I propose 'Immersion' You 'surrender' here the same way you surrender to a movie you are watchingm or a video game you are playing. ) It uses anticipatory architecture to prime the nervous system to register anomalous data. It is "belief " - but not held as a dogmatic, left-brain "thinky" conviction, but experienced as an embodied, right-brain, and whole-body state of being where knowing and doing quantum collapse into a single act and reality.

Every House offers an accessible, entry-level hot take designed for newcomers. It gives beginners a tangible hook, but it is fundamentally a surface-level placeholder. Then newcomers mistake the model for the key itself, believing that mastering the architecture of the explanation unlocks the phenomenon. In reality, the models are ritual and mythic affordances for us to enter what I am proposing we think of as different game server realities.

Ultimately, there is no box. The box is just for us to integrate experiences. But there are rules for each shared, dreamed-up reality. Most newcomers are looking for the perfect model to pre-adopt and graft to their head like an Alien's face-hugger, which they think is the trick to making the magic work, and cheap, fast magic theory sells best.

 

[diskrete]

@MorganBlack - as you are a practitioner with a lot of experience, whats your opinion on the more "traditonalist", or should i say "rconstructionalist" approach, like those done by ImperialArts, Julio Cesar Ody, or Lisiewski, the author of "Howlings" ? All 3 of them, claim that A - phsical manisfestation is not jus possible, but required as a sign of success, and B - "exotic" tools, like the literal "Lions Skin Belt". or certain knives are required. What do you think?

 

[MorganBlack]

whats your opinion on the more "traditonalist", or should i say "rconstructionalist

To be clear I like those guys a whole bunch! (Lisiewski, less so. He tried to "prove" it all to a secular audience that is his ontological enemy, and went off the deep end. Dude did himself real damage and is very much a cautionary tale )

That said, I'm very House TradCath, in my heart ,body and soul. While my intellect is still inclusive and agnostic. Daimonc Idealism is my shabby attempt to get my thinky-brain to shut up. I also think it's what going on, but it too is just my current model.

It is also not my place to speak for them, or anyone. I also see a lot of myself in them, and I think what they are holding to and defending themselves from being erased by is post-Enlightenment, technocratic consensus. That is an anti-magic reality and yeah. keep at arms breadth or more

And more practically we all seem to lean to the aggressive side of sorcery a bit. So in part, maybe the reason they hate the paganism and House Anglo-Secular esotericism is that both are very culturally "hippie-coded." I and other Folk Catholic sorcerers pull no punches, but that is another topic entirely.

Post automatically merged: Wednesday at 7:15 PM

RE: The lion-skin belt, et al. Not totally required but you will have a more full experince using them. (Verum does not require the belts or any belts, but it is helpful if you are using the Lesser Key it prbobably helps. It is easier to "phase" yourself into the Verum reality-server if you are carrying the player items we are all using to play that game. The daimons see them and know you are serious. If not, you could be just some dweeb who wanders in by mistake. My Verum practice is actually pretty loose. Lisiewski spread a lot of unnecessary fear. That said, I have been told by the Daimons to tighten it up and be a bit more traditional.

For sorcery - magic for effects in the world - all the kit and rigamoarole it is not required. But if you want more nuanced communication with them, a more nuanced mythic and symbolic language is required. Or they will just pick up whatever secular vernacular you are living in and use that. But it will reify House Secular until one day, maybe, they can only appear as UFOs to you and only able to do stupid shit. The reality house rules ofthat universe have changed and your hnew reality does not allow them to exist fully exist t as cartoons, or maybe just an impression, or intition. That is a boring unuivers to be in and you have the allthe keys to exit it, post haste.

Post automatically merged: Wednesday at 7:37 PM

And let's flip this around. Maybe everyone else are the people with problems. Magicians who come from traditional religious cultures really do not need any of this construct we cass "occultism" or "magic."

They don't need us, unlike suburbanites in American mall culture, or the Anglo-Atlantic imperial technocratic culture. They not benefit at all from House Secular jumping over to whitesplain reality to them. Julio, my Mexican-American aunt who was a curandera, Haitian bokors, Folk Catholic magicians have absolutely nothing to gain from paganism, vampirism, the LHP, New Age, Anglo esotericism, the "occult," or even my Daimonic Idealism. Modern esotericism is just a temporarily useful construct for people who have had the sense of the sacred and magical surgically removed from their cultures.

 

[Darkat]

After reading through all of these responses (you fuckers are really smart), I can't help but feel the urge to scream a little. Not because the discussion is wrong, honestly, it's fascinating, but because I think sometimes we try so hard to explain a mystery that we forget to actually experience it. Good luck putting lightning in a bottle.

I am reminded of a quote from Tommy Kelly: "Some mysteries are to be experienced rather than solved."

Some minds cannot help but build castles and cathedrals around a mystery. We construct systems, models, philosophies, and explanations. There is nothing wrong with that. Those things can be beautiful and useful. But we should be careful not to mistake the explanation for the thing itself.

Sometimes the magick is in the mystery. Read that again if you need to.

The presence of a spirit does not become more real because we finally found the perfect words to describe it. The experience does not become more profound because we built a perfect container for it. Some things refuse to be contained.

Stand in awe of it. Let the encounter change you. Let it challenge you. Let it burn away what needs to be burned and teach what needs to be learned.

Maybe the mystery is not a problem to be solved. Maybe it is a relationship to be entered.

Experience is always greater than description. The terrain is not the map, and it never will be. You can spend a lifetime studying the ink, the paper, the lines, the cartographer, and the mathematics of the map, but eventually you have to step onto the land.

Don't let your desire for a box to contain the mystery become an excuse to never enter it. And don't let your attachment to one answer become the very thing that blinds you to what is actually happening.

What the hell do I know. I'm just another voice in the void. But I think sometimes the greatest wisdom is not having the final answer. Sometimes it is standing before the unknown and just saying: "Teach me."

Well said Fireborn - particularly that bit about screaming!

 

[MorganBlack]

There is a place for the occasional anti-intellectualism.

The Grim Verum , my main practice, is part of the Western tradition of "learned magic." But Verum in practice is very "witchy"and "shamanic."

For now we are on this forum... using words. And until we develop reliable telepathy and can just sort of beam nuance to everybody , we are kind of stuck using them.

But I am open to suggestions here. What do you suggest, Darkat?

​

 

[Lucien6493]

heh.

It's tough being a Daimonic Idealist. That time I tried to summon a cosmic entity beyond human imagination to ask about the nature of reality, but it just put me on hold and asked if I tried turning my universe off and on again. Buh-boom-buh-smash!

Models work best as tools for us to think and share our experiences in magic - after having them. Or just become sterile intellectualism that will waste your entire life ruminating over. Unless you want to.

There is only the Mystery (by many names). House Awe is the only house that really matters, in the end.

And to quote myself at the start:

"OK, when you encounter a spirit you conjured standing in front of you that you really didn't believe in, all this debate falls away. But until you get there, you sort of have to lift yourself up by your own bootstraps. Most of the online discourse does not help. And now the internet debate culture makes everyone think too much and feel too little. Let's see if we can use some other thinky ideas to get past thinking in locked-down ways."

I am calling this "Daimonic Idealism" partially to honor the people who helped me articulate it, and because 'Neoplatonic-Orphic Daimonic Idealism' is getting a bit long and excludes more houses than I like.

My current ur-model (as a way of thinking about it) is built on top of time and place of Gen-X magical experimentation, testing specific parameters of how the various magic systems interact with perception and intent. The elevated status of a "model" here was reached only after rigorous stress-testing against raw data. Without real lived evidence, it remains just a hot take or a "faith."

So this is my personal ur-model for magical practice I'm articulating, drawing on other models. It is not supposed to be thought of as a stand-alone religion or "faith" - but for us to use in a practice, to think about and reintegrate all the crazy things that happen in traditional magic. Not to dismiss them as hallucination, which is silly. It models the experiences of many magicians, using my own as a baseline, but not only my experiences. I did not find the models first. I did grimoire magic first and was like... HOLY FUCK!! There really is no point in becoming another crazy schizoid talking about loony wack-a-doodle stuff most people don't care about.

Gen-X magicians DIY'd the FUCK out of western magic and the grimoires, very much in relative isolation in the 1980s and 1990s, and found what worked for us, then met up in Yahoo Groups, finding surprising similarities of experiences among us from many different personal backgrounds and ethnicities. Then many published books, spawned interest in pop-occultism, and it was all downhill for 15 or 20 years or so. (I blame the Neptune in Pisces transit as everyone threw off any Saturnian discipline for identity politics and dissolved all ritual precedent. "Do whatever you want" magic mostly failed. See Neville for the good stuff here.)

This Idealism also "fixes" the tendency in Analytic Idealism to float back into Secularism, and the Animist tendency from being grafted on to materialism. "Spirits = energy" is a pet peeve of mine. It funnels downstream back into paganism, vampirism, and other "faiths" with their materialism-adjacent magical electricity as the only causal agent for magic, so people waste time trying to set paper on fire with their fingers rather than becoming powerful. (not enough minds behind that idea to be a "thing" )

The true "mechanism" of magic, in this model, is not magical electricity, but immersion. The real engine is not found in intellectualized left-brain frameworks or rigid categorical thinking, but in total psychological and environmental surrender to the frame. (House Islam, House TradCath, and House Artist actually get this right, but the word culd needed upsating for the modern age - which is why I propose 'Immersion' You 'surrender' here the same way you surrender to a movie you are watchingm or a video game you are playing. ) It uses anticipatory architecture to prime the nervous system to register anomalous data. It is "belief " - but not held as a dogmatic, left-brain "thinky" conviction, but experienced as an embodied, right-brain, and whole-body state of being where knowing and doing quantum collapse into a single act and reality.

Every House offers an accessible, entry-level hot take designed for newcomers. It gives beginners a tangible hook, but it is fundamentally a surface-level placeholder. Then newcomers mistake the model for the key itself, believing that mastering the architecture of the explanation unlocks the phenomenon. In reality, the models are ritual and mythic affordances for us to enter what I am proposing we think of as different game server realities.

Ultimately, there is no box. The box is just for us to integrate experiences. But there are rules for each shared, dreamed-up reality. Most newcomers are looking for the perfect model to pre-adopt and graft to their head like an Alien's face-hugger, which they think is the trick to making the magic work, and cheap, fast magic theory sells best.

Well said Fireborn - particularly that bit about screaming!

There is a place for the occasional anti-intellectualism.

The Grim Verum , my main practice, is part of the Western tradition of "learned magic." But Verum in practice is very "witchy"and "shamanic."

For now we are on this forum... using words. And until we develop reliable telepathy and can just sort of beam nuance to everybody , we are kind of stuck using them.

But I am open to suggestions here. What do you suggest, Darkat?

​

Nothing cures Intellectualism quite like calling upon a spirit to obligingly re‑arrange the chaos of your most cherished presumptions, worldly or otherwise, regardless of how deeply rooted and solid and logical they might appear. It is merely the flip side of anti-intellectualism though, and hauntingly similar in structure to the original question..."real or not?" What @MorganBlack calls Daimonic Idealism does not fit into that schema at all, but is upstream of it, far closer to the word-play perfected by traditional oral cultures. But then, he is a closet Vaishnavite devoted to Saraswati. And alas, She flooded him. Now he is carried away by the mighty torrents of her Vac.

Daimonic reality is multivalent. In other words, it has many meanings. A Daimon is never just one thing. It is not logical. When you come across the unknown in the deep-wood and you poke at it, what you get, quite apart from what you thing you are getting, will mean an "n" number of different things at the same time, some of those meanings (and time-frames) being self-contradictory and/or contradictory to others meanings/realities in the stack because reality is fundamentally relational.

For inveterate pseudo-intellectuals like me that is pure candy. We love us some holy paradox. Just as we love us the Demiurge and his creation (Ahriman) which some call consensus reality, if they are still ensnared by it. Within the Daimonic, whatever the hell it is, even the "real world" is filled with infinite wonders and complexities though because we ourselves are far more than we know, and usually we don't know what what we are, let alone where we are, or what we are doing there, let alone where there (the daemonic) actually takes place. All you can do is jump in and go where the story, and your place within it, might take you.

Post automatically merged: Yesterday at 6:20 PM

I would just add that since we have dual-citizenship we are always navigating the Daimonic from within the interwoven Ahrimanic reality and veer, depending on circumstance, and happenstance, sometimes toward the rational/irrational side of the spectrum; sometimes thinking in psychological terms, sometimes not; sometimes going for full immersion, other times using an intellectual approach to shit, with no position being anything other than fluid.

 

[MorganBlack]

But then, he is a closet Vaishnavite devoted to Saraswati. And alas, She flooded him.

Aww. You know me so well, Lucien! But I can't just come of here and swoon over Her, and the World Soul, as much as my heart sings to her song.

All us mystics ultimately only speak only one language. But I'm not a Levanatine or Hellenic mystic of two thousand years ago. In 2026 America we just don't thave much mythic langage lef rand these are are probably the best ones, I feel, for now. I'm appy to swtich to new ones and better ones if they appear.

Unless ya'll wanna to Strip Mall Jesus. ( or Strip Mall Odin?). I mean.... fine... but please don't make me.!

There is a real spiritual reality there, as with all mystics, but it's also being shoved through and had to manifest in a greatly reduced, monosyllabic, and far less nuanced mythic language. We can do better, I feel.

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