Grimoire Magicians vs. The Tryhards

Thee Nightfool said:

in this case, Kali and Shiva-Bhairava

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Neat! I hope you write more on this sometime, Thee Nightfool.

Not to go too far with Interpretatio Graeca / Interpretatio Catholica, and all apologies here for any misinterpretations, I look at Bhairava, and go, "Hmmmmm. Time god, Saturn, the dead, cemeteries... why, hello, Demiurge! "

M

MorganBlack said:

Agreed, AlfrunGrima. I have a Zen Buddhist meditation practice which I love. As I think you get, I'm just advocating here turning down the volume on the tryhard uptalk from an 11 to a 2.5 in a hierarchy of importance for grimoire magic.

I do not like speaking outside my experience, so here I'm only advocating such for my one more formal 'system' the Grimorium Verum, and at least a little by extension, grimoire magic overall.

I do not have the same level of hubris many have to speak for ALL MAGIC™ or to make hard recommendations for people who use other systems I have no experience in. That too is an artifact of publishing and mass confirmation bias originating in the same art-school dorm room project that gave us modern magic as a totalizing mind virus.

A lot of that can be blamed on Theosophy, Crowley, and Gerald Gardner.

Theosophy for their weird Orientalist World Religion fantasies - and for importing a bunch of misinterpreted Asian ideas with fan service.

Then Crowley's for his flex acting like he was speaking for ALL MAGIC™. To re-balance Crowley and put him in a more useful spot, I agree with Dr. Stephen Skinner, that when Crowley writes the word "Magic," auto-word-replace it in your head with "Mysticism." That is where he belong FYI, I also happen to like Crowley and what I got from his training system, but it's not a must have for a grimoire practice.

Then Gerald Gardner appropriating the tools - like our black-handled knife, circle , and our Underworld vibe - from a Goetia he never practiced, all to add "witchy" aesthetics to his new religion.

Again, all good if people enjoy them, just the totalizing mind virus of 20th-century Anglophone magic and accompanying hooey needed some highlighting. I also happen to like Crowley, so I am not saying he has no value; just that we need to find the right place to put him in relation to 'traditional' Magic.

And huge props to Neville Goddard, whose Law of Assumption "plays well with others" and is great on its own or to mix in. Same with Conjure / Brujeria / Trad Witchcraft, which can all operate in different theological contexts and mix with Goetia very well

And historically was part of it , or even IS it, at a folk level. Jake Stratton-Kent said "Goetia is the historical witchcraft everyone has been looking for." And I see signs of some excellent,very "witchy" Goetia coming out of Europe now, with Frater Acher and others. Freed from the Garnderian head-trip. (Again not to be too harsh on the old atristocrat.)

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My concern nowadays is that Stratton-Kent and Acher haven't opened it up as much as people think they have (I can't comment too much on Acher's recent work. I hear it's good, but I don't know).

Several in my circle have basically said they weren't entirely certain what Stratton-Kent was trying to do exactly. He still very much advocated for a "by the book" operation of the Grimorium Verum, and then (I guess?) treating the Verum spirits like you would Exus or whatever afterwards. This certainly isn't "jailbreaking" the Verum system, though, nor is it returning to some sort of ancient/hidden witchcraft tradition in plain sight.

All respect to the guy, though. His passion was evident, and I certainly feel like he was making some headway in weaving a new Occidental system of sorcery... but I'm not convinced it came to fruition before he passed away (please feel free to tell me I'm wrong, and why... I haven't given this scene any attention in years now, I think... been doing other stuff for personal/spiritual reasons).

MorganBlack said:

Neat! I hope you write more on this sometime, Thee Nightfool.

Not to go too far with Interpretatio Graeca / Interpretatio Catholica, and all apologies here for any misinterpretations, I look at Bhairava, and go, "Hmmmmm. Time god, Saturn, the dead, cemeteries... why, hello, Demiurge! "

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I'll make a thread on this if people want. I'm not a guru or even a hardcore sadhaka (in fact, I've pretty much abandoned the practice) but I can definitely say Hindu tantra (witchcraft, for those that assume... otherwise) is vastly different than most people realize. In both positive as well as utterly negative ways.

I think what made NAP succesful (and obnoxious to read in current times) was all the stories of succes included in the book (I like to call it it's own mythology). I guess it gave the framework for the reader of it's time (american adults in the 70's-80's) the imagination to prove it could work and would work for them. I think we are less gullible nowadays (or maybe just me) and find it like an annoying salesman trying to sell you snake oil. I wish i were more gullible tho; at least for this. I find it difficult. although i can say i had some recent success with the NAP this week, so i'm improving

Hmmm, this is a very fraught topic and could easily derail this thread. My "Catholic Grimoire" thread might be the place for it.

That is where I put Jake, whom I happen to like.

When reading Jake - at least his early writing - what I took away was an additive rather than subtractive mythic interpretive layer, that came from his use of the techniques of comparative religion. He maybe went too far emphasizing the Greek threads of the grimoires, but it is in there.

The GV is an Italian, Southern European grimoire, and he felt it "preserved more of the older Greek Goetia." He probably overstated the case for this, but I will say the Greek concepts of Hell/Hades are very close to the Catholic concept of Hell/Purgatory, and all probably came from the same Orphic / Hellenic / Neoplatonic substrate that gave us both. One does not have to "go pagan" to get there, but by reading the pre-Christian writers and concepts, as the Church Fathers certainly did, can help sound out a cosmo-conception.

Personal Gnosis Warning:

If you ask the daimons of the GV what they are, they'll sometimes say they're beings left over from the Primordial Darkness who build reality - and I'm sometimes inclined to think they are not joking. In my view, what they "really are" are manifestations and lower emanations of the ancient primordial Time God, the Demiurge, who precedes these later names and comes to us through the Church from a prior Earth age. He is the original Creator God that created all later creator gods and the daimons.

So, in my view, Jake is just using different names for the same Creator God. He is far more pagan than I, but his "solve" for the Catholicism of the GV was to add a Thelemic Greco-Egyptian Neoplatonic framework. If that seems strange I would just point out St. Paul, who pretty much gave us Catholicism, was a Hellenized magician whose letters are soaked in Neoplatonic concepts like the Pleroma, Aeons, and ascent through the heavens. I do not want to say it IS literally the same thing all the way through, but it kind of is.

So, I just don't see the problem unless one has a hardline fundamentalist theological view, either pagan or Christian.

Jake's Thelemic Greco-Hellenic system works, but they also run around a bit more, I have found. Probably because his "high philosophical pagan" structure is missing the Catholicism's far more Demirugic and rather violent expression, which I also adore. Mary is the nice part. All that that was just part of the ambient culture the GV came from, but I have no issue with people finding other cultural expressions of the same powers that simply exist "in the universe" . Pagans are nice people and usually have real personal theological issues clustering around the legitimate use of violence and other Saturn / Mars Demiurgic expressions.

Ohana said:

But who is magic guarded from? If someone has respect and wants to learn it why not let them.

I get it if they don't have respect for it but money also gives you an advantage. Money is exchanged for labor. Does the same hold true for magic?

Is it not given because something thats spiritual doesn't want to give it? Do they know they won't respect it? Is it due to personal preference?

Even though I didn't fully know what I was doing I kind of had to work for my awareness for any of this. It may not seem like it but I had to come to grips with my imagination. I had to see really terrible things and sit with it.

I was born in a really terrible situation and had to adapt fast to the emotional weight of it all. I would trade it for a normal life and not have as much awareness? I would prefer to have been able to see friends, to have a community and learn awareness of something a lot later in life.

The things I underwent. The conditions I had to bear and things my mind would create were terrifying. It was like looking at h3ll. I don't even want to say the name honestly. I would have preferred normality even if it meant I was less proficient or aware of magic right now.

It was labor. Very painful labor. Even in the imagination way. The passive way. It was still labor just a different type. It wasn't fun and I'm going to be honest its hard to live normally and make friends or work or do anything.

Its hard because I'm just in a different world. When you have to grow up faster become wiser it isolates you from your peers. I miss being more like them than not. And if anyone saw that post I made in the crossing the abyss section the soul ice bucket challenge that wasn't crossing the abyss but was just an ice bucket challenge for the soul.

I'm still shaken by it. My soul/ego/personality whatever you believe in. It feels different. Its shaken. I think its scarred a little I think. It hurts. I still haven't fully recovered. I don't know if there is a predisposition to magic some might just have to learn it to adapt to the world. Or maybe I'm wrong I don't know.

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I'd say there are two ways about it. One way is upward, in which you learn and let learn and everyone improve. But there is an alternative way to be above - it's when you put others down and feel better. In the land of the blind the one-eyed is king and all that. Unfortunately, the world is yet in this condition, where people are barely above mud level. Those who exploit this state and try to keep us in it, are deathly affraid of knowledge and reason, so they do everything they can to stop it, and many people are happy to remain ignorant. What you are dealing with is our collective karma. You are sensitive to it. I am sensitive to it. Maybe you also hate it when people desensitise themselves by some mythology, thinking they are being part of, while in fact they are no different from people who forget themselves in TV series and such. Collective dumbness (dopeness) makes it harder for those who want to awaken, so great resources get spent on that - opium for the masses. Light or dark paths - it's the same in the end. Just look to your inner truth and don't mind what people in the occult say)

MorganBlack said:

Pagans are nice people and usually have real personal theological issues clustering around the legitimate use of violence and other Saturn / Mars Demiurgic expressions.

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These people aren't actual pagans, then. Neopagans, perhaps... but not at all how ancient people would have perceived violence (specific cultural matrix be damned).

MorganBlack said:

Mary is the nice part.

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I would argue Mary is far darker than most make her out to be, but that's my unverified personal gnosis... and it's quite beyond the norm. A slightly long story is anyone is interested.

Thee Nightfool said:

I would argue Mary is far darker than most make her out to be, but that's my unverified personal gnosis... and it's quite beyond the norm. A slightly long story is anyone is intinterested.

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Even from a Catholic view she is not always the nice part. Stabat Mater is an heavy emotional text. From people I know who were singing that text I heard that they experienced a rather dark mother and a lot of tension building up.

David Rankine brought up the Shekhinah in his recent book as a lost part of the grimoire tradition. So she can be seen as part of the lost "tech" that got filled in with chi-balls, and twisting youself into a pretzel.

I am pleased as punch that others are also re-introducing - as I think of her - The Goddess / Mary / Sophia back into the grimoire tradition.

Thee Nightfool said:

Mary is far darker than most make her

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Hell, yeah!

I hear her Empress of Hell manifestation would scare away Hekate. Or is it Hekate? Speaking of which, I've never seen them together in the same room.

I am a weird Catholic because of her. I really had no idea. So far, all her manifestations (nee apparitions, in Church-speak) have been nothing but jaw-droppingly sweet and beautiful - or filled with manifestations of the odor of roses and citrus that others around me can also smell. Sigh. It was love at first sight.

MorganBlack said:

I hear her Empress of Hell manifestation would scare away Hekate. Or is it Hekate? Speaking of which, I've never seen them together in the same room.

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Yeah, I've heard that through the grapevine myself, hahahaha.

MorganBlack said:

St. Paul, who pretty much gave us Catholicism, was a Hellenized magician whose letters are soaked in Neoplatonic concepts like the Pleroma, Aeons, and ascent through the heavens. I do not want to say it IS literally the same thing all the way through, but it kind of is.

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I don't know why would you say that unless you are talking about another st paul. in his own words he was a jewish pharisee. he may have lived in another place, but that won't automatically make him a Hellenistic magician. this account is also acknowledged in another places like The Cambridge Companion to St Paul.

Philippians 3:5​

circumcised on the eighth day, a member of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew born of Hebrews; as to the law, a Pharisee;

SeekerPS, I can go into all about St. Paul in another thread. It's too large a topic for here.

And so it all starts.

It kind of always comes down to "whatever works for you". Grimoires are great, most of us here love books and have recieved our first glimpses into the Other through these texts or received confirmation of our own experiences through the words of an author. I myself probably fall more under the tryhard umbrella, as you put it. My first contact with Other was not through books and my first acts of magick weren't a grimoire working, or someone else's ritual, so I viewed those work through the lens of culture, history, heritage and just celebrating any magickal thought or action. Naturally, like a good little hungry rat, I stole bits and pieces of many things that got woven into my own system. I mostly operate on gnosis and my world view is an animist one, where I try to engage God and all Her mysteries on as many levels that I can. At some point in my life, i did a lot of (group) Work blasting of on various psychedelics. All of these things were helped immensely by my mind being "worn in" through meditative and breath work, and it saved me on many occasion. Especially when engaging with spirits (friend, foe or neutral) on their "home turf" and any high weirdness moment I had in life. For me magick is a lot of unpredictable moments and journeys, and don't feel I could pull of a major ritual in a high stress encounter or a situation that would demand an impromptu working. Hard agree on imagination being the foremost tool of engaging in magickal work or communion with spirit of any kind. Also helped by a mind versed in meditation and thusly in the tryhard camp, really. Also agree that magick can be produced with success without the need for self exploration or any kind of personal growth.
Tldr, both/all camps and their methods are wonderful and not mutually exclusive.

It’s not always black and white. I don’t do grimoires, and I’m not a try hard either. I’m honestly the type who wants to do less for more. It’s a misunderstanding that you have to grind to get great results.

My experiences are through tried and tested on my very own system. I didn’t borrow or test on other people’s methods/systems and test whether they fit me or not. It works pretty well for me precisely because I wasn’t trying to follow anyone else’s framework. Once you adopt a system, or any other systems combined, you stop interpreting something for what they truly are, and you just use any of the systems’ interpretations in your work. You stop treating something with the curiosity and perspective needed to approach it, because you think you already “know” what something is, just because you read it somewhere.

I don’t share a lot of my experiences because people treat them as UPG, or because they aren’t recorded in any systems or records. But I prefer stripping away any notion I have and approaching things firsthand rather than reading secondhand from any system. For me, that’s led to a lot of genuinely beautiful experiences.

If you need a system to get started, go for it. If you don’t and it’s working for you, go for it. What works for one person won’t necessarily work for another. Use what works best for you, whether that’s books or a mix of other approaches, or create your own. I really do believe all roads lead to Rome, you don’t have to take the same route as everyone else.

(For a very few who are about to throw me some books’ names, don’t.)

Keldan said:

It’s not always black and white.

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Certainly.

Mind, I am only speaking here for the Grimorium Verum as a practice of traditional magic, and by some extension other grimoire magicians, where all the post-1899 modern additions are not required.

The issue I am addressing here is the truth claim that those additions are either required for the grimoires, or "actually" are the real causal agent - the "things that make the magic work." The modern magic category error is to conflate the two and then compound the error by 1,000%.

By analogy, it’s like wanting to grow bigger and stronger by lifting weights, but spending all your time running marathons. Cardio is helpful for doing deadlifts, but they are not the same as deadlifts. So, if your bodybuilding and strength trainer has you running marathons instead of hitting the weights, that is an issue.

Trad magic - meaning pre-1899 magic - is literally spirit magic. Other forms of magic may not have a class of spirits that oversee, guide, shape, and empower those traditions, and so may require more modern techniques to make them "work." But I dislike it when people who need those techniques assume those of us who are not part of their very very late traditions require them, or when they use those unneeded techniques to "explain" the grimoire tradition, which precedes them. They are playing in our sandbox, not us in theirs.

That said, I have a Zen meditation practice, which I would highly recommend to everyone. I enjoy trance tremendously and get all sorts of incredible visions when I empoly them in ritual. But visions are not required for the magic to work. I have worked the GV very successfully without trance or any of the techniques those other forms of magic require. A clearer demarcation between them is all I'm suggesting.

MorganBlack said:

But visions are not required for the magic to work.

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The magic referring to here is only the 'filthy' Medieval demon magic of the grims. I have no solid pinion an all that other very late modern stuff. So, as always, YMMV.

MorganBlack said:

Certainly.

Mind, I am only speaking here for the Grimorium Verum as a practice of traditional magic, and by some extension other grimoire magicians, where all the post-1899 modern additions are not required.

The issue I am addressing here is the truth claim that those additions are either required for the grimoires, or "actually" are the real causal agent - the "things that make the magic work." The modern magic category error is to conflate the two and then compound the error by 1,000%.

By analogy, it’s like wanting to grow bigger and stronger by lifting weights, but spending all your time running marathons. Cardio is helpful for doing deadlifts, but they are not the same as deadlifts. So, if your bodybuilding and strength trainer has you running marathons instead of hitting the weights, that is an issue.

Trad magic - meaning pre-1899 magic - is literally spirit magic. Other forms of magic may not have a class of spirits that oversee, guide, shape, and empower those traditions, and so may require more modern techniques to make them "work." But I dislike it when people who need those techniques assume those of us who are not part of their very very late traditions require them, or when they use those unneeded techniques to "explain" the grimoire tradition, which precedes them. They are playing in our sandbox, not us in theirs.

That said, I have a Zen meditation practice, which I would highly recommend to everyone. I enjoy trance tremendously and get all sorts of incredible visions when I empoly them in ritual. But visions are not required for the magic to work. I have worked the GV very successfully without trance or any of the techniques those other forms of magic require. A clearer demarcation between them is all I'm suggesting.

Post automatically merged: Yesterday at 5:50 PM

The magic referring to here is only the 'filthy' Medieval demon magic of the grims. I have no solid pinion an all that other very late modern stuff. So, as always, YMMV.

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The problem nowadays is that many in the Western occult scene/communities are actually far more invested in the psychological model rather than the spiritual model. This is why there seems to be an emphasis on "controlling the mind" and etc. (pseudo-Vajrayana Buddhism imo). I blame Theosophy's influence on the Western esoteric tradition (if such a thing actually exists in reality) for this sort of view.

Very much so, Thee Nighttfool!

For a breakdown of the Orientalist fan service of the Shamballa Crowd , see Donald Lopez's Prisoners of Shangri-La which argue that Westerners used their own imagined version of Tibet to "fix" what they saw as the failures of Western Christianity, and by extension as we can see here, Trad Magic.

As Donald Lopez Jr. notes the transformation of Tibetan spirits into archetypes was a deliberate sanitization by translators like W.Y. Evans-Wentz (who was a Theosophist) to make the tradition palatable to a post-Enlightenment, scientific audience.


Authentic Tibetan Buddhism is simply lousy with wrathful deities, spirits, and chthonic forces, the Dharmapalas. Theosophy sanitized these spirits into "psychic forces" or abstract "principles" to suit Victorian sensibilities, and then just kept running with it half-cocked into a land of pure fantasy. Which is not 100% terrible, and can work in a New Thought / Chaos Magic framework.

But when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. By the late 1800s, the grimoires were seen as spooky Catholic relics or "low sorcery." Theosophy offered a "Scientific Religion" from the East that felt "cleaner, better, more elevated like us" than those filthy demons and spookiness, ink, knives, and circles of the grim tradition.

Each period/culture has a different context or perception ..we should always take that into account in case we want to better understand them.

Thee Nightfool said:

I'll make a thread on this if people want. I'm not a guru or even a hardcore sadhaka (in fact, I've pretty much abandoned the practice) but I can definitely say Hindu tantra (witchcraft, for those that assume... otherwise) is vastly different than most people realize. In both positive as well as utterly negative ways.

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A good thing to have a thread about that, I hope you will invest some time to make a thread.

Thee Nightfool said:

The problem nowadays is that many in the Western occult scene/communities are actually far more invested in the psychological model rather than the spiritual model. This is why there seems to be an emphasis on "controlling the mind" and etc. (pseudo-Vajrayana Buddhism imo). I blame Theosophy's influence on the Western esoteric tradition (if such a thing actually exists in reality) for this sort of view.

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Yes, agreed. I discovered that I fall in trap also. I'm writing personal essays about my magic praxis, for personal reasons and not be meant to be read by other people. Every time when I read things back, I see that I didn't manged to escape that way of thinking although the experience is pre-verbial and quite strong. There seems to be a part of my mind that wants to explain things, which is not always helpful. And yes, controlling the mind is a powerful way to change things in life but that is another thing than the pre-verbial current. Kind of Jungian black book and Jungian red book. Same person, different routes.

MorganBlack said:

Authentic Tibetan Buddhism is simply lousy with wrathful deities, spirits, and chthonic forces, the Dharmapalas

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yep. Let's not forget that Milarepa was one of the most accomplished magician of his time . Alexandra David -Neel detailed how she created tulpa- that magical servitor. ..a method she learned in Tibet.

AlfrunGrima said:

Every time when I read things back, I see that I didn't manged to escape that way of thinking

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Yeah, it's an unexamined mind-virus. I too occasionally find myself thinking I need to add some extra busy work to be "doing something."

How to get past it probably requires some awareness and openness to minority viewpoints. Hence the thread.

Intellectually, my brain is still very much a Chaos Magician - but pretty quickly, while using the Grimorium Verum, I recognized that the "models" did not really speak to the experiences I was having. I joked back in the 1990s that I’d become an "intellectually indefensible medievalist." The benefit of Chaos Magic is as a sort of Intellectual Zen that let you "shut up and get out of the way", even while I let my heart love what it loves unapologetically, and without needing the whole world to agree with me.

The rituals of trad grims magic works at a very interactive non-intellectual level. I feel the same about traditional witchcraft and New Thought. Chaos Magic , my own Daimonic Neoplatonism, and Bernardo Kastrupian Idealism, and a willingness to just let the experiences be what they are without needing to intellectually "explain" them works for me here, and let me be a Neoplatonic Pantheist and weird Folk Catholic. I also don’t have anything I’m trying to defend, and tend to treat other takes, as I mentioned, as an additive layer rather than as subtractive one - and then acting (out) like anyone is taking something away from me.

Rob Rider Hill, who is another "GV guy," is writing very close to my own thinking here, even using some of the same metaphors I’ve been using for a couple of decades.

Permission to be Mad — the Chaos Magick Meta-paradigm
Part 1
Part 2

The main issues I have with aggro modern pagan reconstructionists is that they trying way WAY too hard to be taken seriously as a replacement religion, so they all have a chip on their shoulder, and waste their time trying to recruit for their worldview. So they come into areas they are not about them to demand to be taken seriously, while their methods are still mid-20th-century "Wiccanate," which is fine, but most of their magical tech is filled in with other people’s stuff. Chaos Magic would cure that like a bad case of teenage acne.

To quite St. Simon Dyda, a sorcerer after my own heart (if I had one), who:

" ...subscribes to the mindset of the aforementioned sorcerers of
Late Antiquity and engages with Abrahamic spirits as well as
pagan ones. In the case of pagan and diabolist spirits, we have
the option of subversively employing syncretism to disguise
these relationships; in the case of Christian or Jewish spirits
where disguise is not necessary, pagan students can familiarise
themselves with the pagan origins of these spirits, how they
may be employed in a pagan context, and should be aware
that for the true pagan all spirits are pagan spirits

A pagan happens to be passing a shrine of St Anthony when
he discovers that he has lost his wallet. Should he then think:
‘Well here’s a stroke of luck, I happen to be in the presence
of a specialist in recovering lost property’ and then proceed to
engage the assistance of the saint, he is demonstrating the
mindset of both a true sorcerer and a true pagan. If instead
he shuns the very thought of approaching a Christian saint for
help, he is demonstrating the mindset of a Christian
fundamentalist and a D&D cleric.