Wow! Love this conversation. I love hearing the roads other people have traveled!
On a practical level the tech I use is very similar to God-King’s, with a bit more Verum as my go-to grimoire. I mostly work within a Folk Catholic framework when reaching toward
The Mystery but flip to a more Alexandrian “Christo-pagan “ (Ugh, need a better word) framework for the sublunar realms, with help from some saints and a very special Lady.
I did not expect to be a Catholic, even if a very weird one, but I had a very powerful experience in that “mythstream” that fundamentally changed me that I was like, dammmit, okay, fine.
I grew up in a very scientific Unitarian household with a Jewish-British father and a Mexican-American mother. So I had some bits of Kabbalah on one side, and Mexican folk magic on the other, you know , basic stuff, like putting butter on a burn. But I was raised to be a modern with all the sensibilities. Loved the arts, comics, and Dungeon and Dragons, and table top RPG’s. Went to work in the video game industry.
I did my first 'spell' when I was around 8 after coming across a grimoire in the school library. I am old enough that that was in the 1970’s before the Religious Right swept though the States and wiped away all the last remaining bits of the Weird 1970's. Like a lot of Gen-X magicians – and there were not that many of us then ,I did the whole 20th century Robert Anton Wilson to Crowley to OTO after having read Huson's ‘Mastering Witchcraft’ round age 12.
But pretty early in my magical career, after having summoning a demon from my cobbled together system of Goetia – to go spectacularly well at first, then spectacularly wrong - ( I will do not want to give the grim details, the fear is not helpful) I figured I , like pretty much like everybody else in the English -speaking occult world , really knew next nothing about sorcery. (FYI, When Crowley writes about what he calls "Magic" he is really writing abut mysticism, not sorcery) So when it presented itself I took and the opportunity to learn from the Vodou community , which helped me which tremendously. I brought all this back later to my Goetia practice.
Back then, nobody knew anything and we were just figuring stuff out. The benefit was there was not this firehouse-to-the-face of low-quality occult jabber jabber, promising you Supreme Power for 10 payments of $66.60 to invoke the Dark Flame of Satan’s great hairy testicles, or whatever comic book character, or literary figure, is most popular at the moment.
On the plus side there is a whole bunch of great stuff, so much so that now there all no secrets Well, except for the mysteries you have to discover yourself though your practice.
What system to follow, I do not think that matters much until ones gets down to the individualized sublunar world. Aside from that, choose a system and stick with it, rewrite your subconscious (theosis). The spirits (daimons) meet you halfway and manifest half according to your personal bullshit - what Aurum Solis called your "Deep Belief" what your nephesh (animal soul) expects them to be - and the other half in alignment with
The Mystery.
So if I you expect the daimons (spirits) to be impressions and thoughts in you head. They will! If you expect energy then they will appear as energy. If you expect them to be UFOs, fairies, or pagan gods. They will too! But they are half us – half our bullshit - and half
The Mystery, and that is a far more a personal journey that learning the technologies of magic and sorcery.
My take - my
personal bullshit - is a Stellar to Solar Pantheism expressed in a very pagan Folk Catholicism - from the Uncreated, the Nous, to Demiurge to Solar Demiurge , then the daimons, both above and below.
I used to keep all my system separate but they all sot of slotted together on their own. , But but they all have origins in the ancient Mediterranean area’s Alexandrian Synthesis, which includes both NeoPlatonism, Christianity, and early Pre-Talmudic pre-rabbinial “Gnostic” Judaism (which is Neoplantonism expressed in that culture) , but now expressed in my rather Luciferian , very Mexican, pagan Folk Catholic framework.
But that is just me. Other frameworks and personal cosmo-conceptions can work as well.
