Author I've taken courses from both Jason Miller and Jack Grayle — experience and doubts from a source-obsessed student in China

[baobaoking]

First, let me introduce myself. I’m from China, born in the late 1990s, and have been exploring the occult for about six years. My first teacher introduced me to the Eastern European Slavic folk tradition; Hekate was the first deity I encountered, and Lilith came later. For the past two years, I’ve mainly been poring over texts from the Solomonic tradition—I’ve been buried in my studies, reading one book after another. I’ve spent so much time buried in books that I’ve never actually gotten around to putting what I’ve learned into practice. Today I won’t be discussing sympathetic magic or energy models—I just want to talk about two teachers. I’d like to ask you all: Has anyone taken courses with Jason Miller or Jack Grayle? I’ve purchased both of their courses, watched them through in their entirety, and completed some of the exercises for each, but I haven’t progressed to large-scale practical application yet. I’d like to share my experience and what made me stop.

Let’s start with Miller. I took Sorcery of Hekate and practiced diligently for several months, including the core mantra that required reciting hundreds of times a day—the course has confidentiality requirements, so I won’t post the original text here. What made me stop wasn’t laziness, but a vague sense of discomfort that’s hard to put into words. I’ll try to break it down and explain it clearly.

The first layer is the method. This practice of forcing myself to accumulate a certain number of recitations every day—I recognize its origin: Tibetan Buddhist ngöndro are conducted exactly this way, and Miller never hides his Tibetan Buddhist background. The method itself isn’t the problem. The problem lies with me—or rather, with the ground beneath my feet. First, let me state an objective fact: In China, there is a profession known as chumaxian (出马仙)—folk mediums who claim to be possessed by spirits such as fox deities or snake deities, acting on behalf of “divinities” to convey messages and carry out tasks. This industry is highly commercialized and rife with fraudsters. I myself have been deceived by a chumaxian, having experienced everything from coaxing and trickery to threats and intimidation, at considerable cost. As a result, I have a visceral wariness toward statements like, “A certain deity told me something.”

In Miller’s classes, such statements are very common. In almost every class, and with almost every deity he encounters, he recounts what that deity personally told him. I’m not accusing him of lying. But for me, this is a hurdle I simply cannot overcome: do these ancient deities, thousands of years old, really seem like conversation partners who are at his beck and call? I said something in my previous post that I’ll repeat here: In a world where integrity is scarce, spirit beings can deceive—they can impersonate deities. So unless I see it with my own eyes, I won’t readily believe anyone who claims a particular god or demon spoke to them.

The second layer is textual evidence. I’ve combed through Betz’s translation of the PGM and couldn’t find any corresponding sources for the content of Miller’s course. The Hekate he describes in his class is completely different from the Hekate I’ve come to know through my own work over the years, and from the Hekate depicted in classical texts. Some of the procedural steps give me the impression—if I may be so blunt—of scenes straight out of a sci-fi movie; not even Constantine features such bizarre practices. I understand he takes a pragmatic approach—as long as it works, that’s all that matters—and plenty of people buy into that. But for someone like me, I can’t feel at ease without solid scholarly evidence. By the way, a bit of background: Hekate is actually quite popular in China’s esoteric circles; everyone wants to have some connection to her. As for just how outlandish those “witchcraft” practices are, I won’t go into detail here. So when I saw Miller weaving Eastern methods into Hekate’s system, the sense of dissonance I felt grew even stronger—this is probably a kind of internal conflict unique to someone who was raised in the East but whose aesthetic sensibilities have always leaned toward Western classical traditions.

Let’s talk about Grayle again. First, let me make one thing clear: there are posts on the forum discussing controversies surrounding his personal conduct, but that’s not what I want to talk about here—I keep his books and his personal life separate. I took his PGM course and also signed up for Hail Hekate!. I have to say, he teaches the PGM exceptionally well: it’s well-researched and well-sourced, I like his teaching style, and he never says things like “Hekate told me this or that.” Comparing the two teachers, I’m more inclined to believe that Grayle might actually have tapped into something real.

But he also leaves me conflicted. In the book The Hekataeon—by the way, this book is virtually impossible to find in China, and getting it through other channels is absurdly difficult—it’s no exaggeration to say it’s like going through all 81 trials in Journey to the West; no matter how hard it is for you to snag a limited edition, it’s still way easier than it is for us.—there’s a nine-day ritual: performed for nine consecutive days, with a divination on the eighth day. The imagery involves a road sign at a crossroads: the path to the left is bathed in sunlight, while the path to the right leads into a dark forest, followed by blood—you’re supposed to drip your own blood onto it. My witch friends who follow the Left-Hand Path really enjoy this kind of ritual—setting up a Baphomet on the altar and dripping blood and semen onto it. But in the classical texts I’ve read, Hekate’s rituals do indeed involve blood—dog sacrifices, purification rites—but that’s the blood of sacrificed animals, belonging to the realm of city-states and formal ceremonies. I have never seen any classical text that requires a devotee to cut themselves and offer blood to her as part of a covenant. I don’t know what the origin of this Grayle ritual element is: Is it a modification of some form of oath-taking? A kind of revelatory technique? Or is it purely a modern invention? If anyone knows the source, please be sure to let me know.

Let me summarize my confusion. I’ve carefully watched both teachers’ courses and performed some of the rituals myself, but I’ve always been held back by a sense that something isn’t “rigorous enough,” preventing me from fully committing. This might be my “professional bias”: the esoteric market in my part of the world is, to put it politely, overly commercialized; to put it bluntly, it’s rife with charlatans. Those who’ve been burned by fire tend to take it more seriously than others—I’m particularly wary of any UPG-style claims. This isn’t disrespect; it’s self-preservation. So I’d like to hear your thoughts: Have any of you actually practiced their systems? How effective were they? Has anyone seriously researched the traditional basis for these practices? If anyone is interested in the full story about chumaxian, I can start a separate thread to go into detail.

 

[armageddonz1]

You are right in your wariness. I myself have been tricked several times by tricksters when I was trying to communicate with other spirits.

For someone like you who is only interested in things that you can see and sources, you should read the works of David rankine and Stephen skinner, particularly their works on ancient grimoires. They are very scholarly in their approach. They themselves encourage to keep your standards high when it comes to occult. During evocation, if you didn't get any proper physical confirmation of their presence, or see them directly, chances are the attempt was a bust.

This is my UPG given to me by my own spirits, that you shouldnt offer blood to anyone other than whom you truly trust, particularly your own blood. Blood summons their primal aspect of them that is less understanding of human sensibilities and more dangerous. If you offer them blood, they will come in an aspect that enjoys blood, and that is not always a good thing. And once they get used to blood, they will take nothing but blood as offering.

 

[tiger's eye]

Hello, I’m also a practitioner from China, and I’m glad to meet you here. Regarding the two “teachers” you mentioned, I’d like to share my personal views.
Regarding Jason Miller and his various courses, my view is this: he is a fairly modern magician who was raised within a “Western-centric” framework. He once spent time in India receiving “initiations” from a Tantric master and studying under him. These experiences have shaped Jason Miller’s highly personalized practice. As you’ll easily notice, he consistently emphasizes direct instruction from the deities themselves, the pursuit of divine “revelation,” and adherence to certain “precepts” and rules—all of which stem from his deep influence by Eastern Tantra, combined with his original Western, modern understanding. I’m not in a position to judge his personal practices, but I must say that I personally don’t care for them. Given your more direct experience with deity worship and your preference for more traditional Solomonic magic, I think Jason’s material might not be the best fit for you. This isn’t to say his work has no merit, but rather that many of his concepts differ fundamentally from the practices you engage in or tend to pursue, which could significantly impact your actual practice. You’re not alone in feeling this way; I, too, find Jason’s approach quite “inappropriate.”
As for Jake Grayle, his approach is very different from Jason’s. Regarding his book Hekateon, which you mentioned, Jake himself explains in his introduction and throughout the book that the content is not purely traditional. It is a work “inspired” by ancient classics (including the PGM), meaning that while the book incorporates many classical elements as “building blocks” or “forms,” at its core it remains an “inspired work.” It is not about the actual historical worship of Hekate, but rather Jake’s own “personal worship” of Hekate, and the book is ultimately dedicated to Hekate as an “object for worship.” Since you’ve also enrolled in his Hail Hekate course, you should know that Jake himself strongly encourages the development of personal practices rather than strictly “following the rules.” This means that his Hekateon is not something you must follow, nor is it the only way. Rather than simply a book, it is more accurately a “worship practice” that Jake himself embodies through his own actions. You can adopt the rituals within it, incorporate the methods described, learn from Jake to develop your own personal practice for worshiping Hekate, or even adopt an approach completely different from Jake’s. For me personally, Hekateon serves more as a source of inspiration than a practical guide for readers—Jake is “demonstrating” how to worship Hekate, and the “spirit” of this approach outweighs the “methods” themselves. However, I can say with certainty that many of Jake’s practices are rooted in ancient traditions and have been adapted in a “reasonable” way. While I haven’t practiced many of them myself, the approaches he proposes are clear, well-reasoned, and well-founded; they leave a very positive impression and offer many ideas worth analyzing and learning from.

 

[weirdbird]

The Hekate he describes in his class is completely different from the Hekate I’ve come to know through my own work over the years, and from the Hekate depicted in classical texts

This is an interesting point, because Hekate is, for the lack of a better word, a celebrity in the modern occult/witchcraft/paganism communities, and different people have experiences so vastly different, I would be inclined to believe there must be a good number of different entities regarded as "Hekate". It's much the same with Lilith.

Closer to the point, I have no doubt in my mind Miller is making it up as he goes while drawing on the actual sources for inspiration, he's not a rigorous occult scholar and you shouldn't treat him like one. I read his "Protection and Reversal" back in the days and flipped through "Financial Sorcery", and I was left with an impression of it being a mixed bag of solid ideas, practices taken from other sources and general (and generic) modern occult practices echoing around the web. I like some parts of his books, neutral on others.

But in the classical texts I’ve read, Hekate’s rituals do indeed involve blood—dog sacrifices, purification rites—but that’s the blood of sacrificed animals, belonging to the realm of city-states and formal ceremonies. I have never seen any classical text that requires a devotee to cut themselves and offer blood to her as part of a covenant. I don’t know what the origin of this Grayle ritual element is: Is it a modification of some form of oath-taking? A kind of revelatory technique? Or is it purely a modern invention?

I believe it is a modern misconstruction. It looks important, feels important and does a good job of making a deep impression on your own mind but ultimately I can hardly imagine the ancient sorcerers and priests risking a potentially unpleasant wound for a few droplets of blood. Besides, they were trying to impress a deity, not themselves. It's much the same with semen I believe, no one wants to get summoned into a surprise bukkake, if I were Baphomet I would have been very upset about the state of my altars.

As was mentioned above, yes, you should look into Stephen Skinner as he tries to be as rigorous as possible in his research and he does a good job of compiling and reconstructing information across multiple historical sources. Though as a result, his writings rarely touch on the religious aspect of things.

(Not to derail the thread, but while we're scrutinizing the authors whose first names start with a "J", I would love to hear an actual Chinese practicioner's opinion on Jason Read sometime)

 

[ZSLMH]

I’m particularly wary of any UPG-style claims. This isn’t disrespect; it’s self-preservation.

This is the right approach. I have no experience with either author's courses, so I will withhold judgment. UPG stuff should all be taken with a grain of salt, always. It's wrong to outright ignore it though, because so many of the older texts we often respect are just older UPG, too. The difference being the old authors did this in the shadows vs commercializing it. It's up to you to sift through the bullshit, and your skepticism isn't off base.

Based off of your post.. I don't think you need to pay people for courses. It seems you are already doing the "work." Read more books, formulate your own opinions. Find your own way. We all have our own path. Forge your own versus the pigeonhole that paid courses might lead you down.

 

[baobaoking]

Ha, running into a fellow countryman in this corner of the internet is genuinely rare. I don't know what the current rules say about languages in threads, otherwise I'd be very tempted to answer you in Chinese. Wishing you good health.

Here's a fun bit: Solomonic magic and Hekate were the two things I first touched, at almost the same time. Strictly speaking, if we're being precise about the timeline, Solomonic was the very first system I ever came across, and back then I honestly had zero interest in it. Fast forward through all these years of practice: I've seen the real and the fake, and I've called up the ones you should call and a few you probably shouldn't. As we say back home, my 八字 is hard enough to take the hits. Or in internet Chinese: 头铁. You'll know exactly what that means.

I agree with pretty much everything you said. About Jack: I think I've bought basically all of his courses. To this day PayPal keeps charging me and I've honestly lost track of which course the deductions are even for. His PGM series is my favorite thing he's done. Those lessons read like poetry, I mean that. The bulk of my own Hekate prayers actually come from his PGM material. And, just between us, that course sent me hunting for the source texts too. I managed to buy a copy of the PGM for my shelf, which is currently stuck who knows where in transit, and the waiting is driving me up the wall. So if anything I said about the book you discussed carried a bit of attitude, chalk a good part of that up to a man who can't get his copy. Kidding. Mostly.

Compared with Jason Miller, Jack is the one I actually love. His courses have given me a lot, on the practical side and on the academic side both. Heavy UPG or not, he works like a rigorous scholar. The one part I struggle with is the Nine Days devotional in his Hekate line. Maybe it's simply not right for me at this stage, and I'll leave it at that. There are many ways of working with Hekate, and his way doesn't have to be mine. He says as much in the book himself: go find your own way. Like you said, he encourages practice, not obedience.

And since we're both from the same soil, we've both seen the circus over there. I won't even get into the people offering the goddess lamb skewers and pickled chicken feet.

To be accurate, I'm not a devoted Solomonic operator either. Part of what pulled me into that side was pure exasperation: fine, if nobody's telling the truth, I'll call them up and ask them myself. The funny discovery was that the Solomonic crowd overlaps with my PGM work far more than I expected, and some of them lie just as habitually, if not more outrageously. Which is interesting in its own way.

Anyway, very glad to have run into a compatriot here, and it's a pleasure to meet you. I can tell you're a serious practitioner. 很高兴认识你。

 

[unlight]

Speaking of Tibetan Buddhism, I actually believe that Buddhist ritual practices have constantly been evolving. This is primarily driven by the pursuit of a more immediate lineage—that is, lineages with clear, modern spiritual realizations—and secondarily by constraints regarding time and materials. Many of the practice texts (sadhanas) used in modern times have been re-edited or compiled by teachers, or more likely, by the teachers' teachers.

Furthermore, even though it is sometimes criticized, when it comes to reciting mantras, if it is genuinely effective for a person, it actually doesn't take many recitations for dream signs or other such omens to appear. Conversely, the absence of such signs doesn't necessarily mean the practice itself is flawed, but it at least indicates that its efficacy for that specific individual is insufficient.

When it comes to spirits and deities, I believe that truly credible information from them is usually obscure in meaning and comes unsolicited. For example, you might travel to a new place and encounter an unfamiliar spirit who tells you about some obscure local history. Even though such information can be verified, it is ultimately meaningless.

In the end, everything boils down to the plainest of practices: repetition rather than novelty.

 

[solxyz]

First, on Jason Miller: While I have not taken his Hekate course I have taken most of his other courses, and I regard him as one of the best living teachers of magic that we have. He is not, however, a traditionalist in the sense of trying to hew close to any particular text or oral teaching. His deal, rather, is that he has a huge amount of experience with a very broad range of traditions and he weaves them together in his own way for his own purposes. I find him particularly insightful in the way that he goes about this, and I have learned a lot from him about how to identify core elements of functional tech and how to weave with it. Additionally, his systems work well; they both have depth and are quite streamlined, and they have provided me with a very solid base for further explorations.

Yes, Miller's systems are woven heavily with his UPG and he is very transparent about that. I'm sorry that you've had bad experiences with fraudsters, but that is part of the territory. We all need to grapple with the fact that magic is an inherently liminal undertaking that is always going to be full of ambiguities, uncertainties, and pitfalls. But in the end, I don't think you can be a fully functional magician without engaging with UPG. If you can't hear the spirits, or don't have any trust in what you are hearing, then you're just flying blind. I understand the comfort of wanting to stick to what is written in black-and-white on some authoritative page, but the reality is that those old pages are nothing more than the result of long-ago magicians doing what Miller is doing now, using their UPG to creatively synthesize multiple streams of received traditions as guided by their own cosmological vision.

I have much less experience with Grayle. I have a copy of the Hekataeon, which I intended at one time to work through, but then got busy with other things. He is certainly more of a traditionalist than Miller, in that his courses on the PGM are basically about what is written in the PGM, and his Hekate material is rooted more heavily in historical texts, but as you note he does bring his own vision into that work as well. The thing is: that is necessary and inescapable. We don't have the full texts of any fully functional Hekate system, and the texts that we do have were written for different people operating in very different social contexts. If his aesthetic isn't to your liking, that fine. Don't do it then. Or do it anyway to challenge yourself to expand your range and see what experiences these things may hold. It's totally up to you. But whether you do Grayle's version or Miller's version or someone else's version or make it up yourself, the structure of the situation is the same: someone is making something up. Hopefully that creative work was done intelligently and in a way that harmonizes all the peices of the system. But the only real way to find out is to try working it and seeing how it goes.

 

[unlight]

Ultimately, the more you put things into practice, the more you’ll realize that certain things work only for you personally.

 

[solxyz]

One more thing on UPG: some people's UPG is better than others. Some people hear more deeply and/or more precisely than others. Developing discernment about the qualities of people's UPG is an important part of learning to navigate the world of magic. As I have suggested above, I don't think that "steer clear of all UPG" is a functional strategy if you want to get very far.

 

[Thee Nightfool]

(Not to derail the thread, but while we're scrutinizing the authors whose first names start with a "J", I would love to hear an actual Chinese practicioner's opinion on Jason Read sometime)

I would like to know this about Read as welll...

Jason Miller isn't someone I put a lot of faith or trust in. He brags about being a "middle-class sorcerer" via the income he makes from his very overpriced courses. You're 100% correct about it being Eastern-esoteric influenced. The Hekate material from Miller comes off as a very watered-down kind of Vajrayana "tantra" of sorts. I don't believe he is being honest about how he received this arcana, even though I have no real way of proving that (and neither does he).

Grayle, on the other hand, comes off as a far more trustworthy individual in terms of how he approaches Hekate from a traditional witchcraft/PGM perspective. However, he does the same thing as Miller, namely provides expensive courses that are probably not necessary in the long run. I do hear from others that when you pay for Grayle's course, he is available for consultation if you have questions/issues, and that might be worth the price of admission alone. Additionally, he's not as much of an asshole as Miller (though recent allegations apparently taint this notion a bit... for those who care, that is).

For example, I've had many tell me Miller turns into a grumpy person depending on the type of question you ask him... he's got a real issue with people using Hekatean magic for "unethical" reasons. Well, why teach the so-called "unethical" magic if you get pissed when your students want to use it for something? Morality-policing sorcery is annoying and, quite frankly, putting an ethical sheen onto something that really shouldn't be there in the first place (especially if you are paying hundreds of dollars for the course).

I'll echo what someone else said above me... I'd trust academic-practitioners like Stephen Skinner (who wrote an incredible volume on the PGM as a thesis).

 

[solxyz]

The Hekate material from Miller comes off as a very watered-down kind of Vajrayana "tantra" of sorts.

In what way is it "watered-down?" It is certainly true that a big part of Miller's creative and teaching work focuses on making Vajrayana tech available to westerners who do not want to go through the process of becoming dedicated Vajrayana practitioners. Being myself a western Vajrayana practitioner, aware both of the many treasures that the Vajrayana holds as well as the ways in which it is not a great fit for most westerners these days, I regard that as a very valuable service. Being myself a Vajrayana practitioner, also of the primarily of the Nyingma lineage, I sometimes disagree with Miller on matters of emphasis and interpretation, but on the whole I find that what he is teaching is accurate and perceptive, meaty and substantial. Can you justify your suggestion that his teachings are "watered down?" Or is that just a thing that you toss out in passing to try to throw shade for your own personal reasons?

However, he does the same thing as Miller, namely provides expensive courses that are probably not necessary in the long run.

The courses are a bit expensive but not out of line with what other online courses cost. Miller's courses have gotten increasingly expensive, such that I probably won't take any more with him, but I don't judge anyone for charging a market rate for their work. This is how they make their living and a lot of work has gone into developing those courses. As for whether they are "necessary," there is not much that is really necessary, but I will say that Miller's courses have propelled my practice in ways that I never would have encountered anywhere else.

I'll echo what someone else said above me... I'd trust academic-practitioners like Stephen Skinner (who wrote an incredible volume on the PGM as a thesis).

To each, their own. I appreciate what Skinner does. Clarity about historical methods and sources, and seeing how far we can get by reviving those methods, so to speak, is a valuable project. But personally, I'd rather center my approach in direct and living practice, with the historical thing as one stream that can feed into and enrich that direct and living practice. It seems that the appeal of the historical/academic approach is that there are clear external reference points. We can all look at the PGM and see that Skinner is not pulling stuff out of his ass. But the problem is that is that you can't actually live your life by robotically applying the instructions from a mass of texts from 2000 years ago. If you are not centered in a direct and living practice, then you don't know how to make this material your own. As I said in an earlier post here, magic is an inherently liminal project, full of unclarities and uncertainties. We have to learn how to navigate that. Just seeking to flee from it, into security and certainty, is going to undermine your ability to get very far.

Post automatically merged: Yesterday at 11:51 PM

As an addendum, regarding the cost of these courses: if, for example, one wants to learn Vajrayana itself, the amount of money that one is going to spend to acquire the range of teachings that Jason makes available through his courses is orders of magnitudes more than what it would cost to purchase all of Miller's courses.

 

[Beyond Everything]

They're just people trying to make money. Powerful esoterica is not something you go to a website and get through your credit card.

I can tell you I knew someone who purchased a 'magical' item from Miller back when he used to sell them, maybe it was 2010ish, and they were far from impressed.

Miller somewhere or other also stated that one could not manifest desires through visualization/mind power. So he cant even get basic magic correct.

 

[MorganBlack]

I have not taken Miller's courses, but many non-native English speaker and non-American readers may not be aware there are socio-economic factors to consider here.

Miller HAS to write the way he does if he wanta to make any semblance of profit from his published material . His "soft occult " New Age style (to call it something, that bland melange you see everywhere from about 2011 to 2025) was all the rage for many years, but underneath I also know he is less New Agey than he seems. We were in the same occult order many years ago, and we oddly share a number of similar allies, daimons and practices. I had no idea until recently .

That said, I am less far New Age and Eastern than he is (aside from Zen) , and more a "grim trad" Grimoriun Verum guy - but I also get to speak as I wish becasue I don't have to write for a white, suburbanite "occult" audience. I am not beholden to their exceedingly specific personal preferences.

You may not be aware, but there is a lot of identity politics in Anglophone occultism. Miller HAS to frame legitimate practices using a framework of Tibetan Buddhism or New Age Paganism because if he wrote using historical Western magic references, he would lose 90% of his white Protestant audience.

To give him the benefit of the doubt, I suspect the limitations here are not his, it's theirs - but the reality is occult publishing is downstream from huge sociological and cultural changes after the World Wars within modern Western society.

The late 19th- and 20th-century occult revivals heavily drew from secularized and Protestant demographics carrying a deep-seated cultural aversion to traditional western mystical practices which are mostly very Catholic, or Anglo-Catholic coded (not that one must take them literally,these are myths for your right-hemisphere to use as a bridge to the real Mystery, in my opinion. But there is a real reality bhind the appearances. Long story.)

So contemporary occult and magic authors frequently find it commercially safer to frame meditative technologies using Asian terminology.

Ritual repetition is also found in Western theurgy, within Catholic theosis , and ancient Greek Iamblichean theory - all allied cousin traditions since everyone loves Aristotle and Plato. But to call these vocal repetitions a "mantra" rather than a "prayer" or even a "invocation"(The semantic word games in modern esoterica are endless in an attempt to avoid reading any history ) to find something to call it that read as super exotic and spiritually neutral to a modern audience - whereas calling it a rosary, litany, or Hesychast prayer can trigger historical, aggro sectarian baggage, or even total crash outs.

Since you are exploring the Greek traditions, some more details here

Book – EPUB/MOBI - Gregory Shaw - Hellenic Tantra: The Theurgic Platonism of Iamblichus

Hellenic Tantra argues that scholarship on later Platonism has been misled by a dualist worldview. The theurgic Platonists in the school of Iamblichus (4th century CE) did not ascend out of their bodies to be united with the gods—as is the common belief—but allowed the gods to descend into their...

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