New here: question about symbolic systems, ritual practice, and “results”

[mrlovemelt]

Hi everyone, I’m new to this forum and still very much an amateur when it comes to occult study, so I hope this is the right place to ask.

I’ve been reading around a few different areas: ceremonial magic, astrology, alchemy, chaos magic, tarot, and some older esoteric traditions. One thing I keep circling back to is the relationship between symbolic systems and actual practice.

For those of you with more experience, how do you personally distinguish between:

1. A symbol or ritual “working” psychologically, by shaping attention, intention, memory, or behavior
2. A symbol or ritual “working” spiritually, energetically, or metaphysically
3. A system becoming meaningful simply because the practitioner has invested belief and repetition into it

I’m not asking this from a skeptical/debunking angle. I’m genuinely interested in how experienced practitioners think about this. Do you treat the occult more as a language of the unconscious, a technology of consciousness, a spiritual framework, a contact system, or something else entirely?

Also, for a beginner, would you recommend going deep into one tradition first, or exploring comparatively across several systems before committing to a path?

Appreciate any thoughts, reading recommendations, or warnings about common beginner mistakes.

Alternate version, a little more mystical / poetic:

Hi all, new member here.

I’m at the beginning of my occult studies and trying to approach the subject with respect. I’m especially interested in the way different traditions seem to treat symbols not merely as “representations,” but almost as living structures: gateways, correspondences, mirrors, or instruments of transformation.

My question is this:

When you work with symbols, spirits, planetary forces, tarot, ritual forms, or other occult systems, how do you understand what is actually happening?

Is the work primarily reshaping the practitioner’s consciousness? Is it aligning the practitioner with external forces? Is it a language for communicating with something beyond the ordinary mind? Or are these distinctions too modern and too rigid?

I’m asking as someone who is still learning the basics, but who is very interested in the difference between studying occult material intellectually and actually engaging with it as practice.

For someone early in the path, what helped you move from reading about the occult to developing a grounded, serious practice?

 

[Mh4419]

Welcome

 

[saber]

I personally view it a spiritual system and a method of contact between our world and the world of spirits. I know plenty of occultists that think it's all psychological, though, and they're no less occultists than I. You can take a lot of different approaches and it will all fall under the umbrella of occultism. Hell, I can do the exact same ritual as someone else and they might interpret their results through a purely psychological lens whereas I view it as energies external to me being manipulated.

There's really no wrong answer to this question, it comes down to how you interpret your experiences and that's only something you can do!

Answering one of your other questions, the thing that probably got me from just reading about the occult to developing a grounded practice is by having a daily cleansing or banishing ritual. I try to do the LBRP as often as I can, and once you have a general habit of doing a ritual (ideally one that prepares the space for additional ritual work), it's not hard to add other things to it.