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

[Robert Ramsay]

"In this book it is spoken of the Sephiroth and the Paths; of Spirits and Conjurations; of Gods, Spheres, Planes, and many other things which may or may not exist. It is immaterial whether these exist or not. By doing certain things certain results will follow; students are most earnestly warned against attributing objective reality or philosophic validity to any of them." - Aleister Crowley

"If a person defines a thing to be real, then the consequences of that thing ARE real." - The Thomas Theorem

The kicker is that some of those consequences can be magical effects, which can easily be attributed to the thing you defined to be real, rather than the magical process itself; mistaking the map for the territory.

 

[armageddonz1]

As someone who has seen spirits in physical form and interacted with them in physical form without even summoning them (nature spirits, spirits of the dead), they are very real and external to us. However, when summoning, they do seem to take the form we expect them to. Aaron Leitch calls it reality tunnels. So, if I summon Lucifer believing he is a demon, he would come through the reality tunnel where he will take the form of a demon. But if I call him an angel, He will come as such. Thus, there is an interaction with the external and the internal. The macrocosm is connected to the microcosm inside the magician, which can be summed up as "as above so below". But no, they are not illusions or just products of our mind. Their faces might be, though.

 

[Ingulbjörn]

As someone who has seen spirits in physical form and interacted with them in physical form without even summoning them (nature spirits, spirits of the dead), they are very real and external to us. However, when summoning, they do seem to take the form we expect them to. Aaron Leitch calls it reality tunnels. So, if I summon Lucifer believing he is a demon, he would come through the reality tunnel where he will take the form of a demon. But if I call him an angel, He will come as such. Thus, there is an interaction with the external and the internal. The macrocosm is connected to the microcosm inside the magician, which can be summed up as "as above so below". But no, they are not illusions or just products of our mind. Their faces might be, though.

How do spirits look like when not summoned?

 

[armageddonz1]

How do spirits look like when not summoned?

One shapeshifted into my family member, one looked like a human caked in mud, one looked like humanoid but black fur like hair all over the body, red eyes and no other distinct features, one looked like a man who didn't have a head but had eyes on his chest. Later on, i learned this guy looked like the blemmies creature of folklore but l am from Asia.

 

[Ingulbjörn]

That’s interesting. Do you think that’s the microcosm or that the spirits could somehow shapeshift into someone familiar to you?

 

[Bakakse]

The Catholic Church still maintains an official rite of exorcism and trains specially authorized priests to perform it. If all of this were merely a mental construct, why would it have survived in an institutional form for nearly two thousand years?

This is something I tend to reflect on whenever I begin to have doubts. Even though I have seen and sensed certain phenomena since childhood—without summoning them, performing rituals, or reading about them beforehand—I still question my own experiences from time to time.

Now, partly thanks to AI, I have access to cultural, religious, and occult descriptions that were unavailable to me as a child. Looking back, I recognize in them figures and phenomena that I had already seen or sensed before, even though I had never previously read or heard anything about them.

For me, this does not constitute definitive proof in itself. However, when something happens that I cannot adequately explain through the mind or psychology alone, I simply sit there and think: all right, perhaps there really is something there after all.

 

[MorganBlack]

OK, this topic is one of my pet peeves.

Gah, being wordy here:

If you think the entities we conjure are just psychological constructs, then so they will be for you. Just look at all the 20th-century psychology magicians who will - with very serious straight-faced - tell you magic can only change your mind. Brujos be like, "WTF are you talking about, kid?" (Yes, I know what Lon means, but damage done.)

OK, when you encounter a spirit you conjured standing in front of you that 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. Lets see if we can use some other thinky ideas to get past thinking in locked down ways.

The old 20th century rationalist explanation for spirits was they are just psychological projection, usually cherry-picking Jung to support them. “You’re just externalizing your subconscious.” And I do feel think there is a component there that is true. It's not totally wrong, but needs better contextualizing.

This synthesis uses Dual-Aspect Monism, Analytic Idealism, Kashmiri Shaivism, and Buddhist philosophy. (or just read Neoplatonism as we magicians keeps insisting. ), and might help get off this perpetual merry-go-round of materialist-versus-supernaturalist debate. When you put these lenses together you can start to think of the entities of the grimoires as just as real as any of us. This "stance" helps get the "real" manifestations. Nobody like being told they don't really exist.

Dr. Jeffrey Kripal's Dual-Aspect Monism draws on physicist Wolfgang Pauli, and psychologist Carl Jung to talk about how there is single underlying reality, and suggests the mental and the physical are not two separate things. They are two different aspects of a single, underlying reality. That single reality is seen as the ontologically fundamental substrate of existence, and it's neither strictly physical nor strictly mental, but contains the potential for both.

What we experience inside as an emotion, a symbol, or a thought has an objective, structural counterpart on the outside. And what we experience on the outside similarly has an emotional component. In classical times, that interior-exterior emotional matrix was just "soul." Your soul , and all Soul. They are two sides of the same reality - right now, you are in World Soul (the Neoplatonic Anima Mundi.)

For currrent and aspiring grimpore magicans, Kripal often emphasizes the concept of the "impossible body", the anomalous phenomena, like demons, ghosts, fae, and more, collapse the boundaries between the subjective and objective.

In Dual-Aspect Monism, the Solomonic demon exists in a liminal space where the boundary where "internal thought" and "external space" breaks down. That space is very, very liminal. See George Hansen's The Trickster and the Paranormal for more: Book – EPUB/MOBI - George P. Hansen -The Trickster and the Paranormal (2001)

The mind does not merely "imagine" them. In a monistic universe, imagination is literally an ontological force. (Hello, Neville Goddard!) Mental imagery has a real causal role in shaping psychological and physical reality. The objective entity is summoned, given stories, an identity, a role, and expected behavior through the localized interface of the Solomonic ritual, the architecture of the operator's nervous system, and the shared Kastrupian dreamspace / mythspace you are both "in" - so they are modulated by mass precedent of us all, just like we all are. Spirit epigenetics, anyone? So it's hard to just turn them 100% into whatever you want, and they tend to take on similar historical themes.

A demon (or any anomalous grimoire entity, or a fae, or UFO) is a "psychoid" entity - a term originally coined by psychologist Carl Jung - to describe phenomena that straddle the boundary between the mind and objective matter. The demon is part mind and part matter. Not just mind, living in your head rent-free.

It possesses intent, intelligence, symbolic meaning, and a distinct point of view that can interface directly with human consciousness, emotion, and imagination. And it is part matter. It carries an objective, structural footprint in the fabric of reality, manifesting with independent consistency, causal effects in physical space, and using structural grimoire "rules."

My only complaint with Dual-Aspect Monism is their language. These are academics, and their terms have that super-bland, anodyne, white-boy, Star Trek nerd-coded, neutral, technical tone like "The Psychophysical Matrix" (ugh), "The Neutral Monistic Substrate" (fuck, no!), or "Cosmic Consciousness" (boring!), or the "Information/Awareness Field" (Beam me up, Scotty!). Just fuck off with that self-serious wheeze. This is why magicans are socool, we weaponize poetry.

Now, if you drop a more flavorful and resonanat Shaivite lens directly on top of that exact same concept, a Shaivite would call that deep single Reality Parama Shiva (or simply Shiva), understood not as a guy sitting on a mountain, but as Prakasha-Vimarsa, Luminous Awareness and Self-Reflective Power. In the grims this reality is called God, but it's same idea (again ,go read Neoplantonism).

In Bernardo Kastrup’s Analytic Idealism, universal consciousness is seen as fundamental substrate of reality (hello again, Neoplatonism!). And human beings are simply localized dissociations within that mind, whirlpools in a single cosmic river. How is that really any different from other non-human minds? None at all, I'd say.

To see how this plays out in actual practice we can look to VajrayanaBuddhis where practitioners visualize and interact with complex, non-human entities like wrathful protectors, dakinis, and Buddhas. Westerners will often ask: "Do you guys actually believe these gods are real, or are they just metaphors?"

A Vajrayana practitioner would find that question entirely missing the point. In Buddhism, all phenomena are recognized as svapna-sama, as real as a dream object. While you are dreaming, the tiger chasing you is completely real. It has causal powe, your heart rate jumps, you sweat, and you can be hurt by the experience. It is only recognized as "empty" (sunyata) of a permanent, independent essence when you wake up. I think Bhuddism goes too far being uncommital, and so has some limititations, ironically, but good here as another lens to look at the same reality

Using Dual-Aspect Monism, Buddhist emptiness, and Kashmiri Shaivism together as a collective lens we can see that the entities evoked in the grimoires are both themselves AND mind-shaped (both your local mind and the collective Mind more broadly). The human mind (as an individual level ina small space and collectively in a local culture, in a bigger space ) acts as the prism that focuses the light, and the ritual acts as the structural triangle that gives the spirit a temporary room to stand in. When a critical mass of human minds locks onto an resonant ideas and stories with a a deep sense of felt-meaning you get sometimes new culturally modulated daimons - like mid-20th-century American-culture-coded UFOs, or other regional figures like the Mexican chupacabra and duendes (Latino fae).

To say a demon is shaped by the human mind is not an insult to its existence. After all, you are shaped by your biology, your culture, your linguistic framing, and the narrative loops you think and feel through. It's the same deal across the entire multiverse.

A magician and the demon are both participants in a temporary theater of the cosmos. In a universe where everything is made of mind, the boundaries between "internal thought" and "external entity" dissolve. The spirits are real because consciousness is real. And when you call them and they stand before you and actually do things, you are simply meeting another facet of the Infinite Mind looking back at you with its own eyes. Just like your mechanic, the cashier, or your dog and cat... it all starts to look a lot more like Kashmiri Shaivism.

In mainstream Western materialism, matter is dead, passive, and mechanical. In Kashmiri Shaivism, consciousness is defined by Svatantrya - absolute, unconditioned free will and creative power. Consciousness doesn't just exist; it acts, plays, and transforms. Because it is totally free, the supreme reality, Parama Shiva (who is also the Western God of the grims, and vice versa in my view) - and has the radical power to contract, create, fragment, and forget itself just so it can experience variety.

This is why the universe exists. Kashmiri Shaivism rejects the notion that the physical world is a fake projection, and has the concept of Abhasa, meaning "shining" or "appearance." Thjis is not unique to them and can be found also in Kaballah, and other Western mystical traditions: just as a crystal can reflect many different colors without changing its intrinsic nature, the one universal consciousness reflects itself as infinite distinct objects, people, and entities, and sitations. The mechanic fixing your car, the cashier ringing up your groceries, your dog sleeping on the rug, and a demon standing in a Solomonic triangle are all actualizations of God. They are localized sparks of the same divine light, contracting themselves into specific forms to experience a specific point of view.

Because consciousness is the only substance and possesses absolute freedom to configure itself into any pattern it chooses, whether a human ego, a natural law, or a grimoire entity, your job as a magician (operating in a more shamanic sense as an expression of God) is to find "right-relation" with it. This allows you to interact with wrathful, "hot" manifestations of God and mitigate the negative. A tiger is also God, but it's the aspect that wants to be a tiger and may or may not get along with the aspect that is you.

Because consciousness loves to play the game of subject and object, it fractures itself into distinct points of view so it can look back at itself with surprise, fear, awe, and fascination. This is meant to be fun, in my opinon, so so try to relax and not make it too weird.

Ao I recommend stopping worrying about these questions too muih . It's all very real. As real as you or anything. You just need to make the leap to a part of Creation that WANTS to be magican and demon. I modified this with a conjuring-friendly Neville Goddard view to recommned just accept this all as so, and it will be very true for you. I hope this helps.

Others expect them to just show in their imagination. So they do. I hear that can work, so I'm not saying it has to be this or nothing. But if you Once you embrace the external aspects of Dual-Aspect Monism, and similar ideas, the manifestations you get will be MUCH more dramatic. My Hougan called me a "materializing medium." I have no training in this and was initially confused what he meant.

What I think I did was just EXPECT them to show up, as you see here (below). Others expect them to just show in their imagination. So they do. I hear that can work, so I'm not saying it has to be this or nothing.

But if you constrain the demons so they only show up in your imagination, then these conversations will never end. They will always seem like just parts of your own psychology. This is all why I recommend not doing drugs when conjuring. Afterwards you can't be fool yourself by rationalizing all away as tripping-balls pot dream.

Now, in your current practice, if you are happy where you are, great! Have fun. Conjuring daimons isn't the only form of magic, but it's the coolest, if often very weird, in my opinion.

I find it weird and suss when people have an hard and fixed opinion on things they don't have any experience or serious interest in. Those people I encourage to go hang and talk with others who are also doing whaetever it is they are doing. Like, over there! Way, way over there.

But if you're bored with your current practice, and want to have some spooky fun, and do cool shit, you can engage with the story and dynamic of old-school grimoire magicians, and shift to a reality where demons do exist ,and can appear and do physcial lthings , then maybe this helps.

That reality is where I like to hang out. Not all the time, but enough it has been core to my practice for three decades. You can join us by internalizing some of the "rules" of this game server we are on, which are just stories God /Shiva / all of us together has deccided is fun.

This below is what that reality looks like. It's not the only reality. It's really up to you. Just say the words, wave the stick in the air, feel deeply the stories, be a little scared but not too scared, and EXPECT it to look like this, and then it will be:

Author - Jason S. Black’s notes from 'Pacts with The Devil' (1993)

The macro-level topic here might be 'Shifting into a Daimonic Universe.' More below. I'd been meaning to post these excerpts from the early 1990's book Pacts with the Devil (by S. Jason Black & Christopher S. Hyatt, Ph. D., New Falcon Press, 1993) as the evocatory bookend to the simple but...

wizardforums.com

 

[Robert Ramsay]

I would boil most of this down to "They will be as real as you expect them to be" - and you don't have to believe in them to expect them to be real

Psychology or not, the whole thing about magic is that you change physical outcomes with your mind.

How you change them is up to you.

 

[MorganBlack]

I agree, Robert, what a magician expects personally is a huge part of it, but what is never mentioned is how what we collectively accept and expect together is also a factor in play.

Kastrupian Idealism say the laws of physics and gravity are a dreamed-up share reality, but its also very hard to flap your arms and fly. You are beholded the local 'game rules.' The grims advise to work in remote space to get away from a locked down shared reality.

In a very Rupert Sheldrake kind of way, things that have happened before tend to have an increased probability of happening again through morphic resonance. There is a shared-mind aspect to the grims and all flavor of rituals. An expectation-precedent. A grimoire is basically an ancient, high-traffic game server with specific game rules, built by collective expectation over centuries. They are cultural coded, Kastrupian dreamed-up realities. And you can pick from a variety of them. But they all work a little differently.

You suppose you could materialize Goku from Dragon Ball, and I hear John Constantine has shown up. But the "game rules" of John Constantine means he is probably going to get you killed. The "game rules" of UFOs seems like they will anally probe you. The "game rules" for demons going back to the Greeks, is they will grant your wish while being a bit freaky and breaking reality a bit. Pick your poison.

 

[Lucien6493]

I agree, Robert, what a magician expects personally is a huge part of it, but what is never mentioned is how what we collectively accept and expect together is also a factor in play.

Kastrupian Idealism say the laws of physics and gravity are a dreamed-up share reality, but its also very hard to flap your arms and fly. You are beholded the local 'game rules.' The grims advise to work in remote space to get away from a locked down shared reality.

In a very Rupert Sheldrake kind of way, things that have happened before tend to have an increased probability of happening again through morphic resonance. There is a shared-mind aspect to the grims and all flavor of rituals. An expectation-precedent. A grimoire is basically an ancient, high-traffic game server with specific game rules, built by collective expectation over centuries. They are cultural coded, Kastrupian dreamed-up realities. And you can pick from a variety of them. But they all work a little differently.

You suppose you could materialize Goku from Dragon Ball, and I hear John Constantine has shown up. But the "game rules" of John Constantine means he is probably going to get you killed. The "game rules" of UFOs seems like they will anally probe you. The "game rules" for demons going back to the Greeks, is they will grant your wish while being a bit freaky and breaking reality a bit. Pick your poison.

OK, this topic is one of my pet peeves.

Gah, being wordy here:

If you think the entities we conjure are just psychological constructs, then so they will be for you. Just look at all the 20th-century psychology magicians who will - with very serious straight-faced - tell you magic can only change your mind. Brujos be like, "WTF are you talking about, kid?" (Yes, I know what Lon means, but damage done.)

OK, when you encounter a spirit you conjured standing in front of you that 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. Lets see if we can use some other thinky ideas to get past thinking in locked down ways.

The old 20th century rationalist explanation for spirits was they are just psychological projection, usually cherry-picking Jung to support them. “You’re just externalizing your subconscious.” And I do feel think there is a component there that is true. It's not totally wrong, but needs better contextualizing.

This synthesis uses Dual-Aspect Monism, Analytic Idealism, Kashmiri Shaivism, and Buddhist philosophy. (or just read Neoplatonism as we magicians keeps insisting. ), and might help get off this perpetual merry-go-round of materialist-versus-supernaturalist debate. When you put these lenses together you can start to think of the entities of the grimoires as just as real as any of us. This "stance" helps get the "real" manifestations. Nobody like being told they don't really exist.

Dr. Jeffrey Kripal's Dual-Aspect Monism draws on physicist Wolfgang Pauli, and psychologist Carl Jung to talk about how there is single underlying reality, and suggests the mental and the physical are not two separate things. They are two different aspects of a single, underlying reality. That single reality is seen as the ontologically fundamental substrate of existence, and it's neither strictly physical nor strictly mental, but contains the potential for both.

What we experience inside as an emotion, a symbol, or a thought has an objective, structural counterpart on the outside. And what we experience on the outside similarly has an emotional component. In classical times, that interior-exterior emotional matrix was just "soul." Your soul , and all Soul. They are two sides of the same reality - right now, you are in World Soul (the Neoplatonic Anima Mundi.)

For currrent and aspiring grimpore magicans, Kripal often emphasizes the concept of the "impossible body", the anomalous phenomena, like demons, ghosts, fae, and more, collapse the boundaries between the subjective and objective.

In Dual-Aspect Monism, the Solomonic demon exists in a liminal space where the boundary where "internal thought" and "external space" breaks down. That space is very, very liminal. See George Hansen's The Trickster and the Paranormal for more: Book – EPUB/MOBI - George P. Hansen -The Trickster and the Paranormal (2001)

The mind does not merely "imagine" them. In a monistic universe, imagination is literally an ontological force. (Hello, Neville Goddard!) Mental imagery has a real causal role in shaping psychological and physical reality. The objective entity is summoned, given stories, an identity, a role, and expected behavior through the localized interface of the Solomonic ritual, the architecture of the operator's nervous system, and the shared Kastrupian dreamspace / mythspace you are both "in" - so they are modulated by mass precedent of us all, just like we all are. Spirit epigenetics, anyone? So it's hard to just turn them 100% into whatever you want, and they tend to take on similar historical themes.

A demon (or any anomalous grimoire entity, or a fae, or UFO) is a "psychoid" entity - a term originally coined by psychologist Carl Jung - to describe phenomena that straddle the boundary between the mind and objective matter. The demon is part mind and part matter. Not just mind, living in your head rent-free.

It possesses intent, intelligence, symbolic meaning, and a distinct point of view that can interface directly with human consciousness, emotion, and imagination. And it is part matter. It carries an objective, structural footprint in the fabric of reality, manifesting with independent consistency, causal effects in physical space, and using structural grimoire "rules."

My only complaint with Dual-Aspect Monism is their language. These are academics, and their terms have that super-bland, anodyne, white-boy, Star Trek nerd-coded, neutral, technical tone like "The Psychophysical Matrix" (ugh), "The Neutral Monistic Substrate" (fuck, no!), or "Cosmic Consciousness" (boring!), or the "Information/Awareness Field" (Beam me up, Scotty!). Just fuck off with that self-serious wheeze. This is why magicans are socool, we weaponize poetry.

Now, if you drop a more flavorful and resonanat Shaivite lens directly on top of that exact same concept, a Shaivite would call that deep single Reality Parama Shiva (or simply Shiva), understood not as a guy sitting on a mountain, but as Prakasha-Vimarsa, Luminous Awareness and Self-Reflective Power. In the grims this reality is called God, but it's same idea (again ,go read Neoplantonism).

In Bernardo Kastrup’s Analytic Idealism, universal consciousness is seen as fundamental substrate of reality (hello again, Neoplatonism!). And human beings are simply localized dissociations within that mind, whirlpools in a single cosmic river. How is that really any different from other non-human minds? None at all, I'd say.

To see how this plays out in actual practice we can look to VajrayanaBuddhis where practitioners visualize and interact with complex, non-human entities like wrathful protectors, dakinis, and Buddhas. Westerners will often ask: "Do you guys actually believe these gods are real, or are they just metaphors?"

A Vajrayana practitioner would find that question entirely missing the point. In Buddhism, all phenomena are recognized as svapna-sama, as real as a dream object. While you are dreaming, the tiger chasing you is completely real. It has causal powe, your heart rate jumps, you sweat, and you can be hurt by the experience. It is only recognized as "empty" (sunyata) of a permanent, independent essence when you wake up. I think Bhuddism goes too far being uncommital, and so has some limititations, ironically, but good here as another lens to look at the same reality

Using Dual-Aspect Monism, Buddhist emptiness, and Kashmiri Shaivism together as a collective lens we can see that the entities evoked in the grimoires are both themselves AND mind-shaped (both your local mind and the collective Mind more broadly). The human mind (as an individual level ina small space and collectively in a local culture, in a bigger space ) acts as the prism that focuses the light, and the ritual acts as the structural triangle that gives the spirit a temporary room to stand in. When a critical mass of human minds locks onto an resonant ideas and stories with a a deep sense of felt-meaning you get sometimes new culturally modulated daimons - like mid-20th-century American-culture-coded UFOs, or other regional figures like the Mexican chupacabra and duendes (Latino fae).

To say a demon is shaped by the human mind is not an insult to its existence. After all, you are shaped by your biology, your culture, your linguistic framing, and the narrative loops you think and feel through. It's the same deal across the entire multiverse.

A magician and the demon are both participants in a temporary theater of the cosmos. In a universe where everything is made of mind, the boundaries between "internal thought" and "external entity" dissolve. The spirits are real because consciousness is real. And when you call them and they stand before you and actually do things, you are simply meeting another facet of the Infinite Mind looking back at you with its own eyes. Just like your mechanic, the cashier, or your dog and cat... it all starts to look a lot more like Kashmiri Shaivism.

In mainstream Western materialism, matter is dead, passive, and mechanical. In Kashmiri Shaivism, consciousness is defined by Svatantrya - absolute, unconditioned free will and creative power. Consciousness doesn't just exist; it acts, plays, and transforms. Because it is totally free, the supreme reality, Parama Shiva (who is also the Western God of the grims, and vice versa in my view) - and has the radical power to contract, create, fragment, and forget itself just so it can experience variety.

This is why the universe exists. Kashmiri Shaivism rejects the notion that the physical world is a fake projection, and has the concept of Abhasa, meaning "shining" or "appearance." Thjis is not unique to them and can be found also in Kaballah, and other Western mystical traditions: just as a crystal can reflect many different colors without changing its intrinsic nature, the one universal consciousness reflects itself as infinite distinct objects, people, and entities, and sitations. The mechanic fixing your car, the cashier ringing up your groceries, your dog sleeping on the rug, and a demon standing in a Solomonic triangle are all actualizations of God. They are localized sparks of the same divine light, contracting themselves into specific forms to experience a specific point of view.

Because consciousness is the only substance and possesses absolute freedom to configure itself into any pattern it chooses, whether a human ego, a natural law, or a grimoire entity, your job as a magician (operating in a more shamanic sense as an expression of God) is to find "right-relation" with it. This allows you to interact with wrathful, "hot" manifestations of God and mitigate the negative. A tiger is also God, but it's the aspect that wants to be a tiger and may or may not get along with the aspect that is you.

Because consciousness loves to play the game of subject and object, it fractures itself into distinct points of view so it can look back at itself with surprise, fear, awe, and fascination. This is meant to be fun, in my opinon, so so try to relax and not make it too weird.

Ao I recommend stopping worrying about these questions too muih . It's all very real. As real as you or anything. You just need to make the leap to a part of Creation that WANTS to be magican and demon. I modified this with a conjuring-friendly Neville Goddard view to recommned just accept this all as so, and it will be very true for you. I hope this helps.

Others expect them to just show in their imagination. So they do. I hear that can work, so I'm not saying it has to be this or nothing. But if you Once you embrace the external aspects of Dual-Aspect Monism, and similar ideas, the manifestations you get will be MUCH more dramatic. My Hougan called me a "materializing medium." I have no training in this and was initially confused what he meant.

What I think I did was just EXPECT them to show up, as you see here (below). Others expect them to just show in their imagination. So they do. I hear that can work, so I'm not saying it has to be this or nothing.

But if you constrain the demons so they only show up in your imagination, then these conversations will never end. They will always seem like just parts of your own psychology. This is all why I recommend not doing drugs when conjuring. Afterwards you can't be fool yourself by rationalizing all away as tripping-balls pot dream.

Now, in your current practice, if you are happy where you are, great! Have fun. Conjuring daimons isn't the only form of magic, but it's the coolest, if often very weird, in my opinion.

I find it weird and suss when people have an hard and fixed opinion on things they don't have any experience or serious interest in. Those people I encourage to go hang and talk with others who are also doing whaetever it is they are doing. Like, over there! Way, way over there.

But if you're bored with your current practice, and want to have some spooky fun, and do cool shit, you can engage with the story and dynamic of old-school grimoire magicians, and shift to a reality where demons do exist ,and can appear and do physcial lthings , then maybe this helps.

That reality is where I like to hang out. Not all the time, but enough it has been core to my practice for three decades. You can join us by internalizing some of the "rules" of this game server we are on, which are just stories God /Shiva / all of us together has deccided is fun.

This below is what that reality looks like. It's not the only reality. It's really up to you. Just say the words, wave the stick in the air, feel deeply the stories, be a little scared but not too scared, and EXPECT it to look like this, and then it will be:

Author - Jason S. Black’s notes from 'Pacts with The Devil' (1993)

The macro-level topic here might be 'Shifting into a Daimonic Universe.' More below. I'd been meaning to post these excerpts from the early 1990's book Pacts with the Devil (by S. Jason Black & Christopher S. Hyatt, Ph. D., New Falcon Press, 1993) as the evocatory bookend to the simple but...

wizardforums.com

The only thing I would add here is that if we accidentally on purpose wrest language from meaning and meaning from language then the daemonic may appear in our experience as neither psychological nor as an objective entity but as a world onto itself, with its own weather systems, landscapes, textures, colors and dreamscapes, simply because our sense of narrative logic and sense of coherence runs into a scaling problem on the order of evoking Leviathan for help with a plumbing problem. If he offers you a Naked Lunch or a waterfall in your kitchen it might well be because two worlds have momentarily blended their ontologies. We also are far bigger than either our psychology or our heuristic allows for, and a good deal stranger, perhaps. And you know it as well as I do that, if only to remain self-consistent, we will gravitate toward either Duality or Non-Dual-Monism or alternate between the two, all the while missing the excluded middle, the Daemonic, which has the capacity to momentarily cast us out of our self-referential perspective and constitute for us an experience of the world that does not have us in it. We don't have to choose. In Hebrew they called it "navi". it's ecstatic. It's Enlightenment with Pastrami, man. You don't have to lose the wu for the wei. You can live them in creative tension, both together.

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In other words, the daemonic is neither an illusion, nor yet is it real. It is a mode of perception in it's own right.

 

[MorganBlack]

Hehe. Right, right, Lucien!

I was going to touch on both Patrick Harpur's Daimonic Reality and classical Neoplatonic thought, and how mirrors Jacques Vallee's structural view of UFOs as a psychoid system. But damn, writing a book as it was.

Just mulling this morning over coffee. To bring it home and be more relevant for us magicians and mystics:

Humans ensoul the ordinary through our encounter with them. We embody them with "soul"a Catholic mystic would say. I would say we are Logos-or can be - and others say we humans are the fulcrum of reality, and I agree.

In Neoplatonism and the broader archaic worldview, objects, places, or ritual tools like a dagger or a rock do not necessarily possess an intrinsic "soul" or independent agency. They are passive matter until they are caught up in a relationship, or as any shaman would say, until they take actions , affect the magician or priest, or become participants in an active mythic encounter. They become alive through action, participation, and the spark of the psychoid-daimonic bridge.

Daimons can be a piece of art, your ritual dagger, circumstances, places, a seer speaking them in voice, or a rock. But they are not all luminous. In the shamanic-to-Neoplatonic-to-Catholic Western tradition, they only have a soul and become alive when they DO something. So to a shaman or animist magician, they are not yet spirits or daimons until they express "soul." and demonstrate an inner subjectivity.

Harpur emphasizes that daimons do not belong purely to the subjective mind, nor do they occupy ordinary physical space in a nuts-and-bolts way. They are real, but not like your coffee cup is real, or a ham sandwich is real. They belong to a third reality, the daimonic or imaginal realm, that can uses physical objects - a light in the sky,a sudden coincidence (sorcerers take note!) , or a ritual artifact - as a medium through which to manifest.

This is the same reason why Jacques Vallee argued that UFOs and high strangeness act like a spiritual control system. They project physical traces (burn marks, radar signatures, physiological effects), but they wrap themselves in absurd, symbolic, and theatrical garb designed to hack human belief and shift reality-tunnels rather than act like ordinary physical objects. They happen at the intersection of matter and meaning.

Since we are Western magicians, let's bring it right back home to Western spirituality and mysticism.

"If, then, you do not make yourself equal to God, you cannot apprehend God; for like is known only by the like. ... Think that nothing is impossible for you, consider yourself immortal and able to comprehend all things... Fly high above all time and span all eternity; then you will apprehend God."
- Corpus Hermeticum, Book XI (The Mind to Hermes)

"The cosmos is an image of God, and the sun is an image of the cosmos, and man is an image of the sun."
- Hermetic Fragments, VI


From Shakespeare, it's right there in Hamlet:
"There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so."


The point of working within this framework, whether you're dealing with grimoire spirits, daimons, or the malleable physics of a Kastrupian -Daimonic mythspace, is conscious curation. You pick a good meaning and a constructive baseline so that the daimons you encounter supports, expands, and elevates you rather than tearing you down. You deliberately steer the narrative toward something that makes you happy, joyful, creative, loving, and fun, and away from becoming a bitter, cramped, sniveling asshole. That what Western theurgy is for, as well as Catholic theosis / self-divinization. (From the Greek theosis, meaning "divinization" or "deification" See Athanasius here, "God became man so that man might become god.)

That ugly state of being in a cramped, defensive, reactive loop, is what the old maps literalized as "Hell." And the expansive, creative, fluid state (one that rises to the better part of the imaginal post-mortem, as the Orphics and Catholics tell us) is what they called "Heaven." You are building the architecture of your own experience from the ground up, now and after death.

For the Orphics, your state of consciousness at the moment of death, and the habits of mind and emotional patterns you built while alive directly dictate your trajectory through the post-mortem realm. Orphic mythology speaks of two springs in the underworld: the Pool of Lethe brings forgetfulness and passive drowning in unconsciousness, and the Pool of Mnemosyne brings memory, lucidity, and remembering your divine origin.

So if your life was spent in that cramped, reactive, petty peevishness, basically being a hysterical, sniveling asshole, your psyche is structurally bound to lower, confused, and terrifying realms. That's "Purgatory." If you cultivated the expansive, joyful, creative, and divine spark, your soul navigates the imaginal post-mortem state with clarity, moving toward the upper tiers of divine remembrance. Western systems are meanto comiditon our inner sense system for the post-mortem dreamspace before you even get there.

That's actually what all the Western practices of initiatory ascent and ritual descent frameworks across the Western esoteric traditions are - pre-mortem flight simulators. They are eschatology. They are soul gyms.

This is next bit is personal gnosis. Take it as you wish.

The point of the Catholic intercessory allies, I have been told by my imaginary friend and treacher St. Cyprian (who yells at me whan I tell he does not really exist) , is to help you make the transition to the nice part of the afterlife - which is not seperate place, it too is also the World Soul.

The rising on the Sephiroth, the Enochian Aethyrs, Merkaba mysticism, and much of the Death and Resurrection Show of Catholic saint magic - we are experiencing the post-mortem states ahead of time so we don't freak out and get trapped in a Buddhist Bardo-state hell world (Purgatory in the Catholic system). When you die, you lose access to your brain, your consciousness-reducing valve, so finding yourself in an unbuffered post-mortem environment (whether we think of it as the Buddhist Bardo, or with the terrifying angelic gatekeepers of the Hekhalot, or Catholic Purgatory) acts like a hall of mirrors. Every unintegrated neurosis, hidden fear, and petty fixation comes alive and traps you in an endless loop as a stuck "ghost" - a ruminating consiousness until a magician comes along, reminds you who you are, and sets you free. See the horror movie, The Others , with Nicole Kidman, for what that looks like.

Anyway, I really didn' t mean to raise the stakes quite so much.

For a great video intro. Patrick Harpur discusses daimonic reality, the nature of the imagination as an objective force, and how anomalous phenomena bridge the gap between the physical world and the mythic otherworld,and they even talk about Bernardo Kastrup. We seem to be a club now

Patrick Harpur: Daimonic Reality

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[Angelkesfarl]

So, if we summarize the thread and the members’ responses, we’ll find that there is a near-certain expectation that these are entities with personalities distinct from your own reality, yet they can merge with it, understand it, and transport you to another reality, another place, or their own inner worlds. What, then, are the worlds of the demons, and are they the same as the worlds of the angels? Do they share the same world, or does each inhabit a separate one? In ancient and Hermetic traditions, the world is divided according to the Kabbalah’s Tree of Life into three upper worlds, followed by seven planetary realms called the heavens or Sefirot, and finally the earthly realm where incarnate beings dwell.

Demons are defined as jinn and jinnah. They are the first inhabitants of the jinn realm and were created from fire. They inhabited the earth and ran rampant upon it, and wars and massacres raged among them, leading to the near collapse of their world after the angels were commanded to purge the earth of their traces and powers. The angels descended into a war whose outcome was inevitable; the jinn lost their kingdoms, and the angels banished them to the world of the jinn or to another realm. This dimension is the closest to the physical world, yet it is a higher plane where they can interact with the Earth but cannot physically influence it except through another power and through portals that open and close at fixed intervals…

These are dates linked to the movements of the stars, so that they can be calculated chronologically; and if we consider that each planet in the seven ancient signs is a gateway—though these are moving gateways that open in different directions— Arab scholars described them as “stations” and symbolized them with four stages: for example, the summer sun signifies fire at its peak; the autumn sun, where fire weakens due to the wind that causes the leaves to fall; and the winter sun, which is cold and has lost its ability to burn; and finally, the spring sun, where the sun is gentle and its light does not burn but radiates warmth and aids in the growth of living creatures—and this is indeed observed in reality.

The four phases of the sun, for example, influence all dimensions: in the other dimension, the fiery forces of the sun’s minions are strengthened, leading to destruction, wars, and bloodshed; in autumn, they bring division, estrangement, and the downfall of the powerful; in winter, they are conducive to the overthrow of thrones and the collapse of nations; and in spring, they are associated with new beginnings and construction. Here, they determine which gates will be crossed and which forces will be able to act or exert influence. What remains in the equation is how you can break through both sides to create a passageway so that your actions can manifest and emerge from the realm of inner imagination (“desire”) into true reality (“action”). This point requires us to examine it and reflect on it carefully.

 

[Robert Ramsay]

I agree, Robert, what a magician expects personally is a huge part of it, but what is never mentioned is how what we collectively accept and expect together is also a factor in play.

Kastrupian Idealism say the laws of physics and gravity are a dreamed-up share reality, but its also very hard to flap your arms and fly. You are beholded the local 'game rules.' The grims advise to work in remote space to get away from a locked down shared reality.

In a very Rupert Sheldrake kind of way, things that have happened before tend to have an increased probability of happening again through morphic resonance. There is a shared-mind aspect to the grims and all flavor of rituals. An expectation-precedent. A grimoire is basically an ancient, high-traffic game server with specific game rules, built by collective expectation over centuries. They are cultural coded, Kastrupian dreamed-up realities. And you can pick from a variety of them. But they all work a little differently.

You suppose you could materialize Goku from Dragon Ball, and I hear John Constantine has shown up. But the "game rules" of John Constantine means he is probably going to get you killed. The "game rules" of UFOs seems like they will anally probe you. The "game rules" for demons going back to the Greeks, is they will grant your wish while being a bit freaky and breaking reality a bit. Pick your poison.

I usually refer to 'what we expect together' as The Consensus - it's the way that reality knits together so that we all (mostly) agree on the same things, and people don't suddenly turn into strawberry ice-cream . Sometimes it's good to have a locked down shared reality

Basically, this is what we fight against/manipulate in order to do magic. When something is malleable to magic (and, Douglas Adams and Kastrupian idealism aside, I do not include things like gravity ) you have to 'sidestep' everyone else's expectations - normally you do this by not telling anyone until the magic is completed, so they don't have any expectations, or grouping up, so that everyone involved has the same expectations.

At the end of the day, though, a lot of it is not so much other people's expectations, as what you expect to be their expectations This is why successful magicians can come across as arseholes - not giving a fuck is part of their magical success strategy

I'm still not sure about how Sheldrake's work fits into things. It's a genuine effect - but is it only part of The Consensus? Does it play any role in magic as well?

 

[MorganBlack]

The Consensus - it's the way that reality knits together so that we all (mostly) agree on the same things, and people don't suddenly turn into strawberry ice-cream

"The Consensus"Love it, Robert! Agreed.

Re: Sheldrake's work. That was my probably clumsy attempt to retroactively find a model to describe the lived experiences of Goetic and Solomonic magicians. In 2004 I joined Yahoo groups and got to convene and share with a lot of the practicing magicians who later became published authors: Rufus Opus, Frater Moloch, Aaron Leitch, Jason Miller, Jake Stratton-Kent, and others. At the time there were maybe twelve conjuring magicians, if that many, and it was long before simplified magic procedures became popular on the internet.

The thing we noticed when conjuring daimons is that the tenor of ritual used has a huge influence on how the daimons appear. Use Greco-Egyptian rites, and they will be more austere and cosmic. Use more Greek rites, and they will be more "bro-y." Use more Catholic rites, and they will be more aggressive. For me, and from what John King said recently in his experience , use the Grimorium Verum and they will be more "Lovecraftian" (read chthonic here, I think), even if you don't expect them to appear to personally, I will add. This is imporant, I feel.

I've also noticed the daimons I conjured through the Lesser Key were more "trippy," and with the Verum were more dark and solid. I can cut out personal belief and expectations because I don't like to project my personal aesthetic choices everywhere. As an art director and concept artist, that's my day job. Many people who treat magic as an artistic hobby and personal identity, usually try to force the personal tastes onto the daimons in a act of ritual solipsism. I think that's is a left over artifact of the 'Daimons are only psychology' model, and why , it seems to me , almost everyone in occultre nd paganism wants to police everyone else brains. "Respect muh indentity."

I feel magic is a language, and all languages are 100% true. And all this is my rough attempt to make an inclusive framework - Daimonic Idealism (to give it a name) - which I hope respects whatever framework people are useing as being 100% true. And no in the condescending, 'Oh, that true.s... for YOU." way. The shared Story becoming the house"or game rule is a huge part of it so i was thrilled when the interviewer with Patriuck Harpur came to the same conclusion

See also, Fourth Wall Phantoms, which should be seen as experiences rather than 100% explanatory. This model can go too far into House Secular very quickly and needed more nuance. The one imaginary friend I have that I allow access to my mind will yell at me if I tell him he was never alive and doesn't exist. They hate that.

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I tend to think of it as a movie, a narrative, we all decided - including the daimons - to use as temporary house rules for interdimensional diplomacy. Games need rules to be a game. Just like human-only games, and in a sense the rules "manifest" the game we are playing, thing called football, basketball, or tiddlywinks. A "house rules ," lets a TradCath magician, an Islamic magician like Angelikesfarl, or a pagan magician like Jake Stratton-Kent have their rown quantum universe with their own house rules, in my model. Each is very very real. Playng football doesn't mean that basketball is fake. House Islam is not in conflict with House Pagan, and House Catholic or House Secular is not in conflict with anyone.

Sheldrake's work. well, I'm using to think about how a the shared story gathers momentum for a group of minds, some human, some non-human. .There was no reason for John King's and my experiences withthe GV to both be Lovecraftian. . I also don't project my aesthetic expectations onto the daimons I am conjuring and let them appear as they wish in trade for being required to do things for me. also feel the story gains momentum the more it is used. I think the GV whose core story has gathered momentum since the 14th century., drawing on elirver sotires but comingtoegther in a varation of the Solomonic Story around that time

Oh, re scifi-horror aesthics. I actually dislike Kenneth Grant and all things UFO. I dont do aliens. I see nothing in their storeis that says they are actually useful for sorcery, nd seem to only manifest head trips, like the DMT daimons. But who knows. Not my House.

I just want more people to try it with an open mind before we all decide what the Verum daimons "totally and for real-realy true" MUST look like. I'm also tired of waiting and decided to paint an illustration of what Guland looked like for me when he appeared in my game room (ha!) one bright Los Angeles afternoon and took me on an adventure. One that changed me for the better, even if it was very rough spritual journey. I am a much better for it, which diverges from House TradCath a little and blends a bit with JSK's House Pagan. I lean more toward House Indegenous in practice and say this is about finding "right relation" to the intelligence being expressed as a demon in relationship to a magician.

 

[Robert Ramsay]

I roll my eyes when people say such and such is 'only psychology'. That's like 'poetry is only words' or 'it was only the placebo effect'. To quote DuQuette: "It's all in your head; you just don't know how big your head is".

One warning: when you say

I can cut out personal belief and expectations because I don't like to project my personal aesthetic choices everywhere.

it's not entirely true. You can try and do that, but since magic works at such a fundamental level, you have no choice but to see things from your own point of view, even if it isn't happening at a conscious level (in fact, if it's really working, it absolutely will not be happening at a conscious level!)

To quote Buckaroo Banzai: "Wherever you go, there you are."

 

[MorganBlack]

it's not entirely true.

Agreed, Robert! I am not that objective. I did try to go back and write "As much as I can .." but was banging this out before needing to get work done, and then ran out of time.

I also feel you should bring in your own body-memory - your felt-sense of engaging with the Story - the thrills, the chills, not just your thinky-think self personal identity memory. Become immersed in the story. Play the game.

I was speaking more to what I think of as your toxic identity, or maybe 'hostile solipsism '- which McGilchrist has done a great job showing that is an artifact of our left-hemisphere. I think we can see it manifest when people get hostile toward other folks 'House Rules' and call them "egregores" or "Abrahamic" - or thinking that they are messing up Solomonic Magic with "paganism."

Most of the "projecting into" is already done by the story of House Rules, and everybody can relax.

I am probably butchering it, but leaning into Julian Barbour's' timeless physics' - where the universe consists of a static landscape of "Nows" rather than a flowing timeline - we can see the magicans through time contribting to the Solomonic / Grimoire Magican reality right now and alwasys. We are piggybacking on a game already being played and that is being played through time. And it has a life of it's own outside our thinky self..

I also feel some people's collective magic games feel weightless and plastic becasue they're more recent than they think and have a very shallow time depth. (And I suppose they also have died off in the future becasue they are not retroactively causing any felt effects here in the past, but who knows? ) Again, not my House, not my rules. But many are truly old, and so see have a 'reality server' with their game running and many players teleporting in and still playing .

 

[Robert Ramsay]

Agreed, Robert! I am not that objective. I did try to go back and write "As much as I can .." but was banging this out before needing to get work done, and then ran out of time.

I also feel you should bring in your own body-memory - your felt-sense of engaging with the Story - the thrills, the chills, not just your thinky-think self personal identity memory. Become immersed in the story. Play the game.

I was speaking more to what I think of as your toxic identity, or maybe 'hostile solipsism '- which McGilchrist has done a great job showing that is an artifact of our left-hemisphere. I think we can see it manifest when people get hostile toward other folks 'House Rules' and call them "egregores" or "Abrahamic" - or thinking that they are messing up Solomonic Magic with "paganism."

Most of the "projecting into" is already done by the story of House Rules, and everybody can relax.

I am probably butchering it, but leaning into Julian Barbour's' timeless physics' - where the universe consists of a static landscape of "Nows" rather than a flowing timeline - we can see the magicians through time contributing to the Solomonic / Grimoire Magician reality right now and always. We are piggybacking on a game already being played and that is being played through time. And it has a life of it's own outside our thinky self..

I also feel some people's collective magic games feel weightless and plastic because they're more recent than they think and have a very shallow time depth. (And I suppose they also have died off in the future because they are not retroactively causing any felt effects here in the past, but who knows? ) Again, not my House, not my rules. But many are truly old, and so see have a 'reality server' with their game running and many players teleporting in and still playing .

I agree with the body thing - as Anil Seth says, we are not just our brains, our brains are meant to work as part of our bodies, and it's a left-brain delusion to refute that.

So yeah, maybe morphic fields are how we form house rules/egregores. Otherwise, my thought was if you accept e.g. an Egyptian god as old and powerful, that's how they'll be.

I usually explain my stuff as a simplified version of Barbour's 'Platoniverse' - rather than all possible combinations of all possible particles, a tiny fraction of which form timelines, I simplify it down to a complex interplay of Einsteinian block universes, each composed of sequences of 'Nows' - the difference between a prairie and a railway shunting yard

The other person to look at, although I haven't explicitly included his work, is Stephen Wolfram, whose work with mathematical automata showed that if the rules for your automata are flexible enough, you can end up with more than one path that ends up at the same destination, and he explicitly compares this to quantum physics.

I'm currently working on a new chapter, about the brain, trying to gain more insight into the process of consciousness, and what magic can teach us about that process. After all, since magic is an unexpected result of normal human consciousness, don't we normally learn more things from unexpected results?