[Opinion] using video games and popular culture stuff in magic

[duncanhillscoffeeco]

His real grimoire turned out to be The Necronomicon.

From Evil Dead?

 

[Tryp]

There's dozens, and if you were to list all the movies featuring a Necronomicon you'd find quite a few.

All of a sudden I have an impulse to start collecting Necronomicons and craft the Metanecronomicon.

 

[Faria]

There's dozens, and if you were to list all the movies featuring a Necronomicon you'd find quite a few.

All of a sudden I have an impulse to start collecting Necronomicons and craft the Metanecronomicon.

Younger people just don't know what it's like to have an all-consuming desire for arcane knowledge and going to the bookstore to find the entire New Age shelf is stocked with cheesy crapola with cats and rainbows, but there's this black book with a sigil on the cover and NECRONOMICON written on the side and the imprimatur of Bill Burroughs on the back.

 

[MorganBlack]

A Quimbanda and Palo Mayombe priest I know told me about the Haunted Ramen Experiment run by Gregand Dana Newkirk of the Haunted Objects Podcast. They’re paranormal investigators made pretty famous by their paranormal show Hellier. (Great show, highly recommneded!)

So they set up a experiments where groups of people focused their intention to imbue an ordinary objects with paranormal qualities. They made haunted ramen, which was hilarious. The Quimbanda priest gave me this an example of the spirits pots work, and I was like "Yep! We give them "ghost bodies."

My fav Chaos Magic "god" - technicality a daimon here - is John Constantine, who has a real life WikiPedia entry. Not a great guy to run into, I imagine, since in the early comics most of the people around him die in some terrible ways.

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We can make all sorts of daimons. I just think they're much more powerful the more minds there are creating that reality. See Bernardo Kastrup here for some of the Idealist-animist mechanics behind it. Some of these also have minds of their own behind the masks, maybe nice, or maybe not.

 

[Aeternus]

A Quimbanda and Palo Mayombe priest I know told me about the Haunted Ramen Experiment run by Gregand Dana Newkirk of the Haunted Objects Podcast. They’re paranormal investigators made pretty famous by their paranormal show Hellier. (Great show, highly recommneded!)

So they set up a experiments where groups of people focused their intention to imbue an ordinary objects with paranormal qualities. They made haunted ramen, which was hilarious. The Quimbanda priest gave me this an example of the spirits pots work, and I was like "Yep! We give them "ghost bodies."

My fav Chaos Magic "god" - technicality a daimon here - is John Constantine, who has a real life WikiPedia entry. Not a great guy to run into, I imagine, since in the early comics most of the people around him die in some terrible ways.

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We can make all sorts of daimons. I just think they're much more powerful the more minds there are creating that reality. See Bernardo Kastrup here for some of the Idealist-animist mechanics behind it. Some of these also have minds of their own behind the masks, maybe nice, or maybe not.

Objects have a lot of capacity of storing energies. Whether we talk about walls, phones, beds, computers and TVs or even fridges or washing machines, those things can store energies.

When it comes to the comic book characters, besides John Constantine, I must say that I remember some very interesting characters from the D.C. comics universe who had something to do with the occult and, just like in John Constantine's case, things weren't nice at all:

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But, interesting enough, there is this other guy called "Dr. Occult" in the D.C. Comics universe who is a superhero with a lot of occult powers like scrying:

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I subscribe to the concept of being able to create our own daimons, some having their own minds as well. After all, remember that there are characters / diamons in various universes, each with its own set of rules and structure.

 

[nunaphael]

Just to clarify, I still use all kinds of inspirations that I derived from roleplaying systems over the years. World of Darkness and Call of Cthulhu are just the most relevant that came to mind when I wrote my earlier reply. I could list dozens more (GURPS, Rifts, D&D, Pathfinder, Warhammer, etc). Table-top roleplaying is like, my thing. I've been the narrator/storyteller/DM in almost every campaign I've ever been in, started from age 7 onward, because my grandmother didn't like video games (and because nobody else had the motivation to host). Actually, she didn't like that I was playing D&D either, when my grandmother found out about that she had a "satanic panic" moment and confiscated hundreds of dollars of my books from me that my mother bought for me (my mom basically didn't care what I did as long as I didn't cause problems).

The fact that it's so deeply engrained into my identity means it often comes up whenever I let go and allow gnosis to kick in. It's no surprise to me that often my present experiences share a current with my past experiences. In psychoanalysis they call that "transference". Of course, being more mystical, I chalk it up to destiny and synchronicity, being able to look back at your whole life and connect the dots, see the pieces of the puzzle finally starting to reveal a picture. Something about spinning narratives, telling stories, being a diverse actor who can play any NPC needed at any moment, building imaginary and fantastic worlds in exquisite detail, their histories, metaphysics, demographics, and ecologies... I mean, is it really just a game? Are we really just playing games? Really? Is that all it is? Roleplaying is just a "game" to you? Do "games" mean anything to you, then? Are they just distractions to you? Are they not magical tools, transformative devices, or physical portals into limitless realities? Is imagination "less real" than physical sensation?

You see? I'm not so sure it's "just a game" that I've been playing. I'm not so sure of that. Maybe it's something more. Like a training program I was engaged in from a very early age, because it was just something about me, something in my nature that I brought with me into this world. I was not born a "blank slate", nobody comes into this world "tabula rasa" - even if you are a diehard materialist, there is the biological predisposition called "temperament" that is empirically known to exist in infants and can be demonstrated to exist as early as 2 weeks after delivery, way too early for there to have been any kind of social programming or operant conditioning to have influenced the child (unless there was a major traumatic event during those two weeks). So I most certainly came into this world surfing a current that existed before me, which I have been swept up in my entire life, and part of my awakening has been realizing this, coming to terms with it, and then deciding if I want to continue on this path.

Younger people just don't know what it's like to have an all-consuming desire for arcane knowledge and going to the bookstore to find the entire New Age shelf is stocked with cheesy crapola with cats and rainbows, but there's this black book with a sigil on the cover and NECRONOMICON written on the side and the imprimatur of Bill Burroughs on the back.

I remember being 17 and wandering into the Barnes and Noble located in downtown Santa Rosa, CA. I remember going up to the info desk and asking briefly where the "occult" section was, the response being "the new age section is located on the second floor". I went up the staircase to the "new age" and "spirituality" section, which to my disappointment was actually merged in with the "self-help" and "psychology" section, which was also overlapping the "philosophy" section. Each of these were not so big on their own, and kind of haphazardly thrown together without much concern for how organized it was. Like, authors just shoved in with no alphabetization, no order to it, you just had to browse. Most of them were as you described, really gaudy, really kitsche, my gut instinct was "this is garbage". On the cover art, a lot of them have rays of light and shit emanating from the center, you know, some amophous blobs of color and geometry or generic alchemical symbols all over or something like that. When I was 17 it was the year 2000, so at the time there was not yet a shitload of "black magic" or "satanic" grimoires by edgy LHP wannabes proliferating the shelves. It was like 40% astrology, 40% wicca, 10% psychic powers, 4% extraterrestrials, 1% everything else.

In fact, that was the day I found Liber Null & Psychonaut (because it stuck out like a sore thumb on the shelf), which I mentioned in another post was like the gateway drug for me that got me into actually practicing rituals and doing exercises aimed at producing results and experiences. Like, at first I just hit the gym, spiritually speaking. I did the meditations and exercises, the death posture, cumming on my sigils like Grant Morrison suggested. I listened to Alan Moore rant about neoshamanism and modern apathy and told all my friends to read Watchman and really listen to what Rorschach was saying in his journal. I had also purchased a copy of Buckland's "Complete Introduction to Witchcraft" which sat around for months before I actually got around to reading it. It was also kind of a gateway for me, into more "traditional" witchcraft systems, and eventually into grimoire traditions and from there it's just been an endless journey of learning about new systems. There's always more to learn.

 

[Morell]

I can only praise Liber Null myself. Really gave me a gateway into magic no other book did. Giving blueprint I could use to form a ritual I could put my heart into was real gamechanger. After that I was way more comfortable with practice and practically every ritual ever since I did was my own creation based on things and characters I wanted to work with.

Just to clarify, I still use all kinds of inspirations that I derived from roleplaying systems over the years. World of Darkness and Call of Cthulhu are just the most relevant that came to mind when I wrote my earlier reply. I could list dozens more (GURPS, Rifts, D&D, Pathfinder, Warhammer, etc). Table-top roleplaying is like, my thing. I've been the narrator/storyteller/DM in almost every campaign I've ever been in, started from age 7 onward, because my grandmother didn't like video games (and because nobody else had the motivation to host). Actually, she didn't like that I was playing D&D either, when my grandmother found out about that she had a "satanic panic" moment and confiscated hundreds of dollars of my books from me that my mother bought for me (my mom basically didn't care what I did as long as I didn't cause problems).

The fact that it's so deeply engrained into my identity means it often comes up whenever I let go and allow gnosis to kick in. It's no surprise to me that often my present experiences share a current with my past experiences. In psychoanalysis they call that "transference". Of course, being more mystical, I chalk it up to destiny and synchronicity, being able to look back at your whole life and connect the dots, see the pieces of the puzzle finally starting to reveal a picture. Something about spinning narratives, telling stories, being a diverse actor who can play any NPC needed at any moment, building imaginary and fantastic worlds in exquisite detail, their histories, metaphysics, demographics, and ecologies... I mean, is it really just a game? Are we really just playing games? Really? Is that all it is? Roleplaying is just a "game" to you? Do "games" mean anything to you, then? Are they just distractions to you? Are they not magical tools, transformative devices, or physical portals into limitless realities? Is imagination "less real" than physical sensation?

You see? I'm not so sure it's "just a game" that I've been playing. I'm not so sure of that. Maybe it's something more. Like a training program I was engaged in from a very early age, because it was just something about me, something in my nature that I brought with me into this world. I was not born a "blank slate", nobody comes into this world "tabula rasa" - even if you are a diehard materialist, there is the biological predisposition called "temperament" that is empirically known to exist in infants and can be demonstrated to exist as early as 2 weeks after delivery, way too early for there to have been any kind of social programming or operant conditioning to have influenced the child (unless there was a major traumatic event during those two weeks). So I most certainly came into this world surfing a current that existed before me, which I have been swept up in my entire life, and part of my awakening has been realizing this, coming to terms with it, and then deciding if I want to continue on this path.


I remember being 17 and wandering into the Barnes and Noble located in downtown Santa Rosa, CA. I remember going up to the info desk and asking briefly where the "occult" section was, the response being "the new age section is located on the second floor". I went up the staircase to the "new age" and "spirituality" section, which to my disappointment was actually merged in with the "self-help" and "psychology" section, which was also overlapping the "philosophy" section. Each of these were not so big on their own, and kind of haphazardly thrown together without much concern for how organized it was. Like, authors just shoved in with no alphabetization, no order to it, you just had to browse. Most of them were as you described, really gaudy, really kitsche, my gut instinct was "this is garbage". On the cover art, a lot of them have rays of light and shit emanating from the center, you know, some amophous blobs of color and geometry or generic alchemical symbols all over or something like that. When I was 17 it was the year 2000, so at the time there was not yet a shitload of "black magic" or "satanic" grimoires by edgy LHP wannabes proliferating the shelves. It was like 40% astrology, 40% wicca, 10% psychic powers, 4% extraterrestrials, 1% everything else.

In fact, that was the day I found Liber Null & Psychonaut (because it stuck out like a sore thumb on the shelf), which I mentioned in another post was like the gateway drug for me that got me into actually practicing rituals and doing exercises aimed at producing results and experiences. Like, at first I just hit the gym, spiritually speaking. I did the meditations and exercises, the death posture, cumming on my sigils like Grant Morrison suggested. I listened to Alan Moore rant about neoshamanism and modern apathy and told all my friends to read Watchman and really listen to what Rorschach was saying in his journal. I had also purchased a copy of Buckland's "Complete Introduction to Witchcraft" which sat around for months before I actually got around to reading it. It was also kind of a gateway for me, into more "traditional" witchcraft systems, and eventually into grimoire traditions and from there it's just been an endless journey of learning about new systems. There's always more to learn.

Beautiful story of your path. Thanks for that. I can relate, I had a time when I was thirsty for occult books and was going into local stores and digging through New Age and self-help stuff. Got my probably the most dangerous book this way. (brethinaism rubbish that actually killed few people) But for the practice I wanted to follow there aw usually nothing. The path was worth it. Now I see better what value can be found in what books and what I can actually expect to find in them.

 

[FreedonNaad]

I believe that using pop culture helps in different levels that all together create the magick you need :

1. Creative visualisation : remember Dragon Ball creating spirit bombs? Watch the scene and try to picture yourself doing it. Put the more sensory elements you can.

2. The emotional trigger : say "expecto patronum" in your mind, imagine a deer figure running in the room erasing all the dementors in it.... See the deer glowing more and more. How do you feel?

3. Throw out you correspondance book and create yours : which character embody the air element to you? Imagine being this character, maybe he can fly/glade/invoke that element (like Ventus in Kingdom Hearts) What colors does he wear? How is his personnality?

I think people forget that tradition itself was built by adapting older symbols into new contexts. Renaissance magicians looked back to Egypt and Greece, the Golden Dawn synthesized countless earlier systems, and every generation has translated timeless archetypes into the language of its own era. Pop culture can function the same way because the imagination responds to living symbols, not just ancient ones. The danger is not using Dragon Ball, Harry Potter, or Kingdom Hearts as symbolic gateways, but confusing the fictional character with the deeper archetypal current that gives the symbol its power. Tradition provides a framework refined over centuries, while modern stories provide imagery that resonates with contemporary minds. Used with discipline and discernment, both can point toward the same underlying realities.

 

[OberonFromTheHills]

Kingdom Hearts as symbolic gateways

You say that to someone who use Ventus and Sora as archetype for the Fool/Air Element 🩷🫰

 

[Ohana]

I truly think any piece of media or art can carry deep spirtual meaning and truths if looked at by a person that can connect with it. A very funny example of this is from this video.

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Its a 3 paneI comic strip and someone was stiII abIe to spend an hour dissecting it. This isn't to make fun of when peopIe do it because I do it too to a degree this is just to show how even the most innocuous piece of media can be utilized to develop the seIf and find meaning within the piece of art and within your own Iife.

My fav Chaos Magic "god" - technicality a daimon here - is John Constantine, who has a real life WikiPedia entry. Not a great guy to run into, I imagine, since in the early comics most of the people around him die in some terrible ways.

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I read this characters wikipedia page and I was exhausted reading it. He seems like a character that just never sits stiII and does everything at once aII the time. Good for him me I wouId not be abIe to do aII that. WhiIe reading this I thought that he shouId eat a granola bar just from doing aII this. ReaIIy interesting character turned daimon in certain practices. I appreciate this share.