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Hermetic Audio Glossary

Whenever I hear people pronounce jargon words from the occult lexicon, half the time they use some sort of idiosyncratic pronunciation or another. Given the relatively solitary nature of most practitioners, our encounters with these words are often almost exclusively through writing rather than speech. Combine this problem with the fact that many of the names and jargon words are drawn from Greek, Hebrew, Latin, and a number of other languages, those who haven't had formal exposure to these languages are often impaired in their ability to wrap their heads around how the words should sound and are left to muddle their way through as best they can. In the early 2000s, I had a website with a section called the Hermetic Audio Glossary. My goal with this project was to present audio pronunciations of various names and jargon terms, in order to give others an idea of how the words should sound. Language has always been a living thing, and there is no "One True Pronunciation" fo...
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On Ritual Purity

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Whenever I hear magicians talking about spirit evocation, particularly from a grimoiric standpoint, there is inevitably a discussion of ritual purity.  I always find myself a bit surprised by the degree of ritual purity a number of other magicians observe, because I have had positive and effective results while doing very little in that regard:  my purity routine for ritual generally involves little more than bathing/showering while saying the  Asperges Me .  I have my own take on ritual purity as a result, which seems to differ from that of a number of other practitioners. I've often heard magicians express the viewpoint that ritual bathing is necessary because our natural smell is offensive to the spirits.  I find that this notion ignores a key bit of history.  While bathing was much more common in medieval Europe than popular culture leads us to believe (bathhouses were plentiful and often frequented), the general hygiene of the populace was still less ...
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Communication with the Spirits: A Guide for the Perplexed

In the world of magic, there are fewer things more divisive it seems than the ideas around invocation/evocation of spirits and what it means to interact with them.  This isn't a matter of any small or trivial difficulty, even for those who have experienced such phenomena themselves.  The difficulty is even greater for those who have not achieved such communication, and who are often left wondering what exactly they should expect or how things are supposed to work.  As with many things in magic, nothing is going to look exactly the same from one practitioner to the next, and our current subject is no different.  While I can only provide my own perspective on the issue, I am doing so in the hopes that it can clear a bit of the confusion around the topic and bring practitioners (and aspiring practitioners!) together with some more productive dialogue. Much of the perplexity seems to surround exactly what should  be expected in terms of the encounter with the spirit...
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WMiT Interview!

 My goodness, life comes at you fast.  I was certain I had posted about this long ago when the episode first aired; but in case you missed it, I was interviewed on the excellent "What Magic is This?" podcast about the Kybalion and its history as a work of ersatz Hermeticism.  Thanks so much to Douglas Batchelor for having me on, and for the wonderful conversation!
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A Method for Cryptographic Sigil Creation

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  Inspired by my recent conversations with Erik Arneson , Tres Henry , and Taylor Bell , I've been thinking a lot of late about the potential uses for cryptographic hashes in the creation of magical sigils.  After playing around with the ideas a bit and making a few false starts, I've developed a proof of concept to share with the wider community. Background:  What's a Cryptographic Hash? In the world of cryptography, a hash function is a one-way encryption operation.  This means that source data (plaintext) can be encrypted with a hash function, but once encrypted it cannot be decrypted.  This doesn't sound especially useful at first glance, but in truth these hash functions play a vital role in the world of information security.  Because the same input will always give the same hashed output, the hash of a file or other piece of data serves as a unique signature of that input.  This has many uses in file integrity checking, authentication, and other...
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Why I Love the Golden Dawn Tradition

 A little while ago, I wrote a post about some of the problems that I see in the present-day Golden Dawn tradition .  As I said at the time, I still hold the tradition dear to my heart even though I have issues with the temporal institutions that currently embody it.  To read my previous post, however, one might think I had nothing but criticism to offer. This post is the other side of that coin. For me, there is nothing else like the Golden Dawn.  Having spent about a decade doing magic in a temple setting, working through the grades and experiencing their energies and their impact in my life, it's still difficult to imagine not working magic that way--even though I haven't been in a working temple environment for a few years now.  While the A.'.A.'. is similar in structure, I've never been a fan of Crowley--though I have more empathy for him these days than I once did.  And there are various Masonic and para-masonic organizations which also share a lodge ...
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Toward a Methodology for Reality Hacking

"Superstition is the tribute paid by ignorance to knowledge of which it recognises the value but does not understand the significance." Dion Fortune, Sane Occultism If you have read my previous post on magic as hacking , you may find yourself persuaded by the similarities between the two activities, but asking yourself where exactly that leaves you as far as putting the information into action.  A set of techniques or processes gets us only so far as the use cases they were developed for:  continuing to slavishly rely on them in circumstances they were not intended to address seems superstitious at best (using Dion Fortune's definition above), and potentially ineffectual or counterproductive at worst.  Nor does it help to understand what the tactics are unless you can also have some insight into where (and why) these can and should be applied.  With that in mind, I've been spending my time lately considering what a methodology would look like if we are to approach ma...
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