Hermeticulture

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

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 well-maintained than it i

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 spirits.  Joseph Lisiewski

 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!

  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 arenas, but from

 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 setting i

"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 mag

We look hard We look through We look hard to see for real Sisters of Mercy, "Lucretia My Reflection" Inspired by my recent conversation with the delightful Erik Arneson , I decided to take some time and write up a more cohesive set of my thoughts on the interrelationship of magic and computer hacking. Prefatory note:  "Hacking" is a very broad term, which covers not only intrusion into computer systems, but also their defense, engineering, and an entirely vast array of non-computer-related tinkering, making, and puzzling.  Here, however, I'm talking specifically about the offensive side of hacking:  the approach to breaking into computers and networks. In my day job, I'm a professional computer hacker.  I work on an internal red team, which means that I'm paid by my employer to break into our own systems before criminal threat actors can do so, and serve as a sparring partner for our network defenders.  In recent years I've seen a great many parallel

I recently had the pleasure of being interviewed by Erik Arneson , host of the outstanding Arnemancy podcast .  We had a delightful conversation on the relationship of magic and computer hacking, the esoteric uses of cryptography, and a great deal about the philosophical underpinnings of magic--including some of the big questions that arise when you begin to explore the nature of magic itself. Mercifully, we did not talk about the Kybalion. Big thanks to Erik for having me on the podcast! Listen now:  Anything but the Kybalion

 My friend Taylor Bell recently interviewed me for the Green Lion Podcast , in a two-part episode.  I always have great conversations with Taylor, and it was a lot of fun to record this one together.  We dig into the weeds of magic, Forteana, and all things weird and wonderful. Interview Part One Interview Part Two

  Recently I had my first podcast interview, on Projeto Mayhem .  Watch as I get tag-teamed by Marcelo del Debbio and Andre Descrovi about the Kybalion, one of the most controversial texts in modern western occultism.  Thanks to both of them for having me on the show and for the thought-provoking questions!

After two full years of deliberation, I recently resigned from the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.  I had been a member for more than a decade, almost half of it as an Adept.  I had been struggling with this decision for two years, after I had a falling out with my mother temple in early 2019.  At the time, I exercised my right as an Adept to unaffiliate with that temple and continue on my Path as a solitary practitioner.  But in doing so, I felt adrift.  I had effectively lost not only my chosen family of 10 years, but all of the people in my life I held dear who spoke my own native spiritual language.  I had already experienced the Golden Dawn tradition elsewhere, first initiating into a different Order back in 2005, and anyone can walk that Path alone if they so choose--so my resignation didn't mean that I couldn't pursue my own spiritual journey anymore.  But my chosen family was irreplaceable, as was the experience of doing lodge-style magic with that family and having

In my last post on this blog, I had reflected on the perspective voiced by the character of Henry Fogg in Lev Grossman's The Magicians  that the magician's inner pain is what makes them stronger: that they "burn it as fuel, for light and warmth," and in so doing have "learned to break the world that has tried to break [them]." I said at the time that I would leave an analysis of that question to my next post on the subject. It turns out there's no way to answer that question except through experience.  And if we hadn't already had enough inner pain as it was, the novel coronavirus has affected us all in our own disparate ways, giving us plenty more of it to deal with.  It's certainly left me with my own share of scars to bear. So, what deep truths have I learned about the nature of magic and pain?  Was Fogg right after all? Well, the jury's still out.  Do those of us who are called to the magical path experience pain more deeply than