Hermeticulture

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...

 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...