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 ...