Having started my occult path before the arrival of the internet I am “old school” and believe that initiation is not something you get automatically. A friend of mine in another school is having problems with a student who felt he should be initiated because he said so. He had shown up, paid his dues, and he felt he was ready. He was so shocked when his teacher said no, he left in a huff and then started to attack the teacher online for not noticing his greatness. Like many modern “magicians” he has failed to see that his very actions are exactly why the teacher did not want him initiated yet. The assumption was that rejection was the ego of an
group mind
SORTING OUT THE SHEEP FROM THE GOATS
Occult groups can't let everyone in. They have to be exclusive clubs and there are good reasons for this. One of the difficult issues that a modern occult group faces is “who do you let in” which actually comes out as “who don’t you like.” The modern “new age” theory is that everyone should be let in unless you can find a damn fine reason not to. However his is not entirely true. There are some people who should not be allowed into an esoteric group until they have mastered some fairly basic skills and some will find the work actually dangerous. Mental illness On my Facebook group were talking earlier about being excluded from occult groups for mental illness – and it
Modern esoteric groups have a judgement problem
It does not take much before the thin veneer of hypocritical traditional Christian attitudes comes bubbling up to the surface in the occult community. Recently two occult leaders, EA Koetting and New Falcon Press’s Michael Miller were arrested. Koetting on drugs and weapons charges, and Miller for using a camera to spy on kids having showers. Immediately certain elements within the occult community closed ranks. If they did not try to delete posts in which the news was made public they were loudly sounding off about how it was wrong to talk about. Some justified their stance on the basis that it is bad for occultism if it is linked to such people by the popular press. Others felt that
WHY GOOD PEOPLE DO EVIL MAGIC
A number of years ago I did not believe in magical attacks. Most of the magicians I knew had been positive that attacking someone was a bad thing – unless there were real reasons. A “real reason” presented itself in the 1990s when I was involved in a ritual to curse Saddam Hussain. The ritual was designed to twat his expansion plans by effectively cursing all his actions. The ritual, which was under some senior people of the Order I was in at the time, got a little out of control and the doll which represented Hussain was damaged – its neck was pulled out of shape. We thought our curse worked when the First Gulf war ended with Hussain totally
Magical Egregore 101
Since the Magical Order of the Aurora Aurea decided to leave the Golden Dawn, there has been some somewhat strange comments about egregores including one very confused comment from one clearly uninformed “chief of an order.” Ironically there was been one comment from a chap who has spent a long time claiming I was not Golden Dawn for years, suddenly insisting I was because I did the same rituals as him. It is nice to be wanted, I guess!Since I learnt about egoregore early on in my training it never occurred to me that people did not really understand how they worked, so I thought I better explain. If anything it will make why we have walked away from the