The recent attention to the pulling down of statues of those whose history has fallen short of modern expectations has a long magical tradition. In Ancient Times statues had a magical function. They were supposed to represent either Gods or Heroes looking down on society and protecting it. Sometimes they were used as a focal point for a god at a particular site. In other times a statue was erected to a dead human “hero” to appease them. In Egypt, the Hermetica (and repeated by Iamblicus) statues were used by magicians to communicate directly with the dead or Gods. They were doorways between the worlds, and the statues could speak. But statues were often destroyed or buried because they were not doing their

One of the central issues about contacting spirits, either ritually, channeling, scrying or through inner plane chats is a fear that they might be lying. Much time has been wasted by magicians listening to what they believe is their “contact” or “an angel,” getting duff information and acting on it. Iamblichus mentions spirits who seek to trick the magician into following them by pretending to be much more important than they are. Much of the problem is based on a lack of knowledge of how spirits work. The assumption often is that the gods and spirits are “like mighty humans” and approached in the same way. However, Gods and spirits are not humans -- they are spiritual forces which have a consciousness

In looking at ancient systems and texts there are shedloads of pitfalls for those who have worked within a system and those who are self-taught. When people have started to suggest that you do not have undergo that basic training in a system and can just launch into ancient texts and cobble together a workable system, I wonder how. I love adopting a historical approach to magic – my bookshelf is no longer dominated by modern occult classics and has been replaced with academic texts and different translations of source texts. It is part of my make-up that I love history (up until the renaissance where I lose interest.) It is natural then that my path would involve taking a historical

If you had to boil down Hermetic thought into a single idea, then you are left with a saying which would be familiar to those who know their Led Zeppelin lyrics (and the Three Musketeers). It would also prove inconsistent with the Kybalion and other modern beliefs as to what Hermetics really are. All is one and one is All. Meditating on this one phrase can keep you up at night and when accepted as truth and applied to most magical or spiritual situations it answers most questions. Hermetics is a very wide church and binding it to too many ideas is tricky but the idea of a Monad is consistent.  It means that everything is made up of One Thing or a

Being locked down during the Coronavirus and having your life being put on hold has taught me a couple of things which are important for the occult path. Some dismantle a few esoteric myths; others were just things I learnt on along we way. It does not matter how experienced you are in magic, or how good, there are somethings which are bigger than you and you cannot deal with (or are meant to) magically. Even if I were able to do a ritual to eradicate the Coronavirus I would not be allowed out of my house for a couple of weeks. No amount of magic will change that. If you look at this issue wider, it means that other

While people mistakenly believe the new-age pseudoscientific mishmash which is the Kybalion is hermetic, few have looked at Corpus Hermetica to work out what the real Hermetic Principles are. There are far more than seven but here are 11 which I produced, without too much effort (there are many more). 1.      God is One Thing which is unknowable and having built creation within itself. If anything is a division, then it is only an illusion. It contains within itself everything. If in doubt remember that everything is One Thing.  This has a huge impact on those looking for dualities such as Good and Evil for if such dualities are real, they are illusions within God.  So if we can’t know God

The Hermetic tradition is all about Thoth and so words are really important.  However collections of words called stories have a life of their own and and important too. In my novel “When a Tree Falls,” I wrote this about stories, mostly as a joke. However, like many things in that book, it was all true. “It is a secret known only to journalists, novelists, and storytellers that there are only fourteen unique stories in the world. These archetypal stories come from one source. The names, places and material facts of the story might change throughout history, but always the essence is the same. Even stories that twist and turn until you are not sure what the outcome will be will

The idea that Daemons are partly human-made and partly divine appears to have hacked off those who are religious or that believe that Ancient texts do not support the idea. My goal in making these ideas available is to show how magic works, why it does not, and how it is different from religion. To briefly recap, a human cannot connect directly to an invoked spiritual force and unconsciously creates a messenger or Daemon for it based on their perception. The nature and power of the Daemon depend on the human’s ability to tune their ideas to that aspect of the divine force. Humans often mistake their Daemon for divine energy. This happens naturally in religion and is why some of