The modern occult scene is drowning in sparkle and stupidity, and nothing proves it more than the rise of the overpriced online course.
Click on one of these overdesigned horrors and you’re greeted with ambient synth drones, mystical fonts cribbed from a Lord of the Rings DVD menu, and the promise of ancient secrets revealed. Hand over a few grand and you’ve just paid for the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram (again).
We’re talking eye-watering prices for material so old it’s public domain in drag. No gnosis, just Regardie with a Canva upgrade.
There are exceptions. Doc Solomon’s Aaron Leitch puts out stuff that’s cheap, usable, and doesn’t try to convince you he was trained in Atlantis. His work is practical, down-to-earth and mercifully free of unicorn emojis. Servants of the Light do a good course, but only if you put in the work. If you like to learn about Tarot in an esoteric system and adore the New Age approach and a cult of personality around dead leaders, there is always BOTA. But they are an anomaly in a sea of “Awaken Your Divine Lightbody in Five Easy Payments” nonsense and don’t cost an arm and a leg.
A few years ago, MOAA ran a proper correspondence course. It was written to cover the entire Golden Dawn outer order. The initiations were converted into pathworkings, the exercises were stripped down and made practical, and it didn’t cost a bloody fortune. The whole thing took just a couple of months to write, less time than it would’ve taken to bang out a book. It ran for 20 months, and the plan was to let students move through it gradually while submitting meditation diaries to supervisors.
Did students do the work? Did they hell. The first course had half of them drop out. Second course, half of those left bailed too. Only two people got to lesson 20. It wasn’t even about the money. The course was free at first. Then it was priced at a whopping five bucks, just so people would treat it like it had some value. Still, the dropout rate made lemmings look committed.
In the end, we killed the course off. Not because it wasn’t good, it was, but because it took far too much time and energy to babysit people who couldn’t be arsed to do a daily meditation and write a few lines about it. The return on effort was zero.
Now here’s the really grim bit. None of these modern course “teachers” seem to have been trained by anyone. Their sole qualification is that they’ve slapped together a course and stuck a price tag on it. Some of these courses look suspiciously like they’ve been spat out by AI or lifted wholesale from someone else’s hard work. Aaron Leitch’s course was pirated by someone who then failed to provide even the most basic support or instruction.
One recent commercial course even tried to charge several thousand euro for a bland rehash of the Middle Pillar and LBRP. No context, no depth, not even a fresh thought. Just the same basic rituals you can find in second-hand bookshops or written in biro on the back of a pub napkin by someone who once read Crowley.
If you’re paying top dollar for PDFs, pre-recorded YouTube videos and a certificate designed in Microsoft Word with a fake Latin motto, you’re not being initiated into a mystery tradition. You’re funding someone’s new kitchen. These can be as lucrative as online conferences which Paola wrote about here.
It is hard to tell if a course is worth the money. Some of the worst junk is dressed up like the second coming of Mathers. It is based on the premise that ‘real occult secrets’ must be delivered by Harpo Marx [pictured] dressed in black robes, pretending to be a magician while honking through scripts. These productions aren’t meant to teach anything; they’re built to match what punters think arcane mystery looks like.
Sometimes you can dig up the truth about these clowns with a quick internet search. There might be complaints, legal threats, warnings, or whispers on forums. Other times, you’ll find nothing but polished nonsense and marketing fluff. Hefty price tags are another clue. If it looks like it was priced by a cocaine nose jobs of Wall Street, it’s probably bollocks.
It’s not difficult to create a decent online course, especially if it focuses on a specific aspect of a tradition. They end up like the weekend workshops I went to in the 1990s. You’d go, get a brainful of insight from someone who knows what they are talking about, and be left to work out the rest on your own. That model worked because it wasn’t pretending to be a path to enlightenment wrapped in glitter.
The real irony is that this knowledge is readily available, either for free or in books. Real occult work lives in grimoires, academic texts and the reading matter that requires thought, not shopping carts and countdown timers.
Thanks to influencer culture, algorithmic sleaze and faux exclusivity, the grifters have levelled up. Their marketing tools are sharper but the scam is as old as a tarot deck.
Magical training still demands effort. It means reading, contemplating, trying stuff out and thinking critically. Most of these so-called courses bank on you doing none of the above.
So next time a glossy, magical mega-package tempts you, ask what you’re buying. If it’s just the LBRP and Middle Pillar served with fairy dust and fake gravitas, save your money. Buy a book and learn something.
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