Thread for the Occult & Esotericism [Resources]

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Occult Rock [Expanding Mind Podcast]

"Host Erik Davis talks with author Peter Bebergal, author of Season of the Witch: How the Occult Saved Rock and Roll, about imagination, performance, and rock star delusions."

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fire said:
I think the main problem with exerting any kind of magic across a large scale is inherent in the nature of the manifest reality. There are an infinitesimal number of data points that by their very nature are in the ever-present motion of fluid change. Good luck.
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I think the magick used to shift your own subconscious processes works at least some of the time. The kind used to try and influence events...well I've never really tried any of those rituals so I can't say...
 
Halloween as Liminal Window Zone

...Surrealized zone likes Halloween, Burning Man or Comic Con, where people shape-shift into novel forms that reflect the unconscious more than conventionalized values and aesthetics, are liminal window zones where the boundary between the imaginal and what gamers call the “RW” (real world) blurs. Just as the liminal zones of dawn and dusk are seen by many spiritual and magical traditions as powerful times to express intentions and seek visions, you may also find that synchronicity, vision and inspiration are heightened in surreal zones. They can be temporary autonomous zones where one can shape shift and deviate from conventional expectations. I have found for myself that these surrealized zones heighten my imagination, make visions more accessible, and allow me to feel that I am walking along edges where various realms impinge...
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Not sure about this part, would need to see data:

many schizophrenics are people who were undergoing spontaneous shamanic initiatory experiences without any guidance, and with neuro-pharmecutical sabotage from modern psychiatry, so that they never pass through the initiation but remain permanently liminal. This theory would account for the complete absence of schizophrenia and many other psychopathologies noted by anthropologists who have studied tribal societies.
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Ultraculture University

I've not looked into this deeply - as with anything related to the occult could be amazing, could be garbage. I do like the Ultraculture site though.

Ultraculture has courses on magick, and have updated their site into what they say is a genuine education portal. They (maybe it's one guy?) note the following:

- A fully feature-laden online education site, with HD video hosted from Vimeo Pro, courses split into chapters, reward badges, forums for students and more
- You can preview courses by watching the first unit for free
- You can now create an account to save your courses, track your progress and interact with teachers and students
- The entire site now sits behind two SSL layers (both at the host and CDN), ensuring your information is kept consummately safe

And many, many more features and improvements—it's a REAL ONLINE EDUCATION PORTAL now, not just a collection of archived videos, and now that it's done (it took me about three months to put together) I'm VERY excited to start adding lots more courses, events and happenings.
 
Led Zeppelin's Dance with the Occult

Unless you looked for it, the words would essentially be invisible, but their very existence on the record would impress a great truth that Page was convinced the world needed: “Do what thou wilt.” This single moment serves as microcosm of the entirety of the influence occult would have on rock and roll. It would spread out into rock’s atmosphere in ways neither Manning nor the band could have predicted. The timing was perfect. Music fans were anxiously waiting for the next incarnation of Dionysus to remind them the god was not dead. He was merely biding his time while the astral trails of psychedelic rock dissolved. Led Zeppelin perfectly encapsulates the power of the occult imagination, how it continues to see expression, and how it was able to completely propel rock and roll into electrifying new directions.
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The Lore and Lure of Aleister Crowley: A Dialog

Nearly six decades since his passing, the famed occultist Aleister Crowley continues to fascinate. Prompted by the publication of two recent biographies, Aleister Crowley: Magick, Rock and Roll, and the Wickedest Man in the World, by Gary Lachman (Tarcher/Penguin) and Aleister Crowley: The Beast in Berlin: Art, Sex, and Magick in the Weimar Republic by Tobias Churton (Inner Traditions), Reality Sandwich invited the two authors to discuss Crowley’s relevance today. The exchange took place by email.
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Pepe Silvia said:
Does anyone have any information on Franz Bardon?
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Hi Pepe, years ago I used to frequent several forums where people were readers of, and practitioners of, Bardon's "initation into hermetics", some of whom for many years. (I have read the book, but not practically followed any of it).

I never really encountered any negative comments about it, in fact quite the contrary. if you're interested in his practices, perhaps google his name & forum...I'm sure Taobums has numerous threads on it, but I can't recall for the life of me the other forum there was regular discussion (10 years ago or more!).....there are some incredibly detailed threads out there.

In regards his life story, just google it I suppose! That's what I did!! Interesting chap......:)
 
manjit said:
Hi Pepe, years ago I used to frequent several forums where people were readers of, and practitioners of, Bardon's "initation into hermetics", some of whom for many years. (I have read the book, but not practically followed any of it).

I never really encountered any negative comments about it, in fact quite the contrary. if you're interested in his practices, perhaps google his name & forum...I'm sure Taobums has numerous threads on it, but I can't recall for the life of me the other forum there was regular discussion (10 years ago or more!).....there are some incredibly detailed threads out there.

In regards his life story, just google it I suppose! That's what I did!! Interesting chap......:)
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Thanks Manjit! I bought IIH back in august and the theory section is really interesting, even though the book is usually praised for its practices rather than the theory. I was starting on the first step for a little while, but then school started back up and I fell out of practicing. I think I'm gonna give it another try, only this time I'm going to stick with it and see how far I can go.
 
“Thinking it” in the Mansion of Many Apartments

To me, the suggestion not to “overthink” the “dots” of the phenomena we discuss here is a suggestion to remain in—or return to—this chamber. Now I know that Michael does not really think this way. He is constantly investigating the phenomena on a deep level, and he has a theory of Reality as information that largely overlaps with my own worldview. He is thinking it, not overthinking it, and I perceive Michael, as well as the majority of regular commenters here, to be open to the “burden of the Mystery.”

Just as the self-labeled skeptics are prone to look down upon those as yet clinging to their comforting beliefs and congratulate themselves on their ability to embrace the harsh truths of materialism, I am tempted to pat myself on the back for having accepted the “burden of the Mystery.” I am open to all of the phenomena out there! I do not simplify! I’m a true intellectual, dangit.

But when one is truly in the Mist, one finds difficulty cashing that check. There is no teller at the window. There is no one to confirm that, yes, one is just so right about everything. Indeed, the contradictions and issues one perceives impugn one’s ability to sort them all out, to paint the Big Picture once and for all. Should Michael permit, it is lack of ease and comfort in the Mist that I would like to explore in my next guest post.
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"Robert Anton Wilson" from The Occult World

As an occultist thinker, Wilson needs to be seen in light of his reading of Crowley, and specifcally of the pragmatist and even reductionist thread that runs, inconsistently, throughout Crowley’s work. In the introduction to his 1903 edition of the Goetia, for example, the young Crowley argues that ‘the spirits of the Goetia are portions of the human brain.’ Crowley later voiced something closer to Wilson’s own model agnosticism in ‘Liber O vel Manus et Sagittae,’ an instruction manual for the A.:A.: that Wilson often quoted. Alerting students that they will encounter the discussion of things – like gods and spirits – which may or may not exist, Crowley asserts that ‘it is immaterial whether they exist or not. By doing certain things, certain results follow; students are most earnestly warned against attributing objective reality or philosophical validity to any of them.’ Though offering a simplistic portrayal of the contradictory Crowley, Wilson helped propagate an infuential ‘countercultural’ vision of Crowley.
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H.P. Lovecraft & The Occult

In contrast to the implicit supernaturalism of ghost stories or the gothic tale, the metaphysical background of Lovecraft’s stories is a ‘cosmic indifferentism’ rooted in the nihilistic and atheist materialism that Lovecraft professed at great length in his fascinating letters. This lifelong philosophical stance led Lovecraft to embrace the disillusioning powers of science, but also to pessimistically anticipate science’s ultimate evisceration of human cultural norms and comforts. His weird tales were imaginative diversions from this nihilism, but their horror reflected it as well. Lovecraft’s literary vision was also amplified by the vivid, often nightmarish, and intensely detailed dreams he experienced throughout his life. A crucial influence on his fiction, Lovecraft’s dreaming can be seen as a phantasmic supplement to the reductive naturalism of his intellectual outlook, lending his work an uncanny dynamism that helps explain its continued power to stimulate thought, imagination, and cultural creation.
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To illuminate Lovecraft’s fictional transformation of the occult, it is helpful to conceptually distinguish two streams of lore and practice of the Western magical arts. On the one hand, there is an elite stream of learned magic associated with literacy, arcane knowledge, and to some degree fraternal orders—an ‘esoteric’ cultural orientation that includes medieval monks as well as, for example, Victorian Freemasons enthralled with Egyptian mysteries. On the other hand, there is the vast, amorphous, and often highly localized body of folklore, seasonal ritual, herbcraft, hexing, and healing techniques associated with rural life or communities with low degrees of social status and formal education. This ‘popular’ magical culture has in many ways left scant traces in the historical record, which in turn has allowed scholars and occultists alike to invent sometimes highly speculative accounts of its characteristics—accounts that themselves sometimes become part of the occultist milieu.
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The Counterculture and the Occult

Perhaps the single most important vector for the popularization of occult spirituality in the twentieth century is the countercultural explosion associated with ‘the Sixties’—an era whose political and culture dynamics hardly t within the boundaries of that particular decade. A more useful term was coined by the Berkeley social critic Theodore Roszak, who used the word ‘counterculture’ to describe a mass youth culture whose utopianism and hedonic psycho-social experimentation were wedded to a generalized critique of rationalism, technocracy, and established religious and social institutions. As such, the counterculture significantly overlapped, though also sometimes resisted, the parallel rise of the New Left and its ideological and occasionally violent struggle against more-or-less the same ‘System.’ Within a few short years after its emergence in the middle of the 1960s, the counterculture had transformed social forms, creative production, personal lifestyles, and religious experience across the globe. Though the counterculture was a global phenomenon, its origins and many of its essential dynamics lie in America, which will be the focus of this chapter.
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http://www.academia.edu/9551741/_Th..._Occult_from_The_Occult_World_Routledge_2014_
 
Simulations& the Supernatural: How Tarot Theory & Baudrillard’s Nightmare Shed Light on the Nature of Reality

A groundbreaking perspective, Baudrillard asserted that all of reality is a simulation. He once stated that “we have passed out of the industrial era, in which production was the dominant pattern, into a code-governed phase where the dominant schema is simulation.”[1] And he meant this literally. For this innovative thinker, reality directly coincides with an apparent law of value. What he called ‘hyperreality’,or ‘floating values’, what makes up reality is an indeterminate fluctuation much like money or power. It is significations of reality called simulacra and not reality itself. in other words, an illusion.

“There is no longer such a thing as ideology; there are only simulacra.”

Occultists recognize this line of thought. Specifically, the tarot readers absolutely understand what Baudrillard is referring to and have been espousing this point of view for centuries. In the Trump card of the Major Arcana called the ‘Devil’, the Tarotist intuitively recognizes the bondage or ‘simulation’ of materiality. Whenever this entity turns up in a tarot spread, there is always an idea of restriction or Saturnian influence. It’s not entirely negative, it’s simply a matter of identifying the simulacra in one’s life or unconscious.
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Baudrillard also came to this conclusion but described it in philosophical terms. He asserted that the unconscious relinquished its own reality principle in order to become an operational simulacrum. At the exact point where its psychic principle of reality is confused with its psychoanalytic reality principle, the unconscious becomes another simulation model.[2] But how does it work? For Baudrillard, reality is a “processual matrix”. In its most idealized form, it has a binary structure. it’s a simple questions/answer, stimulus/response format of bi-polarity that pushes us to place ‘value’ or signs of the real instead of the real itself. He states that, “It is the processual mode of the simulations that dominate us. They can be organized as an unstable play of variation, or in polyvalent or tautological modes, without endangering this central principle of bi-polarity: Digitality is, indeed, the divine form of simulation. Why does the WTC in NYC have ‘two’ towers…”[3] Again, the Tarot reader would agree with this idea. Part of reacting to the Devil is to negate the simulation of difference. To slip the veil or chains, so to speak; To not get lost in representations. And that’s the real fear isn’t it?
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And in regards to Baudrillard’s simulation? Occultists are not iconoclasts. We don’t destroy but create in a literal sense. To us, representation occurs only in the re-presenting or re-newing of the sacred. Our entities exist and are both determinate and self-determining. They are created and become autonomous through the act of creation. Are they simulations? Are they simply significations of a reality substituted for reality itself? Are we simply deluding ourselves in a matrix illusion? I would provide a resounding no because of the experiential nature of the occult conjuration. For a simulation to take hold it must have time to form and be accepted by those it tries to enslave. The trajectory of ceremonial magick forms and reforms continuously in real time. There simply isn’t enough time for a simulation to perverse the pot. During an operation, the nature of reality and what can be accepted is in a state of flux. Magicians speak of doorways or gates. Aspects of numinous reality being experienced as the entity is renewed and re-embodied by ritual. Simulation simply doesn’t enter into this experiential numinousness. And if it could, it would be like a ‘temporary file’ or cookie on your computer hard-drive. Not possibly something that could take hold but something deleted upon exiting the web browser or ‘ritual’. The occultist is naturally familiar with ideas of science, cyberpunk, and technology. But there are inherent differences that allow the occultism to escape simulation bondage. It is these esoteric nuances that make the conjuration such a remarkable shaper of reality.
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Forthcoming Publication: The Occult World

"This volume presents students and scholars with a comprehensive overview of the fascinating world of the occult. It explores the history of Western occultism, from ancient and medieval sources via the Renaissance, right up to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and contemporary occultism. Written by a distinguished team of contributors, the essays consider key figures, beliefs and practices as well as popular culture."
 
Victoria Nelson: Gothicka

Victoria Nelson writes about the rise of the supernatural into mainstream popular culture. Vampires and werewolves, no longer monsters, have become heroes. Vampires and werewolves, no longer monsters, have become heroes. We discuss the allure of the horror genre for a generation that feels technology has failed them. Are zombies infected with a post-technological autism that occurs when the grid crashes? Does the popularity of these creatures express a longing for spirituality?
 
Psychonaut Field Manual: A Cartoon Guide to Chaos Magick:

http://ultraculture.org/blog/2015/01/12/psychonaut-field-manual-cartoon-guide-chaos-magick/

psychonaut-field-manual-bluefluke-chaos-magick-1.jpg

http://twitter.com/home?status=Psyc...naut-field-manual-cartoon-guide-chaos-magick/
 
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