/ Recent content on Hugo -- gohugo.io en-us Sun, 15 Oct 2023 10:15:31 -0500 /about/about/ Sun, 15 Oct 2023 10:15:31 -0500 /about/about/ About the site This website has had a long history of false starts, bad ideas, and forgotten intentions. I hadn’t thought about in years, until recently when I attempted to find something online and a web search linked to one of my old blog pages. I had no idea I still hosted these pages anywhere, as at the time there existed no way to access them from the main page of the site’s current, forgotten iteration. /posts/mantra-sigils/ Mon, 26 Jun 2017 09:07:26 -0500 /posts/mantra-sigils/ The chaos magick approach to sigils has spread through the vast majority of modern magical traditions, and for good reason! They work. Many variations on the theme exist and I particularly enjoy working with the Mantra Sigil. An operator creates the statement of intent much the same way as creating the more common pictographic sigil. Start with a statement of intent: “I will succeed in obtaining my first Patreon pledge." (Back when I originally wrote this, I experimented with Patreon. /posts/trouble-with-positive-thinking/ Thu, 06 Apr 2017 09:07:15 -0500 /posts/trouble-with-positive-thinking/ The casual observer can see the positive thinking movement everywhere. The core concepts get shuffled about and depending on the cards we draw we get things like Byrne’s The Secret, Hill’s Think and Grow Rich, Emoto’s Secret of Water, or a vast swath of the New Age movement. A little positive thinking can help carry us through the tough times and help us achieve our aims. Dogmatic positive thinking is plain destructive. /posts/chaos/ Tue, 07 Mar 2017 09:06:55 -0500 /posts/chaos/ Chaos, as a word, conjures different images for different people. To many, the word suggests absolute randomness. Others immediately think of a thing, or non-thing, from which all things manifest. This reminds me of a stanza from the Tao Te Ching: “Tao gives birth to…10,000 things.” Ten thousand, in the old Taoist texts, represents a sufficiently large number to encompass everything. But science associates chaos not with randomness but with unpredictability. /posts/magus/ Thu, 14 Jul 2016 09:06:42 -0500 /posts/magus/ I’ve never considered using the term Magus to describe myself. Though its classical definition is effectively synonymous with magician, the various Orders used the term as a name for high-grade members. Calling myself Magus would feel a bit disingenuous and perhaps even a bit pretentious. Magician doesn’t resonate strongly either, but it works well enough so I’ve stuck with it. Recently, though, I came across a passage by Eliphas Levi in a book and it struck me deeply. /posts/whisky-keeps-better/ Sun, 12 Jun 2016 09:06:24 -0500 /posts/whisky-keeps-better/ Ramsey Duke mentioned the phrase “whisky keeps better than beer” in SSOTMBE Revised (2002) and it struck me as powerful metaphor. People once described whisky as aqua vitae in Latin, though as a Scotch lover I like the Scottish Gaelic uisge beatha; both terms translate to “water of life.” How does one turn fermenting grain into this water of life? By distilling it. In a purely material sense, distillation separates the pure from the impure. /posts/smart-spells/ Thu, 28 Apr 2016 09:06:08 -0500 /posts/smart-spells/ When crafting a simple or off-the-cuff spell, it’s tempting to work from a simple statement of intent. I want more money. I want a blue car. Sometimes even simpler, such as a single word: love, prosperity, etc. These sorts of vague statements communicate little more than ideas. It’s hard for magick to work them. Think about it. Go to a car dealership and tell the sales person “I want a car. /posts/enchanted-life/ Wed, 27 Apr 2016 00:00:00 +0000 /posts/enchanted-life/ The rise of dis-enchantment I have a huge respect for science. For all the things it has taught us and allowed us, as humans, to achieve. The world made smaller and information made so freely, often overwhelmingly, available. (Of course, quality information remains a rarity here on the Internet.) In Science’s quest to explain everything in neat little causal chains reduced to the smallest quanta, it has also dis-enchanted the world. /posts/what-is-magick/ Mon, 25 Apr 2016 09:03:49 -0500 /posts/what-is-magick/ I spell magick with a ‘k’ to create a clear separation between it – the occult, the mystical – and the illusion, sleight of hand, entertainment sort of magic. And, I rather like the way it looks. But why do I feel the need for such a distinction? Indubitably, magick is one of the subtlest and most difficult of the sciences and arts. There is more opportunity for errors of comprehension, judgement, and practice than in any other branch of physics.