u/alcofrybasnasier

It’s surprsing what you can learn reading philosophy. I just read Schopenhauer’s essay on the Will in Nature, his panpsychist treatise. At the end, he discusses magic and how it proves his philosophy is correct. Arthur had an enlarged ego.

The essay turned Nietzsche against his teacher. Kierkegaard found Schopenhauer’s turn to magic unfortunate even though he said that he and Schopenahuer were on the same page otherwise - a fact people don’t know about Kierkegaard.

Schopenhauer’s essay spurred a resurgence in occult movements. Blavatsky and members Order of the Golden Dawn like Yeats credit influence from Schopenhauer.

One of my main contentions is that studying philosoohy from all eras is crucial for theurgic occultists. Porphyry, Iamblichus, Proclus, Damascius, Sosipatra were all formidable philosophers. They studied Plato, Plotinus, Aristotle, the Hermetic texts, Pythagoras, Numenius, and so on. They were current on all things philosphical.

Whether it’s ancient western or eastern classics, Medieval, Renaissance, Enlightenment, Romantic, or modern philosophy, one should read all manner of philosophy to strengthen reasoning and logical skills, as well as to prepare the mind for the journey on the path to the One.

Favorites for modern occultists include Heidegger, Bataille, or some deconstructionists. I’ve read my fair share of them but my money is on straight-laced philosophers like Nagel, Ewing, Leslie, James, Whitehead Russell, Hameroff, and so on. The latter authors have a form of panpsychism as part of their teachings. Research into the former group finds no such teachings. I believe panpsychism is fundamental to theurgy and occultism.

It is a plaster impression of an ancient Greco-Egyptian magical gem (intaglio) dating back to around the 2nd Century AD. Part of the collections at the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin (Berlin State Museums). Cataloged in the Campbell Bonner Magical Gems Database under ID Number DE-Berlin-Aeg_9864 (CBd-221). The gemstone was carved out of green and red jasper.

The voces magicae (magical words of power) combine the incantatory power of the divine world of the Ogdoad and the specific, chthonic powers of the Egyptian god of the underworld and Hekate, guide through the portals of death and to a new life in reincarnation.

The impression given by the museum curator suggests this is a gem to be used to bring down suffering on others. I suggest it's meant to protect the living and to provide guidance after death to a life of wisdom and joy in the afterlife and beyond.

Anubis combines the one who helps prepare the soul for the afterlife, as judge of the soul's life on earth, and guide through the halls of death. Combined with the invocation of the Ogdoad - the primal powers that gave birth to the universe - we see that the charm is meant for regeneration and rebirth.

• ΦΟΡΒΑΦΟΡΒΗ (Phorbaphorbē) - Powerful, rhythmic variation of Phorba; known secret magical name used to invoke Hekate as a cosmic, all-consuming deity.
• ΒΡΙΜΩ (Brimō) - "The Terrifying" or "The Angry One". A formidable epithet used almost exclusively for underworld goddesses like Hekate, Demeter, or Persephone when acting in their fiercest capacities.
• ΟΓΔΩ (Ogdō) - Refers to the divine and holy Ogdoad (the number eight), which represents the eight fundamental primordial deities of Egyptian mythology, bridging Hekate's identity with the Egyptian cosmos overseen by Anubis.

Kierkegaard teaches that what's important in self-transformation is not what you claim from your past to enact in your present but how you appropriate it. Is it a dead past or an instant infinite with possibility?

The history of philosophy and theology has been a quest for the pure self, somehow lost. That is perhaps a mistake. It's not about reclaiming a dead past—"let the dead bury the dead"—but the building of an eternal future. Choose your past not as the past but as preparation for the future.

Kierkegaard also teaches that liberation in the nothingness of the present acknowledges both the death of the past and its resurrection in a just future. We must begin with the transience and nothingness of everyday life to transform the mundane into the miraculous.

The occult sciences promise infinite and impossible identities. Some traditions teach that nothingness forms the basis of who we are. The play of potential selves is important but only as a tensioned antithesis to what must be. Without engaging the real world in its temporality, its finiteness, we end up being inauthentic selves.

The Existentialist, Sartre, borrowed heavily from Kierkegaard's Concept of Anxiety. For both anxiety is the possibility of growth. In anxiety, you show a care for your self in such a way as to want to protect it. Despair is the infinite aspect of this care. Despair shows the realization that you wish to find a self alive with infinite and eternal possibilities.

In the Platonic, and Neoplatonic traditions based on the Egyptian teachings about the afterlife, a journey epitomized by the Egyptian Book of the Dead, philosophy as a way of life involves an initiation into living to die. This way is embodied in the Socratic teaching that

"The wise person seeks death all their life, and for this reason death is not terrifying to them."

Not only does this teaching show what to fear and what not to fear, the initiation into philosophy leads to the cleansing of self and preparation for life after death. The path to this revelation is the continual unveiling of otherworldly potentialities and the envisioning of eternal realities.

Constructing an eternal self occurs in the nothingness of the present. It is within this Nothing that possibilities emerge that guide us on to overcoming the world of shadows and the emptiness of history.

"The world does not subsist ... but for the sake of someone who conceives [themselves] as non-existent." - Rabbi Abbahu Sothah

In each of us, faced with the nothingness of anonymity in modern culture, besieged by the phantasies of technology, there rises the desire for the Other. This Other is what we are not. It is a trace of possibilities pregnant with infinity.

"Take the veil from my eyes that I may see the marvels that spring from thy law." - Psalm 119:18

painting: Charles Sellier (French, 1830–1882) - The Initiation

Feeling out of place and somehow at odds with society and the world are common feelings and thoughts of those who seek greater meaning in existence. For Theurgists, that meaning is participation at the most fundamental level in the creation of spiritual reality. Reality is our heritage.

I study and practice Theurgy to ultimately experience union with the One. The insights that I have gained while practicing theurgy have helped me improve my self-confidence, illuminated with internal self-awareness. They enable me to piece together a coherent narrative of my life experiences.

When Neoplatonic philosopher & Theurgist Iamblichus says that theurgy helps “recall of all our faculties to their original principles” he refers to the cosmological notion of apokatastasis, the general restoration of all things to their original settings, another version of the reset metaphor.

We reset our selves to the beginning and start the ascent to the One, the Good, the Transcendent, the reality with many names but only oneness beyond names and thought.

Synesius - friend of Hypatia and a Theurgist, and future Christian bishop - reports on theurgic beliefs and practices around dreams. Iamblichus speaks of receiving via dreams theurgic rites, nomina barbara, and synthemata.

As goddess of dreams and omens, Theurgic Hekate educates us into the mysteries of theurgy and the universe.

Photo: Austrian fine-art photographer Matthias Lueger.

The crew of four’s trip to the moon and their return has been magical in a sense beyond simply astonishing. It has expanded our sense of what the human will and consciousness can achieve.

But what about the magic that maguses and witches say they believe in and practice? Is that magic real?

“The true magician is not one who performs prodigy in the air, but the one who has absolute mastery over himself and all the forces of nature that are within him and outside of him.” – Eliphas Levi

From the practitioner of magic’s first-person perspective magic is a concentration of will focused on an outcome. The thinking is that if I can sustain a concerted will, along with invoking various spirits who help to manifest my desire, my desire - otherwise unattainable - can be accomplished.

One practitioner says that magic is the ability to impact the forces that rule coincidence. This seems promising. Who hasn’t experienced coincidence in their lives? Do you just shrug it off when it happens or does it make you ponder the forces that allowed it to happen at that time, in those circumstances? Can that convergence of cosmic forces - if that is behind it - be harnessed and somehow activated by will and the arrangement of what practitioners call correspondences?

For me, one indication that these practitioners of real magic could be on to something is the power that some humans appear to exert over raw animal energy. For example, have you seen the videos of people stopping raging elephants and rhinos? One man did it with focusing the animal’s attention on a stick and moving it up and down.

Another shows a man catching a cobra with his bare hands

What shall we say these exhibitions of human will are the products of? Why would a charging elephant that can crush a human like a bug stop mid-charge and stand as though in obedience?

Is there magic beyond this naturally occurring phenomenon? Stephen Skinner says that the reason ceremonial magic could be true is that books of magic like grimoires continue to sold. He says this form of magic works with entities that exist in other realms beyond the five human senses.

Theurgy is the oldest version of this knowledge, harnessing the power of these entities to understand self and the full range of the self’s interaction with all levels of reality.

All matter lives, and everything that lives possesses intelligence … The atom is conscious, if man is conscious, … exercises will-power if man does, is, in its own little way, all that man is. … I cannot avoid the conclusion that all matter is composed of intelligent atoms, and that life and mind are merely synonyms for the aggregation of atomic intelligence.– Thomas Alva Edison