IT’S A PART OF ME. MY INNER DEMONS, THE DARK SIDE. IT’S NEVER EASY TO LIVE WITH THESE DEMONS. BUT LIKE OTHER PEOPLE, I MUST DEAL WITH THEM. I’M LISTENING TO THE SIGNALS OF MY SPIRIT AND BODY AND THEN TRY TO REACT TO THEM. I TURN THESE DEMONS INTO ART OR AT LEAST INTO SOMETHING CREATIVE WHICH IS MAYBE GOOD FOR A LATER USE. THE HARDEST PART IS TO ACCEPT THE MENTAL PROBLEMS, BECAUSE IT’S SOMETHING NOBODY LIKES TO ADMIT. BUT IT’S THE FIRST STEP ON A LONG WAY. I RECOMMEND PROFESSIONAL HELP TOO IF IT’S NECESSARY.
I LIKE THE NEW VENOM MOVIE A LOT, EVEN IF THEY MADE IT PG13 AND TONED IT MORE DOWN THAN ADVERTISED FIRST. THE WHOLE THING IS ABOUT DEALING WITH YOUR INNER DEMON. LIKE DEALING WITH DEPRESSION. GREAT ACTING BY TOM HARDY. INSPIRATIONAL.
The Philosopher’s Stone (note double-headed eagle in centre of diamond). See also Vajra (diamond, thunderbolt).
Double-Headed Eagle (The end product of the Magnum Opus). See also: Rebis in Alchemy, the divine Hermaphroditus (child of Hermes (Intellect) and Aphrodite (Feeling)), Ardanarishvara (androgynous form of Shiva merged with Parvati).
Diagrams from the “Philosophus Lecture” of the Golden Dawn. The numbered green text in the second image refers to each diagram.
“Whatever the etymological origin of the word ‘magic’ may be, the mage is the finder and founder of images. Magic consists in fathoming the great Imagination”.
Images and text from “Mage and Image: An Essay on Hermetic Mutation with Coloured Reconstructions of G. … D. … Wands and Sceptres“ by Steffi Grant (1963). Reprinted in “Hidden Lore: Hermetic Glyphs” by Kenneth and Steffi Grant (2006).
A magician is any practitioner of magic; therefore a magician may be a specialist or a common practitioner, even if he or she does not consider himself a magician. All that is required is the possession of esoteric knowledge, traits, or expertise that are culturally acknowledged to harbor magical powers.
Magical knowledge is usually passed down from one magician to another through family or apprenticeships, though in some cultures it may also be purchased. The information transferred usually consists of instructions on how to perform a variety of rituals, manipulate magical objects, or how to appeal to gods or to other supernatural forces. Magical knowledge is often well guarded, as it is a valuable commodity to which each magician believes that he has a proprietary right.
Yet the possession of magical knowledge alone may be insufficient to grant magical power; often a person must also possess certain magical objects, traits or life experiences in order to be a magician. Among the Azande, for example, in order to question an oracle a man must have both the physical oracle (poison, or a washboard, for example) and knowledge of the words and the rites needed to make the object function.
A variety of personal traits may be credited to magical power, though frequently they are associated with an unusual birth into the world. For example, in 16th century Friuli, babies born with the caul were believed to be good witches, benandanti, who would engage evil witches in nighttime battles over the bounty of the next year’s crops.
Certain post-birth experiences may also be believed to convey magical power. For example a person’s survival of a near-death illness may be taken as evidence of their power as a healer: in Bali a medium’s survival is proof of her association with a patron deity and therefore her ability to communicate with other gods and spirits. Initiations are perhaps the most commonly used ceremonies to establish and to differentiate magicians from common people. In these rites the magician’s relationship to the supernatural and his entry into a closed professional class is established, often through rituals that simulate death and rebirth into a new life.
Given the exclusivity of the criteria needed to become a magician, much magic is performed by specialists. Laypeople will likely have some simple magical rituals for everyday living, but in situations of particular importance, especially when health or major life events are concerned, a specialist magician will often be consulted. The powers of both specialist and common magicians are determined by culturally accepted standards of the sources and the breadth of magic. A magician may not simply invent or claim new magic; the magician is only as powerful as his peers believe him to be.
In different cultures, various types of magicians may be differentiated based on their abilities, their sources of power, and on moral considerations, including divisions into different categories like sorcerer, witch, healer and others.
I personally feel this description / defenition of magic is too narrow and simplistic.-
As a matter of fact i question wether terms such as magic, religion and so on are even relevant in a cross cultural / historical anthropological analyzis.
Magic is the claimed art of altering things either by supernatural means or through knowledge of occult natural laws unknown toscience. It is in contrast to science, in that science does not accept anything not subject to either direct or indirect observation, and subject to logical analysis, whereas practitioners of magic claim it is an inexplicable force beyond logic. Magic has been practised in all cultures, and utilizes ways of understanding, experiencing and influencing the world somewhat akin to those offered by religion, though it is sometimes regarded as more focused on achieving results than religious worship. Magic is often viewed with suspicion by the wider community, and is commonly practised in isolation and secrecy. Modern Western magicians generally state magic’s primary purpose to be personal spiritual growth, many seeing magic ritual purely in psychological terms as a powerful means of autosuggestion and of contacting the unconscious mind. Modern perspectives on the theory of magic broadly follow two views, which also correspond closely to ancient views. The first sees magic as a result of a universal sympathy within the universe, where if something is done here a result happens somewhere else. The other view sees magic as a collaboration with spirits who cause the effect.
Three quotes that changed my perspective on magick forever…
“The experience of a magical result will reveal something very odd about the nature of reality. This will have a transformative effect—your previous view of reality, and so yourself, must necessarily change as a result of that experience. It follows then that the more you do magick, the more you will encounter revelation, and the more you will be transformed. It must be stressed that intellectual comprehension, or explanation, reveals or changes nothing. If you want to know the truth, you must experience it. Magick is one way of experiencing truth.” — Alan Chapman, Advanced Magick for Beginners, p. 18
“Magic is a set of techniques and approaches which can be used to extend the limits of Achievable Reality. Our sense of Achievable Reality is the limitations which we believe bind us into a narrow range of actions and successes—what we believe to be possible for us at any one time. In this context, the purpose of magic is to simultaneously explore those boundaries and attempt to push them back—to widen the ‘sphere’ of possible action.” — Phil Hine, Condensed Chaos, p. 33
“Initiation means a beginning, and in the occult it is the occasion when one becomes aware that the world is more than just the material stuff within it. The stuff is merely the façade that lies over a churning sea of psychic energy, power whose currents and tides do more to determine how the material stuff will be arranged in the future than the stuff that is out there right now. Reality is the objective residue of a subjective process. The residue — the material world— has a certain inertia, to be sure; it won’t just go away. But it does dissipate, decay, get eaten up and covered over, and it is only created anew when some mind of some sort — animal, vegetable or mineral — puts effort into that creation. And so does subjectivity make the world. Magick is the art of managing that subjective process, of exploiting the flow of psychic energy to manufacture a reality that is consistent with our wills. A magician’s first initiation occurs in the moment that he or she realizes that this manipulation of psychic energy as a thing in itself is possible.” — Stephen Mace, Shaping Formless Fire: Distilling the Quintessence of Magick, p. 49
Dee straddled the worlds of science and magic just as they were becoming distinguishable. One of the most learned men of his age, he had been invited to lecture on advanced algebra at the University of Paris while still in his early twenties. Dee was an ardent promoter of mathematics and a respected astronomer, as well as a leading expert in navigation, having trained many of those who would conduct England‘s voyages of discovery.
Simultaneously with these efforts, Dee immersed himself in the worlds of magic, astrology, and Hermetic philosophy. He devoted much time and effort in the last thirty years or so of his life to attempting to commune with angels in order to learn the universal language of creation and bring about the pre-apocalyptic unity of mankind. A student of the Renaissance Neo-Platonism of Marsilio Ficino, Dee did not draw distinctions between his mathematical research and his investigations into Hermetic magic, angel summoning and divination. Instead he considered all of his activities to constitute different facets of the same quest: the search for a transcendent understanding of the divine forms which underlie the visible world, which Dee called “pure verities”.
Occult Aspects 