Tag: occultism

metapsykhe:

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

Knowing ourselves and choosing our paths

occultvisions:

woodsatnight:

A lot of the time we will feel lost or disoriented when trying to navigate through all the different magical practices that exist, especially if we’re trying to learn on our own. With no teacher to guide us, we must make our own path through a wild jungle of information, and it’s easy to end up stagnant because we fear we might go wrong, or indeed walking somewhere that will not do us good. In my experience, the most important thing we can do is know our own strengths. And our strengths often lie with our tempers, despite what some may think. Where one person is always very calm and logical, and might very well benefit from a detached approach to magic, another like myself might only be able to do things 100% or not at all, and therefore need a lot more passion in their magic workings. This is why knowing ourselves, both strengths and weaknesses are so important. If we go with the magic that already fits us, we are more likely to breeze through a lot of things that would be challenging had we chosen another route. 

On the other hand, even knowing our strengths we might choose to go where we have no experience and where we are completely wrong-footed. We might go to the place where there will only be trial after trial, and where each trial either means evolving or dying. And that to me is where traditional craft differs from modern and new age practices.
The latter are likely to encourage you to do what feels good, to never push yourself to that place where you are ready to lie down and cry and the only reason you don’t is that you know you won’t get up again if you do. Of course, this has its own benefits, people would not follow this path otherwise. Some people especially might need this approach because they’ve been hard on themselves all their lives and need to learn kindness. This path is gentle healing.
But traditional craft does the thing that magic was always meant to do in my opinion. It forces us to constantly face the weakest parts of ourselves, to know our mortality yet challenge it anyway. And every time we do, new challenges arise and keep us moving. However, it is not nice and there is no point pretending otherwise. Traditional witchcraft might very well take you so far that you are barely human, for better and for worse. It forces you to exist in all worlds at once and that means constantly losing and rebuilding parts of yourself. There can be healing found here too, when we face the darkest parts of our minds we might find that we are unable to hate ourselves anymore, no matter what. But this healing is only a minor part and it is born of never-ending destruction. 

Neither path is neccessarily better than the other, but it is only when we know ourselves that we can make an informed choice in where we want to go.

MY SIDE BLOG OCCULT VISIONS IS COLLECTING
INTERESTING ASPECTS OF THE OCCULT.
AN OVERVIEW, MENT AS INSPIRATION.
IT’S NEITHER COMPLETE, NOR AN INSTRUCTION.

Novaexpress939393

therion-esoterictattoo:

HYMN TO PAN

O man! My man!
Come careering out of the night
Of Pan! Io Pan!
Io Pan! Io Pan! Come over the sea
From Sicily and from Arcady!
Roaming as Bacchus, with fauns and pards
And nymphs and satyrs for thy guards,
On a milk-white ass, come over the sea
To me, to me,
Come with Apollo in bridal dress
(Shepherdess and pythoness)
Come with Artemis, silken shod,
And wash thy white thigh, beautiful God,
In the moon of the woods, on the marble mount,
The dimpled dawn of the amber fount!
Dip the purple of passionate prayer
In the crimson shrine, the scarlet snare,
The soul that startles in eyes of blue
To watch thy wantonness weeping through
The tangled grove, the gnarled bole
Of the living tree that is spirit and soul
And body and brain — come over the sea,
(Io Pan! Io Pan!)
Devil or god, to me, to me,
My man! my man!
Come with trumpets sounding shrill
Over the hill!
Come with drums low muttering
From the spring!
Come with flute and come with pipe!
Am I not ripe?
I, who wait and writhe and wrestle
With air that hath no boughs to nestle
My body, weary of empty clasp,
Strong as a lion and sharp as an asp —
Come, O come!
I am numb
With the lonely lust of devildom.
Thrust the sword through the galling fetter,
All-devourer, all-begetter;
Give me the sign of the Open Eye,
And the token erect of thorny thigh,
And the word of madness and mystery,
O Pan! Io Pan!
Io Pan! Io Pan Pan! Pan Pan! Pan,
I am a man:
Do as thou wilt, as a great god can,
O Pan! Io Pan!
Io Pan! Io Pan Pan! I am awake
In the grip of the snake.
The eagle slashes with beak and claw;
The gods withdraw:
The great beasts come, Io Pan! I am borne
To death on the horn
Of the Unicorn.
I am Pan! Io Pan! Io Pan Pan! Pan!
I am thy mate, I am thy man,
Goat of thy flock, I am gold, I am god,
Flesh to thy bone, flower to thy rod.
With hoofs of steel I race on the rocks
Through solstice stubborn to equinox.
And I rave; and I rape and I rip and I rend
Everlasting, world without end,
Mannikin, maiden, Maenad, man,
In the might of Pan.
Io Pan! Io Pan Pan! Pan! Io Pan!

IO ΠAN

Source: therion-esoterictattoo