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Magick: Whether & If So How It Works

No...I have not.
I did know several people who did many years ago and from what they told me nothing transpired.

Kenneth Grant had an interesting concept he called Tangential Tantrum, where often he found that he would get results of a completely different nature to what he was trying to achieve. He mentions the theory in the Foreward to Hecate's Fountain. I've had a few similar things happen in that way. Once many years ago I was doing something or other with ritual magick and had no immediate results but the fridge door began opening and shutting very, very quickly and violently again and again for about 10 times. At the time I thought ''that's weird'', it was obviously like some form of poltergeist type manifestation but it had nothing to do with whatever I was doing a the time.

Did the people you know have much experience in the occult? Or were they just experimenting as a one off? I didn't always get the results I wanted when I was starting out, but after decades of practice you should develop the skill and expertise to get results, and if after many years of practice someone still can't perform then I'd try something else as magick isn't for them.
 
Kenneth Grant had an interesting concept he called Tangential Tantrum, where often he found that he would get results of a completely different nature to what he was trying to achieve. He mentions the theory in the Foreward to Hecate's Fountain. I've had a few similar things happen in that way. Once many years ago I was doing something or other with ritual magick and had no immediate results but the fridge door began opening and shutting very, very quickly and violently again and again for about 10 times. At the time I thought ''that's weird'', it was obviously like some form of poltergeist type manifestation but it had nothing to do with whatever I was doing a the time.

Did the people you know have much experience in the occult? Or were they just experimenting as a one off? I didn't always get the results I wanted when I was starting out, but after decades of practice you should develop the skill and expertise to get results, and if after many years of practice someone still can't perform then I'd try something else as magick isn't for them.

Well....the one guy was actually from England and was pretty knowledgeable about the whole occult area and in particular some of the Crowley workings. I don't know how long or how many things he had done before.
The others were ladies and into 'wiccan' magic and were pagan type believers ,and I honestly don't know what they had done before regarding Crowley type things. It seemed to be a phase a few of them were going through in the late 80's and early 90's about the same time I was reading about Crowley. I still own several books by him and several by Regardie ( as well as several by Gurdjieff and Ouspensky which have nothing to do with magick as far as I understand it.).
Can you give me an example of something that you believe you accomplished with 'magick' and how you know it was 'real' (other than the fridge door)?
 
Can you give me an example of something that you believe you accomplished with 'magick' and how you know it was 'real' (other than the fridge door)?

As I've practiced the occult for so many years there's been thousands. And it's just normal to my practice to get results. But just a simple example would be when I was in need of a very precise amount of money that at the time I just couldn't spare, it was around 2011/2012 I think. I performed a ritual and the next day despite not being a gambler I felt compelled to go in to a local bookies, and place a bet, I won the exact amount I needed, 380 quid. Whilst I was in the bookies I noticed I was trembling a lot, despite not feeling nervous or overly anxious.
 
When you perform correctly and to an explicit means it is very common to experience extreme nausea and vomiting. That's a sure sign that you're doing something right. Over in the Fortean Documentaries thread I posted about the late English psychic/medium Eddie Burks (1922 - 2005) who I discovered via the brilliant TV series Ghosthunters (1996-1997). I remember thinking he came across as a nice man and a medium with genuine ability as in one episode he talks about how psychologically and physically exerted he feels after a session, and he needed sleep and food to help recover and psychically recalibrate himself. I know from my own experience this is a real symptom and this was one of the main reasons I posted about him, as it was so refreshing to see such a down to earth and genuine medium on a documentary.

 
Could something like painting a picture be considered a magical act?

If I get an idea for a picture, I spend a lot of time just thinking about it (focusing the will?) before I even start to do preliminary sketches. These sketches will change a lot in the process (sigil craft?) before I am happy enough to proceed.

When a painting is finished, then what you have created has literally come from within you. Something out of nothing. Other people are able to share your vision. If you are lucky, they may be moved by it in some way. If you are really lucky, they may even give you money for it.
This could apply to words and music as well.
 
Could something like painting a picture be considered a magical act?

I definitely think so, I'm an artist too, and you're right. So much goes into a single piece of art, it becomes so heavily charged with psycho-alchemical processes and the residual energy of the artist's emotional, physical and spiritualistic exertions can all add up to make certain works of art very powerfully charged magickally. And I also spend the majority of my time when working on a commission or piece for myself just sitting and thinking or staring at a blank canvas for hours on end.
 
Go ahead. I did ☺

please? fascinating stuff Coastaljames!

no trial will ever be decisive - that's the nature of the beast. I'd love to know how you changed the probabilities to belief rather than non-belief? :clap:
 
I'm not sure this is the place to be honest. I feel it would draw me into a kind of adversarial situation with me being forced to defend what I'm talking about. I don't feel I want to do that. I have nothing to try to sell and no interest in changing what others think. I think you're asking with genuine intentions and I appreciate that. I fear others are more cynical.

Happy to engage in a private conversation when the time is right for both of us- if you'd be interested.

I can quite understand this. *hugs*
 
In my opinon most definitely! Art and science are both magical acts.

I was wondering if you were involved with any groups or Orders CJ? As I thought I remember we lived in the same county. I was originally involved with the O.T.O. but burned my bridges with them as we didn't see eye to eye. The so called Caliphate really came across like a theatrical philosophical group to me. Then I was initiated into Kenneth Grant's Typhonian Order (Ordo Typhonis). I'm also a member of *edit*, and the Fellowship of the Uttara Circles of Kaulas (we like to use F.U.C.K.:D). I'm most focused on my own group though, and also heavily involved with the Sabbatic Craft. PM me if you'd rather brother.
 
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please? fascinating stuff Coastaljames!

no trial will ever be decisive - that's the nature of the beast. I'd love to know how you changed the probabilities to belief rather than non-belief? :clap:

For me I think because I was surrounded by supernatural experiences and poltergeist type activity from a very young age right up to my teens, and because my grandfather passed on to me how to perform curses and magick from a Romani-Jewish origin I was always being prepared for my later life as an occultist and my belief was always there from that young age because when you see things such as inanimate objects move by themselves in ways they really shouldn't it really backs up your own personlised conception of the supernatural world being very real, and magick working just seemed to coincided with that belief, because I witnessed things with my own eyes. And fortean experiences, poltergeist manifestations et al, seem to have happened to many of my family members going back many generations.

My auntie's house when she was young had perhaps the biggest poltergeist case attached to it, which was confirmed by police witnesses and the The Society for Psychical Research performed a very in-depth investigation into the case. I may have shared this before on one of the poltergeist threads but here it is anyway if anyone's interested.
 

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I was wondering if you were involved with any groups or Orders CJ?

Never. Always been with Groucho on such things - "I don’t care to belong to any club that will have me as a member". Magic has always and will remain profoundly personal to me. Never much been interested in the hanging around in funny robes with others malarkey.

As I thought I remember we lived in the same county.

No my friend, I'm in Norfolk.

The Order of Nine Angles

Serious stuff mate. I'm interested, after you wrote about your Jewish heritage, how you feel about the affirmed neo-nazi David Myatt's massive, if not central, influence on the ONA.
 
All magick is essentially self-initiatory, it has to be done by yourself, the individual has to do the work themselves to develop and your daily practice is always a highly personalised routine.

Hear, hear. Well put and I'd agree totally. "Do what thou wilt..." The key word is thou. It's your trip...and as RAW said, "Reality is what you can get away with."

What did you reckon on the Lawrence Blair, Ph.D documentary footage of the Qigong master's demonstrations of externalising Qi?

I'm really not sure. There could be some auto-suggestion going on in much of it. There could be some good old-fashioned parlour trickery going on in other parts. I don't know. It's impossible for me to reach a judgement without first hand experience of something. And even then...
 
I automatically placed my right palm over his head and he was fine after a few minutes. He kept saying ''why are his hands so hot?''. This I continue to use but it leaves me feeling sick and ill

I realise I'm a bit late here but I would like to offer a comment. I think I've posted this before, but on one occasion a new acquaintance, without warning grabbed my head and cured a headache. Now I'm sure most people would say suggestion or placebo effect but no, it wasn't, the thing was the heat in his hands and my head and there was not time to ponder anything other than "Whoah fella what the hell......."
Together with things that happened in my childhood it opened my mind which would seem, given the analytical nature of what I do now for a living, unusual.

I have on many occasions glibly given a reason of "we live in a (slightly faulty) simulation when some posters aggressively assert some viewpoint as it can be used to counter pretty much any argument regarding ghosts, UFOs, time slips etc. It's really a contrarian reaction to their unsupported statements - cobblers plus cobblers equals nothing! But lately I've become more than a little suspicious that the argument has some merit. Not that we are some electronic bugs in a Petri dish, but rather there is something else at play and that what we think of as solid and linear reality isn't.

Try checking out a Reddit thread on glitches in the matrix. Yes there's a few BS merchants but I think they are easy to spot, there is an overwhelming number of everyday people with observations impossible to reconcile with a universe as ordered as we are supposed to believe. Is magick, as a manipulation of of a hidden substrate to our existence any less believable than anything else?

And I have to wonder what tests would be acceptable. Yes levitation would be obvious but what about cases of healing? I'm pretty sure anything less than regeneration of a limb would be written off of some psychosomatic interaction.
 
Stuart Maconie's Freakier Zone, Music and the Occult (BBC Radio 6).

Original broadcast date:
Sun 7 Dec 2014 00:00

Stuart looks at music inspired by the occult with writer Rob Young. From a witches self help book to Aleister Crowley's spells summoned into musical form. Fight your inner demons with the help of John Zorn, Jimmy Page, Coil and more.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b04tlqhg
 
Thanks - this sounds like Pynchon territory:

On sidewalks and walls the very first printed slogans start to show up, the first Central Asian fuck you signs, the first kill-the-police-commissioner signs (and somebody does! this alphabet is really something!) and so the magic that the shamans, out in the wind, have always known, begins to operate now in a political way, and Dzaqyp Qulan hears the ghost of his own lynched father with a scratchy pen in the night, practicing As and Bs . . . .
 
Really? Can you tell us more about that? I heard it was very secretive/possibly didn't have any members apart from Myatt.


Myatt and Moult were at the helm for a long time. I cut all ties with it a couple years back. I thought there was something interesting there in its early form, but was put off by how it had been hijacked in recent years, by right-wing nutjobs online. Dark fluff. Myatt wants nothing to do with it either, having said that he never admitted to being Anton Long anyway. His post 2012 writings are the most interesting. Worth checking out if you haven't read much of his recent stuff.
 
If magic works at all, how does it work?
I'm thinking, how did anybody find out which words, rituals, thoughts etc. had a magical effect in the first place?

Did some poor sap sit in a darkened room pronouncing made-up shit out loud for years and years until something happened? If words have a magical effect on the world, do they work in some way like commands used to program a computer? And...if that's how it works...maybe that does mean we live in The Matrix?

Sorry, I know this an old post, but I've just found it and I've been thinking about this all day.

I don't have any real theories about how it works, besides my belief that 1. it takes the path of least resistance or the shortest link it can find to manifest, and 2. magic comes from the environment around us and how we act upon it.

I'm not much for ritual magic, and a lot of literature about witchcraft (spell work and such) is based on European or British lore and doesn't have much practical use here. Same with much of the American stuff - my environment is an unusual one and frankly there aren't exactly a lot of resources for Texas hill country witchcraft. Any lore the local native people might have had was lost or never recorded. This being the case, I have to do what my ancestors did - Carefully observe and listen to the world around me. This is the key - it's a matter of intuition.

If you can quiet your thoughts for a long enough period of time, you might be surprised how much you will begin to know and feel about your environment. Those words are in italics because they aren't knowledge or feelings in the intellectual or emotional sense. It's something else, but difficult to describe.

That's why I like to use the analogy of the fishing line - cast an invisible line into the ether and feel if something tugs back. Perhaps some people have a natural affinity for this, because while many people know exactly what this is like, others find the idea strange or confusing.

Another component for me is neither believing nor disbelieving . While it's often said that you have to believe in order for these things to work, I find this not to be the case. Let me put it this way - I accept that magic is possible. But when actually casting a spell? Walking the line between belief and non-belief is of utmost importance. Come down too heavily on one side or the other and you cut out a whole realm of possibilities. Don't want it too badly, don't look at it too closely. Know what you want and then stop thinking as you carry out your ritual or spell.

Much like the way animals (and some people) can sense being stared at, don't focus too hard or the thing you're after will run. By the same token, don't fear anything too much or eventually it will roll right up to your doorstep. I can't be sure, but I suspect this has to do with a build up of energy behind the thoughts, as well as any unconscious blocks a person might have. Whatever the case, working in that in-between state of belief/non-belief is vital. (For me at least.)

If you've listened to your intuition carefully, and figured out the paths of least resistance well, your magic will work fine, you don't need any books or charts or fancy equipment.

There are a few effects you have to watch out for in the modern world...just recently, I managed to flatten a perfectly good car battery by doing a bit of witchcraft too close to the car. (that's the second time that's happened actually. :oops:) Which is marginally better than the first time I attempted sigil magic and the battery exploded (which is mentioned in the one of the first posts I ever made on this board.) Well, you live and you learn!

Sorry for the long post, but these things are hard to describe in words. This doesn't explain how magic works, but it might offer a few clues to the mechanism behind it.
 
I welcome any thoughts about anamism in the 20th and 21st century. I pat, hug, and thank my appliances. I have lived with many of so long.

There's a lot of it around these days. Just think of all the recent studies about plant consciousness (or whatever they might be calling it - I know the terms consciousness and intelligence are heavily debated in this case). Seems like there was even a conversation here years ago about computers and cars etc. developing their own personalities. My OH's aunt (bless her hippie soul) fixes her wonky dryer by a laying on of hands. :D
 
Isn't it strange that no-one ever wants to discuss how their Magick works? It's almost as though there is nothing to tell.
From experience, I found out that it's a psychological trick that you play on yourself, it can give you confidence but it is no more real than any other religion or pub medium.
The literature, aesthetic and ritual are undeniably attractive, we're all searching for answers beyond the mundane.
Turn the lights out, 'invoke' the unknown, and you can convince yourself of anything...
 
I actually studied the occult for a long time --since about 4th grade on at local college library, when I should have been in high school classes. I don't really discuss it much anymore. My focus has turned to UFOs. I don't think it should all be tossed out, though I agree there hasn't been much evidence that has made it mainstream that isn't controvertible. A lot of it depends on achieving a "Gnostic State" or magical flow state whether through shamanism, mantras and mudras, seething, prayer, dance, art, etc. ---individually or in a group (cone of power style) where a standing wave of emotion and "thought energy" is stirred up and projected / discharged in an instant with superhuman focus. Sometimes an effigy is used if the effect is supposed to be on an individual or group or area, or a talisman can be made that way too. The sessions are repeated until results attained. I won't defend the efficacy of magical systems --I don't really practice those things anymore, as I don't see a reason for it now.
 
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