I am now an experienced Ceremonial Magician. However, when I was fourteen years old myself, I got turned on to the occult not through reading occult books per se, but through Call of Cthulhu role-playing game, and the fiction of H P Lovecraft.
This is not so crazy as it may sound, since because Call of Cthulhu is based in a fictionalised version of the real world, the creators actually included a lot of historical data of real-life occult organisations and personalities such as Aleister Crowley, Dion Fortune, Israel Regardie, the Golden Dawn, etc. Because this piqued my interest, I remembered them when I came to researching the occult seriously when I was older.
Indeed, several serious occultists I know claimed that they were first inspired to take up the dark arts after reading Dennis Wheatley novels. Dennis Wheatley actually met Aleister Crowley, although he was a bit of a hypocrite in that he told his readers not to get into the occult real-life, as it was a sure path to be enmeshed by the powers of darkness, etc.
So yeah, if you do your research, you will probably find that a lot of fiction is inspired by genuine occultism. A lot however is not. The one thing I would advise against doing is watching The Irregulars. This is probably one of the worst programmes out there when it comes to historical accuracy about occultism. Or about the Sherlock Holmes universe. Or indeed about life in Victorian England generally.
(NB: if you are on Netflix and you want to watch something decent about the occult, try The Midnight Gospel instead).
The Irregulars. Not as authentic as The Midnight Gospel
I don’t normally read Catholic Herald, which is why I’ve only just shared a year old story. Apparently, last month, Dion Fortune was the newspaper’s featured Heretic of the Week. I rather think they meant “hermetic” of the week, but that’s beside the point. Among Dion’s crimes are veering between Catholicism and paganism, and lowering the tone of Glastonbury, although I personally think that Kanye West is more to blame for the latter. 😉
Q: “So were you involved in actual devil worship?”
A: “Not devil worship, no, it was pure straightforward, old-fashioned magic.”
Q: “The Aleister Crowley variety?”
A: “No, I always thought Crowley was a charlatan. But there was a guy called [Arthur] Edward Waite who was terribly important to me at the time. And another called Dion Fortune who wrote a book called ‘Psychic Self-Defense‘. You had to run around the room getting bits of string and old crayons and draw funny things on the wall, and I took it all most seriously, ha ha ha ! I drew gateways into different dimensions, and I’m quite sure that, for myself, I really walked into other worlds. I drew things on walls and just walked through them, and saw what was on the other side!”
David Bowie, interviewed in NME, 1997
It being 2021, this year will inevitably see many five year anniversaries marked, none more keenly felt than that of the great David Bowie, who together with the passing of Lemmy marked the start of the second worst year of recent memory, to wit – the dreaded 2016. The tragedy was so great that it had the effect of drawing the Occult community, which is normally riven by fractious arguments, together to an unprecedented degree. Ironically, this post which I wrote at the time became the most read article ever on my blog.
So the news this week has been dominated by the passing of David Bowie, and when I consider how much attention was paid to the untimely death of Freddie Mercury – the last pop star of comparable status to leave us – it is almost certain that this event will remain in public consciousness for years to come. Anywho: amongst the magical community, it has been widely noted that Bowie was interested in the occult, as witness his interview with NME quoted at the top of this page, and the back cover over the Station to Station LP, below left:
Photo used for the back cover of Station To Station (1976)
Video for Lazarus (2015)
NB: given the amount of Charlie he was packing away at the time, his precise allegiance might well be pinned to the Holy Order of the Sun! Interestingly, Bowie resurrected the costume covered with, ahem, “white lines,” for his almost-certainly-not final music video “Lazarus” (above right). Might not this video be suggesting that David Bowie did not just keep this costume but this persona hanging up in the closet all this time?
But I digress.
There is an image in the Lazarus video on which a number of bloggers have already commented: where Bowie sits frantically writing at a desk, on which rests a skull. Now the obvious interpretation is that it was a reference to Bowie’s own impending mortality, but when I saw it, it stirred the Sumner Family Brain Cell to life, and got me thinking, where have I seen that before?
See: 3minutes 38seconds.
The answer is: it comes from the first degree (Apprentice) ritual of the Ancient & Primitive Rite of Memphis and Misraim – a particularly esoteric form of Freemasonry. Assuming the candidate for initiation passes the ballot, just before the ceremony of his initiation,
…[t]he Expert (i.e. Junior Deacon) then takes possession of the Candidate in the Parvis, carefully binds his eyes and leads him to the Chamber of Reflection. He has him sit before a table, sparingly furnished with a real human Skull; a lit wax Candle, half-consumed; a sheet of white paper, pen and ink. The seat is a stool without a back. He lights a little Myrrh, the traditional funereal perfume, in a corner of the room, in a Censer containing lit coals.
Expert: – Sir, alone, left to yourself, before an image of termination of terrestrial Life, I invite you to write your Philosophical Testament.
The “Philosophical Testament” consists of the candidate’s reflections on his duties to God, the World, and himself: but more especially, like its name suggests, how the candidate would answer these questions if his words were the final legacy which he leaves on Earth. However, the code-word “philosophical” indicates that one is meant to interpret it alchemically. In other words, Death is not the end for the candidate – i.e. for David Bowie – but is the first step on the path to spiritual transmutation.
So, there you have it – Bowie indulging in esoteric symbolism right up until the last!
(A2A) Donald Michael Kraig’s “Modern Magick” was my first serious book on practical occultism as well. It is an ideal book for beginners because (a) it contains a lot of suitable material to get you started; and more importantly (b) it also has an extensive bibliography which will clue you in as to where to go and what to read to pursue your studies further.
“Like the handles. Gives me something to HOLD on to.”
So there I was, lying awake at night, tortured by that most exquisite of agonies – “what the hell is Cybermagick?” And more to the point, what is the real difference between cybermagick and any other type of magick? So I tried to find examples of Cyber on the internet, in the hope this would give me some much-needed relief. I was disappointed to discover three things. Firstly, it has nothing to do with Crowley-style Magic-with-a-K but done by internet-messaging service – although I’m sure this could be a fecund opportunity for an enterprising mage with low-enough scruples. Secondly, it has nothing to do with cheap attempts to insert sexual innuendo into a blog post about the occult in a cynical traffic to drive traffic to ones website! Instead, it is all about the Information Model of Magic.
The Information Model, which has been developed by Chaos magicians in the past thirty years or so, is best described by Frater UD thus:
Energy as such is “dumb”: it needs information on what to do; this can be so called laws of nature or direct commands.
Information does not have mass or energy. Thus, it is faster than light and not bound by the restrictions of the Einsteinian spacetime continuum. It can therefore be transmitted or tapped at all times and at all places. In analogy (but of course only as such!) it may be likened to quantum phenomena rather than relativistic mass-energy. It can, however, attach itself to a medium e.g. an organism or any other memory storage device.
So for example, action-at-a-distance such as remote healing – in the Spirit model one would evoke a spirit, ask it to go heal someone, believing that the spirit to be an objectively-real being, who will then travel across time and space to the target to heal them using its own powers. In the Information Model, the spell intention is converted into an algorithm or program which is transmitted to the target in a manner similar to the way scientists hope to exploit Quantum entanglement and the EBR paradox to use Quantum computers to transmit information: the target’s mind then receives and uses the information thus transmitted rather like a computer downloading and executing code.
It was at this point that I realised that the so-called Information Model is actually a lot older than 1987, as Frater UD alleges. It was in fact known to the Theosophists, and to occultists who were directly inspired thereby, such as Dion Fortune. The Information Model is really an attempt to describe how the Akashic Records work, without using the words “Akashic Records” !
Autobiography of a Yogi, by Paramahansa Yogananda
Whereas Chaos magick would have it that the Information Model has been around since the nineteen-eighties, the idea of a permanency of ideas in the Akasha dates to the eighteen-eighties. Parahamsa Yogananda effectively expresses the same concept thus:
All thoughts vibrate eternally in the cosmos. By deep concentration, a master is able to detect the thoughts of any mind, living or dead.
This being the case, it follows that the Akashic records do not simply consist of past-life memories, but are continually being written to at every moment by living beings. It should be noted that in the same place Yogananda also claimed of his own guru, “[b]y his powerful will, Master was also a human broadcasting station…” thus explaining why he had been able to silently influence, at-a-distance, a random stranger to carry out an action he had willed.
The Magical Battle of Britain, by Dion Fortune, edited by Gareth Knight.
Dion Fortune used the same or similar principles to develop a telepathic theory of magic, i.e. that by combined effort a group of ritualists could impress a Thought upon the Akasha, which would serve to cause it to influence those sensitive to it. E.g. see The Magical Battle of Britain.
My understanding of “Paradigm-shifting” in Chaos Magick is that the whole point in shifting to a new paradigm is to be able to make use of technology not available in the old one. The best non-occult example being Holograms: no-one was actually looking for Holograms until Fourier, the mathematician, theorised that they ought to be able to exist – their invention followed soon thereafter. Fourier was thus able to cause the creation of a new technology by making a successful paradigm-shift in ideas: and note that he did so not by playing “let’s pretend,” or faking it until making it, but by coming up with a fully-worked out mathematical proof! But I digress. My point is that the so-called “Information Model” is not really a paradigm-shift per se, it is really just a pre-existing paradigm described in different terminology. It is, perhaps, however, a revival of interest in an old school of thought that was not fully appreciated by the wider occult community the first time around.
In my previous blog on the Syrian Refugee crisis, I proposed resorting to Sorcery to find out what the best solution ought to be. This naturally leads to the question: can Magic be used to put such a solution into effect?
You have the opportunity to help me out with a writing project, and it’s all to do with Glastonbury in Somerset, England. I am currently working on a hypothesis: that Glastonbury is a lot weirder (and consequently more wonderful) than most people appreciate – and by that I mean spiritual people as well.
Sure, everyone knows about Bligh-Bond, the Glastonbury Zodiac, Dion Fortune and all the rest: but what I’m mostly interested in is the really out-there stuff that seldom gets talked about. For example, the incidents which surprise even those that thought they had seen everything – or which just struck you as highly unusual at the time.
“Happy ending” stories and anecdotes most especially welcome! Please reply in the comment section below, or use the form on the Contact Alex page to message me privately.
Every once in a while, I come across someone who claims that Dion Fortune once said that Magick consisted of causing Willed Changes in consciousness. I personally have two problems with this, to wit:
Firstly, every time I challenge the person saying so to quote where Dion Fortune actually said this, I don’t get an answer. I have read just about all of Dion’s books, and I have never seen the quote myself, so I am wondering if this is not just an urban myth along the lines of the Jesus=Horus story, or the Third Vatican Council meme. As far as I’m aware, Donald Michael Kraig first made the claim in Modern Magick, and the story has taken off from there.
Secondly, and more importantly, even if it is true, what a lot of people do not get is that it certainly does not mean that Magick only takes place in the imagination and nowhere else – and Dion Fortune would certainly have never claimed such a thing herself. How do I know this? Because it is on record that Dion Fortune was a firm believer in telepathy. Hence, Dion would be of the opinion that if you make the right change in consciousness, this would lead, via a process similar to telepathy, to objective results in the world at large. This was essentially her rationale for such magickal workings as those described in (e.g.) The Magical Battle of Britain.
Hence, beware someone claiming that magick is “all in your head,” or words to that effect. It’s neither “all in your head,” nor is it “all in your head.” I personally have seen enough freaky coincidences to have my own evidence of its objectivity.
, and the story has taken off from there.
.
Sol Ascendans - The Website of Alex Sumner 
Alex Sumner’s answer to How and where could I start to practice Magick? (14 years old) – Quora
I am now an experienced Ceremonial Magician. However, when I was fourteen years old myself, I got turned on to the occult not through reading occult books per se, but through Call of Cthulhu role-playing game, and the fiction of H P Lovecraft.
This is not so crazy as it may sound, since because Call of Cthulhu is based in a fictionalised version of the real world, the creators actually included a lot of historical data of real-life occult organisations and personalities such as Aleister Crowley, Dion Fortune, Israel Regardie, the Golden Dawn, etc. Because this piqued my interest, I remembered them when I came to researching the occult seriously when I was older.
Indeed, several serious occultists I know claimed that they were first inspired to take up the dark arts after reading Dennis Wheatley novels. Dennis Wheatley actually met Aleister Crowley, although he was a bit of a hypocrite in that he told his readers not to get into the occult real-life, as it was a sure path to be enmeshed by the powers of darkness, etc.
So yeah, if you do your research, you will probably find that a lot of fiction is inspired by genuine occultism. A lot however is not. The one thing I would advise against doing is watching The Irregulars. This is probably one of the worst programmes out there when it comes to historical accuracy about occultism. Or about the Sherlock Holmes universe. Or indeed about life in Victorian England generally.
(NB: if you are on Netflix and you want to watch something decent about the occult, try The Midnight Gospel instead).
The Irregulars. Not as authentic as The Midnight Gospel
Source: Alex Sumner’s answer to How and where could I start to practice Magick? (14 years old) – Quora
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