The Hall of Hermes is my space for sharing about Hermeticism — the main origin of both Western magic and science — tempered with what I call “gnosis”.

Mostly I’m offering this for fun. I think it’s enriching to understand one of the West’s greatest sources of culture. And I find it satisfying to clean up fuzzy thinking around the topic.

(Yes, science and magic are compatible — but not the way magically-inclined folk often think they are. It’s nothing “quantum” or supernatural. It’s perfectly mundane. It just turns out that the mundane is absolutely wondrous and far more surprising than science has yet noticed.)

I did an overview of Hermeticism as a Facebook livestream series. Each part of that series is here for replay; I recommend starting with them:

• 1. Overview
  A big-picture view of (my way of describing) Hermeticism: seeing reality as a fractal mirror, and therefore studying “above” (astrology) and “below” (alchemy) in order to see how to embody divinity and transcend live & death (theurgy).

• 2. Astrology
  There are layers (“veils” or “koshas”) shaping consciousness. If everything is a fractal mirror, we should see those veils reflected in the sky. Seen this way, astrology can be a metaphoric art that orients us to our own experience.

• 3. Alchemy
  There are laws governing how you can change the fractal. You learn those laws by entangling yourself with parts of it. Since you are (part of) the fractal, this process is key for transforming yourself.

• Interlude: The Law of Subtle Causation
  Magic is the art of working with causes that aren’t widely recognized. This makes those causes subtle. When people miss a subtle cause, they’re stuck working with the effects and can’t really change anything. So a key aspect of learning effective magic is becoming familiar with uncommon causes.

• 4. Qabalah
  Modern Hermeticism uses a kind of map, called the Tree of Life, to synthesize the whole system. I think it was a really helpful addition. It points out crossroads to different states of consciousness and illustrates the goals and methods of Hermetic work.

• Appendix 1: The Hollow Tree
  The main nodes (“Spheres” or “Sephiroth”) of the Qabalistic Tree of Life have “hollow” versions (“Qliphoth”). These are something like the toxic mimics of divine power. They name several key spiritual error modes that I think are worth being aware of.

• Appendix 2: Tarot
  Tarot isn’t actually a core Hermetic topic, but it became popular after the Renaissance and is now heavily integrated. As a result, there are ways to use it as a tool for reading the fractal mirror and for enacting magical change (“thaumaturgy”).

In later posts I give more practical guidance. For instance, I think there’s a way to combine astrology & astronomy as a basis for reading the sky; I explain that method in more depth in this post:

As I flesh out more, I may come back to this intro and update it for ease of reference.

In the meantime, if this approach to Hermeticism interests you, I encourage you to subscribe. You’ll get email notifications when new posts go live, including my more general writing outside of Western magic.

Subscribe now

I reserve a few things for paying subscribers. The ability to comment and also some posts in the archives. But mainly it’s a show of support for what I’m doing here.

Welcome!

They’re also super easy to misuse.

A natal chart is an astrological map of where the planets were in the sky when you were born. In Hermetic theory, it’s an important clue about how the seven core frequencies shape your life.

If you want to work with those energies, it’s a major boon to know how you already relate to them. Kind of like, if I want to ask a friend for a favor, the result I get will depend on the nature of our friendship and what I’m asking them for.

Knowing how to read your natal chart can really help give you this kind of insight. It’s the main thing I use natal charts for.

Unfortunately, most talk I hear about astrology treats these charts as objective descriptions of the energies. As though they have secret information encoded in them and you have to know the right techniques to find it.

I think that attitude alienates folk from gnosis.

As as far as I’m concerned, gnosis is the root of all real spiritual power. It’s where the “oomph” comes from in anything you’d want to call “magic”.

In December I gave a talk on how I orient to natal charts from gnosis. Here’s a trimmed-down version of that talk, focusing on the essentials:

In this talk I mention a workshop I’m putting together for reading natal charts. That’s still coming. It’s just taking me longer to lay the groundwork than I hoped it would during this talk.

In the meantime I recommend working on the embodied foundation, since that takes time to develop:

Below I offer the complete replay for paying subscribers. I don’t think I cut out anything key about natal charts in the edited version up above. But I cut quite a few things that folk who attended live said they got a lot of value from. Here are a few examples:

• Relating to the idea that your future is determined, the stars tell you your fate, etc.

• How I think about different astrological systems, especially different house systems

• Why I think astrology can’t predict anything, although some astrologers can

• A preview of how to view the zodiac through the seven core Hermetic frequencies, and why Capricorn in particular gets misinterpreted a lot (in my opinion)

• How Daoist inner alchemy and Hermetic alchemy compare

• A rant about Ophiuchus, the supposed 13th sign of the zodiac

If that kind of material appeals to you, or if you want to join the conversation in the comments, or if you just want to support me in offering material like this, consider becoming a paid subscriber.

Read more

Real magic is a physical art.

It works through your body.

I often see people who are drawn to magic go into their heads. Getting lost in fantasy or theory.

But it really really doesn’t matter how many correspondences you get right, or how “high” your “vibrations” are, or what gods or energies you attune to, if what you’re doing doesn’t connect cosmic power to the Earth through your physical body.

Hermetic magic in particular can be super slippery on this point. Even within Hermeticism, “Hermes” (the Greek form of Roman Mercury) is a nod to the mind. Most described training is mental. Most learning is intellectual. You can feel like you’re making progress because things make sense and sync up with each other.

But even in Hermeticism, the mind isn’t actually central. It’s just the preferred medium.

The point of Hermetic mental training is to learn frameworks that you look through… so that you live in the world differently. You come to view the Sun as a literal embodiment of your soul, which makes its warm light feel meaningful in a different way than it did before. The moldy food you find in your fridge comes to feel like a reflection of alchemical nigredo — not because you tell yourself a story in your head, but because with practice your body comes to recognize nigredo even if you don’t notice at first.

The mental stuff is actually the fast and easy part. I can list some ideas, and you can memorize them, and then in some sense you would “know” Hermeticism.

But that’s not the interesting part!

The interesting part, in my opinion, is when you’ve internalized the framework. When you don’t need to call it to mind anymore because you can feel the truth it was designed to make available to you.

Without that, Hermetic tools become distractions.

Embodied charts

Of the Hermetic arts, astrology is maybe the worst culprit here. The whole point of the discipline is to feel the link between the cosmos and your Earthly experience. And it’s well-designed to do exactly that! But instead, by default today it’s often used as an exercise in mental abstraction.

But I don’t think it has to be. I think there’s a way to reclaim the deeply embodied nature of the art.

Let me give you an example of what I mean. Right now, I type this, it’s 1:35pm Pacific USA time on December 14th, 2023. If I look up where the seven plants are at this moment, I get the following:

• The Sun and Mars are both in Sagittarius.

• The Moon and Mercury are both in Capricorn.

• Venus is in Scorpio.

• Jupiter is in Taurus.

• Saturn is in Pisces.

To interpret that information, I’d have to memorize what all of these things mean. “Sun in Sagittarius” basically means it’s between Thanksgiving and Christmas… but what does that tell me?

If I’ve memorized the Thema Mundi, maybe it’ll ping in my mind that Jupiter rules Sagittarius. So somehow Jupiter is sort of hosting the Sun and Mars. If I think about how Jupiter is king of the Olympic gods and Mars is the god of war… I can kind of start making associations.

But can you feel how mental this is?

Does it make you more aware of how it feels to be breathing as you read this? Or less aware?

Here’s an astrological chart for the same moment:

(This image is from the iOS app “Time Nomad”.)

Charts like this often get read as summaries of the same information. Once you know what all the symbols mean, you can see how (say) the Sun and Mars are both in Sagittarius. (The Sun is the circle with the dot, and Mars is the “male” symbol. The arrow with the slash in it indicates Sagittarius.)

But I think saying it’s a summary is a bit like saying a road map is a summary of driving directions.

Let me show you how to read this chart more literally.

That horizontal line through the middle is the Earth’s surface.

(Well, it’s actually the Earth’s surface at sea level. It doesn’t account for things like mountains on the horizon or my elevation.)

That vertical-ish line is a longitudinal line — which is to say, it’s part of one of those lines on a globe connecting the north and south poles. Counterintuitively, the top part of that line is south, not north — but it’s that way for a reason: you’ll see the Sun and the moving planets in the southern sky if you’re in the northern hemisphere. So we want the top of the chart to be the visible sky.

(You might wonder why the longitudinal line isn’t straight up in the chart. It’s a bit of a geometric mess to explain why. I think it’s worth coming to understand eventually! But I want to keep this exposé focused on embodied observations for now.)

So those two middle lines cross where I am. If I’m facing south, I’m standing on the Earth’s surface at that intersection looking in the direction indicated by the upper half of that longitudinal line.

The ring of symbols there is the zodiac — but you should really think of it as the ecliptic. Technically that’s the Sun’s apparent path across the stars over the course of a year. We care about it because you’ll find all the planets near that star path: if you draw a line connecting the Sun and Moon, and you extend that as an arc through the sky, you’ll find all the visible planets near that arc.

(Again, there’s a good geometric reason for this. It has to do with the Solar System being kind of a flat disk. But the point is, you’ll see this directly if you look!)

So this chart says that if I’m facing directly south, I can just make out the Moon in the sky nearly straight in front of me (but very slightly to the left). The Sun is lower in the sky a bit to my right.

That funny-looking “4” way on the left there is Jupiter, currently hidden below the horizon. It’ll rise a bit before 2pm today (so probably before I finish this article). But it’ll rise in the north-northeast. That’s practically behind me! You can see that in how that top line bends to the right. So if I’m at the very center and am facing in the direction of that upward-ish line, the place where the ecliptic meets the horizon is a little left of behind me.

So, why am I naming all this?

Because I hope that by my doing so, you can feel how looking at a chart like this one can physically orient you to the sky.

This visceral grounding is key to how you connect astrological ideas to your body.

You might still not know what (say) “Mars in Sagittarius” means… but if you learn how to feel the sky, and you also learn how to somatically tune into the relevant Hermetic frequencies, then the meaning will ring like a bell in your body.

At that point, not only will interpretations stop feeling so arbitrary, but you’ll even be able tell when an interpretation is incorrect.

And your planetary magic will become much more potent and skillful.

Watch the sky

Building this skill is actually really simple. It doesn’t require a ton of study. With modern tech, it’s downright easy. It just takes a while for it to bear fruit:

At roughly the same time each day, notice where the Sun and Moon physically are — relative to you, and relative to the constellations.

That’s it!

I recommend you do this with an app that lets you use your phone like a kind of magic window to the stars. I like Night Sky for this purpose.

I suggest you tweak the app’s settings so that the constellations are easy to notice. That way you can see what constellations the Sun and Moon are actually in. That also helps you track how quickly they’re each moving across the stars.

I also recommend making the ecliptic visible in your app. That’ll make it easier to find whichever planets (including the Moon!) you’re looking for: they all stay close to that line.

When I first started doing this practice, I’d check first thing in the morning, which was usually near dawn. That meant the Sun was in roughly the same place each time relative to the Earth. That consistency really helped build a visceral intuition for the Moon’s speed across the stars.

This practice doesn’t need to take long. Just a few seconds each day. And it really helps bring the sky into visceral reach.

Just be patient with it. The intuitions build up over weeks and months. This learning happens at the pace of the body, like with dance or martial arts. Give it time.

Enriching the practice

Here are some enhancements I recommend playing with as you feel ready for them. Add enough to feel engaged, but not so much that you feel overwhelmed. There’s no rush.

• Notice the Lunar phase and its angle with the Sun.
  This builds a superb embodied foundation for understanding what’s called “aspects”. Take a moment to notice how the Moon’s phase actually looks — either by physically looking at it or by using an app or website like this one. Then, after you find the Sun & Moon, point a hand at each of them, and feel how the angle between your arms feels. That angle and the Lunar phase are directly connected. You’re not looking for anything profound here; just notice how the angle and phase feel in your body.
  

• Look up the Moon’s zodiac sign.
  The zodiac isn’t based on the constellations; it’s actually based on where the Sun is on the ecliptic throughout the year.1 You can learn to see where the sign boundaries are by noticing when the Moon changes sign. This practice will also help you internalize the signs’ order. You can look up the Moon’s zodiac sign on a site like this one.
  

• Find the non-luminaries too.
  (The Sun and Moon are called the “luminaries”, literally meaning “lights”.)
  Look for Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn through your stargazing app. You can find them somewhere near the ecliptic. I suggest either (a) finding them at roughly the same time of day each day or (b) taking the time to embody the angle each planet makes with the Sun (like I describe doing for the Moon in the first bullet up above). That way you’ll start intuitively picking up on how those planets move — their speed, their retrograde pattern, and the way Mercury and Venus stay close to the Sun.
  

• Look up the Sun’s & five non-luminaries’ zodiac signs too.
  At first you’ll want to do this daily, but after a while you’ll probably notice a pattern and will likely just want to check once a week or so. How you look the signs up doesn’t matter all that much; one option is to go to Astro.com and scroll down to the chart on the right labeled “Current Planets”. It’ll tell you the sign’s name if you hover your cursor over the colored symbols. You can ignore all the rows below Saturn and all the numbers for now.
  

• Physically go look at these objects in the sky.
  You want your body to relate directly to this Hermetic sky clock. So go outside and just look! Notice the way the sky feels like a giant dome overhead. How the crescent Moon’s “bow” kind of points at the Sun even below the horizon. The way the planets aren’t quite on a straight line. How the non-luminaries don’t twinkle — and how that helps you find them! Take a little time noticing how your body subtly responds as you gaze at each planet (other than the Sun!) and mentally note what it is. (“That’s Mars.”) There are far more things to notice than I can list in a simple paragraph — which is why you want to go look for yourself! Build your own embodied direct relationship to the sky.
  

• Feel the Sun.
  The Sun is central in astrology for the same core reason gold is central in alchemy. What you’re seeing when you look at the Moon and the non-luminaries is reflected sunlight. So bring it some extra attention. Here are a few suggestions about how you might do so — but see if you can notice the underlying feeling of attending to the Solar frequency:

  • When you feel direct sunlight, take a moment to savor its warmth and the way it can stir alive stillness in you (if it does!).

  • When you can, catch dawn (or dusk) and notice how seeing the Sun’s very first (or very last) glimmer of light affects you. Notice how it rises (and sets) at an angle relative to the horizon: if you’re not in the tropics, it doesn’t just come straight up (or go straight down). Physically observe how it rises (and sets) in a very slightly different place each day: what band of the horizon defines a rising Sagittarius Sun, for instance?

  • Go for a walk during the “golden hour” and let its beauty touch your heart. Notice how this is golden light touching your skin and the land around you. Like alchemists’ gold.

  • The Sun’s path through the sky during the day is called the Sun path — and it’s different from the ecliptic! Try to find that path each day. Anticipate where the Sun will be at a given time, and then check. (There are apps that can help with this. I use one called SunQuest.)

Where does this lead?

Originally astrology and astronomy were the same art. Just like chemistry comes from alchemy.

But starting around three centuries ago, we started distinguishing between magic and science, mostly disavowing the former. This resulted in magic becoming ungrounded fantasy and science growing more mechanical and pointless.

But they really are one art. They’re both much more rich together.

The practice I’ve described here starts to recombine the magic and science of the sky. Most of what I’ve named here is astronomical. But hopefully you can feel how it ties into myth too. It’s not just memorizing dead facts or rehearsing how empty the universe is. You’re learning to feel the sky.

The next steps into the Hermetic cosmos involve learning the stories more deeply. The zodiac in particular. I have a pretty unusual approach that I think is much more natural — and it also suggests some corrections to the usual interpretations of the so-called “star signs”.

Once that’s in place, we can take a look at natal charts. Your natal chart can act as a kind of meditative glyph that makes both thaumaturgy and theurgy a lot more accessible. In my experience this is a key missing step for most people who attempt planetary magic: if they get any effects, they can be hard to tell apart from coincidence, and even the clear effects are sometimes very strange for unknown reasons. Tuning into the natal chart helps tremendously.

(…but not the way most modern astrologers seem to think!)

And, all of this is in the “as above” thread of Hermeticism. There’s similar recombine-magic-and-science work to do with alchemy, and ways of internalizing the Qabalistic Tree of Life that are rich and meaningful.

But one step at a time.

For now, I hope you enjoy making the art of stars more tangible, and real.

Subscribe now

If you want a more visual metaphor, you can think of these seven as a kind of color palate. Everything has color, but all color is a mix of the seven rainbow colors. Learning to “see” these seven Hermetic “colors” lets you play with painting reality in a kind of direct and magical way.

I described a little more in the announcement for November’s talk. This post is sharing the replay of that talk with some commentary and resources. The point of this talk is to give you an embodied taste of each of the seven “notes” so you have a clear sense of what to tune into.

Here’s the initial overview at the start to give some context:

The rest of the talk goes through the seven “notes”, grounding in a kind of hidden eighth “note”. They’re meant to be practices more than explanations. “Energetic transmissions” if you like.

In case it makes navigating the practices easier, I want to offer a kind of overview of those seven Hermetic energies. Here’s how they show up in four domains I often reference:

There are lots of other relevant domains, like psychology and herbalism. But if you can start to feel the “pure tone” of each of these, you’ll be able to notice how these “notes” show up in whatever domain you’re paying attention to.

You might notice, by the way, that there are eight things here. The “why” behind that is clearest in the column for music: Saturn is the higher octave of Earth (represented in astrology by the ascendant). Octaves are the same note played at a higher energy. The “music of the spheres” here hints at an equivalence between Earth and Saturn that shows up throughout Hermeticism.

(As one other example: The Great Work of alchemy is about transforming Earthly consciousness (Ascendant/Malkuth) into Solar consciousness (Sun/Tiphareth), which most people summarize as turning lead into gold. Gold is indeed the metal of the Sun, but lead is the metal of Saturn.)

So with that, let’s get into the meat of it!

Read more

I have several things I’m excited about bringing into this Hall. Now that there’s an overview in place, we have context for some practical work I’d love to share.

I think the right place to start is what I’m playfully calling “the Song of Hermes”. The name is a nod to the Harmony of the Spheres, which is an old Pythagorean idea that the seven heavenly bodies must each create a kind of silent sound. The speed of the planets suggested to ancient minds that their “sounds” must correspond to the seven notes of a musical major scale.

The idea itself is pretty simple: there are these seven energies that show up in a range of different ways (musical notes, planets, gods, metals, herbs, states of consciousness, etc.). This fact leads to some fun observations, like how a musical perfect fifth resonates with alchemical gold, and the dissonant tritone (“the Devil’s chord”) is the sound that challenges the Hermetic mage at the edge of discovery.

But the real value isn’t the mental understanding. It’s the embodied attunement.

When you can really feel these seven energies, you can start to “hear” a kind of mystical “song” ringing through everything. Listening this way lets you dance in time with the anima mundi, the soul of the world. Consciously joining the world dance allows you to become magic rather than simply performing magic.

(This difference is a reference to theurgy versus thaumaturgy from the intro talk.)

I’d like to guide y’all through this Hermetic scale for this month’s livestream. That’ll be on Saturday, November 25th at 9am Pacific. Paying subscribers will have the opportunity to attend live and also access the replay later.

Subscribe now

For everyone, whether attending/watching the replay or not, I recommend reading my essay on Saturn from my old blog “Relentless Dawn”. It’s both an example of one of these celestial “notes” and also a correction. Saturn corresponds to the octave, which in a curious way is “the same note” as Earth. Understanding and feeling why that makes sense is both precious on its own and great context to have for what I’ll share on November 25th.

However! Hermetic mages folded tarot into the Qabalah — their map of all worlds — in a way that turned the deck of cards into something truly powerful.

This means that if you have some taste of the Tree of Life, you can learn to use the tarot as a guide through the Tree. It can become part of your spellcraft.

And yes, you can (obviously) use it for divination — but folk tend to seriously miss what this really means. The KIND of oracle the tarot offers is not a magical future-teller. It's both more subtle and more profound than that.

Summary

The idea is to have every part of Hermeticism — each part of the Tree of Life, each element of astrology, each aspect of alchemy, each stage and state of theurgy — represented in the deck of cards.

Once you know how the cards represent all of that, you can use them as a source of divination, and to “cast spells”.

Each card falls into one of these categories:

1. It’s a trump — usually called “major arcana”. This means it stands in for one of the Paths on the Tree of Life. There are three kinds of trump:

   1. Elemental trumps represent the four classical elements: Earth, Air, Water, and Fire.

   2. Planetary trumps stand in for the seven classical planets: Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, the Sun, Venus, Mercury, and the Moon.

   3. Zodiacal trumps represent the twelve signs of the zodiac: Aries, Taurus, Gemini, Cancer, Leo, Virgo, Libra, Scorpio, Sagittarius, Capricorn, Aquarius, and Pisces.

2. It’s a numbered card, which means it stands in for a facet of one of the ten Spheres of the Tree of Life. Each Sphere is shown as having four facets, represented by the classical elements — but in the numbered cards these are depicted using suits (usually something like wands, cups, swords, and disks).

3. It’s a court card. These represent identities. Or you can think of them as characters you encounter in different parts of the Tree. These are aspects of theurgy. Each character resides in a Sphere. Since each Sphere has four facets, so do these royals. Their names are inconsistent between decks, but there are always four:

   1. The King, who resides in the Sphere of Stars. The father archetype. Conscious essence beyond time.

   2. The Queen, who’s in the Sphere of Saturn. The mother archetype. Eternal threshold consciousness.

   3. The Prince, overseeing the Sphere of the Sun. He is the son, and is also the “higher self”. (In many decks this is the “Knight” — but in some, like the Thoth Tarot, “Knight” refers to the King!)

   4. The Princess, living on Earth. She represents the mortal human (i.e. you!). She is the daughter. (This card is often called the “Page”. She corresponds to the Jack in standard playing cards.)

(One card deserves special mention: The final trump card, often called “The Universe” or “The World”, is both the planetary trump of Saturn and the elemental trump of Earth. It’s the only trump to get two correspondences. It stands in for the Path from the Moon to Earth, which is often taken as the birth canal.)

Here I’ve emphasized the Qabalistic and astrological correspondences. Alchemy is present too but is more subtle: it requires a rich familiarity with the symbols and processes of alchemy, as well as how the Paths of the Tree relate to the Spheres.

That’s not beyond what I’m willing to talk about! But it’s more in depth than I go into in this particular video.

But what happens when you're not deeply clear? When the path is dark?

Hermetic Qabalah has a map for this. It names ten spiritual stumbling blocks people can trip over, called the Qliphoth (literally “husks” or “empty shells”).

On the low end, these are things like clever delusion and victim consciousness.

But there are much more serious forms too, like gurus abusing their students spiritually.

If you learn to read these energies, you can use them as warning signs. They let you know when you're straying off the path.

You can also use knowledge of the Hollow Powers to judge and accuse others if you want to be a dick. Invariably some people will do this. Just like people accuse one another of "spiritual bypassing" without really understanding what that means.

But I think there's a kinder and more helpful approach.

Summary

Here are the Hollow Spheres in quick overview, going from the bottom of the Tree to the top. (I cover all of these in more depth in the talk. This is here for ease of reference.)

• Hollow Earth: Usually called “Lilith”, this is tanha in Buddhism. Gripping, grasping, pushing away. Fixation on how things have manifested instead of where they come from.

• Hollow Moon: Called “Gomaliel”, meaning “the Obscene Ones”. Creative effort devoid of creative power. Empty sexuality, empty work, zombie-like toil. Draining or vampiric trends where people’s body energy gets harvested to perpetuate the harvesting.

• Hollow Mercury: “Sammael”, meaning “Poison of God”. This is bullshit in Harry Frankfurt’s sense: deception based not (just) on lies but on getting the listener to stop caring about truth. Weaponizing the mind against clarity so that intelligence makes you dumber.

• Hollow Venus: “Arab Zereq”, meaning “Ravens of Dispersal” (for reasons that are beyond me — I don’t know why it’s “ravens” here). This is victimhood in the sense of Karpman’s Drama Triangle. Passion devoid of the higher functions of the heart.

• Hollow Sun: “Taigiriron”, meaning “the Disputers”. This is distorted pride, pride as a sin. False light. “I know the way, and I know the way for you!” It’s a very common temptation for people who first reach the Sphere of the Sun: “I’m now fully enlightened! I get it!”

• Hollow Mars: “Golochob”, meaning something like “Arsonists”. Destruction and forceful dispersal without the tempering of compassion or wisdom. This can show up as “holy” wrath, but it can also show up as condemnation and damnation and dismissal on a spiritual level.

• Hollow Jupiter: “Gha’ashebalah”, meaning “the Smiting Ones” — but I think that’s a misleading name. I prefer to think of this as the Devourers. This is grandiosity that consumes others, hollows them out, makes them an extension of you. Think of the way followers of dangerous cults can come to have the same phrases and gestures and speaking tone as each other, like they’re members of the cult before they’re people.

• The remaining three Hollow Powers correspond to the highest Spheres but don’t actually reach them. You grapple with them at full force in opening Da’ath, the Gate of the Abyss:

  • Rejection of Saturn: “Satariel”, meaning “the Concealing Ones”. Saturn gives birth to the material world, so in rejecting Saturn we reject her gift of incarnation. This is the attempt to escape material existence to seek a “higher” spirituality, viewing the realm of duality as corrupt or empty of meaning or value. (This is a point where Hermetic Qabalah disagrees with Gnosticism: the Gnostics viewed the world as a trap to be escaped, while the Hermetic Qabalists view that as the confusion of the Satariel and hold the ultimate goal to be full incarnation as divinity.)

  • Rejection of the Stars: “Augiel”, meaning “the Hindering Ones”. In Hermeticism, the stars reflect the Eternal, which is the home and origin of all souls. Rejecting the stars means rejecting anything beyond duality, manifestation, and sensation. This is materialism for the sake of control. This is where science has fallen in rejecting the wisdom practices of its Hermetic roots.

  • Rejection of Unity: “Thaumiel”, meaning “the Twins”. This is the illusion of duality as the foundation of being. It’s not just a concept: this is duality as fundamental. Belief in fundamental good and evil as opposing forces has the Thaumiel as its parents.

Up to this point in this series we've been cobbling together pieces of the Hermetic puzzle. The way you're looking in a fractal mirror, so you need to look "above" (astrology) and "below" (alchemy) to sort of center yourself and embody divinity (theurgy).

Now we get a map.

The literal map is a diagram called the "Tree of Life". It's a set of ten circles arranged just so with 22 lines connecting them in specific ways.

It can take a long time to understand what this diagram is referring to — because it applies to everything.

Fortunately, I think there's a way to interpret it that's pretty straightforward. It massively clarifies how alchemy and astrology interrelate, and even what the Great Work is and how to achieve it.

Here I offer my way of reading this map.

Further Resources

• If after watching this talk you want to dive into Qabalah more deeply, I have a few recommendations:

  • Memorize the Tree of Life. It’s super handy to have a copy of it in your mind, and if you really get into Qabalah you’ll want that map very deep and reliable in you. The best method for doing this I know of is, every day draw as much of it from memory as you can, and then check.

  • Alan Moore’s comic book series “Promethea” is a rich and fun dive into Thelema, which is Aleister Crowley’s offshoot of Golden Dawn Hermeticism. Books 3 and 4 depict the main character traveling up the Tree of Life to visit each Sphere. Its depiction of each Sphere is a marvelous introduction.

  • John Michael Greer’s book “Paths of Wisdom” goes into marvelous detail about the Spheres, Paths, philosophy, and practice. You could totally use this as a how-to manual. It’s very sparse on diagrams though. I strongly recommend either (a) keeping a copy of the Tree of Life next to you while reading the book or (b) memorizing the Tree directly.

  • There are some key differences between Judaic mystical Kabbalah and Hermetic Qabalah. (There’s no consistent standard, but “Kabbalah” with a ‘K’ is often the Jewish one and “Qabalah” with a ‘Q’ is often the Hermetic one.) I think it’s worth learning a bit about the Jewish Kabbalah to get some context. The best overview I’ve found for this so far is the video series “Kabbalah Revealed”.

• I referenced the “Hollow Tree”. The usual name for the Spheres of the Hollow Tree is the Qliphoth, literally meaning “husk” or “hollow vessel” or “empty shell”. I’m the only one who calls them “Hollow” as far as I know; I just think it’s a clearer term than “evil” or “Dark Powers”. I give a talk later in the Pareto Hermeticism series on the Hollow Tree.

It's key to anything you'd want to call "magic".

In short, it says that magical causes are subtle.

Or in more shamanic language, the physical world is an echo of the spirit world.

Or in a more scientific frame, what you experience is a result of your brain interacting with something you cannot see directly. You're experiencing an interpretation, not that which is being interpreted.

When you understand this Hermetic law clearly… well, you realize it's kind of self-evident. It's like saying "Soft things are soft."

But in practice people often treat this law as false.

…which results in them looking for magical levers in all the wrong places!

Or acting like those levers cannot exist at all.

This video is an interlude in my Pareto Hermeticism series. It stands well on its own. But if you like this talk and would like more, consider subscribing:

Subscribe now

What can you create? What fails when you try? What mysteriously works with pure grace? What does this clearly reflect back to you about your spiritual progress?

Traditionally this was the domain of alchemy.

Metallurgic alchemists (at least the ones who had decent alchemical teaching) weren't just trying to turn lead into gold. They were trying to create "the philosophers' stone".

This fact is a coded hint about what alchemy is actually doing.

Recall that the whole point of Hermeticism is to fully embody divinity here on Earth.

Or said differently, it is to navigate death skillfully. To "produce the elixir of life".

Alchemy is the Hermetic science of consciousness. How life and death interact.

It's immensely empirical. This is where science learned empiricism from.

But as with all things, the truth becomes hard to trace when led by tradition, authority, and literalism rather than gnosis.

In this 3rd session on Pareto Hermeticism, I name the core of Hermetic alchemy as I understand it. It's a vast topic, but as with Hermetic astrology I think the essence is approachable in one talk.

Further Resources

• If you want to dive deep into alchemical symbolism, and you like the Harry Potter series, I very highly recommend John Granger’s analysis as a rich trailhead. He has a large collection of articles on Rowling’s series as “literary alchemy”. His book “Unlocking Harry Potter” is also excellent. This is an introduction to both alchemy and English literature that I really would have loved to know about decades sooner.

• Carolyn Elliott teaches a technique, called “Existential Kink”, that’s just dynamite for most folk. It’s an approach to the rubedo stage of (inner) alchemy. Her book by the same title goes into a lot of depth about her approach.

• The Wikipedia page on prima materia is pretty good. The name and idea of the prima materia is the origin of something dear to my 1990s RPG gamer heart: the Sphere of Prime from the game “Mage: the Ascension”.

• The Elysian Fields — sometimes just called “Elysium” — form a kind of mythical afterlife. Elysium has a lot in common with our conceptions of Heaven. One way to articulate the goal of Hermeticism is to enter Elysium and embody its heavenly qualities on Earth. The reason for its symbolism in alchemy makes more sense when connected to Hermetic Qabalah: Elysium corresponds to Tiphareth, the Sphere of the Sun, which lies above the Veil of Forgetting that defines normal mortal life.

• The closest analog to the philosophers’ stone in Buddhism seems to be the cintamani.

• Snakes show up surprisingly often in spiritual work. In Hermeticism they appear on the caduceus of Hermes (i.e., the twin snakes around a staff that’s now associated with medicine). Across the world they’re associated with wisdom and insight — which is awfully strange if you think about it. Why would we associate snakes with higher consciousness? Andrew Cutler has a curious theory about this that I mentioned in passing in this talk: the Eve Theory of consciousness.

In this session I give an overview of one of its two main practices: astrology.

The point of Hermetic astrology is to orient you to the cosmos. It's part of a system, seamlessly interwoven with alchemy, theurgy, and Hermetic Qabalah.

And the aim of the system is to consciously embody divinity here on Earth.

In this talk I try to give you a feel for the underlying laws. This art has to land in your body for it to work for you. And when it does, it changes how the world looks to you.

Then stuff like "Why look at the stars' positions when you were born?" makes way more sense. It’s far from being an arbitrary rule.

Further Resources

Here’s some follow-up for material I brought up during this talk:

• I’m leaning heavily on what’s called Hellenistic astrology. It’s meaningfully different from modern astrology in some key ways. In particular, the old astrological system was far more compatible with alchemy than modern astrology is. I picked up this style from Matthew Merlin.

• I have a somewhat unusual take on Saturn. I brought it up in this talk. A few years ago I wrote an essay about my approach to Saturn. You can read that essay at this link.

• The term “egregore” shows up in occult contexts from time to time. I’m watching it become a more common term. When I use it, though, I don’t mean something vague or otherworldly. I gave them some grounded description (as “memes”) in a 3-hour YouTube interview, which you can watch at this link if you like.

• Here’s where you can find out more about Michael Ashcroft’s approach to Alexander Technique. He’s also quite active on Twitter and has a thread of threads explaining parts of his approach.

But it’s probably best understood as Western magic.

It’s the origin of alchemy, and astrology, and the Law of Attraction, and Wicca. Of grimoires and spells and wizards who wear pointed hats and write sigils and speak arcane languages to command hidden forces.

But it’s also where the scientific revolution comes from. Isaac Newton was a practicing alchemist, as just one example of many. You can actually see his Hermetic thinking in his formulation of physics once you know what to look for.

Hermeticism is a very deep and complex topic. And it often drowns in fantasy. Since the 18th century there’s been a sharp divide between its rational and mythical sides. An example is how astronomy offers no guidance about how to live a good life, while astrology falls prey to confirmation bias and rationalization.

Fortunately, I think there’s a way to bridge this divide without having to go into a ton of detail. The core of sane Hermeticism is pretty simple. It just requires a perspective shift.

This video was the first of seven I offered publicly on “Pareto Hermeticism”. “Pareto” here refers to the Pareto Principle, also known as the 80/20 rule: “80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes.” Basically, if you know what to focus on, you can do most stuff you care about with just a few of the tools.

This first video gives an overview, mostly focusing on the idea of reality as a fractal mirror. This idea helps make it clear why alchemy and astrology are part of a unified system for cultivating wisdom and magical power.

This was originally livestreamed on Facebook in August 2023. (You can view the original here if you like.) Unfortunately Facebook changed the aspect ratio of the video a few seconds in, so it looks kind of strange. Thankfully it doesn’t break anything about the presentation, and the rest of the series didn’t suffer this fate.

Further resources

Here’s further info on some of the things I brought up during the call, in case you’re curious:

• The Wikipedia pages on Gnosticism and the demiurge give pretty good overviews of those topics. Bear in mind that Gnosticism tends to demonize the flesh as a prison and encourage spiritual transcendence, which is seen as a confusion in Hermeticism. (In the Hollow Tree of the Qabalah this error is known as Satariel, the Empty Power that rejects the divine gift of Saturn.)

• I point out an ancient distinction between theurgy and thaumaturgy. The first is about becoming magic (inducing sacred experiences) while the second is about doing magic (affecting the material world). Much later on a distinction was drawn between “white magic” and “black magic”, roughly corresponding to these two. (You see this in the belief that praying to God is fine and good but casting spells is maybe demonic.) When the West dethroned religion during its Age of Reason, it flipped which of the two kinds of magic was demonized: now prayer was seen as foolish whereas penetrating the secrets of the material world was all that mattered. Today we are still heirs of this confusion, as science versus spirituality. (The fact that science is seen as more authoritative or real comes from what the Hermetic Qabalah names as Ghagiel, the rejection of the divine gift of the stars.)

• I referred to “mathema” as the discipline of using numbers & shapes to train gnosis. The term comes from the mathematikoi (literally “learned ones”), one of the two main groups to arise from the cult of Pythagoras after his death. This is where we ultimately get our word “mathematics” from. The strange rote tool taught in modern math classes is only superficially similar to mathema though; I wrote a Twitter thread in March 2023 ranting about this fact.

Finally, if my style of teaching Hermeticism appeals to you and/or you want to see the rest of the Pareto Hermeticism series, consider subscribing:

Subscribe now

I’d like to offer a different vision of astrological Saturn.

Modern astrology depicts Saturn as a disciplinarian, the celestial taskmaster, the bringer of mundane necessity and the drudgery of practical material existence.

But as I’ve been doing natal chart readings, I keep finding that this just doesn’t quite fit. When naming this sort of Saturnian theme in someone’s chart, they’d often react with confusion, or maybe “Huh. Yeah, I can kinda see how that fits me.” But it wouldn’t have the soul-ringing rightness I’m used to seeing with the rest of the reading. The “stern grandfather” vibe just doesn’t land.

And I could tell some important celestial note was missing.

As I’ve listened closely to Saturn’s frequency, and as I’ve let it shape me from within, I’ve come to notice a strangely familiar dark caress that carries a notably different tone:

The bringer of grief. Slowing down from fatigue and doubt and sorrow to face the truth I quietly already know. Cutting away youth and hope and joy to lay bare that which our mortal forms try never to see. The cold touch we feel when kneeling at a loved one’s fresh grave, watching the emptiness tear away everything we thought we were, exposing a raw naked spiritual truth glowing underneath the layers of illusion we’d wrapped ourselves in but that can no longer protect us from the pain.

And opening the heart in ways it had forgotten how to do on its own.

In my readings, once I resonate with and speak from this darker essence, it often calls forth tears of deep soul remembrance and undeniable truth. I find myself wanting to use my voice with gentle reverence, almost a whisper. It very, very much lands.

I later learned that this “new” frequency is actually much closer to the traditional views of Saturn in Hellenistic and Renaissance astrology. It’s still meaningfully different, to be honest, but it struck me as a confirmation that I am in fact tuning into the right god-frequency.

It also fits much, much better with the rest of Hermetic philosophy. Stunningly so. It’s almost like this fusion of tarot, alchemy, astrology, and the Qabalah have been waiting for this puzzle piece to snap into place on Saturn’s throne.

I find this dark, and bittersweet, and beautiful. Like remembering a long-forgotten precious gift and fetching it from a dusty hidden corner of the attic, aching with memory and grace.

I’d like to share this with you now.

I want to start by sharing a story from the book “Bonds That Make Us Free” by Terry Warner. It captures a snapshot of Saturn’s gift in a way I keep finding myself coming back to even a decade after having first read this.

The bold for emphasis is mine. I’m pointing out the author’s implicit conversation with the Dark One.

Take your time reading this. Pause to breathe it in as needed. Saturn’s touch caresses very tender places in the soul. The heart needs time to open and listen.

[My wife] Susan and I named one of our sons Matthew, which means “gift of God.” During the early months of his life I would dance around his crib in my pajamas, singing. Some of the songs I made up as I went along, some I had learned from my mother, and one my grandfather had taught me many years earlier:

Matthew, Matthew was a fine old man,

Washed his face in a frying pan,

Combed his hair with a wagon wheel,

And died with a toothache in his heel.

Susan would laugh. It was the best of times.

Thirteen years later Matthew appeared one afternoon at the bathroom doorway and yelled, “When’re you going to get it fixed, huh, Dad?” The downstairs toilet had been broken for several days, which meant Matthew had to use the bathroom upstairs where I was changing the baby’s diaper.

I closed my eyes for a moment and took my time acknowledging his presence. My ears began to heat up a little. How dare he talk to his father that way?

I didn’t raise my voice. Instead I set the reeking diaper in the diaper pail and observed my son standing stiffly in the doorway, arms crossed, waiting for an answer. I said, very slowly, “I am not going to answer a question put to me in that tone of voice.”

“So you’re not even going to talk to your own son, huh?”

I did not say the next thing that came into my mind, which was, “I’m not going to talk to my son until he can speak respectfully to me.” Nevertheless, he responded with a defiant “Oh yeah?” in his eyes. For a fleeting moment this reminded me of his bright eyes and spirited bearing when, at the age of nine, he sang “Wells Fargo Wagon” in the university musical. How had that charming child turned into a teenager whom, for that moment at least, I would have been happy to have out of my sight?

Summoning up my patience, I briefly considered explaining how I had tried to fix the toilet that very afternoon—but then decided he didn’t deserve the courtesy of an answer. The growing pressure of my silence was making him squirm. “Fine!” he finally exclaimed, and he huffed out the door, through the house, and down the driveway toward the Hickmans’. Probably to use their bathroom.

“Oh brother!” I heard myself say.

Hadn’t I answered with perfect self-control? Hadn’t Matthew become even more impudent? What more can a father do when his son acts like that? I picked up the baby and told myself to forget about the whole episode.

Not half an hour later I heard Matthew talking with Susan in the laundry room. He was complaining that I was so far gone I wouldn’t even talk with my own children. Susan didn’t say anything in response—she didn’t even try to correct him! All I could hear besides Matthew’s complaints was the hum of the dryer and the clicking of the snaps on the clothes going round and round inside. Couldn’t Susan see he had her eating out of his hand?

I decided to get myself downstairs to make sure the broken toilet wasn’t overflowing. I didn’t want to give Susan and Matthew more evidence against me than they already had. On the way down I nearly tripped on a pile of clothes Matthew had left on the stairway landing. For a fleeting instant I felt like yelling “What are these clothes doing here?”

But I didn’t yell. Suddenly, quite unexpectedly, all my resentful thoughts gave way to silence. As quickly as I took my next step, I could see for the first time what I had been doing, as if light had broken through a crack in the ceiling of my mind. I had been looking upon my own son as my enemy! How could I have done that? How could I have been finding satisfaction in catching him in a fault? How could I have demeaned a person I loved so well?

I knew the conventional wisdom—you need to come down hard on a boy who acts defiantly, not let him get away with it, give him a swift kick in the pants, take away his privileges. But had I done any of those things, I would have felt worse than I did. The truth that mattered was not that he had been mistreating me—perhaps he had but that’s not what stopped me in my tracks. The truth that mattered was that I had been mistreating him.

Saturn brings the truth that matters.

Not to cause shame or pain. Those are the ego’s attempts to squirm away from truths that it fears will obliterate it.

Rather, Saturn reaches within us to open us more fully to love. To remind us why we’re here.

And all precisely as we requested.

To help explain this, I’d like to share a Hermetic creation story with you. This is part of the ancient origin of why we say that natal charts reflect a person’s fate, and why each visible planet in the sky has the meaning it does.

But as I do so, remember:

This is spelling out the story of your soul’s choice to live this life.

If you recognized the glimmer of truth in Terry’s story above, the way that it whispered in your body and heart… then you know what to listen to, where to feel your soul’s inner knowing.

The ideas do matter. There’s a reason these are the Hermetic arts, brought to us through Hermes/Mercury/Odin/Thoth, the trickster god(s) of mind and language.

But the truth that matters is not Mercurial.

It’s Saturnian.

In the beginning, all is One.

Not “was”.

Is.

Time is part of the All. So from within time, from within this dream of incarnation, we experience this initial wholeness as pervading everything. This is the beginning, right here and now. This is also the end, and everything in between. This, Here and Now, is the Eternal Light.

In Hermetic Qabalah we call this “Kether”, the first Sphere.

While in bodies, we create and use minds that normally think entirely within time. So for the sake of speaking — as language is a mental art — it’s convenient to pretend there’s a sequence of events that follow this.

But your soul’s deepest essence knows better. Keep listening to that.

Next (but really in this same all-pervasive eternal Now), the Light shatters into multiplicity.

This is reflected everywhere, but in the material world we see this most clearly in the night sky: The universal Light shatters into countless separate stars glimmering in a vast darkness, each a shard of the One.

In Qabalah we call this “Chokmah”, the second Sphere — which in the material world is literally the celestial sphere doming the sky.

Each seemingly separate shard of Light acts as the seed of a soul. After being born, looking back at how you got here, it’s as though your soul started out as a spark in one of those stars and then flew to Earth to incarnate.

Chokmah also gives rise to the gods. They are frequencies, structures, wholenesses that shape the nature of incarnate experience. As we fly toward Earth — spiritually, not spatially — we converse with each god as an eternal ancient friend who is helping us to design and manifest the mortal experience we want to have.

This is why the planets appear in the sky as star-like, and yet can move around on the celestial sphere: They’re the material reflections of these divine intermediaries between the One and full incarnation, neither here on Earth like us nor fixed in the heavens like the eternal shards of Light.

But there is a spectrum of how star-like vs. incarnate-like the gods are, which we observe as celestial speed against the stars: The slowest, Saturn, touches the boundary between the Eternal and the temporal; while the swiftest, Luna, holds the gate between flesh and dream.

This gives rise to what’s known as the Chaldean order of the planetary deities — the order in which soul-seeds converse with the gods to mould and enter each ever-faster layer of incarnation:

As we work out parts of our life plan with each deity, we set the context for the next god to do their work with us. This moves us closer and closer to the precise context of our births.

This is why where the planets are in the sky at the moment of your birth matters so much: It’s a metaphor, a rhyme, encoding the end result of this whole journey through the realms of the gods to Mother Earth’s embrace.

And the first step of that journey is to enter time.

(Why? Well, the rest of the steps don’t make a sequence without that. Kether, Chokmah, and the discussion with Saturn all “happen at once” beyond and throughout time. For the rest of these celestial conversations to happen in a specific order and move you closer to incarnation, it has to be possible to have one and then another.)

But you don’t really enter time. Not exactly. You, the All, already pervade everything — including the inside of time. You’re already forever both within and beyond time, and are already fully experiencing every moment of this life from birth to death.

What happens instead is more a matter of forgetting everything about your nature beyond time.

With Saturn you discuss how much of your true nature you will forget as you incarnate, and when you will remember what.

(“Truth” in ancient Greek is “aletheia”, which literally means “un-forgetting”. In this sense, Saturn rules truth.)

When this divine ally steps in, it’s to remind you:

Wake up, child. It’s time to wake up a little. Right here.

Like Terry Warner’s sudden inner stillness that swept him out of his rage at his son. Like the revelation of someone who looks at their ten-year marriage, actually takes in that they’re unhappy, and pauses to say “Wait, what am I doing?” Like the tiredness that pulls you down to rest even when you believe you should keep working.

It’s a silent, ringing clarity that cuts through all the forgetting.

…slicing straight through the tender tissues of the ego.

Saturn’s main tasks are to usher you into time’s flow, to guide you through it, and to bring you back out.

We normally call that last step “death”.

The ego — that is, who we think we are while we’ve forgotten who we are — views the return of our spiritual memories as a threat, as something it does not want.

There’s a reason we have the term “ego death” in spirituality. It doesn’t feel like you have this thing called an “ego” that dies while you watch, like a house plant. It really honestly feels like you die. The truth becomes clear only in retrospect, after Saturn’s scythe has sliced away a little of the forgetting to let in a bit more Light.

But both Saturn and your inmost soul-spark know this.

That’s why you work out a deal with this first of the celestial gatekeepers — the so-called “Greater Malefic”:

Whatever happens, ensure my plan, and my return.

I know that in my forgetfulness I will try to fight, and to ignore.

Please help me shape this dream of a life in the vision of love.

And whatever my forgetful form may say,

Take me into your embrace.

Open my heart.

Help me to walk the path of this life,

And in the end, guide me home.

To which the Dark One responds:

Of course, child. I’m right here. Always.

Saturn’s caress is actually quite gentle. Immensely powerful, like the depths of the ocean and the stillness between the stars. But ever so loving, caring, tender.

It is grief, and sorrow, and truth, and darkness that hold us in the agony of loss. A silent movement stirs from deep, deep within us to feel the preciousness of goodbye. Even if we resist, the tears come, and we’re broken open, and birthed anew.

These are not the stern eyes of a harsh taskmaster, pushing our nose into hard work and toil and necessity.

This is the loving touch of a mother who holds us as we weep.

I think it’s easier to understand, feel, and attune to Saturn if we imagine the planetary deity as the goddess of truth that matters. Her influence is gentle, opening, subtle, vast, and yet undeniable — much more akin to Venus and Luna than to Mars, Jupiter, or the Sun.

In fact, the ancient Hellenistic astrologers even named Saturn as one of the three Feminine planets.

And Qabalists identify the Sphere of Saturn (“Binah”) as the realm of the Divine Feminine, counterpart to Chokmah as the Divine Masculine.

(We can see this in the above Hermetic creation story: The One (Kether) ecstatically explodes into countless seeds (Chokmah), one of which enters time to grow in the womb of Form (Binah).)

So why did the ancient Greeks say that Chronos, god of time, is male? Where do we get this imagery of Grandfather Death from?

Well, in terms of history, I honestly don’t know.

But I have a guess.

Most of the significations the ancients and Renaissance astrologers had for Saturn — old age, withering, sadness, failure, depression, self-doubt, senility, hopelessness, fatigue, diminishment, death — are the forms of Saturn’s influence that the ego most fears. They are how she gets your attention when the false self desperately tries not to notice.

Even the modern version — obligatory toil, responsibility, restriction, discipline, structure, mundanity — are all about the ego’s strategies for dealing with mortal terror: “How do I ward off Death? How do I earn safety?”

(This is actually an echo of the Protestant fear of and response to God’s judgment: “If I don’t work hard enough, or if I take pride in my work, God will send me to Hell!” Same origin as the Protestant work ethic.)

So I think the attempts to describe Saturn have mostly been the ego expressing its own recoil from her.

In other words, Saturn depicted as an old, withered man…

…was actually a reflection of what those male scholars feared they would one day see in the mirror!

They focused on their own egoic fear and recoil to avoid looking directly into the eyes of the Dark Feminine.

But she is patient, and understanding. She simply smiles and gently replies:

Go willingly or be dragged. Your choice, love.

When we focus instead on the blessings of Saturnine influence, we get a very different picture from the sweat-drenched ravings and hand-wringing of the terrified Masculine ego:

• Maturity and wisdom

• Clarity of perspective

• Accepting needed rest

• Deepening trust in existence

• Letting go

• Effortless living

• Embodying and speaking truth freely

• Releasing old, painful ways of being

• Treasuring what matters most

• Vulnerability and authenticity

• Freedom from delusion

• Fully accepting and working with what is real

• Freely surrendering to the unknown

• Spiritual awakening

• Non-attachment

• Serenity

These are most certainly not qualities to fear.

They just come with a price:

To receive these, we must let the truth in.

The parts of us that are made of lies and ignorance find this terrifying. They recognize that this would mean their end.

This is why Saturn is called “malefic” along with Mars. These two love and support us in our journey just as much as the rest. They just do so in ways that are challenging for the mortal to understand as good.

(…although that challenge is exactly part of how they support us!)

And the fact that Saturn’s “hard to understand” influences are Feminine is precisely why she’s known as “the Greater Malefic”.

It’s worth remembering that during most of human history women were revered and sometimes even worshipped as the portals between the material and spiritual realms. They bring souls into the world — through the same portal that can suck the vitality right out of a man’s cock and being in lovemaking. In a spiritually well-held container, women who are giving birth often go into a natural psychedelic trance purely by the power of their own bodies; this has led some cultures to view mothers as powerful shamans who successfully reached into the stars and brought their children safely to Mother Earth.

A tremendous amount of misogyny — not just hatred and oppression of women, but of the Feminine — has its roots in male mortal terror of this awe-inspiring power over the gates of life and death. As men and women both internalized this Masculine distrust of the wet and potent Unknown, men even started taking over the processes of birth (as doctors) and death (as priests), and they began ushering women in states of too much spiritual power (such as during menstruation or childbirth) out of their fragile holy places.

So it strikes me as utterly unsurprising that Mother Time…

…who took our soul-seeds from the stars into herself and birthed us into Form…

…would come to be depicted as a male figure…

…who, despite it all, even in ancient Greek myths still gave birth to the Olympian gods.

In Lon Milo DuQuette’s book “Understanding Aleister Crowley’s Thoth Tarot“, he explains the alchemical meaning of the four court cards of each suit. He calls it an “alchemical drama”. The highlights go something like this:

1. The King and Queen make love, making her pregnant.

2. The Queen gives birth to twins — a Prince and a Princess.

3. In the act of birth, the Princess totally loses touch with the monarchs, falling well beyond their direct reach.

4. The Prince leaves home to listen for word of the Princess and guide her home again, remaining in distant but direct contact with their parents.

5. He cannot fetch her from where she is without losing his connection to home. So she must reach out to him herself.

6. Once together, the Prince and Princess marry. (Yes, this seems a little odd. We’ll get to this.)

7. And upon their return, they become the King and Queen.

(Bear in mind that the names of the roles differ between decks. The Thoth Tarot calls the King “Knight”, whereas many other decks call the Prince “Knight” and the Princess “Page”. And modern playing cards call the Princess “Jack” and drop the Prince entirely! I’ll stick with the King/Queen/Prince/Princess language here.)

The Princess is us, so to speak. The human mortal. And the Prince is the Holy Guardian Angel, a.k.a. the Higher Self. We call their union at the end “the Alchemical Marriage”, the fusion of Heaven and Earth.

But what are we to make of the King and Queen? Who or what is it that we become after the Alchemical Marriage? That is, what does it mean for the mortal to “become the Queen”?

To answer that, it’s helpful to connect this alchemical tale with the earlier creation story. That story follows what’s called “the Lightning Flash of Creation” on the Qabalistic Tree of Life:

The King is the multiplicity of Chokmah, who ecstatically explodes into countless star-seeds. That’s the gray circle in the upper right.

The Queen, at Binah, is Saturn. The story of the twins’ birth is describing the process of one of those seeds entering time. (We’ll get to how one seed becomes “twins” later.) Her Sphere is the black one at the top left.

The Prince (a) goes as far down on the Lightning Flash as he can while (b) still staying in contact with the Eternal realm of the top three Spheres via direct Paths. That farthest point is the Sphere of the Sun (“Tiphareth”), the middlemost yellow circle. If he were to go any farther, he would forget Eternity and would not be able to bring the Princess home. So there he waits.

And the Princess falls aaaaall the way to the bottom, to the Sphere of Earth (“Malkuth”). There, not only is she out of sight of Eternity, but all three adjacent realms (the Spheres of Luna, Mercury, & Venus) also fail to connect directly to the upmost triad. And Earth has no direct link to the Sun, where her Prince resides.

Because of all this, the Princess must travel up the Tree if she’s to reunite with her family — which is to say, to remember who she is.

The Princess’s first step up the Tree is the reverse of her last step down: She journeys up to the Sphere of Luna — the subtle realm of energies, archetypes, and the subconscious — along that lowest vertical Path.

That Path between the Earth and the Moon is unique. Every Path on the Tree has a corresponding major arcana tarot card, and every major arcana card is the trump of a planet, zodiac sign, or element. But that key Path, the Path of the card “The Universe”, is the only one with two significations:

• It’s the elemental trump of Earth…

• …and also the planetary trump of Saturn.

We see this curious duality between Gaia and Saturn appearing in metallurgic alchemy too. The task of turning lead into gold, in pursuit of riches and immortality, reflects the journey from Malkuth (Earth) to Tiphareth (the Sun). But lead isn’t really the metal of Earth the way gold is the Sun’s. Lead is specifically the metal of Saturn. So somehow lead is standing in for Malkuth — which is to say, alchemy uses Saturn to indicate the Earth.

This echoes a common Qabalistic saying: “Kether is in Malkuth.” Because the top three Spheres reside beyond time, they are paradoxically both different and the same. Since Binah (Saturn’s Sphere) is the entrance to time, it’s the closest of the three to being something like comprehensible to mortal minds, so it’s common to use its symbols to stand in for the whole upper triad.

So a slightly more astrologically flavored way of expressing this Qabalistic saying is: “Saturn dwells on Earth.”

Which leads us right back to this curious matter of the Earth-bound Princess becoming the Saturnine Queen.

The word “becoming” is a bit deceptive here. It’s more like remembering — in exactly the way Saturn governs aletheia, i.e., truth as un-forgetting. After their union in the Alchemical Marriage, the Prince and Princess remember that they always were the King and Queen.

Yes, in a curious way, they are their own parents — just as they are secretly aspects of one another.

In order for our soul-spark to fall below the Sphere of the Sun (“Tiphareth”) the first time, we had to forget Eternity. But this is quite a trick because there isn’t anything other than the Eternal. (“In the beginning, all is One.”) So that step down from the Sun is a matter of creating distance from, and learning to ignore, the parts of us that recognize the ever-present Now.

We call those intentionally forgotten parts “the Holy Guardian Angel”.

And climbing back up to Tiphareth is the same thing as remembering and reclaiming those parts of ourselves.

In my experience, meeting the Angel at Tiphareth doesn’t really feel like talking to a separate spirit or guide. That’s just how it looks from the lower four Spheres while climbing up. Rather, “meeting” my HGA in the Sphere of the Sun feels more like:

“Oh. Right. I am the Angel. I have a mortal form. And I always knew that. Right.”

Having gone through the fall-and-climb, though, the experience has changed. In a non-mental way, I can remember the descent, and I see how this new experience of the Sun is different. I have a body now. I know what it’s like to turn my gaze away from Eternity and live purely within time. I understand suffering, and mercy, and why they matter.

And I un-forget why I did all this in the first place — including the forgetting.

Taking the throne after this is a matter of having one foot in time and the other in Eternity. Fully incarnate, fully God. Straddling the paradoxical dance of remembering and forgetting, and giving birth to a blissful world.

Which is to say, coronation is a matter of remembering that you are Saturn.

You bring yourself into time.

Climbing back up to the upper three Spheres is the same thing as remembering that you never left — just as meeting with your Angel is a matter of realizing that you two have always been one and were never apart.

As Saturn, as quite literally truth incarnate, you choose how much of this you will un-forget, and when.

You didn’t really have a chat with some planetary deity before you were born to plan out the flow of time in your life. That’s just how it looks “in retrospect” while you forget.

Rather, you are having that “conversation” with yourself, right in this very moment.

You experience that “discussion” as the apparent flow of time from one moment to the next.

This is that life-planning exploration with the Dark One.

Right here.

Right now.

At once beyond and within time.

For otherwise you would not be reading this…

…Your Majesty.

Most of the above came from Saturn teaching me directly. I attuned to her frequency, and she guided my attention.

I didn’t recognize her as Saturn at first, really. It wasn’t until I started trying to make sense of natal charts that I noticed that this Dark Feminine energy fits so, so well in the role of the Greater Malefic.

(Although I had noticed hints before — namely that Hellenistic astrologers call Saturn “feminine” and that the Sphere of Saturn is that of the Divine Feminine.)

For a while I tried using the modern “disciplinarian” vibe for Saturn anyway. It’s a coherent energy signature. I tried to see how those two are secretly the same, or how they both applied in folks’ charts.

But after a while I gave up trying to reconcile them.

The Goddess of Truth just… fits there.

Reading natal charts that way makes the whole chart light up for the other person. Their soul remembers.

So I just found myself awkwardly disagreeing with astrologers about their own art!

Alas.

And then, after leaning in that direction for a while, I found out that this vision of Saturn is way closer to historically accurate.

Matthew Merlin gave a talk he called “Resurrecting the God of Death” in which he spelled out the history of Saturn’s significations. It turns out that what I’ve named here is much closer to traditional ways of describing Saturn than is the modern “discipline/structure/obligation/etc.” vibe.

(The above image is a slide from his talk.)

Merlin really does his research. He even learned ancient languages so he could read the actual original untranslated texts himself!

I’m definitely not going to do his research justice here. But I’d like to offer my attempt at a few main highlights and conclusions that stood out for me.

It turns out that around the turn of the 20th century, some astrologers started dropping Saturn’s “death and decay” connotations and added the now-familiar “structure” meaning. If I remember right, Merlin couldn’t quite pinpoint why. My best guess is that this was due to the upsurge in “positive thinking” coming from e.g. New Thought: “Focus on the positive to manifest the positive! Give the negative no attention lest it come about!”

(This later gave rise to “Think and Grow Rich” type philosophies and, now, the popular version of the “Law of Attraction”.)

Then in 1930, astronomers identified and named Pluto. Astrologers reasoned that whatever caused the scientists to christen it the Roman god of the underworld must have been meaningful, so they guessed that the planet must have something to do with death and transformation — which were influences that had been achingly missing in astrological readings for over a quarter century at that point. So Pluto got some of Saturn’s old significations.

So if you’ve been reading through this and thinking “Hey, isn’t he actually describing something like Plutonian energy?”… 

…well, that’s why!

I didn’t set out to challenge how modern astrologers do what they do. If you work with Pluto and you view Saturn as the structure guy and you get good results, great! You do you.

I just found it immensely remarkable that I didn’t know any of this… and Saturn taught me. Saturn corrected my impressions.

And then history corroborated her lessons to me.

That seems remarkable enough to be worth sharing.

When someone’s next step in their fate dance is to attune to Saturn, I focus on reminding them:

You already know how to do this. You know her voice. Just be still, and listen.

It’s very easy to get into the culture’s trappings and ego distractions. “Death is a great teacher!” “I got this great black candle and some myrrh and some sombre music ready to go.” “Oh yeah, I looooove looking at dead birds, seeing their decay….” “Right, I’ve gotta meditate.”

These are all perfectly fine.

And they’re also loud.

If you want to hear her, you know the silent note to listen to.

Think of a loved one. What if something were to happen to them before you see them again? The last time you looked them in the eye might be the final time.

Do you remember how you parted? How you felt? The quality of your attention to that last moment?

What does being still with that truth stir in you?

Breathe. In this moment. This precious moment.

Nearly everyone has something to grieve.

You matter.

Your sorrow matters.

You know where I’m pointing.

Whenever you’re ready.

“As far as I’m concerned, there is literally zero difference between psychology (the study and evolution of the psyche) and magic.”

This fascinating claim landed in my inbox recently. Its author, Carolyn Elliott, runs an online community that practices Hermetic magic and Jung-flavored alchemy. She was addressing some confusion about why she encourages magical practice as a way of cultivating personal growth.

Honestly, I largely agree with her claim about psychology and magic. I view it as an aesthetically rich way of interpreting Jung.

But there’s a puzzle worth noticing:

If there’s literally zero difference…

…then why does this need to be said at all? Why isn’t it already obvious to everyone?

It turns out there’s a deep, rich history behind this. It’s a wicked tale involving sorcery and enlightenment, betrayal and corruption, and several centuries of manipulation that even the manipulators have forgotten about…

…all, amusingly, leading directly to today’s pandemic.

It’s a context that I wish all people who try to practice this type of magic were more aware of, because ignorance of this causes a great deal of pain and confusion and poor results from attempted magic.

I won’t give the full story here. It’s simply too long for a single article!

But I’d like to give enough to loosen the cultural reins a bit.

The history of science has an embarrassing kink in it.

The scientific revolution really took off in the 1700s, during what’s called “the Age of Enlightenment” or “the Age of Reason”. The Church had been dealt a fatal blow with the Reformation about two centuries earlier, and with its newfound breathing room the West deeply embraced the power of logic, experimentation, and mathematics.

It’s not a coincidence that the American Constitution was written toward the end of this century. It was an intentional experiment in designing a government via reason rather than dogma or power.

The way modern scientists tell this story, you’d think the practices of religious devotion and medieval magic were superstitions we thankfully outgrew.

But there’s one rather key detail that they keep conveniently forgetting to mention:

Isaac Newton was an alchemist.

This was not an accident. Magic wasn’t a distraction for him. It’s not that “he just didn’t know better.”

This was absolutely central to the birth of science.

Had Newton not been practicing magic, science as it is today almost certainly would not exist.

As the story goes, Newton saw an apple fall from a tree, and then he wondered:

“I bet the same power that pulls the apple down also pulls the Moon down. So why doesn’t the Moon crash into the Earth?”

Bear in mind that at the time, even though we knew that the planets move in elliptical orbits, we didn’t know why. Nothing on Earth easily moves elliptically.

But this had not bothered philosophers before. The realm of the heavens and the gods always seemed to behave by different rules than the Earth. After all, the Moon doesn’t fall down! The Sun stays in the sky, as do the planets and stars. So their rules must be different!

But Newton would have recognized that this violates a key principle that some of you may have heard before:

Newton was familiar with Hermetic principles like this one. He would have recognized that the split between Heaven and Earth didn’t fit what he understood from his alchemical studies. So he sought to unify “above” and “below” in a coherent vision.

He also believed in a lawful God. He was sure that God continually intervened in His creation, but that He had a design in mind. This made the universe comprehensible: Even if God were to pass a miracle, it was possible to understand why, because God would choose to follow His own laws. Nothing happens “just because”.

Hence the Law of Universal Gravitation. Not a theory, rule, principle, or tendency. A law.

And even the basic idea of Newton’s Law of Gravitation is Hermetic. It’s literally “like attracts like”. It’s an application of the same Hermetic principles that inspired the modern Law of Attraction.

But all this is just groundwork.

Newton’s most powerful effect on the world was actually a potent act of Qabalistic magic.

In short, he taught the world how to speak hidden sacred Names of God.

I need a brief tangent to the main story here to bring in some context.

Part of the reason we use the word “spell” to mean both “magical effect” and “to name the letters making up a word” is that they both relate to speaking. “Spell” used to mean “say”, as in “Let me spell that out for you.”

I’m pretty sure this relates closely to the Qabalistic idea that words have inherent power. For instance, the Tree of Life has a Hebrew letter associated with each Path. So every Hebrew word therefore describes (and in some sense is) a connection of forces between the Spheres.

The Renaissance mages who wove Qabalistic magic, Christian mysticism, Greek philosophy, and Hellenic Egyptian Hermeticism & alchemy into a motley practice were experimenters extraordinaire. One of their more creative endeavors was to use Hebrew Names of God and angels in order to summon potentially dangerous spirits and bind them to do the mage’s bidding.

(This is probably why modern myths have it that mispronouncing a magical spell can be super dangerous!)

However, the most powerful Names of God are unpronounceable. That was thought to be because they referred to aspects of existence that were beyond the kenning of mortals, or were too powerful for humans to safely handle.

Probably the most famous of these is the Tetragrammaton. Transliterated into the Roman alphabet, this is “YHVH”, which is likely where we get “Yahweh” and “Jehovah” from. But the Tetragrammaton really is impossible to pronounce — at least in the conventional sense.

(One could argue that all of existence is itself a pronunciation of the Tetragrammaton! But that doesn’t help your mouth and vocal cords make the right sounds.)

However, if you could somehow find a way to pronounce these hidden Names of God, you would become capable of commanding profound and previously incomprehensible forces.

Newton’s main contribution to the modern world was to translate God’s Names from Hebrew into a fundamentally different kind of language — one that allowed its speakers to pronounce vastly more Names of God.

He even demonstrated its power by speaking an entire universe into existence.

Sadly, most modern folk have never encountered this language. It’s very rarely taught, and its old name has now come to apply to a distasteful widespread practice of psychological and emotional abuse.

This has an Orwellian effect that makes it very hard to explain what Newton actually did, magically speaking, because any and all references to the language usually evoke soul-pain and feelings of inadequacy and fear.

So please bear with me here. I promise, it’s not what you’re likely to initially think it is.

Some of you will have guessed by now:

I’m talking about mathematics.

…but it’s important to note that basically no one today is taught math — not as Newton knew it, and not as I mean it here.

Remember that the ancient Greek schools of math, like Plato’s Academy and the Cult of Pythagoras, were spiritual schools. Mathematics was a key aspect of a mystical practice for coming to directly encounter divine truth. The famous Allegory of the Cave was meant to depict the soul’s journey to encountering the brilliant Light of the Good. In this context, mathematics was a discipline for tuning the mind toward deep spiritual clarity and away from illusion.

But most people reading this have never encountered mathematics — not in this sense. What most people bump into in “math class” is computation. You’re given a method for solving numerical problems, and then you’re given a bunch of problems to solve — usually problems you don’t care about and never will.

This is akin to teaching sex ed purely by showing photos of used condoms.

But it’s much, much worse than that. Students have no reason to find any of the content of math class at all relevant to them. The efforts to fix this with “word problems” are laughable. The real reason most people suffer through a course on algebra or whatever is because they have to, on pain of embarrassment and not graduating and getting yelled at by teachers and parents.

And often, no one really knows why they’re forcing students to go through this abuse — but they usually pretend to:

• “You need it to be good with money.” (Bullshit.)

• “You’ll need it to get into college.” (Maybe true… but why does college require it?)

• “It helps you to think better.” (Oh really? How so?)

• “You need it for the next math class.” (Which I need to take… why?)

• “I know it sucks. I’m sorry it’s like this. But it’s required and you have to go through it.” (Okay, at least that’s honest… but why is it required?)

This whole thing is almost perfectly designed to be a soul-crushing abomination that traumatizes students’ relationship between understanding and wisdom.

And to be clear, this is despite the usually golden intentions of teachers, parents, etc.

The trouble is, most of them were traumatized this way too. The whole thing is a transgenerational mess.

(My Ph.D. is in math education. I say this with no small amount of relevant experience.)

So I want to be clear here:

The language Newton used to cast his spell really is properly called “mathematics”…

…and that is not the thing you’re probably inclined to think it is.

At its core, true mathematics is the divine art of clearly perceiving and understanding truth on your own terms, free of illusions and confusion and social pressure.

It’s not about numbers or computation or proofs, any more than language is about the alphabet or grammar or memorizing poems you don’t care about.

It’s the art of sharpening, and effectively wielding, the Sword of the Magician.

So with that said, let me explain the impact of Newton’s grand spell.

His main written work described the entire world of movement — on Earth, in the Heavens, the microscopic and macroscopic, every nuance everywhere — with a few very simple mathematical expressions.

He had, in effect, created a full physical universe made of math.

The objects in Newton’s world are not things as you and I are used to them. They’re geometric structures that are magically also equations (the same way y=x is magically also somehow a line). They interact according to mathematical laws. They have no intention, no soul, no artistry. Newton’s universe is a mechanical clockwork space where all movement is fully predetermined, forever.

But then the wizard went one step farther:

He opened a portal for entering his new universe.

He showed how the movement of the planets all make sense if you view them as objects in his strange world. He could explain their observed elliptic orbits using the same mathematical principles that show how apples fall from trees.

Suddenly we could view ourselves as being in Newton’s heavens.

This was a very powerful tool. Walking through Newton’s portal, we could model all physical movement as precisely as we cared to measure it. To this day, Newton’s work is considered the beginning of serious modern physics.

But that turned out to be a fatal flaw too.

After a while, people forgot there was a portal. They started insisting that we live in the mathematical world, that we always have, and that all impressions otherwise were pure delusion.

Newton’s portal worked so well that it required no spiritual awakening whatsoever to use it. Anyone could learn the language and then wield it to command powerful forces of reality much like you or I can use light switches without understanding electricity.

But this created an illusion. It became more and more unspoken that of course we live in a world governed by mathematical laws. Maybe we’re wrong about exactly which ones — Einstein famously tweaked and updated Newton’s laws to account for the unvarying speed of light — but obviously we have basically the right idea! After all, our technology works!

Never mind that our technology lacks a certain wisdom.

I don’t say this to generically bash the flaws of being human, or to criticize science for being imperfect. I mean this as a pointed critique of the forgetfulness imposed by the last 300 years of scientific obsession with Newton’s magic — not realizing that it is, indeed, magic.

In many cases, magical training required a kind of spiritual initiation. If you didn’t get the glimmer of enlightenment that let you see the underlying wonder and terror of reality, then people who had gotten that insight usually wouldn’t teach you the more potent arts of manifestation. Often you couldn’t learn them because, prior to penetrating the Veil of Paroketh, you actually have no damn clue who you actually are or what you’re capable of or how to access your own power.

Which is to say, the Western practice of magic was (among other things) an enlightenment discipline that yoked wisdom and power.

Newton’s spell called in a new era where access to a kind of deep magic no longer required wisdom training.

Oops.

So the unwise neo-mages started stupidly proclaiming that because there’s no room for concepts like wisdom or divinity in Newton’s mathematical clockwork machine, they do not exist, and belief in them is superstitious nonsense that should be rooted out and destroyed.

Sadly, this included targeting the branches of magical practice that focus on cultivating wisdom.

One of the first targets was all of religion.

To be fair, mainstream Christianity was a dying and shattered spiritual path by Newton’s time. It had become vastly more interested in power and dogma than in enlightenment.

But this doesn’t excuse a certain foolish gaslighting.

The God of magical Qabalism, for instance, isn’t an “imaginary friend”. God is more like reality itself. John Michael Greer really captured this nicely, I think, in his book Paths of Wisdom (p. 11):

“The words we use to describe the universe are symbols of our experience of the universe, which is itself a symbol of something else. About that ‘something else’ we can know almost nothing. […] all we can every really experience are the symbolic images the ‘something else’ creates in our minds. Still, after a fashion, we can reason about it. We can postulate that, in some sense, it exists. We know that it lies beyond the universe we experience, that it gives rise to that universe in some manner we don’t understand. We know that its true nature is totally inaccessible to us. And as we consider these attributes, we may begin to realize that this ‘something else’ sounds very much like what mystics of so many different places and times have called God.”

And yet, because there’s a silly version of this to condemn, a popular sport amongst militant atheists is to mock all references to a reality beyond their Newtonian playground. It’s as though they’re saying “If you believe in any God beyond this mathematical world, then you must believe in a stupid version, and therefore you’re foolish.”

Which really is amusing. I mean, they’re kind of implying that they themselves don’t exist. Otherwise who, exactly, is looking at this mathematical world? Is the math looking at itself from the inside somehow?

But I digress.

A related tactic is frame setting. For instance, Richard Feynman gives a brilliant lecture on scientific thinking — precise, clear, beautiful. The man had a marvelous mind. But in the middle he delivers this (my bolding):

“The same goes for astrological influences. If it were true that the stars could affect the day that it was good to go to the dentist, then — because in America we have that kind of astrology — then […] the physics theory would be wrong because there’s no mechanism, understandable in principle from these that would make it go. That’s the reason there’s some skepticism among scientists with regard to those ideas.”

The thing is, that’s not astrology’s claim. I’m sure some astrologers assert this, and if so then Feynman’s critique definitely cuts at their worldview. But astrology’s core premise isn’t about a mechanism within the mathematical sandbox. Rather, it’s about the power of getting insight by tracking a poetic relationship between self and world, and using the planetary bodies as “rhymes” within that “poem”.

(…the very same “poem”, by the way, that likely gave Newton his original inspiration!)

But that’s tricky to translate into the scientific framework. So even brilliant well-intentioned scientists like Feynman end up doing the simplest translation possible into the Newton-like realm of math, noticing that the oversimplified theory doesn’t work there, and then dismissing the original thing with a smirk.

It’s important to realize that these and related gaslighting moves have been going on…

…for over three hundred years.

This is a big part of why naïve realism — a background assumption that there’s an objective reality that’s independent of us and which we perceive mostly accurately — has such a firm hold on Western minds. Since the European Enlightenment, more and more people of authority have just… assumed we’re living in Newton’s new universe.

This has had two disastrous results.

The first has been a systematic destruction of meaning and meaning-making. Notice that Newton’s mathematical sandbox doesn’t have room for meaning, beauty, significance, love, bliss, or self-transcendence. Those are all illusions generated from mathematical objects bumping around mechanically. We might scale it up to “brain chemistry”, but the brain is still a machine inside a clockwork universe obeying pointless mathematical laws.

And that clockwork universe will eventually fade into nothingness, dragging even our feeble illusions of purpose into an existential grave.

This is bleak. Very, very, very bleak.

The standard answer to being trapped in an utterly pointless universe from which there’s no hope and no way out…

…is numbness and distraction.

This is a big reason why alcohol is a cultural staple whereas the vastly safer drugs of insight (LSD, MDMA, psilocybin, etc.) have been systematically banned.

This is also where our cultural obsession with staying busy comes from: “nailing it” at work, keeping yourself entertained, “improving” yourself, keeping going with caffeine and nicotine, etc.

…all while having this background sense that something is dreadfully wrong.

Naturally, once the collective unconscious found a mythic way of depicting this relentless, hopeless, brain-eating cultural infection, a certain kind of story became popular in the modern imagination:

It’s telling that during the same time period, Lovecraftian stories started getting popular. A common theme in Lovecraft’s cosmological horror is that knowledge drives you mad: Humanity lives in a tiny pocket of a vast, incomprehensible, and at best unyieldingly indifferent universe filled with horrible monstrosities. If one of those maddening beings happens to notice you… well, they’ll probably eat you if you’re lucky.

The implied argument is: It’s better to be entertained and distracted and believe in comforting lies than it is to behold the awful truth.

This is a major factor in why information bubbles, social media, and modern journalism all work the way they do. After the 2016 American election, the most stunningly obvious need was to find a way to bridge conversation and heal the divisive scar separating left-wing and right-wing.

But that was less interesting (i.e., distracting) than getting offended and scared…

…which meant profit followed other-side bashing…

…so the conversation actually divided even more harshly to the bizarre point that whether you wear a face mask is a political statement.

(Appropriately enough, I cannot find an image anywhere on the internet that depicts this divide without implying that the anti-mask folk are reactive nutjobs. But I’m sure their concerns have no underlying validity whatsoever and that any emotional imbalance and pain in them is best addressed via condescension and mockery, right?)

This is, quite literally, mass psychosis.

…which makes enormous sense!

I mean, if understanding reality means seeing that meaning does not and never can exist, do you really want to stare into that Abyss? Maybe psychosis is just… better!

This implicit background thinking, by the way, seems to be why so many governments were so slow to respond to the Covid threat. Governments survive based on their ability to stay in power. If that ability requires keeping the people distracted and entertained with illusions, then posturing becomes more important than tracking physical reality.

Besides, who is going to risk looking at actual reality and perhaps glimpsing Cthulhu?

Behold, the legacy of commanding hidden Names of God without understanding what you’re doing.

“Beware of unearned wisdom.”

Carl Jung

But that’s just the first disastrous result.

The other problem is a tremendous self-doubt that permeates Western wisdom practices.

Like… I’m guessing that you probably have a niggling doubt in the back of your mind (or perhaps not so far back!) that maybe all the stuff around magic and alchemy and the Law of Attraction and Higher Selves and astrology and all that is… just bonkers? Like playing with that is maybe just kidding yourself?

I know quite a few people who started owning the fact that they seem to get channeled messages, and whose lives are vastly improved for leaning into that and just trusting it…

…and yet they have to grapple with a fear that maybe they’re literally losing their minds.

It’s funny how people who are studying physics don’t have to worry about that.

That must be because their worldview is just correct, right?

(We’ll just quietly ignore the question of how anyone could possibly know something like that….)

I sometimes refer to this as “paradigm privilege”. There’s this undercurrent in the culture that just… assumes that naïve materialism is basically right, that science should get the glowing aura of authority, and that we’re embedded in a mathematical world that’s in some basic way like Newton’s.

It’s pretty bizarre when said that way, huh?

But there it is.

And magic-flavored cultures still mostly buy into it.

For instance, Dr. Joe Dispenza got really popular right before the pandemic from what I can tell. But what he’s teaching isn’t new. It’s basically a rebranding of New Thought.

So why do people love what he’s saying so much?

Well, basically because he’s giving them scientific permission to believe in magic.

It matters a lot that he’s a neuroscientist, for instance. And that he uses a lot of biological and brain science terms to describe how his methods work.

He’s bestowing the authority of the privileged paradigm on hope.

“Your brain and body don’t know the difference between having an actual experience in your life and just thinking about the experience — neurochemically, it’s the same.”

Joe Dispenza

There’s a really basic problem with the approach Dispenza is using though. Well, three problems, but they’re intertwined:

• In order for Dispenza’s magic to work, you have to believe in his science and his scientific authority. But what if he’s wrong? In order to protect the hope and meaningfulness received from Dr. Joe’s teachings, then, you have to guard against potential contrary ideas from other scientists. You need ready arguments that make Dr. Joe’s ideas unfalsifiable, and you need to avoid getting too curious about experiments that disprove his core claims. Which is to say, you have to alienate yourself from love of truth and deep curiosity and skeptical inquiry — the few wisdom practices that survived into the scientific discipline.
  

• Dispenza’s methods don’t solve the underlying problem — namely that science claims to derive its power from the true view of reality, which happens to be devoid of all meaning. He doesn’t show the exit from Newton’s brilliant existential grave. Or if he does, he buries the lede. So although he offers a way to reintroduce meaning and hope, he doesn’t seem to offer a path for cultivating wisdom, which means eventually his approach will degrade the same way science and religion have.
  

• The fact that people aren’t caring for the above two points means that there’s a market for spiritual bullshit. Maybe Dr. Joe is sincere and basically right, or maybe he’s sincere and BSing himself, or maybe he’s deceiving others in a narcissistic bid for attention and money. I don’t know — and it’s super damned important that it’s hard to tell! Because that last option — narcissists exploiting the spiritual market — is basically guaranteed to happen somewhere. Those people are going to manipulate the stories that spiritual groups agree on in ways that make those groups even more exploitable over time, which in turn increases how many narcissists show up to exploit the market… giving us a vicious cycle that results in expensive BS workshops and sex scandals and social backbiting in the name of love. So even with perhaps the best of intentions, Dr. Joe is actually encouraging a harmful spiritual market.

Just to be clear: I don’t have anything against Dispenza, or with people listening to and benefitting from him. Given the current social conditions, he might be doing the kindest, best thing he knows how.

I’m just trying to point out the dark consequences of buying into and relying on three centuries of gaslighting.

I could just as well have picked on The Secret. Or HeartMath. Or pretty much every single goddamn reference to the word “quantum” outside of physics and computer science.

(Seriously. I promise, quantum physics says absolutely nothing whatsoever about consciousness. That’s actually super important, and it would be an utter horror shitshow if it did. But explaining this in magic-inclined communities usually amounts to a kind of emotional violence because they’re using the authority of science to validate their ways of making meaning. In one sense, this whole essay is an attempt to help people out of that trap and into a recognition of their power to validate themselves.)

Science is very powerful. It’s worth listening to. None of this is to say that you should ignore science. Do so at your peril!

But I encourage you to keep in mind:

Its culture disowned wisdom.

Let’s conclude by returning to the original question:

If there’s literally zero difference between psychology and magic, why does this fact need to be pointed out?

In short, it’s because while there’s no difference in essence, there is an important difference in branding.

You see, Newton’s potent math box doesn’t really have a place for anything like choice or free will. And yet humans seem to experience it, and to use it to affect things in the physical world. That’s quite a conundrum if you believe we actually live inside that box! It seems to teasingly suggest some kind of spirit from beyond the box, interacting through the human mind.

That’s why the word is “psychology”. The Greek word “psyche” means all three of “breath”, “spirit”, and “mind”.

(It’s very classical to equate breath and spirit. Even our word “spirit” is Latin for “breath”. Being inspired literally means taking in a breath, like the gasp that sometimes comes from insight. And “expire” is a reference to the final outward breath of a dying person, often thought to be the soul leaving the body.)

It’s not really possible to make sense of the human psyche purely from within Newton’s box.

Sure, large chunks can and do make sense. If you damage parts of the brain, this clearly affects parts of the mind. And we seem to have a kind of autopilot that takes us straight home from the grocery store while we’re lost in thought. That part can quite likely be described within the scientific worldview.

But there’s this big gaping window that no one can seem to explain from within the privileged paradigm:

The window you’re looking through.

That which wakes up, and beholds that you exist.

That which is experiencing the idea of the Newton box to begin with.

As a matter of intellectual philosophy, this doesn’t matter all that much. Scientists roll their eyes and shake their heads and mutter something about how “we don’t know” doesn’t mean “it can’t ever be explained”. Mystically inclined folk nod and knowingly smirk at the ignorance of the scientists.

Both are kind of foolish, honestly.

But here’s the thing:

When you actually do the inner psychological work needed to become a more functional human being and transform your life…

…at some point you will encounter your inmost self…

…and then this spurious distinction between psychology and magic truly vanishes.

It’s not a coincidence that Carl Jung, one of the major founders of modern psychology, reintroduced alchemy as a serious and plausible endeavor.

The reason there’s an apparent difference between psychology and magic is this:

• We call it “magic” when we view it as falling outside the Newton box. It’s magic as opposed to science, you see.

• We call it “psychology” when it looks like it might fit inside the box.

When you stop buying into science’s paradigm privilege, and you instead just view it as one (very powerful) tool among many…

…then you can be free of the gaslighting, the meaninglessness, and the need for science’s approval.

You can enter and leave Newton’s box whenever you like.

You can behold all in wonder, and use all that works, freely.

You can remember that you are God.