004 Trauma For Your Own Good

New podcast. Available from the usual places. Alan Chapman and Duncan Barford, editors of a forthcoming collection of Aleister Crowley's magical writings, discuss the true meaning of Crowley's legacy and thought. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Nineteenth Enochian Call; the relevance of its description of the Earth to current events; suspicion of its description; implications of governance of a whole by its parts; how one part can never be an answer to the condition of the world; the truth of the world reveals itself in times of discord; the possibility of two different worlds; the nature of these different worlds; the rearrangement of the dominant way of understanding the world; the importance of naming things and of the refusal to name them; naming as a conduit into social and cultural drama; disadvantages of not naming; discrimination as the virtue of Malkuth; withdrawal and reserve as components of discrimination; nothing within the world offers escape from the nature of the world; our inner knowing of the nature of the world; leaning into the world diminishes the opportunity for something other; preoccupation with reputation as a substitute for humanity; the morality of the gutter; a cultural drama driven purely by a concern for personal reputation rather than a true contact of horror with the soul; reputation as a substitute for lack of control; doubling down and damnation; moving in the direction of loss of humanity; Buddhism and the Nineteenth Enochian Call; “It repenteth me I made Man”; the sorrow of the divine at the choices of humankind; how sorrow and compassion suggest an alternative path; warnings from God; a vision and its qualities; “being grabbed”; the destruction of a city; allowing the vision to disclose its nature; an event in reality that seemed to match the vision; contrasts and similarities with precognition and synchronicity; how prophecy is neither an instruction nor a message; “you know it when you see it”; the city in the vision was revealed as New York; prediction versus prophecy; the instructions embedded in the Call and addressed to the First Aethyr; scrying the aethyrs as remote viewing; Crowley’s approach to the aethyrs; consistency in the experience of scrying the aethyrs; the power of creation handed to the created; magick as the providence of God; the way out is through the world as it is; going first to the highest and the highest governing the parts is the way to turn things the right way up; conscious participation in the process of division; magick as the way out from darkness; the experience of scrying the First Aethyr; finding one world through the other as a complete image of creation; the point of the vision as an expression of divine sorrow; its fulfilment an indication of the reality of the divine.

A tale of receiving cash from a demon; the result of the working having the same character as the working; a tale of summoning Lucifer; the danger of nothing seeming to have happened; the urge to teach Lucifer a lesson; appreciating the multiple facets of manifestation, including the experience of self; the contrast with the manifestation of the divine; the dilemma of leaning into the demonic; total manifestation and the redundancy of magick; warnings against demon magick; breaking free from the loop of repeated mistakes; exiting the occult; demonic bondage; a tale of trying to liberate a demon; the naivety of this; the torturous flavour of the results; the impossibility of liberating something with a nature opposed to liberation; a tale of demonic possession; the problematic but compelling nature of ritual amnesia; amnesia as a possible sign of trauma (or false transmission); the nature of trauma in relation to the demonic; similar dynamics in non-magical contexts; malevolence and its nature; evil and the denial of evil; speaking with a demon; the baffling refusal of the possessed to be free from possession; the dynamics of addiction; possession as a slow process with a long history; the accumulation of small violations of conscience; how a further false transmission results in a lost soul; malevolence as that which reacts to good as an existential threat; malevolence as a conscious choice; everything as an encounter with the demonic or the divine; the ubiquity and subtlety of malevolence; how demons erode conscience and lure us into destroying ourselves; examples of choosing a different course; all demons as one entity that uses our good intentions to destroy ourselves; humans and demons as malevolent in different ways; demons as the endpoint of malevolence; luring others into hating the good; a tale of roasting a demon in the fire; intentional malevolence manifesting as a demon; Dion Fortune and Aleister Crowley on magical combat; how awakening is a fire and demons are drawn to extinguish awakening; spiritual reality and astral imagery; how demons say yes to annihilation.

Different types of discarnate entities; the nature of the entity defined by our relationship to it; distinguishing between different types of entities and relationships to them; elementals; the dead; demons; the pros and cons of experimentalism; “helpful elementals” and the problem of psychologization; two types of psychologization; power animals; ancestral spirits; the relationship to higher entities; how the divine demands everything; techniques of connection to higher powers; attention and the lower powers; the reciprocal nature of the relationship; the demonic sustainment of identity; relationship rather than appearance as the nature of the entity; the divine as self-evident; paying attention to internal states; how the lower realms might be helpful or necessary; the suitability of the contactee or devotee; working with the dead; attention to our own assumptions and motivations; “spirit-trafficking”; magick versus taking things seriously; a story about “demonic splashback”; issues concerning respect; demons as demonic; the story of “Marvin” and the dead cat; the engineering of circumstances by demonic entities.

Our recent podcast hiatus; the relevance of reputation to magick; the use of reputation by spiritual teachers (Crowley, Gurdjieff, Milarepa); the indispensability of dissuasion; contrasts between this and modern spirituality; warnings against reputational damage; reputational contagion; why and how reputation will not survive the Great Work; the reputational disaster of The Baptist’s Head material; why we might want to stand by this regardless; the antidote to these problems in Magia; following the thread versus reputation and preference; the destruction of the teacher’s reputation; bad reputation differentiated from inappropriate conduct; following the thread regardless of revulsion; the impossibility of gatekeeping; how disgraced teachers are often overly preoccupied with reputation; dissuasive teachers we have known and loved; trust for the truth rather than for the teacher; how, if even the teacher may not know what they are following, then neither will the student; why non-abuse is so easy; “Boomer magick” and its impact on contemporary spirituality; the Gen X perspective; the opportunity presented by the passing of the Boomers; the current prevalence of “the Phenomenon” in podcasts; the suspicious absence of faeries from our experience; the annoyance of crappy little spirits; the possible relevance of this to classic faerie encounters; misdirection, deviation, fakery and fictionality; the relationship of faerie and UFO encounters to awakening; getting stuck in the “outer threshold” of spiritual realisation; how most work with spirits might be a distraction; the contrast of this perspective with animism and spiritism; why the mystery of the Phenomenon is actually not mysterious; the delusion of collective awakening; the problem with “the other of the other”; the Phenomenon as a manifestation of the Many; the importance of engaging with particulars; encounters with birds and the contrast of these to faerie encounters; birds and angels; the paranormal as a possibility for initiation; discriminating between spirits by their relationship to the human; the Phenomenon as a parody of initiation.