Search Results for: dion fortune

The two previous posts on this blog will doubtless have occasioned a certain amount of frustration on the part of some of my readers. I can hear the distant muttering from here: “Okay, you’ve talked about Hiram Butler trying to become immortal by keeping his legs tightly crossed; you’ve talked about sex clubs dressing up…

It’s always struck me as rather odd that so many people think that occultism is inseparable from sex. The habit goes back a long way; the Jewish prophets, when they denounced their fellow Israelites and neighboring peoples alike for worshipping somebody other than the storm god of Mt. Sinai, routinely mixed accusations of sexual deviance…

I noted in a post earlier this year that although I greatly enjoy the fiction of H.P. Lovecraft, I don’t find it spooky at all. I find his tentacled Elder Gods endearing rather than terrifying, and the vision of reality central to his fiction—the philosophy that Lovecraft scholar S.T. Joshi has helpfully labeled “cosmic indifferentism,”…

Last month’s survey of sources of magical power in the Western tradition covered a lot of ground, and it’s probably going to be helpful to summarize before we proceed. Until the middle years of the nineteenth century, there were broadly speaking two major theories among operative mages about how magic works and where the power…

Once upon a time, operative mages in the Western world could quite easily pick up a newly published novel or a magazine fresh from the press, and read stories that featured real magic of the sort they themselves practiced. I’ve been reminded of that in recent weeks, after spending some of my free time reading…

When a fundamentally irreligious society takes up the comparative study of religion, it’s a safe bet that the results are going to be weird. Certainly my own encounters with the academic field of comparative religion, first in my university days and then in decades of reading since then, have left me scratching my head more…

The logical fallacies discussed in last month’s post here on The Well of Galabes aren’t simply a product of sloppy thinking. As already noted, they serve a specific purpose, which is to protect a particular set of beliefs from criticism. Every society in what I’ve termed the Dragon phase of its history, the stage in…

Last month’s post explored the modes of consciousness that blossom and fade at different stages in the rise and fall of civilizations. I want to go a little more deeply into those modes, because they have a great deal to teach about how magic works, and also about why it is that magic reliably falls…