With this post we continue a monthly chapter-by-chapter discussion of The Doctrine and Ritual of High Magic by Eliphas Lévi, the book that launched the modern magical revival. Here and in the months ahead we’re plunging into the white-hot fires of creation where modern magic was born. If you’re just joining us now, I recommend reading the earlier posts in this sequence first; you can find them here. Either way, grab your tarot cards and hang on tight.
If you can read French, I strongly encourage you to get a copy of Lévi’s book in the original and follow along with that; it’s readily available for sale in Francophone countries, and can also be downloaded for free from Archive.org. If not, the English translation by me and Mark Mikituk is recommended; A.E. Waite’s translation, unhelpfully retitled Transcendental Magic, is second-rate at best—riddled with errors and burdened with Waite’s seething intellectual jealousy of Lévi—though you can use it after a fashion if it’s what you can get. Also recommended is a tarot deck using the French pattern: the Knapp-Hall deck, the Wirth deck (available in several versions), or any of the Marseilles decks are suitable.
Reading:
“Chapter Eighteen: Potions and Magnetism” (Greer & Mikituk, pp. 355-363).
Commentary:
There are chapters of our text that modern readers can examine in perfect comfort, serene in the conviction that the subjects Lévi discusses are nothing anyone has to worry about nowadays. Our medical knowledge has advanced far enough since his time that nobody has to worry about being accidentally buried alive, for example, and even our Satanists are pretty small beer compared to their equivalents in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Then we turn the page and slam face first into something that has far more relevance to today’s life than most of us like to think about.
This chapter belongs to this latter category. It begins innocently enough with a fine bit of literary atmosphere, brandishing imagery from classical Greek and Roman authors. These, as my more literate readers will be aware, used Thessaly in much the same way that cheap modern horror writers use Transylvania, as a cliché for anything scary. It’s true, mind you, that magical practitioners in ancient Thessaly seem to have known, as their equivalents in rural areas all over the world have always known, how to use locally available substances to affect consciousness. There are plenty of naturally occurring drugs that will lower inhibitions and stir passions, and plenty of others that will raise inhibitions and quell passions. These are among the basic working tools of rural folk magic everywhere.
A certain degree of folk knowledge of neuropsychology underlies all this. The two categories of effects just noted are functions of the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems respectively. These are the two parts of the nervous system that aren’t dependent on the brain for their operation. The sympathetic nervous system is a net of nerves connecting the vital organs, coordinated by little lumps of nerve tissue called plexi, of which the solar plexus is the largest and most important; it keeps your organs working in the normal way and activates the biological appetites—food, sleep, and sex. The parasympathetic nervous system is a smaller but equally influential nerve net, centered on the vagus nerve, that rides herd on the sympathetic system and damps down its effects when blood and energy have to surge to the muscles or the brain.
These two are the yin and yang of the human nervous system. Stimulate the sympathetic system and the physical passions become more insistent while the muscles and mind relax; stimulate the parasympathetic system, and the physical passions fall silent while the muscles and mind snap to attention. There are plenty of drugs that can do either of these, and plenty of other methods that do them just as effectively: a caressing hand will stimulate the sympathetic, for example, while a sharp tap with the fingers will stimulate the parasympathetic. Tricks to activate one or the other play quite a substantial role in the toolkit of the old-fashioned witch, but they are rarely more than the foundation on which the practitioner builds.
The key to the old magic of Thessaly, and of a hundred other lands, is that the ebb and flow of activation between sympathetic and parasympathetic systems takes place below the ordinary level of consciousness. I say “ordinary” because you can learn to be conscious of that ebb and flow, given a certain investment of time and practice, but most people never put in the work they would need to achieve this, or see any reason to do so. That leaves them vulnerable to one of the odder habits of the human mind—its insistence on seeing passions as effects, not causes. This allows the witch to insert a false cause into the equation and get a desired effect.
Consider a man who wakes up angry. Quite often this happens because his dreams have stirred up memories of past events that left him feeling frightened, grieving, or ashamed—it’s another odd habit of the human mind that it often flees from these feelings into anger, which is less uncomfortable to experience. As he stomps around the place in the gray light of dawn, his strongest desire (though it’s usually an unconscious one) is to find something onto which he can project his anger, so he can vent it. He’ll find something, too. Watch what happens next, though: he’ll insist with perfect sincerity that the target of his anger is the thing that made him angry. It’s not—far more often than not, the anger came first, and found a target on which to earth out—but unless he learns to observe his own mind, he’ll never notice this.
Now consider the way that the same effect empowers the witch’s love potion. Let’s suppose that the man we’ve just discussed is heterosexual but uninterested in a particular woman, and that woman wants to manipulate him through sex anyway. All she has to do is make sure he drinks something that stimulates the sympathetic system; then she does something to catch his attention in some way. Even if he doesn’t like her, if she’s got even the most rudimentary skills at the art of seduction, odds are he’s going to mistake the activation of his sympathetic system for sexual arousal inspired by her presence, and there’s a good chance that they’ll wind up in bed. If she knows what she’s doing, she can use this effect over and over again, and convince him that he’s crazy in love with her. He’s not, but his own lack of self-knowledge leaves him hopelessly vulnerable to this kind of manipulation.
Of course men can and do run the same kind of operation on women quite frequently, and it also happens tolerably often with gay and lesbian couples. People also do it to themselves, as witness the phenomenon of “beer goggles.” Alcohol is a powerful stimulant for the sympathetic nervous system. People drink it to give themselves permission to do what they want to do in the first place, but think they shouldn’t. So they wake up the next morning in bed with someone they’d normally consider unacceptable as a partner, and blame it on the beer. The unspoken reality in most such cases is that both participants in this transaction have highly inflated expectations of the kind of partners they can reasonably expect to attract, and have to cast a beer-fueled spell on themselves to get realistic about their options.
This kind of doublethink is embarrassingly common among people. Lévi points this out wryly with his discussion of the attraction many women feel toward “bad boys.” It’s a source of quite some amusement in male circles that so many women these days insist angrily that this attraction is a nasty masculine myth. Anyone who sits in a corner at a singles bar, sips a beverage, and watches the goings-on without getting caught up in them can settle the matter by direct observation. The denials just referenced are all the funnier in that old-school feminists, at least, used to be very well aware of the equivalent pattern on the other side of the gender divide.
The virgin-whore dichotomy, as this latter pattern was sometimes called, was a precisely comparable divergence between the way men said they wanted women to behave and the way they actually wanted them to behave. Social mores being different in those days, what happened much too often is that men married the “good girls” who did what men told them to do, and then cheated on the good girls with the not-so-good girls, producing a cascade of dishonesty, dissatisfaction, and misery on all sides. The same result is just as inevitable the current way around, as a great many former “nice guys” who tried to conform to what women said they wanted, and a comparable number of thirty-something single mothers who can’t get dates and wonder where all the good men are, can testify.
The same kind of cheap sorcery exploiting the gap between desire and reality, though, takes on an even more important form in contemporary life. Identical patterns of manipulation to the ones we’ve just been discussing are used in advertising of all kinds; that’s how advertising works. It’s in no way incorrect, in fact, to say that the economies of the developed world are powered by primitive witchcraft. Look at any advertisement you wish, especially but not only those in video format, and it’s easy to spot which of the two nerve nets they’re trying to stimulate: the warm fuzzy feelings of the sympathetic system are triggered by one set of stimuli, the cold prickly feelings of the parasympathetic system by a different set.
The goal of this kind of witchcraft is essentially the same as with the form we’ve been discussing. It’s just that instead of trying to convince you that you’re sexually aroused by someone who wouldn’t normally attract you, they’re trying to convince you that you want to buy a product, pay for a service, or elect a political candidate who normally wouldn’t attract you at all, by associating the thing they’re trying to sell you with the sympathetic reaction, or the opposite of the thing they’re trying to sell you with the parasympathetic reaction. The gimmicks used for this are utter clichés, and once you spot them you’ll find it impossible to miss them.
The gimmicks in question, please note, are anything but omnipotent. There are two ways that they fail. The first is that the target of the spell has to be unreflective enough not to notice the spell. If the target keeps any degree of mental balance, recognizes what’s going on, and doesn’t fall into the trap of associating the nerve reaction with the ideas or images that are being provided as a fake explanation, the spell fails; it really is as simple as that.
Yet there’s an even more catastrophic mode of failure, which is when the person who’s casting the spell becomes its victim. “Getting high on your own supply,” to use a current bit of internet slang, is fatal in this kind of magical work. If you fall under the sway of your own spell, you lose the ability to realize when it’s not working, and thus become incapable of adapting it to changing conditions. Thus your magic becomes predictable and easily evaded, just as you lose the ability to notice that people are evading it.
As I write these words, the political trajectory of the United States has just been turned on its ear by exactly this effect. One party’s supporters became so high on their own supply that they lost the ability to remember that the warm fuzzy feelings they assigned to their candidate, and the cold prickly feelings they assigned to the other, were artifacts of their own propaganda and would not be felt by anyone who hadn’ t been affected by it. As a result, their propaganda became clumsy and hackneyed, and they became the only ones on whom it had any effect at all. Their attempts to sway public opinion failed, but they remained incapable of perceiving the possibility that it could fail, and so they walked blithely into an epic electoral disaster serenely convinced that they were sure to win.
How this will play out over the months, years, and decades to come is an interesting question, in more than abstract terms. As a lesson for the aspiring student of magic, though, the 2024 US election is worth close study. Set aside your own political opinions and passions, dismiss for a moment the substantive issues that were up for debate, and simply pay attention to how each side tried to associate their candidate with sympathetic nervous system reactions and the other side with parasympathetic reactions. Notice how this was done, who it affected, and who shrugged off whose efforts how easily. You can learn a great deal from this.
You can learn at least as much by studying successful and failed advertising campaigns for products, or by sitting back in the corner of a singles bar with a drink in your hand, as mentioned earlier, and watching the antics of the other people there in genial silence. In each case you’ll see the same effects being deployed over and over again, in different contexts, by different means, and with different degrees of competence. Learn those effects, and you’ll gain an invaluable gift, which is the ability to choose whether to respond to them or not.
More broadly, there are two kinds of magic, which our text describes as the way of the magician and the way of the sorcerer. The magician masters the influences of the astral light in himself or herself, and by doing this gains mastery over those same influences in the wider world. The sorcerer tries to control the influences of the astral light in the wider world without first learning to master them in himself or herself. The sorcerer thus always risks falling under the power of his or her spells—the real meaning of the Faust legend—while the true magician is free of that risk.
Notes for Study and Practice:
It’s quite possible to get a great deal out of The Doctrine and Ritual of High Magic by the simple expedient of reading each chapter several times and thinking at length about the ideas and imagery that Lévi presents. For those who want to push things a little further, however, meditation is a classic tool for doing so.
Along with the first half of our text, I introduced the standard method of meditation used in Western occultism: discursive meditation, to give it its proper name, which involves training and directing the thinking mind rather than silencing it (as is the practice in so many other forms of meditation). Readers who are just joining us can find detailed instructions in the earlier posts in this series. For those who have been following along, however, I suggest working with a somewhat more complex method, which Lévi himself mention in passing: the combinatorial method introduced by Catalan mystic Ramon Lull in the Middle Ages, and adapted by Lévi and his successors for use with the tarot.
Take the first card of the deck, Trump 1, Le Bateleur (The Juggler or The Magician). While looking at it, review the three titles assigned to it: Disciplina, Ain Soph, Kether, and look over your earlier meditations on this card to be sure you remember what each of these means. Now you are going to add each title of this card to Trump II, La Papesse (The High Priestess): Chokmah, Domus, Gnosis. Place Trump II next to Trump I and consider them. How does Disciplina, discipline, relate to Chokmah, wisdom? How does Disciplina relate to Domus, house? How does it relate to Gnosis? These three relationships are fodder for one day’s meditation. For a second day, relate Ain Soph to the three titles of La Papesse. For a third day, relate Kether to each of these titles. Note down what you find in your journal.
Next, combine Le Bateleur with Trump III, L’Imperatrice (The Empress), in exactly the same way, setting the cards side by side. Meditate on the relationship of each of the Juggler’s titles to the three titles of the Empress, three meditations in all. Then combine the Juggler and the Emperor in exactly the same way. Then go on to the Juggler and the Pope, giving three days to each, and proceed from there. You’ll still be working through combinations of Le Bateleur when the next Lévi post goes up, but that’s fine; when you finish with Le Bateleur, you’ll be taking La Papesse and combining her with L’Imperatrice, L’Empereur, and so on, and thus moving through all 231 combinations the trumps make with one another.
Don’t worry about where this is going. Unless you’ve already done this kind of practice, the goal won’t make any kind of sense to you. Just do the practice. You’ll find, if you stick with it, that over time the relationships between the cards take on a curious quality I can only call conceptual three-dimensionality: a depth is present that was not there before, a depth of meaning and ideation. It can be very subtle or very loud, or anything in between. Don’t sense it? Don’t worry. Meditate on a combination every day anyway. Do the practice and see where it takes you.
We’ll be going on to Chapter 19, “The Magistery of the Sun,” on December 11, 2024. See you then!
Hi JMG and kommentariat. When I’ve read about the effects of alcohol in bad sexual “choices”, I’ve just remembered Shakespeare quote…alcohol provokes desire but it takes away performance (if I remember well this quote in English, which isn’t my mother language).
At this link is the full list of all of the requests for prayer that have recently appeared at ecosophia.net and ecosophia.dreamwidth.org, as well as in the comments of the prayer list posts. Please feel free to add any or all of the requests to your own prayers.
If I missed anybody, or if you would like to add a prayer request for yourself or anyone who has given you consent (or for whom a relevant person holds power of consent) to the list, please feel free to leave a comment below and/or in the comments at the current prayer list post.
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This week I would like to bring special attention to the following prayer requests.
May baby Gigi, who may be suffering from side effects of medication prescribed during pregnancy, be healed, strengthened and blessed. May her big brother Francis also be blessed and remain in excellent health.
May May Jennifer and Josiah, their daughter Joanna, and their unborn daughter be protected from all harmful and malicious influences, and may any connection to malign entities or hostile thought forms or projections be broken and their influence banished.
May Ram, who is facing major challenges both legal and emotional with a divorce and child custody dispute, be blessed with the clarity of thought, positive energy, and the inner strength to continue to improve the situation.
May FJay peacefully birth a healthy baby at home with her loved ones. May her postpartum period be restful and full of love and support. May her older child feel surrounded by her love as he adapts to life as a big brother and may her marriage be strengthened during this time.
May Leonardo Johann from Bremen in Germany, who was
born prematurely two months early, come home safe and sound.
May all living things who have suffered as a consequence of Hurricanes Helene and Milton be blessed, comforted, and healed.
May Tyler’s partner Monika and newborn baby Isabella both be blessed with good health.
May The Dilettante Polymath’s eye heal and vision return quickly and permanantly, and may both his retinas stay attached.
May Giulia (Julia) in the Eastern suburbs of Cleveland Ohio be healed of recurring seizures and paralysis of her left side and other neurological problems associated with a cyst on the right side of her brain and with surgery to treat it.
May Corey Benton, whose throat tumor has grown around an artery and won’t be treated surgically, be healed of throat cancer.
May Kyle’s friend Amanda, who though in her early thirties is undergoing various difficult treatments for brain cancer, make a full recovery; and may her body and spirit heal with grace.
Lp9’s hometown, East Palestine, Ohio, for the safety and welfare of their people, animals and all living beings in and around East Palestine, and to improve the natural environment there to the benefit of all.
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Guidelines for how long prayer requests stay on the list, how to word requests, how to be added to the weekly email list, how to improve the chances of your prayer being answered, and several other common questions and issues, are to be found at the Ecosophia Prayer List FAQ.
If there are any among you who might wish to join me in a bit of astrological timing, I pray each week for the health of all those with health problems on the list on the astrological hour of the Sun on Sundays, bearing in mind the Sun’s rulerships of heart, brain, and vital energies. If this appeals to you, I invite you to join me.
This is a fairly timely post given some of the weirder changes in political rhetoric going on right now. I hope I’m wrong, because things could get extremely weird for the next couple of years if I’m not, but it looks like the Democrats are doubling down on the Trump and everyone who supports him is racist, sexist, and evil with a side of evil sauce, but with a new twist.
One of the more fascinating things about the last decade or so is the rise of talk about “implicit bias” into the mainstream, which is the idea of subconscious attitudes that shape behaviour in ways the people influenced by them remain unaware. The first thing I find so fascinating is just how close it gets to the kind of occult material discussed here; and even though most people talking about it back away from many of the implications of it, there is a ton of important material here that validates a lot of occult traditions.
The other part of what makes this so interesting is that many of the people who are making these claims never once seem to stop to notice these apply to them as well: it is usually only other people who they are willing to discuss here. The wryly amusing fact that nearly all the research done finding implicit racism is a powerful psychological force use datasets drawn from left-leaning minds has not been lost on me; but it runs deeper than that. These findings apply across the board, not in the extremely one sided fashion they are so often applied now.
It looks like the spell has started to evolve from “Everyone opposing us is motivated by evil” to “Everyone opposing us is motivated by evil; and we have Science showing when someone tries to claim they oppose us for any other reason it is because they do not actually know what motivates them!”
our culture has made many “bad boy” and “good girl” tropes that play on our desires and sell them back to us as movies and shows.
women like werewolves and vampire movies because of their instinct to “tame” the alpha male! their “perfect” man is a cruel, powerful, and uncaring monster to the outside world and kind, soft and obsessed with them. And for men they want an undiscovered princess, a women who is confused, high status and way more beautiful than she thinks she is, that somehow is both craving for male attention and managed to avoid it until you have arrived.
fun post, thanks!
“The first is that the target of the spell has to be unreflective enough not to notice the spell.”
The trouble here is that people often don’t have a sense whether they are truly reflective or not.
I read (somewhere!) that ‘educated’ people are often more susceptible to propaganda than the ‘uneducated’ partly because they think whatever education they have arms them with enough reflective capacity to allow them to defend themselves against propaganda.
Apparently the “the mark of maturity is the withdrawal of projections” (Jungian therapist Marion Woodman, I believe), but it appears this withdrawal of projections isn’t a matter of withdrawing them completely, but more a matter of becoming aware first of one’s crudest projections, only to reveal ever more subtle degrees of projections, and this process may not ever end because we are humans with physical and emotional bodies.
This is more complicated because of how related abstract thought in general is with the act of projection. Indeed, one way to define a projection might be as the unconscious use of an abstraction in the service of emotions or instincts. I’ve observed, in myself and in others, how seemingly rational statements or arguments are made in discussions about politics, for example, but there’s this hazy emotional core underlying them. That doesn’t guarantee that the conclusions are faulty but it likely increases the chances they are, and the main thing I’ve found effective to handle this is not to refine my arguments but become aware of that underlying emotional core.
I’ve been reading and thinking a lot on this topic in the past few months, and one of the threads I’ve come across is, for example, how the capacity for self-deception can, without great care, increase the further along the spiritual path you get. Which has been quite sobering to consider especially because I am still working on the more crude projections I engage in. This would seem to be one of the dangers Levi has been pointing out when working with the astral light!
“Stimulate the sympathetic system and the physical passions become more insistent while the muscles and mind relax; stimulate the parasympathetic system, and the physical passions fall silent while the muscles and mind snap to attention.”
Yet, drugs that decrease sympathetic activity *sedate*. When under effect of a strong sympatholytic drug, a patient undergoes sedation…but of a peculiar kind: the mind operates almost independently of the body – he or she reacts, consciously, when stimulated, but otherwise remains in a dream-like state.
Of course, I do not expect exactness from a hundred-years old text written by a layman. Should we understand that under the effect of such drugs the mind gets focused in itself because it has been temporarily unburdened from the body?
It seems like academics are really high on their own supply. I mean, I I know the professor in Animal House was really stoned. Not only was he high on his own supply, but he they take regular skinny dips into the student pool. What they are toking has really gone to their head. The problem with repeated bong hits is you don’t have time to come back to reality.
The acceptance of ones place in the biological/sociological pecking order seems to happen better within smaller groups than it does within a very large population. So in small groups ( village, small isolated town, college, bar at closing time) our brain does a better job of assessing our prospects with the other sex given the observable pool to choose from and the competition.
I think the internet has really messed this up. It has effectively presented men and women with an infinitely sized dating pool. Our primitive social brains have trouble grasping our place in the pecking order in such a situation and as a result successful dating and pairing seems to be way down from the pre-internet past. I am tool old for this new era and met my wife within the compact confines of a remote University in the pre-internet age. But I am told by younger people that internet dating is a mess.
Slightly above average women ( on a physical attraction scale) think of themselves as perfect 10’s and demand to meet only the most handsome and wealthy men. While average looking men with fat wallets think of themselves at the top of the dating pool. There is no hands-on biological give and take. The false, contrived and glitter enhanced world of internet dating sites distorts and eliminates the subtle social signals we need to effectively find our place in the biological world.
Chuaquin, there’s that! In modest amounts, though, it does the one but not the other.
Quin, thanks for this as always.
Taylor, oh, that’s rich. Still, “maybe you should check your own implicit biases” may turn into a useful tool in response.
Alex, and nobody ever stops to wonder whether these tropes are being deliberately marketed to keep men and women angry and upset at each other. Lonely, depressed people do more compulsive shopping than happy, contented people…
Jbucks, excellent! Yes, that’s one of the core differences between intellectual and spiritual development. You can learn and learn and still remain completely clueless about your own projections. Since archetypes are the raw material of thought, as I see it, we literally can’t think at all without projecting — but we can learn to be conscious of our projections, hold them lightly, and be ready to change them: to use them rather than being used by them. Intellectual education won’t do that, nor will the more ideological kinds of spiritual training; it takes meditation and reflection.
Bruno, drugs are blunt instruments and don’t reliably mimic the natural responses of any of the body’s systems.
Eagle Fang, there’s that!
Clay, yes, very much so. I’m not greatly looking forward to dealing with that when I begin dating again; I plan on staying offline for that aspect of my life, however.
“These two are the yin and yang of the human nervous system. Stimulate the sympathetic system and the physical passions become more insistent while the muscles and mind relax; stimulate the parasympathetic system, and the physical passions fall silent while the muscles and mind snap to attention.”
Ah, that is delightfully synchronous given what I’m currently experimenting with!
In this morning’s practice I needed to adjust the vagus breathing to a less rigid and longer form and spent about an hour working – very noticeable were the effects on channeling the ‘creative’ energy to ‘charge’ the blended cauldrons – the effects have stayed with me the whole day.
Taylor,
Once upon a time in my early twenties, I took one of those implicit bias tests that are used in social science research and meant to demonstrate unconscious racial prejudice on the part of the taker. It was essentially a lot of very rapid-fire images (many images per second) of black people and white people all mixed to gather, and I had to click on buttons that essentially represented “good” and “bad” for each image without having time to consciously notice the person’s race or expression. I believe the buttons were green and red, but I can’t recollect their actual labels. The result was that I am apparently implicitly biased ever-so-slightly in favor of black people (I’m white). It was clear at the time that that wasn’t the result it was meant to demonstrate! I am often tempted in conversations about racial politics to earnestly discuss my attempts to overcome my unconscious anti-white biases as revealed by that test, but so far have resisted.
““Everyone opposing us is motivated by evil; and we have Science showing when someone tries to claim they oppose us for any other reason it is because they do not actually know what motivates them!””
That meshes rather well with the current fad of “there is no free will” rattling around the psychological spheres.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2398369-why-free-will-doesnt-exist-according-to-robert-sapolsky/
On a different topic, Much of Levi involves meditation, as in formal meditation. For those who do not engage in formal meditation, what substitutes for it? What counts as informal meditation? The BC comic from a couple of weeks back involved fishing. How about weeding the garden? Or reloading ammunition like yesterday? Does any repetitive low mental effort activity give the same general effect? For that matter, when I was working on the Phud I would often go out to the Forestry Department’s demonstration wood lot for some archery practice. That was a welcome break from the highly abstract research project.
I’ve never seemed to need formal meditation, attempts to do so generally result in a nap. Ideas and concepts are generally bouncing around in my head in a Brownian motion sort of way. Some of the linkups resulting from that were very helpful in my career.
Excellent!
The perceptual manipulations of witches and advertising moguls are being studied by some psychologists. In a 2021 Lecture at Cambridge, Jordan Peterson said, “You don’t see objects and infer meaning; You perceive meaning and infer objects.”
That phrase is worthy of serious meditation! It helped me understand that the ‘Implicit Bias’ folks are trying to inject their own meanings into my perceptual mechanisms as a means of control;
It also helps me prevent mistakes at work–Suppose that it is my job to confirm that HCTZ tablets have, in fact, been put into a patient’s medicine vial labeled HCTZ. If I am aware that I am using an internal set of meanings to infer the objects before me, I will also know that when the ‘Mint’ drug manufacturer puts the same minty-green label on all the types of drugs they make, they are increasing the danger that my tech has selected the wrong stock bottle. Add to my set of meanings, ‘Mint means danger of wrong selection’ and my accuracy of check is improved.
And isn’t “…You perceive meaning and infer objects” another way of saying “Magic is the art and science of causing change in consciousness in accordance with will”?
For the interested, here’s a textual summary of Peterson’s talk:
https://thecritic.co.uk/how-do-we-perceive-the-world/
and the video of the full talk;
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5HgSnS-z4JU
Thanks again for this blog series, JMG.
British observer here. First off, thank you to our host and the education he’s graciously and tirelessly offered for so many years now. I think even a total ignoramus like myself eventually can get some of the basics right. Viz. once you see the curtain raised on Oz, you can’t forget seeing what’s been revealed behind it. Step 1 truly is ditching the Telly Belly Bunkum box.
But I digress from what I wanted to comment on: The utterly insane reaction from a sizeable part of the US electorate on losing in 2024. I first thought what I was seeing being reported was just isolated instances: people videoing themselves crying, screaming, issuing threats of violence, disavowing family and lifelong friends for voting Trump, women shaving their hair, getting tattooed, POC maga hat wearers getting physically assaulted by little old white ladies for not acting like they demand black people should, sex strikes, hysterectomies, the list goes on! But they keep on coming to the extent I must conclude these OTT reactions to a democratic vote (more or less as democratic as any other afaik) are *widespread *.
So given your explanation of incompetent sorcery above, JMG, I can only conclude that what we are witnessing is true damage to real victims. These people really DO believe the sky is falling. They really DO believe Trump is ‘literally H…ler’. I laughed at what I saw at first. It just all seem so comically absurd! But now I am profoundly sad and sorry for these people. They have been brainwashed. They are the victims of their own side’s bad magic. All the warm’n’fuzzy is gone for them, they got hit with all the cold’n’prickly their side threw out. Brrrr.
@Alex Thurber #4
I always thought the werewolf concept, at least in the Lon Cheney movies’ version of it, was a projection of womens’ cycles onto a man– Which of us men, living with a woman, has not occasionally gotten his head bitten off when his partner is in that time of the month?
I think many women who have that understanding of Lon Cheney werewolf movies might feel justifiably smug about them. “Hmph!” they might say, “It’s not just Lon Cheney–Give any man a monthly cycle, and they couldn’t manage.”
Have there been successful female werewolf movies? I can’t think of any…
I used to think that the vampire concept was a representation of the Rentier or Professional Managerial Class, secretly sucking the life out of others to prop up their own lifestyle. Prince Vlad Dracul and many other royal families fit that description.
But the Twilight series, about a teenage vampire who falls in love with a normal girl, is plainly about growing into sexuality. She desperately wants him to bite her neck, but the consequences! She knows (for now) she shouldn’t. He desperately wants to bite her neck, but (for now) loves her too much to take advantage. Who hasn’t been there?
John, yes: that’s also true about alcohol…
“as a great many former ‘nice guys’ who tried to conform to what women said they wanted”
This was a timely chapter for me, magical education aside.
My parents spent a fair amount of effort teaching me as a young child to be a nice guy. I understand why, they were hoping to avoid teen pregnancies and other unpleasantness. Beyond that, they displayed a continual contempt for normal male behavior.
But I was a janegirl by nature, shy and sensitive, and they forgot to include any instruction on how to pursue a romantic relationship. I imagine they felt I would be fine and figure it all out. It… didn’t work out that way. So now in middle age I’m trying to recalibrate and figure out when it’s appropriate to be a gentleman and when not.
As I was reading this Bob Marley’s 3 little birds came on and it occurred to me that his choice of 3 is significant and I had never really thought of it in that song. But in fact to stay outside the drama of the conflict of 2 is actually much harder than it sounds.
My friend, who had been so common sense about the covid debacle and was a comfort for me in difficult times, suddenly called me all distressed about ‘racism.’ I was quite surprised she couldn’t see the drama from a more balanced view, but then again it takes significant awareness of what you are bringing to the table to see it. Thank you to you (and Bob!) for helping me to start to see.
Not for nothing did the Desert Fathers adjure dispassion, or regulation of the appetitive (desire) and incensive (anger) aspects of the soul…not true detachment or apathy, but rather a discernment of how these can be easily stirred up and led astray (by demons, in their case).
One bit of interest from the recent desultory results: the Blue side seemed to recognize at some point that they ought to project “joy” with their chose candidate, to try to conjure up…something positive, I reckon. Where it went amiss, I guess, is how out of step it was with the lived reality of many in the country, and how such a fantasy of (big quotes) “joy” might perhaps look instead to those experiencing harship…and interesting if desultory attempt, if nothing else.
Axé
@Emmanuel Goldstein, #15
Well, regarding female werewolf movies, Ginger snaps was a moderate success that spawned two sequels and a cult following in the early 2000s. While the sexual element is there, I think the central theme is the coming of age of two suburban kids that are thrown head-first into a merciless world. The adults in their lives are either bumbling fools or self serving jerks, therefore useless. In order to survive, the protagonists have to piece together a new world model out of the unreliable information available from slightly older, not as clueless kids.
I’ll ask pardon from our host since this is not immediately relevant to this weeks theme (though I think it fits in the general topics we are exploring together).
Hi John Michael,
Oh yeah, know thyself, then choose and act consciously.
When a particularly unpleasant chunk of such mud was thrown at me last week, I responded by telling them that ‘I’m not emotionally invested in the outcome’. Done, end of story.
Man, I’ve been watching people and the media lose their minds over your election for the past two months, and it surprises me to see how great a percentage of the population don’t want to put the time into learning how to protect themselves from this most basic of tomfooleries. And! You can see that the media has fallen for their own spells and are now busy signing their imminent demise notices – bubble land must be a nice place to live! Those articles over the past few months with the polls suggesting that the outcome would be close, should have their authors and editors face some pretty harsh consequences, lest the bad habits continue, with even worse consequences. They’re not there to set the tone, they’re there to report upon the tone – they’ve got just one job. The same thing happened in 2016, Brexit, and err, the Voice referendum down here. Makes me wonder what else they’re getting seriously wrong, don’t you reckon? 🙂
Have to laugh, Witches for Patriarchy, or was it against the patriarchy, oh well, I now forget, they’re probably the same people hyping up some sort of weird sex strike which I saw reported upon in the media recently. Like what the? It all sounds very deeply weird. Anyway, I don’t have time for such nonsense, and so didn’t bother reading the articles. 🙂
It’s a funny old world out there dude! I’m of the opinion that irreverence is a good response to this particular subject.
Cheers
Chris
@Clay,
Have you ever watched any of Hoe_math’s videos? If you are trying to understand the dating climate out there, his insights are useful. (I’ve been out of the dating scene for 30+ years, but I am trying to understand my daughter’s life.) The video that (I think) relates to what you are describing is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vh0hj9ZD9FY&list=PLkKRC7A4ub5VF_hbQcJTarycebW6lUswm&index=9. (For those who don’t watch video, you can drag the video slider to look at his diagram, but I’ve been unable to find any of his diagrams available for free on the Internet.)
@Miow,
Perhaps if they keep the cat hats off after they shave their heads, they might get some more light to their pineal gland…
@Emmanuel Goldstein,
Re: werewolves as a projection of women’s cycles onto a man… Ha! But also, Hmm…
There’s a whole genre of meme videos produced to support Donald Trump that illustrate this principle well: they’re all a sequence of disconnected images backed with hard rock or triumphant orchestral music that goes: “Jet plane! Army men! Fireworks! American flag! Donald Trump 2024!”
Absolutely no attempt at telling a coherent story, just a series of visual and musical emotional triggers, with the target displayed at the end for the payoff.
First, thank you, JMG, for clarifying the point that that “the anger cones first; the object comes second,” or else is deliberately searched for, or projected onto the current object of the media’s “10 second hate.” And how very closely the Sympathetic nerve system mapped onto the Romantic Era mindset.
Is there a difference between people whose Parasympathetic nerves divert energy to the brain and those who divert it to the muscles? As a double Capricorn with Mercury in Sag and Moon in Gemini, mine seems to get diverted to the brain, hence to the mouth (or keyboard,) but whose muscles are in nearly as bad shape as the systems connected to the plexi – food, sleep, and sex.
In the Tarot card, you have the Crab, the dog, and the wolf. Does the Crab symbolize the Parasympathetic system types? You’ve already discussed the Wolf back in the Ring Cycle post, the Dog being the Guardian version of the Wolf.
This may be way OT: But here it is; delete if you see fit.
Headline from one of the Pocket Posts, from “Aeon.” “Say Goodbye to the Information Age; it’s All About Reputation Now.” Subhead: “We’ve begun to evaluate and trust the source rather than the message.”
Do you think women liking “bad boys” has anything to do with (most of) them having female astral bodies? If there’s anything the bad boys are good at, it’s creating lots of fun, excitement, and drama. Which seems like something a female astral body would find to be quite stimulating? “Nice guys” aren’t going to be all that good at creating emotional fireworks.
Clay, very true about those dating apps and social media platforms! Of course, those site are presenting only the illusion of an infinitely sized dating pool. For the average man, it’s endless scrolling of women will never swipe right on them (unless they’re looking for a free food date); even most of the ugly ones will not give them the time of day. For the average woman, they get access to a short list of men in their town who would ordinarily be way out of their league; i.e. are very good looking, and present themselves as having money and leading fun and exciting lives. The problem is, the “top” men on those sites are usually only interested in these average women for sex, and then promptly moving onto the next one who foolishly thinks she just landed “the one”….well, because these guys have lots of options and thus they can. Yeah…I think we need to go back to the old days when one’s courtship pool was very local and restricted to small family/church/friend circles.
Seems like social media and much of the internet is a giant web of sorcery.
Hello, I just got home from a Week in the hospital. Would appreciate prayers, healing, and so forth.
One of Dion Fortune’s “Dr Taverner” stories describes some occult mischief done by means of gift bouquets in which a moonstone and a somewhat vanilla-like scent had been included, with the result that the recipients became vulnerable to telepathic ill-wishing, and then became confused and suicidal. The scent is derived from the tonka or Tonquin bean, which has been used as an adulterant for vanilla, but which can have irritant properties. One aspect of the perfumer’s art is to combine scents in such a way that the sweet or pleasant serve to mask some more potent but less acceptable, thus slipping the latter under the threshold, so to speak, of consciousness.
It is interesting that many of the scents Levi mentions (eg, almonds) are not regarded as particularly powerful nowadays. It may be that we are less sensitive, or that the scents are more synthetic and do not have the complexity of natural scents, or that we have so many distractions that it takes something more than a sweet irritant to worm its way into our thoughts and moods.
Some scents can also have direct effects on the nervous system, mimicking to some extent the effects of neurotransmitters, but that is perhaps a topic for another time. I will say that Levi’s account of the way that deliriants and so on affect consciousness really does foreshadow the “set and setting” formulation of the 1960s. Whether any of the researchers who developed that formulation had read Levi is hard to say, since, if they did, they were probably not inclined to advertise it. It was much more respectable to cite the Tibetan “Book of the Dead” than to admit having read a 19th century French magus.
Earthworm, delighted to hear it.
Siliconguy, the key is reflective attention to your thinking, so you think about your thoughts. A daily walk in which you reflect on some chosen theme, and keep your mind focused on that theme, is a good substitute.
Emmanuel, excellent! I’m delighted to hear that Peterson is teaching this. I would say that magic is the art of deciding which objects you associate with which meanings.
Miow, it really is sad, and yes, there are human tragedies happening right now as a result of the blowback of Democratic propaganda. Brrr indeed.
Cliff, ouch, I’m sorry to hear you have to go through this.
Tamar, I take the fact that you’re mentioning me in the same breath as Bob Marley as a profound honor. Thank you!
Fra’ Lupo, I’m not sure that anyone, even Harris, actually felt the joy the marketing people wanted her to project. Even before panic set in, it was a profoundly joyless campaign.
Chris, oh, granted. A good belly laugh is helpful.
Kfish, thanks for this. Yes, that’s a good example.
Patricia M, the variations in sympathetic nerve activation — well, that’s an interesting issue the old lore doesn’t address. I’d say the dog, who is the guardian, is the parasympathetic, while the wild wolf is the sympathetic; the crayfish represents the ductless glands, which are far more primitive and basic than any of the nervous systems.
Corax, hmm! That’s an interesting suggestion, and a plausible one.
Your Kittenship, positive energy incoming. Heal promptly!
LeGrand, hmm! It didn’t occur to me that Lévi was talking about set and setting, but of course you’re quite correct.