Tagged with Occult

A group of Adepts, determined to stop the world's downward course into materialism, caused a spiritual influx to be thrown down into America. Great souls from Atlantis incarnated into the bodies of North American Indians. It was they who brought forward the movement of Spiritualism. (more)

As the 1950s wore on, the occult could seem like something of a spent force in American life. Foes of Spiritualism had exposed one mediumistic fraud after another. By the end of the decade, the occult could appear to be little more than an amalgam of eccentrics and loners. A new voice was needed. And it arrived just as the cusp of the 1960s came into sight. (more)

What if the Apocalypse has already happened? How should we live in a post-Apocalyptic world, when all of the values of the previous one have been destroyed? Aleister Crowley had an answer. (more)

What is the connection between divination and parapsychology? Why is divination's mode of operation so alien to science, and rejected by mainstream religion? The MA programme in the cultural study of cosmology and divination at the University of Kent, Canterbury (UK) seeks to bridge the gulf between theory and practice in the study of divination. (more)

Money could be seen as an exteriorized soul to be locked away so that our bodies acquire magical invulnerability. But it need not be hidden away -- it can be circulated and "beget" itself endlessly in usury. It constitutes humanity's one really totally successful experiment in magic: (more)

To his many readers, Mircea Eliade is known as a visionary historian of religion and the occult. Few are aware that in his early career, Eliade was a fascist propagandist in his homeland of Romania. (more)

The occult subculture faces cultural stigmata associated with the term "magic," and seems unable to explain or demonstrate the benefits of including a practice of magic in one's life. So what are the real benefits of magic? (more)

Halloween has roots in the ancient Celtic holiday of Samhuinn, a time of no-time, when order and structure were abolished, when chaos could reign. (more)

While I don't think it's necessary for magicians to have identity crises, I do think a more explicit exploration of identity in magic is in order. One reason that this hasn't occurred is that the definition of magic that is usually relied upon is hopelessly outmoded. (more)

Might the balls of light that have been appearing in photographs in recent years be evidence that the solar system is undergoing a phase transition to a higher-energy state? (more)

Because of blind spots, some common aspects of human experience literally cannot be seen by those embedded within the Western scientific worldview. It excludes phenomena such as telepathy and clairvoyance that suggest we are deeply interconnected in ways that transcend our everyday notions of space and time. (more)

An interview with Daily Grail editor Greg Taylor about liminal oddities such as surrealism, reincarnation, UFOs, secret societies, occultism, shamanism, and cryptozoology. (more)

Many great claims are made for magick, almost exclusively by magicians and those who fear them. Andy says, “After you’ve done it long enough, and you start to manipulate things, you get the feeling you are part of a bigger game.” But doubters ask: “How can you be sure that it might not have happened anyway?” So we devised a public demonstration. Live, on the usually sober Channel 4 News, on August 21, 2001, presenter Jon Snow would be magickally coerced into momentarily losing his composure, he would corpse, that is, laugh out loud – live on air. (more)

[Daemonic Dispatches] • In the Republican presidential primary debate in South Carolina, only two of the ten candidates repudiated torture. Frontrunner Rudy Giuliani said interrogators should "use every method they can think of" to get information. The audience applauded wildly, in a chilling gesture that seemed to suggest that many contemporary Americans are happy to have torture performed in their name.Torture has a long history on this Turtle Island continent. Rudolf Steiner spoke of a set of black magical mystery practices in ancient Mexico dating to the first century AD. (more)