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The rise of the occult on social media has eerie parallels with the 16th century


Eldorado

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It’s 1.30am in the morning, and I’m about to watch a duel between magicians. One is a “demonolater”, a word I have never heard before, someone who claims they worship demons and can petition them in return for knowledge or power.

The other describes themselves as a “Solomonic magician”, and claims to be able to command demons to do his bidding, as some Jewish and Islamic traditions have believed of King Solomon, who ruled Israel in the 10th century BC.

I first discovered this debate because, in the course of studying 16th century books of magic attributed to Solomon, I had found, to my astonishment, that “Solomonic magic” is still alive and well today, and growing in popularity.

https://theconversation.com/witchtok-the-rise-of-the-occult-on-social-media-has-eerie-parallels-with-the-16th-century-168322

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It’s 1.30am in the morning, and I’m about to watch a duel between magicians. 

I immediately thought this was how it would look...

 

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14 minutes ago, XenoFish said:

 

That came to mind, too.

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2 hours ago, Eldorado said:

It’s 1.30am in the morning, and I’m about to watch a duel between magicians. One is a “demonolater”, a word I have never heard before, someone who claims they worship demons and can petition them in return for knowledge or power.

The other describes themselves as a “Solomonic magician”, and claims to be able to command demons to do his bidding, as some Jewish and Islamic traditions have believed of King Solomon, who ruled Israel in the 10th century BC.

I first discovered this debate because, in the course of studying 16th century books of magic attributed to Solomon, I had found, to my astonishment, that “Solomonic magic” is still alive and well today, and growing in popularity.

https://theconversation.com/witchtok-the-rise-of-the-occult-on-social-media-has-eerie-parallels-with-the-16th-century-168322

I have a 100% success record with Sigils and believe I have uncovered a hidden form of causality.

I argue that cause and effect, retro-causation, non-local causation, and probabilistic causation, are all different aspects of `super causation`. Super causation is patterns of behaviour as a form of causation. With some of them a pattern needs to be done just once, with others multiple times to get it to stick. It all depends on the circumstances and probabilities.

So it goes like this. I set a pattern of behaviour which is dieting. On my diet I limit myself to two meals per day to loose weight. After a couple of weeks I try to stop and have a feast. Then note how the universe tries to stop me having my feast. Maybe I cannot find my bank card to order it, maybe my internet goes down, maybe the takeaway business sends the wrong food. Whatever it is, the universe will try to keep my pattern of dieting going. I can break it if I stick at it which would be setting a new pattern of behaviour.

So, the best pattern I have is to be lazy, hate responsibility, hate the poor, hate the weak, hate being noticed, hate being looked up too, wish I didn`t have to do things myself to get them done correctly, and to have set pairs of work socks. Every weekday I get up at 7am and put on a pair of those work socks.

The result has been amazing success in my career. The downside is my work colleagues are incompetent and I have to clean up after them.

I would argue the above is present in the Bible. Not explicitly stated, its implicit in the texts. The characters set patterns of behaviour like remaining faithful, and then wrong doers get punished.

Edited by Cookie Monster
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Just now, GlitterRose said:

That came to mind, too.

Two occultist battling is pretty stupid if you ask me. I've been on a variety of occult and psionics forums over the years. Seen too many people "fight on the astral", nothing more then an ego contest.

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1 minute ago, Cookie Monster said:

I have a 100% success record with Sigils

Because they are psychological. If you think long enough about an emerald green car, you'll start seeing them everywhere. With a sigil it's just a concentrated burst. Emotionally empowered and encoded (against the conscious mind to a degree), so it sinks into your subconscious faster. There is nothing mystical or woo woo about them. No different than language just a coded verson of it. 

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13 minutes ago, XenoFish said:

Because they are psychological. If you think long enough about an emerald green car, you'll start seeing them everywhere. With a sigil it's just a concentrated burst. Emotionally empowered and encoded (against the conscious mind to a degree), so it sinks into your subconscious faster. There is nothing mystical or woo woo about them. No different than language just a coded verson of it. 

I know your scepticism on these issues.

Its a shame I cannot get you to try it.

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11 minutes ago, XenoFish said:

Two occultist battling is pretty stupid if you ask me. I've been on a variety of occult and psionics forums over the years. Seen too many people "fight on the astral", nothing more then an ego contest.

Going all occult pewpewpew on each other.

Really mature there. 

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4 minutes ago, Cookie Monster said:

I know your scepticism on these issues.

Its a shame I cannot get you to try it.

I always thought he had. 

Sigils absolutely work. He's not skeptical about that. 

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15 minutes ago, Cookie Monster said:

I know your scepticism on these issues.

Its a shame I cannot get you to try it.

Sorry I've used sigils for since I don't know how long. Of all the techniques and methods I have experimented with over the years. I can attest that sigils do work. There are no "correct" sigils, no "correct" method of charging them, no "correct" method using them. The correct method is creating them in a manner that works best for the individual. Most creation methods are just suggestions. The stronger the emotional charge the better, this charge would be the desire for the thing or the need for whatever in question, all of those feelings channeled into the sigils creations. There are other empowerment methods but let's keep this PG. 

I believe it was Austin Osman Spare (basically the creator of the modern sigil method) considered them to be a means of creating a psychological complex. That wouldn't stop till realized. Create and fire a sigil for more money. A person might take on extra work, take up job opportunities or be willing to work longer hours. Even theft. By using them a person is more prone to connecting dots better, call this confirmation bias, synchronicity, or even a coincidence. 

Like I mentioned before it is just a way of using language. Just different. Do not pretend I don't have a clue. There is even a method that Spare warned against call the earthenware virgin, I'll let those who wish to google that have fun. 

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18 minutes ago, GlitterRose said:

I always thought he had. 

Sigils absolutely work. He's not skeptical about that. 

No I am not. Of all the things I have done, all the methods, I can attest that yes sigils do work. 

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1 hour ago, XenoFish said:

Of all the things I have done, all the methods, I can attest that yes sigils do work. 

So.....

You have done a 180 on everything paranormal, but you have done a further 180 on sigils.  That's 360 degrees!

Congratulations on being exactly where you were.

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6 hours ago, acute said:

So.....

You have done a 180 on everything paranormal, but you have done a further 180 on sigils.  That's 360 degrees!

Congratulations on being exactly where you were.

Sigil are psychological. Everything else was a disappointment. I never stated they don't work. You must be dense. 

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8 hours ago, XenoFish said:

No I am not. Of all the things I have done, all the methods, I can attest that yes sigils do work. 

Scrying "works," too. I don't know whether that was something you tried, Strange face illusion is searchable; and Giovanni Caputo is the pioneering laboratory investigator of the phenomenon in this century (and so his name is searchable, too).

There's a YouTube video in the OP article where a presenter explains demonolgy. Somewhere along the way she displays a scrying mirror she uses. I suppose the lesson from that is the power of interpretation in shaping what she thinks she sees. But that she sees somthing "weird" can be reliably reproduced under laboratory conditions.

John Dee (1527-1608) was a famous (or notorious) celebrity in the magic and alchemical circles of his time. Dee was an avid scryer, and his scrying mirror is kept in the British Museum.

https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/H_1966-1001-1

That's a pretty concrete "parallel" between social media (the YouTube video) and the 16th century (John Dee's toolkit).

Edited by eight bits
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Staring into a mirror creates a visual hallucination due to the same and constant stimulus. It's nothing special. Think of it as self induced pareidolia.

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34 minutes ago, XenoFish said:

It's nothing special.

It's special as an accessible object of study, and probably one of the few occult things that literally millions of ordinary people have done. The non-mirror version of it (staring into another person's face in poor lighting or other stressful conditions) is a Scientology exercise, but also has therapeutic uses (an application studied by Caputo, and by others, too).

Regardless, whether an experience is or isn't special is on the person having the experience. That woman in the OP video clearly finds her experience with her scrying mirror "special." Whether that feeling would survive knowing that Caputo can get most people hallucinating (but see the ETA below, that's really not the right word), usually within a minute or two of starting the exercise, I don't know. There are a lot of ways she could rationalize it, were she so inclined (for example, to argue that yes, she said that it "works," but it is Caputo's naive subjects and not her sophisticated self who don't understand what they're seeing.)

So in any event, have you tried it? How it seemed to you at the time versus what you make of it now would be interesting to read, if you ever feel like writing about it..

ETA: On a point arising, the collapse of the relevant portion of the visual processing system is neither a hallucination (it is a physiological response determined by a stimulus actually present leading to a misinterpretation of the scene - hence the name strange face illusion) nor necessarily pareidolia in any usual sense. For one thing, some subjects report chaotic experience (the opposite of pareidolia). The woman in the OP was very vague about what she sees and what connects that experience to demons for her.

Edited by eight bits
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1 minute ago, eight bits said:

So in any event, have you tried it? How it seemed to you at the time versus what you make of it now would be interesting to read, if you ever feel like writing about it..

I've done it in the past. Don't see a point now. There is no reason. I know that you're not seeing the dead, demons, aliens, angels, or whatever. Let's put it this way. Science has a nice way of ruining the magic in many things. The more a person learns about what they believe in and the psychological effects of that belief, the less they believe in it. The magic dies. So no I don't think I'll play such a childish game again. I personally feel it is just one of those stupid things people do because they don't know better. What's even dumber is believing they're contacting something supernatural. I wasted years of my life on pathetic imaginings. The only take away was learning a new way of using affirmations. 

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2 hours ago, XenoFish said:

due to the same and constant stimulus.

There was another "staring exercise" that I hadn't ever thought of as "occult" until I learned that the Golden Dawn group (W. B. Yeats, Aleister Crowley, the founders of the Irish Abbey Theatre, ...) practiced it: retinal afterimages (searchable).

The basis was Hindu tattva figures, colored shapes representing the constiituent "elements" of the universe (e.g. fire represented as a red triangle). If you stare at one of these figures long enough, then you'll continue to see it or its negative (depending on the ambient light) when you close your eyes, or maybe even when you just look away with your eyes open.

I'm not sure why the Dawners thought that was "special," since the afterimage is a faithful duplicate of the stimulus' shape and at worst the original colors are "reversed." It's therefore very unlike the strange face illusion, where what you see is heavily distorted compared with the stimulus and possibly utterly unrecognizable.

There is some explanatory material (including Golden Dawn primary source documents) online

http://osogd.org/?s=tattva

but my mumbo-jumbo tolerance is frail today.

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3 hours ago, eight bits said:

Scrying "works," too. I don't know whether that was something you tried, Strange face illusion is searchable; and Giovanni Caputo is the pioneering laboratory investigator of the phenomenon in this century (and so his name is searchable, too).

There's a YouTube video in the OP article where a presenter explains demonolgy. Somewhere along the way she displays a scrying mirror she uses. I suppose the lesson from that is the power of interpretation in shaping what she thinks she sees. But that she sees somthing "weird" can be reliably reproduced under laboratory conditions.

John Dee (1527-1608) was a famous (or notorious) celebrity in the magic and alchemical circles of his time. Dee was an avid scryer, and his scrying mirror is kept in the British Museum.

https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/H_1966-1001-1

That's a pretty concrete "parallel" between social media (the YouTube video) and the 16th century (John Dee's toolkit).

Scrying using a mug of black coffee.

Once mastered try guessing which answer (A, B, C, or D) will be picked for the next question on a quiz show. The trick is to notice the very first answer that appears in your mind and to go with that.

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50 minutes ago, eight bits said:

There was another "staring exercise" that I hadn't ever thought of as "occult" until I learned that the Golden Dawn group (W. B. Yeats, Aleister Crowley, the founders of the Irish Abbey Theatre, ...) practiced it: retinal afterimages (searchable).

The basis was Hindu tattva figures, colored shapes representing the constiituent "elements" of the universe (e.g. fire represented as a red triangle). If you stare at one of these figures long enough, then you'll continue to see it or its negative (depending on the ambient light) when you close your eyes, or maybe even when you just look away with your eyes open.

I'm not sure why the Dawners thought that was "special," since the afterimage is a faithful duplicate of the stimulus' shape and at worst the original colors are "reversed." It's therefore very unlike the strange face illusion, where what you see is heavily distorted compared with the stimulus and possibly utterly unrecognizable.

There is some explanatory material (including Golden Dawn primary source documents) online

http://osogd.org/?s=tattva

but my mumbo-jumbo tolerance is frail today.

Painting a sigil or other such symbol onto a flat piece of aluminum foil, then staring at it has the same effect.

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29 minutes ago, Cookie Monster said:

Scrying using a mug of black coffee.

Once mastered try guessing which answer (A, B, C, or D) will be picked for the next question on a quiz show. The trick is to notice the very first answer that appears in your mind and to go with that.

Is this before or after 3 energy drinks and 2 lattes? 

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1 hour ago, Cookie Monster said:

Scrying using a mug of black coffee.

I've also heard of people doing it by holding a dollop of black ink in their cupped palm.

An intriguing possibility arises from Corinth apparently having been a center for manufacturing cheap polished base metal mirrors in Saint Paul's day. Just the thing to elicit the strange face illusion. Thus, when Paul wrote to them (1 Corinthians 13:12), "Now we see as in a mirror darkly ..." he may have been referring to scrying as a means of prophecy.

ETA:

Quote

Once mastered try guessing which answer (A, B, C, or D) will be picked for the next question on a quiz show. The trick is to notice the very first answer that appears in your mind and to go with that.

Did you see anything in the coffee, or was it just a concentration aid for you. or... ? I ask because seeing meaningful but isolated letters is sometimes reported as the outcome of scrying sessions.

 

Edited by eight bits
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20 minutes ago, eight bits said:

I've also heard of people doing it by holding a dollop of black ink in their cupped palm.

An intriguing possibility arises from Corinth apparently having been a center for manufacturing cheap polished base metal mirrors in Saint Paul's day. Just the thing to elicit the strange face illusion. Thus, when Paul wrote to them (1 Corinthians 13:12), "Now we see as in a mirror darkly ..." he may have been referring to scrying as a means of prophecy.

ETA:

Did you see anything in the coffee, or was it just a concentration aid for you. or... ? I ask because seeing meaningful but isolated letters is sometimes reported as the outcome of scrying sessions.

 

When you go to bed close your eyes, and try getting thoughts to put up by themselves. Its the same thing done on something black. Getting your subconscious to show you stuff.

Edited by Cookie Monster
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