Speaker 1: Welcome to the One on One Podcast with your host
one A Yala.
Speaker 2: Welcome back to another episode of the One on one
Podcast your host. As always, make sure to follow the
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Occult this Monday, how monk of this owners? Man? You
know all that good stuff on there? You're on the
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and joining us today we have Ike Baker very excited
for this conversation. What's up, Ike? How you doing, man?
Speaker 3: I'm good, Thanks for having me on. Thanks very much.
I've heard about your podcast for a really long time now,
and we've got a couple of mutual friends, so it's
good to finally meet you.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I've seen you around when I had reached out
to the publisher because I actually wanted to interview. I
think his name is Kevin Klein, I think is his name,
but he doesn't really have any information. He published the
John D Journals, the whole compendium of all the magical journals,
and she's like, hey, I'll reach out to him. But
have you had Ike on And I know I'd seen
you on other shows before. I'm pretty sure there's been
a you've been on Mark show. Right, My family thinks
I'm crazy, and probably some other people too, North American
all people.
Speaker 3: Sky, Yes, Sky, philosophical mind stuff.
Speaker 2: Shout out to him and so Ike, we're gonna be
talking about some of your newest work here and I
just want to pick your brain because you are a ceremonialist, right,
you're practicing a cultist. You're right about the occult, the esoteric.
But before we get into that, where can people find you?
Because you also have a podcast. Where can they go
check that out? And where can they find your books?
Speaker 3: Yeah? So thanks. So the podcast is our Kanam. You
can see it here on the bottom right or left
corner of my screen. It's a R C A n
v M. That's on YouTube app, Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
I've got everything pretty much on my website. It's Ike
Baker dot com. I K E B A K E R.
You've got probably three or four episodes. The newest episodes
of my podcast are available there. My blog links to
buy the book. Also, I do part of our kanom
is not just a podcast. It's I do documentary style
presentations on the history, theory, and practice of esotericism. And
so you've got some videos up there that you can
watch some of the documentary stuff, check out some of
the trips, the excursions, and also conferences that I've organized.
They're all up there too, So Ike Baker dot com
you can get a nice cross section of everything that
I do. And the should be a little sort of
textbox in the bottom right hand corner of the screen.
You can click on that and write me anything that
goes directly to my personal email. So if you have
any questions, comments, thoughts, please feel free. I try to
make myself as available as possible to interested parties.
Speaker 2: Within reason, Yeah, within reason.
Speaker 3: It can get it viral out pretty quickly.
Speaker 2: So so you got a lot of interesting people hitting
you up. I mean I get all kinds of sort
of weird emails. And do you do you get the
cryptic messages sometimes of like these people who are You're
almost there but not quite ike? You know, like you
ever get those people?
Speaker 3: I well, I get grumpy messages a lot of times.
It's from people who are big fans of alistair Crowley
because I'm not, and so I just I call that
a bad case of theelamitis. That's really yeah. So but yeah,
I do get. I get some strange stuff. But I
there's wonderful, wonderful people out there, truly, and I appreciate
every second that they offer me, if if not in
asking questions. And I learned stuff from people all the time,
you know.
Speaker 2: Right on, and I tell us a little bit about yourself.
What got you started in this whole esoteric and occult
realm of things, and what gave you the final push
to actually become a ceremonial magician and start actually doing
the do you're an actual magician. I'm an armchair ocultist.
So we're here talking because I study this stuff all
the time and I talk about it, but I've never
I've done some one or two things, but nothing too crazy. Yeah.
Speaker 3: Well, I mean we need both in this world. So
that's good, and I'm happy to be in dialogue. That's
kind of where I find myself. I am in dialogue
with you know, the occult enthusiasts, the occult researchers, practitioners,
non practitioners, and academics. I work a lot in academia.
Tons of stuff coming up this year but also last year,
so that I feel privileged to be able to have
this kind of omnidirectional conversation going with everybody at the table. Now,
I've told this story before on other podcasts, but for
your audience, I'll tell it again. I had studied, you know,
kabbala astrology, thing alchemy. I was very interested in how
cryptic alchemy was as a kid. Started studying this stuff
probably when I was like eighteen, you know, two thousand
and four, two thousand and three era. But the thing
is that what was available to a kid like me
in the Long Island suburbs in New York was kind
of like this Dan Brown occultism, you know, And so
that's really what I based a lot of my study
on Internet research and stuff like that. I wasn't familiar
with that world just yet. So at around nineteen or twenty,
I remember my aunt had a tenant and this lady
was very nice and she was very quiet, but she
threw herself in front of a train and my aunt
called me over and she said, hey, it turns out
that this lady was a hoarder and I need help
emptying the apartment, and so there were stacks of books
like you'd see in like a TV show with you know, pathways,
and a lot of the books, journals, stuff still wrapped
in the cellophane. So we're hauling this stuff out and
this book, this one book cover just grabs my attention
and I pull it out and it's the title was.
I got it right here on my bookshelf. I still
have it, the book The Oracle of Kabbala by Richard Sideman.
And so I flipped through this thing. I read it
in a day walking around my neighborhood. I wouldn't say
that I was any more educated on Kabbala than from
my previous studies, but something struck me and said this
is important. So I went on the yellow or white
Pages or something like that when people used to use
that on the internet, and I typed in Long Island
Kabbala Study Group. So gentlemen's name and information came up.
I emailed him. I said, hey, I'm really interested in
the Cabala Study group and he said, well, that thing
doesn't meet anymore, but there's this other thing. And the
other thing was the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.
And I started having this back and forth interviewing courtship period.
I was also a musician and so I spent a
lot of my time out on the road playing shows.
And it was really a crossroad moment for me because
I met these people and I wasn't sure what the
heck magic was, you know, like, what do they think
they're doing? Like Harry Potter wand wavings? This seems insane.
So I decided to go back out on tour, and
I was actually I flaked out. I really was like
a typical millennial flake for that age. I no call,
no show to my first initiation, and as life would
have it, maybe seven or so years later, my life
completely fell apart. I had a really what I guess,
what we might call a tower card experience. Just the
whole sand castle got kicked down by providence, I guess,
And as devastating as that was, I really for something
in my gut told me to reach back out, and
I did, and I said, look, I'm really sorry, but
I feel like this is my calling. Otherwise I wouldn't
come back here hat and hand like this, and I
don't even know why. So they ended up reinitiating me
and or really recording me reinterviewing me and then finally
initiating me, and the rest is history. You know, I've
been in the Order now for just about a decade,
and I am a I run the Ashville Temple of
the Hermitic Order of the Golden Dawn. I'm the imperiator
of that temple and an administrator and a senior adept.
So that's how I got started, really very interesting. It
was almost like a tractor beam situation. I wasn't sure
what I was headed towards, but it put me in
a really good position because I didn't have a head
full of stuff that I was constantly pretty rejecting onto
what this needs to be or what this should be,
and trying to stuff the shoehornet into this neat little
box that fit my preconceptions and expectations. My you know,
unfamiliarity with it allowed the system to reveal itself to
me and show me what it was instead of me
kind of constantly jumping the gun. So I'm I actually
am lucky.
Speaker 2: I think, you know. The the way I got involved
with the occult and occultism, esoteric and all this other stuff,
it was a gat my my religious upbringing because I
was always told to stay away from it, right. Do
you think maybe that lady she did she have any
other occult books? Did the occult push her to the
brink of doing what she did?
Speaker 3: Well? She was she was Jewish, So I think that
that explains the Kabbala book because there were a few
other Kabbala books, like she might add like a version
of of Matt's Zohar one of the additions or volumes.
But I didn't see anything else at the time that
was like astrological or alchemical. But I mean we're talking
a long time ago. It could have been the case.
Speaker 2: Yeah, because that's something like I've been told, you know,
don't read the Book of Enoch. That's going to possess you.
And the latest one I heard was I was like,
why is the Old Testament so different than the New Testament?
And they were like, just disregard the Old Testament completely.
I was like, what, that's the canon? Like what do
you mean? So I always had this shroud over it.
And I also am a musician. I played a lot
of years guitar in church. So I've seen miracles, I've
experienced the Holy Spirit, I've seen supernatural things, so I
know that there's something there. My question to you is
again a very elementary question, but I always like to
get the perspective of actual people who dabble into it.
What is magic? Is it real? Is it make belief?
Because I'm in the middle, I think that there are
some real aspects to it, and the more I look
into it, A lot of the occultists, and I'll use
the example one of the latest ones Johann Veyer that
wrote the Pseudomonarchia that kind of did in a satirical way, right,
And then before that I had count of Gabalias where
his work was supposed to be making fun of like
the occult of the time. But then Manly p Hall
and Blovatski took it and all these other you know,
prominent occultists took the work and took it serious. So
where do we stand? I mean, those are more recent examples.
But what is magic? Is it a system? Is it
a force?
Speaker 3: Like?
Speaker 2: What exactly is it? To you? At least?
Speaker 3: Yeah, well, it's interesting. That was my first really you know,
several years ago when I decided, hey, you know what,
I'm going to throw my hat into the ring and
start talking about this stuff because of how really crazy.
Everything was seemed on the internet with you know, young
kids doing sort of goetic demonic evocation massive Reddit threads.
I'm like, this is not healthy, I don't think because
here's the crux of the matter. If magic is real,
now there are certain forces at play that we, I
personally believe we are looking at from a perspective that
obscures what it is. It'd be like, well, I know
that's a guy. I know that this is a person
sitting in front of me, but I only see the
back of their head. You don't really get a good
sense of you know, the definitive the defining features of
the face, the voice, the mannerisms, you know, that kind
of thing. And a lot of us are looking at
it from this perspective because it's essentially the forefront of consciousness,
you know, consciousness experiments. And I'm not talking about necessarily
that whole rond to burn the secret sort of thing.
That kind of stuff really rubs me the wrong way.
I think there's a lot of damage done to things
like magic by way of the New Age and stuff
that came out of you know, post Blovatskian and some
Blavatskian theosophy. But it is. It is predicated on this
idea that the operator is a universe in miniature. And
what does that mean. It basically means if you look
at the you look at the universe. The universe has
to be from a certain vantage point taken as a whole.
We don't know if it's finite or infinite, definitely, most
people think it is to some degree finite. But all
the multiplicity, the different solar systems, different galaxies, the black holes,
life known and unknown, all that multiplicity is contained within
that sort of you know, monatic structure of this is
a universe. It is a whole with many moving parts.
And we just like anything else, really, we are tiny
organisms within the greater hole. But that relationship is mirrored.
We are a single unit, a universe with many moving
parts and many constituent organisms. And so there is a
relationship there, a reciprocity that allows magicians to call forth
certain aspects. Right, I don't have a planet in me,
I don't have Mars inside of me, but I'll tell
you I have anger, and I have aggression, and I
have energy, and I have courage, you know, And that
Mars within this seems very psychological, that Mars within, can
be roused, can be brought to the forefront of my
my miniature universe, my microcosm. We have a term for
it in Western ceremonial it's called the sphere of sensation.
So it's the it's the outer boundary of the aura,
inclusive of everything else. Your body, your energy, meridians, your thoughts,
your emotions, your you know, psyche, all of that is
inclusive in your tiny microcosmic universe. And so we select
in magic. We we it's very specific. It's not mysticism.
We don't open open up and let whatever you know,
or mediumism, i should say, and just kind of haphazardly
summon things or or allow things to enter into us
because we're at a severe disadvantage when operating with things
on the quote unquote other side of the veil. We
can't there's no guarantee they're going to show us a
true form. So we do the best that we can
in being hyper selective and hyper specific in that selection.
And so we use things like color and sound and
names and words and sense right incense and things like
that to rouse this quality, this specific force within our microcosm.
And then to the degree that we're able to raise
that one particular let's call it vibration or motive thought,
motive being to the forefront of this the universe. We
can then call the corresponding forces in the exterior universe
almost like a vacuum, like a like a whirlpool, gaining
what David Rankin has called magical momentum. And that's a
big part of it. And you've got some people on
one side of the fence that say, hey, well, I'm
a goetic or I'm a solomonic magician, and you know
you're a golden Dawn and you know, I mean I
even work you know, theorgy out of the calleda and
oracles and reconstruct this stuff from the PGM. And they're
very quick to say, well, but we summon spirits. It's
not us consecrating something, consecrating italisman, it's the spirit consecrating it.
And the thing is, you know, all of these disembodied
intelligences have an objective reality, but you access them that
Our access points are all within here, it's all within
our psychology, the psyche, and those entities, those spirits, they
don't have physical body. I can't ask them to take
me to the DMV in a car the way I could,
you know, to have my fiance or my friend drive
me to the gym or something like that. You know,
they can't do that. Why because they don't have solidified
physical forms. They are an intelligent energy. And so at
the end of the day, your consciousness is making contact
the part of you that is transcendent of the physical,
your sort of you know, uh signal, your your intelligent energy,
which is located for the time being in your body
and wherever you are in the world, is making contact
with those disembodied intelligent energies and and interplay and interacting
with them. And so really we're at the forefront of
consciousness here. You know, we have put something that is
very very large into an extremely small box for a
very long time. And I think some of that is
somewhat intentional from the powers that have been that that
are now and have been for centuries.
Speaker 2: Is it an aspect of the occult? And I was
reading a book by a pupil of Eugene Consalia, which
was a pupil of a Falconelly, right, the infamous Fulconelly,
And there was something, I forget the name of the book.
There was something in the book you said where when
you're looking at this thing, the occult or any of
these topics, that it will quite literally morph in front
of you, and it's in an almost elusive fashion. And
I've experienced that myself where sometimes you think you've got it,
you know, you're hitting the nail on the head, and
then when you go to strike again, the nails moved,
you know, a foot that way, and you go, wait
a minute. It just clicked for me. It made perfect sense.
And do you think that the that since the occult
and all this stuff is more readily available to people.
Now you're talking about Reddit, which I'm sure there's a
bunch of crazy stuff on Reddit, right, the stuff that
you eat on there? Do you think that that is
an aspect of the occult, that it's always kind of
sort of changing in morphing. And are there characters at
play who muddy the water's on purpose in order to
kind of move people away from the truth with a
capital T or the source or something. What are your
thoughts on that?
Speaker 3: I would say that the more in line, the more
firmly centered in the path I am, the more is
i would say, demonstrable, empirical and agrees with the insights
of many other adepty over vast centuries. For instance, I'll
give you this example. I didn't start out as an
academic occultist. I just wanted to do the practice, okay,
and the and that's that's kind of the temple culture
I was. I came up in when I was being
trained in the Aromatic order of the Golden Dawn. The
temple culture was if it works, use it, do it,
you know, do it safely, but do it. Son. I
remember the first time that I had an encounter with
really an entity, and that encounter took place in a
visualization exercise, and for many, many years I couldn't figure
it out. And I have these experiences repeatedly, but the
first time was the most jarring, existentially startling. When you
can watch something that you thought was part was being
projected or generated or emanated by your own imagination take
on completely a life of its own and with a
species of autonomy and a level of vitality. Life in
its eyes, in its inspression, in its expression. It completely
dominates the scene. You can't you have no idea what
it's going to say next, what's going to do next?
How did this happen? You're thinking to yourself, I am
not thinking this. So fast forward. You know I have
these you know, you learn how to do that stuff
safely and control it, and you bounce ideas off of
people when you're in an order right and thoughts. That's
the great part about it is there's this support system
you can talk to each other about. You know, have
you had an experience like this? Sure enough most people have.
So fast forward to years later, and I decided to
get more academic, and I'm reading the works of the
Neoplatonists of the second, third and fourth century CEO. Okay,
we'll talking almost two thousand years ago. And in this
one particular book, Deanima on the Soul, written by the
by the Neoplatonic philosopher Iamblicus of Kalkis, he was like
the for anybody that knows theorgy, the idea of theurgy,
ritualized spiritual assent, he's the godfather of it for all
intents and purposes, on the on the historical record. So
what he writes is the mind and attention follow what happens,
but essentially they are not seized by divine inspiration. Only
the fantasia, the imaginal faculty, has the capacity to be
seized by the god or the entity right the angel
Aguilois the messenger and moved. But the mind and attention
follow what happens. So he's describing almost two thousand years
before I had no idea who I probably had this
experience a hundred times before I knew who he Amblicus was,
and he's saying exactly what I experienced. This this autonomy
that happens in the imagination. And the only way I'd
be able to say, I am not thinking this is
because my mind and attention was following the fantasia, the
images that I had generated but had been seized by
something other than myself, Because that is the level where
we all coexist, us, the gods, the angels, the demons.
It's all on the astral you know it's and we
are the most poised to create change here. So now,
if you want, if you want to create change on Earth,
you'd better get in touch with the human that's your best.
You'd better, you'd better hijack, co opt whatever it is,
find a human and to do your to do your will.
That's the dangerous part about magic. So the thing is
for me, it doesn't really morph because I've been in
it and the key component of being able to have insight,
and I talk about this in the preface to my
book A Formless Fire that came out last year. A
lot of people think insight is like the accumulation of stuff,
you know, I got to think about it and analyze.
Insight at this level that we're talking about is the
removal of stuff, the removal of you know, ideation of
on certain things, and and analysis. It's being able to
see clearly what is and not have this, you know,
let's call it cognitive dissonance. The only reason cognitive dissonance
is the thing is because we have been trained that
this stuff can't and shouldn't happen, shouldn't be able to happen.
And so yeah, that's going to create cognitive business. But
the role of an adapt and initiative magician is to
hold the opposites in balance and not let one overtake.
So my subjective and my objective realities have to do
this dance. And it's okay that there's not a resolution.
I'm the resolution. I'm the mediator between the two. Again,
it's another reason why magic can be tricky, because you've
got to have a really firm grasp on reality and
know how and when and for how long to let
yourself go into these more subjective realms, and how much
space to give those things in your life. Now, the
thing that really gives the insight is practice, practice, practice, practice.
When I and still I mean, doing this stuff for
twenty years and I still read my research and it's
almost like this this strange thing. It's like, I'm I'm
I feel like I'm on raveling a mystery when I'm researching,
and I'm getting closer and closer and closer. And what
happens is it's attention that never resolves because what I'm
trying to learn has to be experienced. It can't be
written or talked about. You can write and tell you
about how to get to the experience, but we can't
write anything about the experience itself.
Speaker 2: I love that because it is that right how you're
saying it's phenomenological in nature, because you know, when someone
was abducted by aliens, it was real to them, whether
you believe it or not, and they're the ones that
experienced it. And it's like I've always used the example
of when you look at your firstborn son for the
very first time and you feel that love, that just
crazy feeling that you're like, oh my god, this is crazy.
I can't describe that to anybody unless they felt it themselves, right.
It's an experience that need it's it's a phenomenon that
needs to be experienced and it can't be described. And
that's something that I struggle with when you know, researching
all this, a lot of times I ask myself, like,
what is all this for? And does it all matter?
And where does it resolve how you're saying, And it's
going to eventually get to a point where it's like
you can read all about it all you want, but
you're gonna have to, you know, put a intent across
the abyss and pass on to the next side to
actually experience what it is that we're reading about, because
that is part of it. And it makes a lot
of sense too that you would need to be training
and practicing and you know, after you're initiated to hone
in on that skill. And I was going to ask
you a few questions, so you said earlier, it's sort
of in your head. Your consciousness is contacting these things.
We know that we don't understand consciousness. You know, from
a human perspective, we don't know what it is. We
don't know what it means. It's just there, is it
the human experience? Like? What is it? And I know
you don't like Crowley? But was Crowley onto something when
he said it's all you know, well, he said the
goetia was sort of in your head and it was
different parts of your brain. Was he kind of sort
of hinting at that that it's all in in your head?
Or was he trying to lead people astray?
Speaker 3: I had found I have found that.
Speaker 2: Uh.
Speaker 3: I don't think Crowley believed it was all psychological. I
think that Crowley often And I'm not one of these
people who doesn't like Crowley because of some one off thing.
I've read most of his works. His poetry is the equinox, is.
Speaker 2: The you know, hey, it's okay, all that stuff.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I grew to hate him. I didn't hate him
when I started out, and I realized that this guy,
this guy's a great example of that he doesn't understand
what he believes because he would oscillate so much. He
was so obsessed with this idea of you know, he
was like this devout lover who relinquished himself and sacrificed
everything for the attainment of Samadi and his higher genius,
or as he called it, the Holy Guardian Angel. And
then he'd go spend a week in a brothel and
he called that balance, my friend, that's not balance, that's extremes.
He was an extreme person, and I believe he had
extreme highs, extreme lows. There were times where he was
sure of something then he was And he's a really
good example of what not to do when working these
initiatic trajectories, because I know he came from a system
that said, we're not right hand or left hand. We
are middle path. We're middle path magicians. So there's got
to be that dynamic equilibrium, right where instead of going
like this across the tree of life from from severity
to mercy, severity to mercy and spending a millisecond crossing
the center, we have to find a didynamic equilibrium and
work our way up the middle pillar. And that's the
path of mildness, really, and that is the point of
balanced power. And he was not that kind of initiate.
And as a matter of fact, you know, he he
actually most of the all of the adepty of the
Temple of which he was a part in London, refused
his admission to the Inner Order, and so you know,
you're not that type of guy. And but I do.
I do think that at some points he believed it
was psychological, and then he had experiences that showed him
that it wasn't just psychological. And that's that's a definitive
moment for every magician, when you get to see if
you actually believed in this all along. You know, it's
like whoa that that happened? You know, like I so,
and some people run away screaming. But I think that, yes,
there are access points in our microcosm. Young The best
way to think of it is in a Jungian context,
because he said, Okay, we have a subconscious, and then
we have an unconscious, and our personal, our individual unconscious
is actually a doorway to the collective unconscious, and the
collective unconscious is the realm of the archetypes. And so
we have access points in our microcosm two things that
have an objective reality, they have an existence of their own.
I'm I would say that this theory is probably the
most popular among magicians throughout history. I would say serious
occultists today practiced, experienced occultists know that there is no
accounting for this stuff in any totally psychological model. It
defies belief, probability, what have you. And then on the
other hand, you do have to dig deep into your
own psychology in order to work any of this stuff.
Otherwise those things on the other side will just be
using you like a puppet.
Speaker 2: Speaking of being used by puppets and a connection with
Young two, I was going to ask you what your
thoughts on Young were, because he was one of those
ones that really took the dive from an academic perspective
sort of thing and mixing the occult in with that
and one of my favorite concepts, right, we have the
active imagination. And there was another guy, Henry corban I
believe it was, who talked about the mundus imagine analysis, right,
and you're talking about these things on the other side
playing you like a fiddle, and you had John Dinawarod
Kelly kind of experiencing that too, where they were using
their system to contact these entities that at the end
of the day were like, hey, you want to learn
the secrets of the universe, boys, you got to swap
your wives, Like what wis?
Speaker 3: Right?
Speaker 2: Oh you know so.
Speaker 3: Uh.
Speaker 2: The mundus imaginealysis have been a concept that's really intrigued
me for a long time. Where the way to describe
it is where it's this middle realm, right, and it's
an autonomous realm between the real and the unreal, and
it gushes forth from your consciousness and these things come forth,
and you know, people say that that's where angels come
from and all these different things. Would you say that
active imagination is a crucial thing in the occult any
practice because you're saying about visualizing things.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I'll say this. It's because it's a very good question,
because it gets to the heart of something here that
other questions on this line of reasoning are too vague
to address. Active imagination is extremely important if you're gonna
have a hard time as a magician if you can't
visualize things and hold them there and not only visualize
them with your eyes closed, but visualize them with your
eyes open. Now that active imaginal realm. I wouldn't say
that's where angels come from. I wouldn't say that's where
demons come from. I wouldn't say that's where gods come from.
I'd say that's where the forms that they use to
communicate with us come from They come from that in
between realm that burgeons forth from the mind and like
a hand slipping into a glove, but the glove's gotta fit.
It can't be something completely inharmonious with their essential nature.
They don't work like we do. They don't have free will.
We have free will. That's why I, you know, I
can you know, be fat one day, skinny the next day,
and it's you know, there's there's like a logical sequence
in between the two. These things don't really have a
species of free will to the degree that human beings do.
That's why it's extremely unique to be a human being.
But they will communicate with us in given that we
formulate the right glove, so to speak, you know, the
right form. And that's a big part of Golden Dawn.
In other forms of Kabbalistic magic is the assumption of
God forms and the creation of what we call telismatic images.
And it's exactly that kind of what we call in
the Greek tradition m sichosis, the insulment of that image.
That is what I experienced in the Fantasia, and as
Henri Corbon called it also he coined this phrase, or
at least popularize it the imaginal faculty instead of calling
it imagination because that has like this stigma to it
where it's like it doesn't mean anything, it's not real. Well,
he was translating, you know, I think Persian and Arabic
texts Islamic texts. It was like, I have to find
a different word to use because they're saying what was
translated into English as imagination, but it doesn't mean the
same thing. So he's talking about the active capacity to
generate images. That is a power of the soul. That is,
that is what we in magic. That is one of
the magical tools of a human being, the part of
your soul that can imagine something if without any prompting,
nothing there. You know, that's how buildings get built, cities
get built, you know, strategies get formulated, all sorts of
wonderful things come from this realm. And still people, you know,
like to think of it that it's junk, it's nothing.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Henry Corbin was studying Sufiism and right, the swelling
dervishes and all that, which is super super interesting, and
the concept of active imagination. I've I've done it. Myself.
I've done the I believe that writing is a powerful
tool and that's why young you know, the Red Book,
Black Book and all these things. I think at writing
the way I've come to understand it, not only is
writing sacred, because if you really think about it, any
magical tradition, any religious text, any any any religion, I've
always said, is hell together by writing. And it's it's
writing that shifts the paradigm of reality quite literally, and
it has shaped our world as we know it, any
major world religion. Really, I mean, it comes down to
an old book that was translated and passed down and
and I think that's why stories are so important as
well in our reality because they do this. They kind
of serve as a as a crutch in my opinion,
to the active imagination because now they're they're taking away
and they're kind of, you know, leading you astray from
having to do the active imagination by just putting pictures
in front of you and that's the substitute for that, right,
So they're kind of deconditioning you from the original, which
was oral tradition, which was you know, creating mind palaces
and the art of memory, which you know I've always
tried to understand the art of memory for such a
long time, and I you know, this concept that who
is it that that Yates that she writes about Francis Yates,
and she it eludes me because I'm like trying to
read her works and I'm trying to dig in and
like really buckle down, and I'm like, what Francis tell
me the answer to the memory? Like what is it?
And it's like this concept that maybe memory itself is
a power that you're able to use to how you're saying,
maybe tap into the source or energy or you know,
I still don't know.
Speaker 3: I mean, I mean, here's the thing that happens when
you become an initiate, you know. And Crowley said this
to his own chagrin. He's like, I was threatened on
all pains of death not to reveal any of the
secrets and then safe, safely entrusted with the he Through alphabet. Well,
the thing that we're doing and things like that, going
done with the Hebrew alphabet, the signs and symbols of
alchemy of astrology. We are building a symbolic vocabulary because
what happens, right, Okay, So here's the thing you get
active imagination, but at some point that that active imagination
becomes receptive, and what it's receptive to is the power
that you're invoking. If you're a magician, you want something
to come into the image you have made, so you
made it amenable to. It's you know, what we would
consider to be its harmonies, its correspondences. It's kind of
the same thing where it's like, hey, if you put
a drum kit in a room and you know, a
bowl of of of pasta and meatballs, I'm going to
be very likely to be in that room. Whereas if
you put things that aren't harmonious to my nature, I'm
not going to come in there. So it's kind of
a similar I mean, it's a very gross exaggeration, but
it being facetious to kind of make a point here.
So what we do is imagine, you know, you're let's
say you're doing a pathworking where you're using here this
diagram the tree of life behind me, and you're working
the paths in visualization. Now, some of that is active.
You got to know the correspondences. You got to but
then there's always this moment and you prepare for that
moment and you Okay, So now I need an entity
and the entity tells me or it does, I don't know.
I'm gonna have to see. And this is an elementary way.
Pathworking is an elementary way to build this skill of
going active passive, active passive in the imagination. Now, what
would happen if all of a sudden big birds showed up?
Because that's what's in your available imagery, that's what's in
your lexicon. Will be very difficult to interpret this stuff.
Why because that's not a universal symbol. That is a
subjective symbol, that is a personal symbol that means something
to you if you know anything about you know the
difference between archetypal and and sort of dream imagery. So
what we're doing in a system like the Golden Dawn
is we're training ourselves. We're training into ourselves a symbolic vocabulary.
And that's why all these things have all these correspondences
in these meanings. So that if I see the letter alf,
I'm thinking spirit, I'm thinking the head of the Ah,
you know, I'm thinking the breath of God, you know.
And you know, if I if I think, you know,
the Hebrew letter vow, I'm thinking of some kind of nail.
I'm thinking of some kind of phallic interpretation, obviously in
a divine sense, in an elevated sense. So we have
all these things that allow us to interpret these experiences
and make these things more fluid for us. And you're
one hundred percent right about words and letters. This is
a very ancient, ancient uh philosophy, the magical philosophy of language.
Not only is it the written word, it's the spoken word.
Why because this is the same way the ancients conceived
of the creator, God, God, the demiurge, whatever you want
to call it, It created in the same way. So
they had two terms, nous and logos. Logos is the order,
it's the pattern. It's the universal laws that we that
in our indicative of harmony and therefore some sort of
grand intelligence. On the other hand, news is the intelligence itself.
It's the mind of God. And I mean you could
think of it as like that which generates the platonic forms,
if you're familiar with those things, or the if you're
if you're into Neoplatonism, it's the second hypostatic postulate of nous.
It's just mind. So logos, which really in Greek means
word logos. That order is to noose the mind of
God as speech is to the human mind. Why because
it reveals things unseen. You cannot see my thoughts, but
you will know them when I speak them, and that
will give you some sort of indication of my character something,
It will give you something about my nature just from
hearing the things that I say. And it's the same
way that we approach the investigation of the divine and
the cosmos. We look at the order, the logos, the
speech of God. Right in most accounts, either Brahma utters
the divine om or you know, Yahweh says let there
be light. He doesn't fashion a light bulb. God said
let there be light, because it's the The order is
indicative of the thought, the same way my speech and
your speech is indicative of the contents of our mind.
So there's something very very interesting and magical here. And
this circles all the way back, and they'll close this
on this point. It circles back to what I was
saying before. With individuals as its small universe, as tiny
sort of co collaborators in this grand dance, we're almost
like a mirrored reflection but attenuated. You know, we're We're
not God, but we have similar capacities given our size
and station.
Speaker 2: You mentioned earlier about these Reddit occultists that usually when
people dive into the occult, the first thing they want
to do is the hardest hitting stuff. They want to
conjure demons to physical manifestation or whatever it is that
they're trying to do. Right, They want to go balls
to the wall right off the bat. And you said
that that's not healthy, right, in a sort of way,
are there are there only certain people who can interact
with this, similar to how you know, like a shaman
class or priest class. And right, we've been talking about
the mondus imaginatze or active imagination this concept, and some
people can't visualize within their head. Some people don't have
an inner monologue. Would that play a role as to
maybe you not being able to interact with it. Does
that play into the aspect of hey, I tried this,
nothing happen. Maybe I don't believe enough. Where does that
come in?
Speaker 3: So I would say I'll start off by saying this,
I have seen it most of the time, not all
the time, most of the time when people want to
jump in and do all the crazy stuff first, because again,
like I said earlier, they're testing their own belief they don't,
you know, I say it all the time. I hear
magicians that have written books that have been on the
internet saying, oh, well, the dangers in magic are negligible.
I don't know, do you believe in any of this stuff?
You know, because there are real and significant dangers to
things like this, most of which are psychosis and delusion.
So I'm not even just talking about you know what
if you call something that you can't get to go away?
You know what, if you do something successful, I would
say probably sixty percent of all magic that is done
by magicians. And this is a gross exaggeration and probably
too much of an overestimate, but I would say in
my experience that like sixty percent of the magic that
most people are doing because they don't understand what magic is.
It is just psychology and it's not you know, it's
not necessarily actual magic. Now, I would say, you know,
once that kind of you know, there are a couple
of people that either something happens, let's say they have
a natural talent or whatever, they accidentally providentially did something
without realizing it on a perfect astrological election, right, the astrology,
we use it like the tides. If I want to
get to that island, I've got to go when the
tide is going out, not coming in and working against me.
So a lot of that's really why magicians pay attention
to astrology, because there's a lot of that etheric kind
of tide thing that we're working with now. Maybe a
beginner just so happened to be floating when the tide
was out and it worked. Now there are two types
of people. There are people who are going to get
scared and leave it alone, or there are people who
are going to say, Okay, I like this, I'm going
to keep doing it some more. And I would say
people that have a fantasia it's called they don't have
the ability to visualize. There are other ways you can be.
You can develop other senses you can I've worked with
people who thought they had a fantasia and can now visualize,
you know, because it's like I spent a lot of
time explaining to them and working with them about what
visualization is. They just couldn't figure out what was going on.
Am I supposed to be seeing something that? No? You know,
not when you're visualizing, when you're visualizing. I mean, you
are imagining something in your head. Now for the purposes
of magic, you have to open your eyes and that
should be automatically after a while of practice. Project it
should be in the room with you, but not three dimensionally,
two dimensionally, but it's it's there as an overlay. And
what is that. It's combining the hemispheres the same way
that I would go loose it in a dream, right,
I take my way mind into my my unconscious to
my subconscious. You're doing that in magic. You're bringing the subconscious,
You're bringing the intuitive, the imaginal into your waking consciousness.
So it's it's it's the inverse of like lucid dreaming.
Really is what you're doing. And so you teach people
to do that, and if they can't do it, there
are other ways. But the main thing is this people
shouldn't and this is this is a truism from very
very old. It's just now in the modern times of
this kind of you know, democratization of everything because we
have the Internet and we don't know what it means
to have any kind of self control or or uh,
you know, blockages from seeing things doing things, and everything's
free you can watch somebody get beheaded on the internet,
you can watch people having sex, and whatever you want,
you can see and do in our world. And so
these kinds of things that I'm about to say, even
though for most of human history we're just obvious to everybody,
we've kind of thrown them by the wayside. And that
is that you shouldn't do magic until you're prepared to
do magic. And what is that preparation? Initiation? So you
get a lot of people who go into magic and
they never initiate an initiation. If it's true, if it's
an actual initiatic order with qualified initiating adepts and a
formula that works, you're going to undergo what we call
a spiritual alchemy. You know, a lot of people think
that's new agy. Well take a look at Zossimus' Panopolis
talking about spiritual end laboratory alchemy, you know, or really
it was metallurgy in his day, being just reflections of
each other, right, and that's the third fourth century again,
and he was an Egyptian scribe priest, so not new agy.
But really there is a salve at Coagula that should
have happened to you. Like I said earlier, you have
to know your own psychology or these things will use you.
They will play you like a fiddle, and they will
use you like a puppet. So you must undergo that
alchemical initiation to know yourself better. And not only that,
but what we talked about the microcosm, the miniature universe, well,
the universe as it exists out there, the macrocosm, the
big version that has more divine proportions. What do I
mean by that, Well, most things are tempered by their
opposite constantly right, equal amounts of in the course of
the year, equal amounts of day and night. This is
the same thing if you go to Iceland, where like
half the year it's dark, but then also half the
year it's light all the time. There's a natural balancing
act that happens in the microcosm. Because of nature and
nurture and traumas and all sorts of exterior things, we're
all out of whack. We don't have that same balance.
So what the alchemical initiation is supposed to do is
supposed to rebalance you in according to the or in
accordance with the proportions of the universe. You know, you're
using nature as your model. That is hermatism, that is
rawsy crucianism. You're reading the Book of Nature and learning
how to find an experience and maintain the dynamic equilibrium
of balance. And a lot of that has to do
with virtue. A lot of that has to do with
what we call, you know, sofrosini in the Greek tradition, temperance,
balance equilibrium. This is knowing thyself and not just letting
yourself off the rails. You're going to an extreme. Things
in this realm cannot exist for long if they are extreme,
and so the prevailing mode of existence is a dynamic
equilibrium along the center of gravity, the middle. And so
if you haven't done that, I do not recommend that
you do magic. Also, if you have mental health issues,
I don't think that that is that is now I'm
talking about schizophrenia. I'm talking about you know, severe disassociative
disorders and maybe even things that are that are very
like severe bipolar disorder. I would recommend for your health,
not out of some kind of exclusion exclusionary sentiment, but
for your health. You you are communicating with things you
can't see, and you are aggrandizing potentially your ego to
cathedral heights, and not only that, but if you're undergoing
out chemical initiation, it's actually a species of self induced schizophrenia.
So you don't really want to exacerbate any of these things.
So those are the types of people who I think
shouldn't do magic.
Speaker 2: Yeah, no, that makes perfect sense. You said it's a
it's a self induced psychosis in a sort of way,
right to be able to do these things. And you
know you mentioned spiritual alchemy. I've heard that Freemasonry eliminated
the lab work. You know, you were talking about Zozimos, right,
who talked about that about how you know, Henrik what's
his name, Henrik Conrath, you know, and the plates that
they would enter right in the oratory of the laboratory,
and like that's what those plates served. It was their
all chemical lab on the other side, and that's what
those mandolas essentially was for and with the perspective and everything,
because they would go in and do part of their
alchemy within that. You mentioned emerging the hemispheres, right, you
have the government with hemi sync and their trials on them,
their studies on that. And I want to ask you
the million dollar question that a lot of people because
I do speak about conspiracies as well, because I think
it kind of crosses the conspirac cult. Right, it's a
conspiracy what we're talking about. Now, are you able to
do all this? Are there demons? Are there angels? Can
you control them? Can you not? Right? Like people always
wonder about that, And are what you would consider the
elites using magic, subtlety or on purpose to control the masses?
And if they are, are the masses even sus susceptible
to a sort of magical manipulation if you will, Because
this is a conspiracy theory that a lot of people
talk about. Where you have the skitzos on the internet
collecting you know, they do the the jamatria nowadays, which
is kabbala, right, which is a which in my opinion
is a real practice, just not the way that people
are using it nowadays. But what are your thoughts on that,
on this elite secret cabal using magic all on us,
you know, through Hollywood and the media and social media
and all these things.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's a big question, and it's part of it
was you know, this whole thing what you're talking about now,
what you're bringing up is a big reason why in
the first place, I wanted to study Kabbala and things
like that and see what is going on here, because
something inside of me just no or knew that some
of this stuff was at play. And the thing is,
I meet a lot of people, especially in occult orders.
You know, they tend to be well, I'm not going
to make any negative or disparaging kind.
Speaker 2: This is a safe place. You can say whatever you want.
Speaker 3: I well, you know, the thing is, they tend to
be a little diluted and a little hypocritical and a
lot of the times, and a lot of that has
to do with not everybody, again is an initiate. Not
everybody has gone through this hard won balancing act, and
it doesn't end. I'll be doing this till I'm dead,
and I have to. He's no choice. You can't turn
back now. But a lot of people they, for some reason,
we get together in robes and funny hats and say
all these crazy words and vibrate and go around in circles,
and we do all that for the purposes of bringing
good into the world. How far fetched is it that
there is some group of people doing that somewhere to
bring bad into the world. And what is bad? Self interest?
Like self interest. That is a runaway train, right, Okay,
So vicious self interest is, for all intents and purposes,
the dark force, the dissolutive force in society and an
individual's it's compelling us constantly to use our arrows, our
spiritual desire, which is the inherent nature of our soul,
to ground it in orgasms, food, money, competition, instead of
reaching back up like an infant, to our creator and
to the higher hierarchies, our brothers and sisters spiritually beyond
or or above us. I don't want to say a
value judgment, but there's a there's a hierarchy here, right.
We're talking about logos order. The universe is ordered, and
so is so are the spiritual is the spiritual realm.
And that's a truism of all occultism for as far
back as you go. Uh So, I don't know anybody
that is an elite that practices this stuff. So I
want to clarify that I'm not claiming to have any
behind the scenes hidden knowledge.
Speaker 2: But.
Speaker 3: I know what it's like. I I'll say this, I
understand and I noticed the markers of when someone is
under some kind of control, under some kind of spell,
some kind of enchantments, some kind of a will dominance,
for lack of a better term. I also some of
my work is in clerical stuff. I've spent seven years
as a deacon an exorcist, so I also know the
hallmarks of you know, parasitism, possession, not even full on possession,
but attachment of certain entities. And I would say that
the overwhelming majority of people are under some kind of
influence one way or another, because what renders us susceptible
to that kind of influence is now hardwired, and has
been for one hundred years, almost hardwired into our society.
You know, substances which weaken the etheric body, disruptions in
our natural circadian rhythms, in our natural hormonal sort of output,
those rhythms being constantly in fight or flight, lowers immunity.
And I'm not even just talking now from the perspective
of a magician. I have a college level training in
Chinese medicine and an acupuncture, so I learned the energetic stuff.
I studied with chigong masters and all that stuff. I
got a ray key practice, and it's just a truism.
In all forms of traditional energetic medicines. You do certain
things and your chi your defenses break down, and it
makes it easier for things to enter. I would say
most people are into that or subject to that, and
a big part of that is the mass media. The
mass media, there has never been a repository of popular
opinion in the same way as we have it today,
where literally we've got screens in our pockets in every
room in the house, multiple ones, and you can tune
in and things and people that you wouldn't let into
your living room if they were knocking on your door.
Now have you by the nose, have your attention. And
one of the things that preliminarily you learn as an
initiate is you must control the gate of your mind.
We think we only have a gastronomical or a physical diet.
We have a mental diet, and that mental diet gives
whatever coming in direct access to our energy, direct access
to our thoughts, feelings, emotions. Especially if we have not initiated,
what does initiate mean to begin? If we have not
even begun the inward journey? These people are basically like
real you know, they're like just baby sheep fawnds to wolves.
They have no way of even knowing how I viscerated
there they're getting. I don't know if it's coordinated, but
I know what I'm seeing. I definitely know what I'm seeing. Uh.
Is there a suspicion on my part that a lot
of this is coordinated as fuckingly? But I can't you know.
Of course, somebody's sources, like you know, and uh, trust me,
I don't have any.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, source, trust me, bro And you you've said
enough to again leave enough room for speculation and anyone listening.
I always encourage people to do their own research. Don't
listen to me, don't listen to you know anything. I'm
just here. Just make up your own assumptions and and
I'm just presenting the information. What you do with that
is up to you. And so I want to spend
the last bit of the show talking about your new
work that's going to be coming out here in April
and a Theoric Magic, a complete system of elemental, celestial
and now chemical magic. Can you tell us a little
bit about this work? What is a Theoric Magic and
what all that can say? Stuff? Sure?
Speaker 3: So, yeah, that's coming out in April, uh with Lluellen
And essentially it's a distillation of it's it's I would
say it's it's an introductory distillation. Although I mean there
are tons of exercises in this book. You will be
busy for a very long time with this book if
you choose to actually, you know, do the practicum. I
wanted this. My last book, A Formless Fire, was more
you know we I had appendixes in there where you could,
you know, do the LBRP consecrate holy water, do with
Spageria tanks here, but nothing at this level of practice.
That was much more of a history and theory book,
and I wanted I never want to write going along
with this whole theme of keeping things balanced. I never
want to just release all this intellectual info, dumb stuff
without having another book come right up behind it and okay,
now here is it practical stuff. So that's what etheric
magic really is. I do go into the history and
theory of it, though you have to know the theory
and the history is just very interesting. I'm using the
term etheric U basically as a Western term for for
chi or for for the energy bodies. Now, when I
say energy is energy, I don't mean energy in the
in you know, electricity or or we don't know what
this stuff is and it's not imaginal because it's it's
actually physical. It's it's you can see it, you can
palpate it, you can feel it, you can move it.
It's just some form of physicality which is extremely rarefied,
and it resembles a fluid like light. And you'll hear
that talked about constantly, right, I talk about it in
the book Shime the astral Light and all this kind
of stuff. It moves like water and it is radiant
like light. And I give many, many exercises to be
able to teach people to see it and feel it
and then move it. And that's those are just the
preliminary exercises I like I mentioned, you know, I went
to school for for for massage, bodywork, Eastern bodywork, and
Chinese medicine acupuncture. I trained in chigung I trained in Taichi,
and trained in martial arts. I trained in raiki, and
all this was going on, I was also doing Western
ceremonial magic, and I realized, wow, like, these are two
sides of one coin, truly, and we've we could in
the Western system we completely gloss over it. Some people
say like, oh, yeah, well it's hidden, Okay, Well Why
does it have to be hidden? Why do I have
to read now chemical text. It's going to give me
a seizure or stroke, you know, trying to figure this
thing out. Who knows if the guy who wrote it
knew what he was talking about. I'm not going to
waste my time. So I really really dove headfirst into
the energy systems and the practices of the East because
they're very very well codified, they're very well kept, and
it's part of a magical tradition. Benabel one one of
my favorite authors and practitioners of all time. That woman
makes me look like a monkey. She is incredible, and
she put together. She has a book called the Tao
of Craft, and she talks about Daoist magical consecrations of
sigils and talismans and the moving of chi. It's a
very defined energy work sort of thing, intelligent energy. And
so I basically, over the course of ten or eleven
years eleven years now, I use the Kabbalistic Tree of
Life as a kind of scaffolding and the symbol system
of Western alchemy to basically create a system of energy
work that does what we were talking about, spiritual alchemy
that does have applications to every kind of magic include
if you're going to do it conjuration, I don't recommend
condur you can use this for anything. And then also
there is a the health aspect of it, right, because
that should be a part of any practitioners. You know,
regime is energetic health the more. That's what chigung is,
you know, that's the big secret. They transform chi into jing.
They transform energy into essence, right, So they're taking prana
and they're building with it more kundalini. And that's essentially
what chigung does. It's why they call it the Fountain
of Life because or the fountain of youth, because they're
transforming that energy into life essence. This is a big
part of the Daoist adept and interral chemical tradition, and
I believe it is and was a big part of
the Western tradition, but we lost it. So I'm I'm
bringing it back in this book and really giving the history,
theory and a crap tone of practice for anybody that
wants to work this system, do the energy work, and
then apply it magically.
Speaker 2: The watery light is that something similar to what the
Gnostics talked about in the Upper eons that you were
going to be, you know, reunited with the source. And
they described it as this watery light.
Speaker 3: Absolutely, I would say that what it is is that's
the you know, the shamim up in those the fiery
waters up there, and essentially that is it is the
creative impetus behind everything. So there's this system, right. These
words are muddled, their definitions are not precise any longer
when we say things like spirit and soul. But in
the ancient system, particularly the Hellenistic system of the Greco
Egyptian Romans, you had si kei psyche soul, which was
the aggregate totality of your experience of interiority. What do
I mean by that? Your thoughts, feelings, emotions, everything that
makes you you inside your head, that experiential component that
was your soul. Seek that's where we get psychology from.
They thought it was you know, metaphysical, and I believe
that there is a component that is metaphysical as well. Now,
spirit was numa, okay, and that actually is this sort
of light like substance. And for anything, even a soul,
to enter into materiality, it had to be sort of
vehiculized or enshrouded in this spirit. So spirit is literally
the vessel of the body and the soul right, because
matter has no life in and of itself, It needs
numa and seek, it needs spirit and soul in order
to become animate. The word animate or animate comes from
the Latin anima soul. It's throughout the Platonic dialogues. Matter
only has life when there is soul and spirit in it.
And so that's that's what I'm talking about here. This,
this ether is is this this spirit. It's also called
the breath of God, and it is essentially, it is
essentially the part of God that it is. Everywhere in
the Corpus Hermeticum you have you have many things said
about the One, the absolute, the monad capital g God.
But the one that sticks out the most to me
is God is one and its substance is light. And
you look at masonry, you look at golden dawn, all
this stuff. There is an intense preoccupation with light, further light,
more light, light and extension. All of this light. It's
not a lot of people will say, well, because it's
it's you can look at it platonically, where light is
not just you know, knowledge of things, but knowledge itself
and there's an interesting correlation to that with we were
talking about before Noose the intellect of God. Well, I
was speaking with the professor Walter Honograph at the University
of Amsterdam and he told me, you know, he's like,
you know, yeah, that word gets translated as intellect, but
what it really means is light. So it's really, really,
really incredible is that it seems to be that whatever
infinite mind is dreaming our reality, the basic substance it
is using to create and move everything is light. And
so that's why I hesitate to call it energy because
really it's this liquid light. It's this fluidic light that
we're working with here. And the interesting thing is again
that Noose intellect and light correspondence is it responds to
our minds. There's a saying in Chigung where the mind
goes the chi flows, and so that's another thing that
I take people through in the book, this preliminary exploration
of hey, you have an energy body. You have to
link your conscious mind to it, and it's going to
be like an arm. You didn't know you have that.
Now you have to learn how to work the fingers
and relearn how to use that thing. It is completely atrophied.
And it's the same concept with your your etheric bodies,
is that you link your mind to it and then
it will do what you want it to do.
Speaker 2: So many things are going through my mind, and I
love Daoism. Daoism is very amazing and there are a
lot of interesting concepts within that and what's sprouted from
that as well, right, because there's this evolution and you
talked about taking various aspects of magical systems and kind
of sort of merging it into your own. And I've
always compared magic or this the current, right, this thing
to the force. Right in Star Wars and George O. Fucus,
you know, shout out to Slick dissident, he came up
with that one of where you have the Jedi who
use the force this thing for good and they write
good sub and good and evil subjective even and you know,
in those terms, but they use it for positive right
light good, and then you have the Sith that use
it for more nefarious purposes how we were mentioned earlier, right,
for corruption, manipulation, power, you know, dominance over other people.
And is that the correct analogy that this magic, this thing,
this etheric thing is like the force where you can
tap into it using your own hardware. But as long
as you know how to navigate your way around it,
you're good. And that's why there have been multiple magical
systems throughout all of history.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean I would say, well, first, I would
say this about the analogy. I like it because I'm
a big fan of Star Wars, especially the original trilogy.
But I would say that the idea of the force
was actually derived allah. You know Taoism, and you know
Joe Campbell, who influenced the series from the very beginning.
It is derived from that principle of of you know,
this unifying force that is all permeating. It's what we're
talking about the light now. And I remember what Yoda
says too. He pinches Luke and he goes, luminous beings.
Are we not this crude matter? Luminous beings? We are
beings of light, That's what he's telling him. But your mind,
Luke's mind is so convinced that I am this guy
in this place who can't lift the X wing out
of the And then he says, I don't believe it.
And Yoda says, well, that's why you fail, you know,
because you can't wrap your mind around this shit, And
that to me is another lesson of initiation faith, right
because people say, Okay, if you're a gnostic, you don't
need faith. Yeah, But the thing is, in order to
become a gnostic you need faith because you're not a
gnostic until you have knowledge. So well, yeah, what's the
motivation to work towards that path? Why am I going
to climb the Holy Mountain if I don't have faith
that something's going to reward me at the end. So
there needs to be some kind of faith. But I
would say that the good and evil and nefarious they're
tricky terms. Can you get a lot of people right now,
especially all of the world, that think they're doing good,
but they're really doing evil because they're so convinced. There's
so much emotionality behind this idea of doing capital g
good that they don't realize they're subverting it. Their flame
is ruddy. It's not a bright, pure luminous flame. It's
a flame that is giving off vicious heat and black smoke,
and so it's not really this fire of nourishment. It's
this fire of destruction, is what they are manifesting. Even
though they think that they're doing good. Right. Road to
hell is paved with good intentions. And so I would
say that in order to use something for the highest
and best purpose, you are using the force, the light,
the ether for balance. Balance. That is what you want
to do. You want to if and sometimes you know,
to the uniated, it might look like you're doing something bad.
It's kind of the same way in the prequels when
Obi Wan says, you know, Anakin, you were supposed to
bring balance to the force. Well maybe he did. Maybe
there was too much light, you know, he needed to
bring the darkness to balance it. And what comes from that,
Luke Skywalker, you know, So it's this, It's really what
we want to talk about is triangulation. You don't want
to stay on the vertical or the horizontal axis of
polarity of bad and good night and day. That's an
unresolved duality. Now a lot of people think you can
take the poles and just push them together. Well, that
boof goodbye phenomenality. You can't have no experience that way.
And other people kind of sit in the middle and
kid themselves, kid themselves, and that they're you know, I
have transcended duality. And what happens is you're still subject
to the line of fire. You will nothing here is
static in this realm. You will find yourself moving very
slowly to either side, imperceptibly so and then from your position,
you'll not really know if you're in the middle. So
what needs to happen? And this is another initiatic technique.
You'll see a lot of triangles, particularly in the Golden Dawn.
You triangulate, you find a position which is center but
above the line of verticality, and that is once you
Once you're able to sort of walk that middle pillar
and find the center point, you can rise above the
situation and apply what needs to be applied. You you
get a bird's eye view, and then you work as
an emissary of the divine by bringing balance to the
situation however you can, and you don't just do that
willy nilly. So there's a tremendous onus and responsibility that
you take on yourself. So you better be damn sure
this needs to happen and that you're the one to
do it now. On the other hand, you know I
would say, uh, just because if you can harness this
energy and move, it doesn't mean that you should be
doing anything outside of your own practice with it. And
I'll tell you why. When you become a magician, we
call it sort of lighting up on the astral But
really what it's more like is you become a whirlpool
that sucks all this energy in. And how fast and
how powerful that draw is is normally correspondent with how
much you practice how much inherent energy you kind of
are a battery for it. And also the moon cycles,
the lunar cycles are very important. Now. The thing is,
if you're really really great at pulling this energy in,
but let's say you've got no control over your libido,
you are going to that energy is going to come
through you, and instead of sublimating and radiating, you're going
to ground it in an orgasm or some other destructive tendency. Now,
orgasms aren't, like of themselves, destructive, but when you have
that much energy and that little self control, that's going
to dominate your life. And that again, in systems of
traditional medicine, that will kill you. You will die early
from wasting essence, wasting jing they call it. This is
not I'm not talking about, you know, seman retention. Here,
this new kind of weird reactionary thing that's going on.
This is an old thing where ancient doctors would tell
the Emperor of China how many times a day he
could orgas them if we wanted to have longevity, you know,
and it's still a thing in modern Chinese, traditional Chinese medicine.
So there's things like that, other destructive behaviors, addictions, things
like that, you know, overeating will it is a way
of kind of expressing that intensity of energy that is
ultimately self destructive. And so you need to have a
really firm grasp on these things. And you know, people
nowadays they don't understand these concepts. So they think they
think that all these ancient texts we're talking about morality.
They're not. They're talking about natural law. They're talking about
cause and effect, and they're talking about you know what
that which is the stuff, This is what it is.
And so now a lot of people balk at that.
They're very they are very reactive against that because of
the social moras of our time. But I mean the
social moras of our time, I mean they're kind of
responsible for the time. We like to point back at
this person and that person in this epoch. It's these guys.
It's what we are doing right now, the way we
are living and the way we are thinking and behaving
towards ourselves and each other, that is that keeps us
in this crisis.
Speaker 2: So reality is what I've called a cosmic cumshot. It
really is. You know, it comes down to that. You
know this concept and I identify well, yeah, no, I
think that that's came into exist. I think we're right
the seed of God, if you will, right the big Bang,
if you will, I identify with with Yoda when he
I'm a father. So when he dies, after answering so
many questions that Luke had for him, He's just like, Okay,
I'm done. You know, he just dies, he just leaves.
But one of the things that I've always speculated on
that I know holds the secrets. And you know, you
keep talking about the light, and in my opinion, the
secrets are in the light now and the manipulation of it. Now.
I don't know if it's physical light, because then you
can get into like you know, the cathedrals and like
what they were doing and were they invoking a spiritual
experience while you were in there because of the manipulation,
you know, the tiffany glass was made in a certain
alchemical procedure, so you know, you know the way they
made it. Does that have an effect on it? Or
was it more of like John D's katroptics, where you know,
you have the stellar rays where your soul would become
a mirror, right, and you can harness these rays that
are constantly coming up and down from above, and then
you have the you know, the whole stellar rayce thing
where a sacrifice plays a role into that where you're
able to snuff out that light and then you take
that and you can use it for something else in
another operation. So you know, this plays a role until
we were talking about earlier about you know the Illuminati,
they're the illuminated, right, did they know how to truly
manipulate the light? And again, I don't know if it's
the physical light that we see or something beyond or
maybe a mixture of both, right, because there is something
to be said about let there be light. Yeah, that's
the whole thing.
Speaker 3: Well, and the interesting thing here is twofold because this
is a very again a very very ancient idea. One
of the reasons that we are preoccupied, particularly in freemasonry
as I'm sure you're aware with the solar allegory, right,
I don't know about that. Masonry is predominantly preeminently a
solar allegory. You have the worship of a master in
the east, the junior warden in the south, the senior
warden in the west. Nothing is in the north. Why
because in the northern hemisphere the sun moves through the
southern skies. So it's the position, the triangular, the triangulation
of the officers in a Masonic lodge is the ecliptic.
It's the apparent path of the sun and the sky.
And this whole dying and rising kind of thing again,
is the sun dying in the west to be reborn
in the east every day, and then to achieve its
meridian height, its brightest in the in the mid heaven.
And this is the story of man, and this is
the story of the soul, and this is the story
of immortality and creation, because for some reason, this is
the mental material that is creating the dream stuffs of God,
the dream life of our of our creator. And so
Plato actually, in the book seven of the Republic, he
talks about the allegory of the cave. It's pretty famous, Well,
what does the prisoner who has been freed, what is
the first thing that he encounters? The sun? But he
talks about how that sun is just an image and
analog for what he calls the sun behind the sun,
which is that it's the same principle of radiance and
beneficence and life and light. Right, they looked and they
saw like, oh, things grow when there's light and heat
on them. You know. Oh, that's what we need for life,
you know. And and uh, and for human beings to see,
we need this kind of light. And so but that
to Plato and to the Platonic traditions that influenced, you know,
the Platonic tradition influenced all the Hermetic stuff as well.
People like to think that's exclusively Egyptian. There is not
a single Hermetic text that predates the Platonic dialogues, you know,
it's it's Breco Egyptian. He was using the same vernacular
as Plato in the Hermetic dialogues. It's the same words
meaning the same terms. And so he talks about the
sun behind the sun, which is a metaphysical principle of
radiance and giving and light and moving outward from the center,
and so it's kind of both. There's this tradition in
Neoplatonism late Platonism that's a part of the theurgic practice
of you know, I mentioned in before Yambucus. It's called photogogia,
and it's the work of the luminous body working on
the ether to pure your etheric body. They called it
the Ovgo eighties soma the luminous body, or they called
it the Okima numaticon the spiritual chariot, right, because in
order for a soul to be brought into earth, it
had to have a chariot, it had to be vehiculate, vehicularized,
and so that chariot, that spiritual pneumatic energy, energetic chariot,
has to be strength and purified, rectified. And so this
was done through lifestyle, through the pursuit of virtue, through
diet dietary specific dietary regimens, and also things like prayer
and visions of the sun and being out before Helios
and taking in the rays of Helios and so, you know,
to these people, all of reality was symbolic of a
metaphysical truth. So they didn't have to say, well, is
it one or the other, It's both it's both because
all of reality and its entirety is a symbol for
the truth of God.
Speaker 2: So the Son of God, I mean, we all think
of it as like the sun that you give birth to.
But it's making me think of this the sun, right,
the one thing that is the life force of humanity.
And I've heard the sun could be a portal as well.
I've heard that souls can pass through it or come
out of it something or other or something like that
might have been a little new age where I heard
it at, but right, the sun being a portal. And
then you have the concept of the black sun as well,
which is kind of sort of like this inversion of it. Right,
So that's something that I've always thought about the secrets
of light and what it means. And then all these
guys like John d who were super into optics and
you know, all these concepts. One last question before we
wrap up. So you have this book that has a
lot of practices, and you wrote the first one as
a more of the theory, and then now you have
the practice, which is perfect because in order to do
something you need an instructional manual. But what are other
than aggravating existing conditions? What are some of the consequences
of using magic and what could go wrong? I think
you mentioned a couple you summon something that you can't unsummon,
that you maybe didn't learn its name, so therefore you
don't know how the hell to call it away. But
what are some other things that maybe people should watch
out for if they are going to be dipping their
toes into all this stuff.
Speaker 3: Balance is key because magic will naturally throw you out
of balance. So to undergo that sort of purificatory quote unquote,
you know, sequence of spiritual alchemy is a preliminary It's
creating a safeguard so that you know yourself a little
more and you are more in touch with your energy bodies,
your emotional life, your physical life, the realities of yourself.
And this is not a great time I am in
the world for that kind of stuff. People will give
a lot of lip service. They'll say a lot of
platitudinous things about the shadow. But then like you, look
all anybody's doing to say, and you're the problem. You're
the problem. You're the problem. Will take that ray and
invert it, turn it on yourself. What in me is
making me a problem or making problems in my life,
because if you're not prepared for that, what if you're
not prepared by that, taking in this energy will inevitably
destroy you. Levy said it, Lavatsky said it. The magicians
of the Golden Dawn warned about it. You can keep
going back because you keep going back. Anybody that's there's
always a warning that this stuff will will kill you,
really literally kill you, if not drive you completely insane.
But in some measure, you know, and I've seen that
happen as well. Now, the really thing, the really interesting
thing is this, right, So, this idea of a devil
on one shoulder and an angel on the other, it's
not new, and it's not Christian only. This is a
very old idea. It goes back to the ancient Greeks.
They believed in the Hellenistic Greeks, they believed in the
Agatho diamond the guide of good counsel, and the Coco
diamond the guide of bad council. And there were a
lot of diamonds that served to drag mortals down further
into materiality and not let them rise in spiritual assent.
There was a theorist in the eighteenth century. His name
was Martine de Pasqually, and he founded something called the Elukhens,
the elect Priests of the Universe. It was a sort
of his idea of chivalric masonry, but he took in
a direction where they were summoning demons for the purposes
of exorcism, literally trying to exorcise demons from the sphere
of the earth. It was a very intense thing to
exists in the present day. Now. He wrote something called
the Treatise on the Reintegration of Beings, or really it
was put together after his death by some of his
students from his notes and letters. Mike Osborne. Michael Osborne
did a great translation of the Treatise out of the
original French. It's available on Rose Circle Books. I actually
did the audio book so for that. Now Pasqually talks
about how when the soul fell into humanity it became
what what what gets translated as a pensive being, and
what he really said was that none of our thoughts
are our own. And this is past Qually, but it's
it's it's resonant with this idea of the Agatho diamond,
the Cocko diamond. None of our thoughts are truly our own.
The only the truest expression of a human soul is
the action it takes. Which voice it's heeding. Is it
the agatho diamond we're listening to, or is it the
cocko diamond we're listening to. And the very interesting thing
is that most of the time they sound like you.
So if you're not prepared to become aware, to become
sensitive to the inner realms, you will think you are
having a thought and this long con, this long game
will be played, and you may not face the consequences
on this side of the veil. I'd rather face them
here than on the other side. So that that's that's
something that is very very important. And then you have Zausim,
as we mentioned him. He talks about something called the
anti memon diamond, the mimicking diamond, and that diamond is
one that is evil, wants to destroy you, but speaks
to you as if it were good, and again plays
this long con. You see this a lot in like
Celtic Irish literally fairy tales, the tales of the fae.
You know, Originally nowadays we think of them as like
these cute little you know, tinker bell things. These were
horrifying beings that were involved in contractual relationships with humans
that ultimately led them to their downfall. And so these
things are out there, and if you're not if you're
not trained, you will not be prepared to know what
is going on. So it's very easy to like just
take a person and destroy them if you're if you,
if you're somebody who is is going to be dipping
their toes in this in the deep end.
Speaker 2: Here either way, by the book. But proceed with caution,
is well, I.
Speaker 3: Give you the cautions. I don't do anything that's not
that doesn't have some kind of guardrail, and that's thanks
to the Golden Dawn. The Golden Dawn gets looked at
as kind of like these magical germophoone, but really what
it is is we are creating, as best as we can,
laboratory like experiments for magic. Right the same way you
would create a sterile field to like do some sort
of we're doing that energetically.
Speaker 2: Absolutely. I really enjoyed our conversation. Man. All the things
you say, you just make my mind just go off
into places and I'm trying to connect all the dots.
And I really appreciate you joining me today and enlightening
us on your work and the esoteric and the occult.
I really appreciate it. Can you let the people know
one more time where they can find you, your podcast,
your work, all that good stuff for those that didn't
catch it at the beginning.
Speaker 3: Sure. Well, First, thank you very much for having me on.
I really appreciate it. It's been a privilege to talk you.
Though you called yourself an armchair occultist, you had several
very insightful things to say, and the questions are just great.
You know a lot sometimes like you don't as a guest.
I'm sure you know, like you don't know what you're
walking into all the time. But this was great, and
you do put on a great show, and it's it
shows because you've got a following and people know you.
So thanks for having me on. You can find me
at Ike Baker dot com. I K E B A
k E R. The last thing that I want to
plug is really important to me. This October eighteenth to
the twenty sixth, I'm going to be leading an excursion.
It's an immersive it's a field immersive excursion in Egypt,
and it's going to be an Upper and Lower Egypt.
We're going over the course of nine days to some
of the most important and magnificent ancient temple sites like
the osireon the Temple of Osiris at Abydos, the Temple
of Hathor at Dendaro look Sore, the Valley of the
Kings and Queens, all over the place. It's going to
be absolutely incredible. I'm going to teach hands on a
group of sixteen participants the history, theory, and practice of
Greco Egyptian theoretic magic. It's gonna be a once in
a lifetime experience, probably because I won't do this again.
It's just been very logistically heavy. But I can't wait
to get back into Egypt. I've gone every year for
three years now. But yes, this is going to be
absolutely incredible against sixteen participants. Registration is open until March
twenty first. For anybody that's interested, you can message me
on my site, and there's more that one has here
up on my website. You can check out the open
house video that we did where I went through the
entire itinerary and how I put these rituals back together,
reconstructed them from ancient sources and stuff like that. We're
going to have private access to these temples so that
is something that is extremely rare, and we'll also be staying.
We'll have a three nights day to ourselves on one
hundred and fifty acres of King's Island in the middle
of the Nile River. So again that's going to be
in October of this year. Registration is open till March twenty. First,
reach out to me if you want more information.
Speaker 2: Awesome. Yeah, you're not going to get that with a
Graham Hancock tour for sure. He's not going to be
teaching you the secrets of magic and all that stuff.
So make sure to hick ike up for that and
check out his website, check out his work. And I
appreciate your kind words. I am a student and I
am just here to learn have interesting conversations. So this
is very fun for me and this is what I
enjoy doing, so I appreciate that. And as always, everyone
make sure to follow the show on social media at
the one on one podcast www dot tj OJP dot
com colt. This Monday Amunculus Owners Manual, make sure to comment, like, share, subscribe,
all that stuff. Let us know what you think down
in the comments is have a conversation and there's always everyone,
I'll catch you on the other side. Goodbye, no