Speaker 1: You see, something's going to happen.
Speaker 2: What? What's gonna happen?
Speaker 1: What?
Speaker 2: I welcome to the Occult Rejects.
Speaker 3: This episode, I got a very very special guest, somebody
Speaker 3: that I was looking forward to getting on one. They're
Speaker 3: into solomonic magic and they're also into science, so I'm
Speaker 3: very excited for this. But before we inst introduce our guest,
Speaker 3: let me introduce the other reject joining us.
Speaker 2: We got my Man and Lose Giant's going on.
Speaker 4: So how you doing? You can find me on YouTube,
Speaker 4: on x and on Instagram all Headless Giant. And I've
Speaker 4: got shows that I do with Nick on Tuesdays and Thursdays,
Speaker 4: and I've got a show on Monday called Alty Mondays
Speaker 4: where we do a bunch of experiments that I think
Speaker 4: Astra might appreciate and enjoy. So we've got Alchemy as well,
Speaker 4: and tomorrow I've got the Trialogues with Ethan Indigo and
Speaker 4: Ricardo Calvodio. We're gonna be talking about interesting topics as well.
Speaker 4: Just a couple of weeks and now I'm.
Speaker 3: Back, Yes, Yes, and the seven seven seven we else
Speaker 3: we'll be doing Yes Yeah, And if you guys have
Speaker 3: any stories or anything, please send them into Headless and
Speaker 3: I'll send you out some stickers.
Speaker 4: So Headless Giant Podcast at gmail dot com. Send me
Speaker 4: your stories and we will send you stickers.
Speaker 2: Hell yeah, awesome.
Speaker 3: And now the guest, since we've only got one reject
Speaker 3: with us today, we got Estra and she was suggested
Speaker 3: to me from Serena Sinclair. She thought that she'd be
Speaker 3: a perfect guest, and when I checked out her profile,
Speaker 3: I was like, there, sure sounds like it. So I'm
Speaker 3: very excited to have you on.
Speaker 2: Estra.
Speaker 3: Please, from test tubes and cauldrons, please let everybody know
Speaker 3: what your deal is and where they can find your
Speaker 3: amazing work in your podcast.
Speaker 5: Yeah, hey everybody, and thanks Nick for inviting me on.
Speaker 5: I was super surprised to get the invitation, but thrilled
Speaker 5: all the same.
Speaker 1: Yeah. So my name is Astra.
Speaker 5: I am a solomonic ceremonial audition and I focus specifically
Speaker 5: in the Grimmore tradition, but in my everyday life, I'm
Speaker 5: also a scientist. I got my degree in biochemistry alongside
Speaker 5: a minor in molecular biology and microbiology, but then I
Speaker 5: went to graduate school for biochemistry and now I work
Speaker 5: in a laboratory where I do science of all kinds,
Speaker 5: not just biochemistry. So that's a bit about me. You
Speaker 5: can find me on Instagram at astrological it's technically astrologist
Speaker 5: shel with Cia L because the name was taken. And
Speaker 5: a lot of my magical work and my magical independent
Speaker 5: scholarship can be found on substack under the title Celestial Crucible.
Speaker 1: And that's it.
Speaker 3: Nice nice here, if you don't mind, after the show,
Speaker 3: give me the link for that that one thing and
Speaker 3: I'll add that to.
Speaker 2: The show notes for sure.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Nice, nice.
Speaker 3: Well, obviously there's a bunch of questions that have for you,
Speaker 3: but I mean, I guess we'll start off with like
Speaker 3: what got you into the occult?
Speaker 2: And to start with, you know, I guess solomonic magic.
Speaker 1: I know. Yeah.
Speaker 5: So I actually I was alwaised in a fundamental you know,
Speaker 5: Christian home, as were a number of people, and I
Speaker 5: so of became discontent with Christianity as a whole. I
Speaker 5: didn't see the tenants of the faith being held up
Speaker 5: with way people were acting, and I just kind of
Speaker 5: really didn't like any of that. So when I went
Speaker 5: to college, just when you're like free from your parents' influence,
Speaker 5: I decided to explore, and I took a lot of
Speaker 5: philosophy classes, took a lot of religion classes amidst all
Speaker 5: the science work, and was just trying to get sort
Speaker 5: of a lay of the land. And in doing so
Speaker 5: I came across Paganism and Buddhism.
Speaker 1: And Eastern traditions.
Speaker 5: My grandfather's from India, so I've already been exposed to
Speaker 5: like the Hindu faith. Yeah, so it was just a
Speaker 5: good time for exploration. And around that time I became agnostic,
Speaker 5: but I thought, you know, maybe there's something there. So
Speaker 5: I started as an eclectic witch actually, and I was
Speaker 5: doing all the stereotypical which you ship that you see
Speaker 5: on Instagram, and.
Speaker 1: Yep, I think we all start there maybe, but it was.
Speaker 5: Super shallow and I really didn't feel like it was working,
Speaker 5: and like there just there was no substance behind it.
Speaker 5: It's one of those things where you do because you
Speaker 5: see it, you do because people tell you to. But
Speaker 5: that's never really been how I've lived my life. It's
Speaker 5: never been enough for me. I want to know the
Speaker 5: why behind things, which is partially why I'm a scientist,
Speaker 5: and that applied to the coal as well, and so
Speaker 5: I really began like trying to figure out what the
Speaker 5: reasons were behind why I needed all these things, and
Speaker 5: I sort of quickly found out that a lot of
Speaker 5: it is due to Agrippa and the influence right that
Speaker 5: he had on the coal and I was like, damn,
Speaker 5: all right. So I read the three books alone for
Speaker 5: the first time, got very confused. But then I had
Speaker 5: a friend who pulled me aside and they said, you know, hey,
Speaker 5: I really think that you would vibe with ceremonial magic.
Speaker 5: And at first I was sort of hesitant because when
Speaker 5: you're in the woodcraft community, a lot of people say,
Speaker 5: you know, the ceremonial auditions are crabby people.
Speaker 1: It's a bunch of just like trad bros and all.
Speaker 1: That's all this kind of crap.
Speaker 5: Because some much shit. So I was really hesitant, but
Speaker 5: I began looking into it. My friend introduced me to
Speaker 5: rufus Opus's Seven Spears.
Speaker 2: Oh I heard that.
Speaker 5: Yeah, that was the very first thing that I actually worked,
Speaker 5: And it was really like that sort of planetary initiation
Speaker 5: that he leads you through was really impactful, and I
Speaker 5: think it opened up the starting point for my exploration
Speaker 5: with other spirits.
Speaker 1: I worked that. I was like, yeah, well, day I'm
Speaker 1: going to do this.
Speaker 5: I went online, was looking at ceremonial magic and Grimoor's
Speaker 5: and stuff like that. Of course, the first thing that
Speaker 5: you see is the KEYO Solomon.
Speaker 1: That's like the.
Speaker 5: Number one Grimmore that everybody knows that pops up when
Speaker 5: you search, and I pulled it aside and I was like, okay,
Speaker 5: I'm working with you. Is that's a new thing, but
Speaker 5: we'll go for it, I guess. But I wanted to
Speaker 5: do it right. And this is also something that I
Speaker 5: think comes from my science background. But when you have
Speaker 5: a protocol in the laboratory, you don't just.
Speaker 1: Like change it.
Speaker 5: Yeah, good reason, because some shit's gonna happen and you
Speaker 5: remove some critical step that is actually really important for
Speaker 5: sample preparation, and now your whole term is sucked and
Speaker 5: you can't use your data.
Speaker 2: Right, yeah, really quick.
Speaker 3: That was the main That was one of the main
Speaker 3: reasons why I mentioned that I ended up joining the
Speaker 3: OTO was because of just noticing that even with some
Speaker 3: of Crowley's work, people were kind of like, that's not
Speaker 3: how it is in his own stuff. So I was like,
Speaker 3: I guess I just got to go to a place
Speaker 3: to where they have a set regimen and that's not
Speaker 3: being played with. This is what works and that's what
Speaker 3: we use. I know it almost can sound very whatever controlling,
Speaker 3: but it's just I wanted something that it was just
Speaker 3: you know, this is what I'm doing so well.
Speaker 5: I think there's something could be said for having a
Speaker 5: distinguished cosmology and sort of dogma that you operate from.
Speaker 5: I know, like not operating from a place of dogma
Speaker 5: is a really popular thing right now with chaos magic.
Speaker 5: But truthfully, if you don't have dogma, you should have
Speaker 5: the very least, in my opinion, have have like a cosmology,
Speaker 5: a way in which you see and explain the world,
Speaker 5: because it helps you determine a framework from which you operate,
Speaker 5: and if you don't have that, you're just sort of
Speaker 5: like thrown shit at the wall and helping that it works,
Speaker 5: which frankly is a reasonable thing to do.
Speaker 1: We do in science all the time. But like it
Speaker 1: should have been somewhat educational in how you decide what
Speaker 1: to do and where.
Speaker 5: So I totally understand that, like trying to join the
Speaker 5: lodge to get a lot of that stuff, and I
Speaker 5: did the same. Actually when I decided to work the Gatia,
Speaker 5: I wanted to do it the way it was written
Speaker 5: in the Grimore as much as I could, but there
Speaker 5: was a lot of sort of piecing together what that
Speaker 5: actually meant, and if you actually read it, there's a
Speaker 5: lot of preparatories that the has happen. You got to
Speaker 5: make tools and you have to get all this material
Speaker 5: and it takes a while. So it took me about
Speaker 5: a year and a half to sort of supply everything
Speaker 5: and make everything for the operation. And during that time
Speaker 5: I said, well, I don't want to just like do
Speaker 5: nothing while I'm doing all of this as well. So
Speaker 5: I got hold of this sisteros self initiated initiation to
Speaker 5: the Golden Dawn and the Big Black Book by Yeah
Speaker 5: it's Jobcgardi, and I was like, this is something that
Speaker 5: looks reasonable to like do. So I began working my
Speaker 5: way through that and doing some of the exercises I
Speaker 5: got familiar with, like the l Europe and all the rituals,
Speaker 5: the pentagrams and hextagrams and all that stuff went through
Speaker 5: Like Donald Pyson's Scrying Book.
Speaker 1: I sort of treated it like a little I don't
Speaker 1: know so like a college course at the time.
Speaker 5: Through scrying, doing the experiments, writing down my results and
Speaker 5: keeping track of everything, and so I really grew actually,
Speaker 5: like I I looked back at that year and a
Speaker 5: half two years, and it was really foundational for a
Speaker 5: lot of what I do now.
Speaker 1: It's so I'm really grateful for that time.
Speaker 5: But yeah, that's well, that was sort of the structure
Speaker 5: that I stole I guess you could say from the
Speaker 5: Golden Down a little bit while I was starting the
Speaker 5: Grimmoor Magician experience as well.
Speaker 2: Nice. So you used to actually you Julie l b
Speaker 2: RP and the Instagram and all.
Speaker 1: That I get. I did all that. I did it.
Speaker 1: I was instructed. I was that person who was like,
Speaker 1: did it twice a day for a year?
Speaker 4: Yeah?
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I.
Speaker 1: Did it, did the whole thing.
Speaker 2: So that is awesome. Nice. Nice.
Speaker 3: I used to love when I had to keep it real.
Speaker 3: Sometimes in the OTO, the women would actually end up
Speaker 3: doing them. Jist, did there's our lodge a lodge master.
Speaker 3: Her name was Kanye at the time. She did the
Speaker 3: regulars fucking detail.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and I mean that she had that she rememories.
Speaker 2: I was like, wow, Yeah.
Speaker 5: Memorization is something that I think people like really sleep on.
Speaker 5: I actually it's a role for myself personally, when I
Speaker 5: do ritual, I try and memorize all of it if possible,
Speaker 5: just because it really allows you to be in the moment.
Speaker 5: If the words come naturally to you, you can actually
Speaker 5: really engage with the magic, and like from a grid
Speaker 5: more perspective, generally speaking, it's better if you work with
Speaker 5: more than one person because that way you don't have
Speaker 5: to play all the roles. But like for me, if
Speaker 5: I'm doing it alone, then I have to do the
Speaker 5: conjure and the squire and the scribe like I have
Speaker 5: to do all the things. And so if I have
Speaker 5: everything memorize ahead of time, it sort of takes the
Speaker 5: conjure like mindset. Let's that becomes second nature and let's
Speaker 5: be step more into like describing mindset. And so it
Speaker 5: just allows me to interact with the magic a little
Speaker 5: bit more tangibly, instead of being so focused on actually
Speaker 5: doing the ritual and doing the movements and doing all
Speaker 5: the other shit that you have to get do.
Speaker 1: In the middle of it, I.
Speaker 3: Felt like once You're just like flowing out of my mouth,
Speaker 3: and it was able. I was able to you know,
Speaker 3: I've mentioned this before. Sometimes for me, those things were
Speaker 3: just almost like a moving meditation. Yeah, and yeah, once
Speaker 3: I had a memorized it's just like I was just
Speaker 3: going to to explain. But yeah, definitely definitely different than
Speaker 3: what I'm not trying to worry about what I'm saying.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's like a Western taie tee or chigong where
Speaker 4: you're doing the motion of the energy throughout the body.
Speaker 4: And I think that's important for people to realize, is
Speaker 4: that visualization creates something and if you're not exactly sure
Speaker 4: what that thing is, keep engaging with it and you'll
Speaker 4: you'll understand what that energy is moving through your body.
Speaker 4: But your body is like the antenna that you're picking
Speaker 4: up and feeling these different currents, and so having that
Speaker 4: daily practice is you know, it's a tuning yourself to
Speaker 4: those energies and understanding how they work within your own body.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I guess it can be really subtle.
Speaker 5: I think that's like when people do your ritual and
Speaker 5: they say, oh, nothing happened, Well, I think a lot
Speaker 5: of time it just really settled. If you weren't paying
Speaker 5: attention to it, or you aren't sort of looking for it.
Speaker 1: You'll miss it.
Speaker 5: And that was the thing that I really struggled with
Speaker 5: early on in my magical career was I was so
Speaker 5: concerned with doing everything correctly as the conjurer that I
Speaker 5: didn't pay attention to those like.
Speaker 1: Subtle and like and puts that a current ritual itself.
Speaker 5: And for the longest time I was like, damn, I'm
Speaker 5: a shitty magician, Like this isn't working. But I did
Speaker 5: some additional training and I began to notice them more
Speaker 5: and I was like, oh, I just think I was
Speaker 5: not paying attention to this.
Speaker 3: So so more back if you don't want it, maybe
Speaker 3: asking a little bit more about the croatia. What was
Speaker 3: your experience with working with that if you don't know
Speaker 3: and it that and like maybe give a little bit
Speaker 3: more of like it can be very detailed, like what
Speaker 3: you were saying, all these things you have to make
Speaker 3: and wear.
Speaker 2: Maybe if you could go over that just to give
Speaker 2: people more of an idea.
Speaker 1: Yeah, sure, So if you read The Greater Key and
Speaker 1: the Lesser Cause, Solomon, there is there's a lot.
Speaker 5: Of tools that you need for this, and some of
Speaker 5: them I think you actually need some of them. I
Speaker 5: think you don't need having done this, but like so
Speaker 5: for example, you need the robe that has the embroidered
Speaker 5: certain symbols. You need the shoes that has like symbols
Speaker 5: on it. You've got to have the head band or
Speaker 5: the crown. You need the lion skin belt, right, And
Speaker 5: of course there are people who talk about how you
Speaker 5: can use like a stag stag's pelt for that instead
Speaker 5: of the lion skin. There are other people who see
Speaker 5: you can use like a harlot's clothing.
Speaker 1: Right. That was like Jsk's big thing, I think, But
Speaker 1: you had to get that.
Speaker 5: I had stag out because like lion skin is very
Speaker 5: difficult to get, although I will be getting some student.
Speaker 1: I'm very excited about that. I know it's great.
Speaker 5: And then you have like the white handled and the
Speaker 5: black handled knives, right, and those have to be made
Speaker 5: at specific hours with certain symbols on them, and then
Speaker 5: they have to be like dunked into specific urbal pinctures.
Speaker 5: So I actually worked with a with a blacksmith at
Speaker 5: that time and I made I had I actually was
Speaker 5: able to get like the blood of a black cat.
Speaker 5: I got it legally, there was nothing illegal going on.
Speaker 5: I had a veterinarian friend at the time, and I
Speaker 5: was like, hey, even if it's just dried blood like
Speaker 5: that works too and they were able to get me some,
Speaker 5: which is great, made the concoction with like the blood
Speaker 5: and all the poisonous nerves that everybody tells you to substitute.
Speaker 5: And then I took it to this blacksmith's shop and
Speaker 5: I was like, okay, and this day and this time,
Speaker 5: like this is when we're.
Speaker 1: Dunking the knife into this like concoction. And so we
Speaker 1: did it.
Speaker 5: And so the knives are made according to the full
Speaker 5: specifications astrological timing and everything. And there was like a
Speaker 5: whole bunch of other stuff where gott to make the
Speaker 5: circle and that is like its whole own process with
Speaker 5: salms things that over it.
Speaker 1: The paint all had to.
Speaker 5: Be consecrated beforehand, the brushes were consecrated beforehand. It was
Speaker 5: a lot to do and like so that's why it
Speaker 5: took so long, right. Also, if you read the grimoard,
Speaker 5: they say that you should be making the majority of
Speaker 5: the instruments during the day and hour of mercury, so Wednesdays,
Speaker 5: during the hours when the moon is waxing. So if
Speaker 5: you sort of break that down within a year, that
Speaker 5: means that within a month usually about two weeks are waxing,
Speaker 5: and there's two Wednesdays during that, so about two days
Speaker 5: per month that you can like actually make substantial progress
Speaker 5: towards whatever you're doing. And so it was something where
Speaker 5: it was like a lot of flurry of preparation beforehand,
Speaker 5: and then those Wednesdays. I was in college and going
Speaker 5: into graduate school at the time, so like I had,
Speaker 5: I had the time.
Speaker 1: It wasn't like.
Speaker 5: I couldn't take a Wednesday off to make all these things.
Speaker 5: Since that's why it took so long is because I
Speaker 5: didn't have every day in a year and a half,
Speaker 5: I had like two days a month, right, And then
Speaker 5: once I had everything, I hadn't said up.
Speaker 1: I actually rented out a like storage place because.
Speaker 5: I wanted a bigger room to do it. I didn't
Speaker 5: want to necessarily do at my own house.
Speaker 2: Oh I've known people to do that, actually rent.
Speaker 5: Yeah, because there it's it's silly, I think you in
Speaker 5: your own house. But and of course you heard all
Speaker 5: the horror stories and everything, and I was like that
Speaker 5: it could be a haunted story for somebody else in the.
Speaker 2: Future, something to talk about exactly.
Speaker 5: So I went the story facility and then did the ritual.
Speaker 5: I won't necessarily specify exactly who I called up. But
Speaker 5: it was interesting, I'll put it that way. The first time,
Speaker 5: like it worked.
Speaker 1: I did get I wouldn't at the time.
Speaker 5: I wasn't necessarily like primed enough to be able to
Speaker 5: communicate with despair very well. But I definitely saw things
Speaker 5: in the outside of the circles, like she was happening,
Speaker 5: her banging on the walls, the sort of still and
Speaker 5: I was doing one there. I felt like super fucking
Speaker 5: late at night, like I had to get special permission
Speaker 5: from the facility and manager to be there so late,
Speaker 5: and what I asked for. It came to ferition about
Speaker 5: three and a half weeks afterwards, so by the end
Speaker 5: of the time that I did it that month and
Speaker 5: I've only I only did it once since then. So
Speaker 5: I've only done two goetic operations in my whole magical career.
Speaker 5: Because I later went back and I sort of re
Speaker 5: read the La Megaton and I was like, I So
Speaker 5: there was someone I talked to someone I'm just at
Speaker 5: the point in my career and they said, hey, you
Speaker 5: used to consider working it backwards, and I was like,
Speaker 5: what do you mean? And they appointed me to Jnar King.
Speaker 5: I don't know if you're familiar with him, he wrote
Speaker 5: Techniques of because it high magic or solmonic magic is
Speaker 5: even skinner, I don't call the exact title. And they
Speaker 5: appointed me to him, and he recommends doing it backwards.
Speaker 5: So you work from the ARS nova or what people
Speaker 5: think is the r notoria, and you work then towards
Speaker 5: the Croatia. And the reason why is because if I'm
Speaker 5: gonna okay, technically speaking, the arts nova is not the notoria,
Speaker 5: but we do think that some parts of it came
Speaker 5: from the notoria. So there are people who say, oh, well,
Speaker 5: just work with ours notoria first then instead of doing
Speaker 5: the URS nova, so just put a background on that.
Speaker 1: So I was like, okay, fine.
Speaker 5: The reason you do that is because the Arts notoria
Speaker 5: gives you all the skills you need as magician.
Speaker 1: Right, It's there to help you learn the liberal arts.
Speaker 1: It's the whole point of it.
Speaker 5: And so you're teaching you like mathematics, teaching you mathematics
Speaker 5: is teaching you natural philosophy of teaching you all kinds
Speaker 5: of shit that like the Renaissance magician would know, and
Speaker 5: so that gives you.
Speaker 1: All the skills. And it also sort of starts as
Speaker 1: like a should you pursue this.
Speaker 5: Should you not pursue this because you have to get
Speaker 5: approval essentially in a dream from.
Speaker 1: The angels to pursue the arts Natoria.
Speaker 5: And then once you do that, you need to ours Paulina,
Speaker 5: which is looking at mostly as a biable angels, right,
Speaker 5: And then you go to the urs Almadel and you
Speaker 5: get the angels of the four Altitudes, which like technically
Speaker 5: speaking historically are also zodiacal in nature, but we'll get
Speaker 5: into that. And then you moved through the Theorty Gauatia
Speaker 5: and you have this correspondence of angels and demons or
Speaker 5: these sort of these aerial spirits which are like above
Speaker 5: the Glaatia, but they're technically sub lunar, and then you
Speaker 5: get to the Gracia. So the whole idea is that
Speaker 5: if you work at backwards, you sort of build your
Speaker 5: use spirit team in a sense, right to like have
Speaker 5: your back as you go into working with these spirits
Speaker 5: who within this system are considered danger like dangerous and malevolent.
Speaker 1: And I thought that was a really good idea, So
Speaker 1: I put all.
Speaker 5: My gai stuff sort of away, and I said, okay,
Speaker 5: let's back up a little bit, and let's actually do this,
Speaker 5: let's work the Victoria, then let's kind of move our
Speaker 5: way through. So I did that essentially for the next
Speaker 5: like five six five five is five to six years.
Speaker 1: Of my life. I worked the whole system of salmag.
Speaker 5: Magic from back to front, and I sort of found
Speaker 5: throughout that process that I actually don't need to work
Speaker 5: the ars Coatia really ever at all, and I work
Speaker 5: mostly the Almadel, the Paulina, and then I do a
Speaker 5: lot with the Angels of the.
Speaker 1: Pentacles of the Greater Key as well.
Speaker 5: So I sort of like have moved away from the
Speaker 5: ars Ceatia. I just think it's overrated, Like I just
Speaker 5: don't think it's necessary. I think it's only where I fall,
Speaker 5: and there are other frankly, there are like other terrestrial
Speaker 5: spirits I would go to before I'd go to them anyway,
Speaker 5: And so that has sort of left my practice over time,
Speaker 5: but it's certainly where I started, so we'll leave it
Speaker 5: at that.
Speaker 4: So on on on the idea of hierarchies within the
Speaker 4: spirit world. Now, hierarchy itself means a divine order, and
Speaker 4: so when you're dealing with either demons or angels or
Speaker 4: anything in between, it's sort of like there can did
Speaker 4: to an element, and that element is kind of the
Speaker 4: precursing factor for what these h spirits sort of do
Speaker 4: within that associated sphere. Now, when you're dealing with goetic elements,
Speaker 4: is there this this idea of fear associated with sort
Speaker 4: of the underworld sort of hierarchy.
Speaker 5: I don't know there's a fear associated with them necessarily.
Speaker 5: I think that they have been they have come to
Speaker 5: be feared, and like the modern community people don't work
Speaker 5: with them because they're scared and they're like, oh my gosh,
Speaker 5: demons whatever. Like, Truthfully, they have their place in the hierarchy.
Speaker 5: I don't think it's something to be fearful of. If
Speaker 5: you want to work with these more cathonic aspects or
Speaker 5: you want to get really nitty for like treasure hunting
Speaker 5: and shit, the gas are great, well, like they literally
Speaker 5: are spirits insight like underneath the earth. If you want
Speaker 5: that stuff like, those are the people, those are the
Speaker 5: ones to go to or things that are like hidden
Speaker 5: that you need to be brought to life. Those spirits
Speaker 5: of the wish you can also be really helpful with that.
Speaker 5: That's why some of them are connected with diseases, right,
Speaker 5: because diseases are often hidden within the body, so I
Speaker 5: think that like they have their place within the hierarchy.
Speaker 5: I don't necessarily think they're to be feared, but I
Speaker 5: also would say, like do your due diligence and don't
Speaker 5: like treat them like a friend, if that makes sense.
Speaker 5: Like they're still spirits, they're still powerful. They can still
Speaker 5: do a bunch of shit that you may not want
Speaker 5: in your life. So that's why when like I work
Speaker 5: solomonic magic specifically, I try to do it as closely
Speaker 5: to the book as I can, because I just think
Speaker 5: that when you start removing the safety protocols, like all
Speaker 5: of the shit, the circle, the knife, the sword, the
Speaker 5: names of God around you and on your person, they're
Speaker 5: all there to protect you, the magician. And when you
Speaker 5: start removing that, you're essentially like stripping away protections bit
Speaker 5: by bit, so there's nothing left between you and the spirit.
Speaker 5: And so do you need to fear them? No, I say,
Speaker 5: if you're working in the system as you need to,
Speaker 5: or like the way that it's written, I don't think
Speaker 5: you have anything.
Speaker 1: To worry about.
Speaker 5: It's when you start to sort of stripping that stuff
Speaker 5: away that I think there's more to be concerned about.
Speaker 5: It's why I'm not a huge fan of demonologry. I
Speaker 5: can't really say anything positive about that necessarily from my
Speaker 5: own perspective.
Speaker 1: But yeah, so I don't necessarily think that you need
Speaker 1: to see or anything their spirits, just like everything else.
Speaker 4: So would you say that my magic consists of a
Speaker 4: contractual sort of space or liminal space between the physical
Speaker 4: world and the spirit.
Speaker 1: Realm I think high magic is. So let me back
Speaker 1: up a little bit.
Speaker 5: Within ceremonial magic, you sort of have two separate parts
Speaker 5: of high magic.
Speaker 1: One is theogic, right, which is much.
Speaker 5: More devotional in nature, and the other is more thomeaturgic,
Speaker 5: which is just like practical application of magic. It's where
Speaker 5: you get things like packs and stuff like that. I
Speaker 5: actually think in order to be a good magician you
Speaker 5: need to have both. You need to have a theoretic
Speaker 5: practice and you need to have these like packs. So specifically,
Speaker 5: when we get into the Grimwore tradition with the spirit
Speaker 5: of the Gratia, there is this level of like sort
Speaker 5: of coersive pacting with them, although it doesn't need to
Speaker 5: be coercive. I think this is the misunderstanding that people have,
Speaker 5: is that because you call them into a triangle, and
Speaker 5: you call them into the circle and you're you know,
Speaker 5: essentially saying you will do this that you like are
Speaker 5: abusing the spirits.
Speaker 1: But the packs still have to be made. You still
Speaker 1: have to come to an agreement.
Speaker 5: Like it's not the spirits will have to say yes,
Speaker 5: I will do this thing, and you say, then I
Speaker 5: will do this other thing for you, and you come
Speaker 5: to an agreement within it.
Speaker 1: It doesn't have to be disrespectful.
Speaker 5: There are magicians who are part of the higher ceremonial
Speaker 5: magic and more tradition who don't like the coursive nature
Speaker 5: of that, and like I'm one of them, but you
Speaker 5: still want to operate better within the realms of that
Speaker 5: packed aspect of it. All of this to say that
Speaker 5: that's an important aspect of it, but there's also an
Speaker 5: aspect of this theory devotion where the practical shit is done,
Speaker 5: because like, we live on earth and we have needs,
Speaker 5: right and even the Grimmores.
Speaker 1: Tell you want to.
Speaker 5: Get your shit together as a person living a life
Speaker 5: before you start doing some of this stuff. And in
Speaker 5: order to do that, you work with these spirits because
Speaker 5: they can give that to you. Like some of the
Speaker 5: got ex spirits can give you a job, can give
Speaker 5: you money, can give you health, like help you with
Speaker 5: health issues, like they can help you with those things,
Speaker 5: and so can the angels when you don't get me wrong,
Speaker 5: but like, once you have your life together and it's
Speaker 5: in your set up, essentially, your financial problems are good,
Speaker 5: like health is good.
Speaker 1: Personal problems are good. That gives you more opportunity to do.
Speaker 1: But I think the real.
Speaker 5: Purpose of high magic is, which is this sort of
Speaker 5: changing after apotheosis or unification with the divine right. You
Speaker 5: can't do that if you're like about to be homeless,
Speaker 5: so a lot of the grim wars. You have both
Speaker 5: of these aspects. You have the practical nature of help
Speaker 5: yourself live a better life, and you have a theoretic
Speaker 5: side of ceremonial magic where it's like, okay, now that
Speaker 5: you've done that, like, let's sort of shift our focus
Speaker 5: towards being unified with the one Creator whatever you want
Speaker 5: to call it.
Speaker 4: Right, Well, what role do you think distractions play in
Speaker 4: sort of hijacking people's uh, you know, natural progression? Because
Speaker 4: it sounds like this this would be the progression that
Speaker 4: a lot of ancient mankind would be going through coming
Speaker 4: into a more you know, stable kind of a civilizational setting. Like,
Speaker 4: now you've got everything working for you, how are you
Speaker 4: getting close to the divine? How are you elevating your
Speaker 4: own consciousness? And in a lot of ways, I see
Speaker 4: you know, distractions as being the tool by which people
Speaker 4: get off of the path towards divinity and more stuck
Speaker 4: in this in this realm of you know, materiality.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I totally agree with you there.
Speaker 5: I think there's a lot of in a modern day
Speaker 5: there's a lot of distractions at truth, if I didn't
Speaker 5: have to survive by having a job, I would be
Speaker 5: that person who like goes and becomes a nun just
Speaker 5: so I can engage with magic full time. Like I
Speaker 5: freaking wish that was in sort of.
Speaker 1: I wish that was my will. It's not.
Speaker 5: Unfortunately, I think social media is perhaps the biggest, like
Speaker 5: to be so for real with you, There is so
Speaker 5: much shit pedal on social media that gets people like
Speaker 5: all caught up into petty arguments with people that could
Speaker 5: be misunderstandings or conspiracy theories that send you down you know,
Speaker 5: rabbit holes of you know, hours and research and it's
Speaker 5: just like how much of that impacts you on a
Speaker 5: daily basis and like your actual life and if it
Speaker 5: doesn't impact you, then like it doesn't really matter. I
Speaker 5: think that much. I just I think so many people
Speaker 5: get distracted by things that are really superficial and it
Speaker 5: really don't matter. And like, personally, one of the things
Speaker 5: I do every single year during LENS because I'm also Catholic,
Speaker 5: is I remove social media from all of my devices,
Speaker 5: Like I close on the apps, I delete everything from
Speaker 5: my phone. And I do it because it's a really
Speaker 5: important sort of spiritual reset for me during that time
Speaker 5: to like remember what the focus should be and for me,
Speaker 5: like that focus is this for communication with good that
Speaker 5: is my desired goal, and what do I need to
Speaker 5: get there and what is holding me back? And I
Speaker 5: find that a lot of I also a lot of
Speaker 5: online stuff in general I think calls me back and
Speaker 5: it's so much I feel better. I'm closer to God
Speaker 5: when I engage with other people, when I engage my practice,
Speaker 5: and I can't do that if I'm wasting hours scrolling
Speaker 5: on TikTok.
Speaker 3: I have realized how much more work I can get
Speaker 3: done on the show if I really don't engage too
Speaker 3: much on social media, and how much more happening. Yeah,
Speaker 3: it's yeah, that's that's really I think kind of like
Speaker 3: the biggest mind fuck on humanity is really these apps
Speaker 3: has to say.
Speaker 5: Really, actually, our attention spans are worse, and that's been
Speaker 5: scientifically studied.
Speaker 1: Our capacity for deep thought is worse.
Speaker 5: There was a recent MIT study that came out looking
Speaker 5: at the impacts of AI on people's ability to think
Speaker 5: critically when they.
Speaker 1: Were writing an essay.
Speaker 5: Crazy, how much just using AI for research alone prevented
Speaker 5: the growth of gray matter, which is really what you
Speaker 5: actually want your brain and just is making people in
Speaker 5: capable of forming coherent arguments and really putting together like
Speaker 5: good solid information. Why has information like declined over the
Speaker 5: years because people aren't reading books and they aren't talking
Speaker 5: to each other and having these like deeper philosophical conversations
Speaker 5: asking the questions of why, like it is Really it's
Speaker 5: really sad to see and I see it in myself,
Speaker 5: Like my capacity ten years ago to do like really
Speaker 5: difficult research, it's harder now than it was. Like I
Speaker 5: see that in myself. So I'm not over here shitting
Speaker 5: on everybody, because I'm shitting on myself as well here,
Speaker 5: But it is sad that it's gone down so much
Speaker 5: and we're only at the beginning of it.
Speaker 2: Ye oh, hell is you muted?
Speaker 4: Oh sorry. We like to talk about the art of
Speaker 4: memory too, as sort of like this sort of introductory
Speaker 4: kind of a way of understanding how these different angels
Speaker 4: work within the conscious mind as well as you know,
Speaker 4: how ancient people saw polytheism like it was this massive
Speaker 4: mnemonic device that sort of branched out and associated with
Speaker 4: everything just on the surface level. And having the memory
Speaker 4: to sort of put everything that you see into this
Speaker 4: photographic framework and having mnemonic devices was seen as a superpower.
Speaker 4: In fact, they accused what was.
Speaker 6: His name, I keep blanking on it, Bruno, Bruno. They
Speaker 6: accused Bruno of having these strange magical powers when he
Speaker 6: was using these mnemonic tools and devices that he had
Speaker 6: learned from the agents in his own practice. And I
Speaker 6: think that art of memory plays up.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 5: I loved you Buna and Bruno, so God you brought
Speaker 5: up their art of memory.
Speaker 1: Great, great concept and topic. You guys covered it on
Speaker 1: your show. I think a while ago there's such an
Speaker 1: interesting like misrepresentation of ancient culture. I think among magicians
Speaker 1: sometimes we.
Speaker 5: Treat it like it's like, oh, it's a separate pantheon
Speaker 5: on gods. But truthfully, and a lot of the ancient civilizations,
Speaker 5: like it was a permeation into culture. Like it was
Speaker 5: so interwoven that there wasn't a separation between religion and
Speaker 5: magic and everyday life. Like it wasn't separated like it
Speaker 5: is in sort of the mid like in the Western
Speaker 5: world nowadays. And so, like you said, a lot of
Speaker 5: this sort of art and memory stuff. It's one of
Speaker 5: the reasons why myths were so important to the civilizations
Speaker 5: because they taught moral and social codes, right, Like, everything
Speaker 5: was so interwoven and woven into these like associations within
Speaker 5: the memory with these symbols and certain names and everything
Speaker 5: like that, that there wasn't separation that we see today.
Speaker 5: And so it did have a bigger impact on the
Speaker 5: individual because they were the current that we talk about
Speaker 5: in sort of society is nowadays that you have to
Speaker 5: like get plugged into in order to do effective magic.
Speaker 5: That current was just their life and so there was
Speaker 5: no plugging into it. It was literally just their life.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that is true.
Speaker 4: I got to bring this up. So a good example
Speaker 4: is the Golden ass we were just going through it
Speaker 4: on a Great Pills podcast, we were talking about all
Speaker 4: of these sort of strings of epithets that they had
Speaker 4: for the gods and goddesses that they would invoke upon,
Speaker 4: you know, certain activities or when you know, they're cursing somebody,
Speaker 4: and so the whole chain of you know, epithets would
Speaker 4: be sort of representative of their connection to these gods
Speaker 4: and goddesses, and it wasn't seen as sort of obscure
Speaker 4: or difficult to understand. People sort of had that in
Speaker 4: their minds already at the time, and it was like
Speaker 4: this this combination of both nature, psychology and physical matter
Speaker 4: that I think a lot of people just lose perspective
Speaker 4: on when they're looking at their own societies because we're
Speaker 4: sort of disconnected from those different layers of society that
Speaker 4: exist all around us at all times, and not having
Speaker 4: that awareness really makes it hard to have a decent
Speaker 4: conversation half the time.
Speaker 1: One hundred percent.
Speaker 5: This is the why the cosmological like their specimen part
Speaker 5: on having a cosmology, because like, that's what that is
Speaker 5: to these people, right, and that is their cosmology. It's
Speaker 5: the way in which they view the world and they
Speaker 5: live their life. And when you have that the way
Speaker 5: that you work magic and engage with the world totally changes,
Speaker 5: and so kind of returning that to our practice nowadays,
Speaker 5: where we have been so separated, like everything is categorized
Speaker 5: now right. You have science, you have magic, you have religion,
Speaker 5: you have like psychology, you have all these things. And
Speaker 5: I'm sure we say they're interconnected, and we give examples
Speaker 5: of that, but like people don't live that connection, and
Speaker 5: I think that's like the myss that's really the problem.
Speaker 5: But when you have a cosmology, it gives us sort
Speaker 5: of a worldview by which to allow all of them
Speaker 5: to sort of marry. And the way that is fluid
Speaker 5: and you can't necessarily define. And it's funny because, like
Speaker 5: as somebody who's a scientist, people will ask me, you know,
Speaker 5: how can you how can you have faith and being
Speaker 5: Catholic and how can you also do magic? And the
Speaker 5: answer is, because I don't see it's all as t
Speaker 5: woven to me, like God's creation and the spirits that
Speaker 5: we engage with are interwoven into the things that I
Speaker 5: study scientifically and the magic that I do in the
Speaker 5: way I interact with the world. Like it's not some
Speaker 5: they aren't categories in my life. It's just the way
Speaker 5: in which I live and interact with the world. So
Speaker 5: I think like the capitalistic and consumeristic categorization of everything
Speaker 5: and like scientific materialism that came about in sort of
Speaker 5: the late Renaissance period, like in the Alignment period, just
Speaker 5: really fucked a lot of shit up in terms of
Speaker 5: people being able to live within these cosmologies in a
Speaker 5: very real and intimate way.
Speaker 4: Right, Right, And uh, if you look at the time,
Speaker 4: any little tools that single cellular organisms use, you find
Speaker 4: a lot of coordination with what these gods used as
Speaker 4: their implements. Right. So you've got this bow and arrow,
Speaker 4: you've got these spears, you've got shields, you've got all
Speaker 4: the rest of the stuff that single cellular organisms are
Speaker 4: using in a very utilitarian way that actually reflects a
Speaker 4: lot of these ancient pantheons. It's like, this is what
Speaker 4: the agents were talking about. They're making a system of
Speaker 4: infinite associations because they understand that these are the base
Speaker 4: level interactions that people can sort of have even you know,
Speaker 4: everything is love and war in their concept, right, these
Speaker 4: are the fundamental primaries. And so they're seeing all of
Speaker 4: these things, you know, have that same attribute and since
Speaker 4: we don't have a cosmology, we it's easy to take
Speaker 4: advantage of people because they don't even see the weapons
Speaker 4: on a psychological level. Like you're getting booked by people
Speaker 4: who are using these psychological weapons, and they're not act
Speaker 4: seeing them for what they are because they don't really
Speaker 4: have the experience to know that these, you know, things
Speaker 4: that people have done ripple out to infinity. Right, all
Speaker 4: of those associations are rippling out to infinity. So you
Speaker 4: could start to see it or you could stay blind
Speaker 4: to it at your own detriment. And I think that's
Speaker 4: that's where where we've kind of gotten stocked the last
Speaker 4: twenty or thirty years.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I totally agree with everything you said there.
Speaker 4: Well, talking about microscopy, are you actively working on any
Speaker 4: scientific projects that can change the world or what are
Speaker 4: you working on?
Speaker 5: Well, I will say so one of the things that
Speaker 5: I'm doing, so one of my specialties is three D
Speaker 5: celculter And I'm going to explain this in sort of
Speaker 5: terms of like why it is important. But when we
Speaker 5: have a drug, for example, that we're trying to develop
Speaker 5: for whatever the disease condition is, the way it moves
Speaker 5: through the pipeline is you start with the drugs of
Speaker 5: the chemist make and then we characterize it. And first
Speaker 5: we characterize it in cells, so like if I swabed
Speaker 5: my own cheek, I could take the cells there and
Speaker 5: then play them and have them grow external to myself continuously.
Speaker 5: And so oftentimes what we'll do is we'll take diseased
Speaker 5: cells and we will plate them external from the source,
Speaker 5: and then we essentially treat them with these drugs to
Speaker 5: see what the outcome is.
Speaker 1: And then we say, okay, great, we saw an effect.
Speaker 5: And so now we move into animals, and then they
Speaker 5: do the testing in animals, and then we go from
Speaker 5: animals into humans. Now, the problem with each of those
Speaker 5: steps is that the way cells act in like a
Speaker 5: Patriot dish versus the way mammalian cells act in a
Speaker 5: body or even an animal. It's different because, like for
Speaker 5: this is something that happens commonly. You have a drug
Speaker 5: that say, works really well in mice and you see
Speaker 5: a great effect, like we can talk about cancer drugs.
Speaker 5: Everybody else what those are, and the tumor size like
Speaker 5: decreases and the animal is regaining weight, it's eating where
Speaker 5: it's more active. We say, okay, great, it works in
Speaker 5: these animals. Now let's move to human studies. So you
Speaker 5: do that and you see no effect. Well, even though
Speaker 5: the drug is we're targeting the same kind of protein,
Speaker 5: for example, there are differences between like a mouse protein
Speaker 5: and a human protein. And so one of the big
Speaker 5: areas that we're focusing on a research now are these
Speaker 5: developments that we call three D CEL culture models. And
Speaker 5: the whole point is to sort of simulate the human
Speaker 5: organ essentially as a whole, as a way to sort
Speaker 5: of bypass the animal step, and through some of my
Speaker 5: important we can actually take these human cells that the
Speaker 5: drug will be working on in like the body, we
Speaker 5: can put them into this external three D system. And
Speaker 5: one of the things that we did was creates what's
Speaker 5: called a.
Speaker 1: Lung on a chip system.
Speaker 5: So we essentially have a membrane that we put cells
Speaker 5: from the lungs onto and there's one hundreds of different cells, right,
Speaker 5: so there's we're talking a whole mixture of things. And
Speaker 5: then we put this chip into a machine and we
Speaker 5: force it to breathe. So the membrane moves up and
Speaker 5: down like the uh organ your lungs wood in your body.
Speaker 5: And there is a difference between how essentially viral like
Speaker 5: viral infection. For example, we were doing some stuff with
Speaker 5: stars could be too and the infection is more intense
Speaker 5: when we incorporate this sort of breathing mechanic in this
Speaker 5: three D model than if you're where you were to
Speaker 5: just do it on like cells that are sitting on
Speaker 5: a dish. And so it shows the importance of really
Speaker 5: mimicking what's happening in the human body to get a
Speaker 5: good understanding of how a drug will treat something.
Speaker 1: And so we're.
Speaker 5: Trying to develop a lot of these sort of three
Speaker 5: D cell culture systems. We got We've got long on
Speaker 5: a chip, We've got brain on a chip. We've got
Speaker 5: like nerves on a chip. There's you've got livers on
Speaker 5: a chip.
Speaker 1: Like. We have all these sort of.
Speaker 5: Different, uh, three D models that we're trying to make
Speaker 5: as precursors for drug testing before we actually get into
Speaker 5: human models. That's sort of skip the animal part of this,
Speaker 5: because animals aren't necessarily analogous to the human condition. If
Speaker 5: we can actually say, hey, in the three D model,
Speaker 5: we see really effective results from an upregulation of a
Speaker 5: particular pathway, for example, with this specific drug that is
Speaker 5: actually more comparable to a particular protein and an actual
Speaker 5: human than there's a higher chance of probability that it
Speaker 5: will be successful in human trials. And so it just
Speaker 5: essentially quickens the line from drug development to actual treatment,
Speaker 5: which is huge. That's like a big thing that I
Speaker 5: work around at my job, which is super cool.
Speaker 1: And I'll stop there.
Speaker 4: Well, you've got a lot of occult principles that now
Speaker 4: you can incorporate into the laboratory process that we're missing
Speaker 4: before because you've got the principle of rhythm, right, You've
Speaker 4: got the principle of all of these other factors that
Speaker 4: play into the human laboratory, which would be you know,
Speaker 4: our bodies that we're trying to influence that aren't necessarily
Speaker 4: present in those laboratory conditions that you know, are missing
Speaker 4: a lot of the pieces that would make up a full,
Speaker 4: you know, human system. And so by introducing those other principles,
Speaker 4: you're you're simulating what the whole human system would be
Speaker 4: doing in these specific conditions. So, yeah, I think that's
Speaker 4: that's really positive step.
Speaker 5: You know, it's cool too because it's sort of it's
Speaker 5: a good I actually think that the interaction and the
Speaker 5: interplay of things and it's like three D couldres system
Speaker 5: we're creating is a good sort of representation of like
Speaker 5: how the I don't know, the heavens sort of the
Speaker 5: whole spiritual ecosystem kind of works. Right, we say that
Speaker 5: there's there's tons of interplay of everything. I mean, even
Speaker 5: within these three couple ty systems, Like the interplay is crazy.
Speaker 5: There's so much shit going on, it's even impossible to measure.
Speaker 1: Most of the time. And I think like people, especially
Speaker 1: like are more tradition.
Speaker 5: Sometimes it's really easy to get bottled into this idea
Speaker 5: that everything is in a strict hierarchy and truthfully and like,
Speaker 5: we know it's not the case, because there's plenty of
Speaker 5: systems and grimors that say, like moved, you know, Michaels
Speaker 5: representative of Mercury, and Raphael is actually representative of the sun, right,
Speaker 5: or there's actually three governors over a particular time period,
Speaker 5: it's not.
Speaker 1: Just one particular archangel.
Speaker 5: But I think there needs to be a little bit
Speaker 5: more fluidity, like the structure the grimors are for us
Speaker 5: as the magicians people doing the work. But truthfully, I
Speaker 5: think sort of the cosmos and the grander scheme of
Speaker 5: things is so much more fucking like, it's so complicated.
Speaker 5: There's so many spirits that we don't know who are
Speaker 5: serving under various spirits that we do know. And so
Speaker 5: I think, like a lot there's so much in this
Speaker 5: like really integral network of interactions that's happening on like
Speaker 5: a spiritual level, and I think we see that mimic
Speaker 5: within nature, and humans are only one example of that.
Speaker 5: I mean, like ecosystems in nature are also crazy complicated
Speaker 5: the shit that like they have going down as well.
Speaker 1: So I think it's a great sort of representation people.
Speaker 5: You know, we always say macrocosm is a reflection of
Speaker 5: the macrocosm, but like literally think the complexity of life
Speaker 5: speaks to the complexity of the macrocosm in way, so
Speaker 5: we can only sort of comprehend.
Speaker 4: Right, I think in a lot of ways, what we're
Speaker 4: seeing now is the integration of all of these uh
Speaker 4: you know, principles that have kind of been ignored by
Speaker 4: the materialist paradigm of science now being picked up by
Speaker 4: alternative researchers who are doing incredible stuff with them. I
Speaker 4: would encourage you, if you haven't yet, get the book
Speaker 4: The Fourth Days of Water by Gerald Pollock, because he's
Speaker 4: got a lot of stuff about the easy zones and
Speaker 4: water that then can change the outcome of certain, uh,
Speaker 4: you know, experiments, especially within the body, because you know,
Speaker 4: if the heart was pumping enough blood to keep the
Speaker 4: body running, our heads would explode as soon as we
Speaker 4: bent over. So there's some other physical principle at work
Speaker 4: within the body that is, you know, causing you know,
Speaker 4: water or blood pushed around that a lot of people
Speaker 4: sort of glossed over since the eighteen hundreds, and so
Speaker 4: we're you know, I think repicking up these water sciences
Speaker 4: and understanding how vital water is to the spiritual as
Speaker 4: well as the physical is so important at least for
Speaker 4: moving forward in the field of medicine and science and
Speaker 4: all the rest of its.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I think it speaks too because something that people
Speaker 5: I think forget, especially in the occult meatia, you can
Speaker 5: take occult principles and apply them to this Isaac Ninnen
Speaker 5: had an extremely prolific spiritual practice.
Speaker 1: Like this man. Sure he was an excellent.
Speaker 5: Scientist, but he was also an occultist, like, no question
Speaker 5: about that. And we even go back to alchemy, right,
Speaker 5: It never used to be chemistry and magic. It used
Speaker 5: to be sort of a singular science, and we see it.
Speaker 5: There's so many examples in history of people who have
Speaker 5: taken these sort of basical principles and thought, I wonder
Speaker 5: if I can actually put this to study, or I
Speaker 5: wonder if if there's a way I can measure this,
Speaker 5: and then they've done it and it's created some of
Speaker 5: our most important scientific principles. I think we have to
Speaker 5: be a little bit careful because people tend to take
Speaker 5: science and turn it into pseudoscience, which is like, I'm
Speaker 5: not here for. In fact, a lot of the testes
Speaker 5: and Culture's podcasts is sort of debunking a lot of
Speaker 5: these claims because we can take those concepts and apply
Speaker 5: them to science and we often see real results.
Speaker 1: To it, but they still need to be put under.
Speaker 5: The scrutiny of the scientific method, and if they're not significant,
Speaker 5: then we can't make any sort of definitive claim. But
Speaker 5: the other side of that is that just because it's
Speaker 5: not necessarily significant to the scientific community doesn't mean that
Speaker 5: it's not significant.
Speaker 1: I think that's the other thing, right is people say, oh.
Speaker 5: Your magic has to be legitimized by science, because science.
Speaker 1: Is like our truth. In modern society. Right, people say,
Speaker 1: I want to know what's true? Answer is science?
Speaker 5: Science will tell us is everybody's answer to that. But
Speaker 5: science is not capable of answering everything. Science is really
Speaker 5: prime to study the natural world. It's not necessarily prime
Speaker 5: to study the cause of the natural world. And so
Speaker 5: that they think where people often get misled, and so
Speaker 5: we can study perhaps me an outcome of something or
Speaker 5: how it maybe affects the body. Like there's been a
Speaker 5: lot of actually great meditation studies recently that have been
Speaker 5: coming on the last couple of years looking at how
Speaker 5: meditation impacts the body itself, looking at like ECGs and
Speaker 5: reporter dot coms, but also looking at you know, changes
Speaker 5: in like epigenetics and gene expression, or certain chemicals that
Speaker 5: are produced in greater quantities and whatever. But some things
Speaker 5: I just don't think science are actually capable of measuring.
Speaker 5: And that's fine because you don't need to have that
Speaker 5: scientific legitimacy if you believe something is having an impact,
Speaker 5: and in some cases belief is quite a powerful dragone
Speaker 5: of itself. Basbo effect has actually like really has a
Speaker 5: high impact on people.
Speaker 1: There was a.
Speaker 5: Study and there's a cancer study. I think it came
Speaker 5: on twenty seventeen where they had patients who they were
Speaker 5: giving chemotherapy to the other patients to they you know,
Speaker 5: pretended like they were giving chemotherapy too.
Speaker 1: That was their placebo.
Speaker 5: And like some of the chemotherapy patients in that control
Speaker 5: placebo group did just as well as patients.
Speaker 1: Who forgiving chemotherapy.
Speaker 5: There was another paper recently we didn't have some of
Speaker 5: the podcast about prayer and the impact of.
Speaker 1: Prayer on people's health and their recovery.
Speaker 5: And the group that thought people were praying for them,
Speaker 5: but they like people weren't actually praying for them, they
Speaker 5: recovered almost as well as the group of people who
Speaker 5: did actually have people praying for them and knew they
Speaker 5: had people praying for them. Like, it's crazy how much
Speaker 5: of the bosbo effect can really impact people's perception of
Speaker 5: what's going on in.
Speaker 1: The world right time.
Speaker 4: And we like to classify the placebo effect as you know,
Speaker 4: you've got the placebo, which is like where you're having
Speaker 4: a good effect, a good for the homeostasis, and then
Speaker 4: you've got the no cibo effect, which is where now
Speaker 4: your beliefs are negatively impacting your own life. And then
Speaker 4: at the very far end of the no sebo effect
Speaker 4: is voodoo death, where your beliefs have actually influenced your
Speaker 4: your death because you believe you're going to die. So
Speaker 4: there's there's a huge slippery slope that I think a
Speaker 4: lot of people just aren't aware of, and changing those
Speaker 4: negative beliefs and practices are so important to having a
Speaker 4: happier life. It's it's ridiculous. I mean, that's that's really
Speaker 4: the factor right there. You can be as rich as
Speaker 4: you want to but have a shitty eternal life, never
Speaker 4: be happy.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I tell people all the time. I'm like, you
Speaker 5: want to know what the miracle drug is. It's the effect,
Speaker 5: that's the miracle drug.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, it's amazing what the mind can do to
Speaker 3: the body if you believe some crazy So what are
Speaker 3: some other things like that you cover on your show?
Speaker 3: I know you do kind of get into like it's
Speaker 3: like science and magic, correct.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 5: So, like we did a whole episode on like epigenetics
Speaker 5: recently because there's a lot of conversations to the occult
Speaker 5: community about you know, this passing on of trauma and
Speaker 5: like what that means and people people attribute a lot
Speaker 5: of things to genetics to specifically like the sequence of
Speaker 5: the genome that like aren't actually at like attributed to
Speaker 5: genetics themselves.
Speaker 1: It's attributed to something called your epigenome or epigenetics. So
Speaker 1: and one of them is the inheritance of trauma.
Speaker 5: This idea of nature versus nurture, And again, what if
Speaker 5: we're talking about the intersection of like this philosophy of
Speaker 5: the world and these spiritual discussions like nature versus nurture,
Speaker 5: and that debate has been going on for centuries. I
Speaker 5: mean we've got Plato talking about that shit and Aristotol,
Speaker 5: I mean, it has going on forever. And we know
Speaker 5: that like scientifically, there is an impact on your environment
Speaker 5: regarding sort of how your body reacts to things. And
Speaker 5: so epigenetics is essentially how the genes of your body
Speaker 5: are controlled. So you might have a gene for something,
Speaker 5: but it may not ever be turned.
Speaker 1: On because it's not useful for you in a particular region.
Speaker 5: A lot of traits that people have, like even just
Speaker 5: colors of skins, like melanin production or there was oh,
Speaker 5: there was actually a really interesting study twenty twenty twenty one.
Speaker 5: I want to say, but they actually did a study
Speaker 5: following people from like pre birth some of they were
Speaker 5: still in their mother's uterus and then after birth for
Speaker 5: twenty years they followed them and they were trying to
Speaker 5: look at some of the epigenetics behind extraversion and introversion
Speaker 5: and why somebody is maybe even more extroverted more introverted,
Speaker 5: and they actually found out it's because of the degree
Speaker 5: of methylation of a particular gene related to like this
Speaker 5: particular aspect of humans, which is so fascinating, right, Like methylation.
Speaker 5: To describe what that is is simply taking a methacre,
Speaker 5: which is a carbon plus three hydrogens, and it's popped
Speaker 5: onto the promoter region of a gene. So when a
Speaker 5: gene is transcribed, you have a protein that binds to
Speaker 5: this promoter region and then transcribes it into mRNA that
Speaker 5: gets turned into proteins and then it goes and does
Speaker 5: its thing in the body. When you methylate that promoter region,
Speaker 5: that gene is unable to be transcribed. It essentially acts
Speaker 5: as like a barrier, so the protein can't bind to
Speaker 5: that particular area anymore. And so people who were actroverts
Speaker 5: had less methylation and thus more production of that gene
Speaker 5: than the people who were introverts. And that's something you're
Speaker 5: able to study, which is so cool, and so how
Speaker 5: many aspects of the individual are tied to that sort
Speaker 5: of same thing. And there's tons of different and sort
Speaker 5: of post translational modifications which will be called those where
Speaker 5: it's it could be methylation, that could be a cutilation,
Speaker 5: that could be certain proteins and other things. But it
Speaker 5: clearly has an impact on the way people interact with
Speaker 5: the world.
Speaker 1: And that's just one example.
Speaker 5: Uh, And so I definitely think that because our genes
Speaker 5: are mostly the same across the rule Right Human Genome Project,
Speaker 5: one of the best things they came out with was
Speaker 5: that we have ninety nine point nine percent of our
Speaker 5: genomes are the same across the Homo sapien species. Now
Speaker 5: that's not to say that we are all totally identical,
Speaker 5: because that point one percent point zero one percent.
Speaker 1: If your cells have six billion.
Speaker 5: DNA nucleotides in them, the point one percent is still
Speaker 5: like six million, Okay, So it's still a very substantial
Speaker 5: difference from cell to cell. But generally speaking, we're very similar.
Speaker 5: And so then what determines the changes. The answer to
Speaker 5: that is your epigenome is the epigenetics of ad all
Speaker 5: and so I think That is something that I really
Speaker 5: hope to see more research on in the future, this
Speaker 5: idea of nature versus, you know, nurture. Is it just nature,
Speaker 5: is it just genetics, or is it also nurture in
Speaker 5: the sense that your genetics are influenced by your environment,
Speaker 5: the way that you grew up, and so if someone
Speaker 5: There was actually another research study that looked at Holocaust survivors,
Speaker 5: and it's interesting because some psychologists were noticing that the
Speaker 5: children of Holocaust survivors actually had like more mental issues
Speaker 5: that required more psychological help than these survivors themselves, which
Speaker 5: is so interesting, doesn't really make a lot of sense,
Speaker 5: But they did some epigenetics studies and saw that the
Speaker 5: trauma that the parents induced during the Holocaust was actually
Speaker 5: passed along to their children in the sense that they
Speaker 5: were more likely to have the same changes in terms
Speaker 5: of the epigenetics and methylations, all these other things than
Speaker 5: the or the children of people who hadn't incurred a
Speaker 5: lot of that trauma. So there is some scientific validation
Speaker 5: for this idea, like trauma specifically is passed from parent
Speaker 5: to child. Now we have to be a little bit
Speaker 5: careful in saying this. The same trauma really it's more
Speaker 5: scientifically accurate to say the same changes or the same
Speaker 5: epigenome that we see in the parent is past the child.
Speaker 5: That is really all we can say scientifically, but from
Speaker 5: if you want to sort of extend that thought, you
Speaker 5: can say, well, if this particular epigenetic change is causing
Speaker 5: this behavior and the parent, you may expect to see
Speaker 5: more of that behavior from somebody who has that same
Speaker 5: epigenome as a child. That's not something we can necessarily
Speaker 5: scientifically prove or like support, but we can see the
Speaker 5: association and that can give us more insight into how
Speaker 5: to study this further, to.
Speaker 1: Get the idea more sporty, if you will.
Speaker 4: Right, And the epigenetic studies really got started with a
Speaker 4: really kind of a mystical tip to it. So what
Speaker 4: they were doing with the rat ancestral memory studies that
Speaker 4: really kicked off the epigenetics thing was trying to put
Speaker 4: rats through a maze and then testing their offspring, even
Speaker 4: though the offspring had had no contact with the sperm donor,
Speaker 4: on how well they did in the maze. And what
Speaker 4: they found is that there was a correlation between the
Speaker 4: rats who successfully got through that maze and the generations
Speaker 4: before them that did so as well. So there's a
Speaker 4: specific link along those ancestral memories somehow being transferred to
Speaker 4: with his.
Speaker 1: Theory of survival of the fittest.
Speaker 5: It's really epigenetics at work, Like that is essentially what
Speaker 5: he was seeing. He was seeing that when conditions get
Speaker 5: and this is actually something that we see also if
Speaker 5: you look at the epigen mix of like famine, the
Speaker 5: people who live through famine versus their children, you see
Speaker 5: a fact on the children because of the way the
Speaker 5: environment that whole famine itself impact of the parents. The
Speaker 5: same thing is that the survival of the fittest right
Speaker 5: in order, we must adapt in order to survive, and
Speaker 5: that adaptation is often can often be measured from an
Speaker 5: epigenetic perspective. And so there's a lot more research going
Speaker 5: on in that. It's a booming field at the moment,
Speaker 5: which is great. It's been really fun to read a
Speaker 5: lot of the data. But yeah, like that's one example
Speaker 5: of an episode that we did and why we did it.
Speaker 5: We've done plenty of episodes looking at like the science
Speaker 5: of prayers, So why do people pray? What is really
Speaker 5: the impact that it has. We looked at it from
Speaker 5: like an occult perspective, and we also looked at it
Speaker 5: from a scientific perspective.
Speaker 1: We've looked at sort of the art of memory.
Speaker 5: For example, we've done some episodes on the impact of
Speaker 5: like meditation and stuff on the body and looking at
Speaker 5: like easy too and papers.
Speaker 1: That have come out about that.
Speaker 5: We've talked generally about, you know, what it means to
Speaker 5: be a researcher and how that is applied, and how
Speaker 5: you can apply that to a magical practice. Like I think,
Speaker 5: I maybe I'm going to get some flat for this,
Speaker 5: but I think in the occult community people tend to
Speaker 5: be a little bit more relaxed in the way they
Speaker 5: sort of engage in these kind of things. But if
Speaker 5: you really want to have any sort of measurable like
Speaker 5: way of measuring change over a period of time, you
Speaker 5: really have to approach it and think about controls and replicability,
Speaker 5: and you need to be taking good.
Speaker 1: Notes like I have. So I have notebooks.
Speaker 5: I probably have fifteen notebooks of my actual experience, and
Speaker 5: I have recorded things so intensely because otherwise you can't
Speaker 5: make any definitive conclusions. You could just be fooling yourself.
Speaker 5: Your brain is really good at that it's really good
Speaker 5: to fooling yourself, but the thick of things that you
Speaker 5: don't actually we didn't actually do, where you didn't actually experience,
Speaker 5: And so having these really the intense records is it's
Speaker 5: a way of sort of keeping yourself accountable too and
Speaker 5: saying nothing has changed, and if nothing has changed, why
Speaker 5: is that? And how can I change what I'm doing
Speaker 5: to like make things better?
Speaker 4: We found the uniting link between solemonic magic and academia rigorous.
Speaker 2: You've got to be.
Speaker 1: I.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I think like magic and science are never will
Speaker 5: never explain the same things, and I think it's sort
Speaker 5: of a fool, a fool's mission to attempt that. Like
Speaker 5: a lot of the quantum science talk is a bunch
Speaker 5: of bullshit, and I just like am so nigh here
Speaker 5: for that, because even like if you talked a physicist
Speaker 5: about the niven number of friends who do crazy shit
Speaker 5: that I don't really understand. But if you're talking to
Speaker 5: them about like the quantum experiment, this whole like observer effect,
Speaker 5: they essentially say it has no impact.
Speaker 1: On like a macro level.
Speaker 5: Things operate differently at a quantum scale than they do
Speaker 5: in the actual world. So trying to tribute quantum science
Speaker 5: to like a larger scale is absolute pseudoscience and it
Speaker 5: has no place, like they would say, it has no
Speaker 5: place in scientific discussion. Okay, And so I think what
Speaker 5: happens is again like people are trying to take magic
Speaker 5: and they're trying to legitimize using science, using as quantum
Speaker 5: things that we don't understand. Even quantum scientists will say,
Speaker 5: I don't really know what the fuck is going on,
Speaker 5: but like this is what we see, right, we're measuring
Speaker 5: and they're doing much weird mathematical calculations to like figure
Speaker 5: out what it.
Speaker 1: Is they're saying.
Speaker 5: But again we can't, we can't attribute that to a
Speaker 5: macro level. And so magic, if you want to be
Speaker 5: rigorous about it and your approach to it, you can
Speaker 5: learn things about magic and science.
Speaker 1: You can learn things about science. And when you combine the.
Speaker 5: Two and you say, like you look at the world
Speaker 5: through a natural philosophy lens, which is really what we
Speaker 5: often use in magic, it can give you insights and
Speaker 5: the things you could actually potentially change and study. And
Speaker 5: then the so that you get from that can say, oh,
Speaker 5: I saw a difference here when these techniques were applied,
Speaker 5: like meditation for example.
Speaker 1: And so what happens if I apply these other techniques,
Speaker 1: so like there can be sort of this communication between
Speaker 1: the two in the sense that they inform each other
Speaker 1: without this need to like be legitimized by each other.
Speaker 5: And I think that's what I would really like ask
Speaker 5: people to stay creeping forward.
Speaker 1: It's like, treat your.
Speaker 5: Magic like science, but don't expect them to explain each
Speaker 5: other because they're just not prime to do that, right,
Speaker 5: would be nice?
Speaker 3: What about the you know, if you don't mind, uh,
Speaker 3: would you mind talking maybe a little bit more about
Speaker 3: the meditation stuff that you kind of talked about.
Speaker 5: Yeah, So there was a lot of it was genetic
Speaker 5: and it was ab agenetic, and also just looking at
Speaker 5: the impact of meditation on specific areas of the brain
Speaker 5: and like what an active And I will say, I'm
Speaker 5: not like a brain surgeon of any kind, right, so
Speaker 5: these are the rulesults that I read that I'm not
Speaker 5: necessarily like, I didn't take the state of myself or anything,
Speaker 5: but they were essentially able to show in terms of
Speaker 5: like reported patients, but also areas of the brains that
Speaker 5: are related to like patients and conflict management.
Speaker 1: And empathy when you.
Speaker 5: Meditate and you engage in daily it was like daily
Speaker 5: for thirty minutes or something. They have real impacts on
Speaker 5: those areas of the brain. Those areas of the brains
Speaker 5: sort of lied up during the meditation. And also there's
Speaker 5: the chemical levels that are released during meditation as well
Speaker 5: that cause changes in your body to I don't remember
Speaker 5: the whole list, but it was in this paper, and
Speaker 5: over long periods of time, it has a very real
Speaker 5: impact on life. And there's plenty of slays to look
Speaker 5: at the longevity of someone's life who have also meditated,
Speaker 5: and a lot of these these changes, the chemicals that
Speaker 5: are released and everything like that is what sort of
Speaker 5: aids this longevity, and so it clearly has a correlation
Speaker 5: to people living a happy This is related to the
Speaker 5: chemicals that are released and a more fulfilled life. People
Speaker 5: feel more fulfilled when they engage in a lot of
Speaker 5: these meditative practices. And there's also some research that I
Speaker 5: haven't done quite as much, like looked into this quite
Speaker 5: as much around this idea of like sort of somatic
Speaker 5: breathing or just more generally the idea of like living
Speaker 5: a slower life and how that also impacts are the
Speaker 5: way that we perceive the world. There was a study
Speaker 5: that in twenty seventeen, I believe, where they were looking
Speaker 5: at how the perception of time has an impact on
Speaker 5: how your body like reacts to certain aging principles. So
Speaker 5: the faster that you perceive time living by, which from
Speaker 5: a social media perspective, even moving very quickly, it has
Speaker 5: an impact on your body's relation connection then to aging.
Speaker 1: And so people when people.
Speaker 5: Are saying things like I feel really old when they're
Speaker 5: at younger ages, there seems to be and it hasn't
Speaker 5: there haven't been a lot of studies done on this.
Speaker 1: I'm not gonna say it definitively, but.
Speaker 5: There seems to be a correlation between our perception of
Speaker 5: time and the actual aging process, which is crazy. And
Speaker 5: I hope that they do more research surrounding that because
Speaker 5: I think it it makes a lot of sense because
Speaker 5: our brain does have a really strong influence over our
Speaker 5: bodies and how they respond to things. And so if
Speaker 5: it is based on like perception, which is something that
Speaker 5: our brain controls, then yes, it would send signals to
Speaker 5: your body to try to be trying to like sending
Speaker 5: these aging signals that you say earlier then they would
Speaker 5: normally be sent if we weren't perceiving that change.
Speaker 4: Right, So the Greeks talked about subjective time in relationship
Speaker 4: to Chiros and Chronos, So Kronos would be the objective time,
Speaker 4: and then Chiros would be the subjective time or the
Speaker 4: quality time that you are having in between. What's so
Speaker 4: painfully obvious about Chiros is the is the ephemeral nature
Speaker 4: of the quality time. So he's only got a tuft
Speaker 4: of hair in the front of his head, and he's
Speaker 4: balancing a scale on a razor blade, and the only
Speaker 4: way to catch him is from the front. So the
Speaker 4: only way to get quality time is to is to
Speaker 4: make that plan and grab out in time to actually
Speaker 4: catch him. Whereas you know, Kronos is sort of everywhere
Speaker 4: at omnipresent in everything, but that quality time is much
Speaker 4: harder to get a hold of.
Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 5: So again, like we see some of these concepts that
Speaker 5: people have noticed for years and various cultures, it's not
Speaker 5: just not just the grapes to have the said constant time. Actually,
Speaker 5: like showing an impact on the biological world, in the
Speaker 5: natural world, it's crazy to be actual the whole, even
Speaker 5: like how natural philosophy turned sort of turned into science.
Speaker 5: Like if you if anybody's ever read Agrippa and you've
Speaker 5: read like the first book. I just wanted to diss
Speaker 5: the first book when I initially read through Agrippa because
Speaker 5: I was like, this is some wild shit. But truthfully,
Speaker 5: I think that it goes to show that application of
Speaker 5: like natural philosophy principles leads to scientific relation in many cases.
Speaker 5: I mean, Planet the Elders had some wild shit, okay, like,
Speaker 5: but there was some truth. There was one example I
Speaker 5: read recently again when I was going through it, where
Speaker 5: he talks about the dung beetle and it's connection to
Speaker 5: the moon because the dung beetle when it calls under
Speaker 5: dunge and lays the eggs, and the eggs essentially sit
Speaker 5: and grow for twenty eight days and then all these
Speaker 5: like young beetles come flying out of the dung. And
Speaker 5: so that's why they were supiated with mood because this
Speaker 5: twenty eight day cycle.
Speaker 1: And you're like, that's a weird association to make, but
Speaker 1: it makes a lot of sense.
Speaker 5: I mean, they do. Dung beetles have a twenty eight
Speaker 5: y cycle. It's like a scientifically supported thing. And so
Speaker 5: they based her that maybe you attributed it to the
Speaker 5: moon spiritually, but like that connection between the moon and
Speaker 5: the dung beetle is there. I mean, that's like that
Speaker 5: cycle connection exists. And so we see a lot of
Speaker 5: that in sort of this these ancient science.
Speaker 1: But we also see it's it's cool to get.
Speaker 5: The validation in like modern day of things that were
Speaker 5: said fucking forever ago. As crazy as he was, Poet
Speaker 5: of the Elder had some cool scientific claims.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's something I want to uh want to ask you.
Speaker 3: Do you think you know it's possible that you know,
Speaker 3: thousands and thousands of years ago they actually kind of
Speaker 3: understood science more than we think they did.
Speaker 5: I think a lot of people because here's.
Speaker 3: The thing, you think that secrets considered now, you know
Speaker 3: what I'm saying, the secret secrets and the mysteries mysteries
Speaker 3: that slippers shit.
Speaker 5: Because I think when we look back and we look
Speaker 5: at people like playing it over with people like Aristotle
Speaker 5: and all these folks who you know, had patia, all
Speaker 5: these few people who had really impactful philosophy, I don't
Speaker 5: think we give them so much credence in being smart
Speaker 5: in these like ways of thinking right and logic ands
Speaker 5: so and so forth. If they were smart in that way,
Speaker 5: why in God's name do you think they weren't smart
Speaker 5: in these other ways? Like I don't think like I
Speaker 5: don't think it's a single application, like the intelligence fans.
Speaker 1: More than one topic. And actually it was Oh my gosh,
Speaker 1: I'm blanking on the name it.
Speaker 5: But Ezra I think it was who was a philosopher.
Speaker 5: But he also was one of the founding people in
Speaker 5: medical science, right, And it's like, why so many of
Speaker 5: the things that we when it comes to treatments and stuff,
Speaker 5: a lot of it was determined by like magic, magical philosophy,
Speaker 5: the four humorous and all of that. Even doctor's time
Speaker 5: informant and Richard Napier, if you've never looked into them,
Speaker 5: they're fascinating folks. In the seventeenth eighteenth century, if I
Speaker 5: recall correctly, and they were asked for physicians, and so
Speaker 5: what they did essentially was they would have people come
Speaker 5: see them who were sick, and then they would.
Speaker 1: Take account of all the symptoms.
Speaker 5: So the color of the urine is someone was flushed
Speaker 5: with fever, so and so forth. And they would also
Speaker 5: cast a chart of the decumbenture. So this is a
Speaker 5: chart when somebody took to bed and they were sick,
Speaker 5: and based on sort of where the planets were and
Speaker 5: the symptoms of the sickness, that's what they would use, like,
Speaker 5: they would use that help them diagnose what was wrong
Speaker 5: with the individual.
Speaker 1: And because of this very elaborate.
Speaker 5: System of the connection between the planets and various diseases
Speaker 5: and what the planets were attributed to, right, Saturn attributed
Speaker 5: to bones, mars, inflammations, stuff like that, they were able
Speaker 5: to offer some remedies that actually, like were effective, also
Speaker 5: based on planetary correspondence of herbs and various things.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 5: So, like this idea that like science or that like
Speaker 5: medicine and magic or astrology are not compatible is blatantly false.
Speaker 5: We see this historically and now we're all the the
Speaker 5: concoctions created actually helpful. No, Okay, some of it clearly
Speaker 5: was not, Like if you make something out of a
Speaker 5: poisonous substance, it's not gonna help somebody except for making
Speaker 5: maybe making him throw up, which I don't know.
Speaker 1: I guess percation was often a way to help heal somebody.
Speaker 5: But my point being that they've always been connected and
Speaker 5: they sort of still are, and I don't think like
Speaker 5: I think we've sort of thrown the baby out with
Speaker 5: the bast water the bath water a little bit in
Speaker 5: the sense of saying, you know, oh, because this is
Speaker 5: one thing now in modern day is considered pseudoscience talking
Speaker 5: about astrology, like we're gonna just not even consider that
Speaker 5: anymore when we like.
Speaker 1: Do medical treatments and stuff.
Speaker 5: So personally, like for surgeries and stuff, I have an
Speaker 5: astrologer that I consult to figure out good times based
Speaker 5: on like where are mars is and where's Mars at?
Speaker 5: Because Mars is the ruler of like knives and sharp
Speaker 5: things and surgery and surgeons. If I'm sick, for example,
Speaker 5: sometimes I'll cast a horrory chart or I'll look at
Speaker 5: the astrology and be like, will medicine even help with this?
Speaker 5: And if the answer is no, I'll kind of just
Speaker 5: suffer through it. It's been interesting to see, like I've
Speaker 5: done some comparative analysis where like I will be sick,
Speaker 5: I'll cast a chart, like a horror chart to say
Speaker 5: we'll going like we'll going to the doctor and getting
Speaker 5: this and help, and the horror chart will say no,
Speaker 5: like it won't actually do anything for you.
Speaker 1: And then I'll go to.
Speaker 5: The doctor anyway, and then they'll be like, oh, I
Speaker 5: think you just have like a viral infection, like there's
Speaker 5: something we can really give you, so just you know,
Speaker 5: deal with it.
Speaker 1: And like that's happened so many times that I also
Speaker 1: start to like believe the chart.
Speaker 5: I still do it, like I'm just curious, right, and
Speaker 5: like if there is something really wrong, like I don't
Speaker 5: want to not go because right, like all those reasons.
Speaker 5: But I think it's an interesting core relation that like
Speaker 5: I've seen personally that my experience the doctor correlates pretty
Speaker 5: positively to what I get from the Horrory chart, which
Speaker 5: was just so weird but also incredibly fascinating. So yeah,
Speaker 5: again that like they can inform each other, there can
Speaker 5: be cross talk, and I don't need the doctor to
Speaker 5: confirm my Horrory charts, right, Like that doesn't even take
Speaker 5: me a the conversation, but I can certainly see that
Speaker 5: there seems to be some positive correlation there.
Speaker 4: Well, you never know, he might be a vetic astrologer,
Speaker 4: which is a possibility nowadays, So a lot of that
Speaker 4: comes to people like Edgar Casey, Right, Edgar Casey had
Speaker 4: that really strange foundation that he didn't seem to get
Speaker 4: from any of his books or anything like that, which
Speaker 4: was all based on this you know, astrology and all
Speaker 4: of these other medicines that he's getting. And it was
Speaker 4: like he was channeling a Scleppius or this ancient healer,
Speaker 4: and we see how his prescriptions really actually do apply
Speaker 4: to these heavenly bodies and all the rest this astrology
Speaker 4: that he you know, it wasn't exposed to. So there's
Speaker 4: a yeah, a really powerful correlation in there.
Speaker 1: It's crazy. I actually this is something that.
Speaker 5: Yeah, if you were a doctor who were yes, And
Speaker 5: this is something that in magic I think people really
Speaker 5: sleep on. It's not a problem quite as much in
Speaker 5: high magic as it is in various forms of like witchcraft.
Speaker 5: And I'm going to use the term low magic here
Speaker 5: and not in a denigrating way, just as a distinct
Speaker 5: like a uh way to distinguish. But people, oh, there's
Speaker 5: a lot of people who say, you don't need to
Speaker 5: even bother about the astrology. But like the Grimmore tradition especially,
Speaker 5: it is so blatantly apparent that the astrology actually matters
Speaker 5: quite substantially, and that if you ignore it it's.
Speaker 1: Not going to work. That you think the way that
Speaker 1: you think it's gonna work.
Speaker 5: Like if you do a working when a planet is
Speaker 5: de bilitated, why in God's maybe do you expect that
Speaker 5: planet do anything helpful for you.
Speaker 1: It's it's a ridiculous notion.
Speaker 5: And it's one of those things where again, like apply
Speaker 5: these sort of standards of a more rigorous scientific.
Speaker 1: Exploration of things as a way to be able.
Speaker 5: To measure, like I have done a couple of exermons
Speaker 5: where I've taken I have more of these on the
Speaker 5: way where I've done, like a pick a trix talisman,
Speaker 5: for example, there was one I did one recently that
Speaker 5: is it is Jupiter in cancer telesman.
Speaker 1: And you make it to help you see spirits.
Speaker 5: And I made multiple of these talismans using various conditions.
Speaker 5: So though the one variable that was consistent was Jupiter
Speaker 5: is in cancer, but there were other variables, like I
Speaker 5: had the moon and the sign of that recommended I
Speaker 5: asked of the tign I recommended. I had various planets
Speaker 5: with positive like Jupiter needs to be trying or in
Speaker 5: a positive aspect of Venus, for example, And so I
Speaker 5: had some talismans that did have that, and I had
Speaker 5: others that didn't, and I had some where Jupiter was
Speaker 5: opposing on malefic planet. Just essentially taking the recommended astrological
Speaker 5: weather around the creation of the talisman and doing some
Speaker 5: things and doing not doing other things and seeing the
Speaker 5: effect that it would actually have on the efficacy of
Speaker 5: the talisman itself. And then I've given these to people
Speaker 5: and they're testing them for me, and I'm asking essentially
Speaker 5: for reports back to see, okay, which talismans worked the best.
Speaker 1: And which ones didn't. And I didn't tell them what
Speaker 1: teleisan was for.
Speaker 5: I just said, hey, when you're doing ritual, because all
Speaker 5: my friends are ceremonialgicians for the most part, I was like,
Speaker 5: when you're doing ritual and you're doing things with spirits,
Speaker 5: I was like, have this on you or wear it
Speaker 5: as a necklace, whatever you want, and let me know
Speaker 5: if it changes anything. So I don't have the results
Speaker 5: quite yet, but I asked them to give it Like
Speaker 5: I think when I say six months of testing to
Speaker 5: get the results back, but like those are the kind
Speaker 5: of experiments you can do from like a scientifically rigorous
Speaker 5: perspective to find your variables, Like don't tell your testers,
Speaker 5: but it's for that is not a blind study, right,
Speaker 5: So mine is just a singular blind studying the sense
Speaker 5: that my testers are blind, but I am not guess results,
Speaker 5: record them, and then try it with like a bunch
Speaker 5: of different things. There's nothing stopping you from doing this
Speaker 5: kind of experimentation. Then this is like what I think,
Speaker 5: it's a fun part about magic, Like really have fun
Speaker 5: with they experiment, figure out what is needed, what is
Speaker 5: not needed, what has to be included, and what are
Speaker 5: something to work what maybe doesn't have to be included.
Speaker 5: And this can be informed by spirits too, right, Like
Speaker 5: this is so many people I think don't like that
Speaker 5: I do this, maybe, but I don't really give a shit.
Speaker 5: When a spirit tells me something, They're like, go do
Speaker 5: this thing, and I'm like, cool, why.
Speaker 1: Do you want to do this thing?
Speaker 5: And they either won't tell me or they'll give me
Speaker 5: a reason. I don't just take the spirit's word for it,
Speaker 5: like I will. I will test it. I'll say, Okay,
Speaker 5: I'm gonna do it with this change that you suggested,
Speaker 5: and I'm gonna do it without the change that you suggested,
Speaker 5: And let's see how both of them work. More often
Speaker 5: than I works better with the way the spirits sudgusted.
Speaker 5: But like again, it's the way it's trying to validate
Speaker 5: the technologies that are given to you through spirit, trance
Speaker 5: or ritual or whatever. I think people will oftentimes just
Speaker 5: take these things on faith, which is fine, but like
Speaker 5: there's like just because you've got it in nosis or
Speaker 5: upg or whatever however.
Speaker 1: You received it doesn't mean that it's.
Speaker 5: Free from scrutiny and Cerinly, if you want to share
Speaker 5: this technique, it helps to people to say, hey, I've
Speaker 5: validated this. Here are people you can talk to you
Speaker 5: that I validated it with to get their experience. You
Speaker 5: don't have to take my word for it as a
Speaker 5: person sell you whatever I'm trying to sell you, go
Speaker 5: ask other people and let their testimony sort of be
Speaker 5: the enhancer behind whatever technology you're pushing forth.
Speaker 4: So I think you just recently had a solomonic magician
Speaker 4: talking about summoning the four wins before doing any solomonic ceremony,
Speaker 4: because he's says, right, right, David, right, how much faster
Speaker 4: and better it works, just because he's he's playing around
Speaker 4: with it, and he's using the techniques from these different
Speaker 4: things and applying logic and applying his own magical senses
Speaker 4: to it. So I think that's that's a very important
Speaker 4: part that I think a lot of people are missing
Speaker 4: out on. You can't just stick to the rote tradition.
Speaker 4: You actually have to find what works better for you.
Speaker 5: Yeah, well it actually is. So I recently worked his
Speaker 5: Clavist intelligence rum. I did the whole work, the whole
Speaker 5: ritual with a magic group that I do a lot
Speaker 5: of work with, and I did the ritual without the winds,
Speaker 5: like because I emailed David and I was like, hey,
Speaker 5: I know you talked about like this whole wind conturation
Speaker 5: of adding it in and I was like, I would
Speaker 5: like to test that, but this is the first one
Speaker 5: I'm doing. Is I'm not going to incorporate this time.
Speaker 5: But his Clavist Spiritum book is stuck in customs right now,
Speaker 5: which is driving me crazy because I want to get
Speaker 5: my hands on it. But essimply all this to say
Speaker 5: that we've done the one ritual without the winds. Like,
Speaker 5: on the next ritual that I do with his system,
Speaker 5: I want to incorporate the winds to do that exact
Speaker 5: same experiment, right, Like I want to say for myself,
Speaker 5: people have said it, but I want to see and
Speaker 5: so yeah, I'm doing that expermentation.
Speaker 1: I think it's so fun and important. Cute fan of drink.
Speaker 1: Any you guys got him on.
Speaker 5: And I was like, oh yeah.
Speaker 3: I said I I was reading his stuff since I
Speaker 3: got into this stuff.
Speaker 1: Yeah, me too, yea.
Speaker 2: So it was really wild for me to actually have
Speaker 2: them more.
Speaker 3: I was like, Wow, is there anything else you would
Speaker 3: like to talk about before we wrap it up, or
Speaker 3: anything or anything thank's worth mentioning?
Speaker 1: I mean, I don't think so. I think we covered
Speaker 1: a lot of great topics.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you talked a lot and the hour into twenty minutes.
Speaker 2: Haven't you got anything?
Speaker 4: No, I'm good, this is This has been a great interview.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, yeah, there's definitely things I'd like to uh
Speaker 3: definitely have you on again in the future, I'm sure.
Speaker 5: Oh yeah, I know people think feel free to hit
Speaker 5: me up bond socials too. I love talking about I
Speaker 5: tell people all the time, you mentioned like a grippa
Speaker 5: to me, you mentioned a could of them, or you
Speaker 5: mentioned any kind of science topic, and I'm here and
Speaker 5: I will talk to you, talk to you for hours
Speaker 5: like this is not this is my life.
Speaker 1: I love it all so much and had.
Speaker 5: Less like we should talk about your experiments. I'd love
Speaker 5: to hear how all that's going for.
Speaker 4: Sure, sure, absolutely, yeah alchemy mondays, I'm gonna get the
Speaker 4: socks all it out again this Monday and we're gonna
Speaker 4: do some more experimentation.
Speaker 1: It's gonna be great. Sounds great.
Speaker 3: Oh you know what it was meaning it was meant
Speaker 3: to say before. I don't know if it was Jabir,
Speaker 3: I've been high end that you were trying to think
Speaker 3: of before. I think he's considered the father of chemistry.
Speaker 2: He was an.
Speaker 3: Alchemist where I think even some of like kind of
Speaker 3: like the protocols they have now are almost like kind
Speaker 3: of like a duplicate or you know, his some of
Speaker 3: his stuff almost kind of trends, you know, got moved over,
Speaker 3: like the way he would do certain things and write
Speaker 3: it down kind of because staples like he was reused now.
Speaker 5: Alchemy is so fascinating because you have not to go
Speaker 5: on a whole different rant topic. If you guys have time,
Speaker 5: we can get into this. But alchemy is a fascinating
Speaker 5: field because you sort of have two different time periods
Speaker 5: of alchemy.
Speaker 1: You have alchemy when it.
Speaker 5: Was sort of initially born as like a discipline and
Speaker 5: then you have it's later you have its resurgeons sort
Speaker 5: of in the Renaissance period, and then you have sort
Speaker 5: of secondary resurgeons for alchemy became entirely psychological.
Speaker 1: I hate that period.
Speaker 5: I prefer to go to the early period where alchemy
Speaker 5: was really attributed more to these sort of scientific experiments.
Speaker 1: I mean, these people were.
Speaker 5: Trying to understand matter, and this is sometimes where a
Speaker 5: lot of plants actually get their correspondences from where you know,
Speaker 5: they would do an extraction, say, oh, the mercury of
Speaker 5: this plant is a specific color, it's gold. Therefore it's
Speaker 5: associated with the sun. Like these are the sort of
Speaker 5: ways that people were applying this natural philosophy to this
Speaker 5: more scientific exploration of various plants. Because we talked about
Speaker 5: like the hidden virtues and the cold virtues, as the
Speaker 5: Grippa calls them. They're virtues that aren't necessarily apparent all
Speaker 5: the time, and like the physical manifestation of things, they
Speaker 5: are sometimes which is why like the sunflowers with the
Speaker 5: sun because it resembles the glyph of the sun and
Speaker 5: it's also yellow, and it also like when the sun
Speaker 5: is up, the flower actually look towards the sun, right
Speaker 5: and so you have all those characteristics in it as well.
Speaker 5: But then when alchemists, we're doing a lot of these
Speaker 5: sort of extractions of things.
Speaker 1: We're not looking at.
Speaker 5: The hidden essence, the hidden inside of the planet, if
Speaker 5: you will. And that also has an impact on the
Speaker 5: correspondence if you can assign to things.
Speaker 1: And it's interesting too because.
Speaker 5: For example, a Grippa also talks about in book one,
Speaker 5: he'll say, the onion is both lunar and it's martial
Speaker 5: because by itself, it's white, it is.
Speaker 1: Full of water.
Speaker 5: Right, those are all lunar things. But if you cut it,
Speaker 5: it causes pain. That's very martial characteristics. And if you
Speaker 5: were to do it, lookt onion, which if you've never
Speaker 5: done before you should. It's actually kind of fun.
Speaker 1: Smell awful though, do it outside.
Speaker 5: Like the chemicals that are in the mercury of the
Speaker 5: onion are painful.
Speaker 1: Like if you actually breathe.
Speaker 3: In, hold on your voice to start to screw up
Speaker 3: for a second, hold on, try to try talking again.
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah, yeah, sometimes it will like lit you out.
Speaker 2: You have to like let it catch up.
Speaker 3: Sorry, okay, you want to go on from I think
Speaker 3: cutting the No wait, no, you were saying.
Speaker 1: Cutting the onion. So what you cut again? Is it
Speaker 1: still going?
Speaker 2: No, I think you're good.
Speaker 1: Now, Okay, when you.
Speaker 5: Cut into an onion, it causes harm to you, right,
Speaker 5: the enzymes cause harm, and so that's why it has
Speaker 5: the marshal quality to it.
Speaker 1: And when you actually do an extraction of an onion
Speaker 1: and you get extract the mercury and the sulfur.
Speaker 5: Uh, if you were to run that through an alcms,
Speaker 5: which I've done before, and that's the words why I'm
Speaker 5: talking about this, which is liquid chromatography, gas chromatography, and
Speaker 5: the mass back essentially a way of breaking down the
Speaker 5: molecule looking at its individual atoms. You'll see that the
Speaker 5: components within the sulfur and the mercury, now that they're concentrated,
Speaker 5: they're painful.
Speaker 1: If you like breathe it in.
Speaker 5: It burns the inside of your nose and your mucous membranes.
Speaker 5: And so we even see that that martial quality, which
Speaker 5: is like a hidden quality. You're technically speaking, until you
Speaker 5: bruise the onion of some kind, that's like a hidden
Speaker 5: the coal virtue that you can elucidate using alchemy. And
Speaker 5: now we have ways of testing all chemical things on
Speaker 5: a more scientific level, which is great, but just the
Speaker 5: fact that if you had been had that mercury and
Speaker 5: you smelled it and you got the pain, that would
Speaker 5: also have indicated to you that the onion has this
Speaker 5: martial nature to it as well. So alchemy has always
Speaker 5: been really scientific, right, It's been a way to explore
Speaker 5: the natural world and all the hidden virtues that lie
Speaker 5: within the various parts of the world, whether it be
Speaker 5: minerals or plants or whatever. And that's that's really what
Speaker 5: I love about alchemy. That's what I think is so interesting,
Speaker 5: that it's like another way of exploring the natural world
Speaker 5: using some of these more ancient philosophies that are still
Speaker 5: applicable in modern day.
Speaker 1: Okay, now I'm done.
Speaker 4: Well, I just wanted to throw in there that for me,
Speaker 4: I don't see a real separation between the psychological and
Speaker 4: the more natural forms of alchemy, because the original sort
Speaker 4: of Greek mentality was that everything is existing inside of
Speaker 4: the mind of Zeus, the news of Zeus, right, And
Speaker 4: so what they were doing is they were finding the
Speaker 4: hidden properties because it found the hidden properties in themselves
Speaker 4: as well. You've got the tie between astrology and personality
Speaker 4: types and all the rest of these things that go
Speaker 4: directly into alchemy. And I think, you know, when people
Speaker 4: sort of see that linkage between the mind and everything
Speaker 4: and this vast web of associations that are created from it,
Speaker 4: it's really hard not to you know, apply alchemical principles
Speaker 4: to psychology in some ways.
Speaker 1: You know, Yeah, I definitely see that.
Speaker 5: I also there's also an aspect, right that a lot
Speaker 5: of our associations are based on perception, and again, perception
Speaker 5: is something that the brain handles.
Speaker 7: So yeah, yeah, I think if you know, especially with
Speaker 7: the Islamic ones, I mean, those seem to be the
Speaker 7: oldest ones I've come across, some of those alchemists.
Speaker 2: You look at the stuff that they're actually doing with
Speaker 2: like plants and stuff. Cool.
Speaker 3: Yeah yeah, yeah really there, like how they even had
Speaker 3: charts of like like and this to do that, to
Speaker 3: make it like they really knew like how to move
Speaker 3: things around. Actually yep, it's like, god damn, like I
Speaker 3: don't even know how to like I have problem making
Speaker 3: chocolate though, you know, you.
Speaker 2: Know these guys, it's making all sorts of crazy shit.
Speaker 1: Oh that's a great book.
Speaker 3: Yeah, but it's thank you very much Aster for coming on.
Speaker 2: That was really that was a lot of fun actually
Speaker 2: for me. Thank you, thank you.
Speaker 1: Yeah, episode absolute pleasure.
Speaker 5: Thanks you for having me on, Thanks for talking about science,
Speaker 5: spirituality to the best topics.
Speaker 3: Yes, oh, definitely definitely and yeah, we'll definitely get you
Speaker 3: on again in the future. Hello Giant wants you to
Speaker 3: remind everybody all your shows where they can find you.
Speaker 4: All right, you can find me on Mondays on YouTube
Speaker 4: doing Alchemy Mondays. You can find me on Tuesdays doing
Speaker 4: seven seven seven with Nick, also on YouTube, and on
Speaker 4: Thursdays we've got the Magical Mailbag, so send in your
Speaker 4: occult slash, esthoteric slash paranormal stories to Headless Giant podcast
Speaker 4: at gmail dot com. Friday's usually doing something with Nick
Speaker 4: or Jules doing some kind of a crazy thing to
Speaker 4: check it out. And then on Sundays I've got the
Speaker 4: Trialogus with Ethan and Ricardo. So check all those shows out,
Speaker 4: put the bell on, have fun.
Speaker 3: Yes, thank you very much, Helus and Astra. Please let
Speaker 3: everybody know where they can find all your stuff again.
Speaker 5: Yeah, so I'm on Instagram as astrologist cl so c
Speaker 5: I a L and then you can find most of
Speaker 5: my work. I'm trying to make it, I guess a
Speaker 5: greater effort to public some magical experiments and stuff on
Speaker 5: zeb stack, which is titled Celestial Crucible. So I'm actually
Speaker 5: our ritual Groove's most recent workthrough of the clouds intelligence are.
Speaker 1: Richell is up on zebstack if you want to take
Speaker 1: a look.
Speaker 5: So yeah, there's some some great stuff there with magic
Speaker 5: squares and everything too.
Speaker 1: But yeah, that's.
Speaker 3: It awesome, Thank you very much again, and uh yeah,
Speaker 3: like I said after the show, if you don't want
Speaker 3: to send me those links, I'll make sure.
Speaker 2: I add them to the show for sure. Sounds good,
Speaker 2: and thank you.
Speaker 3: Everybody who was in the chat looked like everybody was
Speaker 3: thoroughly enjoying this as much as I was.
Speaker 2: And that's why we go live.
Speaker 3: And uh yeah, and until the next one, everybody be well,
Speaker 3: Lada
Speaker 1: Thanks everyone, Bye bye,