Occultism: Get your triggers here folks!

 I was born at the tail end of the 1980's Satanic Panic. However this odd movement (over-reaction) didn't just abruptly end on January of 1990 or 91 for that matter. No, it had reverberating affects well into the 90's and 2000s. I grew up in a strict Orthodox Presbyterian family that was greatly affected by this panicked propaganda. My mission as an Occultist and Catholic is to shine the proper light on magickal practice, both the good and the not so good. I will honestly try to present an objective position on the topics I cover. 

So then, what is Occultism? This is not always an easy question to answer and there are so many who have a particular answer to this question. For the Evangelical Protestant and Strict Catholic this term is simply an alternative for "Satanism" (que eerie organ music here). However, I tend to believe that Occultism is on a spectrum: 

Above we can see a picture of a standard spectrum. One end is less severe, or dangerous, than the other and the spaces in between differ in severity. This is something that is rather controversial to the mainstream religionist who discards the esoteric out-of-hand. However, my first experience with the occult lead to serious confusion, because I wasn't taught about this spectrum. So I would be remiss if I didn't explain this spectrum to you, dear reader. 

The Right Side of the Spectrum (The Right Hand Path/Path of Mercy)

The right hand path (RHP) as it is called in modern occult terminology is essentially the path towards Theosis. Theosis is a complex word for a simple goal, Oneness with the Divine or G-D. This is the goal of Initiatory Magick. This is the path of the mystic or the magus. In Qabbalah it is the white pillar on the right side the Tree of Life. This is comprised of the three Sephiroths: Netzach, Chesed, and Chokmah, leading up to Kether and beyond. Man resides in the sephira Malkuth. It is Jachin in the Masonic tradition, one of the two pillars in Solomon's Temple. This path seeks a benevolent return to the source, the Divine Monad. This would include ceremonial ritual, Eucharistic Rites, Prayer, spiritual discipline, meditation, and pathworking the Sephiroth. 

This is where confusion can throw someone off. If all magic is evil then this makes little, if any, sense at all! Can all of this be an elaborate scheme by Satan to trick them into evil? If the goal is Theosis or oneness with G-d then Satan seems to not be benefiting at all. This was what threw me in my youth. When I first came into contact with Magic I was blown away to find magicians authoring long and very elaborate prayers to G-d, the Trinity, and Jesus Christ. 

The concept of G-d on the RHP tends to be a bit different from the standard religion concept. While G-d may be triune in the Christian sense, it is also the Monad. The point which all things expand from and return back to, in "the end". G-d is the Tetragrammaton, the unpronounceable name. What G-d is not is a vengeful old authoritarian quick to rain down punishments without a moment's notice. G-d is not just outside us a residing in his state of perfect beingness (Ehyeh), but G-d is also within us.   

"Through these He has given us His precious and magnificent promises, so that through them you may become partakers of the divine nature, now that you have escaped the corruption in the world caused by evil desires." (2nd Peter 1:4)

The art of magick aligns the magician with the essence of the Divine within us. This simultaneously aligns us with the Divine beyond us. Magick changes or transforms the practitioner into a more Divine state. 

The Left Side of the Spectrum (The Left Hand Path/Path of Severity) 

The Left Hand Path goes off of a peculiar philosophy, one of a rather radical sense of individuality. The Left Hand Path, in a modern sense, has been warped to meet materialistic and hedonistic ends. The LHP has its origins in the ancient Aghori of Hindu discipline. These mystics would intentionally do things that would violate Hindu social norms. This included behavior the Aghori Sadhus themselves would find horrid and disgusting (such as eating beef, sexual impropriety, and smearing cremation ashes on their bodies.) They did this not to intentionally be "evil", but rather to take a severe path towards the Unchanging Substance, Brahma. It was a fast path towards enlightenment, but it was often a very hard path to take and few would succeed. This is rather different than what is known as the LHP today. 

It took an odd turn with Theosophists tending to call things they didn't personally like "LHP". This was picked up by a carnival barker and admitted con-man Howard Stanton Levey. He saw the LHP as a permission slip to engage in hedonism and rousing social criticism. In 1966 he organized his small Magic Circle and formed it into the Church of Satan. The LHP for them was sorcery-only magic, in the name of Satan. They embraced the cynical, rejected organized religion and formed rituals to celebrate the material world. This would not last long and in 1975 a moderate portion of the church split off and formed a theistic version. They left the old Hebrew Satan behind and turned to an old Egyptian neter called Set. Set came to be seen as the Principle of Isolate Intelligence. The first form, from a platonic perspective. Set's intelligence of himself, against the mechanistic universe, was the first and this gift was passed off to all of humanity. Black Magic was a way for the Setian to come to some realization of his own gift.

The modern Left Hand Path idolizes the individual nature of the human animal. On the practical side it is atheistic and sees the individual as their own god, laying out their own morals and being their own ultimate truth. On the theistic and abstract side, the Self is the soul that could either be blended into the uniformity of  G-d or it could be refined, through ceremony, to be Sovereign. Essentially, the Subjective Reality of the black magician is continuously refined into an independent state becoming a god. This is known as Apotheosis, rather than Theosis. 

On the Tree of Life this would be the sephiroth: Hod, Geburah, and Binah. The key here is on the Tree of Life, the LHP still leads to Kether and the Ain Soph Aur. 

So now we can see two extremes of magic, separated by a vast gulf in-between the spectrum. This vast gulf can include Hoodoo, Voodoo, Wicca, Esoteric Christianity, Martinism, Rosicrucianism, Norse Magic, various pagan magickal practices, etc. 

Mainstream Christianity, despite all we have laid out about occultism, lumps all of these practices together and makes the mistake of assuming it's all Satanism and black magic. This is not only inaccurate it's flagrantly dishonest and propagandistic in it's nature. It claims that those of us who have used and are using obviously Christian systems of magic, like the Golden Dawn or the Grimoire of Pope Honorius, are either tricked by Satan or we are Satanists in disguise. 

This attempt to lump everything into one sinister category does more damage than it does anything. If the Golden Dawn practitioner is no different than the Setian why stick with the complex rituals of a 5=6 or memorize countless rituals like the LBRP, LBRH, MP, or the Rose Cross Ritual? 

When I was a young man I leapt at the opportunity to show my father, a devout presbyterian at the time, a card game character that was very obviously a beautiful seraphim. This was to dissuade his belief that these card games were "tools of the devil".  Without missing a beat he told me that Satan dresses up as an angel of light to tempt people. Using these rather ridiculous tactics causes people to fall away from the faith rather than reinforce it. For awhile it caused me to, because I felt that nothing was ever good enough for certain strains of Christian thought. It was less about the glory of the Divine and more about mindless devotion to an ideology.

Occultism is modern Christianity's collective seraphim card. It's more about one's allegiance to a denomination or doctrine than it is about connecting with the Divine. Which is what the 5=6 degree is busy doing and the Satanist is not.