Suppose someone had an obsession with clowns to the point thats it’s all they think about. Now suppose that this person begins dabbling in evocation and astral projection. They pick up a copy of the Goetia, maybe do a little research, and get to work summoning Andras. He appears and acts like a clown. Same with Glasya Labolas, Belial, and Paimon, etc. Literally every spirit appears and acts like a clown. Astral travels nearly always involve encounters with clowns. Would you say that:
These spirits are nothing but projections of this person’s obsessions and fantasies.
These are actual Goetic spirits who choose to manifest as clowns.
Because I want to drop in one other possibility - these are actual Goetia spirits who manifest as clowns due to that person’s projections and fantasies which have the necessary energy and focus to flesh out the interactive, co-created, structuring energy the spirit uses.
I covered it before with this browser analogy:
If you call on spirits under a specific mask, in this case presumably Joy Of Satan, you’ll probably see them show up looking blond, the same as the Imperial Arts author sees demons looking ugly and weird, because he’s a grimoire trad. guy.
I don’t place expectations on them, and they take all kinds of forms for me, including totally non-anthropomorphic.
Same with angels - you go to them assuming they’re these bad guy hustlers, you’re going to limit what you get.
You know how, to get online and view a website, you need a program called a browser?
You can set browsers to make all the text on sites come out a specific way, you can block javascript (which gives a lot of the interactive functionality & other aspects on a web page, and blocking it can totally cripple the way some sites display) - and the belief you take to any magickal interaction seems to be like that.
It seems to affect what kind of manifestation you get, including limiting some of the ways the spirit will act, or what it will say to you.
Note that even with 25+ years experience in magick, I’m still only saying “seems to be” because I wouldn’t presume to know it all.
So, belief isn’t a passive thing, in magick - it can affect what you get delivered to you!
I have the same reasoning as Lady Eva, but I picked projections, cause if it has to be one or the other, I think it’d be more likely the magician was projecting, than the other way around. Though I think both can happen. Does that make sense?
Giving it further thoughts I’m fucking glad this never happened to me (so far) or else every spirit would show up as pizza delivery guy, my beacon of hope and light
I have known folks with the “clown” obsession. They had a great time with their clown friends for many years. But when it came time to get things done the clowns just didn’t have the steam. I would suggest that these people were either delusional or had so limited and constrained legit spirits to the point that they were impotent.
@Lady_Eva Very interesting reading this especially as I voted for the opposite.
In my case I’ve studied psychology as well as the occult, I tend to see the hypothetical clowns of the Goetia as manifestations of not only one’s own subconscious beliefs but also wishful thinking too.
In other words most people will often see, hear and feel what they expect to in many occult practices. Whether they realise this fact or not? Its all to do with our individual psychology, life experiences and the way our brain is wired.
However in my own magickal practice I quite often see even the goddess that Ive worked with for years in multiple different forms, different locations and sometimes her voice sounds different at times too.
The same when I am contacted by the dead ever since I was a young child. The same thing. When I can actually see them they often look different, sound different, feel different and even smell different.
So that’s why I voted the way I did and believe we often see what we expect to. Along with the human collective unconscious playing a huge part from the works of Carl Jung. Most of us usually see what our own psyche itself projects to us and then we believe it to be true, but is it?
That’s why its taken me so many years of study and magickal practice to truly differentiate between fanciful thinking or actual reality whether from thhs realm or the next.
There is far more that I could say about this topic. But am so tired and am using my mobile to write this atm.
Spirits can assume any form they want. What I refer to as a legit spirit is the power and intelligence behind the form. It is entirely possible to create a form and call it Belial without ever contacting the intelligence that IS Belial to inhabit and speak through that structured form. Such empty forms are little more than sock puppets that will merely conform to expectations. I am doing a write up which will be posted later on how to know the difference
In my opinion legit spirits have souls you can scan and feel it and they are entering the astral just as you are and not actually living there. Legit spirits are what thoughtforms are not (not saying thoughtforms don’t serve a purpose be it placebo or nocebo) but thoughtforms no matter what they become egregore, godform etc for me feel hollow, like energy with no depth besides the belief fueled energy people give them. That and to me legit spirits are transversing the astral just as we do while they’re from other planes and the astral is just the collective unconscious of all beings imagination desires emotions hence why those things are so easy to manifest on top of the loose density.
Ok let’s assume two spirits appeared to you… each one is identical to the other… each one claims to be, let’s say Belial. How do you “know” which one is legit ?
That’s coming up in more detail my later post, but a fake is probably just going to pull things out of your mind and parrot it back to you. If you drop mind, then they can’t even do that. An intelligence outside yourself is going to be able to give you gnosis on things that don’t originate from your own mind that can be verified. That’s just one example.
