No, sorry 
because it lies at the heart of what you are talking about here:
Let’s see the list:
Intent trumps mechanics
This assumes one “group” has entirely the correct mechanics, already in place, whereas another has entirely the wrong mechanics.
I dispute this, 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!
If we look at human history and specifically the history of “demons” i.e., beings named in the grimoires, we find some will reveal themselves (to some of us) to be ancient gods or goddesses (Bael, Buné come to mind) while others appear to have no prior known form that was degraded and stereotyped into demonic (Sitri maybe is an example of this, and Belial).
Furthermore, you can observe the differences this shift in belief makes when evoking by comparing the works of a grimoire-traditionalist such as Imperial Arts, and his experience with Buné, to my own experience where I approached her free of expectations and over time she revealed she was also the spirit behind the goddess Wadjet, and that she is very loving and will assist with making contact with the deceased (like you, I largely believe spirits are discrete personalities, not forces, although with Lucifer/Satan that line may somewhat blur, as with a person’s experiences when dealing with “big-G God” and some angels).
Another example is Imperial Arts’ perception of Belial contrasted with that of Aaron Donaghue, and I covered that in more detail here.
Finally, you can take that from the spirit world right into this topic – you were on this forum for a while, no issues, you decided to tear apart one member’s experience because you did not think highly of her, in a prolonged and intentionally hurtful manner, so, you got banned.
I permitted you to try again, and now, you come on this forum and start telling us we are, in fact, a hive-mind and guess what – people seem to be “uniting” against you.
Even though in this topic alone, some of us replying have been seriously and significantly at odds over serious issues that remain a point of difference. But to you, we seem like a unified group with shared thinking.
You are seeing what you want to see right here, right now, with US – and you tell me that can never happen with a spirit, which probably has a far more complex personality than any human?
Anyway, back to the list:
anthropocentrism,
Pointless trendy –ism, short of spending a long lifetime experiencing being another type of life-form, every living thing appears to experience itself as the centre of its own universe, though most also realise other beings feel the same way.
relativism (therefore, every spiritual experience is valid and legitimate, there are no wrong answers),
Wrong: what matters are RESULTS, no-one on here who posts a failed working gets pats on the head (nor asks for them) just for doing things in some approved manner. Results are all that counts, and all most of us care about, absent any personal choice to love or serve a philosophy, or entity/ies of our choice.
To re-quote myself, enlightenments and big revelations about “the nature of truth/life/reality” (etc) are the monopoly money of magick: feels good in the hand, in the moment, but they do not pourchase any changes in the real world.
Results - new job, better car, more money - are proof that regardless of how and what you are doing, it is working.
And to do the opposite, to automatically discard someone’s spiritual experience as INvalid and ILlegitimate, is how dogma gets started, and dogma can be every bit as wrong as someone’s “delusional” experience – with the dangerous difference that dogma then gets enforced upon others who are tutored and shamed into following it.
So for that reason, on here, we leave the gateway open, because when it comes to damage done, dogma can roll on for centuries, even millennia (just look at the practice of Type 3 female circumcision, that kills women and babies for no real purpose) whereas one person’s mistake will have less of an impact.
On this forum peer-testing, without force or the need to sit in judgement on each post, is key – if someone is significantly out of alignment with the experiences of many others, they will observe this and can investigate why, and whether they wish to do anything about it.
This is significantly better than any similar alternative.
tools are just a psychological prop yet spirits are somehow real beings(?),
(I will ignore the 2nd part since I think we’re on the same page as to spirits being “real,” at least on this side of the Divine Paradox where we talk using ordinary terms.)
One of E.A.'s recent newsletters described most tools as training wheels/props, but stated that some objects have innate power of their own. I don’t have the newsletter handy to link.
This is a view I share, and from what I see, most people go through a stage of wanting all the tools, then none of the tools (when finding they are non-differentiated from the All) and then, finally, entering into the “some tools do something better than my mind can, others are less important.”
This fits perfectly with the following widely-accepted views: 1. Objects and non-human beings can have a real spirit of their own and 2. That spirit sometimes aids us in our magick, for various reasons of its own.
So, again, to class all tools as one interchangeable group is an error of thinking that leads to erroneous conclusions – the nature and functions of an ancient crystal that formed over tens of millions of years will be different to a Tarot deck that’s mass-produced, and rolled out via a network of minimum wage hands, to reach someone browsing in the local new age shop.
Tarot cards can be dispensed with and the images, once “uploaded” into a mind training in divination, used instead, because the image, not the plastic-coated card, is where the power or “real spirit” of the deck resides. That said, some will still find the physical deck most useful, because it leaves more mental runtime free, and some physical decks will also become imbued with a spiritual power of their own.
This is textbook animism, nothing contentious or relativist.
the well known demons are there to help us ascend,
The general view seems to be that something got off track, either before recorded history (known as “Atlantis” etc., though the writings on that don’t sit well with many of us, either) - or, and this fits as well with the former, that things started to go wrong with the genesis of the monotheistic faiths that all share a theme of shunning contact with spirits, and prohibiting divination and the use of magick to change reality.
Many demons (including the “former god with own cult” and the “just kind of appeared along the line in grimoires” guys) are not happy about this, and have their own agenda to work and see things change.
The idea all demons are just Santa Claus with horns, here to see us fulfil selfish desires away from the older forms of social and spirituality morality, is not often found on here, or, not often held for long once someone begins to truly communicate with spirits, understand that magick is REAL, and understand the implications of magickal awakening becoming a global phenomena.
our goal is ascent, so on and so forth…
If you can find 2 people on here who have the exact same definition of what that is, I would be astonished – I thought it was an umbrella term for each individual’s reaching a stage (or, series of stages) whereby their magickal abilities allow them to significantly improve their world to their own liking.
Political differences alone, forged from different life experiences, geographical location, preferred worldview and currently preferred outcome for the wider world rule out that “ascent” being a single vision held by all of us, in the exact same way.
. Just threw some ideas just to further the discussion. The topic is good.
