Occult trends

General Discussion
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Curious as to everyone’s thoughts on something that’s been on my mind a while. Many of the topics covered in the occult are pretty common. Some for good reason and others out of mere trend. I often wonder why we see so few new areas, practices and traditions being invented or discovered. Now bare in mind I’m not being to specific here.

Everyone tends to follow the same areas of practice and quite often their beliefs. Most xo clusions I’d say come from commonly believed information rather than real contemplation.

If you were to remove all occult books on magick and sit a person down to start it all over, how different would it be?

In science thw theory is if you destroy all trace of discovery the same discoveries would be made again.

But could we say the same for magick? Would we discover the same gods, demons etc. Would we discover the same magical interests like tarot and runes. Or would we end up finding totally new things.

I find things like tarot, runes etc are done out of popularity. It’s convenient and everyone knows more or less what it is, even non magick folk.

My question is what is the occult doing now that isnt influenced by popular trend. What are the new methods of divination or evocation? What new practices have we found or evolved. New spirits or demons?

But of a rambly post but had it on my mind tonight.

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This is an interesting subject. Part of me wants to say if all knowledge of magick practices was lost or destroyed, new forms and concepts would take their places. However, with so many people over such a large amount of time pouring energy and emotion into the current systems, would the new ones have the same amount of power to them?

Then again, some of the practices we have today have been passed to us my spirits, gods, demons, etc. So I’d have to think some things would re-emerge.

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Eclectic new manifolds in the works from deep six explorer and her handlers. New to the site, in increasing demand:)

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If you look at historical folk-magic the world over, you do find some odd trends that could not be explained through physical communication. Some are because they are fundamental to how humans understand the world (like the act of symbolism itself), some are because they are the simplest way to make something work (like poppets) and some get kind of weird (like the eight spoke wheel, and knots).

Love, hate and hunger are the broadest set of motivations for all practical magic. Later on you can probably enter greed into that, but the earlier spells revolve more on fertility for crops and animals and less on wealth, because food was considered a tradable currency.

Anthropologically, gods derive from minor spirits, either due to ancestor worship or animism. Both of those are pretty fundamental to the human condition, since we have a hard time imagining our own non-existence and so prefer the idea of afterlives, and once you have dead spirits you generally have ways to interact or appease them. Similarly, we tend to personify the world around us and attribute motivations to objects. So, as long as a group gets into a herding/agrarian social level they will usually develop gods of some kind.
Most cultures also ask the question of where the gods and the dead live, and the answer is usually in a 3+ realm system which opens up the entire concept of multiple levels of reality.

The ability to imagine the future, which is said to have evolved to allow for the tracking of prey, gives birth to divination. Fundamentally, I don’t think that any divination system is all that different from any other in the mechanics, but the answers change based on how they can be expressed through the medium. The purest form would probably just be a flash of insight.

Ok, so if you set up another planet of humans and watched them, they would likely have gods and ghosts, cast practical magic for love, hate and greed, would use some common symbolism that is too basic to ignore, would have layered worlds and would divine the future.
The basics would largely be the same, but once you start getting into the actual specifics of their gods and culture, then it begins to vary wildly. I doubt that the same later things would develop though, as they require our culture to have meaning, the highly complex ideas we use are based on ideas we have about how language, math, science, information and the world in general works.

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I think we’d discover not necessarily the same magickal interests, but just different iterations of them. This is really about who “gets” there first to make those discoveries, and those trends will likely follow through that magician’s or culture’s lense.

It doesn’t matter if the language or terminologies change; it will be, for the most part, the same basic concepts and ideas being rehashed because people are all having a very similar experience when working toward godhood, initially. This eventually gets turned on its head though.

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Well, I don’t identify as a magician, I’m a mystic, so I think I’m headed in the opposite direction of most people here, and maybe I shouldn’t even be answering this, but I just kind of winged everything and let it unfold from my intuition because occultism-related books and courses were too boring for me. And it was too much work. I didn’t feel like I needed it.

I “came up” spiritually in isolation because of this, and the result is that I don’t use the same terminology as everybody else and I don’t do things the way other people do them. I have to communicate this stuff in a way that’s unique to me, and a lot of times it just leaves people saying, “Huh?” This makes it hard for me to get people to value what I’m saying, and this is a problem because I do this full-time and I need to make money from it somehow. There’s a language barrier, and most people are not willing to stretch themselves to try to translate what I’m saying. They’re too locked into their systems, and those systems are constantly being reinforced by their peers, so there’s no need for them to take risks.

I’m not willing to try to force myself into a system at this point though. It would fragment my godhood. It’d be taking a step backwards.

The upside is that I have complete spiritual freedom, and I was able to take a shortcut straight to the top. (That was another problem I had with training—progress is too slow.)

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I don’t necessarily see anything wrong with the way you’ve done it. You’ve built your own system and that’s pretty cool. The biggest thing I can see being an issue, is what you’ve already mentioned; conversing and identifying with others about things.

I think cross-system learning is essential to achieving godhood. You can only go so far when you block yourself off from other sources of learning.