hey guys. i would just like to quickly share why i am specifically asking about shadow work. i was watching a video of Satan and Sons on youtube where they did a Pick a Card: Prince Azazel. basically it’s where you pick a card out of four piles and you basically pick the one that stands out for you right. so i did that and the pile spoke specifically about shadow work and how the magician should do some shadow work in order to like you know move forward so to speak whether that is magically or just in life in general. i also watched a video from tomb of sarab on youtube where also he mentioned shadow work. so to me i just cannot ignore it you know.
i’ve read up a article speaking about shadow work but i guess i’d like to know from the members in the forum as to what shadow work is. why is it important for a magician. what demon(s) are specifically good for shadow work and what results did you get from shadow work.
i’d appreciate your feedback and i’m excited to read your comments on shadow work. thank you.
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Interesting topic. I am curious about this as well.
This is my understanding, limited as it might be. Shadow work speaks to self exploration in the Jungian construct. Jung held that we all possess undesirable qualities that we have learned to hide from ourselves. A person who wants himself to be kind may put his anger in his shadow. One who wishes to be chaste may put their libido in their shadow.
Now the undesirable aspect doesn’t disappear. Sometimes they thrive in the shadow. They generate complexes, possibly even psychoses. They frequently result in cognitive/behavioural disonance, which is a clinical way of saying one’s mind and one’s actions are not aligned. This causes all sorts of trouble.
Shadow work is the courageous exploration of one’s shadow self… to see what latent desires or belief’s are sabotaging us. By bringing the so-called defects into the light of awareness, they can be examined and hopefully transmuted into something that serves us better.
Some people also refer to this as fighting one’s demons. Wish you the best of luck as you follow this noble pursuit.
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A really good analogy for what you’re doing with shadow work is present both in the first four degrees of the Golden Dawn and A.’.A.’. systems when you work with Malkuth and the lower triad of the ToL to consciously aggregate/assimilate the four elements within yourself (really being catch-all baskets for something like the four humors). Someone who takes that elemental analogy out to its details quite a bit is Franz Bardon, both in his black and white and four element mirrors in Initiation into Hermetics but then all of his aphorisms for the four elements in Universal Master Key.
What it really amounts to is self-reflection, self-inquiry, getting to know what you have in you, and getting to know all of the unseen within yourself (and yes - as FrEEDRIVE put it a large part of this territory is traits you either have not been able to express out in the world or simply don’t want to - you’ll also likely meet your anima or animus). In a lot of ways this amounts to the kind of excavation that Freudian psychoanalysis was about, ie. excavating this territory and colonizing it with reason. That said though the idea isn’t to dominate those parts of yourself further but to gain a flexible relationship with it of the sort where your own subconscious mind can trust to let you in farther - and the idea is from there you start to open the doors of perception more to the world that’s getting filtered out, hence the seership and the like for magicians and people who want to work in other planes of reality.
When I first got into my shadow work I figured Lilith was the best deity to work with but I had compelling circumstances that suggested her. Other people may feel a draw to a different god, goddess, etc. and it’ll depend on what they’re dealing with in the way of both life circumstances and their shadow.
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As MagickAndBreakz had said, you would be able to find a deity to help with your shadow work.
I was asked to work with Lord Lucifer by Horn God and Hecate. Once I started working on it I figured how much I have to change myself and Lucifer has been extremely patient working with me, instructing on a regular basis when I sway away from my shadow work.
Hope you come across the right deity to work with, who would help you with your shadow work much quicker.
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i want to thank you guys so much for giving your input and helped me understand shadow work better. one thing that i’m curious about is how the process works when you’re working with a deity etc that helps you with this process. what do you and the deity do? what is happening within thy self during that process? i’m really curious. and if you don’t want to share that’s totally fine with me. i respect your privacy at the end of the day.
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@FrEERDIVE basically nailed it, a magical tip though, it can be used for alchemy 
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I was asked to work with Lord Lucifer by Horn God and Hecate. Once I started working on it I figured how much I have to change myself and Lucifer has been extremely patient working with me, instructing on a regular basis when I sway away from my shadow work.
My biggest personal hang-up with respect to work with Lucifer was that I didn’t feel comfortable that I could pin down his actual identity properly (and my worry there - when you don’t know your deity well - all sorts of things would love to stand in for him/her and get your attention!). Lilith, or whatever put me in touch with her, pushed me in his direction last spring and summer (2019), now a bit over a year later starting in on TOAF you have Lilith, Lucifer, Leviathan - they’re a packaged deal in that sense.
There’s a lot I find interesting there, particularly bouncing Donald Hoffman’s social network of conscious agents off of Stephen Wolfram’s hypergraph concept of the universe, the idea that universes are formed around ‘branes’, branes could be individual hypergraphs (substrates for a universe), and many NDE’ers talk about being pulled out of this structure into another as if these are defined zones that aren’t in the same ‘cloud’ of contacts (or if I want to get nerdy - different server). The way Asenath is discussing them it’s a bit like Lilith and Lucifer are the salt and sulphur, Leviathan is the particular ‘brane’ we’re in.
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