I think the opening of this forum and the fact it now dominates search results for a lot of magickal, spiritual, and occult terminology, has led to a cultural shift: away from the norms of the old forum, full mostly of people who wanted to practice magick for its own sake/the sake of long-term ascent, and who often had bigger goals than purely personal gain (or the roundabout, “I’ll become a living god of empires and then she’ll want me back” stuff), and the many new friends now, who just have a problem they want fixed, and would gladly give up magick if they got it solved another way - like the difference between being a forum for plumbers, versus a helpcentre for those with leaky pipes.
I’m not judging those sick/heartbroken/poor (etc) people btw, because many folks got into magick trying to scratch some itch, then later got serious about it.
But the decreased amount of enthusiasm for the practice in its own right, of doing magick for its own sake, tends to cause people who just want the results to struggle with innovation, improvisation, and creativity, and I think that can create a kind of clash of cultures, because they appear to want spoonfeeding, while from their POV, we’re all gluttons sitting at a feast, with all the knowledge and powahs, refusing to hand over some crumbs.
The fact magick is a craft which has to be honed seems to get lost, and so does the fact that theophanies (interactions with gods and high-level spirits) are not the same thing as magick, which is focused on tanglible results, primarily in this realm of existence.
Literally anyone can become a god in the astral and be told they’re that, and yet not be able to manifest a piece of free cheese.
I had no actual books, just a few precious things I scraped together from fiction, folklore, and family stories; no peers, the internet didn’t exist, and I didn’t even know magick was a real thing people did, and that didn’t stop me. I therefore strive to educate people to innovate and be creative.
But with an eye to my future lifetimes, I also want the maximum knowledge made available, so that next time I can start off with better tools…