I’m sitting and writing this in the days between the solstice and the New Year. Those strange, delicious in-betweenness days which, according to legend, are bonus dates that extend the 360 degrees of the horizon’s circle into the 365-ish days of the solar year. I’m grateful that, as I reflect on the year that is on its way out, I’ve been so fortunate. Especially in Euro-American culture we tend to believe that what happens to us is the results of our choices, and up to a point that may be true. However, much of what happens in our lives is the result of conditions around us, and innumerab ..read more

Hello Friends, Here in the northern hemisphere the equinoctial shift has passed and we begin to enter the rich darkness. The new academic year begins and we move inside, away from the frolics of the summer, and our attention is once more drawn within. As they say in psychedelic therapy ‘the darkness is where the treasure lies’; the darkness may be challenging but it is also in this deep within that insights can be found. Like it says on the Thoth Tarot card Art (aka Temperance): “Visita Interiora Terrae Rectificando Invenies Occultum Lapiiderm”, Latin for “Visit the interior parts of the earth ..read more

For over the past 35 years, Mogg Morgan and Mandrake of Oxford Press have been at the forefront of exploring, practicing and communicating about the more dynamic and creative dimensions of occult practice in the broad tradition connected with the legacy of Aleister Crowley. Aleister Crowley and Thelemic Magick by Mogg Morgan Whether you love or loathe the Great Beast 666, if you are a practicing magician in the 21st Century you cannot but be shaped by the seismic impact of his legacy. His poetry, radical exploration of personal boundaries and occult endeavour have been critical in shaping both ..read more

Having done a couple of highly enjoyable podcasts recently related to my new work Chaos Monk: Bringing Magical Creativity to the New Monastic Path I thought I would share those links (Here and Here) and a further excerpt from the book: Art by Greg Humphries from Walking Backwards: The Magical Art of Psychedelic Psychogeography In thinking further about how we might magically engage with movement in both the body and landscape, I recently interviewed my dear friend and magical co-conspirator Julian Vayne regarding his experiments in psychogeography and the role that it played within his own i ..read more

“Women are divinity, women are life, women are jewels.” Yoni Tantra “Within, a Sakta; outwardly a Saivite; in the world a Vaisnava. This is the rule.” Kaula Upanisad Regular readers of this blog will be aware of my previous explorations of the contribution that Mike Magee has made to development of the Thelemic current within the world of contemporary occultism here. Via the impact of the Amookos Order that he founded (the Arcane and Magickal Order Of the Knights Of Shambhala), and his accessible but scholarly translation of core Sanskrit texts, Mike has helped lay a significant foundation f ..read more

The prolific Steve Dee has written a third book! Chaos Monk offers an unexpected fusion of New Monasticism and Chaos Magic, demonstrating that it is possible to simultaneously be devout and fully embedded in the everyday world… Steve writes: This book is an invitation to spiritual intensity. In the face of life’s brevity, it seeks to offer a challenge to consider what truly matters and how we might find skilful means for exploring such a question. As the pace and pressures of daily living seek to crowd out our ability to find space and silence, I believe that those traditions and techniques as ..read more

A few weeks ago I caught Covid-19. The tell-tale double line of the lateral flow test slowly emerged to confirm what I could feel happening. This was the closing of a time-loop that I recall beginning in late 2019. Nikki Wyrd and I had been keeping an eye on an emerging novel disease in China and once the first few cases started turning up elsewhere it was pretty obvious that we were headed towards a global phenomenon. In my office, before First Lock Down, I showed a graph of the infections from the influenza pandemic of 1918 to a colleague and opined that this new disease would likely follow ..read more

Around two decades ago I moved from Brighton on the south coast of England to rural North Devon. I recall searching online in an effort to learn about the place where I’d decided to raise my family and put down roots. Through this research I discovered the tale of the ‘Bideford witches’. Their story, the tale of the last people of England to be executed for the crime of witchcraft, haunted me. The trial of 1682, in common with many others, was the result of a perfect storm of factors and, like most witch trials of the early modern period, was far from a rural mob lynching. Rather, the Bideford ..read more

Introduction Having just convened for the second time after the lockdown with our coven we performed a conjuration of Astaroth – the third time that I have done goetic work in a group and we considered it to be a great success. Without revealing my exact method (I would like people to come along and experience my method for themselves!) we managed to each of us ask Astaroth a question and get a fitting answer. All of us were very happy with what we had achieved! Participants left feeling inspired and empowered. Being a chaos magician I will freely construct my rituals in a creative way to hop ..read more

I have recently been busy doing a cluster of podcasts related to my work as a therapist, the path of Chaos Witchcraft and also my own heretical take on gnostic mythology. This last discussion with the lovely Talk Gnosis channel took me back 5 years to many of the themes regarding dualism and deity that I explored in my book A Gnostic’s Progress. Contemporary attempts to reimagine gnostic practice often get tangled in the dilemma of how literally to engage with primary sources that often seem to be viewing the material realm and the body as being overwhelmingly negative. In both my book and the ..read more