In 2024, the hegemony of the always-online occultnik shut-in has come to an end for all but the most diehard identity performers, incels (and femcels), parasocial masturbators, and medicated incompetents still lurking on platforms like Tumblr, TikTok, Patreon, and YouTube. Covid was their heyday, but once social distancing peaked and social life slowly started to go back to normal, they had to slink back to the basement.
Unfortunately, on
magical-ish platforms—I hesitate to say “in the magical community” anymore,
since most of what passed for that went south after the so-called “blog
renaissance” got destroyed by social media—a certain kind of annoying cretin
persists. To be honest, this kind of
fool comes with the territory, since a large chunk of the occult book industry
makes a living off his credulousness and need to feel clever. Think: 101 Ways to Sell Your Soul and Win
or Arcane Seduction Spells or, in a more contemporary guise, Non-Appropriative
Trans Witchcraft to Fight the Patriarchy.
Whatever the zeitgeist makes trendy, you can bet lots of occult books
will emerge along the lines of money, sex, and petty personal power dressed up in
those fashions.
But once you see this imbecile,
you’ll never unsee him. He comes in two
distinct flavors: vanilla and edgelord, which ultimately amount to the same
thing, since they emanate from the same personality defects. Goes like this:
I feel that, on
some level, the world has given me a raw deal.
I’ve discovered the occult and am (probably, though this is never
certain) sensitive to magical energy. I
am determined to use this sensitivity to fuck over people I resent, get money,
and play a rapey seduction game with those who otherwise wouldn’t give me the
time of day. I don’t want to put in the
long hours of study and practice to acquire genuine magical capacities (since I
don’t really care about anything deeper than the above goals). So I’m going to look for occult shortcuts in
the form of existing patterns, formulas, and workings—even better if I can
contact the authors of those and quiz them about their ideas without having to
do any research of my own. Yes, I’m ignorant,
lazy, and unwilling to even do a Google search to learn the proper definitions. But the world owes me!
This person is
useless. His “occult” short-cutting and
sense of entitlement will turn out to be as effective as everything else he
attempts. Maybe he knows how to take a shit
properly (one hopes). With that as his
one skill, everything may have begun to resemble it. But the world owes him money, love, and a
sense of authority, certainly. Therefore,
he may also be proficient in using these assumptions to annoy anyone who has
the misfortune of encountering him—in real life, but far more likely online. He’s not a troll. He’s just an immature consumer displacing a
certain amount of space for a time while he fantasizes. He’s an unaware LARPer. He’s having a nice, long wank that might last
a few decades.
Why in the world am I
spending time on this sort of person in a blog post? I’m tired of him. Very tired—as much for how much he personally
annoys me as for the ignorance he perpetuates.
Before you dismiss this post as merely a personal rant about an
occult-world cliché, consider the opposite of this personality type. Success in operative magic (results-based sorcery)
always depends on an almost diametrically opposite approach. Think about it. Nothing (and this very much includes magical
work) can be accomplished without a certain amount of risk, effort, and strain. Anyone telling you different is selling you
an inferior product.
Operative work, the
kind that creates tangible, measurable effects in the practitioner’s perceptual
fields and ultimately in the objective universe, is magnified in proportion to
one’s courage. And it works like that the
more you do it. This is, incidentally, why
rebellion and opposition are such key concepts on the Left Hand Path. They’re always-available power sources. But it’s true for any spiritual system that
seeks change: you have to put yourself out there. You have to suffer (in the old sense of the
term, which is as much to “undertake” or “withstand” as it is to experience discomfort). As Louis Martinié famously put it, “First comes the working; then
comes the work.” To even get to a personal
understanding of what Martinié’s
talking about, you have to be brave, turn off OnlyFans, and leave the basement.
Matt Zane, in Transpersonal
Satanism, puts it like this: “If necessary steps are not taken to willfully
remove the self from what society or social circles impose, the external environment
will define it.” In other words, make
your own choices or someone will make them for you. Magic is about causing a change in the self
on some level, which may cause comparable changes beyond the self in the
world. This is inherently transgressive,
since the world (including the social world of consensus culture) always tends
toward conformity. The mere act of magic
is a small violation of that consensus.
Don’t believe me? Try loudly invoking
Odin in the lobby of the largest bank downtown and see how connected you feel
to society. Even better, try it in the
waiting room of your healthcare provider.
As the quote from
Proverbs at the top of this post points out, the way of transgressors is
hard. Indeed. In the words of a radical religious text that
has been used to enforce some degree of social conformity since it began to be
compiled, yes, transgress and you will taste salt. But the alternative is ultimately worse. And so we see the occultnik consumer who
thinks he has a clever take on getting paid and laid. He is undeniably a fool. He wants to transgress, but he wants it to be
easy. That’s not how it works. Back to WitchTok and the latest book on
socially conscious non-appropriative teen witchcraft. That’ll work, for sure.