What the fuck is the occult?

how pataphysical

Occult ,noun, meaning secret or hidden knowledge.

They still haven't agreed on what knowledge actually is however.

Also i think occult i think means amount of blood in your shit in medical terminology.
Or it means an actual shit sample.

Role playing game for people who want magic to be real.

Are there any good books on the occult? Is it a subject even worth reading up on?

Stupid

What are you looking to find?

Just listen to robert anton wilson
He is so far the most objective author i have read on the subject.

the anti thesis to all that is holy, wholly.

Think of the reinterpretation of Cain and Able in Demien.

>God curses Cain with a mark on his forehead, to walk the earth with a brand, that any man that smites him down would be smited 7fold or some arbitrary number..

Why the fuck would God give Cain a mark that gives him safety? Occult boi

DnD irl damn

just a bunch of bullshit

C. Wilson's book on the occult is wonderful. For example, he discusses how birds can navigate with great precision across long distances without any tools. How do they accomplish this? Likewise with cats, animals seem to have some kind of intuitive way of sensing, and the question that emerges is why should we be any different? How do we explain deja vu, dreams, and coincidences? He claims that we have an animal past that abides in certain people (poets mostly) but which is largely inaccessible to most people. The task then, if you should like to inquire about reality, is to explore these questions and attempt to recover this knowledge from our past.

how to be a psychopath/sociopath for autists

"The occult" is a misnomer the real verb/noun would be "occultation".
It is in fact a practice of hiding knowledge. This is the magician's craft.

tell me more about this cain shit

Yeah not kidding I'm also a bona fide gay, what am I missing?

Holistic ideas wrapped in poetic sounding words. At it's core it's a pyramid scheme for influence, power, money and pussy that works via a hierarchy of knowledge which in turn creates a hierarchical power structure. Mostly it works in the opposite way that most modern religions preach, by promising wealth, power and pussy, but only if you learn all the secrets, and know how to draw all the symbols and sing all the songs in order to pass to the next step on the ladder. I can't fully call it bulshit because there's some genuine insight and clever ideas in all that but the language it uses is designed to confuse and baffle with ideas that are explained with a lot more clarity in psychology, sociology, physics, etc. text books.

It's more of an alternative to what's considered holy imo.

Like in Genesis, first God created the birds in the sky and the beasts of burden and the plants - the Lord God created the birds in the sky and the beasts of burden and the plants - then Adam names them.

This would imply a difference between God and Lord God (Yahweh), which kind of coincides with, from what I know, the gnostic belief of a god of the world and a real god, Lord God being the god of the world. Or god as it applies to man / Israelis.

what the occult is depends on the occultist. mainly, though, it boils down to psychology.

>Why the fuck would God give Cain a mark that gives him safety?
To stop the cycle of vengeance. Cain couldn't have conceived Enoch without it.

Because Cain is the first penitent

Is Castaneda occult?

No that is shamanism. The only Occult book I've found is Crowley's "Book of Lies.

It's a 19th century meme based on the works of Franz Anton Mesmer. This paradigm was adapted by the Masonic Lodges of the day and gave rise to influental folks like Eliphas Levi, MacGregor Mathers and Aleister Crowley.

The main gist goes something like this. The planets emenate invisible rays which permeates and influence everything on Earth, condensing to form a substance known as the Magnetic Fluid in Mesmerism and Astral Light in occultism.
The purpose of magical training, which includes pseudo-oriental forms of meditation, is to develop a strong willpower and imagination. Ritual is concieved as a theatrical aid to enter into a state of known as Sommanbulism in Mesmerism and trance in occultism, heightening the above mentioned faculties, thereby causing magical phenomena to occur. Jungian psychology and Chaos Magick is an offshoot of this paradigm.

Before Mesmer, there were no such thing as the occult. There was magic to be sure, but it operated from a very different paradigm, mostly rooted in the Graeco-Arabic tradition of Neoplatonism. But don't tell /x/, they're far too Mesmerized by the flowery prose of Levi and Crowley.

He was not pentitent , only fearful of punishment , which was never susbstantiated.

God marks Cain to prevent further murder on his account; thus, the mark of Cain can only be viewed as a gift of protection. Cain is the stronger of the two siblings and clearly blessed because of this.

>mfw the old Hebrew God gets off on murder to appease him

Look into more hermeneutics

>He doesnt know about John Day and alchemy which is the foundation of order of golden dawn.
Manley P Hall
Hermes Trigemestus

Lurk more.

>He doesn't know about John Dee's dependence on Florentine Platonism as systematized by Agrippa and Isaac Cauabon's debunking of the supposed ancient origin of the Corpus Hermetica.

>He doesn't know the Golden Dawn is based on the Cipher Manuscripts and is worthless without the Z Documents

>He doesn't know about the connection between French Mesmerism, Martinism and the Golden Dawn

>Thinks he can understand alchemy out of it's traditional Aristotelian context

This is fun. Will you please write something more for my personal entertainment?

it's wishful thinking for edgy teens

10/10 post. You have a way with words.

>I come from a christian background and am afraid that there might be other options for me than atheism. Really into Sam Harris and stuff. Also, I watched some Stanley Kubrick. Eyes Wide Shut. That guy really knows his stuff.

All "occult" means is "hidden". I don't think the word was even really used very much until the modern era. Nowadays it can refer to anything from mysticism, to kabbalah, to astrology, to ceremonial magic, to animal magnetism/hypnosis.

Nowadays, it seems like the kids are all into Thelema and Chaos Magick. They don't seem too serious though. I'd recommend just reading some Plato (especially Phaedo, Timaeus, or Phaedrus), since it's pretty much all based in that anyway. Even Christianity, which is in many ways a watered down version of Platonism, mixed with Judaism.

Don't get me wrong, a lot of the things Jesus said were pure gold. But the rest of the new testament is pretty tacky.

>read Baudelaire
>the introductory poem straight up mentions "Satan Trismegistos"

Hm

It's almost like every major artist before the 21st century was into this kind of thing

It's retro fringe science.

> Isaac Cauabon's debunking of the supposed ancient origin of the Corpus Hermetica.

tricky to believe this one. hermes trismegistus is mentioned outside of the hermeticum.

Yeats' A Vision. Automatic writing, gaining access to a system of metaphors, etc. Whatever, it worked for him.

He certainly is, in great abunadance in the Medieval Arabic tradition in particular. Kevin Van Bladel has written an excellent book on the topic, but that's beyond my point.

It was a widespread belief that Hermes Trismegistus was an ancient Egyptian sage, contemporary to Moses, if not older.

Isaac Causabon did a philological analysis of the language of the Corpus Hermetica and came to the conclusion that it couldn't be older than the 3rd century CE.

Amongst other things, it utilizes technical terms and philosophical concepts from the Greek tradition, such as Aristotle's Unmoved Mover in Poimandres.

Thats what I meant by "debunking". Brian Copenhaver goes into greater detail with this in his translation of the Hermetica.

I'm surprised people still fall for the Thrice Greatest meme.

Anyone here read Julius Evola - Hermetic Tradition? Would you recommend it?

i thought it was pretty well understood hermes trismegistus wasnt an individual but a school of thought, and that it was a collective pseudonym. the fact that the hermeticum we have today was written by a greek in alexandria doesnt necessarily negate the content. greek and egyptian scholars were in dialog for centuries, the greek pantheon contains egyptian gods after all.

I call the collection of the undefined laws Metaphysics. It might be possible to manipulate aspects of this dimensional projection through tweaking parameters we cannot see or understand without diligent study and practice, but I would be the last person to say so if I could pull it off.

Lotsa weird phenomena out there. Some underlying set of rules must be present. Logic runs the stars,not hope after all.

If you could pull it off you would be a god. Otherwise you're just manipulating your experience, not the world.

Occultism or magic in general is pretty interesting. It has always been about the secret sharing of knowledge among the initiated. Then for political reasons magic started to become throwing fireballs and cursing people, this, of course, gives you a lot more respect from kings and villagers alike. Once Christianity gained control over Europe occultism died out as it was perceived as blasphemous. In this era it was mostly sustained by Arabs and Jews, around the 17th century is when occultism started making a come-back among Europeans; we have lots of important people, like Issac Newton, who studied the occult in depth. I would say that it's mostly the lowering of persecution towards occultists that started this comeback, there wasn't a particular advancement in the field that made it important again.

What gave it its strong comeback in the 20th century, and even a fair amount of credibility was the developments at that time. Kant's transcendental idealism seemed to be a good argument for the mental nature of the Universe, something the Hermeticists believed in. We also had psycho-analysis, and particularly the works of Jung; which gave a burst of respect to the old myths, and even pointed towards some form of metaphysical conscious phenomena. It never really got mainstream, but around 1900-1950 was probably the golden age. A fun fact is that the Nazi party was originally funded by an occult secret-society, so they had quite a lot more resources than they do today. Once the cold-war set in, and materialism dominated the earth, occultism took a nose dive.

If you want to get into the occult I suggest reading the Kybalion, it's a short and easy read.

A good read, but I'm not convinced of a lot of the things you said. First, although it is true that there were Nazis who were also interested in the occult, it seems nearly implausible based on available evidence to say that their origins were in the occult.

Also, Kant would in no way have boosted interest in magic. He was not in the strict sense an idealist, but rather a formalist. His concept of the thing-in-itself means that nobody ever really knows anything. That means we never have real knowledge or wisdom, outside of awareness of our own mental structures. This seems incompatible with most mystical systems I'm aware of.

Finally, Christianity doesn't seem incompatible with occultism since many of the most influential occultists in the western world have been Christian. Think Agrippa, Lilly, Pseudo-Dionysus, &c. Similarly, there have been Muslims, Jews, and even Pagans who were opposed to occultism.

It's worth discussing the anti-occultist Pagans, since typically Paganism is presented as being inherently occultist/pro-magic. Plotinus, for instance, seemed to have thought that ALL Theurgy (magic) was sorcery. Sorcery, for Plotinus means that somebody is trying to escape from fate, or gain illegitimate influence over the world. Of course, this was countered by Iamblichus, for whom Theurgy (magic) was an indispensable element of religion. Then Rome fell and the line was broken. Maybe Hypatia knew some pretty important stuff. We'll never know because she was killed by the Christian Fundies of her day.

There is magick book 4. There are gnostic text. There are random books on magic.

Thelema is definitely not based on Plato. It's based on Jewish mysticism and Gnosticism. Chaos magick is based completely on Gnosisticm from what I've read.

You likely have no idea what Jesus is taking about and even less when you take into account the scripture found in the Nag Hammadi library.

Looks like we've got a Thelemite here! Anyway, sorry, my post wasn't written clearly enough. I should really start editing these things more carefully. What I meant to say is that practically ALL western thought is based in Plato, whether eso- or exo-teric. I haven't read enough Crowley to say whether or not it departs from that system or not, but I know of quite a few Philosophers who claim to have surpassed Plato, but fell into the same traps that he showed us clearly how to supercede.

Now, of course Plato himself was influenced by Pythagoras, Oracles (whether Chaldaean or otherwise), and others.

Gnosticism as a theology seems to claim that there is a demiurge, but that s/he is evil. So it's basically stuck with an eternal rebellion kind of perspective. Would you say that's accurate?

>if you get cucked, you win

>Maybe kants subtler occult contributions are really universal maxims, and his thesis-antithesis-synthesis

I once had a chance meeting with Harlan Ellison when he came into the supermarket where I worked. I asked him to guess what I was listening to on my walkman,he replied, "some garbage",but was surprised to see a cassette tape of his collection of readings of Midnight at the Sunken Cathedral. So we had a brief conversation,which started with if I believed in Ghosts,some touchstone to determine if I was an imbecile or not. I said I did,and he dismissed me with a sad shake of his head. But I continued:

I believe in ghosts. That is to say,I believe we are made up of atoms,and they are made up of protons,neutrons and electrons,and they in turn are made of smaller bits that are only in this dimension part of the time. I also believe a living body generates a unique electrical field,and the head holds the highest complexity of the patterns they form. Thetefore I may conjecture that under times of great stress or duress the electrical activity increases,and could not the electrons firing about our neurons leaves echoes in our spacetime dimension and these could be considered ghosts,wandering places they knew and stuck in their temporal rut. And lastly,I believe there are aspects of physics we as yet do not understand.

This impressed him,or so I thought. Sort of fits into my view of Metaphysics. Years later,I went Ghost Hunting in a Florida town called St Augustine, a place over 500 years old. This process was to travel at night to places with a lot of history and blast the area with flash photography, to catch the distortions revealed with the photonic bath. Mostly these were "orbs" like in this pic. Could they not be electron patterns left from.a traumatized brain of long ago?

Ezekiel 9:4

>Look into more hermeneutics
no u

>a mark on his forehead
The 6-nose is the mark. There was no declaration about what it was.
Tefillin, however, is a cube you put on your forehead or hand.

>First, although it is true that there were Nazis who were also interested in the occult, it seems nearly implausible based on available evidence to say that their origins were in the occult.
Checkout the 'Thule Society'. It helped fund the young party. Although I think there's some autist on YouTube who has the word Thule in his name, so that kind of soils the fantasticness of the entire thing.

>Also, Kant would in no way have boosted interest in magic. He was not in the strict sense an idealist, but rather a formalist. His concept of the thing-in-itself means that nobody ever really knows anything. That means we never have real knowledge or wisdom, outside of awareness of our own mental structures. This seems incompatible with most mystical systems I'm aware of.
I guess I should have focused more on idealism in general than name dropping Kant. A big principle of idealism is 'mentalism'. The hermetic understand of the universe is that it was mentally created by The All; I presume this corresponds to the dreaming god of the far east.
>Finally, Christianity doesn't seem incompatible with occultism since many of the most influential occultists in the western world have been Christian. Think Agrippa, Lilly, Pseudo-Dionysus, &c. Similarly, there have been Muslims, Jews, and even Pagans who were opposed to occultism.
You're correct in that Christianity isn't totally incompatible with occultism. It's just the Christianity was very hostile to esotericism. There are plenty of Christian mystic traditions, and all the Abrahamic traditions have some form of esoteric art.

God punished Cain with exile, but gave him a chance at redemption by protecting his life with the mark.