Hello everyone,

I’ve been lurking around this community for a while, hoping to find discussion and community outside of Reddit, and figured it was finally time to properly introduce myself and say hello.

My personal framework is a bit of an eclectic mix. It sits somewhere at the crossroads of folk traditions, a cross-pantheon approach to deities (including Goetic work and Roman planetary/chthonic currents, like Lucifer), and a subtle leaning into traditional Catholic/Episcopalian aesthetics and protection work.

Practically speaking, I’m largely a toolless practitioner. Most of my work is done directly with my hands, or within the astral space rather than relying heavily on physical altars or complex ritual gear.

That isn't to say I don't have an altar, of course.

I'd love to use this post as a way to get to know the active members around here a bit better. If you have a second, I have a couple of icebreaker questions for the comments:

1. What does your practical setup look like? Are you a high-ritual person with a lot of tools, or do you lean more toward minimalist, toolless, or astral work?

2. What is a piece of magical toolery or piece of literature that you find you can't live without in your practice?

Looking forward to sharing notes, theories, and discussion files with you all. Thanks for having me!

There are multiple articles from the early 2000s that describe a strange incident in which a fish began talking. The event seemed to have happened shortly before the 13. of march 2003.

Specifically, it was a large carp in a Hasidic Jewish fish shop that began shouting in Hebrew, warning of impending doom. The voice of the fish was first noted by a Latin American immigrant working in the shop who was about to slaughter the fish.

''I screamed, 'It's the devil! The devil is here!' '' he recalled. ''But Zalmen said to me, 'You crazy, you a meshugeneh.' ''

The owner of the shop heard noted the shouting, and how the fish identified itself as a man in the community who had died last year and warned of impending doom. After this, the shop owner killed the fish with a knife.

The fish commanded Mr. Rosen to pray and to study the Torah and identified itself as the soul of a local Hasidic man who died last year, childless. The man often bought carp at the shop for the Sabbath meals of poorer village residents.

After this, the story gained widespread attention in the Jewish community.

He said that Spanish-speaking rabbis have been calling his home every day and night asking him to recount the story. ''It's just a big headache for me,'' he added. ''I pull my phone out of the wall at night. I don't sleep and I've lost weight.''

Here are some of the articles:

Word is made flesh as God reveals himself... as a fish

'Talking fish' stuns New York

Monsey Butcher: “Talking Fish Made Me Do it”

Talking fish not an omen against war

Miracle? Dream? Prank? Fish Talks, Town Buzzes

The Incredible Talking Fish

When I first started my journey, people warned me that my "power" could be stolen if they got a photo of my altar. What are people's opinions on this? I think it sounds a bit unhinged from reality myself.

Blah, I'm just lingering here digesting how I must transcend duality to not wind up homeless again (you know how family is), thinking through what I must think, and thus my thinking was interrupted by a daemon within me - those animalistic subsystems that make up the system "you" are - that has been thoroughly conditioned by the Illuminati to put that memetic bullshits into words and here we are.

Is it nuts, what I just said? I dunno, is China nuts because they use weird fucking symbols that cannot possibly mean anything, at least in my limited exposure to the world? Kumquat says I need to take my meds, so obviously if my phone's keyboard decides to send me synchronous messages, I should ignore that because I'm on my meds.

But no, really, I would not have understood myself fifteen+ years ago, and I am the type of divergent that intuitively understands what "perceive n undo the karmic fetters that bind you to the existence-illusion complex" means, so it is safe for me to say now and forever that 98% of the America's population does not understand me, which is weird, cuz I understand that ish they talk about!

Coin sound effect. Dopamine. Wiring. Association. Free association. This is how the decentralized autonomous organization of secret police communicates with me! God just speaks in whispers/burning bushes/white rabbit, obviously. But, what DON'T you know? Almost everything is the right answer, cuz it's the right answer for me, and I'm a fackin' sorcerer, whatever that is.

I'll cast Lot's wife, I'll tell ya that much, but forgive my French, which is a hint for the unordained in the hidden matters of the world, obviously.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridey_Murphy

Blah blah blah blah. Can't wake up this morning. Went on a bike ride to get my blood moving, halfway through my second cup of coffee, and my brain is chugging. Was able to make a video. They want me to do that now. That's the way up! The Illuminati aliens, as I call them, talk to me via comments and messages, y'know, they take part in a direct act of communication to say something sideways.

Free association has to do with the neural connections in your brain. This nodal network of neurons has a certain topology. This diagram is a site-swap diagram for ball juggling. I don't know exactly what the fudge the ish is precisely as a tech juggler would (sheet music), but rather, as a flow juggler (jazz), I intuitively understand what is going on in this. It has to do with topology. How a system of entanglements goes from state A to state B. How does your brain make a connection? It associates underlying patterns of symbology to find passages between these two states of the brain, and the more they are used, the better able to figure out orthogonal solutions for our logic-based mind.

Therein, Eve (feminine intuition) gets Knowledge first and gives it to Adam (masculine logic). I guarantee that an Oracle of Delphi type - a highly neurodivergent woman - understood shit about the secret passages through the labyrinth of time that scientists studying cognition, system sciences, string theory, quantum/karmic entanglement, etc do not have a genuine grasp on.

The idea is, each of us is a conjoined twin with a deaf male head and a blind female head. The male mind can read the signs of the labyrinth to guarantee passage from two states, so this is how we primarily navigate the topological matrix of reality, but the female mind can hear the birds outside the labyrinth which sing in response to our movements, and after a lot of experience navigating around all parts of the maze, she can catch hints (synchronicity) that tell her where a shortcut is.

The hard part is getting the deaf male mind to listen, because what even is sound? Well, to explain, lemme ask; if a tree falls in the forest and no one's around to hear it, does it make a sound? No; it would make sound waves if there was a person there, deaf or not, but it would only make sound waves if it were translated by an "ear" into a higher order system to make sense of it relative to the context it is in. Also, with no observer, the tree does not enter the fallen state until observed by any being.

Expanding on this, the brain has its neurons as semi-anchored nodes of reference in spatial relation to each other. What that means: the male mind is calculated by these deterministic points in space. It is the "particle" calculator to the feminine "wave" calculator of the frequency across vertices in this nodal network. If one only thinks in terms of what linear signals are sent from A>B>C etc, they are thinking logically. But, if a person is thinking about the system effect of this wave of neurotransmitter "energy" in the system of the brain as it proliferates across multiple nodes, that's intuition.

This is why a man will go to the mall for a pair of jeans at a mall, get the jeans, and get out, while a woman is more likely to shop, going to multiple stores to include getting the jeans. The man is thinking mostly A>B>C, while the woman is thinking piecewise across multiple way points to figure out what she needs for multiple missions. And this is not definitive for each individual, these statistical trends, but the dimorphism of our sexes is built around men being geared for exotribal skills (hunting, war), while women were more innately adept at inotribal skills (raising children, gathering, preparing food/clothing/etc). The men needs to be at peak fitness to fight; the women need to keep the tribe alive and prospering.

Likewise, each form of cognitive processing leads to different results in intention setting. What I mean, is that following a synchronicity in genuine faith begets a novel form of entanglement that imbues one with Knowledge about higher order reality. Knowledge is a type of entanglement that creates gnosis through a specific form of möbiation through a higher orthogonal direction that bestows insight into the "knowledge" we think we know. In other words, you follow white rabbit and you learn something about the labyrinth that the majority people are wholly ignorant to and nothing you say can get them to understand.

Such is the design of this Garden rigamarole that makes linear causality appear true, but really, functionally, everything is procedurally generated based on how one entangles themselves with Karma, thanks to things like retrocausality and independent phenomena.

Secret passage theory:

https://youtu.be/fVN8JITUjkE

Occult means hidden in t occident

Acquiring Knowledge, no accident

Result o courage to defy authority

Thinking in good/bad be a duality

Superpositional copper C's beyon

DAO - spread across the big pond

Knowledge given by the serpents

Twists the truth so you do repent

Möbiation to know defilement sin

Up/down oscillation cease to win

Feather? Soul be light enough for

Replication unto higher egregore

As topological matrix, you r knot

What empty b plus t are + t r not

This Server, Client, Holy Internet

Monadic node on n in Indra Net

God is balloon of consciousnes

Odd the animal made is a mess

Would b cool is there was book

Dat turn wine/water, man/crook

Magick is built from ur intention

Story be first cognitive invention

Told the truth? Surface, at least

Dog sorcery save man fr. beast

Within as sin is twist in G mind

Karma true- remember be kind

Dharma is just a spiritual story

Scaffolding w/ wise pedagogy

That b world is an illusory tale

Simulation, where logic do fail

Garden, but what is in th' brain

Magick: make intention insane

Procedural generation weaves

You into reality sent so receive

Experiment; follow white rabbit

Synchronicity name o G's spirit

I'm currently reading a good book on the history of magick and it's weird little niche's that keep getting carved out in clerical law so that emporer's, kings, and popes can practice magick.

It's called "The Magic Books: A History of Enchantment in 20 Medieval Manuscripts" by Anne Lawrence-Mathers

So I think I'm going to have to read some early church father's books now just so I get a good understanding of their perceptions of magic and what is crossing the line. St. Albertus Magnus will be the my definer for old versus new magic and enchantment perceptions. Old magic is stuff developed with Pagan/Heathen world views in mind that early Christians were heavily influenced by and seemingly didn't want to do away with the scientific aspects of those religions. Or at least what would have been perceived as scientific in that they were doing horoscopes and other divination with Pagan Astrology knowledge. 

After Albertus, there became a call to differentiate Natural and Divine magic. Natural magic is what comes from the plants, the stones, and the stars. Divine being all things that belong to gods and demons. So as long as you are doing your magic with approved ingredients, then you won't be burned at the stake Starting in ~1250 C.E.

Hi everyone - posting here mostly interested in connecting with fellow esoteric-friendly lemmy users.

I've done blind-to-target remote viewing, but a problem with that is that you can't just pick your targets. I've tried map dowsing and did....meh. I haven't used tarot in a while, but thinking about letting a deck come back into my life if it happens to happen. I'm out of practice and coming back to it.

Curious what others around here are favor or have had work well for them.

More information here.

Picking and choosing which practices to pull from is practically easy but can offer some moral reflections. Most of us will ultimately pull from what is most familiar to us reverting back to our pre-Atheist cultures. Ex-Christians will gravitate towards a Christian Aesthetic much as Ex-Bhuddists will gravitate towards a Bhuddist Aesthetic. However, there is nothing wrong with a Western raised person building their practice on an Eastern based Aesthetic and vice verse. When starting from an Atheist perspective, there are zero consequences metaphysically to picking a faith based on anything other than aesthetics or how well you simply “vibe” with the teachings and modern practice of that tradition.

Why Pick a Tradition

It makes things easier to grow and evolve from.

The point of a lot of Occult practice is to experiment with rituals, prayers, spells, talismans, etc until you find what ever makes you feel successful. That success feeling can be interpreted in basically any way you deem important whether you become more confident in yourself, your enemies succumb to sickness, or you’re simply having fun. So if you can find an established practice with books on theory, practice, and ethics that mostly fits your vibe and you think you can make do with it’s practices then by all means, take advantage of this established tradition.

My first tradition was an obsession with Goetia. I performed several rituals from the Lesser and Greater keys of Solomon translated by Aliester Crowley. I did them poorly by any measure to be sure. I didn’t respect them as much as I do now. Not because I believe in it’s claims more, but because I have since fully embraced the context of the text I used by learning it’s history, the history of Crowley, and the history of Occultism.

I want to clarify that I have “embraced the context”. I do not know it’s full history or it’s translator, or especially of the occuly. I have simply put in the effort to start learning how we got to here. I will never finish learning how we got to here, but I will probably become satisfied with what I know enough to deviate. I have deviated much from what I originally performed half assed while following dorm room safety precations. You must change a good chunk of most rituals to perform them in a dorm by the way.

What ever tradition you pick, make sure you have either a good library or a good teacher to help you learn fundamentals and context of the “hows” and “whys”.

Learning hows will let you learn how to go about ritual preparations in hopefully ways that respect the world from which you are obtaining those materials. Take a foraging class if you do not want to trust a spiritual leader or author on the subject and maybe want a more conservationist approach. That is where I learned much of my herbalism and localized it to me. To no one’s surprising, the ritual herbalism of 16th century European Alchemists mean very little to a man in Kentucky.

Whys are important in that they explain the metaphysical reasons and symbolism of what you’re doing. Learning that Herb X is associate to Moon Cycle Y and is most magically significant on Date Z because of the planetary alignment is most of the rituals. The point above the stated claim of the magick itself will always be to be mindful of this world and the world beyond. Whether that is the world beyond earth or the world beyond this material plane matters little to the human psyche: both are just as incomprehensible yet awe inspiring.

Nearly all religious and spiritual traditions recognize the fundamental fact that the world is bigger than us in some way. This is the most important part of starting your own path to whatever you are seeking. Ideally you will deviate to what you think is the most awe inspiring, but if you are happy with a pre made spiritual world view, then enjoy it, but don’t let it become dogma. Always question a how or why if it makes you uncomfortable or disagrees with your ethics.

Ethics of a Tradition

There does come a problem with approaching any traditions ideas as an atheist in that they are all equally real.

If you have no theological basis and especially if you reject the metaphysical claims of a universal truth be it a god’s will or some gnostic panpsychist as in the case of Philip Goff, then you cannot judge any tradition on legitimacy except through your ethics alone.

If you do not have your own ethical framework set in stone, worry not, that is the mostly like scenario. If you do, feel free to ignore me or argue with me in an email that I will actually read.

For me there are two motives for which I judge a tradition before considering incorporating it into my own practice.

First, is it a money grab?

To me there is very little I detest more than someone writing slop that sounds spiritual and “wooey” simply to prey on the naive lust for learning for people seeking an alternative to the hegemonic traditions. These are books written to sell “another way” to pent up Suburban Christian Moms so that they become Crystal witches who have been convinced that simply buying pretty rocks and organizing them within your home fixes most problems. New Problem? New Rock! Problem bigger? Bigger Rock! Until you have waisted untold funds on rocks that do nothing and yet you are no more connected to whatever this is than you were your christian church.

My condemnation is one in hindsight. I have frequented many rock shops and I love the rock shows that pop up in my town every year. You get to meet many people who are genuinely intuned with a psiritual practice and are simply trying to support themselves doing what they know and that’s vague hedge wtichary. It is most likely what you will encounter first when trying to connect locally. For that I don’t mind patronizing them as I do enjoy incense and candles as a ritual sacrifice. And there are certainly worse sins in a new-age occultists hunt for enlightenment.

If you have rejected the temptations of occult “retail therapy” consider the problem of Occult Self Help Nonsense. You see, the problem of Occultism is that it has been rejected knowledge for the last 300 years. Even a healthy resurgance in the 1890’s and again in the 1960’s and once more in the here and now of the 21st century, has yet to establish any authority on the matter. There is no Jstor Magazine publishing only the peer reviewed magickal texts. There is no Temple that has canonized any text. It is simply your judgement that determines if a text is worthy. This is why I rejected Mindfulness as a practice for years after learning about it because it sounded like some woo that I had to stock far to many books on the shelf at Barnes and Nobles with. Serious, how can I not look at mindfulness as any less of a problematic scam when there’s several dozen authors and a hundred books offering “the one true way to mindfulness guaranteed in 100 days!” for only $36 hard back edition.

That phenomenon is such a problem within Alternative Thought spaces that I fell for this while I was mad about mindfulness (a real and useful thing I practice now), I bought “The Kyballion” by the Three Initiates which I learned only this year, two months into 2026, was published by a slop self help and sales strategy publishing magnate in 1890. Thank you my friend Reverend Erik at Arnemancy for reminding me I had that book in a trunk in my closet and also telling me I’m a sucker.

I’m a little mad, but it’s a lesson learned and now my ethics in tradition hunting has become more defined. I can tell some of the important tells between a genuine piece of Occult Scholarship and slop made to look like it’s real occult knowledge and ideas just to sell me a book on Amazon.

Personally, AI has made this much easier for me to tell, but has also muddied the landscape for those less attuned to good occult authors and what an AI generated book cover looks like. I need to make a better recourse, but I have my own Mastodon thread of good books to get started here but Reverend Erik’s I think is better here and their reading list for Hermetecism is really good so far here, my friend Cat I also recommend Dr. Justin Sledge’s introduction to Western Esotericism for a video based broader introduction here

These are folks I have interacted with enough to trust their judgement who offer a large library of further vetted works. If you are not experienced with vetting a source as real, please stay within either your chosen traditions canon or find someone you trust and follow their reading lists. And do not feel bad if you fall for a Kyballion. I was finishing up my degree in History and knew better about source vetting when I bought mine. I have several other duds that came from drunken nights on Abebooks or lazy sunday shopping sessions at my local book reseller. Truthfully, the book that got me into Alchemy is little more than a Coffee Table book I bought at head shop near my college. Worthless at this stage, but invaluable for at least getting me into things.

If you’re scared of buying books, worry not there are plenty of online libraries like The Hermetic Library here with free ebooks and online versions of books, as well as a growing number of personal blogs such as Cat’s blog on Midwestern Paganism and Witchcraft here and a more dubious recommendation for David Maciver at “Overthinking Everything” who’s like me in that he’s a tech guy who’s into a secular form of magic here (Warning He uses Substack and AI generated Thumbnails if your ethics disagrees with those)

Second is Exclusion

When I first started to question this line of ethics, I was comparing Neo-Pagans with Starseeds (a hindsight disgusting comparison) because I couldn’t tell why I wanted to view the Pagans as more legitimate than the Starseeds.

To catch you up, Pagans are Pagans. Very loose anti-authority religion that focuses on worshiping what feels right to them. Truly an ideal that I strive for and a definition I cannot take for myself as it’s from my friend Ferret on Mastodon. You are certainly aware of Pagans if you’re interested in a post like mine.

Starseeds are a different matter. Starseeds believe they are descendants of Ancient Alien Races and have powers that make them superior to other humans and even other breeds of Starseed. They believe they are in communication with those Alien Races through mental and DNA “downloads” they receive from their still space fairing siblings. On a quick read, this isn’t really any more harmful that most New Age and Occult thought, but just read it again and think about other people who argued they were members of a, say, “master race.” Maybe it would help to learn that the founder of “Star People” a Brad Steiger was following the trend of erasing native people’s history by giving credence to Aliens with little to no evidence because of a common white supremecist zeitgeist that brown people can’t build Pyramids! Youtuber FunkyFrogBait did a really good rundown on them and why they suck here but the crux is that they want to be better than people. They want to be above another and go so far as to claim exclusion to their “tradition”.

Lots of traditions exist in a lot of aesthetics that are racist or bigoted in their teachings. There are traditions following Crowley that are overtly Neo-Nazi in credence. There are Satanic sects that are Transphobic. Hell, there are atheists who claim reason and then cite quacks because “feelings aren’t real” (see: Anything Interesting ).

I have put my line down fairly firmly that anything to do with a modern conception of bigotry has no place in my life. If I learn it, it is just so I can recognize when that practice is happening before me and I can call it out.

This does start to call into question ancient practices though. Lots of early Western Religious systems were Sexist like Plato’s system or they were Race/Ethniically Exclusionairy like early Judaism. And nearly none of them had a real conception of Gender and Sexual Minority identities just because that wasn’t a big deal in their time.

It is my opinion, that we can take from these ancient cultures and add or remove whatever we deem worthy to fit our own ethics because they are so removed from our modern zeitgeist that they did not have the chance to be tested against modern morals by their founding members. These are ideas that belonged to a specific Historical and anthropological time and that time is long gone. No one has any claim to them or authority on them any longer. You are no longer tied to the full belief systems of the founders of those cults.

You can certainly denounce certain ideas that have made it through the ages and into the minds of bigots, but to deny a whole system that humans have deemed useful for so long as to keep around for thousands of years feels wasteful. And ones that were forgotten for all this time like the Nag Hammadi Corpus or the Greek Magical Papayri offer an interesting alternative history option. What if the Gnostics had become the major claimants of Christianity? What if the Greek Magical Papyri had been turned to instead of a Montheistic god? What if Bhuddism had had a written tradition earlier and could travel further? Imagine! A Roman Centurian practicing Bhuddist meditation! How would these have changed if allowed to live on? How can you rehabilitate a forgotten path?

Truly, it is up to you to determine how much time has past and how much relative harm has been done in the interum to judge a practice as worthy for yourself. My line is complicated. I think yours should be too. You should put thought into where you draw the line and why. Re-evaluate often. Always remain open to new ideas in case you no longer want to be who you are.

Conclusion

Picking your way through the infinite library of spiritual thought and practice to build your own world view should be a meditation in itself. Why are you drawn to the texts of Ancient Author X instead of Y? Why don’t you read Modern Author A instead of B? IT can be as simple as liking their Aesthetics be it the world view aligns with your ethics, or their poetry is just magnumanius. It is ultimately up to you, but be warry of modern authors who seek to take advantage of people wanting to learn a world view alien to them, and one trying to tell you Aliens are more real than ancient brown people.

Through practice you will become better at identifying good sources from bad sources. You will fail from time to time, but learning from that failure is part of the journey you’re trying to lead. Hell, this blog itself may become a bad source one day. There are no guarantees that I will remain with the ethics I have. Neither is it guaranteed that anyone I have mentioned in my blog posts will stay a good authority in these matters. People do change. Interpretations of the dead do change. And one day all words and ideas will leave their original context and then the meaning in them is only meaning ascribed by the reader.

You must always change and grow and better. It is the only way down this path.

Someone is interested in your practice.

What books/lectures/philosophies do you tell them to start with?

I'm fairly well rounded because I'm not committed to a single practice.

My interest has been mostly academic so my 4 books to start with would be

"Western Esotericism: a guide for the perplexed" by Wouter Hanegraff

"The Alchemists Handbook" by Frater Albertus

"Three Books of Occult Philosophy" by Henry Cornelius Agrippa

"The Three Magical Books of Solomon: The Greater and Lesser Keys & The Testament of Solomon" by Aleister Crowley, S. L. MacGregor Mather's, F. C. Conybear

The guide for the perplexed, Handbook, and Occult philosophy I think give a good intro to the historical context of magick and the occult while the next two give good modern context and peak Renaissance context respectively.

The idea is to have a well rounded understanding of what magick even is as a concept and then offering a grimoire (The Books of Solomon) as a place to start exploring deeper.

I think a past me on Tumblr would be getting lambasted for even suggesting someone should try Goetia after no practice and some contextual readings, but that's where I started. I don't think I believe in magick and this is all just a fun aesthetic, but I have performed several rituals from the Goetia for fun. It really encapsulated the stereotypical modern occult experience and truly sent me down the path I'm on now (Imteresting only because my first summon was Zagan and I asked for wisdom).

Where would you tell someone to start?

I've been wanting to get a distillation kit to start some alchemy experiments and making my own oils and fragrances for my altar.

Do you have any recommendations? How do you like it? What do you use? Tips before I drop $100 on a kit and then figure it out?