The Occult Expert Who Cannot Do Magic
How information overload made practical skill harder to find
Since the arrival of the internet, occultists have been flooded with information which would have been unthinkable 30 years ago. Academia has also started to take notice of occultism as important historical or cultural narrative, and suddenly there are academic papers on every aspect of occultism.
When I was just starting in the 1980s, there was a limited amount of information, and you had to pay top dollar in the few occult bookshops that were brave enough to exist against a Christian backlash. We had to read “occult classics” such as Dion Fortune’s Mystical Cabbalah because that was all there was. If you were lucky to find yourself in an order, you focused entirely on what was taught there.
That scarcity had obvious problems. Bad material spread, teachers became little popes and secrecy protected ignorance as efficiently as anything useful. Yet scarcity did one decent thing: it forced students to stick with the material they had and use it.
They repeated exercises, fought unclear instructions, compared results and learned by sticking around. They could not dump a system every fortnight because some podcast made another tradition sound sexier. But they sometimes had to live with bogus teachings because that was the best their teacher could offer.
The modern student has the opposite curse. They can download a PDF library before breakfast and gather three initiatory systems by lunch. Traditions now sit on hard drives (usually unread), in paid courses, and private internet groups. Manuscripts once needing travel and contacts can be found in minutes.
This should have created a generation of terrifying occult operators. Instead, it has produced too many people who know many names and command almost nothing.
Instead of competence, this new knowledge has created a new monster: a noisy expert class that can cite everything and do almost nothing. Its members have become fluent in occulture without becoming especially capable at magic.
Such an occultist might have an academic qualification (often in anthropology) and can explain Mathers and Regardie, compare versions of the Key of Solomon, fix your Hebrew and sneer at dodgy lineage claims and precisely where every other poor sod has gone wrong.
I found myself referenced in a book in which the writer cited me as a source for information but immediately discounted what I said because I was merely a practitioner who spoke to people who were there. This struck me as strange for several reasons. As a journalist, being there or talking to someone who was there is infinitely better than researching a piece of paper, and being a practitioner is the only way a person can really understand what magic is all about.
These new types of knowledge-based magicians are slightly different from armchair magicians or academics in that they have sometimes tried the Lesser Ritual of the Pentagram for a few weeks, made a talisman once and meditated.
But in magic, practice is impolite, strips away the flattering talk and leaves you with weak concentration, unreliable memory, and the speed with which desire corrupts judgement. Daily ritual becomes tedious long before it gets useful. Meditation shows the mind’s refusal to behave, and divination gives evidence that interpretation bends itself toward expectation.
For knowledge-based magicians, reading leaves fewer bruises and lets them move on to the next shiny thing without further training. They begin with tarot, move into the Golden Dawn, discover astrology, study runes and become interested in Enochian magic. Then come folk practice, Kabbalah, Voodoo or Santería, and maybe Tantric practice to spice things up.
Each subject is understood well enough for pub chat or a YouTube conversation, but not well enough for mastery. The issue is one of reliability. If you see a book, you have no idea how qualified the person is to write it. An academic might have just recycled lots of ideas into a new package (while quoting their sources). At the same time, they have no idea what happens if their more knowledge-based approach ends up with goat’s hooves being burnt into the carpet.
Academic theories also become outdated, while occult traditions may preserve them long after scholars have abandoned them. Margaret Murray’s witch-cult hypothesis has been discredited, yet it helped shape the historical mythology of modern Wicca. Once an academic theory has been built into ritual, identity and lineage, correcting it becomes considerably harder than revising a journal article.
Much more information on subjects like ancient religions (particularly Egypt and Greece) has appeared, which could turn magical systems on their head. While this is a good thing, it sometimes means chucking out things that worked in favour of things that do not (or at least work differently).
One example is the ancient Headless One rite, translated by Samuel Mathers and later developed by Aleister Crowley as the Bornless Ritual. Within modern ceremonial magic, it became associated with the Higher Genius or Holy Guardian Angel. The source text, however, is an exorcistic operation in which the magician invokes and identifies with a terrifying divine power capable of commanding spirits. Historical research does not necessarily make Crowley’s adaptation useless, but it reveals how far he moved from the original purpose. In this case, and the Murray case, we could say that knowledge-based research was useful. However, if you compare this to Jake Stratton-Kent, who fused knowledge-based systems with hardcore practical work, you get something different.
What happens is that the practical worker takes the best that academia can offer and then builds that into their personal system. They build that system into something that is real for them and yet has a logical coherence. This prevents the situation I described at the beginning, where students had to accept occult rubbish because that was the best that their teacher had to offer.
But my central concern is that this halfway house between knowledge and practice is being lost in favour of a consumption model. Modern occulture encourages consumption as spiritual motion. Publishers, teachers, schools, platforms and initiatory outfits have something to sell. That is not automatically menacing. Books cost money, teachers need paying and serious training takes time and resources.
However, acquisition became the main model of progress. Every purchase renews hope without demanding much change in behaviour.
What is risky about this is that the market loves permanent beginners. In fact, one of the things I get in trouble for is not writing enough books for beginners because “that is where the money is.” As a result, the market is flooded with books based around poorly understood “Lesser banishing (sic) ritual of the pentagrams” and the middle pillar exercises.
Another risk is when the knowledge creators and academics decide to get in on the act and set themselves up as teachers. A university lecturer might be good at teaching their subject within their ivory tower, but when they get put in front of students who want to see something practical, they flounder and bluff.
One very expensive Italian workshop on planetary magic decided that it was not important to look at moon magic because the “moon was not a planet.” This would have been news to Agrippa or anyone else doing serious magic. In another case, one person is trying to convince her followers that it is possible to use the PGM headless one ritual to fix broken appliances or cars (although lately we have noted that she is getting a human to come in to do the work).
This is what happens when an armchair magician attempts to repackage ancient knowledge into a commodity.
Real competence looks modest by comparison to this circus. A capable occultist may know fewer systems and make less claims. They may perform a limited range of operations reliably, know what they are meant to achieve and recognise failure. They can revise their approach without inventing cosmic excuses to shield their pride.
Such a magician will still make mistakes, but continuity makes those mistakes easier to spot. The experienced practitioner knows when to continue, adjust a method or stop.
Once the novelty fades, the work starts to expose deeper patterns. This stage is often mistaken for stagnation because it lacks sparkle. Boredom is often the point at which fantasy stops paying off.
The student finally meets the practice without the flattering glow of discovery. Many leave right there. They decide the system lacks power, search for something more advanced and repeat the same dreary cycle. Another tradition gives them new vocabulary and fresh enthusiasm until repetition is required again.
If the student chooses one area of work and stays with it for a fixed period, perhaps six months, they will get much more out of it, and it will develop a power of its own. For example, for the last ten years, I have had a daily candle ritual that involves some basic invocations, but I have only missed them twice, when I was in the hospital and another time recovering from a serious illness. I also have regular protection rituals. Sometimes these have been as dry as fuck, and I have not wanted to do them, but each of them gives a connection and a power which now could not be matched by any single ritual.
I have embellished the ritual a little over the years because mindless repetition teaches little, but constant reinvention destroys the chance to recognise what is happening.
Six months is long enough for excitement to fade and real patterns to appear. Someone who has practised two systems deeply can compare them, but a person who has tried 20 systems is mostly comparing first impressions.
Study still matters, and historical knowledge stops old errors from returning in new hats. Theory gives structure to experience and helps explain why a method may work. A comparative study can expose assumptions hidden inside a single tradition. But it is always going to be practice that gives a system sense.
A book read before sustained work may seem profound because the student lacks the experience needed to question it. The same book read later may reveal precision, confusion or pure invention. It forces ideas to meet conditions beyond the author’s authority and the reader’s admiration.
Bad practice examined honestly teaches more than theory protected from experience. Failure provides material for improvement while endless preparation preserves only the fantasy of hidden ability.
Information has made occult training cheaper, broader and harder for incompetent teachers to control, but it has made evasion easier. The modern student can spend a lifetime preparing, comparing and acquiring without remaining anywhere long enough to become competent. Knowledge becomes useful when it is forced to survive repetition, boredom, failure and correction. Until then, it is merely another library collection.
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