#western esotericism

[mise-n-abyme]

"Nothing to say nor do, but to be a visitor passing on through; beholding the mystery that is of you, with eyes that are golden blue, and words which cannot construe what lies here in this memory of moments so true. Your life is a virtuous school, repeating dissonant lessons until they are explained in full; receiving recognition between the blurred lines of perception, the understandings of this divine inception are seemingly unmeasurable circumstances captured by a progression of an immaculate deception."

~Mise-n-abyme

|Artwork: 'The Blessings Of Lord Buddha' — Chalermchai Kositpipat, 2006

[adocentyn]

Abraxas

“The bird fights its way out of the egg. The egg is the world. Who would be born must first destroy a world. The bird flies to God. That God’s name is Abraxas.”

— Hermann Hesse

[arcane-offerings]

The Great Pentacle of Solomon. Vol. II. Les Clavicules de R. Salomon, late 18th century, MS 4670, Wellcome Library, London.

[alchemisoul]

Robert Anton Wilson & Genesis P. Orridge Discuss Aleister Crowley & Species Evolution

[maeviuslynn]

Portrait of myself as an expression of the day to day practice of my work. Self portrait, 2023

I am a ceremonial magician who has the privilege and honor of sharing glimpses of my beautiful journey with the world. I paint, sculpt, write, and pour my soul into everything I do. All of these creative outlets fail to capture what it truly feels like to explore the reaches of magick and divinity. What it feels like to assert my place in the magical current so many people have occupied before me. I am humbled by the divine forces woven through ourselves and the world. I am overjoyed, scared, elated, transformed, awakened, and enchanted.

This picture is a humble, but real glimpse of me doing the work. I am wearing one of my shoddily constructed tau robes. I prefer something I have crafted with intention and consecrated over anything else. My hair is pulled back so it doesn't catch fire during ritual. It also keeps the back of my neck cool. I usually wear no make up or next to no make up for ritual in case I start to cry or sweat profusely. I frequently am brought to tears by my recent work scrying. The last thing I need is mascara dripping all over everything.

The expression of magick through ceremonial practices is no better or worse than that of the work of others. I think magick is beautiful in all of its forms. Each of us has something powerful to bring to the table and share. I am not a folk practitioner or witch, but I continue to have profound respect for those who are. I feel like a better person and stronger magician by surrounding myself with a diversity of different perspectives. 

[thatwhichdoesnotsuffer]

Americans have great drive, but no conscience. Americans live for the dollar. They have drive to achieve more, succeed more, to be biggest on the block, but they have not developed conscience; therefore no drive to help God.

Secret Talks with Mr. G

[hearthsandhistory]

Aleister Crowley vs. WB Yeats in The Battle of Blythe Road

This is a story about two magicians.

One of them was WB Yeats, writer, poet and politician.

One of them was Aleister Crowley.

You may not know that Yeats was a well-respected member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, a very influential (if deeply problematic) esoteric and magical society. Other members included Bram Stoker, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and many other notable artists, writers, actors and political minds of the day.

Aleister Crowley was also a member (and an aspiring poet) and had a passionate rivalry with Yeats. Crowley, famously a complete shithead, was getting a reputation around town for being a total bastard and the rest of the Order of the Golden Dawn was getting sick of his shit. In 1900, they decided to kick him out of the order, which make Crowley absolutely lose his mind in anger.

Crowley decided that if he wouldn’t be let back into the club, he would storm the clubhouse and steal some of their secret papers to help found his own magical school.

He showed up one day at the meeting place of the Golden Dawn on Blythe Road in London - dressed like a highland warrior for some reason - trying to ascend the stairs into the building while shouting spells and curses.

Yeats and a few other members of the Golden Dawn stood at the top of the stairs, shouting back their own curses. Shockingly, neither set of incantations seemed to have any effect.

The two men stared one another down across the stairs as Crowley continued his approach, spells flying. Years of simmering resentment bubbled to the surface.

Suddenly, Crowley was upon them, reportedly armed with a dagger. Yeats had enough and stopped chanting.

As biographer Richard Elman later wrote, "the forces of good struck out with their feet and kicked him downstairs.”

Yeats booted Aleister Crowley full in the chest, who rolled down the stairs and was bodily thrown into the street.

That was the end of Crowley’s career in the Golden Dawn.

[blubberquark]

The Dark Arts

As a beginner programmer, you should know that eval() is evil, that you should never copy and paste code in cases when you could just put that code in a function and call that function from both places, that you should use a real debugger instead of printing out values, and that you should not use raw sockets in Python.

Sometimes I see beginners who do not yet understand why you can’t just use eval() or sockets - or eval() together with sockets, even - pretend to be more experienced so the greybeards on IRC will explain to them, only to come back a couple of days later with a bug that should have been really obvious if they were really as experienced as they claimed. Topics like eval() are not closely guarded secrets that the greybeards want to keep to themselves, they are much more like actual literally esoteric knowledge, knowledge that is accessible only to those who have been initiated.

This time, I am trying something different. Instead of explaining why you shouldn’t use those things unless you know what you are doing, I will give you the exceptions. This knowledge will be next to useless unless you have been initiated in the art of software engineering, unless you could already have arrived at the same conclusion on your own.

You have been warned.

Print Debugging

I tried to debug a platformer with break points. Super annoying. Instead I use print, I draw boxes on the screen, I have an in-game log console, I have a button I can hold to show more debug info. It varies from game to game.

Debugging movement is not even about bugs, but about game feel.

eval()

I use eval() in my yarn.py library. It’s something like YarnSpinner, which is something like Twine, but for dialogue trees and multiple choice text embedded in games, not for whole games that are just text. Since it doesn’t use it to run code that was sent over the wire, but code that is part of data files that come with your application, it’s reasonably safe to do this. Statements like <<if $EXPR >> and <<print $EXPR >> will evaluate $EXPR in the scope of the yarn.py session, so that they have access to local variables. The statement <<run $PROG >> will execute $PROG with exec().

I thought about having statements like <<set $VAR to $VALUE>> and to store variables in a dictionary. But why bother? After all this, I’d have my own interpreter for a language that’s worse than Python, so I might as well use eval() and exec().

Adding convenient functionality to yarn.py, like the ability to query a node that has been visited, is only a matter of implementing a function in Python and adding it to the interpreter scope in eval(). Instead of adding a special case to the evaluator to handle visited nodes, I have added a visited dictionary to the interpreter scope, and so users can write <<if visited[”StartNode”]>>.

Copy+Paste

I copied and pasted code in a game of mine that lets you save and view replays. In addition to keeping the the gameplay code under source control, for every major revision of the game I copied the gameplay code into a new file. This way, I can import the appropriate gameplay module for a replay file, and run that.

Gameplay code is decoupled from input handling or rendering. Those actually get updated with every new release.

If I had substantial code sharing between versions, I would need to carefully add conditionals each time I made a change. And if I didn’t have old versions of the gameplay code at all, characters would just miss jumps, get stuck in the ceiling, or otherwise come out of sync with the original gameplay as I tweak the physics of movement.

Good thing I have the animations decoupled from the gameplay, or I’d need to version those too.

Raw Sockets

In my multiplayer real-time strategy game I used raw sockets. Every frame, the game receives UDP packets and updates data structures that keep track of received network communication. Then it sends UDP packets back. As long as a packet goes unacknowledged, it is sent again and again on every subsequent frame.

There were no problems with partial data, because I used UDP packets, which either arrive whole or not at all. There were no problems with buffering and de-syncing, because if no packets were received, the game loop would just continue and try again next frame. Packets didn’t have sequence numbers, but they had time stamps and frame numbers.

This form of networking does not require rollback, client-side prediction, async, or a separate thread, but it does introduce a small, fixed amount of lag. With good networking conditions (wired Ethernet LAN), the lag can be as low as a single frame.

pickle

Just kidding! You should never use pickle.

[brother-hermes]

IMAGINATION & MENTAL ALCHEMY

Visualization is a powerful technique. One we can use to tune into the macrocosm around us. Let’s discuss the mystic interpretation of the triangle as a symbol of our manifesting ability. Rock with me as we take that journey within.

[techniche]

In Advancement of Learning, [Francis] Bacon argues that just as there are 'brotherhoods' in families and those associated with certain skills (crafts guilds), there should also be a 'fraternity in learning and illumination.' By 1586, the Fra Rosi Crosse Society, or the Order of the Rosicrucians, which became a degree in the Knights of the Helmet. Bacon later gave the group the name of Acception Masons, who were to carry out the long-term objectives of societal reform outlined in the  Advancement of Learning...  ...At Gray's Inn, Bacon was a member of the Order of the Helmet, dedicated to the goddess Pallas Athena, who was most often represented dressed in armor like a male soldier, holding a spear in her right hand, with a serpent writhing at her feet, and wearing a Corinthian helmet raised high atop her forehead. Developed in the early seventeenth century BC, the 'Corinthian style' helmet had no earl holes, but had solid nose guard a phallic cap-shaped crown. It is also known as the Cap of Hades, Helm of Hades, or Helm of Darkness. Wearers of the cap in Greek myths include Athena, the goddess of wisdom, the messenger god of Hermes, and the hero Perseus. Rabelias called it the Helmet of Pluto, and Erasmus the Helmet of Orcus, a Roman god of the underworld. In classical mythology, the helmet was also known as the Cap of Invisibility that can turn the wearer invisible. According to Bacon, 'the helmet of Pluto, which maketh the politic man go invisible, is secrecy in the counsel, and celerity in the execution.' Thus the members of the Order of the Helmet likewise served 'invisible' to the world, much of their labour being published anonymously or under pseudonyms. To signify their vow of invisibility the knights of the order all had to kiss Athena's helmet. Pallas Athena was known as 'the Spear Shaker', or the 'Shaker of the Spear', while the cryptically hyphenated version of the name 'Shake-Speares' appeared on the title pages of certain plays of Shakespeare, and on every page of the first edition of his sonnets.

David Livingstone (Ordo Ab Chao: The Grand Lodge, Chapter 1: The Elizabethen Age: Knights of the Helmet, pg. 5-6, 2022)

[mise-n-abyme]

"One shall not allow circumstances define what they are as a Man, but ponder what it is in Man which gives them those circumstances."

~Mise–n–abyne

Artwork: 'History of the Two Worlds' (Utriusque cosmi maioris scilicet et minoris Metaphysica, physica atque technica Historia) – Robert Fludd, 1617–1621

[adocentyn]

Our god is named Abraxas...

“Our god is named Abraxas and he is both god and the devil at the same time. You will find in him both the world of light and of shadows. Abraxas is not opposed to any of your thoughts or to any of your dreams but he will abandon you if you become normal and unapproachable. He will abandon you and look for another pot in which to cook his thoughts.” - Hermann Hesse

[Artwork by J. Augustus Knapp for Manly P. Hall’s The Secret Teachings of All Ages, 1928]

[arcane-offerings]

David Rankine. The Grimoire Encyclopedia: A Convocation of Spirits, Texts, Materials, and Practices. West Yorkshire: Hadean Press, 2023. Hardcover edition. Two volume set. 756 pp + 676 pp. Limited to 700 copies.

Shop link in bio.

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[alchemisoul]

Freemason Sufi Druid | Robert Graves

Graves turned down a CBE in 1957 and was among a shortlist of authors considered for the 1962 Nobel Prize in Literature, losing out to John Steinbeck. And while mostly remembered as an author and poet, his contributions to the comparative examination retracing the overlapping commonalites shared and missing links in between Western and Eastern esotericism, hermeticism, and mysticism are not as widely cited or as commonly known as those of Manly P. Hall, Madame Blavatsky, Aleister Crowley, G.I Gurdjieff, P.D Ouspensky, Robert Anton Wilson, Rudolph Steiner, and Alan Watts but nevertheless stand on their own merit.

[sororalice]

Towards a Philosophy of Magick, Pt. 7: Belief Change

Where I address the system of belief revision I will use in my work. Written 11-13-23.

Perhaps one of the most difficult of human behaviors is belief change. Our minds seem to naturally prefer to retain prior beliefs regardless of internal contradiction or external disconfirmation, and many of us have personally experienced how our perceptions and attitudes can warp to preserve prior beliefs in the face of new evidence or to prevent previous errors being revealed. This is why we must develop a systematic approach to belief change so that we may consistently perform “reality-checks” as successfully as possible.

In doxastic logic (the logic of beliefs), we talk about belief revision in terms of a “database”, a logically closed set of sentences held to be simultaneously true. In epistemology, this would be called a “system of beliefs” or “belief set”, and in logic this would be called a “theory”. In our case, of course, the sentences in our system of beliefs do not necessarily need to be consistent, but their paraconsistency must be bounded firmly within certain limits (in our case the special justifications that are given for each paraconsistent premise).

We will also assume that one is doxastically committed to believing the logically contingent sentences that follow from the sentences in their database, thus all sentences which follow logically from the sentences in the database are actually included within the database. This property is called “contingent closure”, which means the database is “closed” under the operation of logical consequence. In practice, of course, it is unlikely that someone actually believes every logical consequence of the set of beliefs they actually hold. Such a state of belief would require a sort of standard of logical omniscience to which no actual doxastic agent could be held. None of us are perfectly logical reasoners, and none of us can enunciate a complete list of all of our beliefs, much less all of the consequences of our beliefs, much further less force ourselves to actually believe all those consequences. However, this idealization of our doxastic logic proves useful when we want to talk about paradigms and theories, so we will retain the assumption for utilitarian purposes.

Now let us examine some simple cases of belief change. The most common model of belief change in current “Western” anglophone philosophy is called the “AGM model”, named after the three inventors of the model, Carlos Alchourrón, Peter Gärdenfors, and David Makinson (1985). This model has three possible operations: contraction, expansion, and revision.

1. In contraction, a sentence “p” is removed from the database. This also revises all consequent sentences in the database that contained “p” as an element. In effect, the belief set “D” (for database) is replaced by a new system of beliefs “D-p” (or in AGM notation, “D÷p”).

2. In expansion, a sentence “p” is added to the database and that is the only change made. In effect, the belief set “D” is replaced by the smallest belief set “D+p” that has the property of closure (see above).

3. In revision, a sentence “p” is added to the database and all sentences that would contradict “p” are removed from the database. In effect, the belief set “D” is replaced by the belief set “D+p-not p”, or in the notation of AGM, “D*p”.

Why is this a model useful? Because it is not enough to simply list beliefs when we want to talk about belief change. We don’t just want to talk about disconnected sentences we believe to be true, false, or—in very rare cases—both. We want to talk about how our beliefs “hang together” to form a total theory of the world. And what motivates this desire to see and test how our beliefs hang together? We engage in belief testing and belief change because in almost all cases we want to be consistent in our beliefs and to be able to detect inconsistencies in the statements and beliefs of others. This is because we tend to see contradictions in our own beliefs as problematic, and we usually see contradictions in the statements of others as an indication of either faulty reasoning or deception, both of which we tend to be socially motivated to detect for utilitarian purposes. While the paraconsistent logic we are using in this work is tolerant of inconsistency, it must always be remembered that all usage of paraconsistency must be both specially justified and limited to paradoxes and certain mystical insights to avoid logical “explosion”, the state of all possible propositions becoming arbitrarily true. We almost always want to be consistent and we almost always want others to be consistent, so we are strongly motivated to make sure that our beliefs as a whole—or at least within a given domain—“hang together” consistently.

Now let’s look at some of the problems that show up in belief change and some strategies to address them. In the following database, all four statements are held to be true and classically consistent.

1. p

2. q

3. If (p and q) then r

4. Not r

Now, obviously we have a problem here, because if sentence 4 is true, then one or more of the sentences 1-3 must be false. Given this situation, what should we do?

1. Our first strategy should obviously be to test each of the sentences in our database against our evidence, by which I mean our data about the actual facts or states of affairs, either mental or physical, in the world. If any of the sentences in our database contradict any of these prior epistemological commitments, we have a good case for revising the database. However, this isn’t a foolproof strategy, because sometimes there are problems in our paradigm or theory, and sometimes there are errors—or at least apparent contradictions—in our data set. So while this is a first place to start, it may not resolve our problem.

2. Let’s say that everything fits the evidence…what then? We can proceed stepwise through our database and find the problematic sentences and then “contract” our database by removing them and revising any dependent sentences appropriately. In this case, the problematic sentence is either sentence 3 or sentence 4 or both. But we naturally want to revise our database of beliefs as little as possible; we don’t want to sacrifice important knowledge. If we subtract sentence 3 or sentence 4 from the database, our remaining sentences become consistent…they “hang together”. But which one should we subtract? Or should we subtract both? Generally we want to delete the fewest sentences possible because we usually want to preserve knowledge, so if we aren’t forced to subtract both sentences, we shouldn’t. Is it possible to make a principled decision between the two? Peter Gardenförs (1988) argued convincingly that contraction of belief sets should be governed by a principle of “epistemic entrenchment”, where we say that given an exclusive choice between retaining two beliefs “p” and “q”, we should choose the belief that is more useful to inquiry and has more explanatory power. For our purposes we will choose to retain the sentence in our belief sets that most tends to the production, possession, and use of knowledge (defined as one of our primary goals in the introduction to this work), which we have already defined as “justified true belief” (defined in the section of this work on epistemology). This means we should choose to subtract sentence 3 rather than sentence 4, because sentence 4 gives us a new proposition, a new datum about a fact or state of affairs in the world, while sentence 3 defines a relation between sentences 1 and 2. We may well be able to rediscover any lost relations by reexamining the relevant relata, but if we lose a relata by deleting sentence 4 we may lose important knowledge forever.

This simple example presents the basic epistemic situation available to us continuously. We constantly have to decide how to add, subtract, and revise beliefs in order to both accurately reflect and usefully interact with the world. Over the course of this work, I will test various ideas and revise them as necessary using methods like this and attempt to present them as clearly as possible.

Now, how does all of this apply to the alien? They know that some of their beliefs are incomplete or mistaken, but they don’t know which ones. Their task, as defined in the section of this work on the “Xeno Position”, is to learn as much as possible about the world in which they find themselves (both mental and physical) and about the purpose with which they have come to be in this world, with the goal of then working to fulfill that purpose. This task is difficult under the best of circumstances, but the problem of justifying not only a change of beliefs in general but any specific change in particular seems impossible. In short, the alien needs help. Can anything help differentiate true from false (or at least useful from useless or helpful from harmful) beliefs when the logic and evidence seems to support both but the particular issue is not subject to paraconsistency? How can the alien revise their beliefs to most accurately and usefully engage with reality, especially the realities of magick, mysticism, and living the spiritual life?

We will explore the answer to this question in the next section, where I will introduce the concept of resonance.

Works Cited:

1. Carlos E. Alchourrón, Peter Gärdenfors, and David Makinson, On the Logic of Theory Change: Partial Meet Contraction and Revision Functions, (Journal of Symbolic Logic, Number 50, pp. 510–530)

2. Peter Gärdenfors, Knowledge In Flux: Modeling the Dynamics of Epistemic States, (MIT Press, 1988)

[thatwhichdoesnotsuffer]

Most people do not know how to struggle, nor do they like to struggle. They do not like the sensations which proceed from struggle; they do not like the stress which comes as a result of struggle. In order to use impressions as a shock, one must create a struggle between yes-ing and no-ing.

Secret Talks with Mr. G