Thousands of Followers

Discuss any aspects of Magic not covered in our more specific forums.
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Chrysophylax
Adeptus Minor
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Thousands of Followers

Post#1 » Tue Feb 05, 2019 2:26 pm

Recent threads concerning public commercial presence as an occult practitioner, and some private correspondence on some established cult leaders, has led to this post. I hope to stimulate some thought and discussion about the nature of our own work, what it contains, and where it is designed to go.

There is a massive disparity between the kind of spirit-worker with thousands (or millions!) of followers and the kind we see more often here, who appear to be solitary or involved with small working groups. I’d like to discuss these differences and the reasons behind them, and what that means for both types.

For the sake of this discussion, I’d like to exclude anyone founded on a “teaching only” model: we are only talking about those whose spiritual practice is primarily aimed at causing real-world personal changes through spirit interaction of some sort, or related practices such as are discussed in these forums. The Pope, the Dalai Lama, and your Hopi elders don’t count; this is a discussion of magicians of whatever type, not of religious leaders.

I think a lot of you folks would be really surprised to know how many people out there are “bestselling authors” of spiritual literature, hosting fully-booked workshops and attracting thousands of followers worldwide. Almost all of these people – I would say all of them, without exception – are engaged in disreputable activity. They are using their followers to extract sex, money, and power for themselves at the expense of others, and their wide nets of advertisement are merely spider-webs designed to catch the gullible.

And yet, these people have the kind of things that most magicians are seeking through their magic, whether it is a level of respect for wisdom, personal security and comfort, and the crown of success. You would be very hard-pressed to name a dozen well-known magicians who could claim anything remotely close to the kind of lifestyle and achievement enjoyed by the mass-market producers.

When looking at the kind of practices promoted by these people, the celebrity psychic guru types, it comes down to some very simple things that are usually in the first few pages of what we could call a real book on magic. Anything beyond this is dismissed as irrelevant, across the board. You will not find a large-scale esoteric cult operation with the level of doctrinal complexity of something like the Golden Dawn, except for possible exceptions like Scientology which could be considered the GD’s bastard grandchild.

Compare that to the kind of discussions here. We dissect a wide range of ideas down to their most minute details, and have a diverse array of practices, some very complex and consuming years of dedication and a lot of time during the day; but none of us are on par with some of these pop-guru types whose presence overshadows all our work. You can learn every aspect of Goetia, Enochian, medieval witchcraft, and spend twenty years following Franz Bardon, and I’m going to just guess that at least some of the time, your life is topsy-turvy and leaves you feeling lonely, overworked, and underpaid.

Meanwhile, that former bartender from New Jersey who runs an Authentic Native American Healing Circle Retreat at $10k per person per day is sipping his daiquiris in the Bahamas and signing his latest book deal. More than 100,000 people downloaded “The Secret” last month. Tantric guru P.R.Tigunait has schools on every continent, and don’t even get me started on the Blue-Green Goose. You might spend twenty years trying to learn how to conjure demons by the Left Hand Path, while Benny Hinn is blowing demons on live TV and receiving every reward you wish you had but don’t.

I would like to ask you folks for your opinions on this disparity, and how it is that these people are in the position that a large percentage of magicians apparently wish they were in, when their practices rarely get out of absolute basics and utterly deny the relevance of about 90% of what we, as dedicated practitioners, attempt to master.

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