Quotes

Persephone speaks: The underworld is my temple; it is my sensual, tactile engagement with all that is above and below, without and within; the sanctuary of my impassioned meeting with the depths of my lover’s embraces. I understand the complexities of wild cravings, the decisions made from passionate abandon. I am no one’s victim or concubine. I am sovereign, clear, the one who chose to eat those pomegranate seeds. Do not underestimate the fierce power of a maiden’s desires. I wished to become queen of the underworld, the vessel between the realms, ascending the stairway between light and dark, the only place I am unaccompanied. I own the depths of my existence— can you say the same for yourself?

…Every pagan pantheon embodies a psychology; or at least a role-set of behaviours and drives characteristic of a spectrum of human motivations, fears and desires. The more developed pantheons have elaborate myths and legends which reveal much about what humans can do or what they should do, and why they choose to do it or not.

Thus the study of Classics equips us to understand ourselves and our fellows at least as well, if not better, than any passing fashion in any number of incomplete modern psychological theories. Rather oddly, we actually lost a lot of our psychological knowledge during the period of dominance of monotheist religion, and recent attempts to recover it using the techniques of scientific reductionism have produced rather unsubtle and frequently useless ideas that only work on rats or people confronted with questionnaires.

Never again will you be capable of ordinary human feeling. Everything will be dead inside you. Never again will you be capable of love, or friendship, or joy of living, or laughter, or curiosity, or courage, or integrity. You will be hollow. We shall squeeze you empty and then we shall fill you with ourselves.

In our culture, unlike, say Tibet, we talk about faith, which has been sarcastically described as belief as a belief in things one knows to be untrue. Direct experience – gnosis – is discouraged from every corner. This is true for the Jew, the Christian, and the Atheist alike.
If you don’t believe this, we suggest you take a close look at the hysterical, almost panic-striken way in which Psychic Research has been attacked by all of the above groups for strangely similar reasons, no matter how convincing the evidence or distinguished the researchers. A person who breaks the limits imposed on him by the world at large is a very disturbing phenomenon. He doesn’t respect authority and he makes a lousy servant.

Since ‘heretic’ is no longer fashionable (and we use that word deliberately), ‘mentally ill’ is the term that has replaced it, meaning esentially the same thing or worse. There are many health care professionals in this country who consider the claims of having a psychic experience grounds for drug therapy.

Recently I read an article by a Latino mental health expert who believes Santeria fosters a dependency upon the Santero and that this is ‘bad’. This assertion boarders on ridiculous since every competent Santero provides his client with self-treatment remedies to strengthen the client’s spiritual protection. Did the ‘mental health expert’ ever question what his profession fosters? Not just dependency upon the therapist, but dependency upon the consensus as well.

…in the Universe there are many energy fields which we cannot normally perceive. Some energies have a spiritual source which act upon a person’s soul. However, this soul does not exist ab initio, as orthodox Christianity teaches; it has to be brought into existence by a process of self-guided observation. However, this is rarely achieved owing to man’s unique ability to be distracted from spiritual matters by everyday trivia.

A person doing his true will is assisted by the momentum of the universe and seems possessed of amazing good luck. In beginning the great work of obtaining the knowledge and conversation, the magician vows “to interpret every manifestation of existence as a direct message from the infinite Chaos to himself personally.”

To do this is to enter the magical world view in its totality. He takes complete responsibility for his present incarnation and must consider every experience, thing, or piece of information which assails him from any source, as a reflection of the way he is conducting his existence. The idea that things happen to one that may or may not be related to the way one acts is an illusion created by our shallow awareness.

Magick does not offer an escape from ordinary reality: rather it offers a full-on confrontation with it, which one can easily lose.

Who hasn’t asked himself, am I a monster or is this what it means to be human?