Quotes

Traditional witchcraft is regional witchcraft, it is not and never has been a standardised practice and long may this continue to be the case. The day witchcraft loses regional variation is the day traditional witchcraft ceases to exist

There are people who think that things that happen in fiction do not really happen. These people are wrong.

If you think a deity is calling you, ask why. What is he or she calling you for? There is an idea floating around that every Pagan should have his or her own patron deity. This is a nice thought, but it doesn’t align with what our ancient ancestors believed nor with the experience of many contemporary polytheists. The gods have their own areas of interest and responsibility – being your guardian and guide may not be at the top of their priority lists.
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Don’t assume that any contact is an offer to be your patron, or even that you should have a patron. People and gods are all unique – no two relationships are identical.

If a goddess or god is calling you, odds are good she or he wants you to do something: make an offering, tell a story, do something to help his or her work, or do something to make yourself ready to do something bigger at some point in the future. Be prepared to respond with action.

That something may or may not include priestly work. Priesthood is a special calling and is not to be taken lightly. Priests and priestesses are people who have taken special obligations to perform special services for an extended period of time. For all I have done for and with Morrigan, she has not called me to be her priest. But that hasn’t stopped her from asking me to do things for her. As with the question of patronage, don’t assume you should be a priest or priestess.

Just to be clear: modern Paganism generally takes a very Protestant approach to priesthood. All Pagans are priests in that you don’t need a specialist or other intermediary to approach the gods. Those who are called to priesthood – those who I would call priest or priestess – are servants of a particular deity or deities with an obligation to do their work in this world. Or they are servants and leaders of a particular group – they are clergy.
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Ask yourself if what you’re hearing is challenging you to do something different – to change the way you worship, the way you live, the way you think, the way you relate to the rest of the Universe. The gods are busy and they don’t need idle followers. They need people who will be their hands in this world.

Finally, ask yourself if you’re ready to hear the call of the gods. While you can and should retain your sovereignty even when dealing with the gods, what is heard cannot be unheard and what is promised cannot be undone.

Myths are public dreams, dreams are private myths.

The aim of all true Adepts is to relieve a suffering humankind in its physical and spiritual misery"

I earnestly confronted my devil and behaved with him as with a real person. This I learned in the Mysterium: to take seriously every unknown wanderer who personally inhabits the inner world, since they are real because they are effectual.

The central message of The Book of the Law is the Law of Thelema: “Do what thou wilt shall the whole of the Law. Love is the law, love under will.” Thelema is the Greek word for Will. It – like Agape, the Greek word for Love – has the numerical value of 93.

In the Qabalah there is a numerological system called Gematria, which informs us that words with the same numerical value are descriptions of each other or they are indications of a single phenomenon.
The Law of Thelema is the Law of Will and Love. Every act of Love must be under Will, that is, in accordance with one’s True Will. Such is the Law of Liberty by which we perfect ourselves in Nature to realize and accomplish our True Will.

The magical doctrine of The Book of the Law asserts that every man and every woman has a proper course in life – a True Will – just as every star has its own orbit, and that the duty of every individual is to pursue his or her own course, just as every star must move on its own orbit.

The Book of the Law proclaims: “Every man and every woman is a star.” We are all individual Centers of the Universe, each with our own unique Path to pursue in the Cosmic Order. As such, we are to be free of all standard ways and codes of conduct, and we are to exist by our own inward light and truth in this Way of Liberty. If we all did our True Will there would be no conflict and no interference with one another.

The Book of the Law further states that we have no right but to do our Will, and that any deviation from this path is a direct violation of the Law of Thelema. We must know our True Will and do it with one-pointedness, and without lust of result. Also every act is to be a sacrament, a ritual of Love under Will. It may all be summed up in one simple injunction: There is no law beyond Do what thou wilt.

I mean, for me, the whole turning-point in my thinking about magic was when I realised that the only place this has to happen is inside your head. And that doesn’t mean it isn’t real. I think we have a problem in that we live in a materialist society – I don’t mean “everybody’s a bread-head, man”, I mean that we believe that the material world is the only one that’s important, the only one that exists. Despite the fact that believing that requires thinking, and science can’t actually explain how we think. It’s the ghost in the machine, forever outside the province of science. You can’t reproduce a thought in an empirical laboratory experiment, so you cannot properly talk about thought. Thought is a supernatural event which we all experience every minute of the day.
The world of ideas is much more important than the material one. I mean, what’s more important, the reality of a chair or the idea of a chair? I’d say it looks like the physical world is actually predicated upon the intangible world of ideas and the mind. It looks like that’s the more important territory. Okay, so let’s treat it literally as a territory. There might be ways to explore it, ways since time immemorial that people have used to explore it. Drugs. Meditation. Some unpleasant ones like scourging and fasting, which never sound like much fun to me. Lots of ways that people have found over the years to get themselves deeper into this mental space.

There is no sentimentality here. We need dirt under our nails and smoke stiffening our hair. We need salt drying on our chests, and bramble snagged calves. We need to strip our fingers of rings and throw them into the lake. We must dedicate ourselves to our forty days in the wilderness rather than our five minutes of fame. Magic must become more savage if it is to have any meaning in the world, any power. Myths are not to be draped about poetry, they come from the very substance of the earth, this is the mask we must wear. Be fierce from this understanding taking root.

Thus the Idolater-Witch holds the heretical view that all truly magical images are living, and worthy of contemplation in both beauty and grotesquerie. All serve as potential reservoirs of fascination and the liberation of power, and the most potent among them achieve a liminality incorporating both states of aesthesis. In this way we may understand how a wrathful deity may also be a deity of compassion, and how its hallowed icons may be both glorious and ghastly. Such is the iconography of the Flayed Gods, among whose red company dwells Xipe Totec, Mani and Christ the Lord.