Dr. Stephen Skinner | The History Of Magic, Summoning Spirits, & John Dee

00:05 The Master's almost surely have a clearly maybe something there. And until you thoroughly tested every last course just to think, you know the less you really do! That's true Dr. Seuss. Where would we be without TNT? Cause' we know they're lying to us Just don't know what we'd without TNT The Higher Side Chat Show Our one company

00:43 Alright Hiresight Chatters, as we continue to examine pockets of power in the human story and areas where we see the course of history altered by the will of a few well-placed people. We've come to recognize that actions of the Holy Roman Empire and overall campaign against magic just might take the cake! Of course popes and kings couldn't help but try to eradicate this natural technology wherever they encountered it, because the empowerment that comes from direct access to the other and knowledge that you're more than just a helpless victim of circumstance did not mesh well with their plan for full spectrum dominance. And we're still feeling the effects today because centuries later, the majority of people are still completely ignorant to this entire slice of the human experience and most attitudes about magical practice generally range from it being a bunch of silly useless primitive superstitions to it being evil dangerous and not worth the trouble. It will bring

01:36 Conveniently, these attitudes of apathy and fear still serve their same purpose in that ruthlessly fractured magical knowledge is still being put back together by the passionate few scholars and enthusiasts determined to restore it. Well, today's guest Dr. Stephen Skinner has dedicated much of his life to this very restoration and is one of the leading authorities on classical magic and the grimoires of old. Dr. Skinner was educated at Sydney University graduating in English Literature, Geography & Ancient Greek Philosophy and was awarded his PhD in Classics from The University of Newcastle for a thesis on tracking magical texts through the ages

02:13 He's the author of more than 36 books published in more than 20 different languages and among them are numerous translations and restorations of magical writings, rituals, and grimoires that are often reaching the English-speaking world for the first time ladies and gentlemen. He is also responsible for introducing real feng shui to the West and wrote the first twentieth century English book on this subject in 1976 A man of many accomplishments and a true champion of the re-enchantment of the world, Dr. Stephen Skinner welcome to The Higher Side Oh, thanks for such a nice introduction. I try and thanks so much for being here! I'm seriously in awe of what you've done because you've really left your mark on the world and expanded the knowledge base in this underrated area in ways that really can't even be measured. And maybe to grease the wheels a bit here could you elaborate on some of those accomplishments or tell people about some of the translations or restorations you're most proud of? For those that are unfamiliar

03:12 Okay. Well, for me when I was a kid, I probably had the same misconceptions about magic as everybody else but when I started digging, I realized that it's really a technology. It is a series of procedures and although people don't normally associate scientific method with magic, scientific method is simply a matter doing experiment and seeing if it comes out as predicted and if it does that validates the theory a lot of the early grandma's actually had sections in which was called experimental offering the same sort of experiments and prediction of results. This fascinated me when i went back

03:58 through the grimoires and then from them back to Greek magic, right back to the Greco-Egyptian magicians. Because of the Greco Egyptian magicians there was no problem with authority at least until Romans came because most of the Greco Egyptians were also temple priests so religion general belief in magic all came out of the same buildings The reason I spent some time in Egypt looking at some of these temples, which are quite a good state of repair with the formula still written on the walls. But my initial access to this formula was through the Greek notes of a couple of magicians who lived in the second or third century AD and they were not frightened about writing down what it was that they did and what the results were from this

04:56 Even to making comments at the end, you know this has been tested so many times and works And I thought that was a very direct way of looking at magic and a million miles from perhaps the 21st century way of looking at it. So, yeah that was my driver and I have to say that although I got academic qualifications because I had to learn to read classical Greek to be able to read these papyri –and I did go through every single papyri that's known that is connected with magic– that was a lot of reading

05:36 There are a number of translations, bits and pieces. But the translations... And somebody's going to have to forgive me for saying this were done by people who didn't understand what magic was or they would just think well it's superstition so it doesn't matter how you translate it So there are something like 60 different words for the different procedures of magic in ancient Greek the modern translations translate all 60 words as either spell or write. So when you read the translation, you have no idea what it is that they're actually driving at. I went back and looked at the original Greek and figured it out, and went through every single spell split them up into different categories and worked out what the methods were so I published this book called Techniques of Greco-Egyptian Magic

06:27 It's not a recipe book is not designed for somebody to pick it up and do magic. But is designed to sort out what was done how it was done, what's the next book will be a little bit more practical but that one something needed to be done by anybody moving along i was always interested in the grandma's leave from my city sorcerers or magicians manuals dating from about the twelve hundreds right through to last century, and my approach is always been don't read the text of their enemies. Read the books that they actually wrote and used it's like if you wanted to investigate twentieth century physics sometime in the future

07:16 you would read books by the physicist rather than people who are criticizing them. It's not a very good parallel, but there you go and I found remarkable similarities that the techniques were very similar even though the names of spirits called we quite often be different and then About 13 years ago, I moved to Asia which is where i live now and I met up with Taoist Chinese magicians. With a lot of coaxing got around to talking to them about what they did and I was quite gobsmacked discovered that the techniques again were the same so I think we are talking about something quite real here because if they weren't the same you know people just made up

08:08 magical gibberish every time they wanted to do some magic, then sure it's a waste of time. But these techniques were all quite parallel That's so interesting. And in terms of looking at magic from a scientific perspective, I think that's really the approach that is most interesting to me because i'm always interested in how things work and I want to understand the mechanisms behind them. Being at this for as long as you have can you tell us anything about those mechanisms for those who are still trying to get their head around how this can work? Okay well this might upset a few people and I'm sure there are some people who will contradict what I am about to say

08:48 But 20th century magic has sort of become a question of visualizing and doing mental exercises and things. And it's not, it's nothing to do with mental exercises. It is specific formula, and it is to do with independent spirits, angels, whatever you like to call them. Real magic consists in calling these entities Constraining them binding them and getting to do what you are send to do. And they can't do everything that's not magic like in the children story books there is very specific things i can do it specific spirits have specific specialties, if u r something to do something that's not as it were

09:40 on their list, then they just play and can't do it. But if you call the correct entity and you call him at the right time of day, and you do the procedure in a correct way, and you ask him to do something or tell them what your order is, then nine times out of 10 that thing will happen. I'm still figuring out what the tenth time is because It doesn't always work. So, you know because I was brought up in a fairly Western scientific way, I am only interested in things that work and I'm only interested in things that are repeatable. The difficulty with mysticism and things like that is they're not necessarily repeatable but I want something that's as repeatable as metallurgy or mining or something like that. Something that you can actually nail down

10:32 So when it comes to actually contacting spirits, because there are just so many and like you say they all have purposes. Some are attached to different days different times of the day You know some chaos magicians They talk about the idea of building your own pantheon of spirits when you're deciding like who to contact but But that's a chaos magician. What are your thoughts on that? Or at least helping people determine what spirits to approach early on when the list of possibilities can seem kind of overwhelming Well, I knew Pete Carroll When he used to come to the Illuminist Club in London when he was working with Ray To sort of generate the theories of chaos magic so we had many a long night talking about these things but The spirit is either

11:19 something that you have, no the spirits are objective. If you call specific spirits and add them to your team as it were then that's a valid remark and then you can continue to use the same ones. Chaos magic is little bit more about well I won't say generating spirits but its not quite the same so how do explain chaos magic when it works? Well You know, there is in the background as it were a lot of random spirits wandering around and sometimes a medium for example will get a message from spirit quite often not the uncle sam or the uncle jack that he purports to bring it but it will be an external message so sometimes you can hit upon a spirit like that and then get a result

12:14 But that's a little bit chaotic and I would prefer to use the Grimoire system, which is that you have... Well they're called in Chinese, so the Chinese musicians call them registers of spirits. In Western magic something like the Goetia has 72 spirits listed together with their names, their sigils and all things you need to call them So I would tend to work from an already extant register of spirits rather than trying to generate them. Fair enough, and having gone through all the grimoires of the Western tradition are there systems or books of spells that you consider to be more potent than others? Yeah there are this sort of direct line transmission of spells from the Greek magicians who come through the thing called a hygromantia

13:13 which then became the source of the Key of Solomon. Now by the time it reached the Key of Solomon, virtually anybody interested in magic has heard about the Key of Solomon certain things got left out because magic which usually passed on an apprentice basis from the master who can do it to an apprentice and therefore a certain amount of that became oral instruction, was left out from the books or they just didn't translate sections of it. So if you go back to the hygromancer that one is probably more complete than most grimoires

13:52 To talk about the history a little bit, is Greco-Egyptian about as far back as we can go? I assume. Yes and i'll tell you why because greco-egyptian papyrus bulk of them were probably the work of one or at most two magicians And these are their working manuals. They wrote out all the spells in hand, in ancient Greek many thousands of words and they tested them and made comments on them Now that kind of as it were private musicians journal is quite rare if you go before the great coach if you go to bc, show this magical stuff in bowls the magical stuff and various descriptions of medical stuff in the book of the dead but.

14:44 A lot of this is for the benefit of the dead, what they should do in their post-mortem life. And okay if you happen to have just passed on maybe some of this stuff is useful I can't tell but on this side of the divide between life and death material in The Book Of The Dead is not particularly useful there are some methods that you can extract from it but its mostly concerned with what you do out in the afterlife And likewise, a lot of the other texts that date before in BC period do not give the technique and are not written for the purpose of recording the method. They'll be written from an external point of view.

15:32 I really am interested in the history. Did you find that when you're looking at this, did you think the Greeks looked at or used magic differently than the Egyptians in any significant way? Were there different approaches that these two cultures took? Okay let's talk about Jewish magic for a few seconds. Jews have often been considered to being exemplary magicians. In practice there are very few Jewish magical texts before the 9th century. This may be because they've been destroyed, but I think it's more likely that they were not created because as a fairly religious group of people, I don't think magic was particularly popular but a lot of the words in god names, archangel names and so forth flowed into Egyptian and Greco-Egyptian magic

16:23 The Greeks, being very rational – which is why I love them they think in a very logical way – wrote out a lot of the Egyptian spells in Greek with comments and did it systematically. And this Greco-Egyptian papyri are obviously a Greek magician who could read Egyptian and who understood Egyptian magic writing it out for his own benefit and for his successors' benefit that kind of text Is pretty rare many text talking about what my questions did you know how they joined the seven head of a goose back on to the goods and things like that but there's nothing about how they did it. So these are stories i'm not very interested in those so,

17:12 I've lost track of your original question. Oh, differences between the Greek and Egyptian approaches? Well, the Egyptian approach was mainly concerned with what you do in the afterlife. The Greeks were very concerned about what to do in this life so by combining the two Greco-Egyptian magic has its magic to fetch someone you love, magic improve your health magic to see a god face-to-face, things like that to be done in this life. And these techniques were then passed up to the Muslim invasion of Egypt they were passed up to Constantinople and they were used by the monks there. There's a lot of papyri about that

17:57 And then finally, when Constantinople fell to the Muslim invasion they quickly relocated to Italy. It's in Italy that a lot of these texts were translated into Latin so I've been lucky enough to get the original Greek and final Latin and compare them two. Then they continued to be magicians' handbooks right through into the 17th and 18th century. At that point, they began to be more romantic and their practical content was rather diluted by a more romantic approach.

18:36 This is kind of a random question, but you mentioned the Book of the Dead and I'm kinda curious because so many cultures they have different funeral rites and burial practices. Being someone who puts stock in reincarnation do you think that different practices might have an effect on reincarnation or the post-death experience? Okay well not having had a post death experience at least not one i can remember my comments are purely on basis observation The Egyptians mummified the bodies of their dead, royalty particularly. And as far as I can gather the purpose was so they wouldn't be reincarnated by making them unable to decay. That person would then be allowed to stay in the summer lands and having a good time fishing or playing loots whatever the Egyptians did for life

19:35 At least that's my take on why they mummified. On the other hand, Hindus almost immediately burn the body and that I am sure forces the spirit onto the next incarnation they will have a couple of weeks, maybe as much as 40 days to hang around and then they're forced into the next incarnation. Now I think that's sort of difference in world view that Hindus thought that they wanted to get on with it is it were Egyptians thought no-no-no I think we will stick with the fun time and me in the afterlife before you have to come for this earth

20:15 But as I say, this is my conclusions rather than practical experience. fairly common pattern of getting a big dramatic result early on and then having trouble getting back to that level for awhile before the results eventually become more consistent. Did you find yourself in a similar pattern to that? Or maybe could you tell us about some powerful results in your early practice that kind of blew the doors off? Well, I was lucky to have had a good physical manifestation in my late teens

21:03 as a result of working with the greece and i managed to buy that spirit and so from then on, i have the help of that spirit to find other spirits no i haven't experienced drop off in the practice wow you are lucky so. You know, talking about magic being scientific and repeatable if done correctly. What are some of the most common errors or important things that get missed in terms of doing it right that hurt that replicability? Okay, that's easy to answer. Doing practical magic you need to consider several important things one is you actually need protection from the spirit

21:48 These people who attempt to call spirits without any protection are really playing with fire. Spirits, and I won't necessarily include angels, they're not necessarily pro-human beings so in Greco Egyptian practice and in the medieval practice of the primrose it is common to draw a consecrated circle on the floor around the operator and then to place an area, a spiritist loci or triangle into which the spirit needs to be forced manifest. If that's not done A, the spirit will either not come or come and lie and will not do what you tell it to do so that is one thing second thing is spirits cannot read your mind which is a great advantage but they are

22:41 They are sensitive to certain things and one of those is smell. So every magical ritual has the burning of incense Magogamathas thought it was so you could manifest the spirit in the incense, other people, so it could cloud the mind of the operator. In fact, he establishes an atmosphere that the spirit can manifest into if the smells are nice at the end of the ritual, you reverse it and burn something which is very unpleasant. And this helps to send the spirit back from whence it came but because the spirits have got such sensitive

23:19 smell evasion if you like, you need to fast beforehand so that the typical sweat smells of human beings are not there in the ritual. You also need many of the grimoires say you need to bath and purify yourself beforehand That's a really practical thing that is not a spiritual thing It is to remove the amount of smell The Egyptians said should not eat garlic beforehand When i read that bit I figured what is it that is common between you should not eat fish, whats common between those two? They smell. And so if you know if your recently been smoking or you've eaten garlic or you've eaten fish then this tends to drive the spirit away and then the other thing is you need to do it away from the center of city although if

24:16 Got the techniques down, Pat. Can be done in the centre of the city but it's much better done out where you have no distractions In some ways spurs that you haven't bound a little bit like wild animals Yes, you can coax them to come But you can't coax them to come if there's heavy traffic thundering past the door and people screaming down the street. At least that is hard work then, so I usually either do it out in the open somewhere... at one stage i was lucky enough to have a property in France which was well secluded from everywhere else and I had a cleared area amongst trees that was quite useful

24:58 If done inside the city, then quite often it will either be a cellar or possibly a very high balcony. Anyway that's what I found from practical experience that spirits are sensitive and they're bit shy and you need to encourage them to come and then you need to bind them That's so interesting. I did not know smell was such a factor, I mean I know saying the right words and facing the right direction and having a circle of protection are important when interacting with spirits but I struggle to rectify how something like a chalk circle could have such an effect on a spirit or how facing north instead of east could really be such a factor in making contact do we know what makes these things work even?

25:45 Yeah, I can tell you what that is. If you just draw a chalk circle it will have no effect. What you need to do is then take very sharp sword or dagger and cut the line around there now when you do that a trace is left in the astral of sharpness as it were and spirits will not comfortably cross that line. If it's just chalk, that makes no difference to them but the line must be cut with a sharp instrument It doesn't hurt also to then say appropriate consecrationary words. But you know, magic is in a lot of funny ways very physical so that's the circle. What was the other thing you mentioned? Oh! Facing the right cardinal direction. Ah okay that is important

26:39 because spirits do come from different directions. If you look at some of the grimoires, they're very specific. One, The Theogio Goetia actually has 32-point compass rows in front of the grimoire indicating which spirit comes from which direction. Chinese magicians also have the same thing except they have 28 points and they very specifically call from one of eight directions or even one of 28 directions. Now, at a very basic level if you call the spirit and it comes from behind you when you're standing there talking and you've got your back to it the spirit will actually be offended they wil not be cooperative so it is always good to face the direction for which you expect it to come

27:28 Obviously, sometimes you may get the direction wrong or a little bit off. But if you're actually standing with your back to it when it arrives and you don't notice its appeared then the next steps in the ritual won't take and you've wasted the evening so direction is important The other thing that's important is timing as you rightly mentioned If you want Spirits of the Moon Monday is much better time to call than say Saturday If you want spirits of the moon, the first hour of Monday or the 15th hour of Monday is a good time because then you've got the hour right as well as the day. And the reason for this is that in the spirit world there are tides and there are certain times when these spirits are strong enough to manifest and certain times when they're not. if you call the spirit when they're not in a strong position, they cannot come

28:26 Because for them coming to the physical plane is very difficult. It's like if you and I conducted this interview underwater, sure with breathing equipment it would be okay but we just had to hold our breath and gesticulate it'd be very difficult And so for spirits coming into the physical world until they get used to it is very difficult So you need to give them You need to give them a certain amount of respect, not turning your back on them. You need to give them an atmosphere that is pleasant for them and by that I mean the incense that's pleasant for them. You need to coax them. And if you do all these things, you may have to try two or three times but you need to do it at the right time and preferably the right hour

29:10 And the restriction on time and hour really go back to 2000 years ago, the tables in the Greek papyri for the right times to call particular spirits. I reproduce them in my book and I can tell you that it makes all the difference if you ignore the right time then the spirit will probably ignore you. This also explains a number of failures people thinking that they can just, you know get up on a Saturday night and call the spirit of Mercury in an hour of Saturn. It's not going to work. That's so interesting I mean...I'm curious how this magical practice that you've had for quite some time has helped you constructs a more accurate model for reality? I mean these little magical techniques and kind of rules are sort of clues into the infrastructure we find ourselves in aren't they?

30:09 Yeah, indeed. What was it? Shakespeare's famous remark that there is more in this world than you and I think of... That's a totally misquoted phrase but yes there is a hierarchy outside of the physical plane It doesn't often impinge on the physical plane But when it does, it can be quite powerful. And if you have called a spirit which can do a specific thing and that's what you asked to do and then given good reason to do so nine times out of ten will do so. So I am convinced this hierarchy is real. There's no reason to disbelieve that angels on various levels that you might read about in the Kabbalah also exists. That makes the physical world

30:59 just the more solid, the more concrete bit at the bottom of a long ladder with various different entities. Some my friends would say this is very medieval view of the world and they find that faintly amusing but if you've experienced it then you have no problem with that! Yeah, man. So something else that I've heard you say in a previous talk is that magic is useless if you just sit and read about it It's fascinating and it's interesting but it is a practice. It's the technology And the whole point is to use it and I love how direct you are about that I think a lot of this audience is probably in that place where we know more about magic than the average person at least on an intellectual basis but

31:47 the material can still seem so vast and dense that we might not feel comfortable actually starting to use it. Do you have advice for people who might be right at that point? Is there a go-to ritual or grimoire you recommend people use to get their feet wet?" Well, it is very easy to become an armchair magician and compare grimoires and read commentaries and all that sort of thing. And there are indeed a lot of people out Magic is actually hard work. It's not surprising that a lot of people feel that way as we go to grimoire, no magic is quite difficult you need number of things with ceremonial magic you need to prepare implements beforehand if your chemistry and you want to do an experiment you need to get your buns in the house you need to figure out how to use it you need to test tubes and things contain what you're working on

32:43 So in magic, you need to get the implements that are needed such as the sharp knife to draw a circle. Otherwise it's just a chalk circle and it is not going to work You need to get the most appropriate incense for what you planned do And you need to get them ready on a particular day On that particular day you need prepare yourself by ritually dispersing or preferably bathing beforehand Most people are not prepared to do that Or they take the view, I can just do this in my lounge room when the kids have gone to bed. And the spirits are not really that comfortable in all the vibrations and smells and things that you had in your lounge room and television going on at the corner of the same time. This is not a place to do it so a chemist wouldn't do potentially explosive operations

33:41 Probably some people have done it on the kitchen table you wouldn't do it in your lounge room you need to have separated space, who is upset he preferably needs to be long away from human beings but if u can do it. What's a bit of extra effort so people don't set this up before and then they wonder why doesn't work when my name is in the cello and the cell was absolutely Dirty from coal and God knows what else. And the spirits just won't come. They do not want to go to that particular space. It's very strange that people think of, if we talk about black magic, that spirits are evil and dark and whatever... Actually spirits aren't. Spirits like a very pure and holy environment. If they don't get it they're not coming unless you conjure them but that's getting into other subjects. Yeah, we won't go into that.

34:40 You got an offer them a conducive space and that's the shouldn't be used for something else should be just use magic so most people say well i've got a house and i don't have a spare room. and I can't be bothered driving into the country and finding a quiet grove of trees, quite difficult in some countries. So they don't do it. They sit down and read about it. And that's commendable too because 50 years ago there weren't a lot of people reading about these things or even taking them seriously so there has been a definite shift. I have to agree that even Harry Potter has helped him this shift

35:24 Yeah, I guess it all helps. What are your thoughts on starting with an ancestor altar or getting the best results with that approach? Not something you'd recommend? Okay. Spirits of various sorts there are elemental spirits, there are spirits from the grimoires and you can also call ancestral spirits so in a way that is probably a safer procedure because your ancestors as long as they realize that they are your ancestors Not likely to be harmful and indeed mediums sometimes called spirits who will then help them. They would usually refer to them as

36:04 What's the term? Can't remember the term, but anyway. Yes an ancestral altar is not a bad way to start but it's not the only thing and one of things that I often say is that actually dead human beings don't know very much more than live human beings. I believe that! So if you want knowledge which is outside of usual that you can find on Wikipedia or in your grandfather's chest, then you need to talk to non-human spirits. Fair enough!

36:40 And to get back to the history a little bit, like I mentioned, a lot of guests we've had they do magic that maybe is more in the chaos realm or they've invented their own modalities. But to have someone here who's so knowledgeable and classical magic, I'm curious if maybe you can shed some light on what a magical life was like before this oppression? Is there any way to really restore that picture? Well, we can restore the picture Okay, let's whip back to ancient Egypt. The priests did magic... They did it as a trade and so if one of the villagers came and said they wanted an amulet to protect them against sickness or they're going to war and they wanted an amulet to protect them against being shot by arrows then the priest would do that there would be no condemnation of that when the Romans took over Egypt from the Greeks

37:33 they were a little bit wary about magicians being used to either predict or cause the death of an emperor. And so several times, they banned it but then when Christians in the fourth century flooded into Egypt or whatever happened and there were definite Roman laws against magic, then magic and pagan religion was sort of lumped together So while the church was trying to suppress the worship of Anubis or the worship of Isis, their procedure was to treat it as a heresy and persecute people. And Christian persecution... The monks started it in Alexandria I think 397 or something where they destroyed one of the major temples in Alexandria and destroyed many of the papyrus in the library

38:32 with the view that if it wasn't sanctioned by the Christian church, then it didn't exist. It didn't need to exist and then this was followed up when the Muslim invasion happened in 660. The guy that conquered Alexandria found a huge library of Alexandria with as many guesses but 700,000 papyri rolls or whatever. The numbers are probably wildly wrong and One of the Christian monks said, what are you going to do with this? So he wrote back to his boss in Babylon and said, what am I supposed to do with all these papyri. And the answer came back if the papyri conformed to what you can find in the Koran then there's no point so destroy them

39:26 If the papyri contradict what is found in the Koran, then you should destroy them. So he fed the bakehouses of Alexandria for six months—I mean all the bake houses with papyri so people cooked their food on the collected wisdom of the Greek world which included things like geometry who the Greeks did prior to the Christian era which has survived up to today, but no thanks to either the Christians or the Muslims in destroying the texts. And then of course in medieval Europe, oh and in fact in Constantinople it was quite often the monks who kept up the practice of magic some of them were persecuted for it one of the common

40:18 ways of punishing somebody was take the eyeballs out which meant that they can see what they were doing but listen and kill them. And so there were various attempts to suppress magic one because it's written the current rules, because with magic you can do things which might have resulted in a change your phone number where the americans use in a regime change and also a certain amount of fear that these guys got an advantage here, and we don't really want that to be so. And the heads of the church also didn't want there if they were not similarly skilled in a couple of pokes worse skill than magic then it's better do just get rid of it. While you're burning the manuscripts, you might as well burn some of the practitioners as well. Fortunately

41:14 quite a few of the practitioners of so-called learned magic, people actually used the grimoires to escape the fires. But a lot of the manuscripts were burned and so what we have in the West now is a fragmented set of information about magic and one of the things that I found very useful in Asia was that I was able to see what the Chinese practice was and where Some item was used or done which is missing from western magic i look at the power of made adjustments to the western method and it worked a lot better. And that's because chinese magic although there's been some persecution is actually feeling intact,

41:59 One of the Chinese magicians that I became friends with claims, and I'm not sure that's true. That he is the 36th in line of magician-apprentice right away down and certainly some of his magical texts are considerable age so that was confirmatory for me and also helped me to rebuild bits of the Western magical method And as i started this conversation it's method that interests me because something can be checked is no point in asking people's opinion. What did jack do three hundred years ago probably interesting but i want to know how jack and i wanna see if i can do it as well,

42:49 Absolutely. And I wanted to talk to you about John Dee a little bit, because of course you're very familiar with him and you've restored and translated a lot of his fractured writings but he was also someone who seemed to take scientific approach to magic too. One of my main curiosities is magics influence in use among the elite being general conspiracy guy but that's another area where John Dee comes up a lot what are your thoughts on him in his practice? Okay, so you're right on track there and we can do the elite thing because magic was recorded basically in Latin. Some of the greatest magic grimoires are still in Latin haven't been translated and John Dee knew that and he selected methods

43:35 from several different grimoires, melded them together and used them in a scrying context rather than the full invocation. He believed that massive prayer beforehand was all the protection he needed. In fact when his scrier got in touch with various spirits he found that he was not contacting necessarily angels but also other spirits. In fact Kelly on one occasion complained that he'd been pinched by one spirit and showed quite severe marks on his arm, which may have been Kelly having Dee armed. So Dee quite often would be talking through the scryer to a spirit which was claiming to be an angel but probably wasn't. But Dee was using standard magical technology and the whole idea was that if I'm contacting angels A it'll be safe B they'll tell me the truth what he didn't take into account well if they're not angels

44:33 i need an atomic the truth i can be led astray and also ways and indeed poor john de was a little bit strange, can you for example told him what he should say to steven who is king of poland. And what he said to him was, he told him off for not being a good Christian and how you should pray and do this that and the other. Stephen just refused to see him after that saying if I want that kind of advice, I'll go to priests. I don't need to go to a magician. But anyway, let's leave it here or there but because magic was predominantly available in Latin until less extent in those days in Greek

45:13 you needed to be a scholar or monk to read it, or an aristocrat because they would have had an education which included learning Latin. And as indeed in say England up until 1950 in the elite schools who would also have learned Latin. So the interesting thing is that the angel magicians of the 1700s and early 1800s were definitely almost all elite so for example the master of the roles which is one of the highest legal positions think lord denning, he was an angel magician. The lord of the admiralty also interested in calling spirits there were a number of laws and also a number really rich and successful lawyers and they passed the manuscript from one to another and i tracked my books

46:11 who i want to pass it to somebody else and you can see the change in messages that goes from hand to hand. And they are undoubtedly all elite because you don't become a senior judge lawyer or lord, what is the belongings of the class now at the same time those people who were not quite so much would have been learning What would you use a more cut down form of magic invocation without protection and things like that but anyway. Conspiracy wise your absolutely right in the seventeen hundreds and eighteen hundred it was almost entirely province of the elite,

46:53 Hmm. Well, conspiracy media it does tend to be a bit sensationalist when talking about magic often throwing everything under an umbrella of Satanism and that nearly everything the elite do is a ritual or blood sacrifice to expand their power absorb energy from the masses And maybe I'm hoping we can bring a little nuance to that perspective But do you see any indications that the elite class of today use magical tools to any significant degree? That's a curly question, isn't it? I do know some members of the elite who do practice magic. That is true and one or two of them they practice it really well but I don't see any of them practicing in the ways that the sensational media would have you believe if we're talking about...who was it

47:48 David Eak and people that far out, then I don't really believe any of that exists. Well, I guess one question would be do you get the impression from your study of magic that it could scale up to a level of blood sacrifice? And that might affect its potency or is are those claims overblown? Okay, well I'm going to say straight out that blood sacrifice is one of the methods used in some forms of magic. And the reason is that spirits need to be offered something nobody works for nothing and there's two approaches one as you combine them and force them and the other approach is that you can gratify them and give him something they want

48:39 Now, spirits cannot access of their own accord something on the physical plane. It has to be literally given to them So when incense is burned, the words should be expressed which says that the incense is being burned for their benefit. If you think back into ancient history, the ancient Jews before 70 AD had massive sacrifices of animals in the temple and Jerusalem dating right back to King Solomon's era and they knew that gave them a certain amount of power

49:16 Once the Romans had destroyed the temple in Jerusalem in 70 AD, a lot of that power was lost. Jews were scattered across the world. Very sad for them and there was never a possibility of rebuilding the temple. The temple was in fact rebuilt three times, almost three times and even early in the Christian era one of the emperors funded the rebuilding again because he was feeling guilty about what they did in 70 AD but his reign was far too short so not very much happened

49:52 We're getting away from blood sacrifice. Yeah, it's an unpopular thing to say but yes small animals are sometimes sacrificed and for those of you out there who are vegetarian which I am mostly and who is squeamish i don't really see why there should be any difference between doing that having somebody else slaughter animal so you can eat a steak But eating a steak obviously doesn't have any magical use at all. But, you know animals have been from time immemorial slaughtered by human beings these days mostly for food but there is still one set of magical techniques where blood is useful One word of warning here those people who want to be politically correct will say well why don't you sacrifice your own blood? You know prick your finger in a few drops

50:46 That's a very unwise procedure because it establishes direct link between you and the spirit which in times after that will find very troublesome. Yeah, I can only imagine so we kind of talked about John Dee a little bit Of course he was an advisor to Queen Elizabeth Do you get any indication that the elite of today have similar? Magical advisors on call or do you think those days are done? That's an interesting question. I remember that Tony Blair and his wife, Sherry had a rather new age advisor advising them on what they should do which came out at one stage but i don't think she equates with what the sort of people we're talking about if the elites have their own

51:40 Magicians then they're not really keen to tell you about it right and if i knew one or two such cases are really shouldn't elaborate on that. Fair enough. Dee did useful astrological things like pick the right date for Elizabeth's coronation, thereby making probably one of the best reigns in British history. I'm pretty sure that nobody picked Elizabeth II's date of coronation and it would have been sorted out by a public servant. In Asia My other interest is from sherry and i don't mean in the really crass hot way just moving furniture around, but i know that a lot of the elites in asia use function masters to ensure their projects will be successful on the money will continue to come in the case of some of the casinos out here. There's special function masters make sure when it comes into the casino doesn't leave

52:45 as in the gamblers should please leave with empty pockets. Feng Shui is not magic, but it was my answer in the sense that specialist practitioners are still used by the elites out here and so wouldn't be surprising if it was used by some of the European or Western elites. Somehow I don't get feeling that the present president of the US or even the past couple have asked that kind of advice. That's a, what I think that's the kind of answer i generally get is it doesn't seem like they're into that stuff at all? That the kind of demonization or just suppression of magic is so severe at this point that even the elite class are missing out on a tool that they could have access to

53:32 Yeah, it's more than these days is modern suppression. What it is of course is I won't say indoctrination But the scientific approach to everything says you know if you can't see it or measure and it doesn't exist My answer that is you can't see radio waves but radios still work and how do you explain that? If you can pin somebody down, ask them to do that. They'll go into a lot of theoretical stuff but they can't really demonstrate except perhaps shielding their own radio from the source. I don't know where i'm going with that. Well, another thing that has come up before is the idea that maybe all the signals of our modern world might interfere somehow with our connection to the spirit world

54:21 Well, I know that noise and smells interfere with our connection to the spirit world. So it wouldn't surprise me if having a Wi-Fi degraded one's abilities in that area. Of course all of us need to be connected. I prefer to be connected through cable rather than Wi-Fi but that is just me. So yeah but i think it's the attitude that magic is nonsense and magic fairy tales, that protects people from wishing to use it.

54:59 As I mentioned earlier, I think Harry Potter has actually influenced the younger generation in a fictional sort of way. But it's at least opened their mind to the possibilities. Absolutely! It gets the wheels turning no doubt. Yeah and then so many more people of that generation are now looking to see what they can find and what they can do I have to say when i was a kid there is very few books on magic out there nowadays the world's where are many, no i'm more guilty than most for having added to the stack of books.

55:34 involved with magic. Well, considering for how long people could be put to death for reading this kind of stuff I feel like maybe we should do it just out of respect for people who lost their lives over it? Yeah nice one yeah well the Witchcraft Act was only repealed in 1951 in England witchcraft, informal persecution probably happened right after the Second World War. But it's more disregard now rather than persecution. Right? Well said! It definitely is And so before we go, I did see that it looks like you're involved in an upcoming release about the Vonic manuscript. Of course it's legendary because so many people have been unable to decipher or decode it having translated so much and being so familiar with old grimoires what is your take on the manuscript? Do you think you cracked the case? Well if you ask me point blank can you translate it? The answer is no

56:35 Every time somebody comes up with a theory about it, it's oh, it's bound to be this kind of code or it's bound to be coded. It is actually I'm fairly certain that the original language is Italian and Latin, but it's been coded in such a way. It is not gibberish because people have done letter counts on it and it has the proportions of letters of natural language so its not gibberish there's definitely something in there The plant drawings are the giveaway because a number of plants have now been identified

57:13 It's not really magic, it is pharmacy. Pharmaceuticals drawn from plants. It is cosmology and astrology. And so obviously done by somebody who lived in the world where all these things were related rather than separate faculties at universities. The stuff has written on and the ink have been dated I think it's dated to 1420, plus or minus 20 years. So it's really quite old. It wasn't fortunately invented by Moinish himself. It wasn't invented by Dee. In fact, I think Dee probably never owned it despite the stories that he sold it to Emperor Rudolf II. It wasn't written by Bacon

58:04 The author will probably always remain anonymous. One day I believe somebody will crack it, what we've done in this is produce a very clear photo representation of it showing how the pages fall and showing the detail and drawing one's attention to several clues and points and things. I wish I could say that we cracked it and translated I've, or various researchers have figured out some words particularly plant names in Italian predominantly. But that's it, it goes no further now to my own detriment I have to say that there are a number of different editions the Voynich manuscript suddenly all come out at the same time and this is rather surprising but this sometimes happens that at a certain point people start thinking about a particular manuscript or a particular person like me and suddenly a lot of books come out on

59:08 All i can say is that the one that I contributed to, the reproduction it's really very splendid and so you can see a lot of detail. It's a lovely manuscript I can't see anyone cracking it for another, i don't know 20-30 hundred years. But um...I'd like to be around when that happens because i really would like to read what's in there. Oh yeah! It would be great but it almost seems like we will get further and further away from being able to do this you know the further we get away from its source No, I think it would have been difficult even in 1500 people were being confused by it. It's definitely been written by somebody who was very interested in plants because the plant details amazing like a rhizome root is one which connects underground and connects to several different plants. It's quite rare but its really detailed drawing of it so whoever made this

1:00:09 hasn't just written rubbish about plants they actually don't know what's the roots color check you know and then discovered. And i think it's probably for medical purposes i suspect that this is a great was, doctor at the very least to have list of doctors i'm also pretty sad that he lived in northern italy somewhere near pisa And I'm absolutely certain that it was Jewish because some of the references in there, and some of the descriptions and some of the drawings reflect mikvahs which were common at that time. They weren't common in Christian communities... Anyway read the book!

1:00:57 You know, so I can describe various things about him with certainty. His religion his profession is where he was. I can also say that he probably traveled across the Swiss Alps to southern Germany or that he was patronized by a German family because one of the little drawings in Sagittarius shows a bow and arrow but it doesn't show a longbow it shows across bow And crossbows were very common in southern Germany, just north of the Alps and they weren't common in Italy. So you know there's little hints like that me and two of my colleagues who are from Central Europe one is Polish who was also interested in John Dee did a lot of digging

1:01:47 Well, we haven't dug out everything otherwise we'd have the answer but we've dug up more than other people have up to this point. Very cool! Well the devil's in those details and you seem to be closing in on it Wow, well Dr. Skinner this has really been an honor for me because I do have so much respect for your work and contributions to the magical community and history Hopefully what seems like a magical resurgence continues to grow and more people end up appreciating those contributions as well before we go Would you like to remind the people where to get deeper into your work any upcoming projects or your web address those kind of things? Well if you're interested in feng shui then i got a couple of books on country particularly.

1:02:30 one on Flying Star Feng Shui. Flying Star Feng Shui is one of the best methods for working inside a home, if you're interested in Greco-Egyptian magic then I've done Techniques of Greco Egyptian Magic which was published by Golden Board. You can see it on Amazon, you can pick it up in bookshops and the States few books option in England as well and a couple in Europe sadly not in Singapore so Then I've also done a techniques of Solomonic Magic which covers a lot of the grimoires. And it actually lays down the various tools that you need and how they should look and how they should be prepared, so techniques of Solomonic Magic is useful if you're going to do that sort of thing

1:03:19 And if you were interested in the Goetia, then David Rankin and I produced the Goetia of Dr. Rudd. Dr. Rudd was a real practitioner in the mid-1600s he actually advanced magic a fair bit and we produced his manuscript in entirety. I've written quite a lot of commentary on how he did it, where the historical background is and all that sort of thing so that's good if you're interested in the Goetia. Otherwise, there's actually in total 46 books on my pen. Some of them long since gone out of print but I'm fairly easy to find on Amazon probably easier to find on Amazon than it is at the bookshops. Isn't that the case these days? Yep! Well very cool again can't thank you enough You're an inspiration man take care out there Okay thanks for putting up with me for what is it

1:04:20 Well over an hour. Oh yeah, two hours! Good God... Anyway it's been fun talking to you thanks Craig. You got it Cheers. Cheers. Bye. Peace Abra-cadabra and cheers indeed Hiresight Chatters big thanks to Dr. Stephen Skinner So so impressed with his knowledge and this was an episode that i studied quite a lot for if you can believe it but there's just so much so much to know. Just even getting your head around, single century or tracing one particular text is difficult enough not to mention the various layers of context for the times various waxing and waning influences laws in attitudes and level of aggression towards magic at a particular point

1:05:08 Whew, I find it to be a lot of fun actually but quite challenging. Conveniently i'm also deep into Gordon White's Grimoire course which has to be like the best of its kind! I know nothing like it tons of amazing information very synergistic with this episode of THC and what I've been having to digest for quote-unquote work lately But the Hygromantia is now on my wedding registry along with an altar to replace my makeshift one out of my fiancé's childhood toy box. And we also got a whole lot of dab rig supplies and concentrate stuff on there too, so deal with it family! You got a real Sophie's Choice to make here are you gonna buy me and the lady drug supplies or occult stuff?

1:06:00 Or a nice neutral bullet blender while you can still grab yourself in neutral option act quick family and another effect that this episode and Gordon's grimoire course of had on me is that they have. set me on a path of looking for old rare books and libraries or collections that I could check out locally. It's just fascinating stuff, and a lot of what i found isn't in English which is to be expected but if I had an extra 10 grand laying around I could see the appeal in getting an old book of spells that maybe hasn't been translated and slowly going through and working out that translation. I mean fuck Sudoku

1:06:39 the Sunday Paper Crossword Puzzle, right? I mean do this if you want a challenging puzzle to solve. But i love it! One of the most academic approaches to magic we've probably taken with a guest and I have a lot of pride in this show because i don't find many interviews with Dr Skinner out there. And, I think about how many people listen to this show and just making it to this point you really are in a pretty special club like Miguel Connor too great show on Gnosticism two weeks ago take that and this piece and you have a nice little crash course in some very deep material Do you think anyone in your regular life understands these things like you do just off these cliff notes? I mean, especially if you heard the plus shows. These two episodes would be the start of a nice little gift set if there were such a thing. Of course, I don't want to diminish the depth of these studies or these guests' work and make it sound like well 2-hour podcast we know what we need to know

1:07:37 But at the same time we are putting this out to a lot of people compared to what's typical for genre like magic. Granted it is small niche so I'm not trying to brag about anything because it kind of like being the world tallest midget but it still cool to me and analogy would be Joe Rogan right? So he got like the podcast of all podcasts in his audience larger than probably two-thirds of what on TV So i love to watch it because of that fact and we does a show about pizza gate or one with randall carlson, i get all worked up in giddy cuz its not that is the most mind blowing stuff ever for someone who looks into this regularly but. Just because i know how many people its reaching and thats whats cool about scale that down at THC where were reaching tens of thousands of people but our subjects are even more obscure

1:08:29 Anyway, I do think the good doctor is spot on when he talks about the difficulty of doing magic. We've been trained to sort of brush the whole subject off like oh yeah i can manifest things with squiggles on paper? If it was that easy everyone would do it! Okay well how many times have you done it?! How many times have YOU tried?? You can't outsource everything. And I think the analogy that magic is like chemistry is great, it requires a lot of setup precise calculations It's not easy when you start to get into it But easy shouldn't really be the question either Is it worth? It should be the question and to me it seems like it is though I am still light on personal results if I'm being honest but staying up-to-date with Empire hasn't Resulted in anything either so I guess the bar is pretty low

1:14:37 Hey, see your mind The highest eyes spell on you You're not afraid to do the time Yeah, yeah, yeah, oh, hey Hey guys, thanks for listening to the first hour of The Higher Side Chats podcast with me Greg Carlwood. If you don't know there is a second hour to all the episodes we do around here generally were able to get a lot deeper into the topics and ideas that our guest is about so if you enjoyed what you've heard from THC for free consider signing up at the higher side chats plus dot com to get the second hour of the five shows I put together each month

1:15:37 I never really wanted to be a paid subscriber podcast, but i really hate the idea of spending airtime promoting some product that's completely unrelated and telling you the best way to support this show is buy an audiobook or new underwear by mail. So instead if you like this show double your time with it for 5 bucks per month and let's cut out all the other shit It's half the price of a movie ticket and you get at least an extra 5 hours of show per month. Collectively it keeps us stable, and frees me from wasting your time with anything but the show that came to listen too. It is really the only way for independent one man shows to make it, I do what I can so that its worth your while

1:16:15 Since we started this, I've always tried to use the subscriptions to improve the podcast and make signups more advantageous. It started with just a second hour for the main show but now we've got a nice forum going where people can get deeper in conversation about episodes with other listeners, submit a candidate in the guest request thread or share their own personal projects to get out of the soul-crushing 9-5 cog in the wheel life on the entrepreneurs thread! The forum and the Plus comments are always the first places I try to go for listener engagement, but it does get harder as the show gets more popular. Because of that there's also a direct messaging feature you can use to reach me through the Plus site also!

1:16:54 But beyond the forum, if you like any of the music I've used for THC. Most of it I've hired artists to make and have provided all as free downloads to Plus members too! So if you like a particular song you heard close the show out recently come get the MP3. I should also mention that If you don't like paying $5 recurring every month I get that You can buy 3 months 6 months or 1 year up front and just be done with it. I have plenty listeners who send checks & money orders to the P.O box too I try to make it as easy for people as i can and you can read more about on the sign up page. Also be sure to check out the FAQ help page on the Plus site if you have any questions or concerns about how to listen to a password protected show on your devices, I've highlighted a lot of great solutions and one those would be the iPhone app that just recently hit the Apple App Store A super kind and talented listener made it for us and you can use it to stream or download either the free or plus show

1:17:49 If you're on Android, I'd use PocketCasts or PodcastAddict and subscribe to the feed manually that way. I also try to throw in occasional bonus shows or Q&A shows and I've got a few other weird ideas I might get to try out soon but I give ya all I can for five bucks And I hope you'll at least give it a shot if you've listened to a few free shows and find them unique or valuable. I know there's a lot of podcasts out there and I'm just one of em'. But if you have any questions, concerns or comments about any of this please get in touch with us at thehiresideschatsteam.com I also wanted to plug the Hireside newsletter i'm going to be putting out totally free for anyone who wants to sign up at the main internet website for the show thehiresideschats.com You can also get on that email list through the Hireside Chats Facebook page there's a button there as well

1:18:36 But the reason I'm doing this is because I get tons and tons of emails after a show goes up asking me about how I feel about a particular guest or topic, and the wrap-up isn't always the best place to do that. Especially if I have anything negative to say. Sometimes the dust needs to settle... sometimes I need to hear feedback from you guys first.... There are a lot of factors but usually have something to communicate to you and just don't get to it So on the first of the month I plan to send out a little newsletter with my thoughts about the 5 shows this previous month and talk to you about anything else that's on my mind or going on. And what is probably most enticing is that I'm gonna give some insight into at least one guest coming up in the month, which people have been begging for some posted schedule for a long time and personally think I'd like the surprise! But signup for the Hireside Newsletter it comes out on the 1st of the month and I won't waste your time with any other emails

1:19:29 And that's it. I appreciate you listening, and try to give alternative ideas and guests a fair shake on high quality podcasts, expose some deep level conspiracies without the yelling, and hope to offer some inspiration that even though the system relentlessly suggests you should follow their blueprint of mediocrity, you can do your own thing and live a much happier life despite all negativity in this world. So go ahead and treat yourself! Isn't it about time?