Free Plus Show: Dr. Stephen Skinner | The History Of Magic, Summoning Spirits, & John Dee

00:01 Hello free first hour subscribers. Greg Carlwood here and over the years some of the main things I've heard about the full two-hour plus show and the membership are things like, oh i've been meaning to sign up for a long time but have just been lazy or that the first hour sounds so good and complete that it's hard to feel like you're missing that much or assess the value of a second hour Basically, the old adage you don't know what you're missing. And I understand that point. I don't really like to tease things in that sort of way feels too sleazy salesman-y So I thought about how I could address that what I might be able to do to convince more free listeners that it's worth converting over for and there really is no better way to do that than showing free listeners What a plus show is like or how much more second hour might contain

00:51 And that is my plan here, at least for a while. And we'll see how it works out for me one older plus show in the free show feed every month at the end of the month as a sort of peek behind the plus curtain because people who are members hear full two hour interviews in a single file. It's a little different from the way other people in this space do it where they split the hours into two separate files To me, as a listener that's annoying. It's like flipping tape from side A to side B I don't really want to deal with that when i'm in the middle of something else just keep it going! Also a waste of the listeners time to hear two wrap ups and two introductions trying to get back into the vibe so thats why I do it like I do it does confuse people sometimes

01:39 Which means that for these free feed sample episodes, if you feel like what you're hearing is too fresh in your memory skip ahead about 50 minutes and just pick up from there. And you can be pretty sure that you're hearing all the Plus Show content My process has always been find a natural sounding cut point about halfway in Make a chop and then tack on the whole tell us where we can get more links, etc. Section that is always at the end of a full interview So if you're trying to work it out in your head That's how I do it

02:15 But that said, I'm trying to choose episodes that I have fond memories of even if the material isn't 100% fresh in my mind and ones that are also on some of the more timeless subjects. No point rehashing some old political thing or a previous year's astrology and just going by that gives me tons of great shows to choose from I hope you enjoy this new process, and it gives new life to older episodes. And re-highlights some of the amazing guests i've been lucky enough to have. Of course if you end up thinking damn that was good! That was more satisfying than just a normal free show maybe it is worth $8 a month well then i would hope that you do pull the trigger...I mean why try to make it something else? That IS THE GOAL HERE

03:03 So I think everyone wins with this free Plus show a month plan. If you want to know why I picked this episode and the date it originally aired, I'll add that to the show notes right along with the easy plus sign up links if you want to start that seven day free trial if you want plus through Spotify use the Patreon link otherwise use the main one thanks and enjoy. And it's popping masters almost surely have of this clearly maybe something there And until you've thoroughly tested every last course, just did you know the less you really do? That's true Dr. Seuss! Where would we be without THC? Cause' we know they're lying to us Just don't without THC The highest side-check show of all companies

04:10 Alright Hireside 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

05:03 Conveniently these attitudes of apathy and fear still serve their same purpose, and 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

05:40 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

06:38 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, add a prediction of results. This fascinated me when i went back

07:25 through the grimoires and then from them back to greek magic, right back to the greco-egyptian magicians because the great egyptians there was no problem with authority at least until romans came. Because most of the great 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

08:23 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. Wow! That was a lot of reading

09:03 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

09:54 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, that one something needed to be done by anybody moving along i was always interested in the grandma's the 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

10:43 you would read books by the physicists 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 to discover 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

11:35 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

12:15 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. It is to do with independent spirits, angels, whatever you like to call them. And real magic consists in calling these entities Constraining them binding them and getting to do what you asked him to do. And they can't do everything that's not magic like in the children story books there are very specific things i can do it specific spirits have specific specialties, if u ask me to do something that is not as it were

13:07 on their list, then they just plain 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 ten that thing will happen I'm still figuring out what the tenth time is 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

13:59 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 and when he was working with Ray to sort of generate theories of chaos magic so we had many along night talking about these things but the spirit is either

14:46 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 from but it will be an external message. So sometimes you can hit upon a spirit like that and then get a result

15:40 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 comes through a thing called a hygromantia

16:40 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 of The Key of Solomon certain things got left out because magic was usually passed on an apprentice basis from a master who can do it to an apprentice and therefore a certain amount of that became oral instruction that 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. 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

17:30 The Greco-Egyptian papyri, the 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 all those magical stuff in bowls this magical stuff and various descriptions of medical stuff in the book of the dead but.

18:10 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.

18:59 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

19:50 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.

20:39 I've lost track of your original question. Oh, differences between the Greek and Egyptian approaches? Ah well the Egyptian approach was mainly concerned with what you do in the afterlife. The Greeks were very concerned about what you could 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 after 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

21:24 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.

22:03 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

23:02 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 worldview 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

23:42 But as I say, this is my conclusions rather than practical experience. Right. I mean, that is interesting! I figure there had to be some rhyme and reason to why they're doing these things and it might have some kind of effect but we'll just have to wait and see... And with practicing magicians that i've talked to there seems to be a fairly common pattern of getting a big dramatic result early on and then having trouble getting back to that level for awhile before their 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 as a result of working with Gauri Sheth

24:32 And i managed to find that spirit and so from then on, i have the help of that spirit to bind other spirits no i haven't experienced a drop off in the practice wow you are lucky. 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

25:15 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

26:07 They are sensitive to certain things and one of those is smell. So every magical ritual has the burning of incense But Gautama Thurs 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

26:46 smell-o-vision 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. What's coming between those two they smell and so if you, no reason to smoking or you're reading garlic fish then this tends to drive the spirit away. The other thing is you need to do it away from the center of the city although if u

27:42 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 spirits that you haven't bound are 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 is well secluded from everywhere else and uh..I had a cleared area amongst trees that was quite useful

28:25 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 Well, 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?!

29:12 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

30:05 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 rose 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

30:55 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

31:52 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 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

32:37 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?

33:36 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, it 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

34:26 just the more solid, the more concrete bit at the bottom of a long ladder with various different entities. Some of 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

35:14 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 than to compare grimoires and read commentaries and all that sort of thing. And there are indeed a lot of people out The 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 you need to figure out how to use it you need to test tubes and things contain what you're working on

36:10 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

37:07 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 a cello and the seller 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. You

38:07 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 will 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 in this shift

38:50 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 call spirits who will then help them, they would usually refer to them as... 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 the things that I often say is that actually dead human beings don't know very much more than live human beings

39:49 I believe that. So if you want knowledge which is outside of the usual, that you can't find on Wikipedia or in your grandfather's chest then you need to talk to non-human spirits Fair enough. 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 the suppression? Is there any way to really restore that picture well we can restore the picture

40:32 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 on 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 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

41:28 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 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

42:29 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 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

43:21 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 ways of punishing somebody was to take their eyeballs out which meant that they couldn't see what they were doing but at least they didn't kill them. And so there were various attempts to suppress magic, one because it threatened the current rulers because with magic you can do things which might have resulted in a change or what's the word Americans use? In regime change? Yeah

44:12 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 their... If they were not similarly skilled – and a couple of popes were skilled in magic – then it's better just get rid of it. While you're burning the manuscripts, you might as well burn some of the practitioners' as well. Fortunately 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

45:06 Some item was used or done which is missing from western magic i look at the power of made adjustments to the west and it worked a lot better, that's because chinese magic although there's been some persecution is actually feeling intact. 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

45:55 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 or 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. 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 magic's 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?

46:43 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 for 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 my occasion complained that he'd been pinched by one spirit and showed

47:30 quite severe marks on his arm, which may have been Kelly having Dee on. But anyway... So Dee quite often would be talking through the scryer to a spirit which was claiming to be an angel but probably wasn't. And 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 as well if they're not angels I'm the don't tell me the truth i can be led astray and also ways and indeed poor john de was little bit strike, jerry for example told him what you should say to steven who is king of poland.

48:14 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 the other. Stephen just refused to see him after that saying if I want that kind of advice on 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 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

49:10 the master of roles which is one of the highest legal positions and lord denning. He was an angel magician the lord of the admiralty also interested in calling spirits, who are number of lords and also a number really rich and successful lawyers and they passed the manuscript from one to another and i tracked my books who and what to pass it to somebody else when 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, without obviously belongs to the class now at the same time those people who were not quite so much would have been learning

50:03 What are the news in a more cut down form of magic invocation without protection and things like that but anyway. Conspiracy was your absolutely right in the seven hundred some eighteen hundreds it is almost entirely the province of the elite, 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?

50:48 Oh, 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 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 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?

51:37 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 Now, spirits cannot access of their own accord something on the physical plane. It has to be literally given to them

52:14 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 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

52:57 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 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

53:45 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 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. Hmm, 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?

54:43 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 magicians, then they're not very keen to tell you about it. And if I knew of one or two such cases, I 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

55:32 I'm pretty sure that nobody picked Elizabeth II's date of coronation. It would have been sorted out by a public servant in Asia, my other interest is Feng Shui and I don't mean in the really crass pop way of just moving your furniture around But i know that a lot of the elites in asia use from three masters to ensure their projects will be successful and the money will continue to come, in the case of some of the casinos out here there is specialist function master make sure when it comes into the casino doesn't leave. Send me your gambler please leave with empty pockets but country is not magic but it was my answer in the sense that

56:22 specialist practitioners are still used by the elites out here. And so it 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

56:58 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 see it or measure that doesn't exist My answer to 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 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

57:48 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 because 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.

58:26 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 now days the world's where are many, no i'm more guilty than most having added to the stack of books.

59:01 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 getting back to practical magic and actually interacting with spirits

59:41 Another thing that comes up for me is a general attitude of negativity because I guess i start to feel a little bit weird when it comes to commanding and binding spirits. It seems a little bit aggressive, I guess? Is it always so forceful or is that just the terminology we use? No let me draw parallel. I said earlier that spirits are a little bit like wild animals if you're out west in the states and you want to tame a wild horse You can take a couple of different routes you can feed the sugar and say nice things to it or you can use the fairly violent way of bridling and doing the horse. Exhausting and so forth and that might be my parallel with binding that works most domesticated horses have been through that procedure,

1:00:33 Very few domesticated horses have simply become rideable through love and cuddles. And I know that a lot of armchair magicians say, oh you should really be nice and respectful to those spirits Yes well i would certainly be respectful to them but they are tricky dickies and they will not... They will only do what they want to do which is why a lot of magicians fail unless their bound if there are bound Then, for one reason or another if it's been done properly they have to do in the same way that a horse that has a bridle. You pull on the left rein and the horse turns to the left – it has to do it! If you take the bridle and reins off and kick it into the side and say please horse go down the left path chances of doing that are pretty slim

1:01:27 Yeah, I think that's a great analogy. A great way to look at it because it kind of hard to wrap your head around sometimes when we're dealing with things that we don't have experience with or have never seen before but that leads me into the next question because I'm curious about the logic and reasoning of non-human entities We can expect them to communicate or think exactly like a human would Is there anything to be said about the difference? Or how to make better sense out of our interactions Yeah, they are very limited. They're limited to specific fields of action. Iamblichus said of them once that... He didn't actually say they were a bit stupid but a bit slow on the uptake and they need to be constrained and he said more but i'm not going to discuss that now because it comes right to the heart of how you do it

1:02:23 Yeah, I mean we're all mollycoddled city dwellers. None of us well very few of us could kill our own animals to cook right somebody has to do it for us very few of this could do surgery on another human being it has to be left a specialist and You know spilling blood makes a lot of people scream but if you brought up the country that if you bought out in the country all this is not such a big deal and if u go back to ancient times you don't actually have to go back more than about hundred fifty years when people are aware of what's happening in the country it's not such a big deal. But we've been made politically correct and ultra sensitive

1:03:12 All of which is good up to a point but it does chop large amount of our experience out and then we wonder. What are the basic things is that the parchment, did you do the keys on things must be made from an animal because part of this animal skin and they should make yourself And i have done that and it's quite an interesting procedure and its hard work. I can tell you the parchment rather than paper or plastic or something is much more effective so perhaps in some reason, the spirit can understand the sigils on it because written on something that was once living just sketched out of a compass on a piece of paper it's much much less effective.

1:04:03 People will not push themselves to do those things. One day somebody may discover how you can do sigils on plastic and still get the same effect, but it's sure as hell is not going to be me. Yeah I mean once we can do it on Facebook we're all gonna be set! Yeah it won't happen...it will not happen yeah There are only certain images and things that the spirits recognize these are not what comes up on Facebook Well, as for people's fears on this kind of stuff. I've heard you discuss the classic notion of the Faustian pact—this idea of making a deal with a trickster and losing your soul—and that it was more of a Christian invention to scare people off and I think that's really interesting how can we separate real concerns in dangers in dealing with this kind of thing from that lingering propaganda residue?

1:04:57 Okay, you're absolutely right. It was largely a Christian gloss on the Faust books that he lost his soul. The pact is real but the pact is what the spirit makes with you and it's his obligations to you that are written into the pact. Then the whole idea of losing your soul or whatever at the end I think is a priest sphere rather than a magician sphere There are dangers in magic. One of them is obsession, there are a number of people who get obsessed or possessed anyway but if you're actually actively calling particular spirit and you have no defense and you don't know what you're doing then it is occasionally happens that the spirit will take up residence And then you've got a serious problem when you need an exorcist who knows what they're doing So there are dangers in doing magic

1:05:58 It's like electricity, with the right insulation at the right circle, the right phylactery. You don't get zapped but if you do these things and handle a wire without the right proportions then you may get zapped so some magic like physics or doing household electrics is not without danger It's interesting, like people talk about obviously the dangers of not doing things correctly. I guess you can get possessed or you could unleash something it's curious that there aren't really very many or at least i don't know very many accidents

1:06:43 In magic that have exposed themselves to the mainstream like you have an accident by not preparing things correctly and somehow an entity would gain influence in there would be noticeable in a mainstream way you don't understand is that ever happen i guess it doesn't. No if he does game that kind of control over your because you've been stupid and not taking any protection then, you're more likely to be Talk to next by psychiatrist and then committed and then who's gonna hear about it. Yeah fair enough, i'm doing awful people in the same as most of them are insane some input there but relatives, what's on the mobile service just a second you cannot talk spirit out not

1:07:33 is not possible. So psychiatry has no fix for possession and those who are unfortunate so likely to spend the rest of their life locked up somewhere, right? And then you know they're not going to be interviewed by journalists and if they were, the journalist wouldn't know what to make of it if they'd ask a psychiatrist. Psychiatrist would give fancy terms but he wouldn't be able to cure it or they can do chabonation or chemical effects so the person turns into a vegetable and doesn't cause any trouble anymore. And then where's the story? It doesn't get heard." Yeah, that's true! Man... So you've looked at so many different schools of magic how would you really compare and contrast the systems you're most familiar with for people who might find it a bit hard not to just think of them as one big soup I mean we have Enochian

1:08:27 Goetia, Solomonic all these things. How would you separate them for people? That's a bit of a hard one as the basic mechanism is the calling and spirits or angels if somebody wanted to start it would be rather better to start with Angels there are like one grimoire called the Almadol which only deals with the Angels of the four quarters And that's a relatively good place to start. There was a book recently by Fr Asham Chason who goes some length about his experiences using that particular grimoire and I have also used it so I know the names of the spirits you call, or if you like to call them angels they are fairly...I wouldn't say they're harmless but they are safer

1:09:24 So you might start with that particular grimoire. Nobody should jump in and do the Goetia first up, or even the Key of Solomon first up. You know? So you should tame a few simple ones first. Right! That was going to be my next question is there like a level of the hierarchy that we should stay away from in the beginning? Stay with angels and lower? Well...you know there's a lot of confusion between spirits and demons Damon originally was a Greek word meaning that spirit who might be a personal spirit. In fact, Socrates had a personal daemon spelled slightly differently which was of great advantage to him and I think a lot of the things that he said came via that daemon

1:10:13 The Christians got hold of the word in the third and fourth century, modified it to demon and declared all of them evil. Which is not really true so there's some operations for calling a personal daemon that will actually act as your guide and that's not a bad place to start because if you do have personal daemon or spirit a relatively benign spirit who is, as it were on your side and can advise you and help. That's a good entrance rather than diving straight into poetic calling. Enochian? Well that's the specialized thing because D did not – how do I put this

1:11:05 The knocking calls are quite extraordinary. They will produce results. Dee didn't put a circle down, but he prayed an awful lot beforehand. I think that modern individuals probably have lost the knack of praying fervently or with any great strength so perhaps that's not so good. And Dee is so interesting! channel the entire Enochian magical system from these angels that he was in communication with, with Edward Kelly for sometimes I guess I've heard 10 hours a day they were talking to these beings. That's a strong connection. Yeah he worked Kelly really hard. He paid him 80 pounds a year which in those days was probably like paying him eighty thousand a year

1:11:54 So he paid him relatively well, but he kept him at it looking into the crystal all the time and conveying. Sometimes Kelly ran a bit dry and had to make few things up. And it's fairly obvious when he was doing that or had to go away to his room to think about it which is when you're planning to make something else. But yeah D definitely wanted the deepest knowledge in the universe sadly the spirits that he called didn't have it because I think that few of the entities called are actually angels. Because the spirits of lower order or close to the physical plane are much easier to call, angels are long way away and have got better things to do and answer questions about when their mother might arrive or whatever else they wanted to know

1:12:45 Also another thing that I heard is interesting about Dee and Edward Kelly is their exploration of alchemy. I've heard rumors that they might have had some success in that area, what are your thoughts on their alchemical work? Well certainly a lot... yeah I would go along with that. A lot of things that Kelly did were fake and tricksterish but I think he had some success with alchemy He finished up being a very rich guy, even after he'd been locked up a few times. And he was given the title by Rudolph II and finished up owning lots of land in an adjoining town and also mines. His house I think still stands

1:13:30 I discovered that his house in crack has been demolished and replaced by relatively modern buildings. Yes i think that either he or kelly really discovered the white and red powder in well allegedly glassbury, And for a long, long time they were simply using that to do transmutations to say see we can do that. But they couldn't actually manufacture the powders again so as they ran out things were getting worse when they broke up this split up D gave all of the powers to Kelly who then went on and become much more successful alchemists I think he must have been using more of these to keep his place

1:14:11 I'm not sure that either of them actually discovered the procedure to generate the red and white powder, but I am pretty sure that they used red and white powder that somebody else had generated. The other alchemist which I think hit upon some really useful stuff was Rupert Scissor. Some his writings seem to be quite clear. I knew a modern alchemist in London who used lapidus as his pseudonym. And I saw the laboratories in a cellar near Baker Street, I think in Malcolm Street actually and I think he'd got about four fifths of the way and the reason I say that is not because he just told me but because the sequence of colors that appeared in the flask were the classical sequence

1:15:07 With ordinary chemistry, if you're trying to get a sequence of just for the sake of argument red blue and then black. That's just for instance is very difficult to fake that and he did get the right color sequence but didn't get the last step On the other hand, looking at it from a scientific point of view obviously using atomic manipulation you could change lead into gold and it doesn't seem to be very good reason by heating re-heating subliming calcinating that you could replicate the same thing but I think its possible.

1:15:44 Yeah, so many people just chalk alchemy up to trying to turn lead into gold but it's so much more than that and the powders are so provocative. And just like you said I've seen a few indications that the art is still alive although its very secret and its even more obscure then magic It does seem like some people are behind closed doors still experimenting with trying to crack this case They definitely are. A lot of modern chemical equipment like heating pans and things have been bought by modern day alchemists, a lot of money has been spent on aspects of alchemy which is come to the fore as plant-based alchemy which the old alchemist I don't think did but that's still quite interesting. I did get involved with it with Lapidus whose real name was David Kirwan but it seemed to me that

1:16:40 given the number of alchemists who failed, I suppose the number of magicians who had probably succeeded that magic was a much more profitable way. I could see results whereas with alchemy it sounded like interminable heating and cooling for years and years before result come. And you know if it was only gold then thats great but its not really big deal I mean, creating the universal medicine now that would be a great deal. And in Singapore, I know a doctor researcher who is actually looking at it from that point of view that if there is some kind of product which would actually stimulate the let's just fantasize stimulate the immune system and kill all the bugs then that will be a real contribution to human health and welfare

1:17:37 So that facet of alchemy is still interesting to me. Right, yeah cheers to that! That would be pretty amazing who knows if it would be released if it ever did get achieved because it would interfere with Big Pharma's profits but we can hope Yes you're right and probably bought out by a big pharma company who'd probably bury it but anyway as you say we can hope Or just keep it for the people at the top Yes, I suppose that's possible and in which case we wouldn't know about it would we? No. So another element that kind of tends to get tangled up when talking about magic and trying to unravel the history is separating religion and magic and also the mystery tradition what can you tell us about the significance of separating those things and where to really draw the lines between them

1:18:31 Okay, there's very clear distinction between those. The mystery tradition is a bit difficult to talk about because the mystery tradition does not exist anymore in any... No? Ah okay! There are individual practitioners etc and you could say that part of the work of The Golden Dawn was in fact like a mystery tradition but I'm going to dive back to Greco-Egyptian papyri. In those papyri, the average length of a magical operation would be 60 lines or so in that papyri. The mystery tradition material in there is much longer – many hundreds of lines – so that's one distinction. The difference between magic and religion is pretty easy to define. A lot of academics

1:19:23 find it, seem to find it problematical and say that you can't distinguish because religion uses some magical techniques like priests have been known to work as exorcists but I don't think magic uses any religious techniques. And the approach is completely different first of all religion is concerned with the gods If it's Hinduism, then it is many gods. If it's Christianity, then one or three gods. If it's Islam, then one god and the approach is one of supplication as everybody knows that the translation of Islam is submission and it also true in other monotheistic religions that the approach is one of submission – please God do this for me nothing else

1:20:14 The approach of magic is not dealing with a god, because I think most magicians think that commanding a god is just not on. It's looking at a lesser spiritual creature and it's one of command and that in my book is completely different from supplication so that's what I think is the difference between religion and magic. The mystery tradition however is designed to elevate their practitioner to the point where he is so sufficiently pure and spiritual that he can actually communicate with a god or at least an archangel. You're probably going to ask me, can or does that happen? Yes I am convinced it can and does happen because i'm familiar with the techniques used

1:21:06 And so you got three different ways of human beings communicating with other entities. If you just look at how they performed, religion is performed in public inside temples, inside mosques and churches everybody is invited to come and quite often people are invited to convert That's that approach magic magician is not interested in large audience he is any interested in either doing something himself or for a client and then past times across working for clients just wanted to cancel the time, will be done secretly not having the because you don't want these methods and we don't want the typical school which might come.

1:21:58 from people who don't understand what you're doing so the procedure for doing it is different mental attitude is different techniques are different. I don't understand why academics feel that they can separate magic from religion i think in some ways, what they do is in their heads and mix up paganism and magic. But indeed, paganism is religion. It doesn't matter what the name of the god is if you're worshipping a god and begging him to do your favour – that's religion! And so like Macmillan, if you confuse paganism with magic because magic deals with multiple entities and paganism deals with multiple entities

1:22:44 Then then everything gets confused. So I just like to peel those apart again Religion is public religion is supplicatory Magic is private magic does not supplicate Magic deals with shall we say entities further down the spiritual scale and closer to the earth? Religion deals with gods quite often rather inaccessible cards yeah, that's a great breakdown in the confusion for a lot of Regular folks I think just comes from the Roman Catholic Empire shutting it down. They thought oh, well this is just religious infighting I just had this discussion with an atheist friend of mine who thinks I'm crazy for this interest and I say to him look man if you have a problem with Catholicism You should care about magic because this is the kind of stuff that they were trying to stamp out And so for that reason maybe you should pay attention to it Just despite these people that you hate so much as an atheist

1:23:43 Well, I think probably that atheists would make the worst kind of magicians because they're not even going to give any credibility to anything that they can't see touch or push. Whereas you have got too well we won't go into them and why shouldn't they be? I think there's a large number of people who'd probably sign on a census form Church of England or Roman Catholic probably in their heart are more atheist Yeah, I'd agree. And I've also heard you discuss the Egyptians

1:24:19 knack for breathing a certain life into statues to give them that sort of sentience that can be communicated with it was something you said in passing and I really wanted to ask you about that because it's A theme that has come up before in conversations about the Muse concept, about Greek statues and Renaissance art and powerful works like The Mona Lisa And the idea that That's why people might be attracted to it. Because it has some kind of quality there. But what are your thoughts on the intersection of art and magic? Do some of these great works, either by accident or design end up becoming outposts for spirit contact? Okay let's examine pagan religion for the moment quite often a lot of the idols have some spirit embedded in them

1:25:07 And there are very precise techniques for either breathing life into the thing or trapping a spirit inside. And most people just find that incredible and they'll go, what are you talking about? And magicians have frequently done things like this either into a small image or into even a talisman by tying the individual spirit there it gives you a point of contact and it's not going to disappear. And then you can continue to press it, to bring about the effect that you want brought about. So I have absolutely no doubt that spirits can be embedded in statues, uh...to less extent paintings. Statues much easier! There was a modern Czechoslovakian magician called... what was his name? Uh...Francisek Barden

1:26:05 And he, in his books quite clearly outlines the method for doing it. I can vouch that it can and has been done. So does that answer the question? Yeah! I think that's just so interesting because we see tons of statues in Greek and Egyptian culture and we know they had these practices...so I've just been curious about to what degree that might have been part of their art I think it is fairly common. For example, the statues in the main Greek temples definitely would have had the gods if not tied to the statue at least connected with a statue because you need to localize gods and spirits we're only human We can't deal with the big one in the sky, we can't deal with something which we can see so by tying at least part of that to a statute then we can address it

1:27:02 It's again like facing the right direction in a circle. You can face the statue and here I suppose you've got a magical technique which is abuse in religion. As for the Mona Lisa, I can't really say that any time I have seen the Mona Lisa it was over the shoulders of hundreds of other people craning their necks and if the Mona Lisa had anything to say to me it was impossible to hear because So I think a lot of that is just publicity and she's been written up. She has great work of art, but maybe not the only great work about And then because I live out in Asia, I quite often frequent temples and It becomes very clear that some are almost empty you can walk in there's no No bars at all with others

1:27:58 There was one such temple in Cambodia, which is devoted to the Taoist gods. And they were very palpable and they were very present. You could take a skeptical person in there and after a few minutes even they would begin to feel the atmosphere. That's intriguing because I'm still in that intellectual phase and i'm pretty energetically dense. I haven't ever...I've gone places where people say they feel an energy, but haven't really felt much energy but maybe I'm just working on that? No no not at all! I can relate to that. I don't consider myself particularly sensitive to these things but that particular temple in Cambodia you would have to be incredibly thick-skinned not to feel it. That has definitely had

1:28:51 the statues in there have definitely been enlivened. Because most of the outside of Asia, any pagan temple in Europe has been completely destroyed or moved a few times or embedded in concrete, or whatever else. And so there's not much to be felt in Europe anymore. Right it's probably even harder in the United States I'd assume? I wasn't going to say that but you're dead right Fair enough. Well, one more question about art and magic I mean you said it'd probably be easier to Attach a spirit to a statue rather than a painting what about the possibility of music is that too far out? Attaching a spiritual music that I'm sure cannot be done hmm fair enough That's another one of those things the conspiracy world sometimes talks about

1:29:47 Well, I mean one could use music as an accompaniment to a ceremony but it would be more of a distraction than anything else. I've also heard that talked about in classical music too that some of those old guys had magical methods to their music but who knows? That could all be hyperbole too! Oh there's some wonderful stories about violinists...I'm just trying to think who having sold their soul to the devil then played the violin with great vim and vigor. I'm not particularly musically inclined, so my real answer is that i don't know when it comes to that."

1:30:29 Well, this is another weird one I got for you and I gotta ask because you're very knowledgeable about the magic side of things. And there's a trend in the field of ufology now to equate these strange sightings or the abduction scenario more closely with magical workings or spiritual entities as opposed to some alien being from outer space Have you given any thought to that kind of the Jacques Vallée attitude? Do you think that perspective has any merit I don't have an answer for that. But, it's quite an interesting idea that in fact the aliens might be from this world but in fact spirits or...I mean there was some writers who thought about them as coming from the inside of the earth. Stories about drill and things like that even I think Bill Willerton wrote a book about that. Yeah!

1:31:24 That's an interesting possibility, but I have no direct knowledge of it. Never having seen...I've seen the occasional thing in the sky which could have been a flying saucer but I haven't heard nothing any closer than that so I really don't know. Right on, well what about the extent to which an entity could manifest physically? Obviously people see things when they perform rituals they get visions but is there a way for... Is it possible for an entity to manifest physically and stay in that form if its so choose or is there mechanism there for anything like that

1:32:03 Yes, that is possible. I have seen examples of that Let me give you a story about something that happened early on in my practice I sometimes tell the story because it is very concrete and the evidence was photographable I was present at an invocation of a particular goetic spirit called Agares And then they enable manuscript to guys spoken all this as being like a bird or having a bird head and it is even drawn slightly like a bird. But when we were doing this, none of us actually thought about his bird-like qualities and just thinking about the other concerns getting things done properly. And the evocation was relatively successful but we didn't get visible manifestation. We did get the objective that we're trying for another visible manifestation but towards the end

1:33:04 An entire flight of birds came down the chimney, this was in a place right out on the country and began to fly around the circle endlessly in an endless stream of birds. And then when it was banished they went up the chimney again and we all thought... They didn't enter the circle they were just on the outside of the circle and everybody thought okay are we having a good hallucination here or do we actually get physical manifestation? And we finished and we tidied up, and left the room. We turned the light on before leaving the room. And low and behold around the circle

1:33:46 was quite a considerable amount of birdship. None of it entered the circle, so we know from that these are physical birds now. Were they driven down there by the spirit or were they just having a lark? My belief is that they were manifestation of the spirit that was very physical Because in the middle of the night, somewhere around about one o'clock in the morning what are birds doing? And even then flying down a chimney parading around a circle rather than crossing it just seems pretty unbelievable. But nevertheless we went back next morning and photographed it and yes there was no bird shit inside the circle at all

1:34:33 Wow. So the answer to your question, that's just one example I could instance other examples but i think one story is quite enough, yes you can get relatively physical manifestations sometimes it's visible to the point of three-dimensional sometimes and you can see what's behind it through Quite often it swells and contracts, and otherwise doesn't hold steady. But yes physical manifestations are possible. And it's really tough for the spirit to do that. I would assume yeah energetically that must be but that is a really awesome story! You mentioned that you achieved your magical aim in there

1:35:22 That made me think of something I heard you talk about where, in terms of the history, you've described that magical targets or goals have kind of changed quite a bit when you compare the real heyday to modern times. Is that right? Yeah yeah for example just let's start back at the beginning going back to the great co-Egyptians there are about 60 odd different things that they strove to do magical operations visibility and i'll talk to you about that in a minute evocations, get an answer like the end of the case of the Egyptians it was either into water or oil lamp. Producing compelling someone you're in love with to respond in the same way and so on

1:36:15 But there was no magical operations, give me more money. And whereas you read people's efforts these days and one of the top aims is let me win the lottery or give me more money so there is one drastic change what other things have changed? Well I mean things like invisibility you would normally categorize that as something that can't happen. And I would have categorized it the same way, but then when I look back at the Greek, the word was actually amourosis and we've been translated by other translators as invisibility and I tracked the word down and had a look and its real meaning is darkening so it's not really invisibility, it's just the turning down of the light in a person

1:37:12 And I've experimented with this and been able to stand in the middle of a shop, completely as it were turn out darken myself to the point where people walk straight past me or even bump into me. Not having seen that i was there and then that's my method that i did get from the great egyptian papyri so but nobody does that anymore uh i mean If you're like Crowley and decided you were going to do it in a highly lit restaurant, run around shouting and waving your arms then obviously you are going to be visible. No amount of darkening is going to enable you to do that so I'm able to stand even in the crowded room and nobody's looking at me and if somebody trying to find me they can walk right past several times and still not find me

1:38:05 It's only got a limited application, but it's just one example of a technique which isn't done much nowadays that was quite common in Greco-Egyptian times. That's cool! Yeah it's not straight up invisibility not quite so epic more of a subtle thing but definitely in that wheelhouse and that's cool yeah and quite useful in some circumstances I can imagine Then, causing dreams is another thing the Greco-Egyptians did. And what they wanted was prophetic dreams so they wanted a dream in which any specific god would come to them and give them an answer to questions that were bugged about it. If you're getting clear answers this is quite often a little bit more useful than say getting an answer from the I Ching or from Tarot So that was one other technique but one of the fascinating techniques

1:39:03 Isn't practice at all anymore sending dreams the great egyptian musicians had a message. Descending a specific dream to another person and i've messed around with that, i'm in some success of that that's so fun sounds fun And I was going to ask you about divination arts as far as tarot, astrology, the I Ching. Is there a form that you find most potent or one you found more successful than others in terms of divination? If you want advice then the Yi Jing is quite good because it doesn't say this is gonna happen and that's gonna happen but tells you what you should do if you are an honorable and good person

1:39:51 If you wanted more information than the tarot is quite good but the terror has to be done with the right frame of mind. My wife is quite good at doing readings, I've seen her shock people with the amount of detail there are other well strangle crystal gazing have never found that very successful for me personally but i'm sure there are people who do find it useful Yeah, but the basic difference between divination and magic is that divination seeks to find out what will happen. Magic seeks to change it And I am always in favor of seeking to change it rather than finding out what's going to happen and then going oh my god thats gonna happen What can I do? Absolutely

1:40:42 And I guess there are limitations to that too. Would you consider it just like a probability enhancer? Is that, would that be a definition of magic? No no it's more exact than that Really Yeah if its done right four times out five or nine times out ten and by done right I mean you've selected the right spirit you've asked the right question used the right time in the right instance You do everything absolutely right and it works. Divination is more like probability enhancer because you will get glimpses of what may happen in the future, but sometimes interpreting you need somebody who's good at that sort of thing. I mean it's the old gypsy tent thing – somebody who has been telling fortunes for 40 years is actually probably much more likely to be able to read the cards correctly than somebody who picked up a book and learned about the tarot last week

1:41:41 I do love how black and white you talk about the fact that it does work if you do it right but, You're right in that how often do naysayers, these critics How often have they done the real hard work In getting all of that stuff right? And the whole set up. Getting the knowledge right and then actually performing a ritual They don't do it so to say that it doesn't work is kind of silly Yeah, you're absolutely right. It's like one of my less complimentary phrases about academics writing about magic is that you wouldn't expect a professor who...a professor chemistry who'd never touched a test tube to know what he was talking about. I agree. You've gotta do it

1:42:30 And then they will hypothesize it might be this, it might be that or they'll look at parallels in African magic or whatever else. And then the African magic is miles away from classical Grimoire magic or classical Western magic and because you can't do it doesn't mean it doesn't exist there's lots of things I can't do. Like, I don't play tennis very well but it doesn't mean it doesn't exist and that's a very bad parallel. The rest of my family played very well so I feel a bit cut out there. No if you don't do the experiment then your result is not valid. You know? If the Royal Society hadn't been formed in 1660-something

1:43:22 and people were still going along the lines of, well the bible says that there are seven planetary spheres and they all rotate around the earth therefore that must be it. But they haven't done experiments, they haven't got a telescope, they haven't measured movement on planets then their opinion is worthless. And this is same as true if somebody said If i put electrolysis terminals into a solution of copper sulfate, no gas will be produced at the end because all you got is copper and liquid so hydrogen will not be produced on one of the terminals. Because they haven't done it if they did it would find that indeed how should this produce to hold the terminals but you gotta do you gonna do the work

1:44:10 And magic is easily as demanding as chemistry. You just put any old shit in the test tube and you won't get the result, but if you put the right shit in a test tube but don't heat it then you wont get the result. If you do not heat to the right temperature then you wont' get the results and then chemists will say no that doesn't work. But you've got to do the steps and also prepare yourself well in the ways that I mentioned. Well said, I mean i'm definitely guilty of half-assing some magic attempts that didn't work! And why not? Why not? We've all self included done stuff not properly and it hasn't worked but fortunately that's now some time ago

1:45:02 Because it's damn hard you need a space you need to play she needs equipment has to be pure it has to be constructed properly, yes to the possible matches possibly made by your hands so that other influences on their new equipment. You have to cut the circle so that its actually cut with a blade You can't stand in the middle of a room, point your finger at the circle and go zap I fixed the circle. It doesn't work like that you got to bend over and do it. You can just burn joss sticks when you're trying call a mercurial spirit. You've gotta burn right incense. There's many things you can't do but if you do it right then you follow right through to the end

1:45:50 Four times out of five, you get a result. Not one time but four times out of five and that is one helluva boost when you do get a result. Oh I'm sure! And after that sometimes the problem is well what do I do next? What do I ask for next and anyway... Well it's a formula and you got to get it right Yeah and it's a complicated formula It's not simple And before we really start winding down here, of course we brought up Feng Shui a little bit ago and I want to ask you just a little bit more about it because it is so interesting.

1:46:35 Like i said im energetically dense but are there any principles of the art form that people might be able to play around with in their home for maximizing the flow of good energy and space in a way that they might be able to feel hey, there is something here. Yes but again it's technical and its complicated you can't just put wind chime on the left hand window corner and hope that works doesn't work like that One of my reasons for liking country is that i learned in hong kong many decades ago and learn from a guy who was the function master four some of the elite, add i saw these guys paying him every year whether they call on him not pay him a salary every year. The end of the year you got a purse

1:47:27 I'm a significant amount of money and i thought these is hot business man chinese businessman pretty tough, i know you to be paying this guy all the money if it's bullshit because it's in find out so that was my first introduction to it. Eventually he told me that you don't practice side but confessed to me that he couldn't teach me the theory because his master had important and his master before that haven't taught him But I learned the theory later, so i've learned my feng shui back to front. Starting with a practice and then later picking up why it works and it again is a technique

1:48:09 And of course in america and the west it's been done made so simple like there was one method. Suppose a country which says if you don't have a compass just call the front door north and you can see immediately that You might be right one time in eight but that's not a very good idea is another dumbed down version which doesn't use the loop and i love bands are, very complicated chinese compass you need to measure accurately i go sometimes clients. I'm here mostly chinese actually your declines and you

1:48:53 You say you want to know the facing direction of the house and i'll say it faces east because the sun rises there that is not good enough, we have to find out within about five degrees what exactly is. Because the basis of function is physical one reasons why i was so knocked over by it was because my first, my first profession was a geography lecturer and measuring the land Working with maps and things was sort of second nature to me. When I saw this guy doing really detailed measurements and detailed calculations, I thought yeah there's got to be something here. And then i saw that when he made the changes real things happen in the lives of his clients and I was hooked so that was 1976

1:49:47 A lot of people think well, Feng Shui is a bit woo-woo. But done properly it's just as scientific and almost as complicated as magic and frankly if you just want to do things like accumulate money or have business success or have a lot of good relationships, Feng Shui actually works easier and faster than magic That's interesting because i mean you just explain it but up until this point its effects seemed a bit vague to me no good energy or bad energy in our homes and it's like. Okay well i don't feel energy generally so i don't know my just supposed to be in a slightly better mood but that makes little more sense, no nothing to do with being sensitive you can be completely dance and still do the calculations get it right

1:50:41 It's also got nothing to do with the college it was a long time which tries to tie country up the college which is nonsense the point of function changes changing, the occupants relationship with the outside world so that if its money they want the money comes along easier. If it's networking content say they want these things come out easier because friends that want you make better just never come on easy Mostly i work for chinese rather western clients listen to go out can i win the lottery and no it doesn't do that, chinese clients over know exactly what they want this done in a series of steps i know you'd like me to give you a quick hint as to what you should do. What is very simple place to place i suppose probably the simplest thing is that outside your front door

1:51:41 should be clear and open if you don't know how to wait for the garbage then your phone is never going to be good. If u open on to a wide field then you have the opportunity to use fun trade improve your life considerably, no is that physical internally you need to make very specific changes so i find realistic lives in the house which faces exactly southwest, the answer will be different from another one of your listeners whose face is exactly north or east. So I can't give general information because the calculations need to be done beforehand

1:52:27 I respect that. It's too precise. It is. And so before we go, 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 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. Every time somebody comes up with a theory about it, it's bound to be this kind of code or it's bound to be coded. It is actually fairly certain that the original language is Italian and Latin but it has 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 as natural languages so its not gibberish

1:53:26 There's definitely something in there. The plant drawings are the giveaway because a number of the plants have now been identified 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 and 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. The author

1:54:28 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 were 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

1:55:30 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

1:56:31 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!

1:57:19 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

1:58:09 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 function then i got a couple of books on country particularly.

1:58:52 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

1:59:42 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 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

2:00:42 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 a 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 and attitudes and the level of aggression towards magic at a particular point

2:01:30 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?

2:02:22 Or a nice neutral bullet blender while you can still grab yourself a neutral option. Act quick, family! And another effect that this episode and Gordon's Grimoire course have 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

2:03:01 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

2:03:59 But at the same time we are putting this out to a lot of people compared to what's typical for a genre like magic. Granted it's a small niche so I'm not trying to brag about anything because it's kind of like being the world's tallest midget, but it is still cool to me an analogy would be Joe Rogan right? So he's got like THE podcast of all podcasts and his audience is larger than probably two-thirds of what's on TV So I love to watch it because of that fact and when he does a show about pizza gate or one with randall carlson. I get all worked up in giddy cuz it's not that it's the most mind-blowing stuff ever for someone who looks into this regularly but just because I know how many people its reaching, and that's what's cool about it scale that down at THC where we're reaching tens of thousands of people but our subjects are even more obscure

2:04:51 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

2:05:41 And if you only heard a one hour show today, know that the Higher Side Chats always puts out the first hour of each show for free. But if you want to go deeper sign up for The Higher Side Chats Plus for just five bucks a month on our website and unlock the whole shebang! Today in the plus show I asked dr. Skinner about separating real dangers and concerns in magic from that religious propaganda John D And Edward Kelly's alchemical work Separating magic religion and the mystery tradition the connection between spirits and powerful art that part, I love Ufology is connection to magic and inner-earth beings That part I love too

2:06:25 Invisibility magic, feng shui, the Vonnick manuscript and everything you ever wanted to know about magic but were afraid to ask. So join the club! You get full archives, lifetime access to the Hireside Chats Plus forum and occasional treats that...you just won't believe And it's been a pretty good month. Last week was Richard Belzer, a big name to be getting down here in the gutter with little ol' me and something a lot of people liked although there were also a lot of people who noticed that he does seem stuck in the liberal bubble I would agree but still fun Miguel Conner super great romp through Gnostic scholarship boom what more do you want

2:07:05 Recluse who I thought knew a lot about the six degrees of Kevin Bacon aspects of the deep state and some other unsavory operations. And then Isaac Weishaupt who dropped some knowledge on May 4th about esoteric and occult aspects of Star Wars and other media staples, I think we've done all right in May, well worth five bucks if you ask me and June will be no different. Next week we're getting into reptilian bangster priesthoods secrets of American history and instead of the same old news articles about giant skeletons in early America We're going deep into the journals and written accounts of conquistadors who said they encountered living giants so helluva ride next week

2:07:47 And then the one after that is just really high-level conspiracy stuff that's well sourced, that you're gonna love. So sign up already! You know this show is unique enough. Treat yourself and I'll see you next time Do pick up Dr. Skinner's books if you want to go deeper Find a way to let them know you appreciated this interview And I've done my part. Your move, oppressive overlords of the timeline, spirituality siphoners and religious authorities guilty of the great grimoire fracturing... You're fucked. I can't stand it all. I wonder, is your mind? Perhaps I've spouted Are you afraid to do the time? Yeah!

2:10:21 I ain't gonna take none of your proven ground And I can't stand no one putting me down Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's better on you

2:11:00 Hey, see your mind The highest eyes that are on you You're not afraid to do the time Yeah, yeah, yeah, oh I know