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Saturday, December 1, 2018

Witch Power, Occult Awakening and Dangerous Illusions




In Rold Forest we have a witch. Her name is Dannie Druehyld. In her book Heksens Håndbog (the Handbook of the Witch) she writes that to live like a witch is to live with the Goddesses, the flowers and the call of the birds – to live cyclic. To experience everything which happens, as a part of a magical puzzle, where every splinter of reality, every human being, you meet, is a piece of your life´s puzzle. 

To live like a witch, she says, is to be aware that every coincidence forms a pattern, a gate to a universe of colors and possibilities, which opens roads, sandy tracks, marshy paths in moisty alder bogs, roads which are created while you walk. The dark road, which Norns, Völva, runecasters, soothsayers, shamans and other seeking folks throughout time have wandered. There are many possibilities, and the path through the thicket is endless and dark, but it is you who chose every step, and you who forms the pattern, which the Norns, under the shadow of the Ash, weaves in the cloth of your life.

Druehyld writes:

“In a magical spider web reality weaves connections, as fragile threads. Every mosquito has a pattern, every bird has a song, which can reach you, and when we are in the Oak grove with the Mother, who contains all life, the magical thread vibrates, which spins the coincidence, and we live in the harmony, the faith and the reality, we thought were ruptured. We will carry a wisdom about life and in every cell contain the will to harmony and the feeling of vibrating love, which unites all life´s wish about surviving in peace.

“We have created a world, which can destroy the form of life we know with children, flavors and flowers. A world where we can be the last who get the opportunity for unification with our Great Mother, Our Earth, the loveable, fragrant creature of woods, birds, rivers and the spirits, who live obscurely behind them. And we can choose a world which can be stronger than it has been in many centuries. You have the choice, the responsibility and the demand to your surroundings and yourself – you choose the path”.


Druehyld´s book about witchcraft and circles just shows one of the patterns you can use. Just like all patterns change, the form changes in light of storm, sun and wind. In this way no life is firm, but a change which creates joys and sorrows. Druehyld writes:

“To live like a witch is to hear the call of the Mother, to hear the shout of the Earth, to choose to live for life, love and hope. To make yourself one with the soul of the Mother and be the Mother, the goddess, the witch, the Völva, or what you would like to call yourself, in all the ways you live your life and in all the patterns in which you meet people.

“From the now you create the magic, the circle, the initiation and the healing. Therefore there are no fixed frames, priestesses, knowledge or creatures. There are that which we create together in the moment, and what we do.

“The paths are as many as the beams of the sun, and each wandering light contains love and fantasy, which makes your circle spurt.

“You make the peace, and we are the many, we have the power of the Mother with us, for it is her who carries us.”

Druehyld writes that what a witch foremost needs is nature, beautiful places, sea, birds, sky, stars which shimmer, night and day, sun and moon, light and darkness. To catch the flavor of trees and flowers, to see the colors change, to sit on a giant mound and see the sunset coloring the clouds, see the birds sail through mist.

Everything which can be sensed, lived and felt, allows powers to sink deep into you and paint your soul with images you always will be able to find.

Therefore Mother Earth is the most important tool of the witch. The tools and animals of the witch are filled with myths. Dannie Druehyld is a storyteller.


The spiritual teacher Mary Shutan claims that a witch is called by an occult awakening. Occult awakenings are where we find a gateway to spiritual awakening though witchcraft, magic, and other occult practices. Occult awakenings allow for us to become aware of the forces of the Universe, such as the elements, as well as to come into contact with personal and spiritual power. In many cases, occult awakenings will eventually allow for us to come into contact with deities and other spiritual beings, deep spiritual insights, and a unique way of working with the energies that comprise the Universe.

Occult awakenings are strikingly similar in some ways to Shamanic awakenings, especially in the case of witchcraft, where we feel a calling to the practice. Occult awakenings can be low-level understandings in which we create further layers of illusion and obscuration of reality, or they can also be sudden and difficult awakenings into a fully realized or close-to-realized state. In this case we suddenly come into contact with knowledge, understandings, and experiences with powerful spirits and beings that radically transforms our understandings of the universe and our place in it.

Many of us who experience occult awakenings have a unique ability to play with or work with the layers of conditioned reality to our benefit. This type of awakening is not rare, but true, powerful practitioners who have awakened enough to get to the state of understanding and working with the powers and elements that comprise conditioned reality are rare. We discover when we go through an occult awakening that it requires great study and knowledge based in specific traditions as well as focus over many years´ time. This is even true for those powerfully or naturally called to occult practices, even though some of us may have natural aptitude and gain spiritual power and knowledge quickly. It takes time to learn the proper rituals, methods of communication, and to develop relationships with the forces that comprise conditioned reality and beyond. During an occult awakening it is important to keep an understanding of the Self and what we are called to do. It is easy to get lost in communities and circles. These circles and communities can be a great way to learn, but as they are focused on group rather than individual need we can find ourselves out of focus from our specific path. Finding ourselves in a safe way and asking consistently why we are being called and allowing for ourselves to go deeper than even the books, groups, or communities venture can create a full awakening.


Like all other spiritual awakenings it is important to be able to navigate in the spiritual misinformation of our age. In my Ebook Evolutionism – The read Thread of The Matrix Conspiray, I tell about how also occult knowledge has left the traditional path and developed into New Age. For those of us who are occult awakened it is important to know about this. In the following I will give an overview over this development, supplied with links to other articles, which explain mentioned topics in depth.

Modern occult knowledge has its origin in Western Esotericism. I´m quite fascinated by esotericism, and there is a lot of valid stuff to be found here. Western esotericism could for example be treated as a world view that embraces 'enchantment' in contrast to world views influenced by post-Cartesian, post-Newtonian, and positivist science which have sought to 'dis-enchant' the world. Esotericism is in this sense understood as comprising those world views which eschew a belief in instrumental causality and instead adopt a belief that all parts of the universe are interrelated without a need for causal chains. It therefore stands as a radical alternative to the disenchanted world views which have dominated Western culture since the scientific revolution, and must therefore always be at odds with secular (modern) culture.

An early exponent of this definition was the historian of Renaissance thought Frances Yates in her discussions of a "Hermetic Tradition", which she saw as an 'enchanted' alternative to established religion and rationalistic science. However, the primary exponent of this view was Faivre, who published a series of criteria for how to define "Western esotericism" in 1992.

The origins of Western esotericism are in the Hellenistic Eastern Mediterranean, then part of the Roman Empire, during Late Antiquity, a period encompassing the first centuries of the Common Era. This was a milieu in which there was a mix of religious and intellectual traditions from Greece, Egypt, the Levant, Babylon, and Persia, and in which globalisation, urbanisation, and multiculturalism were bringing about socio-cultural change.

One component of this was Hermetism, another tradition of esoteric thought in Late Antiquity was Gnosticism. A third form of esotericism in Late Antiquity was Neoplatonism. After the fall of Rome, alchemy and philosophy and other aspects of the tradition were largely preserved in the Arab and Near Eastern world and reintroduced into Western Europe by Jews and by the cultural contact between Christians and Muslims in Sicily and southern Italy. The 12th century saw the development of the Kabbalah in southern Italy and medieval Spain. These are all traditional occult practices which I support.


But with The Age of Enlightenment we witnessed a process of increasing secularisation of European governments and an embrace of modern science and rationality within intellectual circles. In turn, a "modernist occult" emerged that reflected varied ways in which esoteric thinkers came to terms with these developments. One of the most prominent esotericists of this period was the Swedish naturalist Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772), who attempted to reconcile science and religion after experiencing a vision of Jesus Christ. His writings focused on his visionary travels to heaven and hell and his communications with angels, claiming that the visible, materialist world parallels an invisible spiritual world, with correspondences between the two that do not reflect causal relations. Following his death, followers would found the Swedenborgian New Church, although his writings would influence a far wider array of esoteric philosophies. Swedenborg is the predecessor of the channeling craze, which is seen today in Theosophy and New Age (see my article Paranormal Phenomena seen in relation with Channeling).

Though it is extremely important to make aware of the existence of external spiritual beings, both demonical and divine, accounts like Swedenborg´s falls for the thought distortion called truth by authority. The very claim of having total knowledge (authority) of the afterlife is a proof of its delusion. There is not a hint of the traditional philosophical urge to think and discover for yourself, which occult teaching always has emphasized, and it is therefore ending in ideology. This can not be a message from the divine source. Therewith is not said that Swedenborg didn´t had some good ideas. He has for example some interesting thoughts about the free will problem.

Another major figure within the esoteric movement of this period was the German physician Franz Anton Mesmer (1734–1814), who developed the theory of Animal Magnetism, which later came to be known more commonly as "Mesmerism". This is the aspect of esotericism which developed into the New Thought movement, and hypnotherapy (see my articles The New Thought Movement and the Law of Attraction and Hypnosis, Hypnotherapy and the Art of Self-deceit).


Various Spiritualist mediums came to be disillusioned with the esoteric thought available, and sought inspiration in pre-Swedenborgian currents; the most prominent of these were Emma Hardinge Britten (1823–1899) and Helena Blavatsky (1831–1891), the latter of whom called for the revival of the "occult science" of the ancients, which could be found in both the East and West. Authoring the influential Isis Unveiled (1877) and The Secret Doctrine (1888), she co-founded the Theosophical Society in 1875 (see my article The Fascism of Theosophy).

Theosophy is the most obvious predecessor of New Age its “evolutionistic spirituality”. Theosophy is directly trying to synthesize spirituality and science, and is especially inspired by Darwinism, and its theories about human evolution. It is from Theosophy we have the spiritual confused concept of “The Evolution of Consciousness”. And this idea continues today in New Age and Ufology, where spirituality, apart from Darwinism, furthermore is sought synthesized with new developments within psychology, psychotherapy and natural science, especially biology and quantum mechanics.

Add to this that new esoteric understandings of magic also developed in the latter part of the 19th century. One of the pioneers of this was American Paschal Beverly Randolph (1825–1875), who argued that sexual energy and psychoactive drugs could be used for magical purposes. Inspired by Nietzsche this developed into the create-your-own-reality craze in New Age and New Thought. And the combination of spiritual practice with psychedelics was seen in the counterculture of the 60s and is today especially having its renaissance in the so-called “transhumanist spirituality” (see my booklet The Psychedelic Reanaissance and David Jay Brown).

In England, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, an initiatory order devoted to magic which based itself on an understanding of kabbalah, was founded in the latter years of the century. One of the most prominent members of that order was Aleister Crowley (1875–1947), who went on to proclaim the religion of Thelema and become a prominent member of the Ordo Templi Orientis. Some of their contemporaries developed esoteric schools of thought that did not entail magic, namely the Greco-Armenian teacher George Gurdjieff (1866–1949) and his Russian pupil P. D. Ouspensky (1878–1947). This developed into the human potential movement and New Age psychotherapy (see my articles The Devastating New Age Turn within Psychotherapy, Spiritual Vampires, The Vampirised Spirit of John Rosen, and Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh (Osho)).

So, emergent occult and esoteric systems found increasing popularity in the early 20th century, especially in Western Europe. Occult lodges and secret societies flowered among European intellectuals of this era who had largely abandoned traditional forms of Christianity. The spreading of secret teachings and magic practices found enthusiastic adherents in the chaos of Germany during the interwar years. Notable writers such as Guido von List spread neo-pagan, nationalist ideas, based on Wotanism and the Kabbalah. Many influential and wealthy Germans were drawn to secret societies such as the Thule Society. Thule Society activist Karl Harrer was one of the founders of the German Workers' Party, which later became the Nazi Party; some Nazi Party members like Alfred Rosenberg and Rudolf Hess were listed as "guests" of the Thule Society, as was Adolf Hitler's mentor Dietrich Eckart. It is clear that these tendencies have their influence of the obvious fascistic element in the Matrix Conspiracy (see my article The Matrix Conspiracy Fascism).


In the 1960s and 1970s, esotericism came to be increasingly associated with the growing counter-culture in the West, whose adherents understood themselves in participating in a spiritual revolution that would mark the Age of Aquarius. By the 1980s, these currents of millenarian currents had come to be widely known as the New Age movement, and it became increasingly commercialised as business entrepreneurs exploited a growth in the spiritual market.

Conversely, other forms of esoteric thought retained the anti-commercial and counter-cultural sentiment of the 1960s and 1970s, namely the techno-shamanic movement promoted by figures such as Terence McKenna and Daniel Pinchbeck which built on the work of anthropologist Carlos Castaneda. This is the trend which can be seen in psychedelic renaissance in David Jay Brown, which also is the trend of transhumanist spirituality (see my booklet on Plastic Shamanism versus the Traditional Shamanic Awakening).

Other trends which emerged in western occultism in the later 20th century were satanism as exposed by groups such as the Church of Satan and Temple of Set, as well as chaos magick through the Illuminates of Thanateros group. Here we see the direct demonic influence in evolutionism. What´s most frightening is all the techniques of opening the third eye which are given on the internet and social media (I have investigated this in my blog post The Conspiracy of the Third Eye. I call it the 666 Conspiracy).

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