Saint Expedite has been with me for some time, and my appreciation of him has changed dramatically over the period. He went with me to Occulture 2025, where I made an altar to him publicly and took that devotion out of the context of my own practice into something other people could experience. The practice of devotion has expanded from being simply a devotion to a saint of urgent causes over the period of working with Saint Expedite. There is a discipline within his iconography that speaks to the way we live now, particularly our relationship with time, attention, procrastination and the feeling that something needs to be done urgently.

There are saints who have patronage that fits perfectly for a certain age, and Saint Expedite seems to be such a one. This is not just because things need to be done quickly, but because we live in a world where everything competes for our attention, but the things we really need to do keep getting postponed until tomorrow. We live in a world of urgency and yet we are very prone to procrastinate. Everything is always going on and everything needs to be attended to, from watching something, consuming something, responding to something, but at the end of the day, we find out that there was something really needed to be done. This is where the imagery of Saint Expedite becomes incredibly useful.

The crow at his feet symbolizes Cras, which is Latin for tomorrow, and the cross held by him has the word Hodie, which means today. This can easily be interpreted in relation to the reputation that Saint Expedite has for dealing with urgent causes. There is another, far more useful way of thinking about it. Cras is the temptation to postpone what should be done. We convince ourselves that we will send the application tomorrow, make the phone call tomorrow, start job hunting tomorrow, write the thing tomorrow or sort our finances tomorrow. Tomorrow will always be there, so there is a chance to build a whole life out of the things we mean to do but never start.

It is made even easier by the modern world. You might find yourself picking up your phone with the intention of answering an email, and half an hour later find yourself having watched a few videos, read some arguments between strangers and gathered a lot of information that has done nothing to improve your problem. We have virtually unlimited access to information but the access to information does not automatically translate to action. You could end up researching something for months without actually doing anything about it, watching other people undertake what you are trying to do, or taking too long preparing for the action such that your preparations become another way of avoiding the action. This is where Cras ceases to mean tomorrow only as a day of the week and starts meaning constantly postponing things in your own life to the future.

This is why Saint Expedite is a more fascinating saint than merely being one to petition when one wants quick money. His imagery carries a discipline that applies both to the petitioner and to their situation. If you intend to petition for his help, then you should consider where you needlessly delay yourself. There is likely a definite action that you have been avoiding, a conversation you have postponed or a piece of work you keep telling yourself you will begin when you feel more prepared. The question is not whether everything can be solved immediately, but whether there is something that could be done today which you have unnecessarily assigned to tomorrow.

This becomes particularly important when working with Expedite for money, employment and opportunity. It is easy to light a candle and ask for work, but the petition should be accompanied by the practical work of looking for it. If you are asking for employment, send applications, rewrite the CV and contact people who might know of opportunities. If you are asking for more customers, advertise what you do, follow up with old clients and make sure new people can actually find you. If you are asking for money, look honestly at what is coming in and going out, chase what you are owed and consider what practical opportunities are available to increase your income.

None of this means that everything is within our control. People lose jobs, businesses struggle, bills arrive unexpectedly, applications are rejected and institutions can move painfully slowly. Sometimes you can do everything correctly and still find yourself stuck, which is precisely one of the reasons people pray in the first place. There is, however, a difference between asking for assistance with something you are actively trying to change and asking for a situation to change while continually avoiding the actions that are available to you.

This is where the meaning of Hodie becomes useful. Today does not mean that everything must be completed immediately, nor does it require exhausting yourself by trying to solve your entire life in a single afternoon. It means identifying the part of the problem that can actually be acted upon now. A single email, telephone call, application, appointment or hour of concentrated work may be enough. Large problems easily produce paralysis because they cannot be solved all at once, while a smaller action gives the problem somewhere to move.

Someone who is unemployed cannot simply fix their career in a day, but they can send an application. Someone struggling financially may not be able to solve the entire problem immediately, but they can look at the numbers, chase an unpaid invoice or take one practical step towards earning more. Someone building a business cannot create a successful business overnight, but they can contact a potential customer. Understood this way, Hodie is not really about demanding instant results; it is about refusing unnecessary delay.

This is particularly relevant because distraction has become one of the defining conditions of modern life. Our attention is constantly being requested by things that have very little to do with the lives we actually want to build. Notifications, platforms, videos, news, arguments and endless streams of information can consume hours without asking anything meaningful from us. It is possible to spend enormous amounts of time consuming information about the person we would like to become while doing very little of the work required to become that person.

The imagery of Saint Expedite provides a useful correction to this. His intercession can be approached as a partnership between petition and action. You ask him to move what is beyond your control while accepting responsibility for moving what remains within it. If you ask for an opportunity, you make yourself available to receive one. If you ask for customers, you make sure people know what you offer. If you ask for employment, you continue applying. If you ask for a delay to be broken, you also examine whether any part of that delay is being created by your own hesitation.

This does not reduce prayer to hard work, nor does it suggest that effort guarantees success. There will always be circumstances we cannot control, and there are situations in which no amount of personal effort can force the desired outcome. The point is much simpler: when petitioning for movement, it makes little sense to become another source of resistance to that movement.

Seen in this way, Hodie and Cras describe two different relationships with time. Cras assumes that the person we will be tomorrow will somehow possess more courage, discipline, confidence or opportunity than the person we are today. Hodie begins with what is actually available and asks what can be done with it now. One continually postpones participation in our own lives, while the other asks us to enter them as they actually are.

This may be why Saint Expedite feels particularly suited to the present moment. Many people are dealing with uncertain employment, financial pressure, struggling businesses and circumstances that can change very quickly, while at the same time living in an environment where distraction is almost effortless. Things need to happen, yet our attention is constantly being drawn away from the actions that might help them happen. Saint Expedite stands directly within that tension because his imagery reminds us that urgency is not only something we ask heaven to recognise; sometimes it is something we ourselves need to recognise.

To work with Saint Expedite, then, is not simply to ask that something happen quickly. It is to develop a different relationship with delay. We can ask him to move what we cannot move while making sure that we are moving what we can. We can ask for the opportunity while preparing ourselves to take it, ask for the work while looking for it and ask for the road to open while being prepared to walk when it does.

The crow's Cras will always be available because there will always be a tomorrow onto which we can move the things we are reluctant to face. The answer represented by Hodie is not frantic activity or the demand that everything happen immediately; it is the quieter discipline of doing today what genuinely belongs to today, while asking Saint Expedite to assist with everything that remains beyond our reach.

The practical approach is simple. Look at what the martyr actually faced and find where it overlaps with your own situation. If you are being pressured to give in, look towards a martyr who refused to surrender. If you are dealing with enemies or persecution, approach someone who endured the same. If you need courage, look towards those who remained steady when threatened.

Saint Perpetua is a good example. She faced pressure from both the Roman authorities and her own family to renounce her faith. She refused and was eventually killed in the arena. That makes her an obvious saint to approach when you are being pressured to abandon a decision or when other people are trying to force your hand.

Saint Lawrence was executed during the persecution under the emperor Valerian. Tradition remembers him as refusing to surrender the wealth of the Church to the Roman authorities. He therefore has a natural connection with standing firm under pressure, particularly when money, institutions or powerful people are involved.

Saint Sebastian was condemned and shot with arrows after his Christianity was discovered. He survived the first attempt to kill him, confronted the emperor again and was eventually killed. His later cult became strongly associated with protection from plague and sudden death. There is something particularly useful here for protection work: Sebastian is a martyr who was struck but initially survived.

The Forty Martyrs of Sebaste give another pattern. According to their traditional account, forty Christian soldiers were exposed naked on a frozen lake and offered warmth if they renounced their faith. Their story is about collective endurance. They make particular sense when a family, group or community needs to hold together through prolonged pressure.

Saint Agnes offers a different kind of resistance. Tradition presents her as a young woman who refused attempts to control both her religion and her body. Her cult therefore carries strong themes of personal integrity, boundaries and refusing coercion.

Saint George gives yet another pattern. Whatever questions surround the historical details of his life, his cult developed around the image of a soldier-martyr who refused the demands of imperial authority. The later dragon story pushes this further. George becomes the saint who confronts the thing that appears stronger than you and defeats it. That makes his intercession particularly suited to direct confrontation, courage and overcoming an enemy or obstacle.

This is where the martyrs become particularly interesting in practice. You are not simply deciding that Lawrence means courage or Sebastian means protection. You are looking at what happened to a particular person and approaching them through that experience. You can speak directly to it: “You who remained steadfast when others sought to break you, pray for me that I remain steadfast against those who work against me.”

Relics make this even more direct. Early devotion to the martyrs developed around their tombs and remains. Their bones were kept because these were not abstract figures or archetypes. They were the physical remains of people who had suffered and died and whom Christians believed continued to live in Christ. Working with a relic, or praying at the tomb of a martyr, brings you closer to that older understanding of the saints.

This gives you a useful rule when approaching any martyr. Learn their story before deciding what they are “for.” Look at who opposed them. Look at what was threatened. Look at what they endured. Look at the exact point where they refused to move.

That will often tell you more about how to petition them than any list of correspondences.

Find the point in their story where they could not be broken.

That is the point from which you call on them.

Hacksaw Ridge.

I always come back to this film, and every time I do I find myself commending the extraordinary courage and bravery of the individual at its centre, a man who did his duty not merely because a nation asked it of him, nor because his fellow soldiers expected it, but because he understood that duty through the name of Christ. Hacksaw Ridge is ostensibly a war film, and an exceptionally violent one at that, but I have never really experienced it as a film about war. Beneath the artillery, blood and spectacle there is something much older taking place. It is a story about conscience being tested against the machinery of the world, about a man entering hell without surrendering the particular commandment by which he had chosen to live. Desmond Doss walks into one of the most horrifying theatres of the Pacific War refusing to carry a weapon, and yet somehow emerges from that refusal not as a coward standing apart from the battle but as one of the bravest men within it. There is something profoundly saint-like about that contradiction.

I do not mean “saint” here in the formal ecclesiastical sense. Doss has not been canonised, and to call him a folk saint is not to sneak him through the back door of a process belonging to a church that was not even his own. Doss was a Seventh-day Adventist, and his Christianity was shaped accordingly. I mean folk saint in the older and considerably stranger human sense: someone whose life becomes a story through which ordinary people recognise sacred virtue operating in the world. Folk sainthood frequently begins long before committees, theologians and institutions decide what vocabulary should be attached to it. It begins when a person becomes remembered for embodying something so completely that their biography begins functioning almost like a parable. People tell the story because the story itself does something to them. It establishes a moral possibility. It says: a human being actually did this.

And what Doss did at Hacksaw Ridge has precisely this quality. On the night of 5 May 1945, after American forces had been driven back from the Maeda Escarpment on Okinawa, Doss remained behind while wounded men were still scattered across the battlefield. Alone, exhausted and exposed to enemy fire, he began retrieving them. Again and again he dragged wounded soldiers to the edge of the escarpment and lowered them down by rope. The exact number has always carried a certain ambiguity, with Doss estimating around fifty and others suggesting closer to one hundred, the figure eventually settling at approximately seventy-five. Yet the number almost does not matter. What matters is the repeated action. He saved one man and then returned. He saved another and returned again. The extraordinary thing is not simply that he performed one act of heroism. It is that he kept choosing to re-enter danger after he had already earned every conceivable excuse to stop.

This is where Hacksaw Ridge accidentally wanders into the territory of hagiography. The line associated with Doss, “Please, Lord, help me get one more,” is almost indistinguishable in structure from the repetitive prayers of the saints and ascetics. It is not a grand theological declaration. It is not a request to understand the meaning of suffering or history or war. It reduces the entire universe to the person immediately in front of him. One more. Then one more. Then one more. Christianity becomes frighteningly practical at this level because there is nowhere left for abstraction to hide. Love thy neighbour sounds magnificent embroidered onto a cushion. It becomes considerably more demanding when the neighbour is bleeding to death on a battlefield and retrieving him may get you killed.

This is precisely why Doss interests me as a potential folk saint. Saints are useful to us because they take enormous theological propositions and compress them into human behaviour. Saint Francis becomes poverty made visible. Saint Christopher becomes the bearing of impossible burdens. Saint Martin becomes mercy enacted through the dividing of his cloak. Saint Lawrence becomes defiance under persecution. Whatever the historical complexities accumulated around these figures, their stories become concentrated expressions of particular Christian virtues. Doss belongs naturally to this grammar. He is the man who enters the place of killing and refuses to kill. More importantly, his refusal does not become passivity. He does not stand at a safe distance congratulating himself on his moral purity while other men suffer. He runs directly into the machinery of death in order to pull people out of it.

That distinction matters enormously. Pacifism can easily be caricatured as cowardice because the person refusing violence appears to be refusing participation. Doss destroys the caricature because he refuses violence while accepting danger. In some respects he accepts more danger precisely because he has surrendered the ordinary means by which a soldier protects himself. He will not carry a rifle, but neither will he abandon the rifleman who has been shot. His Christianity therefore manifests not as withdrawal from the contaminated world but as a peculiar way of entering more deeply into it. He is not clean because he avoided the battlefield. He is faithful because he walked onto it according to the terms of his conscience.

There is an important magical and spiritual lesson hidden inside this. Modern occultism has become exceptionally good at talking about power and frequently rather poor at talking about virtue. We collect technologies of protection, prosperity, influence, divination, spirit contact and transformation, and none of those things are inherently objectionable, but the older religious worlds from which so many of these technologies emerged generally assumed that power without character was dangerous. The saint therefore represents something different from the magician's fantasy of accumulating abilities. The saint is someone who has become aligned with a principle so thoroughly that the principle appears to act through the life. This is why the stories of saints can become spiritually potent even when stripped of elaborate theology. They demonstrate what happens when conviction survives contact with circumstance.

Doss is particularly useful here because his ordeal concerns the integrity of a vow. Everyone around him supplies perfectly reasonable arguments for abandoning it. The military has its requirements. His fellow soldiers have their expectations. Survival itself appears to make carrying a weapon sensible. Yet Doss refuses to allow circumstance to renegotiate his conscience. This does not mean stubbornness is automatically holy. Plenty of fools have destroyed themselves through inflexibility. What makes Doss remarkable is that his refusal continually produces service rather than self-aggrandisement. He does not say, “Look how pure I am because I will not kill.” His conviction immediately places obligations upon him. If he will not participate in taking life, then he must become extraordinarily committed to preserving it.

That is the bit we frequently miss when speaking about saints. Holiness is not merely prohibition. It is not a collection of things one refuses to do. A serious spiritual commitment creates positive obligations. If you claim mercy, eventually you will be required to become merciful when mercy is inconvenient. If you claim courage, circumstances will eventually appear in which courage costs something. If you claim faith, there will eventually be a moment when the evidence available to your senses tells you that faith is ridiculous. Otherwise these things remain aesthetic preferences. Doss is compelling because the battlefield removes the aesthetic possibility entirely. There is nothing romantic about dragging torn bodies through mud under gunfire. His Christianity has ceased being an identity and become an action.

And this is where I think the category of folk saint becomes genuinely useful. Folk sainthood is not necessarily a declaration that someone was doctrinally perfect, morally flawless or supernaturally authenticated. It is an acknowledgement that certain lives become spiritually instructive through remembrance. Human beings have always done this. We gather exemplary dead around ourselves. We name churches, streets, hospitals and children after them. We keep photographs of grandparents whose lives taught us something. We visit graves. We repeat final words. We tell stories about impossible acts of courage until the stories themselves acquire a devotional quality. Institutional religion did not invent this impulse. It organised something human beings were already doing with their remarkable dead.

Doss fits comfortably within that ancestral human instinct. Imagine the iconography that naturally emerges from his story: the medic without the rifle, the Bible in his pocket, the rope in his hands, the wounded man being lowered from the escarpment, the battlefield burning behind him. None of this requires invention. His actual biography has already generated the symbolic vocabulary. Were he a figure from the fourth century rather than the twentieth, we would barely hesitate to recognise the structure. The object associated with him would become an attribute. The particular ordeal would become his legend. The phrase uttered during the ordeal would become the prayer. The virtue demonstrated would become the reason people remembered him.

“Lord, help me get one more” is especially powerful because it offers a spiritual technology of its own. It is a prayer against being overwhelmed by scale. We live in an age in which suffering arrives numerically. Wars become casualty figures, poverty becomes statistics, catastrophe becomes footage endlessly refreshed on a screen, and eventually the nervous system protects itself by becoming numb. One person cannot save everyone, so the temptation is to save nobody. Doss's prayer annihilates that excuse. You do not have to save everyone. Get one more. Help one person. Complete the task immediately before you. Then ask for the strength to do it again.

There is something almost monastic about this. The Desert Fathers understood that enormous spiritual ambitions frequently collapse under their own weight, while the small action repeated faithfully transforms the person. Pray the next prayer. Resist the next temptation. Perform the next act of hospitality. Return to the cell. Begin again. Doss's battlefield spirituality operates according to the same rhythm under unimaginably different conditions. He does not need to know whether he will save seventy-five men. He needs enough grace to retrieve the next one. Only afterwards does history look backwards and discover that the accumulation of those tiny decisions has become heroic.

This is also why the violence of Hacksaw Ridge is necessary to the story rather than merely cinematic excess, even when the film undoubtedly amplifies events for dramatic effect. Without the horror, Doss's conviction becomes sentimental. The battlefield must appear monstrous because his mercy has to be measured against something. The film presents bodies shattered, burned and dismembered, and into this apocalypse walks a man carrying bandages rather than bullets. The symbolism could scarcely be more Christian if someone had deliberately constructed it as medieval allegory. Death has established its kingdom on the ridge, and Doss's response is simply to steal living bodies back from it one at a time.

There is even something Christological in the downward movement of the rescued men. Doss finds the wounded in the place of death, carries them to the edge and lowers them toward safety. I would not push the comparison so far that the historical man disappears beneath theological symbolism, because that is precisely how we dehumanise saints. Yet Christianity has always recognised holiness through patterns. The saint does not become Christ; rather, something of the pattern of Christ becomes visible through the saint. Service, sacrifice, endurance, mercy and the willingness to place oneself between another human being and death are recognisably Christian forms. Doss's life becomes compelling because these things cease to be sermon language and become physical.

And perhaps this is precisely what a contemporary folk saint should do. We do not particularly need another sanitised plaster figure staring serenely into the middle distance. We need reminders that sanctity, if the word means anything, is often dirty, frightening and inconvenient. The saints of history were not born as statues. They sweated. They became frightened. They doubted. They bled. They annoyed authorities. They made decisions without knowing how history would judge them. Only afterwards do we flatten them into devotional images and forget that the reason anyone remembered them in the first place was because something happened.

Desmond Doss reminds us of the human being underneath the halo.

That is why I continually return to Hacksaw Ridge. I do not return simply because it is an impressive war film or because Doss's actions were heroic, although they certainly were. I return because his story asks an uncomfortable spiritual question: what would your convictions look like if circumstances actually demanded them from you? Not what do you believe while sitting comfortably with people who agree with you. Not which spiritual vocabulary have you accumulated. Not which saints, angels, spirits or traditions decorate your worldview. What remains when keeping your word becomes painful?

Doss answered that question on a battlefield.

He carried no weapon. He did not abandon his comrades. He did not require the wounded man before him to share his theology before saving him. He simply kept descending into danger and bringing someone back.

One more time. More than one more time…

If folk saints are those dead whose lives become living instructions, whose stories contain virtues that communities can return to when they have forgotten how those virtues actually look, then Desmond Doss has a very strong claim upon the category. Not because a film transformed him into a superhero, and certainly not because we should manufacture a cult around every admirable historical figure, but because underneath the Hollywood machinery sits an astonishingly simple Christian witness: a man entered a landscape organised around killing and decided that his particular office within it would be saving life.

There are worse people to place among the exemplary dead.

And there are far worse prayers to carry into the difficult places of our own lives than his:

Lord, help me get one more.

Hey all, I just wanted to say thank you for everyone who has subscribed it really means alot. I have decided to switch my practical offerings to Patreon as it seems to be better suited to that kind of material.

I will be sharing an update with the relevant links etc soon but for now I present …

Spiritual discernment, at its core, is the practice of knowing what influences, spirits, or currents one is engaging with, and deciding whether they are worth aligning with. In Christian mysticism, discernment is often spoken of in terms of “testing the spirits” (1 John 4:1), seeking to separate the voice of God from deception. In chaos magick, the principle is the same: the magician must continually assess whether the entities, egregores, or thought-forms they invoke are beneficial, parasitic, or distractions. Both paths acknowledge that unseen forces shape our perception, and both insist that the practitioner cannot afford to be naïve about them. The unseen world is a field of both allies and predators, and without discernment, one risks falling prey to forces that appear luminous but conceal distortion.

Christianity teaches discernment through prayer, scripture, and the witness of the Holy Spirit. A Christian mystic listens carefully to the resonance of a spirit, does it produce peace, clarity, and love, or confusion, despair, and pride? Chaos magicians employ similar tests, though they may frame them in terms of results and energetic coherence. The question becomes: does the working bear fruit in life? Does it strengthen sovereignty, focus, and clarity, or does it drain, mislead, and enslave? Both traditions agree that not every spirit is a trustworthy guide, and that the practitioner must cultivate an inner compass, sharpened by practice and reflection, to distinguish helpful powers from destructive ones. Discernment is less about paranoia than it is about vigilance, about knowing that not everything luminous is light, and not everything that speaks with authority deserves to be heard.

Spiritual warfare, whether in the language of Christianity or chaos magick, is about confrontation with hostile forces, those that seek to entrap the soul, distort perception, or sabotage purpose. Christian spiritual warfare involves prayer, fasting, declaring scripture, and invoking the Name of Christ as a weapon against spiritual attack. The tools are simple yet profound: words, intention, and faith wielded with authority. Chaos magick warfare uses sigils, banishings, servitors, and improvised ritual technologies. The chaos magician draws on whatever symbols or systems are effective, angelic names, demonic seals, pop-culture icons, or abstract glyphs. In both traditions, words and symbols are recognized as weapons. Just as the Christian invokes the “sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God” (Ephesians 6:17), the chaos magician uses incantations, gestures, and signs to carve order out of psychic conflict. Reality itself is understood as malleable to directed will, and both approaches rely on aligning with a source of higher authority to repel intrusion.

What becomes striking in comparison is how both traditions insist that the warrior be clothed, armed, and centered. The Christian puts on the “armour of God,” truth, righteousness, faith, and the readiness of the gospel, as a protective shield. The chaos magician girds themselves with banishing rituals, wards, grounding practices, and affirmations of sovereignty. Each system understands that entering the battlefield of spirit without protection is reckless. Authority is also central: the Christian invokes the authority of Christ, while the chaos magician calls upon the authority of True Will. In either case, discernment is not just about identifying hostile forces but about knowing one’s rightful ground of power and standing firmly in it.

Spiritual discernment and warfare are not exclusive to one tradition. They are archetypal practices for any serious mystic or magician, woven into the fabric of human experience across religions and esoteric paths. Christianity frames the battlefield as one of light versus darkness, while chaos magick frames it as sovereignty versus entrapment. Yet both traditions teach vigilance, clarity, and the empowerment of word and spirit. The chaos magician can learn much from Christian mysticism’s insistence on testing spirits and holding fast to higher truth, while Christians might recognize in chaos magick’s adaptive, pragmatic methods an echo of the early church’s reliance on spiritual gifts, visions, and signs.

The language may differ, but the battlefield is the same, the inner and outer worlds where forces contend for influence. Discernment keeps the warrior from being deceived, and warfare empowers them to stand firm. To walk either path is to admit that unseen forces matter, and that how we respond to them shapes the destiny of the soul.

Purity in Praxis : A Chaotic Christianity Ritual for Spiritual Warfare Against Negative Thoughtforms

This ritual is designed specifically for clearing persistent negative thoughtforms you experience as invasive, oppressive, or “demonic.” It blends chaos magick techniques (sigil work, gnosis, banishing, servitor or egregore reclamation) with optional Christian language for people who want that resonance. Perform it when you are calm, rested, and in a place where you will not be interrupted.

Prepare the space. Clean the physical area briefly, clear a surface, open a window if you like, and place three simple markers: something grounding (a stone or ring), something protective (a small bowl of salt or water), and something luminous (a candle or bright cloth). If you prefer Christian framing, place a cross, a Bible, or an icon where the luminous marker sits. Ground yourself: stand or sit comfortably and take several deep breaths, imagining roots going from your spine or feet into the earth, anchoring you. Make a short statement of intent in the present tense and first person: for example, “I am clear, sovereign, and free of intrusive demonic thoughtforms,” or, if you prefer Christian phrasing, “I stand in the protection of Christ and release every demonic thought that is not of God.” Keep this sentence short and focused, it will be the basis of the sigil.

I like to use something akin to this prayer:

Here’s a Chaos Magick re-imagining of the Lord’s Prayer. I’ve kept its core rhythm and structure recognizable but rephrased it into the language of sovereignty, will, and reality-shaping — the heart of chaos magick.

A Prayer To The Man Behind The Curtain.

Our Will, which flows through the Infinite,

hallowed be the Names we give You.

Your current moves as it must,

Your design unfolds on earth as it does in the deep.

Give us this day the symbols and sustenance of power,

and release us from the bindings we no longer claim,

as we release those we once bound.

Lead us not into the prisons of illusion,

but deliver us from entropy and parasitism.

For the pattern, the power, and the manifestation are ours,

now, and through all cycles of becoming.

So it is.

Create a sigil from your statement of intent. Write the sentence down and remove duplicate letters, then combine and stylize the remaining letters into an abstract glyph until the letter-forms merge into a single image that feels right. Alternatively, if you prefer a ready shortcut: choose a single short phrase such as “CLEAR MIND” and reduce it into a compact form. The visual quality matters less than your ownership of it, this is your intentional symbol of removal and sovereignty.

Consecrate the tools. Pass your hands over the grounding object, the protective object, and the luminous object, quietly naming their purpose: grounding, warding, and illumination. If you work with Christian prayers, you can say a short Psalm (such as a line from Psalm 23 or 91) over the luminous object, if you do not, simply infuse it with an affirmation of protection and clarity. Light the candle if you use one, the spark represents the principle you align with, True Will, Christ, Source, or simply sovereignty.

Enter gnosis. The effective moment of the ritual is the state of focused altered consciousness where the conscious ego relaxes and the imaginative faculty takes charge. Use whatever reliably produces a gentle trance for you: a short breathwork pattern (four to six breaths with a held exhale), rhythmic drumming, a simple repetitive chant, or a focused visualization of walking down a corridor toward a bright door. The point is to reach a concentrated, calm focus, enough that the sigil can be impressed into your subconscious.

Charge and cast the sigil. With the sigil drawn and your gnosis active, fix your gaze on the sigil and speak your intent aloud once, in a clear voice: “By my will, I banish these thoughtforms. I reclaim my mind.” Let the emotion of refusal and reclaiming surge, but do not get manic, calm, strong intent is the key. Then release the sigil through a method that feels potent: burn the paper with care and let the ashes fall into the bowl (outdoors or over a non-flammable container), bury the sigil, or fold it and place it under the grounding stone. The chosen method signals finality to your psyche. If you work with Christian language, you may say, “In the Name of Jesus, be gone,” or recite a brief declaration from scripture that affirms authority.

Perform a banishing sweep. Stand or sit and visualize a bright shield of light forming a boundary around you. Use a banishing gesture that resonates, draw an outward arc with your hand while imagining that arc severs attachments. You can use a classic Lesser Banishing format (imagine a triangle of flame sweeping outward) or simply trace a circle of light with both hands and imagine every tether to the negative thoughtforms snapping. Speak a short command like, “All intrusive, enslaving thoughtforms return to their source and are sealed from my field.” If you prefer explicitly Christian ritual, replace the command with a Scripture declaration and the invocation of Christ’s name.

Reclaim and reforge. With the negative forms cast out, actively refill the cleared space. Visualize your mind as a room: sweep it clean, open the windows, and invite in clarifying light, courage, and truth. Speak aloud positive anchors: “I am sovereign. My will is clear. I choose life.” Seed the cleared space with a small act that will remind you later, tie a colored thread around your wrist, place a small coin in your pocket, or carry the grounding stone for a day.

Optional servitor (containment), only if you are familiar with creating safe servitors: design a simple, benevolent servitor whose job is to gather and ferry intrusive thoughtforms away, or whose job is to patrol your mental boundaries. Keep its design minimal, name it, give it a fixed lifespan (a week, a month) and clear instructions that forbid it from acting outside the parameters you set. If you are not practiced with servitors, skip this step, banishing plus continued vigilance is fully adequate.

Close the ritual. Thank the forces, angels, or principles you invoked (or simply say “thank you” to your inner power). Extinguish the candle, ground yourself again with a snack or more water, and if you burned the sigil, bury the ashes or scatter them in running water if that feels appropriate. Make a short note in a journal describing what happened and any shifts you notice, this helps the chaos magician assess results and fine-tune future work.

Aftercare and sobriety. Over the next days practice simple micro-banishings whenever a thoughtform tries to return: a single breath with the verbalized boundary (“no”), a brief gesture, or a grounding touch to your stone. If the intrusive thoughts persist, intensify, or are accompanied by distressing voices, sleep disruption, suicidality, or any danger, seek help from mental-health professionals and trusted community leaders. Magical practice is not a substitute for psychiatric care or crisis intervention.

That's it for this time! I hope you've enjoyed it and see you soon.

The Religion of Speed

There is a peculiar misunderstanding that sits at the heart of modern magical culture. We have become convinced that Mercury is the spirit of haste. We invoke him before examinations, before journeys, before business deals and communications, and then quietly import into our understanding of him every pathology of the modern world. Productivity becomes Mercurial. Endless movement becomes Mercurial. The inability to rest becomes Mercurial. Notifications, deadlines, inboxes, calendars, frantic multitasking and the cult of efficiency all masquerade beneath his winged sandals. We imagine that because Mercury moves quickly, he therefore values speed above all else.

He does not.

Mercury has never been the god of hurry. Hurry is born from fear. Hurry fears there is not enough time, not enough opportunity, not enough life. Hurry is the language of scarcity. Mercury belongs to another order entirely. He moves with extraordinary swiftness because he knows precisely where he is going. His movement is not frantic but exact. Every step is measured against an invisible order that precedes him. He arrives not because he outruns everyone else, but because he has never wandered away from the road appointed to him. This distinction appears trivial until one begins practising magic seriously.

Most magical frustration does not arise because the spirits refuse us. It arises because we refuse ourselves. We scatter our attention over a thousand imaginary roads. Every month brings another tradition, another initiation, another teacher, another social media controversy, another grimoire promising the hidden key that all previous grimoires somehow forgot to mention. We become tourists of mystery rather than inhabitants of it. We confuse collecting maps with travelling. Mercury has no interest in maps that are never walked because the messenger exists only where there is a destination.

Perhaps this is why roads and crossroads belong to him. The road is one of the oldest sacred symbols known to humanity because it represents intention made visible. Every road is a prayer that someone believed enough to carve into the earth. Every crossroads is the moment where possibility becomes decision. It is here that Mercury waits, not to choose for you, but to ask a devastatingly simple question: which way are you actually going? The frightening thing is that most people cannot answer. They know what they dislike. They know who has offended them. They know which teacher disappointed them. They know which system failed them. They know which spirit never answered. Yet ask them where they are going, and silence fills the room. Mercury cannot carry someone who refuses to choose a direction.

There is another reason Mercury belongs to roads. Roads are indifferent to comparison. The Roman road does not stop because another road appears more beautiful. The pilgrim path does not envy the merchant's route. Every road fulfils its purpose simply by leading somewhere. Human beings alone seem capable of abandoning their own journey because another person's appears more impressive. Comparison is perhaps the greatest anti-Mercurial force in existence. It arrests movement. It persuades the traveller to stop walking long enough to measure shoes with strangers.

Modern occultism has become saturated with this disease. We compare initiations. We compare visions. We compare grimoires owned, spirits contacted, degrees attained, followers accumulated, altars constructed, relics collected and miracles experienced. We even compare humility, turning modesty itself into another competition. The road disappears beneath our feet because we have become obsessed with watching everyone else's. Mercury does not even notice them. The messenger has a letter to deliver.

Imagine a royal courier riding through a kingdom carrying a decree from the King. Villagers argue beside the road. Merchants shout competing prices. Children play. Armies march. Lovers quarrel. Priests debate theology. None of it matters. The courier does not stop to resolve every disagreement because the message he carries possesses greater urgency than the distractions surrounding it. This is magical discipline. It is not merely concentration. It is remembering what has been entrusted to you.

Every soul, I suspect, receives its own letter from God. Not in words but in inclination. A particular way of seeing. A recurring fascination. An impossible longing that refuses to disappear despite every attempt to ignore it. Some discover it in prayer. Others in craftsmanship. Others among the dead, the saints, the stars or the spirits of rivers and forests. Whatever form it takes, it possesses a strange persistence. It continues knocking long after common sense has declared it inconvenient. Mercury asks only that you deliver it. Nothing more. Nothing less.

People often speak of "finding their purpose" as though it were a buried object waiting beneath the correct rock. I suspect purpose behaves more like a rhythm than a destination. It is something one gradually falls into, like learning the tempo of a piece of music. At first every step feels awkward. You rush where you should linger. You hesitate where you should leap. Yet eventually the rhythm teaches the body. You cease thinking about pace because your movement has become identical with the music itself. This is Mercurial timing. It cannot be manufactured. It can only be remembered.

The greatest illusion of the modern world is that speed is measured externally. We ask how much someone accomplished this year. How many books they published. How many rituals they performed. How many followers they gathered. We imagine history as a race and spirituality as another arena in which medals are awarded. Nature teaches otherwise. Observe the planets. Mercury circles the Sun in eighty-eight days. Saturn requires nearly thirty years. Neither apologises. Neither accelerates. Neither envies the other. Each moves according to a law deeper than preference. Because each remains faithful to its own motion, the heavens remain harmonious. Imagine the catastrophe if Saturn suddenly attempted to become Mercury. Imagine if winter envied spring. Imagine if mountains wished to become rivers. All disorder begins with imitation. All wisdom begins with fidelity.

This explains one of the strangest experiences encountered by serious practitioners. Eventually your pace begins separating you from people you once believed would accompany you forever. Not because anyone has become better or worse, but because rhythm has changed. Some people are called to remain where they are. Others are called onwards. The tragedy lies not in divergence but in pretending divergence has not occurred. Many remain years inside conversations that ended spiritually long ago. They continue attending arguments whose verdict has already been delivered. They remain loyal to identities that no longer fit because they fear appearing inconsistent. Mercury knows better. He understands that remaining stationary can become its own form of idolatry. Movement is not betrayal. Sometimes movement is obedience.

There exists a dangerous misconception within esoteric circles that loyalty means permanence. Stay with the same teacher forever. Remain inside the same current forever. Never alter your language. Never revise your understanding. Never allow experience to challenge inherited certainty. Yet no messenger who refused new roads would ever complete their mission. Mercury's loyalty is not to roads. It is to the message. This changes everything. One begins asking entirely different questions. Not which tradition is superior, but which tradition is asking something true of me now? Not which spirit is strongest, but which spirit has actually arrived? Not how quickly can I advance, but what pace preserves my integrity?

One slowly discovers that magical maturity has surprisingly little to do with knowledge. It has everything to do with rhythm. The novice wants techniques. The adept develops timing. The novice asks what to do. The adept asks when. One spell cast at the correct moment outweighs a hundred performed anxiously. One conversation held when hearts are open surpasses years of argument. One sincere prayer uttered when the soul is ready accomplishes what endless repetition cannot. Mercury governs these invisible intervals. He is the patron not merely of communication but of the precise instant communication becomes possible.

The same principle governs human relationships. Some people will understand you immediately. Others never will. Neither outcome requires resentment. The messenger is not responsible for how every recipient receives the message. He is responsible only for delivering it faithfully. There is enormous freedom in this. You cease attempting to drag people into seasons they are not prepared to inhabit. You stop shrinking yourself to preserve relationships that depend upon your stagnation. You stop explaining every transformation to those committed to misunderstanding it. You simply continue walking. If they are meant to accompany you, they will. If they are not, bless them and continue. The road itself is holy.

One eventually discovers that God keeps time differently than we do. We measure duration. God appears to measure readiness. What feels like delay may simply be preparation. What appears sudden may have been unfolding invisibly for decades. Mercury alone seems comfortable living between these two perspectives. He moves quickly because he trusts the timing that preceded his movement. He neither rushes Providence nor resists it.

Perhaps this is why genuine Mercurial people possess an unusual serenity despite living extraordinarily active lives. Their calendars may appear chaotic. Their interests may span impossible distances. One week they study saints, the next geomancy, the next birds, dreams, plants or stars. To outsiders this appears inconsistent. Yet beneath the apparent diversity exists a single movement. They are following the conversation wherever it leads. The Messenger never mistakes the road for the destination.

The religion of speed therefore has almost nothing to do with speed itself. It is a religion of fidelity. A religion of rhythm. A religion of remaining so attentive to the movement of God within your own life that comparison loses all meaning. Another person's journey ceases to threaten yours because their appointment is not your appointment. Their road does not lead where yours leads. Their pace was never intended to become your standard.

Walk when it is time to walk. Run when the road opens. Rest when the journey demands rest. Leave when Heaven says leave. Stay when Heaven says stay. Above all, refuse to build an altar to delay simply because others have mistaken hesitation for wisdom. Mercury is always moving, not because he is escaping the present, but because he trusts the One who called him onto the road in the first place. The Messenger knows that every faithful step, however ordinary it appears, is already carrying him towards the place where Heaven and Earth have agreed to meet.

It is with a measured but necessary resolve that I bring this phase of my free Substack to a close. What began as a genuine labour of passion, a place to lay things out plainly and test ideas in the open, has been something I’ve valued more than I expected, largely because of the people who have taken the time to read and work with what I’ve put out. That said, there are limits. An individual, who will remain unnamed for now, has decided my work is theirs to recycle and present as original. Rather than dilute what I’m doing or write with one eye over my shoulder, I’m moving this into a subscription model to cut that line off. The cost will stay deliberately low given the circumstances. I appreciate the understanding. Before that shift happens, I want to leave this here as the current closing point of the Christ and Chaos Magick series, a reframing of the Eucharist that puts it back where it belongs, in the hands of someone willing to actually use it.

The Eucharist is one of those rites that has been talked about so much it has been talked into submission. It has been ironed flat into doctrine, turned into something safe, something that can sit in the modern mind without causing friction. Bread as symbol, wine as remembrance, a quiet ritual that ticks along without asking much of anyone. But if you approach it like someone who understands that ritual is a mechanism rather than a metaphor, the whole thing shifts tone immediately. It stops behaving like a memorial and starts acting like a point of contact.

At its core, the Eucharist is built on a very simple and very old premise, that something happens when you take something into the body under the right conditions. You are not observing, you are not reflecting, you are crossing a threshold. You consume what has been named as divine and in doing so you collapse distance in a way that intellectual agreement can never achieve. That should already feel familiar if you have even a passing understanding of shamanic practice, because ingestion has always been one of the cleanest ways to disrupt the ordinary boundaries of the self.

Across cultures the pattern repeats itself with very little variation. The practitioner takes something in, the body shifts, perception loosens, and the line between internal and external becomes negotiable. It is not about believing in spirits, it is about creating a state where the idea of separation stops holding together. The Eucharist sits firmly in that lineage whether people want to admit it or not.

Bread and wine are not random choices dressed up with meaning after the fact. They are already the result of transformation. Grain is broken down and forced through fire, grapes are crushed and left to ferment until they become something that alters the mind and body. These substances already carry the logic of death and change before they ever reach the altar. The consecration doesn’t invent that quality, it directs it.

When the words are spoken, “this is my body” and “this is my blood,” something very direct is happening. It is not a description offered for contemplation, it is an act that fixes identity onto matter. In magical terms it is as blunt and effective as it gets. The statement doesn’t ask for permission, it establishes a condition and holds it in place long enough for the act to follow through.

When you take it in, something shifts. Not in a dramatic cinematic way, not necessarily in a way that overwhelms the senses, but in a way that is consistent and repeatable if you pay attention. The body becomes the site of the rite rather than just the participant in it. The distance between you and what is being engaged closes just enough to matter.

This is where Austin Osman Spare becomes useful, not as something to bolt onto Christianity, but as a way of understanding what is already happening beneath the surface. Spare’s work is concerned with what actually moves the needle in the mind, not what people say they believe, but what gets through to the deeper layers that run the show. His idea of the atavistic self, those buried strata beneath the personality you present to the world, lines up almost perfectly with where a rite like the Eucharist lands when it is engaged with properly.

Atavism in this context is not about romanticising the past or trying to become something primitive. It is about recognising that beneath the surface layer of habits and opinions there is a much older system that responds to rhythm, repetition, symbol, and charged action without needing it explained. That part of you does not care about theological debates. It cares about what is done and how often it is done.

Spare built sigils to slip past the conscious mind and root themselves there. The Eucharist achieves something similar through repetition and structure. The cadence of the Mass, the familiar movements, the sensory field of incense, sound, and space, all of it gradually lowers the guard of the surface mind. Into that opening goes a very specific act, the internalisation of a god who dies, descends, and returns.

That pattern, once taken in repeatedly, starts to embed itself. Not as a belief you hold in your head, but as something that sits deeper, something that begins to colour perception and experience in subtle ways. This is how rites become alive. Not because you decide they are, but because they have been impressed into the layers of mind that actually generate experience.

Now this is where Catholicism needs to be addressed properly, because this is the point where most people either romanticise it or reject it outright, and both responses miss the mark completely.

Catholicism, stripped of its modern baggage for a moment, is one of the most intact mystery systems still operating at scale. It has everything a functioning initiatory current requires. It has controlled space, ritual language, sensory manipulation, repeated liturgical cycles, consecrated objects, structured progression through rites, and most importantly, continuity. Not theoretical continuity, but lived, enacted continuity over centuries.

This matters more than most people are willing to admit. In any working tradition, whether it is called shamanism or anything else, power accumulates through repetition. A rite done once is an experiment. A rite done thousands of times by thousands of people becomes a channel. It develops weight, presence, a kind of inertia that carries the participant whether they fully understand it or not.

The Catholic Mass is saturated with that kind of repetition. Every gesture, every phrase, every movement has been reinforced over and over again to the point where it holds shape on its own. When you step into it, you are not assembling something from scratch, you are entering something that has been kept running whether you were there or not.

This is exactly how oral shamanic traditions operate, even if the aesthetics are completely different. Knowledge is not just passed down as information, it is passed down as participation in something that already works. You learn by stepping into the current and letting it move you until you understand how to move with it.

Now here is where it gets uncomfortable, and it should. The Catholic Church as an institution has not handled this responsibility cleanly. It has, at various points, suppressed experience in favour of control, replaced living contact with rigid dogma, and acted in ways that are not just flawed but in some cases outright reprehensible. There is no value in pretending otherwise. If anything, pretending otherwise is part of the problem.

But dismissing the entire system because of that is just as shallow as defending it blindly. The institution and the current are not identical things. The structure has been misused, mishandled, and at times corrupted, but the underlying mechanism has not disappeared. The rites are still there. The repetition is still there. The accumulated weight is still there.

That creates a strange situation where something extremely potent is sitting inside a container that does not always encourage people to engage with it properly. The result is that the machinery is running, but most people interacting with it are only skimming the surface.

From a practical standpoint, this is an opportunity rather than a problem. You do not need to agree with every aspect of the institution to engage with what actually works. You do not need to resolve every contradiction before you step into the rite. What matters is whether you are willing to treat the rite as operative rather than symbolic.

When you approach the Mass in that way, everything shifts. The incense stops being decorative and starts acting as a modifier of atmosphere and perception. The chant stops being background noise and begins to pull the mind into a different rhythm. The repetition stops feeling dull and starts functioning as induction. The Eucharist stops being a token and reveals itself as the central act that ties all of it together.

If you are going to engage with it, do it properly. Come into it slightly removed from your usual state. Even a small amount of fasting sharpens the body’s response. Give yourself a moment of silence beforehand so you are not dragging the noise of the day straight into the rite.

When the moment comes, do not rush it internally. Recognise that something is about to happen and allow yourself to be present for it rather than treating it as a checkpoint to move through. When you receive, hold the identification in a straightforward way without immediately translating it into something softer or more abstract.

As you consume, keep your awareness anchored in the body. The physical sensation matters because it is the anchor point for the act. Afterwards, give it a moment. Do not snap straight back into conversation or distraction. Let the state settle, even briefly.

Over time, this changes the experience in a way that does not require you to force anything. It becomes more immediate, less conceptual, and more consistent. The rite begins to do what it is designed to do because you have stopped getting in its way.

Taken seriously, this reframes Catholicism entirely. It stops being a system you either subscribe to or reject and starts revealing itself as a functioning mystery tradition that has been running in plain sight. A tradition that has been constrained, mishandled, and at times abused, but never fully extinguished.

If anything, approaching it this way is a form of reclamation. Not of the institution as it presents itself, but of the current it carries. You are not ignoring the flaws, you are acknowledging them while refusing to let them be the final word on something that still works.

That is where the shamanic lens becomes more than an analogy. It becomes a method for bringing the system back to life on an individual level. You engage it directly, you use it as it was built to be used, and in doing so you begin to restore some of the charge that has been allowed to fade.

And there we have it. Get yourself down to your local Catholic church and experience it for yourself.

With love,

RP

Most people come to magick with a wound dressed up as a goal, they want the job, the lover, the money, the opening, and they do the work, sometimes clumsily, sometimes with surprising precision, and when it lands they stop, not because the current has ended but because they mistake the first result for the whole story, treating magick like a transaction rather than a relationship, like a key that only needs turning once instead of a force that reshapes the one who wields it.

There is a quiet arrogance in this way of moving, the assumption that the spirits, the symbols, the current itself exists to deliver a single outcome and then politely step aside, yet what gets missed is that every working alters the field, it changes the operator, it opens further doors that are often less obvious and more demanding, and to stop at the first success is to freeze yourself mid transformation, like walking out of a forge before the blade has been properly tempered.

The story of Sigurd lays this out in a language older than most systems people borrow from today, because Sigurd does not set out to become a legend, he is shaped into one through ordeal, guidance, and the steady accumulation of acts that bind him deeper into fate, he slays Fafnir and gains the treasure, and in a modern mindset that would be the end, the dragon is dead, the gold is won, job done, yet the myth refuses to end there because the treasure is never the point.

Sigurd tastes the dragon’s blood and suddenly understands the speech of birds, and this is the moment most people overlook, because the killing of the dragon is the visible result, the thing you can point to and boast about, but the real initiation is what follows, his perception changes, the world begins to speak in a different language, he is warned, guided, and drawn further into a web of consequence that stretches far beyond the initial act.

This is what sustained magick looks like, the first success is not the reward, it is the threshold, it is the equivalent of tasting that blood, and after that things start talking back, patterns emerge, opportunities and warnings arrive in strange forms, and you are no longer just asking for outcomes, you are being shaped into someone who can move within a larger current.

People who stop after the first result never reach that stage, they kill their dragon, take the gold, and walk away deaf to the birds, remaining at the level of isolated acts, never realising that magick is cumulative and that each working builds a language between you and the unseen, a language that becomes fluency over time, and fluency that becomes authority, but only if you stay in the process.

Sigurd’s story is not clean or comfortable, it is full of betrayal, tragedy, and the kind of consequences that come from stepping fully into fate, and that is the other side people avoid, because continued practice does not just bring more success, it brings more responsibility, more entanglement, and a deeper confrontation with who you are becoming, it asks for more than a single desire, it asks for participation in a larger pattern.

If you approach magick as a one off tool you will get one off results, but if you approach it as a path it will change the way you see, the way you act, and the way the world responds to you, and the goal you started with will either evolve or fall away entirely, replaced by something that fits the person you are becoming through the work.

So the question is not whether magick works, it is whether you are willing to continue after it does, because most people are not, they take the gold and leave the deeper inheritance behind, and they never learn the language of the birds.

There is a very predictable habit that shows up in modern occult circles where systems and grimoires are dismissed not because they have been tested and found lacking, but because they were never properly understood in the first place, and instead of sitting with that discomfort or putting in the time to work through it, the conclusion is drawn that the material itself is flawed, outdated, or unnecessarily complex, which conveniently removes the need to engage with it any further.

When you actually look at how this plays out in real terms, especially online, the pattern becomes even clearer, because you will see people pick up a grimoire like the Key of Solomon or the Lesser Key of Solomon, flip through it, maybe attempt one or two operations with no real preparation, no understanding of timing, no grasp of the planetary framework, and no real effort put into the ritual conditions, and then within a week there is a video or a post explaining why it does not work, why it feels restrictive, or why it is not necessary in modern practice, when in reality what has happened is that they have brushed up against a structured system without the tools to operate it.

YouTube is full of this exact thing, where someone will title a video “I tried Goetia so you don’t have to” or “Why grimoires are outdated,” and within minutes it becomes obvious that the operation was approached like a casual experiment rather than a discipline, with no attention paid to consecration, no real understanding of the spirit hierarchy, no attempt to align with the conditions laid out in the text, and yet the conclusion is delivered with complete confidence, as if the failure of execution somehow proves the failure of the system itself.

What makes this worse is the way the algorithm rewards that kind of surface level engagement, because it is far easier to watch and share a confident dismissal than it is to sit through someone methodically explaining planetary hours, ritual purification, or the logic behind a sequence of actions, so the content that spreads is almost always the content that avoids depth, and over time this creates a feedback loop where the appearance of knowledge replaces actual practice, and the idea of working a system properly starts to feel unnecessary or even excessive.

At the same time there is a shift in language that supports this avoidance, where everything becomes about intuition, personal gnosis, and doing what feels right in the moment, which sounds appealing on the surface but very quickly turns into a lack of accountability, because if the only measure of success is how something feels, then there is no reason to refine technique, no reason to question results, and no reason to engage with methods that require effort to understand.

Grimoires do not operate on that level, because they are built on structure, and that structure is what allows them to produce consistent results when they are used correctly, which means they demand something from the practitioner that cannot be bypassed, and that demand is exactly what causes so many people to reject them, not because they are ineffective, but because they expose the difference between wanting to practice and actually practicing.

If you take something like planetary magic and actually work it as intended, paying attention to timing, to correspondences, to the condition of the operator, to the materials being used, you begin to see a level of consistency that is very difficult to replicate through improvised methods, but reaching that point requires you to stay with the system long enough to understand how it functions, and that is the part that most people skip, because it does not offer immediate validation.

So what you end up with is a culture that talks a lot about freedom and breaking away from tradition, while quietly avoiding anything that would require discipline, and in doing so it cuts itself off from the very methods that would produce the results it is constantly chasing, which is why the same conversations repeat over and over again, the same frustrations come up, and the same conclusions are drawn, all while the systems being dismissed continue to work perfectly well for those who are willing to meet them on their own terms.

With love,

RP

The way angels get used in New Age spirituality does not just miss the point, it reshapes something structured and exacting into something soft, agreeable, and built around personal comfort, and because that version is easy to consume it spreads quickly, carried by language that feels elevated but asks nothing in return, offering affirmation instead of alignment and reassurance instead of responsibility, which is exactly why it appeals to people who want the appearance of depth without the weight that normally comes with it.

When you step back into the older material, especially the grimoires, the contrast is immediate and uncomfortable because angels are not presented as companions or guides orbiting the individual, they are situated within a rigid hierarchy where rank, function, and authority define the interaction, and the operator does not approach them casually but through preparation, timing, and constraint, working within planetary conditions and speaking names that are treated as operative rather than symbolic, all of which reinforces the fact that you are entering into a system that already exists rather than creating one around yourself, and that system does not adjust to your preferences simply because you want it to.

Kabbalah strips it back even further by removing any illusion that angels are independent personalities waiting to engage with you on personal terms, because they are expressions of divine process tied to the sephiroth and embedded within the architecture of creation itself, which means engaging with them is not about building a relationship in the modern sense but about stepping into a current that has direction, structure, and consequence, where your role is to align and participate rather than to define the terms, and where any real contact exposes imbalance rather than smoothing it over, forcing adjustment whether you like it or not.

That entire framework runs directly against the New Age model, so instead of being engaged with it gets bypassed, and what replaces it is a version of angelic work that is centred entirely on the individual, where angels are reframed as accessible, affirming presences that support whatever path someone is already on, requiring no discipline, no restructuring of behaviour, and no real understanding of the systems they come from, which turns them into a kind of spiritual aesthetic that can be packaged, repeated, and sold without ever having to prove itself.

What makes this more than just a surface level issue is the way that attitude has spread beyond New Age spaces and into occult communities more broadly, especially as magick has become more accessible through social media, digital courses, and low barrier entry points that prioritise visibility over depth, because the same patterns repeat themselves under different language, with spirits, angels, and entire systems being reduced to tools for personal branding, quick results, and marketable services, all framed in a way that keeps the practitioner at the centre while quietly removing the structures that would normally test or refine their work.

You see it in the way people talk about “working with” forces they have never seriously engaged with, in the way complex systems get stripped down into a handful of keywords and visuals that can be turned into content, and in the way spiritual practice gets folded into business models where the goal is not alignment or effectiveness but consistency of output and audience growth, which creates a feedback loop where what feels good and sells well replaces what actually works, and where critique is avoided because it disrupts the flow of attention.

That shift produces a kind of hollow confidence where people speak with certainty about practices that have never been grounded in discipline or tested within a structured framework, and because everything is flattened into personal experience there is no real mechanism for correction, no hierarchy to measure against, and no expectation of change beyond surface level adjustments, which means the work never deepens and the practitioner never has to confront the possibility that what they are doing is largely self-generated.

At its core this is a resistance to order dressed up as empowerment, because real engagement with angels or any structured current of magick requires you to step out of the centre and into something that has its own logic, its own demands, and its own limits, and that process is not always comfortable or validating, it often involves friction, refinement, and the slow removal of habits that do not hold up under pressure, none of which fits neatly into a model built on accessibility, affirmation, and constant output.

So what you end up with is a version of angelic and magical practice that looks active but lacks substance, where the language of contact is used without the conditions that make contact possible, and where systems rooted in hierarchy and precision are repackaged into something fluid, agreeable, and endlessly adaptable to the individual, which might sustain a business or an online presence but moves further and further away from anything that could genuinely be called engagement, leaving behind something that feels spiritual on the surface but ultimately circles back to the self every time.

With love,

RP

Humility gets talked about like it means stepping back, staying quiet, keeping yourself small so you don’t upset anyone. In a lot of modern Christian spaces that’s exactly what it’s turned into. It’s no longer about being grounded or honest about your place, it’s about avoiding responsibility while calling it virtue. The necessary shepherd can’t work like that. The flock doesn’t survive because you’re nice about everything. It survives because someone is actually paying attention, making decisions, and willing to carry weight when it needs carrying.

That’s where Saturn comes in, and it cuts straight through the nonsense. Saturn doesn’t care how something looks. It cares whether it holds. It’s about structure, limits, consequence, and time. If something is weak, it either gets strengthened or it breaks. There’s no hiding behind good intentions. Where this softer version of Christianity leans into endless forgiveness with no accountability and kindness with no correction, Saturn demands form. It says hold the line, deal with the problem, take responsibility, even when it’s uncomfortable.

The issue is that in a lot of these spaces, anything that feels like Saturn gets pushed away. Discipline gets called harsh. Boundaries get called judgmental. Consequences get called unloving. And because of that, Saturn itself ends up getting treated like the enemy. It gets lumped in with what people think of as “dark” or “negative” forces, sometimes even framed in the same way they’d talk about the devil, just because it doesn’t bend to comfort or feelings. But that says more about the misunderstanding than it does about Saturn. It’s not evil, it’s just uncompromising. It doesn’t let things slide.

And it’s not just Christianity that falls into this. A lot of magicians and occultists do the exact same thing, just dressed up differently. Instead of “humility,” it becomes “going with the flow,” “letting the universe handle it,” or hiding behind ideas like everything is subjective so nothing really has to be dealt with properly. There’s a lot of talk about power, about working with spirits, about commanding forces, but when it comes to actually holding structure, setting limits, or taking responsibility for outcomes, it disappears. It’s the same avoidance, just wearing different language.

You see it in people who won’t set boundaries with spirits because they’re afraid of being “disrespectful,” or who refuse to correct their own behaviour because they’d rather stay comfortable than be effective. You see it in those who chase experiences, aesthetics, or validation online, but fold the moment something requires discipline or consistency. It’s the same weakness, the same lack of backbone, just repackaged as spirituality or openness.

The necessary shepherd understands that. They know that care without structure doesn’t help anyone, it just lets things fall apart slowly. They know that if you never step in, never correct, never draw a line, you’re not being kind, you’re being absent. And absence is just another form of neglect. So they act when they need to act. They step forward when something needs handling. They don’t hide behind being “humble” or “open” to avoid doing what’s required.

That doesn’t mean they become cold or heavy handed. The lamb still gets carried. There’s still care, still attention, still patience. But it’s not endless, and it’s not blind. It’s balanced. There’s a point where patience runs out and something has to be addressed properly. That’s where most people fold, because they’d rather be liked than be effective. The necessary shepherd doesn’t make that trade.

This is the tension. On one side you’ve got a version of Christianity that pushes people to shrink, to stay soft, to avoid stepping on toes at all costs. On the other side you’ve got Saturn, which is saying stand up, take responsibility, hold things together properly. And sitting right alongside that, you’ve got parts of the occult world falling into the exact same trap, avoiding structure while talking about power. The necessary shepherd sides with what actually works. Not because it feels better, but because it keeps things from falling apart.

False humility doesn’t last when things get real. The moment pressure shows up, it cracks. The necessary shepherd is built through that pressure. They don’t step back when things get difficult, and they don’t dress up avoidance as virtue or spirituality. They stand where they’re supposed to stand, they carry what they’re supposed to carry, and they deal with what’s in front of them.

That’s what real humility looks like. Not making yourself small, but knowing your role and actually stepping into it.

With love,

RP

One example of this confusion is the recurring claim that Lucifer and Jesus are the same being.

The claim appears frequently in modern spiritual discourse. It circulates in occult forums, in social media commentary, in certain strands of modern Gnosticism, and in pop spirituality that attempts to blend all traditions into a single symbolic language. It is usually presented as a revelation that overturns traditional religion. The claim suggests that the church misunderstood its own scriptures, that Lucifer the light bearer is secretly the same as Christ the bringer of light.

But this idea collapses almost immediately when examined historically, theologically, and linguistically. The problem is not merely that the interpretation is unusual. The problem is that it ignores the structure of the traditions it claims to reinterpret.

Lucifer is a Latin word meaning light bearer. It appears in the Latin Vulgate translation of Isaiah 14:12, where it is used poetically to describe the fallen king of Babylon. The passage mocks a ruler who imagined himself divine but who is cast down from his throne. Later Christian interpretation associated this imagery with the fall of Satan. The morning star that rises brilliantly but vanishes in daylight became a symbol of pride that collapses under the weight of its own ambition.

Over centuries the name Lucifer became attached to the archetype of the fallen angel. A being once radiant who chose rebellion rather than obedience.

Jesus Christ occupies a completely different role within the Christian framework. In the New Testament Christ is the incarnate Logos, the divine Word through whom creation itself was made. The Gospel of John describes him not as a created intelligence but as the eternal expression of God entering history. His mission is redemption, reconciliation, and restoration of humanity.

The two narratives move in opposite directions. Lucifer represents the ascent of pride that results in a fall. Christ represents the descent of humility that results in exaltation.

This contrast is not a minor detail. It is the structural core of Christian theology.

The confusion often arises because both figures are associated with light imagery. Lucifer means light bearer, and in Revelation Christ describes himself as the bright morning star. Modern interpreters sometimes seize on this shared symbol and assume identity between the two. But this argument misunderstands how symbols work.

Ancient cultures reused celestial imagery constantly. The morning star is simply the planet Venus. It appears in myths, poetry, astrology, and theology across many civilizations. The same symbol can represent different figures depending on context. To assume that shared imagery implies identical identity is like claiming that every king described as a lion must be the same person.

Traditional readers of scripture understood this without difficulty. The modern impulse to merge everything into one symbolic system is a much newer phenomenon.

The deeper issue is not merely theological confusion. It is cultural.

Modern society often celebrates syncretism as a virtue in itself. The blending of traditions can indeed produce creative insights when done carefully. Renaissance scholars and magicians compared Greek philosophy, Jewish mysticism, and Christian theology while still respecting the internal logic of each system.

But the modern internet age has accelerated a much looser form of syncretism. Instead of studying traditions deeply, people often extract symbols and recombine them freely. Context disappears. Language is detached from its historical meaning. Complex traditions are reduced to interchangeable archetypes.

In this environment Lucifer becomes simply a symbol of rebellion or enlightenment. Jesus becomes another light figure among many. The two begin to blur together not because the traditions support it but because modern culture tends to flatten distinctions.

This flattening has real consequences.

When traditions lose their internal structure, they lose the ability to communicate coherent ideas about morality, cosmology, and human nature. The stories that once guided communities become vague metaphors rather than meaningful narratives. What remains is a kind of spiritual aesthetic. Symbols are chosen because they feel powerful or provocative rather than because they belong to a coherent worldview.

Older religious and magical traditions possessed intricate frameworks. Angels had specific roles. Planetary intelligences operated within defined hierarchies. Divine authority flowed through structured channels.

Within that worldview Christ was understood as the central mediator between heaven and earth. Lucifer was understood as part of the fallen order that had broken from that harmony. Those who worked within these traditions were careful about distinctions. They understood that different spiritual beings occupied different positions in the order of creation.

Modern syncretism often ignores that structure entirely.

In a culture that values novelty and personal interpretation, dramatic reinterpretations gain attention quickly. Saying that Lucifer and Jesus are secretly the same figure sounds radical and intriguing. It challenges traditional authority. It carries the appeal of hidden knowledge but novelty is not the same as truth.

Free speech allows anyone to propose new interpretations, and that freedom is valuable. Yet the existence of a theory does not automatically grant it historical or theological legitimacy. Ideas must still be measured against texts, traditions, and the intellectual frameworks from which those ideas emerge.

When we return to those frameworks, the distinction becomes unmistakable.

Lucifer represents the tragedy of brilliance corrupted by pride. A radiant intelligence that sought its own elevation and fractured the harmony of heaven.

Jesus represents divine humility entering the human condition to restore what had been broken. One narrative describes rebellion that leads to separation. The other describes sacrifice that leads to reconciliation.

These are not the same story. They are intentionally opposite stories and when modern culture blurs them together, the result is not deeper understanding but the quiet erosion of meaning itself.

For further reading see Lucifer Princeps and Praxis by Peter Grey of Scarlet Imprint

Most people say they want to be better, but very few define what that actually means in structural terms. Improvement is often treated as a mood, a resolution, or a reaction to guilt, and then it fades because it was never grounded in process. Enter the Purity Ladder reframes growth as a deliberate ascent, not emotional enthusiasm but sustained refinement. Through a Christian chaos magick lens, becoming better is neither passive grace nor self-help optimism; it is participation in an alchemical process that reshapes the self over time through intentional alignment with a higher pattern.

The Purity Ladder is the steady commitment to becoming a better person through deliberate refinement of thought, habit, and action, and it has less to do with moral posturing than with structural change in the self. To walk this road is to accept that growth is cumulative and that character is built through repeated choices that either strengthen or weaken your alignment with what you claim to believe. In Christian terms this is sanctification, in alchemical terms it is transmutation, and in chaos magick it is conscious self-programming, yet all three frameworks describe the same underlying movement from fragmentation toward coherence.

Alchemy begins with confrontation rather than decoration, because nothing can be refined until it is honestly examined, and this corresponds to repentance understood not as shame but as clarity. Through a Christian chaos magick lens repentance becomes a practical act of recalibration in which you identify patterns that distort your judgment, drain your discipline, or undermine your integrity, and you choose to interrupt them. The black stage of alchemy, nigredo, is simply the willingness to see the unrefined material without denial, which means acknowledging reactive habits, ego defenses, and contradictions between stated values and lived behavior. This is the first ascent, not dramatic but decisive.

Once the material is exposed it can be worked, and this is where purification becomes practical rather than symbolic. You adjust speech so it carries less bitterness and more accuracy, you discipline attention so it is not constantly hijacked by distraction, you regulate appetite so it serves long-term aims rather than short-term impulses. In Christian practice this may look like prayer, fasting, confession, and forgiveness, and in chaos magick it resembles intentional belief shaping and ritualized reinforcement of chosen identities, yet in both cases the mechanism is repetition under intention. You are teaching the nervous system a new pattern and reinforcing it until it stabilizes.

As refinement continues the self becomes less divided, because fewer internal contradictions are tolerated, and this is where albedo and rubedo find psychological expression as integration and embodiment. The virtues you once performed awkwardly begin to feel natural, restraint becomes strength rather than suppression, and compassion emerges from clarity rather than sentimentality. Christ, viewed through this lens, functions as a master template of integrated humanity, not merely an object of devotion but a pattern of self-giving strength and disciplined love that can be internalized through consistent contemplation and imitation. Each time you align action with that pattern you ascend another rung.

This framework becomes practical when it is applied to daily structure rather than abstract ideals. You begin by conducting regular self-inventory, perhaps weekly, identifying one behavioral pattern that weakens your integrity and selecting one corrective discipline to install in its place. You attach that discipline to a symbol or ritual so that it is reinforced consistently, whether through structured prayer, journaling, fasting from a specific habit, or rehearsing a chosen virtue before entering difficult situations. You track progress in measurable ways, not to shame yourself but to observe transformation over time.

You also apply the ladder relationally by committing to truthfulness in conversation, restraint in conflict, and reliability in commitments, because refinement that does not show up in relationships is theoretical. When you fail, you return immediately to recalibration rather than collapse into self-condemnation, treating setbacks as material for further refinement instead of proof of defeat. Over months and years this repeated cycle of awareness, adjustment, and reinforcement produces visible change in temperament and decision-making.

The ladder is not about achieving flawlessness but about reducing internal chaos so that will, word, and deed move in the same direction, because purity in this framework means coherence. Over time the accumulated effect of small disciplined choices reshapes identity, and the alchemical metaphor becomes experiential reality as base impulses are refined into steadiness, fear into responsibility, and scattered intention into directed purpose. The climb is ongoing because there is always deeper refinement available, yet the direction remains constant, upward toward greater integrity and clearer alignment with the highest vision of yourself that you can presently conceive.

Not everything that wants your attention deserves it, nor should every influence that knocks should be let in. Not every voice that sounds interesting is actually helpful despite the presentation or occult buzzwords used to describe it. In an age of who's who guru's and prophets by the dozen accessible via popular social media outlets it's easy to gey swept up in the euphoria but I implore you not to.

This is less mystical than people like to imagine and more practical than they expect. Your practice is shaped, slowly but relentlessly, by what you allow into it. The books you read. The spirits you listen to. The teachers you trust. The emotional tone you marinate in. Over time, these things don’t just influence your work. They become it.

Which is why boundaries matter far more than most beginners realize.

There’s a figure in Christian tradition who gets reduced to jokes or authority tropes, but who actually models this lesson beautifully if you pay attention. Saint Peter is usually remembered as the guy with the keys, the gatekeeper of heaven, the one deciding who gets in and who doesn’t. That image gets flattened into cartoon bureaucracy, but the symbolism is much older and much sharper than that.

Keys are about discernment. Gates are about control. And holding them is not about power for its own sake, but about responsibility.

Peter isn’t praised because he’s flawless. In fact, he’s famously not. He doubts, panics and denies. He gets things wrong in very human ways but what he does learn, and what earns him the keys, is when to open and when to close. When to allow something through and when to say no, even under pressure.

That’s an occult lesson hiding in plain sight. ( no not in a liminal space)

In practical magical terms, your life is a gate. Your mind is a gate. Your ritual space is a gate and every influence you allow through that gate leaves residue. Some of it strengthens your work, some of it weakens it. Some of it quietly distorts it until you no longer recognize what you’re doing or why you started.

The mistake a lot of practitioners make is assuming influence is only spiritual. They’ll obsess over wards and banishings, but let their attention be colonized by outrage, comparison, endless discourse, or teachers who thrive on chaos. They’ll be careful about what spirits they invoke and careless about what moods they habitually feed.

Peter’s lesson cuts through that nonsense.

Guarding the gate isn’t dramatic or not flashy. Most of the time it looks boring. It looks like choosing not to engage. Not reading that thing, not following that voice. Not bringing every new influence into your ritual life just because it feels intense or validating. People LOVE validation in this occult environment we find ourselves in and if you’re not providing an ego massage you might very well be deemed to be irrelevant in comparison to those who will tell you you're the second coming of Cleopatra.

Intensity is not the same thing as alignment.

In the gospel stories, Peter is corrected repeatedly for wanting to act too fast, speak too soon, prove himself too loudly. What matures him isn’t knowledge. It’s restraint. He learns that being entrusted with keys means you don’t open every door just because you can.This applies directly to occult practice if youre willing to try.

Your work will only ever be as clean as the influences you allow to shape it. If you let everything in, your signal gets muddy. If you let everyone speak into your practice, you stop being able to tell which voice is actually yours. Discernment isn’t about paranoia. It’s about coherence and strong practice has a clear center.

That doesn’t mean isolation or rigidity. It means you choose your influences deliberately. You notice what strengthens your attention and what fractures it. You pay attention to what leaves you clearer afterward and what leaves you scattered. Over time, you get very good at spotting the difference.

That’s Peter with the keys again. Not judging from a pedestal, not performing authority, just quietly deciding what belongs inside the gate and what doesn’t.

And the older you get in the work, the less dramatic this becomes. You stop feeling the need to justify your boundaries. You stop explaining why something doesn’t resonate. You simply don’t open the door.

Not because you’re afraid, but because you’ve learned that what you let in shapes who you become.

In occult practice, as in life, holiness often looks like good gatekeeping. And sometimes the most powerful magic you can do is deciding, calmly and without guilt, that not everything gets access to you.

With love,

RP

No matter if you're a full-time occultist, dabbler, or have been thrust into the world of woo by unforunate circumstances, you're probably familiar with attracting people and circumstances that aren't good for you. Be it someone who wishes to take your time or resources without gratitude all whilst wearing a smile and probably saying 'Namaste' ( read new age spiritual communities ) or just general bullshit. Fortunately, there are a number of the solutions. This is one of my favourites. It's quick to the point and packs a hell of a punch.

Enter Psalm 91

Psalm 91 works best when you stop treating it like a comforting poster verse and start treating it like a technology. Read it aloud, slowly, standing upright, spine long, breath deep, as if you are stepping into a jurisdiction rather than asking for help. The psalm is about placement, abiding, dwelling, and taking shelter, so imagine yourself deliberately relocating into a protected zone, a different weather system. Let the language do the heavy lifting. Angels are dispatched, snares are neutralised, contagion loses traction. You are not begging but declaring terms. Read it daily for a set period. Seven days works. Forty is better. Notice what quietly exits your life. Certain thoughts. Certain people. Certain bad luck patterns. Often without drama. The trash will very obviously take itself out. Even if you accidently let it enter again, circumstances will align to where it must leave.

Psalm 91 does not fight negativity so much as it makes it incompatible with your operating environment, like changing altitudes until the pests that persisted are no longer permitted to survive in your atmostphere survive.

To learn how to incorporate this and other psalms into working with the Celestial hierarchies for all needs, sign up to my Angel course, which begins later this month.

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Til next time, choose peace and banish the freeloader.

RP

#angelmagick #psalmmagic #occult

Most people who take spiritual practice seriously hit a strange moment sooner or later. You start out hungry, curious, full of questions, and then at some point things either go quiet or go weird, sometimes both. In a culture that expects constant explanation and output, that can feel like a personal failure rather than a normal phase of the work.

It’s tempting, in those moments, to talk more and explain yourself harder, to turn whatever is happening, or not happening, into something legible and shareable. Not always because you want attention, but because you want reassurance, because you want to know that the connection is still there. There’s an old story that captures this dynamic better than most, and it’s worth sitting with for a minute.

There’s a detail in the Moses story that’s easy to miss if you’re reading it too quickly. He goes up the mountain and doesn’t come back right away. That’s it. No drama yet, no tablets, just absence. He disappears into weather and silence and leaves everyone else standing around wondering what they’re supposed to do with themselves, and they don’t handle it well.

The problem isn’t that they stop believing in God. It’s that nothing is happening. There’s no update, no sign, no sense that the connection is still active, and human beings are very bad at sitting with that kind of open-endedness. We start to itch. We start to improvise. So they make something.

That dynamic hasn’t gone anywhere.

Every practitioner who actually does the work knows there’s a phase where things go quiet. You pray, meditate, do ritual, make offerings, show up consistently, and then the feedback loop disappears. There are no visions, no dreams worth mentioning, no sense of progress you can point to. You’re still doing the thing, but it’s no longer narratable. That’s the mountain.

The mountain is awkward because it doesn’t give you content. It gives you change, slowly, and mostly in ways that are hard to explain without sounding either unhinged or insincere. Traditionally, that wasn’t a problem. You didn’t owe anyone a running commentary on your inner life, and you weren’t expected to produce insights on demand. You could disappear for a bit, let things work on you, and come back when whatever had shifted was solid enough to be useful.

Now, though, we live in a world that quietly insists you stay visible. If you’re a spiritual practitioner online, there’s an unspoken pressure to keep generating, to keep sharing, to keep translating experience into posts, threads, videos, and updates. Not because anyone explicitly tells you to, but because silence reads as stagnation, and stagnation feels like failure.

So when something does happen, anything at all, you rush to say something about it. The trouble is that spiritual experiences aren’t finished products when they arrive. They’re more like half-formed weather systems. If you talk about them too early, you’re not communicating wisdom, you’re just externalizing process, and the internet, bless it, is not especially good at holding unfinished inner material.

This is where things start to get messy. People begin sharing experiences they haven’t lived into yet, insights they haven’t tested, messages they haven’t pressure-checked against time, practice, or consequence. Not out of bad faith, but because there’s a sense that if you don’t keep producing, you’ll disappear. That’s when spirituality starts to look a bit like performance.

In the Moses story, the golden calf isn’t really about idol worship in the abstract. It’s about anxiety management. The people need something visible to organize their attention around while they wait, and Aaron gives them a thing they can point at and say, at least this is here. Content can function the same way, not because it’s fake necessarily, but because it fills the silence before silence has done its job. It gives shape to uncertainty instead of letting uncertainty reshape you.

What’s interesting about Moses, when he does come back, is how little he actually shares. He doesn’t narrate the whole experience, nor does he give a blow-by-blow account of the encounter. He brings down what has settled, what has weight, and what can actually support a community rather than overwhelm it. That’s not restraint for its own sake. That’s maturity.

A lot of modern practitioners would benefit from taking that part seriously. Not everything you experience is meant to be shared, and not everything you learn is meant to be taught. Some things are meant to season you quietly over time, until they show up in how you live rather than what you post.

The mountain doesn’t care about your output or your audience. It cares about whether you’re willing to stay long enough to be altered by what you encounter there. And sometimes the most honest spiritual move you can make, especially in a culture obsessed with visibility, is to go quiet, let the weather pass through you, and come back with less to say but more to stand on.

Get your hiking boots on. Climb that mountain. Just don’t feel the need to vlog your conversation with God to get internet famous.

With love,

RP

Known to some I'm a magician and divination for hire. I wanted to keep my blog seperate from that side of things to keep it ‘pure’ however this is an exception. This course is an culmination of everything I believe in as a practioner and that I wish to give back. Since releasing my episode on the SpiritBox podcast on angels I've been inundated with questions on how to's so this is your chance to learn how I do things.

With love,

RP

Pleased to announce:

ROOTS ABOVE.

The Celestial Path is a three-tier initiatory course designed to take you from absolute beginner to a confident practitioner, guiding you step-by-step into a conscious relationship with the angelic realms. Whether you come from a spiritual, mystical, or practical magic background,or none at all. This course meets you where you are and opens the gates gently, safely, and with reverence.

Each tier builds naturally upon the last, combining spiritual understanding, lived practice, and daily integration so angelic magic becomes not just something you do but something you live.

This is a 3 month long course with segments bi-weekly allowing adequate time for assimilation and for you to fully explore the praxis.

To sign up, please message here's I will require an email address in which to send class material

Cost is £120 covering the entirety of the course.

Start date 18/02/25

I look forward to seeing you all there.

The digital age has altered the occult. There is no way around that. For better or worse, things have changed. Access is easier, information is faster, and what once took years to encounter can now be found in minutes. The old ways are still here, but they are thinning, often pushed aside in the pursuit of visibility, followers, and traction.

The quiet irony is this: wisdom was never about being first. It was not even about competing. It was not a race at all. It was a process, slow, intimate, and fundamentally transformative.

There was a time when occult knowledge moved slowly, not because it was deliberately hidden, but because it required a certain quality of attention to survive being passed on. It traveled through relationships, through trust, through long conversations where nothing dramatic happened on the surface, yet something essential was being reshaped underneath. Understanding did not arrive as instant clarity. It arrived as pressure, through gradual and cumulative effort, and the rewards were earned, as they still are.

The digital age did not reveal the occult so much as it changed the conditions under which revelation happens. Knowledge now moves without friction, detached from the lived contexts that once acted as natural initiations. What remains is not illumination, but saturation. Symbols, spirits, systems, and practices are encountered in endless succession, consumed rather than digested.

Familiarity replaces intimacy. Recognition is mistaken for realization. This becomes most evident when witnessing practitioners being “locked out” of working with spirits because they lack the necessary understanding. The internet can do many things, but it cannot supply that missing depth.

Instead of experience leading to explanation, explanation now comes first, often long before the work has touched the body, the nervous system, or the inner life. The map is complete, but the terrain remains untouched. Something essential is lost in that reversal.

Real understanding has always depended on tempo. It unfolds through repetition, confusion, boredom, and long stretches where certainty dissolves. The digital environment disrupts this rhythm by rewarding speed, novelty, and immediate payoff. Practices that once unfolded over months or years are compressed into fragments, stripped of their ability to unsettle, challenge, or transform. This is not because the mystery has weakened, but because it requires a slower inner pace than the one we are being trained to maintain.

There is also a quieter cost. When occult work is constantly witnessed, compared, and validated externally, the inner compass begins to drift. The question shifts from what is happening within me to how does this appear. The work becomes performative without intending to be, apart from when it explicitly is, and the soul, which learns through silence and risk, loses its footing amid metrics and visibility.

Wisdom was never about accumulation. It was not about collecting systems, correspondences, or titles. It was about narrowing, deepening, and staying with a single current long enough for it to undo you. That undoing cannot be rushed, optimized, or branded without losing its power. It requires obscurity, not as elitism, but as protection.

Older initiatory cultures understood this instinctively. Silence was not secrecy for its own sake. It was a container. The whisper was not aesthetic. It was a technology, shaping the listener as much as the message. Transmission was not about access. Its purpose was to ready you to walk the path. Many today claim they are walking it, but it is often glaringly obvious they are not.

Digital occultism is not entirely a failure. It provides instant access to texts vital to understanding, and at its heart, it is young. Like many young things, it confuses access with mastery. The task now is not withdrawal, but discernment. We must learn how to move through the digital world without letting its incentives shape our inner lives. Used carefully, it can still be a doorway. Used uncritically, it becomes a place where the flame burns bright, but never quite takes hold.

TL;DR

This is why I have not been posting as much. I have become deeply repulsed by the vlog-style approach to occult content. Whatever happened to living in the moment?

That said, this is not an admonishment. If you post, take pride in your work. Just remember why you are doing it.

With love,

RP

Angels have been badly domesticated, pressed flat into symbols that fit comfortably inside belief systems and told to stay there. Over time they were softened into sentimental figures or reorganized into neat celestial bureaucracies, safely attached to particular religions and stripped of their danger. This has made them easier to talk about, but much harder to recognize.

Angels are not members of a religion, nor are they citizens of a theology. They do not belong to Christianity, Judaism, Islam, or any other system that later tried to catalogue them. They are older than doctrine and far stranger than belief, appearing wherever human consciousness brushes up against the deeper architecture of reality. What we call angels are not cultural artifacts but recurring encounters with something that does not originate inside human thought, even though it reliably enters through it.

Across cultures, angels rarely arrive as moral instructors or spiritual mascots. They appear instead as points of contact, interfaces where the human nervous system meets something intelligent, non-human, and overwhelming. In the Hebrew Bible they are destabilizing forces whose presence bends reality around them, not gentle companions offering reassurance. When they open encounters by telling people not to be afraid, it is less a courtesy than a warning that whatever follows may permanently alter the shape of the recipient’s life.

Once the lens widens, the pattern is difficult to miss. The angel Jibril in Islam, the Zoroastrian Amesha Spentas, the Greek daimon, the intelligences of Neoplatonism, the planetary spirits of Renaissance magic, and certain classes of Hindu devas all occupy the same functional role. They mediate between layers of reality. They are not gods and not humans, but something that moves between, translating forces that would otherwise be unbearable or unintelligible.

What differs is not the phenomenon itself but the cultural machinery used to process it. Religion functions as an operating system, a way of compressing and stabilizing encounters with something that exceeds ordinary cognition. Angels run across platforms, adapting their presentation without changing their underlying function.

This is where discomfort begins for institutional gatekeepers. Angelic contact has never depended on correct belief. Shepherds, prisoners, prophets, mystics, magicians, heretics, and people who were not seeking anything at all have reported encounters throughout history. Angels appear in deserts and dreams, in trance states and ritual spaces, in near-death experiences and moments of extreme psychological or existential pressure. They respond to conditions rather than creeds, to liminality rather than orthodoxy.

In this sense angels behave less like religious figures and more like natural phenomena, powerful and indifferent to human categorization, akin to electricity before insulation made it safe and predictable. Religion typically arrives afterward, claims ownership of the experience, assigns meaning to it, and urges everyone to interact with it only through approved channels.

Angels refuse to remain confined to a single religion because they operate at a level of reality deeper than doctrine. This explains why Jewish angelology flows seamlessly into Islamic mysticism, why Christian grimoires borrow without hesitation from planetary and pre-Christian systems, why modern magicians report angelic contact without identifying as Christian, and why committed atheists sometimes encounter beings they can only describe as angelic and then spend years attempting to rationalize the experience away.

Angels do not belong to religions. Religions belong to angels in the same way maps belong to geography. They are useful, sometimes necessary, but never identical to the territory they describe.

There is also a political problem embedded here. Angels are difficult to manage. They do not reliably reinforce social order, nor do they consistently side with institutions. They have a long history of telling people to do things that are inconvenient, destabilizing, or personally costly. This makes them dangerous to systems that depend on predictability and control.

So angels are softened and domesticated. Their sharp edges are sanded down until they become symbols instead of encounters, safe enough to reproduce endlessly without consequence. Once that layer of cultural padding is removed, what remains aligns with a recurring insight found in serious esoteric work: the cosmos is participatory, alive, and responsive, populated by intelligences that answer attention, symbolism, and relationship rather than belief.

Angels are not moral babysitters. They are neighbors in a much larger ecology of mind.

The most workable hypothesis is that angels are meta-cultural intelligences, patterns of agency that pre-exist, underlie, and outlast specific religious frameworks. Religions are human attempts to stabilize long-term contact with them. This does not make religion meaningless, but it does make it instrumental, a tool rather than an endpoint.

Like any instrument, it works best when one remembers what it is for.

We may now be entering a period in which angels are being rediscovered outside the structures built to contain them, not through a return to medieval piety, but through magic, contemplative practice, altered states, and the growing recognition that reality is far stranger and more responsive than we were taught. Mystics, psychonauts, magicians, and ordinary people who simply stared too long into the strangeness of existence and had something stare back are reporting the same encounters using different languages.

Angels were never here to make people behave. They were here to remind us that the world is alive, and that our categories have never been large enough to hold it.

With love,

RP

If we were to fully inhabit the myth of the Nativity as an inner event we may come to the realisation that awakening is not a single moment but a lifelong process of becoming. The birth of consciousness is followed by growth, challenge, exile, and return. In the Christian story, the child is almost immediately threatened. Herod seeks to annihilate what has been born. This reflects a universal inner truth, when awareness begins to awaken, the structures of the old self often react with fear and resistance. The ego, conditioned by habit and survival, perceives awakening as a threat to its authority.

The flight into Egypt could then be understood as the segment of the journey in which new awareness must be concealed and protected. In personal transformation, there are phases when insight cannot yet be shared or fully expressed. It must mature and be cultivated in silence. Many abandon their awakening at this stage, mistaking discomfort or fear for failure. Yet the myth teaches that concealment is sometimes a necessary form of preservation. Growth often occurs in obscurity before it can be lived openly.

As the Christ child grows, so too does the capacity to integrate wisdom into action. The adult Christ does not retreat from the world but enters it more fully, engaging suffering, injustice, and ignorance directly. This reflects a critical truth about inner awakening: it is not an escape from the world but a deeper participation in it. Enlightenment that does not transform one’s relationships, ethics, and sense of responsibility remains incomplete.

The teachings attributed to Christ emphasize paradox. Strength is found in humility and power expresses itself through service. Life is gained by surrendering rigid identities. These paradoxes mirror the internal reversals that occur when consciousness shifts from ego-centered to awareness-centered perception. The self that once sought control learns to listen. The self that feared loss learns trust and the self that defined itself through opposition begins to recognize unity.

To repurpose the myth of Christ’s birth, then, is to accept that spiritual maturity requires both death and renewal. Old self-concepts must dissolve to make space for expanded awareness. This process can be disorienting and painful, yet it is also deeply creative. The birth of the inner Christ marks the moment when one no longer seeks salvation outside the self, but recognizes responsibility for one’s inner state and its impact on the world.

This reinterpretation does not negate traditional faith; it universalizes it. The Christ archetype becomes a shared human inheritance rather than an unreachable ideal. Each person carries the potential to embody clarity, compassion, and moral courage. The question shifts from belief to embodiment, from doctrine to lived presence.

When understood in this way, the Nativity is not an event to be commemorated once a year but a pattern continually unfolding. Every moment presents the possibility of beginning again, of choosing awareness over unconscious reaction. Each choice to respond with integrity rather than fear is another quiet birth of the sacred within the ordinary.

Ultimately, to place oneself in the role of the newborn Christ is to accept the responsibility of consciousness itself. It is to stand at the threshold between what has been and what might be, carrying both vulnerability and potential. The manger becomes the human heart, humble yet capable of holding immeasurable depth. And in that space, the sacred does not descend from elsewhere. It awakens from within.

With love,

RP

Across cultures, eras, and spiritual systems, there has existed a persistent discomfort, sometimes outright hostility, towards spirits deemed unsavoury, chthonic, trickster-like, or morally ambiguous. These beings are often framed as dangers to be avoided, impurities that threaten spiritual purity, or corrupting forces standing in opposition to transcendence. Yet such an attitude reveals more about human fear of reflection than about the spirits themselves. Humanity and these spirits share a profound kinship. We are both dualistic, imperfect, and deeply enmeshed in the practical realities of existence. To deny communion with imperfect spirits is, in many ways, to deny communion with ourselves.

Human beings do not live as abstractions of pure goodness or spiritual ideals. We live in bodies that hunger, desire, fear, scheme, love, resent, and survive. We want money to pay rent, protection from harm, influence within social systems, healing for illness, relief from injustice, and leverage in a world that is rarely fair. These are not lofty or transcendent goals, but they are real. Any spirituality that pretends otherwise becomes a form of denial rather than illumination.

Spirits, particularly those associated with shadows, thresholds, underworlds, vices, cunning, power, or morally grey acts, operate comfortably within these same domains. They understand leverage rather than virtue, consequence rather than purity, and transaction rather than abstraction. This does not make them evil. It makes them functional within the world as it exists. To work with such spirits for mundane aims is not a moral failure. It is an acknowledgement that incarnation itself is messy.

The impulse to sort spirits into categories of good and bad mirrors the human tendency to reduce moral complexity into binaries. Lived reality resists such simplification. A storm can destroy a village and replenish a river. Fire can burn a home or cook a meal. In the same way, a spirit associated with deception may teach survival in hostile environments, a spirit of desire may restore vitality to the depleted, and a spirit of wrath may defend against exploitation.

Many spirits labelled unsavoury are not embodiments of malice, but embodiments of forces humans find uncomfortable: ambition, hunger, boundary-breaking, power, cunning, sexuality, vengeance, and autonomy. These traits exist abundantly within humanity itself, though they are often repressed in the pursuit of appearing virtuous. When spirits are demonised for expressing these qualities openly, the rejection is often a displacement of the human shadow. To befriend such spirits is to accept that moral complexity is not a defect. It is a condition of existence.

A common objection to working with unsavoury spirits lies in the transactional nature of such relationships. Yet human relationships are transactional at every level, including employment, friendship, romance, family, and society. Mutual exchange is not inherently exploitative. It becomes harmful only when honesty and consent are absent.

Those denizens of the aether who operate within practical domains often value clarity, boundaries, and reciprocity. They do not demand idealised devotion disguised as love. They respect negotiated terms. In this sense, they may be more forthright than systems that insist on unconditional submission while quietly extracting obedience. Engaging such forces with discernment and accountability fosters maturity rather than dependency. It requires practitioners to acknowledge their desires directly instead of disguising them behind spiritual language.

Growth, both psychological and spiritual, does not arise from repression but from integration. Those spirits deemed unsavoury often function as mirrors, revealing unresolved fears, ambitions, resentments, and wounds. They do not create these qualities but expose them.

When approached consciously, such spirits can catalyse self-knowledge, resilience, and empowerment. They compel practitioners to confront questions that polite spirituality often avoids. What do I truly want. What am I willing to exchange. Where do my ethics bend under pressure. Who am I when survival is at stake.

These are not corrupting questions in the slightest but honest ones and to shy away from asking them only keeps the soul shrouded in comfortable ignorance.

Historically, those most willing to work with morally ambiguous spirits were often the marginalised, including the poor, the enslaved, the colonised, and the desperate. When survival is threatened, purity becomes a luxury ideology. Folk magic, cunning craft, and spirit alliances emerged not from moral laziness but from necessity. To condemn such practices from a position of comfort is to ignore the reality that spirituality often serves needs before ideals. Unsavoury spirits have long been allies of those navigating unjust systems, offering power where institutions refuse aid.

Humans are not angels fallen into flesh. We are embodied beings striving upward through limitation. Unsavoury spirits, rather than opposing this journey, often accompany it. They understand compromise, consequence, hunger, and the cost of desire. They do not pretend the world is fair, and neither should we.

To befriend such spirits is not to abandon ethics, but to practise them within reality rather than fantasy. It is to accept that growth does not occur by rejecting darkness, but by learning to see within it. In acknowledging our shared duality, we reclaim a spirituality that is grounded, honest, and deeply human.

Perfection has never been the measure of wisdom. Integration has. Until we can bring this notion into the very depths of our being, we avoid a profound opportunity for growth and for understanding the true nature of reality.