Latest / The Occult Rejects / Test Tubes and Cauldrons- Magick and Science
Transcript
- 0:02Speaker 1: You see, something's going to happen.
- 0:06Speaker 2: What? What's gonna happen?
- 0:15Speaker 1: What?
- 0:17Speaker 2: I welcome to the Occult Rejects.
- 0:27Speaker 3: This episode, I got a very very special guest, somebody
- 0:30Speaker 3: that I was looking forward to getting on one. They're
- 0:33Speaker 3: into solomonic magic and they're also into science, so I'm
- 0:37Speaker 3: very excited for this. But before we inst introduce our guest,
- 0:41Speaker 3: let me introduce the other reject joining us.
- 0:43Speaker 2: We got my Man and Lose Giant's going on.
- 0:45Speaker 4: So how you doing? You can find me on YouTube,
- 0:48Speaker 4: on x and on Instagram all Headless Giant. And I've
- 0:53Speaker 4: got shows that I do with Nick on Tuesdays and Thursdays,
- 0:56Speaker 4: and I've got a show on Monday called Alty Mondays
- 0:58Speaker 4: where we do a bunch of experiments that I think
- 1:01Speaker 4: Astra might appreciate and enjoy. So we've got Alchemy as well,
- 1:06Speaker 4: and tomorrow I've got the Trialogues with Ethan Indigo and
- 1:10Speaker 4: Ricardo Calvodio. We're gonna be talking about interesting topics as well.
- 1:14Speaker 4: Just a couple of weeks and now I'm.
- 1:15Speaker 3: Back, Yes, Yes, and the seven seven seven we else
- 1:19Speaker 3: we'll be doing Yes Yeah, And if you guys have
- 1:22Speaker 3: any stories or anything, please send them into Headless and
- 1:24Speaker 3: I'll send you out some stickers.
- 1:25Speaker 4: So Headless Giant Podcast at gmail dot com. Send me
- 1:28Speaker 4: your stories and we will send you stickers.
- 1:30Speaker 2: Hell yeah, awesome.
- 1:32Speaker 3: And now the guest, since we've only got one reject
- 1:35Speaker 3: with us today, we got Estra and she was suggested
- 1:38Speaker 3: to me from Serena Sinclair. She thought that she'd be
- 1:41Speaker 3: a perfect guest, and when I checked out her profile,
- 1:43Speaker 3: I was like, there, sure sounds like it. So I'm
- 1:46Speaker 3: very excited to have you on.
- 1:47Speaker 2: Estra.
- 1:48Speaker 3: Please, from test tubes and cauldrons, please let everybody know
- 1:51Speaker 3: what your deal is and where they can find your
- 1:53Speaker 3: amazing work in your podcast.
- 1:55Speaker 5: Yeah, hey everybody, and thanks Nick for inviting me on.
- 1:57Speaker 5: I was super surprised to get the invitation, but thrilled
- 2:01Speaker 5: all the same.
- 2:03Speaker 1: Yeah. So my name is Astra.
- 2:04Speaker 5: I am a solomonic ceremonial audition and I focus specifically
- 2:07Speaker 5: in the Grimmore tradition, but in my everyday life, I'm
- 2:11Speaker 5: also a scientist. I got my degree in biochemistry alongside
- 2:16Speaker 5: a minor in molecular biology and microbiology, but then I
- 2:20Speaker 5: went to graduate school for biochemistry and now I work
- 2:23Speaker 5: in a laboratory where I do science of all kinds,
- 2:26Speaker 5: not just biochemistry. So that's a bit about me. You
- 2:30Speaker 5: can find me on Instagram at astrological it's technically astrologist
- 2:35Speaker 5: shel with Cia L because the name was taken. And
- 2:39Speaker 5: a lot of my magical work and my magical independent
- 2:42Speaker 5: scholarship can be found on substack under the title Celestial Crucible.
- 2:47Speaker 1: And that's it.
- 2:49Speaker 3: Nice nice here, if you don't mind, after the show,
- 2:51Speaker 3: give me the link for that that one thing and
- 2:54Speaker 3: I'll add that to.
- 2:54Speaker 2: The show notes for sure.
- 2:56Speaker 1: Yeah.
- 2:56Speaker 2: Nice, nice.
- 2:58Speaker 3: Well, obviously there's a bunch of questions that have for you,
- 3:00Speaker 3: but I mean, I guess we'll start off with like
- 3:02Speaker 3: what got you into the occult?
- 3:04Speaker 2: And to start with, you know, I guess solomonic magic.
- 3:09Speaker 1: I know. Yeah.
- 3:11Speaker 5: So I actually I was alwaised in a fundamental you know,
- 3:14Speaker 5: Christian home, as were a number of people, and I
- 3:19Speaker 5: so of became discontent with Christianity as a whole. I
- 3:23Speaker 5: didn't see the tenants of the faith being held up
- 3:25Speaker 5: with way people were acting, and I just kind of
- 3:27Speaker 5: really didn't like any of that. So when I went
- 3:30Speaker 5: to college, just when you're like free from your parents' influence,
- 3:35Speaker 5: I decided to explore, and I took a lot of
- 3:37Speaker 5: philosophy classes, took a lot of religion classes amidst all
- 3:41Speaker 5: the science work, and was just trying to get sort
- 3:43Speaker 5: of a lay of the land. And in doing so
- 3:46Speaker 5: I came across Paganism and Buddhism.
- 3:49Speaker 1: And Eastern traditions.
- 3:50Speaker 5: My grandfather's from India, so I've already been exposed to
- 3:53Speaker 5: like the Hindu faith. Yeah, so it was just a
- 3:58Speaker 5: good time for exploration. And around that time I became agnostic,
- 4:01Speaker 5: but I thought, you know, maybe there's something there. So
- 4:04Speaker 5: I started as an eclectic witch actually, and I was
- 4:08Speaker 5: doing all the stereotypical which you ship that you see
- 4:12Speaker 5: on Instagram, and.
- 4:15Speaker 1: Yep, I think we all start there maybe, but it was.
- 4:19Speaker 5: Super shallow and I really didn't feel like it was working,
- 4:24Speaker 5: and like there just there was no substance behind it.
- 4:27Speaker 5: It's one of those things where you do because you
- 4:29Speaker 5: see it, you do because people tell you to. But
- 4:31Speaker 5: that's never really been how I've lived my life. It's
- 4:34Speaker 5: never been enough for me. I want to know the
- 4:36Speaker 5: why behind things, which is partially why I'm a scientist,
- 4:39Speaker 5: and that applied to the coal as well, and so
- 4:42Speaker 5: I really began like trying to figure out what the
- 4:46Speaker 5: reasons were behind why I needed all these things, and
- 4:48Speaker 5: I sort of quickly found out that a lot of
- 4:50Speaker 5: it is due to Agrippa and the influence right that
- 4:52Speaker 5: he had on the coal and I was like, damn,
- 4:54Speaker 5: all right. So I read the three books alone for
- 4:58Speaker 5: the first time, got very confused. But then I had
- 5:01Speaker 5: a friend who pulled me aside and they said, you know, hey,
- 5:04Speaker 5: I really think that you would vibe with ceremonial magic.
- 5:08Speaker 5: And at first I was sort of hesitant because when
- 5:11Speaker 5: you're in the woodcraft community, a lot of people say,
- 5:13Speaker 5: you know, the ceremonial auditions are crabby people.
- 5:16Speaker 1: It's a bunch of just like trad bros and all.
- 5:19Speaker 1: That's all this kind of crap.
- 5:20Speaker 5: Because some much shit. So I was really hesitant, but
- 5:23Speaker 5: I began looking into it. My friend introduced me to
- 5:27Speaker 5: rufus Opus's Seven Spears.
- 5:29Speaker 2: Oh I heard that.
- 5:30Speaker 5: Yeah, that was the very first thing that I actually worked,
- 5:33Speaker 5: And it was really like that sort of planetary initiation
- 5:36Speaker 5: that he leads you through was really impactful, and I
- 5:39Speaker 5: think it opened up the starting point for my exploration
- 5:43Speaker 5: with other spirits.
- 5:43Speaker 1: I worked that. I was like, yeah, well, day I'm
- 5:45Speaker 1: going to do this.
- 5:47Speaker 5: I went online, was looking at ceremonial magic and Grimoor's
- 5:50Speaker 5: and stuff like that. Of course, the first thing that
- 5:52Speaker 5: you see is the KEYO Solomon.
- 5:54Speaker 1: That's like the.
- 5:54Speaker 5: Number one Grimmore that everybody knows that pops up when
- 5:58Speaker 5: you search, and I pulled it aside and I was like, okay,
- 6:03Speaker 5: I'm working with you. Is that's a new thing, but
- 6:06Speaker 5: we'll go for it, I guess. But I wanted to
- 6:10Speaker 5: do it right. And this is also something that I
- 6:13Speaker 5: think comes from my science background. But when you have
- 6:16Speaker 5: a protocol in the laboratory, you don't just.
- 6:18Speaker 1: Like change it.
- 6:20Speaker 5: Yeah, good reason, because some shit's gonna happen and you
- 6:24Speaker 5: remove some critical step that is actually really important for
- 6:26Speaker 5: sample preparation, and now your whole term is sucked and
- 6:29Speaker 5: you can't use your data.
- 6:30Speaker 2: Right, yeah, really quick.
- 6:31Speaker 3: That was the main That was one of the main
- 6:33Speaker 3: reasons why I mentioned that I ended up joining the
- 6:35Speaker 3: OTO was because of just noticing that even with some
- 6:39Speaker 3: of Crowley's work, people were kind of like, that's not
- 6:41Speaker 3: how it is in his own stuff. So I was like,
- 6:44Speaker 3: I guess I just got to go to a place
- 6:45Speaker 3: to where they have a set regimen and that's not
- 6:48Speaker 3: being played with. This is what works and that's what
- 6:51Speaker 3: we use. I know it almost can sound very whatever controlling,
- 6:55Speaker 3: but it's just I wanted something that it was just
- 6:57Speaker 3: you know, this is what I'm doing so well.
- 7:00Speaker 5: I think there's something could be said for having a
- 7:02Speaker 5: distinguished cosmology and sort of dogma that you operate from.
- 7:06Speaker 5: I know, like not operating from a place of dogma
- 7:09Speaker 5: is a really popular thing right now with chaos magic.
- 7:11Speaker 5: But truthfully, if you don't have dogma, you should have
- 7:14Speaker 5: the very least, in my opinion, have have like a cosmology,
- 7:18Speaker 5: a way in which you see and explain the world,
- 7:20Speaker 5: because it helps you determine a framework from which you operate,
- 7:24Speaker 5: and if you don't have that, you're just sort of
- 7:25Speaker 5: like thrown shit at the wall and helping that it works,
- 7:27Speaker 5: which frankly is a reasonable thing to do.
- 7:30Speaker 1: We do in science all the time. But like it
- 7:33Speaker 1: should have been somewhat educational in how you decide what
- 7:36Speaker 1: to do and where.
- 7:37Speaker 5: So I totally understand that, like trying to join the
- 7:40Speaker 5: lodge to get a lot of that stuff, and I
- 7:42Speaker 5: did the same. Actually when I decided to work the Gatia,
- 7:48Speaker 5: I wanted to do it the way it was written
- 7:51Speaker 5: in the Grimore as much as I could, but there
- 7:55Speaker 5: was a lot of sort of piecing together what that
- 7:57Speaker 5: actually meant, and if you actually read it, there's a
- 8:02Speaker 5: lot of preparatories that the has happen. You got to
- 8:04Speaker 5: make tools and you have to get all this material
- 8:06Speaker 5: and it takes a while. So it took me about
- 8:08Speaker 5: a year and a half to sort of supply everything
- 8:10Speaker 5: and make everything for the operation. And during that time
- 8:14Speaker 5: I said, well, I don't want to just like do
- 8:16Speaker 5: nothing while I'm doing all of this as well. So
- 8:19Speaker 5: I got hold of this sisteros self initiated initiation to
- 8:24Speaker 5: the Golden Dawn and the Big Black Book by Yeah
- 8:27Speaker 5: it's Jobcgardi, and I was like, this is something that
- 8:30Speaker 5: looks reasonable to like do. So I began working my
- 8:37Speaker 5: way through that and doing some of the exercises I
- 8:41Speaker 5: got familiar with, like the l Europe and all the rituals,
- 8:43Speaker 5: the pentagrams and hextagrams and all that stuff went through
- 8:47Speaker 5: Like Donald Pyson's Scrying Book.
- 8:49Speaker 1: I sort of treated it like a little I don't
- 8:51Speaker 1: know so like a college course at the time.
- 8:54Speaker 5: Through scrying, doing the experiments, writing down my results and
- 8:57Speaker 5: keeping track of everything, and so I really grew actually,
- 9:00Speaker 5: like I I looked back at that year and a
- 9:02Speaker 5: half two years, and it was really foundational for a
- 9:05Speaker 5: lot of what I do now.
- 9:07Speaker 1: It's so I'm really grateful for that time.
- 9:08Speaker 5: But yeah, that's well, that was sort of the structure
- 9:11Speaker 5: that I stole I guess you could say from the
- 9:14Speaker 5: Golden Down a little bit while I was starting the
- 9:17Speaker 5: Grimmoor Magician experience as well.
- 9:21Speaker 2: Nice. So you used to actually you Julie l b
- 9:24Speaker 2: RP and the Instagram and all.
- 9:25Speaker 1: That I get. I did all that. I did it.
- 9:29Speaker 1: I was instructed. I was that person who was like,
- 9:31Speaker 1: did it twice a day for a year?
- 9:34Speaker 4: Yeah?
- 9:35Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I.
- 9:35Speaker 1: Did it, did the whole thing.
- 9:37Speaker 2: So that is awesome. Nice. Nice.
- 9:39Speaker 3: I used to love when I had to keep it real.
- 9:41Speaker 3: Sometimes in the OTO, the women would actually end up
- 9:44Speaker 3: doing them. Jist, did there's our lodge a lodge master.
- 9:49Speaker 3: Her name was Kanye at the time. She did the
- 9:51Speaker 3: regulars fucking detail.
- 9:55Speaker 2: Yeah, and I mean that she had that she rememories.
- 9:57Speaker 2: I was like, wow, Yeah.
- 10:01Speaker 5: Memorization is something that I think people like really sleep on.
- 10:04Speaker 5: I actually it's a role for myself personally, when I
- 10:08Speaker 5: do ritual, I try and memorize all of it if possible,
- 10:12Speaker 5: just because it really allows you to be in the moment.
- 10:15Speaker 5: If the words come naturally to you, you can actually
- 10:19Speaker 5: really engage with the magic, and like from a grid
- 10:22Speaker 5: more perspective, generally speaking, it's better if you work with
- 10:26Speaker 5: more than one person because that way you don't have
- 10:28Speaker 5: to play all the roles. But like for me, if
- 10:30Speaker 5: I'm doing it alone, then I have to do the
- 10:33Speaker 5: conjure and the squire and the scribe like I have
- 10:35Speaker 5: to do all the things. And so if I have
- 10:38Speaker 5: everything memorize ahead of time, it sort of takes the
- 10:40Speaker 5: conjure like mindset. Let's that becomes second nature and let's
- 10:45Speaker 5: be step more into like describing mindset. And so it
- 10:48Speaker 5: just allows me to interact with the magic a little
- 10:50Speaker 5: bit more tangibly, instead of being so focused on actually
- 10:54Speaker 5: doing the ritual and doing the movements and doing all
- 10:56Speaker 5: the other shit that you have to get do.
- 10:58Speaker 1: In the middle of it, I.
- 11:00Speaker 3: Felt like once You're just like flowing out of my mouth,
- 11:02Speaker 3: and it was able. I was able to you know,
- 11:03Speaker 3: I've mentioned this before. Sometimes for me, those things were
- 11:06Speaker 3: just almost like a moving meditation. Yeah, and yeah, once
- 11:10Speaker 3: I had a memorized it's just like I was just
- 11:13Speaker 3: going to to explain. But yeah, definitely definitely different than
- 11:17Speaker 3: what I'm not trying to worry about what I'm saying.
- 11:20Speaker 4: Yeah, it's like a Western taie tee or chigong where
- 11:24Speaker 4: you're doing the motion of the energy throughout the body.
- 11:27Speaker 4: And I think that's important for people to realize, is
- 11:29Speaker 4: that visualization creates something and if you're not exactly sure
- 11:34Speaker 4: what that thing is, keep engaging with it and you'll
- 11:36Speaker 4: you'll understand what that energy is moving through your body.
- 11:39Speaker 4: But your body is like the antenna that you're picking
- 11:42Speaker 4: up and feeling these different currents, and so having that
- 11:45Speaker 4: daily practice is you know, it's a tuning yourself to
- 11:48Speaker 4: those energies and understanding how they work within your own body.
- 11:52Speaker 1: Yeah, I guess it can be really subtle.
- 11:54Speaker 5: I think that's like when people do your ritual and
- 11:56Speaker 5: they say, oh, nothing happened, Well, I think a lot
- 11:59Speaker 5: of time it just really settled. If you weren't paying
- 12:01Speaker 5: attention to it, or you aren't sort of looking for it.
- 12:04Speaker 1: You'll miss it.
- 12:05Speaker 5: And that was the thing that I really struggled with
- 12:07Speaker 5: early on in my magical career was I was so
- 12:09Speaker 5: concerned with doing everything correctly as the conjurer that I
- 12:13Speaker 5: didn't pay attention to those like.
- 12:15Speaker 1: Subtle and like and puts that a current ritual itself.
- 12:19Speaker 5: And for the longest time I was like, damn, I'm
- 12:20Speaker 5: a shitty magician, Like this isn't working. But I did
- 12:25Speaker 5: some additional training and I began to notice them more
- 12:28Speaker 5: and I was like, oh, I just think I was
- 12:29Speaker 5: not paying attention to this.
- 12:31Speaker 3: So so more back if you don't want it, maybe
- 12:37Speaker 3: asking a little bit more about the croatia. What was
- 12:40Speaker 3: your experience with working with that if you don't know
- 12:44Speaker 3: and it that and like maybe give a little bit
- 12:47Speaker 3: more of like it can be very detailed, like what
- 12:50Speaker 3: you were saying, all these things you have to make
- 12:52Speaker 3: and wear.
- 12:53Speaker 2: Maybe if you could go over that just to give
- 12:54Speaker 2: people more of an idea.
- 12:56Speaker 1: Yeah, sure, So if you read The Greater Key and
- 12:59Speaker 1: the Lesser Cause, Solomon, there is there's a lot.
- 13:04Speaker 5: Of tools that you need for this, and some of
- 13:09Speaker 5: them I think you actually need some of them. I
- 13:10Speaker 5: think you don't need having done this, but like so
- 13:12Speaker 5: for example, you need the robe that has the embroidered
- 13:15Speaker 5: certain symbols. You need the shoes that has like symbols
- 13:17Speaker 5: on it. You've got to have the head band or
- 13:19Speaker 5: the crown. You need the lion skin belt, right, And
- 13:22Speaker 5: of course there are people who talk about how you
- 13:25Speaker 5: can use like a stag stag's pelt for that instead
- 13:28Speaker 5: of the lion skin. There are other people who see
- 13:31Speaker 5: you can use like a harlot's clothing.
- 13:33Speaker 1: Right. That was like Jsk's big thing, I think, But
- 13:37Speaker 1: you had to get that.
- 13:38Speaker 5: I had stag out because like lion skin is very
- 13:42Speaker 5: difficult to get, although I will be getting some student.
- 13:44Speaker 1: I'm very excited about that. I know it's great.
- 13:48Speaker 5: And then you have like the white handled and the
- 13:50Speaker 5: black handled knives, right, and those have to be made
- 13:52Speaker 5: at specific hours with certain symbols on them, and then
- 13:56Speaker 5: they have to be like dunked into specific urbal pinctures.
- 13:58Speaker 5: So I actually worked with a with a blacksmith at
- 14:01Speaker 5: that time and I made I had I actually was
- 14:05Speaker 5: able to get like the blood of a black cat.
- 14:07Speaker 5: I got it legally, there was nothing illegal going on.
- 14:09Speaker 5: I had a veterinarian friend at the time, and I
- 14:12Speaker 5: was like, hey, even if it's just dried blood like
- 14:14Speaker 5: that works too and they were able to get me some,
- 14:16Speaker 5: which is great, made the concoction with like the blood
- 14:20Speaker 5: and all the poisonous nerves that everybody tells you to substitute.
- 14:24Speaker 5: And then I took it to this blacksmith's shop and
- 14:26Speaker 5: I was like, okay, and this day and this time,
- 14:29Speaker 5: like this is when we're.
- 14:30Speaker 1: Dunking the knife into this like concoction. And so we
- 14:34Speaker 1: did it.
- 14:35Speaker 5: And so the knives are made according to the full
- 14:37Speaker 5: specifications astrological timing and everything. And there was like a
- 14:43Speaker 5: whole bunch of other stuff where gott to make the
- 14:44Speaker 5: circle and that is like its whole own process with
- 14:47Speaker 5: salms things that over it.
- 14:48Speaker 1: The paint all had to.
- 14:49Speaker 5: Be consecrated beforehand, the brushes were consecrated beforehand. It was
- 14:53Speaker 5: a lot to do and like so that's why it
- 14:55Speaker 5: took so long, right. Also, if you read the grimoard,
- 14:58Speaker 5: they say that you should be making the majority of
- 15:00Speaker 5: the instruments during the day and hour of mercury, so Wednesdays,
- 15:05Speaker 5: during the hours when the moon is waxing. So if
- 15:08Speaker 5: you sort of break that down within a year, that
- 15:11Speaker 5: means that within a month usually about two weeks are waxing,
- 15:16Speaker 5: and there's two Wednesdays during that, so about two days
- 15:19Speaker 5: per month that you can like actually make substantial progress
- 15:24Speaker 5: towards whatever you're doing. And so it was something where
- 15:27Speaker 5: it was like a lot of flurry of preparation beforehand,
- 15:29Speaker 5: and then those Wednesdays. I was in college and going
- 15:34Speaker 5: into graduate school at the time, so like I had,
- 15:35Speaker 5: I had the time.
- 15:37Speaker 1: It wasn't like.
- 15:37Speaker 5: I couldn't take a Wednesday off to make all these things.
- 15:41Speaker 5: Since that's why it took so long is because I
- 15:42Speaker 5: didn't have every day in a year and a half,
- 15:44Speaker 5: I had like two days a month, right, And then
- 15:49Speaker 5: once I had everything, I hadn't said up.
- 15:52Speaker 1: I actually rented out a like storage place because.
- 15:59Speaker 5: I wanted a bigger room to do it. I didn't
- 16:02Speaker 5: want to necessarily do at my own house.
- 16:03Speaker 2: Oh I've known people to do that, actually rent.
- 16:07Speaker 5: Yeah, because there it's it's silly, I think you in
- 16:09Speaker 5: your own house. But and of course you heard all
- 16:13Speaker 5: the horror stories and everything, and I was like that
- 16:19Speaker 5: it could be a haunted story for somebody else in the.
- 16:21Speaker 2: Future, something to talk about exactly.
- 16:28Speaker 5: So I went the story facility and then did the ritual.
- 16:33Speaker 5: I won't necessarily specify exactly who I called up. But
- 16:38Speaker 5: it was interesting, I'll put it that way. The first time,
- 16:43Speaker 5: like it worked.
- 16:43Speaker 1: I did get I wouldn't at the time.
- 16:49Speaker 5: I wasn't necessarily like primed enough to be able to
- 16:52Speaker 5: communicate with despair very well. But I definitely saw things
- 16:55Speaker 5: in the outside of the circles, like she was happening,
- 16:58Speaker 5: her banging on the walls, the sort of still and
- 17:00Speaker 5: I was doing one there. I felt like super fucking
- 17:02Speaker 5: late at night, like I had to get special permission
- 17:05Speaker 5: from the facility and manager to be there so late,
- 17:09Speaker 5: and what I asked for. It came to ferition about
- 17:13Speaker 5: three and a half weeks afterwards, so by the end
- 17:15Speaker 5: of the time that I did it that month and
- 17:19Speaker 5: I've only I only did it once since then. So
- 17:21Speaker 5: I've only done two goetic operations in my whole magical career.
- 17:25Speaker 5: Because I later went back and I sort of re
- 17:29Speaker 5: read the La Megaton and I was like, I So
- 17:34Speaker 5: there was someone I talked to someone I'm just at
- 17:36Speaker 5: the point in my career and they said, hey, you
- 17:39Speaker 5: used to consider working it backwards, and I was like,
- 17:41Speaker 5: what do you mean? And they appointed me to Jnar King.
- 17:44Speaker 5: I don't know if you're familiar with him, he wrote
- 17:46Speaker 5: Techniques of because it high magic or solmonic magic is
- 17:50Speaker 5: even skinner, I don't call the exact title. And they
- 17:54Speaker 5: appointed me to him, and he recommends doing it backwards.
- 17:56Speaker 5: So you work from the ARS nova or what people
- 17:59Speaker 5: think is the r notoria, and you work then towards
- 18:02Speaker 5: the Croatia. And the reason why is because if I'm
- 18:06Speaker 5: gonna okay, technically speaking, the arts nova is not the notoria,
- 18:11Speaker 5: but we do think that some parts of it came
- 18:14Speaker 5: from the notoria. So there are people who say, oh, well,
- 18:17Speaker 5: just work with ours notoria first then instead of doing
- 18:20Speaker 5: the URS nova, so just put a background on that.
- 18:23Speaker 1: So I was like, okay, fine.
- 18:25Speaker 5: The reason you do that is because the Arts notoria
- 18:27Speaker 5: gives you all the skills you need as magician.
- 18:29Speaker 1: Right, It's there to help you learn the liberal arts.
- 18:31Speaker 1: It's the whole point of it.
- 18:32Speaker 5: And so you're teaching you like mathematics, teaching you mathematics
- 18:36Speaker 5: is teaching you natural philosophy of teaching you all kinds
- 18:38Speaker 5: of shit that like the Renaissance magician would know, and
- 18:41Speaker 5: so that gives you.
- 18:42Speaker 1: All the skills. And it also sort of starts as
- 18:45Speaker 1: like a should you pursue this.
- 18:46Speaker 5: Should you not pursue this because you have to get
- 18:48Speaker 5: approval essentially in a dream from.
- 18:51Speaker 1: The angels to pursue the arts Natoria.
- 18:55Speaker 5: And then once you do that, you need to ours Paulina,
- 18:57Speaker 5: which is looking at mostly as a biable angels, right,
- 19:00Speaker 5: And then you go to the urs Almadel and you
- 19:02Speaker 5: get the angels of the four Altitudes, which like technically
- 19:07Speaker 5: speaking historically are also zodiacal in nature, but we'll get
- 19:10Speaker 5: into that. And then you moved through the Theorty Gauatia
- 19:13Speaker 5: and you have this correspondence of angels and demons or
- 19:15Speaker 5: these sort of these aerial spirits which are like above
- 19:18Speaker 5: the Glaatia, but they're technically sub lunar, and then you
- 19:21Speaker 5: get to the Gracia. So the whole idea is that
- 19:23Speaker 5: if you work at backwards, you sort of build your
- 19:27Speaker 5: use spirit team in a sense, right to like have
- 19:30Speaker 5: your back as you go into working with these spirits
- 19:35Speaker 5: who within this system are considered danger like dangerous and malevolent.
- 19:40Speaker 1: And I thought that was a really good idea, So
- 19:43Speaker 1: I put all.
- 19:44Speaker 5: My gai stuff sort of away, and I said, okay,
- 19:46Speaker 5: let's back up a little bit, and let's actually do this,
- 19:49Speaker 5: let's work the Victoria, then let's kind of move our
- 19:51Speaker 5: way through. So I did that essentially for the next
- 19:56Speaker 5: like five six five five is five to six years.
- 20:01Speaker 1: Of my life. I worked the whole system of salmag.
- 20:05Speaker 5: Magic from back to front, and I sort of found
- 20:09Speaker 5: throughout that process that I actually don't need to work
- 20:13Speaker 5: the ars Coatia really ever at all, and I work
- 20:17Speaker 5: mostly the Almadel, the Paulina, and then I do a
- 20:22Speaker 5: lot with the Angels of the.
- 20:23Speaker 1: Pentacles of the Greater Key as well.
- 20:25Speaker 5: So I sort of like have moved away from the
- 20:27Speaker 5: ars Ceatia. I just think it's overrated, Like I just
- 20:30Speaker 5: don't think it's necessary. I think it's only where I fall,
- 20:32Speaker 5: and there are other frankly, there are like other terrestrial
- 20:35Speaker 5: spirits I would go to before I'd go to them anyway,
- 20:38Speaker 5: And so that has sort of left my practice over time,
- 20:41Speaker 5: but it's certainly where I started, so we'll leave it
- 20:44Speaker 5: at that.
- 20:46Speaker 4: So on on on the idea of hierarchies within the
- 20:50Speaker 4: spirit world. Now, hierarchy itself means a divine order, and
- 20:54Speaker 4: so when you're dealing with either demons or angels or
- 20:57Speaker 4: anything in between, it's sort of like there can did
- 21:00Speaker 4: to an element, and that element is kind of the
- 21:04Speaker 4: precursing factor for what these h spirits sort of do
- 21:09Speaker 4: within that associated sphere. Now, when you're dealing with goetic elements,
- 21:15Speaker 4: is there this this idea of fear associated with sort
- 21:20Speaker 4: of the underworld sort of hierarchy.
- 21:25Speaker 5: I don't know there's a fear associated with them necessarily.
- 21:28Speaker 5: I think that they have been they have come to
- 21:29Speaker 5: be feared, and like the modern community people don't work
- 21:32Speaker 5: with them because they're scared and they're like, oh my gosh,
- 21:34Speaker 5: demons whatever. Like, Truthfully, they have their place in the hierarchy.
- 21:38Speaker 5: I don't think it's something to be fearful of. If
- 21:41Speaker 5: you want to work with these more cathonic aspects or
- 21:43Speaker 5: you want to get really nitty for like treasure hunting
- 21:45Speaker 5: and shit, the gas are great, well, like they literally
- 21:49Speaker 5: are spirits insight like underneath the earth. If you want
- 21:52Speaker 5: that stuff like, those are the people, those are the
- 21:54Speaker 5: ones to go to or things that are like hidden
- 21:58Speaker 5: that you need to be brought to life. Those spirits
- 22:01Speaker 5: of the wish you can also be really helpful with that.
- 22:02Speaker 5: That's why some of them are connected with diseases, right,
- 22:05Speaker 5: because diseases are often hidden within the body, so I
- 22:08Speaker 5: think that like they have their place within the hierarchy.
- 22:11Speaker 5: I don't necessarily think they're to be feared, but I
- 22:14Speaker 5: also would say, like do your due diligence and don't
- 22:17Speaker 5: like treat them like a friend, if that makes sense.
- 22:21Speaker 5: Like they're still spirits, they're still powerful. They can still
- 22:23Speaker 5: do a bunch of shit that you may not want
- 22:24Speaker 5: in your life. So that's why when like I work
- 22:28Speaker 5: solomonic magic specifically, I try to do it as closely
- 22:32Speaker 5: to the book as I can, because I just think
- 22:33Speaker 5: that when you start removing the safety protocols, like all
- 22:36Speaker 5: of the shit, the circle, the knife, the sword, the
- 22:40Speaker 5: names of God around you and on your person, they're
- 22:43Speaker 5: all there to protect you, the magician. And when you
- 22:46Speaker 5: start removing that, you're essentially like stripping away protections bit
- 22:50Speaker 5: by bit, so there's nothing left between you and the spirit.
- 22:53Speaker 5: And so do you need to fear them? No, I say,
- 22:57Speaker 5: if you're working in the system as you need to,
- 23:00Speaker 5: or like the way that it's written, I don't think
- 23:02Speaker 5: you have anything.
- 23:02Speaker 1: To worry about.
- 23:04Speaker 5: It's when you start to sort of stripping that stuff
- 23:05Speaker 5: away that I think there's more to be concerned about.
- 23:09Speaker 5: It's why I'm not a huge fan of demonologry. I
- 23:11Speaker 5: can't really say anything positive about that necessarily from my
- 23:14Speaker 5: own perspective.
- 23:16Speaker 1: But yeah, so I don't necessarily think that you need
- 23:18Speaker 1: to see or anything their spirits, just like everything else.
- 23:21Speaker 4: So would you say that my magic consists of a
- 23:24Speaker 4: contractual sort of space or liminal space between the physical
- 23:30Speaker 4: world and the spirit.
- 23:31Speaker 1: Realm I think high magic is. So let me back
- 23:36Speaker 1: up a little bit.
- 23:38Speaker 5: Within ceremonial magic, you sort of have two separate parts
- 23:42Speaker 5: of high magic.
- 23:44Speaker 1: One is theogic, right, which is much.
- 23:46Speaker 5: More devotional in nature, and the other is more thomeaturgic,
- 23:50Speaker 5: which is just like practical application of magic. It's where
- 23:52Speaker 5: you get things like packs and stuff like that. I
- 23:56Speaker 5: actually think in order to be a good magician you
- 23:58Speaker 5: need to have both. You need to have a theoretic
- 24:00Speaker 5: practice and you need to have these like packs. So specifically,
- 24:04Speaker 5: when we get into the Grimwore tradition with the spirit
- 24:07Speaker 5: of the Gratia, there is this level of like sort
- 24:10Speaker 5: of coersive pacting with them, although it doesn't need to
- 24:14Speaker 5: be coercive. I think this is the misunderstanding that people have,
- 24:16Speaker 5: is that because you call them into a triangle, and
- 24:19Speaker 5: you call them into the circle and you're you know,
- 24:21Speaker 5: essentially saying you will do this that you like are
- 24:25Speaker 5: abusing the spirits.
- 24:26Speaker 1: But the packs still have to be made. You still
- 24:29Speaker 1: have to come to an agreement.
- 24:30Speaker 5: Like it's not the spirits will have to say yes,
- 24:32Speaker 5: I will do this thing, and you say, then I
- 24:34Speaker 5: will do this other thing for you, and you come
- 24:36Speaker 5: to an agreement within it.
- 24:37Speaker 1: It doesn't have to be disrespectful.
- 24:39Speaker 5: There are magicians who are part of the higher ceremonial
- 24:43Speaker 5: magic and more tradition who don't like the coursive nature
- 24:46Speaker 5: of that, and like I'm one of them, but you
- 24:50Speaker 5: still want to operate better within the realms of that
- 24:52Speaker 5: packed aspect of it. All of this to say that
- 24:56Speaker 5: that's an important aspect of it, but there's also an
- 24:59Speaker 5: aspect of this theory devotion where the practical shit is done,
- 25:05Speaker 5: because like, we live on earth and we have needs,
- 25:09Speaker 5: right and even the Grimmores.
- 25:10Speaker 1: Tell you want to.
- 25:11Speaker 5: Get your shit together as a person living a life
- 25:14Speaker 5: before you start doing some of this stuff. And in
- 25:16Speaker 5: order to do that, you work with these spirits because
- 25:18Speaker 5: they can give that to you. Like some of the
- 25:21Speaker 5: got ex spirits can give you a job, can give
- 25:24Speaker 5: you money, can give you health, like help you with
- 25:26Speaker 5: health issues, like they can help you with those things,
- 25:29Speaker 5: and so can the angels when you don't get me wrong,
- 25:31Speaker 5: but like, once you have your life together and it's
- 25:34Speaker 5: in your set up, essentially, your financial problems are good,
- 25:37Speaker 5: like health is good.
- 25:38Speaker 1: Personal problems are good. That gives you more opportunity to do.
- 25:41Speaker 1: But I think the real.
- 25:41Speaker 5: Purpose of high magic is, which is this sort of
- 25:46Speaker 5: changing after apotheosis or unification with the divine right. You
- 25:50Speaker 5: can't do that if you're like about to be homeless,
- 25:53Speaker 5: so a lot of the grim wars. You have both
- 25:55Speaker 5: of these aspects. You have the practical nature of help
- 25:58Speaker 5: yourself live a better life, and you have a theoretic
- 26:01Speaker 5: side of ceremonial magic where it's like, okay, now that
- 26:03Speaker 5: you've done that, like, let's sort of shift our focus
- 26:06Speaker 5: towards being unified with the one Creator whatever you want
- 26:10Speaker 5: to call it.
- 26:12Speaker 4: Right, Well, what role do you think distractions play in
- 26:15Speaker 4: sort of hijacking people's uh, you know, natural progression? Because
- 26:20Speaker 4: it sounds like this this would be the progression that
- 26:24Speaker 4: a lot of ancient mankind would be going through coming
- 26:26Speaker 4: into a more you know, stable kind of a civilizational setting. Like,
- 26:31Speaker 4: now you've got everything working for you, how are you
- 26:33Speaker 4: getting close to the divine? How are you elevating your
- 26:36Speaker 4: own consciousness? And in a lot of ways, I see
- 26:39Speaker 4: you know, distractions as being the tool by which people
- 26:44Speaker 4: get off of the path towards divinity and more stuck
- 26:48Speaker 4: in this in this realm of you know, materiality.
- 26:52Speaker 1: Yeah, I totally agree with you there.
- 26:54Speaker 5: I think there's a lot of in a modern day
- 26:56Speaker 5: there's a lot of distractions at truth, if I didn't
- 27:01Speaker 5: have to survive by having a job, I would be
- 27:03Speaker 5: that person who like goes and becomes a nun just
- 27:06Speaker 5: so I can engage with magic full time. Like I
- 27:09Speaker 5: freaking wish that was in sort of.
- 27:13Speaker 1: I wish that was my will. It's not.
- 27:14Speaker 5: Unfortunately, I think social media is perhaps the biggest, like
- 27:20Speaker 5: to be so for real with you, There is so
- 27:22Speaker 5: much shit pedal on social media that gets people like
- 27:24Speaker 5: all caught up into petty arguments with people that could
- 27:27Speaker 5: be misunderstandings or conspiracy theories that send you down you know,
- 27:31Speaker 5: rabbit holes of you know, hours and research and it's
- 27:33Speaker 5: just like how much of that impacts you on a
- 27:37Speaker 5: daily basis and like your actual life and if it
- 27:40Speaker 5: doesn't impact you, then like it doesn't really matter. I
- 27:43Speaker 5: think that much. I just I think so many people
- 27:45Speaker 5: get distracted by things that are really superficial and it
- 27:49Speaker 5: really don't matter. And like, personally, one of the things
- 27:52Speaker 5: I do every single year during LENS because I'm also Catholic,
- 27:56Speaker 5: is I remove social media from all of my devices,
- 28:02Speaker 5: Like I close on the apps, I delete everything from
- 28:04Speaker 5: my phone. And I do it because it's a really
- 28:07Speaker 5: important sort of spiritual reset for me during that time
- 28:11Speaker 5: to like remember what the focus should be and for me,
- 28:14Speaker 5: like that focus is this for communication with good that
- 28:17Speaker 5: is my desired goal, and what do I need to
- 28:20Speaker 5: get there and what is holding me back? And I
- 28:24Speaker 5: find that a lot of I also a lot of
- 28:27Speaker 5: online stuff in general I think calls me back and
- 28:30Speaker 5: it's so much I feel better. I'm closer to God
- 28:32Speaker 5: when I engage with other people, when I engage my practice,
- 28:35Speaker 5: and I can't do that if I'm wasting hours scrolling
- 28:37Speaker 5: on TikTok.
- 28:40Speaker 3: I have realized how much more work I can get
- 28:42Speaker 3: done on the show if I really don't engage too
- 28:44Speaker 3: much on social media, and how much more happening. Yeah,
- 28:50Speaker 3: it's yeah, that's that's really I think kind of like
- 28:55Speaker 3: the biggest mind fuck on humanity is really these apps
- 28:58Speaker 3: has to say.
- 29:00Speaker 5: Really, actually, our attention spans are worse, and that's been
- 29:03Speaker 5: scientifically studied.
- 29:04Speaker 1: Our capacity for deep thought is worse.
- 29:08Speaker 5: There was a recent MIT study that came out looking
- 29:11Speaker 5: at the impacts of AI on people's ability to think
- 29:14Speaker 5: critically when they.
- 29:14Speaker 1: Were writing an essay.
- 29:16Speaker 5: Crazy, how much just using AI for research alone prevented
- 29:22Speaker 5: the growth of gray matter, which is really what you
- 29:25Speaker 5: actually want your brain and just is making people in
- 29:28Speaker 5: capable of forming coherent arguments and really putting together like
- 29:33Speaker 5: good solid information. Why has information like declined over the
- 29:36Speaker 5: years because people aren't reading books and they aren't talking
- 29:39Speaker 5: to each other and having these like deeper philosophical conversations
- 29:42Speaker 5: asking the questions of why, like it is Really it's
- 29:45Speaker 5: really sad to see and I see it in myself,
- 29:47Speaker 5: Like my capacity ten years ago to do like really
- 29:51Speaker 5: difficult research, it's harder now than it was. Like I
- 29:55Speaker 5: see that in myself. So I'm not over here shitting
- 29:57Speaker 5: on everybody, because I'm shitting on myself as well here,
- 30:00Speaker 5: But it is sad that it's gone down so much
- 30:02Speaker 5: and we're only at the beginning of it.
- 30:04Speaker 2: Ye oh, hell is you muted?
- 30:11Speaker 4: Oh sorry. We like to talk about the art of
- 30:13Speaker 4: memory too, as sort of like this sort of introductory
- 30:16Speaker 4: kind of a way of understanding how these different angels
- 30:20Speaker 4: work within the conscious mind as well as you know,
- 30:23Speaker 4: how ancient people saw polytheism like it was this massive
- 30:26Speaker 4: mnemonic device that sort of branched out and associated with
- 30:29Speaker 4: everything just on the surface level. And having the memory
- 30:33Speaker 4: to sort of put everything that you see into this
- 30:35Speaker 4: photographic framework and having mnemonic devices was seen as a superpower.
- 30:40Speaker 4: In fact, they accused what was.
- 30:43Speaker 6: His name, I keep blanking on it, Bruno, Bruno. They
- 30:48Speaker 6: accused Bruno of having these strange magical powers when he
- 30:52Speaker 6: was using these mnemonic tools and devices that he had
- 30:55Speaker 6: learned from the agents in his own practice. And I
- 30:58Speaker 6: think that art of memory plays up.
- 31:01Speaker 1: Yeah.
- 31:01Speaker 5: I loved you Buna and Bruno, so God you brought
- 31:04Speaker 5: up their art of memory.
- 31:05Speaker 1: Great, great concept and topic. You guys covered it on
- 31:08Speaker 1: your show. I think a while ago there's such an
- 31:12Speaker 1: interesting like misrepresentation of ancient culture. I think among magicians
- 31:18Speaker 1: sometimes we.
- 31:19Speaker 5: Treat it like it's like, oh, it's a separate pantheon
- 31:21Speaker 5: on gods. But truthfully, and a lot of the ancient civilizations,
- 31:25Speaker 5: like it was a permeation into culture. Like it was
- 31:28Speaker 5: so interwoven that there wasn't a separation between religion and
- 31:33Speaker 5: magic and everyday life. Like it wasn't separated like it
- 31:36Speaker 5: is in sort of the mid like in the Western
- 31:38Speaker 5: world nowadays. And so, like you said, a lot of
- 31:41Speaker 5: this sort of art and memory stuff. It's one of
- 31:43Speaker 5: the reasons why myths were so important to the civilizations
- 31:46Speaker 5: because they taught moral and social codes, right, Like, everything
- 31:50Speaker 5: was so interwoven and woven into these like associations within
- 31:53Speaker 5: the memory with these symbols and certain names and everything
- 31:57Speaker 5: like that, that there wasn't separation that we see today.
- 32:02Speaker 5: And so it did have a bigger impact on the
- 32:04Speaker 5: individual because they were the current that we talk about
- 32:07Speaker 5: in sort of society is nowadays that you have to
- 32:09Speaker 5: like get plugged into in order to do effective magic.
- 32:12Speaker 5: That current was just their life and so there was
- 32:16Speaker 5: no plugging into it. It was literally just their life.
- 32:19Speaker 2: Yeah, that is true.
- 32:22Speaker 4: I got to bring this up. So a good example
- 32:25Speaker 4: is the Golden ass we were just going through it
- 32:27Speaker 4: on a Great Pills podcast, we were talking about all
- 32:30Speaker 4: of these sort of strings of epithets that they had
- 32:33Speaker 4: for the gods and goddesses that they would invoke upon,
- 32:37Speaker 4: you know, certain activities or when you know, they're cursing somebody,
- 32:40Speaker 4: and so the whole chain of you know, epithets would
- 32:44Speaker 4: be sort of representative of their connection to these gods
- 32:47Speaker 4: and goddesses, and it wasn't seen as sort of obscure
- 32:51Speaker 4: or difficult to understand. People sort of had that in
- 32:53Speaker 4: their minds already at the time, and it was like
- 32:56Speaker 4: this this combination of both nature, psychology and physical matter
- 33:02Speaker 4: that I think a lot of people just lose perspective
- 33:05Speaker 4: on when they're looking at their own societies because we're
- 33:07Speaker 4: sort of disconnected from those different layers of society that
- 33:11Speaker 4: exist all around us at all times, and not having
- 33:14Speaker 4: that awareness really makes it hard to have a decent
- 33:17Speaker 4: conversation half the time.
- 33:18Speaker 1: One hundred percent.
- 33:19Speaker 5: This is the why the cosmological like their specimen part
- 33:22Speaker 5: on having a cosmology, because like, that's what that is
- 33:25Speaker 5: to these people, right, and that is their cosmology. It's
- 33:27Speaker 5: the way in which they view the world and they
- 33:29Speaker 5: live their life. And when you have that the way
- 33:32Speaker 5: that you work magic and engage with the world totally changes,
- 33:36Speaker 5: and so kind of returning that to our practice nowadays,
- 33:39Speaker 5: where we have been so separated, like everything is categorized
- 33:42Speaker 5: now right. You have science, you have magic, you have religion,
- 33:46Speaker 5: you have like psychology, you have all these things. And
- 33:48Speaker 5: I'm sure we say they're interconnected, and we give examples
- 33:51Speaker 5: of that, but like people don't live that connection, and
- 33:55Speaker 5: I think that's like the myss that's really the problem.
- 33:58Speaker 5: But when you have a cosmology, it gives us sort
- 34:00Speaker 5: of a worldview by which to allow all of them
- 34:03Speaker 5: to sort of marry. And the way that is fluid
- 34:05Speaker 5: and you can't necessarily define. And it's funny because, like
- 34:09Speaker 5: as somebody who's a scientist, people will ask me, you know,
- 34:12Speaker 5: how can you how can you have faith and being
- 34:14Speaker 5: Catholic and how can you also do magic? And the
- 34:16Speaker 5: answer is, because I don't see it's all as t
- 34:19Speaker 5: woven to me, like God's creation and the spirits that
- 34:22Speaker 5: we engage with are interwoven into the things that I
- 34:25Speaker 5: study scientifically and the magic that I do in the
- 34:28Speaker 5: way I interact with the world. Like it's not some
- 34:31Speaker 5: they aren't categories in my life. It's just the way
- 34:34Speaker 5: in which I live and interact with the world. So
- 34:37Speaker 5: I think like the capitalistic and consumeristic categorization of everything
- 34:42Speaker 5: and like scientific materialism that came about in sort of
- 34:45Speaker 5: the late Renaissance period, like in the Alignment period, just
- 34:49Speaker 5: really fucked a lot of shit up in terms of
- 34:51Speaker 5: people being able to live within these cosmologies in a
- 34:54Speaker 5: very real and intimate way.
- 34:56Speaker 4: Right, Right, And uh, if you look at the time,
- 35:00Speaker 4: any little tools that single cellular organisms use, you find
- 35:04Speaker 4: a lot of coordination with what these gods used as
- 35:08Speaker 4: their implements. Right. So you've got this bow and arrow,
- 35:11Speaker 4: you've got these spears, you've got shields, you've got all
- 35:13Speaker 4: the rest of the stuff that single cellular organisms are
- 35:16Speaker 4: using in a very utilitarian way that actually reflects a
- 35:21Speaker 4: lot of these ancient pantheons. It's like, this is what
- 35:24Speaker 4: the agents were talking about. They're making a system of
- 35:27Speaker 4: infinite associations because they understand that these are the base
- 35:31Speaker 4: level interactions that people can sort of have even you know,
- 35:35Speaker 4: everything is love and war in their concept, right, these
- 35:39Speaker 4: are the fundamental primaries. And so they're seeing all of
- 35:43Speaker 4: these things, you know, have that same attribute and since
- 35:47Speaker 4: we don't have a cosmology, we it's easy to take
- 35:50Speaker 4: advantage of people because they don't even see the weapons
- 35:53Speaker 4: on a psychological level. Like you're getting booked by people
- 35:56Speaker 4: who are using these psychological weapons, and they're not act
- 36:00Speaker 4: seeing them for what they are because they don't really
- 36:02Speaker 4: have the experience to know that these, you know, things
- 36:06Speaker 4: that people have done ripple out to infinity. Right, all
- 36:10Speaker 4: of those associations are rippling out to infinity. So you
- 36:13Speaker 4: could start to see it or you could stay blind
- 36:16Speaker 4: to it at your own detriment. And I think that's
- 36:18Speaker 4: that's where where we've kind of gotten stocked the last
- 36:21Speaker 4: twenty or thirty years.
- 36:23Speaker 1: Yeah, I totally agree with everything you said there.
- 36:27Speaker 4: Well, talking about microscopy, are you actively working on any
- 36:33Speaker 4: scientific projects that can change the world or what are
- 36:37Speaker 4: you working on?
- 36:37Speaker 5: Well, I will say so one of the things that
- 36:40Speaker 5: I'm doing, so one of my specialties is three D
- 36:43Speaker 5: celculter And I'm going to explain this in sort of
- 36:46Speaker 5: terms of like why it is important. But when we
- 36:49Speaker 5: have a drug, for example, that we're trying to develop
- 36:51Speaker 5: for whatever the disease condition is, the way it moves
- 36:56Speaker 5: through the pipeline is you start with the drugs of
- 36:59Speaker 5: the chemist make and then we characterize it. And first
- 37:02Speaker 5: we characterize it in cells, so like if I swabed
- 37:06Speaker 5: my own cheek, I could take the cells there and
- 37:09Speaker 5: then play them and have them grow external to myself continuously.
- 37:14Speaker 5: And so oftentimes what we'll do is we'll take diseased
- 37:16Speaker 5: cells and we will plate them external from the source,
- 37:21Speaker 5: and then we essentially treat them with these drugs to
- 37:23Speaker 5: see what the outcome is.
- 37:25Speaker 1: And then we say, okay, great, we saw an effect.
- 37:27Speaker 5: And so now we move into animals, and then they
- 37:29Speaker 5: do the testing in animals, and then we go from
- 37:31Speaker 5: animals into humans. Now, the problem with each of those
- 37:34Speaker 5: steps is that the way cells act in like a
- 37:37Speaker 5: Patriot dish versus the way mammalian cells act in a
- 37:40Speaker 5: body or even an animal. It's different because, like for
- 37:45Speaker 5: this is something that happens commonly. You have a drug
- 37:47Speaker 5: that say, works really well in mice and you see
- 37:51Speaker 5: a great effect, like we can talk about cancer drugs.
- 37:53Speaker 5: Everybody else what those are, and the tumor size like
- 37:57Speaker 5: decreases and the animal is regaining weight, it's eating where
- 38:00Speaker 5: it's more active. We say, okay, great, it works in
- 38:03Speaker 5: these animals. Now let's move to human studies. So you
- 38:06Speaker 5: do that and you see no effect. Well, even though
- 38:09Speaker 5: the drug is we're targeting the same kind of protein,
- 38:11Speaker 5: for example, there are differences between like a mouse protein
- 38:16Speaker 5: and a human protein. And so one of the big
- 38:18Speaker 5: areas that we're focusing on a research now are these
- 38:20Speaker 5: developments that we call three D CEL culture models. And
- 38:23Speaker 5: the whole point is to sort of simulate the human
- 38:27Speaker 5: organ essentially as a whole, as a way to sort
- 38:30Speaker 5: of bypass the animal step, and through some of my
- 38:33Speaker 5: important we can actually take these human cells that the
- 38:36Speaker 5: drug will be working on in like the body, we
- 38:39Speaker 5: can put them into this external three D system. And
- 38:42Speaker 5: one of the things that we did was creates what's
- 38:45Speaker 5: called a.
- 38:46Speaker 1: Lung on a chip system.
- 38:48Speaker 5: So we essentially have a membrane that we put cells
- 38:52Speaker 5: from the lungs onto and there's one hundreds of different cells, right,
- 38:55Speaker 5: so there's we're talking a whole mixture of things. And
- 38:59Speaker 5: then we put this chip into a machine and we
- 39:03Speaker 5: force it to breathe. So the membrane moves up and
- 39:06Speaker 5: down like the uh organ your lungs wood in your body.
- 39:11Speaker 5: And there is a difference between how essentially viral like
- 39:15Speaker 5: viral infection. For example, we were doing some stuff with
- 39:17Speaker 5: stars could be too and the infection is more intense
- 39:23Speaker 5: when we incorporate this sort of breathing mechanic in this
- 39:25Speaker 5: three D model than if you're where you were to
- 39:28Speaker 5: just do it on like cells that are sitting on
- 39:29Speaker 5: a dish. And so it shows the importance of really
- 39:32Speaker 5: mimicking what's happening in the human body to get a
- 39:34Speaker 5: good understanding of how a drug will treat something.
- 39:37Speaker 1: And so we're.
- 39:38Speaker 5: Trying to develop a lot of these sort of three
- 39:40Speaker 5: D cell culture systems. We got We've got long on
- 39:43Speaker 5: a chip, We've got brain on a chip. We've got
- 39:45Speaker 5: like nerves on a chip. There's you've got livers on
- 39:49Speaker 5: a chip.
- 39:49Speaker 1: Like. We have all these sort of.
- 39:50Speaker 5: Different, uh, three D models that we're trying to make
- 39:53Speaker 5: as precursors for drug testing before we actually get into
- 39:58Speaker 5: human models. That's sort of skip the animal part of this,
- 40:03Speaker 5: because animals aren't necessarily analogous to the human condition. If
- 40:06Speaker 5: we can actually say, hey, in the three D model,
- 40:08Speaker 5: we see really effective results from an upregulation of a
- 40:13Speaker 5: particular pathway, for example, with this specific drug that is
- 40:17Speaker 5: actually more comparable to a particular protein and an actual
- 40:20Speaker 5: human than there's a higher chance of probability that it
- 40:25Speaker 5: will be successful in human trials. And so it just
- 40:27Speaker 5: essentially quickens the line from drug development to actual treatment,
- 40:32Speaker 5: which is huge. That's like a big thing that I
- 40:34Speaker 5: work around at my job, which is super cool.
- 40:37Speaker 1: And I'll stop there.
- 40:38Speaker 4: Well, you've got a lot of occult principles that now
- 40:41Speaker 4: you can incorporate into the laboratory process that we're missing
- 40:44Speaker 4: before because you've got the principle of rhythm, right, You've
- 40:47Speaker 4: got the principle of all of these other factors that
- 40:50Speaker 4: play into the human laboratory, which would be you know,
- 40:52Speaker 4: our bodies that we're trying to influence that aren't necessarily
- 40:56Speaker 4: present in those laboratory conditions that you know, are missing
- 41:00Speaker 4: a lot of the pieces that would make up a full,
- 41:03Speaker 4: you know, human system. And so by introducing those other principles,
- 41:07Speaker 4: you're you're simulating what the whole human system would be
- 41:10Speaker 4: doing in these specific conditions. So, yeah, I think that's
- 41:13Speaker 4: that's really positive step.
- 41:15Speaker 5: You know, it's cool too because it's sort of it's
- 41:17Speaker 5: a good I actually think that the interaction and the
- 41:20Speaker 5: interplay of things and it's like three D couldres system
- 41:23Speaker 5: we're creating is a good sort of representation of like
- 41:27Speaker 5: how the I don't know, the heavens sort of the
- 41:32Speaker 5: whole spiritual ecosystem kind of works. Right, we say that
- 41:34Speaker 5: there's there's tons of interplay of everything. I mean, even
- 41:38Speaker 5: within these three couple ty systems, Like the interplay is crazy.
- 41:40Speaker 5: There's so much shit going on, it's even impossible to measure.
- 41:43Speaker 1: Most of the time. And I think like people, especially
- 41:46Speaker 1: like are more tradition.
- 41:47Speaker 5: Sometimes it's really easy to get bottled into this idea
- 41:50Speaker 5: that everything is in a strict hierarchy and truthfully and like,
- 41:53Speaker 5: we know it's not the case, because there's plenty of
- 41:55Speaker 5: systems and grimors that say, like moved, you know, Michaels
- 42:00Speaker 5: representative of Mercury, and Raphael is actually representative of the sun, right,
- 42:04Speaker 5: or there's actually three governors over a particular time period,
- 42:07Speaker 5: it's not.
- 42:07Speaker 1: Just one particular archangel.
- 42:09Speaker 5: But I think there needs to be a little bit
- 42:11Speaker 5: more fluidity, like the structure the grimors are for us
- 42:15Speaker 5: as the magicians people doing the work. But truthfully, I
- 42:18Speaker 5: think sort of the cosmos and the grander scheme of
- 42:21Speaker 5: things is so much more fucking like, it's so complicated.
- 42:25Speaker 5: There's so many spirits that we don't know who are
- 42:27Speaker 5: serving under various spirits that we do know. And so
- 42:30Speaker 5: I think, like a lot there's so much in this
- 42:34Speaker 5: like really integral network of interactions that's happening on like
- 42:39Speaker 5: a spiritual level, and I think we see that mimic
- 42:43Speaker 5: within nature, and humans are only one example of that.
- 42:46Speaker 5: I mean, like ecosystems in nature are also crazy complicated
- 42:50Speaker 5: the shit that like they have going down as well.
- 42:53Speaker 1: So I think it's a great sort of representation people.
- 42:55Speaker 5: You know, we always say macrocosm is a reflection of
- 42:57Speaker 5: the macrocosm, but like literally think the complexity of life
- 43:02Speaker 5: speaks to the complexity of the macrocosm in way, so
- 43:05Speaker 5: we can only sort of comprehend.
- 43:09Speaker 4: Right, I think in a lot of ways, what we're
- 43:12Speaker 4: seeing now is the integration of all of these uh
- 43:15Speaker 4: you know, principles that have kind of been ignored by
- 43:18Speaker 4: the materialist paradigm of science now being picked up by
- 43:22Speaker 4: alternative researchers who are doing incredible stuff with them. I
- 43:26Speaker 4: would encourage you, if you haven't yet, get the book
- 43:29Speaker 4: The Fourth Days of Water by Gerald Pollock, because he's
- 43:33Speaker 4: got a lot of stuff about the easy zones and
- 43:37Speaker 4: water that then can change the outcome of certain, uh,
- 43:41Speaker 4: you know, experiments, especially within the body, because you know,
- 43:44Speaker 4: if the heart was pumping enough blood to keep the
- 43:48Speaker 4: body running, our heads would explode as soon as we
- 43:51Speaker 4: bent over. So there's some other physical principle at work
- 43:55Speaker 4: within the body that is, you know, causing you know,
- 43:58Speaker 4: water or blood pushed around that a lot of people
- 44:02Speaker 4: sort of glossed over since the eighteen hundreds, and so
- 44:05Speaker 4: we're you know, I think repicking up these water sciences
- 44:09Speaker 4: and understanding how vital water is to the spiritual as
- 44:13Speaker 4: well as the physical is so important at least for
- 44:17Speaker 4: moving forward in the field of medicine and science and
- 44:19Speaker 4: all the rest of its.
- 44:21Speaker 5: Yeah, I think it speaks too because something that people
- 44:26Speaker 5: I think forget, especially in the occult meatia, you can
- 44:30Speaker 5: take occult principles and apply them to this Isaac Ninnen
- 44:35Speaker 5: had an extremely prolific spiritual practice.
- 44:38Speaker 1: Like this man. Sure he was an excellent.
- 44:41Speaker 5: Scientist, but he was also an occultist, like, no question
- 44:45Speaker 5: about that. And we even go back to alchemy, right,
- 44:48Speaker 5: It never used to be chemistry and magic. It used
- 44:51Speaker 5: to be sort of a singular science, and we see it.
- 44:55Speaker 5: There's so many examples in history of people who have
- 44:57Speaker 5: taken these sort of basical principles and thought, I wonder
- 45:00Speaker 5: if I can actually put this to study, or I
- 45:02Speaker 5: wonder if if there's a way I can measure this,
- 45:05Speaker 5: and then they've done it and it's created some of
- 45:07Speaker 5: our most important scientific principles. I think we have to
- 45:09Speaker 5: be a little bit careful because people tend to take
- 45:13Speaker 5: science and turn it into pseudoscience, which is like, I'm
- 45:18Speaker 5: not here for. In fact, a lot of the testes
- 45:20Speaker 5: and Culture's podcasts is sort of debunking a lot of
- 45:22Speaker 5: these claims because we can take those concepts and apply
- 45:26Speaker 5: them to science and we often see real results.
- 45:29Speaker 1: To it, but they still need to be put under.
- 45:31Speaker 5: The scrutiny of the scientific method, and if they're not significant,
- 45:35Speaker 5: then we can't make any sort of definitive claim. But
- 45:39Speaker 5: the other side of that is that just because it's
- 45:41Speaker 5: not necessarily significant to the scientific community doesn't mean that
- 45:45Speaker 5: it's not significant.
- 45:46Speaker 1: I think that's the other thing, right is people say, oh.
- 45:49Speaker 5: Your magic has to be legitimized by science, because science.
- 45:54Speaker 1: Is like our truth. In modern society. Right, people say,
- 45:57Speaker 1: I want to know what's true? Answer is science?
- 46:00Speaker 5: Science will tell us is everybody's answer to that. But
- 46:05Speaker 5: science is not capable of answering everything. Science is really
- 46:09Speaker 5: prime to study the natural world. It's not necessarily prime
- 46:12Speaker 5: to study the cause of the natural world. And so
- 46:14Speaker 5: that they think where people often get misled, and so
- 46:18Speaker 5: we can study perhaps me an outcome of something or
- 46:21Speaker 5: how it maybe affects the body. Like there's been a
- 46:23Speaker 5: lot of actually great meditation studies recently that have been
- 46:26Speaker 5: coming on the last couple of years looking at how
- 46:28Speaker 5: meditation impacts the body itself, looking at like ECGs and
- 46:33Speaker 5: reporter dot coms, but also looking at you know, changes
- 46:36Speaker 5: in like epigenetics and gene expression, or certain chemicals that
- 46:41Speaker 5: are produced in greater quantities and whatever. But some things
- 46:46Speaker 5: I just don't think science are actually capable of measuring.
- 46:50Speaker 5: And that's fine because you don't need to have that
- 46:53Speaker 5: scientific legitimacy if you believe something is having an impact,
- 46:56Speaker 5: and in some cases belief is quite a powerful dragone
- 46:59Speaker 5: of itself. Basbo effect has actually like really has a
- 47:05Speaker 5: high impact on people.
- 47:06Speaker 1: There was a.
- 47:06Speaker 5: Study and there's a cancer study. I think it came
- 47:10Speaker 5: on twenty seventeen where they had patients who they were
- 47:13Speaker 5: giving chemotherapy to the other patients to they you know,
- 47:16Speaker 5: pretended like they were giving chemotherapy too.
- 47:18Speaker 1: That was their placebo.
- 47:20Speaker 5: And like some of the chemotherapy patients in that control
- 47:25Speaker 5: placebo group did just as well as patients.
- 47:28Speaker 1: Who forgiving chemotherapy.
- 47:30Speaker 5: There was another paper recently we didn't have some of
- 47:32Speaker 5: the podcast about prayer and the impact of.
- 47:34Speaker 1: Prayer on people's health and their recovery.
- 47:37Speaker 5: And the group that thought people were praying for them,
- 47:41Speaker 5: but they like people weren't actually praying for them, they
- 47:44Speaker 5: recovered almost as well as the group of people who
- 47:48Speaker 5: did actually have people praying for them and knew they
- 47:50Speaker 5: had people praying for them. Like, it's crazy how much
- 47:53Speaker 5: of the bosbo effect can really impact people's perception of
- 47:57Speaker 5: what's going on in.
- 47:58Speaker 1: The world right time.
- 48:00Speaker 4: And we like to classify the placebo effect as you know,
- 48:03Speaker 4: you've got the placebo, which is like where you're having
- 48:06Speaker 4: a good effect, a good for the homeostasis, and then
- 48:09Speaker 4: you've got the no cibo effect, which is where now
- 48:12Speaker 4: your beliefs are negatively impacting your own life. And then
- 48:15Speaker 4: at the very far end of the no sebo effect
- 48:18Speaker 4: is voodoo death, where your beliefs have actually influenced your
- 48:23Speaker 4: your death because you believe you're going to die. So
- 48:25Speaker 4: there's there's a huge slippery slope that I think a
- 48:28Speaker 4: lot of people just aren't aware of, and changing those
- 48:31Speaker 4: negative beliefs and practices are so important to having a
- 48:34Speaker 4: happier life. It's it's ridiculous. I mean, that's that's really
- 48:37Speaker 4: the factor right there. You can be as rich as
- 48:39Speaker 4: you want to but have a shitty eternal life, never
- 48:42Speaker 4: be happy.
- 48:43Speaker 5: Yeah, I tell people all the time. I'm like, you
- 48:45Speaker 5: want to know what the miracle drug is. It's the effect,
- 48:48Speaker 5: that's the miracle drug.
- 48:50Speaker 3: Oh yeah, it's amazing what the mind can do to
- 48:54Speaker 3: the body if you believe some crazy So what are
- 49:00Speaker 3: some other things like that you cover on your show?
- 49:03Speaker 3: I know you do kind of get into like it's
- 49:05Speaker 3: like science and magic, correct.
- 49:07Speaker 1: Yeah.
- 49:07Speaker 5: So, like we did a whole episode on like epigenetics
- 49:10Speaker 5: recently because there's a lot of conversations to the occult
- 49:14Speaker 5: community about you know, this passing on of trauma and
- 49:17Speaker 5: like what that means and people people attribute a lot
- 49:22Speaker 5: of things to genetics to specifically like the sequence of
- 49:24Speaker 5: the genome that like aren't actually at like attributed to
- 49:28Speaker 5: genetics themselves.
- 49:29Speaker 1: It's attributed to something called your epigenome or epigenetics. So
- 49:34Speaker 1: and one of them is the inheritance of trauma.
- 49:36Speaker 5: This idea of nature versus nurture, And again, what if
- 49:39Speaker 5: we're talking about the intersection of like this philosophy of
- 49:42Speaker 5: the world and these spiritual discussions like nature versus nurture,
- 49:47Speaker 5: and that debate has been going on for centuries. I
- 49:49Speaker 5: mean we've got Plato talking about that shit and Aristotol,
- 49:52Speaker 5: I mean, it has going on forever. And we know
- 49:55Speaker 5: that like scientifically, there is an impact on your environment
- 50:00Speaker 5: regarding sort of how your body reacts to things. And
- 50:04Speaker 5: so epigenetics is essentially how the genes of your body
- 50:08Speaker 5: are controlled. So you might have a gene for something,
- 50:13Speaker 5: but it may not ever be turned.
- 50:14Speaker 1: On because it's not useful for you in a particular region.
- 50:19Speaker 5: A lot of traits that people have, like even just
- 50:22Speaker 5: colors of skins, like melanin production or there was oh,
- 50:28Speaker 5: there was actually a really interesting study twenty twenty twenty one.
- 50:34Speaker 5: I want to say, but they actually did a study
- 50:37Speaker 5: following people from like pre birth some of they were
- 50:40Speaker 5: still in their mother's uterus and then after birth for
- 50:45Speaker 5: twenty years they followed them and they were trying to
- 50:48Speaker 5: look at some of the epigenetics behind extraversion and introversion
- 50:53Speaker 5: and why somebody is maybe even more extroverted more introverted,
- 50:56Speaker 5: and they actually found out it's because of the degree
- 50:59Speaker 5: of methylation of a particular gene related to like this
- 51:03Speaker 5: particular aspect of humans, which is so fascinating, right, Like methylation.
- 51:09Speaker 5: To describe what that is is simply taking a methacre,
- 51:12Speaker 5: which is a carbon plus three hydrogens, and it's popped
- 51:15Speaker 5: onto the promoter region of a gene. So when a
- 51:18Speaker 5: gene is transcribed, you have a protein that binds to
- 51:23Speaker 5: this promoter region and then transcribes it into mRNA that
- 51:27Speaker 5: gets turned into proteins and then it goes and does
- 51:29Speaker 5: its thing in the body. When you methylate that promoter region,
- 51:33Speaker 5: that gene is unable to be transcribed. It essentially acts
- 51:37Speaker 5: as like a barrier, so the protein can't bind to
- 51:40Speaker 5: that particular area anymore. And so people who were actroverts
- 51:44Speaker 5: had less methylation and thus more production of that gene
- 51:49Speaker 5: than the people who were introverts. And that's something you're
- 51:51Speaker 5: able to study, which is so cool, and so how
- 51:54Speaker 5: many aspects of the individual are tied to that sort
- 51:58Speaker 5: of same thing. And there's tons of different and sort
- 52:01Speaker 5: of post translational modifications which will be called those where
- 52:04Speaker 5: it's it could be methylation, that could be a cutilation,
- 52:08Speaker 5: that could be certain proteins and other things. But it
- 52:12Speaker 5: clearly has an impact on the way people interact with
- 52:15Speaker 5: the world.
- 52:16Speaker 1: And that's just one example.
- 52:18Speaker 5: Uh, And so I definitely think that because our genes
- 52:21Speaker 5: are mostly the same across the rule Right Human Genome Project,
- 52:24Speaker 5: one of the best things they came out with was
- 52:26Speaker 5: that we have ninety nine point nine percent of our
- 52:29Speaker 5: genomes are the same across the Homo sapien species. Now
- 52:32Speaker 5: that's not to say that we are all totally identical,
- 52:35Speaker 5: because that point one percent point zero one percent.
- 52:39Speaker 1: If your cells have six billion.
- 52:43Speaker 5: DNA nucleotides in them, the point one percent is still
- 52:47Speaker 5: like six million, Okay, So it's still a very substantial
- 52:49Speaker 5: difference from cell to cell. But generally speaking, we're very similar.
- 52:53Speaker 5: And so then what determines the changes. The answer to
- 52:56Speaker 5: that is your epigenome is the epigenetics of ad all
- 52:59Speaker 5: and so I think That is something that I really
- 53:02Speaker 5: hope to see more research on in the future, this
- 53:05Speaker 5: idea of nature versus, you know, nurture. Is it just nature,
- 53:08Speaker 5: is it just genetics, or is it also nurture in
- 53:10Speaker 5: the sense that your genetics are influenced by your environment,
- 53:14Speaker 5: the way that you grew up, and so if someone
- 53:16Speaker 5: There was actually another research study that looked at Holocaust survivors,
- 53:20Speaker 5: and it's interesting because some psychologists were noticing that the
- 53:25Speaker 5: children of Holocaust survivors actually had like more mental issues
- 53:29Speaker 5: that required more psychological help than these survivors themselves, which
- 53:34Speaker 5: is so interesting, doesn't really make a lot of sense,
- 53:37Speaker 5: But they did some epigenetics studies and saw that the
- 53:41Speaker 5: trauma that the parents induced during the Holocaust was actually
- 53:47Speaker 5: passed along to their children in the sense that they
- 53:50Speaker 5: were more likely to have the same changes in terms
- 53:54Speaker 5: of the epigenetics and methylations, all these other things than
- 53:59Speaker 5: the or the children of people who hadn't incurred a
- 54:03Speaker 5: lot of that trauma. So there is some scientific validation
- 54:06Speaker 5: for this idea, like trauma specifically is passed from parent
- 54:10Speaker 5: to child. Now we have to be a little bit
- 54:13Speaker 5: careful in saying this. The same trauma really it's more
- 54:17Speaker 5: scientifically accurate to say the same changes or the same
- 54:23Speaker 5: epigenome that we see in the parent is past the child.
- 54:28Speaker 5: That is really all we can say scientifically, but from
- 54:32Speaker 5: if you want to sort of extend that thought, you
- 54:34Speaker 5: can say, well, if this particular epigenetic change is causing
- 54:39Speaker 5: this behavior and the parent, you may expect to see
- 54:42Speaker 5: more of that behavior from somebody who has that same
- 54:45Speaker 5: epigenome as a child. That's not something we can necessarily
- 54:49Speaker 5: scientifically prove or like support, but we can see the
- 54:55Speaker 5: association and that can give us more insight into how
- 54:58Speaker 5: to study this further, to.
- 54:59Speaker 1: Get the idea more sporty, if you will.
- 55:02Speaker 4: Right, And the epigenetic studies really got started with a
- 55:05Speaker 4: really kind of a mystical tip to it. So what
- 55:08Speaker 4: they were doing with the rat ancestral memory studies that
- 55:11Speaker 4: really kicked off the epigenetics thing was trying to put
- 55:15Speaker 4: rats through a maze and then testing their offspring, even
- 55:18Speaker 4: though the offspring had had no contact with the sperm donor,
- 55:22Speaker 4: on how well they did in the maze. And what
- 55:24Speaker 4: they found is that there was a correlation between the
- 55:27Speaker 4: rats who successfully got through that maze and the generations
- 55:31Speaker 4: before them that did so as well. So there's a
- 55:34Speaker 4: specific link along those ancestral memories somehow being transferred to
- 55:40Speaker 4: with his.
- 55:43Speaker 1: Theory of survival of the fittest.
- 55:46Speaker 5: It's really epigenetics at work, Like that is essentially what
- 55:51Speaker 5: he was seeing. He was seeing that when conditions get
- 55:56Speaker 5: and this is actually something that we see also if
- 55:58Speaker 5: you look at the epigen mix of like famine, the
- 56:01Speaker 5: people who live through famine versus their children, you see
- 56:05Speaker 5: a fact on the children because of the way the
- 56:08Speaker 5: environment that whole famine itself impact of the parents. The
- 56:12Speaker 5: same thing is that the survival of the fittest right
- 56:14Speaker 5: in order, we must adapt in order to survive, and
- 56:17Speaker 5: that adaptation is often can often be measured from an
- 56:22Speaker 5: epigenetic perspective. And so there's a lot more research going
- 56:25Speaker 5: on in that. It's a booming field at the moment,
- 56:27Speaker 5: which is great. It's been really fun to read a
- 56:29Speaker 5: lot of the data. But yeah, like that's one example
- 56:33Speaker 5: of an episode that we did and why we did it.
- 56:36Speaker 5: We've done plenty of episodes looking at like the science
- 56:41Speaker 5: of prayers, So why do people pray? What is really
- 56:44Speaker 5: the impact that it has. We looked at it from
- 56:46Speaker 5: like an occult perspective, and we also looked at it
- 56:48Speaker 5: from a scientific perspective.
- 56:50Speaker 1: We've looked at sort of the art of memory.
- 56:52Speaker 5: For example, we've done some episodes on the impact of
- 56:56Speaker 5: like meditation and stuff on the body and looking at
- 56:59Speaker 5: like easy too and papers.
- 57:00Speaker 1: That have come out about that.
- 57:01Speaker 5: We've talked generally about, you know, what it means to
- 57:05Speaker 5: be a researcher and how that is applied, and how
- 57:08Speaker 5: you can apply that to a magical practice. Like I think,
- 57:12Speaker 5: I maybe I'm going to get some flat for this,
- 57:15Speaker 5: but I think in the occult community people tend to
- 57:18Speaker 5: be a little bit more relaxed in the way they
- 57:21Speaker 5: sort of engage in these kind of things. But if
- 57:23Speaker 5: you really want to have any sort of measurable like
- 57:27Speaker 5: way of measuring change over a period of time, you
- 57:31Speaker 5: really have to approach it and think about controls and replicability,
- 57:36Speaker 5: and you need to be taking good.
- 57:37Speaker 1: Notes like I have. So I have notebooks.
- 57:40Speaker 5: I probably have fifteen notebooks of my actual experience, and
- 57:44Speaker 5: I have recorded things so intensely because otherwise you can't
- 57:48Speaker 5: make any definitive conclusions. You could just be fooling yourself.
- 57:51Speaker 5: Your brain is really good at that it's really good
- 57:53Speaker 5: to fooling yourself, but the thick of things that you
- 57:54Speaker 5: don't actually we didn't actually do, where you didn't actually experience,
- 57:58Speaker 5: And so having these really the intense records is it's
- 58:02Speaker 5: a way of sort of keeping yourself accountable too and
- 58:04Speaker 5: saying nothing has changed, and if nothing has changed, why
- 58:07Speaker 5: is that? And how can I change what I'm doing
- 58:10Speaker 5: to like make things better?
- 58:11Speaker 4: We found the uniting link between solemonic magic and academia rigorous.
- 58:18Speaker 2: You've got to be.
- 58:22Speaker 1: I.
- 58:23Speaker 5: Yeah, I think like magic and science are never will
- 58:26Speaker 5: never explain the same things, and I think it's sort
- 58:28Speaker 5: of a fool, a fool's mission to attempt that. Like
- 58:31Speaker 5: a lot of the quantum science talk is a bunch
- 58:33Speaker 5: of bullshit, and I just like am so nigh here
- 58:35Speaker 5: for that, because even like if you talked a physicist
- 58:40Speaker 5: about the niven number of friends who do crazy shit
- 58:43Speaker 5: that I don't really understand. But if you're talking to
- 58:46Speaker 5: them about like the quantum experiment, this whole like observer effect,
- 58:50Speaker 5: they essentially say it has no impact.
- 58:53Speaker 1: On like a macro level.
- 58:55Speaker 5: Things operate differently at a quantum scale than they do
- 58:58Speaker 5: in the actual world. So trying to tribute quantum science
- 59:03Speaker 5: to like a larger scale is absolute pseudoscience and it
- 59:07Speaker 5: has no place, like they would say, it has no
- 59:10Speaker 5: place in scientific discussion. Okay, And so I think what
- 59:13Speaker 5: happens is again like people are trying to take magic
- 59:16Speaker 5: and they're trying to legitimize using science, using as quantum
- 59:18Speaker 5: things that we don't understand. Even quantum scientists will say,
- 59:21Speaker 5: I don't really know what the fuck is going on,
- 59:24Speaker 5: but like this is what we see, right, we're measuring
- 59:28Speaker 5: and they're doing much weird mathematical calculations to like figure
- 59:30Speaker 5: out what it.
- 59:31Speaker 1: Is they're saying.
- 59:33Speaker 5: But again we can't, we can't attribute that to a
- 59:36Speaker 5: macro level. And so magic, if you want to be
- 59:40Speaker 5: rigorous about it and your approach to it, you can
- 59:42Speaker 5: learn things about magic and science.
- 59:45Speaker 1: You can learn things about science. And when you combine the.
- 59:47Speaker 5: Two and you say, like you look at the world
- 59:50Speaker 5: through a natural philosophy lens, which is really what we
- 59:53Speaker 5: often use in magic, it can give you insights and
- 59:55Speaker 5: the things you could actually potentially change and study. And
- 59:59Speaker 5: then the so that you get from that can say, oh,
- 1:00:01Speaker 5: I saw a difference here when these techniques were applied,
- 1:00:04Speaker 5: like meditation for example.
- 1:00:06Speaker 1: And so what happens if I apply these other techniques,
- 1:00:09Speaker 1: so like there can be sort of this communication between
- 1:00:11Speaker 1: the two in the sense that they inform each other
- 1:00:15Speaker 1: without this need to like be legitimized by each other.
- 1:00:19Speaker 5: And I think that's what I would really like ask
- 1:00:21Speaker 5: people to stay creeping forward.
- 1:00:24Speaker 1: It's like, treat your.
- 1:00:25Speaker 5: Magic like science, but don't expect them to explain each
- 1:00:28Speaker 5: other because they're just not prime to do that, right,
- 1:00:33Speaker 5: would be nice?
- 1:00:38Speaker 3: What about the you know, if you don't mind, uh,
- 1:00:40Speaker 3: would you mind talking maybe a little bit more about
- 1:00:42Speaker 3: the meditation stuff that you kind of talked about.
- 1:00:45Speaker 5: Yeah, So there was a lot of it was genetic
- 1:00:51Speaker 5: and it was ab agenetic, and also just looking at
- 1:00:55Speaker 5: the impact of meditation on specific areas of the brain
- 1:00:59Speaker 5: and like what an active And I will say, I'm
- 1:01:02Speaker 5: not like a brain surgeon of any kind, right, so
- 1:01:05Speaker 5: these are the rulesults that I read that I'm not
- 1:01:07Speaker 5: necessarily like, I didn't take the state of myself or anything,
- 1:01:11Speaker 5: but they were essentially able to show in terms of
- 1:01:15Speaker 5: like reported patients, but also areas of the brains that
- 1:01:18Speaker 5: are related to like patients and conflict management.
- 1:01:23Speaker 1: And empathy when you.
- 1:01:26Speaker 5: Meditate and you engage in daily it was like daily
- 1:01:29Speaker 5: for thirty minutes or something. They have real impacts on
- 1:01:33Speaker 5: those areas of the brain. Those areas of the brains
- 1:01:35Speaker 5: sort of lied up during the meditation. And also there's
- 1:01:38Speaker 5: the chemical levels that are released during meditation as well
- 1:01:42Speaker 5: that cause changes in your body to I don't remember
- 1:01:45Speaker 5: the whole list, but it was in this paper, and
- 1:01:48Speaker 5: over long periods of time, it has a very real
- 1:01:51Speaker 5: impact on life. And there's plenty of slays to look
- 1:01:54Speaker 5: at the longevity of someone's life who have also meditated,
- 1:01:57Speaker 5: and a lot of these these changes, the chemicals that
- 1:01:59Speaker 5: are released and everything like that is what sort of
- 1:02:02Speaker 5: aids this longevity, and so it clearly has a correlation
- 1:02:08Speaker 5: to people living a happy This is related to the
- 1:02:12Speaker 5: chemicals that are released and a more fulfilled life. People
- 1:02:15Speaker 5: feel more fulfilled when they engage in a lot of
- 1:02:18Speaker 5: these meditative practices. And there's also some research that I
- 1:02:22Speaker 5: haven't done quite as much, like looked into this quite
- 1:02:24Speaker 5: as much around this idea of like sort of somatic
- 1:02:28Speaker 5: breathing or just more generally the idea of like living
- 1:02:32Speaker 5: a slower life and how that also impacts are the
- 1:02:38Speaker 5: way that we perceive the world. There was a study
- 1:02:41Speaker 5: that in twenty seventeen, I believe, where they were looking
- 1:02:45Speaker 5: at how the perception of time has an impact on
- 1:02:49Speaker 5: how your body like reacts to certain aging principles. So
- 1:02:55Speaker 5: the faster that you perceive time living by, which from
- 1:02:58Speaker 5: a social media perspective, even moving very quickly, it has
- 1:03:03Speaker 5: an impact on your body's relation connection then to aging.
- 1:03:07Speaker 1: And so people when people.
- 1:03:08Speaker 5: Are saying things like I feel really old when they're
- 1:03:11Speaker 5: at younger ages, there seems to be and it hasn't
- 1:03:15Speaker 5: there haven't been a lot of studies done on this.
- 1:03:17Speaker 1: I'm not gonna say it definitively, but.
- 1:03:19Speaker 5: There seems to be a correlation between our perception of
- 1:03:23Speaker 5: time and the actual aging process, which is crazy. And
- 1:03:27Speaker 5: I hope that they do more research surrounding that because
- 1:03:30Speaker 5: I think it it makes a lot of sense because
- 1:03:32Speaker 5: our brain does have a really strong influence over our
- 1:03:36Speaker 5: bodies and how they respond to things. And so if
- 1:03:38Speaker 5: it is based on like perception, which is something that
- 1:03:42Speaker 5: our brain controls, then yes, it would send signals to
- 1:03:46Speaker 5: your body to try to be trying to like sending
- 1:03:50Speaker 5: these aging signals that you say earlier then they would
- 1:03:53Speaker 5: normally be sent if we weren't perceiving that change.
- 1:03:57Speaker 4: Right, So the Greeks talked about subjective time in relationship
- 1:04:00Speaker 4: to Chiros and Chronos, So Kronos would be the objective time,
- 1:04:04Speaker 4: and then Chiros would be the subjective time or the
- 1:04:07Speaker 4: quality time that you are having in between. What's so
- 1:04:12Speaker 4: painfully obvious about Chiros is the is the ephemeral nature
- 1:04:17Speaker 4: of the quality time. So he's only got a tuft
- 1:04:20Speaker 4: of hair in the front of his head, and he's
- 1:04:22Speaker 4: balancing a scale on a razor blade, and the only
- 1:04:25Speaker 4: way to catch him is from the front. So the
- 1:04:27Speaker 4: only way to get quality time is to is to
- 1:04:30Speaker 4: make that plan and grab out in time to actually
- 1:04:33Speaker 4: catch him. Whereas you know, Kronos is sort of everywhere
- 1:04:36Speaker 4: at omnipresent in everything, but that quality time is much
- 1:04:40Speaker 4: harder to get a hold of.
- 1:04:42Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly.
- 1:04:44Speaker 5: So again, like we see some of these concepts that
- 1:04:46Speaker 5: people have noticed for years and various cultures, it's not
- 1:04:49Speaker 5: just not just the grapes to have the said constant time. Actually,
- 1:04:54Speaker 5: like showing an impact on the biological world, in the
- 1:04:57Speaker 5: natural world, it's crazy to be actual the whole, even
- 1:05:01Speaker 5: like how natural philosophy turned sort of turned into science.
- 1:05:05Speaker 5: Like if you if anybody's ever read Agrippa and you've
- 1:05:07Speaker 5: read like the first book. I just wanted to diss
- 1:05:10Speaker 5: the first book when I initially read through Agrippa because
- 1:05:12Speaker 5: I was like, this is some wild shit. But truthfully,
- 1:05:17Speaker 5: I think that it goes to show that application of
- 1:05:21Speaker 5: like natural philosophy principles leads to scientific relation in many cases.
- 1:05:26Speaker 5: I mean, Planet the Elders had some wild shit, okay, like,
- 1:05:31Speaker 5: but there was some truth. There was one example I
- 1:05:33Speaker 5: read recently again when I was going through it, where
- 1:05:37Speaker 5: he talks about the dung beetle and it's connection to
- 1:05:39Speaker 5: the moon because the dung beetle when it calls under
- 1:05:42Speaker 5: dunge and lays the eggs, and the eggs essentially sit
- 1:05:45Speaker 5: and grow for twenty eight days and then all these
- 1:05:48Speaker 5: like young beetles come flying out of the dung. And
- 1:05:51Speaker 5: so that's why they were supiated with mood because this
- 1:05:53Speaker 5: twenty eight day cycle.
- 1:05:55Speaker 1: And you're like, that's a weird association to make, but
- 1:05:58Speaker 1: it makes a lot of sense.
- 1:05:59Speaker 5: I mean, they do. Dung beetles have a twenty eight
- 1:06:01Speaker 5: y cycle. It's like a scientifically supported thing. And so
- 1:06:07Speaker 5: they based her that maybe you attributed it to the
- 1:06:09Speaker 5: moon spiritually, but like that connection between the moon and
- 1:06:15Speaker 5: the dung beetle is there. I mean, that's like that
- 1:06:17Speaker 5: cycle connection exists. And so we see a lot of
- 1:06:20Speaker 5: that in sort of this these ancient science.
- 1:06:23Speaker 1: But we also see it's it's cool to get.
- 1:06:25Speaker 5: The validation in like modern day of things that were
- 1:06:29Speaker 5: said fucking forever ago. As crazy as he was, Poet
- 1:06:33Speaker 5: of the Elder had some cool scientific claims.
- 1:06:38Speaker 2: Yeah, it's something I want to uh want to ask you.
- 1:06:40Speaker 3: Do you think you know it's possible that you know,
- 1:06:44Speaker 3: thousands and thousands of years ago they actually kind of
- 1:06:46Speaker 3: understood science more than we think they did.
- 1:06:50Speaker 5: I think a lot of people because here's.
- 1:06:52Speaker 3: The thing, you think that secrets considered now, you know
- 1:06:56Speaker 3: what I'm saying, the secret secrets and the mysteries mysteries
- 1:06:58Speaker 3: that slippers shit.
- 1:07:00Speaker 5: Because I think when we look back and we look
- 1:07:02Speaker 5: at people like playing it over with people like Aristotle
- 1:07:04Speaker 5: and all these folks who you know, had patia, all
- 1:07:07Speaker 5: these few people who had really impactful philosophy, I don't
- 1:07:12Speaker 5: think we give them so much credence in being smart
- 1:07:16Speaker 5: in these like ways of thinking right and logic ands
- 1:07:19Speaker 5: so and so forth. If they were smart in that way,
- 1:07:22Speaker 5: why in God's name do you think they weren't smart
- 1:07:24Speaker 5: in these other ways? Like I don't think like I
- 1:07:26Speaker 5: don't think it's a single application, like the intelligence fans.
- 1:07:29Speaker 1: More than one topic. And actually it was Oh my gosh,
- 1:07:35Speaker 1: I'm blanking on the name it.
- 1:07:39Speaker 5: But Ezra I think it was who was a philosopher.
- 1:07:43Speaker 5: But he also was one of the founding people in
- 1:07:45Speaker 5: medical science, right, And it's like, why so many of
- 1:07:49Speaker 5: the things that we when it comes to treatments and stuff,
- 1:07:53Speaker 5: a lot of it was determined by like magic, magical philosophy,
- 1:07:57Speaker 5: the four humorous and all of that. Even doctor's time
- 1:08:00Speaker 5: informant and Richard Napier, if you've never looked into them,
- 1:08:03Speaker 5: they're fascinating folks. In the seventeenth eighteenth century, if I
- 1:08:06Speaker 5: recall correctly, and they were asked for physicians, and so
- 1:08:10Speaker 5: what they did essentially was they would have people come
- 1:08:14Speaker 5: see them who were sick, and then they would.
- 1:08:18Speaker 1: Take account of all the symptoms.
- 1:08:20Speaker 5: So the color of the urine is someone was flushed
- 1:08:22Speaker 5: with fever, so and so forth. And they would also
- 1:08:25Speaker 5: cast a chart of the decumbenture. So this is a
- 1:08:28Speaker 5: chart when somebody took to bed and they were sick,
- 1:08:30Speaker 5: and based on sort of where the planets were and
- 1:08:33Speaker 5: the symptoms of the sickness, that's what they would use, like,
- 1:08:35Speaker 5: they would use that help them diagnose what was wrong
- 1:08:38Speaker 5: with the individual.
- 1:08:40Speaker 1: And because of this very elaborate.
- 1:08:41Speaker 5: System of the connection between the planets and various diseases
- 1:08:44Speaker 5: and what the planets were attributed to, right, Saturn attributed
- 1:08:47Speaker 5: to bones, mars, inflammations, stuff like that, they were able
- 1:08:51Speaker 5: to offer some remedies that actually, like were effective, also
- 1:08:55Speaker 5: based on planetary correspondence of herbs and various things.
- 1:08:59Speaker 1: Right.
- 1:09:00Speaker 5: So, like this idea that like science or that like
- 1:09:04Speaker 5: medicine and magic or astrology are not compatible is blatantly false.
- 1:09:10Speaker 5: We see this historically and now we're all the the
- 1:09:13Speaker 5: concoctions created actually helpful. No, Okay, some of it clearly
- 1:09:18Speaker 5: was not, Like if you make something out of a
- 1:09:20Speaker 5: poisonous substance, it's not gonna help somebody except for making
- 1:09:23Speaker 5: maybe making him throw up, which I don't know.
- 1:09:26Speaker 1: I guess percation was often a way to help heal somebody.
- 1:09:30Speaker 5: But my point being that they've always been connected and
- 1:09:33Speaker 5: they sort of still are, and I don't think like
- 1:09:36Speaker 5: I think we've sort of thrown the baby out with
- 1:09:37Speaker 5: the bast water the bath water a little bit in
- 1:09:40Speaker 5: the sense of saying, you know, oh, because this is
- 1:09:42Speaker 5: one thing now in modern day is considered pseudoscience talking
- 1:09:44Speaker 5: about astrology, like we're gonna just not even consider that
- 1:09:47Speaker 5: anymore when we like.
- 1:09:49Speaker 1: Do medical treatments and stuff.
- 1:09:51Speaker 5: So personally, like for surgeries and stuff, I have an
- 1:09:55Speaker 5: astrologer that I consult to figure out good times based
- 1:09:59Speaker 5: on like where are mars is and where's Mars at?
- 1:10:02Speaker 5: Because Mars is the ruler of like knives and sharp
- 1:10:05Speaker 5: things and surgery and surgeons. If I'm sick, for example,
- 1:10:10Speaker 5: sometimes I'll cast a horrory chart or I'll look at
- 1:10:13Speaker 5: the astrology and be like, will medicine even help with this?
- 1:10:17Speaker 5: And if the answer is no, I'll kind of just
- 1:10:19Speaker 5: suffer through it. It's been interesting to see, like I've
- 1:10:22Speaker 5: done some comparative analysis where like I will be sick,
- 1:10:26Speaker 5: I'll cast a chart, like a horror chart to say
- 1:10:28Speaker 5: we'll going like we'll going to the doctor and getting
- 1:10:31Speaker 5: this and help, and the horror chart will say no,
- 1:10:34Speaker 5: like it won't actually do anything for you.
- 1:10:36Speaker 1: And then I'll go to.
- 1:10:37Speaker 5: The doctor anyway, and then they'll be like, oh, I
- 1:10:40Speaker 5: think you just have like a viral infection, like there's
- 1:10:42Speaker 5: something we can really give you, so just you know,
- 1:10:45Speaker 5: deal with it.
- 1:10:46Speaker 1: And like that's happened so many times that I also
- 1:10:50Speaker 1: start to like believe the chart.
- 1:10:52Speaker 5: I still do it, like I'm just curious, right, and
- 1:10:54Speaker 5: like if there is something really wrong, like I don't
- 1:10:55Speaker 5: want to not go because right, like all those reasons.
- 1:10:58Speaker 5: But I think it's an interesting core relation that like
- 1:11:00Speaker 5: I've seen personally that my experience the doctor correlates pretty
- 1:11:05Speaker 5: positively to what I get from the Horrory chart, which
- 1:11:09Speaker 5: was just so weird but also incredibly fascinating. So yeah,
- 1:11:14Speaker 5: again that like they can inform each other, there can
- 1:11:16Speaker 5: be cross talk, and I don't need the doctor to
- 1:11:19Speaker 5: confirm my Horrory charts, right, Like that doesn't even take
- 1:11:22Speaker 5: me a the conversation, but I can certainly see that
- 1:11:26Speaker 5: there seems to be some positive correlation there.
- 1:11:28Speaker 4: Well, you never know, he might be a vetic astrologer,
- 1:11:31Speaker 4: which is a possibility nowadays, So a lot of that
- 1:11:33Speaker 4: comes to people like Edgar Casey, Right, Edgar Casey had
- 1:11:38Speaker 4: that really strange foundation that he didn't seem to get
- 1:11:43Speaker 4: from any of his books or anything like that, which
- 1:11:45Speaker 4: was all based on this you know, astrology and all
- 1:11:48Speaker 4: of these other medicines that he's getting. And it was
- 1:11:50Speaker 4: like he was channeling a Scleppius or this ancient healer,
- 1:11:54Speaker 4: and we see how his prescriptions really actually do apply
- 1:11:57Speaker 4: to these heavenly bodies and all the rest this astrology
- 1:12:01Speaker 4: that he you know, it wasn't exposed to. So there's
- 1:12:05Speaker 4: a yeah, a really powerful correlation in there.
- 1:12:08Speaker 1: It's crazy. I actually this is something that.
- 1:12:13Speaker 5: Yeah, if you were a doctor who were yes, And
- 1:12:16Speaker 5: this is something that in magic I think people really
- 1:12:19Speaker 5: sleep on. It's not a problem quite as much in
- 1:12:21Speaker 5: high magic as it is in various forms of like witchcraft.
- 1:12:24Speaker 5: And I'm going to use the term low magic here
- 1:12:26Speaker 5: and not in a denigrating way, just as a distinct
- 1:12:28Speaker 5: like a uh way to distinguish. But people, oh, there's
- 1:12:34Speaker 5: a lot of people who say, you don't need to
- 1:12:36Speaker 5: even bother about the astrology. But like the Grimmore tradition especially,
- 1:12:40Speaker 5: it is so blatantly apparent that the astrology actually matters
- 1:12:44Speaker 5: quite substantially, and that if you ignore it it's.
- 1:12:47Speaker 1: Not going to work. That you think the way that
- 1:12:48Speaker 1: you think it's gonna work.
- 1:12:50Speaker 5: Like if you do a working when a planet is
- 1:12:52Speaker 5: de bilitated, why in God's maybe do you expect that
- 1:12:55Speaker 5: planet do anything helpful for you.
- 1:12:58Speaker 1: It's it's a ridiculous notion.
- 1:13:00Speaker 5: And it's one of those things where again, like apply
- 1:13:03Speaker 5: these sort of standards of a more rigorous scientific.
- 1:13:09Speaker 1: Exploration of things as a way to be able.
- 1:13:11Speaker 5: To measure, like I have done a couple of exermons
- 1:13:14Speaker 5: where I've taken I have more of these on the
- 1:13:17Speaker 5: way where I've done, like a pick a trix talisman,
- 1:13:20Speaker 5: for example, there was one I did one recently that
- 1:13:22Speaker 5: is it is Jupiter in cancer telesman.
- 1:13:25Speaker 1: And you make it to help you see spirits.
- 1:13:30Speaker 5: And I made multiple of these talismans using various conditions.
- 1:13:33Speaker 5: So though the one variable that was consistent was Jupiter
- 1:13:36Speaker 5: is in cancer, but there were other variables, like I
- 1:13:38Speaker 5: had the moon and the sign of that recommended I
- 1:13:40Speaker 5: asked of the tign I recommended. I had various planets
- 1:13:44Speaker 5: with positive like Jupiter needs to be trying or in
- 1:13:48Speaker 5: a positive aspect of Venus, for example, And so I
- 1:13:51Speaker 5: had some talismans that did have that, and I had
- 1:13:53Speaker 5: others that didn't, and I had some where Jupiter was
- 1:13:57Speaker 5: opposing on malefic planet. Just essentially taking the recommended astrological
- 1:14:03Speaker 5: weather around the creation of the talisman and doing some
- 1:14:07Speaker 5: things and doing not doing other things and seeing the
- 1:14:09Speaker 5: effect that it would actually have on the efficacy of
- 1:14:12Speaker 5: the talisman itself. And then I've given these to people
- 1:14:16Speaker 5: and they're testing them for me, and I'm asking essentially
- 1:14:19Speaker 5: for reports back to see, okay, which talismans worked the best.
- 1:14:25Speaker 1: And which ones didn't. And I didn't tell them what
- 1:14:27Speaker 1: teleisan was for.
- 1:14:29Speaker 5: I just said, hey, when you're doing ritual, because all
- 1:14:31Speaker 5: my friends are ceremonialgicians for the most part, I was like,
- 1:14:34Speaker 5: when you're doing ritual and you're doing things with spirits,
- 1:14:36Speaker 5: I was like, have this on you or wear it
- 1:14:38Speaker 5: as a necklace, whatever you want, and let me know
- 1:14:40Speaker 5: if it changes anything. So I don't have the results
- 1:14:43Speaker 5: quite yet, but I asked them to give it Like
- 1:14:46Speaker 5: I think when I say six months of testing to
- 1:14:49Speaker 5: get the results back, but like those are the kind
- 1:14:51Speaker 5: of experiments you can do from like a scientifically rigorous
- 1:14:54Speaker 5: perspective to find your variables, Like don't tell your testers,
- 1:14:59Speaker 5: but it's for that is not a blind study, right,
- 1:15:02Speaker 5: So mine is just a singular blind studying the sense
- 1:15:04Speaker 5: that my testers are blind, but I am not guess results,
- 1:15:08Speaker 5: record them, and then try it with like a bunch
- 1:15:10Speaker 5: of different things. There's nothing stopping you from doing this
- 1:15:12Speaker 5: kind of experimentation. Then this is like what I think,
- 1:15:15Speaker 5: it's a fun part about magic, Like really have fun
- 1:15:18Speaker 5: with they experiment, figure out what is needed, what is
- 1:15:20Speaker 5: not needed, what has to be included, and what are
- 1:15:22Speaker 5: something to work what maybe doesn't have to be included.
- 1:15:25Speaker 5: And this can be informed by spirits too, right, Like
- 1:15:29Speaker 5: this is so many people I think don't like that
- 1:15:32Speaker 5: I do this, maybe, but I don't really give a shit.
- 1:15:35Speaker 5: When a spirit tells me something, They're like, go do
- 1:15:37Speaker 5: this thing, and I'm like, cool, why.
- 1:15:40Speaker 1: Do you want to do this thing?
- 1:15:41Speaker 5: And they either won't tell me or they'll give me
- 1:15:42Speaker 5: a reason. I don't just take the spirit's word for it,
- 1:15:45Speaker 5: like I will. I will test it. I'll say, Okay,
- 1:15:48Speaker 5: I'm gonna do it with this change that you suggested,
- 1:15:50Speaker 5: and I'm gonna do it without the change that you suggested,
- 1:15:53Speaker 5: And let's see how both of them work. More often
- 1:15:55Speaker 5: than I works better with the way the spirits sudgusted.
- 1:15:58Speaker 5: But like again, it's the way it's trying to validate
- 1:16:00Speaker 5: the technologies that are given to you through spirit, trance
- 1:16:03Speaker 5: or ritual or whatever. I think people will oftentimes just
- 1:16:07Speaker 5: take these things on faith, which is fine, but like
- 1:16:10Speaker 5: there's like just because you've got it in nosis or
- 1:16:14Speaker 5: upg or whatever however.
- 1:16:16Speaker 1: You received it doesn't mean that it's.
- 1:16:18Speaker 5: Free from scrutiny and Cerinly, if you want to share
- 1:16:21Speaker 5: this technique, it helps to people to say, hey, I've
- 1:16:24Speaker 5: validated this. Here are people you can talk to you
- 1:16:26Speaker 5: that I validated it with to get their experience. You
- 1:16:28Speaker 5: don't have to take my word for it as a
- 1:16:30Speaker 5: person sell you whatever I'm trying to sell you, go
- 1:16:33Speaker 5: ask other people and let their testimony sort of be
- 1:16:37Speaker 5: the enhancer behind whatever technology you're pushing forth.
- 1:16:41Speaker 4: So I think you just recently had a solomonic magician
- 1:16:45Speaker 4: talking about summoning the four wins before doing any solomonic ceremony,
- 1:16:50Speaker 4: because he's says, right, right, David, right, how much faster
- 1:16:56Speaker 4: and better it works, just because he's he's playing around
- 1:16:59Speaker 4: with it, and he's using the techniques from these different
- 1:17:02Speaker 4: things and applying logic and applying his own magical senses
- 1:17:06Speaker 4: to it. So I think that's that's a very important
- 1:17:08Speaker 4: part that I think a lot of people are missing
- 1:17:10Speaker 4: out on. You can't just stick to the rote tradition.
- 1:17:13Speaker 4: You actually have to find what works better for you.
- 1:17:15Speaker 5: Yeah, well it actually is. So I recently worked his
- 1:17:19Speaker 5: Clavist intelligence rum. I did the whole work, the whole
- 1:17:21Speaker 5: ritual with a magic group that I do a lot
- 1:17:25Speaker 5: of work with, and I did the ritual without the winds,
- 1:17:32Speaker 5: like because I emailed David and I was like, hey,
- 1:17:34Speaker 5: I know you talked about like this whole wind conturation
- 1:17:36Speaker 5: of adding it in and I was like, I would
- 1:17:38Speaker 5: like to test that, but this is the first one
- 1:17:39Speaker 5: I'm doing. Is I'm not going to incorporate this time.
- 1:17:42Speaker 5: But his Clavist Spiritum book is stuck in customs right now,
- 1:17:46Speaker 5: which is driving me crazy because I want to get
- 1:17:48Speaker 5: my hands on it. But essimply all this to say
- 1:17:52Speaker 5: that we've done the one ritual without the winds. Like,
- 1:17:54Speaker 5: on the next ritual that I do with his system,
- 1:17:57Speaker 5: I want to incorporate the winds to do that exact
- 1:17:59Speaker 5: same experiment, right, Like I want to say for myself,
- 1:18:01Speaker 5: people have said it, but I want to see and
- 1:18:04Speaker 5: so yeah, I'm doing that expermentation.
- 1:18:06Speaker 1: I think it's so fun and important. Cute fan of drink.
- 1:18:11Speaker 1: Any you guys got him on.
- 1:18:12Speaker 5: And I was like, oh yeah.
- 1:18:16Speaker 3: I said I I was reading his stuff since I
- 1:18:19Speaker 3: got into this stuff.
- 1:18:20Speaker 1: Yeah, me too, yea.
- 1:18:21Speaker 2: So it was really wild for me to actually have
- 1:18:23Speaker 2: them more.
- 1:18:23Speaker 3: I was like, Wow, is there anything else you would
- 1:18:28Speaker 3: like to talk about before we wrap it up, or
- 1:18:31Speaker 3: anything or anything thank's worth mentioning?
- 1:18:33Speaker 1: I mean, I don't think so. I think we covered
- 1:18:35Speaker 1: a lot of great topics.
- 1:18:36Speaker 2: Yeah, you talked a lot and the hour into twenty minutes.
- 1:18:40Speaker 2: Haven't you got anything?
- 1:18:42Speaker 4: No, I'm good, this is This has been a great interview.
- 1:18:44Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, yeah, there's definitely things I'd like to uh
- 1:18:48Speaker 3: definitely have you on again in the future, I'm sure.
- 1:18:50Speaker 5: Oh yeah, I know people think feel free to hit
- 1:18:52Speaker 5: me up bond socials too. I love talking about I
- 1:18:54Speaker 5: tell people all the time, you mentioned like a grippa
- 1:18:56Speaker 5: to me, you mentioned a could of them, or you
- 1:18:59Speaker 5: mentioned any kind of science topic, and I'm here and
- 1:19:00Speaker 5: I will talk to you, talk to you for hours
- 1:19:02Speaker 5: like this is not this is my life.
- 1:19:05Speaker 1: I love it all so much and had.
- 1:19:07Speaker 5: Less like we should talk about your experiments. I'd love
- 1:19:10Speaker 5: to hear how all that's going for.
- 1:19:12Speaker 4: Sure, sure, absolutely, yeah alchemy mondays, I'm gonna get the
- 1:19:16Speaker 4: socks all it out again this Monday and we're gonna
- 1:19:19Speaker 4: do some more experimentation.
- 1:19:20Speaker 1: It's gonna be great. Sounds great.
- 1:19:24Speaker 3: Oh you know what it was meaning it was meant
- 1:19:25Speaker 3: to say before. I don't know if it was Jabir,
- 1:19:28Speaker 3: I've been high end that you were trying to think
- 1:19:30Speaker 3: of before. I think he's considered the father of chemistry.
- 1:19:34Speaker 2: He was an.
- 1:19:35Speaker 3: Alchemist where I think even some of like kind of
- 1:19:38Speaker 3: like the protocols they have now are almost like kind
- 1:19:41Speaker 3: of like a duplicate or you know, his some of
- 1:19:44Speaker 3: his stuff almost kind of trends, you know, got moved over,
- 1:19:47Speaker 3: like the way he would do certain things and write
- 1:19:49Speaker 3: it down kind of because staples like he was reused now.
- 1:19:54Speaker 5: Alchemy is so fascinating because you have not to go
- 1:19:57Speaker 5: on a whole different rant topic. If you guys have time,
- 1:20:00Speaker 5: we can get into this. But alchemy is a fascinating
- 1:20:05Speaker 5: field because you sort of have two different time periods
- 1:20:09Speaker 5: of alchemy.
- 1:20:09Speaker 1: You have alchemy when it.
- 1:20:11Speaker 5: Was sort of initially born as like a discipline and
- 1:20:13Speaker 5: then you have it's later you have its resurgeons sort
- 1:20:16Speaker 5: of in the Renaissance period, and then you have sort
- 1:20:17Speaker 5: of secondary resurgeons for alchemy became entirely psychological.
- 1:20:21Speaker 1: I hate that period.
- 1:20:23Speaker 5: I prefer to go to the early period where alchemy
- 1:20:26Speaker 5: was really attributed more to these sort of scientific experiments.
- 1:20:29Speaker 1: I mean, these people were.
- 1:20:30Speaker 5: Trying to understand matter, and this is sometimes where a
- 1:20:33Speaker 5: lot of plants actually get their correspondences from where you know,
- 1:20:37Speaker 5: they would do an extraction, say, oh, the mercury of
- 1:20:40Speaker 5: this plant is a specific color, it's gold. Therefore it's
- 1:20:44Speaker 5: associated with the sun. Like these are the sort of
- 1:20:46Speaker 5: ways that people were applying this natural philosophy to this
- 1:20:50Speaker 5: more scientific exploration of various plants. Because we talked about
- 1:20:53Speaker 5: like the hidden virtues and the cold virtues, as the
- 1:20:55Speaker 5: Grippa calls them. They're virtues that aren't necessarily apparent all
- 1:21:00Speaker 5: the time, and like the physical manifestation of things, they
- 1:21:02Speaker 5: are sometimes which is why like the sunflowers with the
- 1:21:05Speaker 5: sun because it resembles the glyph of the sun and
- 1:21:08Speaker 5: it's also yellow, and it also like when the sun
- 1:21:11Speaker 5: is up, the flower actually look towards the sun, right
- 1:21:15Speaker 5: and so you have all those characteristics in it as well.
- 1:21:18Speaker 5: But then when alchemists, we're doing a lot of these
- 1:21:20Speaker 5: sort of extractions of things.
- 1:21:24Speaker 1: We're not looking at.
- 1:21:25Speaker 5: The hidden essence, the hidden inside of the planet, if
- 1:21:28Speaker 5: you will. And that also has an impact on the
- 1:21:31Speaker 5: correspondence if you can assign to things.
- 1:21:33Speaker 1: And it's interesting too because.
- 1:21:34Speaker 5: For example, a Grippa also talks about in book one,
- 1:21:37Speaker 5: he'll say, the onion is both lunar and it's martial
- 1:21:41Speaker 5: because by itself, it's white, it is.
- 1:21:43Speaker 1: Full of water.
- 1:21:44Speaker 5: Right, those are all lunar things. But if you cut it,
- 1:21:46Speaker 5: it causes pain. That's very martial characteristics. And if you
- 1:21:50Speaker 5: were to do it, lookt onion, which if you've never
- 1:21:52Speaker 5: done before you should. It's actually kind of fun.
- 1:21:54Speaker 1: Smell awful though, do it outside.
- 1:21:58Speaker 5: Like the chemicals that are in the mercury of the
- 1:22:01Speaker 5: onion are painful.
- 1:22:03Speaker 1: Like if you actually breathe.
- 1:22:05Speaker 3: In, hold on your voice to start to screw up
- 1:22:09Speaker 3: for a second, hold on, try to try talking again.
- 1:22:13Speaker 2: Yeah yeah, yeah, sometimes it will like lit you out.
- 1:22:15Speaker 2: You have to like let it catch up.
- 1:22:16Speaker 3: Sorry, okay, you want to go on from I think
- 1:22:19Speaker 3: cutting the No wait, no, you were saying.
- 1:22:22Speaker 1: Cutting the onion. So what you cut again? Is it
- 1:22:28Speaker 1: still going?
- 1:22:30Speaker 2: No, I think you're good.
- 1:22:31Speaker 1: Now, Okay, when you.
- 1:22:33Speaker 5: Cut into an onion, it causes harm to you, right,
- 1:22:36Speaker 5: the enzymes cause harm, and so that's why it has
- 1:22:38Speaker 5: the marshal quality to it.
- 1:22:40Speaker 1: And when you actually do an extraction of an onion
- 1:22:42Speaker 1: and you get extract the mercury and the sulfur.
- 1:22:45Speaker 5: Uh, if you were to run that through an alcms,
- 1:22:47Speaker 5: which I've done before, and that's the words why I'm
- 1:22:49Speaker 5: talking about this, which is liquid chromatography, gas chromatography, and
- 1:22:54Speaker 5: the mass back essentially a way of breaking down the
- 1:22:56Speaker 5: molecule looking at its individual atoms. You'll see that the
- 1:23:02Speaker 5: components within the sulfur and the mercury, now that they're concentrated,
- 1:23:08Speaker 5: they're painful.
- 1:23:09Speaker 1: If you like breathe it in.
- 1:23:11Speaker 5: It burns the inside of your nose and your mucous membranes.
- 1:23:15Speaker 5: And so we even see that that martial quality, which
- 1:23:17Speaker 5: is like a hidden quality. You're technically speaking, until you
- 1:23:20Speaker 5: bruise the onion of some kind, that's like a hidden
- 1:23:23Speaker 5: the coal virtue that you can elucidate using alchemy. And
- 1:23:27Speaker 5: now we have ways of testing all chemical things on
- 1:23:29Speaker 5: a more scientific level, which is great, but just the
- 1:23:32Speaker 5: fact that if you had been had that mercury and
- 1:23:35Speaker 5: you smelled it and you got the pain, that would
- 1:23:37Speaker 5: also have indicated to you that the onion has this
- 1:23:40Speaker 5: martial nature to it as well. So alchemy has always
- 1:23:44Speaker 5: been really scientific, right, It's been a way to explore
- 1:23:46Speaker 5: the natural world and all the hidden virtues that lie
- 1:23:49Speaker 5: within the various parts of the world, whether it be
- 1:23:51Speaker 5: minerals or plants or whatever. And that's that's really what
- 1:23:55Speaker 5: I love about alchemy. That's what I think is so interesting,
- 1:23:59Speaker 5: that it's like another way of exploring the natural world
- 1:24:01Speaker 5: using some of these more ancient philosophies that are still
- 1:24:04Speaker 5: applicable in modern day.
- 1:24:07Speaker 1: Okay, now I'm done.
- 1:24:10Speaker 4: Well, I just wanted to throw in there that for me,
- 1:24:13Speaker 4: I don't see a real separation between the psychological and
- 1:24:17Speaker 4: the more natural forms of alchemy, because the original sort
- 1:24:22Speaker 4: of Greek mentality was that everything is existing inside of
- 1:24:25Speaker 4: the mind of Zeus, the news of Zeus, right, And
- 1:24:29Speaker 4: so what they were doing is they were finding the
- 1:24:31Speaker 4: hidden properties because it found the hidden properties in themselves
- 1:24:34Speaker 4: as well. You've got the tie between astrology and personality
- 1:24:37Speaker 4: types and all the rest of these things that go
- 1:24:39Speaker 4: directly into alchemy. And I think, you know, when people
- 1:24:43Speaker 4: sort of see that linkage between the mind and everything
- 1:24:46Speaker 4: and this vast web of associations that are created from it,
- 1:24:50Speaker 4: it's really hard not to you know, apply alchemical principles
- 1:24:54Speaker 4: to psychology in some ways.
- 1:24:56Speaker 1: You know, Yeah, I definitely see that.
- 1:24:58Speaker 5: I also there's also an aspect, right that a lot
- 1:25:01Speaker 5: of our associations are based on perception, and again, perception
- 1:25:04Speaker 5: is something that the brain handles.
- 1:25:06Speaker 7: So yeah, yeah, I think if you know, especially with
- 1:25:12Speaker 7: the Islamic ones, I mean, those seem to be the
- 1:25:14Speaker 7: oldest ones I've come across, some of those alchemists.
- 1:25:17Speaker 2: You look at the stuff that they're actually doing with
- 1:25:20Speaker 2: like plants and stuff. Cool.
- 1:25:23Speaker 3: Yeah yeah, yeah really there, like how they even had
- 1:25:26Speaker 3: charts of like like and this to do that, to
- 1:25:29Speaker 3: make it like they really knew like how to move
- 1:25:31Speaker 3: things around. Actually yep, it's like, god damn, like I
- 1:25:35Speaker 3: don't even know how to like I have problem making
- 1:25:38Speaker 3: chocolate though, you know, you.
- 1:25:41Speaker 2: Know these guys, it's making all sorts of crazy shit.
- 1:25:44Speaker 1: Oh that's a great book.
- 1:25:45Speaker 3: Yeah, but it's thank you very much Aster for coming on.
- 1:25:50Speaker 2: That was really that was a lot of fun actually
- 1:25:52Speaker 2: for me. Thank you, thank you.
- 1:25:53Speaker 1: Yeah, episode absolute pleasure.
- 1:25:55Speaker 5: Thanks you for having me on, Thanks for talking about science,
- 1:25:57Speaker 5: spirituality to the best topics.
- 1:26:00Speaker 3: Yes, oh, definitely definitely and yeah, we'll definitely get you
- 1:26:02Speaker 3: on again in the future. Hello Giant wants you to
- 1:26:05Speaker 3: remind everybody all your shows where they can find you.
- 1:26:07Speaker 4: All right, you can find me on Mondays on YouTube
- 1:26:10Speaker 4: doing Alchemy Mondays. You can find me on Tuesdays doing
- 1:26:13Speaker 4: seven seven seven with Nick, also on YouTube, and on
- 1:26:16Speaker 4: Thursdays we've got the Magical Mailbag, so send in your
- 1:26:19Speaker 4: occult slash, esthoteric slash paranormal stories to Headless Giant podcast
- 1:26:24Speaker 4: at gmail dot com. Friday's usually doing something with Nick
- 1:26:27Speaker 4: or Jules doing some kind of a crazy thing to
- 1:26:31Speaker 4: check it out. And then on Sundays I've got the
- 1:26:34Speaker 4: Trialogus with Ethan and Ricardo. So check all those shows out,
- 1:26:38Speaker 4: put the bell on, have fun.
- 1:26:41Speaker 3: Yes, thank you very much, Helus and Astra. Please let
- 1:26:44Speaker 3: everybody know where they can find all your stuff again.
- 1:26:47Speaker 5: Yeah, so I'm on Instagram as astrologist cl so c
- 1:26:51Speaker 5: I a L and then you can find most of
- 1:26:54Speaker 5: my work. I'm trying to make it, I guess a
- 1:26:58Speaker 5: greater effort to public some magical experiments and stuff on
- 1:27:01Speaker 5: zeb stack, which is titled Celestial Crucible. So I'm actually
- 1:27:05Speaker 5: our ritual Groove's most recent workthrough of the clouds intelligence are.
- 1:27:09Speaker 1: Richell is up on zebstack if you want to take
- 1:27:12Speaker 1: a look.
- 1:27:12Speaker 5: So yeah, there's some some great stuff there with magic
- 1:27:16Speaker 5: squares and everything too.
- 1:27:18Speaker 1: But yeah, that's.
- 1:27:20Speaker 3: It awesome, Thank you very much again, and uh yeah,
- 1:27:25Speaker 3: like I said after the show, if you don't want
- 1:27:27Speaker 3: to send me those links, I'll make sure.
- 1:27:28Speaker 2: I add them to the show for sure. Sounds good,
- 1:27:31Speaker 2: and thank you.
- 1:27:31Speaker 3: Everybody who was in the chat looked like everybody was
- 1:27:34Speaker 3: thoroughly enjoying this as much as I was.
- 1:27:36Speaker 2: And that's why we go live.
- 1:27:38Speaker 3: And uh yeah, and until the next one, everybody be well,
- 1:27:41Speaker 3: Lada
- 1:27:42Speaker 1: Thanks everyone, Bye bye,