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Hello DBT, Welcome to Dao Bums. I sometimes humorously refer to myself as a Confucian NeoPlatonist. Your description of your own studies in this area remind me very much of my own, with interest in Magic, Martial arts and other odd and obscure studies going back to my late childhood. I was probably one of the few twelve year olds in Southern California with my own copies of Crowley's Magick in Theory and Practice and Waite's Book of Ceremonial Magic, among a few others, to thumb through. I don't have time to speak more of my childhood, much less the following sixty years here, though I have posted a little more elsewhere on Dao Bums, as well as many other things which you might find interesting. Sincerely, Zhongyongdaoist, AKA, ZYD, its easier to type.

I have just finished the first major weather spell in what I hope will relieve the Drought and excess heat in the Southwest of the United States. I hope I will not have made a fool of myself by posting on this here, but I have had success breaking droughts before and doing some weather magic on a smaller scale, and I hope that success can be scaled up for the sake of the lives of millions of people who will otherwise suffer terribly. ZYD

There is a large literature of scholarly work on the subject. I was always interested in history, however, especially after I read the first book of Agrippa's Three Books of Occult Philosophy and realized that there were significant differences between traditional magic as practiced in the Renaissance and magic as it developed and practiced in the "magical revival" of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, I became very interested in intellectual history and the practice of magic in the Renaissance, and I read widely in the history of magic in the Renaissance and Middle Ages. About 1976 I realized based on what I knew of Platonism from this reading that Platonism seemed to provide a rational framework for the practice of magic in the sense that Agrippa wrote about it, and widened my historical reading back to the Hellenistic period and I am quite familiar with the literature written before 1990, and I am sure that the literature has continued to expand since then. Offhand I cannot think of a single work that details the whole of the period that you mention. As an overview of the whole period Lynn Thornike's eight volume History of Magic and Experimental Science was and probably still is considered to be the scholarly standard, and can be downloaded from Archive.org, this will link to Volume One. As an overview and possible source of more recent scholarship the Wikipedia article on Western Esotericism and a special article on the Academic study of Western esotericism look like a useful start. I hope that this is helpful. ZYD

If by Zhong, you mean me, I prefer ZYD, as I note in my signature "Zhongyongdaoist AKA ZYD it's easier to type", aside from that, thank you for your generous appraisal of my contributions to the thread. In one of my posts in this thread I bring up the notion of "formal cause" and I want to expand on it a little bit because it is a very important concept useful in thinking about both Chinese and Western traditions: And In traditional Western magic as expounded in the work of Cornelius Agrippa for example, the idea of Formal Cause is central to the doctrine of "Occult Virtues" an aspect of the tradition much neglected by the Nineteenth Century revival of magic. In a post which I made sometime back I examine this in detail: and related to such Daoist concepts as Wuwei here: As the above posts develop they examine the idea of Formal Cause and how it relates to the topics. I hope these posts will be interesting and informative. ZYD

Lynn Thorndyke didn't call his, literally exhaustive, eight volume history of science: A History of Magic and Experimental Science For no reason, he did it because he had to. By the way, my much used and well worn copy of the Key of Solomon, refers to its magical operations as experiments. Historically magic and also alchemy, were basically the "experiment science" of Philosophy, largely that of Plato and Aristotle, as it existed in antiquity and through the Renaissance and into early modern times. ZYD

I taught myself hypnosis from an encyclopedia article when I was eight or so. I had a friend at the time who was easy to hypnotize and I had a lot of experience. At a certain point I realized that hypnosis could be dangerous and stopped doing it for years. I bought a lot of books to learn more at some point, and in my late teens was quite good at it and wondered if it might be useful in spiritual training. based on my own experience with the training that I did and some later experiments with another good subject I decided that it may be helpful, but was not necessary, so I left it alone until the late eighties or thereabouts when I met people into Neuro-linguistic programming. From them I learned that the techniques of Milton Ericson had been assimilated into and refined within Neuro-linguistic programming and set about studying and practicing that, and those techniques for hypnosis. Again the bottom line is that while such techniques are useful they are not necessary, nor are spiritual practices reducible to them. I said all the above to make clear that I have a significant background in hypnosis and related topics. Now for a quick look at the history of hypnosis. Modern hypnosis began in the late 1700s with the work of Franz Anton Mesmer who developed a healing technique based on what he called "animal magnetism" and using it to heal people, a technique which also could involve trance induction. Skipping over a lot of history to the mid 1800s, the idea of animal magnetism survived and was very influential, Poe for example wrote a story called Mesmeric Revelation, the link provides a lot of good good background information as well as the story. In the middle of the 1800s the skeptical Scot James Braid said that mesmeric trance was all suggestion and created the alternative name hypnosis and after that the notion of animal magnetism and thus energy tranmission, qi, shen, whatever, was banished from the field of hypnosis, this link to the Wikipedia article is also more informative than I thought it would be, I looked at it to remind me who that Scotsman was, and I was reminded of exactly how much interesting history I was only vaguely remembering, but was leaving out. So bottom line, hypnosis is not directly involved but suggestion may contribute to some aspects of the phenomena. All of that said, Shadow training is apparently in important aspect of Daoist training and mastering and using one's own shadow as well as the shadows of others is part of Daoist teaching. Professor Jerry Allen Johnson teaches in it his books. I have all of his books and he talks about it in two of them at least. I picked up my copy of Daoist Magical Transformation Skills: Dream Magic, Shape-Shifting,Soul Travel, and Sex Magic and found a section on it beginning on p. 72. So I guess Naruto is not simply inventing Shadow Clone Jutsu. I hope this information is interesting and helpful, ZYD

Lesser Banishing Pentagram Ritual In the original Golden Dawn it was the first ritual that the member was taught and has become kind of standard starting point for the Western Ritual tradition. I first came across it in Crowley's Magick in Theory and Practice which I bought in the Summer of 1963 when I was twelve as I have mentioned elsewhere on Dao Bums. I did not actually start using it or doing any magical practices until the Summer of 1968 because sometime in 1964 I looked at my cute little library of magic books which I think at the time was about ten to fifteen books, and decided that it was too early to start doing things like that and I stopped buying books and just did Hatha Yoga, which I had started in the Summer of 1961 watching Richard Hittleman's Yoga for Health television program. I became interested in Yoga because of a Superman comic book that I read in which Superman had had to deal with an alien from a distant galaxy who practiced astral projection to explore outer space and came here to earth. In a note the c0mic mentioned that Yoga practicioner's practiced astral projection, and I decided I want to do it too. By the standards of the time I was a strange kid, there was no Harry Potter then like there is now to inspire young would be magicians, with twin interests in magic and science and intended to be a physicist and magician when I grew up. In the Summer of 1966 my brother came back from college and brought with him the Tao Te Ching, as it was still called at that time, the I Ching and Tai Chi Chuan, which started my interesting in Daoism and Chinese training methods. I started buying books again that Summer and started practicing magic using such things as the Lesser Pentagram Ritual and the Middle Pillar exercise in the Summer of 1968, when I figured I was old enough to start training in magic. I will explain more about what happened from 1968 to the early Seventies in later posts. ZYD

The following presumes a good understanding of the Microcosm/Macrocosm relation as I outlined above. In this discussion I will be looking at two principles fundamental to Sadhu's Hermetic perspective and which he talks both about and around in many places in the whole book, which taken together actually give a fair picture of what he is trying to both convey and hide. These terms are defined in a glossary that is part of the introduction as follows: Page 26: Egregor: is a collective entity, such as a nation, state, society, religions and sects and their adherents, and even minor human organizations. The structure of Egregors is similar to that of human beings. They have physical bodies (that is, collectively all the bodies of those who belong to the particular Egregor) and also astral and mental ones; the Egregor being the sum total of all these elements. Page 29: Tourbillons or Vortexes: are astral creations of force which are the bases of all astro-mental realizations. Tradition ascribes the funnel like forms to them. Knowledge of the laws ruling over the tourbillons and their construction, is one of the foremost principles of magic. Although it CANNOT be given in open language to the public at large, it has been sufficiently described for initiates in this course, under the veil of Kabbalistic structures. The most guarded secrets of Hermetic magic are: finding the point of support for the tourbillon on the physical plane, and the formula of transition from the astral to the physical world. The first thing to note is that egregor as used in this classical sense is not to be confused with egregor as used in Chaos Magic. In chaos magic an egregor is solely the creation of human beings which starts out as a "thought form" and evolves to higher levels until it becomes a "god". This is a collective entity like a classical egregor, but a classical egregor is considered to also consist of spiritual beings who have an independent existence and are not considered to be creations of human beings, and can range from Gods and Archangels down to elemental and nature spirits, as Sadhu says on p. 250, "into the Egregor—apart from the pentagrammatical beings of evolutionary type (living men and elementars)—the energy of the elementals, Spirituum Directorum (leading spirits) and even Angels should also be attracted." The modern tendency is to dismiss such notions as irrational fantasies, but there are worldviews such as Platonism in which they are parts of a very complete and rational model of reality. The concept of egregor, sometimes spelled with a final "e" as in the link I am about to give, is quite common in occultist circles as this site on Egregores outlines. As I studied Sadhu I came to the conclusion that an egregor could have only a single incarnate human. as he says on page 80 in an analysis of magical operations, “the person acting uses as his starting point of realization, just the third, that is, the physical plane. it can be the body of the operator himself, or outer objects.” and the rest of it be made up of spiritual beings, thus a single person performing a ritual such as the banishing ritual of the pentagram could be viewed as creating a temporary egregor for a specific magical purpose and I started to view ritual as creating a "unification" of microcosm and macrocosm which was in a sense special, and to which I gave the name of "intercosm" to represent its aspect of unifying microcosm and macrocosm in a single cooperative action. The training which Bardon gives however, does not involve this type of interaction, but rather a training of the microcosmic abilities of willpower and imagination. Even the parts of Bardon that do mention "ritual" training are not training like this, but rather a conditioning process within oneself. The procedures which he gives for manifesting "god" are more complex and their application in his book on magical evocation does involve summoning a spirit, but the core is still purely an exercise of the power of the microcosm through willpower and imagination. I will deal with these practices in a separate discussion due to their complexity. As I thought about these things I began to wonder if there was something special in ritual training involving this union of microcosm and Macrocosm that was unique and could not be duplicated by the purely microcosmic training of Bardon, or for that matter similar training in Crowley or other authors, though the matter is more complex in Crowley and will require its own discussion. Just to make clear Sadhu himself taught exercises for development of the microcosmic development of willpower and imagination and had a book titled Concentration which was devoted to such exercises which he considered essential to mastering his Hermetic teachings, but it existed in a wider context than Bardon, so such exercises can be used with material such as I am expounding here, but they should also be complemented by the ritual experience such as I have outlined above. This is part of the reason why I believe that Bardon type teachings and Golden Dawn practices are not mutually exclusive, however, as I will develop in future posts, they are not necessary to success in these practices either. As for Vortexes in Sadhu they are closely related to egregors though the relation develops in various discussions spread throughout the book which the reader must synthesize through diligent study and reflection. They are an important part of manifesting magical results in the physical world, which is Sadhu's reason for talking around them so much. They are important in the Golden Dawn and I will be dealing with them in more detail in future posts, mostly from a Golden Dawn perspective, which since it was originally not intended to be made public, is more revealing than Sadhu's discussion, though all taken together reveals a clearer picture and I will examine them more in future posts. I realize that the above is rather condensed and I hope that I have been clear enough. Question are naturally welcome and will be answered, just as further posts will be made, as time permits. ZYD

I haven't had time to write anything specific for this thread, but I have been reviewing my posts in general and have some further comments about some issues that I raise in my review of Benebell Wen's excellent work as mentioned above: I needed to keep a review short and so I did not reference this thread: Agrippa's Doctrine of Occult Virtues, a core concept examined and explained Which deals with the most important important, and importantly, most misunderstood, aspects of Traditional Magic, which is the notion of "Occult Virtues", which is just Latin for "Hidden Powers", and is an aspect of Traditional Magic that was left out of the Nineteenth Century revival of Western magic because its philosophical basis in Plato and Aristotle was no longer understood by the people who were researching magic and trying to understand it in terms that seemed "reasonable" circa 1800, but which had already been seriously corrupted by the Seventeenth Century revival of Epicurean materialism under the guise of "Corpuscular Philosophy", and which meshed well with nominalist version of Christianity, which are the antecedents of modern fundamentalism, as opposed to those influenced by Western Philosophy, which were suppressed even by the Roman Catholic Church during the polemical war with Protestantism, which through the Patrisitc writings had been strongly influenced by not only by Plato and Aristotle, but also by "esoteric" writings, such as the Hermetica. The result being that Occult Virtues were simply dismissed as quint superstitions that owed their influence to the suggestibility of the practitioner and not to any inherent power which they contributed to the practice of magic. The astrological aspects of magic suffered a similar fate, and the result was the creation of "Ceremonial Magic" as a standalone practice based solely on the will power and imagination of the practitioner. So, what does this have to do with Chinese Talismanic Magic? It points back to the importance of these Occult Virtues to the practice of magic in general, which should be rooted in what Agrippa calls "Natural Magic", the subject of the first book of his Three Books on Occult Philosohy, and thus the dependency of magical practice in general, and talismanic magic in particular on the nature, and thus the occult virtues, of those things used as the basis of the talisman. Now the important part of Aristotle's theory for Occult Virtues and thus for Talismans is the Formal Cause, the Form, or in the Greek, morphe, is the source of the inherent potential to become an active "Occult Virtue". Now where this ties in which traditional Chinese practice and its root in Chinese Cosmology is in the traditional Chinese Li/Qi or Principle/Substance Cosmology and its relation with the Aristotelian Hylye/Morphe or matter/form cosmology, which I examine in detail in the posts in the "A Science of Wu Wei?" thread beginning here: While I have mentioned the similarity between Li/Qi and Hylomophism many times in the past on Dao Bums, in these posts I examine it in detail with quotes from the Neiye, Dao De Ching, and the Zhuangzi, and establish the importance of Li, and thus of Li/Qi as an explanatory concept to traditional Daoism. I may also quote some from the Huainanzi, but I can't remember offhand whether I do or not, but I do reference and possibly quote from an essay by Harold Roth in which he basically argues the some point and even cites some of the same references to Zhuangzi's writings as I do, as well as quoting extremely suggestive quotes from the Huainanzi which indicate that the idea continues to influence Daoist thought into the middle Han. That these ideas are important is confirmed by Professor Jerry Alan Johnson's: Daoist Mineral, Plants & Animal – Final Edition Which is basically a text on Chinese "Natural Magic". In his discussion Professor Johnson seems to take the notion that the power or occult virtue of the mineral, plant and animal agents with which he is concerned is inherent in them and is only activated by the practitioner. This impression is confirmed when one looks at his ritual for opening and activating a mineral, i.e. page 101 and elsewhere in a ritual that occupies pgs. 89-101. While some of Professor Johnson's language "imprinting" and "programming"; could be used to give a reductionist interpretation, such as the practitioner is only creating a stone as a physical focal point for a thought form, he also uses the word activate in a way which implies that he is activating something in the "Stone of Power", and that his imprint/programming is only a direction to fulfill one of several possible powers of the stone, such as protect, heal or spiritual development. How one further interprets this is going to depend on their personal ontological commitments, but from a perspective of both Daoist and Western magical tradition, a belief in the Occult Virtues is just as "rational" a belief as any reductionist one, which would write off Occult Virtues on a priori grounds. As a person who has spent decades practicing magic in both Western and Chinese modes, and also understands both the details and implications of post 1900 physics and the history of "the Scientific Revolution", as well as the basis of the earlier worldview and it implications, I favor a belief in the efficacy of Occult Virtues, but I am not going to further debate the subject in this thread. I have addressed it to a certain extent in my posts over the years, and may create a more detailed summary of my criticisms of a reductionist framework. My criticism of reductionism are founded on the potential usefulness of a revival of the notion of formal causes in physics and difficulties with the notion of chance and chaos, and the problems presented to cognitive psychology by the notion that the brain is an "organic computer", based on implications of the mathematics of computability related to the notion that "machines can think", all of which lead me to the strong conclusion that formal causes are by far a more rational approach than reductive materialism and any approach to magic based upon it. Finally, what is the importance of the similarity between Li/Qi and Hylomorphism? These two seem to have arisen independently of each other, they occur at roughly the same time, around 300 BCE, and there is little concrete evidence for, and thus little reason to believe, that they are the result of "cultural diffusion". As independent discoveries they reinforce and tend to confirm the notion that, from both East and West there is a magic and spirituality friendly cosmology based on Formal Causes which has arisen because of the experience and reflection of two different cultures, and that as such it could be argued that these similarities arise because they are a "true" account of the fundamental nature of reality, and that reductionist materialism is a fallacious misdirection in human thought and cultural development and should be abandoned. Taken by themselves these similarities are not enough, but do add weight to the notions I mentioned before for rejecting reductionist materialism. This post has been longer than I originally intended, but I hope that these ideas are interesting and helpful. ZYD

I started with the post on the Microcosm/Macrocosm doctrine largely because of the influence which Mouni Sadhu's the Tarot had upon me. While it certainly deals with the Tarot, it deals with the Tarot as a guide in symbolic form to the "Hermetic Mysteries" and analyses all of them in some detail while describing their relations and how they relate to Hermetic theory and practice in as much detail as he thought possible. He did not believe that such things should be revealed clearly in a public form, but that such things should be the fruit of study, hard work and disciple. So the book is not easy reading, but as I noted here: I put a lot of study and work into it. I even used to dream about it in that period. I consider all of the work to have been worthwhile and for reason's which I noted above: was to prove very valuable in understanding aspects of the Golden Dawn that were not well understood by later members because as the Twentieth Century developed in English at least the field was dominated by authors who insisted on psychological and even neurological interpretations into magic. The approach to magic that Sadhu espoused was maintained in French in the works of Papus and other authors who names are sprinkled throughout his work. Among other mysteries of Twentieth Century magic that are clear to a person who understands Sadhu's material is why Mrs. Macgregor-Mathers expelled Dion Fortune out of the Golden Dawn successor group, the Alpha et Omega, or a least the reason she stated, there may have been other issues in the background. I'll talk about that shortly. ZYD

Bardon's system and the Golden Dawn System are not mutually exclusive, particularly when you realize how dependent Bardon is on Aleister Crowley's version of it. While Bardon calls his system Hermetic in the text, its English title adds the Hermetic to it, the original German Der Weg Zum Wahren Adepten obviously doesn't mention Hermetics at all and it is also a purely modern work which has precious little to do with the historical Hermetic tradition, but seems to be a very creative, expansion of ideas derived from reading Crowley and Alexandra David-Neel, whose works were originally published in French and Bardon could have read them in French or they may have been translated into German, a quick search did give evidence of that, but not enough to substantiate a significant number of translations at an early enough date to have been an influence on Bardon, as Crowley's books were, having been translated into translated into German by the Swiss OTO. That said Bardon's system, is safe and practical, though hardly Hermetic in any traditional sense of the word, and it is shaped by and limited to the perspective of the magical revival of the Nineteenth Century, which threw out many "healthy babies" with the bath water because it did not understand them. Back in the late sixties I was interested in and practiced together Bardon and Golden Dawn techniques, I was also interested in the qigong aspects of Taiji Chuan and its possible uses in magic, a subject I have dealt with in other posts on Dao Bums. I eventually dropped Bardon for a qigong approach after analyzing Bardon's system, at least as it is in the first Book and deciding the qigong would be better for my purposes. As for the advice about psychoanalysis, while I agree that a lot of people have gone totally bonkers by ill conceived and worse executed explorations of magic in its Golden Dawn form, there are ways that one can prevent such unfortunate results if one is actually sensible and careful, but few people who are interested in magic are either. I can expound further on any of this if you are interested, but this is all I have time for now. I hope this is helpful. ZYD

Based on what you say above, you might find my posts in Confucian Qi gong interesting: The topic was started by our wonderful friend in the Dao, exorcist_1699, and I contributed to it. Confucianism is one of the most misunderstood Chinese philosophical schools in the West. I decided to investigate it in 2000 and I am glad that I did, it provides a useful framework, and actually complimented my years of studying and practicing Ritual Daoism and Western magic. I hope that you find the discussion and my contribution to it interesting and more importantly, useful. ZYD

More like voodoo than you might think. The Chinese have a long history of Spirit Boxing in which a spirit or god takes possession of the boxer and guides him in the appropriate moves to learn the art as well as providing a boost to the boxer's qi. Back around 1970 when I was first starting to research Chinese martial arts, I found adds for the Green Dragon Society. I wrote to get their catalog and more information and was astonished to find them talking about spirit boxing involving spirit possession by the "spirits" of the eight trigrams. Since I had started serious reading about magic, voodoo, Tibetan yoga, etc. as early as 1963, I was already familiar with the idea of spirit possession, but the idea of its application to martial arts training was completely new to me. I never followed up with it because my Western magical training, already well advanced and successful by that time, disapproved of spirit possession. I hope this information is interesting and helpful, ZYD

Despite what some have said about this the main problem is that we have created categories like 'religion', 'secularism', 'superstition', 'philosophy', 'folk religion' and so on and then try to fit various ways into them. For instance people look for pure original Daoism (or Buddhism) - these never existed. Most of these labels are not useful or even unhelpful. I would say that the only useful label that can be applied here is between Theory and Practice, that Daoists practice their "folk magic" within an framework provided by Daoist authors and Buddhist within a framework which they believe is provided by Buddhist texts. There is a lot more that I could say about the history of these distinctions in the West, but that would take more time than i have now, involving as they do a long a digression into the religious conflicts of the Reformation and Counter reformation, contentions within the Catholic Church between Nominalists and Scholastics, and the rise of such libertines as John Wilmot, the second Earl of Rochester, and its continued development among the Baron D'Holbach and his coterie. As you can well imagine, the explication of all of that would take much time and lead us far afield. ZYD

with because, in marked contrast to Augustine, Crowley stated that love is secondary to will. It's not my mistake to conflate them, it is your mistake to think that I intended to do so. All I did was provide the originating context, about which Crowley, being raised in the fundamentalist Christian sect, the Plymouth Brethren, probably knew nothing, however, he was quite familiar with Rabelais from whom he, oh sorry, I forgot, Aiwass, "borrowed" quite a bit, including the very term thelema. I am quite familiar with Crowley and his writings, as I made clear nine years ago here: When and at what age did you buy your copy of Magick in Theory and Practice, oh all wise one? I have read, about, studied and practiced magic for decades, and I don't care to waste further time with you, so as far as I am concerned we are done here. As far as Crowley goes, there is not much reason, except possibly historical, to pay attention to him. I have posted about him and my reasons for thinking so in various places on Dao Bums over the years and anyone who wishes can find them with a search or two. It should be noted that part of my criticism of Crowley is also a criticism of what I call neo-magic, magic as practiced based on the Nineteenth Century revival of magic. My posts in Eliphas Levi, whom Crowley loved to consider his previous incarnation, dealt with the magical revival and my criticism of it to a certain extent. As a final note just in case someone makes the mistake of thinking that because I emphasis Magick in Theory and Practice above, that it is is all that I read of Crosley's work, which it was not, however, during the early Sixties it was practically all that was readily available. I did read a great deal more of Crowley as it appeared through the later Sixties and early Seventies. Humorously, among other things, I was probably the only thirteen year old in the U.S. to get a copy of The Equinox of the Gods for Christmas in 1963, but that is another story, and I don't have time for that now. ZYD

This morning we had rain showers all across Southern California, a day before the Weather services predicted. I have "broken" two droughts before, the first in 1991, the second in 2014. What I mean by that is that If it hasn't rained in three or four years and I do some magic to end drought and it rains within a week max, and then regular rain patterns continue thereafter for some time (years), then there is certainly correlation, and a strong possibility of causation. The one in 2014 was less than 48 hours from operation to precipitation, the one in 1991, was "several" days, but not more than a week. I started this one last Saturday night. I called this "experiments" in Weather Magic because my interest at this time is whether weather magic can be used to address the issue of climate change, which is why climate change is one of the tags of this topic. ZYD

So, what is the basis of this "magical authority" that I keep talking about, and which is symbolized by the magican's wand? Cornelius Agrippa makes this clear in Chapter Three of the third book of his great compendium of magical theory and practice: Simply put, without this "dignification", one is not practicing Magic, in its "brand name" sense of Magic as it was conceived of and practiced from the Hellenistic period through the end of the Renaissance, and at least a little beyond. I usually call this form of magic Classical Magic and differentiate it from neo-Magic, the result of a revival magical practices that started around 1900. One can certainly produce "magic" like effects through "energized enthusiasm", working oneself into an emotional frenzy and sending it off to have an effect, but this is not Magic, it is sorcery, witchcraft, shamanism, whatever you want to call it, but it is not Magic, and if you have achieve sufficient dignification you don't need emotional frenzy either. Here is an interesting story about a very Magically dignified individual, or at least according to the story he would be: If you are curious, and if you are interested in how Magic is practiced then you should be, you can go here: Plotinus, Our Tutelary Spirit on Wiki Source I recommend this because ideas very similar to some that Plotinus puts forward in this work appear, albeit dressed up in Qabalistic guise, in the Adeptus Minor teachings of the Golden Dawn. I could make references to that, except that the material is too dense, technical and complex for anyone without a sufficient background to read with a satisfactory level of understanding. Of course if anyone with a sufficient background asks, I can refer them to the necessary sections. In modern magic the way that this dignification is trained and achieved is largely through what is called the Middle Pillar practice in either its ritual or meditative versions. It is possible using those teachings to obtain the necessary dignification, if you know what you are doing and practice it correctly, however even the original Golden Dawn teachings teachings leave out important aspects of Classical Magic, however when the Golden Dawn ritual system is used within the full context of the Occult Philosophy as expounded in Agrippa's work, the result is very satisfactory, but lacking this during the Twentieth Century the tradition was significantly degraded. I hope this gives at least some idea of what Magical Authority is, and basically to recap, it is the realization of the divine potential that inheres in every human being. This belief in the divine potential of human beings is common to Western Pagan and Abrahamic traditions, as well as both Daoist and Confucian traditions in China. The methods of realizing this potential are different, but the result is the same and is why in China and the West, the Magician's wand and its Chinese equivalent, are a symbol of authority, like a sovereign's scepter. ZYD

See my post and the discussion here: There was a great deal of activity related to his teacher, Mak Tin Si, and Chi in Nature, when I started on Dao Bums nine years ago. So searching under Mak Tin Si, and Chi in Nature would be the way to research this. I also seem to remember that this fellow, who seems to be in charge of teaching magic now, posted in the past year or so on Dao Bums to invite people to learn Daoist magic with him. I don't think he got much of a response, as really not many here are interested in Daoist magic to begin with, though there are a small number of Dao Bums that are. As a forum, the Dao Bums has no opinion about this group, we only post the opinions and experiences of our members about it. Our members opinions have varied, but if you follow the link in the post of mine that I quoted, you can get an overview, and more of our members may weigh in here about them. I did some research on their site when I first joined here, and as far as I can tell they do not represent a lineal descent from a specific school, but that the founders do represent some authentic aspects of Chinese magical tradition, and that they believe they were authorized in visions by the highest level of the Daoist Pantheon to teach. I would suggest a lot of "due diligence" in regard to any association with them, but that is my personal opinion as a person with a good familiarity with Daoist Ritual and magic, and should not be confused with any official position of the Dao Bums, even though I am a moderator here. As I have said the Dao Bums does not have an official position on this school. I hope other members who remember past interactions with this group will join in with the discussion. ZYD

Sorry I don't understand the difference. If a thought form which is just an accumulation of chi and shen, is given life vitality it can develop intelligence like an egregore, no? You mention the necessity of a collective but a well trained magus can do what many occultists of weaker discipline attempt to do. I'm sorry, I made the mistake of thinking that you came up with the ideas on thought form and egregores on your own, when in point of fact you are only repeating Chaos Magic dogmas. I should have followed up the reference to servitor in your original post, which I recognized as a specifically Chaos Magic technical term, before posting my own. In Chaos Magic thought forms and egregores are linked in this way: However, you did not mention the complete sequence, only the idea that a thought form might spontaneously "evolve" into something "intelligent" enough to pass the Turing test. A notion which, as far as I can tell, is introduced by Madame Alexandra David-Neel in one of her books in an anecdote about a Tulpa that took on a life of its own and went seriously amuk. I read Madame David Neel's Magic and Mystery in Tibet when I was thirteen or so, but I can't remember whether I read the anecdote in it, though I do recall later references to the story, but I cannot place them exactly now. The idea is followed up by Franz Bardon in his Initiation into Hermetics, a book which I read and studied with considerable attention in the late Sixties, reading it cover to cover three times. I started practice Bardon's system while working intently with practices derived from the Golden Dawn. To make a long story short the Golden Dawn method's proved more effective, and I stopped Bardon's training. I will grant your point that the Chaos Magical view that a thought form that influenced a number of people would meet the minimum definition of an egregore even in the sense in which I use it, but as far as I am concerned suffers from the same conceptual limitations as all Chaos Magic does due to its underlying ontological commitments. Beyond that I don't consider this thread to be a place to enter into further discussion about egregores, especially since this only comes to the fore in a discussion of one of the possible meanings of egregore, and we are not even sure if that is what the OP means by the term, so without some feedback from the OP about what sense of egregore is at issue, I don't see much point in posting more on the matter at this time. ZYD

Yes, it was taken seriously, it is exactly in this model that the distinction between "High Magic", that of Ceremonial Magic which was upper class magic and manipulated the "dead matter" of the Cartesian worldview through the animal magnetism, and low magic, the superstitious magic of witches and old women and the lower classes arose. This is purely a Nineteenth Century invention, nothing even remotely like it can be found in Agrippa's Three Books on Occult Philosophy, where magic is viewed as the result of a practice that unifies Natural, Mathematical and Ceremonial magic. Curiously it does emerge as the root a the title of Gerald Gardner's witchcraft novel High Magic's Aid, in which Gardener introduces witches and "low magic" as something which "aids" high magic, thus seeking to heal the imbalance brought about by too much emphasis on "High Magic". Interestingly Agrippa warns about not doing ceremonial magic without using natural magic as part of the procedure, and to my mind the history of the modern magical revival is definitely proof of the Wisdom of that warning. For a person who is interested in the historical perspective, Ennemoser is as I said essential, but to gain a fascinating look into both the theory, the practice and the lives of people who practiced magic in the mid-Nineteenth Century and pre-Blavatsky, you can't beat Art Magic and Ghost Land, both ostensibly written by an anonymous adept and edited by Emma Hardinge Britten, the first deals the theory and practice of magic and the second the adepts supposed biography, are fascinating reading. Of particular interest is the contrast that emerges between the German "occult scientists" who first train and at the same time exploit the young author and the British "ceremonial magicians", a group which the author later meets during a time spent in England. This later English group is usually considered to be the descended from Francis Barrett and is supposed to have included Bulwer-Lytton. A wonderful website dedicated to this remarkable woman can be found here: The Emma Hardinge Britten Archive Where downloadable versions of both these works may be found. A very worthwhile modern scholarly history which uses Britten's accounts as a source is: The Theosophical Enlightenment by Jocelyn Godwyn Edit: Minor spelling

Note: I had intended to post these two last Monday (9/12), but other matters came up. A few days ago I had edited this post some, but when I came back my edits were gone and these bare bones were all that was left. Right now the "New Age" is being discussed and I have a good post on it from several years ago which I wish to put in, so I am posting these two as they stand and will edit them in place shortly. What I principally wanted to make clear was the basis of my response here: and with all due respect to the poster, who does claim that this is their experience, is not an approach that i would use, or did use in what I did. It has all all the appearance of a "New Age" approach to the matter, and I am not a new age practitioner, as any one who has read my posts on magic on Dao Bums for the past thirteen years or so will surely know. If the above poster has had success with the above approach, good for them, but in terms of my own opinion, is more inline with these posts: I can think of several ways that what the poster first quoted above could be accomplished and if they would care to clarify their position they are welcome to do so. ZYD The Consciousness of ordinary people who are bound by three dimensional sensory experience is largely useless, however the emotions that they can generate are not, because these emotions are manifestations of personal qi, which can be directed and used, groups can form large energy fields under the right circumstances and this energy can be harnessed for various purposes, such a rain making, by someone who knows how to do it. There are ways that individuals can harness their emotions for different purposes and that is a study in itself, and also ways that they can learn to control their consciousness, such as I talk about in the following quote which examines a little more about my model of Human Potential and its possible grounding in a scientific worldview. This is important to me because, as i have noted elsewhere I was a Science/Magic nerd as a kid and creating non reductionist models, models meant to explain not explain away the possibility of mystical and magical experiences has been a very real part of my research over the years. I hope that the following is interesting and thought provoking: Space/time is our ordinary awareness in which there is one dimension of time and three of space, however no coherent model of matter and motion can be created within space/time, but it requires the introduction of the notion of at least four dimensional space, to even begin to make sense of the world. Also, as the quote says, this was originally developed for Maxwell's equations for electromagnetism and then applied to special relativity, indicated that the matter energy equivalence usually attributed to Einstein and Special Relativity was already implicit in Maxwell's equations (Einstein's two 1905 papers that deal with this were basically papers dealing with electrodynamics, so this is no surprise.). In my interpretation of this I view space/time as broken symmetry of four dimensional spacetime which results in space/time, matter/energy, and more importantly for us here, body/mind, in which a fundamental four dimensional unity is experienced as a body with consciousness in it, and that meditation states are those in which awareness is regained of this four dimensional "being", which is what we truly are, in Daoist terms, experiencing "sitting and forgetting" our Body/mind to experience our real nature in wuji. Someone who is experiencing "wuji" would be experience the "causal" level of the elemental level, much like the akasha training which Franz Bardon gives in his book Initiation into Hermetics. A book and author that were very influential on me in the late Sixties, though I moved on to the greener pastures of the Golden Dawn magical system starting in the Seventies. I had originally made more changes to this that, as I said got lost, but I just want to get this posted rather than having it hang over my head and these were the most important things to note. ZYD

I will be perfectly happy to help fill in gaps in your knowledge, here is a link to the search results for my posts which mention "magic": ZYD's posts which mention magic, all twelve pages of them You will note that I do not use Crowley's "k", that is in part because of this: I may reply to more specific matters which you raise as time permits. ZYD

This is something of a complex issue, and I am busy and can only give a cursory answer. How some ordinary thing, like a stick becomes a magic wand, or a knife a magic dagger, and not just in terms of say its official "consecration" or "dedication" for the magician's use, but how some ordinary thing, such as a fan becomes part of a tradition which prepares it and uses it as a magical tool is interesting. The most obvious are such tools as have an origin as weapons and are used as noted above in military magic, but they can also derive from other sources which differentiate along class and occupational divisions, and depend on functional and symbolic aspects of the prospective "tool". In the example of a fan, its obvious use in controlling the direction of air, would indicate it use to control the element of air in general and possibly more specifically weather, and who would use it would depend on social circumstances. A bellows also has a function of controlling the direction of air, but would not be used by a court gentleman or lady, but rather would be something that would arise from craft and folk traditions of magic. A soldier might think in terms of a magic sword, but a woodsman of a magic axe. Something like a scepter though has its derived meaning from it symbolic setting in such things a court ritual, where it is a symbol of power or authority. At a historical distance it may have actually been something that a chieftain might have used to bonk a disrespectful subordinate on the head, but as things become more orderly, it became much more symbolic. So magical tools start as ordinary things which are "pressed" into magical service because of their mundane function, such as fan or bellows, or their symbolic meaning such as a Scepter. At their base they become props in a ritual drama, and some people think that is all that they are or can be, but anyone with real experience knows that they can be more, much more, but that is a whole other subject. I hope this is helpful. ZYD

When I said this: The above is fundamentally correct, though I will try to expand a little on it in a later post. Right now it is almost one am where I live and time for me to head to bed. I meant that I thought that dawei had mentioned the basics, but I was not completely happy with with how he had written about them. In particular "Mencius said, Qi flows from intent.", puzzled me. It has been twenty years since I did my principle study of Mencius and qi and I don't remember anything exactly like this, but dawei may have been hurried and working from memory. However dawei does mention intent, derived from the Chinese 意, yì (idea / meaning / thought / to think / wish / desire / intention / to expect / to anticipate), which is used as a technical term for an ability inherent in 心, xīn (heart / mind / intention / center / core) to use imagination to "form" qi and to imbue it with a specific intention or purpose. A typical example of this would be the creation of a "thought form" examples of which can be found in the books of Professor Jerry Alan Johnson. This ability is used in Daoist Healing, Martial Arts and Magic and becoming skill and adept in its use is an important part of Daoist training. As far as Mencius and qi goes his quote about the "floodlike qi" is well know and I quote it in the topic "Confucian Qigong": There is another quote which I will look for and post. as regards this I agree with that. The question then is: does that intent arise before Existence? I was only quoting dawei and as I noted above I am not in complete agreement with it, however what you seem to be asking is if there is something real that precedes existence which can in some sense have "intent" and possibly even be a creative power influencing existence. Is that a correct interpretation? ZYD

It's mathematical magic my friends, magic squares that is, and neither Israel Regardie, nor the Golden Dawn knew much about either, though the originators of the Golden Dawn were perhaps more savvy in their own thinking and practice than their successors and 'tis a magic most Mercurial, dealing as it does in the formal properties of Systems and most appropriate to this thread. Magic squares are a well formed set of mathematical objects called matrices and matrix mathematics is one of the most important mathematical studies because of its importance to Linear Algebra. One of its most significant uses in the Twentieth Century was it application to Quantum Mechanics, where a some clever matrix mathematics turned out to be the equivalent of Schrodinger's Wave Equation and these two together tiled the floor of the Temple. Now, just as a point of continuity here, I will note that the swapping of rows and columns is an important aspect of using matrices in mathematics, and in their application to solving systems of, for example, linear equations, aiding greatly in simplifying the problem. Their application to magic is another matter, and rather complex and I cannot enter into any detail great detail, but such magic squares are used in Chinese, Indian, Arabic and Western magic. I made a considerable study of them in the 1980s as part of a project of applying modern mathematics to magical practice which I first started pursuing in my teens in 1967 to 68. Among other things that I discovered pursuing that larger project is that information theory can be constructively applied to maximizing the results of Divination and has suggestions for improving the technique of various types of divination. My application of these ideas to Geomancy was very fruitful and demonstrate that criticisms made by Aleister Crowley are more a lack of his imagination then of Geomancy's potential. I will note that the extensions which I made did not require information theory, and I started them before I started to use information theory, but it did require some insight into the logical structure of Geomany and how it called out for such extensions. I wish I had more time talk about this, but it really could fill a couple of books, and even a cursory outline might be more a source of confusion than edification. As a note astrological magic is one of the major applications of Mathematical Magic. Astrological magic was largely neglected in the magical revival, but was considered essential in traditional magic. Interestingly, I was first drawn to Astrological Magic because of my study of the "Church of Light", teachings again largely in the late Sixties. Anyone interested in whatever happened to the "Hermetic Brotherhood of Light" (hint, hint Nungali, if you haven't realized this before.) could do worse than scratching around there and seeing what turns up. Though from the perspective of post Golden Dawn English speaking magic it is widely off the mark, it is much more compatible with the Continental systems of Papus et. al., though unique in its outlook. Edit: Added ". . . and most appropriate to this thread" to the first paragraph, a change which I had made, but there was a passing squall (get it? squall = sql error) that blew it off course. The squall lasted only for a few minutes.