IMBOLC.com

29/02/2024

And it's on air! Enjoy!

What does it take to found a magical institute? Why is in-depth learning so important, especially in an age of short attention spans? In a first-ever intervi...

23/02/2024

Coming soon! Stay tuned!

02/12/2023

Is magic evil?

In the previous post we have been unveiling the fear of change as immanent to quite a lot of people who unwillingly get into touch with magic through conversations or otherwise. This fear of change is the reason that magic has been looked upon as ‘satanic’ or ‘demonic’. However, there is nothing inherently evil about magic, as it is an art and just as with art, some of its outcome might be labelled as negative in the same way as an artist can be labelled as problematic. However, this does not make art itself evil, and the same applies to magic.

The perception of magic as an ‘evil practice’ stems from the view that it is in defiance of the divine will as expressed in human society through the official institutions of church and state. This view is only partially correct as magic is not so much defiant as independent. Some magicians throughout history used it as a weapon of rebellion, but it may also be used as an instrument of liberation.

Magicians work magic in order to find their own spiritual path and come to terms with their lives. Magic frees them from the bo***ge of social conventions that have ceased to nourish their hearts and minds. Magicians of these days come from every part of society and they vary widely in their practice. Luckily, the expansion of New Age and esoteric subjects into all parts of daily life has carried magic along with it. Nowadays, it is ceasing to be a taboo subject and becoming a curiosity. Most people are interested in magic, even if they are afraid to admit that their interest is serious. Given a chance they would attend seminars and university lectures to learn the correct techniques of ritual if such schools existed and if no one would laugh at them. IMBOLC provides the knowledge and the framework to learn magic from the basics to the most intense forms of the art, all within the safety of 31 years continuous teaching and experience.

25/11/2023

The ‘dangers of magic’

Science refuses to acknowledge any study not amenable to verification by experiment. Also, all the major religions have viewed magic as a devilish distraction from ‘legitimate worship’. Neither does magic have a relevance within the world of business, capitalism and investing nor within schools or universities. Academical papers paint a picture of magic as a dead relict, as superstitious belief of primitive societies or some cultural mania. It exists as an outcast, as a subject to intense suspicion at the fringes of our world. All doors are slammed into its face and there is a great amount of institutional hostility against it labelling it as nothing more than fantasy.

However, the reason that magic encounters such profound condemnation is the mere fact that it is perceived as a menace to power structure. Awareness to ‘dangers of magic’ is usually unconscious, but evident. People start feeling uncomfortable if you start talking to them about magic because our world is a complex web of beliefs and expectations. Change them and you change the world, and magic has the innate power to transform beliefs and expectations of those who practice it. Therefore, people intuitively perceive the potential of magic to reform the underlying pattern of the world which terrifies them.

Magic is revolutionary, it threatens the comforting structure of our culture with anarchy and annihilation. If accepted as a form of science, it would destroy the concept of the universe, carefully constructed over centuries. Embraced by religion, magic would undermine the essential relationship between humans and the divine that forms the rationale of the churches. Adopted by Big Business, it would shatter the ‘ethos’ of our consumer driven society. All of these systems would have to reform themselves to accommodate to the magical view of the world. Therefore, magicians are non-conformists, caring little about glamour and personal power and much more about hard work, self-reflection and personal responsibility.

18/11/2023

On why magic cannot be learned exclusively in theory.

From an initiatory point of view, ‘knowledge’ differs very vastly from its meaning in the various areas of contemporary culture.
‘To know’ in a hermetic context is therefore not to grasp something intellectually, not ‘to think’, but to grasp it in its entirety in order to transmute or to turn one’s consciousness into the very thing itself.
It is through this leap, that ‘knowledge’ or ‘cognition’ – something that is available to our prefrontal cortex – becomes something different, it evolves into experience.

On a profane level, knowledge is created by sensual experience. Both, direct experience and sensual experience overlap entirely.
On an initiatory level, however, the existence of several direct forms of experience is recognized which all correspond to certain different ways to perceive and depict reality.

‘Absoluteness’ as a tool to measure things or concepts gets broken down to the degree of active identification of one’s ego with one’s experiences. As soon as a system of such degrees is acknowledged, one can rise from symbol to symbol, from name to name until one reaches a supra-rational spiritual insight, a state of power where all analyzing and speculating ends.

Therefore, only a practical attitude to magical studies can be ‘reasonable’, emphasizing the Golden hermetic saying ‘Post laborem, scientia’ – After work, knowledge. Initiatic knowledge cannot be trimmed into a ‘theory’ and magic cannot be learned exclusively and autodidactically from books.

11/11/2023

Spiritual/Mental Alchemy

Apart from the work of alchemists and spagyrics on one hand and psychoanalyst on the other, there is another - different - process of alchemy culminating in the statement ‘Man is a mortal God, God is an immortal Man’ by Heraclitus.

This allows for two basic options:
The religious way, consisting of accepting (some) God’s will, behaving passively, or the royal, self-responsible magical way, consisting of fighting for immortality through initiation, taking one’s rightful place as God.

Traditional teaching distinguished between survival after death and immortality. The first was the survival of disjointed personality fragments, the second was thought of as ‘Olympic immortality’. The choice between both is made by embracing initiatic work or deciding not to during this very lifespan. Initiation leading to immortality is neither dependent on grace nor on humility, it is a law of natural forces: If the right prerequisites are given, the corresponding effect inevitably occurs.

The initiatic royal-magical path was kept by alchemists encrypted in their work and the idea that their writings are nothing more than a pre-form of chemistry is not tenable. Therefore, the alchemical Great Work consists in separating (solve) body, spirit and soul from one another, distilling every principle in its pure form and putting them together again to a new human being (coagula). To attain immortality, one needs to set values and have desires but learn to control them, develop an indestructible will and take the body into account.

04/11/2023

Reality from a Magical Point of View

We see the world we live in in different categories, for example brightness versus darkness. Brightness can become a strong abstraction, not only related to our ability to visually distinct our environment and act accordingly (i.e. not falling down the stairs) but even more, a personified essence of ‘it is bright’ by taking away the temporal and factual frame of reference. Thus, ‘the brightness’ becomes something entirely different and can be related to many contexts, such as ‘bright night’, ‘one’s thoughts can brighten’, etc. ‘Darkness’ meanwhile is associated with the perception of no visual differences or at least relatively few differences.

However, this very ability to simplify the world through abstractions is a double-edged sword and as with all abilities – especially true in magic – the more we generate of it the more responsibility do we have to take for ourselves, our thinking, our reasoning and our acting in the world.

Our idea of ‘the world as it is’ simplified by our ability to categorize it is based on our habits and filters we have learned from others and developed as problem solving strategies. This also means that we usually keep confirming our habitual mindsets and neglect other options than those already embedded within us leaving little to no room for alternative perceptions. Therefore, the majority of society, our psyches, conceptions of ‘nature’, ‘magic’, ‘magicians’, ‘good’, ‘evil’, etc. are nothing but social constructs resulting of thousands of years of self-adaptation.

As magicians we need to start thinking differently in order to develop alternative realities which fit the goals of our psyche: a highly variable environment that confronts us again and again with new problems which serve to outgrow ourselves – otherwise ‘immortality’. This means the need to break habitual filters and establish new lenses through which we gain different insights into the universe’s machinery.

29/10/2023

Initiation and Secrecy

In ancient mystery cults violence was one widely accepted method for initiation. Though IMBOLC’s teaching method is different, the spirit is the same. Only after we have learned indifference to physical suffering, we can receive real initiation. The ceremonies of the elemental grades I° to IV° serve to actively discipline our minds leading us to analyse and understand our souls. They deal with the four states of matter, the four elements of the ancients as an answer to the five senses. Our senses are the pathways through which our consciousness approaches the will. It is the objective of our lives as initiates to bring this will to such a state of perfection, strength and wisdom that instead of being a plaything of fate, we build a fortress inside ourselves to be able to retire to in times of need.

In the ceremonies of the higher grades, we endeavour to impress upon the imagination of the initiates the forms under which they can obtain perfection and work in harmony with the world force by presenting a perfectly balanced series of symbols.
In the ceremonies of the lower grades, the principles most insisted upon are secrecy and brotherly love. Apart from practical aspects silence is a tremendous aid in the search for occult powers. By studying the effects of calm concentration, one quickly discovers that is in this very silence where thoughts that are above human consciousness veil themselves in symbolism. Therefore, the more deliberate thought and concentration precedes an action the more effective it will be.

A caveat: There is always an amount of danger of personal influence in presenting such material to a wider audience. Keep in mind that although knowledge has to be gained from every available source, the opinion of others should receive the very smallest of your attention. Free yourselves from your environments, believe nothing without weighing and considering it four yourself. The god who will judge you at the day of reckoning is the god that is within you now.

21/10/2023

Consideration of the ‘Magical Will’

If you hope to attain any extraordinary or special power, which could be described as ‘magical power’, you have to attain strength of the will first. And even before attaining this strength of the will you are required to cultivate the strength on four levels first: your body, mind, intellect and emotion. Spiritual powers will flourish only if you starve the ‘animal soul’ which is largely dependent on the state and treatment of the ‘animal body’. But: the animal part has to be cared for and protected, kept in health and strength but not pampered, it is part of our being, our nature.

Spiritual power results from the transmutation and catalysis of our animal nature, the condition of balance is therefore necessary before the manipulation of the will is ideally possible. The will is more though than just the ascending of higher desires over the lower ones as it takes away the veil of the hidden which then becomes manifest, in the universe as well as in ourselves – as above so below.

Therefore, IMBOLC students learn to achieve moderation in all things human. However, we do not encourage extreme ascetic habits as they are a source of danger and may lead to a contemplation of one’s own heroism or supposedly coolness. To be truly ascetic means to submit to discipline and to curb unruly emotions, thoughts and actions – the introspection or ‘soul mirror work’. Do not let yourself be fooled though. The one who permanently disengages from life while practicing in a secluded area will maybe obtain lesser rewards that the one who restrains himself among the crowds of the city passing through a busy life unpolluted showing more resistance and suffering severe discipline and is no longer perceived by the public.

14/10/2023

Dare Reality!

Working your way through the so-called ‘Atrium’ consisting of the first teaching letters within IMBOLC, essentially you need to find the magical way to destroy the familiar image of yourself. To achieve this, you must first learn to perceive the reality of yourself, the very fact that forming the center of the universe is not a mere dream to humanity and let go of the habituation of so many who limit not only themselves but unfortunately also freeze their environment into a rigid state of anxiety, submissiveness and hopelessness.
It is your duty to turn around and release yourself and your environment from petrification, imagine that earth, water, air and fire contain conscious forces and also know that the so-called forces of nature are only projections of our primordial nature. The inner conviction that one’s own being and the world itself are constructed exactly as one is proclaiming will generate a feeling and perception of greatness and power if it is proclaimed by the properly trained mind. With this new vision embedded within you, that which once used to be mere imagination evolves into an active force bringing forth a liberation and the ability to build a new life.

10/10/2023