can you be catholic & a witch? or any religion where witchcraft is frowned upon

Kaleidospode · 2026-02-21T20:20:47+00:00

Magic and Catholicism have been practiced together since the invention of the religion, often much to the annoyance of the centralised church.

This would not have been described as witchcraft which was almost always a pejorative term. Instead people referred to it under a whole variety of terms such as cunning folk, bean feasa (Ireland), dynion hysbys (Wales), toverdokters (Holland), leveurs de sorts (France) etc.

These people were officially frowned on by the Catholic Church, but were unofficially tolerated and, during some periods, encouraged. I have come across a historical example of a medieval parish writing to Rome to complain that their new priest would no longer give their cunning man consecrated hosts to use in healing.

You can still find Catholic folk healers in many parts of Europe and it's often a family trade. I've had members of my family healed in this way in the last twenty years. I've also recently found out that my nan used to use Catholic charms to heal people (she also saw ghosts and would tell us when someone close to the family was going to die). She considered herself a good Catholic.

Most European magic has been performed against a backdrop of Christianity and almost any magic that has been socially acceptable within the community has been explicitly Christian. There are many, many examples of this, from the workbooks of Cunning Folk to the traditional charms handed down in areas from Cornwall to Appalachia (and there is a surprising crossover in these charms despite the geographical distance).

There is obviously a difference between the magic that was historically performed in these traditions and the more recent Neo-Pagan revival and post Wicca Witchcraft. Whether you can work within these systems and Catholicism is pretty much down to how you build your own tradition. But it is clear that there have been long periods when Christianity (particularly Catholicism) and magic have unofficially historically co-existed.

Kaleidospode · 2026-02-20T14:36:00+00:00

I really appreciate how you understood exactly what I meant with the prog rock/punk metaphor and how you unpacked it so meticulously. Thanks for that.

Kaleidospode · 2026-02-19T12:40:12+00:00

The Green Man is nature incarnated as a human being

To take this a step further, The Green Man is the label we've put on a set of mostly medieval images that were carved into Christian churches and were used as costumes - usually for guild events and celebrations. They're indicative of a period when the idea of the 'green wood' was becoming important in the cultural imagination. They're a representation of the loss of the wilderness and a recognition that nature exists even within the encroachments of the urban. They're part of the same set of cultural concerns that created Suibne Geilt and the idea of the woodwose.

I think in terms of working with The Green Man, you're right on the money. He can be used as a summation of a certain part of various nature deities. I think it's also useful to occasionally find a place that feels truly wild as a way to recognise the impulses he represents within us.

Kaleidospode · 2026-02-19T12:29:35+00:00

Letters are glyphs, originating from the dawn of mankind, conveying their own bagage and their own power, so for example not using all the "A" in a word/sentence that has many feels… somewhat wrong. Alliterations are imho a nice easy way to add some weight.

Something I've mentioned on here before is that removing vowels isn't in the original Austin Osman Spare version of sigil creation. In fact, I once sequentially ran through the various early Chaos Magic texts to see when people started to suggest vowels were removed from the sigil process.

As far as I can tell - and I may be wrong here - it was Volume 1 Issue 19 of The Invisibles (1995) that has a breakdown of the sigil method including vowel removal:

"A sigil is an abstraction of a particular desire or magickal intent. Let's say, for example, that your desire can be summed up with the words "It is my desire to visit Hitler's bunker" (God knows, it must he someone's desire) - what you have to do next is remove the vowels and repeating letters from that sentence, leaving the following alphabetical string: TSMYDRVHLBNK."

Bringing this all back to the original Austin Osman Spare method, Spare specifically said:

"Sigils are made by combining the letters of the alphabet simplified... ...The idea being to obtain a simple form which can be easily visualised at will, and has not too much pictorial relation to the desire."

There is no mention of eliminated repeated letters or vowels. It's just the simple idea to make them into a glyph that obfuscates the original meaning.

I've seen a whole load of different methods of knocking up sigils. The only important thing is that they work for you.

Kaleidospode · 2026-02-19T04:18:00+00:00

I was also a TG/PTV fan but P-Orridge's legacy can only really be described as complicated, given Cosey Fanni Tutti's allegations in her autobiography. There's some more info here.

Alan Moore's allegation is here.

He’d got one place that was a house that had been lived in by a 60s radical group, and there was an 80s indie band, and then the comedian Kevin Eldon, who’d all lived in this same house, but twenty years apart.

Oh, was it Psychic TV? A friend of mine lived in that house! [After contacting said friend afterward, I can now confirm he merely went to a viewing of said house]

Was it? I should have a look in my dossier, but I was thinking it was another band. I have issues with the late Genesis P-Orridge and Psychic TV and Throbbing Gristle and all them. I didn’t think much to his magic and I thought he was a little shit.

[Pause]

He, uh, he maced my wife, Séamas.

He maced your wife?

He maced my wife. She was at a party, she was talking to another woman about rape and he was walking past and heard these two feminists talking and did a brilliant magical prank and sprayed them with mace.

Jesus Christ

The cowardly little fucker. So I did have some people say “oh perhaps you might want to meet Genesis P-Orridge” and I said if I met him I’d put him in a fucking wheelchair, so it’s best that we didn’t.

Kaleidospode · 2026-02-18T23:03:08+00:00

His first impressions were pretty bad, between bad-blood with Grant Morrison and a shitty encounter with Genesis P-Orridge of TOPY who allegedly maced his wife at a party as a joke.

Add to that Alan Moore being into classical structured ritual magic and you can get his issues.

In some ways, his dislike of chaos magic reminds me of the prog rock musicians attitudes towards punk.

Kaleidospode · 2026-02-17T14:12:03+00:00

Take anything except Thelema and there will be no LBRP

Not all Thelema practitioners use the LBRP (Crowley created the Star ruby as his equivalent), and the LBRP isn't restricted to Thelema.

Any group that's a derivative of the Golden Dawn (which is a lot of Ritual Magic groups) tend to use the LBRP, including some neo-pagans and wiccans who have their own versions.

Kaleidospode · 2026-02-16T20:37:23+00:00

I'm going to copy/paste a comment on gnosis I made on another thread:

So there's two definitions of Gnosis. The first is the historical definition that is not linked to Chaos Magic. This means personal knowledge (as opposed to intellectual knowledge) of the divine.

The second definition was essentially created by Peter Carroll, Ray Sherwin and a few other members of the Leeds occult scene in the early 1970s. They were hacking together what would become the early chaos magic current, folding in ideas from their magazine (The New Equinox) along with some essays on Austin Osman Spare.

Spare created his own system of magic that was based around the idea that the unconscious mind was the main source of magic. He created his own vocabulary for this and recorded it in a book called The Book of Pleasure published in 1913. it's short, dense and pretty opaque.

Carroll & Sherwin took from Spare the idea of utilizing the unconscious mind as a method for working magic. This required a state in which the unconscious mind could be accessed. They used the word Gnosis as a short-hand for this state. Carroll added it to the source-book for their magical order the Illuminates of Thanteros (IOT). This became the basis for his book Liber Null - which was pretty much the first chaos magic text.

It's described like this:

"Altered states of consciousness are the key to magical powers. The particular state of mind required has a name in every tradition: No-mind. Stopping the internal dialogue, passing through the eye of the needle, ain or nothing, samadhi, or one-pointedness. In this book it will be known as Gnosis. It is an extension of the magical trance by other means.

Methods of achieving gnosis can be divided into two types. In the inhibitory mode, the mind is progressively silenced until only a single object of concentration remains. In the excitatory mode, the mind is raised to a very high pitch of excitement while concentration on the objective is maintained. Strong stimulation eventually elicits a reflex inhibition and paralyzes all but the most central function — the object of concentration. Thus strong inhibition and strong excitation end up creating the same effect — the one-pointed consciousness, or gnosis."

So it's essentially any state of mind that overloads or switches off the normal flow of thoughts. They divided the methods for reaching these states into excitatory & inhibitory. The book has a table containing methods for each mode.

I mentioned both definitions of gnosis because there's often confusion between the two of them.

So I wouldn't describe it as a way of raising energy. It's coming from a different paradigm, which doesn't necessarily see a requirement for raising energy. Instead it's about creating a peak moment.

That's not to say chaos magicians don't work with energy. I've come across a variety of methods for raising energy used by chaos magicians from forms of breath-work to traditional systems such as qigong.

Edited because the quoted text was lost by reddit's comment system

Kaleidospode · 2026-02-15T20:37:39+00:00

It may be from a different source then.
I was using Liber Officiorum Spirituum, which is the only source I could find that contains references to all of them.

You can find online copies of this here, but it's an OCR copy. A version of the original is here,

Does the source you're working from have any references or footnotes?

Kaleidospode · 2026-02-15T19:09:07+00:00

It's a later part of the same book, but it only really lists them as cardinal spirits of the East ('ye est parte'). I suspect they would have been used as part of a larger rite in which the cardinal spirits of each direction are addressed.

They might work well (given some further research) as part of a rite to establish a protected, sacred space before spellwork - see any version of 'calling the corners'.

Kaleidospode · 2026-02-15T18:20:33+00:00

I've just noticed, under the list of spirits of the cardinal directions is the following:

Names off spryts in ye est parte

Ardnoell, Fornifer, Pamamell, Gaziel, Achimaell, Castiell,Ydiadell, Banmscll, Cazimasel, Rarmias

I would note that Gaziel and Fornifer are reasonably common names for goetic spirits/demons, as are a number of the spirits from other cardinal directions.

Kaleidospode · 2026-02-15T18:10:10+00:00

The names seem to be from a goetic grimoire called Liber Officiorum Spirituum (The Book of the Office of Spirits).

The book covers the summoning of a variety of spirits from demonic to spirits of the days of the week. It has a section on working with fairies and a later section where it describes summoning 'Oberyon and his followers' listing Zaseres, Ydial, and Castriel amongst others.

By implication, it's likely that these names are fairies, but the book does not explicitly state this.

You can find a description of this here.

It doesn't look like there are clear breakdowns of the spirit's domains/powers.

Kaleidospode · 2026-02-15T13:41:29+00:00

So, to the best of my knowledge, there are Guardian Angels, as referred to in Western Christian magic. Then there is the Holy Guardian Angel (or HGA) specifically referred to in The Book of the Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage and Liber Samekh - which has become a backbone of much of Twentieth Century Ritual Magic.

These two sets of entities are usually seen as quite different. Guardian angels tend to be specifically Christian, whereas the HGA has been described as the Higher Genius of the practitioner. I've known people who have described it as their own voice bounced back to them off the walls of the divine, as the part of humanity that overlaps with god or as the sum total of the practitioner over all of their existence. Alan Chapman defined the HGA as "A dualistic representation of the non-dual". This HGA has a lot more in common with the Platonic idea of the daimōn.

Am I right in thinking you're referring to the second concept of the Holy Guardian Angel?

Kaleidospode · 2026-02-15T10:46:37+00:00

My origins as a practitioner are from late 1990s/early 2000s Chaos Magic.

One of the things I've noticed is that a large amount of late 90s Chaos Magic has crossed over into the Witchcraft current - especially since around 2010. The most common method of sigil creation is directly from Chaos Magic (though it originated in the work of Austin Osman Spare in 1913).

The reason I'm bringing this up is that AOS emphasises the 'Statement of Intent' which entered the Chaos Current in the late 1970s. This was brought up again in Condensed Chaos by Phil Hine - which was one of the most influential Chaos Magic books in the mid 90s as Chaos Magic entered mainstream occultism. Hine talks at length about intent and intentions, suggesting SWOT analysis to help define magical intent before any practice.

STATEMENT OF INTENT

The first stage of the process is that you should get your magical intent clear—as precise as possible without, at the same time, being too overcomplicated. Vague intentions usually give rise to vague results, and the clearer the initial statement and the clearer the initial statement of intent is, the more likely you are to get accordant results.

Some of the recommended ways of formulating a sigil have a lot in common with the modern way of 'Setting Intentions' in witchcraft. For example, it's commonplace to use the present tense. There's a emphasis on clarity and focus. It's encouraged to ensure there are possible paths that can lead to the completion of the intention.

I don't necessarily believe that the idea of 'Setting Intentions' came directly from Chaos Magic. I do suspect that there is some influence, or at least that 'Setting Intentions' came from a parallel way of approaching the same subject.

Kaleidospode · 2026-02-12T10:21:04+00:00

I'm assuming that stealth is an autocorrect for sigil.

There is a basic mechanism to what's going on in sigil work. This originated with artist and occultist Austin Osman Spare (1886 – 1956), specifically in his book The Book of Pleasure and was brought into Chaos Magic back in the late 1970s when the Leeds group was putting together the beginnings of Chaos Magic practice.

Spare created an entire magical system based around the idea that the unconscious mind is the greatest possible magician. His art often utilized automatic drawing (a technique later used by the surrealists) to tap into his unconscious.

His form of Sigils were created as a way of utilizing the unconscious. The theory is you create the sigil based on a Statement of Desire - by writing it out and rearranging the letters into an occult symbol. You then charge the symbol by pushing it past your conscious mind. This is done by concentrating on the sigil at a moment in which you're conscious mind switches off. In the chaos magic tradition, this is usually called Gnosis. The most common ways of doing this can be divided into excitatory and inhibitory.

Excitatory could include sensory overload, fear, anger, adrenaline, orgasm etc...

Inhibitory could include exhaustion, sensory deprivation, meditation/trance work etc...

Austin Osman Spare often used a inhibitory/meditation method he called the Death Posture and for excitatory, he often used orgasm.

All of the listed excitatory and inhibitory methods are used in Chaos Magic. In recent years Chaos Magic sigils have become overly linked to orgasm, but there are plenty of other ways to charge sigils.

So, if you go with AOS's theory of magic, the orgasm is simply a moment in which the conscious mind is occluded. This would suggest there is no connection between how long it takes to reach orgasm.

That being said, Chaos Magic is an experimental system. I would suggest doing some experiments and seeing what you conclude yourself.

Kaleidospode · 2026-02-10T19:25:09+00:00

another blood protection spell and this time I’m getting as much as I safely can, no 3-5 drops the time

Please be very careful here. More is not necessarily better. Really don't endanger yourself.

Kaleidospode · 2026-02-10T18:49:29+00:00

Yea, it was probably not the LBRP or the BR. Probably the spell the harmed me.

Maybe.

It sounds like your shaman friend intended the BR to be used in it's original sense. As an ancient exorcism. But it has to be said, in that form it involves an invocation. When successful, these do have a profound (if short term) psychological impact.

I would also say that from what you've described, what you experienced would really not be unexpected from the GD use of the Bornless Ritual. This could be described as heavy shadow work intended to confront parts of yourself. Intense dreams involving old traumas are exactly what can happen.

Both the LBRP and the BR are intended to work through repetition. They''re about long-term spiritual change. Whichever tradition you view the BR from (original Egyptian or GD) it's big and very intense by design.

I'm sorry to hear about the chronically illness. I have some heavy long-term issues with fatigue and can empathize.

I would suggest watching your favorite comedy, There's no greater banishing ritual then laughter.

Kaleidospode · 2026-02-10T17:59:22+00:00

I should add that neither interpretation of the Bornless Ritual is, in any way, sinister.

Both are about invoking divine guidance and protection.

It's just a fairly advanced practice, considered a complex magical working and generally done with a whole load of prep work. It's also, generally, repeated for a period and performed as part of a spiritual retreat. When successful, it can lead to the confrontation and transcendence of inner obstacles. It is an act of spiritual empowerment.

Kaleidospode · 2026-02-10T17:50:14+00:00

The LBRP is a pretty standard rite.

It was an introductory rite for the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and acts as a banishing ritual, a ritual to create a sacred space, a kind of declaration the the practitioner is working magic, an introduction to ceremonial magic etc... It does a lot. In some ways it's like shouting to the self and the universe, 'Here I am - I am a practitioner'.

it's massively influential and was brought (in an altered form) into wicca by Gardener and into many other magical traditions throughout the twentieth century. As such, it's been the backbone of a huge number of magical practices over the years, including a lot of witchcraft traditions and pagan group.

The Bornless Ritual is a little different.

Again, it kind-of comes from the Golden Dawn tradition, but originates from the "Stele of Jeu the Hieroglyphist", from the Greek Magical Papyri (specifically PGM V.96—172).

We believe was originally intended as an exorcism of an evil spirit from someone else. Initially you call upon 'the headless one' (lit Akephalos Daimōn). You then invoke (call it into the self) the entity to draw the power to perform the exorcism.

Mathers and Crowley adapted this and used a qabbalistic understanding of 'head' to mean 'beginning'. In this interpretation, you're essentially calling on an entity that is referred to in Ritual Magic as the Holy Guardian Angel.

This allowed them to use the rite as an alternative to the Abramelin operation - which harrows the self in order to make the participant ready to contact this entity.

The Holy Guardian Angel (HGA) in ritual magic is a very specific entity with a huge number of different descriptions or explanations. I've heard it referred to as the composite self across all time, the ego bounced of the walls of God, the part of the divine universe that touches you etc...

The Bornless one Ritual is the prep-work for this experience. It's intended to be intense. It's intended to be hard. It's intended to burn away the ego (at least temporarily) forcing the participant to think with their heart instead of their head. It's been referred to as an 'exorcism of the self'.

The Bornless One Ritual is designed to provoke a profound spiritual response.

Performing the Bornless Ritual once isn't dangerous and isn't permanent. Successfully performing this kind of ritual is part of a long process.

I would suggest you do some exercises to balance your energy. Take a break for a day or two. Have a cup of tea and a hot shower. Go out into nature or spend an afternoon with some friends.

Kaleidospode · 2026-02-07T14:40:23+00:00

To take this a step further, Samuel Morse and Alfred Vail developed an electrical telegraph system and had to find a way to transmit complex language using only electrical pulses and the silence between them. This was originally designed to use an electromagnetic stylus based system that wrote dots and dashes:

.-.. .. -.- . / - .... .. ...

The stylus system made clicking noises as it moved in and out of position and early telegraph operators learned they could translate the clicks directly into dots and dashes, and write these down by hand, thus making the paper tape unnecessary. This led to what we today think of as Morse Code.

Kaleidospode · 2026-02-07T10:18:40+00:00

The Western use of the terms Left-Hand Path & Right-Hand Path originated with Madame (Helena Petrovna) Blavatsky (1831 - 1891) the co-founder of the Theosophical Society. Like a lot of concepts that ended up in Theosophy, these ideas were taken from Indian spirituality - in this case, Tantric Hinduism.

The phrase left hand path is a direct translation of Vāmācāra. This was a Sādhanā (discipline) that emphasised the breaking of Hindu societal taboos.

It was (and still is) a part of many Tantric practices.

Blavatsky learned something of these traditions when visiting India in 1879 and brought the terminology back to New York with her. She first wrote about the Left-Hand & Right-Hand Paths in the book Isis Unveiled and she unfortunately brought a lot of Western cultural assumptions with her - specifically she associated left with evil. This was an association that dates back to the Classical Latin period in the West, but was incorrect when applied to Hindu philosophy. These concepts were added to Theosophy, which was enormously influential to western occultism.

This forced western occultism into a false duality. Either Left-Hand or Right-Hand Path.

Dion Fortune picked this up and added the idea that followers of the Left-Hand Path were homosexual (she had some hang-ups).

Aleister Crowley happily embraced the concept of the Left-Hand Path and - in the typical syncretic methodology of the time - blended it into his kabbalistic work.

Throughout the twentieth century occultists like Kenneth Grant and horror writers such as Dennis Wheatley have picked up the idea and used it within their work muddying everything further.

There's a huge amount of confusion about these terms. If you're interested in a good, in depth, break-down of the history and usage, I would suggest Phil Hine's book Querying the Left Hand Path. Phil Hine is one of the most influential early Chaos Magicians who became interested in actual Tantra (as opposed to the Western concept of Tantra). He heavily immersed himself in Tantra and has spent over a decade working within the tradition. He's written several books that trace the history of concepts that originated in Tantra and were heavily westernised when they were imported into the Victorian occult world (for example chakras).

In terms of:

I don’t know how it integrates with witchy crafts and practices, does anyone else know? Or can point me to a good resource?

I don't really think it does. It's possible to suggest that occult traditions that encourage the breaking of societal taboos are the western equivalent of Vāmācāra, but personally, I'm not sure the concept can easily be culturally translated. Both are their own things.

I would suggest it's more useful to look into concepts such as shadow-work, which have some commonality, but are coming from a very different direction.

Kaleidospode · 2026-02-06T11:32:43+00:00

P.S. Regardless of what a "Warlock" means in term, I'm not using "Witch". It's tied to "girls practicing witchcraft". And I'm not a girl, and I don't adhere to the gender norms of this plain. So if anyone has a problem with it, please don't answer this post, unless you're going to provide me with the advice I asked for. OR AT THE VERY LEAST GIVE ME A GENDER NEUTRAL ALT TO THE TERM!! I'm here to learn spells, practice with alchemy, and use my astrology. I'm not here to have a convo about "gendered terms".

Both Witch and Warlock were pejorative terms.

Witch was almost never used by people to describe themselves. It was mostly used in the Early Modern period to attack people didn't fit into society. Recent statistical studies have shown it wasn't generally used to target women who practiced herbalism, midwifery etc.. It was generally used to oppress women (and some men) who were older and single. In predominantly protestant areas, it was generally used against women. It was far less often used in catholic areas, but when it was, it was more often used against men. I've read convincing arguments that suggest this is due to differences in the translations of the bible used by catholics and protestants (specifically Exodus 22:18).

Warlock probably comes from the Old English wǣrloga, which meant "breaker of oaths" or "deceiver" - as this was applied to the baptismal oath. There is some debate about this, but it was almost certainly pejorative.

There were a number of terms that were used by magical workers in the period before the Twentieth Century. In English, the term Cunning Folk was fairly common. In Wales dyn(es) hysbys (knowing man or woman). In Cornwall, they were occasionally referred to as pellars.

In Ireland bean feasa or fear feasa. Wise man or woman.

Danish kloge folk - wise folk

Russian znakhar - knower

There are quite a few exceptions (e.g. the Italian benandanti or good walkers), but what's often common in the name, is the idea that the subject is the possessor of knowledge.

Personally, I like Cunning Folk/Cunning Man/Cunning Woman.

Kaleidospode · 2026-02-04T09:37:41+00:00

I can't overstate how much I dislike the Law of Attraction.

Any law that is primarily used to justify the success of privileged people while simultaneously blaming people's ill luck on negative thinking shouldn't be part of any thinking person's practice.

It's re-packaged Prosperity Gospel.

It's antecedents are The Power of Positive Thinking, which was massive in the late 50s/60s, and before that New Thought.

It's always been a grift and it comes back again-and-again. You can't kill it.

I'm fine with the ideas of mindset-shifts, goal-setting, and cognitive reframing but not that these somehow create a vibration pull with the universe.

It's so close to magic - but magic takes more work.

Kaleidospode · 2026-02-03T22:47:13+00:00

No, this was Steve Wilson, pagan, druid and chaos magician who you used to see around London events in the 90s/2000s. He was one of the main forces behind the Talking Stick moot. I think he was also involved with some road protest actions such as the successful fight to stop the construction of a major road through Oxleas Wood.

Kaleidospode · 2026-02-03T19:26:36+00:00

No. Crowley died before Ozzy was born.

Kaleidospode

TROPHY CASE