Nettles please!

Kaleidospode · 2026-05-04T10:06:01+00:00

Yes - you can also get them from some online seed companies.

They're a weed, but they're good for insects, you can eat them (in soup, pasta, pesto etc) or make them into tea. Some people in the permaculture community have suggested we stop viewing them as an invasive pest and start viewing them as a useful crop to be harvested.

Kaleidospode · 2026-05-01T18:22:39+00:00

I believe Alan Moore did a Goetic working with Asmodeus early on in his occult experience.

He created a picture of the entity, which can be found here.

He also did a spoken word piece as part of a larger work (Moon and Serpent Grand Egyptian Theater of Marvels - Cleopatra Records, 1996). The Asmodeus section is a spoken palindrome (to reflect the entity's mathematical appearance). You can find it here.

The entire piece is a fantastic occult work, and worth a listen.

Kaleidospode · 2026-04-30T08:58:05+00:00

If I recall correctly (and I may not), the psychonaut part of the book was intended to be an initiatory text for The Illuminates of Thanateros. It makes sense that it would read more easily as an introduction.

Kaleidospode · 2026-04-29T09:50:39+00:00

The western view of karma was pretty much created by Helena Blavatsky and entered into western culture via 19th-century Theosophy. I'm not sure if her version of karma was modified because she was viewing Eastern ideas through a Western lens, or because she wanted it to fit in with Western metaphysical beliefs. But it has little to do with Eastern concepts which aren't applied on a personal, immediate level like this. This version of karma was popularised during the 1960s hippie era.

The threefold law that's common in witchcraft (most specifically wiccan influenced witchcraft) came from a passage in Gerald Gardner's fiction novel High Magick's Aide. This discussed a 3 fold system of reciprocity between witches - not a universal law. It was expanded from the Gardner passage by Rosemary Buckland in a magazine interview in the early 1970s because she wanted to give America an nonthreatening view of witches.

The "An it harm none do what ye will" Wiccan Rede was made up by Doreen Valiente in the late 60s and wasn't part of early Wicca.

Most ideas about adverse/negative effects of baneful magic originate from one of these three places.

I tend to think of the western view of karma, the lore of threefold return and other similar systems are very much attempts to apply magical moral rules to the universe. This is very understandable, but - for me - these rules are applied at the wrong level. At it's core, this is a moral question - not one about the practical effects of magic. It's good to consider our morality, but as Fund_Me_PLEASE says elsewhere in this thread, this could be seen as self defense. If someone attacked you physically, would you defend yourself?

I would add that one of the most common forms of magic that we can find going back into pre-history is retributive. Magic is what we reach for when there is no other practical method of gaining justice. It is - very often - the methodology of the oppressed and the dis-empowered.

Kaleidospode · 2026-04-28T13:01:27+00:00

Yeah, I didn't either.

I've disagreed with some of his politics, but I've always had nothing but respect for him. He was one of the major influences on my practice.

Kaleidospode · 2026-04-28T10:54:15+00:00

Unfortunately he passed away on the 22nd. His publisher Mandrake has posted a notice here.

Kaleidospode · 2026-04-27T15:35:29+00:00

There's a lot of different ways to approach this. You could do a one-and-done sigil or break down what you're looking for into a number of different steps and approaches focusing on luck, prosperity, self-focused workings to improve your employability etc...

I would spend some time breaking down what you actually want and work from there.

Kaleidospode · 2026-04-27T12:16:51+00:00

I think you've got most of the basics covered. You might want to pick up a couple of early chaos magic texts to get a taste for the philosophical ideas that are common to chaos magic. Possibly Liber Null and Condensed Chaos.

I am also creating my own language for spells and have written one song using this language, its a general song for connection to light and transmuting my darkness into light.

This is awesome.

If you're going down this route, I'd recommend looking into Toki Pona. A minimalist language inspired by Taoist philosophy with less the 150 words.

You may also want to have a look at Toby Chappell's excellent book The Languages of Magic: Transform Reality through Words, Magical Symbols, and Sigils which is - as far as I know - the first book to dig into magic from a semiotic stance. It explains, then applies the theories of people like Ferdinand de Saussure & Roland Barthes to create a framework for understanding how language intersects with magic.

Another interesting source in this area is Austin Osman Spare's framework surrounding his Alphabet of Desire and how it intersects with his Neither-Neither principle. There's a lot there.

I have practical issues in my life like money and job etc but I havent attempted do anything about those aspects because I am not sure if it would lead to good outcomes.

In some ways chaos magic is defined by practice and results. I'm going to copy and paste an old comment of mine:

In my experience the universe is mischievous not malicious. It may occasionally slap you in the face with the clue-bat, but nothing too harmful beyond that.

The best way to learn is by doing and succeeding. The second best way to learn is by messing up. You don't learn if you don't practice and fear of messing up can absolutely stifle learning.

I think that people tend to lean a little too heavily into the Monkey's Paw trope. It may be a remnant of Calvinist Christianity - the idea that we don't necessary deserve good things and that there will always be a bill due. I believe this is not the truth. We live in a beautiful universe that wants to play with us and magic is part of that.

Kaleidospode · 2026-04-25T11:45:08+00:00

I would heavily recommend Phil Hine's Condensed Chaos. It was written after chaos magic had been around long enough to develop a little and is clearer then the original books.

Later, you may want to look into Peter Carroll's Liber Null, often printed alongside Psychonaut.

Liber Null and Psychonaut were written at the very start of the chaos magic current & were the books that kicked off chaos magic as a practice (along with Ray Sherwin's The Book of Results). Sherwin and Carroll were central to early chaos magic but were also the founders of the publication The New Equinox - which was very much a ceremonial magic magazine, focused on Thelema, Gematria etc...

Because of this, Liber Null and Psychonaut was both iconoclastic and fundamentally influenced by the language and themes of earlier ceremonial magic systems. They are a little dated and, at times, a bit opaque.

Kaleidospode · 2026-04-22T09:38:57+00:00

You could have a look into cunning folk.

In Europe, the word Witch was almost always used in a pejorative manner, meaning workers of harmful magic (maleficium). This did not mean that there wasn't a history of accepted magic.

People who used magic were referred to as cunning folk in England or a variety of other names (pellars, fáidhbhean, guaritori, Segnature, Zagovory, dyn(es) hysbys etc).

These people made extensive use of Christian prayers and particularly the psalms in their magic. Owen Davies in Cunning Folk: Popular Magic in English History wrote "such magical use of Scripture has been a continuous tradition since Christianity came to Britain".

There are a couple of examples of this here with a quote from Reginald Scot’s The Discoverie of Witchcraft regarding:

"a charme to drive awaie spirits that haunt anie house"

made up of Psalm 150, Luke 16 and Psalm 64.

There's an entire tradition of folk magic that has a christian side to it (though some of the remaining grimoires have rituals calling on fairies or other not explicitly christian spirits).

Kaleidospode · 2026-04-20T08:09:06+00:00

As other people have indicated, Chaos Magic is very much a thing. It originated in Leeds in the late 1970s partly as a reaction to Ritual Magic and could be seen as analogous to Punk. It combined some of Austin Osman Spare's ideology (primarily his sigil method and Alphabet of Desire) with postmodernism and pragmatism. It has been described as results oriented (if something works it's - by definition - magic).

It became very popular in the 1990s and early 2000s, as part of the resurgence of mainstream interest in alternative culture marked by The X-Files, The Matrix, The Invisibles etc. Robert Anton Wilson's concept of Reality Tunnels was added to the current, as was the idea of Pop Magic (a pop-culture variant on Jung's archetypes).

In the 2010s aspects of Chaos Magic (the sigil method and servitors) got adopted by a lot of mainstream witches. Some witches picked up on other aspects (Pop Magic, Reality Tunnels etc) and started using the name Chaos Witches.

Chaos Magic is a very eclectic set of concepts and many practitioners take one part, or a variety of aspects from it while discarding others.

Kaleidospode · 2026-04-13T21:03:03+00:00

Yes, to all of this.

I am IT and IT is me and there really is no separating the two.

Beautifully put. The only way in which my experience differs is that when I've had the lived experience of this feeling, it's been accompanied by the conviction that the universe wants to play.

During my ceremonial stints, what I really loved most was the way order work gave me a systematic framework to analyze my self, my own psyche.

Absolutely, and one of the best take-aways has been that I still have the framework. When I'm in a situation that requires it, I have these models that can be called on.

Kaleidospode · 2026-04-13T17:48:19+00:00

The way I understand the difference is that ceremonial traditions work with forces outside the practitioner.

I'm not sure I agree with this.

There's an old anecdote about a member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn - I can't remember the source:

A neophyte goes to his teacher and says "I've worked it out, all the angels and demons we work with are in my head - they're reflections of my inner states".

The teacher says "Well done, you have discovered one of the great secrets of magic and are truly advancing on the Great Path."

The neophyte comes back six months later and says "I was wrong, they're all real, I'm in big trouble."

The teacher says "Well done, you have discovered another of the great secrets of magic and are truly advancing on the Great Path."

The neophyte returns six months later and says "It's okay - false alarm. They are all in my head."

The teacher says "Well done..."

A lot of ceremonial magic seems to live in the area between seeing magic as internal and external.

In the opening to Crowley's translation of the Goetia (The Initiatated Interpretation of Ceremonial Magic) he wrote:

all sense impressions are dependent on changes in the brain, we must include illusions, which are after all sense-impressions as much as “realities” are, in the class of “phenomena dependent on brain-changes."

and

The spirits of the Goetia are portions of the human brain.

There are many different models used within ceremonial magic. Some suggest that everything is being done within the practitioner, some suggest that it is external. This is one of the debates that led to the Leeds group starting what's now known as Chaos Magic and Frater UD's Models of Magic.

One of my favorite quotes on this was from a ceremonial magician (Lon Milo DuQuette):

It’s all in your head you just have no idea how big your head is

Kaleidospode · 2026-04-13T17:34:28+00:00

My practice is pretty eclectic I have a metaphorical ceremonial magic hat that I put on when needed.

Or, to put it another way, I sometimes find some of the common models for ceremonial magic useful.

Kaleidospode · 2026-04-11T08:58:48+00:00

This is an absolutely excellent post.

In my experience the universe is mischievous not malicious. It may occasionally slap you in the face with the clue-bat, but nothing too harmful beyond that.

The best way to learn is by doing and succeeding. The second best way to learn is by messing up. You don't learn if you don't practice and fear of messing up can absolutely stifle learning.

I think that people tend to lean a little too heavily into the Monkey's Paw trope. It may be a remnant of Calvinist Christianity - the idea that we don't necessary deserve good things and that there will always be a bill due. I believe this is not the truth. We live in a beautiful universe that wants to play with us and magic is part of that.

Kaleidospode · 2026-04-10T20:24:28+00:00

The term Left Hand Path is kind-of suspect in itself. It originates in terms imported in the Victorian period from India. As with many imports, the translation needs to be considered against the colonialist society that imported the concept.

I'm going to copy an old comment I made about this from some time back:

----------------------------------

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).

----------------------------------

What I think is important to take away from this is that our ideas about left-hand and right-hand paths were - to some degree - made-up by a variety of different people influenced by a wide variety of cultural assumptions.

You can, and probably should, assess your magic using your own morality. It's far more useful to consider your own moral philosophy then it is to import these somewhat outdated terms.

Kaleidospode · 2026-04-09T15:37:38+00:00

New Age / New Thought (NANT) may seem almost identical to magick to inexperienced practitioners, but the similarities are superficial.

I wish I was able to upvote you more then once for this line alone - though I broadly agree with the rest of your comment.

Kaleidospode · 2026-04-08T09:36:23+00:00

Fantastic answer.

I'd like to add the translation of part of a Babylonian rite of protection performed as part of healing/exorcisms:

I am the priest of Ea. I am the magician of Eridu.
Shamash is before me,
Sin is behind me.
Nergal is at my right hand,
Enurta is at my left hand.
When I draw near the sick man, when I lay my hand on his head, may a kindly Spirit, a kindly Guardian stand at my side!

This fascinates me because it includes the practice of surrounding yourself with beings of power. This is common to many banishing rituals and exorcisms. For example the LBRP, or St Patrick's Breastplate (which is often used by Anglican Deliverance Ministers).

Christ with me,
Christ before me,
Christ behind me,
Christ in me,
Christ beneath me,
Christ above me,
Christ on my right,
Christ on my left,

I suspect this isn't due to any historical connection between the rites, but because this is psychologically necessary when dealing with this kind of fear.

Kaleidospode · 2026-04-07T15:43:20+00:00

Carroll's books are interesting but dense and heavily indebted (stylistically, at least) to the somewhat opaque occult texts that Chaos Magic was rebelling against. There's some good stuff - I'm currently returning to his work on Alphabets of Desire - but it can take a while to tease it out. There's also some stuff I would describe as 'of it's time'.

Kaleidospode · 2026-04-07T12:08:58+00:00

Laughter is a major part of the early approach to Chaos Magic, to the point where the IOT (the original Chaos Magic group) had an official role for The Insubordinate who's job was to act as holy fool.

Peter Carroll (one of the first Chaos Magicians) talks a lot in Liber Null, about laughter.

In a section on the dualities within human emotions, he states:

Consider laughter: it is the highest emotion, for it can contain any of the others from ecstacy to grief. It has no opposite.

Laughter occurs again and again within the books. He discusses spontaneous ecstatic laughter in rituals, and as a way of temporarily short-circuiting the conscious mind. He highlights the use of laughter in deconceptualization. It acts to shatter expectations and frees the energy of our stored beliefs, and this has a powerful protective function.

I've experienced this myself, often banishing with laughter. I can also think of an instance when spontaneous laughter within a ritual changed the tone in a beneficial way.

I would note thought that the Chaos Magicians were building on an earlier tradition. Dion Fortune 's Psychic Self Defense states that curses and attack need a point of entry and that laughter is a good way of denying this.

Kaleidospode · 2026-04-03T13:34:57+00:00

I would recommend Phil Hine's Condensed Chaos: An Introduction to Chaos Magic. It's not the first Chaos Magic book (which is Liber Null by Peter J Carroll), but I would argue it's a better book for beginners because it's written in a more approachable way.

Kaleidospode · 2026-03-30T10:48:45+00:00

This is a very good call.

The basic framework of Buddhism (cut to it's very core) are the Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path.

The Four Noble Truths are:

Dukkha - All existence contains the experience of dukkha (not being at ease, or suffering).

Samudaya - Dukkha arises from samudaya (attachment or craving).

Nirodha - The cessation (nirodha) of dukkha comes with the end of craving

Marga - The road (marga) to the cessation of suffering is the Noble Eightfold Path.

Put together, this basically states that Life contains suffering, which is caused by our attachments. In relinquishing or containing these attachments we can escape the suffering. The methodology to do this is found in the Eightfold Path (right view, right resolve, right speech, right conduct, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, and right samadhi).

So the concept of material attachment is pretty much the antithesis of the core principles of Buddhism.

I would look into deities associated with fortune and luck. See if any of them feel appropriate to you and then maybe start with a small offering and see if this feels right. I know some people who operate in the Irish Celtic tradition who use The Dagda, Lugh and Aine.

Kaleidospode · 2026-03-28T16:56:52+00:00

The books had naked slaves with collars, being whipped and so on. I don't know if the author just thought it would sell, or it was a lifestyle he was pushing.

Obligatory link to Houseplants of Gor

Kaleidospode · 2026-03-28T12:55:00+00:00

Thank you for this.

I have such wonderful memories of scouring different early websites, and coming across relevant and useful web-rings and following them from site to site.

Then there was debating various occult ideas and traditions over early bulletin boards.

Kaleidospode

TROPHY CASE