readings, one book at its own scale — a
practitioner’s two-volume reconstruction of the underworld tradition,
the operations the blog’s Western material has been standing on, and a
hazard the book names in order to refuse itThirteenth of the readings. The western column read the West as a
syllabus — grades, gates, a table of correspondences, and its safeguards
written into the lessons. Two esoteric
tarots read a frame that fits in a hand: a fixed table plus a
reader. Both read the tradition’s theory — what it
teaches, what it tabulates, what it says about itself. Neither read its
operations, and neither went near the stream this book
claims is the source of all of it: the underworld. Jake Stratton-Kent’s
Geosophia is cited nowhere in the rest of the blog. Its
two volumes argue that the material those posts have been reading is the
later, sublimated form of a practice-first tradition, and that the
practice is where the tradition lives.
Status. This post reads one source, in two volumes. Every quotation is verbatim from a complete digital text of the edition, checked character for character against it and cited in the notes by volume, book and chapter heading — the book’s own running heads are the address used here. The source’s typographic quotes are rendered as straight ASCII, its small-caps dropped-capital artefacts are normalised, a quotation’s opening capital is normalised to its position in the sentence, and elisions are marked […]. The book’s history is not adjudicated. Its thesis is not adopted: nothing below asserts that the underworld is the root of Western magic, and nothing asserts that it is not. §5 is about the kind of warrant its historical claims carry, and that section is the centre of the reading. No living author or scholar is diagnosed, no one’s practice is validated or disqualified, and the book’s contentious material is reported as the book’s content and not adopted (§6). As everywhere: describe structures, diagnose no one.*
Twelve readings in, the series has a habit: take a source whole — lexicon, structure, omissions, evidence — and ask what a blog that has quoted sources all along now has to change. The Western material inside that run has been theoretical material. The western column assembled the West’s safeguards from a curriculum: the Golden Dawn’s gate at the Neophyte grade, the Quareia syllabus with its staged Void, the clinical referral written into a lesson. Two esoteric tarots took a deck — a fixed table of correspondences, a set of positions, a reader — and asked what kind of frame an object is. Both read the tradition’s self-description and its teaching materials faithfully. Neither read its operations, and neither went near its underworld.
Geosophia is the deliberate counter-case, and the counter-case is in its argument rather than its marketing. Its thesis is not that the tradition has a theory and also a practice. It is that the theory is the later form of the practice — a sublimation, and in places a distortion:
“It has its own worldview – of which theology and philosophy are later sublimated forms – and far from being a specialised sub-discipline, it is the primal origin of the entire Western tradition of magic.”1
Set that against the two posts. The western column quotes a syllabus in order to show that the West wrote its safeguards down; on this account a syllabus is what the tradition became after it stopped being something else. The tarot post treats a correspondence table as a public, fixed, checkable instrument; on this account a table is a mnemonic for a myth, and “while these remain data in a table there is comparatively little magic in them”.2
And the debt is a silence, which is measurable. A case-insensitive search of the rest of the blog’s content for “Geosophia” and “Stratton-Kent” returns 0 hits. The book is not cited anywhere, not in passing — the ordinary condition of a source not yet read, which the series exists to repair. But the shape of the gap is worth stating. The two posts the blog built its Western picture from are, on this book’s terms, descriptions of a derivative: the celestial, ouranian, philosophical material, read as the tradition, with the practice underneath it unread and the underworld untouched. Whether that framing survives §5 is what the reading has to work out.
There is also a hazard in the source, named before the reading began: Geosophia is a reconstruction offered by a practitioner, and its historical claims are of a different kind from a scholar’s. The book often says so itself. §5 sets that out, and it is the load-bearing section.
Geosophia: The Argo of Magic is by Jake Stratton-Kent, in two volumes from Scarlet Imprint under the Bibliothèque Rouge banner, copyright 2010, designed by fofó. The text carries the copyright pages, so the edition facts can be stated rather than inferred: Volume I, “Printed & bound by Antony Rowe Ltd.”, ISBN 978-0-9567203-0-6; Volume II, ISBN 978-0-9567203-1-3.3
The structure is the argument as much as the sentence is. Eight “Books” run across the volumes — One to Four in the first, Five to Eight in the second — and the spine of all eight is Apollonius’ Argonautica, chapter by chapter: “Argonautica I: Preparation & Departure”, “Argonautica III: Jason and Medea”, “Argonautica IV: Homeward Bound”. Interleaved are chapters headed “Goetic Gallery” — case studies under a name for a class of magical person: Argonautica, Sibyllinia, Necromantia, Astrologia, Orphica, Barbaricæ, Sympathia, Maters de Mysteria, Metamorphica — and, after each block, “Implications for Modern Practice”. A journey with a commentary at every port, and the ports are the underworld’s.
Its sources are named and credited: the Greek Magical Papyri in Betz’s translation, which are “difficult to over-value”; the Testament of Solomon and the Hygromanteia, named as the earliest texts of the Solomonic genre; the grimoires read directly — Grimorium Verum, the Key of Solomon, the Heptameron, the Grand Grimoire, the Lemegeton’s Goetia; a whole book of translated Picatrix operations; the Orphic books as the grimoires’ earliest ancestors; and the Thracian, Phrygian, Chaldean, Hittite and Sabean material worked through as source, not colour. The acknowledgements thank “generations of scholars, from Charles Wycliffe Goodwin to Hans Dieter Betz, who brought us the Greek Magical Papyri”, and name Skinner and Rankine, Joseph Peterson and others.3
Its purpose is stated in the introduction, and it is two-sided:
“The purposes of this book therefore should be becoming clear, although the work is not without considerable difficulties. One purpose is to reach behind the Classical Greek inheritance to reveal the older strata of chthonic religion. Another is to show, with demonstrations of continuity, the influence of both archaic practice and the archaic practitioner on what followed.”4
“The archaic practitioner” is the phrase to hold. This is a study of a worker, not of an idea, and the sentence that says what the work is for also says what it is not:
“This purpose is neither impartial historical understanding nor a re-enactment style historical reconstruction nor even Hellenic neo-paganism”; it “serves an emergent synthesis of global magic produced by cultural forces active in our own time”; and “it is my contention that goetic magic, properly understood, is the most important fundamental element Western magic has to contribute to the melting pot”.5
So the genre is declared, the aim is given in the first person, and the book then spends its length showing continuity from the Greek goen to the Renaissance Verum and printing the operations as evidence.
The argument begins with a word. Goetia is not a first name for black magic, and it does not take its name from an art:
“[T]he term goetia derives from a word indicating a person, a rare case of the art taking its name from the artist. Such a person was termed a goes. Goetia is related primarily to the identity of the operator, and only secondarily to their art or perceptions of it.”6
And the person is a mourner, the goen who performs the goos:
“The word goes relates to terms describing the act of lamenting at funeral rites; the mournful howling considered as a magical voice. These magical tones can guide the deceased to the underworld, and raise the dead. This is the root of the long connection of goetia with necromancy, which has come to be termed black magic.”6
That is the hinge. If the operator’s name is the mourner’s name, the eldest Western magic is a funerary art. The Introduction draws the conclusion in its central paragraph:
“[T]he chthonic realm was the source of oracular power at all stages of Greek religion. The celestial or transcendental realms became all important in later magic, not least as the source of the magician’s authority. Previously the earth as source of life and the underworld as the abode of the dead were central to religion and magic. More to the point, much of the magic of later times – particularly that characterised as goetic – was an adaptation – one might even say a distortion – of the older type.”7
“… was an adaptation – one might even say a distortion – of the older type.” The claim then runs at system scale:
“[A] combination of negative image, misleading associations and confused semantics has prevented the historical identification of goetia as the original core, and the earliest designation, of Western magic.”8
“[T]he core concepts of Western magic both originate and are embedded within the goetic tradition. Goetia has long been devalued and disowned, but these concepts persist within occult traditions even while their origin is disguised.”9
The strongest version makes the celestial stream itself a relocation, worked out on Plato’s Er and Plutarch in “Er of Pamphylia”: a departure from older Greek ideas “involved varied projections of the afterlife either mostly or entirely into the heavens”, and
“[i]n many instances this involved or assumed a transferral or projection of the geography of Hades onto the sky; complete with its rivers, Islands of the Blessed and other important locations.”10
What the transfer produced is what the western column’s material is made of. Under astrological influence from Chaldean and later Jewish sources, “the seven planetary gods, with their near all-encompassing role in human destiny, become the hostile Archons of Gnosticism”.10 The spheres and the tables are the underworld’s geography with the underworld taken out. The book is not proposing that later magic has underworld themes. It is proposing that later magic descends from an underworld practice and has largely forgotten it.
The blog must not take this; §5 and §6 supply the counterweight. But it is a real thesis, argued at the scale of the sources, and it is in the blog nowhere.
If theory is the later form, the practice must be shown, and here the book does something the blog has no precedent for: it prints the workings in full and then comments.
Volume I’s “Conjuring the Sibyls” takes three consecutive chapters of Reginald Scot’s Discoverie of Witchcraft, Book XV — “the first section is of considerable length”, it warns, so the comments “appear instead following each of the three sections” — and prints them entire.11 The first is An Experiment of the Dead: “First fast and pray three days, and abstain thee from all filthiness”, the body of a suicide or an executed criminal, a companion with “a candle in his left hand, and in his right hand a crystal stone”, a hazel wand bearing “these names of God written thereupon”, and a bargain in which the operator promises the spirit “an alms deed” and to “pray for thee” — an obligation running both ways.11 The other two are the treasure charm and the three fairy sisters who grant a ring of invisibility: “And if they come not the first night, then do the same the second night, and so the third night, until they do come: for doubtless they will come, and lie thou in thy bed, in the same parlour or chamber.”11 The commentary reads the Sibylia rite as a parhedros operation — the magical assistant the papyri call a paredros and the later tradition calls the Holy Guardian Angel — and reads the invisibility rite against the myth of Gyges from Plato’s Republic, Book II, quoted whole. The material is presented as continuity with evidence: “The rite thus brings us more or less full circle from Mystery religions, ancient Lydia and its Sibyl to a conjuration of Sibylline fairies in Renaissance England.”11
Volume II does the same for what the practitioner does with the days. “Mia Labores: Goetic Devotions” describes a working life in the first person:
“[M]y magical work concerns goetic processes, and involves a strong devotional aspect while dealing with spirits of the earth and the Underworld. This does not imply that I am a Satanist, but that my approach to the spirits differs from medieval demonology and the later derivatives.”12
What follows is concrete and unglamorous: a shrine built from a cabinet; images of “a clay head” or “a statuette”, installed with the shelf chosen “according to the rank of each individual spirit”; offerings of “fire and water”, candles for thanks and water and incense “to maintain the link and feed the spirits”; the intermediary spirit of the Grimorium Verum, Scirlin, who “acts in the same way as the Holy Guardian Angel in other supposedly transcendental systems”; and a routine of cleaning, washing, consecration and daily prayer described under a borrowed Brujeria word, mia labores, “my chores”:
“This cycle is the basis of empowerment of the magician, the instruments, and particularly, of the spirit agencies that underpin the more spectacular magical work that is more commonly spoken of, but whose reliance on the adoption of a magical life based on devotion and actual work is too often left unsaid.”12
Two things bear on everything the blog has argued. The first is that this is not a syllabus: no gate, no grade, no order you cannot skip, no curriculum — a shrine, a wash, old coins kept for offerings, a routine described as a vocation. The western column’s second addition, “a curriculum is a safeguard”, is therefore a property of a Western lineage and not of the West; §7 states the correction. The second is that the book’s instruction on how to work is not an instruction to repeat:
“[T]he goal should be the acquisition of mastery of symbolic languages, in order to compose rites and texts for oneself. Misguided imitation of our predecessors and purely retrospective approaches fall short of an attainment that, while devoutly wished for by many, is lost if this is not well understood.”13
And one practitioner-directed instruction, in Volume I, where no written rite exists: “the magician who wishes to pursue the ideas raised in this book would do well to consider organising a visit to Hades for their self.”14 So the practice layer is not a secret and not a table: printed sixteenth- and eighteenth-century workings, a life around a shrine, a compositional instruction, a ritual from the papyri traditions. That is what the blog has been reading about without reading.
This is the spine. Geosophia advances historical claims — origins, transmissions, datings — that are the author’s reconstruction rather than established scholarship. The blog’s job is not to adjudicate them. It is to describe the structure of the argument and its kind of warrant, and to mark which claims are which. The book does much of that marking itself, in its own voice, and the marking is not consistent — which is the finding.
First, the genre claim is made at the front, once, plainly. Not a preface that hedges over a text that does not:
“To avoid misunderstanding, this is not a strictly academic approach, though availing itself of modern studies. The study of interpretations of history is termed historiography, and I avail myself of this term to indicate that interpretation to a definite end rather than strictly scientific use of literary and other evidence is the purpose here.”15
Second, the object of study is declared a mythic past, not a history. “My intention is not a complete historical reconstruction of magic and religion of a particular circumscribed historic period”; “I am not drawing a family tree of dates, times and places in which oriental and Greek ideas influenced one another”; it “is not intended to be strictly historical”, because the relation of Orphism and goetia with the Dionysian currents “provides a creation myth for transforming modern magic”.15
Third, the direction of the inference is named as a method. The most disarmingly honest sentence in the book, from the section on Melissa:
“This study seeks to partially regenerate the older stratum by extrapolation from elements of the new.”16
The older layer is not recovered from documents about the older layer. It is inferred from the later material, by a practitioner, for present use — which fits the genre claim exactly.
Fourth, the novel historical claims are marked as the author’s, in the first person. “This may be the first attempt to assess the Thracians role in the history of Western magic”; “So far as I am aware this has not been remarked on previously”; “I feel that my interpretation of the origins of such rites is correct”; “my speculation in The True Grimoire that Spare was acquainted with, and inspired by its contents”; “It is my contention that…”.17 And in a dense argument about purification he marks an assumption as an assumption, in the text: “or so we must assume on the basis of available evidence”.18
Fifth — the counterweight the blog has to carry — the same voice states contested claims as givens. The clearest instance is the transmission claim the whole book rests on:
“That the Magical Papyri are the ancestors of the later grimoires is a given, the relations between them are plain.”19
The sentence just before it is in the same register: the Orphic books, the Papyri and the Byzantine Solomonic texts “constitute the phases of a continuous literary tradition”.19 Neither hedges. The hedging a few pages later is what tells: against Betz’s “the Underworld in the papyri has assumed massive importance”, the book answers “It appears to me that this may not be such a recent development”.19 And in one place it argues against a named scholar while granting his caution. Charles Kahn rejected the description of Empedocles as a shaman on the ground that no account survives of him journeying to the underworld and returning; the book answers, “Academic caution is commendable and necessary”, and then, “Nevertheless, one is entitled to wonder about the extensive variations in accounts”.20
What the structure amounts to. This is a syncretic reconstruction with a declared genre, written by a practitioner who names his sources, credits the scholarship he uses, states the direction of his inference, marks many claims as his own reading and elsewhere states others as settled. It is not a Two Esoteric Tarots case: there the deck dispute had a dated diplomatic record and a treasury entry competing with the magical claim, so a reader could choose on third-party-checkable evidence. Here, on most of the load-bearing genealogy, there is no such record, and the book does not pretend there is. Where there is documented material — the Papyri, the Testament of Solomon, the Hygromanteia, the Picatrix, the printed grimoires — the citations are real and the primary texts are quoted at length, so a reader with the editions can check the operations, though not the genealogy.
The honest formulation is neither “the history is unreliable” nor “the history is established”. It is: the operations are documented, and the genealogy is argued. The practical material is checkable against public texts; the claim that it is the root of the whole Western tradition is a reading, offered with its method stated, by a practitioner with a stake in the reading being right. It is the reading, not the material, that the blog must hold at arm’s length — the two-esoteric-tarots problem in a different key, and the difference is that here the author is the one who says so.
First: the hedge and the assertion sit side by side, and the blog should cite the book both ways. The same Introduction that says “this is not a strictly academic approach” and “it is not intended to be strictly historical” also says “the Magical Papyri are the ancestors of the later grimoires is a given”. A reading that quotes one half is not reading the book. The handling is §5’s: cite the operations as text, cite the genealogy as a reconstruction, and say which is which each time.
Second: the book is not anti-theory, and its anti-theory sentence is aimed near the tarot post.
“Magic without theory is a dead letter, a mere recipe; but theory without mythic language cannot be readily transformed into magical practice. In fact regardless of the particular philosophical model, these mythic expressions constitute a language of archaic goetic practice.”21
Geosophia is not saying theory is worthless. It is saying that a theory stripped of its myth is a recipe, and that the myth is the operative part — the opposite of the account the blog has used, in which a table is a public, fixed, checkable instrument. Both can be true: the table is checkable, and the table is not the operation. §7 makes that the third correction.
Third: the register is polemical where it touches institutions and cultural ownership, and the blog must not adopt it. The Goetia of Solomon’s procedures are called “despicable”, and said to “simply reflect the spirit-negative attitudes of an outdated theology”; the alternative is “infinitely preferable”. On who may take part: “it is absurd for critics – generally white – to insist that as a non-initiate into this tradition or that, I have no rights in this ongoing dialogue.”22 This post adopts neither position and does not enter the argument. It records that Geosophia has a polemical edge on both, in the book’s own voice, and that a reading quoting only the serene material would misrepresent it.
Fourth, and it matters most to this blog: the hazard is named and the fence refused.
“Some say that my methods, which I see little sign they fully understand, are not entirely safe. To this, I would be the first to agree; they are not safe, because they are not a placebo or a static acceptance of our tradition’s current limitations… Magic is not a no-risk vocation. To encourage this avoidance in others is at best futile, and at worst a betrayal.”23
“Madness or other disasters may threaten; even destroy the unprepared magician who loses the golden thread. However, as a notorious magician once said, an initiatory ordeal that has no risk of failure is not an ordeal.”23
That is a position, not an oversight, and it is the exact inverse of the western column’s material. It is not the blog’s position, and the blog should not pretend it is. It is the sharpest counterweight in the reading: a practitioner’s manual that treats the safety rule as a betrayal.
Fifth: there is one caution addressed to a practitioner, and it is about respect, not safety. In “Ghosts, Demons & the Grimoires”, on the ancestor spirits of the tradition — “ancient magicians become spirits themselves” — the book adds: “For those among us with any imagination this is a sufficient note of caution; when conjuring spirits a degree of respect is necessary, since one day we may well be numbered among them.”24 It is an ethic of the work, not a boundary on it, and it is the closest the book comes in its own voice to a warning about the operations.
Three corrections, stated once each.
The blog has been reading the tradition’s self-descriptions and its syllabus and calling that the tradition. A practice-first source makes visible what the syllabus was a later form of: the operations. The blog now owes the operations — the conjurations, the shrine, the offerings, the working life — a place in the Western material, beside the safeguards and the tables it already has.
The consequence for the western column is specific. Its second addition was “a curriculum is a safeguard”, read as a property of the West. Geosophia is a Western manual on overlapping territory with no curriculum at all: no grade, no gate, no order you cannot skip, and no safeguard word anywhere in either volume (§8). The row stands for the lineage the column actually quotes — the Golden Dawn and Quareia — and must not be generalised to “the West”. This is the correction the holy daimon delivered by another route: a Western text on identical ground that gates nothing.
The blog’s Western material has been the celestial, ouranian side — the Tree, the spheres, the planetary correspondences, the guardian angel — and it has never read the underworld stream: the goen as mourner and guide of souls, necromancy as a communal duty, the dead as the natural focus of a magical life. Geosophia supplies that stream whole, with its operations attached, and the blog should carry it as a stream it had not touched — without adopting the claim that the stream is the root.
That one is checkable against the blog and it holds. The only appearances of the tradition’s underworld vocabulary in the content are a footnote to a Frater Acher pamphlet — Goêtic Common Sense: An Interlude for the Inveterate Chthonic Sorcerer — in the western column, and a passing mention of “goetia” in the tarot post.25 Two touches at the margin, in footnotes and asides. The underworld tradition is the largest unread region in the blog’s Western material, and this is the first post to open it.
The blog’s reading of a correspondence table has been an instrument’s reading, not a practitioner’s. Register both: the table is public, fixed and checkable, and it is also, on a working practitioner’s account, a mnemonic that carries comparatively little magic until the myth is restored to it.
The correction is not to abandon the tarot post’s finding. The table is public, the utterance is the operator’s, and the blog needs two questions where it had one. What changes is that the blog now has a practitioner’s statement of what the table is for, and should carry it next to the check rather than under it.
None of the three touches what the blog has argued about frames, seats, checks or safeguards. All three change what the blog may say it has read: a series about theory and description has taken a practice-first source as its unit, and a series about the West has found that its West was one half of one stream.
The series reports the presence or absence of a safeguard, a metered pace and a clinical referral as search results, scoped to the text of this edition. This book’s results are the starkest in the series, and each is a different kind of absence.
“Safeguard”: 0 hits, in both volumes. A case-insensitive search of the two volumes returns nothing, in any form of the word. The series has had a clear zero before — Holy Daimon, Memories, Dreams, Reflections — but never across a book that prints this many operative procedures. Two volumes of conjurations, offerings and rites, and the word does not occur once.
No metered pace. “Pace” returns 17 hits in Volume I and 10 in Volume II, and not one is a rate: nearly all are inside the word “space”, plus “the pace at which ideas were evolving”, “terminology struggled to keep pace”, a ritual instruction to “Advance ten paces”, and a Latin dismissal, vade in pace.26 What the book has instead is a cadence — “Assuming the grimoire is the background or inspiration for your magical work as a whole, this prayer will be said every day”, offerings daily or weekly “ascertained by divination”, ritual baths “on a regular basis” — and a cadence is not a fence. Nothing in either volume says how much is too much, how fast is too fast, or when to stop.
No clinical referral at all. A case-insensitive search returns 0 hits for “therapist”, “psychiatry”, “psychiatric”, “clinical”, “mental health”, “breakdown”, “seek help”, “professional help”, “self-harm” and “dose”. The words that do occur are historical or narrative: “physician” 6 times, five of the six inside a quoted ancient text (four in Plato’s Charmides on the physicians of Zalmoxis, one in Empedocles), the sixth the author’s own gloss on Paeon; “doctor” 9 times, every one a historical person or an idiom — the witch-doctor become philosopher, “Doctor Faustus”, “Doctor Dee”, “doctors of religion”; “hospital” 3 times, all “hospitality”; “therapy” once, and it is Pindar founding “a cult of the Mother specialising in music therapy”; “suicide” and its forms 4 times, all in the conjuration material — the spirit of “a new buried suicide or criminal” — or in Medea’s story.26 Not one of these is addressed to a reader’s safety, and there is no route out of the practice to anyone.
The vocabulary of danger is present, and it is aimed at the past. “Danger” returns 18 hits in Volume I and 17 in Volume II, every one mythic, historical or narrative — the “dangerous nature of many chthonic figures”, the dangers of the Argonauts’ voyage, one quoted grimoire licence asking that a spirit depart “without injury or danger to man or Beast”.26 “Caution” returns 9 hits in total; five are methodological, three narrative, and one is addressed to a practitioner — the respect note at §6. That is the whole practitioner-facing warning vocabulary of a two-volume manual.
The nearest thing to a safety test is quoted from the Picatrix, and it is a bar, not a route. “The simple test with which to guard yourself is that only the strong of soul and noble of substance should venture on these works”; those who broke the stipulations “have received warning signs too strange and wonderful to describe at length”, and one such magician was “struck with horror and was mocked by all” for forty days.27 That is a caution inside translated source material. It is not the author’s, and it sends nobody anywhere.
And the book’s own position is the opposite of a safeguard. §6 quotes it: the methods “are not safe”; “Magic is not a no-risk vocation”; and to encourage the avoidance of risk in others “is at best futile, and at worst a betrayal”. The finding is not that this book is careless, and not that it has not thought about the question. It has thought about it and answered it — the risk is the design.
That places it against the series’ other findings. Star.Ships had no practice to fence; two esoteric tarots described an operation and fenced nothing, in a genre where nobody would expect a fence; the holy daimon is a manual for solitary practice with no referral; the holy heretics states a dose and leaves its meter to the practitioner; Memories, Dreams, Reflections supplies the strongest check in the series — a professional rule — but for analysts, not for readers; Eichmann in Jerusalem has no practice at all. Geosophia is the first source in the series that states the harm, states that it is deliberate, and refuses the fence as a matter of principle — in a book that prints what to say and what to do. The blog’s own word for the mechanism here is the designed method; here the risk is part of the design, on the record, in the author’s voice.
Three things this post does not do. Nothing here assesses the author or any practitioner; nothing here validates or disqualifies anyone’s experience or practice, including the work described in the book; and nothing here is grounds to act on anyone’s behalf or to restrict anyone’s practice. The absences are reported as search results scoped to the text of this edition, and a search shows only what it indexes. What the blog can say, and should, is what the two volumes say: this is a manual with the danger named and the fence withheld.
A reading holds one source whole and asks what a blog that has quoted sources all along now has to change. This one returns a source, a correction and a gap.
The source is the practice layer, and it is new. Two volumes of operations — from Scot, from the Verum, from the papyri, from the Picatrix — quoted at length and commented on; a working life described with its chores; a compositional instruction that is the opposite of a recipe; and an underworld stream the blog had not touched. Whatever a reader makes of the genealogy, the material is now on the page.
The correction is about what the blog has been calling the tradition. It read the syllabus, the safeguards and the tables, and read them well. It did not read the workings, and it did not read the stream whose name is the oldest word for the operator. The curriculum row needs its scope fixed; the underworld needs a place; and the correspondence table needs a practitioner’s account of what it is for standing next to the check. All three are corrections to a reading habit, not to an argument.
And the gap is the sharpest the series has returned. The book does not lack a safety culture by accident. It names the risk, names the casualties — “madness or other disasters may threaten; even destroy the unprepared magician” — and declines the rule, on the stated ground that a magic with no risk of failure is not worth practising. Every other source in the series either could not see the question or answered it in some form: a dose, a referral, a professional rule, a wish for sanity. This one answers by refusal, in a book that tells the reader what to say at the graveside. The blog should record that answer in the author’s words, mark it as his, mark the two volumes’ own zero for “safeguard”, and hand the next reading the question this one cannot settle: whether the line between a discipline and an ordeal can be drawn by the person inside it.
A tradition that has been read as what it says about itself — its syllabus, its tables, its self-descriptions — turns out to have a working life underneath the description, and the blog has just read it for the first time. That is not a conversion and not an indictment. It is what the series is for: the theory comes off the top of the stack, and what is under it is put on the page.
Marking: a reading. Documented — the book’s identity, edition and provenance (both copyright pages are present in the texts, with the publisher, the Bibliothèque Rouge banner, the 2010 copyright line, the designer, the printer of Volume I and both ISBNs, quoted at 3); the structure (eight Books, the Argonautica spine, the “Goetic Gallery” and “Implications for Modern Practice” chapter types), read off the running heads; the aim and the purpose statements, verbatim from the Introduction; the thesis and every claim of it assembled in §3, verbatim; the practice material in §4, quoted from the printed workings and from “Mia Labores”; the absences in §8, reported as scoped search results with counts at 26; and the book’s own contentious passages, quoted and attributed to the book. Inferred, as this post’s — §1’s framing of the book as the counter-case to the western column and the tarot post; §5’s structural finding that the operations are documented and the genealogy argued, and that the register shifts between the hedge and the “given” within the same voice; §6’s counterweights, including the reading of the safety refusal as a position rather than an oversight; §7’s three corrections; §8’s placement of this book against the other sources in the series; and §9’s bottom line. The book’s history is not adjudicated and the thesis is not adopted: nothing here asserts that the underworld is the root of Western magic, and nothing asserts that it is not; §5 names the kind of claim the book makes and stops there. The book’s polemical material on the Goetia of Solomon, on institutions and on cultural ownership is reported as the book’s content and is not endorsed. No living author or scholar is diagnosed, no one’s practice is validated, disqualified or restricted, and the book’s own zero for “safeguard” is a search result scoped to these two volumes, not a claim about any person.
Vol I, Introduction: “goetia focuses on earth and the underworld. It relies not on authority from the celestial regions – the so-called adversarial angels of aristocratic magic in the Jewish and Christian tradition – but the innate power of the magician. It has its own worldview – of which theology and philosophy are later sublimated forms – and far from being a specialised sub-discipline, it is the primal origin of the entire Western tradition of magic.” The preceding paragraph in the same close: “The identity of the operator makes goetia what it is, not the good or bad nature of the spirits involved.”↩︎
Vol I, Introduction, “Mythic Language”: “While these remain data in a table there is comparatively little magic in them. Endowed with a personality, the spirit becomes an active participant in the ritual, and in the creation of rituals. Reference tables are no replacement for the mythical context of a spell, although with a little creativity they can partially substitute for the lack of one.”↩︎
Geosophia: The Argo of Magic, Jake Stratton-Kent, Scarlet Imprint under the Bibliothèque Rouge banner, copyright 2010, design by fofó. Volume I: “Printed & bound by Antony Rowe Ltd.”, ISBN 978-0-9567203-0-6; Volume II: ISBN 978-0-9567203-1-3. Read from complete digital texts of both volumes. The address is by the book’s own running heads, the strings “GEOSOPHIA THE ARGO of MAGIC” (Volume I, 35 occurrences) and “GEOSOPHIA VOL II” (Volume II, 38 occurrences), each followed by the chapter title; the chapter sequence those heads carry matches the printed tables of contents, and they are the address used throughout. Every quotation was located and checked character for character. The book has no foreword, no preface and no conclusion; Volume II ends with two appendices, a select bibliography and an index. Structure: eight “Books” — One to Four in Volume I, Five to Eight in Volume II — the spine being Apollonius’ Argonautica, chapter by chapter, interleaved with “Goetic Gallery” chapters and “Implications for Modern Practice”. The acknowledgements name “generations of scholars, from Charles Wycliffe Goodwin to Hans Dieter Betz, who brought us the Greek Magical Papyri”, and thank “Stephen Skinner and David Rankine for their prodigious researches into Solomonic magic and above all for raising awareness of its Hellenistic origins”, “Joseph Peterson”, and “Michelle Newitt and Theresa Chisholm for their contributions to the Picatrix section” (Vol I, front matter).↩︎
Vol I, Introduction: What is Goetia?, close of “Chthonia Regained”: “The purposes of this book therefore should be becoming clear, although the work is not without considerable difficulties. One purpose is to reach behind the Classical Greek inheritance to reveal the older strata of chthonic religion. Another is to show, with demonstrations of continuity, the influence of both archaic practice and the archaic practitioner on what followed.” The Introduction’s three subsections are “Chthonia Lost”, “Chthonia Regained” and “Mythic Language”.↩︎
Vol I, Introduction: “This purpose is neither impartial historical understanding nor a re-enactment style historical reconstruction nor even Hellenic neo-paganism”; “It serves an emergent synthesis of global magic produced by cultural forces active in our own time, in which Western magic is fused with influences from the New World and elsewhere”; “It is my contention that goetic magic, properly understood, is the most important fundamental element Western magic has to contribute to the melting pot”.↩︎
Vol I, Introduction: “the term goetia derives from a word indicating a person, a rare case of the art taking its name from the artist. Such a person was termed a goes. Goetia is related primarily to the identity of the operator, and only secondarily to their art or perceptions of it”; “[The word goes] relates to terms describing the act of lamenting at funeral rites; the mournful howling considered as a magical voice. These magical tones can guide the deceased to the underworld, and raise the dead. This is the root of the long connection of goetia with necromancy, which has come to be termed black magic.”↩︎
Vol I, Introduction, “Chthonia Regained”: “the chthonic realm was the source of oracular power at all stages of Greek religion. The celestial or transcendental realms became all important in later magic, not least as the source of the magician’s authority. Previously the earth as source of life and the underworld as the abode of the dead were central to religion and magic. More to the point, much of the magic of later times – particularly that characterised as goetic – was an adaptation – one might even say a distortion – of the older type.”↩︎
Vol I, “Goetia and the Identity of the Magician”: “Thus a combination of negative image, misleading associations and confused semantics has prevented the historical identification of goetia as the original core, and the earliest designation, of Western magic.”↩︎
Vol I, end of “The Book, the Treasure Hunt and the Cave”: “As will be seen in the course of this study, the core concepts of Western magic both originate and are embedded within the goetic tradition. Goetia has long been devalued and disowned, but these concepts persist within occult traditions even while their origin is disguised.”↩︎
Vol I, “Er of Pamphylia”: “this involved or assumed a transferral or projection of the geography of Hades onto the sky; complete with its rivers, Islands of the Blessed and other important locations. Such developments, interconnected with Babylonian astrological thought, represent a crucial stage in the development of Western magic”; “Under the influence of astrological ideas from Chaldean and later Jewish sources the seven planetary gods, with their near all-encompassing role in human destiny, become the hostile Archons of Gnosticism.” The section’s opening, on Plato’s tripartite schema: “In this important respect this is completely distinct from older Greek ideas about the afterlife; in which the underworld was the abode of the dead, good or bad.” “Er of Pamphylia” follows “Trophonios” inside “Goetic Gallery: Necromantia Rexurgat” (Vol I).↩︎
Vol I, “Conjuring the Sibyls”, which prints three consecutive sections of Reginald Scot’s Discoverie of Witchcraft, Book XV. The framing sentence: “My comments are not interspersed with the text in this case. They appear instead following each of the three sections. This may cause some slight inconvenience, as the first section is of considerable length, but the flow and feel is rather better preserved by this arrangement”. The first section is headed “Chapter VIII: An Experiment of the Dead”: “First fast and pray three days, and abstain thee from all filthiness; go to one that is new buried, such a one as killed himself or destroyed himself wilfully: or else get thee promise of one that shall be hanged, and let him swear an oath to thee…”; the operator’s companion carries “a candle in his left hand, and in his right hand a crystal stone”; the master holds “a hazel wand in his right hand, and these names of God written thereupon, Tetragrammaton Adonay Agla Craton”; the bargain includes “I will give thee an alms deed, and pray for thee”. The third section, the three fairy sisters and the ring of invisibility: “And if they come not the first night, then do the same the second night, and so the third night, until they do come: for doubtless they will come, and lie thou in thy bed, in the same parlour or chamber.” The closing frame of the commentary: “The rite thus brings us more or less full circle from Mystery religions, ancient Lydia and its Sibyl to a conjuration of Sibylline fairies in Renaissance England. The connection of invisibility with shamanic initiation (and with caves) is also underlined by this circular journey.” Quotations from the printed workings are given as the text renders them; the italics markup and the small-caps artefacts are normalised.↩︎
Vol II, “Implications for Modern Practice”, subsection “Mia Labores: Goetic Devotions” — the text prints the drop capital as “M Y MAGICAL WORK”. Also from this section: the shrine and its images (“A cabinet with cupboard space below and shelves above is a very suitable basis for such a shrine… Images typically take two forms, one is a clay head, and the other is a statuette”); the offerings (“the essential aspect of ritual with a household shrine consists of offerings. These will generally consist of fire and water, as well as food if appropriate… Candles are generally offered in thanks for a favour, while water and incense are offered more regularly to maintain the link and feed the spirits”); the intermediary spirit (“In my ritual work I am in constant contact with the intermediary spirit of the Grimorium Verum, whose name is Scirlin. He is the focus of a good deal of ritual, and the recipient of frequent offerings. In many respects Scirlin acts in the same way as the Holy Guardian Angel in other supposedly transcendental systems”); mia labores (“There is a useful expression in Mexican witchcraft or Brujeria that has no direct counterpart in modern Western occultism. The expression is mia labores, which literally means my chores, but refers to routine magical work such as cleaning the sanctuary and the performance of routine prayers and spells”); the daily cadence (“Assuming the grimoire is the background or inspiration for your magical work as a whole, this prayer will be said every day”); and the cycle paragraph: “The cycle of rituals and the routine of magical chores is an important aspect of the pursuit of goetia as a vocation. This cycle is the basis of empowerment of the magician, the instruments, and particularly, of the spirit agencies that underpin the more spectacular magical work that is more commonly spoken of, but whose reliance on the adoption of a magical life based on devotion and actual work is too often left unsaid.” This section also carries the only passage in the work that declines to legislate for the reader on a specific practice: “no general rules can be offered herein. The reader must make their own informed decisions regarding this aspect of sacrificial ritual” — scoped to sacrifice, and offered as a limit on the author’s competence rather than as a safety rule.↩︎
Vol I, “Goetic Gallery: Orphica”, subsection “Ritual Composition”: “the goal should be the acquisition of mastery of symbolic languages, in order to compose rites and texts for oneself. Misguided imitation of our predecessors and purely retrospective approaches fall short of an attainment that, while devoutly wished for by many, is lost if this is not well understood.” The same subsection introduces the point: “There is an idea in contemporary understanding of the grimoires, and indeed other magical systems, that nothing is to be changed… Such ideas are largely mistaken.”↩︎
Vol I, “Implications for Modern Practice” (Book Two), subsection “Visiting the Underworld”: “This said then, the magician who wishes to pursue the ideas raised in this book would do well to consider organising a visit to Hades for their self. Besides the options of arranging a vision quest along various lines, the involvement of traditional ritual adjuncts is a worthwhile consideration.” In the same section: “the ability to travel through the underworld is the reason for the emphasis on the power of invisibility.”↩︎
Vol I, Introduction. “To avoid misunderstanding, this is not a strictly academic approach, though availing itself of modern studies. The study of interpretations of history is termed historiography, and I avail myself of this term to indicate that interpretation to a definite end rather than strictly scientific use of literary and other evidence is the purpose here.” “My intention is not a complete historical reconstruction of magic and religion of a particular circumscribed historic period; this study involves several phases of the past for the purposes of the present.” “I am not drawing a family tree of dates, times and places in which oriental and Greek ideas influenced one another. The relationship of the Orphic reforms and of goetia with the Dionysian currents provides a creation myth for transforming modern magic. This creation is conceptually prior to the emergence of Goetia and its involvement with older religious traditions; it is not intended to be strictly historical”. Immediately after: “Consequently this mythic past is essential to a revitalised and practical pagan goetia in the here and now”.↩︎
Vol II, “Maters de Mysteria”, subsection “Melissa”: “Having identified this critical phase in the development of Western magic as a literary tradition, involving the Orphic books, the magical papyri and the grimoires, it is important not to oversimplify, particularly to assume that this is where the magical element in these rites first appears… This study seeks to partially regenerate the older stratum by extrapolation from elements of the new.”↩︎
Vol II, “The Barbarian Interpretation”: “Even so, this may be the first attempt to assess the Thracians role in the history of Western magic. Such a first has implied limitations, but at the same time is too overdue to be neglected.” Vol I, “Goetic Gallery: Argonautica”, in the Orpheus material: “So far as I am aware this has not been remarked on previously, and it would be interesting to know how it is interpreted by the academic community.” Vol I, “Conjuring the Sibyls”: “Nevertheless, I feel that my interpretation of the origins of such rites is correct; the juxtaposition of these three magical procedures supports this thesis to a considerable degree.” Vol I, “Introduction”: “my speculation in The True Grimoire that Spare was acquainted with, and inspired by its contents has been verified by Gavin Semple, (see his introduction to Spare’s Two Tracts on Cartomancy).” Vol I, “Conjuring the Sibyls”: “as I have already given my hypothesis regarding the origins of treasure hunting.” The same passage names the counter-evidence and answers it in the first person: “I am of course aware that magical treasure hunting in the literal sense took place, as well as being used as a basis for confidence tricks… Nevertheless, I feel that my interpretation… is correct.”↩︎
Vol II, “Implications for Modern Practice”, subsection “Purification Rites”: “As seen in the accounts of the divine men Empedocles, Pythagoras and others, such rituals not only assured the initiate of an agreeable afterlife, but were part of a process of self deification which – or so we must assume on the basis of available evidence – was to culminate in the post mortem state.” In the same subsection, on the author’s own practice: “My own goetic work employs adaptations of Thelemic ritual known as Pyramidos, particularly its opening and closing”.↩︎
Vol II, “The Magical Papyri”: “It is evident enough but should not be forgotten that the grimoires are not an oral folk tradition; nor, despite outside influences, are they merely an adaptation of an imported Eastern system. They were from their very beginning a Western literary genre”; “As remarked by Joseph Peterson, and noted by Skinner and Rankine in their Veritable Key of Solomon, the earliest texts of the Solomonic genre are Greek: both Hellenistic (The Testament of Solomon) and Byzantine (The Hygromanteia)”; “The Orphic books, the Magical Papyri, the Byzantine and subsequent Solomonic texts constitute the phases of a continuous literary tradition; in all these phases the texts existed on their own merits without the warrant of a ruling minority, whether aristocratic or theocratic”; “The collection of ancient magical texts, published as The Greek Magical Papyri in Translation, is difficult to over-value”; “That the Magical Papyri are the ancestors of the later grimoires is a given, the relations between them are plain.” In the same chapter, the hedged register: “Betz observes in his masterly introduction that the Underworld in the papyri has assumed massive importance. It appears to me that this may not be such a recent development, when the transferral of the Underworld to the sky is properly considered”; and the same passage’s “Perhaps too it is here, rather than in Christianity, that we find the original demonisation of the pagan gods.” This chapter also carries the claim that “the distinction understood to exist between ancient theurgy and goetia is largely false” — and, on theurgy as its descendant, “Theurgy is essentially a reformation of magical religion, a restoration of archaic goetia” (Vol II, “Theurgia”), with “Goetia – the art of the Goen, a founder and celebrant of Mysteries – is the earlier form of Theurgy; working with the gods”.↩︎
Vol II, “Goetic Gallery: Sympathia”: “Modern academics are naturally cautious in assessing such material. Such caution led to Charles Kahn rejecting the description of Empedocles as a shaman on the grounds we possess no account of Empedocles journeying to the Underworld and returning from the dead. Academic caution is commendable and necessary, and the use of the term shaman in the Greek context is not necessarily helpful. Nevertheless, one is entitled to wonder about the extensive variations in accounts…” The dispute is Empedocles’ Purifications and Charles Kahn, Pythagoras and the Pythagoreans; this post records the exchange, takes no side, and has not consulted Kahn.↩︎
Vol I, “Implications for Modern Practice” (Book One), subsection “The Practical Philosophers”: “Magic without theory is a dead letter, a mere recipe; but theory without mythic language cannot be readily transformed into magical practice. In fact regardless of the particular philosophical model, these mythic expressions constitute a language of archaic goetic practice. Accordingly throughout this text various practical workings are emphasised. Many of these involve very down to earth procedures closer to Hoodoo than to complex rituals, necromantic conjurations or other sophisticated applications. This kitchen magic is not to be despised on account of its seeming simplicity.” In the same chapter, on the theory/praxis question: “More recently a new perspective has emerged, in which the Hermetic Corpus is indeed distinct from the magical papyri, but only in that theory is distinct from praxis”. “The Hermetic Corpus” here is the external textual corpus, and the phrase is the book’s.↩︎
Vol I, “Implications for Modern Practice” (Book Two), subsection “Our tradition and learning from others”: the alternative to the Goetia of Solomon is “infinitely preferable to the despicable procedures of the Goetia of Solomon, which simply reflect the spirit-negative attitudes of an outdated theology”; “it is absurd for critics – generally white – to insist that as a non-initiate into this tradition or that, I have no rights in this ongoing dialogue”. Reported as the book’s positions; neither is adopted here. The section’s own framing is a call for “forming a similar relationship to the spirits of our magical traditions to that of our counterparts in other cultures”.↩︎
Vol I, “Implications for Modern Practice” (Book Two), subsection “Our tradition and learning from others”: “Some say that my methods, which I see little sign they fully understand, are not entirely safe. To this, I would be the first to agree; they are not safe, because they are not a placebo or a static acceptance of our tradition’s current limitations. The magician who avoids burning their fingers does not progress personally, still less advance the art for future generations. Magic is not a no-risk vocation. To encourage this avoidance in others is at best futile, and at worst a betrayal.” “Madness or other disasters may threaten; even destroy the unprepared magician who loses the golden thread. However, as a notorious magician once said, an initiatory ordeal that has no risk of failure is not an ordeal.” The “notorious magician” is not named in the text. In the same subsection the author also writes of the initiation he has in mind: “Madness or other disasters may threaten… Survival on the other hand brings real knowledge and power, as the magicians disencumber themselves of useless or unhelpful learning, while retaining whatever has proven itself valuable.”↩︎
Vol I, “Ghosts, Demons & the Grimoires”: “These are ancestor spirits of the magical tradition; ancient magicians become spirits themselves. For those among us with any imagination this is a sufficient note of caution; when conjuring spirits a degree of respect is necessary, since one day we may well be numbered among them.”↩︎
The western column, in its note on the epigraph source: Frater Acher, Goêtic Common Sense: An Interlude for the Inveterate Chthonic Sorcerer. Two esoteric tarots quotes a speaker placing the deck’s users “at a very instrumental end of the spiritual spectrum, one more usually associated with goetia than with classical theurgy”. Case-insensitive search: “geosophia” and “Stratton-Kent” both return 0 hits in the rest of the blog; the underworld vocabulary (“goeti”, “underworld”, “chthonic”, “necroman”) returns three files — the two above and quareia — with “underworld” in neither of the two above.↩︎
Absences are reported as case-insensitive substring counts over the texts of both volumes, and a search shows only what it indexes. “safeguard”: 0 hits in both volumes. “pace”: 17 hits in Volume I and 10 in Volume II; every one is inside “space”, except four — “the pace at which ideas were evolving” and “terminology struggled to keep pace” (both Vol I), “Advance ten paces” (Vol II) and the Latin “Vade in pace” (Vol I) — and none of the four is a rate of work. 0 hits for “therapist”, “psychiatry”, “psychiatric”, “clinical”, “mental health”, “breakdown”, “seek help”, “professional help”, “self-harm” and “dose”. “physician”: 6, five in quoted ancient texts. “doctor”: 9, all historical or idiomatic. “hospital”: 3, all “hospitality”. “therapy”: 1, Pindar’s “music therapy”. “suicide”/“suicid”: 4, all in the conjuration material or Medea’s story. “danger”: 18 in Volume I, 17 in Volume II, all narrative, mythic or historical. “caution”: 9 total, five methodological, three narrative, one practitioner-facing (§6). This post’s search list mirrors the one used in two esoteric tarots’ §7 and the holy daimon’ §8, so the results are comparable across the series.↩︎
Vol II, “Works of the Moon in the Twelve Sign”, the Capricorn section of the translated Picatrix material: “If any of these conditions are not kept, and are flouted and ignored, or if any point is omitted, or if the magician cannot keep his powers through uncleanness this will effect the light of the Moon. So that one day he sets out to call her power and will not know how, and his demands are not due to him. Therefore did one pray everynight until a spirit came and stopped his mouth. For forty days was he struck with horror and was mocked by all for the duration.” Then, in the Aquarius section: “The magician must learn that these stipulations concerning these operations apply to him and must be met to obtain his wish or else he works in vain, and wastes his life in games. Many who have not performed them correctly have received warning signs too strange and wonderful to describe at length. The simple test with which to guard yourself is that only the strong of soul and noble of substance should venture on these works.” The chapter opens “H erein I speak of the doctrine found among Kurdish and Abyssinian magicians” — the text’s drop capital, normalised here — which is the Picatrix’s own voice in translation, reproduced by the book rather than written by it. The whole of Book Eight, “The Magic of the Picatrix”, gives translated operations with the source editions credited in the chapter.↩︎