With the steady decline in organized religions in the world today. There is an ever growing desire for people to nurture a sense of whimsy. A sense of magick and awe in every aspect of our lives that simply can’t be satisfied with traditional means of religion. No longer do people seemingly want to be a body on a pew listening to a single interpretation of the enchanted world. Yet, we still want to escape from the boring or scary aspects of mundane life and we want to see the world with a sense of enchantment while feeling like an active agent in this process of discovery.

This creates a problem because our world is filled with a great many people who want to sell us an enchanted world view. Fill our ears, overwhelm our eyes, or consume our thoughts with something like an enchanted world view. And wouldn’t you know it! They just so happen to sell the thirteen book set on how to have that exact world view! Or maybe you should give up your worldly possessions to our communal bank account and live on our ranch in Montana! That’s how you obtain enchantment! Worse still, maybe they tell you exactly who “the enemy” is and why they’re denying you this magical world of peace and harmony! You should help us genocide them!

These are all real paths that can befall someone simply wanting to learn about this weird and interesting world of Occultic and Esoteric knowledge. This is a space that I truly believe is interesting and has room for all sorts of engagement, but it must be approached with a critical mind so as to avoid the traps above.

Here we will talk about ways in which to pick through the marketplace of religions and identify bad paths.

Why Pick a Tradition at all?

The rhetorical goal of a lot of my writing is to talk people into building their own practice. Their own relationship with themselves and their place in the world. This has usually been the goal of religions, to define our roles in this world. However, I don’t trust these ancient institutions to be infallible nor their gods. You shouldn’t either. If you take away anything from this piece it should be a general distrust by default of any and all organizations. Yet, they are still valuable to us as non-believers, heretics, and general nuisances to the establish religious order. They have aesthetic value!

Aesthetics? Yes Aesthetics! Established religions have an aesthetic that is often appealing to someone. The way they do rituals, their choices of venue for service, their general “Vibes” as we say currently. This to me is the most important part of establishing a personal practice because it lets us indulge in art and culture. It is the core of our social animal being in the modern era, being able to convey a sense of who you are by the symbols and style you dress yourself in.

I’ll admit that this may just be a me thing, but there’s something awesome about the old world religions’ sense of flair. Temples built by skilled craftsman at mind boggling scale or in breath taking locations. Uniforms and silly hats for special events. Things developed to establish a presence. A sense of unique identity for these religious folks and their religious practice. Something that we should take inspiration from.

My Aesthetic

I often joke that I was raised by a Catholic and a Baptist which means I didn’t go to Church. Which is true, but I was surrounded by both Catholic and Baptist religious aesthetics because of this and thus got a feel for what it must be like to be either one. Further being in the bible belt means you can absorb the important parts of general Christianity via osmosis (after reading the Bible, I think that’s how most of them get it too).

So, my exposure to the Christian Aesthetic meant that the more foreign but familiar Catholic stance was a tempting “Forbidden Knowledge” because it was talked about less than the Baptist one. Thus I pursued knowledge on the history of Christianity and ultimately Catholicism and then Pre-Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy.

That familiar aesthetic allowed me to fully immerse myself in what was not said and learn the full context of Christianity and exposing me to Western Esotericism in the form of Alchemy and then Ritual Magick like Goetia.

So altars covered in candle wax, incense, and detailed circles painted in gold and silver; rings and necklaces also covered in magick circles, semi precious gemstones, semi precious metals (I’m not made of money); shelves of books about all sorts of topics in history, science, religion, philosophy, sexy vampires, and the occult; and flowy clothes like capes and cloaks. I have embraced my inner Merlin vibe. It also helps to do IT because they expect you to be weird there.

This is how I signal to the greater world who I am. Here I think it is fair to concern ourselves with the worry of “Doing stuff for attention”. In short: Don’t. Don’t worry about what people think of you. In Oberron Zell-Ravenheart’s “Grimoire for the Apprentice Wizard” he talks about his invisibility spell that allows him to dress as a wizard and walk around down town San Francisco without any trouble. In truth, just no one cares, it’s down town San Francisco, the locals are probably just happy he’s clothed.

Hell, as I type this now, I am wearing my wool cloak in a coffee shop! More people should wear cloaks! They’re great!

There’s a lot of reasons I can give for why just being who you want to be and not really caring who sees is valuable. For me its a two fold confidence boost. The first step is it is embarrassing. More than once I’ve been joked about for my aesthetic choices, but I really took to the philosophy of Cato the Younger who intentionally dressed like a clown, wore no shoes or underwear, and invited ridicule so that he would become more stoic and could endure much worse ridicule. The second is that it invites conversation. For as many jabs as have been made at me there are probably as many people genuinely intrigued by the choice to wear such strange clothes, strange jewelry, and yet still carry myself with confidence. These folks are my friends. My community. People with a sense of intrigue and wonder who genuinely wanted to know why I am weird and what I gain from it. Now this is the point of publicly wearing your heart on your chest and being openly and proudly authentic.

Goals

Having a metaphysical goal and reasonable path to that goal is also an important part of picking a tradition. Self betterment has a lot of paths and lots of ink, and blood, has been spilled expressing those opinions on a true path to self enlightenment, liberation, or god.

Some practices encourage an intellectual pursuit, valuing secular learning and criticism of oneself and the system to actuate self betterment. Some hold the body in high regard and sees physical betterment necessary to actuate self betterment. Some see the pursuits of the body as a detriment to self betterment. Some see the urban world as a test of the self. Some see the urban world as a tainted world of corruption. And the truth is they all have merits.

The most important thing to do is to constantly self evaluate. Is this goal good for me? Is it good for others? Is it what I really want to pursue? I am a fan of the Stoic and Buddhist goals of self betterment. At their core it is a continuous self reflection that is conducted through various self denial rituals. Sometimes it is good food or even food at all. Sometimes it’s a denial of all thoughts so that we can experience the now. But in both cases the goal is to see through the dramaturgy of every day life. To know and be aware that this world is filled with much much more than what we need and to know that most people in it are acting in their own interests. Denying ourselves material luxuries and knowing there are forces in the world set on taking advantage of you for these material luxuries is part of the path to self actualization.

You may disagree and that is fine really. Maybe self actualization is strictly financial success at all costs. Maybe the only goal is communal love which can be experienced completely neutral of the material world. Maybe your goal is to become the greatest violinist and you want to develop a religion that helps you reach that goal!

There’s a lot that goes into a practice. Which is why I recommend a pre-built starting point. Some sort of framework in which you can start from and rework to match your personal Aesthetics and Goals. I started with a Christian Ritual Magician Aesthetic and added Stoic and Buddhist goals. You can do something similar. Just keep in mind…

There are some problems with modern religious frameworks….

What to Look out for

Wouter Hanegraaf calls our current religious world a “Supermarket of Religion” (“Western Esotericism: a guide for the Perplexed”) because we have almost globally achieved true religious independence. No longer do we have wide spread persecutions of heretics or religious minorities in the world. There’s still problems, for sure, but it has never been any where near this good to be a religious weirdo in any point or place in time.

Because of these options, people are already practicing localized and even personalized faiths with dogmas, doctrines, and traditions that match absolutely no other religious framework completely. Some are so interesting to people that they have small cults following this same path. And this is where things get dangerous: Organized religion.

Would this be an Atheist’s Grimoire if it didn’t warn against Organized Religion? You probably already know all the reasons to be weary of them, but here’s my main reasons to distrust an Organized Religion or even a singular Religious Leader.

Money Grab

I’ve made my stance known about the rampant consumerism within New Age spaces. Crystal Witchcraft is not much more to me than Retail Therapy with a wooy wrap on it. But that’s interesting for it’s own reasons and I don’t think is the dangerous part it’s just the climate with which a Money Grab scheme would be present.

Crystal Witchcraft and this Witchcraft Lite that is practiced in American Suburbia has already spawned several Pyramid Scheme “companies” selling teas, essential oils, and various other homeopathic (read useless) remedies for everything from depression to cancer. All you need to do is give hundreds of dollars to someone who’s thousands of dollars in debt to someone else to get these “Life Saving” products.

There’s nothing wrong with buying consumables for your practice. I even frequent my local Crystal Witch store to get incense, candles, and teas for my altar. The problem is getting preyed upon and there are other ways they will do this.

“Self Help Books”

I cannot say anything about Self Help books being useless because I do think they have value. In fact the entire premise of this series is based on a Self Help book called “Atomic Habits” (Author’s name). They do have value. And I’m sure there are plenty of actually useful Self Help Books in the world. However, there’s a lot of “buzzword” books that look like a self help book that’s following a trend.

When I was getting into Magick, I worked at a Barnes and Nobles. I stocked the “Self Help” section constantly and there were hundreds of “Mindfulness” books that existed. There were whole series of books on mindfulness there. And based solely on the backs of these books, they sounded like more consumerist nonsense. That your life, no matter how sucky, could be made better by simply accepting this situation and being mindful of the good parts of life. That upset me and read as a “you only need to buy my book to be happy” sales pitch and I viewed mindfulness as a scam for years because of that.

The book “Work Pray Code” by Carolyn Chen ironically both confirmed my concern and opened my mind to mindfulness. There’s problems with her book as there are any book, but it confirmed that this era of stocking mindfulness books overlapped with a massive spike in interest of secular mindfulness and meditation in Silicon Valley and other high strain knowledge work. So I was stocking books that were simply trying to capitalize on this trend and telling over worked employees that they should just meditate away their abuse.

Ironically I had purchased a book at the same time, that was wooy buzzword slop from a hundred years ago called “The Kyballion” by the Three Initiates. I learned only this year thanks to Reverend Erik that this was a book published by a guy who owned a book publisher who wrote under various pseudonyms and self published his own writings to capitalize on trends. He mostly wrote sales strategies but the Kyballion was to capitalize on the “New Thought” movement which basically boiled down to “if you just gaslight yourself you won’t be sad.” So not really different from mass market mindfulness.

These kinds of books I think can have value to an individual. I think of Dan McLellan’s “The Bible Says So” here because his view on the Christian bible is easily the most profound thing I’ve ever heard a Christian say. He says something to the effect of The Bible is just words on a page. Every addition, every chapter, every author had a rhetorical goal that is so far removed from our modern context that the author’s intended meaning is almost completely moot. Paul was writing for first century Christians not twenty first Century Christians. You cna find your own meaning in what he says.

However, my major concern is that, in the age of LLM/AI “Authors”, you will have to sort the wheat from the chaff. If you search any good occult book on bookshop.org or amazon, you will find mostly AI slop with a speckling of what you might actually want. You only have so much money to spend on books and only so much time to spend reading those books. AI generated content is not content that respects your intelligence and isn’t generating anything new or profound. You’re better off reading the Wikipedia pages for things your interested in and only running off of that. Even the Kyballion has value compared to AI Generated occult books because it still at some level reveals the ethics of its Author and gives us the ability to reflect on a vague understanding of the New Thought movement.

It’s for this reason I recommend finding a trustworthy reading list, blogger, cool witch lady you met at the local Unitary Universalist church, etc. when picking books to read. I need to make a better resource, but I have my own Mastodon thread of good books to get started here but Reverend Erik’s I think is better here and their reading list for Hermetecism is really good so far here, I also recommend Dr. Justin Sledge’s introduction to Western Esotericism for a video based broader introduction here

If you’re scared of buying books, worry not there are plenty of online libraries like The Hermetic Library here with free ebooks and online versions of books, as well as a growing number of personal blogs such as Cat’s blog on Midwestern Paganism and Witchcraft here and a more dubious recommendation for David Maciver at “Overthinking Everything” who’s like me in that he’s a tech guy who’s into a secular form of magic here (Warning He uses Substack and AI generated Thumbnails if your ethics disagrees with those)

Exclusion

Exclusionary practices are ones which make a claim that only certain types of people can do this magick or that it should only be fore a certain group of people. This is an idea that I have argued as meaningless to an atheist practitioner but should be approached with caution because there is some nuance in why a practice is being exclusionary and even more nuance for how you should approach one. My primary concern is those who are being exclusionary for racist/bigoted reasons and who are fairly modern.

New Age Problems

Your average New Age practitioners are generally fine. I have nothing against suburban folks wanting to play witch by burning incense, diffusing essential oils, and buying pretty rocks. Everyone needs a hobby and this is a genericized version of “magic” that anyone can do it and not get much if any grief at church on Sunday. Yet, within the modern New Age zeitgeist there is a lot of fetishization of the Global South, First Nations and Far East that feels gross.

My focus has generally always been on Western Esotericism just from a general fascination with how Western Magick influenced my current being of citizen of the Western World. I have only been really interested in the Buddhism scene for the last year? Year and a half? And that has generally been through the lens of western and often atheist authors too. So, by no means am I claiming to be an expert in these ideas or do I want to speak on their behalf, but I do want to address this weird love of gas station dream catchers and head shop yin yang tapestries.

The point of an occult practice in the modern age is the self. Self actualization and self exploration. As Westerners, we are often inclined to express that inward self outwardly by the types of trinkets we consume and display. I do it too. Not many of us in the west are immune to this. But this is not the same as engaging with the ideas and systems of belief that these symbols represent. This is not respectfully engaging in something people take very seriously. This is a costume we wear often with a superficial understanding of our costume.

Note: Here I am referring to the theory of Symbolic Interactionism. We, as a collective, ascribe meaning to symbols and then by displaying those symbols we display who we are.

That is why I think of gas station dream catchers and head shop yin yang tapestries as this ultimate expression of capitalist disrespect of these cultures that have historically been pillaged on the grounds of being “lesser”. Even today are mostly found as cheap novelties to be bought as last minute gifts for people who smoke too much weed.

“That’s a lot of words, Nags. But why is this exclusionary?”

Great question! Originally I wanted to talk about my early experiences within the occult spaces of Tumblr. A place filled with people who’s hearts are in the right place but are often causing more harm than good to the nuance of life. To a lot of folks in spaces like that, they will make claims like First Nations/Native American spirituality are exclusive to those people and there for smudging, spirit animals, and ayahuasca shouldn’t be done by none Natives of the Americas.

Which is extreme. You can do whatever you want, but in the case of these specific practices you won’t be doing them as intended without the help of indigenous peoples. Which makes sense since they are guardians of that knowledge and have reasonable reservations about sharing that with descendants of colonizers. Further, it’s often a communal practice.

The point of a religion is two fold. The most important to me is the self and the second most important part is the community. That is what religion has historically been used for, maintaining communal cohesion. For better or worse.

If you are not participating in the community of a community based religion, then you are not participating in that religion.

But there’s also Real Nazis

It is a feature of my own experiences that I am immediately suspicious of people who idolize Norse Ancestry. It is a none aspect of white supremacists groups apparently called Nordicism.

Granted that most people I’ve met lately who’ve been obsessed with Norse Paganism are often Left or Liberal spiritualists with a good grasp on empathy. Otherwise they’re just deeply obsessed with the vast swaths of Viking media that’s still relevant as of 2026.

But on this scale of full blown Nazi to just normal Scandinavian people, there is a subtle and divergent obsession with “Aryan Looking” aesthetics. These are groups that have nearly all the trappings of a normal Nazi master race claim, but will insist that they are not really human and therefore it’s not really Aryan Master Race ideology. These are The Starseeds.

Starseeds are in my favorite genre of pseudo-history: Ancient Aliens. Another subtly racist world view if it wasn’t so plainly a money printer for the like six guys who write about it and present for the “History Channel” (The quotes are sarcastic). Here’s a better write up on why Ancient Astronaut Theory is deeply problematic to put it politely.

Starseeds are unfortunately in the same space as Western Esotericism because it is a form of “Forbidden Knowledge” like anything else. Except it is modern forbidden knowledge because it has basically as much proof as any other religion and also it is filled with revealed knowledge or gnosis. Gnostic knowledge is anything from visions to signs from you’re preferred spiritual system. Tarot is gnostic knowledge. Starseeds obtain gnosis by abductions, visions, and “downloads” in some cases. Downloads are basically claims that their alien DNA is being unlocked by telepathic energy of some kind. Usually this includes rhythmic spasms or even something as simple as restless leg syndrome.

I think Funky Frogbait did a really good run down of why Starseeds are problematic specifically and the risks involve in having an uncritical mind that is desiring an enchanted world view.

Harmful Cults

Cults aren’t inherently bad in my view. A cult is simply a community built around a charismatic leader. It does not necessitate that the cult be detrimental to the cultists, but I will concede that it does lay a ground work for abuse. An Idea I got from Rick Alan Ross who is a cult deprogrammer.

When considering a practice, especially one that necessitates a teacher or community as mentioned in the previous passage, there will always be people who want to be an authority on a subject for none altruistic reasons.

Consider Aleister Crowley. We may not know how much harm has been done to his followers versus how much was blown out of proportion by his critics, but we do know that Crowley wanted to become important in several Occult Communities so that he could recruit for his Religion, Thelma. Not the worst abuse of power by a cult leader, but Crowley is still an influential name within the Occult communities today with his religion still being practiced. I even own a couple of his books.

I am also not one to dismiss traditions that necessitate teachers or a community Such as South Asian Gurus and Indigenous Powwows respectively. I have a personal tendency against them, but ultimately I am semi trained in Academic History and long for community like all humans do. That is a personal quandary to figure out.

I haven’t done much to talk about a bad cult to watch out for yet. So let me introduce you to South African Satanist Riaan Swiegelaar. Allegedly, Riaan is reformed and is now a Christian of some type and works to remove people from Satanism and back into gods arms as it were. He makes all kinds of claims about the horrible realities of what he did to people and how he facilitated those abuses.

The problem I have with his claims is his lack of self ownership. Satanism is a lot like Protestant Christianity in that there’s a lot of “denominations” and a lot of independent Satanic covens. There is no unified Satanic church that is ordering these abuses. There are larger Satanic Aesthetic organizations like The Satanic Temple or The Older Church of Satan who were seemingly uninvolved with Riaan’s “church”. So, when you say “The Satanic Church did” you’re really saying “My Satanic Church did” and when you were one of the founders you should be say “What I and my accomplices did”.

Cults necessitate an amount of narcissism and humans love having a single clear leader to differ to (There’s both a Linus Tech Tips clip and a Slavoj Zizek quote I want to include here, but I can’t find either. Will update if I find them). Even worse, the world of the Occult is diverse, cryptic, and filled with aforementioned opportunists preying on people with a curious mind. That’s why I often to to historical origins for occult learning.

Why Ancient Traditions Over Modern

Appeal to Antiquity is a common means to test the legitimacy of a tradition. The fallacy is obvious, this is good because it is old and it’s still around because it’s good. This I think is a dangerous thought for most things really. We used to drink Radium for nearly 50 years with other radioactive products being sold as pseudo-scientific cure-alls as late as the 2020s. So the logic would go that because drinking radioactive metals was seen as good for you in 1896, it’s probably still good for you now! Even if Your Jaw Falls Off.

This is, of course, an extreme example and less relevant for our purposes. For us we would want to look at the historic origins of a tradition that is so influential in the modern age, and then from their own words and context (or as close as we can get knowing them) we should work outwards towards a personal interpretation.

The idea is two fold for me. The first is the abstract value of ancient words and our ability to “negotiate” meaning in those words. [Come back to this]

When I talk about Negotiation with a text, I am again referring to Dan McLellan’s “The Bible Says So”. In the introduction he talks about the Christian Bible and Jewish Torah as a collection of texts with a specific Apoligetical or Polemical Theology point that is unique to their time period. Any relevance to our situation now is the reader adding their own context to the meaning of the words. The example Dan gives of this is KJV Jude 1:22 “And of some have compassion, making a difference.” Dan points out that we have an idea of what it means to “Make a difference” because to us in modern American culture that’s something more akin to “Change the world for the better”. It has a very active verb connotation. When Dan and even the biblestudytools link say it’s not about doing something but being able to tell the difference between two things.

We negotiated a meaning into “making a difference” that was nothing like the original authors intent. In academic history, we would call this a personal bias.

Biases are unavoidable when doing any sort of writing. You are putting words to paper or words to screen or words to a room full of listeners. You are intrinsically tied to the words you are committing to the world. And you know what you mean when you say those words completely. However, your audience will not know precisely what you mean when you say or write words because that person is not you. They can work with as much context as they have derive meaning from your words and, assuming you’re a good communicator, come away with a very informed version of your idea, but this is the edge of language for us. If we could zap the full personal understanding of a topic into other people’s minds, we wouldn’t have to have such developed language, schools, or sciences.

Everything has this problem and when you add, say, two to three thousand years between making your biased, context dependent argument and the current person reading that argument is now suffering from a real problem. What the hell did they mean by this? Short answer: impossible to know for sure. Long answer: Welcome to academic history! [I’ll have another post on this idea here].

So, it is my view that long dead authors are simply free to read and negotiate into whatever practice you want. It even has the benefit of being generally viewed as a “cultured” thing to do by reading and practicing ancient philosophies. You can even find modern clubs and groups that follow these teachings as well. I am generally more in favor of these small peer groups than an organized religion because it’s more healthy discourse (usually) than some charismatic agent guising their opinions as “truth”. I have a local Stoics club and a Zen Buddhist reading group I’ve attended once or twice because most of my own practice is based on my own readings of their original philosophies and some modern readings from authors I like. You can also always start arguing with people on the internet too. All good calls.

Conclusion

Getting into the Occult is a strange time. You will struggle often to find work that is just good work. Even the established traditions of the world are filled with bigotry and racism. That is why I refuse to acknowledge these traditions as “moral” frameworks and only see them for their aesthetics or goals. Morals are something you bring to your religion and it is your reflection on those morals that will determine how much you will change your practice.

Yet there are signs that we can look out for to determine if this is a practice being shared for genuine self benefice or if it is a propaganda campaign for fascists or capitalists. Measuring everything against your morals is the main path to self betterment in my eyes.