Modern man has such hopelessly muddled ideas about anything “mystical,” or else such a rationalistic fear of it, that, if ever a mystical experience should befall him, he is sure to misunderstand its true character and will deny or repress its numinosity. It will then be evaluated as an inexplicable, irrational, and even pathological phenomenon. — Carl Jung, Psychology and Religion, p184

Magic and mysticism are methods by which we can come to understand the role of nature, instinct, and the numinous in conscious awareness, empirically. Our intuitions well up from the unconscious, from the parts of the brain that are “dark” to our awareness, and are not simply meaningless epiphenomena. What our feelings tell us about reality is a great deal more important to us than what we actually see before us, as we shape our image of reality primarily according to how we feel about it. Learning to understand and manipulate our feelings is not straightforward, nor is the development of genuine personal insight, and so a certain degree of effort and learning about psychological and mystical methods is required.

Magic is a means to extend our capacities beyond the limits we conventionally ascribe to experience because of our half-informed notions about how things work. The ability to believe in possibilities beyond what is currently assumed is the very basis of both magical practice and scientific discovery. There will be all sorts of false starts, there will be literalists whose psychological needs entirely eclipse the process, but there are also genuine mystics engaged in the process of understanding the universe by understanding their own minds.

Our primary take on the hermetic axiom, “As above, so below,” is that nature, the All, is reflected in a mysteriously analogous way in the operations of human consciousness. Man is a self-aware, thinking, predatory species of nature, but a part of nature nonetheless. As a part of nature, he therefore is nature, and so can observe natural processes simply by observing himself and the workings of his mind. It is the grand scale and beauty that is revealed in our observations of nature both within and without that gives us pause and elicits statements of awe not unlike those that attend orgasm — a condition that arises entirely from our own bodily and mental conditions, which we are nevertheless inclined to attribute to God due to our language's incapacity to effectively express the sacred any other way.

If you can learn to listen to the voice of the Daemon it will become a tool that you use in everyday life for as long as you remember the way. As an intermediary to the unconscious, the Daemon represents the inner voice that wants to call our attention to things. Learning to access the Daemon, however you conceive of the process, will be integral to the development of any sort of supernormal sensitivities. Everyone experiences moments of apparent precognition, telepathy, synchronicity, etc., but most people are inclined to ignore or dismiss them as mere feelings. Distinguishing the voice of the Daemon from that of our fears and desires is a subtle art that can only be learned by experience, but it is a way of understanding how to make supernormal occurrences more frequent and useful, as the channels of communication become more open with practice.

Finding Purpose

We know that we don't want to die, and that we don't want to be bored. What this tells us about nature is up to our sensitivities and individual capacities to ascertain. We only know that it makes little sense for us to have the nature of Promethean self-overcomers if this were not in some sense the way of the universe itself, the way that the instinctual will of the whole thing we call nature is experienced in our individuated, human awareness. Instinct is not simply an abstract scientific idea that hopes to explain innate, unlearned behaviors, but an aspect of our experience — the compulsion to create more life, to extend being to more things by holding them in our awareness — for as parts of nature we are also nature experiencing itself, nature endowed with intellectual, self-reflective qualities.

We would suggest that the experience of the presence of God, Satan, the transcendent, the divine, the sacred, etc., attends moments of psychological integration, of the realization of fundamental truths about ourselves and about the hidden nature of the world as we experience it. The “path” we walk, the “way” we follow toward wisdom, is essentially this self exploration, else it is merely the repetition of the thoughts of others. Self-exploration is not looking around and finding things one likes to identify with, but rather is a discipline of finding what you truly want in a sea of confused motivations and then going after it with single-minded purpose. In order to know what comes from the True Will we have to engage in a process of deprogramming and allowing experience to present itself without judgment, without preconceived notions about what is possible. This is entailed in the suspension of disbelief required for magical ritual to have its effects. It is not a fixed belief in magic that motivates this suspension, but rather an acceptance of a wider range of possible means of achieving the desired outcome than might be assumed.

The only way to test the claims of mystics to special wisdom is to achieve a little yourself, to connect with the tradition, just as the only way to achieve the known physical and mental benefits of rudimentary meditation is to meditate. The information from which to make an actual judgment has to be present to experience in order for it to be measured, otherwise you're simply precluding things you have no experience of, which is not skepticism but dogmatism. Gnosis prompts beliefs, and it is for the magician to understand where his gnosis ends and his beliefs, his tools for employing gnosis toward self-empowerment, begin.

Magical Consciousness

What our magical consciousness looks like, and what distinguishes it from delusion, is simply running both processes in parallel, the rational and the non-rational, allowing each its interpretations and enjoying the fruits of both. The problems atheists want to avoid arise from taking one's artful interpretations to be literally true at all times, or to mean that one has a particularly strong connection with some supernatural God that others lack. This is not the sort of God Satanists have in mind. It contradicts our position as God in a universe without God. When a Satanist experiences God he experiences his consciousness having expanded its powers and breadth to such a degree that he feels himself to be God. Classically this experience has been referred to as theurgy, and despite what many esotericists would have you believe, it's not that difficult to attain under the right circumstances. Every day people are experiencing the same divinity that drove the creation of every religion with a philosophy worth looking at. They're using varieties of yoga, meditation, hypnosis, ritual, and yes, drugs to change their mental states and experience the numinal, and it's changing their lives.

What this experience means to a Satanist, whose Faustian soul finds in the experience of cosmic consciousness no confirmation that he is therefore looked after by a sentient being, is that God is always a metaphor if “he” is to make any sense as a concept. But he is a metaphor for a condition that changes your perspective in a way that frankly separates human beings from one another profoundly. The realization that attends mystical or psychedelic theurgy is that consciousness is in some sense a part of everything, a part of all experience but also of nature itself, patterned in physics and the natural world. One can understand all of this intellectually, but it's not the same. Nothing new is learned in the experience as regards a supernatural realm, which is why the babbling of someone who's been thrust into the experience can seem utterly banal from outside. What is different is perspective, which gives to the whole of experience a different luster and to the intellect a sense that it penetrates more deeply, if for no other reason than everything is a great deal more interesting. We begin to have a greater empathy with nature, which isn't to imply some emotional gushing sensibility, but rather we experience it in a way that relates it more to ourselves. We're in the world in a way that is often not the case in our rational cages of ideas and worries about modern living.

What is Religion?

There are civilizations that never named their gods or attempted to portray them... The Romans themselves, for almost two centuries, did not portray their deities; at most, they represented them with a symbolical object. What characterizes the primordial times is... the idea or perception of pure powers, adequately represented by the Roman view of the numen. The numen, unlike the notion of deus (as it later came to be understood), is not a being or a person, but a sheer power that is capable of producing effects, of acting, and of manifesting itself. The sense of the real presence of such powers, or numina, as something simultaneously transcendent and yet immanent, marvelous yet fearful, constituted the substance of the original experience of the “sacred.” — Julius Evola, Revolt Against the Modern World, p42

Once you've had this peak experience, you feel a need to integrate it somehow into your overall understanding of life, which is typically not lived at such an intense level and so not being interpreted in the previous light. When LaVey says we need ritual, he doesn't so much spell out what for, beyond the surface desires of the ritual construct and as a general means to relieve anxiety. Religion is to us a ritually maintained connection with the numinal state. We've learned that we can reconnect to the “God” state with sound, odor, lighting, and other mimetic signals that are used for every invocation — that the whole collection of ritual elements can be tied to the theurgic experience such that acts and experiences of the ceremony can bring one back to this immensely empowered state.

The strangeness of the encounter with the numinal, the fear and awe it induces, one can easily understand being interpreted straightforwardly, by someone who lacks any other sort of explanation, as the literal interaction of a God with himself. The Satanist understands that the experience is being produced in his brain by some natural process, whatever metaphorical description he employs to describe its intricacies. The naturalness of this occurrence does not in any way make it less profound to anyone but those with a religious or Platonic fetish for “supernatural” explanations. Taking the flowery language of “God” and the “supernatural realm” used to describe the experience to be metaphorical does nothing to reduce the significance of the actual experience to my life, or my direct understanding of the possibilities available to consciousness, which are beyond comprehension. Rather, it means that I have within me everything I need to have a full “spiritual” life without needing to serve any higher power than myself.