#150 - Scrying, Science & Radical Listening with Harper Feist | Glitch Bottle

Salutations listeners and welcome back to Glitch Bottle, the podcast where we uncork the uncommon in magic, mysticism, and the generally misunderstood. I'm your host, Alexander F., and today we are so excited to be speaking with scryer esotericist and scientist Harper Feist. Now, listeners, some of you out there may be wondering,

What actually is scrying at its essence in magic and divination? What are the pitfalls and key tips for using candles crystal spheres obsidian mirrors and so many other surfaces and materia in order to better interact with and develop relationships with spirits is scrying a naturally developing skill Or can it be developed if you don't start with that skill? Well, with these questions and so much more, Harper Feist is truly the best person to ask.

Harper, as I know so many of you listeners are familiar with already, but for those who would like a fuller picture as well, Harper is a master scryer and esotericist. a scientist, an author, a historian, and so many other things. She's interested chiefly in magical and religious innovations of late antiquity.

And the use of these tools and methods today. In addition, Harper is also involved in the Ordo Templi Orientis, or the OTO, is an ordained priestess of the Ecclesia Gnostica Catholica, and also... is the current interviewer of the U.S. Grand Lodge's official podcast, Thelema Now, which I know many of you listeners have heard. And also, Harper is a member of the AA. Harper, something also you're familiar with.

teaches a well-received class on scrying at the Blackthorn School, in addition to so many other publications and presentations and areas of expertise. So today, we're so honored because we're going to be diving deep into... scrying into science discussing harper's background harper's incredible authorship of works, including Eo Typhon, a hymnal, also discussing her essay and explanation of the illumination in the Hagia Sophia's original dome, which is just fascinating. And with all of that.

asking Harper your glitch bottle, Patreon listener questions, and a huge thank you to each and every supporter of the podcast for not only your support, but for your awesome questions for Harper as well. And so. With all that being said, Harper Feist, thank you so, so much for taking the time and coming on the Glitch Bottle podcast today. Really appreciate it. Oh, thanks, Alex. I think this is going to be just a gas.

The listener questions are amazing and I'm super honored. And I also really like your use of the word uncorked. Ah, well. You make all of your interview subjects feel like a bottle of fine wine whose time has come, you know? Well, thank you so much. I never thought of it that way, but you're right. Each guest in some ways is top shelf and is willing to be uncorked with specific.

Areas, notes, bouquets, expertise. And I think you bring all of that, if I may be so bold. So I'm very much looking forward to it. And it's long overdue, by the way. Oh, my gosh. I mean, I've been... following you and appreciating your work for like years at this point. And so I'm the one who's honored, truly. Oh, well then what took you so long, Alex? Well, you know, sometimes one goes down one too many rabbit holes and then one forgets that one's in space time. Although.

that didn't prevent something we'll talk about a little later is that did not prevent you from actually remaining in my space time as well as a few magical colleagues as well so we can oh yeah that that I think we're going to have to talk about that. We will absolutely have to talk about that. And. And so much more, Harper. But I think, of course, probably the best for the few listeners who maybe have not read about your early experience or heard about it is...

You are so accomplished in the Malkuthian sphere, which we'll talk about, but also, of course, in the esoteric sphere. Can you share with the listeners, Harper, how do you first come to... explore and immerse yourself in esotericism? Was there like a specific moment in space time or was there a gradual unfolding? How did you get drawn to magic and esotericism?

Well, you know, the person I am now is the person I was as a child. I want to understand the world and I want to be a deep part of it. And I think... Looking back, let's say, to Junior Harper, like maybe Harper as a six-year-old, I don't think... At least at that point, I differentiated between magical thinking and factual thinking. And perhaps most six-year-olds don't. And it turns out that even to me as a...

scientist and whatever else I am, I don't distinguish so much. And in fact, I distinguish more about how I get to a conclusion than the conclusion itself. And maybe to say just a little bit more about that, in my mundane reality, I can think in a straight line. I can do math and I can come to scientific conclusions and I can build hardware. I can do all those things. And in order to do that, I have to think in a straight line. But in the rest of my reality...

I think it's not a good idea to think in a straight line. If I want to read your facial expressions, for example, that's not a linear thing. It's an instinctual thing. And so, you know, really what you're asking me is how do those two modes of thinking relate? And for me, it's a handoff. And both modes are valuable.

And maybe, let me put Cherry on that Sunday there. Most people in the Western world, maybe even in the Eastern world, are... married to rational thinking and critical thinking but we just we evolved to do both types of thinking and probably some types of impressions that we don't currently have words to map around. We developed this way for a reason, and it's because irrational thought is very useful to us.

Don't you think? That's such a lovely way to put it. Exactly. The way I think of it is, we're so obsessed sometimes with esotericism, trying to reduce things to a physical... you know, replicable cookie cutter approach, but really instead of the laws of physics, it's the laws of meaning and ritual and space that are obey. And I think you've said it far better than I could.

And yeah, Harper, I mean, that kind of gets to your point, this exact issue of evolving with both forms of thinking and then...

For the first time in one's life, experiencing, quote unquote, or interacting with a spirit for the first time. Can you share a little bit of... about that as you were growing up and as you were going through this. I know Ben McStefan, who's been on the podcast, the excellent scryer with Frater Ash and Chasson has shared about his early exposures and experiences.

What was that like, that first time? Can you walk us through that experience? Well, God knows. So, Ben Strider is actually a close friend of mine, and we have shared... stories in abundance so of course he's really precocious really masterful and my entra entree let's say into this field came later um When I was the same age as he started to have his spiritual experiences, I was, I think I was running around trying to understand what decay was naturally.

And when I was seven, maybe, and I think that's the age he says that he had his first spirit encounter. I was running around with little plastic bags full of blood vessels that I'd extracted from a roast that my mother made, and I was putting them on my way to school so I could watch them. And I didn't see that as a scientific thing. I just saw that as this is how life works. And much later, I realized that I could...

kind of read people better than others. So instead of reading invisible people, I was reading visible people. And it turns out that those skills are so similar as to be nearly undistinguishable. My first formal encounter with a spirit was a spirit that I called Well, I saw, let's say, I saw in a Solomonic summoning with an exorcist who was following Dr. Rudd's Goetia instructions. And the spirit seemed to me kind of like a whiny person. And they mostly, they seem like people to me.

I'm not really visual, so the fact that they don't look like humans doesn't bug me very much. But they sound a lot like people. And I can go into more detail about that story if you wish. Absolutely. Oh, yeah. Should I? Please do. The floor is yours. So there are some embarrassing parts to this story. The embarrassing part would be how this whole thing got initiated. And that is that I met this man. I was...

faculty at a university in Denver. Chemistry, right? So, I'm teaching physical chemistry to youngsters and critical thinking, which is funny. And I was lonely, and so I went on OkCupid, and I was looking for people who were similarly inclined, and I found one out of 500,000 fucking people to talk to. And this guy... We met at a bar, and we had a couple drinks, and he said, Hey, Harper, have you ever seen a demon? And I'm like...

Well, you know, I thought you were going to ask me what my sign was. Or, you know, what's my favorite kind of cake? But instead, he wanted to know if I'd ever... done this kind of working. And he never had. What he wanted to do was actually find a bunch of money. And of course, this is a historically appropriate use of Solomonic... demon conjuring you know because plague and people burying cash and all that kind of stuff etc so he talked me into summoning a demon

to help him find money. And he was a high-level Mason in Boulder, in Boulder, Colorado. And so he had access to the local Masonic temple. And on early Saturday morning, we... crept in there after having built all of the tools ourselves, including the big circle on a piece of Canvas. He bought a sword. I don't know if his belt was lion skin, you know, right? Who knows? Anyway, he bought all the stuff and I helped him do all these things.

So we snuck into the Masonic temple, and we locked the doors, and we laid the circle out on the tuckered floor, and he was absolutely terrified. Alex, he was like, ugh. quivering and he was afraid that something was going to happen i on the other hand was afraid that i get caught in the masonic temple because girl not supposed to be in there And further, I was also, you know, I was much more afraid of the Masons than anything else. So we started The Conjuration and about...

two seconds in, it became really apparent that he wasn't going to be able to remember all the stuff he memorized because he was so scared. So he pulled out. He pulled out the script and he was reading the script and I was sitting at his feet inside the circle, triangles way the hell over there. So he did the whole thing and I heard a noise from the other side of the Masonic Lodge.

not in the triangle so i told him that hey you know is the demon supposed to show up in the triangle uh-huh yeah so he got even more worried but the demon showed up in a chair at the very end of the Masonic Lodge, and it was shy. And withdrawn and sounded an awful lot like my mom when my mom wants a phone call. You know, why have you never called me? Kind of thing. So I had a conversation with a demon, which was not in the triangle.

where it was supposed to be about finding treasure and that kind of thing and the demon's like you know gosh you're talking to me i'll help you And that was kind of the end of it. We closed things up and my quivering friend went away and he actually never, I never saw him again because I moved to Florida the very next day.

Now, here's where things get really weird. He calls me about two weeks later and he's like, you know, I was having a massage and the demon came to me. And I'm like, that's not supposed to happen. He's like, yeah, that's not supposed to happen. He was terrified. So I took the sigil of the demon and I put it in the only metal container that I had, which was an orange metal toolbox. And I went off and I got help.

Actually, and I talked to Frater Ashan at that point. And a series of other things happened. But that was my first encounter with the spirit. I never went looking.

But it really turns out that one of the myriad of things I learned from that experience is just that I'm really porous. And what I did with the... the spirit there I'm doing with people all the time and the fact that we actually use a bunch of the same skills people and communicating with people and demons is why I'm teaching the class. It's all the same stuff. It's just communication. We ask questions and then we listen.

And we listen with our eyes or our ears or our bodies or our smells. But we listen. And my class is about that, largely. and about using the imagination to help that process. But I don't... You know, that first encounter, it showed me that communicating with demons is really not so different than talking with your boss or getting a new account at a bank. or learning how to cook an octopus from the guy at the fish store. You know, we ask and we listen. Did you feel that...

Um, when you were having this experience for the first time, and as you mentioned, you are not as visual, let's say, did you, was there an internal, I think this is a question a lot of people might have too. Was there initially. an internal register of the shift in, in presence. And then it was confirmed by looking on the other side of the room and seeing the spirit in the chair or.

Can you walk us through some of the internal changes that you experienced? What a great question. So in the very first encounter, I wouldn't say that all of this was really clear. I've kind of worked this out since. I don't always see spirits. I don't think I always see people, actually, but maybe that's a different question. But when...

When I am doing my work in circle, principally, I feel temperature changes and pressure. And the pressure is always the first indication that something is happening. So I feel pressure. on my back on my neck um sometimes in my on my on the front part of my body sometimes it's um intrusive but firstly there's a body sensation that some something weird is about to happen and then there are ancillary let's say sensory experiences that usually have to do with smell.

And I do see things, but more and more I don't care if I do. Does that make sense? And maybe all that stuff happened in the first time, but because I was actually afraid that the Masons were going to bash the doors down, I wasn't paying attention. Yeah. Yeah. No, that absolutely makes sense because, you know, exactly, you're talking about this kind of full immersion and this shift.

I think a lot of people, especially, and I'm sure that in the course that you teach, you might get this question a lot from people who are just starting out scrying or people who have maybe been far along on the path about, okay, how do I know that? what I'm experiencing is an external register. As you say, the pressure, sometimes intrusive, various indications versus I'm in a circle.

I'm nervous. It's my first ritual. How do I know that I'm not somehow conjuring, as William Blake says, these mind forged manacles that I'm. I'm already pre-setting things, you know, and I'm pre-setting expectations. How do you, especially when you're first starting out, how do you differentiate? Or is it just, oh yeah, you immediately know when you feel that pressure. It's like.

This is completely external from anything that I could ever even psychologically come up with. Oh, you know, people in my class are forever asking about this. You know, sometimes I wonder if my answer doesn't frustrate them because I really think it doesn't matter so much. Now, here's the thing. Scientifically... There's no separability, right? There's no way for me to say, this is me and this is not me. And that's true of everything I do in esotericism.

as in as as it is in science and and heisenberg actually i think said said it best it's like i'm not observing uh nature i'm observing myself in in relationship to nature that's a paraphrase but i think it's really important there's no separability i have an experience um with something is it me is it the something it's It's the combination because, you know, all right. So let's pretend it. Let's pretend that we're going to actually do this to show the video. So above my head.

is this this styrofoam guy i'm pointing to him now and i make masks on the styrofoam form if i you know if i'm not looking at him is he still there Does it matter? I mean, this question of if a tree falls in the forest and you're not there, does it make a sound? No? Or yes? These things are not clear and people need to give themselves permission to not care about it. It's an experience. It's an experience that gives us information.

This is what we're looking for. It's not the truth, capital T, because, you know, we could argue for a long time about if there's such thing as real truth for that. we'll have to turn the camera off and get alcohol. But no, I think in the end it doesn't matter so much and people need to let themselves go about that. You know, if you're tied to what the truth is... then you might be denying yourselves the experience. It's the experience we want. The information we want.

Does that ring true to you? And if not, fight me. Fight me. Well, our boxing gloves are going in the same direction on this, Harper, because... I totally agree. One of the things that I that I know I've shared about, but also many of the guests on the show is breaking through the expectation of this. To me, this is a this is.

a stereotype that solomonic ritualistic magicians get because people i think on the outside who haven't practiced it say oh this is all these are just people who are fetishizing um you know post medieval catholic ritualistic structures and they're not really delving into anything or oh they have these unrealistic expectations that you must have a lion's skin belt and you must have all the materia magica and and they're so petrified

And so, Ridge, that's not at all the impression I get chatting with, obviously, practitioners like yourself, but Fraud or Ash and Shassan. Dr. Stephen Skinner, David Rankin, who has written about this as well. I mean, there are so, so, so many. Jack Braille is another one. There are so many people who exactly you could line up 100 people. All practicing the Goetia, the second book of the Lamegaton's Goetia, of the Lamegaton. And you will have 100 different idiosyncratic feedback-based.

experience-based results. And that informs your own practice. I totally agree with you on that. But that's so similar. It's very similar to meeting somebody, right?

So if we were all going to go and meet a celebrity, any celebrity, even, you know, Warren Buffett, Taylor Swift, it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. We would all have a different approach. We would all use different words. If we were all to come together at the end, we would describe them differently.

It's really important to know that my eyes don't work the same way that your eyes work. My nose doesn't work the same way your nose works. My brain certainly, you know, a wide variety of experiences. It has to do with our personal past, our genetic past, what we've been trained to do. Our experiences are really different.

To be surprised that we all have different spiritual experiences is kind of silly because, you know, we can't even agree on what color a rock is. You know, why get wrapped around the axle around?

something like that right 100 100 yes it comes down to it comes down to you and this is even reflected in the grimoire literature i mean it even says in many different cases i mean i'm thinking of drawing spirits into crystals here but you know it specifically says some of the questions are you know you summit you pick this specific time say to summon a martial spirit or a jovian spirit but then one of the questions once you have successful contact is

So what are the best times for you? What are the most appropriate times? Like immediately based on idiosyncratic individual feedback. Absolutely. No, this is like you make a new friend and you're like, hey. When is it best for me to call you on the phone? Exactly. Exactly. Actually, it's very useful to treat the spirits as though they are your friend, until they're not.

course and that's a different thing but you know we're surrounded we're surrounded with invisible input all the time we should treat them with respect we should listen before we talk um You know, all of the sort of communicative lessons that we learned in kindergarten apply here. Absolutely. It's super important, you know, and if we're going to go out and we're going to talk to spirits of any ilk, what we need to learn is not how to talk.

We all know too much about that, but how to listen. Yes, and that touches to me, and I'm thinking of the memory that you shared about your first experience about that relationship. And dichotomy, but also interrelationship between the operator and the scryer. And I'm really looking forward to chatting about that. But one of the many things that I love about you, Harper, is you just...

You just casual, you have so much experience and expertise. You just kind of casually drop things like, oh, when I was teaching chemistry, you know, to students. So I think before we continue in the vein of, you know, specific esoteric lessons.

Can you share with listeners, I just think this is one of many fascinating aspects in the menagerie that is your experience. In addition to everything else with your esoteric experience. You are a scientist. Can you share with the listeners about your scientific background? And what is the relationship between the knowledge, the wisdom, the application of the scientific method? How does that...

augment or compliment or challenge your own esoteric experience? What a great question. Let me start the answer to that. as an 18-year-old undergraduate. So I didn't declare my major until I think I was a second semester junior. I sort of had to be forced to do it. And when I showed up at university, I was a little lost, but I found myself in the sub-basement of the library on the CU Boulder campus.

Norlin, which is the name of the library, is this enormous building and it's got rabbit hole upon rabbit hole. And in the basement are other books that, you know, nobody's looked at for a long time. So imagine, if you will, dimly lit environment, vaguely smelling of mold. It's just a little bit cold. No one has been down there for a long time. And the sound...

There's so many books and therefore, you know, lots of surface area that there's a dull sound in the place. Automatically just drew me like a magnet and I hung around down there. You know, because it was cool and because I was lost and, you know, kind of this weird introverted person, too many people, blah, blah, blah. So I'm in the basement.

And I ran into Lynn Thorndike's collection called Magic and Experimental Science. I have literally never been the same. So even the name of the books should draw you in. magic, and science. And it turns out, of course, the spoiler here is that until 200 years ago, those things were the same. So, I appreciated that early in my career, and because of those books, I said, I'm going to be a historian. I'm going to study Elizabethan and Tudor England because John Dee.

And it turns out, okay, then later someone introduced me to thermodynamics and I decided that math was just bitten. And I became a chemist. So fast forward a bunch of years. I got a PhD degree in physical chemistry. I scaled up a gas phase chemical laser. which people had been trying to do for a long time. I was momentarily famous for that. And so I study, let's say, unstable compounds, explosives.

and high-powered lasers. And that's what I've been doing for my whole career. Harper Feist is not actually my real name. Everybody knows that. I need... I need to hide behind a pseudo I needed. I don't think I need to anymore. But because I worked on a security, have worked on security clearance a bunch of times. So that's why I have one. And by now, it's like my real name. So just call me Harper. However, science and magic are the same to me. And they became the same to me.

on a day in a very dark laboratory when I watched a single levitated aerosol droplet of sulfuric acid freeze when it warmed up. Right. Just let that settle in. That's not supposed to happen. Right. So I warmed it up. Long term experiment, lots of lasers and frozen shit. And I loved it. Right. So it's just. Just like ritual. All the prep in the beginning and all of the words in the scientific journal, all of the magic hoo-hahs and doodads.

It's really the same. And at that moment, I realized, oh my gosh, these two halves of my life are actually the same. And, you know, for those scientific people out there, the reason that actually happened is because when you make sulfuric acid really cold, it turns into a glass. And when you warm it up, it crystallizes just like that. Ping!

in this perfect array, it loses its symmetry, was gorgeous beyond. In the same way that Sitting on a mountain and talking to the earth is beautiful in the same way that sitting inside a circle and talking to an invisible being is beautiful. They're the same, Alex. They're the same. Listeners, I hope you appreciate this as much as I do because the direct experience, but also the.

shattering, the breaking of the misconceptions. And really, Harper, what I really appreciate about many things with you sharing that is you are removing, I think, a lot of the... A lot of the obstacles that people have when they first approach it, they either feel like they have to systematize everything or they need to totally understand something when it obviously is.

A paradox in and of itself, a cult means hidden, right? These things are just simply beyond our ken in many ways. And I think, Harper, this leads to a question which you might have already touched on, and the answer might be... It doesn't matter or, you know, it really all is the same. But listeners who hear your excellent sharing of the scientific.

your scientific background and your scientific approach and also the experience you had with scrying might wonder, okay, so what the hell is scrying? I mean, what... what is going on here and of course online there's you know 65 trillion debates but you know is this is this a physical

manifestation that you see? Is this having an inner sight that's somehow replicated in neuronic patternings? So from your experience, Harper, what would you like listeners to know about what is scrying or if there even are any what are some of the general mechanics if you will behind scrying hmm Well, go ahead and ask 500 questions at once, Alex. Oh my gosh. Well, so let's start with...

What is scrying? So, in my class and in my book, which I will eventually, you know, get dealt with and submitted to Llewellyn of all places. So, we call this, I call this. maybe some of my students do in following, an imaginative trance to get information not readily available. Now, so that's super, super different than... It's super different than maybe what other people say, right? Because it doesn't talk about who the spirits are.

And we can talk about that if you want, because I have opinions about that. There's no facts, but I have opinions. And it gets rid of kind of the, like, New Age. slickness of the basic question. We use our minds to amplify little tiny signals that we get in our bodies to reach out and get an answer to a question. And it's really very similar, since you were asking me about the similarities between science and my occultic habits.

So, it's really similar, right? We use scientific equipment to look at phenomenology that's somehow invisible to our ordinary senses. Scientists do this. all the time and in fact other people ordinary completely mundane people do this too they just don't recognize that they're doing it we all use microscopes or glasses or whatever to increase our visual acumen. We listen to electronic things.

We see electronic things. There's so much of our world that's not directly experienced through our bodily senses. That's really what I'm talking about. Insofar as scientists take invisible signals and amplify them with tools, scryers take very small... sensory information and use the imagination to amplify it to something that's meaningful to answer a question or to get to know a spirit deity ancestor

You know, what have you. So, for now, that is my functioning definition of scrying. Now, people will be surprised.

Maybe, or maybe not, given what we've already talked about, that I think we've all evolved to do this work. And the thing that makes me think that is people... No animal, no being, no plant has evolved, does anything that it didn't evolve to do. The fact that we can do this essentially means that we are meant to. It's part of our skill set, and we're constantly doing it with other people all the time. Can you read other people's minds, Alex?

Well, if they vocalize intent, I can make excellent guesses, but I can't tap directly into their neural firings, if that's what you're asking. so tell me how you read someone's body language yeah i mean i for me if i'm talking to someone seeing someone and if there's a certain amount of Bodily behavior going on. I take it in via my senses. And then I associate whatever that behavior is. I think subconsciously I associate that with predetermined.

patterns of other things in other words if someone you know i might oh this person seems angry or oh this person seems happy and i'm associating that sensory input with past experience as well. But I also might be doing it, Harper, totally wrong and inefficiently. Wrong. So let me actually translate what you just said. Please. This is fun. Thanks for playing. What I think you're doing is you are making a story about what other people do that allows you to make sense out of their behavior.

Right? Yeah. Right? So, we're always making stories about things. And when I say imaginative trance, this is kind of where I'm headed with that. Right? In the absence of data, people make stories, right? If somebody comes to you and says, Alex, I stole your car. And you're like, you stole my car? And they say, I stole, I came to your house at midnight last night. I snuck into your house. I grabbed your keys. I got into that.

Let's pretend you have a Porsche. So I got into your Porsche and I drove away because my best friend is hospitalized in St. Louis and I had no way to go. Okay, so in this case... You have the whole story and you're not like, I wonder why Ted stole my car. Right. absolutely you don't have to make it up because you have the whole story but we never have the whole story so we're always like did ted steal my car because no ted stole my car because he's an asshole

So, not that Ted's an asshole, but you know what I mean, right? So, we're constantly, we are meant, we make meaning out of the unexplained. And then we tweak it to see if it's true. And scrying is really the same, right? So, we go into this imaginative trance and we have an experience past the limits of our senses. past the limits of our rational thought, and then later we see if that's true. Crowley says, success is your proof. Does it work later?

then maybe there's some veracity there. Right? So I think it's really important from, you know, the scientific standpoint, we go and we get the data, we make an interpretation of the data. And then later, we see if all of the rest of the data that comes actually supports our initial hypothesis. That is an important part in kind of what we're up to here.

And maybe not the classical definition or something, right? It's fascinating. I mean, to me, it gets to just the, you know, obviously the very famous quote, right? um which i'm gonna totally butcher here no ending for a video uh but just that the the universe is

As large as your head, but you just don't know how big your head is. I'm thinking of the hard problem of consciousness that the best neuroscientists right now are still wrestling with. Actually, Harper, that makes total sense. And I think.

This leads to something you touched on just five minutes ago, which is that you have opinions on spirits and what they are, what this means. And I know that we have some. questions for you from listeners about specific kinds of spirits. But before we even get there, all right, so this is what scrying is. And if you see me typing here on my screen, I'm an imaginative trance.

to get information that's not readily available and so i just i love i love that um i love that definition so if that is what scrying is and it's a specific procedure designed to do that to fill in some of the gaps because we are telling each other stories, those kind of internal narratives, then what is a spirit in your experience? What is that being?

Sitting in the chair in the Masonic Lodge with the Theurgia-Goetia operation, right? What are the spirits that you engage with on a regular basis? What are those? Wow. There are a variety of ways to answer that question, but I think... Let's go back to the basic definition. The spirits are... Firstly, they're the sources of our information. And they're kind of non-standard, non...

touchable, feelable. I don't want to say nonsense, but, you know, actually that might work. You know, they're sources of information. And so we could get into the, are they real? But I think it doesn't matter. The world as we experience is not real. Right. I mean, one of the things we and so I know I owe you an answer about what are the spirits, but first. I want to cast doubt on even the concept of what's real. Right. So.

I can see you through the means of all this electronic foo. Do you actually... look the way you do on screen? Do you have a short beard? Are you wearing a blue shirt? Do you have this marvelously mischievous hairdo?

I don't even know if that's accurate. Is that real? So further, let's disappear down this rabbit hole. So my eyes see only visible light. Humans call it visible light because... humans eyes can see it it's 400 to 700 nanometers there is a whole bunch of different light on the uv end of it and on the infrared end of it we see that much of the available bands of light. We hear only a tiny bit, so dogs hear much higher in frequency, larger animals, especially those who are...

they hear the lower frequencies. It turns out that as we age, the frequency at which we can hear things, it drops. And all this stuff is actually flexible in our own lifetime. Our skin, human sensory touch. touch is much less sensitive than a horse's skin much more sensitive than you know a dog's skin under fur so I dare you and I dare anyone to tell me what is real based on the fact that our sensory, our sense organs can only see that much of what's out there. We don't know what real is.

And so I have bunches of scientific equipment. Do I know what real is? I know maybe a little, I know 10% more. We don't know what real is because we don't have the whole picture. So if you doubt your senses and you should. Then. It doesn't matter if spirits are real things or if the presence of the ancestors is real. You should just get rid of that word entirely and look for information.

And it could be that spirits are, you know, as Jake infamously said, they're the remnants of the restless dead. I love that. You know, rest in peace, St. Jake, for sure. And ancestors, who are they? Do we resonate with them because of blood or because of passion or because of knowledge? But, you know, we can't know, but that should not bother us because we don't actually understand the truth and we don't know what real is. Does that make sense?

Oh, totally. Because I, yes. And you said it far more eloquently than I can, but something that I think about and we discussed before on the show is this, that sometimes people say, ah. Magic doesn't work, you know, Solomonic ritualistic magic, unless there's a physical confirmatory presence of a spirit. There's a physical, you know, Dr. Lissouskian. full manifest evocation to full manifestation and yet the most important thing that you just touched on is did you get the source of information

Did it work? Well, I didn't see anything. I didn't hear anything explicitly. Okay. Did you issue a charge to the spirit? And was this accomplished? Those should be the focus. And I think that's what you're saying is that. You know, people are obsessed with, oh, I need this real confirmatory, say, physical or audible or some kind of visual representation, which, as you've touched on, is great if it happens. But is that the...

Most important thing when the entire point of the ritual is getting information. And let me just say this. I love your definition. Let me pull it up here because it's just such a lovely. As William Blake says, marrying the contraries of a beautiful, magical, magical and scientific version, because your definition, I love that spirits.

Do spirits live in the 28th dimension? Are they manifestations of our mind? Are they called deep from the consciousness? No, you say spirits could be any of those things, could be none of those things. Spirits. They are the source of our information. I really appreciate that level set that you're giving people. And can I say something kind of provocative? Please.

Most of us can't summon to complete physical appearance a real person. Touche. Well said. Right? So imagine you're at work and you... ran into someone in the hall and they're telling you about something fairly important let's say um you know oh okay here this happened to me not long ago so the project is going to fail

because x y and z and after x and y i'm i am already gone from the conversation because i'm thinking well what's going to happen and i'm already like spinning my own story so we can't even call into full physical manifestation our neighbor no and so so i i dig it We all want to have these apex experiences that look like fucking Gandalf and CGI and all that. But no, you know, until you can actually do that with your own kid or your cat, forget it.

excuse me lion skin's not gonna help that right no yep yep um Yeah, lion skin will fail you when you are in the office or in traffic or trying to summon someone for a conversation or to get more information in the Malkuthian physical realm, let alone anything. Yesotic or above for using traditional associations. And the failure is not the person or the spirit or the ancestor or even, God forbid, the lion skin. It's us. It's us and our inability, utter inability at times to act as a conduit.

That is so lovely. And I know we have some questions exploring some of the some of these exact issues, including some of the procedures, ways to make oneself more of a conduit, more of a. more of a a vessel since harper were on the topic of spirits as sources of information and since you just touched on may he rest in peace uh saint jake uh with you know the remnants of the restless dead

We have many, many listener questions for you. Everyone, including myself, so excited just that you are taking the time to chat. We have a listener question for you from Tirza Villegas, who is asking and saying, Harper is scrying typically done with non-human spirits. At this point, I almost exclusively work with my ancestors, Tirza says. The scryers I've encountered.

only talk about working with other spirits, but I'm curious about learning more about this practice to deepen my communication with my ancestors. Well, there's no reason not to use all of this tech for that purpose. I mean, you know, so probably we've answered all of these questions already, right? what we ought to be, you know, as people, as animals who have evolved to see and experience invisible as well as visible things.

We should apply every tool to every situation to increase the likelihood that we'll succeed. Everything that I do for spirits, I also do for my son. I also do for the people who work for and with me. I also do all of these things for my cats. You know, so it's not so much something that people should pull into ritual. It's something they should be doing, you know, all the time. You know, eat your Cheerios.

learn how to listen i think i think we can stop the pod we we won't obviously but that's that's the what a beautiful summation yeah chop wood and carry water one of the things that i i think about as well as it's like You know, there's this, not an esotericism specifically, but I think in general, you're right. There might be people kind of meander through life or go through each day. I know I'm guilty of this, where you just don't appreciate it.

You know, you don't appreciate the, I think Terrence McKenna said this, I'm not sure, but not only is the universe stranger than we imagine reality, but it's stranger than we can imagine. Yes. You know, and. I think that like, oh, here I am, you know, let's say it's early in the morning, I'm, you know, drinking my coffee and, you know, the coffee mug is too, and I heat it up and it's too hot and I'm just annoyed. I'm like, wait a second.

My hand is made out of millions of vibratory... atoms and valences with electrons and there are these interactive abilities and the only reason my hand can even touch this mug is not because the mug is solid but because the force the actual physical And then all of a sudden you're like, wait a second, reality, reality, even the most quote unquote mundane aspects is amazingly strange and beautiful and wonderful. And how often do I fail to appreciate it?

So, you know, the mystery there, it has nothing. And you put your finger square on it, Alex. And if we're going to stop the podcast, right, which we won't do, but, you know, we'll stop it because of what you said. What you just did was say, what I had to do in order to make the world magical was to get out of my own head. Right? And so...

When we focus on others, you know, other people's communication or my cat's communication, oh my God, don't even get me started there. I'll become instantly the crazy cat lady. But, you know, when we're listening to things that are not the voice in our head that's quacking, you know, my cup is too hot. Fuck you, universe. That thing. You know, as soon as we're not doing that anymore, the world is bigger and it's more interesting and it's more fun, you know, so I'm all about fun.

my students know this about me, but it's also more magical. And as soon as we do that, we are connected. And so, you said it, I didn't. right get out of get right the thing that's in here it absolutely great keeps the lungs going heart going all that stuff but it does have a It is a little selfish. And if we can move from the inside of our own head and start looking at the experiences of other beings, do they...

visible or invisible, carnate or incarnate, the world instantly is a cooler place. Just like that. 100%. Instead of the laws of physics, which are always ever present, it's shifting the laws of meaning inside our own experience, you know, and. I love that. And I think, Harper, I think this goes to the next question for you from Tirza Villegas. And this kind of touches on something you've said about...

How everybody's different. Everyone effectively has their own idiosyncratic approach with scrying, with magic. And Tirza is asking and saying, how much of the skill... is learned and how much is natural uh tirza says uh i am a fantastic so i've never been able to see once my eyes are closed even though i'm an artist Fascinating question. No, you know, I like that a lot, but I think the spoiler was issued a couple minutes ago when we were talking about the fact that I believe...

And, you know, I'm not a biologist, I confessed that before, but I think biologists would say we can't do anything that we didn't evolve to do. So, let's expand that a little bit. And further, let me quote Oha-sensei, the founder of Aikido. Morihei Ohishiba says, what one man, what one person can do, any person can do. We are... We're all able to do this to some degree. Let's pretend it's like an athletic event. How shall we? So I'm a terrible runner.

I run if I think I'm going to get hit by a car, actually. Shh, don't tell. Some people will think poorly of me because of this, but it's the same, right? Given that I have two legs and a heart that mostly works, I can run. Some people run a lot better than I do. But they practiced. either that or they had a lot of cars to run away from but no i mean like they practiced and they had a coach and and and they and we all know right given given if if we're

If we're abled in that way, we can run. And if we're not abled in that way, we can do other things. We are all capable of walking, running, moving in some way. Same with scrying. We all can do it. Can we all do it to the same degree right now? No. But, you know, there's practice and there's thinking about things. So some people run without shoes and some people run with heel strike. Some people run with toe strike. We all have to discover the way in which we run.

It's not very different. I am convinced. So several people who can't natively visualize things have come through my class. And I won't say it was my doing, but... Because of the questions that get asked in our surrounding, they come to the point where most of them actually do know that they're seeing things. And this isn't things that I do. It's just questions that get asked. You know, heel strike, toe strike. Grass, pavement.

We all have our own ways to do this. And the first thing that we all have to do is acknowledge our uniqueness and work from there. Don't work from someone else's foundation. Right? We can all do this. Yeah, and hearing you share your foundation, your idiosyncratic Harper Feistinian foundation is a very helpful wellspring, I think, for I know myself and I know the listeners to kind of draw their own.

topographies before they venture forth or as they venture forth and this next question actually might fall into this category about you know pavement versus grass um but i think it kind of gets to this point of If spirits are the source of our information or of information that is not as readily available, how does that information hit? Does it depend upon your own...

background in education and learning or experience. And so to all of that, we have a listener question for you from McKinley Valentine and McKinley is asking and saying, do spirits Harper typically make use of. your default mental processing style in order to communicate. For example, if someone thinks in words but not pictures, so they are a fantastic, but visuals aren't their default mode, is it likely spirits will communicate in words rather than images, or is it more based on the spirits?

preferred communication style versus the practitioners. So I love this question just beyond, but I bet you, Alex, and the listeners too, already. are going to guess what i'm going to say like of course but also you know we here my science hat back on we can't separate those does the spirit talk to us in ways that we can understand, or do we simply accept the input that we can process?

Interesting. And then how would you know the difference, right? Because you don't know what you don't know if you get a certain feedback that literally is the information that you have. Yeah. But, you know, this goes back to another doesn't matter. We get the information and we're going to, you know, look at it later. to see if it's useful to us. So, we can't tell the difference between the spirits speaking Greek to us because we actually understand Greek.

Let's map it that way. Did the spirit speak English to me because I'm a native English speaker? Or do I understand the words, do they sound like English because I am? These are further inseparable questions, and so long as we're getting the information, that's actually an academic exercise and not a practical one.

interesting but we still if so long as we're getting our information and we can compare it with oh god i'm gonna say it reality you know it's fine and so let me tell a story about this the only time i was ever paid to do a scrying ritual was when

I was working with another magician who was paid to find some lost firearms. So the problem at hand was that a person that we mutually knew... had lost a pair of dueling pistols, and he didn't know whether he'd just moved and they were gone. And he was worried that... I think this is... I may have the details a little mixed up. It was a long time ago, but I think he was worried that his daughter's boyfriend had stolen them.

And further, he thought they were loaded and he was worried, you know, about the legal ramifications of their loss. And so he came to this other practitioner who came to me and said, We're going to summon a Solomonic demon to figure out where these things are, because lost stuff, right? This is the totally traditional reason to summon a Solomonic demon. entity. So we did that. And in trance, I saw a very cluttered space like boxes on boxes and junk and like hoarder.

like a hoarder television program, really. And as I moved through that space, I saw a wooden box. However that works. I think it was kind of visual, but I also think it was tactile. So I smelled the space and I felt the wood of the box. I remember in the trance, I opened the box and the pistols were inside. The internal surface of the box was red velvet and the dueling pistols were...

You know, one pointed north, one pointed south. Beautiful. And so that's what we reported. Cluttered, hoardy space. Smell of... hot dampness, mold, and then the presence of the firearms. And that's exactly how he found them. So, I got the information from the Spirit. And we sent it out there into the world. And then much later, he came back and he said, you know what? You were right. And I'm like, I wasn't right. Okay, I got the right information from my invisible buddy.

But that's the sort of corroboration that says, is it real? Let's not go there. Is it important? Yes. Is it interesting? Yes. So, I mean, that's the kind of thing. And the scientific part of me is super insulted by all this. It's like, fuck it.

Yeah. How do you, you know, just, just, I, you know, I just have to ask. Cause as you say, as you said many times now, look, there's, there's really no separation and one embraces both of these methods. But when you do have those moments of like, okay, you know. I'm in the lab, right? Scientific method, hard, rigid.

materialistic you know evidence-based must must be able to replicate given the recreation of specific conditions under experiment you know all of the classic um from newtonian onwards right and then this happens where it's it's spirits as sources of information what what are some of the can you give listeners the, maybe a few snippets of the conversation between what your scientific brain might be yelling at your magical side or what, um,

You know, that used to be more difficult for me than it is now. But at that time, I thought, Alex, I thought, I'm losing my mind. And then I thought, nah, not really. No. And it all has, and I processed this years later, five maybe?

years later when i was actually thinking about okay so here i am um i'm a professor and i'm teaching people about chemistry and i also had this group of undergraduates that i was teaching critical thinking to And that's like, you know, don't be an idiot when you vote and don't be a sucker on the Internet and like, you know, figure out how to negotiate the modern world without without.

kind of losing yourself yeah was that and so you're right i am teaching people how to how to think critically and how to think in a straight line basically and um

It was maybe five years ago that I discovered that, all right, the ancient Greeks, they had... And so, right, I've taken... philosophy as an undergraduate i know about the syllogisms and i know about brutal linear thinking but the greeks had a very specific way of thinking called mania they wouldn't have called it a way of thinking but um

They could be really irrational. And E.R. Dodds, he wrote a book called The Greeks and the Irrational that describes that, right? And so, the ecstatic and the improbable and all of this stuff. had a real place in antiquity that we don't have now we you know we in modern day reality we we fail to give this a place at the table but when you do you have permission to not worry so much about thinking that is best relegated to calculating.

Gosh, how much pain it takes to paint my office or how to use a map. You give yourself permission to use your intuition, to use your body. to be an animal. And it opens all these doors where suddenly these things are no longer in violent conflict, but they are useful together. And I think, you know, for me personally, huge discovery. Huge discovery. It lets me be who I am and not be too unhappy about it. maybe that's so great and and how to your point how ironic right that the um

You know, oh, the Greeks and yeah, brutal linear thinking and the perfection of logic. Right. But they also had this entire language that allowed. And I love that phrase about giving yourself permission to use intuition or your body like. So, yes, there was. map pure right mathematical geometric syllogisms all this you know excellent rationality and all that but then there was the there's deep lessons that these things can't touch that can only be found by

embracing the laws of meaning, if you will, as opposed to the laws of physics. Okay, so an entire part of my life worships Newton and Einstein and Boltzmann and Heisenberg and all that kind of stuff. But then the other side is Plato, right? So the Phaedrus talks all about this. This is... Thinking irrationally was practiced in ancient Greece. And everything that we know about...

you know, the PGM and Homer and everything that comes down to us from a kind of classical period. Not that the PGM was classical, mind you, but... Even, you know, this bleeds into Christianity, you can read it in the Bible. And our absolute addiction to rational thinking is very modern. And it doesn't suit us very well. We need something that we've jettisoned for the moment. And it would really, it behooves us to reclaim this because it makes us into complete people.

We need it. Yeah. You know, scrying and occultism and all that aside, we need it. Oh, yeah. Oh, my goodness. And this this will in. A few questions from now. This actually, to me, it touches on directly something you've actually written about extensively, but I'm in particular thinking of an essay in which you collaborated with Peter Mark Adams. You look at the Hagia Sophia, for example.

Sure. From a purely geometrical, you know, brutal mathematical, you know, all the rock and place. Sure. It's it's it has all those elements, but yet embedded. And I think this is an interpretation of for me of what you just said, but amid that, right, amid swimming in the ocean of this kind of hard mathematical, you know, geometric. you know, linear thinking is encrypted within that embedded within it is this rich, beautiful, nonlinear, intuitive.

alphabet code that it's just right there if we only can see it i don't know if that's a fair way to put it but no you know i i like that but but let's separate it um Let's separate it with the question. And so I've never, what you just said made me think about this. I've never actually described it in this way. So the essay actually is very linear.

And it describes how the light actually works inside the original dome of the Hagia Sophia, which of course none of us has ever seen, the whole place fell down. you know, 80 years after its construction because of structural instability. And the structural instability was probably chosen because it created this beautiful... transformative lighting now so the the questions that i was just talking about so there is the how how did harper how did the light

manifest itself in these descriptions of the original Hagia Sophia. Well, okay, so I present a whole bunch of geometry and very linear thinking there, but... why why did they do that and the whole actually the whole of the Peter Mark Adams book is the answer to the why question they chose to build this dome that they knew they had to know was unstable they had to know it wouldn't last they had to know that any earthquake could knock it over because

all of the architectural um smarts were there at the time they knew they knew what they were risking to make that absolutely amazing lighting that's described and they took the risk, that's the why. So there's the how, which is rational, and there's the why. which is the irrational and the mysterious and what is absolutely necessary for us to be completely human. It's the why. Again, we're coming back to that theme of...

marrying the contraries of bathing in the paradox. I'm sure there's many different ways that one could phrase it. By the way, listeners, just for some extra context, this is Harper's excellent essay. which is as an appendix to Peter Mark Adams in his book, Sanctum of Kronos, Spiritual Descent in the Age of Tyranny. Harper's excellent essay is entitled An Explanation of the Illumination in the Hagia Sophia's Original Dome. So please check out the podcast and video descriptions as well.

Pick up a copy of that too. And I think, Harper, this really touches on, I mean, we have many more listener questions for you about kind of the mechanics behind it. But in terms of your last point of... going back to ancient Greece, but the allowance and the permission of intuition. Earlier, you touched on... Being aware of external things like, for instance, the the pressure that might change or the kind of physical aspects that.

are recalibrated before an appearance of a spirit mckinley valentine has a question for you about going the other way and i'm curious your thoughts on it so mckinley says

People talk about discernment and scrying in the sense of don't mistake messages coming from your own ego or anxiety as being messages from spirits. But what about discernment in the other direction? How do you avoid? And dismissing messages from spirits because you think that they're just your own thoughts or not even noticing the messages because they blend in with your own stream of consciousness. Oh, well, okay, so that's a beautiful question. But the quick answer is accept everything.

and then fish it out later, right? So one of the things that I'm kind of working on for my book right now is the fact that when we innovate, let's say, there are two... at least two steps but let's let's fiddle with the two steps so the guy who invented velcro he was an engineer i think he was a swiss guy i mean doesn't this sound like a kind of german swiss thing so he's wandering around in the you know in the

in the woods and these burrs get on his dog and he's like outraged because he's got to pull these burrs off the dumb dog but he looks at them and they're complicated and he doesn't really understand why they're so damn hard get off the dog so he takes he takes the birds and he looks at them under a microscope and he determines that there are spikes all over them okay so that

is the observation. And according to McKinley's question, this is everything. So there's... what's going on in my head, the fact that my heart is going too fast, the fact it's cold in here now, and the weird voice that's behind my back. You know, all of this together. That's the observation. That's the burr has spikes on it. And I'm pissed because it's hard to get off the dog. Observation. But then...

There's what we do with it later. So he took this crazy system with all these spikes all over it. It's a stupid dog. And he looks at it under a microscope and he understands. how it happens, like I said, and he scales it such that, you know, he realizes that you could actually make one surface that's a dog and one surface it's a burr and they stick together reversibly and you could go and make velcro okay so get all of the observation the whole thing

Don't peel anything away. This is the purpose of the magical journal and the scientific notebook. Take all the notes, record everything. every little detail planetary day planetary day planetary hour um what the weather's like what you're wearing what you had for lunch do the whole crowley thing right i had i had limoncello for dessert even whole curly thing and later watch what happens and see what part of it matters the the whole this whole source thing

I think ultimately if it were separable, it would be interesting, but it's not. So we have to separate it. Observation results or... you know what happens later right so that's the way i think about it i'm i'm sure there are a hundred thousand other ways to think about it but for me this rings true and the the whole model of the creation of Velcro, as absolutely dirt pedestrian as that sounds, it applies. Yes. It applies. Very...

Very good pun there with applying and Velcro and peeling things on and off. I don't know if that... I totally agree. It does apply. And I love that. What I'm getting, Harper, from what you're saying is... And this is something that I certainly, I remember years ago when I first started as well. And today it's something I need to watch out for, which is, would it be fair to say this?

Another way of saying how you said it so eloquently would just be as well. Don't preemptively just dismiss information because you have a preconceived notion of. This needs to come from this source or this needs to come from that. Take take all of the before you carve your Michelangelo or some kind of Davidic statue. Take all take all the chunks of raw marble in and then later on.

you can start rafting yeah yeah i mean so that that's right it's it's like the the temptation to censor things i i think all right We want to have an experience. We have expectations about what that experience will be like, but that's actually censorship in a way. And so we should be very careful about that. And the way to get around that is just...

to record everything, think about it later. You know, like Mr. Velcro, you don't have to think, you don't have to choose what's, you know, what's important at the moment. Think about that later. If we can separate anything, we can separate the observation and the results. So do that. Take all of the observations.

Take everything in. Okay. So I love that. And listeners, if you are as appreciative as I am, I think this is really, really just so key to remember because I know for me, that's something that... One needs to let go of are those mind forged manacles before going into a ritual or working with the scryer or, you know, any of those esoteric procedures.

Scientists, as Harper knows, better than anyone have beakers and lab equipment and laser precision measurement tools and, you know, specific instruments, scientific instruments. One could argue that scrying might also have its own materia. And so this next question.

um for you harper is from uh aaron and aaron is asking and saying can you harper speak about the significance of the actual scrying surface to use and how important it might be to use A consecrated or purpose specific surface like a black mirror versus something like the surface of a natural body of water, a crystal sphere. Can you talk about the surfaces? Or, of course, one thinks of ancient practices with oil and thumbnail scrying. I mean, what? Yeah.

What about the services? Do they matter? Is there a difference? What are your thoughts? You know, so I'm pretty agnostic about those things. But so this gets into. kind of preparation for any work, right? Any work, including science and scrying and cooking and intimate behavior, all of these things. So if... it's important to the practitioner, then it's important. So, so there's a, there's a PGM spell and it's,

the Typhonic Initiation one. And at the end, right, the reason that we do the Typhonic Initiation spell in the PGM is because it allows you to basically scry anything, anywhere. So, all right, so several of us have done this. It's in some ways sort of severe, but at the end, the PGM talks about scrying into a bowl of water from the spring.

or a bowl of water from the ocean, or a bowl of water from a well. And each one of those things has a series of characteristics associated with it that will do something slightly different. True or false? What do you think? So it's up to the practitioner. Interesting. This is my iPhone. And here, look, you can see me in it. And now let's see if we can see Alex in it. Oops. Alex. Oh, there's Alex. Yep. There you go. Wow. This, you know, my iPhone surface.

Oops, except now. It's a great scrying surface. And, you know, actually, if you look down the bore of a glass, also, if you... If in the dark you have a piece of anything, anything will work. The point is to get yourself out of your own head and ask a question. So, to me, all of that stuff is agnostic, but if a practitioner says, I love my black mirror, then it's the perfect thing.

And if the practitioner says, my Peloton screen is the best thing, then it's the perfect thing. And if, you know, if you're really tied into some ritual system and you... let's pretend we're trithemians for now and we have uh you know a scrying sphere the size of a small orange and with a you know with a golden bear on the back perfect do you need it to do any work no no i mean what is what is the actual what is the actual tool we're using to do the work

The body, the eyes, the mind, the nose, the skin. You are the instrument. You are the beaker, if you will. You are the experimentation for the most effective communication. I love that, Harper, because... It again, breaks the misconceptions. It's just like someone who's obsessed with, I must have a physical manifestation of a spirit, but then it's like, okay, to me, that's more small picture. The big picture is...

What was your question? What did you ask? Did it manifest in the time period that you gave? Did you do that? It sounds like you're saying with scrying, it's... It's the same thing. It's don't be mired in this kind of maybe more small picture thinking instead of it's like, okay, no matter what it is.

Black obsidian mirror, crystal sphere, fingernail, looking down a wine glass. There could be anything, but it's like, but what is your question? What are you seeking from the sources of information, the spirits? Right. Yeah, exactly. I think the focus on the actual surface is really interesting. I would encourage people to have that be an aesthetic question rather than a functional one. What do you like to see? What encourages your creativity? What opens your mind?

your mind? What removes distraction? Let that be an aesthetic choice rather than thinking it's going to drive the whole experience. What's going to drive the whole experience is you and the question. That is so great. That is so great. Harper, really appreciate that. You know, as well. We have some questions that I think go back to your first story that you shared about being in the Masonic Lodge.

But before we get to those, here's one that I think, and I'm sure you discussed this in your course, and I'm looking forward to chatting about your course. And listeners can check out the links below for all of Harper's excellent publications.

course material um can you sketch out because i know that this is such a broad topic but can you sketch out harper what are some of the biggest pitfalls or mistakes or assumptions maybe assumptions that that people knew to scry and often fall into and how can they how can they avoid those assumptions or pitfalls is is is there anything that you kind of see over and over again or something that you find yourself sharing about again and again well you know i think the primary stumbling block

that many people have is they think they're bad at it. When of course we're, you know, if you adopt my definition of the whole thing, we're doing this all the time. And it's just, you know, so for us to extend this to an invisible system, it is just that. It's an extension. It's not something groundbreaking and brand new.

if we apply the way that we handle ourselves in front of other people um that's a really good start and so when when people say oh i'm new at this or oh i i'm bad at this or You know, they're assuming a lot there because, you know, we're doing this intensive listening.

All the time. Intensive listening in response to a question. We do that all the time. And the other thing is, you know, the folks in my... current cohort of the class which just started and the registration is still open but we're already talking about this you know the notion that somehow what we see in movies is real And so, I super love this. I love this. Maybe this is maybe too much of a confession, but I'm a...

I'm a cultural imbecile like I don't do movies really and so I listen to pop music sometimes I read You know, I constantly read, but I don't, I'm not a movie person. So, when people come and they say, I want to have a spiritual experience that's like CGI. They don't usually use those words. But, you know, we shouldn't expect things because we've seen them in a movie. Including, like...

I'm going to have my pants scared off, including Gandalf falling off the bridge in Moria and screaming, Fly, you fools! you know these things have never happened to me personally so i think it would it would really be nice if people didn't equate their spiritual lives with that sort of media experience. I think that would be really useful because it gets into all these comparisons where, you know, nobody is going to have that experience.

Nobody's going to have 5,000 horsemen or 50,000 horsemen at Helms Deep on their way to the office. And so we shouldn't expect to have the exorcist experience the first time we perform a Solomonic summoning ritual. No. Okay, so those of us in the know have heard the story about Selene filling the Colosseum in Rome with demons. Probably we shouldn't expect that either.

right you know at least at least that's documented but you know the uh kind of the coherent theme through all this is expectations though and if you Expect too much, then you're not open to what's really happening, I think. Your head is already full of what you think the answer is. So there is no question. Right, right.

it's already full of of all this all all this preconceived information when as you said at the very beginning of our interview that the real key is not filling your head with information it's listening it's the opposite it's it's creating a space to listen to the spirits. And so much of that can be just crazy improbable. But if you decide beforehand what you think that experience is going to be, there's no room for the actual thing to happen.

That's such a great point. Such a great point, Harper. Again, listeners, I hope you appreciate that as much as I do, which is make sure to manage your expectations of it, but also know that. Sometimes because, again, things are not only stranger than we imagine, they're stranger than we can imagine. So whatever Hollywood fantasy is kind of being conjured up in your own mind, things will be stranger than that.

um perhaps or or different or um you'll maybe see do you find that too hard but this just popped into my head about

You mentioned kind of taking a page out of good old Uncle Alistair there and recording everything. Sometimes... When you do record everything and you do go through a procedure, a scrying procedure, a ritualistic magical procedure, do the answers to the questions, does the information, if you will, does it sometimes come? Does it come a week later, a month later? Do you find that there are delayed? I'm using the word delayed temporally, but there really is no delay. It's all the same, but like.

Is information revealed or shared even on a timeline or does it just totally depend on the question that you're asking and the request? I can only answer that for myself personally. So there's a whole variety of that sort of temporal response, that timeline, if you will. And I don't know if it's related to the type of question, but I think it's more my processing of the information.

So, sometimes it's like, all right, so we all have these books of magical correspondences, right? 777 or David Griffith has one. There's another couple. Anyway, these correspondence books, your head should kind of work like that, right? So, you have... Like Mr. Velcro, you have the observation and then you have some realizations later. I doubt seriously if Mr. Velcro went home immediately and invented Velcro that very day.

So there's some processing that we have to do with our own heads and our own experiences to come up with, oh, maybe that's what that means. And, you know, we're never really sure. But, you know, in case that bothers you a whole lot, we're not sure in real life if our conclusions are salient even. If they're meaningful, it needs to be enough.

You know, and so there are workings that I have been part of, and I'm still trying to figure out what the fuck that meant. Trust me on that. And I'm sure that's true for you, Alex, and I'm sure it's true for almost everyone who's listening. you do a thing and you think about it and at some point later you think maybe i understand a little bit and then you think some more and you're like oh maybe i didn't right

Right. Absolutely. Okay. But, you know, that's not esotericism. That's not occultism. Sorry, ladies and gentlemen, that's being a person. And I love that because that's been one of the themes of what you've been sharing is being in touch. Again, think about giving yourself permission to use intuition and nonlinear thinking, you know, go back to the ancient Greeks, like having that ability to.

process things. I love that. Absolutely love that, Harper. So let me very briefly give an example of this. Oh, please, please. So I gave, as an exercise, I gave to one of my classes not very long ago, the... I gave them the exercise to go off and use Trithemius' ritual to conjure Michael on Sunday, first thing in the morning. And it's like, how many times have I done this in my life? A lot. Hundreds, maybe? A lot. And so I said to everyone in the class, okay,

Let's make this dirt simple. Some of you don't have a bunch of money. Some of you don't have all the ritual toys. So we'll make all the ritual toys out of paper and wood. And in my head, I'm like, I'm going to standardize this experiment and see what happened. So, we all made our stuff, and we all did this ritual, and I... We decided, okay, we're not going to use a crystal ball because we didn't all have one. So we are going to look for, we're going to scry incense smoke. Very, very traditional.

Okay, we should all know how to do that. And so, I'm in my own living room and I'm doing this ritual and I'm thinking, I'm just doing this because class. And the weirdest... Some of the weirdest shit happened to me. And the thing that really got my attention was that I threw a bunch of incense on the brazier and the fire went out. The coals went dead. And I'd never seen that before. Right. So experiment over. Wow. And.

So I opened up the brazier later when it cooled off, and the material that I pulled out of my frankincense bag were pebbles. Hmm.

So what do you do with that? And for whatever reason, I fell into the biblical story where King Nebuchadnezzar throws... shadrach neshach and abednego into the furnace and they didn't burn there were three pebbles and so like i'm not a card-carrying christian really and but but that story came into my mind and i realized so the whole thing was about protection and about improbability and about impermeability and about being indestructible

So, there was an observation, and what came later is still evolving for me. And so, what actually happened, if we think about the physics of the situation... is that there were rocks in my frankincense bag but that turned into a really potent spiritual message to me absolutely yes the you know yep

the laws of meaning were in full effect because of, and especially, I love that image, by the way. I mean, talk about a, uh, both with, uh, The three in the furnace, but also with your procedure about literally in both cases, say a direct celestial or spirit interaction. interference message however we want to want to phrase it wow right and and so we are conjuring an angel and the angel of the lord in the story at least and i think it's in daniel

The angel of the Lord was the reason that those guys were unharmed. You know, the whole thing, just, you know, very... a little experience, but I'm still processing it and it's still providing meaning. So that's what I mean about the separability of the observation and the results. I'm still processing the results of that little experiment that I did with my class. 100%. Stunning. really yes very much so and um i again i think that goes directly to the theme of don't uh

Don't be so hard on yourself. Don't have these unrealistic expectations of I need a Hollywood experience or even no Hollywood experience, but I expect to have all of the information immediately right away. I mean, this listeners, you know, you're hearing it from Harper herself about processing that. So I think if Harper is doing that, then that that would be a very good indication for our own idiosyncratic requests.

as well and harper speaking of you just mentioned tritemius and and some of the more traditional uh approaches to things and i love the standardizing uh the experiment by making all the magical accoutrement out of paper that's just such a great thing um

One of the things when it comes to kind of classic, quote unquote, ceremonial magic procedures and whatnot, is something that David Rankin talks about and has written about as well in his Grimoire Encyclopedia, where, and I mean. I immediately thought of you when I when I read this, because David gives a modified consecration of the scryer that needs to be done.

before a ritual. And David, when he was on the podcast, he was talking about, you know, it's important that you consecrate things people don't usually think about. You know, if you have any rings on, your contact lenses, anything you bring into the circle. you need to consecrate. Yeah. So like, I mean, I don't know. And then he gives us modified consecration of the scryer. So what do you think, Harper? Do you think that, um, that it's important for scryers themselves to be?

consecrated in addition to the other magical accoutrements that are present in a ritual well why not so as we consecrate the incense oh inanimate creature of god So, what's stopping us from saying, oh, animate creature of God? Of course, we should do that. We should be constantly consecrating ourselves to our own work.

I mean, above and beyond the whole scarring thing, we've devoted ourselves to a spiritual path, and we should constantly be... be acknowledging that and and in so doing consecrating our our efforts ourselves our body ourselves everything i feel really strongly about that And I'm not sure, but I think that's what Crowley meant when he advocated for his adherents to take Eucharist every day.

Right? Do the Mass, right? Either do the Gnostic Mass or the Mass of the Phoenix every day. I'm pretty sure that's what he was getting at. Consecrate yourself all the time. Gosh, I sound like Yoda. Spiritual beings, are we? And we should acknowledge that every moment that we can. What a beautiful thing. What a beautiful thing, because it goes to that point about reality being strange and beautiful and a miracle effectively and just this wonderful thing. I love that, Harper. Love that.

And as well, we have some questions for you about collaboration and about different publications that you have, too.

Let me stick with science here a bit because we have a listener question for you from B. And B is asking and saying, Harper, how? And this is something you've touched on.

in the last in the last uh hour or so but how do you balance how do you balance your scientific and magical personas socially b is saying do you share any of your magical work writing your practices or for that matter the oto with your colleagues i assume scientific colleagues or is it more of a double life type of a scenario do you

Do you feel like chemistry or science generally has informed your magical practice or vice versa? What's the overlap between the two? And I know that you touched on that, but to be to be first point is first. I mean, yeah. How do you. balance that and with colleagues on both sides of the spectrum, if you will. Well, you know, so you've asked two very distinct questions. So, I think I've answered the second one. For me, science and magic have found an equilibrium in my life, in me.

Those two things, I'm always doing them all at the same time. You can see how the way that I describe scrying and spiritual pursuits in general is heavily... informed by my scientific path, my training at least. My scientific work is also heavily... influenced by my magical work in that I'm very patient. I am a really keen observer. And if...

If I have achieved some degree of notoriety in science, it's because I'm a really careful observer. And that actually came out of my magical practice. I am. But in terms of social... The question about how I interact in society, I am two completely different people. And I will confess, let's see. The closest I've come to confessing my secret identity to the people at work is that one of my junior engineers takes care of my cats when I'm on travel.

travel a lot. But when she comes to take care of the cats, it takes me about three hours to prepare the house. Right. She knows about my book collection, so she clearly has a pretty good idea of what she's dealing with. But all of the bones and all the magical implements, my enormous collection of knives. some of which are not even mine. The skulls, all that stuff, it disappears into boxes. My statue, my statuary, I put it all away every time I travel.

and i need someone to take care of the cat i am effectively i'm two different people i have the scientist part a linkedin account and a facebook account all that stuff And then I have the Harper Feislandia. And everybody knows Instagram and Facebook and all this other stuff. I'm two people. And it will never be any different. And I wonder sometimes, so facial recognition is so good that if the government must certainly know I'm the same person and I'll never again get a security clearance.

Should I say that here? I don't know. I did. Well, that is the government's loss, but that's okay. And I totally... can understand that as well because I, I also have that, uh, uh, kind of two different, I call it like when you're, when someone's coming over or when you're getting ready to travel, I just call it like, yeah, like putting the.

putting the ritual room and the magical areas, like putting it in a zip file, you know, just like putting it in a nice compressed dot zip. It is. It's password protected. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. No, I love that question though. And it's not, I don't really think the people I work with would be so surprised at some of it. You know, the fact that I've actually cursed the fuck out of child abusers with lead tablets and actually had things happen, they would be surprised about that.

they know that um i have that i study ancient greek and coptic They know about some of the weird things I've read. A couple of them read the essay I wrote for Peter Mark Adams. I changed the name so they could read it. Actually, that's the... You know, that's the only piece of my writing that my parents have ever seen. My family doesn't know. Yes. Yes, absolutely. Keeping the importance of keeping those two spheres, making sure they're non-overlapping magisteria. Right.

Indeed. The Venn diagram overlaps, but maybe by a percent or two. Yeah, right. Exactly. that's awesome yeah that's awesome um and i i like that question same here same here love that b uh and um B also has a follow-up question for you because we also have some questions from listeners that I think are great at kind of, you know, very...

Big picture kind of looking at the future of magic and esotericism as well. But B, and this touches directly on your experience, Harper, is asking, how would you, Harper, compare or contrast? AA training with modern magical schools and paths beyond just the one-on-one instruction. Are there places where you feel there's something the AA does that other systems are lacking or the other way around? Any thoughts on that? Oh, man, I'm going to get in trouble here. I just know it.

So, I think the AA for me has been really beneficial, but it's been really beneficial on the Hode line of things, right, since you brought that up. So, the mercurial... thinking and reading and processing the linear part the rational part of magic the history The gematria, the tree of life, correspondences, all this kind of stuff. The AA has been absolutely instrumental in me developing a symbol language.

And, you know, I bet Agrippa said similar things when you talked to him, right? So we build a symbolic structure to operate within. That's absolutely necessary. And people think, well, I have to start this way. Well, no, we all benefit from this kind of work. Kind of in the same way that as a scientist. My education didn't finish when I got my PhD. I read constantly. I'm always in contact with my collaborators and my...

my competitors, actually, about this kind of stuff. It's a mapping. And it's a furtherance of our education. So the AA is really, really good for the HOD. structure i think um i don't know so very much about modern magical education actually i know um kind of What's up at the Blackthorn School? I know that nowadays you can learn anything from YouTube. Everybody has a class. This is why I'm kind of stepping away from it pretty soon, I think. But I think that's it.

In some ways, it's probably similar education furthering. And in some ways, it's probably pretty different in that I hope that many of these classes grant. permission to explore. So I think, you know, and that's an incomplete answer to the question, but I think it's the best I can do out of ignorance. I hope that people are given permission to explore. This is what we need past the establishment of being able to focus our minds on things.

the establishment of a symbol is that that is a perfect uh perfect answer that one would love and appreciate from a scientist right is is that lovely Very well thought out response. I think that's great, Harper. And you, by the way, listeners, check out the links and the video and podcast descriptions for all of Harper's excellent. publications and writings and also ways to support Harper. We also have a question for you about your book.

From the lovely Jack Grail's Grail Press, you recently authored E.O. Typhon, a hymnal. And B is asking a question about this, Harper, saying. How did you come around to Typhon generally and then writing your new book? Do you find you need to do protective or limiting work when engaging with this type of being? How would you expect preliminary work to play out in the world or the lives of someone who engages Typhon, especially for the first time? So, yeah. Anything Typhon?

That's a lot of ground there. I got involved with Typhon after I watched a movie. And I watched the movie when... Maybe I was still a professor then. I'm not sure. But there are all these movies on YouTube encourage everybody to look just because they're cool. But when in a crowded city. when there is an empty building and somebody wants to put a new one where the old building was, they have to get rid of it.

And how that's generally done is through a series of controlled explosions that cause the building to fall in upon itself. The building falls down and then they kind of scrape it off and they put a new building. And it occurred to me that the deity, I'm going to call him a deity, the deity Typhon governs this kind of thing. And I think, you know, without, like, going off the deep end, you can prove it to yourself historically or at least mythologically that...

Typhon prepares the ground for rebuilding. Yeah, you know, in some ways he's a classic storm god, and he's certainly a god that's associated with chaos. But in general, to me, he does what those explosives do. He prepares a very busy situation for a new thing. The Earth is full of people. Famously, there's a statement that's made in the movie The Matrix about how we're viral. We're viruses. We don't know when to stop.

We build and we build and we build. And so there's not a lot of place for new stuff for people. And it really occurred to me when I saw this movie of what the... the building coming down. Trust me that I watched a lot of movies about explosions, for reasons. But I got interested in Typhon because of that movie, and I wrote a poem about it. in 2008 or something about the preparation of the new place. The preparation of the new place is a social statement.

It's a practical statement. It's a personal statement. And my invocation of Typhon was to prepare and is constantly to prepare me to receive new things. And with respect to that. I don't advocate this to everyone. This is the way I operate. I did not protect myself against any of this because I wanted it to operate on me. That is right. Don't build yourself any boundaries between you and an entity if you want it to operate on you.

If you want it to operate on someone else, different story. If you want it to operate on society in general, perhaps different story. You need to consider that as a practitioner. Me, I was naked before the forest. and the naked before the force part of this is where the book came from that is incredible um The felt presence of direct experience and the vulnerability that I'm sensing there too, you know, just about placing yourself there without any, you know.

Consecrated circles traced by an iron blade or any kind of defensive rearings or citadels in the astral or here. Wow. That's incredible. Listeners, check out the video and podcast description. I know that, frankly, I... Not sure if there's any copies left, Harper. I guess I'll have to check. No, it doesn't seem like there are very well. No, Yotaifon sold out. The deluxe version sold out before it was even bound.

The standard edition sold out, I think, two days after it was released at Miskatonic. It's gone. thing, right? Nothing ever truly ends. If any listeners would like to have Yo Typhon and don't have it, go to Miskatonic. Go to the site where it's talked about and ask to be notified when it's back in stock. Because if there are enough of you kind and generous people, interested in wild people, crazy and...

And extreme people will do it again. But only if there are enough of you, because, you know, we want it to be worth everybody's while. And two, if we release a second edition of it, I will. We, we, me, and Typhon, we will make a new hymn. Ooh, wow. So there's a dare for you. But only if it's of interest to people, I'll leave it there. Uh-oh.

Fortune favors the bold, so check out the link in the podcast video description to head over to Miskatonic and to make that ask. That really does sound certainly like... I think we'll have many bold thinking and bold minded listeners wanting that and asking for that, Harper, for sure. That would be the best thing ever. Absolutely.

Check out that link, listeners. Harper, I know we definitely want to talk about, you know, obviously your... your course as well as upcoming uh projects which you've already uh intimated on as well but before we get there um as we wrap up the scrying um section because i have some kind of Really big picture questions from our listeners that I'd love to hear your thoughts on. But as we wrap up the scrying section, can you share about...

Two or three things about scrying that maybe we haven't touched on yet that you think it's always just good for people to keep in mind, whether it's your students or people taking your course or people thinking about scrying. Anything else that we haven't touched on? Okay, I'll take you up on that. So, two things. Everything gets better when you practice, and you cannot practice unless you start. Okay, that would be number one. And number two is it's easier for me and for...

a significant percentage of my students to not take this deadly seriously. Like, you know, we have to have fun with what we do. We all have day jobs, we have families, we have, you know... obligations shitty and not let your practice not do that right we need to have this be cool we need to have this be interesting and entertaining and If you take the words interesting and entertaining and cool and you add them all up, it means fun. And, you know, fun is considered to be a triviality, but...

You know, why would you do it if it wasn't that? Just asking. So those would be my two responses to that question.

Love that. Yes, yes. I'm just sitting here nodding because I'm just like, okay, these are lovely, dusky gems that I think we all need to have in our pockets. And thank you for... for reminding us of that um really really excellent harper two uh okay so going a bit more global or beyond There are some other questions we got from listeners for you that I think, I know that we have an after show, but before we get to that.

I really want to ask you these as well. We have a listener question for you from Jack Walter, who is asking and saying, do you Harper think the presence of modern technology?

helps or hinders us in things like scrying, divination, or the practice of magic in general. You know, I'll just turn it over to you. I mean, I'm thinking of everything from AI to... uh just interconnectedness social media fasting social media overload i don't know there's so many things what do you what do you think ah you know so i i really liked i really liked this question

And I want to not answer it directly. But what I want to say is, you know, lots of us love the BGM. So here's a set of largely folk magic. spells, workings, that have to do with all these weird materia magica and these weird god names that we don't understand and all of this. So I love to play the game of moving the PGM forward into 2024. And so the scribes that wrote the PGM...

would have adored microwave ovens. They would have loved cars. Half of those spells would be about cars. The other half would be about pornography. So magic matches social needs in every case. And you want to get all nerdy and stuff. Well, most of magical history is about... getting other people to do things for you and to think things. And nothing is different. In that situation, you could actually say, well, you know, advertising executives are magicians.

Did I just say, ooh, dirty? But here's the thing. We use what we have, right? We use what we have to create magic that we need. We don't do magic that we don't need. for some reason. And we have the tools we have. We don't get to go back and buy the feet of hawks at the market.

What can we do instead? Well, we can go to the Chinese grocery and buy a chicken and cut its feet off, for sure. But is that even necessary? It's like, don't let your practice get stuck in the... the second century ce and don't let it get stuck in the 14th century ce and don't let it get stuck in france and you know in in the era of the sun king let your magic resonate within you and your life and your house with all your stuff now as an example people in my advanced

class right now we decided we were going to visit each other astrally and so we we do this all the time it's super easy you know ask ask me later hold my beer all that stuff But this time, we used AI to create images of our astral temples, and we visited those. I don't think any of this stuff is in our way. It's up to us to figure out how to make use of it, isn't it? It's the environment. We use a tree, we use the front porch, we use the...

car. We use the neighbor's house. We use our basement. We use cat hair. We use the spoons in our kitchen. AI is the same. Computers are the same. The surface of the cell phone, here I am again. Same. These are tools and they're our environment and therefore useful. I love that reminder. I love that. And even talking about getting stuck in the 14th, 15th or 16th century, you know, there are, for instance, very serious and I think very good, say, people who are interested in.

Enochian, for example. However, you know, John D's wax table of practice, the table of practice, he... To your point, he saw the technology from the sworn book of Honorius and the Summa Sacra Magice, and he took that and imported it into an Elizabethan era, you know, working with Edward Kelly, Crystal Sphere.

Thanks. So it sounds like that kind of fits your theme about no matter what century you're in. If you look at people who are even like Dee, very well known, it was about, or Dr. Rudd is another great example, taking Dee and then modifying it. Yeah. At the technology, right? I mean, amplifying it, augmenting it, accentuating it, changing it, mollifying it. It's just interesting. Well, and nowadays, if you want to do Enochian magic...

you really ought to invest in a 3D printer. No? I mean, so there's an honor in doing things the way that they've been presented. And, you know, as practitioners, it deepens our work to do things historically. But we shouldn't get stuck there, I think. Right. And 3D printers are so fucking awesome. Yes, they are. And I think just like with the targeted use, as you just elucidated with AI, 3D printers.

Same thing. I think we're just scratching the surface in many ways. Look at it as a tool and think of ways to incorporate that into your practice. Why not? Otherwise, it's a lost opportunity. And if it doesn't work, then just don't do it again. Oh, my God. Right. This is something that, oh, my goodness. I mean, you and. Yeah, Frader Chasson, Frader Acher, Dr. Stephen Skinner. Pretty much it's like magic is, if it works, continue to use it. If it doesn't...

Discard it. It doesn't mean you hate the system. It doesn't mean that it's an evil thing or a bad thing. It just means that we all have our own paths that we're walking. And so what calls to you?

in that way you know you know one one other thing to say about that yeah don't so and and this is me talking to me maybe don't try something once and then give up right yes yes so so if you're going to do an experiment and it doesn't work the first time tweak it try it again or try it again tweak it and and you know see if Right? If whatever happened to you is reproducible. Right? And don't expect for things to work the first time. Oh, my God.

doesn't work for me if if any of the the people in the listening audience have things work the first time we want to know about it because that doesn't work for the rest of us right sorry We're stubborn and we keep working on it and that's why we're where we are. Right, right. Yes, yes. In fact, I think even, and my goodness, yourself and... Jack Grail and...

Dr. Skinner, no, far more than I do. But I seem to recall that even if you look at the original PGM, you will and you look at the scrolls of Egypt, of, you know, magicians in Alexandria in the year, you know, 215 or something. And you can see. where they call them experiments. I mean, these are called experiments, but also it even says in the 2000 year old magician writings, you know, spell X tried.

10 times worked 8 out of 10 times. That scientific method, if one may be so bold, is found 2,000 years ago. You know, that is so important. I'm so glad that you're leaning on that, Alex. You know, because nothing... Y'all, nothing works the first time ever. And if it does, it's probably bad. Well, there you go. You just heard it from Harper herself, okay? So do not have the craving for results that seems to...

In fact, I know it has with me for sure. You know, I did all this preparation. I'm setting everything up perfectly. Now the fireworks start. Well, no, now. You go through the procedure, you record your results, and that's what's important. Right. Absolutely. Exactly. Yeah. The use of the word fireworks, a plus. Touche. Well, even Harper going out to an even bigger picture, Michelle Rella Summers, who Michelle is great, love Michelle. She's asking for you, Harper, as a magician.

And as a historian, how do you, Harper, see the state of the world within the next year? And what can we do to make it better? So how do you see things blossoming or unfolding? collapsing or transforming or however you'd phrase it you know so that's an uncomfortable question and therefore a super cool one and i think You know, this gets to like a definition of sphere of influence. So I think...

I'm not so sure if the world is any shittier than it ever has been right now. So there are a lot of people... constantly are like, you know, the world's on the edge of destruction and it's never been this bad, blah, blah, blah. But, you know, and I shouldn't say, I don't want to be dismissive about that. So I recount the blah, blah, blah. But here's the thing. I don't think the world is any worse now than it ever was. Human nature is the same. The degrees of difficulty are perhaps different.

You know, public health is really good now, so people don't die of cholera. So there's that. People who die in warfare statistically are fewer than in... In the past, certainly man's inhumanity to man remains. As brothers fight ye, does that actually mean us fighting each other or with each other? So, people love to fight, people love to complain, it seems to be an inveterate part of humanity itself. So...

It's actually a really good beer conversation whether the world is worse now than it has been before. To me, I don't think it probably is. I operate on that assumption. I think other people should feel free to operate on different ones because they have different metrics about what's bad. And that informs how I decide to improve my world. I improve my world by changing things that don't work for me. Typhon.

for example. But I also feel like my improvement of the world has to start at the core of me. And I have to be ethical and clear and... compassionate. I have to do well by my family and my friends and help as many people as I can locally. That's the occult side of me. The scientific side of me actually is working really hard on helping recycle processes for waste. You know, my other interests are all in the improvement of the ecology and reuse of metals in particular.

I really think, you know, we need to start with ourselves as we talk about improving the world because, you know, our sphere of influence is really pretty small. And that's very painful for people who can see what's going on across the world. We know what's going on in Israel, and we know what's going on in the Ukraine. We know what's going on... in China to some degree. We know what's happening. But can we touch that? I don't know. And if we can touch it...

It's not because of magic. It's because of our humanity and the beauty of our humanity and the softness of our humanity, or perhaps the fierceness. But we have to recognize that our sphere of influence is much... smaller than the sphere of our understanding. And that would be the most painful thing about the modern world to me. Yeah. Yeah. Just seeing.

everything and understanding to you to use the the phrase that you just said you know so many different factors but yet the sphere would would it be fair to say that based on what you just shared harper that and to michelle's point

exactly what you said that the best gift or the best presentation that you can make to participate in a stabilization vitalization revitalization a healthy approach would be to look at your own sphere whatever falls in the circumference of your own sphere that's something that is worthy of attention and dedication and refinement and improvement and and i think you know to to kind of you know tie the the whole of the conversation together

Listening is that thing. And we need to listen to one another, certainly as humans, but we need to listen to the spirits of place. and the spirits of time. And we need to listen to the voices that are present for us in locations and in things. And this radical listening is super important here. And I think scrying actually has a place in all of this because it teaches us to settle. and ask a question, and without any expectations, be prepared to hear the answer. Ah, love that.

Love that. This actually gets to this just popped into my head, Harper, but it's something I think we mentioned we would we would touch on is, I mean, look, you, whether it's Peter Mark Adams, Frater Acher, your collaborations with him, Jack Grail. I can say, and I don't know if the other two participants in this would want to be identified, but I can personally say, listeners, I have benefited greatly.

From Harper's own inventions, magical insights and recommendations while working with in the forest with multiple times with two other fellow colleagues magically and.

collaborating in the wilderness and one of the first things that one of these magical colleagues did to your point harper was make make an offering to the spirits of the place and and asking permission yeah utilizing the elements right it's just can you just talk about that whether it's uh um the importance of collaborating as you have done with so many

other magical colleagues um but also just echoing that importance of never forgetting that yes you do occupy a place an environment a locale some kind of constellation of elements You know, just globally, and I feel like I'm shorting all of the people that you just mentioned and some others, but we're part, all of us, me, Alex. All of the guys that you talked to about, all of the people that I work with in the Order, we're part of a net. And the net is certainly human, but...

You know, I personally think, as I've said before, right, we've evolved to be communicating entities. We communicate with one another, sometimes sweetly and sometimes nastily. We communicate with spirits of place, whether we like it or not. What do you do with your trash? Do you have a lawn or do you have a bee garden? All this kind of stuff. We make decisions that matter to the beings that are close to us.

And that net is what, it fulfills us, it creates us, it binds us to our humanity, but also to something larger. All the people that I work with on the esoteric end of things, they make me who I am. The people I work with on the scientific end of things, I would be nothing without. We stand on the shoulders of giants, but recognize that people are standing on your shoulders too, and are linked arm in arm. in this unbreakable chain of life and of communication

that we need to pay attention to. I'm not nagging anybody and this is not me preaching. I think I'm just saying a thing that we all actually know. You know, we should pay attention to that. And when someone tugs on your elbow or the guy standing on your shoulders is uncomfortable, we know. And when you're standing on the shoulders of someone brilliant. You know, like Acha, like Jack, like Peter, you know, and countless others. When those guys are uncomfortable, we know, I know.

And in the doing, they're my teachers. In the doing, they're my colleagues. In the doing, they're my environment. I can do nothing without all these guys on the esoteric end of things and also, you know, the science dudes. And everybody's the same. Alex, you're the same. You have a family, you have a job, you have a place. And you have all these inanimate objects that actually are also talking to you.

It's a whole different conversation and people think I'm crazy about that. We have an environment that we're part of and and this radical listening. It makes us. It tightens the net. Threading the mesh of that net. That's... That's so lovely. What a powerful reminder. Thank you. Thank you, Harper, for sharing that. I know it's something that I need to constantly keep in mind, as well as the sphere of influence, too.

Well, Harper, I mean, that was such fantastic. I mean, really, listeners, I hope you appreciate that as much as I do. Harper, by the time this podcast comes out, it'll be like mid-May. So can you tell us about... The excellent scrying course that you have. And of course, listeners, check out the links in the podcast and video description below. But what would you like listeners to know about the course, about registration, about anything and everything?

Well, you know, if it's mid-May by the time it comes out, registration will be close to closing. So we'll probably, it's the 8th of May today. And we'll probably close registration in a week or two. Week and a half, probably. Currently, the foundational scrying class that I'm teaching is just in the get-to-know-you phase.

We haven't done anything really nuts yet. That comes later. People will, you know, if they hear this and they think, oh my God, I can't live without that, you know, we'll let you in. And, you know, there will be plenty of time. And, of course, with the Blackthorn School, all the videos are available in perpetuity. And the exercises will be present in a Facebook group. You know, and who knows, when Zuckerberg gets tired of playing with us, we'll all disappear. But until then, we'll be there.

You know, I kind of think that's it about the class. After this cohort, I'm going to take a sabbatical away from it. to focus on a little writing and a bunch of ritual and a potential move to Europe. My professional life is changing. My personal life is changing. I'm so delighted. I have a bunch of work to do. Well, that is so lovely. And also, like you said with the class, I know listeners, whether it's...

for this, for registration or for any potential future opportunities. They will keep their ear to the ground because we were talking about this before, but... McKinley Valentine was asking in all caps, when is her next scrying course opening up? I'm ready to pounce. Oh, so McKinley has pounced. Yes. So she's all taken care of. Exactly. So I think McKinley exactly echoes the thoughts of many, many listeners as well. Okay. So as we wrap up the main podcast, Harper, of course...

Please check the links listeners below. You've intimated, of course, you're working on your next book. You're always working on something, whether it's thinking about different issues, a new project, a new. A new book. Can you give us, in addition to what you've shared earlier, can you give us any additional hints on upcoming projects, esoteric issues, anything capturing your interest right now?

Two chief things. So I have an essay that I'm just finishing up for an issue of... How to even put this? It's a... A collection put out by Three Hunts Press on necromancy. And I have, hopefully, I think it's been accepted, a piece that I wrote about a Homeric magic.

series that I've been up to for about three years. So, that's the newest thing that I'm working on writing-wise. The book I'm putting out hopefully soon with Llewellyn is about scrying and it will contain a bunch of the ideas that we've talked about here. Even the little story about Velcro. And so, Acha and I are doing all sorts of nifty things too, including... writes in the mountains and that kind of stuff and that will uh blossom into things that we'll write about in due time

Excellent. Okay. Well, then I think that leads to the final question, which is, of course, ways that listeners can...

support you, Harper. So, of course, check the links below for links to all of Harper's books. Listen to Thalema now, obviously. Harper's incredible. Whether it's online courses, but how else can people, obviously links below to your website, Harper, but how else can listeners support you? Is there anything else that you'd like to share with listeners? The one last thing that strikes me is that a year and a half ago, I decided I needed to do a little creative thing every day.

And that turned into my Instagram account, which has some photography in it. And if people, so, you know, there's all the writing and then there's the thinking and the class and all that stuff.

If people would like to go and see my photographs, you know, that would be cool. And I'm not saying that I'm good at this. It's all a work in progress, certainly. But I would be honored to have people... uh go and look at the things that um i'm taking pictures of and i have a bunch of uh quirky little movies in there so uh i i'm a little nervous to to pump that but by the same token I'm kind of proud so check that out so lovely and that will be below listeners so please

Please check that out. My goodness. Scryer, esotericist, author, historian, scientist, Harper Feist. Harper. I cannot express to you truly how fortunate and how thankful I am and appreciative that you would take the time to share with the listeners about all of your thoughts, your wisdom, and your experience. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast today, really. Thank you for the invitation, Alex.

The questions that you've asked and that your audiences have asked, incredibly deep and probing and personal and revealing. And I've enjoyed every second of this.