You see, something's going to happen.
What? What's gonna happen?
What?
I welcome to the Occult Rejects.
This episode, I got a very very special guest, somebody that I was looking forward to getting on one. They're into solomonic magic and they're also into science, so I'm very excited for this. But before we inst introduce our guest, let me introduce the other reject joining us.
We got my Man and Lose Giant's going on.
So how you doing? You can find me on YouTube, on x and on Instagram all Headless Giant. And I've got shows that I do with Nick on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and I've got a show on Monday called Alty Mondays where we do a bunch of experiments that I think Astra might appreciate and enjoy. So we've got Alchemy as well, and tomorrow I've got the Trialogues with Ethan Indigo and Ricardo Calvodio. We're gonna be talking about interesting topics as well. Just a couple of weeks and now I'm.
Back, Yes, Yes, and the seven seven seven we else we'll be doing Yes Yeah, And if you guys have any stories or anything, please send them into Headless and I'll send you out some stickers.
So Headless Giant Podcast at gmail dot com. Send me your stories and we will send you stickers.
Hell yeah, awesome.
And now the guest, since we've only got one reject with us today, we got Estra and she was suggested to me from Serena Sinclair. She thought that she'd be a perfect guest, and when I checked out her profile, I was like, there, sure sounds like it. So I'm very excited to have you on.
Estra.
Please, from test tubes and cauldrons, please let everybody know what your deal is and where they can find your amazing work in your podcast.
Yeah, hey everybody, and thanks Nick for inviting me on. I was super surprised to get the invitation, but thrilled all the same.
Yeah. So my name is Astra.
I am a solomonic ceremonial audition and I focus specifically in the Grimmore tradition, but in my everyday life, I'm also a scientist. I got my degree in biochemistry alongside a minor in molecular biology and microbiology, but then I went to graduate school for biochemistry and now I work in a laboratory where I do science of all kinds, not just biochemistry. So that's a bit about me. You can find me on Instagram at astrological it's technically astrologist
shel with Cia L because the name was taken. And a lot of my magical work and my magical independent scholarship can be found on substack under the title Celestial Crucible.
And that's it.
Nice nice here, if you don't mind, after the show, give me the link for that that one thing and I'll add that to.
The show notes for sure.
Yeah.
Nice, nice.
Well, obviously there's a bunch of questions that have for you, but I mean, I guess we'll start off with like what got you into the occult?
And to start with, you know, I guess solomonic magic.
I know. Yeah.
So I actually I was alwaised in a fundamental you know, Christian home, as were a number of people, and I so of became discontent with Christianity as a whole. I didn't see the tenants of the faith being held up with way people were acting, and I just kind of
really didn't like any of that. So when I went to college, just when you're like free from your parents' influence, I decided to explore, and I took a lot of philosophy classes, took a lot of religion classes amidst all the science work, and was just trying to get sort of a lay of the land. And in doing so I came across Paganism and Buddhism.
And Eastern traditions.
My grandfather's from India, so I've already been exposed to like the Hindu faith. Yeah, so it was just a good time for exploration. And around that time I became agnostic, but I thought, you know, maybe there's something there. So I started as an eclectic witch actually, and I was doing all the stereotypical which you ship that you see on Instagram, and.
Yep, I think we all start there maybe, but it was.
Super shallow and I really didn't feel like it was working, and like there just there was no substance behind it. It's one of those things where you do because you see it, you do because people tell you to. But that's never really been how I've lived my life. It's
never been enough for me. I want to know the why behind things, which is partially why I'm a scientist, and that applied to the coal as well, and so I really began like trying to figure out what the reasons were behind why I needed all these things, and I sort of quickly found out that a lot of it is due to Agrippa and the influence right that he had on the coal and I was like, damn, all right. So I read the three books alone for
the first time, got very confused. But then I had a friend who pulled me aside and they said, you know, hey, I really think that you would vibe with ceremonial magic. And at first I was sort of hesitant because when you're in the woodcraft community, a lot of people say, you know, the ceremonial auditions are crabby people.
It's a bunch of just like trad bros and all. That's all this kind of crap.
Because some much shit. So I was really hesitant, but I began looking into it. My friend introduced me to rufus Opus's Seven Spears.
Oh I heard that.
Yeah, that was the very first thing that I actually worked, And it was really like that sort of planetary initiation that he leads you through was really impactful, and I think it opened up the starting point for my exploration with other spirits.
I worked that. I was like, yeah, well, day I'm going to do this.
I went online, was looking at ceremonial magic and Grimoor's and stuff like that. Of course, the first thing that you see is the KEYO Solomon.
That's like the.
Number one Grimmore that everybody knows that pops up when you search, and I pulled it aside and I was like, okay, I'm working with you. Is that's a new thing, but we'll go for it, I guess. But I wanted to do it right. And this is also something that I think comes from my science background. But when you have a protocol in the laboratory, you don't just.
Like change it.
Yeah, good reason, because some shit's gonna happen and you remove some critical step that is actually really important for sample preparation, and now your whole term is sucked and you can't use your data.
Right, yeah, really quick.
That was the main That was one of the main reasons why I mentioned that I ended up joining the OTO was because of just noticing that even with some of Crowley's work, people were kind of like, that's not how it is in his own stuff. So I was like, I guess I just got to go to a place to where they have a set regimen and that's not being played with. This is what works and that's what
we use. I know it almost can sound very whatever controlling, but it's just I wanted something that it was just you know, this is what I'm doing so well.
I think there's something could be said for having a distinguished cosmology and sort of dogma that you operate from. I know, like not operating from a place of dogma is a really popular thing right now with chaos magic.
But truthfully, if you don't have dogma, you should have the very least, in my opinion, have have like a cosmology, a way in which you see and explain the world, because it helps you determine a framework from which you operate, and if you don't have that, you're just sort of like thrown shit at the wall and helping that it works, which frankly is a reasonable thing to do.
We do in science all the time. But like it should have been somewhat educational in how you decide what to do and where.
So I totally understand that, like trying to join the lodge to get a lot of that stuff, and I did the same. Actually when I decided to work the Gatia, I wanted to do it the way it was written in the Grimore as much as I could, but there was a lot of sort of piecing together what that actually meant, and if you actually read it, there's a lot of preparatories that the has happen. You got to make tools and you have to get all this material
and it takes a while. So it took me about a year and a half to sort of supply everything and make everything for the operation. And during that time I said, well, I don't want to just like do nothing while I'm doing all of this as well. So I got hold of this sisteros self initiated initiation to the Golden Dawn and the Big Black Book by Yeah it's Jobcgardi, and I was like, this is something that
looks reasonable to like do. So I began working my way through that and doing some of the exercises I got familiar with, like the l Europe and all the rituals, the pentagrams and hextagrams and all that stuff went through Like Donald Pyson's Scrying Book.
I sort of treated it like a little I don't know so like a college course at the time.
Through scrying, doing the experiments, writing down my results and keeping track of everything, and so I really grew actually, like I I looked back at that year and a half two years, and it was really foundational for a lot of what I do now.
It's so I'm really grateful for that time.
But yeah, that's well, that was sort of the structure that I stole I guess you could say from the Golden Down a little bit while I was starting the Grimmoor Magician experience as well.
Nice. So you used to actually you Julie l b RP and the Instagram and all.
That I get. I did all that. I did it. I was instructed. I was that person who was like, did it twice a day for a year?
Yeah?
Yeah, yeah, I.
Did it, did the whole thing.
So that is awesome. Nice. Nice.
I used to love when I had to keep it real. Sometimes in the OTO, the women would actually end up doing them. Jist, did there's our lodge a lodge master. Her name was Kanye at the time. She did the regulars fucking detail.
Yeah, and I mean that she had that she rememories. I was like, wow, Yeah.
Memorization is something that I think people like really sleep on. I actually it's a role for myself personally, when I do ritual, I try and memorize all of it if possible, just because it really allows you to be in the moment. If the words come naturally to you, you can actually really engage with the magic, and like from a grid more perspective, generally speaking, it's better if you work with more than one person because that way you don't have
to play all the roles. But like for me, if I'm doing it alone, then I have to do the conjure and the squire and the scribe like I have to do all the things. And so if I have everything memorize ahead of time, it sort of takes the conjure like mindset. Let's that becomes second nature and let's
be step more into like describing mindset. And so it just allows me to interact with the magic a little bit more tangibly, instead of being so focused on actually doing the ritual and doing the movements and doing all the other shit that you have to get do.
In the middle of it, I.
Felt like once You're just like flowing out of my mouth, and it was able. I was able to you know, I've mentioned this before. Sometimes for me, those things were just almost like a moving meditation. Yeah, and yeah, once I had a memorized it's just like I was just going to to explain. But yeah, definitely definitely different than what I'm not trying to worry about what I'm saying.
Yeah, it's like a Western taie tee or chigong where you're doing the motion of the energy throughout the body. And I think that's important for people to realize, is that visualization creates something and if you're not exactly sure what that thing is, keep engaging with it and you'll you'll understand what that energy is moving through your body.
But your body is like the antenna that you're picking up and feeling these different currents, and so having that daily practice is you know, it's a tuning yourself to those energies and understanding how they work within your own body.
Yeah, I guess it can be really subtle.
I think that's like when people do your ritual and they say, oh, nothing happened, Well, I think a lot of time it just really settled. If you weren't paying attention to it, or you aren't sort of looking for it.
You'll miss it.
And that was the thing that I really struggled with early on in my magical career was I was so concerned with doing everything correctly as the conjurer that I didn't pay attention to those like.
Subtle and like and puts that a current ritual itself.
And for the longest time I was like, damn, I'm a shitty magician, Like this isn't working. But I did some additional training and I began to notice them more and I was like, oh, I just think I was not paying attention to this.
So so more back if you don't want it, maybe asking a little bit more about the croatia. What was your experience with working with that if you don't know and it that and like maybe give a little bit more of like it can be very detailed, like what you were saying, all these things you have to make and wear.
Maybe if you could go over that just to give people more of an idea.
Yeah, sure, So if you read The Greater Key and the Lesser Cause, Solomon, there is there's a lot.
Of tools that you need for this, and some of them I think you actually need some of them. I think you don't need having done this, but like so for example, you need the robe that has the embroidered certain symbols. You need the shoes that has like symbols on it. You've got to have the head band or the crown. You need the lion skin belt, right, And of course there are people who talk about how you can use like a stag stag's pelt for that instead
of the lion skin. There are other people who see you can use like a harlot's clothing.
Right. That was like Jsk's big thing, I think, But you had to get that.
I had stag out because like lion skin is very difficult to get, although I will be getting some student.
I'm very excited about that. I know it's great.
And then you have like the white handled and the black handled knives, right, and those have to be made at specific hours with certain symbols on them, and then they have to be like dunked into specific urbal pinctures. So I actually worked with a with a blacksmith at that time and I made I had I actually was able to get like the blood of a black cat. I got it legally, there was nothing illegal going on.
I had a veterinarian friend at the time, and I was like, hey, even if it's just dried blood like that works too and they were able to get me some, which is great, made the concoction with like the blood and all the poisonous nerves that everybody tells you to substitute. And then I took it to this blacksmith's shop and I was like, okay, and this day and this time, like this is when we're.
Dunking the knife into this like concoction. And so we did it.
And so the knives are made according to the full specifications astrological timing and everything. And there was like a whole bunch of other stuff where gott to make the circle and that is like its whole own process with salms things that over it.
The paint all had to.
Be consecrated beforehand, the brushes were consecrated beforehand. It was a lot to do and like so that's why it took so long, right. Also, if you read the grimoard, they say that you should be making the majority of the instruments during the day and hour of mercury, so Wednesdays,
during the hours when the moon is waxing. So if you sort of break that down within a year, that means that within a month usually about two weeks are waxing, and there's two Wednesdays during that, so about two days per month that you can like actually make substantial progress towards whatever you're doing. And so it was something where it was like a lot of flurry of preparation beforehand,
and then those Wednesdays. I was in college and going into graduate school at the time, so like I had, I had the time.
It wasn't like.
I couldn't take a Wednesday off to make all these things. Since that's why it took so long is because I didn't have every day in a year and a half, I had like two days a month, right, And then once I had everything, I hadn't said up.
I actually rented out a like storage place because.
I wanted a bigger room to do it. I didn't want to necessarily do at my own house.
Oh I've known people to do that, actually rent.
Yeah, because there it's it's silly, I think you in your own house. But and of course you heard all the horror stories and everything, and I was like that it could be a haunted story for somebody else in the.
Future, something to talk about exactly.
So I went the story facility and then did the ritual. I won't necessarily specify exactly who I called up. But it was interesting, I'll put it that way. The first time, like it worked.
I did get I wouldn't at the time.
I wasn't necessarily like primed enough to be able to communicate with despair very well. But I definitely saw things in the outside of the circles, like she was happening, her banging on the walls, the sort of still and I was doing one there. I felt like super fucking late at night, like I had to get special permission from the facility and manager to be there so late,
and what I asked for. It came to ferition about three and a half weeks afterwards, so by the end of the time that I did it that month and I've only I only did it once since then. So I've only done two goetic operations in my whole magical career. Because I later went back and I sort of re read the La Megaton and I was like, I So there was someone I talked to someone I'm just at the point in my career and they said, hey, you used to consider working it backwards, and I was like,
what do you mean? And they appointed me to Jnar King. I don't know if you're familiar with him, he wrote Techniques of because it high magic or solmonic magic is even skinner, I don't call the exact title. And they appointed me to him, and he recommends doing it backwards. So you work from the ARS nova or what people think is the r notoria, and you work then towards
the Croatia. And the reason why is because if I'm gonna okay, technically speaking, the arts nova is not the notoria, but we do think that some parts of it came from the notoria. So there are people who say, oh, well, just work with ours notoria first then instead of doing the URS nova, so just put a background on that.
So I was like, okay, fine.
The reason you do that is because the Arts notoria gives you all the skills you need as magician.
Right, It's there to help you learn the liberal arts. It's the whole point of it.
And so you're teaching you like mathematics, teaching you mathematics is teaching you natural philosophy of teaching you all kinds of shit that like the Renaissance magician would know, and so that gives you.
All the skills. And it also sort of starts as like a should you pursue this.
Should you not pursue this because you have to get approval essentially in a dream from.
The angels to pursue the arts Natoria.
And then once you do that, you need to ours Paulina, which is looking at mostly as a biable angels, right, And then you go to the urs Almadel and you get the angels of the four Altitudes, which like technically speaking historically are also zodiacal in nature, but we'll get
into that. And then you moved through the Theorty Gauatia and you have this correspondence of angels and demons or these sort of these aerial spirits which are like above the Glaatia, but they're technically sub lunar, and then you get to the Gracia. So the whole idea is that if you work at backwards, you sort of build your use spirit team in a sense, right to like have your back as you go into working with these spirits who within this system are considered danger like dangerous and malevolent.
And I thought that was a really good idea, So I put all.
My gai stuff sort of away, and I said, okay, let's back up a little bit, and let's actually do this, let's work the Victoria, then let's kind of move our way through. So I did that essentially for the next like five six five five is five to six years.
Of my life. I worked the whole system of salmag.
Magic from back to front, and I sort of found throughout that process that I actually don't need to work the ars Coatia really ever at all, and I work mostly the Almadel, the Paulina, and then I do a lot with the Angels of the.
Pentacles of the Greater Key as well.
So I sort of like have moved away from the ars Ceatia. I just think it's overrated, Like I just don't think it's necessary. I think it's only where I fall, and there are other frankly, there are like other terrestrial spirits I would go to before I'd go to them anyway, And so that has sort of left my practice over time, but it's certainly where I started, so we'll leave it at that.
So on on on the idea of hierarchies within the spirit world. Now, hierarchy itself means a divine order, and so when you're dealing with either demons or angels or anything in between, it's sort of like there can did to an element, and that element is kind of the precursing factor for what these h spirits sort of do within that associated sphere. Now, when you're dealing with goetic elements, is there this this idea of fear associated with sort of the underworld sort of hierarchy.
I don't know there's a fear associated with them necessarily. I think that they have been they have come to be feared, and like the modern community people don't work with them because they're scared and they're like, oh my gosh, demons whatever. Like, Truthfully, they have their place in the hierarchy.
I don't think it's something to be fearful of. If you want to work with these more cathonic aspects or you want to get really nitty for like treasure hunting and shit, the gas are great, well, like they literally are spirits insight like underneath the earth. If you want that stuff like, those are the people, those are the ones to go to or things that are like hidden that you need to be brought to life. Those spirits of the wish you can also be really helpful with that.
That's why some of them are connected with diseases, right, because diseases are often hidden within the body, so I think that like they have their place within the hierarchy. I don't necessarily think they're to be feared, but I also would say, like do your due diligence and don't like treat them like a friend, if that makes sense. Like they're still spirits, they're still powerful. They can still do a bunch of shit that you may not want
in your life. So that's why when like I work solomonic magic specifically, I try to do it as closely to the book as I can, because I just think that when you start removing the safety protocols, like all of the shit, the circle, the knife, the sword, the names of God around you and on your person, they're all there to protect you, the magician. And when you start removing that, you're essentially like stripping away protections bit by bit, so there's nothing left between you and the spirit.
And so do you need to fear them? No, I say, if you're working in the system as you need to, or like the way that it's written, I don't think you have anything.
To worry about.
It's when you start to sort of stripping that stuff away that I think there's more to be concerned about. It's why I'm not a huge fan of demonologry. I can't really say anything positive about that necessarily from my own perspective.
But yeah, so I don't necessarily think that you need to see or anything their spirits, just like everything else.
So would you say that my magic consists of a contractual sort of space or liminal space between the physical world and the spirit.
Realm I think high magic is. So let me back up a little bit.
Within ceremonial magic, you sort of have two separate parts of high magic.
One is theogic, right, which is much.
More devotional in nature, and the other is more thomeaturgic, which is just like practical application of magic. It's where you get things like packs and stuff like that. I actually think in order to be a good magician you need to have both. You need to have a theoretic practice and you need to have these like packs. So specifically, when we get into the Grimwore tradition with the spirit of the Gratia, there is this level of like sort of coersive pacting with them, although it doesn't need to
be coercive. I think this is the misunderstanding that people have, is that because you call them into a triangle, and you call them into the circle and you're you know, essentially saying you will do this that you like are abusing the spirits.
But the packs still have to be made. You still have to come to an agreement.
Like it's not the spirits will have to say yes, I will do this thing, and you say, then I will do this other thing for you, and you come to an agreement within it.
It doesn't have to be disrespectful.
There are magicians who are part of the higher ceremonial magic and more tradition who don't like the coursive nature of that, and like I'm one of them, but you still want to operate better within the realms of that packed aspect of it. All of this to say that that's an important aspect of it, but there's also an aspect of this theory devotion where the practical shit is done, because like, we live on earth and we have needs, right and even the Grimmores.
Tell you want to.
Get your shit together as a person living a life before you start doing some of this stuff. And in order to do that, you work with these spirits because
they can give that to you. Like some of the got ex spirits can give you a job, can give you money, can give you health, like help you with health issues, like they can help you with those things, and so can the angels when you don't get me wrong, but like, once you have your life together and it's in your set up, essentially, your financial problems are good, like health is good.
Personal problems are good. That gives you more opportunity to do. But I think the real.
Purpose of high magic is, which is this sort of changing after apotheosis or unification with the divine right. You can't do that if you're like about to be homeless, so a lot of the grim wars. You have both
of these aspects. You have the practical nature of help yourself live a better life, and you have a theoretic side of ceremonial magic where it's like, okay, now that you've done that, like, let's sort of shift our focus towards being unified with the one Creator whatever you want to call it.
Right, Well, what role do you think distractions play in sort of hijacking people's uh, you know, natural progression? Because it sounds like this this would be the progression that a lot of ancient mankind would be going through coming into a more you know, stable kind of a civilizational setting. Like, now you've got everything working for you, how are you getting close to the divine? How are you elevating your
own consciousness? And in a lot of ways, I see you know, distractions as being the tool by which people get off of the path towards divinity and more stuck in this in this realm of you know, materiality.
Yeah, I totally agree with you there.
I think there's a lot of in a modern day there's a lot of distractions at truth, if I didn't have to survive by having a job, I would be that person who like goes and becomes a nun just so I can engage with magic full time. Like I freaking wish that was in sort of.
I wish that was my will. It's not.
Unfortunately, I think social media is perhaps the biggest, like to be so for real with you, There is so much shit pedal on social media that gets people like all caught up into petty arguments with people that could be misunderstandings or conspiracy theories that send you down you know, rabbit holes of you know, hours and research and it's just like how much of that impacts you on a daily basis and like your actual life and if it doesn't impact you, then like it doesn't really matter. I
think that much. I just I think so many people get distracted by things that are really superficial and it really don't matter. And like, personally, one of the things I do every single year during LENS because I'm also Catholic, is I remove social media from all of my devices, Like I close on the apps, I delete everything from
my phone. And I do it because it's a really important sort of spiritual reset for me during that time to like remember what the focus should be and for me, like that focus is this for communication with good that is my desired goal, and what do I need to get there and what is holding me back? And I find that a lot of I also a lot of online stuff in general I think calls me back and
it's so much I feel better. I'm closer to God when I engage with other people, when I engage my practice, and I can't do that if I'm wasting hours scrolling on TikTok.
I have realized how much more work I can get done on the show if I really don't engage too much on social media, and how much more happening. Yeah, it's yeah, that's that's really I think kind of like the biggest mind fuck on humanity is really these apps has to say.
Really, actually, our attention spans are worse, and that's been scientifically studied.
Our capacity for deep thought is worse.
There was a recent MIT study that came out looking at the impacts of AI on people's ability to think critically when they.
Were writing an essay.
Crazy, how much just using AI for research alone prevented the growth of gray matter, which is really what you actually want your brain and just is making people in capable of forming coherent arguments and really putting together like
good solid information. Why has information like declined over the years because people aren't reading books and they aren't talking to each other and having these like deeper philosophical conversations asking the questions of why, like it is Really it's really sad to see and I see it in myself, Like my capacity ten years ago to do like really difficult research, it's harder now than it was. Like I
see that in myself. So I'm not over here shitting on everybody, because I'm shitting on myself as well here, But it is sad that it's gone down so much and we're only at the beginning of it.
Ye oh, hell is you muted?
Oh sorry. We like to talk about the art of memory too, as sort of like this sort of introductory kind of a way of understanding how these different angels work within the conscious mind as well as you know, how ancient people saw polytheism like it was this massive mnemonic device that sort of branched out and associated with
everything just on the surface level. And having the memory to sort of put everything that you see into this photographic framework and having mnemonic devices was seen as a superpower. In fact, they accused what was.
His name, I keep blanking on it, Bruno, Bruno. They accused Bruno of having these strange magical powers when he was using these mnemonic tools and devices that he had learned from the agents in his own practice. And I think that art of memory plays up.
Yeah.
I loved you Buna and Bruno, so God you brought up their art of memory.
Great, great concept and topic. You guys covered it on your show. I think a while ago there's such an interesting like misrepresentation of ancient culture. I think among magicians sometimes we.
Treat it like it's like, oh, it's a separate pantheon on gods. But truthfully, and a lot of the ancient civilizations, like it was a permeation into culture. Like it was so interwoven that there wasn't a separation between religion and magic and everyday life. Like it wasn't separated like it is in sort of the mid like in the Western world nowadays. And so, like you said, a lot of
this sort of art and memory stuff. It's one of the reasons why myths were so important to the civilizations because they taught moral and social codes, right, Like, everything was so interwoven and woven into these like associations within the memory with these symbols and certain names and everything like that, that there wasn't separation that we see today.
And so it did have a bigger impact on the individual because they were the current that we talk about in sort of society is nowadays that you have to like get plugged into in order to do effective magic. That current was just their life and so there was no plugging into it. It was literally just their life.
Yeah, that is true.
I got to bring this up. So a good example is the Golden ass we were just going through it on a Great Pills podcast, we were talking about all of these sort of strings of epithets that they had for the gods and goddesses that they would invoke upon, you know, certain activities or when you know, they're cursing somebody, and so the whole chain of you know, epithets would be sort of representative of their connection to these gods and goddesses, and it wasn't seen as sort of obscure
or difficult to understand. People sort of had that in their minds already at the time, and it was like this this combination of both nature, psychology and physical matter that I think a lot of people just lose perspective on when they're looking at their own societies because we're sort of disconnected from those different layers of society that exist all around us at all times, and not having that awareness really makes it hard to have a decent conversation half the time.
One hundred percent.
This is the why the cosmological like their specimen part on having a cosmology, because like, that's what that is to these people, right, and that is their cosmology. It's the way in which they view the world and they live their life. And when you have that the way that you work magic and engage with the world totally changes, and so kind of returning that to our practice nowadays, where we have been so separated, like everything is categorized
now right. You have science, you have magic, you have religion, you have like psychology, you have all these things. And I'm sure we say they're interconnected, and we give examples of that, but like people don't live that connection, and I think that's like the myss that's really the problem. But when you have a cosmology, it gives us sort of a worldview by which to allow all of them to sort of marry. And the way that is fluid
and you can't necessarily define. And it's funny because, like as somebody who's a scientist, people will ask me, you know, how can you how can you have faith and being Catholic and how can you also do magic? And the answer is, because I don't see it's all as t woven to me, like God's creation and the spirits that we engage with are interwoven into the things that I study scientifically and the magic that I do in the way I interact with the world. Like it's not some
they aren't categories in my life. It's just the way in which I live and interact with the world. So I think like the capitalistic and consumeristic categorization of everything and like scientific materialism that came about in sort of the late Renaissance period, like in the Alignment period, just really fucked a lot of shit up in terms of people being able to live within these cosmologies in a very real and intimate way.
Right, Right, And uh, if you look at the time, any little tools that single cellular organisms use, you find a lot of coordination with what these gods used as their implements. Right. So you've got this bow and arrow, you've got these spears, you've got shields, you've got all the rest of the stuff that single cellular organisms are using in a very utilitarian way that actually reflects a lot of these ancient pantheons. It's like, this is what
the agents were talking about. They're making a system of infinite associations because they understand that these are the base level interactions that people can sort of have even you know, everything is love and war in their concept, right, these are the fundamental primaries. And so they're seeing all of these things, you know, have that same attribute and since we don't have a cosmology, we it's easy to take advantage of people because they don't even see the weapons
on a psychological level. Like you're getting booked by people who are using these psychological weapons, and they're not act seeing them for what they are because they don't really have the experience to know that these, you know, things that people have done ripple out to infinity. Right, all of those associations are rippling out to infinity. So you could start to see it or you could stay blind
to it at your own detriment. And I think that's that's where where we've kind of gotten stocked the last twenty or thirty years.
Yeah, I totally agree with everything you said there.
Well, talking about microscopy, are you actively working on any scientific projects that can change the world or what are you working on?
Well, I will say so one of the things that I'm doing, so one of my specialties is three D celculter And I'm going to explain this in sort of terms of like why it is important. But when we have a drug, for example, that we're trying to develop for whatever the disease condition is, the way it moves through the pipeline is you start with the drugs of
the chemist make and then we characterize it. And first we characterize it in cells, so like if I swabed my own cheek, I could take the cells there and then play them and have them grow external to myself continuously. And so oftentimes what we'll do is we'll take diseased cells and we will plate them external from the source, and then we essentially treat them with these drugs to see what the outcome is.
And then we say, okay, great, we saw an effect.
And so now we move into animals, and then they do the testing in animals, and then we go from animals into humans. Now, the problem with each of those steps is that the way cells act in like a Patriot dish versus the way mammalian cells act in a body or even an animal. It's different because, like for this is something that happens commonly. You have a drug that say, works really well in mice and you see a great effect, like we can talk about cancer drugs.
Everybody else what those are, and the tumor size like decreases and the animal is regaining weight, it's eating where it's more active. We say, okay, great, it works in these animals. Now let's move to human studies. So you do that and you see no effect. Well, even though the drug is we're targeting the same kind of protein, for example, there are differences between like a mouse protein and a human protein. And so one of the big areas that we're focusing on a research now are these
developments that we call three D CEL culture models. And the whole point is to sort of simulate the human organ essentially as a whole, as a way to sort of bypass the animal step, and through some of my important we can actually take these human cells that the drug will be working on in like the body, we can put them into this external three D system. And one of the things that we did was creates what's called a.
Lung on a chip system.
So we essentially have a membrane that we put cells from the lungs onto and there's one hundreds of different cells, right, so there's we're talking a whole mixture of things. And then we put this chip into a machine and we force it to breathe. So the membrane moves up and down like the uh organ your lungs wood in your body. And there is a difference between how essentially viral like
viral infection. For example, we were doing some stuff with stars could be too and the infection is more intense when we incorporate this sort of breathing mechanic in this three D model than if you're where you were to just do it on like cells that are sitting on a dish. And so it shows the importance of really mimicking what's happening in the human body to get a good understanding of how a drug will treat something.
And so we're.
Trying to develop a lot of these sort of three D cell culture systems. We got We've got long on a chip, We've got brain on a chip. We've got like nerves on a chip. There's you've got livers on a chip.
Like. We have all these sort of.
Different, uh, three D models that we're trying to make as precursors for drug testing before we actually get into human models. That's sort of skip the animal part of this,
because animals aren't necessarily analogous to the human condition. If we can actually say, hey, in the three D model, we see really effective results from an upregulation of a particular pathway, for example, with this specific drug that is actually more comparable to a particular protein and an actual human than there's a higher chance of probability that it will be successful in human trials. And so it just essentially quickens the line from drug development to actual treatment,
which is huge. That's like a big thing that I work around at my job, which is super cool.
And I'll stop there.
Well, you've got a lot of occult principles that now you can incorporate into the laboratory process that we're missing before because you've got the principle of rhythm, right, You've got the principle of all of these other factors that play into the human laboratory, which would be you know, our bodies that we're trying to influence that aren't necessarily present in those laboratory conditions that you know, are missing a lot of the pieces that would make up a full,
you know, human system. And so by introducing those other principles, you're you're simulating what the whole human system would be doing in these specific conditions. So, yeah, I think that's that's really positive step.
You know, it's cool too because it's sort of it's a good I actually think that the interaction and the interplay of things and it's like three D couldres system we're creating is a good sort of representation of like how the I don't know, the heavens sort of the whole spiritual ecosystem kind of works. Right, we say that there's there's tons of interplay of everything. I mean, even within these three couple ty systems, Like the interplay is crazy.
There's so much shit going on, it's even impossible to measure.
Most of the time. And I think like people, especially like are more tradition.
Sometimes it's really easy to get bottled into this idea that everything is in a strict hierarchy and truthfully and like, we know it's not the case, because there's plenty of systems and grimors that say, like moved, you know, Michaels representative of Mercury, and Raphael is actually representative of the sun, right, or there's actually three governors over a particular time period, it's not.
Just one particular archangel.
But I think there needs to be a little bit more fluidity, like the structure the grimors are for us as the magicians people doing the work. But truthfully, I think sort of the cosmos and the grander scheme of things is so much more fucking like, it's so complicated. There's so many spirits that we don't know who are
serving under various spirits that we do know. And so I think, like a lot there's so much in this like really integral network of interactions that's happening on like a spiritual level, and I think we see that mimic within nature, and humans are only one example of that. I mean, like ecosystems in nature are also crazy complicated the shit that like they have going down as well.
So I think it's a great sort of representation people.
You know, we always say macrocosm is a reflection of the macrocosm, but like literally think the complexity of life speaks to the complexity of the macrocosm in way, so we can only sort of comprehend.
Right, I think in a lot of ways, what we're seeing now is the integration of all of these uh you know, principles that have kind of been ignored by the materialist paradigm of science now being picked up by
alternative researchers who are doing incredible stuff with them. I would encourage you, if you haven't yet, get the book The Fourth Days of Water by Gerald Pollock, because he's got a lot of stuff about the easy zones and water that then can change the outcome of certain, uh, you know, experiments, especially within the body, because you know, if the heart was pumping enough blood to keep the body running, our heads would explode as soon as we
bent over. So there's some other physical principle at work within the body that is, you know, causing you know, water or blood pushed around that a lot of people sort of glossed over since the eighteen hundreds, and so we're you know, I think repicking up these water sciences and understanding how vital water is to the spiritual as well as the physical is so important at least for moving forward in the field of medicine and science and all the rest of its.
Yeah, I think it speaks too because something that people I think forget, especially in the occult meatia, you can take occult principles and apply them to this Isaac Ninnen had an extremely prolific spiritual practice.
Like this man. Sure he was an excellent.
Scientist, but he was also an occultist, like, no question about that. And we even go back to alchemy, right, It never used to be chemistry and magic. It used to be sort of a singular science, and we see it. There's so many examples in history of people who have taken these sort of basical principles and thought, I wonder if I can actually put this to study, or I wonder if if there's a way I can measure this, and then they've done it and it's created some of
our most important scientific principles. I think we have to be a little bit careful because people tend to take science and turn it into pseudoscience, which is like, I'm not here for. In fact, a lot of the testes and Culture's podcasts is sort of debunking a lot of these claims because we can take those concepts and apply them to science and we often see real results.
To it, but they still need to be put under.
The scrutiny of the scientific method, and if they're not significant, then we can't make any sort of definitive claim. But the other side of that is that just because it's not necessarily significant to the scientific community doesn't mean that it's not significant.
I think that's the other thing, right is people say, oh.
Your magic has to be legitimized by science, because science.
Is like our truth. In modern society. Right, people say, I want to know what's true? Answer is science?
Science will tell us is everybody's answer to that. But science is not capable of answering everything. Science is really prime to study the natural world. It's not necessarily prime to study the cause of the natural world. And so that they think where people often get misled, and so we can study perhaps me an outcome of something or
how it maybe affects the body. Like there's been a lot of actually great meditation studies recently that have been coming on the last couple of years looking at how meditation impacts the body itself, looking at like ECGs and reporter dot coms, but also looking at you know, changes in like epigenetics and gene expression, or certain chemicals that are produced in greater quantities and whatever. But some things I just don't think science are actually capable of measuring.
And that's fine because you don't need to have that scientific legitimacy if you believe something is having an impact, and in some cases belief is quite a powerful dragone of itself. Basbo effect has actually like really has a high impact on people.
There was a.
Study and there's a cancer study. I think it came on twenty seventeen where they had patients who they were giving chemotherapy to the other patients to they you know, pretended like they were giving chemotherapy too.
That was their placebo.
And like some of the chemotherapy patients in that control placebo group did just as well as patients.
Who forgiving chemotherapy.
There was another paper recently we didn't have some of the podcast about prayer and the impact of.
Prayer on people's health and their recovery.
And the group that thought people were praying for them, but they like people weren't actually praying for them, they recovered almost as well as the group of people who did actually have people praying for them and knew they had people praying for them. Like, it's crazy how much of the bosbo effect can really impact people's perception of what's going on in.
The world right time.
And we like to classify the placebo effect as you know, you've got the placebo, which is like where you're having a good effect, a good for the homeostasis, and then you've got the no cibo effect, which is where now your beliefs are negatively impacting your own life. And then at the very far end of the no sebo effect is voodoo death, where your beliefs have actually influenced your
your death because you believe you're going to die. So there's there's a huge slippery slope that I think a lot of people just aren't aware of, and changing those negative beliefs and practices are so important to having a happier life. It's it's ridiculous. I mean, that's that's really the factor right there. You can be as rich as you want to but have a shitty eternal life, never be happy.
Yeah, I tell people all the time. I'm like, you want to know what the miracle drug is. It's the effect, that's the miracle drug.
Oh yeah, it's amazing what the mind can do to the body if you believe some crazy So what are some other things like that you cover on your show? I know you do kind of get into like it's like science and magic, correct.
Yeah.
So, like we did a whole episode on like epigenetics recently because there's a lot of conversations to the occult community about you know, this passing on of trauma and like what that means and people people attribute a lot of things to genetics to specifically like the sequence of the genome that like aren't actually at like attributed to genetics themselves.
It's attributed to something called your epigenome or epigenetics. So and one of them is the inheritance of trauma.
This idea of nature versus nurture, And again, what if we're talking about the intersection of like this philosophy of the world and these spiritual discussions like nature versus nurture, and that debate has been going on for centuries. I mean we've got Plato talking about that shit and Aristotol, I mean, it has going on forever. And we know that like scientifically, there is an impact on your environment
regarding sort of how your body reacts to things. And so epigenetics is essentially how the genes of your body are controlled. So you might have a gene for something, but it may not ever be turned.
On because it's not useful for you in a particular region.
A lot of traits that people have, like even just colors of skins, like melanin production or there was oh, there was actually a really interesting study twenty twenty twenty one.
I want to say, but they actually did a study following people from like pre birth some of they were still in their mother's uterus and then after birth for twenty years they followed them and they were trying to look at some of the epigenetics behind extraversion and introversion and why somebody is maybe even more extroverted more introverted, and they actually found out it's because of the degree of methylation of a particular gene related to like this
particular aspect of humans, which is so fascinating, right, Like methylation. To describe what that is is simply taking a methacre, which is a carbon plus three hydrogens, and it's popped onto the promoter region of a gene. So when a gene is transcribed, you have a protein that binds to this promoter region and then transcribes it into mRNA that gets turned into proteins and then it goes and does its thing in the body. When you methylate that promoter region,
that gene is unable to be transcribed. It essentially acts as like a barrier, so the protein can't bind to that particular area anymore. And so people who were actroverts had less methylation and thus more production of that gene than the people who were introverts. And that's something you're able to study, which is so cool, and so how many aspects of the individual are tied to that sort
of same thing. And there's tons of different and sort of post translational modifications which will be called those where it's it could be methylation, that could be a cutilation, that could be certain proteins and other things. But it clearly has an impact on the way people interact with the world.
And that's just one example.
Uh, And so I definitely think that because our genes are mostly the same across the rule Right Human Genome Project, one of the best things they came out with was that we have ninety nine point nine percent of our genomes are the same across the Homo sapien species. Now that's not to say that we are all totally identical, because that point one percent point zero one percent.
If your cells have six billion.
DNA nucleotides in them, the point one percent is still like six million, Okay, So it's still a very substantial difference from cell to cell. But generally speaking, we're very similar. And so then what determines the changes. The answer to that is your epigenome is the epigenetics of ad all and so I think That is something that I really hope to see more research on in the future, this
idea of nature versus, you know, nurture. Is it just nature, is it just genetics, or is it also nurture in the sense that your genetics are influenced by your environment, the way that you grew up, and so if someone There was actually another research study that looked at Holocaust survivors, and it's interesting because some psychologists were noticing that the children of Holocaust survivors actually had like more mental issues
that required more psychological help than these survivors themselves, which is so interesting, doesn't really make a lot of sense, But they did some epigenetics studies and saw that the trauma that the parents induced during the Holocaust was actually passed along to their children in the sense that they were more likely to have the same changes in terms of the epigenetics and methylations, all these other things than the or the children of people who hadn't incurred a
lot of that trauma. So there is some scientific validation for this idea, like trauma specifically is passed from parent to child. Now we have to be a little bit careful in saying this. The same trauma really it's more scientifically accurate to say the same changes or the same epigenome that we see in the parent is past the child.
That is really all we can say scientifically, but from if you want to sort of extend that thought, you can say, well, if this particular epigenetic change is causing this behavior and the parent, you may expect to see more of that behavior from somebody who has that same epigenome as a child. That's not something we can necessarily scientifically prove or like support, but we can see the association and that can give us more insight into how to study this further, to.
Get the idea more sporty, if you will.
Right, And the epigenetic studies really got started with a really kind of a mystical tip to it. So what they were doing with the rat ancestral memory studies that really kicked off the epigenetics thing was trying to put rats through a maze and then testing their offspring, even though the offspring had had no contact with the sperm donor,
on how well they did in the maze. And what they found is that there was a correlation between the rats who successfully got through that maze and the generations before them that did so as well. So there's a specific link along those ancestral memories somehow being transferred to with his.
Theory of survival of the fittest.
It's really epigenetics at work, Like that is essentially what he was seeing. He was seeing that when conditions get and this is actually something that we see also if you look at the epigen mix of like famine, the people who live through famine versus their children, you see a fact on the children because of the way the
environment that whole famine itself impact of the parents. The same thing is that the survival of the fittest right in order, we must adapt in order to survive, and that adaptation is often can often be measured from an epigenetic perspective. And so there's a lot more research going on in that. It's a booming field at the moment, which is great. It's been really fun to read a lot of the data. But yeah, like that's one example of an episode that we did and why we did it.
We've done plenty of episodes looking at like the science of prayers, So why do people pray? What is really the impact that it has. We looked at it from like an occult perspective, and we also looked at it from a scientific perspective.
We've looked at sort of the art of memory.
For example, we've done some episodes on the impact of like meditation and stuff on the body and looking at like easy too and papers.
That have come out about that.
We've talked generally about, you know, what it means to be a researcher and how that is applied, and how you can apply that to a magical practice. Like I think, I maybe I'm going to get some flat for this, but I think in the occult community people tend to be a little bit more relaxed in the way they
sort of engage in these kind of things. But if you really want to have any sort of measurable like way of measuring change over a period of time, you really have to approach it and think about controls and replicability, and you need to be taking good.
Notes like I have. So I have notebooks.
I probably have fifteen notebooks of my actual experience, and I have recorded things so intensely because otherwise you can't make any definitive conclusions. You could just be fooling yourself.
Your brain is really good at that it's really good to fooling yourself, but the thick of things that you don't actually we didn't actually do, where you didn't actually experience, And so having these really the intense records is it's a way of sort of keeping yourself accountable too and saying nothing has changed, and if nothing has changed, why is that? And how can I change what I'm doing to like make things better?
We found the uniting link between solemonic magic and academia rigorous.
You've got to be.
I.
Yeah, I think like magic and science are never will never explain the same things, and I think it's sort of a fool, a fool's mission to attempt that. Like a lot of the quantum science talk is a bunch of bullshit, and I just like am so nigh here for that, because even like if you talked a physicist about the niven number of friends who do crazy shit
that I don't really understand. But if you're talking to them about like the quantum experiment, this whole like observer effect, they essentially say it has no impact.
On like a macro level.
Things operate differently at a quantum scale than they do in the actual world. So trying to tribute quantum science to like a larger scale is absolute pseudoscience and it has no place, like they would say, it has no place in scientific discussion. Okay, And so I think what happens is again like people are trying to take magic and they're trying to legitimize using science, using as quantum
things that we don't understand. Even quantum scientists will say, I don't really know what the fuck is going on, but like this is what we see, right, we're measuring and they're doing much weird mathematical calculations to like figure out what it.
Is they're saying.
But again we can't, we can't attribute that to a macro level. And so magic, if you want to be rigorous about it and your approach to it, you can learn things about magic and science.
You can learn things about science. And when you combine the.
Two and you say, like you look at the world through a natural philosophy lens, which is really what we often use in magic, it can give you insights and the things you could actually potentially change and study. And then the so that you get from that can say, oh, I saw a difference here when these techniques were applied, like meditation for example.
And so what happens if I apply these other techniques, so like there can be sort of this communication between the two in the sense that they inform each other without this need to like be legitimized by each other.
And I think that's what I would really like ask people to stay creeping forward.
It's like, treat your.
Magic like science, but don't expect them to explain each other because they're just not prime to do that, right, would be nice?
What about the you know, if you don't mind, uh, would you mind talking maybe a little bit more about the meditation stuff that you kind of talked about.
Yeah, So there was a lot of it was genetic and it was ab agenetic, and also just looking at the impact of meditation on specific areas of the brain and like what an active And I will say, I'm not like a brain surgeon of any kind, right, so these are the rulesults that I read that I'm not necessarily like, I didn't take the state of myself or anything, but they were essentially able to show in terms of like reported patients, but also areas of the brains that
are related to like patients and conflict management.
And empathy when you.
Meditate and you engage in daily it was like daily for thirty minutes or something. They have real impacts on those areas of the brain. Those areas of the brains sort of lied up during the meditation. And also there's the chemical levels that are released during meditation as well that cause changes in your body to I don't remember the whole list, but it was in this paper, and over long periods of time, it has a very real
impact on life. And there's plenty of slays to look at the longevity of someone's life who have also meditated, and a lot of these these changes, the chemicals that are released and everything like that is what sort of aids this longevity, and so it clearly has a correlation to people living a happy This is related to the chemicals that are released and a more fulfilled life. People feel more fulfilled when they engage in a lot of
these meditative practices. And there's also some research that I haven't done quite as much, like looked into this quite as much around this idea of like sort of somatic breathing or just more generally the idea of like living a slower life and how that also impacts are the way that we perceive the world. There was a study that in twenty seventeen, I believe, where they were looking at how the perception of time has an impact on
how your body like reacts to certain aging principles. So the faster that you perceive time living by, which from a social media perspective, even moving very quickly, it has an impact on your body's relation connection then to aging.
And so people when people.
Are saying things like I feel really old when they're at younger ages, there seems to be and it hasn't there haven't been a lot of studies done on this.
I'm not gonna say it definitively, but.
There seems to be a correlation between our perception of time and the actual aging process, which is crazy. And I hope that they do more research surrounding that because I think it it makes a lot of sense because our brain does have a really strong influence over our
bodies and how they respond to things. And so if it is based on like perception, which is something that our brain controls, then yes, it would send signals to your body to try to be trying to like sending these aging signals that you say earlier then they would normally be sent if we weren't perceiving that change.
Right, So the Greeks talked about subjective time in relationship to Chiros and Chronos, So Kronos would be the objective time, and then Chiros would be the subjective time or the quality time that you are having in between. What's so painfully obvious about Chiros is the is the ephemeral nature of the quality time. So he's only got a tuft of hair in the front of his head, and he's balancing a scale on a razor blade, and the only
way to catch him is from the front. So the only way to get quality time is to is to make that plan and grab out in time to actually catch him. Whereas you know, Kronos is sort of everywhere at omnipresent in everything, but that quality time is much harder to get a hold of.
Yeah, exactly.
So again, like we see some of these concepts that people have noticed for years and various cultures, it's not just not just the grapes to have the said constant time. Actually, like showing an impact on the biological world, in the natural world, it's crazy to be actual the whole, even like how natural philosophy turned sort of turned into science. Like if you if anybody's ever read Agrippa and you've
read like the first book. I just wanted to diss the first book when I initially read through Agrippa because I was like, this is some wild shit. But truthfully, I think that it goes to show that application of like natural philosophy principles leads to scientific relation in many cases. I mean, Planet the Elders had some wild shit, okay, like,
but there was some truth. There was one example I read recently again when I was going through it, where he talks about the dung beetle and it's connection to the moon because the dung beetle when it calls under dunge and lays the eggs, and the eggs essentially sit and grow for twenty eight days and then all these like young beetles come flying out of the dung. And so that's why they were supiated with mood because this twenty eight day cycle.
And you're like, that's a weird association to make, but it makes a lot of sense.
I mean, they do. Dung beetles have a twenty eight y cycle. It's like a scientifically supported thing. And so they based her that maybe you attributed it to the moon spiritually, but like that connection between the moon and the dung beetle is there. I mean, that's like that cycle connection exists. And so we see a lot of that in sort of this these ancient science.
But we also see it's it's cool to get.
The validation in like modern day of things that were said fucking forever ago. As crazy as he was, Poet of the Elder had some cool scientific claims.
Yeah, it's something I want to uh want to ask you.
Do you think you know it's possible that you know, thousands and thousands of years ago they actually kind of understood science more than we think they did.
I think a lot of people because here's.
The thing, you think that secrets considered now, you know what I'm saying, the secret secrets and the mysteries mysteries that slippers shit.
Because I think when we look back and we look at people like playing it over with people like Aristotle and all these folks who you know, had patia, all these few people who had really impactful philosophy, I don't think we give them so much credence in being smart in these like ways of thinking right and logic ands so and so forth. If they were smart in that way, why in God's name do you think they weren't smart
in these other ways? Like I don't think like I don't think it's a single application, like the intelligence fans.
More than one topic. And actually it was Oh my gosh, I'm blanking on the name it.
But Ezra I think it was who was a philosopher. But he also was one of the founding people in medical science, right, And it's like, why so many of the things that we when it comes to treatments and stuff, a lot of it was determined by like magic, magical philosophy, the four humorous and all of that. Even doctor's time informant and Richard Napier, if you've never looked into them,
they're fascinating folks. In the seventeenth eighteenth century, if I recall correctly, and they were asked for physicians, and so what they did essentially was they would have people come see them who were sick, and then they would.
Take account of all the symptoms.
So the color of the urine is someone was flushed with fever, so and so forth. And they would also cast a chart of the decumbenture. So this is a chart when somebody took to bed and they were sick, and based on sort of where the planets were and the symptoms of the sickness, that's what they would use, like, they would use that help them diagnose what was wrong with the individual.
And because of this very elaborate.
System of the connection between the planets and various diseases and what the planets were attributed to, right, Saturn attributed to bones, mars, inflammations, stuff like that, they were able to offer some remedies that actually, like were effective, also based on planetary correspondence of herbs and various things.
Right.
So, like this idea that like science or that like medicine and magic or astrology are not compatible is blatantly false. We see this historically and now we're all the the concoctions created actually helpful. No, Okay, some of it clearly was not, Like if you make something out of a poisonous substance, it's not gonna help somebody except for making maybe making him throw up, which I don't know.
I guess percation was often a way to help heal somebody.
But my point being that they've always been connected and they sort of still are, and I don't think like I think we've sort of thrown the baby out with the bast water the bath water a little bit in the sense of saying, you know, oh, because this is one thing now in modern day is considered pseudoscience talking about astrology, like we're gonna just not even consider that anymore when we like.
Do medical treatments and stuff.
So personally, like for surgeries and stuff, I have an astrologer that I consult to figure out good times based on like where are mars is and where's Mars at? Because Mars is the ruler of like knives and sharp things and surgery and surgeons. If I'm sick, for example, sometimes I'll cast a horrory chart or I'll look at the astrology and be like, will medicine even help with this? And if the answer is no, I'll kind of just
suffer through it. It's been interesting to see, like I've done some comparative analysis where like I will be sick, I'll cast a chart, like a horror chart to say we'll going like we'll going to the doctor and getting this and help, and the horror chart will say no, like it won't actually do anything for you.
And then I'll go to.
The doctor anyway, and then they'll be like, oh, I think you just have like a viral infection, like there's something we can really give you, so just you know, deal with it.
And like that's happened so many times that I also start to like believe the chart.
I still do it, like I'm just curious, right, and like if there is something really wrong, like I don't want to not go because right, like all those reasons. But I think it's an interesting core relation that like I've seen personally that my experience the doctor correlates pretty positively to what I get from the Horrory chart, which
was just so weird but also incredibly fascinating. So yeah, again that like they can inform each other, there can be cross talk, and I don't need the doctor to confirm my Horrory charts, right, Like that doesn't even take me a the conversation, but I can certainly see that there seems to be some positive correlation there.
Well, you never know, he might be a vetic astrologer, which is a possibility nowadays, So a lot of that comes to people like Edgar Casey, Right, Edgar Casey had that really strange foundation that he didn't seem to get from any of his books or anything like that, which was all based on this you know, astrology and all
of these other medicines that he's getting. And it was like he was channeling a Scleppius or this ancient healer, and we see how his prescriptions really actually do apply to these heavenly bodies and all the rest this astrology that he you know, it wasn't exposed to. So there's a yeah, a really powerful correlation in there.
It's crazy. I actually this is something that.
Yeah, if you were a doctor who were yes, And this is something that in magic I think people really sleep on. It's not a problem quite as much in high magic as it is in various forms of like witchcraft. And I'm going to use the term low magic here and not in a denigrating way, just as a distinct like a uh way to distinguish. But people, oh, there's a lot of people who say, you don't need to
even bother about the astrology. But like the Grimmore tradition especially, it is so blatantly apparent that the astrology actually matters quite substantially, and that if you ignore it it's.
Not going to work. That you think the way that you think it's gonna work.
Like if you do a working when a planet is de bilitated, why in God's maybe do you expect that planet do anything helpful for you.
It's it's a ridiculous notion.
And it's one of those things where again, like apply these sort of standards of a more rigorous scientific.
Exploration of things as a way to be able.
To measure, like I have done a couple of exermons where I've taken I have more of these on the way where I've done, like a pick a trix talisman, for example, there was one I did one recently that is it is Jupiter in cancer telesman.
And you make it to help you see spirits.
And I made multiple of these talismans using various conditions. So though the one variable that was consistent was Jupiter is in cancer, but there were other variables, like I had the moon and the sign of that recommended I asked of the tign I recommended. I had various planets with positive like Jupiter needs to be trying or in a positive aspect of Venus, for example, And so I had some talismans that did have that, and I had others that didn't, and I had some where Jupiter was
opposing on malefic planet. Just essentially taking the recommended astrological weather around the creation of the talisman and doing some things and doing not doing other things and seeing the effect that it would actually have on the efficacy of the talisman itself. And then I've given these to people and they're testing them for me, and I'm asking essentially for reports back to see, okay, which talismans worked the best.
And which ones didn't. And I didn't tell them what teleisan was for.
I just said, hey, when you're doing ritual, because all my friends are ceremonialgicians for the most part, I was like, when you're doing ritual and you're doing things with spirits, I was like, have this on you or wear it as a necklace, whatever you want, and let me know
if it changes anything. So I don't have the results quite yet, but I asked them to give it Like I think when I say six months of testing to get the results back, but like those are the kind of experiments you can do from like a scientifically rigorous perspective to find your variables, Like don't tell your testers, but it's for that is not a blind study, right, So mine is just a singular blind studying the sense that my testers are blind, but I am not guess results,
record them, and then try it with like a bunch of different things. There's nothing stopping you from doing this kind of experimentation. Then this is like what I think, it's a fun part about magic, Like really have fun with they experiment, figure out what is needed, what is not needed, what has to be included, and what are something to work what maybe doesn't have to be included.
And this can be informed by spirits too, right, Like this is so many people I think don't like that I do this, maybe, but I don't really give a shit. When a spirit tells me something, They're like, go do this thing, and I'm like, cool, why.
Do you want to do this thing?
And they either won't tell me or they'll give me a reason. I don't just take the spirit's word for it, like I will. I will test it. I'll say, Okay, I'm gonna do it with this change that you suggested, and I'm gonna do it without the change that you suggested, And let's see how both of them work. More often than I works better with the way the spirits sudgusted. But like again, it's the way it's trying to validate the technologies that are given to you through spirit, trance
or ritual or whatever. I think people will oftentimes just take these things on faith, which is fine, but like there's like just because you've got it in nosis or upg or whatever however.
You received it doesn't mean that it's.
Free from scrutiny and Cerinly, if you want to share this technique, it helps to people to say, hey, I've validated this. Here are people you can talk to you that I validated it with to get their experience. You don't have to take my word for it as a person sell you whatever I'm trying to sell you, go ask other people and let their testimony sort of be the enhancer behind whatever technology you're pushing forth.
So I think you just recently had a solomonic magician talking about summoning the four wins before doing any solomonic ceremony, because he's says, right, right, David, right, how much faster and better it works, just because he's he's playing around with it, and he's using the techniques from these different things and applying logic and applying his own magical senses to it. So I think that's that's a very important part that I think a lot of people are missing
out on. You can't just stick to the rote tradition. You actually have to find what works better for you.
Yeah, well it actually is. So I recently worked his Clavist intelligence rum. I did the whole work, the whole ritual with a magic group that I do a lot of work with, and I did the ritual without the winds, like because I emailed David and I was like, hey, I know you talked about like this whole wind conturation of adding it in and I was like, I would like to test that, but this is the first one I'm doing. Is I'm not going to incorporate this time.
But his Clavist Spiritum book is stuck in customs right now, which is driving me crazy because I want to get my hands on it. But essimply all this to say that we've done the one ritual without the winds. Like, on the next ritual that I do with his system, I want to incorporate the winds to do that exact same experiment, right, Like I want to say for myself, people have said it, but I want to see and so yeah, I'm doing that expermentation.
I think it's so fun and important. Cute fan of drink. Any you guys got him on.
And I was like, oh yeah.
I said I I was reading his stuff since I got into this stuff.
Yeah, me too, yea.
So it was really wild for me to actually have them more.
I was like, Wow, is there anything else you would like to talk about before we wrap it up, or anything or anything thank's worth mentioning?
I mean, I don't think so. I think we covered a lot of great topics.
Yeah, you talked a lot and the hour into twenty minutes. Haven't you got anything?
No, I'm good, this is This has been a great interview.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, there's definitely things I'd like to uh definitely have you on again in the future, I'm sure.
Oh yeah, I know people think feel free to hit me up bond socials too. I love talking about I tell people all the time, you mentioned like a grippa to me, you mentioned a could of them, or you mentioned any kind of science topic, and I'm here and I will talk to you, talk to you for hours like this is not this is my life.
I love it all so much and had.
Less like we should talk about your experiments. I'd love to hear how all that's going for.
Sure, sure, absolutely, yeah alchemy mondays, I'm gonna get the socks all it out again this Monday and we're gonna do some more experimentation.
It's gonna be great. Sounds great.
Oh you know what it was meaning it was meant to say before. I don't know if it was Jabir, I've been high end that you were trying to think of before. I think he's considered the father of chemistry.
He was an.
Alchemist where I think even some of like kind of like the protocols they have now are almost like kind of like a duplicate or you know, his some of his stuff almost kind of trends, you know, got moved over, like the way he would do certain things and write it down kind of because staples like he was reused now.
Alchemy is so fascinating because you have not to go on a whole different rant topic. If you guys have time, we can get into this. But alchemy is a fascinating field because you sort of have two different time periods of alchemy.
You have alchemy when it.
Was sort of initially born as like a discipline and then you have it's later you have its resurgeons sort of in the Renaissance period, and then you have sort of secondary resurgeons for alchemy became entirely psychological.
I hate that period.
I prefer to go to the early period where alchemy was really attributed more to these sort of scientific experiments.
I mean, these people were.
Trying to understand matter, and this is sometimes where a lot of plants actually get their correspondences from where you know, they would do an extraction, say, oh, the mercury of this plant is a specific color, it's gold. Therefore it's associated with the sun. Like these are the sort of ways that people were applying this natural philosophy to this more scientific exploration of various plants. Because we talked about like the hidden virtues and the cold virtues, as the
Grippa calls them. They're virtues that aren't necessarily apparent all the time, and like the physical manifestation of things, they are sometimes which is why like the sunflowers with the sun because it resembles the glyph of the sun and it's also yellow, and it also like when the sun is up, the flower actually look towards the sun, right and so you have all those characteristics in it as well. But then when alchemists, we're doing a lot of these sort of extractions of things.
We're not looking at.
The hidden essence, the hidden inside of the planet, if you will. And that also has an impact on the correspondence if you can assign to things.
And it's interesting too because.
For example, a Grippa also talks about in book one, he'll say, the onion is both lunar and it's martial because by itself, it's white, it is.
Full of water.
Right, those are all lunar things. But if you cut it, it causes pain. That's very martial characteristics. And if you were to do it, lookt onion, which if you've never done before you should. It's actually kind of fun.
Smell awful though, do it outside.
Like the chemicals that are in the mercury of the onion are painful.
Like if you actually breathe.
In, hold on your voice to start to screw up for a second, hold on, try to try talking again.
Yeah yeah, yeah, sometimes it will like lit you out. You have to like let it catch up.
Sorry, okay, you want to go on from I think cutting the No wait, no, you were saying.
Cutting the onion. So what you cut again? Is it still going?
No, I think you're good.
Now, Okay, when you.
Cut into an onion, it causes harm to you, right, the enzymes cause harm, and so that's why it has the marshal quality to it.
And when you actually do an extraction of an onion and you get extract the mercury and the sulfur.
Uh, if you were to run that through an alcms, which I've done before, and that's the words why I'm talking about this, which is liquid chromatography, gas chromatography, and the mass back essentially a way of breaking down the molecule looking at its individual atoms. You'll see that the components within the sulfur and the mercury, now that they're concentrated, they're painful.
If you like breathe it in.
It burns the inside of your nose and your mucous membranes. And so we even see that that martial quality, which is like a hidden quality. You're technically speaking, until you bruise the onion of some kind, that's like a hidden
the coal virtue that you can elucidate using alchemy. And now we have ways of testing all chemical things on a more scientific level, which is great, but just the fact that if you had been had that mercury and you smelled it and you got the pain, that would also have indicated to you that the onion has this
martial nature to it as well. So alchemy has always been really scientific, right, It's been a way to explore the natural world and all the hidden virtues that lie within the various parts of the world, whether it be minerals or plants or whatever. And that's that's really what I love about alchemy. That's what I think is so interesting, that it's like another way of exploring the natural world using some of these more ancient philosophies that are still applicable in modern day.
Okay, now I'm done.
Well, I just wanted to throw in there that for me, I don't see a real separation between the psychological and the more natural forms of alchemy, because the original sort of Greek mentality was that everything is existing inside of the mind of Zeus, the news of Zeus, right, And so what they were doing is they were finding the hidden properties because it found the hidden properties in themselves
as well. You've got the tie between astrology and personality types and all the rest of these things that go directly into alchemy. And I think, you know, when people sort of see that linkage between the mind and everything and this vast web of associations that are created from it, it's really hard not to you know, apply alchemical principles to psychology in some ways.
You know, Yeah, I definitely see that.
I also there's also an aspect, right that a lot of our associations are based on perception, and again, perception is something that the brain handles.
So yeah, yeah, I think if you know, especially with the Islamic ones, I mean, those seem to be the oldest ones I've come across, some of those alchemists.
You look at the stuff that they're actually doing with like plants and stuff. Cool.
Yeah yeah, yeah really there, like how they even had charts of like like and this to do that, to make it like they really knew like how to move things around. Actually yep, it's like, god damn, like I don't even know how to like I have problem making chocolate though, you know, you.
Know these guys, it's making all sorts of crazy shit.
Oh that's a great book.
Yeah, but it's thank you very much Aster for coming on.
That was really that was a lot of fun actually for me. Thank you, thank you.
Yeah, episode absolute pleasure.
Thanks you for having me on, Thanks for talking about science, spirituality to the best topics.
Yes, oh, definitely definitely and yeah, we'll definitely get you on again in the future. Hello Giant wants you to remind everybody all your shows where they can find you.
All right, you can find me on Mondays on YouTube doing Alchemy Mondays. You can find me on Tuesdays doing seven seven seven with Nick, also on YouTube, and on Thursdays we've got the Magical Mailbag, so send in your occult slash, esthoteric slash paranormal stories to Headless Giant podcast at gmail dot com. Friday's usually doing something with Nick or Jules doing some kind of a crazy thing to check it out. And then on Sundays I've got the
Trialogus with Ethan and Ricardo. So check all those shows out, put the bell on, have fun.
Yes, thank you very much, Helus and Astra. Please let everybody know where they can find all your stuff again.
Yeah, so I'm on Instagram as astrologist cl so c I a L and then you can find most of my work. I'm trying to make it, I guess a greater effort to public some magical experiments and stuff on zeb stack, which is titled Celestial Crucible. So I'm actually our ritual Groove's most recent workthrough of the clouds intelligence are.
Richell is up on zebstack if you want to take a look.
So yeah, there's some some great stuff there with magic squares and everything too.
But yeah, that's.
It awesome, Thank you very much again, and uh yeah, like I said after the show, if you don't want to send me those links, I'll make sure.
I add them to the show for sure. Sounds good, and thank you.
Everybody who was in the chat looked like everybody was thoroughly enjoying this as much as I was.
And that's why we go live.
And uh yeah, and until the next one, everybody be well, Lada
Thanks everyone, Bye bye,