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No one has more reason to hate AI than me. It has cost me two jobs and made my life difficult. However, I am also a user of it magically and otherwise. This has put me at odds with those who are trying to rationalise their terror of technology as magic or other issues. In most cases, showing ignorance of how it works and its impact.

The technology, as it exists now, however clever, is like an autocorrect. It uses existing data to guess what the next line in the word should be and checks it for context.  It cannot develop new occult material or leak “secrets” that are not already there. If you are seeing oath-breaking material coming from your AI, it is because someone else has already discovered it and broken it by putting it on the Internet (you could find the information by Googling).

AI can be used to create occult essays for your group texts, but if you do that, you are missing the point of what this exercise is supposed to be doing (memory retention, etc.) and are failing in your magical path.  While it was not due to AI, MOAA insists that people write out their course materials and tests by hand.

Other fear-based allegations are based on the use of AI to “replace creativity” and put creative people out of work. AI has limits on images and depends on the imagination of those using it.  If I use it to create a cartoon, the sense of humour remains mine; if I use it to create a painting, it must still be relevant to my needs.  In several of my books, I have used the Golden Dawn’s magical image system to create more realistic magical images. These are far more useful to my readers than the rough cartoons drawn by the original Golden Dawn.

Those who complain that AI is killing the jobs of creative people often have never bought a painting, commissioned an illustration, or had a library of unread pirated PDFs or music on their computer. Those who complain that AI datacentres are taking all the water and electricity away are doing so through a Facebook and Google datacentre. They were not complaining when local journalism died because advertising was cheaper on the Internet. Neither did they worry when a lack of advertising killed off the trade press. The fear of losing creativity only exists because technology is involved.

I should point out that AI cannot replace good writing, artwork or design. While useful, it averages everything.  It turns shit writers into even shittier writers spitting out information in the same way as each other. No amount of AI can match a magical or creative experience.

Fear is failure, and fear of AI will result in failure. Humanity is going in that direction no matter what, so the choice is to adapt or fall behind.  I recommend this article for those who want to think some more about this https://substack.com/home/post/p-186363686

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Dolores Ashcroft Nowicki has died; she was 95.

Tributes have been pouring in for her, leaving me slightly perplexed and putting me in a position to bluntly speak my truth (which always ends up badly). There is no doubt that she was hugely influential in the Western Mystery Tradition, both as a writer, Director of Studies for the Servants of Light and organiser of courses. But her story was complex and affected many people, and sometimes not in a good way.

I was a bit player in her story. In 1988, I joined Servants of the Light and was so impressed that I decided to come to the UK to attend all the workshops that were being run by DAN. I was hugely enthusiastic, and between Dolores and her number two, David Goddard, I learnt the basis of magic that I would use for the rest of my life and for that I am hugely grateful.

DAN’s writing was a brilliant approach to practical magic for beginners. Her ritual magic workbook (ritual) and Shining Paths (pathworking on the Tree of Life) are still essential reading material.

In her workshops, Dolores had a genius for taking a ritual and expanding it so everyone could take part, even if it was just a line to say. This allowed people attending her workshops, who had no ritual experience, to feel what it was like to stand up in front of others magically as a godform. At the time this was a big deal for many.

Another important point was that, despite being extremely conservative in many respects, Dolores Ashcroft Nowicki was eager to open the doors of the Mysteries to those who had previously been openly excluded. For example, she permitted homosexuals to join the Servants of the Light (SOL), the esoteric school she directed. This was particularly notable given that, in the UK during the 1980s, societal attitudes towards homosexuality in the occult were still largely conservative, and many organisations continued to exclude LGBTQ+ individuals. DAN’s willingness to foster inclusivity within SOL was therefore progressive for its time and helped some people access teachings they might otherwise have been barred from.

She also established a working lodge system with SOL, and in the group I was in, it worked extremely well. At its peak, there were 10 working lodges worldwide with standardised opening and closing times. It was a stage or two above Wicca, with some masonic/ceremonial effects. Perhaps the most significant thing was the use of Godforms and pathworking, which raised the rituals to a much higher pitch than the writing suggested.

All this meant that the order peaked in the 1990s, with huge conferences held in London, where everyone had a chance to take part in a major ritual. It was interesting to take part in. It was believed that there were about 1000 active members in the SOL correspondence course (we used to be told a much larger figure, but that was probably including inactive members).

But there were flaws in DAN’s life that made her story more of a warning than something to be duplicated by others. The biggest issue was that she encouraged sycophants who formed a hardcore around her and fought to be noticed by her. This was physically draining on her. At one workshop, someone else and I pretended she had to take a call from Jersey so she could sneak away from the sycophants to have a cup of tea and a moment to herself.

Generally, these people were encouraged, even if they lacked magical talent or personal skills. While I was in SOL, initiations were rare, but it was unusual for a magician to receive them; instead, they went to those who, by their loyalty and deification of DAN, were owed a favour.  But this hardcore of people gave her plausible deniability and acted as protectors and enforcers when things went wrong, and for a few reasons, they did. Those who were on the receiving end of these people were unaware whether the attacks came from DAN or her henchmen, and certainly, she did little to stop them.

Some of these people suffered considerable damage, but when you talk to them about her death now, they respond with a feeling of regret that they never resolved things with her, as if they were to blame.

The other thing she had was a mercurial relationship with the truth, which was difficult to spot. I am not talking about some minor mythmaking here; I mean full-blown fantasy posing as self-aggrandising reality.  One example was her unique blend of witchcraft, which was interesting as it was practical. It appeared to be based on different English folk traditions, and if you were interested in Green Ray was good stuff. However, in her eyes, it was not enough to present this material; it needed an elaborate backstory. Her initial claim was that she was initiated in a secret village that had survived the burning times by remaining hidden. This story was surprisingly similar to a book by Charles de Lint, which I knew DAN had read.

This backfired because many Wiccans in SOL wanted to know where this village was. After saying it was secret, DAN gave a nebulous location before giving up and finally saying it “was on the astral.”

This led me to question her claim that she had been trained by Dion Fortune’s Inner Light before leaving to found SOL with her husband, Michael. She was certainly associated with the Inner Light for a short time, and while there, she worked with W. E. Butler. However, I have been unable to find anyone who can confirm that she ever held a grade within the organisation. One Inner Light member told me explicitly that she could not reasonably be described as having been “trained by them.”

This is not especially important, since she did have a close working relationship with Butler and clearly learned a great deal from him. My concern is not that something was missing from her background, but that there seemed to be a need to embellish the story in the first place.

The other issue is that she would set her followers off against each other.  At times, someone with genuine and obvious magical talent would appear in SOL and be given a position of responsibility, on the assumption that they would provide material or drive people to the Order. However, these “blue-eyed boys and girls” had the shelf life of yoghurt, particularly when they were designated the title of DAN’s successor. What would happen is that, for a wide range of reasons, these “blue-eyed boys and girls” became surplus to requirements; they would be fired, and the minions would be told that they were evil and go on the attack.

Before the internet, this was easily done through letters, but by the 1990s it became increasingly difficult, though outsourced attacks were more effective.

More serious was DAN’s relationship with her husband, Michael, which I think shaped many of her negative actions. While I will not go into this at this time, I think that fear of what he would do or say was behind some of her choices. This might simply be because I liked Dolores and believe that some of her worst actions were motivated by how her husband would react and by the fear of being left penniless if he left her.

I want to make it clear that any bad blood between me and DAN was resolved before her death, and we had a good and open chat about it all.  Her death was unusual in that I found myself wondering what had happened to her on the day she died. It is like that sometimes with people that you owe some form of debt.

However, I do not think I can legitimately join those who would make DAN a goddess. She was extremely human, and her life holds a lesson for every occult leader and should not be glossed. Some of her stories, good and bad, have made it into my books.

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One of the things you cannot escape with occultism is religion. Most magical systems are hardwired into religion in some way. It is possible to change systems of magic, such as flipping the Key of Solomon or Abramelin to a pagan magical system, but religion has to be a factor.

This is because occultism has been a “hidden system” to understand religion or philosophy. Without the Gods, it becomes pretty pointless.  While there have been some attempts, such as Chaos magic, to strip religion from magical systems, the results are fairly soul-destroying.

However, one thing I have noticed recently is that there are times when religion is not the bedrock of occultism that it should be. This is when the ground swell of a religion changes so utterly that an occultist can no longer follow it. The depth that an occultist aspires is no longer held together by the religion that they are supposed to follow.

I have been reading Tony Fuller’s book Anglo Catholic clergy and the Golden Dawn and how the Church was a huge factor on the life of the last Golden Dawn order to close its doors Whare Ra (in New Zealand).  In this situation the order was a Christian Anglo-Catholic community. Subgroups in the Order prayed together in a literal Christian sense. There might have been Ancient Egyptian (and Greek) godforms in the ritual, but initiates believed that Christianity was the highest expression of religion that the pagans aspired. Christ was the ideal role model for a human magician.

But things have considerably changed. In the last decade, Christianity has been hijacked by the far right. It has become less about Jesus and more about “Conservative Christian values.”  Occultists can’t have a spiritual bedrock in a religious system which calls for one person to hate another because of their race, colour or sexuality. Magically, the Spiritual Christ or Adam Kadmon is a single figure representing all of humanity and cannot be divided. Those without compassion, calling for such divisions, claiming Christianity is their bedrock, have no part of magic and are gaining ground within that religion.  Christian occultists find it increasingly difficult to escape the group mind which has contaminated their religion and find themselves having to say “that is not my Christianity”. At the same time, they know that they are swimming in a pool that someone has pissed in.

Controversially, the same thing is happening to Kabbalah. The once sacred letters of Hebrew are being stamped onto bombs involved in the genocide of those in Gaza. One cannot feel that the group mind of Judaism has been contaminated badly by the Far-Right police of Israel. While the religion of Judaism and Kabbalah is terrific, it is starting to be corrupted by the fascist and often atheistic streams of Zionism and hate churned out by Benjamin Netanyahu. The result is that some occultists to “feel bad” when using Hebrew-based systems (even if those systems are far removed from any genocides).

Islam, once the bastion of spiritual and scientific knowledge and magical wisdom, has been dragged down by fundamentalist elements which encourage a conservative hatred of others, which would have been unknown to its founders. The Hamas anti-Jewish hate-based uprising, which fell into Netanyahu’s hands, was far removed from Islamic chivalry, futuwwa, which encompasses virtues such as courage, generosity, justice, respect for women, and selflessness, which are rooted in pre-Islamic Arab ideals of muruwwa and Islamic teachings.

To be fair, the problem works both ways. To create the latest shiny thing, some occult groups have been taking up traditions which they do not clearly understand. For example, Voodoo is a religion of emancipated black slaves, fusing Roman Catholicism with African traditions. However, when you have wealthy white people following a spiritual path, they cannot even comprehend that you end up with over-tattooed goths, pissed and stoned out of their box on DMT, dancing around a pole. You also get a would-be cult leader posting racist mems about black people without even realising it. One must wonder what the Gods who inspired Toussaint Louverture, Jean-Jacques Dessalines and Henry Christophe to throw off the French yoke of oppression, think about these European pretenders, who are the descendants of those who enslaved them, stealing something else from them.

Religion is supposed to give occultists a moral floor (compassion, restraint, obligation, accountability) and a metaphysical map (what a human is, what the divine is, what transformation is). Some provide a devotional engine (prayer, confession, purification, sacrifice, praise) a community container (tradition, correction, elders, continuity) and a relationship with the sacred that is not just “results”.

When religion loses that moral floor and becomes a tribal identity, the magician is stranded, because the “group mind” stops being a vessel and becomes a contaminant.

Religions are multifaceted systems comprised of a mystical foundation, a body of liturgical practices, ethical guidelines, and an institutional framework. Most modern contamination is happening in the outer two layers. The occultist’s job is to decide which layers they can still inhabit without poisoning their work.

If you stay inside a tradition, the magician needs to stop anchoring themselves as an “I am X”, and move to a daily rule that produces the spiritual substance you need. A workable rule might be a fixed cycle of prayer or devotion (morning and evening minimum) a purification practice (confession, restitution, invoking) and an act of service or repair weekly (religion without charity or compassion becomes cosplay). There should be regular contemplative practice (silence and meditation).

To keep yourself pure within a traditional group mind you should have strict boundaries on political media intake. This will not solve the religion’s public sickness but stops it from taking root your psyche.

Find or build a micro-church, not a crowd Whare Ra worked because it was a contained community with shared discipline. Big religions are now megaphones that enable idiots to shout their stupidity at others for “likes.”

If you feel that the tradition’s moral floor has collapsed, you do a spiritually clean exit. Don’t do the modern move of “I’m still X but not like them” forever. You do a ritual and ethical exit. As part of the ritual you name what you can no longer consent to and formally release your identification.

Always keep what is universal (virtue, prayer, devotion) but consciously choose a new container.

Switch from “religion” to “mystical lineage” if this is appropriate. If the institutional religion is unusable, you anchor to the mystical stream inside it. As a Christian, your anchor could be contemplative, sacramental mysticism, love and forgiveness. A Jewish anchor could lean on ethical monotheism and contemplative Kabbalah, not nationalistic theatre. Islam could emphasise tasawwuf and adab as the spine, avoiding a culture-war performance. This lets you keep the religious engine without swallowing the current political personality grafted onto it.

If you adopt a different tradition, you do it with humility. You don’t grab traditions you don’t understand, then act like spiritual landlords or cult leaders. If you don’t have information, language, context, and restraint, you don’t have the tradition.

If your participation makes you more arrogant, more theatrical, cruel, you’re not “initiated”, you’re just up your own arse and believing your own bullshit.

The final decision is challenging. You deliberately form a new synthesis, which can be an enticing risk in occultism, though at times it is necessary.

If you do it, it has to be built like an adult with clear metaphysics, explicit ethics, devotional practice, and serious constraints against cult dynamics. It is best if you keep your synthesis to yourself (even if it is good). The last thing you want to be is a prophet of the new Aeon, it always ends badly and in disappointment.

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