Magic as Working with Spirits
“What is very prevalent today in the West is what I call the psychological model of magic. This is magic divorced from any occultism or mysticism. It believes that magic is simply a form of psychology, so angels, gods, and spirits are just names and faces that we humans have made up to paste over our own psychological complexes. Aleister Crowley wrote a really good piece about that where he takes the entire Goetia and boils it down to being a method of accessing different parts of your brain and manipulating your own thoughts in a way. I think I was never fully in agreement with that, but I do see where I was very influenced by it. When I first started learning from Ashani Lele, this is someone practicing the ATRs, there is no psychology involved. It is these spirits; these are the dead and the ancestors, all real, tangibly real, and this is how you work with them. He is the one that started to show me, number one, a different worldview than I had been getting from the Hermetic Golden Dawn type material and started showing me something I think I might have already kind of agreed with a little more, but I just didn't know it yet. Every time he would tell me things, I would go back and read the grimoires. He wasn't talking about the grimoires; he was talking about Lukumi and Palo Mayombe and their views on things. I would read things in the grimoires that before had not made sense, but now they made sense looking at it from this worldview over here made sense, whereas looking at it as all just psychology, the grimoires just seemed silly. It was because of that, because of that shift in my worldview, and to directly answer the question with all that is the basis, what I generally mean when I say magic today, and it's not this narrow, but when you see me online and I say the word magic, nine times out of ten what I am talking about is working with spirits. Magic is a set of protocols that we use to interface with spiritual entities in order to gain their respect and their willingness to work with and for us, so that is magic, and that's the classical definition of magic. The people who wrote the grimoires, that is what they, that is how they defined magic.”