So funny story:

Some guy named John Dee does a lot of spy stuff. Works directly with the Queen of England. Also engages in extensive scrying sessions with Edward Kelly. Talks to alleged Angels. Comes up with an entire damn system of magic along with a cohesive alphabet. Angels tell him that their explicit intent is to literally cause the apocalypse.

John Dee predicts the rise of the British empire and asserts this vision to Queen Elizabeth 1^st. This promptly inspires her to launch a thousand ships and colonize pretty much the entire planet.

Flashforward: the environment is in shambles. Technology is destroying our minds generation by generation. ‘Wealth’ is a monopoly game designed to give the rich private islands and illegal sex parties (huge understatement here). We are collectively fucked.

I don’t know about you, but the progression history has taken ever since John Dee and the Enochian incident is pretty sus.

Expand further. Western Occultists LOVE Enochian Magick. It becomes the center-piece for some of the most complex Magickal workings ever attempted by Western thinkers. Aliester Crowley also did spy work and purportedly failed an incredibly dangerous working designed to summon his ‘Holy Guardian Angel’. The mansion where this took place burned down. He also did a lot of work with Enochian Magick.

Starting to see a pattern?

Magickal practice has always existed in Western society. It’s been something of a fancy hobby for people too rich to know what to do with their wealth and time, but those who dedicate themselves swear by it. It works, they say. It generates tangible results.

If you don’t believe in Magick, I’ll save my argument with you for much more wordy essay involving a bridge between neurochemistry, collective social reality, and the possible existence of a thing you might call a ‘god’. But that’s not what this is.

This is for the believers. And the knowers. It’s for the believers who have begun to suspect there are things that slip through the cracks in the carefully crafted façade we call society. It’s for the knowers who have seen those cracks, and very likely dived headfirst into them.

The hypothesis? Western Society is on a crash course for destruction, and it was designed that way. It’s literally Magick’s fault.

Why? Because Western Magickal tradition has never existed in an openly ‘Magickal’ society where things like spirits are considered to be as tangible and real as trees. It’s because a rift was carved into our collective soul when the folk-magic of countless societies was gutted by the march of colonial imperialism, and then absorbed back into the decrepit god-machine we call ‘Christianity’.

It might sound like I’m knocking Christianity as a whole, and well, kind of? But also not. I do believe there is a very real way to be a Christian in a world genuinely populated by spirits, gods, and monsters. But again, that’s for another essay.

This is short blip to set the tone. To set the stage for a theoretical dive into the possible impact Magick – specifically ‘Western’ Magick’, if you could even call it that given it’s long history of appropriation – has had on the trajectory of society as a whole.
I don’t want to throw the baby completely out with the bathwater. I’ve learned so much from countless followers of the Western Hermeticism, and I refuse to call every exchange and hybridization of Magickal systems complete appropriation. The Hermetic tradition itself has a long history of scholars and practitioners travelling to far-off lands to be initiated into new traditions by masters who considered these students worthy. I would love to live in a world where the free exchange of occult knowledge and the cultivation of Magickal presence is considered an art and science equal in caliber to mathematics and physics.

We don’t live that world. We live in a world built on theft and cities built on the graves of ancient cultures. We live in a world scarred by a nation purportedly led by the divine will of ‘God’.

And it’s very possible Angels did it.