>>24685799
>>24685803
I will just add to these excellent posts that, in my personal experience, the only magical ability possessed by people active in this scene is their capacity to transmute your money into drugs and then those drugs into vomit on your couch.

Note also that the modern occult, which holds basically to liberal ideals of freedom as the ability to sate one's appetites and to achieve whatever it is one just so happens to desire, and a sort of moral anti-realism is basically a total inversion of all prior practices in this area. These people claim they are part of a lineage going back to the Middle Ages or Antiquity, but all the related stuff from those periods is deeply religious, spiritual, and philosophical. The philosophy of the pre-moderns is very focused on asceticism, the development of virtue, virtue as a means of attaining true freedom and self-determination, etc. Modern occultism is basically just taking some of the superficial aesthetic forms of the old tradition and then doing modern liberalism over it, with some obscurantistism layered over it. There is also a lot of syncretism, but in a funny sort of way where "really the Platonists and Hindu mystics were actually closer to Nietzsche!"

Freedom is not about having one's actions be underdetermined. Action that is determined by nothing would necessarily be random and arbitrary, the opposite of freedom. Freedom is the self-determining capacity to actualize and communicate the good. The biggest limits on freedom are ignorance and weakness of will.

Man doesn't create himself from the aether; he is not self-moving. Neither is he wholly powerless over his own acts. One can be relatively more or less self-determining and self-governing, to the extent that one has unified oneself and is no longer ruled over by ignorance, passion, and the lower appetites.

As Saint Augustine says: "...the wicked man, though a king, is a slave. And not only the slave of a single man, but what is worse, a slave of as many masters as he has vices."