Occult Traditions

Damon Zacharias Lycourinos, Editor

May 2012

According to its true, living meaning, Tradition is neither servile conformity to what has been, nor a sluggish perpetuation of the past into the present. Tradition, in its essence, is something simultaneously meta-historical and dynamic: it is an overall ordering force, in service of principles that have the chrism of a superior legitimacy.

- Julius Evola

Within a mundane and simple arena of understanding and experience, the word 'occult', which derives from the Latin word 'occultus', refers to anything aspiring to knowledge of the hidden, secret and clandestine. However, if one is to dwell deeper into the arcane dialectics of the holy matrimony of the macrocosm and microcosm it becomes apparent, and not always in a logical and pleasant fashion, that more is to be whispered, unveiled and conjured in regards to the occult.

Since the dawn of ages men and women have sought a glimpse of occult gnosis within the awesome natural performance of ritual, the slithering flow of the elements, the sensational sounds of the spheres, the iconic form of dreams undreamt and now awoken, the irrational whispering of mystical verse, the silence of contemplation and the passion drenched erotic thirst for life, death and rebirth. Unlike the priesthood of convention and dogmatism, these men and women, the Magos, have been a visible representation of spiritual virility, the human condition and many times the romantic antinomian ethos refusing the dictates of conventional society, morality and metaphysical culture whilst aligning themselves purely with the laws of the pure forces of the cosmos. They employed a multitude of arcane symbols reflecting other dimensions of spiritual rapture; they howled barbarous names of holy and unholy power in the wilderness; they communed with gods and goddesses deep within their own heavenly and earthly abodes; they conjured angels and demons within and outside geometrical patterns of spiritual authority; they glimpsed into the present reflecting itself through the future and echoing from the past; they have been hunted, praised, deified and condemned to the abyss... yet they are still amongst us, brothers and sisters, essentially attempting to adapt the Occult to a disenchanted world, a world which no longer harbours a dimension of irreducible mystery based upon an experience of the sacred as present in the daily world, a world that is decadent, materialistic, mortally egocentric, delusional, imbalanced and suffocated.

Contents:

• Conjuring Magical Assistants in the Greek Magical Papyri - Damon Zacharias Lycourinos
• The Spell of Pnouthis as a Mystery Rite in the Greek Magical Papyri - Damon Zacharias Lycourinos
• Waters Animating and Annihilating Apotheosis by Drowning in the Greek Magical Papyri - Aaron Cheak
• The Hierarchical Cosmos: Occult Theology as a Direct Continuation of Neoplatonism - Christopher A. Plaisance
• From Roots to Fruits: A History of the Grimoire Tradition - David Rankine
• A Source of the Key of Solomon: The Magic Treatise or Hygromancy, or Epistle to Rehoboam - Ioannis Marathakis
• The Icelandic Tradition of Magic: Analysis of a Late-Eighteenth Century Icelandic Galdrabók - Christopher A. Smith
• From Conjuror to Philosopher: A Comparative Analysis of Medieval and Renaissance Angel Magic - Christopher A. Plaisance
• Dining with the Dead: A Canaanite View of Death and Necromancy - Tess Dawson
• Composite Incenses and Incense Attributions: A Historical Survey - Ioannis Marathakis
• The Science of Omens: Divining the Will of the Gods - Gwendolyn Toynton
• Seth, the Red One of Chaos and Equilibrium - Damon Zacharias Lycourinos
• Evolian Sex, Magic, and Power - Damon Zacharias Lycourinos
• Wizards at War: Buddhism and the Occult in Thailand - Gwendolyn Toynton
• Woman was the Altar - The Wiccan Great Rite: Sex, Tea, and Religion - Sorita d’Este
• Treading the Spiral Maze: Changing Consciousness in Wiccan Ritual - Melissa Harrington
• Akephalos Being an Attempted Restoration of the Rite of the Headless One, according to the Stele of Jeu the Hieroglyphist - Matthew Levi Stevens
• The Holy Guardian Angel: A Golden Thread in the Tapestry of Being and Becoming - Companion Abraxas
• The Eucharistic Feast of Agathodaimon - Companion Abraxas
• The Rite of the Solar and Lunar Mysteries of the Altar of Eros for the Consecration of the Talismans of Helios and Selene - ΔΑΜΩΝ
• The Calling and Adoration of Aion, and the Spell of the Mystic Flame - ΔΑΜΩΝ
• The Hymnic Adoration and Invocation of Thoth - ΔΑΜΩΝ