Hey, how do you feel about how some Tumblr witches, psychics, etc. downplay the abilities of certain entities that are typically characterized as demonic or can physically harm you, even when other people are sharing their very real and often serious encounters with those entities?

ofwoodandbone:

“I want to summon Shax, but I don’t think I need to follow the rituals in the Lesser Key because he either wouldn’t want to harm me or wouldn’t be able to. If I don’t believe he can, he can’t.” 

I’ve seen it spread around that this kind of thinking is ‘UPG’ or ‘pulling from personal beliefs’, but both have been drilled into the New Age mentality. It’s been taught to every practitioner who has picked up an occult book from Barnes and Noble or Urban Outfitters (yes, I’ve seen them there and it hurts). 

One of the New Age movements’ key points is that ‘YOU have the power to control EVERYTHING in the Universe if YOU just BELIEVE it and INTEND it’. 
Belief and intention. 
Both strikingly underlined in New Age operations, and both majorly absent in many old workings, like those coming from grimoire traditions. 

New age witchcraft books have the same undercurrent of thinking, that if you don’t believe in something, you don’t give it power. Or if you intend for something to end up a certain way, it will. And that might be so when you’re staying within those systems and using New Age spirit methods like channeling. 

But when you’re trying to apply them to systems and spirits that predate that thinking, you’re running into a fucking wreck. Those spirits don’t care about beliefs. They’ll make you go mad. 

And I’m not even going to go into the fact that so much of the witchcraft pushed in pop culture is stemming from ceremonial magic, but has effectively been castrated because its practitioners have removed the ceremony, thus making it a system of beliefs without operation. 

Tea for another day.