Description:
Join us for a stimulating livestream interview with occultist and author Jason Miller as we explore the nuanced domain of strategic sorcery. Jason Miller, recognised for his profound contributions to contemporary magical practices, will illuminate the theoretical underpinnings and practical applications of strategic sorcery, a methodology that synergises ancient esoteric traditions with modern pragmatic strategies.
In this discourse, we will examine the foundational principles of strategic sorcery, distinguishing it from other magical paradigms through its focus on pragmatic and measurable outcomes. The conversation will delve into the integration of diverse magical systems within Miller’s framework, the role of disciplined practice, and the ethical dimensions of employing sorcery in various facets of daily life.
The interview aims to provide an in-depth analysis of how strategic sorcery can be employed to effect transformative changes, encompassing personal growth and professional advancement. Miller will elucidate his methodological approaches, offering both theoretical insights and practical guidance, making this session invaluable for both seasoned practitioners and those newly acquainted with the occult.
ABOUT OUR GUEST
Jason Miller (Inominandum) has devoted 35 years to studying practical magic in its many forms. He is the author of six books, including Consorting With Spirits and the now classic Protection and Reversal Magick. He teaches several courses online including the Strategic Sorcery One Year Course, The Sorcery of Hekate Training, and the Black School of Saint Cyprian.

He lives with his wife and children in the mountains of Vermont. Find out more at www.StrategicSorcery.net.

Support Angela’s Symposium

• Speaker: Dr Angela Puca
  Hello symposiasts. I’m Dr Angela Puca, Religious Studies PhD, and this is your own online resource for the academic study of magic, esotericism, Paganism, Shamanism, and all things occult. As you will have seen in the intro, this project of delivering free academic knowledge for you, normally in my episodes, is based on peer-reviewed scholarship. As you know, during my interviews, I interview both academics and practitioners. But anyway, my project of bridging the gap between academics and practitioners is funded by you guys, so I would really appreciate it if you consider supporting my work with PayPal, Ko-fi, Patreon. There are lots of ways; you will find all of them in the info box. And don’t forget to sign up for my newsletter because you will get more updates and news about my work. So now that the housekeeping, or the symposium keeping, is done, I can bring on our special guest today. Hi Jason.

Meet Jason Miller

• Speaker: Jason Miller
  Hello, how are you?

Books

• Speaker: Dr Angela Puca
  I’m very excited to be talking with you. I was mentioning earlier that I’ve been familiar with your books since before I started my academic journey. So this is very exciting for me and it was nice to hear that you were watching my channel, especially the interviews apparently.

• Speaker: Jason Miller
  Yeah, yeah, no, I love it. You’re brilliant.

• Speaker: Dr Angela Puca
  Thank you. So tell us a bit more about yourself for the viewers that are not familiar with your work, which I think is unlikely, but who knows?

Jason Miller Introduces Himself

• Speaker: Jason Miller
  So, yeah, I call myself a sorcerer, and that’s because I guess I’ve been around the block a few times. I’m not nailed to any one corner of the esoteric world, for good or for ill. I had some psychic experiences when I was younger, and, or maybe I’m just crazy, that’s always a possibility, right? But for whatever reason, they always stuck with me, and when I got to my teens, I started exploring mysticism and esotericism. While I was still in high school, even though I grew up in this nothing town in New Jersey, I instantly found a Rosicrucian teacher who was a teacher at my high school. She taught me protection exercises and kind of guided me on how to read some books critically to get worth out of them without believing every last thing that the author said, which is how I hope people read me. And also a rootwork practitioner, Walter, who had a conjure shop in the town next to mine, and then John Myrdhin Reynolds, or Vajranatha. I think he’s the first Westerner ever to be ordained as a Ngagpa, a sort of Tibetan Buddhist sorcerer priest.

Early Influences: OTO to First Book

• Speaker: Jason Miller
  And so, yeah, I had encountered all these people before I was even an adult. None of them sort of took me and said, “I will teach you,” or anything like that. I mean, they all taught me, but they all helped guide me and cultivate my interests and advised me when necessary. It was great, and so that began my sort of interest in the occult. Then I drifted into the OTO for a little while. I was one of the founding members of Thelesis Encampment, or Lodge now, in Philadelphia. I drifted back out of the OTO, as so many do, and I went to Nepal. I was studying Tibetan Buddhism, so I travelled to and lived in Nepal between 1999 and 2000. I came back and continued those studies but also opened up to a larger world. That’s sort of when I started focusing a lot on practices relating to Hecate. It’s also when, a few years later, I started writing and teaching. I wrote an article for Witchvox called… Oh God, I can’t even remember the name of it now. I think it was like “Spellcrafting the Real Witches’ Craft” because they had these themed months on witchcraft, right? This theme was about what really makes spells work, and of course, it was just filled with people posting little mini-articles like all that you need is your intent. Nothing really matters: the colours don’t matter, the herbs don’t matter, nothing really matters, just believe in your intent, dreams, and your fairy wishes. Then an author, Carl McColman, wrote a piece and insinuated basically that spellcraft was just a big distraction away from the proper religion that paganism could be if it would just let go of all this wackadoodle spell stuff. So that drove me to kind of argue with him and say no, this stuff matters. If you want to look at where the witch’s craft is over time, I think you could trace it easier through spells, through people that actually cared enough to write down what they were doing. When you study it, there’s a real kind of coherence to it; it’s not just thoughts and whatever you want. So that got published on Witchvox, and then New Page Press, which was Carl’s publisher at the time, wrote to me. I thought they were going to be mad that I was arguing with Carl, but they said no, we’d love for you to write a book. And then, shortly thereafter, Carl McColeman became a Catholic and now writes books on contemplative Catholicism, which are great, by the way. He’s not big on spellcraft; he’s not even big on novenas and things in Catholicism. He kind of rolls his eyes at the “Novena Catholics” that do the kind of Catholic folk magic. But when it comes to Julian of Norwich and Meister Eckhart and that mystical tradition, he’s really quite good.

• Speaker: Dr Angela Puca
  He was clearly more into mysticism than magic, I guess.

• Speaker: Jason Miller
  Yeah, and that’s, you know, I mean, that’s fine. That’s his experience.

Importance of Magick in a Spiritual Path

• Speaker: Dr Angela Puca
  So what is magic to you? Why do you think that magic matters even in a spiritual path?

Magick is a Human Need

• Speaker: Jason Miller
  Well, you know, magic to me is the art of influencing minds and events through unknown means, right? I guess it’s close to that Crowley nugget of causing change in accordance with will, but I think that’s too broad. I think when people say it causes change, it loses the idea that it’s an influence, that there are other causes at work that might be competing. So if somebody just thinks, well, I’m going to do this spell and then this is going to happen, well, maybe, but if you’re trying to make it snow in July, maybe not, because there are too many other influences. No matter how much influence you want to throw in there, it’s probably not enough to make it snow in July, at least not in most of the planet. So I like influence. Why do I think it’s important? I think, for lack of a better word, it’s just a human drive, it’s a human need. If it wasn’t, it would be gone by now, right? The world turned its back on it. So much of English literature about it, which magicians today use and rely on as sources, was actually written to discredit magic, right? Like Scott’s “Discoverie of Witchcraft,” Casaubon’s “True and Faithful Relation,” even Weyer’s “Pseudomonarchia Daemonum” – they were all sort of written to be critiques of magic and witchcraft, and now they’re primary sources for magicians and witches. So I think that just like, who is it, Pascal? There’s a God-shaped hole in the heart. Maybe there’s a magic-shaped hole in the head, and so there are people who feel this as real or as more real as any other part of their life.

I guess I’m one of those people. I don’t think it’s something that I try to push on people that I think they should do, but it’s something that some people are drawn to, pulled to, some people would even say forced into by their experience with spirits. There are stories all over the world of people being obsessed with spirits and the shaman or the priest taking them in and saying, well, you need to be trained or this is going to really disturb your life. So there, yeah, there’s something for that.

Sure, here is the continuation of the extraction of the sections from the document:

The Buddha and the Sorcerer Parable

• Speaker: Dr Angela Puca
  Yeah, I guess my question was coming from an old conversation that I had with one of my professors at university. He’s now retired, but at the time he was a professor of Indian philosophies and religions, so there was also Buddhism. He was himself very akin to that kind of philosophy, so he and I had a very long discussion at one point where I was arguing the importance of magic for a spiritual path. He was quoting from the Buddhist Canon, saying that there’s a passage in the Canon where the Buddha meets a sorcerer, and the sorcerer says, “After 30 years of training, I can finally walk on water to cross the river.” The Buddha replies, “You could have just taken a boat,” and that is to highlight the fact that magic or sorcery is considered, in a way, a distraction from the ultimate goal that is Enlightenment. My reply to that story to my professor was that the point of the sorcerer was not to cross the river; it was to get to such a state of connection and unity with the river that really what mattered wasn’t to cross the river, but to achieve the state of connectedness. I don’t see how that is different from a path towards Enlightenment. I think that I’ve always had this pet peeve that many people don’t see that magic, not necessarily, but it can definitely also be a mystical path because in order to achieve certain results, you have to go through that immersiveness, that state of connectedness that goes beyond the way that we mundanely interact with the world.

Sorcery and Enlightenment

• Speaker: Jason Miller
  Absolutely. And of course, in Tibetan Buddhism, magic and mysticism sort of really become strong bedfellows. I think even there you have warnings to sort of not lose the plot, right? Like, so you have a recognition that some practitioners might get so embroiled in offerings and ransom rituals and things like this that they sort of forget about Enlightenment. But I agree with you completely. There is no reason that mysticism and magic just don’t exist but feed off one another and inform one another. I always thought of it, and one of my older teachers taught me, that it was like this light that shines in you. You reflect it outward into the world through your actions, so let your sorcery reflect that mystical Enlightenment.

What is Achievable through Magick

• Speaker: Dr Angela Puca
  Yeah, so I was thinking that I always found that your books are very practical and useful. So I think that if practitioners are listening, they would really benefit from reading your books for practical advice. On that note, I’d like to enter more into the conversation about Practical Magic, or Strategic Sorcery as you call it. You mentioned earlier with the metaphor of the snow in July that there are things that are achievable and things that are not achievable. So how can practitioners assess whether a magical goal is achievable or not, and what do you think makes magic effective or more effective towards a goal? Because you describe magic as an influence, and everything that you use or do not use will contribute to add or subtract to that influence. So, yeah, I guess the question is—two questions are probably the case here—so one question is how can a practitioner assess if the goal that they have is not achievable with magic, and how can they make it achievable with magic, if possible, if it is still within the realm of possibilities?

Divination

• Speaker: Jason Miller
  Well, I mean, some people would answer right away, “divination,” right? You can divine if this is within the sphere of possibility, and that’s true to an extent. I would say there’s also a feel to it after a while. Just like you said that it wasn’t about running across the river; it was about connection. You become connected over the years to fields of probability, I guess you might call them. Sometimes you’ll get a sense that something is possible, even if it sounds like it’s not. Then at other times, something that seems on paper like it should be something we can influence doesn’t. Ultimately, look at it like you look at anything else and decide: is this worth the time and effort just based upon what I know in an ordinary way? You know, if I decide tomorrow that I’m going to go and climb Mount Everest without any further training or anything like that, I’d say I have like a 99.9% chance of dying. But if I then set about training and then using magic to help me along the way, then I think magic can increase my chances of maybe doing that in a year or so, right? Maybe drop it down to an 80% chance of dying. But I don’t need any kind of divination or spirit to tell me that; I can just look at the facts on the ground and say, okay, this seems like this. Now, sometimes magic produces miracles, like really strange effects, paranormal effects, stuff that is written about in books that seems like a storybook result. These things happen. I think every practitioner has stories about this, but they’re not repeatable; they don’t happen all the time, which is why you don’t see us on the news being hired by governments to manipulate foreign powers and things like that.

Role of Probability in Magic

• Speaker: Jason Miller
  So you kind of have to bank on probability a little bit. You can’t bet your money on a miracle. This is sort of the lottery magic, right? People are like, “Oh, but I just need to win the lottery.” You’d probably be better off just figuring out how to make ends meet and then using magic to help you get that done because the chances of winning the lottery are, you know, it would be easier to get struck by lightning twice. So, I mean, I’m really kind of a person who likes to tell people, “Listen, once you’ve accepted that magic is real, go back to your ordinary way of thinking. Integrate that into how you normally think. Think mechanistically that this is an influence. Think, okay, what are the probabilities of this happening?” Think about it in an ordinary kind of way; just include spirits and spells into that worldview. Don’t get all woo-woo; don’t get lost in, “I’ve opened my mind, and now anything might be true.” I guess I preach the magical to the mundane thinkers, and I preach mundane thinking to the overly magical thinkers. Come back to reality, come back to common sense. Think of spirits as you would think of people, and a lot of the questions just go out the door.

Using the Mundane with Magick

• Speaker: Jason Miller
  Now, as for what increases your chances: number one, interacting with ordinary efforts. People never hear me right when I say this, so I’ll try to say it again. Some people just think, “Oh, well, then there’s magic and then there’s the mundane, and of course I’m doing the mundane, but I want to focus on the magic.” But it’s not that simple. The magic you do should be informed by all the mundane steps, right? If somebody wants to find a job, they should figure out how they’re going to network and then build their magic around that model of how they’re going to network to find the job. All the other mundane steps inform the magic, and then the results from the magic will inform the next mundane steps. They are interconnected in a way that we can’t just say, “Just give me the magic stuff; trust that I’m doing all the mundane stuff.” It doesn’t work like that. So that’s number one.

Using Influence on Others and Spirits

• Speaker: Jason Miller
  Number two is to figure out the level of influence that you are willing to put forth. I think we have examples of simple magic and we have examples of extreme magic. I’ve sometimes said about influence, like, well, you know, if I’m trying to charm another person’s mind or something like that, it’s an influence upon them; it’s not mind control. People don’t cast a spell and then suddenly the target of their spell is like, “Yes, I love you,” and then follow them around. Pagan conferences would look a lot different; they would be filled with supermodels and, you know. But then people will say, “But there are rituals of mind control and influence.” And like, yes, there are. Traditionally, there are, and a lot of them involve people ingesting things and things that would basically amount to kidnapping and brainwashing. And that should be off the table for everyone. Nobody should be thinking, “Well, this is what the spell says to do, so I’m going to go ahead and do that.” That should be off everyone’s plate. So you have to think: what am I willing to do ethically? What am I willing to offer? I’ve seen people get involved with spirits or gods, and in their communications, whether these are valid communications or not, they think, “Well, if I offer more, if I offer better if I offer more, maybe I’ll get what I want.” And so people start having their altar overflowing with rotting food, or they start channelling money that would be used for necessary things into offerings for the spirits. And I always say, listen, keep it sane.
  The spirit can say, “This is what I want,” and you can tell the spirit, “It’s nice that you want that, but no, I’m not going to get you a $200 bottle of Johnny Walker just because it’s blue and you’re Jupiter.” That’s not going to happen. I mean, for me, now maybe it will happen, but I’d be like, “You pay for it then.” Get me the $10,000 I asked for and I’ll get you a whole bottle of Johnny Walker Blue, not a problem. So there are ways to do this, but you can increase your connection, you can increase the time spent. I’m big on mantras and chanting from my Buddhist training and from my Hecate work, and you know I tell people, listen, it really does matter how long you spend doing this. If you just sit down for five minutes and say your chant, you get a little result. But if you sit down for a few hours and you keep finding yourself distracted but keep moving yourself back, then it really does build up this force, this power, this connection with the gods and spirits that will do more than just five minutes. So it’s about effort.

Will Spirits Help Achieve Goals

• Speaker: Dr Angela Puca
  And do you think that the type of… because I know that you’re very big on working with spirits to achieve things magically as opposed to just doing it by yourself without any help from any spirit. So do you think that there are certain spirits that will increase your likelihood of achieving something magically, that will allow you to leverage a higher degree of influence towards your goal?

You Don’t Get Coffee from the CEO of Starbucks

• Speaker: Jason Miller

Yeah, there are. I’m not against people not working with spirits, by the way, because ultimately I believe that you are a spirit and I am a spirit. So there is power and influence and the ability to work magic without calling upon additional spirits. I know that some people who are approaching things through a fairly strictly grimoire-magic lens don’t like that, but I would still argue that is the case. But yeah, there are certain spirits. I hate to use the word “more powerful than others” because it’s a little bit misleading. Sometimes a local spirit that you contact through offering will be able to do something for you that, you know, the Arch Duke from the Goetia of Solomon will not be able to do, even though that spirit is this very powerful and well-known spirit. I explain this to people; it’s almost like if you have… I forget who the CEO of Starbucks is, but if you have the CEO of Starbucks on speed dial and you want a coffee, do you speed dial the CEO of Starbucks or do you talk to the barista at the Starbucks? Even though she’s “less powerful,” I go right to the barista and ask him or her to make me a coffee and I give the offering in exchange. I mean, I guess you could say it’s all under the umbrella of the CEO. So it’s not about power; people have this sort of weird Pokémon idea like, “Well, I’m going to call upon Astaroth because she has, you know, 150 hit points, whereas this other lower Vassago only has 20,” and it doesn’t really work like that. Sometimes those bigger vast spirits are wonderful and can provide a whole legion of spirits that will get you right back down to the local chain anyway. But sometimes it’s better to go local, or sometimes it’s about the spirits that you have a connection with, right?

Using Aphrodite for Money Working

• Speaker: Jason Miller
  I was talking last year with somebody who has spent years connecting with Venus and Aphrodite, and she was interested in money magic. She’s like, “You know, so I guess I should start working with Jupiter.” And I was like, well, yes, but it’s not like there isn’t a way to generate money using the powers of Venus and Aphrodite. Influence in the business world is everything, and so she can present that influence there. It’s not just about love magic; it’s about emotion, it’s about influence. So if you’re trying to sell something to someone, emotions and influence—if you make people feel—then that’s a huge benefit there, as opposed to “give me money, give me money, give me money, Jupiter, give me money,” right? So, you know, if you’ve got this connection, if you’ve got this relationship, that can be a huge advantage as opposed to, “Well, I looked this spirit up and that’s the spirit for money, so I’m going to dial a deity and cold call.” So yeah, I think spirits are a lot like people in that regard.

The Variable Power Attributed to Spirits

• Speaker: Dr Angela Puca
  So, yeah, it’s interesting how, you know, this conversation around spirits, because there is generally the idea that certain spirits are more powerful than others. And, you know, it really depends on how you define powerful because in the realm of magic, it really depends on what it is that you want to achieve, and things may be very specific. So, as you said, if you know what you want is something that a local spirit can get you, it doesn’t make sense to call upon one of the kings in the Goetia.

Magick Evolves over Time

• Speaker: Jason Miller
  But, you know, I mean, even when we look at the spirits in the Goetia, people feel very almost constrained by those descriptions, right? Like, this is what the spirit does, this is what the book says, so therefore I am trusting that the book has the whole picture. But why do we think that, right? And people will say, “Well, it’s consistent through the Medici Code text and through Weyer and through the others,” and it’s because they were copied. It’s not like each individual practitioner produced one of these books; they literally just copied from one book to the other. So ultimately, it boils down to one person who decided that this is what Astaroth does. And, you know, I have communicated with Astaroth God knows how many times since I was a young man. I’ve never been stank out of the room with a noxious odour that I needed a ring to make her stop, as is described in the books. So, I mean, I value the books, I love the books, don’t get me wrong. But there’s also, you have to look at things and say, you know, even historically, how much of the record do we really have available? I mean, you would be better able to answer that than I would.

But, you know, we never know the whole picture. And then even now, as a modern practitioner, why do we treat magic as if it’s this thing that doesn’t evolve and get better over time? People have this idea that magic degenerates over time, like, “Oh, well, if this is earlier, that must be true, whereas everything after that must suck.” And I don’t think the world works that way. I don’t think anything works that way. Even religion doesn’t really work that way. I mean, for some people it does, but why is magic—like, none of us go to the doctor and think, “I don’t want those antibiotics, I want leeches,” right? Like, “I want leeches and I want trepanation.” None of us do that, despite there being beautiful texts describing these things. So what I’ve been really fond of saying is magic is a real thing and it works similar to how other real things work.

Assume that if it is More Ancient it is More Valid

• Speaker: Dr Angela Puca
  I think that I agree with you, and I always find it fascinating also because, obviously, since I’m an anthropologist of religion, I try to also understand why people think the way that they do. It is interesting because, why do people believe that if something is older and more ancient, it is necessarily better or more desirable in a magic sense?

Does Age indicate Authenticity

• Speaker: Jason Miller
  They might even think actually it’s worse because it’s outdated. I mean, with everything that is technology, we tend to think like that, you know, that something very old is likely outdated and perhaps is not going to work that well in our time and age. But when it comes to magic and religion, it seems that people tend to value the antiquity a lot. It is associated with authenticity. I think part of the reason why people think like that is that there is a need for something that is authoritative. With magic, you don’t really have a central dogma, and that’s one of the beautiful things about esotericism and different esoteric traditions. You don’t have a central dogma; you don’t have something that gives you the stamp of approval, okay, so this is authentic. This can be scary for many people. So maybe one thing that they might leverage on is the fact that if something comes from a very ancient grimoire, then it must be authoritative because if people have done it for so many centuries, then it must be authentic. So I think that’s one of the reasons why. I think for me, as I said, being a scholar, I try to unpack why people think the way that they do and what it is that lends a certain thing a sense of authority. I think because magic is so elusive and we live in a world that tells you that magic is not even a thing, then people and practitioners need extra support, you know, even for themselves, to feel like what they’re doing is actually valid, to give a sense of validity. But I think that often practitioners run into the opposite problem of appearing less authoritative because they claim an antiquity where there isn’t any, like with Wicca, for instance, or with other practices that people pretty much make up the fact that they are more ancient than they actually are. Whereas if they were to say, “Oh, this is a new practice, it is very effective,” and, you know, it could have been very well a new technology. It’s like the discovery of the internet or something that is new and much more effective than what we had before. So claiming antiquity where there isn’t any is actually doing the opposite of what people are trying to do.

And then the fourth one I think of is meaning, right? Like there are some things that maybe aren’t particularly functional, don’t produce any result, nor are they ancient, nor rooted deeply in a culture, but they just give people a framework that they find useful. Sometimes there are New Age practices and things like this. I have seen people find comfort and a valuable framework in them, so who am I to say it’s not authentic? So, I tend to just divide up this idea of what’s authentic and what’s not and just say, well, how are we measuring this? Because if I’m just talking function and you’re talking history, but we’re just using the word authentic, then we’re using like you’re measuring distance, I’m measuring volume, and we’re not even talking about the same thing.

And at the same time, I think that there is some kind of authenticity that people should be able to look at and say, okay, you’ve just pulled this completely out of your butt, and it’s just made up and wildly different than anything ever. Like, I had one person years ago tell me, “Oh, Kali is the same as Mary, and she worships Kali and Jesus, and this is how things are in India,” and I’m like, no, it’s not; it’s really not. So, there is a sort of wild, crazy thing where you want to be able to say, if that’s your thing, cool, but don’t try to make it something that it’s not. And I respect when people point that out and call it out. I try to be careful about letting people know, so if something I’m teaching is something that I arrived at with a spirit or through my own work, I try to let them know. If it’s something that’s rooted in history, in either an older practice or a cultural practice, I try to let them know. If I’ve changed it from its original form, I try to let them know that too. I say, “Listen, this is inspired by spiritualist baptism of the dead, but we’re taking it to this different place.” So, I just think people need to be clear about things in this day and age.

Honesty is Important – Italian Witchcraft in America

• Speaker: Dr Angela Puca And I think honesty is important because, you know, the problem is that when you find meaning or even effectiveness in something, just state it. Don’t make up things that are just not true and not accurate because that is going to also damage the effectiveness that you have found and that could be valuable to share. An example of that comes to mind is with all the books on Italian witchcraft in America. As you may know, I’m Italian and I’ve done a PhD on Italian witchcraft and shamanism. It really took me a long time to make a video on Stregheria because I didn’t want to be disrespectful towards the people in America who have found value in that, but that is not authentic at all. So, my problem with Stregheria and other things that are said to be Italian witchcraft in America, which are not, is the fact that they claim to be Italian witchcraft. But if they were to say, “Oh, this is something that for us Italian Americans who have an Italian heritage is meaningful to us, it is allowing us to reconnect with our roots in our own way, even though it doesn’t correspond to what Italians do,” that would be absolutely fine.
  And that’s why I’m also very sensitive to the fact that many Americans with Italian heritage do find value and meaning in those kinds of practices, even though they don’t reflect in any shape or form what actually happens in Italy. But the moment I have a problem with it is when they claim that it is Italian witchcraft. I have personally witnessed Raven Grimassi arguing with actual Italians who could actually speak Italian. I’m not kidding, that happened. When you get to the point where you can’t even speak Italian and you’re arguing with actual Italians, telling them that you know what Italian witchcraft is, then we really get into the fraud realm. It’s like, wait, what? But I do realise that many people who follow that American system have found value in it. So that’s why I say I’m not trying to bash people who follow that kind of tradition, but it’s important to be honest about what people are doing because then you can find value in what it is for what it is and not for what it is not and you’re pretending it to be.

Charles Leland and Aradia

• Speaker: Jason Miller
  I couldn’t agree more. When I was growing up, Charles Leland’s books meant the world to me. When I was young, you know, Aradia was inspiring. And then, you know, later I moved to Philadelphia where he lived and actually he helped found the art museum there. I got to talk with somebody who is an expert, and he was like, “Yeah, no, none of this is really accurate at all.” And I, you know, I accepted that. Just, you know, that’s the way it is. It’s so funny because it reminds me almost of the Italian language. Have you ever been to New Jersey or the New York area?

New Jersey – Italian Americans

• Speaker: Dr Angela Puca
  No, but I know it’s full of Italian Americans.

Italian American Pronunciation

• Speaker: Jason Miller
  Right, so I grew up in New Jersey with a lot of Italian Americans. And so, you know, I would go out and I would ask for, say, you know, capicola, and they would say, “No, it’s pronounced gabagool.” And I was like, okay, if that’s your Italian American, then, but if you say so. Throughout my whole life, living in New Jersey and North Jersey and in New York, you’ll hear people, you know, they don’t want a cannoli; they want a ganol, or, you know, they want gabagool instead of capicola. And then when I was older, I travelled to Italy and I was like, oh yeah, the Italian Americans don’t know how Italian works.

Finding Roots Admirable

• Speaker: Dr Angela Puca
  No, but I think it is still valuable because I’ve also encountered many Italian Americans through my work. I think for most of them it is admirable that they are trying to reconnect with their heritage and their roots. So that’s totally admirable. I think the only moment where it becomes a bit problematic is when they pretend to know things that, you know, maybe if they were to frame it as something that is part of the Italian-American community, that would be accurate. Whereas when they say, “Oh, this is Italian,” you know, that just becomes inaccurate. Sorry, that was a digression.

• Speaker: Jason Miller
  That is a… no, it’s fun, and it’s a similar concept, it’s a similar idea.

More about Working With Hecate

• Speaker: Dr Angela Puca
  Yeah, and I appreciate the fact that, for instance, in your books you always clarify when something comes from your own interactions, like in Protection and Reversal Magic where you talk about your work with Hecate or Hekate. I appreciate the fact that you say, “This is something that has happened from my interactions and I offer it to you,” as opposed to claiming something that is not really there. But could you tell us more about your relationship with Hecate, especially since you have the famous Sorcery of Hecate? Actually, one of my colleagues has taken your course as part of his fieldwork. You probably don’t know.

Meditation at a Charnel Ground

• Speaker: Jason Miller
  I don’t know if you know that or not, but I don’t know for sure who it is. There are a couple of people… I am very proud to have appeared in a couple of people’s dissertations and things like that. I think Ben Joffe gave a paper comparing me talking about inner heat with Dr. Nida, who of course is a much better source for Tantra than I am. But anyway, this all started strangely enough when I was in Nepal and I was meditating on corpses at the charnel ground of Pashupatinath. It’s very similar to Varanasi. There are ghats on the river; they bring the bodies, they burn them, and Kuenzang Dorji, who I was living with at the time, had suggested I go there and spend three days meditating on impermanence. And so I did. As soon as they started with the funeral pyres, I was there. I would spend all day identifying with the corpse. But of course, my mind is not so sharp that I can just rest in meditative absorption for 12 hours, right? Twelve minutes is a lot; that’s a major success. So I kept going back to it, but things happen. When you meditate, what in Tibet they call nyams – strange things that you see, weird phenomena. Things move closer, things move further away, people just suddenly disappear from your field of view. You can still see everything that’s there, but there are no people or animals. It happens to me a lot if I meditate for a long time. That’s not to say that they really disappear; I just, you know, it’s in my perception. So at this one point, everyone disappears.

Jason Miller Meets Hecate

• Speaker: Jason Miller
  And this figure with two torches in reddish clothes that I did not recognise comes up across the river and says, “You are to offer a supper to me. You are about to go home,” which was true enough; in a few months I would be returning to the States. “When you return, offer me a supper. I have something to teach you.” And I was sort of like, she doesn’t look like a dakini; this is probably just a brain fart, right? So I said, “Okay, sure, whatever, no problem, but I have to go back to meditating.” I just pulled my attention back to the corpse in front of me, and then things returned to normal. But unlike an ordinary interruption, this stuck with me. I think sometimes these psychic experiences have a way of feeling more real than ordinary things, and this felt like that. So of course, I go and Google “goddess with two torches” and I recognise Hecate. Now, the part of me that wants to be absolutely just a fantasist will say, I’ve never even heard of Hecate; she just came out of the blue because she’s Hecate. The reality is, I had been an occultist at that point for 20 years. I’m sure I’ve seen images of Hecate, so somewhere in my head, this information was there.

Sure enough, a few months later, I find myself coming back to the States, but I was coming home in two ways. I was returning physically, but I also had made the decision to not pursue becoming a Tibetan lama. I wanted to return to the wider world of magic and occultism. I felt like that was where my talents were needed, where I had a little more freedom to express than within the well-tread grounds of Tibetan Buddhism. So I had made that decision to still practice but to open myself back up to the wider world. I ended up staying with a friend of mine who was an archaeologist, and he helped me dig deeper into Hecate in books, gave me a copy of Steve Ronan’s “The Goddess Hekate” and Van Rudloff’s book on Hecate. I felt really well-armed. So I had this spiritual experience, and then I went and hit the books. If the spiritual experience doesn’t at all match the books, I think it’s fair to say that probably wasn’t Hecate. That was just me fantasising or some other spirit masquerading, but it all seemed to match up, if not perfectly, then still reasonably well.

Jason Encounters Hecate at Pine Barrens

• Speaker: Jason Miller
  So I went to the Pine Barrens. I found the three-way crossroads, I laid out an offering of eggs and honey, and I read the Orphic Hymn and meditated. Then she appeared in this other form with six legs and six arms and three faces, holding various things, very dakini-like in fact. Then four other spirits appeared with different heads, and I wrote about these in “Protection and Reversal Magic.” She said, “These are guardian spirits,” and she told me their names and what elements they were associated with, the directions and all that, and said, “You need to keep offering suppers, and I will keep teaching you,” which is a relationship that we maintain to this day. Twenty-five years later, this is still unfolding for me because I guess I’m thick. It’s like, “You’re a little slow, Jay, so I’ll teach you what you can grasp, and then when you get it, we’ll keep going.” But the thing that blew me away is, in further research, there’s this tetradic form of Hecate that is mentioned, I think, by Michael Sellis—no, some Roman historian; I’m going to have to look it up.

Tetradic Form of Hecate

• Speaker: Jason Miller
  But at any rate, there’s a reference to this tetradic form of Hecate that had the same four heads as the four guardian spirits she introduced me to: that of a bull, a horse, a snake or Hydra head, and a dog’s head. So I was really like, oh, okay, you know, when research and revelation rhyme, that’s really when the good stuff happens. So I kept going, and I started sharing with a few close friends, and we would work the material as it came. Then, you know, I opened it up to a few more people, and then eventually, 15 years later, she finally was… you know, I kept wanting to write a book. I kept wanting to be like, oh, I can’t wait to put this in a book, and she’d be like, no book. And I’m like, but everybody’s doing these incredible… like, this is a golden age for magical books. Like, Andrew Chumbley is making these crazy books out of toad skin, and there’s limited editions, and you know, I want to have a book come out of England that’s made out of unicorn scrotum, and there’s only nine copies, and you know, it’s written in goat’s blood. And she’s like, no, just stop. So then, you know, it was 15 years later when it came around. I was like, okay, you could teach this, but you have to be able to answer people’s questions. This is not a book you can just sit down and forget about; you need to actually teach this. So that’s what I did. And here we are. People are still going; there’s a new cycle starting soon, people are signing up. And she… you know, it was like an “if you build it, they will come” kind of thing, Field of Dreams. So sure enough, that’s what happened, and it’s still going strong. And I mean, not only is it spiritually rewarding, but it’s become the cornerstone of my career.

How is Hecate Different from Other Deities?

• Speaker: Dr Angela Puca
  So, how is Hecate different from other deities that you worked with?

It is not Competition but Relationships

• Speaker: Jason Miller
  Well, I would never kind of compare and say, well, you know, Hecate is awesome and your deities suck because I think it has a lot to do with connection and interaction.

Personal Relationships

• Speaker: Dr Angela Puca
  Yeah, it’s more about your relationship, not how other people interact with other deities.

Hecate is Different for Jason Miller – Direction rather than Goal

• Speaker: Jason Miller
  Hecate is different for me than any other deity I’ve worked with because she is still evolving. In fact, whenever I’ve pressed for the final result, like in Buddhism we have enlightenment, in Christianity we have salvation, and we have all these, you know, samadhi and all these things that people point to and say that’s the end, that’s where you wind up. I would press, like, you know, we have the system now, where does it ultimately lead? The answer is always like, “I’m not done moving beyond. Why do you think you will be done moving beyond in this life? Why do you need to know? Just know the direction you’re headed; that’s the important thing.” When I look at Hecate’s evolution, I look at her in the Theogony, and the way Hesiod writes about her is so completely different from how she appears in the Greek Magical Papyri and the defixiones spells. In the latter, she is this fierce underworld figure, whereas Hesiod depicts her as a caregiving goddess, this Titaness who allies with Zeus and has the ability to go through all the various worlds. Then she appears again in the Chaldean Oracles, utterly different again from how she is in the Papyri. She is this cosmic, transcendent figure where Had and Hadad—like, Had is beyond the beyond manifestation, Hadad is in the empyrean realms of manifestation—but Hecate alone is fully transcendent.
  And that idea that she is the most transcendent and cosmic figure yet also the most imminent and accessible figure. How is it that we can point to this figure, Hecate, going beyond, who is ever moving beyond not only what we conceive of but our ability to conceive, and also this goddess that Greeks would write tablets to and say, “Break my neighbour’s horse’s leg because he really pissed me off”? She works on that level as well. That’s where the beauty of, as we talked about before, magic and mysticism working together hand in hand comes in. These things are not contrary to one another; they inform one another deeply. I think Hecate represents that—the fact that she never ever goes away. She appears especially in Orthodox theologians writing on demonology. They’re not just talking about Satan; they talk about Hecate and the Strophalos. Then later, she appears in Macbeth of all crazy things, right? Why is Shakespeare making the witches worship Hecate in Scotland? But she never goes away. She appears in the strangest places. I think the first time I ever Googled “Hecate PGM,” Hecate in the Papyri Graecae Magicae, the first result was a Russian assault rifle or a Russian sniper rifle. I was like, that’s weird. So yeah, you know, she’s always there around the edges. That’s magic to me. A lot of people talk about, “Oh, this deity contacted me, this deity contacted me.” I’m not like that. This is a unique experience. I teach on other spirits and other saints and gods and things, but those have always been driven by my interests and contact. This was quite different.

Hecate in the Historical Record

• Speaker: Dr Angela Puca
  And how does your relationship with Hecate relate to or is informed or not informed by the historical occurrences of Hecate in the past? Because you mentioned a few things and, of course, some of them are even contradictory. So how much do these historical occurrences matter to you in your own relationship with Hecate?

Historical Records are an Anchor

• Speaker: Jason Miller
  They matter. They’re an anchor. I think that’s the best way to describe it. They’re an anchor. An anchor keeps the boat from drifting off course or out of the area that it wants to be in, but it doesn’t pull the boat down into the water. So when I think about the Theogony and I think about the legend of Persephone and Hecate leading Demeter into the underworld, I think about the PGM, and I think about the defixiones, and I think about the oracles of Hecate that we have records of and everything else, they’re an anchor. For instance, there was a time early on when there was a sort of, I guess you might call it, something occurring in the communication thread between Hecate and me that was more from me than her. And we do this with people sometimes, right? Like, “Well, I want them to think this, so I’m going to interpret everything they say in that light.” I was doing that; I made that mistake, and it led to some things that were not really congruent with her practices at all. So to move forward, I had to recognize those and kind of say, okay, that was an error on my part. This is not something that person would say.

Deep Fake Analogy

• Speaker: Jason Miller
  It’s like the spiritual equivalent of a deep fake, right? Like if somebody tomorrow posts a deep fake, and it’s like Donald Trump saying something incredibly loving and positive to the world, everybody would think, “Oh no, that’s definitely a deep fake. That’s not who he is at all.” Sorry, I shouldn’t talk politics, but I think even his supporters would be like, “That doesn’t sound like him.”

• Speaker: Dr Angela Puca
  I don’t like him anymore. I say, I don’t like him anymore.

Checking Revelation Against History

• Speaker: Jason Miller
  No, yeah, exactly. They would be like, as in, yeah, his supporters would be. So, you know, if something is just completely not in keeping, that would be important to me as a check. If something doesn’t resonate at all with anything, then that would be something that I would look at and say, are we sure we want to make this part of this teaching? Am I getting this right? And sometimes the answer is yes, sometimes the answer is no. Sometimes the answer is, yes, this is what I told you, and you should include this. So, for instance, I use the epithet Hecate Soteira as related to serpents. Now, there is a cave at Soteira where Hecate was worshipped; there is no archaeological evidence that serpents were involved in that worship. So I went back and said, is this correct? Because the epithet occurred, there was a vision of Hecate’s serpent instructions for this sort of serpent movement. But I circled back and said, it’s not that it’s wrong, but I can’t look to that and say, yes, that happened in that cave in history. Hecate said, “No, that’s what I want it to be.” Now, whether that really happened in history and we just don’t know about it, whether it’s spiritually significant, I don’t know. But it’s one of those things where it was a check, and I went back, and she’s like, “No, put it in.” But even now when I teach it, I will clarify and say, this is what we use based on what I was told, but historically speaking, don’t go looking for the cave of Soteira and expect to see serpent artwork or something; it’s not there. So that’s all you can do really as a practitioner, I think, is be honest.

Reconstructionism

• Speaker: Jason Miller
  But also, I’m not a fan of reconstructionism. I’m not a fan of practitioners who are like, “Well, this is what we know of history, so we’re going to live-action role play as if this is all accurate, and if I can’t point to an archaeologist or an anthropologist who can verify this, then it shouldn’t be in my spiritual practice.” That, to

Reconstructivist Spectrum

• Speaker: Dr Angela Puca
  I also met reconstructivists who don’t really associate authenticity with what they do. Obviously, it depends; there’s a spectrum even there. There are some reconstructivists that are just as you describe them, but I’ve also met other reconstructivists for whom it’s more about being very aware that it’s impossible to reconstruct something that happened millennia ago today and things need to be adjusted. They just try to find the most accurate way of doing that possible. I’m thinking about a group in Rome. They are reconstructivists of the Roman religion, and of course, they are aware that Roman religion was not one religion. So they have to, first of all, decide what time period they’re going to refer to and what area they’re going to refer to because for the Romans, it wasn’t one religion; it was a series of different cults. It completely differs massively depending on the specific time frame and the specific area. Even when you talk about Diana—or Diana, as English speakers say—and other gods, you will find every specific geographic area would have their own Diana, their own Apollo. It’s interesting how that has translated with the advent of Catholicism, having the local Madonna. So they have the Madonna of Pompei and different traits and characteristics, just as happened in the past. But my point is that, for instance, this group that I’m thinking of, they try to be as accurate as they can, but they are very aware that what they’re doing is indeed a form of reconstructionism. So it’s never going to be what it was then, and they are just trying to… and for them, it’s not even a matter of authenticity. It’s more a matter of practicing that specific Roman cult in the best way that they can. So I think that there are also ways of being a bit more sensible when it comes to reconstructivism.

Each to Their Own

• Speaker: Jason Miller
  I agree, and I think movements like that are important. There’s a strong root there, obviously, and they preserve a tradition. So, yeah, I think it’s wonderful. There are so many things that are not necessarily my bag or what I find gets my juices flowing, but other people love it, and that’s the way it should be.

Perennialism

• Speaker: Dr Angela Puca
  You also mentioned the fact that there are people who claim that a certain deity is also Mary and also Jesus. That is a very typical thing scholars have pointed out about contemporary esotericism. This has been the case for quite some time, to be fair. Eclecticism has been part of esotericism for a long, long time. I can’t even say when it started, to be honest, because you can see elements of that with Eliphas Levi and the Renaissance. I think it’s always been part of esotericism to a certain degree. But I think the way that we see it now has been very influenced by Theosophy and the idea of perennialism. The Theosophical interpretation of perennialism, because obviously even in the Renaissance you have the Prisca Theologia, but the Theosophical interpretation of perennialism is where everything has one truth. I mean, all traditions and all religions all underlie one truth, so there’s a lot of emphasis on finding the common denominator. Can you still hear me? So, there’s a lot of emphasis on finding the common denominator because that is seen as the kernel of truth and ignoring the cultural specificities. Whereas for academics, of course, it’s the opposite because all the cultural elements are incredibly important and they are an integral part of a specific culture and specific worship. So I guess I was trying to get at the fact that in your books you talk about eclecticism and a sensible way of doing eclecticism as opposed to a way of doing eclecticism which is just mixing lots of stuff randomly. So could you talk a bit more about that? How would you recommend that practitioners go about incorporating elements from different traditions in a way that is more sensible, we can say?

Sensible Eclecticism

• Speaker: Jason Miller
  Yeah, so you’re right, of course, and we see these kinds of blurred lines of traditions and gods morphing from one to another going back forever. I’m looking at an image, an icon, of St Christopher with the dog’s head, which of course comes from Hermanubis, who is Hermes and Anubis put together when the Greeks took over Egypt. And so that kind of tradition, that kind of blending… people have these ideas of firm barriers like this is this, this is that, these are the columns, they never bleed over. And that’s just not how things work, ever. It’s messy; it’s all messy. So the first thing an eclectic should do is recognize that the world is messy and that maybe when everything is fitting into some neat column, or when you need to create some kind of theory like perennialism that just shoves it all together in a way that you can say, “Ah, there it is, I understand everything,” you probably are misunderstanding everything. I just bought some old books by Manly P. Hall just because they were on sale and they’re old books. But reading through some of them, it’s the same perennialism that Blavatsky preached. And I think that for magicians in particular, that sort of “it’s all the same” is actually one of the worst things for your magical practice because the devil is in the details. Yes, Kurukulla is a red goddess who’s associated with sex and love, and so are the various Bomajeras in Brazil, and so is Babalon of the modern Thelemites. We can say those things are true, but that’s no different than saying, “Oh, Jason’s a kind of overweight 50-year-old dude, and that’s an overweight 50-year-old dude, and that’s an overweight 50-year-old dude. They’re all the same dude, right?” We’re not all the same person, just like they’re not all the same goddess.

With spirits, of course, they’re more subtle than people are, so there are times where maybe you can say there’s a Venn diagram overlap, right? Or you can just do what I do, which is throw your hands up and say, there’s probably more to this than I can even perceive, so I’m not going to try to nail it down. The facts of this I’m going to let go of; I’m going to focus on truth in meaning and truth in usefulness. But when it comes down to nailing exactly what these goddesses, gods, and saints are, what they consist of, how much of Anubis and Hermes are in St Christopher and trying to quantify that, I just—I have no interest. It’s all conjecture masquerading as facts that we have no way to verify, so I’m done with it all.

Eclecticism Limited in History

• Speaker: Jason Miller
  So I would say to people that are eclectic, let go of that. Don’t try to nail everything down; don’t try to say this is how everything works. Embrace the fact that it’s more subtle and you don’t even know how everything works in the ordinary world, much less in the subtle regions. Embrace unknowing. Embrace that you might even be wrong about some of the things you think you know. I would also say don’t let traditionalists who hate the word eclecticism get you down or deter you, because you’re on the side of how magic was really practiced, not the people that are saying, “No, this is the correct book and we are going to do things only in this book,” and that is because we’re hardcore grimoire magicians or we’re hardcore this tradition. It was never so simple, and our practice also has to reflect the world that we live in. In ancient times, you would have felt a spiritual call and you would have had access to the wise people, magicians, shamans, or witches in the area where you lived. You wouldn’t have been living in Italy and suddenly deciding, “I’m going to worship Freyja,” right? You wouldn’t know who Freyja was necessarily; you might, but we live now in a world of jet travel and the internet. Our world is eclectic. For me, as a guy who encountered a Rosicrucian, a rootworker, a Ngakpa, and several other people from different ways of practicing magic before the age of 21, it would have been extremely inauthentic of me to say, well, I can’t learn from these people; I have to just pick one. For me, that would have been a betrayal of the world that I lived in and the experience that presented itself to me. And if magic is real, if it’s a real thing that has real effects, then I’m interested in function. My assumption is just like with everything else: we know some things, and they originate from various traditions, and there are things that we don’t know, and we’re in the process of learning. But things move and change and evolve, right? Like, if a cure for cancer is suddenly found in a particular village in Brazil in some shamanic potion, does the world say, well, we can’t look at that and synthesize it and make a cure for cancer because it belongs there and only there and only those people have access to it? Of course not. I mean, maybe that’s just an imperialist view or a colonialist view. I’m not saying we go in and deforest and take over, but at the same time, if we can do something with respect, we look at it, we see what the active ingredients are, we figure out maybe even how to improve on it, and that to me is how the world works and how magic works as part of the world.

The Extent of Knowledge Available

• Speaker: Dr Angela Puca
  Yeah, I think that something you mentioned is also something that colleagues have talked about at conferences: the point being the information that is available to you. So, when we look at the development and the history of religion of certain practices, including magical practices, what we see is there is as much eclecticism as the information that is available to the people practicing. The difference that we have now is that instead of living in a village where we have limited exposure to the outside world, we are living in a world that is hyperconnected via the internet and all sorts of means. So the information that we have available to us is larger than it ever has been. This is still working on the assumption that what was done in the past was somewhat more authoritative, which is not the case, as we clarified earlier. But even working by that assumption, if somebody 2,000 years ago had had access to all the information we have now, they would have probably been much more eclectic than they were. They didn’t have the choice to be eclectic because they didn’t have the information.
  I can see this even in my research because, interestingly enough, I’ve studied Italian witchcraft and vernacular healing, and there are certain practitioners that are isolated. They live in secluded areas, and those who live in secluded areas, even though they are part of the same tradition, will only do the things that were done in their family, passed down through generations. They don’t really include anything from the outside, and that is because they don’t talk about the practice, they don’t share information, and they are just not exposed to anything different from what was happening in their family. In some cases, they were not even aware that this was something that was happening in other towns and cities in Italy. So you do have cases like this even nowadays. When there is isolation and the person is not exposed to more information, they will stick more to the tradition, to how things have been done, without changing anything because obviously, they don’t have any other information to do otherwise. Whereas for those who are part of the same tradition but live in places where they’re more connected, they’re more willing to share practices, they’re more willing to listen to other people’s practices, then you start to see a higher degree of eclecticism. So it’s something that we see over and over. When cultures have encountered each other in the past, they started… you know, we have mentioned, for instance, Egyptian culture. Even with the Egyptians and the Romans, for instance, we still have temples. I come from southern Italy, and you do have influences from Greek culture, from Egyptian culture, and you will find all these cohabitate and become something different, so in effect, become a form of eclecticism. In history, we see over and over that when cultures have met, you find forms of eclecticism.
  So I don’t think that what happens today is that much different from what happened in the past. It’s just the degree of information is much higher because of the internet and how connected we are. Maybe the thing that I think is a step probably different, or at least it really depends on the tradition and the culture, is that perennialist view. Perhaps the idea of “oh yeah, Babalon is the same as Kali, who’s the same as this, and they are all the same” is more modern. Maybe that depends as well.

Good Information in a Sea of Misinformation

• Speaker: Jason Miller
  Yeah, I mean it’s a big, messy world. I think that differences in volume become differences in kind as well. One of the challenges with the Internet is getting to the correct information and finding the good information amidst a sea of misinformation. I tell my students now, when I was growing up, we didn’t have the Internet, and I didn’t live in a city with an occult bookstore, so I had to work with what I found at the library and the mall. So, like, the Necronomicon—sure, that’s available, I’ll work with it. “The Complete Book of Magic and Witchcraft” was my first exposure to the Grimorium Verum process, even though there’s only little segments of the Grimorium Verum sampled in there, because we had to work with what we had available. So, we had insufficient information, whereas now we have this massive flood of information. We have better translations; we have better… God, how many translations of the Grimorium Verum are available in English? We have all these Cyprian texts that were available in Portuguese and Spanish forever, but not in English. So it’s a wonderland, but there’s also hordes of misinformed TikTok videos and people that are presenting “IO HEKA IO HO” as an ancient Egyptian practice, and thousands of people in that group going, “Yeah, wow, incredible,” right? And I’m not there to say, “No, no, it’s not; it’s very modern.” The symbol that everyone uses for Hecate, the Strophalos Wheel, it’s an ancient symbol, it’s a prehistoric symbol, but it has nothing to do with Hecate. It wasn’t associated with Hecate until the 1980s. But people feel like, oh, that is the ancient thing. So we have misinformation, but we also have much better information available. The tools that people need now are to dig through all the misinformation and crap to find it. And now with AI, we have bespoke misinformation. It’s not even commonly held misconceptions. Now you’ll get on, and it will generate entirely new misconceptions just for you.

Importance of Peer-Reviewed Research

• Speaker: Dr Angela Puca
  Yeah, I think that the thing that I always advise—one of the reasons why I started my YouTube channel was to face this problem and offer a solution to the problem—because everything that I say on my channel, in my episodes, is based on peer-reviewed research. But, obviously, I wouldn’t want people to just follow me as a guru. So I think what it’s really important for people to understand is that they need to find the sources. When you hear something, look at the sources. Who says that? Where is the information coming from? Look at the quality of the source. Is it a reliable source? Is it an academic source? It is important to understand to go back to the source of the information. And it’s not just for magic practice; it’s for everything. Because with this post-truth paradigm that we live in, even from a political point of view, we can see that people tend to easily believe things that are just not true because they have got a lot of engagement on social media or because they were pushed by an algorithm. So people really need to exercise their critical analysis skills and question what they read and what they are fed by saying, “Where is this information coming from? What’s the source?” Even the things that I say on my channel, I mean, I told you that everything is based on peer-reviewed academic sources. I mention the references; go and read them, go and read the sources. Check it out, find if I’m saying anything wrong that doesn’t correspond to research. So I always tell people that it is really important to look at the sources because that’s really the only way that you can gauge. Because even when you look at academic sources or scientific papers, they will be outdated at some point. You will have new ones, so perhaps in 50 years my videos will not be as accurate as they are now because there will be new research. So that’s why it is so important to have the sources stated, and if they’re not stated, I just wouldn’t give any credit to that information at all. Look at the sources: where is this information coming from? Is this a reliable source? Is there any accuracy behind it?

Academia is not Infallible, but Academics are Aware of this

• Speaker: Jason Miller
  I couldn’t agree more, and it’s one of the things—you pointed to people that aren’t academics sometimes holding academia up as if it’s scripture, right? And they’ll say, “Well, this is academic; this was an academic book, so it must be true.” And I’m like, no, it’s an academic book, so it’s based upon the best information they had available at the time. That changes, and so do opinions. The differences between academia and religion and misinformation are that academia is aware of this and changes based upon the information available or tries to, whereas scriptures are set in stone and ignore the evidence. Cult leaders just, you know, “Well, this is what I said, so that’s what matters.”

Applying Academic Knowledge to Practice

• Speaker: Dr Angela Puca
  Yeah, academia and academic methodology are not about truth. It’s something that I always tell people. Truth is something that is metaphysical and religious. Your truth is something that you find in your own practice and has nothing to do with science or academia. What academia does and scientific inquiry does is to find the most accurate information that you can find at a given time, given the methods and the data that we have at our disposal. So obviously, this is going to change over time. I still find academic scholarship obviously very valuable because it is still the most accurate information that we have, but it’s not religious truth. It’s not something that you should follow like a religious guru. I think that would be silly, but it’s important to acknowledge what’s the accurate information, and then you decide what to do with your practice. It’s an example that I’ve given before on my channel. Say that we know for a fact, given the archaeological evidence, that the deities Diana and Hecate are two different deities. Okay, then you have a vision in your spiritual practice that says, “I am one; I am Diana and Hecate. I am that one goddess, and I’m here to help you.” So what do you do with that information? If it is a vision that has happened to you as a practitioner, of course that has value to you and has value to your practice. Now, the only moment that becomes an issue is when you start writing books and writing posts saying, “Oh, actually, I had this vision, so it means that in history the truth of the matter is that Diana and Hecate were the same goddess because I had this vision, so it is true.” That is when the problem starts, and when you do need more neutral and accurate information from academia. Because when people start to make claims based on their own experience, then you run into the problem of really spreading misinformation based on something that is incredibly valuable and incredibly important but personal. That is something that always… it’s not like I try to tell people, “If you have a vision that tells you something that contradicts academic scholarship, then you shouldn’t follow that as part of your religious path.” Of course not, that is your religious path, though it’s not history. You need to make a clear distinction between the two. That’s my point.

Fluidity in Divine Identities

• Speaker: Jason Miller
  Oh yeah, and I mean we can look at history and see how this happened in the past. How many Papyri spells equate Hecate with Selene or merge her with Artemis? It doesn’t mean that they are the same being. We have this happening where you have figures like Maria Padilla and the Witch of Evora, who are Spanish and Portuguese legendary figures, but then they emerge in Brazil as aspects of Pomba Gira. Does that mean that they are now owned by Quimbanda? Of course not. But does that mean that Quimbanda is doing something wrong? No, of course not. It’s just, this is the big, wonderful, messy world where we should expect—honestly, when we think about how messy people are, how fluid our identities are, right? How I’m somebody who is on this podcast with you right now, and then later I’m going to be very different with my wife and kids, and then very different when I’m driving later and somebody’s in front of me and they’re pissing me off. So, when we think about how fluid we are, and then we think, well, then there are these subtle beings, wouldn’t we expect them to be even more fluid, even more subtle? Why are we trying to nail them down?
  And that’s, you know, that’s the kind of mess we have to accept. I think the mistakes start coming when we start to determine facts in the context of magic and religion and even philosophy to a degree.
  You know, when I think about Plato, I think about things that are still meaningful for me in everyday life, ways of contextualising friendship and knowledge that are important to me. When I think about what Plato and Aristotle say about atoms and molecules and, you know, cosmology, I’m just like, “Yep, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong. Everything’s wrong.” And we know this now, but we couldn’t say that in the past. So, in a way, it really held us back because no one was able to just say, “Well, you know, maybe Plato’s wrong. Maybe that’s not how it works.” So, yeah, it’s a big, big mess. That’s my advice for eclectics: embrace the mess and don’t get swept up in your own visions. Anchor yourself to research, anchor yourself to history. Don’t let it pull you down, but don’t cut yourself free of it either, because that’s when you start getting into silly town.

• Speaker: Dr Angela Puca
  So, is there anything that you would like to talk about that we haven’t covered yet? Something that you want my audience to know?

Where to Find Jason Miller Online

• Speaker: Jason Miller
  No, you know, I mean, anyone listening, you know that I do this professionally. I teach courses. You can find everything I’m doing at strategicsorcery.net or you can look me up on Facebook. I guess I have an Instagram that is mirrored off of Facebook, so there is all that self-promotion stuff. And I’ve got books that are available wherever books are sold because I never did do one of those fancy—one of my best friends owns Hadean, but I never did do one of those fancy English books made out of, you know, dragon leather and goat’s blood. My books are just, you know, paperbacks from Weiser. So, grab those, and then if you like the cut of my jib, take a look at the courses, and, you know, that’s all I can ask.

Dr Puca Recommends Jason Miller’s Books

• Speaker: Dr Angela Puca
  Absolutely, and I would recommend them as well. I think that your books are really great in explaining magic practically and how to go about doing magic in a way that makes sense, and also how to interact with spirits in a way that is useful for magical practice.

• Speaker: Jason Miller
  Oh, thank you so much.

Last Question Usurped

• Speaker: Dr Angela Puca
  You anticipated my last question, which was, how can people find you?

• Speaker: Jason Miller
  Well, now they know, so do you have another last question?

Dr Puca Thanks Moderators and Donors

• Speaker: Dr Angela Puca
  No, I guess I just wanted to thank Vocatus and Hank for their support to the channel and to the conversation, and thank you also, Andrew, for moderating the chat. I’m not sure if Joao and Edward are present, but if so, thank you to you as well. And yeah, I guess we can conclude it here if that’s okay with you.

Support Angela’s Symposium

• Speaker: Dr Angela Puca
  So, thank you all, guys, for being here and participating in this interview. Leave me a comment because I want to know what you think about what we talked about. Obviously, don’t forget to smash the like button, subscribe to the channel if you haven’t already, and share the video around so that more people can know about the Symposium and Jason Miller’s work. Yeah, thank you all so much for being here. I hope that you all stay tuned for all the academic fun.
  Bye for now.