Obviously, this isn’t a eulogy. I do hope some of the people who knew him well will share some reminiscences. These are just my initial, personal thoughts, feelings and impressions as we integrate a step change in English and Western magic.

There is an inverse relationship between the level of danger associated with practising magic in a place and the number of people getting about in public dressed like a nonbinary Morticia Adams outside of the office Halloween party.

Firstly, this is simply interesting to observe. But secondly, there may be something teachable in the inverse correlation as great chunks of the West descend into dominionist claptrap churchianity.

I talk about it in this video filmed in the hometown of Paraguay’s most famous witch.

• Synchromysticism is modernity’s best available form of omen logic.

• And that getting good at it is one of the more reliable ways to get good at magic.

We’ll cover

• Seneca’s distinction between the candle and the comet

• The rise and decline of synchromysticism as a subculture.

• Jung on the I Ching and psychoid archetypes

• The Māori concept of wairua.

• And the practical toolkit.

Show Notes

• Chris Knowles on Cosmic Connections: Mystical Practices & Reality’s Hidden Language.

• Wearing Jung’s Skin Like A Pelt.

• Jake Kotze on The Higherside Chats.

I wanted to gather my thoughts while still in the jungle in advance of the upcoming premium member course -Jebus For Magicians- because we will be going deep on syncretism. (I low-key think syncretism is magic.)

Anyway, you can listen along above, or you can watch the YouTube video below.

Enjoy!

(PS - show notes are in the video description.)

• What to make of it?

• How to think about it?

• What, if anything, to do with it

Are two very special guests: Alan Chapman and Peter Grey. Now, like me, neither of them is a Thelemite. But what they do have is an encyclopedic knowledge of the era, the material, and the magic behind it. So if you’ve ever wondered whether the Book of the Law has anything to say to you if you’re not already one of Crowley’s followers, this is that conversation.

• Alan’s essay, Is A God To Live In A Dog? is referenced several times in the episode. You can download a copy here.

• Peter wrote a follow-up essay after the discussion, which you can get here.

Show Notes

• Peter Grey’s Substack.

• Alan Chapman’s website.

And in the next instalment of our series ‘Hospicing Modernity’s Magic’, I want to look at:

• How psychology diverged from magic and why.

• Jung’s role during his lifetime.

• What the magicians of modernity did with the ‘legitimacy umbrella’ they received from Jungian thought.

• Which parts of this journey do we take with us into the magic of today?

Chapters

• 00:00 Introduction

• 01:11 Wearing Jung’s Skin Like a Pelt

• 01:57 The 19th Century & Roads Not Taken

• 07:56 The Red Book 10:50 Active Imagination

• 15:26 Jung & Astrology

• 17:59 Is Magic Just Psychology?

• 22:09 Synchronicity

• 29:17 The Yi Qing & Moments in Time

• 33:08 Synchromysticism as Omen Logic

• 35:26 Psychoid Archetypes & the Unus Mundus

• 43:00 The Post-Jung Pelt-Wearers

• 49:27 What to Hospice, What to Keep

• 52:32 Use Magic to Legitimise Jung

This is the beginning of a little project exploring what we should take with us through this fourth turning.

00:00 - Remember When Magic Was Safe?
01:50 - The Golden Age We Just Lived Through
05:19 - Eating the Wrapper, Throwing Away the Candy
06:34 - What Is Modernity?
09:54 - Why "Hospicing Modernity's Magic"
11:24 - The Hospicing Framework
13:00 - Nothing Is Going Wrong
14:54 - A Telling, Not a History
17:32 - The Series Roadmap
21:18 - What We Carry Forward
22:47 - Join the Conversation

Here are the videos I reference:

At Work In The Ruins | Dougald Hind

Alan Moore's Moon and Serpent Bumper Book of Magic

00:00 - Remember When Magic Was Safe?
01:50 - The Golden Age We Just Lived Through
05:19 - Eating the Wrapper, Throwing Away the Candy
06:34 - What Is Modernity?
09:54 - Why "Hospicing Modernity's Magic"
11:24 - The Hospicing Framework
13:00 - Nothing Is Going Wrong
14:54 - A Telling, Not a History
17:32 - The Series Roadmap
21:18 - What We Carry Forward
22:47 - Join the Conversation

Here are the videos I reference:

At Work In The Ruins | Dougald Hind

Alan Moore's Moon and Serpent Bumper Book of Magic

In the first act of Prometheus, David, the synthetic, spends a little over two years entirely alone on the ship, the eponymous Prometheus, while the rest of the crew is in cryo-sleep. It’s my second-favourite of any of David’s scenes in the movies. (There is a Fassbender-on-Fassbender kiss in the next movie.)

He spends two years learning different languages, getting really good at shooting hoops, watching classic films like Lawrence of Arabia, and monitoring and researching dream states. All kinds of stuff.

I think about that sequence whenever I have the farm to myself, which I do for the next two weeks. We live sufficiently remotely that I can go days and days and days without talking to anyone in person. And it usually coincides with times when I am insanely busy. (What actually happens is that there is no one around to stop me from working continuously. James will do human things like sit and have coffee in the morning. Disgusting. I’ll just have this weird milky goo bag and go back to being robotistic, thank you very much.)

But I am not just busy with work. I also make sure all the farm chores -cleaning, feeding, harvesting stone fruit, etc- are done, like David running the ship. And I’m back taking regular (online) Spanish lessons. I’m convening my six-week shadow work intensive, which also requires multiple calls. I have weekly calls with a health coach in the US. And I have weekly business strategy calls. So I talk to people. They’re just not here. If there are no calls, I do not talk to any humans.

Except it’s not just talking. It’s not like how during the plandemic they tried to say that catching up with friends and family was just as good and how nice it was that the streets were so quiet and pay no attention to the drastic rise in alcoholism and domestic violence. I’m self-improving.

This is not going to be one of those posts about how ‘self-improvement’ is just another consumer habit like yoga or trying to sell shitcoins, and you should go back to being a slob because that’s actually bullshit. That’s cope. You literally entered these physical space-time conditions in order to transform. Is a weekend workshop on how to paint a verandah the same as contemplating the great works of classical philosophy? That’s a mean-spirited, straw-man comparison.

Instead, I want to make the case for… a slow food movement version of transhumanism? For instance, I use baselang (expensive but highly recommended) for Spanish language learning. How it works is you pay a monthly fee for access to dozens of tutors from different Latin American countries. You pick a time slot, see who is free, and… have the call. In which you can practice talking, or lessons, or whatever. I absolutely cannot get Latin American Spanish-speaking practice in Southern Tasmania. Similarly the other coaching I am getting is just not available here. It’s good. These are professionals who are good at a thing I need.

Yes, it requires money. But I also never go out for food (there is nowhere here), am back on the zero-alcohol game, don’t have kids, and so on. So I don’t really fuck with the sneering cheap shot that it “MUST BE NICE.” It is, actually. I work very, very hard and I enjoy doing that and also this.

And I think about what the cross-pollination of that is across the living field. I get good at things that assist me in the things that I am good at, which subsequently assist other people in their own lives to get better at various things. How markets work, basically. But there’s a peculiar… I don’t know… force multiplier when you decide to intentionally have a David season.

For one thing, you do it in a state of amusement. It lacks the seriousness of a crypto-bro’s “lock in”. Those stories always amuse me but also make me sad: Disappear for six months and come back unrecognisable! Oh, kid. Who in your past wounded you so that his/her external approval became existential for you? Will Daddy finally love you, or will that girl from school finally rue the day she turned you down? You don’t even need to come back, son. Transform! Have adventures! Explore the world! Find someone who loves you for you!

For the second thing, although it is related to the first thing, there is an expectation that the improvements will be put into some sort of service. I get better at my job by knowing more Spanish and being more healthy. But also, the people I work with are intentionally chosen because I like them and want to support their independent business. This, I think, is the other reason I called it slow food transhumanism. Remember when Amazon was coming up, and people more to our way of thinking were all “support independent bookstores!” and they all went bust anyway, except actually the good ones kinda didn’t, and there is even something of a quiet resurgence of these non-alcohol-related third spaces like themed bookstores or bookstore/cafe/event venues?

Slop isn’t just an AI problem. It’s an everything problem. Government services are slop. Customer service is slop. Most things you pay for are slop and will be washed away by cheaper slop. We are in this moment, the slopocalypse is entirely unavoidable. Which aspects of a hyper-digital reality do you wish to world with as we move through this turning? (Yes, I’m aware this is Substack and people will grumble if you suggest there just might be something good about this transformational moment because they are scared they will never get the absolutely mid-novel they have been working on for twenty years published now that AI can do a better job than them.) What role do you have to play in the perpetuation -even thriving- of the remarkable?

I will say you do need to have enough in the tank to handle a David sprint. In the Southern Hemisphere, January is a time of abundant living energy. It’s easy to green juice and get your steps in and duck out of one work thing for a Spanish lesson and then back. I’m aware from personal experience that January and February in the Northern Hemisphere is just playing a five-finger knife game (I’m still on Alien) and waiting for the daylight to come back.

But if the stars align and you get a period of isolation that is your own choosing, and you have enough in the tank, and you can do so while remaining embedded in the physical (I have online coaching calls, but I live on a farm), I commend to you the David moment. You’ll be shooting hoops from a bicycle in no time.

There’s a meme that’s been evolving since 2021, and in its current chaotic incarnation, it’s become accidentally magical—even if the people using it don’t realise it.

In this episode, I’m unpacking “do it for the plot” as a practical framework for the year ahead. Not just as permission to take risks, but as a way of activating synchronicity and maintaining agency when things inevitably go sideways on the way to your goals.

I’ll walk you through how to use this alongside your existing magical toolkit—your amulets, your enchantments, your divination practice—and share the diagnostic story I keep coming back to for checking where I’m actually at versus where I think I am.

I’m also introducing a new project I’ve been wrestling with: hospicing modernity’s magic. Because the late twentieth century gave us some genuinely powerful techniques wrapped in a frame that insists magic isn’t real. I want to find a way to respectfully retain the useful stuff and jettison the less-than-useful.

There’s practical advice here for interrogating your intentions for 2026, plus some thoughts on why the slacker-era re-enchantment is officially over and what needs to replace it.

Happy new year, kids!

PS - This episode is available in your favourite podcatcher, as well.

At this time of year, when many of us are rudely awakened from our hard-earned slumber by multiple ghosts wanting us to support their GoFundMe or something, I thought we might look at ghosts.

What are they? Are they even real? And if they’re not, what are they for?

And the exploration is framed by a series of strange experiences I had recently at Australia’s most haunted site and possibly the cruellest exemplar of the doctrine of transportation, Port Arthur.

Enjoy!

PS - Let me also take the opportunity to sincerely thank you for listening, watching, supporting and sharing the various Rune Soup offerings in 2025. Have a wonderful Christmas.

Austinmas 2025! Can you even believe it? Legendary astrologer, Austin Coppock, returns to the show for a look at what 2026 has in store for you.

Here’s what we cover:

🪐The end of “nothing ever happens” energy
🪐 What war looks like in the Age of Air
🪐 January’s hidden assemblies and the parade before Pluto
🪐 Neptune’s 13-year sign change
🪐The Saturn-Neptune conjunction and its strange history with Russia
🪐 Why March could see dangerous confusion and technical disasters
🪐 April’s straightforward brutality
🪐 The sweet spot worth planning around
🪐 Late June’s triple switcheroo
🪐 Mars-Uranus in Gemini and American history
🪐 August’s grinding square with both malefics in their fall
🪐 The shadow over November’s “jolly conqueror”
🪐 What 2026 sets up for early 2027
🪐 Solar eclipses and kings who bump their heads

How To Use The H1 Astrology in You Life

January’s Gift

Use the hidden assembly energy for genuine visioning. Where does your capacity for struggle go? What’s actually worth anything? What are your sneaky little moves? Get trajectory set before the crazy train.

April’s Pressure

Mars-Saturn conjunctions every two years aren’t new—but this one’s in Aries with Neptune. Being pushed beyond reasonable limits. A week’s work in a day and a half while already burned out. Endurable, but genuinely shitty.

The May-June Repair Window

Not just absence of destruction but actively sweet and reparative. Build here what you couldn’t build in the storm.

PS - As always, you can find the episode on my YouTube channel and also in your favourite podcatcher.

This is a story I first heard via Nigella Lawson, although it is a more famous parable: A woman is preparing a pot roast. She carves the sides off the meat like she always does, because that is what her mother always did. One day, she asks her mother why she does this. Her mother says it is just what her own mother always did. So they ask the grandmother, who tells them, “Oh, that’s just so that it would fit in the pot I had at the time.”

I think about how this applies to contemporary magic or, at least, people feigning it on Instagram. If you’re unaware, I’ve been playing around with it the past couple of months for the first time ever because… well… have you ever been to a party at a house that is about to be renovated or knocked down? And you can kick in the walls, and throw paint all over the carpet and it’s super fun? Kinda like that. Nothing matters anymore. Do whatever you want.

Anyway, there is some sort of Marshall McLuhan pot roast thing going on over there with what passes for practical enchantment. Firstly, everyone seems to be using giant stainless steel or pewter platters upon which they stick teeny tiny little candles. Now, I am all for fire safety or whatever, but metals are magically active. You don’t need stainless steel in your love spell, especially when it comprises about 95% of your spell by weight. Upon these platters and between these teeny candles, salt is typically spread. (This was the inspiration for my first viral reel.) Then maybe a little sprinkling of potpourri. Done!

Why is this a pot roast thing? Because everyone there is doing it. Why? Here is the McLuhan angle: Because that setup looks good when you film it vertically with your phone. It’s content rather than magic. The medium is the enchantment.

I genuinely find this fascinating. Because, obviously, you can backcast to before the Instagram or internet era and find the same McLuhan pot roast reality. The clearest example is the role of the book in Western magic, being both the defining object and the principal means of its continuity. Western magic is book-shaped in the same way these Instagram spellbortions are phone-shaped.

And I’ve had cause to think about this as I completed the remaster of the sigil magic course. You can find the complete thing on YouTube now. Here’s the final module.

In the premium member app, people asked some really good pot roast questions, like “Okay, but why specifically do we eliminate the vowels? Does anyone know?” The thing I enjoy the most about this course remaster is that it is meta like that. Because, before you ask why we eliminate the vowels, ask yourself if you really think that’s where the ‘magic’ happens.

As I mentioned at the outset of the project, I have answered questions like this so many times that I wanted to make the revised course one long, personal meditation on that very question: Where do you think the efficacy actually is in sigil magic? What do you think is its active ingredient? Is vowel removal simply carving the edges off the roast so it fits in the pot? Probably. But it also feels like if you didn’t do enough to it then it also wouldn’t work. However, I still think what you add and what you retain is going to be different for almost everyone, and somewhere in that realisation is the secret to how it works in the first place.

Because that’s the key. Carving the sides off or not is going to be different for each person. But everyone still needs to turn the oven on to get a pot roast. The fact that magic -defined in the final module as a collection of techniques for operationalising the reality of co-creation- works; the fact that it is some kind of ‘true thing’, means that it probably does have ‘rules’. However, these tend to be the level up from where people typically look for rules. Venus governing love, green and copper, isn’t a rule. It’s a result of a rule -in this case, the existence of governance itself. The rule is ‘things are in relation to other things, sometimes hierarchically’.

If you attend to the wrong level, you end up with the worst of all outcomes: A pot roast with no sides, sitting raw in a cold oven. How will you take food photos then?

That weekend, my chief suspect broke his leg in three places playing soccer.

Did I cause this? Probably. Would I do it again? Of course not. Even though cigarettes in Australia are now about five times more expensive, I haven’t smoked in years.

After decades of doing magic, I have a litany of truly petty, absurd successes. Things that, looking back on, I didn’t really want. Or, at least, the best parts of me didn’t want. Venal things. Egoic reactions to workplace humiliations. Pyrrhic relationship victories.

What do we keep in the Underworld? In the shadows?

Things we do not want other people to see, obviously. It’s not a trick question, or a particularly deep one. This is the Jungian story of the formation of the shadow. But I would argue this is something he found and described, rather than something he discovered. (There was a lot of that sort of ‘discovering’ going on at the time. Continents, cities, tribes, river sources, etc. I think he rediscovered the Underworld.)

Now, here is something that has always haunted me. In the European tradition, why is the Lord of the Underworld also the Prince of Light? Why does a Lightbringer rule over a kingdom of shadows?

Again, it’s not a trick question. The individuating process -and Lucifer is archetypal individuation- involves bringing light to your own shadows.

And the things you keep in your Underworld don’t have to be particularly ‘dark’ or ‘bad’. If you grew up in a sporty household, but you were really musically inclined, your musical self is probably down there, for example.

Good stuff, bad stuff. You just have to know what you want. What you really want. This is harder to nail down than you might realise. What we typically think of as persistent problems or ‘wants’ -chronic under-employment, perpetual singlehood- are better understood as questions asked the wrong way.

This is the real danger of the literal and metaphoric demonic part. You might be the kid cursing the other kid over cigarettes. But that danger is not inherent in magic, nor even in demons. The opposite has, in fact, been my experience. I stopped being an asshole (most of the time) faster with magic than without it, in no small part because it forced more encounters with my traumas and their coping mechanisms.

Magic and desire, desire in magic, how to best serve it, how it best serves us, has been a lifelong intellectual love affair.

So if your interest in such things has piqued, there are a bunch of practical exercises in the latest module of my completely free Ultimate Sigil Magic Course.

If parts of that light you up even further, we will be running another cohort of The Shaman’s Devil early in the new year. This is my six-week shadow work intensive. The first one was a huge success and sold out in a couple of days. So if you are keen, jump over to the website and sign-up to be notified.

The process of shadow work is the process of surfacing and clearing all the ways you get in your own way, so that all those new and better things you have been waiting for can actually happen. You could scarcely find a better way to set yourself up for 2026 -an absolute shitstorm of a year- than committing to participating in this container.

It has always amused me how a certain kind of magician sees sigil magic as something new or shallow or facile or otherwise not especially magical. Because the thing is, it is all those things in the wrong hands. Just as most magicians in the ‘lion skin belt’ camp maybe don’t realise their outfits look more like a corporate team-building exercise using items from the lost and found bin than the robes of a Theban high priest. (“Janice is modelling our team’s effort. She is a witch! The bracelet is made from paperclips.”)

I always like to leap to the defence of sigil magic but the reality is how you do anything is how you do everything. You definitely can embody all those dismissive things people say about it. Equally, you can turn yourself into an outrageously absurd spectacle attempting to grimoire things up, or you can approach the practice with the requisite context and humility and avoid the LARP/cope trap.

In the case of sigil magic, matching your envisioned future with a creative expression of it in the present is a modern version of the oldest form of magic if you step into that story.

And when you do, your magic works better. This is the subject of module 2 of the Ultimate Sigil Magic Course.

Enjoy.

Permit me to reframe.

I don’t actually hate sigils. Probably. I think. But with the experience of having trained thousands of people on the very best possible approach of sigil magic, I have come to see the practice as a grease trap for idiots.

If you’re a newer subscriber, let me give you the backstory.

Almost fifteen years ago, I wrote a blog post describing the methods I used in my own practice of sigil magic, particularly in a precarious job context, while living in a London sharehouse. This included a method for activating multiple sigils at once, along with a method of essentially ‘pulling forward’ the results into reality. The post has been viewed millions of times. It was a key factor in getting one of my publishing offers. It meant that the first premium member course we ever did was on sigils.

I transformed my life using sigils and the fact that I managed to do so transformed my life again as I began sharing those methods and perspectives with people. I became the sigil guy, for better and for worse.

And they work. No question about that. But they don’t work the way people think they work, and they certainly aren’t optimised the way people want to optimise them. This is what I mean when I say they are a grease trap for idiots. I have fielded the same three questions hundreds and hundreds of times, and each of those questions could have been answered with a Hillary Clinton meme.

Those three questions are variations on the following:

1. Can I use [pen/pencil/paint/etc] on [paper/wood/stone]?

2. Should I burn them?

3. If not, how do I dispose of them?

None of this matters. At all. Let me tell you what matters.

1. Surfacing your true desires, ie what you actually want, not how it is currently showing up in your life.

2. Removing the internal blocks and worthlessness wounds that cloud your ability to see the things that you want.

3. Getting out of your own way.

Now, it so happens that a sustained sigil campaign will (lovingly) force you through those three steps. But I almost never get asked about anything pertaining to the second set of questions. Actually, a few of the premium members have asked when the remastered sigil course will be available, and I am always tempted to ask, “Why? Why do you specifically want the new sigil course when we have a prayer course and a manifestation section of the foundation course, a grimoire course, a wealth magic course, and so on? What are you hoping to achieve that you think can only be achieved with sigils?”

I know the answer. They think they will learn a hack. A sneaky trick where, if you just use green instead of black paper, then your magic will work better. They think their current lack of success is a technical failure rather than a procedural one: “Maybe I should activate them at dawn?” Not “Do you think wanting this specific job has something to do with how little my father was interested in me as a child?” This is the grease trap. Everyone lands in it. The good ones climb out of it and embark on a successful magical career. Lots of people don’t because they refuse to do the work that is in front of them. And so the thing I hate about sigils is also the thing I love most about sigils.

Is this a weird way to announce that I am making the fully remastered sigil course available completely for free on my YouTube channel? By embarking on a lengthy explanation as to why I hate sigils? Because that’s what’s happening.

The first module is available now. Go and hit the bell icon or whatever it is to make sure you get the rest of them as they drop over the next several weeks.

And you should watch it. I’m quite excited about the idea of making the sigil course I really want to make, which describes how I think they really work. Because, done correctly, they are in fact a strange and compelling practice.

1. You step yourself into a daily prayer and contemplation practice.

2. You grapple with your own definition of synchronicity and spirit contact.

3. You give yourself room, often for the first time in your life, to gently surface what you really want and *gasp* what you really deserve.

4. You explore your own boundaries and ambitions.

Finally, you show up for yourself. Sometimes I wonder if it isn’t this last part -showing up for yourself- that is the ‘reason’ beginners often achieve startlingly good results the first time they activate some sigils.

So, come join us. I intend to have fun with this one. You might too.

Peter Grey joins the show once again to talk about his explosive new book. We explore who the being of Lucifer is, his relationship to Western magic, Western magicians’ relationships to him and how the current of liberty, individualism and legitimate rebellion have shaped centuries of culture.

An excellent discussion about a milestone achievement in Western Occulture.

Get the damned book here.

Enjoy!

Note: As always, you can get the audio version in your podcatcher, and you can watch on YouTube.

Apparently, William Shatner had his own version of this famous observation: “If you want to get screwed, tell your plans to God.”

It’s cute, but it only captures half of the original meaning, as far as I can tell.

One of the peak experiences of my entire life happened earlier this year, on an ayahuasca dieta in the Upper Amazon. And it wasn’t (just) the ayahuasca. I was dieting a master shaman plant, piñon blanco, which is a being of and from the highest realms of light. After the last night of ceremony, back in my tambo, with the visionary aspects of the ayahuasca having largely worn off, something happened to me. I saw God, basically. In fact, as it was happening, before any sense of separate self was completely blown away, I had the awareness to pray, “Oh please don’t let me be another ayahuasca casualty. I don’t want to emerge from the jungle thinking I’m God or something. I’ve got enough problems as it is.”

This, and my initial unwillingness to let go of the notion that -sure, I’m God, but so is everyone else- was deeply funny to the being that was… descending?… all around me. Deeply funny like it was belly laughing. It sounded like Lord Buddha was playing Jabba the Hutt in a pantomime play. Deep laughter, but enlightened. It kept knocking my feeble belief that other people were also God from my mind, and every time I would try to think it again, it would knock it away and laugh.

And I get it now, after the fact. That thought is great down here in normal awareness. But if you try to go up there with it, you are definitionally holding onto an illusion of separateness. For other people to be God, other people must be other. So the feeling was more “nope, just you. You’re God.” And what was so funny to this being was that God itself had forgotten that it was God. God had come down here and forgotten literally the one and only thing in the universe.

(When I came back from my Enochian Samadhi disco ball experience, in my mind I tentatively tested the second half of the sentence again, “… and so is everyone else,” and it stuck. So I’m pleased to announce I emerged from the jungle just as sane as I was when I went in, for whatever that’s worth.)

So let’s unpack this ‘men plan, God laughs’ thing. There is, of course, the Shatner layer: All forms of planning are essentially hubris because of how small we are in relation to the Creator and the cosmos. This is always good to bear in mind.

But when God laughs, is he laughing at you or with you? In my experience, God is definitely laughing at you. But in a good-natured way. There is a tweet from maybe ten years ago that lives rent-free in my head: “If somebody broke into my apartment looking for money, I’d just laugh and help them look.”

He’s laughing at you, but he’s also laughing at the exciting possibility of co-creating with this particular dumb-dumb’s plans now. I mean to riff off the tweet, if you pray to God for money, he will certainly laugh and help you look.

So the secondary aspect of “men plan, God laughs” is closer to Jung’s definition of God or the Self as anything that gets in your way, anything that trips you up, waylays you or scuttles your plans. Because it is in those moments that something new must be born. The old thing is gone. The reliable thing is no more. There must be something new in Creation now. A birth. How delightful. No wonder he’s laughing.

I’m thinking about this now because I’m currently on a bit of a road trip around Tasmania, having finished up the six week shadow work intensive, The Shaman’s Devil. (It was a huge success and we’ll very likely do it again early next year, so sign up to be notified.)

Looks nice, right? These photos are from yesterday, before the 120km per hour winds arrived, which cancelled all trips to the Isle of the Dead. Those were my plans. God started laughing.

And speaking of shadow work, there is a time in my life where that would have quite upset me. But instead of reacting to it, I responded to it. My first thought was genuinely… You know, you could actually go back to the motor inn and write that Substack post about plans going wrong now that your plans have gone wrong.

Responding rather than reacting is at the very heart of how shadow work is such a potent force multiplier for manifestation. This is the invitation hidden underneath ‘men plan, God laughs.’

It is also why people often ask just what exactly was Gandalf’s plan. Because, from a human level, it’s kinda dumb.

As far as I can tell, Gandalf’s plan was

1. To head in the approximate direction of the goal, accompanied by the people and objects who seemed to be carrying some kind of fate/doom/destiny energy pertaining to his goal.

2. At every hiccup or challenge, always choose the Good. At every choice point, always ‘rely on God’.

This twin piston powers all successful magical campaigns. You have an outcome, rather than a plan. A plan is detailed and ‘filled in’, with lots of moving parts. God will surely laugh at that.

So you have an ultimate outcome and then lots of smaller plans or tasks. And each one of them really has only one goal: Choose the good in that specific situation, whatever it happens to be.

But you also do your best to put your finger on the scale by including magical people and objects on your ‘side’, on your ‘trajectory’.

Just as it is in our world, in Middle-earth, it’s the guys with the most detailed plans, Sauron, Saruman, and Morgoth, who always end up on the wrong side and always lose.

Because God’s comedy club is improv-only. And you’re here all week.

Not that we would ever need one, but the flimsy excuse for Chris coming back this time is so that we can discuss his amazing new book, XF-ULTRA: The X-Files, Conspiracy Culture, and the National Security State.

• Can a 90s genre TV-show both explore AND generate high strangeness

• What happened to our ancient mythology?

• Who is called to tend the flame of our culture’s sacred stories through the chaos all around us?

Even if, almost ESPECIALLY if, you’ve never seen The X-Files before, this journey down to the underworld and back up through the trash stratum of popular culture has wider metaphysical implications that make it essential viewing.

Show Notes

• The Secret Sun on Substack.

• XF-ULTRA: The X-Files, Conspiracy Culture, and the National Security State.

In this episode, Dr Radin returns to the show to talk to us about his amazing new book, The Science of Magic.

We look at

• Meta-analyses with trillion-to-one odds.

• Hotel poltergeists that target specific researchers.

• Spoons that bend without force.

• Sigils. Always, always sigils.

Radin explains why materialist skeptics have run out of arguments, how belief literally structures the universe, and why your unconscious mind might be doing magic right now.

If you liked Real Magic, this one takes the conversation even further. The dominant of wider inclusions has surely arrived.

Show Notes

• Pre-order the new book

• Dr Radin’s website

Note: As always, the audio version is available in your podcatcher.