AUTHOR’S NOTE: I have a few less-meaty essays in my backlog of pending posts. This is one, and I will publish the others over the next couple of days.

A fellow member of the r/occult sub-reddit community recently asked a particularly vexing question: “What do you people even do with occult knowledge?” This individual was unprepared for the sheer complexity and profundity of the esoteric path and had been feeling lost for the past two years.

After yearning for meaning, purpose, and truth but not finding them, the seeker’s last resort was to poll more experienced practitioners about the uses they’ve found for the wisdom. I had to think back over five decades to when I started to come up with an answer for what the experience has meant to me. This will be old news for anyone who has been following this blog, but I will once again put it into a neat package:

I started with natal astrology in 1970, mainly to gain self-understanding that went deeper than what I thought I knew about myself, and it’s been one of the best things I ever did for that purpose. I got into Qabalistic studies shortly before picking up the Thoth tarot in 1972, which eventually led me to ceremonial magic.

But ritual of a quasi-religious kind isn’t for me even though I worked with it off-and-on for a number of years, so beginning in 2011 I focused full-time on divination with the tarot, Lenormand and horary astrology. (I’ve done a lot of missing-person work with horary.) I still read books on occult subjects nearly every day, and my 50+ years of experience inspires the almost-daily blog writing that I’ve now been doing for nine years. I have a low-key professional tarot practice going but it’s primarily a hobby, not a major source of income, and I’ve published five ebooks that compiled my first seven years of blog material.

There were many good responses from the population, mostly along the lines of self-transformation and self-mastery (I edited them slightly for clarity):

“to learn and grow;”
“the creation and cultivation of ecstatic joy;”
“(pursuit of) a whole secret life;”
“to change what I want in myself, to see it manifested in the world;”
“to understand human psychology from a deeper perspective;”
“to ground and calm myself in an otherwise chaotic time of life;”
“to find the worldview and explanation of reality, as well as the goals, that really resonate;”
“guidance in life and attaining ultimate spiritual goals;”
“to see what I can learn/do and see where that takes me;”
“as a natural extension of my scholarly interest in history and philosophy;”
“to align myself with the All/the Absolute/the Now such that I am in fact a conduit for the energy of the All”

I spent the better part of forty years chasing self-awareness and self-improvement for many of the noble purposes described above, but in the last fifteen years I’ve settled into a more pragmatic groove with my study and practice. The reddit answer that struck me as the best fit for my current approach is the one I’ve saved for last, and it’s the one that motivates me to offer my insights (and, of course, my opinions) for free in this blog:

“To spread the knowledge to those who are trying to learn.”

The cultural reference that supports my attitude in this regard comes from the song “I Won’t Go Through That Again” by Goose Creek Symphony: “Don’t go buyin’ no-one’s answers if your question was for free.”

It’s the opportunity to help address those questions that keeps me going.