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What’s the strangest thing that’s ever happened to you that you still can’t explain?
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this post was submitted on 11 Mar 2025
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Oh lol yeah. I did "magic" once and it freaked me out so bad I never tried it again.
So I was a bit of an edgy person and fascinated by religion. I bought a book about black magic on ebay or some shit, it came with a drop of blood from the previous owner I realized when I got it in the mail, which was kind of creepy bit you know, authentic?
So yeah, I am reading and it is fascinating stuff. I love the overall concepts and the metaphysical implications, but you know, I don't actually believe in that stuff, so I decide to try it out..
The next day I go to work in a factory, we built trucks/lorries or what it is called in english. I try the techniques I read in the book, about highly specific manifestation and willing into existence. I visualize a sort of trade, and specify the factory will stop for an extended period of time, but not enough to cause any irrepairable economic harm or loss of employment, and certainly no physical or great emotional harm, only economical at a level far removed from the average floor worker. About an hour goes by, and everything stops. Apparently, the engines have not arrived from Germany, due to some delivery chain issue. We cannot continue the line as we are out of engines and they can only be inserted at one specific point, so everything stops until we get more. We all laugh and start just chilling around the factory, there is nothing to do anyways and we already cleaned everything imaginable the first 30 minutes or so (you would not believe how fast cleaning gets done when over a thousand people are ordered to clean because "well we can't just have you standing around"). Now I want to make clear no big stop like this ever happened in my entire time there, especially not because of something that wasn't a big fuckup by someone on site. I got kind of freaked out and never really touched that book again lol.
I have some other ones, but no one else was around for those so they are easier to just blame on me not being very mentally stable at the time.
what book and which method of highly specific manifestation?
the guys from last podcast on the left did magic for a while and they similarly stopped because it kept working and was freaking them out that they were getting into deep.
The Black Arts by Richard Cavendish
I don't remember the specifics of the mental process, this was like 8 years ago. But it was some sort of manifestation technique, probably in the first half of the book
rad, thanks. I'm curious about magic. does he spell it with a k, like magick.
I can't tell if that's an affectation or if it means something different than "magic" since I haven't read any occult books on magic yet.
'magick' was used by the Golden Dawn (including Alaister Crowley and MacGregor Mathers etc), and others to differentiate from stage magic.
No just with a 'c'. He is a historian, and expert in occultism. He is not writing like a practicioner but like a theologist or a sort of religious studies. I was very interested in this at the time and even tried for a while to study religion at some uni courses but personal life got in the way. Anyways, it is an excellent book in that it will just present to you practice and belief from a non-indulgent perspective.
My wife practices witchcraft, and I have begun to lightly look into it and attempted a few things.
My experiences, and what others would say is this....
Magic is not a 5th level wizard casting a fireball spell. Magic is subtle. Magic is coincidence that you willed.
You're not gonna hit the jackpot on the lottery, but you might find that you have the money for what you needed during the ritual through, shall we say, happenstance?
Intent is paramount. Will is secondary.
If you want a good primer on "real" magic, I suggest looking into Chaos Magic. Liber Null is a book to start with, and is generally recommended. That being said, it assumes a little bit of the reader, and a general understanding of the concepts is advised before reading.
Of course, it could all be bullshit and, like I said, coincidence. However, as research into quantum physics advances, I'm less and less doubtful of "random" things causing long term effect. That being said, I'm human. I inherently have biases no matter how hard I try not to.
Also: I bounced around their podcast based on subject, can you list any specific episodes they discussed this?
ope, found it after I typed all this other bullshit - lpotl episode 230 is called chaos magic part 1. I'm pretty sure that's when they started practicing, and it's only in the chaos magic episodes that they go into depth for extended periods about practicing magic, but they mention it obliquely for a couple hundred episodes or so that they're still doing it until they both decide to stop.
...
I can't remember specifically, it was over several dozen or maybe even a hundred episodes in total, it was before Henry got married or I think even met Natalie, and I believe it was around the time they were discussing. Aleister Crowley, but I can't be sure.
I'll go check!
they were both studying chaos magic before, redditors claim Henry is now practicing right hand magic after he quit chaos, and Marcus quit chaos. didn't really go back to it.
I started from the beginning so it would have been in the first few years that they've tried
ope, here there's like two extra clicks not to copy a link.
https://www.reddit.com/r/LPOTL/s/aVaOxiVQca
hey Aleister, Crowley episode is 442, and they were still talking about doing magic at that point or they had just stopped doing magic, so they started before that, and I don't think it went for a very long time, like a year or something before. neither of them wanted to mess with what they saw as unintended consequences.
Awesome, thanks. I have listened to those, I think, but I'm pretty sure I was at work at the time, so I was in and out on it.
I'll have to go back and give it a re-listen.
Thanks again.
for sure, they were interested for like 100 episodes, and after these introductory episodes every now and then one of them would mention yeah and then the sigil worked out last week and they talked for like 2 minutes about how chaos magic was working and then move on and then week after week instead of being positive it started to get negative and the negative consequences sort of ballooned.
have fun listening