Bridget Owens

when in reality the term is more akin to Golden Dawn or Thelema or Heathenry in that it represents a magical approach with like a history and cant be understood by reading the dictionary definitions of the words.

this is exacerbated by the fact that Chaos Magicians are philosophically aligned with being chill and letting people do things however they want so theyre the LEAST likely to be like "actually you should pick a different word."

I think some people misunderstand the meaning of the word "knowledge" in spiritual texts and practices.

Basically, it doesn't matter what you read or what information you have. Until it is experienced by you, it will not become a part of you.

It is through experience that people learn, it is through experience that we can compare things, separate and combine them. And only then we gain understanding and knowledge.

Just for an example. We have a tree of knowledge of good and evil in the bible, right? I would say that it would be better to call it: the Tree of Experience of good and evil. Because good and evil are not definable concepts, they vary from person to person. To know your definition of these concepts, you need to live through each of them. This is actually what happened in the bible.

Why am I saying all this? I want to encourage you to develop your own understanding of the world based on your own experience.

Reading books is good, but it's the knowledge of their authors. You can read hundreds of books on self-development and witchcraft, and get nothing but just information. Information is not knowledge.

What are the things you do on a regular bases in your practice?

Monthly, weekly, daily, etc?

I do have a coven that convenes every other week, as well as several monthly events for the local pagan/occult community which I either organize or am committed to.

Mostly I have regular practices on a monthly basis (or longer):

I track Mercury’s cycles and veil every day during each retrograde.

I mark the turn of the wheel by changing the seasonal decor in my house on Samhain, Imbolc, Beltane, and Lughnasadh.

So much of my practice centers around death, dying, and caring for the spirits of the dead. I can't imagine not using the actual words and instead using "d3ad" or "🎲-ing". If a topic is important, powerful, vast, etc. enough to be a central tenant of your spiritual or magical practice then it deserves to be spoken with the real words.

I mean, we're magical practitioners, right? It makes much more sense to me to use my own spellworking skills to get the things I post in front of the eyes of other practitioners who will truly be interested in what I have to say. Because the reality of doing this silly linguistic song and dance to try and squeak by the algorighm's censorship net (or any of the other things the algorithms are training us to do) is that even if it works, the algorithm is going to mostly push those posts out to people most likely to disagree and fight in the comments about it because that's what drives traffic and ad revenue.