Objectively Powerful Ways to Support Good in the World
What is your acquaintance with the Latin word fanum?
How do you currently assess cultural practices in terms of the appropriate and inappropriate, and why?
How do you currently assess cultural practices in terms of right and wrong, good and bad, suitable and unsuitable, etc?
What is the meaning of the word power from your point of view?
If you wish to learn any powerful spells in support of good in the world, you will first be required to acquire a considerable amount of foundational knowledge.
How do you intend to do so?
If you already believe you have the prerequisite knowledge, how did you acquire it and where is your proof?
What is your acquaintance with power within nature?
What is your acquaintance with power entirely within culture?
What is your acquaintance with the essential difference between power for good and power for evil?
How do you ascertain truthfulness?
How carefully do you distinguish between science, philosophy, theology, divinity, magic and the esoteric, and how do you know?
What do you know about genuine affection?
What do you know about genuine disdain?
What is your acquaintance with the ineffable?
What do you already know about cognition?
What is an enigma to you, and why?
What is obscure from your point of view, and why?
What, if anything, is mystical to you?
How do you attempt to prevent harassment and other abuses?
When people publicly claim, through the mass media, to be victims of a witch-hunt, who are those people, and why are their opinions regarded as newsworthy by journalists and news editors?
What is your acquaintance with the philosophy of religion?
Clear meanings are necessary if confusions and delusions are to be avoided.
How do you define clarity of meaning?
Is it a personal experience or a shared experience?
Is it actually possible to share meanings?
Are shared meanings merely implied rather than accurately understood through evidence?
What is unclear to you about this grimoire, and why, and how can you be sure you know what is clear to you, in any situation?
If you are seeking to acquire particular meanings, why do you wish to do so?
What do you know about sentience?
How have you assessed your moral development and moral status, and through which contexts?
What is your acquaintance with the precautionary principle?
How do you know whether or not it is actually possible to separate reasoning from imagination?
These are obviously important questions for anyone to answer.
How thoughtfully have you prepared yourself for the initial initiation associated with this grimoire?
Powerfully supporting good in the world is a highly reasonable practice. But what, in fact, is that practice, and how do wonderful witches contribute to it?
Constantly attempting to thwart practitioners of abuses has never been an easy task, of course. Abusiveness is widespread and relentless in every human society. Attempting to overcome it requires persistent experiments in combining and recombining every reasonable resource for the greater good.
There is no time or room for complacency.
What, then, do wonderful witches do, and what do they avoid doing?
How are the practices of wonderful witches informed by Pythagoreanism, Romanticism, Hegelianism and other practices associated with Western culture?
And how are the practices of wonderful witches informed by other cultures?
Who has documented the history of witchcraft in various parts of the world, and why?
Do you usually regard goodness as having a magical effect on situations?
Do you clearly distinguish between the power to do good and the power to do evil?
How do you distinguish between magic powers and other powers?
Perhaps you always associate magic with illusions.
Perhaps you always regard witches as the recipients of unjust blame when tragedies arise.
How do you respond to the illusions and delusions associated with injustices?
Contributing to the enlightened re-enchantment of the world is a considerable responsibility. It is one only fully initiated volunteers have the power to accept.
What are you seeking to know about the initiation process, and why?
How powerfully do you already support good in the world, and how do you know?
What is your experience at carving and weaving cultural frameworks?
What have you discovered about the concept of common sense?
What have you discovered about paradoxes?
In ancient Greece, the people were so afraid of Hades, god of the underworld, they avoided speaking his name.
Are all ideas about the supernatural associated with fear?
Are all ideas about the paranormal associated with fear?
Are most ideas about the natural also associated with fear?
Are most ideas about unidentified flying objects associated with fear?
Are most ideas about the unknown associated with feelings of shame and confusion as well as fear?
How do you assess issues relating to the unexplained?
What frightens you, and why?
How do you currently prefer to address your fears?
What do you know about delusions and unreasonable desires for revenge?
Powerfully supporting good in the world begins with awareness of important questions.
Important questions are powerful. They are enlightened investments.
Wonderful witches express loyalty exclusively to enlightenment itself.
They know that clear definitions are essential. They accept no noa-names. They accept no elephants in rooms. They never avoid the accurate assessment of important matters. They do avoid euphemisms, except when practicing their craft through parody and satire.
Do you call a spade a spade and a broom a broom?
Do you practice reverse psychology in the public interest?
There are many ways to define a witch, all of which contradict each other.
There are various perceptions of witchcraft, most of which are deluded.
How do you attempt to prevent delusions and the harm they cause?
One of those causes is the deluded claim that there is no universal morality.
Wonderful witches are the preservers and conveyors of that morality.
How do you distinguish between the misguided, the deluded and the universally good?
What is strange to you, and why?
Perhaps you associate the strange with possible danger rather than being merely unfamiliar to you.
The initiation process, guided through this grimoire, usually takes at least twenty years to complete.
What do you know about the Erinyes?
What do you know about Eris?
You may or may not be familiar with the Feast of the Gods, the Apple of Discord and the Judgement of Paris.
You may or may not be familiar with hellhounds.
You may or may not be familiar with Serapis.
You may or may not know how to respond wisely to a mystery.
You may or may not know anything about the moral status of animals in the ancient world.
You may or may not be aware of varying points of view regarding the possibility or impossibility of the existence of the supernatural.
You may or may not be seeking to interpret various, possibly esoteric meanings in this grimoire.
How do you currently distinguish between the weird, the wizened and the wise?
What do you know about the philosophy of naturalism?
There are many forms of naturalism.
What is your view of the subject?
How do you view mysticism and examine scholarly views on the subject?
What is your acquaintance with The Phenomenology of Spirit and Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel?
What is your acquaintance with The Witch by Anton Chekhov?
Are you familiar with The Discoverie of Witchcraft?
Wonderful witches are always reasonably skeptical. They know that Western culture has always been associated with a cycle of violence, along with many other cultures.
Any behaviours contrary to reason are likely to reflect aggression and/or fantasy, not reality.
All around the world, deluded people believe in vengeful ghosts and other imagined spirits yet they fail to believe the truth.
Yet stories and histories relating to ghosts and witches continue to attract attention. They may even attract tourists.
There are many ways to interpret the cultural influence of witch-related ideas, whether through playing board games, playing music, enjoying water sports, creating comics, artistic expression or forming a new religion.
Yet Australian politics continues to be filled with negative associations with witches of one sort or another.
What is your acquaintance with the Jacobean playwright, Thomas Middleton, especially his work The Witch?
Whether in Europe or Asia or elsewhere, accusations of witchcraft and imaginative and/or imagined expressions of witch-related practices persist.
Violence associated with accusations of witchcraft remains common in India.
Violence associated with the practice of witchcraft remains common in Uganda.
Violent acts associated with claims of sorcery and witchcraft have increased in Papua New Guinea in recent years, and those acts are continuing.
In Australia, accusations of witchcraft are associated with the Sudanese community and in Aboriginal communities in remote areas of the Northern Territory.
In Britain, children read books by Jill Murphy about The Worst Witch.
Most British stories about witches, over the past fifty years or so, have been associated with fantasy and/or horror and/or comedy.
Are you acquainted with a Witchsmeller Pursuivant at all?
Perhaps you believe none of the above powerfully supports good in the world.
How do you distinguish between artistic interest in a subject, intellectual interest in the same subject, economic interest in that subject, religious interest in the subject, emotional interest in the subject, and political interest in the subject?
What is your interest in witches, and why?
What is your interest in power, and why?
What is your interest in support, and why?
What is your interest in good, and why?
What is your interest in the world, and why?
Do you regard any of the above to be interesting questions?
Powerfully supporting good in the world requires enlightened statecraft, with or without the assistance of any sort of witchcraft.
Enlightened statecraft rarely has enough power. How will you help to supply it?
How, for example, will you help to reduce the power of all the crafty schemers who usurp power by legal and illegal means and consolidate it for selfish and deluded purposes?
Perhaps you have much to learn.
Many purported practitioners of witchcraft and statecraft are nothing more than crafty schemers. They want your attention. They want your money. They want your admiration. They want you to make decisions on the basis of images, not facts.
If you crave attention, money, admiration and/or you enjoy presenting the world with a distorted image of yourself and your experiences of life, perhaps you are a crafty schemer rather than a wonderful witch.
It is not possible for most people to become wonderful witches. They do not possess the innate talent and innate temperament upon which that wonderfulness is developed. They do not express adequate respect towards nature, science, reasoning, naturalistic practices, historical fact and enlightened imaginations.
Perhaps you are more interested in Western literature than the scientific acquisition of facts.
Perhaps you are more interested in speculative theories than practical, factual knowledge.
How do you tell whether a mind is lazy or not?
How do you tell whether a mind is ill or not?
How do you tell whether a mind is evil or not?
How do you tell whether a mind is wonderful or not?
Wonderful witches have wonderful minds.
Any sort of literature, Western or otherwise, whether written or oral, has a propensity to distort minds.
Words conveyed as art, or through art, manipulate the thoughts of audiences, in much the same way as political propaganda.
Literature influences minds by preventing them from assessing importance and goodness reasonably. It prevents minds from knowing the difference between fact and opinion.
How do you distinguish between the literary arts and a practical manual of consistently reliable instructions?
Speculation involves thinking about possibilities, and possibly even opportunities, rather than facts.
Even if you do not have the talent and temperament to be a wonderful witch, you may have the power to focus on facts rather than speculations.
How powerfully do you convey facts, and how do you know?
Facts exist whether you are aware of them of not. They are all that truly exists.
Facts are sacred, even when they are unpleasant.
It is unwise to ignore or disregard or attempt to forget unpleasant knowledge. Yet most people do not know what to do when unpleasant facts become known to them. They feel powerless to act wisely.
Knowledge is not power. Facts are not power. Goodness is not power.
What, then, is powerful and how can that power be used for good in the world?
Ability is power.
Inability is vulnerability.
What do you know about your abilities and inabilities?
How do you attempt to acknowledge and address the vulnerability you experience?
All people and other forms of life are vulnerable to some extent at any particular moment.
You currently have the ability to read this grimoire.
What do you know about the power you now possess through this experience?
Goodness never exploits vulnerability. Instead, it prevents the powerful from being exploitative.
Yet when the powerful do not care about truth and goodness, they harm the vulnerable.
How do you express care towards truth and goodness?
How do you prevent harm to the vulnerable.
How do you attempt to empower the vulnerable?
What do you do when the vulnerable ignore your attempts to help, and even accuse you of wrongdoing?
What do you do when the powerful behave as though you are a threat, and even an evildoer?
If you support goodness appropriately, you will have selfish opponents and possibly even cruel enemies.
Most powerful people, whether they actively support good in the world or harm, or a mixture of the two, will most likely have sycophantic assistants, sycophantic supporters and/or sycophantic followers.
Wonderful witches, on the other hand, do their best to prevent all forms of sycophancy. Instead, they insist upon sincerity.
Yet most people fear being sincere. They want to gain advantage through any means possible, whether truthfully or otherwise. They believe that politeness requires dishonesty. They may even believe love requires dishonesty. They do not have the sensitivity with which to communicate truthfully with courtesy. They may or may not have the economic resources, social advantages and other abilities through which freedom can be adequately expressed. They are oppressed by dilemmas.
If you are willing to be honest with yourself about the vulnerability you experience, that is the first step towards becoming more powerful.
You may feel afraid to tell the truth to other people. They may not deserve your time. You have important work to do in the world and very little time in which to do it.
You may already know all people are either in denial about their own vulnerabilities or they want you to pity their vulnerabilities while ignoring your own.
Some people egotistically express real or fake power as a way to hide their vulnerabilities. Do you pity them?
Expressing genuine pity towards the egotistical is very powerful when practiced wisely.
How do you know you are not an egotist?
How do you know you are not a sycophant?
How do you know you have appropriate pity towards the selfish and otherwise deluded?
How have you been assessing your ethics?
Where have you been locating very necessary news?
Who has been teaching you about the enlightened being of political kindness?
What do you know about artistic movements and intellectual movements and religious movements in relation to political movements?
For the immature, egotism is a survival instinct and the cause of bullying.
In the physically mature, egotism is a disease of the mind. It is the cause of all abusiveness.
You may have noticed that your access to this grimoire is not directly associated with economic or spiritual or psychological matters. It is directly associated with political matters.
All expressions of pity are political.
All expressions of self-pity are political.
The absence of necessary pity is political, too.
What do you know about the etymology of pity?
How do you distinguish between pity and compassion?
It is not necessary to have compassion towards pitiable people.
What do you know about compassion as a motivator?
You may be motivated, at any particular moment, by selfishness or enlightened self-interest or mutual support or altruism.
Selfishness involves a disregard for potential harm, even to the self. It is therefore problematic in every situation. That is why children and adolescents require responsible, knowledgeable, adult supervision and guidance on a consistent basis.
It is not easy to manage the egocentrism and egotistic behaviours inevitably associated with the vulnerability of immaturity. There are many powerful influences attempting to counteract that management process, and most of those influences are selfish and therefore harmful.
To whom do you owe sympathy, and why, and how?
What do you regret, and why?
When you have faced dilemmas, you may have experienced regrets regarding your lack of knowledge in those situations. Yet regrets in hindsight are often unreasonable. We can only ever act on the basis of what we know, what we want and how we feel at any given moment.
When people express regret, they often do so from their own point of view. They may not even be aware of any point of view differing from their own. That, in fact, is a sign of their egocentrism.
Egocentric people, of any age, cannot understand why other people fail to think and feel as they do. They may even feel confused and frustrated when people act in ways contrary to their expectations.
While sympathy for confusion is an expression of pity towards the confused, complying with the unfair wishes of the confused is not a good idea. It encourages them to be selfish. It encourages their self-pity. It encourages egotism.
While hindsight cannot possibly change the past, knowledge can change assumptions about the past, present and future. It can therefore change decision-making processes.
Is it actually possible to have accurate foresight without relevant knowledge and adequate experience?
Is it ever possible to make good decisions without the suitable expression of freedom and empathy?
Wonderful witches competently practice prospection. They avoid being persuasive. They want people to ascertain facts for themselves and make up their own minds about possibilities.
How much control do you have about the contents of your mind, and how do you know?
How much control do you have over the choices available to you and the decisions you make, and how do you know?
How do you distinguish between harmful self-interest and harmless self-interest?
How well do you attempt to maintain your physical and mental health, and how do you know?
How well do you attempt to distinguish between interpersonal health and financial health, and how do you know?
How powerfully do you support human and environmental health, and how do you know?
How do you assess egoistic motivations?
How do you assess altruistic motivations?
How do you assess co-operative motivations?
How do you distinguish between harmless collaborations and harmful ones?
How do you distinguish between reasonable and unreasonable forms of competition?
What is your current approach to understanding the impossible?
How does your understanding of the impossible contribute to your identification of suitable goals to achieve?
How do you currently identify genuinely compassionate condolences?
Most moral support is superficial. It is possibly even reflective of narcissism, not altruism.
What do you know for certain about anguish and its alleviation?
Perhaps you regard inner peace as nothing more than complacency.
Perhaps you regard sorrow as a reasonable and responsible reflection of the truth.
What do you believe to be the best way to maintain objectivity towards supporting good in the world?
Perhaps you regard good in the world as a conceit.
Perhaps you regard world peace as a conceit.
Perhaps you regard equitable prosperity as a conceit.
Perhaps you regard sustainability as a conceit.
Perhaps you regard reasonable happiness as a conceit.
Perhaps you regard analytic philosophy as a conceit.
Universal agreement on the meanings of words, concepts and phenomena cannot be achieved merely through analysis, or even synthesis.
The missing factors include patience towards alternative interpretations and empathy towards the holders of those differing points of view.
Philosophical traditions are merely fashions in thinking. Whether you are a practitioner of one way of thinking or another, it is necessary to acknowledge the importance of scientific objectivity. Facts are facts. They are not relative even though interpretations of facts may differ.
Power is associated with strength.
Powerlessness is associated with weakness.
How do you assess justice and injustice in relation to power and powerlessness?
How do you assess justice and injustice in relation to strength and weakness?
Perhaps you regard universal justice as a conceit.
You may be seeking to know how to acquire and use a powerful tool for good in the world.
Who will help you to do so, and how do you know?
There have been many philosophical schools and traditions.
There continue to be many different religious and non-religious beliefs in the world.
There are numerous political ideologies.
There are many types of delusions.
What do you know about delusions of grandeur?
What do you know about psychosis?
When people are pathologically delusional, evidence of the truth does not register in their minds reasonably. That is why their opinions and biases are impossible to change.
Delusional people are inadequately aware of reality. Their beliefs are irrational. Yet they may have the power to convince gullible people that their assessments of situations are true.
How do you assess your own social intelligence?
Power is associated with ability and effectiveness. The misuse of power is widespread. Only the appropriate use of power supports good in the world.
How do you attempt to prevent institutional abuse?
How do you define and address institutional abuses?
What is your acquaintance with perspectivism?
How does perspectivism inform your ideas about the meaning of life?
How have you attempted to form conclusions about the highest good?
What is your preferred approach to cultivating and expressing benevolence, and why?
What do you know about pity in relation to equanimity and magnanimity?
How has your conscience interpreted the above questions?
If you have been regularly performing a political incantation for peace and justice over the past two weeks, what sorts of results have you been observing, and where?
How have you been measuring changes and attempting to link cause and effect?
Perhaps you are mainly seeking a goal-related sense of achievement, for one reason or another.
What is your acquaintance with the etymology of mercy?
What is your acquaintance with metaphysics?
What is your acquaintance with miscarriages of justice?
What have you been learning about the human imagination through comparative mythology?
What have you been learning about religions in relation to human sexuality?
Perhaps you are not interested in the truth about such matters.
What is your acquaintance with self-esteem?
How do you usually prevent your confidence from being misplaced?
How do you prevent your self-esteem from becoming anguish and despair, at one extreme, and over-confidence and hubris at the other?
Miscarriages of justice take many forms. Only enlightened practices can prevent such injustices, and other injustices, from happening.
Even relatively minor miscarriages of justice can cause considerable harm.
You may be aware of considerable religious bigotry.
There is also ongoing insensitivity towards persons with disabilities.
When thinking about miscarriages of the past, how do you imagine the victims?
What do you know about more recent victims, in Kenya, in Saudi Arabia and in Ghana?
As in the past, the only way to stop such practices is through enlightenment.
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