Journal A sceptic's occult studies

[PugsandMugs]

So I will start this journal by saying that im a complete beginner coming in anything related to the occult, as well as a complete sceptic in anything related to magic. My motivations to start these studies has been simply to understand consciousness more. The elements that make up our bodies are part of a cosmic cycle of tremendous scale. The fact that conscious experience is the only indisputably real ontological feature of reality without an empirically proven material cause leads me to believe there must be more to our subjective experience. Our thoughts matter, the way the we feel about things matter, the changes we make in other people's lives, I believe there is power and value in the very act of existing. To study the consciousness is to study the unseen.

The first chapter I want to cover is about history. Setting up a base to understand how spiritual experiences have developed over time, and how is it that the abrahamic religions that shaped me came to be. For some reason people have this notion that ancient civilizations where somehow less smart than us, however this has been proven to be wholly untrue. There in nothing fundamentally different about the way our brain operates today, compared to someone's brain 2000, 5000, or even 20,000 years ago. People have "thought" in the same manner for approximately 300,000 years. The first person to imagine something mustve felt crazy, to create something with your mind that is not there, this is the first instance of real magic ever, the first thought.


About the first spiritual experiences in humans.
Long before civilizations carved the names of their gods into stone, humanity's first spiritual experiences likely emerged from a much simpler question: What is hiding behind the world we can see? Early humans lived in an environment filled with uncertainty. Every rustling bush, distant shadow, or sudden storm could mean the presence of danger, or an unseen force. Cognitive science suggests that natural selection favored a mind that preferred false positives over deadly mistakes. It was safer to assume that something possessed intention than to ignore a genuine threat. Its possible that this tendency to perceive agency in ambiguous events became the foundation from which religion eventually emerged.

This idea is closely related to animism, one of the oldest known forms of spirituality. Animism is the perception that thigns are alive: that rivers possess will, mountains have spirits, forests listen, and storms carry intention. Rather than seeing the universe as an assembly of lifeless matter, early humans saw it as a world inhabited by living presences. Some researchers argue that this perception was an extension of an evolved survival instinct, while others view it as humanity's earliest intuition that reality contains dimensions beyond ordinary perception. Regardless of its origin, animism became the seed from which nearly every ancient religion would stem.

Yet humans did something no other known animal achieved. While many animals appear capable of detecting agency or responding to invisible threats, humans developed symbolic language, abstract reasoning, and the ability to imagine collectively. These abilities transformed instinct and imagination into energies, entieties, rituals, and eventually theology. The invisible became populated with ancestors, spirits, gods, and cosmic deities. What possibly begun as a survival strategy evolved into humanity's search for meaning, purpose, and our place within the universe. Which raises a deeper question that remains unanswered: What is consciousness itself? Science has made extraordinary progress in explaining matter, energy, evolution, and how the brain works, yet no consensus exists regarding why subjective experience exists at all. We can describe neurons, electrical signals, and neuroscience, but we still cant explain why it feels like something to be conscious.

Throughout history, mystical schools have treated consciousness not as a product of the brain, but as the medium through which reality is experienced and transformed. Hermeticism, Kabbalah, Neoplatonism, Hindu philosophy, and countless traditions begin with the assumption that the visible world is only one layer of existence. Whether these traditions describe an objective metaphysical reality or symbolic maps of the human mind remains a question, but they all begin with the mystery of consciousness itself.

Perhaps humanity's first spiritual experience was not the invention of gods, but the moment our ancestors realized that the universe was deeper than what their senses could reveal. It is from this ancient current of thought that the religions of the Near East; including the Canaanite tradition; would eventually emerge.

There is no fundamental difference between man and the higher mammals in their mental faculties . . . the tendency in [humans] to imagine that natural objects and agencies are animated by spiritual or living essences, is perhaps illustrated by . . . my dog [which] was lying on the lawn during a hot and still day; but at a little distance a slight breeze occasionally moved an open parasol . . . every time that the parasol slightly moved, the dog growled fiercely and barked. He must [unconsciously have felt] that movement without any apparent cause indicated the presence of some strange living agent.
– Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man

Permeated by divine power is everything that moves in the universe.
– First mantra, Isa Upanishad

Guthrie, S. (2002). Animal animism: Evolutionary roots of religious behavior. In I. Pyysiäinen & V. Anttonen (Eds.), Current approaches in the cognitive science of religion. London, England.
Peoples, H. C., Duda, P., & Marlowe, F. W. (2016). Hunter-gatherers and the origins of religion. Human Nature, 27(3), 261–282.

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[PugsandMugs]

Last history lesson before getting into more esoteric topics. Like I mentioned earlier, I believe it to be wise to understand where my own beliefs come from. What shaped my own idea of spirituality, growing up in a Catholic familiy I seek to understand the context around which the Bible is formed, what shaped the world into its conception.

About Canaan and the Canaanites.

Canaan occupied one of the most strategically important regions of the world; it formed a natural land bridge between Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Anatolia. Rather than existing as a single unified kingdom, it was composed of numerous independent city-states such as Hazor, Megiddo, Byblos, Tyre, Sidon, and Jerusalem, each ruled by its own king while sharing a common language, religion, and culture. Rather than existing as an isolated civilization, Canaan absorbed influences from every neighboring culture while preserving its Semitic identity, this created an incredibly diverse society whose religious practices evolved through centuries of cultural exchange.
This unique blend of traditions would ultimately shape many of the religious concepts inherited by modern Abrahamic religions. After the Late Bronze Age collapse, the Canaanite cities evolved into what the Greeks would call the Phoenicians, whose maritime trade networks spread the Canaanite culture throughout the Mediterranean. Their innovations and diffusion of the Phoenician alphabet influenced Greek civilization and through it, much of the Western world.


The Canaanite religion centered on a pantheon organized as a divine family: at its head stood El, the wise creator and patriarch of the gods, often called Elyon ("Most High"), togethere with his consort Asherah, the female goddess associated with fertility, and motherhood. Although El held supreme authority, the most widely venerated deity was Baal Hadad, the storm god who controlled rain, thunder, and agricultural fertility, which made him essential to a civilization dependent on seasonal rainfall.
Other deities included:

• Anat, Baal's sister and ally, goddess of war and protection;
• Yam, the chaotic god of the sea;
• Mot, the god of death and the underworld, whose conflict with Baal symbolized the struggle between life and death.

The universe was not divided into a natural world and a supernatural one; instead, both formed a continuous sacred order in which every phenomenon reflected an invisible spiritual reality around us. This conception of cosmic correspondence would later evolve one of the central principles of Hermetic practices "As above, so below."
Canaanite religion was deeply woven into daily life, with basically no distinction between religious devotion, politics, and what would now be called magic. Although the word occult is modern, many of the ideas later and practices established as part of the Canaan religion became central to Western esotericism. Through the Canaanites, and later the Israelites and Phoenicians, ritual was understood as a means of participating in the unseen order of reality. This conception of ritual as a transformative act rather than a symbolic gesture greatly influenced later Jewish worship and the ritual structures found within ceremonial magic, traditions, and Western mysticism.
It was believed that to know the true name of a deity established a unique relationship with that divine power. The many titles of El, Baal, and Yahweh reflected different manifestations of divine authority. The reverence for divine names reached its highest expression within Judaism through the Tetragrammaton "YHWH" . Medieval Kabbalah and other schools would later transform this tradition into a science, teaching that divine names, and combinations of sacred words expressed the hidden structure of creation.


Among the most significant parallels concerns the relationship between El and Yahweh and Baal. Over the course of several centuries, Yahweh came to absorb the titles and authority of El, the supreme creator of the Canaanite pantheon, while also assuming many of the functions traditionally associated with Baal, the storm god who brought rain, defeated the powers of chaos, and ruled from the sacred mountain.
In my opinion, the most significant transformation happened between the tenth and sixth centuries BCE. What started as the worship of Yahweh as Israel's national god gradually evolved into monolatry, and finally into monotheism, the idea that Yahweh alone is God and that no other gods truly exist. During this process, the older Canaanite pantheon was reinterpreted as a host of angels, the titles of El became titles of Yahweh, and competing cults of Baal, Asherah, and other deities were progressively rejected by prophets and reforming kings.
After the Babylonian Exile, this theology and monotheistic doctrine became firmly established and formed the foundation upon which Judaism was built. From Judaism emerged Christianity, and centuries later Islam, making Yahweh the central deity of what are now known as the Abrahamic religions.

NOTE​

For someone approaching this subject from a Catholic background, these discoveries need not be understood as a challenge to faith, but as an invitation to appreciate the historical journey through which religious understanding developed.it is important to distinguish historical continuity from direct inheritance. Hermeticism did not evolve directly from Canaanite religion, nor is Kabbalah a simple continuation of Canaanite theology. Rather, the religious concepts of Canaan passed through centuries of reinterpretation: first within Israelite religion, then through Second Temple Judaism, Hellenistic philosophy, Rabbinic tradition, Jewish mysticism, and finally into medieval and Renaissance esoteric thought. Understanding this historical development allows us to appreciate Canaan as one of the earliest sources of symbolic language. Finally having understood this, we will move into how is it that these spiritual practices and rituals were done, what was the perceived science behind them, first through the Kabbalah.

It is unclear from any modern critique of religion that anyone is in a position to disprove the reality of religious mystery... believers and nonbelievers share a desire to understand the human side of the equation in religious traditions.
-Mark S. Smith, The Origins of Biblical Monotheism

Cross, F. M. (1973). Canaanite myth and Hebrew epic: Essays in the history of the religion of Israel. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Day, J. (2002). Yahweh and the gods and goddesses of Canaan. Sheffield, England: Sheffield Academic Press.
Smith, M. S. (2001). The origins of biblical monotheism: Israel's polytheistic background and the Ugaritic texts. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.