The Missing elements of magick

It seems when I look across these patterns of behavior, it is quite evident that something is blocking or preventing progress. In my opinion, it is the fundamental cause behind all the foolish misinterpretations of the path as well as the downfall of many practitioners and groups. Today, I want to open up the elemental gates a little bit and help you understand its methodology and its secret psychology. This will give you a measurement instrument by which you can not only evaluate teachers and practitioners but also have a clear roadmap for yourself in understanding this most profound mystery and how to achieve success and mastery in your own life—not only in your craft but in life in general.

Yeah, it’s a beautiful morning. As I sit and look through my windows out at the garden, with the soft rain falling, I can see the grass almost starting to renew itself. Winter has passed us here in the southern tip of Africa, and I can see the beautiful passing of one season and the emergence of the next. I’m reminded of how the ancients used to celebrate these four fundamental seasons. We see it expanded in the eightfold wheel, but the equinoxes and the solstices have always been a very profound part of our history. Different religions tried to take over by coupling their traditions or their celebrations in conjunction with these natural events as a way to appease the old people and bring about political harmony. But the ancients always believed, and many magicians did too, that we needed to practice these methods in order to align ourselves and bring us closer to nature.

I’m reminded of the traditional celebration or attunement to the travels of the sun through its four different stages, a practice common in Thelemic traditions as well as in systems connected to the Golden Dawn and other forms of modern magic. These attunements are very accurate to the four stages experienced inside of life. But where this four-stage manifestation was more common for occultism practitioners was in the arena of the four elements: earth, air, fire, and water. Many books have been written on these subjects, and I’m planning on interviewing some of those authors on the show as well. The practice has always fallen into the beautiful and mystical and magical dimension of the elements—everything from learning to move or manipulate fire, connecting with the energy of water, tuning into the sylphs in the air.

Now, don’t get me wrong, there is a place for the magical and mystical dimensions to it, and I’m not going to discuss the full intricate details of that here because, quite frankly, I’ve produced a course that spans over two years to discuss those details, where those ideas come from, and what they mean. Today, I want to discuss the practical application of this because one of the things that I am an advocate of is the practice of responsible occultism. This makes more sense if we move past the general environmental, beyond the quantum mechanical, and even the physical, and into the place where it is the most relevant in our lives.

I spoke about the philosophy of integral sacrifice and the stages of consciousness, and how individuals at different stages will impact the interpretation of data, moving from mythical and magical thinking levels to more integral thinking stages. There’s a beautiful philosophy from Joseph Campbell that I’ve highlighted before: “Every religion is true in that the symbolism is true.” Today, I want to look a bit into the symbolism of elemental magic and the psychology behind it because I find it is the single most misunderstood idea.

If we look at traditions like the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, beyond the neophyte grade, the first initiations are through the elemental degrees. This is often considered a preliminary stepping stone on the way to the grades of Adeptus Minor and Adeptus Major. It is also commonly seen in many other traditions, just as a natural part—you’ve got to open the circle or call the quarters just for protection. That’s where the thought is left for many people. They don’t fully appreciate the power of the elemental dimension or the full map of its psychology, which is, in fact, the most important idea in the entire spectrum of occultism.

Allow me to illustrate. If we look at the mapping of the zodiac upon the hexagram, which has been perverted by the Nazi traditions as the swastika, its original meaning symbolized the zodiac and the sun, and then the four elements inside the four corners. It’s not the only map that indicates that, but in essence, the symbolism is common across traditions. We see the planets in certain ones, we see the zodiac mapping around this, but they all culminate in their points of manifestation as the four elements.

There are a number of psychologies and disciplines that map around these same four elements. For example, one of the ones that I teach is the articulation of a magical result moving through all four elements. In other words, we first need to have an intellectual or mental understanding of the subject matter or we need information or data—air. Only once we’ve got the information or data can we act upon it—fire, in other words, taking action. We may not feel like it in the moment, but the more you do it, the more you get a feeling for it because eventually it starts to align—water. By constantly hammering the stone, as Moses did in the Bible, the gush of water comes out, nourishing and sustaining life, giving us the emotional fuel to get to the next level. Once we get to the next level, then and only then, without water nourishing the old earth or breaking away the old earth, does the new earth reveal itself. New life springs from the old earth. In other words, that’s the moment that the biology or the neurology inside our brain has actually shifted. Then and only then have we made the complete change.

So, while you’re out there trying to tell yourself, “I’m wonderful, I’m wonderful,” or “I’m good at meeting people,” but you’re not actually going out and meeting people, you’re just deluding yourself. This is further explored in the psychology of the elements. I raise this because I see this in the forums and in the communities. I see the unhealthy or shadow side of the elements, and I want to make this practical for you to understand. Given modern psychology has provided us with many maps to reference this, the map I’d like to talk about is that by Robert Moore, author of “King, Warrior, Magician, Lover.”

The “King, Warrior, Magician, Lover” philosophy was popularized in the male development movement because it described what it meant to be a mature man. I have a bit of a disagreement inside of it. Even though some of these expressions are described as very masculine in their philosophy, I believe the overarching frame of it being purely masculine is a patriarchal view. In my personal point of view, these are simply the psychological manifestations of the four elements within everyone’s psyche, including men and women. Your sexual preference or your born gender has very little to do with those quintessential aspects of the element. A woman is just as capable of being a queen, and in fact, part of the problem in our society is women always looking for the king to save them, to lead them, and guide them. There are stages of development where the ego needs to learn to submit to the higher self and that progression, but that’s not the point of our discussion today.

Please know that when I discuss this, I am aware of those stages, and they are very well described in another archetype of the four stages of the feminine, which are really the stages of our own development. We see this in the maiden, mother, and crone, which are the stages of the development of the subconscious of that psyche or that portion of the psyche—our feminine self, so to speak, by that interpretation.

Now, if we look at the interpretation of these four elements, let’s explore them for a quick bit. While we do, I want you to think about different people out there publishing material, people in the communities causing errors and mistakes, and sometimes even criminal behavior. Let’s be honest, that kind of behavior is common to most traditions. It’s an unfortunate issue of mankind. It’s not unique to one system or another. However, I would like to point out that sometimes mental instability can be more common with practitioners of the occult. The reason for that is not the occult; it is the point of entry.

Traditionally, when someone entered the mystical traditions, they did so through a process of advanced initiation or some type of preparatory system where someone guided them. You didn’t just pick up a bunch of books that had no direct connection and had a missing foundation at Barnes & Noble or at Exclusive Books and suddenly consider yourself a practitioner of the ancient ways. I always find the deep call of identity so unique when those people themselves misunderstand the nature of identity itself. The magical precision is the systematic unfolding of the self, the stripping away of the illusion of selfless false identity to abstract the qualities behind it, and systemically learning to integrate, evolve, and develop those things. It is a very difficult task for an individual that refuses to look inside.

One of my old spiritual teachers used to say to me, “Go within or go without.” The statement is as true then as it is today. But the problem is that most people don’t understand it. Most people enter the craft and enter magical traditions and say, “Oh, I’m going to pick up a grimoire on the Goetia because that’s trending right now, and then I’m going to conjure this entity because apparently this one can solve my relationship problems or it can solve my money problems or it can do that.” What you’re doing is a violation of the fundamental spiritual principles behind these traditions.

An individual is chasing. In other words, you’re going and actively saying vibrationally that you lack happiness, joy, love, money, whatever the state is, but if that thing, that portion, that force, that entity, that spell, that which can give it to you, then you’ll be happy. The very laws of nature, the very laws of attraction, the very laws of vibration are in violation of that, and it assures that you will not get it. In fact, you may even attract an experience or manifestation that will then end up pushing the actual objective further away because you’re reinforcing the hallucination. That’s not how it works.

There is a process of initiation applied in the teachings because the practitioner would go from systemically seeing themselves as someone defined by the world, someone that is that way, to realizing, “Oh, wait, I’m not that. I’m actually this thing that I’m after.” The process of initiation has always been the process of the systemic death or separation of your perceived limited self by the resolution of those components and the representation of them through the act or process of ritual, and then the reintegration by changing of meaning. Again, changing of meaning, a deep label, is one of the foundations of magic. In doing so, the practitioner converts their self-concept from being the victim or the servant of reality to being the essence of the thing that they seek.

If I’m constantly saying, “Oh, I want a beautiful girl in my life, and when I find a beautiful girl, I will be exuberantly happy,” yes, if only I had that, and then I’m chasing. I’m chasing the girl. Firstly, if I’m always the one chasing, it may be attractive in the first little bit if I already am an attractive individual. It’s flattering that this attractive person is fond of me, but very quickly in the dynamic of the relationship, it fails because that person realizes you are so in need of them at some level. Being in need of them at that level actively makes them feel like there’s too much pressure, like they’re suddenly responsible for your emotional well-being. As such, they will start pulling away because that responsibility becomes painful, and it’s also not their responsibility. It is your responsibility to manage, and that then creates patterns that we end up manifesting in others. We recreate them because that relationship didn’t work, and we manifest another one.

Ultimately, we keep playing out our own game, and the true magi sees this. I see another example of this and how this manifests and relates to the elements. I see a lot of practitioners out there trying to make a reputation for themselves by ripping off other practitioners. It’s cute, quite frankly. That’s all I can say about it because if any individual has actually studied the mechanisms of what makes up this path, if you’ve studied Kabbalah, if you’ve looked at the degree of life for any extent of purpose, if you’ve studied the psychology around these things, if you’ve truly dedicated to this path—in other words, if you actually are an initiate of the mysteries—then you know, and any one of us knows, that this is simply a manifestation of the shadow elements, a manifestation of the shadow kingdom, of the shadow manifestations of these Freudian archetypes.

Let me give you an example. We have earth, air, fire, and water. These broken down into their corresponding Freudian archetypes are very simple to understand. Air is the magician. The magician has a healthy or mature and an unhealthy or immature aspect. An immature manifestation of the magician is all the kids that jumped on the NLP bandwagon, looking for quick aspects of magic and trying to trick their way into people’s lives. They want to be seen as clever, and it’s sweet and manipulative because usually what happens is this person is weakly integrated. They can’t just ask for what they want. They often disguise themselves under good intention and can’t give you their ask because they’re not congruent with it. They’re very intelligent, they can rattle off a lot of facts and ideas, but it’s not evident in their life. There’s an old classic term for it called the armchair occultist—someone who speaks all this stuff but doesn’t actually practice it, doesn’t actually live it.

Then we see the mature version of that, which is the shaman. The shaman doesn’t care about reputation but just goes and does the work. One of the things I learned early on was that all this knowledge was great, but it meant nothing unless it was practical. So I stepped away from teaching, walked away from platforms, opened nightclubs, opened businesses, and lived a pretty exotic life by many people’s standards because I wanted to apply these things and taste them. If you’re not doing that, if you’re out in forums trying to correct everybody instead of just doing these things in your life, that’s a very clear example we’ve all seen.

Now we can look at the next one: fire. In fire, we have the warrior. The warrior has a mature and an immature aspect. The immature is the hero, and what’s the hero? There’s an old TLC song, “Scrub,” and I think the scrub is a great example. It’s this guy who is always talking about how fly he is, how amazing and wonderful he is. You can even get that in the manifestations of the bully, always trying to attack everybody and looking for a fight. When push comes to shove, they can’t survive the real battles of life. They’re the ones that overtly emotionally express themselves when there’s some small drama. When they get dumped in a relationship, they start stalking and harassing that person. They’re abusive in certain tones, sometimes even physically. This is the unhealthy manifestation of the fire element. The mature version is the one that stops trying to fight everybody out there and starts fighting the real enemy: themselves, overcoming themselves. You don’t see the true martial arts master bragging to everybody about how he’s going to mess this person up. No, because he doesn’t have to prove it to others; he’s proven it to himself.

Then we have the lover, the water element. The lover is the artist, the creative, charismatic, but in its immature form, it can be manipulative. It’s the new tantric right, often seen in spiritual circles. It’s the person who gets into tantra or sacred sexuality just to get laid, and it’s disgusting. It’s okay when you’re young and still learning, but it becomes about validating yourself in unique ways until you have the integrity and charisma to actively communicate your desires and be unapologetic about them. You need to see the merit and value in yourself and trust yourself, so others can trust you.

The mature lover stops chasing new lovers and realizes the beauty they were looking for was not in another person but within themselves. It took a lot of pain, finding soul mates and being betrayed by them, to learn that the beauty was the expression of my own heart. When I was in love, it was beautiful not because of the person or place, but because of my state of consciousness and quality of experience. When I realized this, I stopped chasing and needing new lovers. I became an authentic lover to myself, loving myself first. This is not about being mature or enlightened; we all have flaws. Awareness is key to addressing unconscious narratives.

Now we come to earth, the king or queen, the sovereign. I saved this one for last because it often requires working through the others before truly taking ownership. The immature version, the high chair tyrant, is more common in males. It’s the child who never grew up, often protected by their mother. This protection prevents them from taking full responsibility. Sometimes a traumatic event is needed for them to rely on themselves. In different traditions, people want to give power away to deities or spirits, avoiding responsibility.

The mature king or queen takes total accountability and overcomes their own grandiosity. It’s about recognizing where you really are compared to where you perceive yourself to be, doing the work to bring these together, and destroying delusions. This psychological work is essential for progressing in the magical arts. Perceiving true reality and functioning in our consensual hologram is challenging but necessary for true progress.

If you want to progress up the tree of life and the tree of death, responsible occultism is key. Buy all the grimoires and books you want, but understand the method of magic success lies in mastering the elements. These elements are the vehicle by which we manifest our will. If you have an unhealthy vehicle or underdeveloped archetypes, your manifestations will be slower and more complex. Practice congruently to progress effectively.

Remember, the path of magic requires dedication, commitment, and responsible practice. It’s not about quick fixes or giving power away. It’s about mastering the elements and understanding your true will. Follow this progression, and you will manifest your desires with greater ease and success.

Thank you for joining me for this episode. I’m Adam Nox, and I will see you in the next one. Remember to live deliciously.