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I have been thinking about that conversation ever since. Not because I want to relitigate the argument (I do not), but because the encounter raised a question that I think a lot of people are quietly nursing right now, and which the prevailing discourse handles with extraordinary clumsiness. The question is whether political difference, of the kind we are currently living through, is a difference of opinion, in which case adult human beings can presumably tolerate it the way they tolerate disagreements about novels or restaurants, or whether it is a difference of moral substrate: a fundamental misalignment about what a human being is for, what a society owes its weakest members, what counts as freedom, what counts as cruelty. If the first, we can stay close. If the second, intimacy starts to feel like a category error.

I want to argue here for an answer that is neither of the easy ones. Not the social platitude that politics doesn’t matter and we should all just love each other, and not the harder, more fashionable position that you cannot in good conscience break bread with someone whose vote enacts harm on people you care about. The truth, I think, is more uncomfortable than either, and it has implications that reach further than the conventional discussion lets on, including into corners of life one might not expect, such as the small, fractious, weirdly consequential world of occult and esoteric practice, where the political fracturing of the last decade has played out with a particular intensity that I think is diagnostic of something broader.

The argument that politics is character

The strong form of the position is this: a person’s political views are not a hat they put on at election time. They are a public statement about the kind of world they want to bring into being and the kind of people they think deserve to flourish in it. When someone tells you who they vote for, really tells you, with conviction, they are telling you something about who they think counts, what they believe history is for, and how much suffering they consider an acceptable price for the things they want. You can no more bracket that and “still be close” than you can bracket someone’s belief that you, specifically, are subhuman. Politics, in this view, is character made legible at scale.

There is something to this. I find it hard to fully dismiss. The philosopher Elizabeth Anderson has written for years about how moral disagreement that goes deep enough stops being epistemic and starts being practical: at some point you and your interlocutor are not assessing the same evidence differently, you are living inside different commitments. And the recent empirical work on what political scientists call affective polarisation, the visceral, identity-level dislike partisans now feel for the other side, separate from any disagreement about specific policies, suggests this fusion of politics with selfhood is not a misperception. People really do increasingly experience their political affiliation the way they experience an ethnicity or a faith. Iyengar and Westwood’s foundational work on this, replicated many times since, has shown that Americans now discriminate against members of the opposing party at rates comparable to, and in some cases exceeding, the rates at which they discriminate along racial lines. That is not nothing. That is a society whose civil tissue is being torn along a new fault line.

So the maximalist position is not crazy. It is responding to something real.

But it cannot be the whole answer, and I want to say why.

What the maximalist position misses

The trouble with the “politics is character” view, taken to its conclusion, is that it treats political identity as if it were the deepest layer of a person, the bedrock, when in fact, for most people most of the time, it is something more like the topsoil. People arrive at their political views through an almost embarrassingly contingent process: the household they grew up in, the economic shocks they happened to live through, the friends they made at twenty-two, the algorithm that served them a particular video at a vulnerable moment, the church or the union or the subreddit that happened to be available. Underneath all that there is usually a layer of more durable stuff (what frightens them, what they love, what they think dignity looks like, how they were treated as children), and that layer is what produced the political conclusions, not the other way around. Two people can share that deeper layer and arrive at opposite ballots, depending on whose narrative reached them first.

This is not a claim that political views are arbitrary, or that all positions are equally valid, or any of the other lazy moves that get made when someone wants to avoid taking sides. Some political positions really are monstrous, and the people who hold them really have failed at something morally important. But the typical case of cross-political intimacy, the parent, the sibling, the old friend who has drifted in a direction that alarms you, usually is not the case of a monster. It is the case of a person whose deeper instincts you may still share, but whose surface reasoning has been organised, by forces neither of you fully chose, into a configuration that hits you like a slap.

That is why I cannot accept the strong position. Adopted as a rule, it would amputate from one’s life a great many people who, on the layer that actually matters, are still recognisably themselves. It would also, more quietly, flatter the person doing the amputating into thinking that their own political clarity is the result of superior moral perception, rather than the result of their having been exposed to a different stream of narrative at the right time.

The case for staying in the conversation (which is not the case for staying nice)

Here is where I want to push back on a different orthodoxy. The standard liberal line, the one I myself used to repeat, the one that probably motivated your sending me this, is that conversation across difference is good for democracy, because it softens views, builds empathy, and prevents the slide into mutual demonisation. Talk to your uncle. Read the other side’s newspaper. Don’t unfriend.

The empirical picture on this is messier than the line suggests, and it is worth sitting with. Chris Bail’s experimental work at Duke, published in PNAS in 2018, exposed Republicans and Democrats to a month of curated tweets from the other side and found, to nearly everyone’s surprise, that this made participants more polarised, not less. Republicans became more conservative; Democrats became (somewhat) more liberal. The mechanism, plausibly, is that contact with the opposing tribe’s worst exemplars activates a defensive identity response that overwhelms whatever modest persuasion the better arguments might have managed. More recent work in Media Psychology (a panel study out of South Korea, 2024) has found something even more telling: the relationship between cross-cutting exposure and depolarisation is curvilinear. A little exposure helps. A lot of exposure backfires, especially among those with strong prior commitments. There is a sweet spot, and most of us, fed by feeds engineered for engagement, are well past it.

What this means, I think, is that the prescription “just talk to people you disagree with” is too crude. The kind of talking matters enormously. Twitter-shouting at strangers about politics is not the same activity as sitting at a kitchen table with someone you love, even though both are technically “exposure to opposing views.” The first hardens. The second, sometimes, can do the work the maximalist position says is impossible: not changing minds, exactly, but maintaining the texture of relationship across a divide, so that the divide does not get to become absolute.

That is, I think, the actual case for staying in. Not that you will persuade your father-in-law that he is wrong about immigration. You will not. But the alternative, a society in which everyone has successfully sorted themselves into communities of the pre-agreeing, is not, as it turns out, a society in which the disagreements go away. It is a society in which they curdle into something much worse, because the only image you ever encounter of the other side is the one your own side’s worst polemicists draw of them. The echo chamber, where it exists, is less a place of comfort than a forge for grotesques.

A small parenthesis on algorithms, because the conventional story is wrong

The standard account, that algorithms silo us, that echo chambers radicalise us, that social media has caused the polarisation, is half-true at best, and the half that is true is not the half people usually mean. The 2023 Meta-collaboration studies (Nyhan et al., Guess et al., published in Science and Nature) ran genuinely large-scale experiments where they algorithmically de-siloed people’s feeds during the 2020 U.S. election, exposing them to more cross-cutting content. Polarisation did not budge. A separate experiment had people quit Facebook entirely for several weeks; affective polarisation went down a small amount, but issue polarisation did not. The picture that emerges is not that algorithms are innocent (they clearly amplify outrage and reward extremity), but that they are not the cause of the polarisation in any clean sense. They are an accelerant on a fire whose ignition source is elsewhere: in the political realignments of the last forty years, in the collapse of cross-cutting civic institutions, in the genuinely traumatic economic dislocations that have made it rational for people to look for someone to blame.

What this means for our purposes is twofold. First, the consoling story that we used to agree more and that the algorithms ruined it is mostly false. We have been pulling apart for a long time, by mechanisms much older than the iPhone. Second, the conclusion that we should therefore log off and have more face-to-face conversations is correct, but for slightly different reasons than people usually give. It is correct not because that will heal the body politic (it will not), but because the individual experience of mediated outrage is genuinely toxic, in the way that pulling a slot machine handle for six hours is toxic, and one does not need it to be a civilisational pathogen for it to be worth getting away from.

The esoteric question

Which brings me, by what I admit is a strange route, to occultists and esotericists. I want to talk about this because the politicisation crisis has hit these communities (small, intellectually serious, often very online) with a particular savagery, and I think the dynamics there are unusually clear, almost like a chemistry-set version of what is happening everywhere else.

The scholar Egil Asprem, in a 2020 article in Nova Religio called “The Magical Theory of Politics,” documented what he called the “American Magic War” that broke out among esoteric practitioners around the 2016 election. On one side, a widely publicised mass “binding” working organised against Trump and his administration, drawing in thousands of witches, chaos magicians, and the curious. On the other, a constellation of right-wing occultists and meme-magicians, several of them gathered around imageboard culture, claiming to have already manifested Trump’s victory through what they called “meme magic” and treating the binding as an act of war. What followed, in the years since, has been ugly and granular: friendships dissolved in occult communities, lodges split, anthologies cancelled when contributors turned out to hold views the editors found intolerable, public denunciations of authors whose books had been on people’s shelves for twenty years.

There is a particular reason this hit esoteric circles hard, and I think it is illuminating beyond the niche. Esoteric practice, in most of its modern forms, is built on a premise of personal sovereignty: the practitioner is doing the work, the practitioner makes contact with the unseen, the practitioner is responsible. This makes it a tradition unusually inhospitable to coercion and unusually congenial to a kind of philosophical individualism. But that individualism cuts in more than one political direction. It can sponsor a libertarian-left commitment to bodily autonomy and the dismantling of hierarchies; it can also, and historically very often has, sponsor a right-wing valorisation of the exceptional individual, the initiated few, the natural aristocracy of those who can see what the herd cannot. The two readings have always lived in the same texts. They have always lived in the same lodges. The work of Amy Hale and others on the longstanding right-wing currents within Paganism and ceremonial magic, currents running through Evola, through Crowley’s more uncomfortable passages, through the völkisch streak in early twentieth-century occultism, has made it harder to maintain the comforting myth that “real” esotericism is naturally progressive. It is not naturally anything. It is a set of techniques and a body of symbolism, and the politics it produces depend on who is reading and what era they are reading in.

What this means, for the practitioner trying to navigate a community in which the magician you trained with turns out to vote for people whose policies you find abhorrent, is that the temptation to purify the community (to draw boundaries, to expel, to denounce) is enormously strong, and is also a more fundamental departure from the actual logic of the tradition than is usually admitted. Most genuine initiatory lineages survived precisely because they did not require political agreement among their members. The Golden Dawn included Tory imperialists and Irish revolutionary nationalists in the same temple. The OTO has, at various times, included pretty much everybody. This is not because esotericists are unusually tolerant (they are often the opposite), but because the work the tradition is built around does not run on political consensus. It runs on something else, and the political fight, when imported into the lodge or the working group, tends to consume the something else without producing any actual political result. You end up with a smaller community of the politically pure and the same election outcomes you would have had anyway.

I am not arguing that occultists should refuse to take political positions. Some positions are clearly incompatible with any serious moral practice; a Thelemite who advocates ethnic cleansing has fundamentally misread the texts and should be told so. I am arguing that the reflex, the constant litmus-testing, the policing of who is or is not still acceptable, the readiness to vilify a long-respected teacher because of a tweet, has a specific cost in this kind of community, and that the cost is the destruction of something that took generations to build and that was, in its way, an unusual achievement: a tradition that held together across political difference because it was oriented toward something more durable than politics.

What I have actually concluded

So here is where I land, for what it is worth, after the conversation and all the thinking it set in motion.

I do not believe you have to be friends with everyone. There are political positions whose practical effect is to deny the personhood of people I love, and the relationships I have with the human beings holding such positions cannot be, and should not pretend to be, intimacy. Calling them friendship would be a lie I tell to flatter myself.

But the line that determines this is much further out than the current discourse suggests, and the territory between agreement and unforgivable is where almost all of human relationship actually lives. In that territory the task is not to maintain a perfect ideological seal and it is not to pretend that politics doesn’t matter. It is something subtler: to learn to talk to the person, not to the position; to find the layer underneath the political topsoil where you may still recognise each other; and (this is the hard one) to bear the loss when that layer turns out, on inspection, to be thinner than you hoped, without converting the loss into a moral victory.

The person I had that conversation with: I am still close to them. We are not the same as we were. The conversations have a new careful quality, and there are subjects we now route around the way you route around an old injury. Something has been lost. I am not going to pretend otherwise. But there is also something that has been preserved, and I do not yet know whether what has been preserved is worth what has been lost. Ask me again in a year.

What I do know is that the alternative (clean break, moral clarity, the satisfying snap of having drawn the line) is too easy, and easiness, in matters of this weight, is almost always a sign that one has stopped paying attention. The harder thing is to stay attentive to the actual human being in front of you, with their actual confused mixture of love and fear and inherited stories and votes you find appalling, and to keep being attentive even when it would be more comfortable to file them under a category and move on.

That, in the end, may be the only form of political activity that has not been entirely captured by the machinery making us all worse. It is also, not incidentally, a form of magic in the older sense: the deliberate maintenance of attention against the entropy that would dissolve it. Which is perhaps why the esotericists, for all their current mess, are worth paying attention to. They at least know they are doing a working. The rest of us mostly think we are just having opinions.

Comments are open. I am genuinely interested in disagreement, including from people who think I am letting myself off too easy. Especially from those people, actually.

That distinction is more consequential than it might first appear, and it sets the frame for everything I want to say here. The contemporary scientific literature on lucid dreaming has, in genuine and useful ways, corroborated that practitioners across centuries were cultivating a real and measurable state. It has also, in places, rediscovered procedures the traditions have been teaching for a very long time, sometimes without knowing it had done so. And in other places it has fundamentally misunderstood what those procedures were for. Holding all three of these things together at once is, I have come to think, the only honest way to proceed.

This Saturday, 9th May at 4 pm UK time (11 am EST), I am giving a long-form lecture on Patreon that does precisely that work of holding. It runs for roughly 1 hour and a half and brings together the last forty-odd years of sleep neuroscience, the comparative scholarship on Tibetan dream yoga, the surprisingly thin but high-quality academic literature on lucid dreaming as a tool of Western esoteric practice, and a careful look at how practitioners actually use the state, what for, and what the traditions worth taking seriously have always insisted upon as the conditions of safe and sustained work. What follows is a kind of overture. It will not, I hope, exhaust your interest. It is meant to give you the contours.

What the laboratory has actually established

A useful starting point. The meta-analysis by Saunders, Roe, Smith, and Clegg (2016), pulling together fifty years of studies, estimates the lifetime prevalence of lucid dreaming at roughly 55 per cent of the population, with about 23 per cent of people reporting at least one lucid dream a month. Nearly one in four people has the state with some regularity, largely untrained. This should change how we talk about it. Lucidity is not the preserve of adepts. It is a common human capacity that certain traditions have refined to an extraordinary finish. When you teach dream work to a class, you are giving language and method to something most of those present have already touched, however briefly.

The neural picture, as it stands, is consistent and interesting without being closed. Lucid REM appears to be a hybrid state. It retains the sensory phenomenology of ordinary REM dreaming, but regions of cortex that normally go quiet during dreaming come back online. Dresler and colleagues (2012) produced what remains the foundational EEG/fMRI case study of signal-verified lucid dreaming, and found that during the participant’s lucid episodes, activity increased in the bilateral precuneus, the inferior parietal lobules, anterior prefrontal cortex at Brodmann area 10, and occipito-temporal regions. Baird, Castelnovo, Gosseries, and Tononi (2018) found, working independently, that frequent lucid dreamers show increased resting-state connectivity between the same prefrontal and parietal regions even when awake. The network appears at both the state and trait levels. That is difficult to dismiss as artefact. Brodmann area 10 is the brain’s self-monitoring hub, most implicated in metacognitive self-evaluation during waking. The angular gyrus and precuneus anchor episodic self-reference. What lucidity seems to be, neurally, is the selective reactivation of the self-watching circuitry while the dream continues to run. The dream does not stop being a dream. The dreamer, to borrow a phrase the tradition would recognise, remembers to notice it.

I want to register one note of caution that the popular literature consistently ignores. Voss, Holzmann, Tuin, and Hobson (2009) reported a burst of 40-hertz gamma activity in frontal cortex during lucid REM, and this finding now circulates as if it were settled. It is not. Frontal scalp gamma is notoriously contaminated by ocular artefacts, and subsequent stimulation work has yielded inconsistent results. There is, in short, real reason to hold the specific frequency claim more loosely than the broader hybrid-state picture, which holds firm. I will go into this in some detail on Saturday because it matters for how practitioners read the science: not all replications are equal, not all citations earn their authority, and learning to tell the difference is part of the work.

Dream yoga and the problem of translation

The single most important conceptual move I want to make in the lecture, and the one I think is most often fudged in practitioner-facing writing, is the distinction between the scientific category and the soteriological practice. The scientific category describes a measurable sleep state, defined by frontoparietal reactivation during REM and verifiable through signalling paradigms. Tibetan Buddhist dream yoga, milam, embeds that state within an entirely different ecology of meaning. It is one of the Six Yogas of Naropa, alongside tummo, illusory body, the yoga of clear light, bardo yoga, and phowa. It does not stand alone. It feeds on the daytime practice of recognising appearances as illusory, and it feeds into the bardo doctrine concerning the intermediate states after death. Serinity Young’s Dreaming in the Lotus (1999) remains the indispensable English-language treatment, and what becomes apparent reading her closely is that lucidity, in the dream-yoga frame, is not the endpoint at all. It is the first step of a longer road. The laboratory verifies lucidity and stops. The tradition asks what comes next.

Eleanor Rosch (2014) puts the point with a clarity I find difficult to improve upon: to treat dream yoga as an early version of lucid-dream research is to mistake the vehicle for the road. The instruction to face fearful dream content directly, common across dream yoga manuals, has been picked up by clinical psychology as nightmare rescripting and stripped of its conceptual furniture. The technique looks identical. What is being cultivated is radically different. The clinical version aims at symptom reduction. The dream-yoga version proceeds from the premise that all mental content, terrifying or delightful, is of the same empty character, and that recognising this in dreams is the rehearsal for recognising it everywhere. If your tradition gives you that instruction, you are not being told to manage your nightmares. You are being invited, night after night, into a rehearsal of something much larger.

This is the kind of thing that comparative scholarship can clarify and laboratory science cannot. It is also the kind of thing that a careless conflation of the two domains tends to flatten, which is why I want to spend real time on it in the lecture rather than gesturing at it.

A technology of magic

The portion of the talk I expect to be of most direct interest to many of you concerns the use of lucid dreaming as a technology of magical practice. Here I want to be candid about the state of the literature: peer-reviewed scholarship on the magical use of lucid dreaming in Western esotericism is thin, and most of what circulates on the subject is practitioner writing of variable quality. But the scholarly literature we do have is genuinely good. Egil Asprem’s article on kataphatic practice (Asprem, 2017) provides the most rigorous available frame, arguing that the trained-imagination traditions of Western esotericism, visionary ascent, scrying, the Body of Light work in the Golden Dawn and post-Crowleyan currents, all share a cognitive substrate of disciplined, content-rich attention. Lucid dreaming, in this framing, is one modality among several in a broader repertoire of trained imaginal work, not an exotic import but a continuous development of practices European magicians have been refining since at least the early modern period.

What this looks like at the bench, so to speak, is something I will treat more thoroughly in the lecture, with reference to specific historical antecedents and contemporary practitioner accounts. The use cases overlap rather than dividing cleanly. Cultivated dream incubation, in which a question is posed before sleep and the answer sought either in non-lucid content or, for the more experienced, in the lucid state where the dream may be questioned directly, has a continuous lineage from the Asclepieian incubation rites through medieval Christian visionary literature to the Sufi istikhara tradition Mittermaier (2011) documents in contemporary Egyptian practice. Evocation within the lucid state, the deliberate summoning of spirits, daimones, ancestors or deity forms, draws on antecedents in Golden Dawn astral temple work and in the imaginal journeying methods associated with pathworking. Sigil work, undertaken either before sleep or within the lucid dream itself, varies enormously in the ontological commitments practitioners bring to it, and that variation is itself worth attending to. The most ambitious use is initiatic, the lucid dream as a space for formal ritual and for encounter with figures whose transmissions the practitioner regards as binding on waking practice. This last is also, inevitably, the use most prone to self-deception, and the traditions that take it seriously have always developed elaborate apparatus for distinguishing genuine contact from projection.

That last point I would underline. Asprem (2017) is careful to note that kataphatic practice can be framed in multiple ways without the technique itself changing. Whether a dream-encountered spirit is a real non-human intelligence, a projection of the practitioner’s psyche, a denizen of the Corbinian mundus imaginalis that is neither wholly subjective nor wholly objective, or something else entirely, is not a question polysomnography is built to answer, and no future brain scan ever will be. This is not a weakness in the science. It is a structural limit. Practitioners working from different ontological premises are doing different things, even when the techniques look identical from outside. What the laboratory can confirm is that the state is real, trainable, and measurable. What the state means is decided elsewhere, and that decision belongs to the tradition in which the practice takes place.

There is a further point I want to dwell on at some length on Saturday, because I have not seen it articulated often enough in practitioner literature. The technologies of dream magic were, in nearly every traditional setting we know about, held within a container of ethical formation, lineage transmission, and community interpretation. The lucid dreamer working alone with a manual and a set of techniques has access to the techniques but not to the container. Aleena Chia (2019) has argued, in a media-archaeological study I find genuinely illuminating, that contemporary Western lucid-dream culture represents the secularisation and individualisation of practices that were once communal and ritually embedded. For magical work specifically, this matters more than the popular manuals tend to acknowledge, because the interpretive community is precisely what disciplines claims of initiation, distinguishes genuine contact from self-deception, and holds in check the kind of grandiosity that solitary imaginal work can generate even in experienced practitioners. If your lineage provides such a container, use it. If you are working outside one, proceed with a great deal more caution than the manuals usually suggest.

What I will cover on Saturday, and why I think it is worth your time

The lecture is built for the kind of audience this Substack tends to attract: practitioners and researchers who want the science taken seriously where it earns the right to be taken seriously, and who want it placed alongside, rather than above, the contemplative and magical traditions that have been working with these states for considerably longer than there has been a sleep laboratory. I will cover the prevalence and neuroscience in more detail than I have here, with attention to which findings are robust and which are contested. I will work through the four induction methods that have empirical backing (MILD, WBTB, SSILD, and the pharmacological route via galantamine), explain the mechanism each is leveraging, and discuss why reality-testing, which dominates popular manuals, has weaker evidence than its prominence implies. I will go into Tibetan dream yoga in some depth, including the relationship between milam, ösel, and bardo yoga, and what the comparative scholarship has and has not been able to say about the soteriological structure of the practice. I will treat the magical uses I have only sketched here at proper length, drawing on Asprem’s framework, on the comparative incubation literature, and on the historiography of Western esoteric pathworking. I will spend time on the yoga nidra terminological tangle, which is more interesting than it sounds and goes to the heart of how modern practices misname themselves. And I will close with practical guidance, calibrated to what the evidence actually supports, including a frank discussion of when sustained lucid-dream work becomes counterproductive and what the traditions have always known about why.

The Zoom session runs roughly two hours, with time for questions at the end. Patrons at the relevant tiers will receive the link in advance and access to the recording afterwards, along with the formatted lecture script and reference list. If you have been on the fence about joining the Patreon community, this is, I think, a representative example of what we do there: scholarship taken seriously, practice taken seriously, and the considerable space between them treated with the care it deserves.

Details, link, and tier information are on the Patreon page. I look forward to seeing many of you on Saturday. For those who cannot make it live, the recording will be available shortly afterwards, and I will be drawing on the same material in subsequent posts here.

The sleeping mind knows more than we have credited it with. The question, for practitioners and researchers alike, is what it is trying to tell us, and whether we can slow down enough to hear it.

References

Asprem, E. (2017). Explaining the esoteric imagination: Towards a theory of kataphatic practice. Aries: Journal for the Study of Western Esotericism, 17(1), 17–50. https://doi.org/10.1163/15700593-01701002

Baird, B., Castelnovo, A., Gosseries, O., & Tononi, G. (2018). Frequent lucid dreaming associated with increased functional connectivity between frontopolar cortex and temporoparietal association areas. Scientific Reports, 8, 17798. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-018-36190-w

Chia, A. (2019). Virtual lucidity: A media archaeology of dream hacking wearables. communication +1, 7(2), Article 5.

Corbin, H. (1969). Creative imagination in the Sufism of Ibn ʿArabi (R. Manheim, Trans.). Princeton University Press.

Dresler, M., Wehrle, R., Spoormaker, V. I., Koch, S. P., Holsboer, F., Steiger, A., Czisch, M., & Hallschmid, M. (2012). Neural correlates of dream lucidity obtained from contrasting lucid versus non-lucid REM sleep: A combined EEG/fMRI case study. Sleep, 35(7), 1017–1020. https://doi.org/10.5665/sleep.1974

Mittermaier, A. (2011). Dreams that matter: Egyptian landscapes of the imagination. University of California Press.

Rosch, E. (2014). The emperor’s clothes: A look behind the Western veil of mindfulness and Tibetan Buddhist dream yoga. In R. Hurd & K. Bulkeley (Eds.), Lucid dreaming: New perspectives on consciousness in sleep (Vol. 2, pp. 205–224). Praeger.

Saunders, D. T., Roe, C. A., Smith, G., & Clegg, H. (2016). Lucid dreaming incidence: A quality effects meta-analysis of 50 years of research. Consciousness and Cognition, 43, 197–215. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2016.06.002

Voss, U., Holzmann, R., Tuin, I., & Hobson, J. A. (2009). Lucid dreaming: A state of consciousness with features of both waking and non-lucid dreaming. Sleep, 32(9), 1191–1200. https://doi.org/10.1093/sleep/32.9.1191

Young, S. (1999). Dreaming in the lotus: Buddhist dream narrative, imagery, and practice. Wisdom Publications.

I want to begin with a date, because in this story the date matters more than usual. March 1939. Volume 50, number 1 of Folklore carries a short article by Julia Somerset, Lady Raglan, titled simply, “The ‘Green Man’ in Church Architecture.” Twelve pages. So far as anyone has been able to establish, it was her only published contribution to folklore scholarship. And in those twelve pages, as best the documentary record allows us to reconstruct, the modern Green Man begins to take recognisable shape as a named religious and interpretive figure.

That is the claim, and I want to make it carefully, because I know that many of you reading this have an altar at home where a leafy face looks back at you. I am not here to take that face away. I am here to tell you, as precisely as the sources allow, when it arrived, who gave it its present form, and why the version you have inherited, as a named and synthesised figure, is a modern one. (I have also recorded a video version of this argument on YouTube, for those who prefer to listen rather than read; this Substack piece is the longer companion text, with the citations sitting where you can actually click through them.)

What Raglan actually wrote

Raglan’s article opens with a small scene that is easy to miss and impossible, once seen, to unsee. A vicar in Monmouthshire shows her a carved head at Llangwm church and proposes that it might represent “the spirit of inspiration.” She overrules him. “It seemed to me certain that it was a man and not a spirit, and moreover that it was a ‘Green Man.’ So I named it.” That sentence is the hinge on which everything later turns. The act of naming is explicit, and it is her own. From there she identifies this newly named figure with Jack-in-the-Green, Robin Hood, the King of the May, Green George, the Bavarian Pfingstl, and the French loup vert, all subsumed under the thesis that the carvings encode a pagan fertility god who persisted in unofficial worship beneath medieval Christianity.

The evidential basis for that synthesis is extraordinarily thin. Raglan cites Sidney Addy’s 1901 description of the Castleton Garland, reaches for Attis and Odin by analogy, and leans openly on Frazer’s Golden Bough and Margaret Murray’s witch-cult thesis. She does not cite a medieval text identifying a foliate head with a deity, and no such text is known to exist. It is worth pausing here on how sharply her proposal departs from the prior history of the phrase itself. Brandon Centerwall, in “The Name of the Green Man” (Folklore 108, 1997), demonstrated that before Raglan, no one had applied the term “Green Man” to architectural foliate heads at all. In early modern English, the phrase denoted leaf-clad whifflers in civic pageantry; from the seventeenth century it named a pub sign associated with distillers. Raglan took a term already current in those other contexts and reapplied it to architectural foliate heads in a way the earlier usage does not support.

The coinage stuck. As Kathleen Basford observed in her 1991 review of Anderson and Hicks, again in Folklore, “No one, I think, ever called a foliate head a ‘Green Man’ before Lady Raglan; now we all do, even though we may not accept her hypothesis.” That is the situation we have inherited. It is also the situation this article exists to clarify.

The foliate heads have their own history, and it is not this one

Kathleen Basford’s The Green Man (D. S. Brewer, 1978) remains the foundational art-historical study, and its conclusions sit very badly with Raglan’s. Basford, who was a botanist by training, traced the motif back to Roman decorative masks of the first through third centuries (the Oceanus type in particular) and to Dionysian vegetal faces, which passed into Christian use through late antique sarcophagi such as that attributed to Saint Abre at Saint-Hilaire-le-Grand in Poitiers, and through the Gallo-Roman head reused by Archbishop Nicetius at Trier in the sixth century. By the medieval period, the motif had been fully incorporated into Christian ecclesiastical art, and its church history is far better understood in that context than as a covert pagan survival inserted into church stonework by rebellious masons. There is no good evidence for the rebellious-masons story, and there never has been.

Basford’s description of the Romanesque foliate head is worth holding onto, because it is almost the opposite of what contemporary Pagan readers expect. In her reading, the Romanesque foliate head appears mainly as a demonic or admonitory figure. Its aspect is menacing, grotesque, consistent with the moral symbolism Rabanus Maurus gave to vegetation in the ninth-century De Universo, where leaves signify the sins of the flesh. Only with the Gothic transition around the thirteenth century does the figure acquire the more naturalistic features at Bamberg, Southwell, Chartres, and Rosslyn that later viewers tend to find sympathetic. Basford herself considered Raglan’s fertility hypothesis “very unlikely.” Richard Hayman, writing thirty years later in The Green Man (Shire, 2010), put the consequence plainly: the green men in British churches belong to Christian rather than pagan iconography.

A note on the Indian kīrttimukha comparison, because Mercia MacDermott proposed in Explore Green Men (Heart of Albion, 2003) that the disgorging “face of glory” reached Romanesque Europe through the medieval Arab world, and Ronald Hutton has lent qualified support to the route in Queens of the Wild (Yale, 2022). The structural resemblance is real and arresting. Direct transmission, however, remains undocumented, and the safest conclusion is that any line of transmission is, at present, hypothetical, even though pattern-books, workshops, and long-range ornamental exchange offer plausible mechanisms. Whatever moved across these distances was, so far as the evidence shows, an ornamental or iconographic motif rather than a traceable cult.

Frazer, Murray, and the structure Raglan inherited

To understand why Raglan saw what she saw, you have to look at the framework she was working inside. Frazer’s Golden Bough supplied the template of the universal dying-and-rising vegetation god. Margaret Murray’s Witch-Cult in Western Europe (1921) and The God of the Witches (1931) supplied a mechanism of survival: an organised pagan cult persecuted as witchcraft, whose Horned God went variously by the names of Pan, Cernunnos, Herne, and the Devil of the trial records. Her 1934 paper “Female Fertility Figures” read sheela-na-gigs as disguised pagan goddesses surviving in Christian churches. That is precisely the interpretive template Raglan applied to foliate heads five years later. Hutton identifies the filiation in his Katharine Briggs Memorial Lecture, “How Pagan Were Medieval English Peasants?” (Folklore 122, 2011), where he writes that it was almost certainly Murray’s example that inspired Raglan.

The difficulty is that the interpretive scaffolding in question has been extensively dismantled by subsequent scholarship. Norman Cohn’s Europe’s Inner Demons (Sussex, 1975) showed that Murray’s witch-cult rested on tortured confessions shaped by inquisitorial expectation and, in some cases, on nineteenth-century forgeries. Keith Thomas called her conclusions “almost totally groundless,” and Hutton’s verdict in The Triumph of the Moon (Oxford, 1999) is that she handled her sources with reckless abandon. Each component Raglan fused into a single figure proves, on inspection, to have its own more local and historically specific trajectory. Roy Judge’s The Jack-in-the-Green (D. S. Brewer, 1979) established that the dancing leaf-clad Jack cannot be traced earlier than about 1775, emerging among London milkmaids and chimney sweeps as an urban fundraising custom; Judge later called Raglan’s synthesis a textbook case of invented tradition. Green George is Slavic and Carpathian, known to Raglan only through the pages of Frazer. The May King is documented in English churchwardens’ accounts as a parish revel figure, analysed by Hutton in The Stations of the Sun (Oxford, 1996), and the evidence points to community festivity on the ecclesiastical calendar rather than sacred-kingship ritual. Robin Hood is a late-medieval ballad outlaw. None of these, considered in its own historical context, provides evidence for a single continuous fertility cult. Their later assimilation into one figure was the work of twentieth-century comparative interpretation.

How a coinage became a god

If the Green Man, as a distinct modern Pagan figure, is largely a twentieth-century invention, the more interesting question is why he took. One short answer is that Jungian archetypal psychology, environmental discourse, and a slowly evolving Wiccan theology converged in such a way as to make this figure especially compelling. Doreen Valiente’s An ABC of Witchcraft (1973) already has an entry for him, where he appears as “the spirit of the trees, and the green growing things of earth,” authenticated by a single uncorroborated oral claim that covert pagans were once called “Green Jack’s Children.” As Ethan Doyle White has shown in “A New God for a New Paganism” (Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture 17, 2023), Gardner’s Book of Shadows contains no Green Man deity. Early Wiccans read the foliate heads as images of the Horned God they already had. The figure entered the tradition as an aspect, not a distinct god, and only gradually was he theologically thickened into one, a process visible across Janet and Stewart Farrar’s The Witches’ God (1989) and Vivianne Crowley’s Wicca: The Old Religion in the New Age (1989).

The decisive popular consolidation came with William Anderson and Clive Hicks, Green Man: The Archetype of Our Oneness with the Earth (HarperCollins, 1990). Anderson’s book is a religious text illustrated with medieval art, and it says, in very nearly so many words, that the ecological awakening of the late twentieth century requires the reawakening of the male counterpart of the Goddess. Basford reviewed the volume in Folklore 102 (1991) and noted, with visible restraint, that the sinister and malevolent aspects of the foliate head had predominated through two thousand years of its history. That observation sits beside Anderson’s benevolent consort as a quiet reproach. Broader ecological discourse, to which Gaia language certainly contributed, helped make the figure newly resonant by the close of the century. By the turn of the millennium, he was fixed.

What to do with this

I want to end where I began, with that March 1939 issue of Folklore. Ronald Hutton’s phrase for what Raglan did is that she invented a figure “for a world which was beginning to need him,” a formulation Carolyne Larrington quotes approvingly in The Land of the Green Man (I. B. Tauris, 2015), and which I think is exactly the right description. The Green Man of contemporary Pagan discourse is largely a twentieth-century religious construction. That is not a dismissal. Religious invention is one of the things religions do, and they have always done it. A historically responsible account of modern Paganism gains nothing by obscuring that process; it gains a great deal by attending to it.

The foliate heads remain. They draw on Mediterranean and late antique visual traditions and were thoroughly integrated into Christian medieval art, theologically layered in ways we are still recovering, and they deserve study on their own terms. And the Green Man you know, the one who grows leaves at the equinox and drinks in the pubs that bear his name, also deserves study on his own terms, as a remarkable case of a modern religious figure assembled, largely in public and largely in print, within living memory. He is not ancient. He is ours. That is, I would argue, the more interesting thing for him to be.

References

Anderson, W., & Hicks, C. (1990). Green man: The archetype of our oneness with the earth. HarperCollins.

Basford, K. (1978). The Green Man. D. S. Brewer.

Basford, K. (1991). A new view of “Green Man” sculptures [Review of the book Green man: The archetype of our oneness with the earth, by W. Anderson & C. Hicks]. Folklore, 102(2), 237–239.

Centerwall, B. S. (1997). The name of the Green Man. Folklore, 108, 25–33.

Cohn, N. (1975). Europe’s inner demons: An enquiry inspired by the great witch‑hunt. Sussex University Press.

Crowley, V. (1989). Wicca: The old religion in the new age. Aquarian Press.

Doyle White, E. (2023). A new god for a new Paganism: The Green Man in the modern Pagan milieu. Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture, 17(2), 201–227.

Farrar, J., & Farrar, S. (1989). The witches’ god: Lord of the dance. Robert Hale.

Frazer, J. G. (1906–1915). The golden bough: A study in magic and religion (3rd ed., 12 vols.). Macmillan.

Hayman, R. (2010). The Green Man. Shire Publications.

Hutton, R. (1994). The rise and fall of Merry England: The ritual year, 1400–1700. Oxford University Press.

Hutton, R. (1996). The stations of the sun: A history of the ritual year in Britain. Oxford University Press.

Hutton, R. (1999). The triumph of the moon: A history of modern Pagan witchcraft. Oxford University Press.

Hutton, R. (2011). How pagan were medieval English peasants? Folklore, 122(3), 235–249.

Hutton, R. (2022). Queens of the wild: Pagan goddesses in Christian Europe. Yale University Press.

Judge, R. (1979). The Jack‑in‑the‑Green: A May Day custom. D. S. Brewer.

Larrington, C. (2015). The land of the Green Man: A journey through the supernatural landscapes of the British Isles. I. B. Tauris.

Lovelock, J. (1979). Gaia: A new look at life on earth. Oxford University Press.

MacDermott, M. (2003). Explore Green Men. Heart of Albion Press.

Matthews, J. (2001). The quest for the Green Man. Quest Books.

Murray, M. A. (1921). The witch‑cult in Western Europe: A study in anthropology. Clarendon Press.

Murray, M. A. (1931). The god of the witches. Sampson Low.

Murray, M. A. (1934). Female fertility figures. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, 64, 93–100.

Purkiss, D. (1996). The witch in history: Early modern and twentieth‑century representations. Routledge.

Raglan, Lady [Somerset, J.]. (1939). The “Green Man” in church architecture. Folklore, 50(1), 45–57.

Thomas, K. (1971). Religion and the decline of magic: Studies in popular beliefs in sixteenth‑ and seventeenth‑century England. Weidenfeld & Nicolson.

Valiente, D. (1973). An ABC of witchcraft past and present. Robert Hale.

I have been working through this material for a while now, partly for my own research and partly because the questions it raises keep surfacing in conversations with practitioners, especially those of us with one foot in living folk tradition and one in the academic literature. The Sabbath is the place where the two worlds collide most uncomfortably. It is also the place where, if you are willing to sit with the discomfort, some of the most interesting thinking about what witchcraft actually is becomes possible.

Here is the short version of what I have come to think. The learned Sabbath concept crystallised in a remarkably narrow corridor of the western Alps between roughly 1430 and 1440. Martine Ostorero’s critical edition of the five earliest texts has nailed this down with a precision earlier scholarship could only dream of. Before that decade, the elements existed separately: nocturnal assembly, demonic pact, bodily flight, cannibalistic infanticide, weather magic. Afterwards, they coalesced into a single composite stereotype that would dominate elite discourse for two centuries. That much is settled. What is not settled, and what the lecture I am giving for Magus-tier patrons next month will work through carefully, is the question of where the raw materials came from and what the encounter between elite framework and folk substrate actually produced.

The Cohn–Ginzburg fault line is the obvious place to start, but it is not the place to end. Cohn was right that the stereotype recycled ancient anti-heretical libels (the same accusations levelled at second-century Christians turn up almost verbatim against fifteenth-century witches, which is not a coincidence). Ginzburg was right that the benandanti existed, that their beliefs predated inquisitorial involvement, and that the slow metamorphosis of the benandanti into their enemies is documented in the archival record with painful clarity. Where it gets interesting, and where most popular accounts give up, is in the question of how to hold both of those truths at once without flattening either of them. Behringer’s vestigial mythologems, Pócs’s Hungarian fairy-witches, Wilby’s Isobel Gowdie, Roper’s psychoanalytic reading of Augsburg confessions: each of these complicates the picture in ways that the standard textbook accounts simply cannot accommodate.

And then there is the afterlife, which is where this gets personal for many of us. Michelet invented the witch-as-rebel in 1862. Murray gave that romantic impulse an anthropological veneer in 1921. Gardner transmitted Murray’s framework directly into modern Wicca in the 1950s, and the eightfold Wheel of the Year that organises so much contemporary practice is demonstrably a twentieth-century synthesis with no claim to ancient lineage. None of which makes it less meaningful to the people who practise it. What it does mean is that anyone who wants to work seriously with the Sabbath today has to reckon with the fact that they are working with a constructed image, and that the construction itself is part of what they are working with.

The most historiographically sophisticated position I have encountered, and one I want to spend real time on in the lecture, comes from contemporary Italian folk practitioners (some of whom I know personally) who reject the term Sabbath outright as an inquisitorial libel against their forebears, while affirming the underlying experiential reality of night-traveling, of the spirit’s departure, of the encounter with the dead. They refuse the elite construct and they preserve what the construct distorted. That seems to me about right. It also suggests that the most interesting work being done on the Sabbath right now is not happening in universities.

The full lecture covers all of this in detail: the Alpine crucible, Stephens’s reading of demonological copulation as a metaphysical crisis of belief rather than misogyny in any straightforward sense, the Vauderie of Arras, Pierre de Lancre in the Basque country, the long shadow of Murray, Chumbley’s Sabbatic Craft, the feminist recuperation from Daly through Federici, the aesthetic Sabbath of Robert Eggers’s The Witch, and the digital practice cultures now reshaping the conversation in real time. I will also be discussing the flying ointment question, which deserves more care than either the credulous or the dismissive accounts usually give it.

If you have followed my work for any length of time, you will know I do not have much patience for either the “witches were always real and the Church lied” position or the “it was all just inquisitorial fantasy” position. The truth is more interesting than either. The Sabbath is a palimpsest, and learning to read the layers is, I would argue, one of the most useful disciplines a practitioner and/or scholar can cultivate.

The lecture will be held on Zoom (and recorded) for Magus and higher-tier patrons on the date listed on the Patreon page. If you want to join us, the link is below. There will be time for questions afterwards, and I am hoping for a real conversation rather than a monologue. The historiography is dense but not impenetrable, and I will be working hard to make it accessible without dumbing it down.

Hope to see some of you there: Invitation Link

What does it mean to hold a copy of the Key of Solomon in your hands? For practitioners, the answer has long seemed self-evident: you are holding a book of magic attributed to King Solomon, a text whose authority rests on an unbroken chain of transmission stretching back to the biblical monarch himself. For scholars, the answer has been scarcely less neat: you are holding a late medieval grimoire, probably of Greek origin, that belongs to a well-defined corpus of “Solomonic magic.” Gal Sofer’s Solomonic Magic: Methodology, Texts, and Histories, published by Brill in 2025, dismantles both of these assumptions with a thoroughness that ought to unsettle practitioners and academics alike, and in the process opens up an entirely new way of understanding how these texts came into being, what they actually contain, and why it matters.

Let me say at the outset that this is not a popular book. It is a work of serious philological scholarship, published in a prestigious academic series on Magical and Religious Literature of Late Antiquity, and it is dense, technical, and uncompromising in its methodology. But its implications reach far beyond the academy, and that is precisely why I want to walk you through its arguments in detail.

The Problem of Definition

Sofer begins by confronting a question that might seem elementary but turns out to be extraordinarily difficult: what, exactly, is “Solomonic magic”? The term is used constantly, by practitioners and scholars alike, as though its referent were obvious. But Sofer demonstrates that it is anything but. The phrase has been defined, implicitly or explicitly, in at least three incompatible ways since the early twentieth century: as a body of texts attributed to King Solomon; as a type of ritual magic described by medieval polemicists, particularly the anonymous author of the Speculum astronomiae; and as a vaguely delineated corpus of works that share certain ritual elements such as magic circles, divine names, and the coercion of demons.

None of these definitions holds up under scrutiny. Attribution to Solomon is unstable: scribes routinely changed attributions, and some of the most important texts in the tradition are not attributed to Solomon at all. The Speculum astronomiae and similar polemical sources like William of Auvergne’s De legibus are theological condemnations, not neutral descriptions of a corpus, and using them to define a category of texts is methodologically circular. As for the ritual elements, they are shared so widely across different magical traditions that they cannot serve as distinguishing criteria.

David Pingree’s influential 1986 distinction between “Hermetic” (astral) magic and “Solomonic” (ritual) magic, which has structured much subsequent scholarship, comes in for particular criticism. Sofer shows that Pingree derived his definition almost entirely from the Speculum‘s polemical categories, supplemented by his own impressionistic characterisation of texts he deemed “Solomonic.” Julien Véronèse had already pointed out the problems with this approach, noting that the supposed unity of the Solomonic corpus did not withstand manuscript evidence and that many key texts were known only from late (fifteenth-century or later) copies. Sofer pushes this critique further, arguing that we should stop treating “Solomonic magic” as a self-evident category altogether. Instead, he proposes that we think of it as a label for parts of a textual network, one whose boundaries are determined not by attribution or polemical categorisation but by demonstrable textual relationships.

This is a crucial shift. For practitioners who have understood their tradition as a unified body of Solomonic wisdom, it means that the coherence they perceive is partly an artefact of scribal strategies, editorial decisions, and modern publishing choices. The texts are connected, but not in the way the tradition claims.

A New Methodology: Genes and Networks

To replace the old categories, Sofer develops a methodology that borrows terminology, if not method, from evolutionary biology. He proposes analysing texts at multiple scales: the individual manuscript or “node,” the group of closely related manuscripts or “cluster,” and the small textual units that recur across different manuscripts, which he calls “genes.” This last term is the most important. A gene, in Sofer’s usage, is a discrete passage, formula, list of names, ritual instruction, or narrative element that can be identified across multiple texts. By tracking the diffusion and transformation of these genes, Sofer can map relationships between texts that might otherwise appear unrelated, and he can do so without assuming the existence of a lost original or urtext.

This is a deliberate departure from classical Lachmannian philology, which aims to reconstruct a single authorial original by tracing scribal errors backwards through a stemma. Sofer argues, drawing on Bernard Cerquiglini’s critique of Lachmannism and Peter Schäfer’s work on Hekhalot literature, that such an approach is fundamentally unsuited to “open” technical texts, texts that invite their reader-practitioners to experiment with, revise, and rewrite them. Magical manuscripts are fluid texts par excellence. Their scribes were not passive copyists but active editors who combined, rearranged, supplemented, and rewrote their materials according to their own theological commitments, practical experience, and available sources. Treating such texts as degraded copies of a lost original is not just methodologically flawed; it actively obscures the creative processes by which the manuscripts were produced.

This matters enormously for practitioners, because it means that the diversity of Solomonic texts, far from being a corruption of some pristine original, is constitutive of the tradition. There was never a single, definitive Key of Solomon. There were always multiple versions, shaped by multiple hands, drawing on multiple sources in multiple languages. The scribes themselves often acknowledged this, as Sofer shows through a series of remarkable “confessions” in which scribes reveal their use of disparate sources, their awareness of multilingual traditions, and their strategies for reconciling conflicting materials.

The Textual Clusters

The second part of the book presents detailed analyses of three major clusters of texts. The first is the Liber Bileth cluster, centred on the summoning of the demon king Bileth (or Bilar, or Biled, depending on the manuscript). Sofer’s analysis of the earliest Latin node, lb1, is a masterclass in close reading. He demonstrates that this text is actually an amalgamation of at least two originally separate works: a general exorcism of all malevolent spirits and a specific exorcism of Bileth. The evidence for this includes the curious fact that Bileth himself does not appear until halfway through the text that bears his name, and that the “first exorcism” mentioned in the text has no corresponding “second exorcism.” These are traces of the editorial process by which a scribe fused two distinct textual traditions into a single work.

The Hebrew counterpart, lb2, preserves material closely related to the second half of lb1 but lacks genes present in the first half, confirming Sofer’s analysis of lb1 as composite. Other nodes in the cluster show the text being adapted for different purposes: lb3 and lb4 incorporate the Bileth material into a ritual for creating a “book of spirits,” essentially a consecrated catalogue of demons, while lb5 and lb6 refashion it into a ritual for crafting a magical ring. Throughout, the same genes, the Leprosy Gene (a threat that disobedient demons will be struck with leprosy), the Kindreds Gene (a reference to twelve kindreds that descended from heaven), various Demonic List Genes, the Rings Gene, recur in different configurations, revealing the modular character of the tradition.

The Clavicula Salomonis cluster receives the most extensive treatment, and here Sofer’s argument about auxiliary manuals is central. He argues that the Claviculae were not transmissions of a single work but compilations: attempts by scribes to gather diverse methods for constraining demons into organised, systematic collections. The earliest Italian node, cs1, from the fifteenth century, already contains multiple distinct methods, some traceable to eleventh-century sources through the Sefer Haqqevitza cluster. Later nodes in English, French, Latin, and Hebrew show the same methods being rearranged, supplemented, and adapted according to the needs and preferences of individual scribes. The Clavicula Salomonis, in short, was never a fixed text. It was a format, a way of organizing magical knowledge, and different scribes filled that format with different combinations of material.

The Sapientia Salomonis cluster adds a further dimension. These texts focus on the creation and consecration of demon catalogues, lists of demonic names, seals, and abilities that serve as reference works for practitioners. Sofer shows their close relationship to the Liber consecrationum tradition and demonstrates that the Hebrew nodes of this cluster share striking correspondences with the English Theurgia-Goetia section of the Lemegeton, the “Lesser Key of Solomon” that has been so influential in modern ceremonial magic.

The Babylonian Roots

Perhaps the most consequential section of the book is the third part, in which Sofer traces the historical trajectory of the network’s genes. His central argument is that the practice of gathering or summoning demons, the core activity described by the texts in his network, has deep roots in Babylonian Jewish culture, roots that are textually demonstrable rather than merely phenomenological.

The argument begins with the talmudic interpretation of the biblical prohibition of ḥover ḥaver (Deuteronomy 18:10-11). In the Babylonian Talmud, the rabbis Rava and Abaye debated the meaning of this term, with Abaye identifying ḥover ḥaver as the practice of burning incense to gather demons, using the verb leḥabro, “to gather.” This interpretation was widely accepted by later Jewish commentators across Ashkenaz, France, Italy, and Spain, establishing a continuous tradition of understanding demon-summoning as a recognised, if forbidden, practice within Jewish halakhic discourse.

Sofer then turns to the Cairo Genizah, the extraordinary repository of discarded texts from the Ben Ezra synagogue in Old Cairo, where he identifies fragments of a cluster he calls Sefer Haqqevitza, “The Book of Gathering [Demons].” Building on Gideon Bohak’s earlier work establishing connections between Genizah magic texts and Jewish Babylonian incantation bowls, Sofer demonstrates that the genes found in the Genizah fragments of Sefer Haqqevitza are the direct ancestors of genes that appear in the later Latin, Italian, English, and French texts of his network. The Leprosy Gene, the Demonic List Genes, the Rings Gene, the Kindreds Gene: all can be traced back to these eleventh-century (and earlier) Hebrew and Aramaic sources.

This is a finding with profound implications. It means that texts like the Key of Solomon, long assumed to be of medieval Christian or Greek origin, contain substantial material that originated in the world of Babylonian Jewish magic, material that was transmitted through the Cairo Genizah, medieval Spain, and Italian translation centres before entering the Latin and vernacular European traditions. The path of transmission was not simple or linear; it involved multiple languages, multiple cultural contexts, and the active intervention of scribes at every stage. But the textual evidence, in the form of shared genes, is there.

Overturning the Hygromanteia Hypothesis

Among the most significant revisionist arguments in the book is Sofer’s challenge to the widely accepted “Hygromanteia hypothesis,” which holds that the Greek Hygromanteia, a collection of magical methods also attributed to Solomon, is the ultimate source of the Latin Clavicula Salomonis. This has been something close to a scholarly consensus, building on the work of Chester Carlton McCown, Armand Delatte, and Pablo Torijano.

Sofer turns this hypothesis on its head. Through a careful analysis of the earliest Hygromanteia manuscript, from the fifteenth century, he identifies multiple indicators that the Greek text is, at least in part, a translation from Latin or Italian into Greek, rather than the reverse. He points to the presence of the Latin form “Alpha et O[mega]” rendered into Greek as “Alephatá” (a form a Greek scribe would have recognized had he been working from a Greek source), to the Italian loanword “kampanon” (from campanone), and to numerous other details suggesting that the Hygromanteia drew on the same Latin and Italian sources that fed the Clavicula tradition, rather than being their ancestor.

This does not mean that Greek texts had no influence on the Solomonic network; Sofer is careful to acknowledge that they did, particularly in later periods. But it does mean that the search for a single Greek urtext behind the Clavicula is misguided. The Clavicula emerged, Sofer argues, as a fourteenth-century Italian response to an information overload: a flood of practical magical manuals arriving from Spanish and Provençal translation centres, which scribes organised into systematic auxiliary manuals modelled on the earlier Liber Razielis.

What This Means for Practitioners

Let me turn now to the practical and interpretive implications of Sofer’s work for those of you who engage with Solomonic magic as practitioners rather than, or in addition to, scholars.

First, the diversity of texts is not a problem to be solved. There is a deep tendency within practitioner communities to seek the “correct” version, the authentic Key of Solomon, the original Goetia. Mathers attempted this; Crowley attempted it in his own way; and the impulse continues today. Sofer’s research shows that this quest is based on a misunderstanding of how the texts were produced. There was no single original. The tradition was always plural, always multilingual, always in flux. Scribes like Isaac Zekli in eighteenth-century Amsterdam explicitly worked from multiple sources in different languages, Hebrew and Italian, and saw no contradiction in doing so. Berengar Ganell in fourteenth-century Perpignan was quite conscious that his “Solomonic magic” rested on four linguistic pillars: Greek, Hebrew, Latin, and Arabic. The eclecticism that modern practitioners sometimes treat as contamination was, for the scribes who created these texts, a feature, not a defect.

Second, the Solomonic attribution itself needs to be understood as a scribal strategy rather than a historical claim. Sofer argues persuasively that the consistent attribution to King Solomon functions as a way of legitimating the eclectic, multilingual character of the texts. Because Solomon was believed to possess all wisdom, his name could serve as an umbrella under which diverse traditions, Babylonian Jewish demonology, Arabic astral magic, Latin ritual formulae, Greek divinatory methods, could be gathered into a single work without contradiction. The Solomonic attribution, Sofer suggests, correlates with later stages of textual development, appearing more consistently as texts become more compilatory and systematic. The earlier sources, including the Sefer Haqqevitza fragments, often lack any reference to Solomon at all.

Third, and perhaps most challengingly, the Leprosy Gene, the threat that demons who disobey will be struck with leprosy, which practitioners of Goetic magic will recognise from their rituals, can be traced back through Cairo Genizah fragments to Jewish Babylonian incantation bowls of the sixth to seventh centuries. When Coven recorded their “Black Mass” in 1969 and the high priest threatened disobedient spirits with “dangerous disease and leprosy,” they were, without knowing it, reciting a formula whose ancestry reaches back over a millennium to the banks of the Euphrates. This is the kind of continuity that matters, not the imagined continuity of a single unbroken text, but the real continuity of specific textual genes persisting through extraordinary transformations of language, culture, and context.

Fourth, the relationship between the Solomonic tradition and Jewish magical practice is far deeper and more constitutive than has generally been acknowledged. This is not a matter of occasional Hebrew loanwords or garbled divine names. The core ritual technology of demon-summoning, the formulaic structures, the demonic lists, the angelic invocations, the protective rings, the system of divine names, all of this material has demonstrable roots in Jewish sources, transmitted through identifiable channels. Abraham Colorni’s sixteenth-century translation of a Hebrew Clavicula into Italian was not an anomaly; it was a late episode in a long history of Jewish-Christian textual exchange that shaped the entire tradition.

This is a book that rewards careful reading, and I would encourage anyone serious about understanding the history and nature of these texts to engage with it directly. What Sofer has given us is not a new key, but something more valuable: a map of the network that produced all the keys, and a method for reading them that respects both their complexity and their humanity.

There is a particular kind of vertigo that sets in when something you have built your spiritual life around turns out to rest on shaky historical ground. Not wrong, exactly, in any simple way. But not what you were told. Not what you believed. And the question that follows is not really an intellectual one at all. It is visceral, even somatic: Am I believing a lie?

I want to talk about that question, and about a short but remarkably pointed paper that frames it with real precision. Caroline Tully’s “Researching the Past is a Foreign Country: Cognitive Dissonance as a Response by Practitioner Pagans to Academic Research on the History of Pagan Religions,” published in The Pomegranate in 2011, remains one of the most direct treatments of the emotional fallout that occurs when practitioners encounter scholarship that contradicts their founding narratives. I used it as a key source for the video, and I think it deserves a closer look than a YouTube episode can provide, not least because the dynamics Tully describes are ones I navigate constantly in my own work on Italian folk magic and the Stregheria question.

The paper in brief

Tully’s central argument is built around Leon Festinger’s theory of cognitive dissonance: that when people encounter information fundamentally at odds with their existing beliefs, they experience a form of psychological distress, and that the most common response is not to revise the beliefs but to reject, discredit, or reframe the threatening information. Tully applies this to modern Paganism’s relationship with academic historiography, and she is not gentle about it. She tracks the pattern across three sites of conflict: the published text (specifically the furore around Ronald Hutton’s The Triumph of the Moon and Ben Whitmore’s attempted rebuttal in Trials of the Moon), the archaeological excavation (Goddess worshippers at Çatalhöyük clashing with Ian Hodder’s team), and the museum (Druid groups in the UK demanding reburial of Neolithic remains and privileged access to ancient artefacts).

In each case, Tully argues, the same mechanism is at work. Practitioners who have internalised a particular narrative about the ancient roots of their religion encounter evidence that complicates or contradicts that narrative. Rather than sitting with the discomfort and revising, the more common response is to attack the messenger: academics are framed as hostile outsiders, colonisers of Pagan heritage, agents of some patriarchal or anti-Pagan conspiracy. The scholarship itself goes unread or uncomprehended, and the community rallies around whatever counter-narrative feels most affirming, regardless of its evidential merit.

Tully’s proposed solution is that Pagan Studies scholars, who straddle both worlds, are uniquely positioned to act as translators, making academic methodology legible to practitioners and thereby defusing some of the antagonism. She is careful to note that she is not arguing for the superiority of academic knowledge over other ways of knowing, but insists that if practitioners are going to invoke history as a legitimating force, they need to engage with history as a discipline, not merely as a reservoir of comforting stories.

Where I agree, and where I want to push further

Tully is right, I think, about the basic mechanism. I have watched it play out in real time, particularly around the Stregheria question. The pattern is almost formulaic: someone encounters the evidence that Raven Grimassi’s “Italian Witchcraft tradition” is largely an American construction drawing on Leland’s already-dubious Aradia, on Wiccan ritual frameworks, and on a romanticised vision of Italian folk practice that does not correspond to what actual Italian practitioners do. The initial reaction is rarely curiosity. It is anger, grief, or a kind of reflexive boundary-policing that Tully would recognise immediately.

But I think the paper, for all its sharpness, underestimates something. The cognitive dissonance model is useful, but it can flatten the emotional landscape if you are not careful. Tully describes what Pagans do when confronted with uncomfortable scholarship, but she spends less time on why the stakes feel so existentially high. And this matters, because if you want to actually help people through the crisis rather than simply diagnosing them, you need to understand what is at risk.

For many practitioners, the historical narrative is not a detachable intellectual proposition. It is woven into the fabric of identity, community, and often into experiences that felt profoundly real and transformative. When someone tells you that the lineage you were initiated into was invented in the twentieth century, they are not just correcting a date. They are, from the practitioner’s perspective, threatening the coherence of an entire world of meaning. The experiences do not vanish, but the framework that made them intelligible suddenly looks fragile. That is not the same as a doomsday cult being wrong about the aliens. The affective texture is different, and I think acknowledging that matters if you want to build the bridges Tully is calling for.

The Italian parallel

I write about this from a specific vantage point. In the Italian folk magic world, we have our own version of this story, and in some ways it is even more tangled. Stregheria presents itself as an unbroken Italian tradition of witchcraft. In reality, it is a late-twentieth-century American invention that grafts Wiccan theology onto a deeply selective reading of Italian sources. The actual living traditions of Italian folk magic, the segnature, the healing prayers, the work with saints and the dead, bear very little resemblance to what Grimassi described, and the practitioners who carry those traditions in Italy would not recognise themselves in his books.

But here is the complication, and it is one that Tully’s framework does not quite address. Many Italian-American practitioners who came to Stregheria did so because they were genuinely searching for a connection to their heritage. The longing was real. The family memories of nonne who made the sign of the cross over a headache, who read coffee grounds, who murmured prayers that nobody bothered to write down: those memories are real. Stregheria offered a container for that longing, even if the container itself was fabricated. And so the question “your tradition is fake, now what?” is not really a gotcha. It is a genuine pastoral problem, and it deserves a genuine answer.

My answer, for what it is worth, is that the real traditions are still there. They are not glamorous. They are not packaged into neat initiatory systems. They are messy, Catholic, syncretic, embedded in dialect and local devotion and relationships with specific saints and specific dead. They require you to learn Italian, or at least to learn to listen. They require you to set aside the fantasy of the beautiful rebel witch and sit with the reality of the village healer who would have been horrified to be called a strega. But they are real, and they are worth the effort.

The deeper question

The title of my video was deliberately provocative: “Your Tradition is Fake. Now What?” The “now what” is the part that interests me most, because Tully’s paper, like much of the academic literature on this topic, is stronger on diagnosis than on prescription. She says Pagan Studies scholars can help, and I believe that. But help with what, exactly?

I think the deepest gift that honest history offers practitioners is not the destruction of their religion but its liberation from a kind of false dependency. If your practice only works because you believe it descends unbroken from ancient Mesopotamia or medieval Italy or pre-Christian Britain, then it is, in a certain sense, held hostage by a claim that can be falsified. And that is a fragile foundation. But if you can learn to say, “this practice is powerful and meaningful to me, and it was assembled from various sources in the twentieth century, and those things are not in contradiction,” then you have something far more resilient. You have a practice grounded in honest experience rather than mythologised history.

This is not the same as saying history does not matter. It matters enormously. Understanding where your practices actually come from, who shaped them and why, what was borrowed and what was invented: this knowledge enriches practice rather than diminishing it. But it requires a willingness to tolerate the vertigo, to sit in the gap between what you were told and what the evidence shows, and to discover that the ground is still there even when the map turns out to be wrong.

Tully ends her paper with the observation that a religion that is static is dead. I would add: a religion that is afraid of its own history is dying, even if it does not know it yet.

If you want to read Tully’s paper for yourself, it is freely available online: Caroline Jane Tully, “Researching the Past is a Foreign Country: Cognitive Dissonance as a Response by Practitioner Pagans to Academic Research on the History of Pagan Religions,” The Pomegranate 13, no. 1 (2011): 98-105.

Also check out Sabina Magliocco’s work, which contributed to the wider argument presented in the YouTube episode: Magliocco, Sabina. 2009. “In Search of the Roots of Stregheria.” In Oral History, Oral Culture, and Italian Americans, edited by Luisa Del Giudice, 179–202. Palgrave Macmillan.

And if you have not yet watched the video that prompted this piece, you can find it here.

Read more

Over the past four decades, historians of science have quietly dismantled this picture with a thoroughness that ought to embarrass anyone still repeating it. The work of Lawrence Principe, William Newman, and Pamela H. Smith, among others, has revealed something the Enlightenment worked very hard to make us forget: that the people we now call “alchemists” and the people we now call “chemists” were, for most of recorded history, the same people, doing the same things, and calling it by the same name. The word “chemistry” was not wrestled free from “alchemy” by the triumph of reason over superstition. It was manufactured as a distinct category in the eighteenth century, when a newly professionalising discipline needed a respectable origin story and found one by inventing an embarrassing ancestor. Newman and Principe demonstrated this with precision in their landmark 1998 article in Early Science and Medicine: the two words had been synonyms, and what changed was not the practice but the politics surrounding it.

This is not a pedantic etymological point. It restructures how we understand the birth of modern science, the relationship between craft knowledge and philosophical inquiry, and the question of whether “material” and “spiritual” investigation were ever really the separate enterprises we have been taught to believe they are.

The oldest recipes in the world (and why they matter)

If you want to understand where Western alchemy begins, you have to go to Alexandria, that extraordinary pressure cooker of Greek philosophy, Egyptian craft, and Late Antique mysticism. The earliest surviving alchemical documents we possess, the Leiden and Stockholm papyri from the late third or early fourth century CE, contain over 250 recipes for metallic alloys that imitate gold and silver, artificial gemstones, and textile dyes. What is striking about them is what they lack: there is no mysticism here, no cosmic allegory, no talk of spiritual transformation. They are workshop manuals, resolutely practical. This matters because it complicates one of the most persistent assumptions about alchemy, namely that it was always and essentially a spiritual pursuit dressed in chemical clothing. The earliest material we have is, in fact, chemical clothing with no spiritual body inside it at all.

The spiritual dimension came later, and its greatest early architect was Zosimos of Panopolis, writing around 300 CE, whose extraordinary Visions wove together laboratory procedure and Hermetic theology into something genuinely new. In Zosimos, dismemberment, burning, and reconstitution are simultaneously descriptions of what happens in a crucible and allegories of the soul’s transformation. He did not see these as metaphors for each other. He saw them as the same event observed from two vantage points. That distinction, between metaphor and identity, is the crux of the whole alchemical worldview, and it is the thing modernity has the hardest time grasping.

Not one tradition but many

One of the things that makes alchemy so genuinely difficult to think about is that it is not one tradition. It is at least four or five, and the relationships between them are tangled, partial, and sometimes nonexistent.

Chinese alchemy (liandanshu) developed independently from the Western tradition, rooted not in Aristotelian element theory but in Daoist cosmology, the interplay of yin and yang, and the Five Phases. Its central goal was not the transmutation of base metals into gold but the far more ambitious project of physical immortality. The tradition divided into external alchemy (waidan), which compounded elixirs from minerals like cinnabar and mercury, and internal alchemy (neidan), which internalised the whole process within the practitioner’s body. Fabrizio Pregadio’s foundational study Great Clarity showed that early Chinese external alchemy was not primarily an exercise in correlative cosmology but a ritual practice that coordinated laboratory operations with divine powers. The laboratory was also, in other words, a temple. The tragic irony of waidan is that several Tang dynasty emperors appear to have died from ingesting the very elixirs meant to make them immortal.

Indian alchemy (rasayana) took yet another path, one deeply interwoven with tantric spirituality, yogic practice, and Ayurvedic medicine. David Gordon White’s The Alchemical Body revealed the elaborate system of homologies at its heart: mercury identified with the semen of Shiva, sulfur with the menstrual blood of the Goddess, their laboratory union enacting a microcosmic version of divine creation. The word rasa itself refuses to stay in one register, meaning simultaneously physical mercury, bodily fluid, vital essence, aesthetic flavour, and the creative seed of the divine. This is not sloppiness. It is a deliberate refusal to separate categories that the tradition regards as aspects of a single reality. Mercury preparations from the rasashastra tradition remain in clinical use today as bhasma, calcined metal preparations integrated into Ayurvedic medicine, a continuity that would be unthinkable in a European context.

Islamic alchemy, meanwhile, accomplished the most dramatic institutional transformation: through the massive translation movement under the Abbasid Caliphate, it gathered Greek, Syriac, Persian, and Indian traditions and reorganised them into something systematic enough to reshape European intellectual life for centuries. The sulfur-mercury theory of metals, the classification of chemical substances into rigorous categories, and some of the earliest clear descriptions of mineral acids all emerged from this context. The linguistic traces are everywhere: alchemy, alcohol, alkali, elixir, alembic all entered European languages through Arabic.

The great deception

When alchemy entered Latin Europe through Robert of Chester’s 1144 translation of the Liber de compositione alchemiae, it set off centuries of intense philosophical debate. Could human art genuinely replicate what nature does? Albertus Magnus thought it was theoretically possible but doubted the practical conditions could be met. Roger Bacon championed it. The Renaissance complicated things further when the recovery of the Hermetic corpus collided with the revolutionary iconoclasm of Paracelsus, who threw out Galenic humoral medicine and proposed that diseases were caused by external agents poisoning his tria prima of sulfur, mercury, and salt. His insight that toxic substances in small doses could be therapeutic anticipates the foundations of modern pharmacology.

But the real scandal, from a modern perspective, is what happened at the other end. Robert Boyle, the man whose Sceptical Chymist is routinely invoked as a founding document of modern chemistry, pursued alchemy his entire life. Principe’s The Aspiring Adept demonstrated that the famous book was not an attack on alchemists at all but on unphilosophical pharmacists. Boyle believed the Philosopher’s Stone could transmute metals and facilitate contact with spiritual beings, and he saw alchemy as a bulwark against the atheism that haunted him. Isaac Newton left approximately one million words of alchemical manuscripts, over a third of his surviving papers, representing roughly three decades of sustained experimental work. B. J. T. Dobbs argued that Newton’s alchemical research informed his concept of active principles operating within matter beyond mere mechanical contact, a concept that may have fed directly into his theory of gravitational attraction.

The story we tell ourselves about the Scientific Revolution, the one where rational inquiry steadily displaced magical thinking, simply cannot accommodate these facts without serious revision. And that is exactly what makes them so interesting.

Why this matters now

The historiographical debate about alchemy maps onto questions that remain very much alive: whether empirical investigation and metaphysical commitment are genuinely incompatible, whether craft knowledge constitutes a real epistemology, whether the modern separation of “material” and “spiritual” inquiry is a discovery about reality or merely a professional boundary that got mistaken for an ontological one. Pamela H. Smith’s concept of a “vernacular epistemology,” knowledge generated through bodily engagement with materials that constituted a genuine form of empirical investigation, suggests that the alchemist’s workshop was always a site of real knowing, even when its theoretical framework looks alien to modern eyes.

Principe’s experimental approach has pushed this further still: holding PhDs in both organic chemistry and the history of science, he has physically reproduced historical alchemical experiments and demonstrated that many apparently nonsensical texts describe real, reproducible chemical phenomena encoded in symbolic language. The famous “Green Lion devouring the Sun” is not gibberish. It is a description of gold dissolving in aqua regia, and it works.

The alchemist’s conviction that transforming matter and transforming the self were not two activities but one may have been empirically mistaken in its specific claims. But it articulated something that our current disciplinary structures, which rigorously separate the laboratory from the temple, the material from the meaningful, have trouble even formulating as a question, let alone answering. In an age when consciousness studies, embodied cognition, and the philosophy of mind are all pressing against the limits of reductive materialism, the alchemical tradition is not merely a historical curiosity. It is an archive of questions we have not yet finished asking.

This article draws on material from a forthcoming live lecture, “The History and Evolution of Alchemy: Material Practice, Spiritual Aspiration, and the Making of Modern Science,” covering the full sweep of the tradition from Hellenistic Egypt to Newton’s laboratory, across Chinese, Indian, Islamic, and European contexts.

Join me and our community this Sunday, 15 March, at 4:00 PM UK time / 12:00 noon Eastern (EDT) for the complete lecture on Zoom, with live Q&A. The session is open to Patreon members. Sign up at [PATREON LINK] to get the Zoom link and access to our growing archive of lectures and study group recordings.

I candidly admit that I’m new to SubStack, and I’ve been staring at this blank page for a few days now. So, now it’s time to get this project going.

I still don’t quite know how to use this platform, and the main reason I landed here is to have another platform to send emails to my Newsletter subscribers without paying a fortune!
That said, I do realise this can be much more than a newsletter avenue, and I’d love for you to stick around with me to see what form this space will take.

I have a few ideas at the moment, but I welcome any suggestions.

I’m thinking I could write book reviews et similia here on Substack or more personal reflections on academia, esotericism, life and everything that feels meaningful at the time.

What do you think? Suggestions? Would you get bored if I wrote longer pieces? Do you prefer longer or shorter formats? Does it matter to you?

Let’s get the academic fun started and welcome to my new Substack page!

Angela.

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