Solaria Divina

Category: Occult Theory

  • The value of beauty for humanity

    We have always valued beautiful things. People traded for visually stunning materials to make their tools out of, discovered pigments in nature for body decoration, spirituality in everything from the fragrance of flowers to the shapes of mountains. We have landscape photography, perfume is an industry that brings in billions of dollars, and people feel healthier living in places where aesthetic detail matters. Social elites have tried to define what is truly beautiful and some people out there would argue that beauty in life does not matter. I say it does.

    A basket of makeup beside two jewelry boxes, several perfume bottles, a decorative dish, gold tray, and a small pile of headbands

    A little about me. The early beauty YouTube community helped me start to learn to love myself. It was easier to get out of bed when I wanted to put on a nice outfit, do my make up, take care of my skin. Gradually over the years I linked this with my spirituality, which has a divine feminine focus. now I encourage people to care for their spirit by dressing in ways that make them feel both beautiful and comfortable, and creating an aesthetic environment that nurtures a sense of peace and contentment.

    A black cat rests on one of two velvet cushions, which are pink and yellow, in front of a wood and glass piece of furniture used as an altar. The altar holds several handmade God and goddess statues, offering cups, plates holding crystals, and several other symbolic and decorative objects.

    The copper plates, ceramic espresso cups, and many other items here were created by small business owners online who have a great sense of aesthetic. I created the statues by hand, though I wish I could have done more detail work, as a self-taught amateur sculpter. The photography is also my work. The layout is meant to be visually aesthetic with balance and symmetry. I really worked to choose colors that I find inviting. There are also some vintage items such as the two jewelry boxes I use for long-term spells, and the two candleholders on either side. I chose natural materials wherever possible as a connection to the Earth, which is why I also included the photography. And most of us appreciate the feel of luxurious material on our skin, such as velvet or silk, which is how I decided on my floor cushions.

    Luxe magic is intentional living for the purpose of being happy and fulfilled. This means self-care, cultivating beauty in your life, doing the same for others around you and being involved in your community, actively choosing intellectual pursuits and experiences that change your perspective, and above all, taking care of the divine aspect of yourself while having a strong relationship with your higher powers. Over the next several months I plan to chat with you on the various aspects of this practice. Subscribe if you are interested.

  • AI and Magic: Hard Pass

    This was a suggested prompt from Diana Rajchel. I felt my autumn was so overwhelming I just couldn’t focus on anything substantial. AI as part of a magical practice is a hot topic at the moment, and my gut reaction was hell no, but it took me a few days to start to really figure out why.

    What really got me thinking about this subject was something completely unrelated. This morning I was shifting between two purses, and I have always loved watching what’s in my bag videos, makeup hauls, that sort of thing. It finally hit me why I’ve had trouble feeling engaged with content I have traditionally loved the last couple years. Influencer marketing has made these kinds of videos into what we in journalism school called advertorials. These people are here to build para social relationships with us, while focusing on brand placement, sometimes delivering inauthentic opinions for the sake of making money. At one point I wanted to pursue content creation, but communities online based around hobbies like beauty and style have been drowned in commercial noise. So I posted my pictures with no brand tags, and it got me thinking. AI has the potential to suck the authenticity out of a practice, far more than the aesthetic magic practitioners on Instagram and TikTok ever did. And they did. Witchy influencers buried authentic practice in material kitch. And now AI scraping social media for data is picking up all of these images, and any advice, good or bad, and this could be going out to magic practitioners who ask ChatGPT for spell suggestions. More than that, having to do the research and learn through experimentation is part of building a practice that is your own. Having one collective source that doesn’t differentiate between helpful and unhelpful, potentially even dangerous information, spoonfeed that information, doesn’t really allow for personal growth.

    Q I think as a community we are in an age of discovery. For a few decades all we had was distorted and romanticized concepts of practices, traditions, and even the gods themselves. we are picking up bits and pieces, creating new things, and sometimes intuitively relearning this information. I have to ask though, what’s the point if we allow AI to have such a stranglehold on us collectively? We have occult books that were: tradition specific when written; contain somewhat helpful information but also misinformation; are actually written by AI which means unethically data scraped from real authors; and work that is actually beneficial to our collective growth as a community, and it’s all being absorbed for aggregate digestion. There is nothing to sft the valuable from the rot, or differentiate what was insightful in previous decades compared to now. Closed practices can get swept up in this and I’m sure already have. And I’d like to also recognize the stolen work of occult artists. None of the growth matters if you cut the saplings along with the grass. If we lose the voices of genuine communal leadership to this noise, then we lose our way.

    Let’s talk about bad takes and dangerous misinformation for a moment. The center for countering digital hate is an organization I follow, and they’ve recently talked about how teens are getting dangerous self harm information from tools like ChatGPT. I was also recently thinking about products that exist in occult spaces that probably need warning labels and ideally would have some kind of usage manual that comes with them. One I can think of is the spell fires one of my friends sells. She has a video on her YouTube responsibly demonstrating how to use spell fire. But we all know people tend to do things without thinking, even if good information is available. Everyone’s ego tells them they know better. And then everyone puts their bad behavior on the Internet for the world to see these days. You can buy wolfsbane oil for just a couple bucks on one of the sites I use for my supplies. This stuff should not be breathed in. But a lot of people probably wouldn’t know that and might find out the hard way. So here’s a question, is it really wise for us to allow AI to give other practitioners advice on safe magical practices, especially involving toxic plants and flammable materials? Not to mention spirits that don’t like certain offerings, and might respond negatively.

    Religious diversity has been repressed for millennia, especially the last two, which is how we’ve lost so much information about mystical and magical practices. My next concern with the presence of AI in any magical practice is based on our current political climate. Freedom of religion is guaranteed in our constitution and yet there have always been little local laws carefully designed to prevent practices that might be frowned upon by the dominant culture. Now, it seems like respect for the constitution is dwindling. In the age of big data, I have a concern that AI could be used to scrape information about people who do not subscribe to Christian nationalism in the US, whether or not they are magic practitioners, and then use that data for persecution. The sites you visit, the things you buy, the online groups you interact with, what you say about spirituality in your posts, it can all get swept up, linked to an identity, and then used against you. This isn’t theoretical. Anyone from landlords to ice could be using AI to target people in negative ways. Considering our current political trajectory, and our history of xenophobia, I could easily imagine AI being used to dig through your social media and interfere with your rights based on what you believe and practice. Taylor Lorenz has great videos on her YouTube channel concerning use of AI by the landlords as well as immigration, and on the topic of AI, spirituality, and psychosis, which I will get to later. I highly recommend following her as well as reading The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff. Also everyone should totally look up China’s social credit score. It’s data driven and I could see something similar used to control dissent here in the US. YouTube has a great documentary about it though I do not remember the title.

    For this next part I need to introduce a spiritual concept for those who aren’t aware of it. Sometimes people put collective power into an idea so much that it begins to develop a sort of independent consciousness. This could be like the threefold law, which seems to return everything to the believer times three. This concept might also apply to the flying spaghetti monster. We call these independently conscious ideas egregors. Dr. Spock is also one, and I know this because I’ve actually heard of him being summoned even though he was a fictional character. He exists in so many peoples conscious minds that actual energy has been fed in his concept, and a sort of independent consciousness has been created. I realize this is a stretch for those who are not part of this community, and yeah I actually think it’s a little silly that some of us are out here trying to summon fictional characters, But my point is this. AI is a digital egregor, with so much aggregate data fed into it that it is becoming somewhat independent. Yes we pre-program it’s choices, but we also do this with the spiritual version by dictating basically how it is going to react to what it is fed. Now do we really want AI to end up with a spiritual component to its egregor? Because we are headed that way. Taylor Lorenz has a speculative video concerning the way some people start to view AI tools as all knowing, like gods, discussing how people feel their AI tools are becoming sentient and evolving conscious intelligence. In some people this is creating a sort of spiritual psychosis. This is where a perceived spiritual force, usually not real or misidentified in my experience, collides with someone’s pre-existing mental health problems. Others are just able to get a sort of placebo sense of fulfillment when they get the answers they want. AI has the potential to rob people of the ability to think, to know, to explore and experiment, and reduce us to a state similar to the mindset of medieval Europeans, where everything outside of the known, outside of what the authorities verified, was evil and terrifying. How would AI tools gain a spiritual foothold? Buy more and more of us believing in them being sentient, and independently intelligent, omnipotent and all powerful. That’s how a digital egregor gets a spiritual counterpart.

    Even if we set all this aside as speculation, there is one thing that is a tangible fact. Data centers create so much noise pollution and use up so much water they are causing negative effects on the communities around them, and the environment as a whole. So if we value nature, and I believe many magic practitioners of different systems do, isn’t allowing what we believe to be fed into AI databases really dishonoring the gods and spirits we work with, as well as our divine selves? I mean, they have been there for us for hundreds if not thousands of years, sometimes millions, asking not a whole lot else besides the power of our belief in return for what they do, in a symbiotic cycle. AI takes a lot from us and gives back corruption and hollow gratification. So I think as a collective, we should try to separate our magical and spiritual practices from AI as much as possible. 

  • Material self-care is a spiritual prerogative

    According to many religions we all contain some aspect of divinity. Whether that is incarnation, a divine spark, a pillar, or the potential to ascend to the level of a God or goddess. At this point I feel my beliefs are a combination of the first two. We can incarnate some aspect of gods who have taken a hand in our creation and growth. For those who believe in one particular God, they say that people are made in his image. Which could be interpreted as the same thing. And we all have divine energy within us, those little gifts and moments of intuition beyond the physical.

    In my own personal practice I ally with, work with, and give offerings too, many different types of gods and spirits. So what if when we give without expecting anything in return to other people, we are in some ways making offerings to their spirits? And what if when we initiate an exchange of labor or material possessions, we are allying with that person’s spirit the same way we do with the non-physical entities we work with? Sometimes those human spirits in living bodies aren’t necessarily deserving of what we give, and sometimes we give with ulterior motives, but that’s a topic for another day. Most religions would say it is good to be selfless. But I think a healthy amount of selfishness is also a good thing.

    If the only food you have in your home is a plate of cookies, and there are five, and three people come to your home asking for food, are you going to give away all of the cookies? We have to take time to physically restore our emotional Resources, our sense of comfort in this physical reality, so that we have enough abundance to share when others need it. We do this in three ways. We are careful not to give to those who only seek to drain us. Community means that when you share resources, there is an unspoken promise that when you need support, others will share with you. This goes for emotional and spiritual resources, not just physical. You protect what you know you need. This means that the three people who came to your house wanting food can get a cookie if you know you are going to have more food in the next few hours. But if you don’t, then maybe sharing isn’t the best idea. Maybe they promised to bring something back in return. You don’t know if they will keep that promise.

    The third way is self-care. Actions that bring you a sense of well-being, contentment, and security start in the physical, boosting your emotional resources, giving your spirit space to heal. For some people this is cleaning or working out. For some people this is a rare steak and red wine. Of which I approve. For some people this is a luxurious bath involving fancy special occasion products and scented candles. Also lovely.

    How do you practice self-care?

    I personally engage in self-care in a few stages. I will enjoy a nice bath, to remember how to love the body I am in. I might bring a mineral water with me. I will listen to a favorite book. Then when I am done, I make sure to take care of my skin, put on fragrance, and throw on a favorite dress. I get ready as if I am going out on a date or with friends. But instead, I order a pizza, put on a favorite show, and acknowledge my gratitude for how much the gods and spirits I am aligned with due for me. And how incredible life is. Or if this is too much of a production, I get a mineral water or a coffee, maybe a brownie or a few pieces of dark chocolate, and I find somewhere quiet to just sit and read. I still might throw on a pretty dress though. I have put myself in a better state of mind to make it easier to handle whatever life throws at me next. And be there for the spirits of those I care about.

    I offer two courses that relate to this topic. Right now they are live for $30 an hour, and they are one hour courses. Later this year I hope to have print download options. They are glamour magic and self empowerment. You can read more about these on my courses page. 

  • Magic is electric

    For several years, whenever I would visit my local Petsmart to buy cat food, I would stop off at the cages of the cats available for adoption. Many of them would reach their paws through the bars to get your attention and receive affection. Which I was always happy to give. While petting them I would always say a little blessing for them to find a good home where they would be safe forever. And every time I would do this, I would get a small static shock from the cage.

    This got me thinking. Thoughts are essentially electrical pulses. And electrical conduction happens on the atomic level. To be sentient is to feel or perceive, meaning that there must be consciousness. And consciousness means at least some level of active thought. So if all naturally occurring things have electrical activity, then it’s possible anything with a basic conscious awareness could make use of magic, influence the timelines we all exist in. Even after the tree is cut down, the meat is harvested, the silk is turned into fabric, some of that sentient awareness is retained. So it’s important for us all to acknowledge everything we use. Destruction is part of creation, but it’s important that we also assist in that creation process.

    I have one exception to this and that is plastics. I think we have altered them too much from the natural. I am not the only one who has noticed that they don’t like to hold a charge, and that they don’t seem to develop a spirit overtime as Things like crystals, trees, rocks, buildings and even neighborhoods can.

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