what's up witches and welcome to salem the weirdest place on earth this is a bit of a strange video and i apologize up front for any weirdness that uh occurs as a product let me try and talk about this i'm just gonna kind of go off the cuff here and not do too much editing or anything and just sort of talk about how i've gotten to this point what i'm doing and why and how you can follow along with this journey if you are interested first off i'm going to do like a different angle than i normally do so you can see a little bit of my bookshelf back here this is my computer set up i've got my computer right over here normally i record like this direction but if you just look on this bookshelf and this is you know there's there's like three shelves you can't see here but but you'll see here i've got manly hall's secret teaching of all ages i've got some penzac up there i've got the invisibles whole series i've got a bunch of stuff cyber cyber psycho cybernetics um oh god what else do i have there the flip are the kabalian um sacred and the profane which is one of my favorite books ever written highly recommend that um anyway i say all this to say that let me just start by saying that this stuff is not necessarily new to me i've been thinking about ritual magic for years and exploring things like divination and different forms of paganism etc etc for years but it is only really recently if i'm entirely honest that i've started making a really concerted effort to actually practice ritual magick and the decision to do so is really a lot due to like recent uh understandings about the nature of ritual magic that i honestly didn't have access to before even having read a lot of this stuff or skimmed a lot of stuff i don't actually know too many people who have read this entire book the manly hall secret teaching of all ages i certainly haven't i've skimmed it's more like a reference book than anything else anyway point is i've read a lot of this stuff and the real thing that was kind of a breakthrough for me and the thing that i'm really focusing on now is uh has to do with identity itself and treating identity as a as a kind of like vehicle through which to explore magic um i think we have a pretty odd view of what magical thought is in the west largely because of pop culture but um you know when you when you go back and you look and i want this to be like too informational this is really like a subjective perspective kind of video uh but but it is true that when you go back and you look at you know pre pre mass culture sort of forms of esotericism you see a much different perspective on what magic is than what we sort of proliferate these days in films and on television etc etc now the kind of magick that i am really drawn to is one that views magic itself as a creative technology for the self now we have typically sort of viewed that as as meaning like you know do your positive thinking and you can get whatever you want in the world or or you know uh draw your money to you with money spells or draw love to you with love spells etc etc very new age kind of conceptions of magic and that's a lot of what i've been reading for the past few years uh my my real interest in magic as uh something i was actively reading about is only like six or seven years old i'm very young in this while i've been like playing around with tarot and reading a book here or there for my entire adult life it's only five or six years that i've really passed five or six years that i've really like gone in and so i've sort of like wandered through the new age stuff and if i'm honest i didn't find a whole lot there that really resonated with me so my own sort of development and study with new age stuff never really kicked off i tried to but i could never really it never really got its hooks in me and recently i found myself wandering back into uh the golden dawn stuff and and revisiting chaos magick and these two things sort of merged together are giving me a different insight into what magic even is um than than anything i found in the new age it's stuff that i'm starting to play with now and the way that i'm starting to play with it is i've been doing every day for the past week or so just a very simple straightforward uh golden dawn banishing ritual and basically this is something that takes me about 20-25 minutes every morning it's very simple i won't detail exactly what's in the ritual because it's becoming more and more personal to me the more i do it so i don't want to give too much of it away but but if you know anything about banishing rituals it's pretty pretty much what you would expect and um i do it every morning and and today in fact just now i just finished it and i just i just knew i had to start talking about it because it's starting to become a bigger and bigger part of my identity already what i'm really interested in and the spaces i'm really wanting to explore deeply and you will likely see me exploring deeply here on on tosalem on my personal youtube and crucially the patreon which i'll talk about when i get back we'll talk about that toward the end of this video and i won't keep you too long here because this is all meant to be very introductory but um what i'm really interested in is you know i grew up idolizing people who and without knowing i was doing it idolizing people who seem to be playing with identity itself in a way that was um different you know people like david bowie is probably the the one that is most easily accessible in pop culture but then there are also various magicians that i stumbled upon throughout the course of just being interested in the esoteric grant morrison probably being the biggest one who seemed to be doing something different with their public identity or identities out in the world and so as a as like a teenager and even in my 20s i always just sort of thought isn't it neat that these people have these characters that they portray or in the case of grant these characters that they sort of like model off of themselves and then those characters start feeding back into themselves it was mostly just interesting to me it's only in the last couple years that i've started to see the really concerted effort on the part of these artists and magicians to cultivate an environment within themselves by which they can play around with magical thought as fed through an identity construct very heady idea right but the basic idea is that if you imagine that magic is a technology for self but you kind of disrobe yourself with the idea that that necessarily means that what it's meant for is to improve self then you can open up this vista in your mind which is like well okay well let's say i have a self that is meant to explore a certain magical ideology a certain magical set of beliefs a certain way of being in the world and the way that i decide that i want to explore that stuff is through a construct is through a character and i'm going to present myself as that character within certain parameters and see what sort of what sort of new understanding i can i can glean from being this person being this thing the very interesting thing about that is when you go and you look at a bowie or or a prince i would say prince kind of fell into this a little bit you look at someone like that and you look at what they themselves said about these characters that they were creating about what it was like to have gone through the process of being in these characters for extended periods of time it does not take you long before you stumble upon really deeply impactful metaphysical ideas that these people are are are you know expressing outright in culture that this was a form of magic that irrevocably changed their lives so this whole thing playing with playing with identity through through a set of constructs using a set of both old old in quotes rituals mostly from golden dawn because i i just like that stuff so far and it's resonating with me but also a little bit of a chaos magicky aesthetic is really really turning my world upside down i found this incredible pamphlet i'll include it in the description below so you can check it out if you want a few days ago i was flipping through stuff and i found this thing and i read it i was just like that's it that's it now i read uh liber null by peter carroll it's probably somewhere behind me um or or it's below or above the frame but i read that four or five years ago and and liked it but didn't it didn't deeply resonate with me and then i know i apologies to any chaos magicians i was really intrigued by chaos magic but then i went and i i you know i read liber null and i liked it and i was still intrigued uh and um you know i read some of some other stuff and uh condensed chaos and stuff like that and and dug it but then when i started to like explore chaos magick in in the wider culture on youtube podcasts stuff like that i got really turned off really quickly because because the thing that i don't resonate with with chaos magic is discordianism is that whole like sort of like you know uh nihilistic feeling i know it's not actually nihilistic but it feels nihilistic it feels new atheist to me it's like this kind of like i'm gonna i you know i don't believe in anything i'm gonna wander around on all on top of all vistas i don't really i don't really like that i'm not super interested in exploring that and i also don't yet know now this could change as i start to really play with this stuff i don't yet know that that's as valuable as having a sort of neutral self and then creating constructs you're that you're you're sort of like embodying them but you're always returning to neutral self and you're sort of like uh letting these constructs inform the neutral self but you're not you're not ever letting these constructs overtake neutral self um now that could just be me from from this vantage point of like being very early in this work and not yet knowing if it's going to be necessary at some point to just let these constructs completely overtake neutral self but it just feels like to me if the goal isn't like i want to get stuff like i want to get money i want to get fame i want to get love if that's not the goal if the goal is just like transcendence if the goal is which is my goal which is to say pathways out of the sorts of thoughts and beliefs and structures which have led to a lot of deprivation despair and misery and depression in me personally and which i also see modeled out in culture too and i think there's a two-way relationship there between me getting those things from culture and me putting them back into culture so if the goal is to transcend those things which that is the goal for me in magical thought period i'm not super interested in using magick to get stuff i'm more interested in playing with it as a creative technology to create versions of self shades of self that are able to transcend transcend these oppressive systems uh these oppressive thought forms that i have adopted that i have created in many cases transcendence transcendence transcendence if that's the goal then it only makes sense to me that you would you would you would hold on to a neutral self and these sort of constructs are sort of like soldiers in the field that you're going out and you're playing with and then you're bringing information back you bring information back you're bringing information back now crucially luckily i happen to be alive in 2020 in in in one of the eras where you can actually do this stuff publicly very easily you can play with identity on the internet as long as you're vocal about that that is what you're doing you know it's you're on you can do it and so i'm going to start doing it um i don't know how much of that is going to bleed over into tosalem i would be curious to see if you watching this would want to see a bit of that i do know that i i am changing the whole way you know every november i sort of have this moment where i reflect on everything that that tosalem has done up through that year because november is well just for me i i like the pagan wheel of the year i identify with it makes sense to me part of the reason makes sense to me is because october is for the past few years since i've started going to salem october is like crazy for me every year and so november is just this like oh it's just this decompression and i'm reflecting on what the last year was like and this year october for for tosalem was really cool we had this audio drama which i am doing a follow-up um and it is wildly well we'll see but so far it is wildly different than than what we did with salem's ghosts the salem witch trials audio drama the only similarity so far we'll see this is something else that's i'm updating on the patreon um i'm doing vlogs on the patreon that are like an hour long where i'm talking about the process of writing and making the next audio drama um and hopefully when we cast it and everything i'll be able to like record the rehearsals if all the actors are cool with it or record parts of the rehearsals and post them we'll see but but right now it's wildly different than than uh the first one was we also had a bunch of really good interviews the podcast finally got sorted out after a bunch of technical issues so it started coming out regularly there are more interviews coming up that are super cool um we have a writer on the site her name is ellie she's fantastic um she's she's gonna start doing stuff with the youtube channel as well we are i'm starting to work with people who are sort of in like the the manifestation crafty sort of space because as you can tell i'm really interested in magic magical technology magic as a technology to to achieve these sort of like tangible interesting real world results that you can look at and examine and one of the things that i've seen out in the world that interests me to that end you see this in salem in hauswitch that's probably the best best exemplifier of it look up hauswitch if you don't know what that is it's a store in salem but it's way more than that it's like an online brand there's a there's a book there's a there's it's it's a whole universe really but there's this emergent idea that that that witchcraft when and and ritual magic when when fully you know kind of let in deep down and i don't have good vocabulary for it yet that's why i'm stumbling around this a little bit i'm early days but when led in deep down and treated as a creative technology it can sort of be be uh more i don't know all consuming more useful more more easier to approach for the outsider that sort of thing anyway i'm going to play with it but but part of what we're doing on tosalem i'm starting to look at some of that starting to say okay what if we what if we talk about direct manifestation through stuff that anyone can join us in doing so that's coming up anyway all this stuff started to happen in october october for me personally was a very uh september and october were very emotional uh months a lot of a lot of things that i thought were were going to be like you know when you when when when when you decide that you're going to believe in something and it's hard for me it takes me a long time to decide to believe in stuff personally when you decide that you're going to believe in something and then it just falls apart um i went through something like that in september october and to some degree it's still the the reverberations of it are still ongoing um much to my chagrin and despite my efforts to to be rid of it um it's still happening so i had something like that and it was pretty big uh for me personally happening september october and october is always big and it involved other people and the other people knew that october was always big but you know it happened anyway and and and it was just a very like leading into october this month i was not in a good headspace i was not in like a fun head space you know covin was happening uh so which meant salem's halloween was changing it was just a very strange headspace but then all of october largely because of because of you because of people who who like what i'm doing because of the cast who did salem's ghosts because of everyone who's checked that out because of interviews that i was releasing and the incredible people who decided to come on and talk to me it turned into one of the most transformative months of my life mentally and starting to that is starting to spill out into the world and spiritually too emotionally and i really came away with it with this deep firm recognition and and and uh certainty in what i was doing and and a real new for me ability to just put up walls with with anything that is in infringing on territory that is now sacred to me and so part of why i'm bringing all that up is that as i'm starting to to to think more in this way more in like a a public like i just i i want to do work for you i don't want to be doing work i set all this up thinking like okay i could just write about salem i could do salem videos and i could like put ads on the website and that would be okay and as it's gone on i felt worse and worse and worse about that and i don't like it and salem's ghosts especially and the podcast have both been like eye-opening experiences for me where it really taught me like i i don't much like advertising i don't much and i had ethical problems with it before and so i'm changing everything i'm doing uh to to be more in line with a fan support kind of system and so to that end something that i created back when covin like first started which was a patreon that i've never done anything with i just set it up because i was bored one day i've gone through and i've like really thought it out and put a bunch of stuff tosalem stuff on there and i want to start doing more stuff like this where i'm talking about very direct experiences having other people doing exclusive content all that sort of stuff so i'm putting this out on the youtube channel and i'm very very curious to hear your thoughts below not just on the sort of like uh the sort of esoteric stuff i'm thinking about the witchcraft stuff i'm thinking about the ritual magick stuff i'm thinking about but also also what you think about you know go have a look at the patreon the tosalem patreon it's early days like no one's supporting it yet and i'm not asking you to support it but i would love to hear what you think about it so if you go and you check it out and you see like the tiers is it weird does it make sense um uh you know check it out there's a discord server that i'm i'm lurking in all the time and eventually i want all of these weird people who are into salem and witchcraft and the esoteric in history like i am to come chill with me on that discord server so um anyway so i guess this is a joint sort of like hey go check out the patreon but i do want to say this before i bounce out of here again i won't keep you too long um i do want to say that the the banishing ritual that i am doing i am feeling it change me every time i do it and this is so deeply surprising to me and i'm feeling myself become surrounded by i would say they're like shades of constructs they're not even they're not fully formed but it does feel as if like there's there's like versions of me starting to surround me and and and work that because for me i've always been this way i have to have some kind of like some some some sort of goal or focus or project or something to to to point myself at to do this kind of stuff like i never sit down and just write something it's always like okay i want to do a play so i'm going to write a play and i'm going to produce the play i don't just sit down and write a play i like produce a whole play and i only write it so that i can produce it and you know the audio drama stuff it's that way too it's like i don't just sit down and write audio dramas i only do it because i know i can produce it and i want to make it so there's something in me i don't know what it is but there's something in me that won't let me just like explore uh creatively unless i know i can fully achieve whatever it is or get pretty close to achieving whatever the thing is that i'm exploring so anyway um part of that in regards to this conversation is i want to um i i want to step into these constructs but they're not fully formed but it's starting to uh ways to work with them are starting to appear in my mind out of nowhere projects that i could do exploration very publicly on the internet here on youtube some of it would be to tosalem stuff some of it would be like my own personal channel stuff but i'm not sure where the distinction there is or if there should be one at all so this video is also kind of a what do you think about that is is you know you guys are the lifeblood of what i am doing and i'm so energized the past few months by your support and your engagement and getting to know some of you personally has just been like mind-blowingly cool so what do you think about about put this in the comments what do you think about putting this kind of journey past this video out onto the youtube uh versus putting it on the patreon as like just for just for like fans fans for people who really want to like keep up with what's going on i i will say though just to tie a you know put a little button on this because the video is called i started doing ritual magick and here's what happened here's what happened um as these constructs are appearing i've noticed and i've taken this straight from chaos magick i've started doing different things physically i like i like i mean i'm sorry if this is disgusting but i have like a lot of chest hair as a man and back hair and a lot of a lot of i'm a hairy dude i just shaved it all i shaved it all today just to do it a good friend of mine who is kind of going through this with me she's probably watching this video what's up um she suggested that i just go dance to to in my car i didn't do it in my car i did it here in this room uh in which you're joining me i just go dance to a song that that i really love and like wildly dance but dancing like a spider-man 3 sort of toby mcguire walking down the street kind of way like like thinking that everyone is super into what i'm doing that sort of dance so i did i put on goldfrap strict machine and i just was like the glastonbury i think it's glastonbury performance of strict machine and i that's one of my favorite jams of all time and i just let it go i turned on my i have like colored lights that are synced up to an app that can change any color you want and so i turned turn them on like pink and blue and i just like i mean i just i lost it i'm saying all that to say that like after this experience of like starting to change physically i don't dance normally starting to do different physical things i'm noticing there's something about the body there's some i mean you can see me like this is not this is involuntary these movements that are happening right now i'm not in control um there's something about the body that is like that that feels like it is a direct pathway into whatever this identity stuff that i'm starting to play with is gonna be so if you know anything about that send me links put it down below i want to hear what you think um about all of this stuff this is really me like opening up the floor let's talk about it so i've done been doing ritual magic for a week depending on what you guys say depending on how you feel about it i'll keep posting about it here i'll definitely post about it on the patreon um i'm i'm super super excited to see what's coming already my my my you can see the excitement my my mind is changing and i can feel it and it's scary it's a little weird it's a little tingly in a way that i'm not used to but man is it welcome man am i ready for something like this man am i ready to like take this leap into whatever this new territory is that is all for today witches i want to start doing this thing and i didn't get a glass i was going to get a glass of whiskey or champagne or something to do with this do this with and i didn't so here's my water bottle uh i'm going to i'm going to start closing out the videos by just toasting you because tosalem kind of sounds like a toast so from here on i'm going to toast to salem toast to you stay weird witches wouldn't be sucking my little nozzle like a baby see you next time bye