After a friend of mine discovered that one of his works was plagiarized and used as an introduction for a class a site charges for and was met with less then logical reasoning when he pointed that out to them I started thinking about things like plagiarism, misinformation and changing of definitions in the occult world. This is something that is going on all the time and not that many people seems to bother at all with it. What is the individual occultist responsibility to act and try to change things that are damaging for all serious occultists?

I have for example known about the site I talked about for a long time. Even used to be a moderator there until I understood the entire scoop of what they were doing. I also knew what was going on at an admin level there (since my girlfriend at the time was an admin) and it was far from pretty. When we left we got accused of all sorts of things. Even hacking their website and there were threats about going to visit my ex at home to teach her a lesson. Admins on other websites got pm’s from these people more or less telling them to remove us from their sites. All we were guilty of was criticizing the behavior on the site nothing more. I got so far that we reported the entire issue to the FBI. Unlike them we had all the logs, databases of conversations by the admins and so on since my ex was more or less running the tech of it. The FBI could do nothing about it since it is apparently  not illegal in the states to do these sort of things on the internet. What we could do was to put up all the info we had on a site of our own to expose the entire thing but since we still at that time had friends there we decided not to.

So what should you actually do in a situation like this? I don’t know to be honest. They are totally destroying the occults reputation by doing all this but I am not sure what to do either.

Another example much less dramatic but still a concern I think. This covers plagiarism, misinformation and definition change all in one and is done by one of the largest Satanic groups there is namely Church of Satan. Lets start with looking at some examples of this.

Plagiarism – Much of their Satanic Bible is pure plagiarism and it is word by word. Almost all of the clever small aphorisms in it like “Behold the crucifix for what does it symbolize? Pallid incompetence hanging on a tree!” are all stolen straight up from a writer calling him self Ragnar Redbeard who wrote a book called Might is right.

Misinformation – LaVey and his Church of Satan claim they invented Satanism and that there were no self proclaimed satanists nor any satanic groups before them. This is a total lie. I will just name a few self proclaimed satanists here. Ben Kadoch (listed him self as a Luciferian in the danish phone book), August Strindberg (famous Swedish writer), Stanislaw Przybyszewski and J.-K. Huysmans. Most of these people wrote their own books on Satanism and had followings and this long before LaVey.

Definitions – This is what I find most disturbing in the occult and that is the change of already established definitions. Once again the Church of Satan and LaVey serves as a good example of this. They claim that the only Satanism that exists and the only ones that can call them self a Satanists is them self. We are talking about people who do not even believe in Satan here. They are simply atheists. The word Satanism was as far as we can track it first used by a spy sent out from the Vatican to spy on Martin Luther. In a letter back to the Vatican he described Luthers teachings as satanism. This will mean that the word was first used by the Vatican and that it them who set the definition on its use as they have. Satanism is defined as the worship of Satan. Nowhere has it ever been said that an atheist can become a satanist. The problem is that because of LaVey’s and the Church of Satans massive bombarding of the press this new definition is spreading and even people outside of the Church of Satan are starting to adopt it and believe it is true.

Now I have used the Church of Satan as an example of all that is bad with the occult today but you can see much of the same thing in many other occult branches like Wicca, Witchcraft, Ceremonial Magic and so on. The latest that scares me a bit is within the Grimoire tradition. The grimoires have for a rather long time been free from this new age thinking and one of the reasons I like it so much but it is changing fast. Pop culture writers are starting to catch on to it and definitions, misinformation and plagiarism are starting to appear. Some I have talked to thing the grimoires is the new Wicca and I seriously hope they are wrong.

So back to the original questions. What is the responsibility of the serious occult students? Do we even have a responsibility or is this just progress that can not be prevented? Should it be prevented? Perhaps the true origins of things are not something we should preserve the knowledge of?

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