---
title: "Lyam Thomas Christopher on High Magic, Inner Demons, Self-Initiation, and Spiritual Transformation"
url: https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/post/lyam-thomas-christopher-on-high-magic-inner-demons-self-initiation-and-spiritual-transformation/
date: 2026-05-07
modified: 2026-07-07
lang: en
author: "Perseus Arcane Academy"
description: "Introduction This is a transcript of a recent interview with Lyam Thomas Christopher. Both the video and the transcript are provided below.If you would like to learn more about Lyams..."
categories:
  - "Interviews"
  - "Kabbalah"
  - "Western Traditions"
tags:
  - "Ceremonial Magic"
  - "Kabbalah"
  - "Magic"
image: https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/ChatGPT-Image-Apr-30-2026-01_09_01-PM-1024x576.png
word_count: 8599
---

# Lyam Thomas Christopher on High Magic, Inner Demons, Self-Initiation, and Spiritual Transformation

## Introduction

This is a transcript of a recent interview with Lyam Thomas Christopher. Both the video and the transcript are provided below.

If you would like to learn more about Lyams work please check the following:

Learn more about the work of Lyam Thomas Christopher on his [Patreon](https://www.patreon.com/cw/LyamChristopher).

Also be sure to check his very informative [YouTube channel here](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC00Y8Wm1KYTh2V08_CNbu9g).

---

# Interview

https://youtu.be/X-vqWRE_2pw?si=UCs_VAElcHVvbH9P

**PAA: Hello everyone, and welcome to this new episode of *Perseus Conversations*. I am very excited today because we have someone who is well known in the magical community and on YouTube, and who is doing important work on subjects that constantly come up in magical communities: the real-life problems, internal challenges, and sometimes embarrassing difficulties that practitioners face. Today I am speaking with Lyam Thomas Christopher. Welcome.**

**Lyam:** Good evening to you and good morning to me.

**PAA: Thank you for joining us. As we were briefly saying before we went on air, I am really impressed with your YouTube channel. For anyone listening, definitely check the description box below, because you are going to see important subjects that we all face: the challenges, the internal challenges, and even the embarrassing challenges. I want to dive right in. First, I want to talk about your book, *[Kabbalah, Magic and the Great Work of Self-Transformation](https://www.amazon.com/Kabbalah-Magic-Great-Work-Transformation/dp/0738708933)*. This is something I have only recently discovered through the Perseus community, with people talking about it, the different grades, and what they are doing. For those who do not know, could you give a brief overview of what this book is about, what its goals are, and why you felt the need to write it?**

**Lyam:** The book is written as a dramatic way of introducing the Golden Dawn that actually works, as opposed to trying to go into the Golden Dawn book by Regardie, which is basically a large collection of Golden Dawn writings, rituals, and things like that. People look at the material and say, “What do I do with all this? I can’t even understand half of it.”

*Kabbalah, Magic and the Great Work of Self-Transformation* is a means of exploring what is covered in the Golden Dawn material and experiencing it for yourself. By the time you get through the course, everything in the Golden Dawn book makes sense. In the process, you undergo a spiritual transformation, which is apparently what the original theurgists of the classical era and late antiquity were all about in the practice of high magic.

One other thing about the book: it did not make any attempt to be highbrow necessarily. It was more of an attempt to really get into the dramatics of it. All the stuff that we think is really cool about magic, all the titillating things, matter because magic has a multilevel appeal. There is the highfalutin spiritual material, and then there are the external appearances of it: the dark imagery, mysterious symbols, and things like that.

In order to get into the system, all of that is important. The goetic elements of the magic are important to the high magic. The book is essentially an effort to rescue all of the glamour from the glamour. In other words, all this stuff serves a purpose. You want to use it to stir the imagination because you are setting up a discipline that drills down through the bedrock of the ego and uncovers something soulful, something spiritual, to be discovered.

The reason I wrote it was because that had not been done yet. It was the book I was looking for. You know the common complaint: if you do not find the book you are looking for, you have to write it.

**PAA: That is what has been communicated to me, and after looking at it as well, so many people look at the Golden Dawn and wonder how to access it. There are obviously the big books out there, but, as you say, much of the work is quite highbrow. For someone just coming to it, it can be very intellectual. You can end up reading and thinking, “Great, so what do I do now?” You spoke about spiritual transformation, and I have also been going through your YouTube channel over the last few days. One of the things I listened to today was about abstraction: moving away from the finer details of something and saying, “It is just this” or “It is just that.” So when we look at spiritual transformation, what does that actually look like for a practitioner of this system?**

**Lyam:** You have hit upon something very important. If you go into various traditions of spiritual transformation, Zen, mindfulness, transcendental meditation, and so on, these teachers tend to speak in abstractions.

For example, if you have a recurring emotion that troubles you, they might say, “Deal with the emotion. What does the emotion feel like? How does it feel in your body?” One of the problems is that the very label of the emotion, let’s say jealousy, is an abstraction. The actual experience of jealousy is quite startling.

At the core of the emotion is actually an image, or an imagistic scenario, which is essentially an unresolved duality. This is what we would call a spirit. This thing keeps resurfacing because it is trying to work out whatever duality or unresolved conflict it was originally enmeshed in.

In the scheme of our cosmic evolution or biological evolution, we have come across many challenges and horrific situations that have embedded in us these difficult unresolved dualities. It is sort of like trauma. In the East they call these things samskaras. In the West, we can call them spirits, entities, or demons.

We call them that because when they surface, they surface as imagistic scenarios or images. They come complete with horns, fangs, glowing eyes, claws, and things like that because they get associated and tangled up with traumatic imagery from our evolutionary past. They also appear as flash floods, storms, lightning strikes, explosions, and so on. These are things we have experienced in our ancestry, or so the theory goes, and they are embedded in cell memory.

They haunt us and drive our behavior. You really cannot get at them until you get at the imagistic scenarios that keep surfacing. They are there, but very often we are unaware of them because we have developed a hostile relationship with imagination, or imagination has developed a hostile relationship with itself because of all the pain that is in it. So naturally it says, “That is not real. Forget about that. That is just a dream. It is not important.”

In magic, we do not just deal with the emotion. We do not simply say, “How do you feel? Write about it.” We go into the feeling. What are the entities involved? What are they doing? How do they move? In the old grimoires, they say “move and appear,” because that is how spirits first manifest. There is movement, and then you can suddenly see them as a charging water buffalo, a wolf-like creature stalking you, an avalanche that is going to bury you, or a dark hole you are going to fall into.

These images are not abstract. They are visceral, concrete, and scary. That is how the psyche works. Like it or not, you cannot escape the way the psyche works.

**PAA: So the transformation would be the working through of these things as they appear in your life, or as they become present in your life?**

**Lyam:** It is the acceptance of them and the assistance of them, so they can work out or work through whatever issues they have. In high magic, it is more an attitude of love or compassion for them, and it requires empathy.

You look at this thing that is coming up and making a hell out of your life because it keeps taking over your behavior. Then you ask, “How has this thing evolved to function as it does?” Of course it would work that way. Of course it is trying to do that. This is empathy. This is real empathy.

It is not primarily about being a good person and loving your neighbor, though that is fine. Primarily, it is the empathy we have for these unresolved complexes, these unresolved dualities that surface within us. They are very much alive. They are older than we are because they exist in the traumatic history of humanity and before that. They go all the way back to primordial single-cell organisms.

The tendency to contract when something is poking at you is not just a human thing. It is a life thing. Even plants do it. That contraction is the primordial contraction we experience, and that is what the ego has latched onto. The ego is that compulsive contraction. You cannot seem to unclench anymore. You are constantly on guard, constantly hunting for the next fix, or constantly alert for dangers.

> To be very clear, when we say, “This is mere psychology,” we are dealing with the psyche of the universe, not just the psyche of each individual person. Who came up with the idea that the soul is inside your body? That is something modernity does to you in order to contain you, control you, and isolate you.
>
> Lyam Thomas Christopher

**PAA: So you are saying this is beyond us. It is like a shared pool for humanity. It is not simply that these things manifest only for each individual person?**

**Lyam:** To be very clear, when we say, “This is mere psychology,” we are dealing with the psyche of the universe, not just the psyche of each individual person. Who came up with the idea that the soul is inside your body? That is something modernity does to you in order to contain you, control you, and isolate you.

The experience of the soul being trapped inside the body is certainly interesting, but that is an ego construct. It is part of our affliction, and this is what we examine. It does not mean that you have a soul inside your body necessarily. Soul permeates everything: anima mundi, the soul of the world.

We need to rescue psychology from the psychologists.

> The real task is to turn the light around and look at the entity arising inside the magic circle: this thing you think you are, which is reacting to the thing out there and saying, “I need to get away from that. I need to push it away. I need to forget about it and never think about it again.” Or, “I need it so badly because I am incomplete without it.”
>
> Lyam Thomas Christopher

**PAA: That has completely transformed my understanding of the work within the book. As a baseline, it is not simply within you; it is within the universe. It is the inner plane, so to speak, not just inside you and all your fault because it is inside you. Students working with this brings me to something I mentioned off air about the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram. You said in one of your videos that life might get worse first when you do that practice. That shocked me, because I have done that practice before and thought, “Why am I doing this? What is happening?” Is that because you are bringing up this material?**

**Lyam:** Yes. It is funny because I did not make that up. My teachers in the Golden Dawn, at Ra-Hoor-Khuit Temple, mentioned it almost sidelong. They said the secret purpose of that ritual was to stir up all your stuff. We thought, “What? I thought I was banishing negativity from my life.” They said, “You are.”

What happens is that you are banishing negativity with the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram every day, but what that does is bring a kind of magic circle around you. It reinforces the artificial self that the ego is occupying, creating, or becoming. It reinforces the dichotomy between “me inside here” and “the big bad universe out there.” It strengthens that by pushing the negativity out there.

But the psyche works this way: the stuff you push out there gets puffed up in a more obvious manner. The stuff inside here that pretends to be you is also puffed up. This is why so many people doing magic become ego-inflated. They are puffing up the complexes inside the circle and outside the circle. They become increasingly paranoid and think they are being attacked psychically: “Psychic attack, psychic attack. Somebody sent a demon after me.” Or they think institutions are out to get them. Another one is, “You should be prepared for what is coming,” as though civilization is about to end.

All of this is reinforced by the tendency to push those demons out into the world, where they can arise in more fearsome forms to confront you. The task is to confront them, but not to let them control you.

Here is the really cool part. When we see something outside the magic circle bothering us, our tendency is to go fix it. “I need to fix that,” or “I need to run away from that.” We always have to do something in regard to it. That is karma. That is the error. There is nothing wrong with it, but when you only do that, you are reinforcing karma.

“I need to get a new house. I need to get a new car. I need to get a new girlfriend. I need this. I need that. I need to run away from this.” Every time you respond to the external thing that way, you are reinforcing karma.

The real task is to turn the light around and look at the entity arising inside the magic circle: this thing you think you are, which is reacting to the thing out there and saying, “I need to get away from that. I need to push it away. I need to forget about it and never think about it again.” Or, “I need it so badly because I am incomplete without it.”

These narratives are not real. You begin to look at this thing and say, “What are you? I did not consent to this.” Yet for countless millennia, this thing has been arising and taking over our behavior in various biological forms. Most animals are almost completely dominated by the entities that keep arising and saying, “Go do this. Go do that.” These instincts, drives, and habitual behaviors take over.

As humans, we have developed the ability to supervise these entities and empathize with them. If you cannot empathize with them, you are in trouble. Difficulty empathizing severely damages your ability to make progress with magic or spirituality.

As the things inside the magic circle rise up, the demon inside the house with you is the one you need to scrutinize. You do this on the pages of your magical journal. As you work in the journal, you write about these things as they come up, especially how this thing is responding: “I have this other tendency that keeps coming up. What is that like?”

That is training for the real work of Goetia that comes in the inner order, where you may eventually be conjuring spirits to visible appearance and doing work with them. In the outer order, you are doing a light version of that first. You are doing the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram every day, the Middle Pillar, and things like that, purifying yourself of these things and noticing yourself noticing them. Eventually you can do more intensive work.

**PAA: It seems like a process of identification. Without foreknowledge, people might think, “This is coming, this is coming,” but if you do not deal with these things and scrutinize your tendencies, they just keep taking over.**

**Lyam:** Right. If you do not deal with these things and scrutinize them, they will keep taking you over. In fact, they will inflate you. They will increase your sense of self-importance because now you are more easily irritated by inferior things outside your magic circle. You become an ass. That is how ceremonial magic works. It pushes out the complexes that are causing your suffering.

**PAA: So it is important to be within a system that has a process for dealing with this, rather than just doing the ritual and hoping for the best.**

**Lyam:** If you are going to conjure the demons, you need to confront them. If you do not have the courage to do that, do not do this work.

**PAA: You mentioned the magical diary. That seems really important. Do the magical diary and the ritual work basically work in tandem?**

**Lyam:** Yes, the magical diary is essential. You cannot just say, “I am observing these things and making mental notes.” No. When you write about them, you are not skipping any steps in the scrutinizing process.

You are not only tacitly analyzing them; you are thoroughly analyzing them because the sentence structure and grammar of the words on the page require you to do that. You will not skip as many blind spots that you might otherwise gloss over if you allow the language to carry you through a complete process of narrative and analysis.

It also helps tremendously to have a teacher who can guide you. The teacher might say, “Let me see some of your journal entries, and I will give you some pointers.”

**PAA: That brings us back to exactness versus abstraction. Do not dismiss what is coming up with abstractions. We are good at that: “It is just jealousy,” or “I am just depressed.”**

**Lyam:** Yes. What does depression look like? It can be startling. Or take a fear of heights. Some people’s fear of heights is like falling into a dark hole, being forgotten, and starving to death in darkness. Other people’s fear of heights is like tumbling end over end through space with no control. Mine is more like hitting the ground really hard. That is what I am afraid of.

A psychologist might say, “You have acrophobia, a fear of heights. Here is a prescription.” But let us look at this thing. How does it manifest for you? What does the entity that is about to fall, falling, or clinging to the edge look like? What is the preciseness in it?

**PAA: In addition to the diary and the banishing ritual, is there any other kind of balancing work that people do within the process or the system you have?**

**Lyam:** When we bring up the idea of balance, it has always annoyed me because I ask, “What are we balancing, and where is the fulcrum?” Some people would put the fulcrum over here; other people would put it over there. What are we balancing?

Ultimately, what happens in high magic, in the realm of spiritual transformation, is that the balance is between existing and not existing. This is the sweet spot. It is like the god Thoth as the enterer of the threshold. He is in manifestation and out of manifestation at the same time. He comes and goes, like the moon comes and goes.

This delicate dance of only showing up when needed and disappearing when you are not needed: there is your true balance. What do we do with our lives? We constantly micromanage and meddle in things. Your life is mostly none of your business. Stay out of it. It does its thing. You occasionally show up to tweak things, and then you let go.

So it is a balance between managing and letting go, meddling and disappearing. In *The Lord of the Rings*, Gandalf will show up, say a few words, poke a few people, and then go away. Then he comes back and sees whether they woke up and whether they are actually doing something.

**PAA: So really, follow the process. Let’s say a student is following this process, journaling, and having things grow in their life. Maybe they are not dealing with it as well as possible, or it is affecting their life a lot, and they are thinking, “I am not sure I can get through this.” What would your advice be to that student?**

**Lyam:** The big relief that eventually comes is this: I do not need to fix all this stuff. It needs my tender loving care and attention. It kind of fixes itself when it is allowed to air itself out in the imagination.

If you do not deal with your karma on the level of Yetzirah, or the imagination, it eventually trickles down into your life and makes your external physical life hell. It starts beating you up in the physical world.

The theory is that you can deal with this karma before it manifests physically. When you deal with it on that level, you can help it resolve itself so it no longer appears in your behavior and circumstances of life. No guarantees. Karma is everywhere. It is everything. But you can head off some of the really unpleasant stuff that is trying to resolve itself.

It is painful to think that these things are trying to come out so they can see for themselves that they do not quite work the way they want to. In order to do that, they are going to be pathological first on the level of imagination, in terms of scary dreams, dreams of walking around in the park naked, or other uncomfortable dreams. If you do not deal with them on that level, they will manifest in your physical life.

When people are suffering a lot in their physical circumstances, we can theorize that they do not know how to deal with it on the level of imagination. This is not necessarily true, and it is not their fault. They may not have the executive function that says, “These images are arising. They need help to work themselves out before they become physical.” Who would know to do that? You have to have someone teach you.

**PAA: Let’s move on to something that came from the community. People were talking about the book and things you had said, and a question came through about qigong, internal energy, and why someone might be told to practice this in addition to the work of the book. What differences, if any, are there between the Qabalistic Cross or the Middle Pillar and doing some form of standing qigong? What is one doing, and what is the other doing?**

**Lyam:** In most cases, when a teacher gives you some work to do with the energy body, or something ritualistic like this, you just do it. You will notice your tendency to want to use these things to control your energy: “I want more energy. Give me energy.” You are trying to get things out of it.

The teacher says, “No, do as I say,” because what you are primarily doing is noticing what the energy does out of habit.

I love this idea from biology, though it is not really new: the morphogenetic field or morphic resonance. We inhabit an energy field that ensouls, invigorates, or animates all life in the biosphere, or maybe in the universe. This energy field becomes concentrated in us, and it has habits within it. There are recurring patterns, and these recurring patterns can cause many problems. These recurring patterns are semi-autonomous entities, as we might say in psychoanalysis. They are demons or creatures, often much older than we are, because they persist in the human race, in animals, in plants, and everywhere.

They go through patterns where they are stuck and keep beating themselves up because they are trying to accomplish something. They persist because they occasionally work. Most of the time they do not work, but when they occasionally work, that is enough for them to keep going.

As these energy flows do their habitual things, cramped over here and gushing too much over there, we begin to notice them. The primary thing happening when we are working with ritualistic energy, qigong-type energy, Kundalini work, or breath work is that we are noticing how this energy field exists within the body.

We tend not to believe it is there. Even a Zen teacher might say, “Notice the emotion in your body. Where does it manifest? As a cramp?” People think it is in the body, in the musculature or fascia. But no: it is in the imagination, or the imagination of the universe, or the soul of the world, which is being concentrated. You are now dealing with the eruption of some habitual tendency that is trying to discover what it really is. It keeps coming out so there is an opportunity to deal with it.

The main thing that will eventually collapse is the habitual contraction of imagination into ego. Primarily, what a teacher is working on, like it or not, is destroying you. Eventually, that habitual contraction into a sense of self you think is you will collapse, which frees a tremendous amount of energy.

Normally what happens is that it happens to you, it is catastrophic, and then you recover. If you already have a lot of experience, it is not a big deal. You think, “What was that? I disappeared for a second.” Then you come back. The ego reconstitutes again, and the energy pattern says, “I am back again.” But this thing that is “me” is like a sock puppet. You are crammed up in your head again as a control-tower entity looking out through your eyes. Yet this is not real. It is not what you thought you were.

Problems still resurface, but every time one of these little behavioral eccentricities comes up, you see how it works. You gain an instant understanding that it is an eruption of a habitual energy pattern. This is when you begin to see how these things unfold.

The primary goal, whether it is ritual, qigong, chakra work, Kundalini, or breath work, is to discover that it is not simply in your fascia, muscles, hormones, or neurotransmitters. All of these are manifestations of habitual energy patterns trapped in reactive patterns. Eventually, you begin to see them. They do not liberate right away. You begin to notice them as they are stuck, and it can hurt like hell to notice them. Before, ignorance was bliss. Now you see how stuck you are.

Another thing you see is that the way you are trying to feel better does not work. You see that no matter what you do, in all those habitual ways of striving to fix this or fix that, you are not going to feel better. When you see that, it is as though someone in the family has died. When someone dies, you think, “What is the point of all this? We are going to die anyway.” The same feeling comes up: no matter what I do, it is pointless. This thing thinks it is going to feel better by doing this or that, but it never works. It only works for a little while, and then the suffering comes back.

That is disheartening. It is called the dark night of the soul. You see that nothing you do is going to make you feel permanently better unless you turn the light around and look at the thing that is compulsively trying to feel better all the time.

Then you see: this is what is going on. This thing is trying to feel better all the time. First of all, is there anything wrong with it to begin with? How did it get the idea that something is wrong? This idea that something is wrong is a driving force, a mechanism that keeps us controlling, freaking out, dominating the planet, and killing other life forms so we can live. It is the way karma works, and it is flying blind.

When you notice this thing, you see, “This is not what I am. This is just stuff going on.” Eventually you begin to wake up because this idea of “me inside here” and “things to fix out there” is not real. It is a dream. You do not wake up from the dream; you wake up to the dream. You still see all the dream forms that the nervous system is creating: “That is a bad guy. That is a good guy. Of course, I am the good guy.” But none of that is inherently real, and yet we still wink at it.

That is why so many magicians sleep with one eye open. One eye is turned inside into the spiritual world, where they can see that none of this is actually happening. The other eye is turned outside, playing along with the phantoms the nervous system is creating so it can perpetuate itself.

**PAA: That is not the answer I was expecting, but it is an excellent answer. So whether we are doing the Qabalistic Cross or the Middle Pillar, even though they may come at this from a particular perspective or give particular experiences, the endpoint is identification with reality.**

**Lyam:** Yes. Can you exert energy fields and heal people? Yes, it is possible. But what is involved might scare the hell out of you because it involves deep empathy for, and taking on, the energy pattern of the other person. You can see it because you understand it, and then you demonstrate in front of them that you can come out of it. Maybe they will harmonize with you coming out of it. That is terrifying because you have to actually face what they are facing. That is a kind of healing.

**PAA: Let’s move on to three subjects in one: lodge, lineage, and solitary work. I have seen a few of your videos on these subjects. First, let’s look at lineage. There is this idea of, “My teacher is this person, therefore...” Could you speak to that? Also, is there a difference in what someone can achieve through solitary work versus lodge work? There are many views on this. If someone is in a place where they cannot access anything other than your book, can they develop in the same way?**

**Lyam:** First of all, it is conceivably possible that you can become enlightened just by reading. It is very unlikely, and people say, “You cannot get it from a book.” But if you really know how to read, like a theorist reads, you are going through all kinds of horrific transformations as you read. We know this because we read literature and think, “I cannot believe this. I am tearing up. I am getting chills.”

The ability to do that can spiritually transform you. It is called catharsis. The ability to do that happens on your own while you are reading literature, watching a movie, or better yet, watching a live play. These things happen whether we like it or not. Life unfolds that way.

With magic, art, or drama, we turn up the volume on that. We intensify the catharsis process, purification, and self-empowerment. You realize what you really are and become more authentic.

I came into the work trying to initiate myself, and I was making progress. Then I encountered Ra-Hoor-Khuit Temple and Laura York, who was my teacher. I benefited tremendously from just having a few words with her and hanging out on occasion. We did the 0=0 initiation ritual, which was wonderful, but most of the juicy stuff I got was from being with the adepts of Ra-Hoor-Khuit Temple, especially her.

That is when I realized how lineage works. I have noticed that people doing the *Kabbalah, Magic* work make progress and their lives change. Then they meet with me online and have a conversation like this, and everything suddenly changes for them. They go after it more seriously. They say, “I am going to start over. Now I know what is going on. Now I know what is happening.”

There is nothing special about me, but somehow that has carried forward. I am paying it forward. I got it from Laura, and now I am fortunate enough to have been activated or initiated.

To be initiated is to rise to a new level of activity and function at that level. It is a higher level or deeper level, whatever resonates. You cannot go back because you now see what is possible for yourself, and you have to do this. Once you are in, you cannot undo it anymore. It is done.

If you try to back out, you will suffer horribly because you are trying to live a life that you know will not make you happy in the way everyone else is doing. Now you can see through it, but you are still trying to do it. You cannot do that anymore. It is no longer your game. You can play it and have fun with it, but it is not something you ultimately subscribe to.

**PAA: The last part of that would be this: when it comes to the outer and inner order, from the bookwork, this takes you up to the entrance door. Is that correct?**

**Lyam:** To the portal, right. To knocking on the door and hoping it opens, and then going into Tiphareth and being happy forever.

The real transition from the outer order to the inner order involves being able to work magic from the inside. Let’s say you get into Goetia and you are conjuring demons so they will go do things for you. That is a manner of working with spirits in which you take their existence at face value. You do not really know what they are. You say, “They are out there, and if I conjure them and pretend to be the archangel Michael, they will react, cower, and go do things.”

That is usually the outer-order perspective. As we go through the outer-order process, we realize that is not real. Those are fake forms of power, the kinds of power tyrants wield: coercion and pecking-order authority.

True authority involves penetrating insight into what these spirits are as karmic formations desperately trying to work themselves out. People are collections of these entities, and you can walk around in the world seeing that. Then you are on the inside. You are operating at the level of the soul, and you see how the soul of the world is erupting into manifestation, attempting to work out its dramas.

Working from the inside means that, yes, you may still conjure spirits and demons and appear to get benefits, as though they are doing your bidding. But that is not what is happening. You are helping them work out their unresolved dualities. These spirits or semi-autonomous complexes transform and assume forms that are more helpful, mainly like watchdogs. Instead of taking you over and making you do things, they say, “Look out.” Or they dissolve entirely and never bother you again.

That is the process. In the process, you gain an extraordinary way of living, which for you is quite ordinary because you touch down on the mind the way the mind actually is, not the mind as it has been forced into this role or that role.

We think all these roles we compulsively play are reality. That is a dream state. When you come out of that, you see that being free of these roles, entities, and scenarios compelling you is the reality. That is the mind the way it actually is. It is kind of nice.

You are not immune to these things, but as they come up, you are aware of them. They will not necessarily take you over and force you to be an actor in their drama. They will still act themselves out on the level of imagination, where you can help them realize what they are or what they are trying to do.

They love that. At first, they may say, “What are you doing? You have not noticed me for a million years.” Then they settle in and say, “This is really nice. I am going to serve you as an instinct that is no longer going to grab hold of you and make you do things. I am going to pipe down now.”

That happens all around you. You see these things everywhere. It is not just, “I am getting control of my behavior.” It happens with the people around you as well. They get magnetized by you, or catalyzed, whatever you want to call that.

**PAA: Could we say that this links to authenticity? The authenticity of your practice in what could be called the outer order: as you develop, you transition inward without necessarily needing entrance into another structure. Your own evolution takes you into that state.**

**Lyam:** Let’s backtrack for a second because I want to deal with the idea of group ritual. People think, “I need to join a group, and the group ritual work is going to carry me through.” That is all fine, but primarily this Hermetic work is self-initiation. Even if you are in a lodge, it is your daily work that is going to do the work for you.

When you bring your A-game to the group meetings or the lodge, what you bring is yourself as you are in your current state of personal individual transformation. Here I am. People are learning from you, you are learning from them, and they are noticing the stuff you are stirring up, which may be problematic for you and for them.

It is not necessarily easy. In magical lodges, the work will push out demons and inflate egos. That is how it works. The teacher’s job is to help people deal with that so things settle down and people do the work on the level of imagination instead of letting it come out into the world and beat everyone up.

You can do ritual in groups, and that is fine. But primarily, the work is by yourself: doing your magical journal, doing your daily ritual, and doing whatever your teacher prescribes.

**PAA: That is really good to hear. It shows how tough entering one of these things can be.**

**Lyam:** Especially if you are an addictive type of personality, group work can help with relying on alcohol, pornography, or things like that. When you reach for things that are cheap and easy, it becomes addiction. What the psyche really wants is to be challenged.

When you enter a social group, it is automatically challenging. It is always difficult. There is always a little bit of, “What is going on here?” That is enough to make addiction unnecessary. You are not reaching for that cheap fix anymore because you have a genuinely challenging and engaging situation. That is much more worthwhile than finding a cheap, easy feel-good.

**PAA: I think you have covered authenticity indirectly, but when I saw your material on that, it really struck me. Maybe this is a reflection of me, but I thought, “Yes, that is very important.” Personally, I feel I want my outer to reflect my inner, and if my inner is pretending to be my outer, I feel uncomfortable.**

**Lyam:** You are a practitioner. I have just added you as a practitioner of magic because if you are doing magic, authenticity becomes a huge issue for a long time.

Eventually it is not such a big deal. You run into people and they say, “Have a nice day,” and they do not really mean it. It is all right. Do not freak out. People ask, “How are you?” and they do not really mean it. That is fine. They are starting a conversation.

Authenticity is paradoxical because, from my perspective, you realize there is no “you.” You have all these entities reacting to things outside the magic circle, and each of them is inviting you to identify with it: “This is who you really are. You exist to fight injustice. Let’s go beat up injustice.” But the real challenge is not to identify with the compulsion to become this role-playing thing.

When you realize that none of these entities inviting you to become something are inherently real, then you see there is not really any “me.” But then something curious happens. You notice that the way these entities come out, and the way you play along with them, becomes emblematic of who you really are. It is your own style. You cannot necessarily put a finger on it, but there is the authenticity.

It is like what Oscar Wilde said. This is not a direct quote, but he said there is nothing more artificial than trying to be yourself. The manner in which you wear your different masks tells me who you really are. The manner in which you handle all these entities as they come up, playing along with some and letting others go, is your style. That is your authenticity.

Whatever that karmic pattern is, it is probably going to continue for a very long time, long after your body is gone, in that wave pattern or whatever it is. I do not know whether that is true, but it is a beautiful idea.

**PAA: Thank you for answering that. That was one of the questions I really wanted to cover. I have many others, but I am drawn to ask this: in your own practice, was there a point where you were half in and half out, asking, “Is this real? What is real?” Was there an experience where you felt, “Okay, this is something I need to commit to and go all in”? If you are able to share it, what was that?**

**Lyam:** I mentioned this in the book. I got into magic by pursuing astral projection, which I had some results with. The book was by Ophiel, *The Art and Practice of Astral Projection*. It is a fantastic book, especially for his writing style. He mentioned the Golden Dawn and the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram, and that brought me into Golden Dawn work.

I started doing the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram, and after about a week or two, I felt different. I felt good, but not in the ordinary way. It was more like the ego beginning to think, “I am awesome, and all that stuff out there is just material dross.” That started to happen, but I realized something was going on. This was real. Something was happening.

Astral projection itself was not that big a deal. It was a lucid-dreaming type of thing.

**PAA: I am surprised, because I would have thought that even a clear lucid experience, or a real astral projection, would be quite powerful.**

**Lyam:** It was not remote viewing. It was simply being awake while dreaming, aware and able to fly and explore. Most of us have experienced that before, so we know it is not that big a deal, though it is nice to be able to do it consciously.

But realizing that waving your hands in the air and chanting names actually does something like psychic surgery made me think, “Oh my God, this is real.” From that point, I pursued it seriously and eventually discovered Ra-Hoor-Khuit Temple and the Golden Dawn.

Another experience happened when I was in Zelator. It was my first enlightenment experience, at the level you could say of Assiah, the world of action or material world. I was living in an apartment that had no washroom, so I had to go to the community washroom. I was walking across the lawn and happened to notice that I was the earth arisen in this form, looking at itself.

Then I entered the washroom and thought, “What was that?” I almost missed it. These things are always there. I almost did not see it. That was real. I began to notice that the ego construct is inherently unreal. That was probably the most profound moment out of all the work, even though it was so ordinary and subtle. It had the biggest impact.

Eventually, in the same grade, or perhaps Theoricus, I do not remember anymore, the ego collapsed. I had a letting-go attack. The ego started to collapse, but I was able to hold on. It was beginning to crumble, and I thought I was dying. There were hallucinations involved. I write about this on the Forbidden Realms Patreon site.

It was alarming. I contacted my teachers at the time, and they were all on a camping trip, so I had to wait several days for them to respond. When my teacher responded, she said, “Yes, of course. Next time that happens, just let go. Discover something new. It is all right.” I thought, “What do you mean? I had dragon voices growling into my ears.” I did not know what was going on.

Now I understand it more. I also had experiences of being attacked by teeth, fangs, wolf-like creatures, and maybe snakes. Sometimes I would touch an object in the environment and get an electric shock. These are evolutionary traumas being pushed out into hallucinatory experiences.

It is funny to call them hallucinations because that is an abstraction used to dismiss them. They were tangible and shockingly real, sort of like PTSD for a moment. They did not ruin my life, but I was noticing them. I told my teachers about it, and Laura said, “Good. Very good. You are being attacked by entities. Very good.”

**PAA: That was the point where you thought, “Okay, I am absolutely all in.” You also mentioned Patreon, so I would like to cover that. Would you let us know about the Patreon and anything else you have going on: activities for students or people interested in your work? All of that will be put in the description box below.**

**Lyam:** Speaking of authenticity, I just quit my day job, so this is what I am doing now. Please support me on Patreon.

On the Patreon site, the idea is that being able to contact somebody, even through the computer, and work with them live or through messaging, is often enough to allow the lineage thing to work. I have seen this happening on the internet, especially on YouTube, and I thought, “This can work.” That is why I started doing it. You can have tremendous reach and cause a lot of trouble online.

On Patreon, people can direct message me, and every other day I answer messages. We go back and forth. Some people are doing the work in my book, trying to master Golden Dawn magic. Others are doing enlightenment practices to try to have a spiritual experience. That is fine. Whatever you are doing, there is also biohacking, which is cool because biohacking is pretty much what sorcerers used to do anyway. They called it magic back then, and now we are trying to label it something else.

Biohacking includes breath techniques, exposing yourself to cold and heat, making sure you get enough ultraviolet light, making sure you get enough red light, and making sure you do not get blue light at night. These biohacks can be astonishingly effective, especially blocking blue light at night. I cannot emphasize that enough. People suffer horribly from brain fog, and it can simply be because there is not enough melatonin while they are sleeping. They are not exposed to nighttime anymore. They are constantly immersed in LED or fluorescent blue light, which tells the brain, “It is daytime.”

You can join the Patreon site. It is easy to find. You can look for Lyam Christopher. It is called Forbidden Realms, because these things really are forbidden. You are getting into things that undermine the ego’s narrative of civilization.

That is why magic has such a dark reputation. The karmic patterns that created civilization are based on suffering, stratification of classes, rampant capitalism, and things like that. These are karmic processes demanding that we continue to participate in them. I do not want to get political about it, but freeing yourself from these does not mean going out, radicalizing, changing the world, and becoming president. Forget that. It means being aware of them and becoming more amused as you notice them happening all around you. That can be really important.

There are articles on the Patreon site. I put YouTube videos there as well, though those are free on YouTube. There are enlightenment practices. If you do not want to do the Golden Dawn curriculum, you can do visualizations, energy work, and things like that as an attempt to become enlightened.

There is only one tier right now. I will probably put guided meditations on there for a second tier. Right now, it is only $5 a month. There is no second tier yet, but there probably will be.

**PAA: For that kind of tier, to get direct access to someone with this kind of experience is a no-brainer.**

**Lyam:** I do want to go to Boleskine House. If you know what that is, it is where Aleister Crowley supposedly did the Abramelin ceremony. Not that I am a follower of Aleister Crowley necessarily, but I do think he is fascinating. I would like to travel to Scotland and go to Boleskine if I get enough supporters to pay for the trip. Then I could be that internet celebrity walking around Boleskine House with my phone saying, “Here I am in front of the most infamous house in history.” That would be great.

**PAA: That would be a lot of fun. It is big news that you have given up your day job.**

**Lyam:** Four or five months ago, yes.

**PAA: Fair play. It is a big step.**

**Lyam:** I was a learning specialist, or I still am a learning specialist: twenty years of experience helping people study, read, and write at the college level.

**PAA: Thank you for being on Perseus. I wish you all the luck in the world with the new Patreon. In any way that we can work together or help each other with Perseus, I am happy to do that. I have really enjoyed listening to your answers. Now that I have discovered your YouTube channel, I will be going through it one by one. There is a lot to go through.**

**Lyam:** I am not sure how that happened. I started it a couple of years ago, and it just kept growing.

**PAA: It is bizarre that I had not seen it before, but thanks to people in the Perseus community, they were mentioning people doing the work of your book. I thought, “Who is this? Tell me more.” Then I saw your work and thought, “Let’s do an interview. This has to happen.” Thank you so much for answering all these questions. I had so many questions, with pieces of paper and documents here, but there is just so much. Possibly again in the future, that would be wonderful.**

Thank you, everyone, for joining us. I really enjoyed this episode: learning about these things, making sense of what I had only vaguely understood before, and hearing Lyam explain them. If you enjoyed it, please like this video, subscribe to the Perseus channel, and also head over to all of Lyam’s links below. Visit his YouTube channel, subscribe to his YouTube, and take a look at his Patreon. To have expert advice for a small amount of money is very worthwhile.

Thank you all, and I will see you on the next episode.

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