Modern Magic Spirituality's Relationship To The Past

(November 30, 2025) The techniques of witchcraft and energy work have mostly been reconstructed from personal experiences motivated by the memory that something like it  once existed in the past (The Old Ways).  

The Old Ways are now being revealed with the first successful translations of runestones and ogham stones. These Old Ways turn out to be very magical as many have suspected. Despite the suppression of the intervening years, today's magic spirituality can easily been seen as a continuation of the past, only updated due to our different spiritual needs and our deeper understanding of nature.

The spiritual needs of the past centered around physical survival instead of about peace of mind like today. They were most worried about having enough food.

In the past nature was thought to consist of one realm with everything working according to the same rules. Today we believe we exist in two different realms, the material and the spiritual/conscious realms which work differently and which interact only in limited and at present, in unknown ways. This splitting of reality came about because because after rules of motion were established by  Isaac Newton, people realized that the physical universe could run itself like a clock. The universe did not need deities or spirits to change things. 

Both modern and ancient magic paths have non-dualist worldviews, that is, reality is not a war between good and evil. This perverse idea came from Persian Zoroastrianism and spread east and west along with the Achaemenid Empire (550–330 BCE). With this worldview everything became either inherently good or bad. If the divine realm was good then the material world was bad. If males were good then females were bad and needed to be controlled. If my empire was good then all others were evil and deserved to be conquered (empire rulers loved this ideology). No middle ground existed for uncertainty, neutrality, or transitional states.  

Both modern and ancient magic paths do not lordify their deities, that is, treat them only as royal people who live on some higher plane. Lordification came about when distant kings started to be perceived like nature powers being just as capricious and powerful. Because kings tended to be males, lordification tended to downgrade the divine feminine. These lordified deities also acquired human weaknesses and so they tended to be feared, bribed and flattered (praised). That led to human sacrifices because that was the ultimate bribery. 

Both modern and ancient magic paths tended to perceive their deities as clusters of powers which could be optionally be personified. Deities were felt, not seen. The pantheon of the Old Ways was gender balanced and it even had one hermaphrodite (or at least neutral gendered). Its pantheon was the source of many of the most popular Pagan deities today.  

The European civilization associated with the Old Ways are the Ancient Druids. Their runic and ogham texts were written in the original language of the Neolithic farmers who came out of northern Mesopotamia and spoke Akkadian. This language exists on stone or fired clay tablet ranging in date from the Minoans of 1900 BCE to the Scandinavian runestones and Codex Runicus dating to as late as 1200 CE.

This ancient writing continued to be used despite the various local spoken languages changing around them becoming various mixes of Akkadian and Indo-European. This means that Druid Akkadian was the Latin of the Pagan world and some organized religious group must have been teaching it. The only such group we know of are the Druids. The Druid civilization was also the one which built the megaliths of Europe like Stonehenge prior to the arrival of the Indo-European speakers. 

Reference For Priestess With Pentacle