Inquiry · “You Are Not Your Thoughts”
The Psychological Goetia
Confront and redirect one’s own worst traits, fears and compulsions by treating a Goetic ‘demon’ as a personified portion of one’s own psyche — evoking it into a controlled ritual frame so it can be named, contained, and harnessed rather than left to run unconsciously.
Psychological Goetia: Name the trait you’re fighting and match it to a Goetic spirit. Set the circle (you), the triangle (the trait, held outside you), and the seal. Evoke it into the triangle — the “appearance” is a felt, imaginative presence, not a monster. Confront, name, bind, redirect its energy to a chosen end; then license to depart and close. Keep DuQuette’s frame: “it’s all in your head — you just have no idea how big your head is.”
What it is
Lon Milo DuQuette is a modern ceremonial magician best known for making the Goetia — the medieval grimoire of seventy-two “evil spirits” from the Lesser Key of Solomon — workable for a psychologically literate reader.
His signature stance, captured in his book’s subtitle, is that magick is “all in your head — you just have no idea how big your head is,” and that the Goetic demons are not external monsters but personified portions of the practitioner’s own mind — the fears, compulsions, rages and weaknesses one would rather not own.
The “evocation,” done with the traditional apparatus of circle, triangle and seal, becomes a deliberate, contained confrontation with a disowned part of the self: you summon the worst in you into a ritual frame where it can be faced, named, bound, and its energy redirected to a constructive purpose — rather than left to sabotage you from the dark.
The Method
DuQuette teaches the Goetia with full respect for the grimoire’s mechanics but an explicitly inner reading. The working, in outline as he presents and rationalises it:
- Identify the demon as a part of you. Pick (or let the work reveal) the trait you are wrestling with — DuQuette’s own account is blunt: the Solomonic operation “pulls out. the very worst in me — my worst fears — the worst aspects of my character,” and “the worst in me was the demon.” Match it to a Goetic spirit whose described office fits the quality you mean to master.
- Prepare in the traditional manner. Construct or draw the magician’s protective circle, the Triangle of the Art outside it, and the spirit’s seal/lamen. DuQuette stresses that the elaborate apparatus is not superstition but stagecraft for the psyche — it makes the encounter real enough to matter while keeping it bounded.
- Stand in the circle; evoke into the triangle. Using the grimoire’s conjurations, call the spirit to “visible appearance” in the triangle. DuQuette is candid that “appearance” rarely means a literal apparition; what manifests is a felt presence, an emotional charge, an imaginative form — the trait made vivid and outside you for the first time.
- Confront, name, and constrain. Hold the figure in the triangle — i.e., hold the trait at arm’s length, in awareness, rather than being possessed by it. Address it, learn what it wants, and bind it to your intent. DuQuette’s image is that once trapped in the triangle you can “harness and redirect its monstrous power” toward a chosen, useful end.
- License to depart and close. Dismiss the spirit with the traditional license to depart and close the temple — psychologically, a clean exit that returns the integrated charge to ordinary life and ends the heightened state. Throughout, DuQuette’s instruction is to take the ritual seriously as theatre of the mind: the seriousness is what gives the inner confrontation its force, while the “it’s all in your head” framing keeps it from tipping into literalist fear.
Source & Lineage
The reading is DuQuette’s, developed across My Life with the Spirits (1999), The Magick of Aleister Crowley, and stated most directly in Low Magick: It’s All in Your Head.
You Just Have No Idea How Big Your Head Is (2010), where he describes the Goetic demons as “portions of the human brain.” It sits downstream of the Goetia / Lesser Key of Solomon (17th-c. compilation), of S.L.
MacGregor Mathers’ and Aleister Crowley’s 1904 edition, and of Crowley’s own psychologising preface to that edition (which already treats the spirits as parts of the brain).
DuQuette popularises and humanises that lineage for a modern practitioner. → (Lon Milo DuQuette node); related.
Common refinements
Sliding into literalism. Forgetting DuQuette’s frame and treating the demon as a real external threat reintroduces the fear the method is meant to dissolve.
- Treating it as “just imagination” and phoning it in. The opposite error: without the full apparatus and serious engagement, nothing is stirred and nothing integrates.
- No clean exit. Skipping the license to depart / closing leaves the heightened state and the charge un-grounded.
- Picking a trait you can’t yet face. Starting with your most destabilising material rather than a workable one.
- Doing heavy shadow work alone while in crisis. This is contraindicated (see Safety).
- Refinement: pair with journaling (record what the “spirit” said and what shifted) and revisit over time — integration is iterative, not one-shot.