Are Male Witches Just Scientists? (Witches Vs. Logic) — show notes
Hat tip to Broken Ruune for The Occult Has Become Too Feminine”
Did We Actually Lose Male Mystics?
Trends & NGram Viewer
Comparing: witch, wizard, paladin, druid, sage
Hate to break it to Broken Ruune, but witches have been dominating since at least the middle ages per Google NGram Viewer at least
Unexpectedly, it’s closer on Google Trends, wizards aren’t that much worse off than witches (maybe because of Harry Potter though).
Malleus Maleficarum
In Malleus Maleficarum, is the focus on only female witches? What about wizards, paladins, druids, and sages? Are they also called out as a threat in the book?
ANSWER:
- The Malleus Maleficarum overwhelmingly focuses on women, but it does not say that only women can practice witchcraft.
- Its author, Heinrich Kramer, argues that women are more likely than men to be witches; the book also discusses male practitioners and condemns sorcery and divination.
Historical Wizards
John Dee (1527–1608/09)
- English mathematician and adviser to Elizabeth I who practiced alchemy and astrology, and undertook ritual attempts to communicate with angels through scrying.
- Scrying is basically crystal ball gazing: an ancient divination practice that involves gazing into a reflective, translucent, or moving surface to receive intuitive insights, visions, or hidden knowledge.
- With Edward Kelley, he developed the angelic system now known as Enochian magic.
- Edward Kelley (1555–1597) was Dee’s scryer and ritual collaborator.
- He said he could see and hear angels in crystals or mirrors, relaying their messages and instructions during elaborate spiritual experiments.
- Probably schizophrenic?
Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa (1486–1535)
- German scholar and author of Three Books of Occult Philosophy, one of the defining Renaissance works on natural, celestial, and ceremonial magic.
- He treated magic as an organized body of knowledge and practice.
Giordano Bruno (1548–1600)
- Italian philosopher and former friar who developed Hermetic memory practices designed to link the mind to cosmic powers.
- His “memory magic” was intended to transform the practitioner, not just improve recall.
Paracelsus (1493–1541)
- Swiss physician, alchemist, and medical reformer.
- His healing system combined chemical remedies with astrology, occult properties in nature, elemental beings, and the belief that hidden forces could be discovered and used.
Johann Georg Faust (c. 1480–c. 1541)
- German itinerant astrologer, alchemist, and magician who offered occult services during his life.
- He was the historical basis for the later literary character Faust, although the famous devil-pact story is largely legend.
Nostradamus (1503–1566)
- French physician, astrologer, and author of prophetic verse.
- He regarded astrology and divinatory techniques as genuine ways to perceive future events.
Isaac Newton (1642–1727)
- English physicist and mathematician who privately devoted extensive effort to alchemy, biblical prophecy, chronology, and hidden divine principles in nature.
- He appears to have regarded alchemical transformation as a real possibility.
Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772)
- Swedish scientist, engineer, theologian, and visionary who reported sustained conversations with angels and spirits.
- His work is more visionary and religious than ceremonial magic, but he believed humans could genuinely encounter the spirit world.
Cagliostro (Giuseppe Balsamo) (1743–1795)
- Eighteenth-century occultist associated with alchemy, ritual, spirit communication, and esoteric Freemasonry.
- He presented himself as possessing secret Egyptian and magical knowledge, though his sincerity and many of his claims remain doubtful.
Modern Wizards
Broken Ruune highlights Rudolf Steiner and Manly P. Hall as examples of the male “wizard” figure he thinks is missing from today’s occult culture: men who publicly pursued hidden knowledge and tried to explain it, rather than treating spirituality chiefly as personal comfort.
Rudolf Steiner:
Broken Ruune calls him probably his biggest ideological influence.
- He portrays Steiner as someone who combined Christian belief and mystical experience with an industrial-age respect for science.
- He believed the occult explained the spiritual side of reality, just like science explains the physical side of reality
- Per Broken Ruune, Steiner’s “occult science” aimed to investigate spiritual reality with academic rigor—not predict the future or cast love spells.
His Legacy
Philosophy and spirituality: Steiner founded anthroposophy, creating a comprehensive spiritual-philosophical system focused on human freedom, inner development, reincarnation, karma, and purported methods of spiritual perception. His writings, lectures, societies, and publishing institutions remain the backbone of the anthroposophical movement.
Education: He helped establish the first Waldorf school in Stuttgart in 1919, originally for children of workers at the Waldorf-Astoria cigarette factory. Waldorf education emphasizes developmental stages, storytelling, arts, music, movement, handwork, practical skills, and delayed emphasis on abstract academics. It grew into an international network of more than 1,000 schools by the early 21st century.
Agriculture: Through his 1924 Agriculture Course, Steiner originated biodynamic agriculture (which is DEFINITELY still a thing). It treats the farm as an integrated living organism, emphasizing soil health, composting, crop and animal diversity, and ecological relationships. Biodynamics influenced organic and regenerative farming, although its astrological and “preparation” practices are not well supported by mainstream scientific evidence.
Medicine and care: His followers developed anthroposophical medicine, which combines conventional care with remedies and therapies derived from anthroposophical principles. Steiner also influenced therapeutic education and residential-care communities for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities. Individual medical treatments should be assessed by evidence-based standards rather than accepted merely because they are anthroposophical.
Art, movement, and architecture: Steiner created eurythmy, a performing art in which movement is intended to express the sounds and meanings of speech or the structure of music. He also designed the original Goetheanum in Dornach, Switzerland, as the international home of anthroposophy and a center for theater, architecture, research, and education.
Social and economic thought: Steiner proposed “social threefolding,” in which cultural life, democratic legal-political life, and economic life should be relatively independent. He advocated freedom in education and culture, equality in civic rights, and cooperation rather than pure competition in economic life. These ideas remain influential in some alternative schools, cooperatives, and anthroposophical organizations.
Institution building: His most durable accomplishment may be turning a broad spiritual worldview into working institutions: schools, farms, clinics, pharmaceutical companies, artistic organizations, disability-support communities, publishing houses, and the Anthroposophical Society itself.
Manly P. Hall:
- Broken Ruune points to The Secret Teachings of All Ages as an ambitious attempt to teach the public about mysticism and philosophy.
- He acknowledges that it mixes what he considers genuine information with outdated speculation and fanciful writing, but admires Hall’s willingness to compile and present such a sweeping work. He also describes Hall’s wealthy patrons and expeditions as his own “dream job.”
- The Secret Teachings of All Ages
- In this book, hall argues that beneath outward religious and cultural differences lies a common metaphysical truth about:
- A divine or intelligent source underlying the universe.
- The human being as a microcosm—a small-scale reflection of the cosmos.
- Ignorance, material attachment, and uncontrolled desire as sources of spiritual limitation.
- Self-knowledge, virtue, contemplation, and disciplined study as routes toward wisdom and reunion with the divine.
- Mystery traditions as institutions that concealed these teachings from the unprepared while transmitting them through initiation and symbolism.
- In short: people should learn to read the symbolic “language” embedded in religion, mythology, art, ritual, and nature, then use that understanding for moral and spiritual development.
Wizards Today
Feminine Domination
That’s obvious (Etsy, Witchtok, etc.)
Loss of Initiations
One of the things Broken Ruune bemoans is the loss of initiation rituals, which he saw as a sort of necessary barrier to entry that was supposed to be terrifying and kind of messed up to emphasize the double-sided nature of the occult and how it is genuinely dangerous.
What’s Left
The clearest male-coded or historically male-dominated strands today are ceremonial magic, Thelema, traditionalist/esoteric-right milieus, some Masonic-adjacent rites, and a newer online “occult intellectual” culture. But none has the social reach Freemasonry had at its twentieth-century peak.
Ceremonial magic and Golden Dawn lineages
This is probably the closest surviving descendant of the “learned male wizard” tradition of Dee, Agrippa, and Crowley. Practitioners study correspondences, astrology, Tarot, Kabbalah/Qabalah, planetary ritual, invocation and banishing rituals, meditation, visualization, talismans, dream work, and graded systems of initiation.
The various groups calling themselves Golden Dawn, along with independent practitioners using Golden Dawn-derived material, are not a unified church or a single organization. Their common ancestor is the late nineteenth-century Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Modern practice is usually private or conducted in small temples rather than in a mass public institution.
Gender-wise, it is mixed. It has a stronger male intellectual and historical canon than modern Paganism—Agrippa, Lévi, Crowley, Regardie, Fortune, Mathers, and so on—but women have always been important in the tradition, including Florence Farr, Moina Mathers, Dion Fortune, and later teachers. It would be misleading to call contemporary Golden Dawn practice straightforwardly male-dominated without reliable demographic data.
Thelema and the O.T.O.
Thelema, founded by Aleister Crowley, is a living occult religion built around discovering and enacting one’s “True Will.” Its repertoire often includes ceremonial ritual, qabalah, yoga and meditation, Tarot, sexual symbolism, magical diaries, and Crowley’s broader system of magick. The major surviving initiatory organization is the Ordo Templi Orientis (O.T.O.); its own reported membership was about 4,000 in 2017, while a scholarly estimate put the total Thelemite population in 2020 at roughly 5,000–10,000 worldwide.
This is plausibly one of the more male-skewed modern occult scenes in style, public intellectual ancestry, and recruitment culture. Crowley’s authority, competitive attainment language, graded initiation, and emphasis on disciplined individual practice appeal to many men looking for an explicit “magus” identity. Still, it is formally open to all genders and includes prominent women and nonbinary practitioners; “male-dominated” is not the same as male-only.
Traditionalist and esoteric-right scenes
There is a separate cluster of readers and small circles around writers such as René Guénon, Julius Evola, Frithjof Schuon, and—in more contemporary popular form—figures who combine traditional religion, myth, hierarchy, masculinity, anti-modernism, or civilizational decline.
This sphere is often heavily male, particularly online. It can involve real study of symbols, comparative religion, alchemy, Tantra, Hermeticism, Sufism, or sacred kingship—but much of it is metapolitical philosophy, identity formation, and literary-intellectual consumption rather than regular magical practice. It is also worth distinguishing carefully between serious academic or spiritual interest in traditionalism and the authoritarian, misogynistic, racist, or fascist politics that some communities import from Evola and adjacent thinkers.
In other words, this may be one place where the old male “wizard” aesthetic persists strongly, but it is not automatically a healthy or intellectually reliable successor to Renaissance magic.
Western esotericism as a study culture
A quieter but meaningful modern form is not a lodge at all: people seriously study the history, philosophy, symbols, and practices of esotericism through books, archives, lectures, universities, podcasts, correspondence groups, and personal disciplines.
That includes people working through:
- Hermetic texts and Renaissance natural magic.
- Alchemical imagery and laboratory history.
- Kabbalah, Christian mysticism, Neoplatonism, and Rosicrucian literature.
- Astrological technique.
- Ritual systems descended from the Golden Dawn.
- Jungian active imagination, symbolic psychology, and mythic interpretation.
- Anthroposophy, Gurdjieff traditions, and other twentieth-century esoteric schools.
This may be where a modern equivalent of the historically educated magus is most likely to exist: less a secret-master figure, more a self-directed scholar-practitioner with a disciplined private regimen.