Picking and choosing which practices to pull from is practically easy but can offer some moral reflections. Most of us will ultimately pull from what is most familiar to us reverting back to our pre-Atheist cultures. Ex-Christians will gravitate towards a Christian Aesthetic much as Ex-Bhuddists will gravitate towards a Bhuddist Aesthetic. However, there is nothing wrong with a Western raised person building their practice on an Eastern based Aesthetic and vice verse. When starting from an Atheist perspective, there are zero consequences metaphysically to picking a faith based on anything other than aesthetics or how well you simply “vibe” with the teachings and modern practice of that tradition.
Why Pick a Tradition
It makes things easier to grow and evolve from.
The point of a lot of Occult practice is to experiment with rituals, prayers, spells, talismans, etc until you find what ever makes you feel successful. That success feeling can be interpreted in basically any way you deem important whether you become more confident in yourself, your enemies succumb to sickness, or you’re simply having fun. So if you can find an established practice with books on theory, practice, and ethics that mostly fits your vibe and you think you can make do with it’s practices then by all means, take advantage of this established tradition.
My first tradition was an obsession with Goetia. I performed several rituals from the Lesser and Greater keys of Solomon translated by Aliester Crowley. I did them poorly by any measure to be sure. I didn’t respect them as much as I do now. Not because I believe in it’s claims more, but because I have since fully embraced the context of the text I used by learning it’s history, the history of Crowley, and the history of Occultism.
I want to clarify that I have “embraced the context”. I do not know it’s full history or it’s translator, or especially of the occuly. I have simply put in the effort to start learning how we got to here. I will never finish learning how we got to here, but I will probably become satisfied with what I know enough to deviate. I have deviated much from what I originally performed half assed while following dorm room safety precations. You must change a good chunk of most rituals to perform them in a dorm by the way.
What ever tradition you pick, make sure you have either a good library or a good teacher to help you learn fundamentals and context of the “hows” and “whys”.
Learning hows will let you learn how to go about ritual preparations in hopefully ways that respect the world from which you are obtaining those materials. Take a foraging class if you do not want to trust a spiritual leader or author on the subject and maybe want a more conservationist approach. That is where I learned much of my herbalism and localized it to me. To no one’s surprising, the ritual herbalism of 16th century European Alchemists mean very little to a man in Kentucky.
Whys are important in that they explain the metaphysical reasons and symbolism of what you’re doing. Learning that Herb X is associate to Moon Cycle Y and is most magically significant on Date Z because of the planetary alignment is most of the rituals. The point above the stated claim of the magick itself will always be to be mindful of this world and the world beyond. Whether that is the world beyond earth or the world beyond this material plane matters little to the human psyche: both are just as incomprehensible yet awe inspiring.
Nearly all religious and spiritual traditions recognize the fundamental fact that the world is bigger than us in some way. This is the most important part of starting your own path to whatever you are seeking. Ideally you will deviate to what you think is the most awe inspiring, but if you are happy with a pre made spiritual world view, then enjoy it, but don’t let it become dogma. Always question a how or why if it makes you uncomfortable or disagrees with your ethics.
Ethics of a Tradition
There does come a problem with approaching any traditions ideas as an atheist in that they are all equally real.
If you have no theological basis and especially if you reject the metaphysical claims of a universal truth be it a god’s will or some gnostic panpsychist as in the case of Philip Goff, then you cannot judge any tradition on legitimacy except through your ethics alone.
If you do not have your own ethical framework set in stone, worry not, that is the mostly like scenario. If you do, feel free to ignore me or argue with me in an email that I will actually read.
For me there are two motives for which I judge a tradition before considering incorporating it into my own practice.
First, is it a money grab?
To me there is very little I detest more than someone writing slop that sounds spiritual and “wooey” simply to prey on the naive lust for learning for people seeking an alternative to the hegemonic traditions. These are books written to sell “another way” to pent up Suburban Christian Moms so that they become Crystal witches who have been convinced that simply buying pretty rocks and organizing them within your home fixes most problems. New Problem? New Rock! Problem bigger? Bigger Rock! Until you have waisted untold funds on rocks that do nothing and yet you are no more connected to whatever this is than you were your christian church.
My condemnation is one in hindsight. I have frequented many rock shops and I love the rock shows that pop up in my town every year. You get to meet many people who are genuinely intuned with a psiritual practice and are simply trying to support themselves doing what they know and that’s vague hedge wtichary. It is most likely what you will encounter first when trying to connect locally. For that I don’t mind patronizing them as I do enjoy incense and candles as a ritual sacrifice. And there are certainly worse sins in a new-age occultists hunt for enlightenment.
If you have rejected the temptations of occult “retail therapy” consider the problem of Occult Self Help Nonsense. You see, the problem of Occultism is that it has been rejected knowledge for the last 300 years. Even a healthy resurgance in the 1890’s and again in the 1960’s and once more in the here and now of the 21st century, has yet to establish any authority on the matter. There is no Jstor Magazine publishing only the peer reviewed magickal texts. There is no Temple that has canonized any text. It is simply your judgement that determines if a text is worthy. This is why I rejected Mindfulness as a practice for years after learning about it because it sounded like some woo that I had to stock far to many books on the shelf at Barnes and Nobles with. Serious, how can I not look at mindfulness as any less of a problematic scam when there’s several dozen authors and a hundred books offering “the one true way to mindfulness guaranteed in 100 days!” for only $36 hard back edition.
That phenomenon is such a problem within Alternative Thought spaces that I fell for this while I was mad about mindfulness (a real and useful thing I practice now), I bought “The Kyballion” by the Three Initiates which I learned only this year, two months into 2026, was published by a slop self help and sales strategy publishing magnate in 1890. Thank you my friend Reverend Erik at Arnemancy for reminding me I had that book in a trunk in my closet and also telling me I’m a sucker.
I’m a little mad, but it’s a lesson learned and now my ethics in tradition hunting has become more defined. I can tell some of the important tells between a genuine piece of Occult Scholarship and slop made to look like it’s real occult knowledge and ideas just to sell me a book on Amazon.
Personally, AI has made this much easier for me to tell, but has also muddied the landscape for those less attuned to good occult authors and what an AI generated book cover looks like. I need to make a better recourse, but I have my own Mastodon thread of good books to get started here but Reverend Erik’s I think is better here and their reading list for Hermetecism is really good so far here, my friend Cat I also recommend Dr. Justin Sledge’s introduction to Western Esotericism for a video based broader introduction here
These are folks I have interacted with enough to trust their judgement who offer a large library of further vetted works. If you are not experienced with vetting a source as real, please stay within either your chosen traditions canon or find someone you trust and follow their reading lists. And do not feel bad if you fall for a Kyballion. I was finishing up my degree in History and knew better about source vetting when I bought mine. I have several other duds that came from drunken nights on Abebooks or lazy sunday shopping sessions at my local book reseller. Truthfully, the book that got me into Alchemy is little more than a Coffee Table book I bought at head shop near my college. Worthless at this stage, but invaluable for at least getting me into things.
If you’re scared of buying books, worry not there are plenty of online libraries like The Hermetic Library here with free ebooks and online versions of books, as well as a growing number of personal blogs such as Cat’s blog on Midwestern Paganism and Witchcraft here and a more dubious recommendation for David Maciver at “Overthinking Everything” who’s like me in that he’s a tech guy who’s into a secular form of magic here (Warning He uses Substack and AI generated Thumbnails if your ethics disagrees with those)
Second is Exclusion
When I first started to question this line of ethics, I was comparing Neo-Pagans with Starseeds (a hindsight disgusting comparison) because I couldn’t tell why I wanted to view the Pagans as more legitimate than the Starseeds.
To catch you up, Pagans are Pagans. Very loose anti-authority religion that focuses on worshiping what feels right to them. Truly an ideal that I strive for and a definition I cannot take for myself as it’s from my friend Ferret on Mastodon. You are certainly aware of Pagans if you’re interested in a post like mine.
Starseeds are a different matter. Starseeds believe they are descendants of Ancient Alien Races and have powers that make them superior to other humans and even other breeds of Starseed. They believe they are in communication with those Alien Races through mental and DNA “downloads” they receive from their still space fairing siblings. On a quick read, this isn’t really any more harmful that most New Age and Occult thought, but just read it again and think about other people who argued they were members of a, say, “master race.” Maybe it would help to learn that the founder of “Star People” a Brad Steiger was following the trend of erasing native people’s history by giving credence to Aliens with little to no evidence because of a common white supremecist zeitgeist that brown people can’t build Pyramids! Youtuber FunkyFrogBait did a really good rundown on them and why they suck here but the crux is that they want to be better than people. They want to be above another and go so far as to claim exclusion to their “tradition”.
Lots of traditions exist in a lot of aesthetics that are racist or bigoted in their teachings. There are traditions following Crowley that are overtly Neo-Nazi in credence. There are Satanic sects that are Transphobic. Hell, there are atheists who claim reason and then cite quacks because “feelings aren’t real” (see: Anything Interesting ).
I have put my line down fairly firmly that anything to do with a modern conception of bigotry has no place in my life. If I learn it, it is just so I can recognize when that practice is happening before me and I can call it out.
This does start to call into question ancient practices though. Lots of early Western Religious systems were Sexist like Plato’s system or they were Race/Ethniically Exclusionairy like early Judaism. And nearly none of them had a real conception of Gender and Sexual Minority identities just because that wasn’t a big deal in their time.
It is my opinion, that we can take from these ancient cultures and add or remove whatever we deem worthy to fit our own ethics because they are so removed from our modern zeitgeist that they did not have the chance to be tested against modern morals by their founding members. These are ideas that belonged to a specific Historical and anthropological time and that time is long gone. No one has any claim to them or authority on them any longer. You are no longer tied to the full belief systems of the founders of those cults.
You can certainly denounce certain ideas that have made it through the ages and into the minds of bigots, but to deny a whole system that humans have deemed useful for so long as to keep around for thousands of years feels wasteful. And ones that were forgotten for all this time like the Nag Hammadi Corpus or the Greek Magical Papayri offer an interesting alternative history option. What if the Gnostics had become the major claimants of Christianity? What if the Greek Magical Papyri had been turned to instead of a Montheistic god? What if Bhuddism had had a written tradition earlier and could travel further? Imagine! A Roman Centurian practicing Bhuddist meditation! How would these have changed if allowed to live on? How can you rehabilitate a forgotten path?
Truly, it is up to you to determine how much time has past and how much relative harm has been done in the interum to judge a practice as worthy for yourself. My line is complicated. I think yours should be too. You should put thought into where you draw the line and why. Re-evaluate often. Always remain open to new ideas in case you no longer want to be who you are.
Conclusion
Picking your way through the infinite library of spiritual thought and practice to build your own world view should be a meditation in itself. Why are you drawn to the texts of Ancient Author X instead of Y? Why don’t you read Modern Author A instead of B? IT can be as simple as liking their Aesthetics be it the world view aligns with your ethics, or their poetry is just magnumanius. It is ultimately up to you, but be warry of modern authors who seek to take advantage of people wanting to learn a world view alien to them, and one trying to tell you Aliens are more real than ancient brown people.
Through practice you will become better at identifying good sources from bad sources. You will fail from time to time, but learning from that failure is part of the journey you’re trying to lead. Hell, this blog itself may become a bad source one day. There are no guarantees that I will remain with the ethics I have. Neither is it guaranteed that anyone I have mentioned in my blog posts will stay a good authority in these matters. People do change. Interpretations of the dead do change. And one day all words and ideas will leave their original context and then the meaning in them is only meaning ascribed by the reader.
You must always change and grow and better. It is the only way down this path.
Bowling For Soup either made it or covered it. Hard to tell with punk tbh