The Book So Powerful They Banned It - The Secrets Of The Obeah Bible

This is the curse of all dabblers in the divine and occult mysteries, that when they begin to believe that there is something superior to the merely animal man, this belief opens the door for superstition and idolatry. For having no knowledge of the power of the divine will of God within their own self, they are devoid of the true faith, which is divine self-confidence. Welcome to the Reality Revolution. I'm your host, Brian Scott. Today we're going to talk about the Obeya Bible. For most of recorded history, this material was locked. If you wanted the knowledge, you had to be let in. The Golden Dawn made men swear oaths before it could teach them anything. The Theosophical Society kept an inner section Every European lodge, every Masonic degree, every Hermetic order operated the same way. You found a teacher, and a teacher decided whether you deserved it. And if the answer was no, the answer was no forever. That was the arrangement for centuries. Knowledge moved from mouth to ear under oath among men who had judged each other worthy. Then a man in Chicago put it all of it in the mail. 660 pages. Seals, talismans, invocations, the tables of the Kabbalah, the correspondences of every stone, metal, and plant, methods for healing a person you've never touched, methods for reaching somebody 1,000 miles away, methods for receiving instructions while you sleep. Everything the lodges of London and Paris made men take oaths to protect. For a few dollars, postpaid, in a plain wrapper to any address on Earth. No initiation, no lodge, no teacher deciding whether you are worthy or not. Somewhere around 1920, a package like that comes off a ship and arrives at a post office in Jamaica. The person collecting it has spent a lifetime being told no. Told no by an empire, by a court, by a church, by a plantation ledger written before they were born. Told that the knowledge worth having belongs to other people in other countries with other skin. They carry the parcel home and open it, and the first substantial thing the book says to them is that the root of all magic takes its rise from within the human soul, and that they carry a heaven in themselves from the beginning. That happened thousands of times across the Caribbean and across the American South for years, and people started reporting that it worked. Healings, reversals, money arriving, situations that had been fixed for a decade coming unstuck, reputations built around men and women who had a copy and knew how to use it. The book acquired a name that had nothing to do with the one on the COVID and the name stuck so hard that it eventually replaced the original: the Obeya Bible. And the name of the man who published it stopped being a name and became a verb. You will still hear it in Jamaica. I am going to work some Delorence on you. An American publisher from Chicago became a word in another country's language meaning to place a curse on somebody. Then the government moved. There is a list published by the Jamaican Customs Agency of things that may never enter the country: narcotics, certain firearms, counterfeit currency, And one entry on that list is a publishing house: All publications of De Laurentiis, Scott and Company of Chicago, in the United States of America, relating to the occult sciences. That entry has been in force for roughly a century. It is still here in 2026. A book was judged dangerous enough to sit on a national blacklist beside the weapons and the drugs, and that judgment has outlasted the empire that made it. The company that printed it, and every person involved on either side. I have a copy in front of me, The Great Book of Magical Art, Hindu Magic, and East Indian Occultism, first published in 1898. Today, I'm going to take you through the best of what is actually inside it— the talisman work, the correspondence system, the distance methods, the dream method. And the philosophy underneath all of it, which is considerably closer to what I teach here every week than anybody would guess from the reputation, including one passage that makes the entire ban look absurd. Lauryn William DeLorence is born in 1868 and dies in Chicago in 1936 at 68. What he built in between is a mail-order empire. The DeLorence Company advertised itself as the largest publisher and seller of occult and spiritual books in the world, and the claim was defensible. From Chicago, they shipped books, crystals, incense, talismans, and instruction anywhere a postal service would carry a parcel. The catalog copy in the front of my edition offers a guarantee— cash with the order, and the purchaser may return any and all of the goods within 24 hours of receipt for any reason whatsoever, and the money will be refunded promptly. A money-back guarantee on ceremonial magic supplies in 1915. He wrote and he republished. Some of what carried his imprint was his own. Some of it was public domain material he packaged and distributed, and the distribution is the part that matters historically. He put secrets of the Psalms by Godfrey Selig into circulation. He put Powwows, or the Long Lost Friend by John George Hohman into circulation. He handled the 6th and 7th Books of Moses. None of those were his. All of them reached an enormous readership because a Chicago mail order house was willing to ship them to any address in the world without asking questions. And that distribution had consequences that outlived him by a century. Here's the sequence, and it's a genuine piece of history rather than folklore. The DeLorence catalog reached the American South, where it had a lasting effect in the urban Hoodoo communities of Black America in the decades of the Reconstruction. And it reached the Caribbean. The books arrived by post into a place where an African-derived spiritual practice already existed. Obeya has roots running back to West Africa, carried across the Atlantic by enslaved people surviving in Jamaica and across the region through Generations of suppression. Obeya was already there. It required no Chicago publisher. What the books did was supply a text. A tradition transmitted orally under conditions where writing down was dangerous suddenly had access to a printed volume of 660 pages imported from America, full of seals and invocations and procedures. Some practitioners incorporated it. Some built entire practices around it. And in the popular imagination of the island, that book became authority, the source, the thing behind the thing, the Obeah Bible. Now the part that requires care, because the ban gets described online as a nation fearing a book of magic, and the actual history is considerably more interesting. Obeah was criminalized in Jamaica in the 19th century under colonial rule, and it remains illegal there to this day. That prohibition had far less to do with a fear of the supernatural than a fear of what practice organized. Obeah men and women held authority inside enslaved and later colonized communities. They administered oaths. They bound people together. They were consulted in matters the colonial administration wanted decided by colonial courts. A practitioner with genuine standing in a community was a competing center of power, and colonial governments across the Caribbean treated that as a security question rather than a religious one. So the practice was outlawed. And when a Chicago mail-order company began shipping the printed manual of that practice into the country by the crate, the customs schedule was the obvious instrument. The ban on DeLorence is downstream of the ban on Obeah, and the ban on Obeah is downstream of who held authority in a colony, which produces the situation that exists today. Jamaica is independent, the colonial administration that wrote the law is gone, and a book published in Chicago in 1898 remains on the national list of items that may never enter the country along alongside the narcotics and the weapons. Whatever you make of the contents, that is one of the longest-running book bans in the modern world, and almost nobody outside the Caribbean has heard of it. Open the book, and the first thing he does is defend the word, stating, seeing it is a word originally significative not of any evil, but of every good and laudable science, such as a man might profit by it, and become both wise And happy. Then the definition of magic, and it's the cleanest one I've found. The very root or ground of all magic takes its rise from within the human soul. Wisdom is the beginning of magic, for magic is wisdom, and on this account the wise men were called Magi. Magic is wisdom. The Magi were called Magi because they were wise, and the word describing them became the word describing what they did. And the whole subsequent history of the term is a corruption of that. He goes further, and given what the book is accused of, this passage is worth having in full: Therefore let no one be offended at the venerable and sacred title of magician, a title which every wise man merits while he pursues that path which Christ himself trod, viz., humility, charity, mercy, fasting, and praying. And then: He says, the true magician is the truest Christian. That's the opening argument of the book that Jamaica banned as a manual of sorcery. His model of a human being is stated early, and everything rests on it. As there is in man the power and apprehension of all divination and wonderful things, seeing that we have a complete system in ourselves, therefore are we called the microcosm or little world, for we carry a heaven in ourselves, for From our beginning. We carry a heaven in ourselves from our beginning. And this, which he repeats in various forms across the entire volume: all earthly wisdom is foolishness in the esteem of the power within thy own soul, God. Notice the parentheses. He writes God in brackets after the power within your own soul over and over, hundreds of times across 600 pages. He is telling you continuously and in the plainest available language That the two are the same thing. The introduction to Book 1 takes up astrology, and his position surprised me. He was a lifelong advocate for it, and he spends several pages attacking almost everything the astrologers of his day were claiming. I fully admit that man is endowed with a free will which the stars in no way can counteract. He takes the old maxim that the stars rule men, but a wise man rules the stars, and refuses the popular reading of it. His position is that the stars never ruled anybody to begin with. The stars do not rule men, according to the vulgar and received opinion, as if stars could stir up men to murder, sedition, broils, and lusts. And then the line that carries the whole argument: It is not from without, but from within, by sin, that evil inclinations do arise. He allows that the stars serve as signs, that they foreshadow great mutations and revolutions in weather. That there is a natural sympathy and antipathy running throughout the whole universe. What he refuses is the idea that anything outside you is causing your conduct. He gets genuinely funny about the fortune-telling trade of his era. If an odd silver spoon is but lost, the innocent stars are obliged to give an account of it. If an old maiden loses a favorite puppy, away she goes to an oracle of divination for information, Of the Whelp. And he tells the story of 2 Frenchmen in Paris who rigged a telescope so that letters and figures would reflect inside in an obscure manner. Customers paid a fee, looked into the glass, saw what appeared to be images of distant people, and left convinced they had witnessed a miracle. His verdict on the operators is unambiguous: juggling impostors. The author of the Obeya Bible spends part of his introduction debunking Psychics. 2 more sections of Book 1 deserve stating because they show the range of what he assembled. Natural magic gets its own long treatment, and his definition is straightforward: the application of actives to passives producing effects that are entirely natural and accomplished by manual operation. That is chemistry, herbalism, and applied physics as understood in the period gathered under a heading that sounds supernatural and describes something ordinary. He says he procured everything valuable and scarce on the subject and added a variety of his own experiments, and he offers the volume as a complete companion so that a student who has spent years hunting one author and then another will find, in his phrase, the marrow of them all. That is what the book actually is— a compendium. Somebody assembled the entire Western esoteric shelf into one volume, sold it by post. It has everything in it. Magical rituals, ceremonies, curses, ways to fight curses, protections, all of it. He closes the first half with what he calls mathematical magic, and his argument for it is theological. Seeing the whole universe was created by number, weight, and measure, there's no small efficacy in numbers because nothing more clearly represents the divine essence to human understanding than numbers. Nothing represents the divine to a human mind more clearly than number. He collects a large body of seals from what he calls the famous Hindu masters and from his brother adepts, and notes that he retained the ones he found correspondent with true science on experiment. Whatever you make of the claim, the standard he says he applied is the right one: he kept what worked when tested and discarded the rest. The technical heart of the volume is the talisman work. Which he calls the constellatory practice. He's explicit that he intends to explain something widely discussed and poorly understood, including how they are made, at what times, and by what means they become what he calls vivified. And here's how it works, in the single most important sentence in the book for anybody who carries an object: your own spirit is the vehicle of celestial attraction. Transferring celestial and spiritual virtue into seals, images, amulets, rings, papers, and glasses. The object holds nothing on its own. It has no inherent power. What charges it is you, and the ceremony exists to focus what you are transferring rather than to summon something external. Which means every charged object anybody has ever carried, every crystal, every metal Every pocket stone was charged by the person carrying it. That is a considerably more empowering account than the one usually attached to this material, and it comes from the book people are afraid of. He pairs it with a principle running through the whole volume: there's a natural sympathy and antipathy amongst all things throughout the whole universe. Sympathy and antipathy. Attraction and repulsion. Things that resemble each other reinforce each other. Things that oppose each other diminish each other, and an object deliberately linked to a person or an outcome maintains that link across a distance. The talisman work sits on a system, and the system is the most practical thing in the book, because once you have it, you can build with anything. Everything in creation gets sorted into 4 elements, and the sorting runs all the way through the world. Among stones, dark and heavy stones are earthy, Transparent stones are watery, and he names crystal, beryl, and pearl. Stones that float and are porous are airy, and he names pumice and sponge. And the fiery stones are the ones that produce fire and resolve into it, which for him meant thunderstones, firestones, and asbestos. Among metals, lead and silver are earth, quicksilver is water, copper and tin are air, gold and iron are fire. Within a single plant, the root is earth, the leaves are water, the flowers are air, and the seed is fire because of what he calls its multiplying spirit. Among the planets, Mars and the sun are fiery, Jupiter and Venus are airy, Saturn and Mercury are watery, the moon is watery, and he adds that it draws the celestial waters to itself and pours them onto our world because it sits so close to us. And then he runs the same 4 categories through a human being, which is where it stops being a curiosity. In the body, the bones are earth, The vital spirit is fire, the flesh is air, the humors are water, and the senses— sight is fiery because seeing requires light, hearing is airy because sound is made by striking air, smell and taste are watery since neither works without moisture, and touch is entirely earthy because it takes solid bodies as its object. And in the soul itself, which is the finest piece, Of it, he says, in the soul itself, the understanding resembles the fire, reason the air, imagination the water, and the senses the earth. Imagination sits at water, and water is the element that takes any shape it is poured into and holds none of its own. And the temperaments: the earth signifies a slow and firm motion, the water fearfulness, sluggishness, air signifies cheerfulness, And an amiable disposition, but fire, a fierce, working, quick, susceptible disposition. Here's why any of that matters practically. If you accept the system, you have a working grammar for building anything. Steady endurance calls for earth— lead, dark, heavy stone, root material, slow work, late hours. Communication and lightness call for air— copper or tin, porous stone, flowers, the airy planets. Imagination and feeling and flow call for water— Silver, clear crystal, pearl, the leaf rather than the root. And will and force and speed call for fire, gold or iron, the seed, Mars, and the sun. That's the entire logic underneath every talisman, every stone anybody ever carried in a pocket, and every correspondence label in every magical text written in the last 500 years, stated plainly in one place. 2 claims in his preface are extraordinary, and he makes them Flatly as reports rather than theories. First, healing at a distance. I have likewise proved how cures are performed by virtue of sympathetic powers and medicines, by seals, rings, and amulets, even at unlimited distances, which I have been witness of and am daily confirmed in the true and certain belief of. Second, telepathy. And he hands you the protocol. I know how to communicate with any person and to give him Intimation of my purpose at 100 or 1,000 miles' distance. But then a preparation is necessary, and the parties should have their appointed seasons and hours for that purpose. Likewise, both should be of the same firm constancy of mind. Read the conditions, because they are the interesting part. Preparation is required, an appointed time is required, agreed in advance by both people, and both must hold the same firm constancy of mind. That is considerably more rigorous description than the popular version of telepathy, and it matches almost exactly what serious researchers of the following century arrived at through experiment, including the Silva mind control experiments and techniques. Agreed protocol, agreed timing, both parties in a settled state. He was describing sender-receiver methodology in 1898. He gives a method for receiving information through dreams. And the phrasing is precise. There's also given methods whereby a man may receive true and certain intimation of future things by dreams of whatsoever his mind has before meditated upon, himself being properly disposed. 3 conditions in one sentence: the subject must have been meditated upon beforehand, the dreamer must be properly disposed, meaning prepared in body and mind, And the intimation arrives concerning what was already held in the mind rather than at random. That is dream incubation described the way every serious tradition has described it. And it works. He returns to dreams and visions at length later, alongside long treatments of clairvoyance and mediumship. The question of whether it works— I should address this directly because it is the question everybody actually has. People say this book is powerful. They have said it for 120 years across several countries and communities that had every reason to be skeptical of a product mailed to them from Chicago, and the reputation held long enough that a government wrote it into law. Reputations of that durability usually have something behind them. So let me give you my honest read, having gone through it. The philosophy is genuinely excellent. The material on faith, on thought crystallizing into matter, on the power residing in the soul rather than any object, is as good as anything in the New Thought canon and considerably older than most of it. If somebody used only that part of the book and never performed a single ceremony, they would've gotten enormous value. The correspondence system is a real working grammar. Whatever you believe about the elements, having a coherent framework for choosing materials, timing, and symbolism organizes intention in a way that scattered improvisation does not. Every serious tradition uses one, and this is a good version of it. The distance methods describe something that later research took seriously. His conditions for sending a thought across 1,000 miles are the same conditions the 20th century parapsychologists arrived at through experiment. And the results people report are real reports, whether the cause was the seal, the ceremony, the intention, the expectation of the community around all of it. Something changed in those lives, and the people it changed were in a position to know. My own position, and the one this whole channel runs on, is the one the author gives you himself: the power sat in the person the entire time. And the book was what gave them permission to reach for it. It's been effective for me. I use it all the time. There's such cool stuff in this book. I just love opening it up and just finding cool stuff in it every time, which is on its own an enormous thing to hand somebody who's been told no their entire life. Now, the philosophical core where the book stops resembling anything its reputation suggests— he draws a hard line between faith and belief, and the distinction is The most useful thing. Faith does not come from man, and man cannot create faith, but faith is a power coming from his soul. Its germ is laid within man and may be cultivated or neglected by him. Then the test. If anyone thinks that he can cure a disease or accomplish anything else merely because he believes that he is able to accomplish it, he believes in a superstition. But if he believes that he can perform such a thing because he is conscious of having a power to do so within his soul, he will then be able to accomplish it by the power of true faith. Believing you can do a thing is superstition. Being conscious of the power to do it is faith. And his summary: such faith is knowledge and gives power. True faith is spiritual consciousness, but a belief based upon mere opinions and creeds is the product of ignorance and is superstition. He extends it into a warning aimed directly at his own readership. This is the curse of all dabblers in the divine and occult mysteries, that when they begin to believe that there is something superior to the merely animal man, this belief opens the door for superstition and idolatry. For having no knowledge of the power of the divine will of God within their own self, they are devoid of the true faith Which is divine self-confidence. And then he names the failure exactly. They therefore put their trust not in the one true spirit power within their own soul, but in the gods which they have created with their own imagination. They seek in outward things for which they cannot find within their own empty shells. Some put their faith in doctors and priests, others in herbs and roots, others in magic spells and incantations, He puts spells in the same category as everything else somebody outsources their power to, and his prescription for a first step is startlingly ordinary. The wise know that the first step on the road to spiritual unfoldment is the fulfillment of one's duty as a man, for no god can grow out of a man unless the man has become truly developed as he ought to be. Do your job. Meet your obligations. Become a functional adult. This is the first step in the Obeya Bible. Here's the passage I would put on a wall: Spirit passes into the body and out of it like a breath of air passing through the strings of an Aeolian harp. If we succeed in binding it there, we will create a source of undying harmony and create an immortal being. But to bind spirit, we must be able to bind thought. And then, man is a materialized thought. He is what he thinks. He builds it outward to the scale of the universe. The visible universe is a thought of the Eternal Mind thrown into objectivity by its will and crystallized into the matter by its power. Look at the everlasting stars. Look at the indestructible mountain peaks. They are the thoughts of the Universal Mind, and they will remain as long as the thoughts of that mind do not change. The stars are held in place by an unchanged thought. And then the diagnosis, which is the reason most people fail at everything I teach on this channel. If you could hold on to a thought, you would be able to create. But who but the enlightened can hold on to a thought? Are not the illusions of the senses continually destroying that which you attempt to create? Men do not think what they choose, but that which comes into their mind. If they could control the action of their minds, They would be able to control their own nature and the nature by which their forms are surrounded. Men think what arrives rather than what they choose. The whole of manifestation reduces to whether a person can hold a thought against the continual assault of what the senses report, and almost nobody can. And the remedy he names is mental discipline, which is the same conclusion Privett reached and Norvell reached and Shin reached and Neville reached arriving from 4 completely different directions. His writing on medicine contains one sentence worth carrying with you. He states, you have no right to call a disease incurable. You only have the right to say that you cannot cure it. That is a statement about the limits of the speaker rather than the limits of the condition, and it sits inside a fuller argument. A man who trusts only in his own science will accomplish little, but he who has faith in the power of the healing power of nature acting through his soul, and who employs that power intelligently will accomplish much. He lays out what he calls the 5 causes of disease, and his frame throughout is that the physical body is the instrument and the soul is the operator. Now the passage that changes what this book is. Somewhere past the middle, in the philosophical section, he writes this: The true soul desires faith in self without ceremonies. If you do not require the ceremonies, they will be useless in matters of faith as well as in the art of magic. The author of the most notorious ceremonial magic book in the Caribbean is telling you that once you have the interior condition, the ritual or ceremony does nothing. He goes further and says he has no objection to images and forms, that they move the mind toward piety and are useful to those unable to read, and that he speaks against their misuse rather than their use. But the position is unmistakable: each man is himself nearest to his own god. There's more in the same passage aimed at the entire apparatus of religion, and by extension at the entire apparatus of magic. Belief in opinions is not faith, he says. He who foolishly believes is foolish. We should all have our knowledge in our soul and take it out of the universal fountain of wisdom. Nature did not intend men and women to be fools, blockheads, and simpletons, who are ready to believe anything no matter how absurd it may be; neither did it intend that only one wise and learned man should be in each country, and that the other people should follow him blindly, as the sheep follow a ram. A book banned for empowering a class of ritual practitioners contains an explicit argument against following any authority blindly, And his closing image, which is as fine as anything in the New Thought canon: There is an earthly sun which is the cause of all heat, and all who are able to see may see the sun, and those who are blind and cannot see the sun may feel its heat. There is an eternal sun which is the source of all wisdom, and those whose spiritual senses have awakened to life will see that sun and be conscious of its existence. But those who have not attained spiritual development may yet feel its power by an inner faculty Which is called intuition. I should address the material people expect to find and be accurate about what it actually is. There's a section titled Witchcraft and Black Art, and its subtitle is Their Dangers and How to Avoid Them. That's the framing. It's written as a warning. He acknowledges the existence of practitioners who direct this material toward them, discusses what they attempt, and instructs the reader on protection against it. And he sets a boundary about his own transmission that is worth stating. Some few most secret and terrible things being reserved by the author for his personal pupils only, not to be taught by publication or by correspondence. Whether that is genuine restraint or catalog salesmanship, the effect is the most extreme material stays out of the printed volume. The book also carries a set of conditions on the whole practice. He tells the reader that anybody who wants to benefit must shake off worldly vanity, idle levity, sloth, Intemperance and lust, and that the student must be clean and pure and free from distraction. Whatever the Obayo Bible is, it is a book with an entrance requirement, and the requirement is a character. There's a long section on vampirism. It has nothing to do with what the word makes you picture. It's about energy transfer between living people, and it contains very specific practical instructions. Start with the description of the aura because it's precise. It surrounds the whole body to a distance of 18 inches. He is direct about why the old painters got it half wrong. Painters in all ages have depicted a circle of light surrounding the head of saints called the glory nimbus or aureole. The only fault of the painter was that he restricted this phenomenon to the head. The halo was accurate. They simply drew a fraction of it. Within that field, a layer he calls the health aura, and its route through the body is stated exactly. It is the vehicle of the vital force on this plane, transmuting the life energy poured out by the sun into health and strength. It is absorbed by the spleen and thence runs over the whole body, much in the same way that blood circulates through the veins, okay, raying out from the center in every direction. And it travels on the nerves, which produces a practical consequence: unless the nerves are healthy, the flow is obstructed. Now the part worth carrying: in addition to this raying out, a healthy man flings off, much in the same way perspiration is thrown off large quantities of his aura so that whatever and wherever he goes, he literally sprays health about him. It escapes from every pore and can be directed to flow along certain channels. A healthy person sprays health into every room, and it can be directed. That single clause is the whole of hands-on healing stated in very few words. He goes further and describes what the radiation does for the person producing it. This radiation is a shield against disease. It may be compared to a rapidly revolving wheel which, if struck by some small body, will fling it off at a tangent as soon as it comes into contact with it. Which means your protection is a byproduct of your vitality rather than something separate you have to construct. Spin fast enough and nothing sticks. And what slows the wheel? It diminishes in quantity and suffers in quality from worry, Injury to the body, ill health, grief, melancholy, hatred, anger— each one reduces both the amount you have and the quality of what remains. Now the transfer itself, and this explains an experience everybody listening has maybe had. A man in bad health is like a sponge, and as soon as he comes in contact with a healthy person, he draws the aura to him. If this drain goes on for long, the healthy person is injured very much. A depleted person draws from a full one automatically. No intention is required on either side. It happens the way water moves toward dry ground, which accounts for the conversation you walk away from exhausted while the other person leaves visibly better. He adds that sensitive people give it off very readily and that it passes without their awareness, that it happens particularly around certain types of people. In another unusual detail, He names 2 windows of the year whose natives are especially vulnerable to taking on other people's condition: those born between the 21st of June and the 21st of July, and those born between the 21st of February and the 21st of March. He gives one specific instruction from it: children born in the summer window should sleep apart from elderly people rather than sharing a room with them. Whatever you make of the astrology, the underlying observation is one every practitioner eventually makes independently. Some people are permeable and others are sealed, and the permeable ones have to manage it deliberately. Now the technique, and this is the most immediately usable thing in these pages. He describes 10 minutes a day for anybody who is sensitive or anybody previously robust who has begun losing strength with no adequate reason. Here's the procedure in his words. When rising, imagine that a shell is forming at the extremity of the aura. Picture a white mist, ovoid, becoming denser every moment. Just as in winter the breath is clearly visible with each exhalation, so as you breathe outwards, see in the mind the breath taking form. Use the will in addition, and this will have the desired effect. Break that into steps. 1, on waking, place your attention at the outer edge of your field. 18 inches out all the way around. Picture a white mist there, egg-shaped, enclosing you completely. And 3, breathe outward and see the breath taking visible form as it leaves you, the way it does on a cold morning. Each exhale thickens the shell. And 4, you add your will. Intend it rather than merely picturing it. And the schedule: rebuild it at midday, rebuild it before entering a crowd or a rough part of the city, and build it again immediately before sleep. His note on the last one: form the shell before sleeping and you are unlikely to be troubled. That is a complete protection practice, 3 times a day, taking under a minute once you know the shape. Published in 1898. He gives several more, and some of them are strange enough to be worth knowing. Garlic in a room where an entity of the type he calls the ghoul is suspected, just like the Law of One. Small saucers of nitric acid left on tables for a short time daily, kept away from children and animals And never in a bedroom unless the windows stay open. Kusa grass mats— he notes that the Hindus sit on them while meditating because the fiber is said to resist unwanted influence. And incense, with an explanation of it that reframes every church you've ever walked into. The use of incense in places of worship is not superstition or to have a theatrical effect, but to keep undesirable entities away, just as the origin of church bells was to free the sacred edifice of their presence. The gargoyles seen on cathedrals are the demons escaping. Whatever you make of the claim, that's the finest single reading of cathedral architecture that you can come across. He adds a note on sound that he declines to develop, saying only that there is more in it than the world dreams of, and pointing at the wine glass that breaks when whistled into and the walls of Jericho falling to a trumpet. The 2 kinds of sympathy. This one is worth the whole section. Sympathy is of 2 kinds. However, nearly always the wrong is indulged in. The wrong kind: by feeling keenly and sympathizing with one in pain or suffering from a disease, there's a tendency to reproduce the same symptoms in yourself, to say nothing of being unconsciously drained by the invalid. Feeling somebody's condition with them tends to reproduce it in you, and it drains you at the same time. The right kind of sympathy— let your sympathy be strong, he says. That is to say, look at things from the most optimistic standpoint, which is the only true one. Don't humor him and strengthen him in his negative aspect. And the instruction for a sick room— refuse to see the disease. Talk only of the bright, the helpful. And not only are you cheering him up and practically creating life force, but you render yourself less likely to be drawn upon. Refuse to see the disease. You hold the person in the image of their wholeness rather than joining them in the image of their recondition. That protects you and does more for them, and it is the exact opposite of what most people do at a bedside. He closes with an image everybody recognizes. Some people are wet blankets wherever they go, in a sick chamber or busy market, and some enter a dark cellar the way a ray of sunshine does. That is the aspect to take when visiting somebody who is unwell. One more, because it's the strangest claim in the section and it connects to material I've covered on this channel before. He describes what happens to an evil thought that gets repeated. The entertaining of a thought of evil towards another human being is fed and increased in consequence, so that the next time you repeat the thought, it is with increased power. Each repetition strengthens it. Standard enough. Then the part that goes further: if indulged in much, you create a center of evil, and this may be seized upon by some passing entity which either attaches itself to you and feeds vicariously on your magnetism, ending in possession, or without being pounced upon by an astral inhabitant, it will become kind of alter ego, another stratum of consciousness acquiring a semi-consciousness of its own. And become to a large extent independent of you. So he's saying a repeated thought becomes a center. The center either gets occupied by something outside of you or it develops a partial consciousness of its own. And his application of that is, this is the key to much of the phenomenon of multiplex personality and also accounts for the remarks so frequently heard when a friend sees another whom he has not met for years. How he has changed. Every strong repeated thought is under construction toward becoming a separate thing inside you, which is the thought-form teaching arriving from a completely different direction with an unsettling conclusion attached. Every man is his own devil or God. The company outlived the man. DeLorean died in Chicago in 1936. The DeLorean Company continued operating, and a version of it persists to this day. His catalog kept circulating long after his death, and the effects compounded in 2 directions at once. In America, the material fed directly into the growth of urban Hoodoo. A Black community moving north during the Great Migration, arriving in cities cut off from the rural transmission of practice, could order a book— Secrets of the Psalms, Powwows, the 6 and 7 Books of Moses— all of it available by post from Chicago discreetly to any address. Researchers documenting that tradition in the 20th century found DeLorean's titles everywhere they looked. In the Caribbean, the effect was different because the books entered an existing practice that had been criminalized. A tradition forced underground suddenly had a printed authority, and a printed authority is a durable thing, which is how one man's mail-order catalog became scripture in a place he never visited, among people he never met, for a practice he never named in his own book. The word Obeyah appears nowhere in the Great Book of Magical Art. 660 pages and the word never once occurs. The Obeyah Bible was named by its readers rather than the author. The preface closes with 4 instructions, and they belong together: Be silent. Talk only with those worthy of thy communication. Do not give pearls to swine. Be friendly to all. but not familiar with all, for many are wolves in sheep's clothing. And the whole book carries a repeated instruction to use whatever is obtained for the benefit of your neighbor, and to remember that in that exercise you will experience the satisfaction of doing your duty. He ends by wishing the reader a secret happiness and serenity of soul which the world can never rob them of. Set the ban aside for a moment. And consider what this volume actually represents. In 1898, a man in Chicago assembled an entire Western esoteric inheritance into a single book and made it purchasable by anybody with a postal address. Before that, this material moved through initiation. You found a teacher or a lodge or a lineage, and you were admitted or you were refused. The Golden Dawn required oaths. The Theosophical Society had inner sections. Dolores put it in the mail. Whatever his motives— and the mail-order guarantee suggests commerce set alongside conviction— the effect was democratic in a way almost nothing else in history was. A domestic worker in Chicago, a shopkeeper in Kingston, a farmer in Alabama could order the accumulated occult knowledge of Europe and India and have it delivered. That is why it frightened administrations. A gated tradition is manageable. A tradition anybody can buy for a few dollars Is something else entirely. There's one more thing. It's the reason I wanted to cover this at all. Across 660 pages of seals and invocations and tables and curses and magic spells, the author keeps interrupting himself to tell the reader that the power was inside them the entire time. Hundreds of times he writes God in parentheses after the phrase the power within thy own soul, apparently worried somebody would fail to notice. A man is a materialized thought. Each man is nearest to his own God, and the ceremony is becoming useless the moment you stop requiring them. A book sold as a manual of ritual power, purchased for a century by people looking for ritual power, whose text keeps telling them the ritual was never the point. The people who read it carefully got the message. Here's what survives: magic is wisdom. The word meant a good and laudable science before it meant anything else. You are the microcosm. You carry a heaven in yourself from your beginning, and the power within your own soul is the thing every tradition has been pointing at. Nothing outside you is causing your conduct. The stars are signs rather than causes. It arises from within. Your own spirit charges the object. Every talisman, crystal, seal, or carried stone holds exactly what you transferred into it. And nothing else. Faith is knowledge rather than belief. Believing you can do a thing is superstition. Being conscious of the power to do it is faith, and only the second one produces results. Do your duty first. No God grows out of a man who has yet to become functional. The first step on the road is fulfilling your obligations as a human being. You are a materialized thought. You are what you think. And the universe itself is a thought held long enough to crystallize. The whole problem is holding the thought. Men think what arrives rather than what they choose, and the correction is mental discipline, and there's no shortcut past it. No disease is incurable. You have only the right to say that you cannot cure it. Build the shell. White ovoid mist at the edge of your field, thickened with each visible exhale on waking at midday. And before sleep. Under a minute once you know it. Refuse to see the disease. Hold anybody who is unwell in the picture of their wholeness rather than joining them in the picture of their condition. It helps them more and it protects you. And the ceremonies are optional. Once you have the interior condition, the ritual adds nothing, and each man is nearest to his own God. There's a list of things that may never enter Jamaica. Narcotics, certain weapons, and every book published by a Chicago mail-order house that stopped operating its original form nearly a century ago. The flagship title on that list runs 660 pages, contains plates of spirits and street scenes from Benares, and is known across the Caribbean as the Obeah Bible. Its name became a verb meaning to curse somebody, and inside it, past the seals and invocations and the tables of the Kabbalah, A man from Chicago wrote that the root of all magic takes its rise from within the human soul, that we carry a heaven in ourselves from our beginning, that a man is a materialized thought and is what he thinks, that the stars foreshow and never cause, and you have no right to call anything incurable, and that the true soul desires faith in self without ceremonies. A book feared for 100 years as an instrument of ritual power whose own author kept saying the power was never in the ritual. Each man is himself nearest to his own God. That sentence has been sitting inside a banned book since 1898. Now, before I go, I want to invite you to join the Reality Revolution community. You can find the link in the description at skool.com, S-K-O-O-L.com/realityrevolution, where we meet. We have group coaching sessions. You can find exclusive content. We have an amazing community that joins on a daily basis. It's really an incredible experience. I hope you can join us. I'm sending all my light and love to everyone listening, and welcome to the Reality Revolution. Before you go, there's a version of you who already has everything you came to this channel looking for, and on January 29th through the 31st, you can meet them in person. 3 days at the Gaylord Opryland in Nashville, 9 acres of gardens under glass with a river running through the building. I love Friday ends with the Future Self merger. Saturday ends with the Bliss Body meditation, an hours-long session people ask for more than any other. Sunday is large sums of money, opening to love and activating the New Earth, the new science of manifestation live. And it's producing some of the most profound transformations I've ever seen. Tickets are available now and they're selling quickly. We've already sold a large allotment. allotment from previous sessions, and you can get early bird tickets now. Tickets are in the description. Come and meet yourself.

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