More than once have I seen online posts and comments made by certain people asking for money to perform research. While this might not be as pathetic as a certain African person who wanted people to pay them for meditating on stopping the pandemic, it too is a scam people usually don't recognize. Some of them end up willingly paying money to someone who sits on their ass and collects for apparently doing something any serious occultist should do. The fact they're not actually serious occultists but actually posers is of lesser importance, as a quick overlook over their teachings will likely make people aware of that, yet asking for money to look into more or less older occult sources should be punished by law. I mean, calling a certain KoS Mercury pentacle some kind of fancy octa-thingy as a marketing gimmick should be clear proof of fraud.
If these people would then impart their findings to their occult peers for free it would at least count as giving back to the community. But no, they go even further by using whatever they come across in their so called research to create and sell all sorts of products, thus asking for money yet again. The funny thing is those products they come up with are nothing genuine in the least bit, but in many cases a slightly altered version of something already existing. I could even speculate they hadn't done any actual research to begin with and instead copy-pasted readily available material and only changed a few words to it, which would still be better than what this guy has done.
As a result, we end up with an occult market flooded by more than a few products based on the same original information, many of them being cheap knockoffs of readily existing and tested material wrapped in pretty sparkly boxes tied with all sorts of apparently elegant ribbons. It's how we get more than a few translations of the Orphic hymns for example, stuff that's been beautifully translated into English in rhymes some two hundred years ago. Or how we end up with ten page books covering the Headless Rite, something that's already been studied, tried and even adapted into working versions for many many years yet somehow some wannabe decided they wanted to draw attention to themselves by covering that topic and making it seem as if they are opening wormholes into the Empyrean out of which Cthulhu piloted Death Stars emerge.
Seriously now, how would anyone in their right mind would expect people to buy that stuff? The sad reality is there's lots of potential gullible clients out there who'd gladly throw their money away on everything that appears to glitter. And there's also people who consider themselves kindhearted and who support someone they consider a friend while the other person is playing that role with the sole interest of benefiting from their money and good recommendations. The end result is the people in question receive money twice, firstly for their alleged research and then for the product resulted from that alleged research. It shouldn't surprise anyone if in some cases the same people end up paying them for both.
I recently acquired The Sun of Knowledge, a book that got published exactly an year ago. It is an English translation of al-Buni's eight hundred year old book that was probably written in Arabic (I wouldn't know since I'm no erudite or scholar). I'm sure the person who translated it spent a great amount of time studying the original manuscript in whatever form they had access to it and I'm sure they were afterwards rewarded at least decently given there's a great probability no other such English translation exists. This is not the case for the Picatrix though, given more than a few translations have appeared over the past two decades or so, but rehashing the Orphic hymns cannot compare to the advanced knowledge presented within the Picatrix (even if the more translations of it get published, the more it appears the translators in question are taking part in a who's-got-the-biggest-dick contest).
The same applies if you replace the Orphic hymns with photocopies of old KoS manuscripts and I dare not mention other old grimoires since the beggars in question solely focus on what's easier to understand (and has pretty pictures of the pentacles they're making and selling irrespective of any consideration required to make them work in good ways for the owner, not destroying them as it's happened in some cases), given more complex grimoires require actual scholars to study them and not people who fight online on whether a certain Martian pentacle has Elohim Gibor or Elohim Geber written on it.
Now, I'm unaware of whether the person who translated al-Buni's book ever asked for money to translate it in the first place, as some other person out there has done in the case of translating an already translated work, but had this happened I would've called it out nonetheless had I been made aware of it. I would also call out anyone who'd be asking for money to translate Albertus Magnus' De Mineralibus or Astromagia of Alfonso X (translated for him) even though I would be highly interested in having access to that information far easier than squinting while trying to discern medieval style letters that make up Latin words. I'm unaware of either of these sources being translated into English and I imagine the process of translation could be painstaking, but asking for money for translating something and then asking for money again for the published translation should be punished by law! The punishment should drastically increase the more translations of the same source appear, if no new translation reveals something truly extraordinary the previous translations overlooked instead of cheap (often useless) comments by the translator.
For writing Asteria we needed to make sure we had our sources in order and this meant we had to do extensive research. In some cases cross-referencing sources was needed especially when they offered different data on the same concepts. In many such cases it became painstaking since it often meant we needed to find a single phrase or even a single word that made the difference within a large book. But even so we didn't ask for money for performing such arduous search. We simply published the end result and received money for it, after the publishing platform withheld the largest share.
Earlier this year I released a product that teaches people how to magically work with fixed stars. Given the fact I had already written on the subject in Asteria 2, such a task would've seemed simple enough. Truth is I had to go through the same source material again and come up with a way of compressing everything into something both practical and easy to understand and apply. I didn't ask for any money for doing that. We didn't ask for any money while researching for the free article on eclipses either! Imagine me asking for money for spending more or less time looking for suitable elections for the free election articles I write on this blog, c'mon!
In conclusion, stop giving money away to people who ask for it to do research! If they want to earn money from that they will publish their findings. It's obviously your money and I'm in no position to tell you what to do with it, but I think it would be best to spend it on serious material that would improve your work than freely offering it to someone who's sole interest is to make money regardless if they fool people into believing they're some sort of scholar or expert or whatnot.
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