Enough!

Copy and paste cults strike again. For some years it's become a trend in the occult community to publish the same thing as others before, with added embelishments to give it a personal touch to make it stand apart from the same thing that's been published before. Occult hipsters scribble over the classics and call it revelation. Not only that, but they also have the nerve to chop material from the original sourse.

There’s a long-running con in the occult scene and it goes something like this: dig up an old text everyone already knows, scribble in a few extra adjectives, change some sentence order, and slap your name on the front as if you just descended Mount Sinai with divine wisdom. It’s not just lazy, it’s almost an art form. You’ve got your rehashed Orphic Hymns, dolled up with enough theatrical flair to make a goth kid blush, and your Picatrix knock-offs, where people have the gall to butcher the original material like it’s a Wikipedia article with no moderators.

Now, with the Picatrix, you might, if you're feeling particularly generous or heavily sedated, excuse the occasional edit if the modern scribe at least tries to decode some of the more tangled threads in its dense, archaic prose. But when it comes to the Orphic Hymns, these clowns deserve a collective boot up the backside. Yes, even the ones wearing robes and smelling faintly of patchouli.

The original English translation by Thomas Taylor, The Hymns of Orpheus is more than two centuries old and still gets the job done. It works in spellcraft, whether you say it in English or shout it in your local dialect, skyclad, in your parents' basement. They also work when recited in English by people who are not native speakers. Taylor even had the decency to make the things rhyme, a minor miracle that adds a lovely rhythm to rituals, assuming you're not too busy waving crystals around to notice. But no, that’s not enough for our modern deluded mystics.

Those buffoons claim to have found “hidden meanings” in the source text, which somehow escaped everyone else's notice for millennia. The truth is simpler: they need something to sell and couldn't be arsed to write anything genuinely original. Because that would require talent. And actual knowledge. And experience. All those inconvenient things that can’t be faked with a quick Google search and a vape cloud. But originality doesn't come from photocopying old magic with extra glitter.

And as for their fanbase, the wide-eyed, drooling yes-men who think reposting your every pseudo-academic fart on social media counts as peer review, they're not exactly helping. Having your Salacious Crumb lookalike crowd blowing your horn is not enough.

If these self-styled sages were even half the scholars they pretend to be, they’d have unearthed some obscure, forgotten manuscript by now, translated it properly, and actually contributed something new to the occult bookshelf.

If that weren't enough, there have been bad imitations of Eyes Wide Shut in the occult for more than a while now. Bad, because they lack both the physical implications, unless you're some self-proclaimed guru from around here (Bivolaru or Argeșeanu for example), and the mystery aura, being nothing more than a weirdo gathering or a freak cocktail party with speeches. Una ragazza molto speciale has the story, also translated into español.