Periodically, you come across martial arts that seems really complete and very much old school. Everything is there: the fighting part, the weapons work, the meditation aspect, the yogic practice, the medical practices, et al. And it clearly isn’t made up as the whole system fits seamlessly together. Really smoothly in fact. Smoothly in the way things that take several hundreds of years to develop fit together. Too smoothly to have been something pieced together from somewhere else or being an entirely modern creation.
Except, the guy teaching the system seems to have a bullshit story behind where he learned it. Maybe it is a family system that no other member of his family seems to know about, or he had a mysterious master/teacher that no one ever met. It seems like the whole damned thing just fell out of the air…
Welcome to evocation and the martial arts.
Most of the old school systems out there have a heavily shamanic aspect to what they are doing. The repository for these kinds of things is otherwise known as an egregore. The role of the egregore was discussed in an earlier article, so read up if this concept seems a little fuzzy.
If you want to learn more about how the meditative arts worked in the West traditionally, check this out: Meditation, Yoga and the West – SixtySkills
But…
The basic gist of it is that anytime a large enough group of people devote effort and energy to something over time it forms a kind of empowered thought form in the astral that can be accessed by other people. Since the astral level of existence is timeless, these thought forms can continue to exist for long after their founders, and even most recent practitioners, have been rendered bone dust and tree food.
Eventually, a spirit form latches onto this egregore and essentially acts as it’s representative in the astral.
An enterprising individual with a solid basis in metaphysics can selectively access these things. More often than not, it happens by accident. According to one source, the whole Golden Dawn system got effectively downloaded into the founders of that system when they came across the egregore for it during a group working of astral tourism.
Normally, this starts off as evocation via mental wandering. However, this can have its limitations so eventually this leads to invocation to practice the more physical techniques. Full on spirit possession is a significant risk at this point without proper training.
In the event that doesn’t occur, sterility seems to be the most common side effect.
On a practical basis running enough energy to routinely evoke something like this is pretty draining. Done often enough, or late enough in life, most men end up not being able to have children. Others might suggest this is the purchase price for this kind of information. Either way, it seems pretty common.
The big take away is that a lot of this stuff really comes across as a complete waste of time in terms of a human life. Just because something was relevant hundreds of years ago doesn’t mean it is today.
Sure, some of it may seem cool. But just how useful is a martial system based off of spears in a world where real people use real guns when they really want to kill one another?
Also, things evolve in general. A 1957 Chevy was a great car…for the time. Someone arguing that it is the best car of all time, and that it is superior to anything produced in the modern era is just being silly. The ongoing death of many traditional martial arts is not an accident. The MMA crowd figured some things out and the “old school” systems need to adapt or they simply won’t exist in the future.
If you want to work on the skills needed to explore this on your own, check out the SixtySkills Master course: Master Course (perseusarcaneacademy.com)
