Eternal Consequences: Priesthood, Power, and the Magic We Weren’t Allowed to Name
Exploring the tension between priesthood power and the participatory magic of the stars.
There is a thin, vibrating line between a miracle and magic, and mostly it’s a matter of who is holding the authority to name it. We grew up in a world where “priesthood” was a delegated power, a specific kind of spiritual technology that allowed a man to lay his hands on a head and call down a healing. We were taught that this wasn’t magic; it was just power. But when you look at it through the lens of Geoffrey Cornelius or the old orders of magic, the overlap is undeniable. It is invocatory. It is the human being aligning with a higher order through ritual to influence the unseen.
The allergy to the word “magic” in the spaces we come from is intense because magic implies a lack of a clear, approved source. If you can’t tie the experience directly back to Heavenly Father, it shifts from a miracle into sorcery or witchcraft. It becomes something “unseen” and therefore untrustworthy. This creates a weird kind of soul-shrinking pressure. You find yourself constantly needing to attribute every intuition, every moment of grace, and every bit of personal creation back to the “God source” so you don’t accidentally cross into the territory of the devil’s work.
This pressure is especially sharp for women, whose inherent power is often acknowledged with platitudes but suppressed in practice. We were told we had “natural power” because we could create life, yet that power was never allowed to live within the actual structure of the church. A woman could pray for her child in an emergency, but she wasn’t “acting on behalf of the priesthood”. If she actually tried to use that authority—if she stepped out of the lane of “motherly instinct” and into ritual—she faced the very real threat of being culturally shunned or even excommunicated.
It’s the shame that acts as the air we breathe. It’s the area seventy looking you in the eye and telling you that wearing a cap-sleeve t-shirt has “eternal consequences”. It’s the way authority trickles down until a fiancé feels entitled to tell you your skirt isn’t modest enough because he can’t control his own reactions. We’ve lived in a hierarchy where the “truth” was used as a tool to enforce guilt, checking records for minor dress code infractions to justify shaming someone’s soul.
When we talk about the Daimon or the moment of astrology now, we’re reclaiming a participatory cosmos. We are acknowledging that we are human beings who can engage with the divine without a middleman checking our worthiness. Whether it’s an ancient astrologer invoking a spirit or an everyday person participating in a conversation with their own Daimon, it’s about a direct connection that doesn’t need to be policed. We are learning to trust the fire in our blood when we hear stories of spiritual overreach, and we’re realizing that the “scales” falling off our eyes is just another way of finally seeing the magic that was there all along.