GoÊteia

Welcome to Goêteia

Goêteia.com is a virtual home to share and teach things related to the practice of chthonic sorcery. All content here is a free offering to the occult community. I have written several books on the subject, which you can find in the materia section. The about tab offers a short introduction and the myth tab gives you a full exploration of the history of goêteia. If you wonder what it takes to practice goêteia the skill section offers a first overview. On the lore tab you can access my personal blog on chthonic sorcery. Finally, at the bottom of this page you can subscribe to my newsletter. – And if you still wonder, what goêteia is actually all about, just scroll down a little and continue reading.

Here is to living with the spirits.

Now, what does Goêteia actually mean?

Goêteia is the Ancient Greek term used for the practice of interacting with daimones and deities before the introduction of the Persian loanword mageia around 600 BC. The practitioners, known as goês (singular) or goêtes (plural) , operated outside of established public cults, often on the fringes of society. They were viewed with suspicion, not only due to their itinerant lifestyle and resistance to integration into the emerging polis but also because they were believed to wield daimonic power, which challenged public oversight. The goês was seen as an outsider, grounding their practices in personal relationships and affordances with often chthonic spirits. They were not part of organised groups, were difficult to control, had unpredictable ethics – all of which made them a threat to the regulation of social power. Long before the rise of Christianity, the goês became a memory figure of renegades and chthonic sorcerers who defied tradition and orthodoxy in favour of personal connections with the daimonic realm.

As such, goêteia, as I present it here, is not a derivation from the Lesser Key of Solomon or the spirits described therein. Equally, the practices presented here are neither reflective of a left-hand nor a right-hand path, they neither exclude nor prescribe classical rituals. Rather, the practice of goêteia focusses on assuming our own unique place among the spirits again. This is neither exalted nor submissive, neither predictable nor fixed. Instead, our place among the spirits is dependent on the particular non-human persons with whom we choose to form alliances and the tasks we face together.

Goêteia thus represents a forgotten, autochthonous form of Western magic. It can only be reconstructed in broad outline through historical evidence. It comes into its own and into lived reality primarily through the direct instruction of those daimones, i.e. non-human persons with whom we have shared the land on which we live for thousands of years. In this sense, goêteia is quite simple to explain: it is about restoring our ability to let ourselves be taught by the spirits.