A Discourse of Two Magi
The Pope is dead — long live the Pope.
In the days following the papal transition in Rome, I found myself listening closely — not only to the official proclamations, but to the many voices rising from within the occult circles I call home: friends, magicians, and scholars of the black arts. Many spoke with reverence, even elation, praising gestures of humility or words of peace from the man clad in crimson and purple. What struck me was not their sentiment, but the seemingly unexamined hope beneath it: a deep hunger for meaning, for authority touched by grace, for a figure strong enough to carry the weight of our longing for a better world.
So I watched and listened in silence. Until I began to hear my own inner voices. Unfortunately, they spoke in many tongues and bore many contradictions. At first, I caught only fragments — sharp questions, bristling replies — but gradually, a fuller conversation began to unfold: one marked by paradox, tension, and the wrestling with angels.
What follows is a selection from that inner dialogue. I share it not as a political statement, nor as a doctrinal critique, but as an invitation: to make space for discomfort, for disagreement, for the wide gaze and the tangled paradox. In an age obsessed with closure, let us recall that dwelling in the unresolved is not weakness — it may, in fact, be the beginning of prudence.
I chose the voices of Agrippa and Trithemius because, in my inner dialogue, they came to embody two radically opposed vantage points — both of which are deeply familiar to aspects of my own practice. I chose the names of two friends, because I care for both of them. I do not wish for one to triumph and the other to fail. I chose these names as a gesture of hope: that some bridge might be found that binds them together, without undoing either one.
LVX,
Frater Acher
May the serpent bite its tail.
Trithemius: Why do you appear so downcast, my friend, on such a radiant day?
Agrippa: I am troubled by your words, and they weigh upon my heart.
Trithemius: How so? Speak, friend, and do not let silence be your burden.
Agrippa: The other day, I heard you speaking among the crowd, praising the new Pope. You lauded his address and his call for peace in Gaza and Ukraine, and I could not help but wonder: are you not only content with the man himself, but also with the office he now holds?
Trithemius: And what is there not to admire, when a newly elected man of great power raises his voice in the name of peace?
Agrippa: When a wolf calls the sheep to peace, he may indeed be a peace-loving wolf. Yet, if his pack has feasted upon the flock for generations, how much trust can I place in their leader? His speech may be gentle, yet the deeds of his pack cling not to his tongue but to an ancient lineage of hunger.
Trithemius: And what, I ask, can a single soul do against the tide of the history into which he is born?
Agrippa: This man was not born Pope; he walked for decades along the path of ecclesiastical power, ascending step by step until now he dons the red shoes and bears the burden of centuries.
Trithemius: But do you not see that the urgency of peace outweighs the long shadow of history? Let us be pragmatic in times of chaos, my friend. I spoke those words in the crowd not with the past in mind, but with the cry of the present pressing on my lips.
Agrippa: Let us then look to the present: we find ourselves still in the midst of the pack. Speak with the representatives of indigenous peoples about the loss of language, culture, ways of life, their severance from the land — all fruits borne of the missionaries’ labors. The new Pope served as a missionary in South America for twenty years; he knows well what it means when he calls the Church to “become once more a missionary church.” The cynicism embedded in the words “once more” are almost unbearable. And the wolves are not distant — they dwell among us in the West. Hospitals and institutions, funded with public money, yet operating outside the laws of our nations. They enforce their own labor codes, using them to dismiss queer employees, upholding the grotesque parody of a world that never truly was.
Trithemius: Are we, then, only to engage in institutions without blemish? If so, we shall soon be left with none. We may rest content in our self-righteousness, yet we will inhabit a world broken into fragments. Where there are people, there will be pain.
Agrippa: I am glad you admit this. Yet does not such an admission often serve as a fig leaf, shielding those who would bear no responsibility? For years we decried the rape of children within the Church’s walls. No external scrutiny was permitted. The wolves crafted their own processes, wrote their own rules, and made sure their bellies remained full. How bitter these memories remain for the victims and their kin. And then the grand theater resumes — to elect a new Pope! Can you not see? This moment is the apex of the Catholic parasite’s lifecycle. Here it renews itself, feeds on the hope of the faithful, seduces with spectacle, with crimson robes, white smoke, lofty columns, and one man lifted as if closer to God. This theater has, for fifteen hundred years, cloaked its parasitic nature in pageantry. My friend, it is not pragmatism that guides you, but an uncritical spirit — one who sinks comfortably into his seat when the curtain rises. You are a sheep who has forgotten the shape of a wolf.
Trithemius: You are ever the cynic. You crush the seed as though it were already a withered branch, measuring it against a full-grown tree. Nothing good may grow in the cold soil of your speech, for I hear no whisper of forgiveness in your heart. Consider the late Pope, humble in his bearing, steadfast in the reform he sought, even unto death. A man of honest word, who strove to return the Church to its source — soft speech, helping hands, open doors for all. Now we are fortunate to see another man of similar spirit ascend the high seat. Two Popes in succession! It makes me shudder, my friend, to think how much light they may yet cast into the vaults of the Church. What your heart needs is hope. Hope, and the courage to have faith. But you wall yourself off, retreat into bitterness. No Pope shall ever be good enough for you.
Agrippa: You speak both truth and falsehood. It is true — no Pope shall ever be good enough for me. But I ask you: good enough for what? Look at the world we lost beneath the heel and cudgel of Christendom — the very world that indigenous peoples are still losing to this day. Good enough for what? To draw every eye toward the center of power? To nourish the parasite of Rome? To glorify dependence and discourage every soul from seeking the Divine by their own path? You are right, no Pope will ever be enough. Just as I shall never say, “This is a fine disease! Come in, bring me affliction, make me frail and beholden. Take my gods for a wooden cross; take the language of the mountains, the rivers, and deserts for the bloodied body of a savior who will not return to us.” I scoff at your vicars. See these shoes, my friend: only I walk in them, and none else. No one leads me by the bridle. My heart was not born to wait for return, when I may wander freely myself. My heart is full of hope — when I bathe in the silence of the wild, when I sit among children, when cat and dog sleep on my lap. Do not mistake me, friend. Do not scold the one who speaks the sharp, bristling, stinging truth. I am capable of holding both glory and fury. I am not bitter, nor dark in spirit — only honest in naming injustice.
Trithemius: Agrippa, what spirit has seized you? You have ever been rebellious, yes, and impatient with the order of things — but now your tongue dances dangerously close to the flame. Are you truly aware of whom you speak? The Eternal Womb, the Holy Roman Catholic Church—the builder of the most wondrous temples across the face of the Earth, the herald of glad tidings to all mankind, the everlasting nursemaid of the poor.
Agrippa: Ah, but do not scold the iron hook that stirs the fire from the coals. You may chafe at these words falling from my lips, yet you too know the secret flame that burns within. Even behind your silence, my old friend, you know the greatest betrayal of all.
Indeed, the Church was once born in fire and spirit — cradled by mysteries, midwifed by angels, and fearless before the veil of death. But now, it reeks of ink and coin. Once it claimed to walk among the seraphim and speak with the dead; now it paces only the marble corridors of bureaucracy and issues forth in press statements. It is no longer a vessel of the spirit, but a shadow of the State — seeking not the Divine, but the governance of souls as if they were sheep to be numbered and penned.
It has not merely failed to guide the inner life; it has abandoned it — because it no longer remembers how. No one in scarlet robes has fasted in the desert. No bishop has wrestled with demons under the moon. The saints are relics, not examples. And so, in its forgetting, it sought relevance not by returning to the sacred, but by colonizing the profane. It crept into hospitals, into schools, into courts — into every institution where it might wear a new mask and call itself indispensable.
Because it had lost the art of communion, it called itself charity. Because it could no longer invoke the spirits, it invoked social doctrine. And because it could not cleanse its own sickness, it turned guilt into a currency — collective, inescapable, and infinite.
You ask why I cannot celebrate the new Pope’s words? Because he does not speak from the mountaintop or the silence of the tomb — he speaks from the boardroom. His peace is not the fruit of gnosis but the soft narcotic of managed dissent.
The wolves, dear Trithemius, have an astonishing smile. It is wide and warm, filled with the glow of candles and the perfume of incense. It offers bread to the hungry and comfort to the dying — but always with one hand behind the back, clutching parchment, patent, or purse. Their teeth are not bared in hunger, but in the courtesy of power. Beware that smile, for it has devoured kingdoms.
Trithemius: Then what is it you desire, Agrippa? A world without Church? Without Pope? Are you truly so naive as to believe that something better would rise in its place? Can you not see the flaw in us all — how every gathering of souls strays into crooked paths, across fields of guilt and grace, noble courage and base exploitation alike?
Agrippa: No, I do not deny this. I do not wish the Church undone. What I long for, however, is clarity of spirit. To accuse and to judge need not mean destruction. To take responsibility does not require the burning of one’s foundations. But it does mean questioning them. I wish for a world in which the Catholic Church withdraws from all state-funded ventures, subjects itself to the secular laws of every land, lays down its pageantry, and ceases all missionary work. Let the people find their God — do not impose yours. When this Pope, in his first address, called once more for a “missionary Church,” he bared his teeth and licked his lips. Clever, yes, to follow swiftly with a call for peace. Many wolves have been clever, and the sheep always patient. But I no longer seek to reform the wolf — I seek to awaken the sheep. Let us rise, my friend, in our own strength and shape. Perhaps we shall become bears, lynxes, foxes — or beetles, bats, snakes, toads — all those creatures who know how to live among wolves without being devoured.
Trithemius: So you condemn the sheep for its gracious gentleness?
Agrippa: I condemn the sheep for its stupidity — if it means to survive.
Trithemius: You seek to change what cannot be changed.
Agrippa: Do I? Have you forgotten the old saying: “Ὁ μέγας ἄνθρωπος μικρὸς κόσμος ἐστίν.” — "The great human is a small cosmos.” Your sheepishness is a most accommodating vessel for the poison of your small-mindedness.
Trithemius: I stand here between wrath and wonder, my friend. Do you insult me — or invite this old man to a new adventure? Are you my adversary today, or a better friend than I have been to you?
Agrippa: I am, my friend, merely hungry. Let us make for the tavern. I’ve heard they serve a fine roast lamb today.
Trithemius: So be it, friend. Let us go. I shall take to wine, if only to soothe the storm your words have stirred.
