Know Thyself: Looking Deeper into the Delphic Maxim

For over a year, a few years ago, I hardly spoke. I had needed to go through the death of the person I was, and start over, and it's difficult to know what to say when you have no framework for what the conceptual container of Self is. It was vital in this period to be certain that the recreation was authentic: for too long I'd been a chameleon, simply adopting the mannerisms and interests of the dominant personalities around me. And so to an extreme degree, I went inward. While there is a risk of such a period devolving into the creation of narcissistic complexes, inwardness is so often a necessary balancing factor, and at the time it was critical.

During this time, I began avidly delving into esoteric topics, as well as reading, painting, meditating, and engaging in workshops centered around movement practices. I had a job, which tethered me to a shared societal reality with other humans, and my partner and I did many of these activities together, but we spoke very little, and I did little additional socialization.

As I was researching esoteric subjects, I kept coming across this phrase “know thyself”. Over and over, in various books and pieces of media. At a glance its meaning felt painfully obvious—perhaps even patronizing. Years later, however, I’m coming to understand and practice this doctrine more deeply. I hope to spare you some of that time and share some of my realizations and practical advice for embodying this maxim in your own life.

Gnōthi seautȯn: Greek Roots and Influence

While it is very likely that the Delphic maxim “know thyself” originates or is paraphrased from a concept that predates the existence of Greece altogether, I cannot start there due to a lack of documentation. For now, we’ll say that it is a phrase that likely stems from an older spiritual system, brought into so-called “Western”¹ consciousness via Greek spirituality and philosophy.

Sometimes attributed to the hand of the god Apollo himself, the words “gnōthi seautȯn” are carved into the temple of Apollo at Delphi. This phrase, translated into English as “know thyself”, also appears in the Greek Magical Papyri: a kind of grimoire of Greco-Egyptian magick. Within the Greek Magical Papyri, the phrase is related to the knowledge of and ability to control one’s own personal daemon. While the word “daemon” may feel a little unfamiliar, it may be more relatable to consider this concept as knowing and being able to control one’s spiritual guides, or perhaps more accurately, the spiritual forces that control a person.

What does it mean to Know Oneself? Degrees of Interpretation

In general, when undergoing a search for esoteric knowledge it is important to remember that most teachings contain different layers of meanings: one or more for the initiate, or the beginner; and one or more for the adept or more advanced spiritual practitioner. As you continue in your quest for knowledge and engage in deeper discipline and modes of practice that enable further connection with the Divine, the teachings open like a flower, organically revealing themselves. While I cannot substitute this kind of organic discovery with a text like this, I can give you a bit of direction, and ways to begin to access the deeper knowledge of Self that will enable you in your spiritual pursuits.

Interpreting the maxim “know thyself” from the Greek Magical Papyri, Plato writes in his Symposium that to know oneself is to know one’s soul. Plato believed in a kind of soul-body duality, wherein the soul is the Self, and also the part of oneself that is connected with the Divine. In a way, the Platonic interpretation has more influence on the more modern interpretations of the maxim than the original, more mystical interpretation present in the Greek Magical Papyri. However, if we are to understand the layers of meaning present in the doctrine “know thyself”, we must understand both.

When trying to understand this maxim in a more modern context, beginners tend to consider the act of knowing oneself in a Freudian, psychoanalytical way. In other words, there is the tendency to consider knowing oneself as an act of rational analysis of the mind, or psyche. This is similar to the Platonic interpretation, and is a good place to start. However, it is important that we don’t simply stop here.

The world of modern Western psychology describes the mind as having three basic realms: the conscious, subconscious, and unconscious. The proposition is that we really only have total access to our conscious mind, partial access to the subconscious mind, and limited to no access of our unconscious. Subtly, psychology wishes for you to believe that the only way to access your unconscious mind (I.e: your latent or unknown underlying desires and drives) is through analysis, or therapy. I personally believe that we have access to all our mind through various practices, and see gaining this access as a core element of self-knowledge.

If we combine the more modern interpretation with the Platonic interpretation, we come to something that I think is a good place to start for the initiate. We must understand not only our own psychology, but where our consciousness and corporeality relate to the Divine, and how. We must understand not only our own individual desires and drives, but how those fit into communal purpose.

What is the Purpose of Knowing Oneself?

When we begin to take steps to understand ourselves, the actuality of magick and spiritual practice become possible. Truly, self-knowledge is the prerequisite and the ongoing training to any spiritual practice. Without it, we are simply performing.

The initial necessity for knowledge of oneself begins with the understanding of one’s limitations, shortcomings, and weaknesses. Before we can learn, we must be able to accept criticism and use that criticism to improve. In magick, we are looking for mastery over the immaterial and the material, and it must start within. If we are coming to ritual without the awareness of our own blind spots, we are putting ourselves at risk. Related to this is the ability to understand one’s own intention and will: how are we to execute magick to create the outcome of our intention if we truly do not understand the thing that drives us? This is where the psychoanalytical interpretation is useful to the modern practioner: we can use the theory of subconscious and unconscious drives, and even some techniques to explore them, and put them to use to come to an understanding of what it is we’re truly seeking when we wish to exert our will on the world.

Start there: with understanding your intentions, your limitations, your blind spots. There is no need to overwhelm yourself: inner work is often difficult and can create waves in your daily life as you enter deeper into your self-awareness and illuminate blind spots. In the final section, I will outline practices that can enable this entryway into self-knowledge.

But when you are ready, there are more things to consider.

In a hyperindividualized world, we often like to think of ourselves as islands unto ourselves, our actions having little to no effort on the other beings around us until we will them to. Quite frankly, though, this is not reality. Each and every choice we make has an impact on those around us. As we seek awareness and spiritual attainment, as we search for meaning and self-knowledge and magickal power, we must consider the context of ourselves within our broader community as we do so. It will be to your benefit, and to the benefit of those around you, if you are capable of coming to terms with your role: not just within your inner circle of friends or family, but within your broader regional community, and whichever other communities you intersect with in your daily life.

Finally (at least within the scope of this document), let us consider the importance of knowing thyself as it relates to self-mastery. All practitioners of magick should strive for a level of mastery over themselves: the ability to control themselves–physically, psychically, and psychologically– through all circumstances. Kung-fu trains students that mind can overcome the limitations of matter, and magick believes similarly. However, to attain to this level of control and mastery, one must be disciplined in striving to it, and knowledge of self is a crucial element.

Traveling Inward: How to Attain Self-Knowledge

I would never claim to present to you here a comprehensive list of all of the practices and modalities for traveling inward and learning how to “know thyself”. I also would be remiss if I traveled outside of my own expertise and began recommending modalities I had not tried myself. With that being said, I would like to share a few of my own tried-and-true practices that have helped me achieve inwardness, reflection, self-knowledge, and which I am attempting to utilize towards self-mastery.²

My primary recommendations for the beginner are meditation and journaling. These are accessible: free, or costing only what paper and pens cost, and are available to be practiced for hours a day or minutes depending on what space you have available in your life. The importance of a meditation practice for magick cannot be understated. I would rarely provide any kind of prescription for your life, but if you are engaged in any kind of magick practice (whether you call that witchcraft, Kemeticism, ceremonial magick, chaos magick, or any combination of new age beliefs involving ritual or the manifestation of an intention) I would very strongly recommend that you engage in some kind of daily meditation, even if only for 15 minutes. In the near future, I will release documentation of some of the meditations that I do daily, but another good resource with very easy meditation practices for beginners is Damien Echol’s High Magick.

Discipline entered my magickal practice and enabled me to hold space for ritual for others safely when I began a dedicated daily meditation practice paired with subsequent journaling. What you journal about is highly personal: but the way that worked well for me was meditating for a minimum of 15 minutes, allowing the filler thoughts to dissapate, and allowing my mind to settle and my consciousness to once again fill my whole body (as opposed to being centered in the highly analytical frontal cortex). After meditating, I could sit down in front of my notebook and deeply evaluate the crux of my emotional state, personal events, or any visions or communications that came through while meditating if I was practicing with openness to them. You will likely not feel significantly different after the first week of this, but after a few months of daily practice you will begin to notice patterns in your emotions, be able to identify emotional triggers, and evaluate your behavior and personality with a kind of cool objectivity that may have previously been difficult or impossible to achieve.

Something that may be journaled about or held in dialogue with close friends and family is an understanding of counter-forces to you and your life. This is a quite Nietzchian perspective, and not one I’ve seen recommended in magick texts, but this lens has been useful to me in understanding my own personal values and drives. The basic idea is that you are very likely holding esteem for values, beliefs, and behaviors that exist as a counter-force to something else. The intuition here is that you wouldn’t really consider yourself pro-oxygen (for example) unless some person arrived in your life claiming to be counter-oxygen. In other words, some of the things that matter to you matter because they matter in the negative to someone else. When we consider the counter-forces that shape our worldview and behavior, we can also begin to evaluate our peers and family members: how do they fit into our value system? How do we fit into our family and community spaces? Additionally, are we allowing openness to alternative perspectives? Is there any constructive criticism allowed in our lives, or are we filling our social group with people who wholeheartedly agree with all of our beliefs and values and “other” everyone else? These things are critical to understand if we wish to grow as people, as magickal practitioners, and as community members.

Finally, gaining an in-depth understanding of your geneology, your ancestral lineage, is important for understanding the context of you within the broader framework of history, sociocultural factors, symbolic connection, and so on. Where possible, engaging in deep discussions with your siblings, parents, elders, cousins, etc., can enable a deeper understanding of where some of your beliefs, values, traits, and tendencies come from.

When you’ve deeply considered and practiced the above, or sought out alternatives for self-knowledge for the initiate into magick and spiritual practice, there are modalities for going deeper. Various consciousness alteration techniques and rituals to invoke spiritual guides and regress to past lives are some examples, though there are more. For the sake of finding an endpoint, however, I will save a deeper exploration of these topics for another day.

May you choose the path of knowing thyself, so that you may find transcendent wisdom. Until next time ~

Notes:

1. I understand that the term “Western” to refer to the cultural hegemony of Western Europe and the United States, primarily, is flawed and fundamentally Euro-centric. However, I currently lack knowledge of another term that is both concise and widely understood by readers. For this reason I will use this term here until I find an alternative.
2. The modern world citizen loves to utilize substances first and foremost, seeking quick answers and immediate results. I have too many thoughts and opinions on this topic to include in this document, but my recommendation to you—whether you’ve gone down this route already or not—would be to try at least most of the initiatory practices in a dedicated, consistent way before seeking (or re-seeking) answers from plant guides. Then, I would recommend considering deeply what you are looking to get out of such guides, and if they are truly the right tool for the job. I cannot say anything else on that subject, as I do not wish to stray into the realm of being interpreted as suggesting or recommending the use of such substances