Sorcery of Hekate by Jason Miller - Online Course Review
TL;DR: it’s low key cult behavior, imho
A few years ago I began working with Jason Miller and his Sorcery of Hekate courses 1, 2 & 3 as well as his Strategic Sorcery course and a few of his one off Arcane Audio lessons. I wrote this review to present how my views of the courses and Miller have evolved over time from enjoying the work, to questioning, to rejection. There’s nothing like continued study to change your views. I’ll focus mostly on the Sorcery of Hekate 1 course as I really didn’t find much value in parts 2 and 3 and the other courses aren’t part of the Hekate work. While I don’t use the system any more, haven’t for two years, there are some aspects I found fun and rewarding. I also improvised a healing prayer while singing his chant recently and used a PGM spell in the context of his system but that’s about it. I had no other successes with the system for two years. I tried to keep in touch with him to get a sense for where he’s at lately, but he’s not one for email chit chat, I likely just annoyed him. Oops. Although I mean no offense to anyone who enjoys Jason’s teachings, my honest opinion with four or five years in the rearview, is not a favorable one.
The Sorcery of Hekate course is marketed as “Deep Training in a Secret System of Sorcery” according to the website. It’s all said to be delivered directly to Jason from the Goddess Hekate Herself and one that you are forbidden to teach or share with anyone, according to Miller. I don’t remember signing an NDA, taking any vow of secrecy, or hearing from Hekate that she and her wisdom are a secret, so feel free to ask me any questions you may have. One might reasonably expect that secret teachings aren’t available to purchase online. Well, this one is available for $600.00. So what do you get for this investment? Basically 13 pre-recorded podcasts for the lessons and 13 more recordings of q&a sessions. Lessons run about 45 minutes to an hour on average. You get them on PDF as well, but those are just the same material as the recording. You need to be on Facebook to ask questions for the q&a’s. Miller mentioned you can send him questions by email but it was my experience that those went unanswered. I didn’t find the Facebook group or the q&a recordings useful or enjoyable. Some were several hours long redundant sessions in which Miller had difficulty keeping his composure and struggled to manage his frustration with people asking the same stuff over and over and over. There were a few flare ups on the Facebook Group where Jason took the time to occasionally chastise students for responding to other students comments with information that he deemed incorrect or inappropriate; so I checked out of the group to avoid the silly drama that was needlessly injected by Miller’s control issues. In part 2 the q&a’s were shorter and more tolerable but still only interesting if you were the one asking the question. By part 3 there was almost no questions asked and the recordings came off as just a grumpy guy letting you know he felt like he was wasting his time by teaching you the course, which if you were in it this far had cost $1,800.00. It did seem like as the years went by, the quality of Jason’s responses went down, his temper went up, and it may just be that increasing demands on his time put a bit too much stress on him, as his courses are wildly popular, who knows. We all have days we’re not loving our jobs but berating students that are seeking magical training is probably a bad idea considering that for many, it’s an important part of our personal spirituality.
On to the lessons. Things get better here, at least for part 1 and I had a lot of fun with some of the material. Parts 2 and 3 have some interesting craft projects like a hunting hound, and a dream toad but again some redundancy creeps in, some lessons are unfinished or at least unpolished, some just feel like the cutting room floor scraps added to an extended cut DVD. They definitely don’t feel like another and another $600 bucks worth of info but if I get into something I need to see it all the way through. Darn Asperger’s. So I bought the ticket, took the ride, meh.
Part 1 is the only part I would actually recommend to anyone and that recommendation comes with two caveats. One, that ultimately the systems rigid structure that makes it work in the beginning, feels slavishly boring after a year. And two, do be careful, if you haven’t already picked up on the red flags beginning to pop up, I’ll spell it out at the end of the review. There are many must do and must not do demands Miller makes and he presents them not as his ideas, but rather that Hekate said it has to be this way. I don’t know why but, in an online format I was able to accept such talk that I would never tolerate in person. If someone tells you that they are speaking for the Goddess and this or that must be done, get up and leave. Immediately. I’m not talking about drawing down the moon here, I’m talking about a teacher ever telling you they speak for the Gods. Even if it is some minor mundane task, this is the start of the psychology behind cult behavior. It’s really no different online although it seems safer, but it makes your mind more pliable, more dependent, and before you know it, there goes your paycheck. Guys like me or Miller have the luxury of not needing to worry about a few grand, but to others it means a lot. And I know of students that needed that money but gave it up in the hopes of learning a secret. From the Goddess. That only Jason Miller is allowed to tell. Read his books and you will see he teaches manipulation as part of his work. That’s not magic, that’s psychologically predatory behavior.
Miller is adamant that the daily practice of chanting the mantra “IO HEKA IO HO” 100 times a day must be maintained throughout, lest you be forced to make amends in a Bart-Simpson-at-the-chalkboard-like exercise of chanting the mantra 1000 times. There is a pretty cool necklace you craft of snake vertebrae and other bones for counting chants. The great benefit to be had from all the chanting and visualizing, in fact chanting any mantra, is that it will give you a clear head and great focus. Again no real secret there, meditation is a good thing. The other part of the daily ritual is an ever increasingly detailed visualization of Hekate, three goddesses, a serpent, an astral temple with four elemental guardians, the classical Greek winds and rivers, eight spirits that hang out around the temple, surrounded by the dead and other spirits of Greek antiquity. All this makes up the mandala you learn to visualize until it builds to the final version of Hekate as a nine headed maiden-mother-crone with wings, surrounded by multiple triads of dancing spirits and the serpent. Sounds like an overly complicated technique to get to know Hekate but it is in fact a pretty entertaining way to build some serious visualization skills. He calls this last visualization the Grand Rite and sometimes the Great Rite. Anyone familiar with Wicca might expect the Great Rite to be the physical union of Priest and Priestess but this isn’t that. You’d think Hekate would have come up with an original name to tell him, no?
That brings me to the main criticism of the Miller magic system. Underneath it all, at the heart of it all, conceptually, and magically, it is little different from Wicca 101. Peel back the gilding of complex visualization, and Jason’s strident rigidity (or Hekate’s strident rigidity if you accept Miller’s gnosis), you are basically left creating sacred space, calling the quarters with elemental guardians, energy work by chanting and visualizing, invoking the goddess, making offerings, doing your own spell work, and saying thanks and farewell to any attending spirits. Sound familiar? You can seriously get all of the underlying mechanics to Miller’s system from something simple like Cunningham’s “Wicca, A guide for the Solitary Practitioner.” Everything else is a nice shiny bit of magic bling.
So wheres the fun stuff, that shiny bling? Here’s a few highlights. The first lessons cover the mantra and how to visualize it as flames in the shape of sound. Far out, I like it already! And there is the first of three forms of Hekate to visualize, each more dramatic than the next. The basic ritual you will do is a mashup of lines from various sources and Jason’s gnosis, he isn’t really that clear about a lot of sourcing. There’s some PGM stuff he mentions and other Greek sources that I noticed. The second lesson covers the elemental guardians of the temple and makes use of classical Greek winds and rivers for the four directions. The standard dark moon offering to Hekate is covered, and Jason’s version is a fun and quirky way that turns gross pretty quickly if your doing it indoors. Lesson three is more mantra work and visualization. Lesson four brings in the first set of triple spirits you will work with, the Fates, and lesson five adds two more triple sets of Greek spirits for protection and divination. Up next is a lesson on Hekate’s key and the serpent song from Stephen Edrad Flowers book “Fire and Ice” about a German occult order. Then get ready for a trip to the graveyard and it’s time to work with the dead. Lesson 8 was a favorite of mine. Here you will consecrate a dagger. The resulting dagger just hummed with energy that was noticeable as soon as I would walk into the room. The second form of Hekate enters the next lesson with the 3 Furies followed by the 3 Harpies and the 3 Sirens. All these triplicities are tasked for specific purposes under Hekate’s command. Lesson 11 is kind of a dud. Its the Eight spirits that stand outside the temple gates and are to be used like a mini demon grimoire, with seals and all that, an Ars Goetia knockoff of sorts. There’s a shiny new-age feeling Hekate for the final visualization of her. Three maidens, three mothers and three crones with cosmic space-time wings. The last lesson is the uber visualization of the Great/Grand Rite. A couple dozen beings and serpents whirling and dancing around the Goddess. And somewhere along the way was a mantra chain of flame flowing from your mouth to Hekate’s mouth, out of her genitals and into yours and circling back out the mouth and round and round it goes. Sounds fun right? It is. Did all the meditation and visualization make my mind calmer and stronger? For sure. So what’s the problem? Jason Miller is a very controlling personality. He maintains a level of control and discipline online over his students that would be a serious issue were you not safely separated by the virtual world, and his control is echoed in his magic system.
It’s also worth noting that while Miller is insistent you not share these “secret” teachings with anyone, he also borrows a lot from from many sources without always acknowledging those parts he assembled. There are lines in the work taken directly from Greek sources woven throughout the work. He makes a point to repeatedly point out that this was all knowledge given to him directly from Hekate while wandering the Pine Barrens of New Jersey and during his visit to Asia. I guess she would indeed know the ancient Greek writings. Or at least Miller does. I’m not questioning the legitimacy of his gnosis (maybe) but after these last few years, I wouldn’t accuse of him having the utmost integrity either. I would also point out that there are grumblings on places like Reddit about his behavior being bullying and cult-like and what I saw was pretty close to crossing the line into serious red flag areas. Or it would be were it not in a virtual environment. Online teaching provides a shield and buffer to the physical problems of the real world, but the game is the same, and manipulation is manipulation. He’s a bit grouchy, a bit pushy and makes a few dubious and inconsistent claims now and then. This along with the outright silliness of the idea of secrets for sale made the courses tedious in a way they didn’t need to be. Many people love the system and have an almost sycophantic adoration of the guy, so what do I know. Maybe Hekate really did tell him how many minutes to hard boil her eggs. And to forbid her devotees from sharing her wisdom and magic. Seems out of character to me though. It might just as well be that it’s a really good business model for Miller. I can tell you with certainty that using the dagger to cut the beads and then throw them both into the river was a beautiful and liberating feeling.
So in case it slipped by anyone, the psychology of cult behavior often includes it’s leader speaking the unquestionable, non-negotiable word of a god. This is the keystone to Miller’s class, his system of magic, and his business model. The insistence on secrecy is another red flag. Not the secrecy of tradition but the secrecy that only one person may transmit the rites, the words of deity. His erratic online Jekyll and Hyde behavior only makes this more problematic. If our coven met and I said to you “The Goddess told me that you must…” YOU SHOULD BE RUNNING AWAY BEFORE I FINISH THE SENTENCE! This is obviously more serious in person than online but there is no shortage of victims of online bullying and manipulation that have hurt themselves or others, physically, emotionally and financially. Hopefully the few cases of Miller apparently being an obnoxious bully that have been reported in various forums will be all that comes of it.
I’ll end this long and dreary tale with one of Miller’s stories about his supposed encounter with Hekate and how it relates to the Orphic Hymn. There is a passage at the end of the Hymn to Hekate that translates something like “I pray Thee, Maiden, to be present at our hallowed rites of initiation, Always bestowing Thy graciousness upon the Boukolos.” The Boukolos being the herdsman or oxherd. Much like in Christianity where the terms shepherd and flock refer to priest and congregation, the Boukolos is said to have referred to the same, the priest, and the oxen his congregation. In Miller’s telling of his encounter with deity that he had in in the Jersey Pine Barrens, he visualized a sacrifice of hundreds of oxen, their lives being given as an offering. So when I think of Miller’s teaching, I now have to ask myself, do I want to be part of his herd?
ps: We may hear from Miller himself as he occasionally shows up to defend his work when it’s viewed with any negative association as he once did after gifting The Witch of Wonderlust, Olivia Graves, a promotional freebie of his course 2 and she politely said it wasn’t for her on YouTube. He shared the video on his site and then quickly removed it once he realized what she said, it was kinda funny. He’s pretty good at bending it back.
well, in all honesty 
… more than 1. Whether his business model or not, to keep it in secrecy & such is almost demanding… these must be done, or this is the consequence, is a bit concerning, as well as not citing the sources where he got the information & instead saying it is from Hekate herself. When it’s something directly out of another work, this could also fall under why he wants it so secret, so there are no issues with copyright or plagiarism depending on where they are from & whether they will seek damages.
(hail Loki for standing by my side all those years, even when I tried to avoid him, block the craft, etc, I think I’d never have left if he wasn’t there, beastie kept nudging and putting things my way, till he eventually hauled me and my family out. It was brutal, he basically took a bomb to my faith, but it was worth it). So control is never good. I don’t worship Hecate, but if she’s like the other gods, her aim is to help people, not control them, she’ll want her knowledge shared with all those seeking her 
. If this guy is communicating with an entity, to behave as he did, it isn’t the gods. Just my view. If he tries to hex me, welI hey ho, he’s going to have to deal with Loki, personally I feel if you are imparting spiritual knowledge, earning an income is fine as long as it’s reasonable and most teachers I know, want you to share as it’s good press. I’ve never heard of this guy, but I’m not on social media except this place, I don’t watch much YouTube, but I do talk to Loki, does he reveal things as secret? Umm No! He wants me to yell it from the rooftop! (Maybe that’s just him 
).
, charlatans (I think that’s the one). I’m not saying he’s not genuine in his gifts or abilities, but I remember my aunty saying, that if you are given a gift from spirit, and you use it to exploit people, eventually spirit will take that gift away.
