Recently, I watched a YouTube Short by a young occult content creator offering advice for beginners. Her message was simple and sensible: if you don’t know where to start, start with meditation.
One of the first commenters dismissed the advice outright, arguing that meditation is ‘new’, ‘Eastern’, and something ancient Pagans or historical occultists never practised—implying there’s no historical precedent for it in modern Pagan or Western esoteric practice.
The comment was both confident and completely wrong. There’s a grain of truth in there—yes, some specific meditation techniques come from Eastern traditions—but it’s buried under a very narrow understanding of what meditation is. Let’s widen the lens.
Meditation is older and broader than people think
If by meditation we mean sitting cross-legged, eyes closed, following the breath in a Buddhist or yogic lineage, then yes, that specific form belongs to particular cultural and philosophical traditions—and we should honour those origins when we draw from them. But meditation is not one single technique, nor is it owned by one part of the world.
At its most basic, meditation is the deliberate cultivation of attention, awareness, and presence. And humans have been doing that for as long as we’ve been reflecting on gods, fate, death, and meaning.
Ancient Mediterranean cultures didn’t use the word meditation as we do now, but they absolutely practised contemplation, reflection, devotional focus, and inner listening. The word itself comes from the Latin meditari, meaning to think over, reflect upon, or practise mentally. For the Romans, meditation wasn’t exotic; it was preparation, rehearsal, a disciplined returning to important matters.
Western traditions had their own inner disciplines
In the ancient Greek world, theoria referred to contemplative seeing—a disciplined way of perceiving truth, order, and the nature of reality. Philosophers weren’t simply thinking about ideas; they were training their minds to dwell with them, to let insight emerge through sustained attention.
Plato describes practices of turning the soul inward, away from the distractions of the senses and towards contemplation of eternal forms. The Stoics engaged in daily reflection, mental rehearsal, and attention-training to cultivate virtue and clarity. Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations were not abstract philosophy; they were exercises in self-examination and focus, written as a personal spiritual practice.
Late antique Platonists and Hermetic writers spoke of ascent, stilling the passions, and attunement to the divine intellect. Plotinus described practices of withdrawal from bodily sensation and the cultivation of inner silence to perceive the One. Iamblichus wrote of theurgy—ritual work that required not just external action but internal preparation, purification of thought, and focused imagination.
Jewish mystical traditions developed their own sophisticated contemplative practices alongside these philosophical movements. Kabbalistic meditation involved visualisation of divine names, pathworkings through the Tree of Life, and techniques for achieving devekut—communion or cleaving to the divine. Practices like hitbodedut (meditative seclusion) emphasised sustained inner focus and dialogue with God. These traditions later influenced Renaissance Christian Kabbalah and became foundational to Western ceremonial magic, particularly through orders like the Golden Dawn.
Christian mystics later inherited and adapted these contemplative practices, reframing them theologically while retaining the core skills: silence, focus, and receptivity. Desert fathers and mothers sat in caves practising hesychasm, the prayer of inner stillness. Medieval monastics engaged in lectio divina, a slow, meditative reading designed to transform consciousness, not merely convey information.
In medieval and early modern occultism, practitioners were expected to develop concentration, imagination, and inner discipline. Ritual magic manuals like the Key of Solomon or the Arbatel assume the reader can visualise, hold attention, and enter altered states—skills that do not magically appear without practice. The magician’s ability to sustain focus during lengthy conjurations, to hold complex sigils in the mind’s eye, or to enter visionary states required training.
Pagan practice has always included inner work
Even outside formal philosophy and magic, Pagan religious life across pre-Christian Europe involved practices that cultivated focused awareness.
In the Norse world, seidr practitioners entered trance states through chanting, drumming, and focused intention, seeking visions and communion with spirits. Celtic druids were known for memory training and visionary practices that required sustained concentration. The Eleusinian Mysteries and other Greco-Roman mystery cults involved preparatory fasting, silence, and rituals designed to induce altered states and direct encounter with the divine.
Devotees sat in sacred spaces and observed signs—watching the flight of birds, the patterns of smoke, the movement of water. They listened for omens and divine responses, maintaining devotional focus during offerings and prayers. Oracular practitioners entered trance and possession through repetitive movement, breath work, or intoxicants, holding space for the voices of gods and spirits.
Seasonal reflection aligned with the land, the weather, and agricultural cycles created natural rhythms for contemplation. The quiet of winter, the intensity of harvest, the stillness before dawn—these were not incidental but woven into the fabric of religious life.
Animist and polytheist traditions across Europe, the Mediterranean, and beyond relied on cultivated awareness of spirits, gods, ancestors, and place. You cannot meaningfully relate to unseen beings without learning how to listen. You cannot interpret a sign if your attention is scattered. You cannot hold space for possession or inspiration if you have never practised inner stillness.
How ‘meditation’ became the default term
So how did we get here? How did meditation—a word with Latin roots used by both pagan Romans and later Christian contemplatives—become the catch-all term for inner practices across so many traditions?
The shift largely happened in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when Western occultists encountered Indian and Buddhist philosophy through colonial contact, Orientalist scholarship, and the Theosophical movement. This history is not uncomplicated. Colonial dynamics shaped which texts were translated, who had access to them, and how they were interpreted. The Theosophical Society, led by figures like Helena Blavatsky, popularised Eastern concepts but also reproduced problematic racial hierarchies and often misrepresented the traditions they claimed to honour.
Despite these issues, Theosophy created a space where Eastern and Western esoteric ideas were brought into conversation, and the vocabulary shifted. When scholars translated Buddhist and Hindu texts from languages like Sanskrit and Pali—the liturgical languages of these traditions—they needed English equivalents for terms like dhyana, jhana, and samadhi, which describe various states of concentration and contemplative absorption. They settled on “meditation” as a catch-all term, even though these concepts weren’t identical, and English already had its own words like contemplation and prayer. Attempts were made to create a universal spiritual language, however flawed the execution.
The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, one of the most influential Western magical orders, actively incorporated meditation techniques alongside their ceremonial work. Members were taught specific visualisation exercises, pathworkings on the Tree of Life, and methods for stilling the mind—practices drawn from both Western Hermetic sources and newly available Eastern texts. The Golden Dawn had its own internal conflicts and exclusionary practices, and it was far from a perfect institution, but its influence on modern occultism is undeniable.
The 1960s counterculture brought another significant shift. Meditation moved beyond esoteric orders and into mainstream consciousness through figures like the Beatles studying with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the popularisation of Zen Buddhism by teachers like D.T. Suzuki and Alan Watts, and the spread of yoga studios making Eastern practices accessible to ordinary people. This period connected meditation with consciousness expansion, psychedelic exploration, and alternative spirituality. What had been the domain of philosophers, mystics, and occultists became something anyone could try, and the vocabulary shifted accordingly.
By the 1970s and 1980s, the New Age movement cemented ‘meditation’ as the standard English word for any practice involving focused attention, inner stillness, or altered consciousness. What had once been contemplation, prayer, reflection, or scrying became simply meditation. The term became capacious, flexible, and increasingly detached from any single tradition.
This linguistic shift has been useful in some ways. It gives us a shared vocabulary across practices, but it also creates confusion, leading some to believe that meditation itself is a recent import rather than recognising it as a modern name for something humans have always done.
Why modern occultists recommend meditation
So why do so many contemporary occultists recommend meditation so strongly? Because many of us live in environments that actively erode the skills our practices require.
Constant stimulation, screens, notifications, advertising designed to fracture focus—these shape our baseline experience in ways that older practitioners didn’t contend with. Our nervous systems are overloaded. Our capacity for sustained attention has been deliberately undermined by economic systems that profit from distraction.
This isn’t to romanticise the past. People have always faced challenges to focus such as hunger, fear, exhaustion, trauma, and illness. But the specific texture of modern distraction is different, and for many of us, it requires deliberate counter-practice.
Meditation, in its many forms, is a practical way to rebuild capacities that some older cultures developed more organically through ritual life, seasonal rhythms, and communal religion. It helps you notice your own thoughts and emotional patterns, distinguish imagination from intuition, develop focus for ritual and divination, learn how your inner landscape actually behaves, and build resilience and self-regulation.
These aren’t mystical benefits. They’re practical skills for anyone working with unseen forces, altered states, or spiritual discernment.
Meditation does not have to look ‘Eastern’
A sticking point in conversations about meditation is aesthetic and cultural discomfort. If you’re drawn to Buddhist or yogic meditation, approach those practices with respect, learn from qualified teachers, and understand the context you’re stepping into. Engagement, not appropriation.
But meditation doesn’t require adopting another culture’s forms. Western-rooted alternatives might include silent contemplation with a candle or icon, walking slowly and attentively in nature, reflective journalling with focused intention, gazing practices using flame, water, or sky, repetitive prayer or chant, and oracular listening after ritual or divination.
Call it contemplation. Call it inner stillness. Call it listening. The skill is what matters, not the packaging.
A final word on history and practice
Appeals to ‘what ancient practitioners did’ are often less about history and more about drawing arbitrary lines. Ancient religious practices were diverse, adaptive, and embedded in living cultures, not frozen rulebooks waiting for modern approval. We don’t honour them by refusing to learn a new language for old skills.
Meditation isn’t a foreign intrusion into modern occult practice. It’s a modern word for an ancient human capacity—one that pagans and occultists have always relied on, whether they named it or not.
That said, not every practitioner needs a formal meditation practice. There are Pagans, Witches, and magicians who do excellent work without ever sitting in silence or following their breath. Some find their focus through movement, through making, through devotional acts, or through direct engagement with land and spirit. The goal isn’t to impose a single method but to recognise that cultivating attention—however you do it—matters.
The real question isn’t whether you meditate. It’s whether you are learning, in whatever way suits you, how to pay attention.