(The One Who Sees Through)
There’s a particular quality of attention that changes everything. Not the scattered awareness we bring to most of our days, half-present and reactive, but the focused beam of consciousness that cuts through appearances to reveal what’s actually happening beneath the surface. It’s the difference between looking at something and truly seeing it. Between hearing words and understanding what’s being said in the silence between them. Between accepting the story you’ve been told and recognizing the story that’s actually unfolding.
This is the terrain of Simon Magus.
In Gnostic mythology, Simon wasn’t just a magician in the stage-trick sense. He was a master of perception, someone who could see through the veils that keep most people trapped in consensus reality. The church fathers called him the Father of All Heresy1, which tells you everything you need to know about his power. He threatened the established order not with violence or rebellion, but with vision. He looked at the world everyone else accepted as fixed and saw the malleable, the fluid, the possible.
Behind that hooded gaze in the card, surrounded by alchemical symbols and cosmic wheels, Simon holds the all-seeing eye. Not as ornament or decoration, but as function. He is the one who perceives what others miss. The one who recognizes patterns where others see only chaos. The one who understands that reality is far more negotiable than the archons would have you believe.
Today, he arrives as the second true companion on our journey, following Sabaoth’s sovereign walk. Where Sabaoth taught us to move with calm certainty, Simon teaches us to see with penetrating clarity. Because you can’t walk your true path if you can’t see where you actually are. You can’t create change if you can’t perceive what needs changing. You can’t practice real magic if you’re still under the spell of someone else’s illusion.
The Advent Companion Appears
Simon Magus doesn’t announce himself with flash or spectacle, despite the legends that surround him. In this moment, he appears as concentrated presence, as the quality of attention itself. You feel him first as a sharpening of your own perception, a sudden clarity about something you’ve been looking at without really seeing.
Behind his hood, that penetrating gaze asks nothing and demands nothing. It simply sees. And in being seen by someone who truly perceives, you begin to see yourself more clearly. The masks become visible as masks. The performances reveal themselves as performances. The stories you’ve been telling about who you are and what’s possible start to shimmer at their edges, showing their constructed nature.
Simon’s genius wasn’t that he possessed secret knowledge unavailable to others. His genius was that he looked directly at what everyone else had learned not to see. The divine spark hidden within the programmed self. The fluid nature of reality beneath its apparently solid surface. The power that lies dormant in human consciousness, waiting for someone brave enough to claim it.
The symbols surrounding him in the card aren’t mere decoration. They’re technologies of perception, each one a different lens for seeing through the simulation. The planetary spheres remind us that reality has layers, dimensions, frequencies. The elemental cups speak to the work of containing and directing energy. The eye itself, radiant and unblinking, represents the awakened consciousness that refuses to look away from truth.
As Simon appears beside you today, he brings a question that hums with quiet intensity:
“What have you been trained not to see? What truth has been hiding in plain sight, waiting for you to finally look directly at it?”
This isn’t about developing psychic powers or esoteric abilities, though Simon certainly mastered those arts. This is about something more fundamental: recovering your natural capacity to perceive clearly, to think independently, to recognize patterns that the dominant narrative has trained you to ignore.
Simon’s presence reminds you that you already have everything you need to see through the illusions that bind you. The only question is whether you’re willing to look.
Teaching for the Day
The archons maintain their control not through force but through managed perception. They don’t need to imprison you if they can convince you that the prison is the entire world. They don’t need to stop you from seeking truth if they can persuade you that truth is whatever the authorities decree. They don’t need to suppress your power if they can make you believe you were never powerful in the first place.
Simon Magus understood this completely. His “magic” wasn’t about manipulating external reality, though the legends certainly tell those stories. His deepest magic was perceptual: the ability to see through the constructed nature of consensus reality and recognize the divine potential that the archons work so hard to keep hidden.
The Gnostic teaching is clear on this point: you contain a spark of the divine, a fragment of the Pleroma itself. But that spark has been buried under layers of programming, social conditioning, inherited beliefs, and mechanical patterns of thought and behavior. The archons didn’t steal your divine nature. They convinced you it was never there in the first place.
Simon’s work, and now yours, is to develop the quality of attention that penetrates those layers. To look at your life, your beliefs, your automatic patterns with the kind of clear-eyed perception that doesn’t flinch from what it discovers. This requires both courage and gentleness. Courage because you will see things you’ve been avoiding. Gentleness because what you discover beneath the conditioning is often wounded, often scared, often convinced it needs to stay hidden to stay safe.
But here’s what Simon knew that made him so dangerous to the established order: once you truly see through an illusion, it loses its power over you. Not through effort or struggle, but through simple recognition. The spell breaks the moment you perceive it as a spell.
This is why clarity matters more than almost anything else on the spiritual path. You can’t transform what you can’t see. You can’t heal what you won’t acknowledge. You can’t reclaim what you don’t recognize as yours.
Simon’s teaching today is practical and immediate: Look directly at your life. Notice where you’ve been accepting someone else’s version of reality without question. Identify the places where you’ve stopped thinking for yourself and started echoing the program. Recognize the patterns that keep running automatically, beneath your conscious awareness.
This isn’t about judgment. It’s about vision.
And vision, true vision, is the beginning of all genuine magic.
Journaling Invocation
“What pattern in your life have you been looking at without actually seeing? What truth is waiting for you to finally pay attention?”
This question invites a particular kind of honesty. Not the dramatic confessions or the grand revelations, but the simple, almost embarrassing recognition of something you’ve known all along but haven’t been willing to fully acknowledge.
Maybe it’s a relationship dynamic that plays out the same way every time, and you’ve been pretending you don’t notice. Maybe it’s a habit or pattern that undermines you, and you’ve been looking past it because changing it would require uncomfortable choices. Maybe it’s a truth about your desires, your gifts, your path that doesn’t match the story you’ve been telling yourself about who you’re supposed to be.
Simon’s eye doesn’t judge what it sees. It simply sees clearly. Can you bring that same quality of neutral observation to yourself today?
Don’t write what you think you should see. Don’t perform insight for an imaginary audience. Just look. Really look. Let yourself notice what’s actually there, not what you wish were there or fear might be there. What’s actually, demonstrably, undeniably present in your life right now.
Sometimes the truth that’s been hiding in plain sight is uncomfortable. Sometimes it’s liberating. Sometimes it’s both. Whatever emerges, let it arrive without censoring it or immediately trying to fix it or explain it away.
The practice today is pure perception. Seeing without the usual filters.
Looking without immediately turning away.
Witnessing what is, exactly as it is.
Simon’s magic begins here, in this simple but profound act of clear seeing.
What reveals itself when you finally allow yourself to look directly?
Small Embodied Practice
Find a mirror. Stand or sit comfortably where you can see your own eyes clearly.
Now look. Really look. Not at your hair or your skin or whether you look tired or attractive. Look into your own eyes. Hold your own gaze the way Simon holds the all-seeing eye in the card: steady, unflinching, curious but not judging.
This will likely feel uncomfortable at first. We’re not used to truly seeing ourselves. We’re trained to glance and look away, to assess and adjust, to maintain the performance even when we’re alone. But today, just for a few minutes, let yourself be seen. Let yourself see.
Notice what happens in your body as you hold this gaze. Does your breath change? Do you want to look away? Do you start to smile or to cry? Do you feel resistance or softening? Whatever arises, stay present with it. Keep looking.
After a minute or two, whisper or think this question while maintaining eye contact:
“What are you not letting yourself see?”
Don’t force an answer. Just hold the question while you hold your own gaze. Let whatever wants to surface, surface. Sometimes it comes as words. Sometimes as feeling. Sometimes as a sudden recognition that shifts something in your chest or belly.
You might discover something surprising. You might simply feel the strangeness of truly witnessing yourself without the usual self-judgment or self-improvement agenda. Both are valuable.
When you’re ready to close the practice, take one more deep breath while looking into your own eyes. Acknowledge yourself: “I see you.”
This is Simon’s teaching embodied: the magic of clear seeing begins with seeing yourself clearly.
Not the version you perform.
Not the story you tell.
The actual you, present and real and worthy of direct attention.
The caravan moves together. If today’s companion touched something in you, if Simon’s penetrating gaze helped you see something you’d been missing, let us know in the comments. Your clarity lights the path for others walking beside you.
Tomorrow: Helen of Tyre arrives with her hidden wisdom and priestess mysteries.
Notes
- The Father of All Heresies: The early church fathers had it in for Simon Magus. In Acts, Simon declares himself to be “something great” but responds humbly after he is rebuked and cursed by Peter (Acts 8:9
, 24
). One generation later, the early church writers were accusing him of being the father of all Christian heresies. ↩︎
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