The Power of Personal Gnosis (And Why It’s Not Just UPG)

There’s a phrase that floats around modern magical spaces like an obligatory warning label: "UPG."

Unverified Personal Gnosis.

It often shows up in parentheses, as an apology. A disclaimer. A little shrug that says, "This probably isn’t real, but it happened to me."

But here’s the truth: if your magic relies on someone else’s book to be valid, it’s not gnosis.

Gnosis Is the Root of the Crooked Path

Gnosis means knowing. Not believing. Not borrowing. Not citing.

Knowing.

It’s what you feel in your bones before your brain can make sense of it. It’s what rises unbidden when you touch an ancestor’s grave, dream of a forgotten god, or wake up with soil under your nails and no memory of how it got there.

Gnosis is what happens when spirit speaks and you say yes. When the unseen whispers and you stop asking for proof.

The Crooked Path doesn’t travel by consensus. It wanders. It listens. It trusts the dirt beneath your feet more than the rules in someone else’s grimoire.

To walk it is to risk being called mad. Or heretical. Or wrong. But that risk is the price of truth.

UPG Is a Weaponized Term

Unverified Personal Gnosis.

The name itself reeks of suspicion. Of dismissal. Of academic gatekeeping.

It implies that what you receive through dream, trance, or spiritwork doesn’t matter until someone else agrees it’s valid. That your lived experience needs peer review.

But witchcraft is not a dissertation. And spirit doesn’t need a bibliography.

In truth, almost every ancient belief began as someone’s UPG. Every symbol, every rite, every spell that has survived the centuries was once someone's whisper from the dark.

UPG is only treated as suspect when the person experiencing it isn’t already part of the in-group. When it comes from the queer, the heretic, the poor, the colonized, the neurodivergent.

In those cases, it’s dismissed as delusion. But let a white man write it down in a leather-bound book and sell it at Llewellyn, and suddenly it’s foundational.

I see through that.

When Gnosis Becomes Power

Personal gnosis becomes power the moment you stop apologizing for it.

When you carve it into ritual. When you speak it aloud and feel the air thicken. When you stop needing it to be "verified" and start living as though it’s sacred.

This doesn’t mean blind belief. Gnosis must be lived, tested, metabolized. Not everything whispered in trance is true. But the lie isn’t that spirit speaks—it’s that spirit must speak according to the rules.

Gnosis is not an escape from discernment. It’s an invitation into it.

You learn your patterns. You study your reactions. You keep journals. You track dreams. You look for the threads that connect. And slowly, over time, you weave your own grimoire—one not written in ink, but in blood, breath, and bone.

The Crooked Man Stance

I honor what comes through.

I don’t need your dreams to match mine. I don’t need your gods to speak my language. But I need you to listen. I need you to trust that the thing rising in your gut isn’t nonsense.

It might be messy. It might not be pretty. But it is yours.

And that makes it sacred.

Stop calling your knowing unverified. Start calling it truth in progress.

This is Witchcraft, Untamed.

Your gnosis is valid.

Your voice is power.

Your path is real.