Sounds fascinating.

Did you do that full time? What did you get out of it?

Not full-time. I mostly switched around school, weekends, and library trips. I hadn’t really stopped to ask what I “got” from it until your question—so thanks for this! At the time it wasn’t about extracting any value; it was the adventure of exploration and the hope of recovering something “lost.” I didn’t find anything hidden. In hindsight, the real payoff was realizing there isn’t a secret doctrine behind it all: what we call “occult philosophy” looks like early natural philosophy—people trying to model nature with the tools and knowledge they had. Same impulse as good science today, just different instruments and corpus.