This post is part of a two part series. You can find the first part here.
Last time I talked about how I first got into magic. When we left off, I had just discovered ritual magic in the style of the Golden Dawn. I spent the next several years practicing meditation, divination, and banishing rituals. I studied the symbolism of the tarot, the Qabalah, and the Tree of Life, as well as the works of Israel Regardie and Dion Fortune. I discovered a world of magic that functioned independent of my belief in it. Magic that had predictable, reproducible effects. Magic that required hard work and diligent practice.
But there was one lingering problem with my magical practice that I needed to resolve. The outer order work of the Golden Dawn consists entirely of theurgy – that is, work to purify and elevate the self and move it closer to contact with the divine. It is very much focused on bringing the self into balance and harmony. It looks inward, rather than outward.
Moreover, many of the members of the original Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, especially Dion Fortune, were also interested in the emerging field of psychology. The mind was just being brought into the realm of science, and there was a definite impulse to bring magic into that same realm – to discuss it in the terms of psychology, hypnotism, and the subconscious mind. Fortune is often credited with defining magic as “the art of changing consciousness at will.”1 Under this psychological model of magic, even things like spirit conjuration are thought of primarily as evoking and externalizing the magician’s own primal impulses, rather than conjuring beings with any kind of independent existence.
This focus on psychology, personal growth, and mental exploration meant my magic was fairly limited. I was able to consistently use the techniques of magic to create shifts in my own mental and emotional states – I even got some cool powers over my own body2 – but I didn’t attempt to accomplish much outside of that. I started to wonder: if I can create these shifts in consciousness at will, what can I actually do with that?
This question led me on a brief detour into the works of Michael Harner. Which I’m sort of embarrassed to admit, because I’m pretty sure if you look up “cultural appropriation” in the dictionary, you just find a picture of Michael Harner. Harner was an ethnologist, studying the shamanic practices of various tribes in South America. At some point he started participating as well, and was initiated into a couple different shamanic traditions. No issues with that so far. The problem was that he took these experiences, stripped them of their cultural contexts, and turned them into “core shamanism”: a system that purported to be the underlying technology of shamanism without all the superstitious trappings. At its most basic, core shamanism utilizes drumming to trigger shifts in consciousness, which then allows the participant to go on journeys and interact with other beings in the realm of imagination. Harner, being an American writing for a modern lay audience, is intentionally vague about what exactly these beings are. Are they independent entities? Are they interfaces for your own subconscious mind? Who knows! The point is you can go talk to them and come away with information or perspectives you didn’t have when you started.
While I never thought of myself as any kind of shaman, this idea appealed to me. If I could use magic to generate consistent shifts in consciousness, could I then go explore other realms in vision and interact with beings there? It turned out the answer was yes.
I started adding experiments with these techniques into my magical repertoire. I was equally unclear on the precise nature of the beings I was meeting and conversing with. But they didn’t feel like facets of my own mind. They often reacted to things in ways I didn’t expect, or told me things I didn’t particularly want to hear.3 Still, I hadn’t ruled out the possibility that I had elaborately ritualized talking to myself.
Then one day I did a divination seeking advice from a particular pagan deity. The advice which came out of the reading… didn’t sound like me. I tend to come at things in a structured, cautious, analytical way. The advice I got was bold, it was preemptive, it was a little bit vicious – in short it was perfectly suited to the world as it was fifteen hundred years ago when this deity was commonly worshiped.
Still it was sound advice – and I had asked for it – I would be a fool not to listen; I went ahead and carried out the specific actions recommended in the reading. I’d just gotten into my car to head back home when an enormous, snow-white raptor flew in front of the car. Which would have been notable in any circumstances, but was doubly so because the deity I had been petitioning is classically associated with birds of prey.
This was the first of several experiences that drove home for me the idea that magic could tap into forces separate from myself, and that those forces could generate real change in the physical world. The realization that there were independent spiritual entities out there set me off on a quest to dig deeper. Who in the magical community was treating not just magic, but spirits, as real things? The answer, it turned out, was Solomonic magicians.
In another moment of serendipitous coincidence, I discovered the Glitch Bottle podcast at almost precisely this time. The guests on Glitch Bottle were primarily practitioners of Solomonic magic and purveyors of old grimoires, the vast majority of whom subscribed to the idea that spirits had existence independent of the magician and could cause substantive changes in the material world.
Solomonic magic perfectly blended the rigorous and systematic approach I had come to expect from ritual magic, with the potency of spirit interactions I had come to expect from vision work. And unlike the Golden Dawn, the grimoires weren’t concerned with harmonizing the mind, they were all about tangible benefits in the here and now: rapid learning, buried treasure, the love of women or great lords. This was magic that eight-year-old me would have recognized as such. This brings us to what I consider the second axiom of magic:
The Second Axiom of Magic: Magic Is
Magic is magic. The only reason people put in the time and effort to get good at it is because it can change their lives. If the results you’re seeing from your magic are lackluster, then something is wrong and you should figure out what it is and fix it.
I’m going to pick on Donald Michael Kraig for a moment here.4 In the first lesson of Modern Magick he describes the possible outcome of a money spell:
Let’s say that you do a magickal ritual to get fifty dollars… You go out for a walk, and although when walking it is your habit to go right at a particular street corner, something makes you decide to turn to the left. A block down this street you meet an old friend who returns the fifty dollars you had loaned him several months ago.
As magic goes this is… sort of disappointing. If I’m putting in the years of labor to get good at the craft of magic, I want it to be good for something more than getting my friends to pay back small debts (it seems a waste to use magic here, compared to just asking your friend if he could settle up). Magic should feel miraculous; that is the point. I don’t want to settle for bland results. I want to find buried treasure. I want to burn things down.5
Not everybody is a Solomonic practitioner, or a ritual magician, or a spirit-worker. Not everybody sets out to make the world bend to their desires. But regardless of path, let’s all agree to hold ourselves and our works to a higher standard. Let’s be a little less confident about what isn’t possible with magic, and a little more willing to swing for the esoteric fences. In short, let’s make our magic magical again.
- I’ve never been able to find an actual source for this, just secondhand references from Donald Michael Kraig and Starhawk. That said, it is very much inline with the beliefs Fortune does espouse. Though she also lumped a lot more into the realm of “changes in consciousness” than a modern reader might assume – etheric projection, remote viewing, hysterical stigmata, etc. ↩︎
- For example, whenever I got the hiccups, I could firmly tell them to go away. And they would. ↩︎
- In one case, I encountered an entity who gave me instructions for a simpler method of triggering the shift in consciousness required for vision work. I didn’t use this method the next time I went to visit said entity, whereupon I was told – quite sternly – “if you’re not going to listen when I tell you things don’t bother to come back.” ↩︎
- I have enormous respect for Donald Michael Kraig. Modern Magick set the standard by which all future magical training books were judged. ↩︎
- In contrast to the money spell above, ceremonial magician Rufus Opus has an anecdote where he conjured a demon to manifest a particular (large) sum of money “by any means necessary.” His house subsequently caught fire, resulting in an insurance check in the amount he had asked for. While I wouldn’t necessarily recommend this approach, it’s hard to argue the outcome was bland. ↩︎
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