I’ve encountered a couple folks recently asking what are essentially variations on the same core question: “I’m reading grimoire X, and there are a lot of heavy-handed Christian elements that seem excessive or make me uncomfortable. Can I modify these bits or take them out?”
It’s a great question, and the answer (as with most things) is complicated. I’ve mentioned before that my practice is highly syncretic; I’ve pulled inspiration from a ton of different sources and traditions and assembled them into a personal practice that works for me. Every other working magician I know, no matter how traditional, has done the same. So there is absolutely room to modify and adapt techniques to better suit your beliefs or preferences.
That said, it’s fair to say I generally come down on the traditional side of things. I will definitely recommend that a beginner perform any operation from a grimoire “by the book” a few times before trying to branch out and innovate their own thing.
Imagine rituals like recipes. We have a book (a cookbook) that lays out the steps needed to go from raw ingredients to some finished product – say, a batch of muffins. We’ve heard great things about how delicious muffins are, and want to follow this recipe. There’s just one wrinkle: not only have we never made muffins before, we’ve never eaten one either. Never even seen one.
In such a situation it’s going to be really hard for us to improvise a brand new muffin recipe and have it be a success. That’s not because every single element of the recipe needs to be followed slavishly or it won’t work. But some bits are important, and as a beginner it’s hard to know which ones they are. Until you have a good sense of the result you’re aiming for, it will be incredibly hard to distinguish failure from success.
Let’s say, in our hypothetical example, we decide to change a few things in our recipe before we start. We use cranberries when the recipe calls for blueberries. We leave out the sugar, because we’re trying to cut down on sweets. Finally, we don’t have time to bake them for 25 minutes at 375℉, so we instead bake them for 10 minutes at 550℉. The finished product we wind up with is pretty disappointing: some parts burned black, some parts still goopy, studded with bitter and unpleasant berries.
It would be really easy in such a situation to write muffins off as a bad job and never try them again. It would also be easy – having never seen a muffin – to convince ourselves that what we had gotten was in fact the intended result (“The fluffiness is a metaphor for spiritual enlightenment!”). The reality is that we just made a hash of things.
And it’s not because one can’t make muffins that are less sweet, or cranberry muffins, or even muffins that bake more quickly. It’s just that to do any of those things requires a solid understanding of the principles of baking. And the way to get that is to have made a lot of muffins in the past.
I’ll stop belaboring this metaphor. In performing things by the book, you get a better understanding of the process and expected result, which opens the way for future experimentation. You have a control to compare against to see how any changes you make in the future impact your results.1
So what are we to do, then, in cases where our beliefs don’t line up well with the instructions in a grimoire? In this case it’s worth making the distinction between orthodoxy and orthopraxy. Christianity has put a huge emphasis on orthodoxy – believing the “right” thing. Disagreeing with an endorsed belief, even over what might be considered pretty trivial points of theology (e.g. how many nails were used for the crucifixion of Christ), was a heresy which could see you tried and executed.2 Modern neopaganism and chaos magick have, perhaps inadvertently, reinforced this idea by putting what the magician believes on a pedestal that can spell success or disaster for a magical operation.
In contrast to this, there is the notion of orthopraxy: carrying out the “right” actions. A lot of pre-Christian religions placed more emphasis on orthopraxy than orthodoxy. The gods didn’t particularly care what you believed, as long as you performed the appropriate rites, prayed the appropriate prayers, and made the appropriate offerings.
In my experience, what I believe about a magical operation matters very little. Shockingly little. Some of my most successful spells, in terms of effects on the material world, were those that I had enormous doubts about at the time.3 So this is part of the answer we’re looking for.
It’s also important to remember that spirit conjurations are, at their core, communication protocols. They are methods intended to allow us to get in touch with a spirit in such a way that effective communication can happen. There’s nothing magical about these particular protocols – it’s easy to imagine an infinite variety of equally effective protocols for establishing a communication channel. But a critical element of any communication protocol is that both sides are familiar with it in advance. If I try to convey information to someone using a protocol I just made up and haven’t explained, they won’t know what I’m saying, and may not realize I’m trying to communicate at all.
This is a second reason to work by the book initially. We can (and should) set up any procedure we like to get back in touch with a spirit we’ve already contacted. But that initial contact will likely be more successful if we’re working in a method the spirit is already familiar with and listening for.
I grew up in a pretty agnostic family. We never went to church, I was never baptised, and I never attributed any particular significance to Christ or the Trinity over any other set of gods or spiritual powers. That hasn’t prevented me from successfully using grimoires that evoke spirits in the names of Christ or the Trinity.4 If you’re comfortable engaging with those powers in that way, there doesn’t seem to be much down side.
What if you’re not? What if the history of the Christian church (either broadly or in your own life) have generated enough scars for your to feel uncomfortable engaging with divinity through a Christian lens at all? In a situation like that, the best advice I can give is: don’t.
Working “by the book” needn’t mean working by any one book in particular. There are a number of modern sources that approach spirit conjuration under the aegis of non-Christian powers.5 For folks interested in historical sources, I would recommend the writings of Plato and Iamblichus, the Hermetic corpus, and the Graeco-Egyptian Magical Papyri. Most of the operations in the Christian grimoires are adaptations of techniques from these earlier works anyway.
So choose a source you can get behind, and try to work from it as faithfully as possible. At least a few times. Then improvise, experiment, and record your results religiously. Perhaps the grimoire that future generations work from will be yours.
- I think that a lot of people who subscribe to the psychological model of spirit conjuration (or magic more generally) are coming from this place. If all you expect from magic is to produce changes in your mental state, then any magical operation that does this – which, I would argue, is most of them – can be considered a “success.” There’s no need to distinguish a real result from a placebo if a placebo is all you’re aiming at to begin with. ↩︎
- The Spanish Inquisition, popular conception notwithstanding, was primarily about rooting out heretics and false converts within the Catholic church, rather than witchcraft per se. ↩︎
- Constantly second guessing things I’ve done and thinking about ways I might have done them better is pretty much par for the course for me, really. My magic still works fine. ↩︎
- Quite the opposite, in fact. Working with Christian grimoires has prompted me to delve deeper into Christian religious sources and integrate them more closely into my personal relationship with divinity. ↩︎
- Jason Miller’s Consorting with Spirits provides several conjuration frameworks, ranging from Abrahamic (Christian and Luciferian) to pagan and astrological. ↩︎
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