So many of us, especially me, get stuck in a mindset where we are trying to do the right things in magic. Our focus is on formula. This can easily be blamed on Crowley who wrote extensively about formulae. His Magic In Theory and Practice (which encouraged the name for this site) is full of “formulae” which essentially are divine names and associated mental states.
Chaos magic does a lot for it too. It often encourages people to switch into a mental state where entities are just power sources one can tap into and don’t have their own personality. Once in this mindset, it’s often hard to get out of it. It encourages us to not feel guilty about using a divine power without consent, we don’t need to worry about other entities, everything is done like a nice energy worky feeling. No playing nice with the demon’s personality, trying to bind it, coax it, praise it, appease it… Is that a fun place to do magic from?
When we play with energy in the astral plane we can give it a form using our belief. With practice we can form living a breathing entities that live in energy and seem to have their own personality. Most noticeable are shrines which often develop powerful personalities that present themselves on the astral plane. Their personality being a reflection of years and years of belief about them. So if visualisation and energy work can create a spirit with a personality and belief can seem to shape spirit with a personality, it would appear reasonable to conclude that the mind can create a spirit in every sense of the word. A separate living entities which appears to have its often personality.
A lot of people like to then make the leap of faith and conclude that every spirit is constructed this way. But just because a spirit can be created does that mean all are? The truth is there’s no way to know. If every time you bet on a horse race you lose, does that mean you’re going to lose next time?
Imagine you know you are hallucinating and speak to 12 people. They are probably all figments of you imagination, but what if one of them isn’t? Wouldn’t it be rude if you said “go away your a figment of my imagination”.
Because we might not perceive a power or name that we are using as an entity which could use it without its permission. In the popular modern paradigm we perceive “energies” as tools more than as friends. This is a great paradigm to work from because the result is a powerful ability to summon ideas that are totally under our control. Except sometimes those tools could be more than just ideas. Sometimes they could be potential allies who we piss off by trying to use them whether they want us to do so or not.
I recently tried using Auriel as the angel of earth and it was clear that Auriel did not think I was ready for him and I kept calling him and demanded, “what would it take?” Perhaps I needed to demonstrate my indomitable will and devotion to magic before he would let me use him. Note he just wasn’t happy. I wasn’t Christian enough for him and I did not accept the answer I was receiving. Eventually he name himself as god’s angel of Wednesday and announced he had no relationship to earth.
Magic is a powerful tool, but often stuck in our modern mind-set we often fail to observe the history of the tradition. Magic occurred in Greek and Egyptian times with an intermediary spirit. In Thelema, the Holy Guardian Angel, brought about through a working similar or identical to the Ritual in the Sacred Magic of the Abramelin, is the equivalent. The Holy Guardian Angel is the intermediary spirit. The main difference is that this spirit is one that can transcend our existence and reach to the existence of “god” or the metadivine. The mention of the Witch of Endor in the bible would suggest it was a part of Jewish magic too and mentions of pacts between djinn and humans in the Islamic tradition would suggest similar views there.
Why is this relevant? Because magic was done through dialogue. Through conversation with entities. It wasn’t all flowing energy and thought-forms. When we neglect this part of our magic we insult the very creatures from which we derive much of our power and we offer them nothing in return.Is your magic working?
Is your magic working? How much time did you spend praying for the well-being of the spirits with which you work? How much time did you spend making offerings to them? Do they actually want to do what you are doing?
It is unfair to lay the blame of this squarely on one person or tradition’s head but we should note that traditions which focus on psychology and the human mind have played a major contribution. Many traditions consider all the magic that is achieved is through the mind. Our mind plays a major role in how we perceive the world and if we want to change that our it would seem to some that we just need to change how our mind perceives the world. This is simply the magic of self-delusion. I can imagine my job is satisfying while I am shovelling cow dung and I can blame my imagination of the goddess Aphrodite for that. But as soon as I wonder around telling everyone that Aphrodite got my a job shovelling dung and they see a creepy lunatic smile on my face as I do something which Aphrodite would find to be abhorrant then Aphrodite, as an entity, may begin to get offended by this and the reputation I am setting for her. The magic of self-delusion is powerful and useful but we need to distinguish between it and the other potential that magic has to offer us. If you think magic cannot offer us anything other than self-delusion, then become a psychologist/hypnotist. You will learn to focus on techniques which are more effective for the results you are trying to achieve, you will stop making the rest of us look like a bunch of delusional twats and you will stop insulting the spirits we want to work with. That’s a better result for you and me!
In Buddhism, one deals with one’s experience of the world and its existence in it as being only temporary and therefore unimportant. Buddhism also teaches that there is no permanent higher-self only a state of non-being called an-atman. This is very important as the ultimate state of Moksha (or spiritual liberation) is called Nirvana which means to extinguish like the flame of a candle. This has been misconstrued to suggest that all reality does not really exist and it is only in the mind. Especially when confused with Koans that ask “does a falling tree make a sound when there is noone to hear it?”. Buddhism notes the impermanence of both physical and spiritual nature and therefore the irrelevance of it. It also notes the falsehood that is the sense of self there being no real self. This means that ones experiences are based upon a falsehood but not that they are not real. The role you are playing is that of a character not an actor but the story is just as real as anything.
Buddhist teachings have been misconstrued to suggest that reality is not real and spiritual reality is not real. That’s not the teaching of Buddhism it is simply that “you” are not real and you have misunderstood your role in it. If we continue from this point of view we come to the idea that all reality is the result of your mind and therefore if you cease to believe in it, it ceases to exist. But your lack of belief in something doesn’t make it stop existing. When the Native Americans did not believe in Europeans did that stop the Europeans from coming to visit them? No! You can believe in an entity enough that you experience it through self-delusion and potentially through creating something which a sort of mental existence like a thought-form but that does not immediately change other people’s experience of the world and that does not mean the existence of thought-forms or deities you have not created do not exist for you.
Chaos Magic is also a bit to blame. The focus on the process rather than the entity has meant that someone people have thought they have got results with entities that don’t exist or forces they just made up. There is a massive gap in the mindset between the chaos magician and the traditional magician that prevents most chaos magicians from working from the perspective that there are entities. Many top chaos magicians talk about working from other paradigms but do not want to put in the time and effort required to truly work in the traditional paradigm mostly because they do not understand the difference and therefore see no point in doing so. I am yet to find a magician so practiced in both tradional magic and chaos magic such that they could truly compare the two side by side and frankly I’ve been around the block! Despite this, such claims as “one can be just as successful doing magic with made up crap as they can with a real entity” are prevalent. In that case, if the real stuff has no effect on the success of the magic then it would seem adequate to assume that it actually does not exist and/or is simply not involved in the process of magical working. The real stuff probably does not exist because whether it exists or not makes no difference to the level of success. This mind-set encourages people to use and abuse spirits they have no connection to because they then assume they don’t really exist. No wonder the result is just as rubbish as using made up crap, why would the real entity want to show up for someone that does not believe in its existence?
Now many Chaos magicians are EXTREMELY devoted to magic, more so than normal magicians but the truth is that a relationship is not a formula. It is not something that can be coerced or contrived just look at how it works with animals and humans! This is not useful for a magician with a goal because frankly if you are working towards an end goal you need the spirit to play along more than it needs you, so it just is not going to bother. Especially if you do not already have a relationship with it and do not respect it enough to develop the relationship before starting. When doing work with one’s ancestors it is common to go to church every day for a year to light a candle for ones loved ones. The chaos magician is there to experiment with a force he only believes in if he rolls a certain number on a Saturday. I really struggled with Chaos magicians because they wanted me to be happy to make up BS and try that rather than my highly ritualised stuff sadly that just wasn’t for me, not until I had tested the real stuff and the more and more I test the real stuff the more I notice a disparity between the works of fiction and interacting with entities of some more real existence. As time goes on the blurred edge between the two really comes in to focus and you can identify the limitations which apply to thought-forms which do not apply to some other spirts.
Formulae magic. This is a very different form of magic that is not meant to be used for sorcery but for mysticism. This is where the spiritual development of the initiate is mapped out and the initiate is to experience certain things which lead to them reaching the mystic state they are aiming for or having some form of gnosis. In some instance these formulae are spoken of in terms of names such as Adonai but when viewing the interpretation the approach to the spirit of the name is to analyse the meaning in terms of what that would mean for ones interaction with reality but not what does it inform one about who that entity is. In this case the initiate is experiencing an interaction with their own analysis of the name not an entity so it’s a different process. This does not mean that the entity by that name does not exist and the only use of the name is in this way, in fact such analysis of the names such as seen in Book 4 did not come about until years after these sects had viewed this entity in this way for a long time. It would be like a cult following a leader called Mark. Then taking his name broken into letters M A R K and saying that the M represents Water and the A is air, the R represented the Sun and the K is Jupiter and therefore concluding that “when the trueself is lead by perfected intelligence and perfected emotion the trueself is ready to be a benevolent leader” and then concluding that the original Mark never existed and was just the realisation of the previous analysis. YHVH was worshiped as a transcendental entity the Hebrews misued the idea of his power to give themselves a story to form various ascertions about the world. Whether they were true or not, he existed long before Crowley wrote about his name as a formula and the existence of the formula does not prevent the existence of an entity by that name.
Stop abusing spirits. You will get yourself in heeps of trouble or it just won’t work any better than using a limited thought form. Stop assuming you already no the nature of the universe and you have it all worked out. Have you ever seen a horror movie? The cocky guys die first and those humble enough to admit their ignorance of the true nature of the world, are those that learn fastest and are the hidden gems that we want as our best occulty friend! How about you try some real magic, draw a line between psychology, hypnotism and magic. By all means use the others but if that is all you are doing don’t call it magic you’ll embarass some real sorcerors out there and they won’t thank you for them, I promise you! Not all sorcerors are seeking egoless enlightenment, my dear.
Finally chat to your spirits. Include them in your life. Do nice things for them without expecting a reward. This is a relationship. It doesn’t need to be run like a business. Pray for the dead in your family, all of them. Pray for those that came before you and started the tradition you are initiated in. Pray for those that inspired them. Involve them all in your life and don’t start by begging them for requests. Forget that. They’re not there to give you stuff. They’re there to spend your life with you. So is the world! Enjoy their company and their wacky ideas. Love them. They are your friends. You’re cultivating a relationship with spirit world.
Some magicians threaten spirits by the names of their superiors in some mystical hierarchy of spirits. As my friend Circe would say this hierarchy stuff is all very star trek… who made them think that they are assigned ranks and stuff. It’s very war /military focused. Remember that these hierarchies are not always consistent from grimoire to grimoire and while it might work a spirit coerced is less likely to give you want in the way you’d like and more likely to stick it to the man and give it to you in the most frustrating and painful way possible and in some instances if you threaten it with the name of its superior and the superior is standing there saying “oh no you didn’t” then you’re just going to embarass yourself and cost a relationship with two forces of nature. Make friends with them. Get permission of the superiors before going to the underlings listen to what the spirits tell you about their relationship not all grimoires are perfect and I no none that are entirely complete.
Love spirits they are our friends from the inferior to the divine. The seeds for a relationship with the divine have been planted. Water them and hope for the best.