The Neglected Skill of Magical Training

When I was a teenager, I had the great good fortune to work with a psychic at a New Age bookstore called Celestial Realms.  She was incredible (and I’d love to find her, if she happens across this blog).  I remember once I made my first stab at the Bornless Ritual, but being the newbie that I was I quite forgot to banish.  I didn’t even realize it until the next day when I went to work and the psychic took one look at me and said “What did you do?  You have to shut it down!  It’s good, but it’s too much.”  I hadn’t said a word to her about the ritual, but I realized what she meant, and remembered that I had forgotten to banish.  I finished the ritual in the back of the store.

Anyway, she would occasionally come out with an insight, just a random vision or something.  Sometimes it was seemingly weird advice — “You should go by Patrick instead of Pat.  It sounds more masculine.”  Sometimes it was a vision of the future, and those always came true even if extremely unlikely.  I’ve met herds of fake psychics and show-offs and weirdos, but she was the real deal.

One of those random bits of advice she gave me was about the neglected skill of magical training.  It’s the one thing that those who wish to learn magic almost always ignore at some time or another, and it’s the one thing they absolutely should not ignore if they want to get good at magic and stay that way.

“Your mind,” she said “is strong, but you’re spending all your time there and ignoring your body.  You should jog or something.”

Physical fitness is essential to good magic.  I know that sounds weird, even counter-intuitive, but I can’t help it — it’s true.  Your body is your most important magical tool.  If, like me, you associate exercise with eighth grade gym class, realize that what real exercise is like isn’t at all like that grim twit blowing his whistle and ridiculing you as you stop to walk during laps.

I recommend jogging because it’s fairly cheap and easy, and requires little equipment but shoes.  If you pick up jogging, the Couch to 5k program is excellent.  It starts you off slow, you move at your own pace, and before you know it you’re running ten miles a week.  But anything will work.  Physical fitness has three advantages to the magician.

First, you learn “soft discipline.”  This isn’t grit-your-teeth and gitard ya wimp discipline, but pushing yourself to do what you know you can, and being gentle when you know you must.  I remember during the hardest part of couch to 5k, I kept thinking “I can’t finish this whole ten minute interval.”  Then I realized, why, yes I could.  It wasn’t my body that didn’t want to finish; it was my mind.  ”Shut up,” I told it, and did the interval.  On another occasion, though, I felt a pain in my ankle — just a little one — but I realized it meant I was pushing.  I repeated the previous week’s easier regimen until that muscle got stronger.  This soft discipline is helpful for magicians, because it teaches you how to really change your life — not but an inconsistent spurt of main force, but by gently applying pressure at all times, even tiny and seemingly insignificant pressure.

Second, it teaches you your body, where it is and what it’s doing, and how it’s interacting with your spirit.  You’ll find that it also helps with various breathing techniques and clearing the mind.  It’s no substitute for meditation, but it’s a definite adjunct to it.

Third, it gives you a longer life to pursue the Great Work.  Look at your family history: if you’ve got heart attacks and strokes all up and down your family tree, like I do, you want to get your heart-rate up on a regular basis.  (Assuming, of course, that your doctor agrees.)

Magicians don’t need to be stick-thin to be in shape, mind you, and physical fitness is different for each person.  A disabled magician doesn’t need to give up on physical fitness, just because of a disability.  I jog about ten to twelve miles every week, but I’m no movie star.  The point is to do something: to take the advice of my psychic, and go for a jog, or at least a brisk walk.  It’ll help your magic.

Ephesia Grammata

From diverse ancient sources, we know that on the cult statue of Artemis at Ephesus, there were six words inscribed in Greek script:

askion kataskion lix tetrax damnameneus aisia

What these six words mean is a matter of considerable speculation, if they mean anything at all.  They may simply be barbarous words of invocation, devoid of meaning, although their use is clear.  They were a spoken phalactary, a protective spell, an alexipharmika.

Chester McCown suggests that they may be the names of six separate and distinct daimones.  I’m not so sure, other than in the sense that a magical word is often treated as a being in its own right by classical magicians.  If they are a list of magical beings, then perhaps they represent six daimon servants of Artemis.

If you wish to experiment with the grammata, they are pronounced as follows (at least, approximately — it’s hard to describe another language’s pronunciation without using IPA):

askion (/a/ and /i/ as in Spanish, short o, accent on the first syllable)

kataskion (same as above, accent on second syllable)

lix (short i)

tetrax (short e, accent on final syllable)

damnameneus (short e, eu like a blend between an eh and the French u, accent on last syllable)

aisia (vowels as in Spanish, accent on first syllable)

Signs of Success

DMK, as usual, has an interesting post on his blog about the signs of success in ritual: not that you get what you want, but hints that you’ve done magic before anything manifests at all.  He describes two signs: a change in temperature, and a change in time perception.

I have never experienced either of those things in ritual.  No, not even the warping of time perception, which is common enough in day-to-day life.

What I have experienced that lets me know I’m on the right track is a subjective sensation of intense euphoria.  It’s similar, but not quite the same, as the euphoria I feel at having finished a creative project.  I think it might be related to the idea of Flow.  But again, I’ve experienced Flow while writing or hiking and this isn’t quite the same.

The other indicator is a striking coincidence.  Usually it’s not so direct as do a spell for money, find a crumpled up twenty on the sidewalk.  That’d make me think maybe I didn’t specify quantity clearly enough.  But say you do a spell for money, then immediately turn on the radio and hear this:

It’s not unusual for people related to the purpose of the spell to call out of the blue, or for objects somehow related to the goal in my house to fall or end up in odd places.  Once, a wand I was working on for a friend fell from a table during a ritual invocation; on another occasion, after a particularly intense invocation, I heard a person talking on their cell phone in such a way that everything they said was exactly relevant to what I had asked for.  Obviously, these things can be coincidences.  Vibrations from the nearby train may have jostled the wand from the table.  I might have noticed a conversation that seemed relevant, but not noticed the ones that weren’t.  Confirmation bias seems a likely cause.  And yet . . . in the midst of it, it’s hard not to see a link.

So — temperature changes?  Nope.  Time stretching or compression?  No.  Visual manifestations?  Almost never.  Not for me, anyway.  For me, it’s synchronicity and euphoria.  What is it for you?

Serendipity

You know, now that I look into the nature of the plant mimosa, the more I think “accidentally” burning it during my ritual of Mercury wasn’t a mistake.  It’s one of the few plants that can move in response to stimulus: is that Saturnine or is it Mercurial?  Mimosa teniuflora is used in Ayauasca brews, according to Wikipedia.  Again: there’s Mercurius as psychopomp.

Since we like to use lavender for a lot of day-to-day applications around this house (it’s a wonderful antiseptic), I’d like to find a different scent for Mercurial magic.  But then what do I use for Saturn?  Any suggestions?  Ideally, something in the Morning Star line, because it’s such good incense, but failing that I’ll just find some myrrh.

One way or ‘nother, I want to find something by a week from Saturday, since that’s when I’m scheduled to evoke a particular Saturnine Olympick spirit.

Smelling Good

I used to make my own incense for magic, and while it’s nice and all, I have a job now.  So I’ve been looking around for planetary-appropriate incenses.  I like to find readily available, common scents, rather than pre-made blends, so that I can grow to associate particular scents with particular planets or elements.  My favorite brand is Morning Star.

A lot of tables of correspondence for the elementary perfumes are — old.  I’m not going to burn tobacco as a perfume of Mars, and I’ll be if I’m going to muck about with charcoal for a simple ritual.  Perhaps something elaborate and impressive and once-a-year, but I do magic all the time.  I don’t want to deal with the headache of charcoal every other day.  I’m an American: I want stuff prepackaged and easy to find, please, so I can get on with it.

My current personal correspondences for scents and planets are these:

Moon — Gardenia

Mercury — Lavender

Venus — Rose

Sun — Cinnamon

Mars — Pine

Jupiter — Cedar

Saturn — Mimosa

These are all easy to come by and more or less evocative of their planets.  I’m not entirely pleased with Mercury or Saturn (in fact, yesterday, I accidentally burned Mimosa rather than Lavender and didn’t even notice until today, when I looked at the box — maybe that explains why yesterday’s ritual took so long, although it was successful in the end).  I really like myrrh for Saturn, but that’s hard to find.  They used to make an opium incense which worked great for Mercury, but it’s hard to find and Morning Star, as far as I can tell, doesn’t carry it.

What are your correspondences?  And where do you get your incense?

More (mostly) Agreement

Donald Michael Kraig has another excellent post on breathwork.  I’ve always admired his ability to make the basics crystal clear, so even someone who’s not a beginner can look at it and say “Huh, that’s an easier way to think about it.”

Obviously, I’d quibble with the talk of “magical energy” at the end, but you know me.  Quibble quibble quibble.  At least this is an actual, traditional (as far as I know) conceptualization of prana.  So really I’d quibble about translating prana as “magical energy.”  And that’s so quibbly it’s barely any quibble at all.  Can you tell I just like saying the word “quibble”?

Now That’s Some Good Witchin’

 

A couple in the UK suffering from infertility consulted a doctor who diagnosed her with polycystic ovaries (ouch) and him with a low sperm count.  They were told that the odds of them successfully having a child was one in a billion.  They consulted a witch to solve their problem.

Ladysnake chanted, cleansed their energies and then performed fertility spells before giving the pair a lunar sex schedule.

Ladysnake continued to cast fertility spells for them in their absence with her gathering of witches.

They now have two children.

Now, three things impress me here:

1. The multi-strategy approach: cleansing first, then spells, then a lunar calendar (which is, of course, exactly what a doctor would give them: i.e., have sex when you’re ovulating once a month).
2. The staggering odds of this working.  It’s easy to dismiss something simple, but something one in a billion — that’s lottery-level stuff.
3. The name Ladysnake.  So much better than the usual Bird + Metal + Herb strategy of creating Wiccan names.

That’s some good witchin’!

How to Not Go Crazy

So if clairvoyance is just “faking it,” what’s to say we’re not just making stuff up? The easy answer to that is, we are. That doesn’t make it less useful.

But I’m not sure the easy answer is true. We don’t always make up the stuff we see in visions; sometimes, it just comes to us. Of course, that’s also true of a schizophrenic, so we need to be careful. How do you test a vision to make sure you’re not just “making it up”? There are two ways to go about it: during the vision, and after.

Intellectualizing and doubting a vision while you’re having it is a good way to stop having it, even if it is a “true” (let’s just stipulate that some visions are true) vision. So how do we test a vision to make sure? There are several ways offered by the traditional magicians of the Golden Dawn, but many of them are of limited actual utility. I recall reading one that requires the projection of various Hebrew letters over the vision to see if it survives the experience. I had Hebrew at 8:20 AM; some days, I barely survived the experience, and I was corporeal. It’s easier simply to confront a vision with the symbol of the vision you were trying to evoke. For example, if I’m calling the spirit Och, and I’m not sure I really have the spirit Och, I just imagine his sigil and “throw” it toward him. If he fades away, flickers, looks different, and so on, he’s clearly not Och. He might be self-deception, or a deceptive spirit, but he’s not Och.

Another way to test a vision is after the fact. I do a simple skeptical analysis as I record it in my journal, asking myself some simple Socratic questions. The correct answers, for a real vision, are in parentheses:
1. Does this vision tell me something I didn’t already know? (yes)
2. Does it tell me something I want to hear? (no)
3. Does it tell me something I dread to hear? (no)
4. Does it sound like my own self-talk (for me, sarcastic, flippant, a bit elitist)? (no)
5. Was it mostly in words or in images? (audial is my favored thinking mode; if it’s visual, it’s probably not me)
6. Does it tell me one of the following things that are never true? (no)

A.  You are the savior, most important person in the world, yadda yadda.

B.  You are vile and horrible, nasty nasty thing you.

C.  Everyone/Someone is out to get you.

D.  That movie you just saw is actually true.

E.  You’re not really human.

7.  Does it say or do anything inconsistent with its symbolic nature, such as a supposedly Martial spirit being all loveydovey?  (no)

Obviously, it’s important to remember that sometimes visions do tell us something we dread to hear, sometimes particular spirits prefer to communicate in words rather than images, or vice versa, and sometimes visions do offer us good news.

The ultimate test is this: Does this vision, in any substantial way, small or large, improve my life?  If the answer is no, it is not a true vision.  If the answer is “yes, it proves that I am the Chosen One!” you need to seek therapy.  Because you’re not.

I am.

 

How to Develop Clairvoyance

Clairvoyance is the ability to “see clearly” in your imagination, without controlling the image. There are two simple ways to develop clairvoyance, and one way not to.

First, the way not to: don’t try too hard. It’s easy to dismiss everything in the name of rigor and insist that a clairvoyant image should be as clear as a three dimensional hologram standing in your magical triangle. Most things you see with your physical eyes are in fact physical, not metaphysical.

The two ways to develop clairvoyance both boil down to a single principle: fake it till you make it. Yes, it’s possible to deceive yourself, and you must guard against images that speak too clearly to your own neuroses. For example, if you have low self-esteem, clairvoyant images might consist of you being very important or utterly doomed. Whenever there’s a “very,” test for reality (which I’ll explain in a future post).

The first way to fake it until you make it is to act as if you’ve already got it. I know people who don’t try astral travel until they are sure they can leave their body, and don’t evoke spirits until they can summon a clear vision in a crystal. Go through the motions. If you’re unsure of the accuracy of the images you get, make a note of it in your journal and come back later.

The second way is to “play pretend” (yeah, and maybe that’s all magic is, eh, skeptics?). Ask “if I could see this spirit, what would I see?” Then don’t control the image that arises. An exercise I like for this, which has mundane uses as well, is to imagine a deep dark well or a pair of doors. Look at the well or door in your imagination, then let something rise from the bottom of the well or let the doors open. What do you see? What if that image that you imagine came from outside; what would it mean?

Next post: how to test clairvoyant images to make sure you don’t go woo woo.

Definition of Information

I get this from Luciano Floridi’s Information: A Very Short Introduction. It might help explain what I mean by “information” and why “energy signature” is just a longer synonym for “information” in this sense. Warning: there is symbolic logic. I will explain as we go.

σ is an instance of information, iff

σ consists of n data, for n ≥ 1
the data are well-formed
the well-formed data are meaningful

So, something is an example of information if-and-only-if it consists of one or more bits of data. These can be the letters of an alphabet, a yes/no circuit, a particular shape of a leaf, the color of my carpet, a graph or a chart, or anything else that can differentiated from anything else. All of our sensory experiences are data. All of our experiences are data, period: we have no experience of anything that is not data.

Well-formed means that these data follow rules of organization. In language, this is syntax. In mathematics, its conventions. In the natural world, it’s coherence — if I see a dwarf hanging upside-down from the tree outside my window, I assume that this is not information; it is hallucination because it does not seem to be coherent with my experiences. It is not well-formed.

It is meaningful. Much data gets discarded because we do not assign it meaning. But meaning is merely fitting that data into our experiences. A bee is circling the gutter outside of my window: this is a datum. It is well-formed — bees do fly in the summer, and so it fits within the symbol system of my experiences. It is meaningful: it may mean I need to be careful when I water the lilacs.

Now, by this definition, any meaningful organization of data (for which you can read “experience”) is information.

In fact, information can exist without a consciousness being aware of it.

We often find ourselves facing with Floridi calls “environmental information.” Environmental information is when “two systems, a and b, are coupled in such a way that a’s being of type or state F is correlated to b’s being of type or state G, thus carrying for the observer of a that b is G.” The example I gave above, of the bee, was an example of environmental information. When Temperance Brennan looks at a skull on Bones and says “male, caucasian, thirty years old,” she’s interpreting the data of the skull to arrive at meaning.

Now, if there are any locations where there can be no consciousness, then there can be no information there. Even environmental information requires that someone could at some point observe a. Yet this strikes me as a difficult proposition to accept. Insofar as we are conscious, and construct meaning, then it seems we could at least theoretically observe any environmental data to give it meaning. Which means information must be ubiquitous.

Why is this useful in the study of magic? We have in the definition above the three requirements for magic to work, for our act to be informative enough to cause change in the world. It must contain data — symbols, in our case. Those symbols must be well-formed, selected from a coherent symbol system that reflects human experience. And by manipulating those symbols, we must give them meaning: our ritual must take our attention, our concentration, our deliberation. We can breathe rhythmically and imagine colored spheres of light all we like, if that’s the system that we wish to borrow our symbols from. But it’s not the imaginary colored light that does the magic: it’s the meaning we attach to it.