Neoplatonic philosophy, as already explained, is pervasive in the study of magic. But much of it came in through the back door: either through the Qabala or through its philosophical spinoffs. The third century CE was a fertile time in mystical philosophy. Christianity, the suddenly popular mystery religion, had begun to displace the classical mysteries of Greece and Rome and fulfill the role these mysteries had previously played: as an avenue of personal religious experience amid a rather sterile state religion.

Two other new religious movements also gained footholds during late antiquity: Gnosticism and Hermeticism. Even though they were not in themselves inherently Christian, both of them interacted with Christianity in a syncretic and eclectic way, borrowing and modifying without necessarily understanding the system from which they were borrowing.

A full account of gnosticism would be difficult to cover in so few pages, and to be honest I’m not even remotely qualified. Essentially, however, what all gnostic sects had in common, even those who were not particularly Christian, was the idea that true knowledge came not through reason but through direct revelation. This view of knowledge was particularly striking in light of the intellectual tradition of ancient Greece and Rome. Reason, always, was the measure of truth: direct revelation rarely had the sanction of traditional philosophy. Yet the seeds of this approach are in Plato, and grow strong in the formulation of Neoplatonism.

Similarly, the Gnostics accepted the doctrine of emanation from Neoplatonism, although they identify the creator of the universe, the demiurge, as an evil figure rather than a good one, and therefore regard matter as degraded. This naturally led to the practice of asceticism, the ritual denial of the needs of the body. One reason there are few gnostics, in fact, is that many sects denied the holiness of sex and held reproduction itself to be a sin.

Gnosticism also held little room for magical practice. If your purpose was to deny matter, why interact with it at all? Unlike the view of Iamblichus, that matter could be used as a source of symbolic tokens to act as step stools to the divine, the gnostics saw matter as irredeemably degraded. The only way to be free of its degradation was to be free of matter.

Hermeticism borrowed a lot more from Neoplatonism, despite the assertions otherwise by some scholars. The Hermetic doctrine is laid out in a series of hermetic writings, mostly dialogues, compiled as the Corpus Hermeticum. To say “the Hermetic doctrine” is a bit inaccurate, as these dialogues outline doctrines, some of them contradictory. In some, matter is treated as degraded, as in gnosticism; in others, matter is holy.

Unlike Gnosticism, as well, we have the “practical Hermetica,” a series of writings, among which include some of the passages in the Greek Magical Papyri, for practical magical aims as well as the more spiritual theurgic aims of the so-called Philosophical Hermetica. From these, we can see what appear to be Hermetic rituals, but might bare some resemblance to the rituals espoused by Iamblichus. These include the manipulation of material objects and the recitation of holy names and objects.

These three streams — Neoplatonism, Gnosticism, and Hermeticism — converged in the Renaissance to form the western occult approach often called “Hermetic.” This approach concerned itself with three great fields of magic: Alchemy, the study of the magic of material objects; Astrology, the study of the magic of celestial objects; and Theurgy, the study of the magic of divine objects. These three divisions also reflect a threefold view of the universe: the divine, the celestial, and the material. God, who is featureless and without any quality but goodness, is reflected by a divine intelligence or nous. This nous, the demiurge or craftsman of the cosmos, gives order to the universe. Different Hermetic tracts provide slightly different cosmologies, but they always describe a chain of being from incorruptible perfect idealism to matter, whether regarded as evil or merely transient.

Philosophically speaking, this amalgamation of the various streams that led to modern occultism lacks any sort of overarching system. Overall, the result of this amalgamation wasn’t so much consciously constructed as cobbled together. Yet this result does resemble a system: we can clearly say what is and is not western occultism, at least in some terms. For one thing, western traditional occultism describes a chain of being. It recognizes the importance of consciousness, and regards consciousness as a universal law. It also reflects an ethical system, in which the cultivation of virtue is concurrent with the cultivation of magical power.

The grimoires that arose from late renaissance and early enlightenment experimentation with magic emphasize this ethical system. The Arbatel of Magic, a 16^th century grimoire, consists chiefly of moral aphorisms, which do not look out of place in the light of the Hermetica or Neoplatonic writing. It is clear that moral virtue is connected to magical virtue, in the sense of power. Similarly, the Book of the Sacred Magic of Abramelin describes magic as a side-effect of the theurgic work of attaining knowledge and conversation of a holy guardian angel. Even the Goetia, a very practical work of demonic magic, is not without its moral exhortations.

With a cosmology, a system of ethics, and a theology all its own, it’s clear that the western mystery tradition arising from the confluence of Neoplatonism, Gnosticism, and Hermeticism is itself a religion. Of course, the magicians cleaving to these systems wished to connect it to their own religions, usually some variety of Christianity. But it differs from Christian theology in significant ways. Although there is talk of salvation and the son of God in the Hermetica, there is little talk of original sin, no indication that humans must be saved or will burn forever. Moreover, there are occasional references to transmigration of souls in Neoplatonic philosophy and western mysticism. It’s clear that western Hermeticism is, or at least can be regarded as, a separate and distinct religion.

Yet it is not a dogmatic religion, but a religion of personal gnosis. This feature is one reason that the Hermetic dialogues do not always agree on fine matters of cosmology. Even Iamblichus seems to privilege personal experience over reason. This element of personal gnosis is also the feature that allows the diverse manifestations of western magic. Some of the better grimoires, for example, appear to be notebooks designed for students or the practitioner himself. This is one reason the grimoires often differ in details.

Similarly, it is a religion with no central authority, no clergy, and no particular sacraments. It is a religion, therefore, not of orthodoxy but orthopraxy, but practice is defined by the practitioner himself or herself. Even the issue of whether or not it is a monotheistic or polytheistic religion is left, to some extent, to the practitioner. While there are Hermetic texts that argue for monotheism, they argue for a nonpersonal monotheistic god with multiple personal gods acting as intermediaries.

In this light, the practice of western magic represents a religious tradition existing concurrent with, and sometimes parallel to, the practice of more orthodox Christianity. Just as Gnosticism, Neoplatonism, and Hermeticism arose in response to sterile state religions in the second century, so western magical traditions arose as one option among several for personal experience of religious truth in the face of standard state doctrines.

Just as Hoodoo, which I discussed in my last column, arose from a desire of an oppressed people to gain some power over their environment, so did western traditional magic arise as a reaction to an oppressive ontology. In that light it seems to have a place, even a respectable one, in the face of the contemporary monolithic epistemology of material reductionism. Perhaps we are undergoing a similar magical revival now as a reaction to materialism and as a desire for a personal way not only to control one’s environment but also to open an avenue upward to the divine.

This might be one of the most valuable things magic can offer the world: an experiential, non-dogmatic religion that can syncretize with nearly any other religion. One needn’t necessarily even believe in the efficacy of practical magic (although I do) to espouse this religion, as theurgy is about the internal states of the magician and his or her relationship to the divine.

And if magic is a kind of religion, it helps explain the universally pervasive religious elements in most traditions of magic. Even those newer traditions, such as Chaos Magic, that try to divorce magic from religion often find a god in their bed in the morning anyway. I have even known chaos magicians, pragmatic view of belief aside, who exalt chaos itself to the status of a deity. The Neoplatonic, Hermetic, and Gnostic roots of magic are found even in these new, supposedly hyperrational, and atheistic views of magic.

©2010 Patrick Dunn.
Edited by Sheta Kaey.

Patrick Dunn has written two books on the occult, Postmodern Magic: The Art of Magic in the Information Age and Magic Power Language Symbol: A Magician’s Exploration of Linguistics. He lives near Chicago, where he teaches and writes. You can find his blog here.

It might seem strange to discuss something as nebulous as “spirit” with such a formal word as “anatomy.” But rest assured that the word is appropriate and necessary. I use the word spirit here to refer to spirits as parts of living beings, in both therapeutic and everyday contexts.

Usually, on a daily basis, people tend to act as if the mind and body are separate and mostly unrelated, and the spirit is non-existent. And on a daily basis and in the daily world we function effectively and if not happily, complacently, as if the mind/ body/ spirit split is perfectly natural. But it does not have to be “natural.” In fact, I suspect that the expression of the “naturalness” of this arbitrary distance between the spiritual and the everyday is predicated not so much on the nature of the spirit, as on the feeling of distance and longing of the myth-tellers of our culture.

When I was young and just beginning to study and read, I found a passage in Michael Harner’s Way of the Shaman¹ that I took to heart. Harner wrote that it was expected that someone who was competent in the world of the spirits would be competent in the everyday world as well. Admittedly, the two worlds are not so separate, but there would have been no point in explaining that to my nineteen-year-old self. The lesson, however, remains the same.

The actual interrelationship between the mind, body, and spirit can be best understood by recognizing that the boundaries between them are imposed. Imposed by what, or whom? Imposed by the weight of culture and humanity’s aggregate experience, these boundaries seem as real as anything. They are artifacts of culture, as real as language, or education, or money, or status. Such boundaries are not something to be cast aside lightly. They are not something without meaning, power, and purpose. At the same time, they can be mutable and permeable, although we often treat them as if they are not.

One of the buzzwords of a liberal arts education is the word “hegemony.” This is an individual’s participation in his or her own subjugation under a system that works against his or her best interests. I bring it up here only because a similar relationship exists between a person’s mind and self. It is through our own constant efforts that both the body and spirit are subjugated, silenced, and held hostage.

For many people, especially as they age, the spirit — long ignored and fed only in dribs and drabs — atrophies and hardens, drawing its power not from the realm of the spirit, but from the body and the mind. Insofar as they have “spiritual” relationships, these tend to be based on group membership, relationships, and friendships. Family, church, workplace, home, a favorite sports team or television show, become sources of spiritual connection. Through these groups, our own neglected spirit comes together with the neglected spirits of others.

We participate in groups that share our spiritual power; we feed the egregores that define them and are also defined by them. But it is rare that there is any true source beyond the dim flames of spirit huddled together for comfort and warmth.

One of the greatest sources of spiritual connection available to us in our culture is relationships. Think about the rush of a budding romance; the first flush that lifts us up is the assuaging of our spiritual hunger. That is the spiritual side that draws us to a new partner. Within our culture there are few options to slake that thirst. Is it no wonder that so many of our stories focus on these moments? Truly, that is the meaning of soul-mate, and why, despite our best efforts and intentions, we burn out these relationships so quickly.

Most of the options that we can find in Western culture to counteract this effect are based on an opposing assumption: that the spirit is greater than either the mind or the body. People who find sources of spiritual sustenance outside of themselves and other people are often considered on the “fringe”: Charismatic Christians, New Age healers of varied stripes, as well as people who study magic can all fall into this category.

Charismatic Christians certainly gain from being able to offer a person access to the realm of the spirit, and hold that the spirit is greater than the world. They might, indeed, be the classic example of this method, though they are not the only one. New Age healers, as a group, often match this exact same approach. People who study magic — whether members of Western Mystery Traditions, Wiccans, or out-and-out neo-shamans — certainly can fall into this category.

Whatever the source of spiritual reawakening, a spiritually starved person will latch onto any source of spirit like a hungry baby to a swollen teat, or a drowning man to a raft . . . or another drowning person. Selfishness, fear, panic, and the struggle to draw a breath long denied come together in the newly “awakened” person. This can become the monomania of a new convert, the foolishness of a fresh love, the addiction of coming closer to the divine.

The interrelationship between the mind, body, and spirit is, in fact, predicated on the lack of actual boundaries between these parts of ourselves. Recognizing that mind, body, and spirit are not just interconnected, but of one whole, is not only more accurate, but also allows us to not be beholden to the tripartite model. Instead, we can use such models to interact with these parts of self. “Of one whole” here means interrelated, not undifferentiated. This is an important distinction. Just as we would not walk on our noses, we should not treat our spirits as our bodies, nor our bodies as our spirits. Each “part” of ourselves should be honored for what it is, and respected as such.

In our culture, when mind, body, and spirit do interact, it is usually the mind connecting directly with either the spirit or the body. The culturally common division of the physical from the spiritual prevents us from even examining the possibilities of a more complicated interrelationship.

When the spirit interacts directly with the body, it is an experience we label to instinct. That instinct is not biological, not inborn, but rather is a trainable and useful faculty. I imagine that referring to the spirit as “trainable” might offend some people, but I strongly believe, based on experience, that it is through the disciplining of our spirits that allows us to grow as people. And while a linear model (Fig. 1):

The body is mastered by the mind, which is mastered
by the spirit, which is mastered by God.

may be a legitimate model, a model that better fits my experience is one in which the mind, body, and spirit all directly relate to one another, and none is preeminent, or of greater value (Fig. 2).

The addition of the interrelationships among the three aspects in Figure 2 bears some discussion. The “self” here is neither illusory nor otherwise an aspect of the mind. Instead it arises in the commonalities of all the aspects of the greater self. Yet this model also gives a place to aspects of a person that were wholly ignored in the traditional model. Most specifically, I am referring to a deeper understanding of what are often called “psychosomatic” effects — effects that resemble illness but do not stem from physical causes. By Western models, these effects are “in the mind” but the relationship between the two aspects, if shifted away from the linear model, makes it clear that the effect could originate in the mind or the body, or perhaps even in the spirit.

The place where the mind and the spirit meet is what we commonly call the “chakras.” They are of the spirit but they are also the root of much of what we experience as the everyday mind. Emotions, thoughts, and our connections with others all reside in this place where the mind and the spirit meet.

At the same time, there is a place in the self, as many martial artists and professional athletes in general can attest, where the normal mind does not reach, and where (however it is described) the spirit and the body take action without the intervention of thought. This is the level of instinct, but it can be (and often is) far more than that.

The first step to train the spirit is to bring it into balance with the mind and body, neither ruling nor neglected. As that is done, the second step is strengthening the spirit and increasing its flexibility. There are a number of ways to do this: one fairly famous example would be the daily performance of a ritual such as the LBRP² or any number of similar traditions³. The training of the spirit is no different from the training of any other human faculty only in the details.

This article has come a long way to say that the human spirit is neither an unimportant part of the self to be disregarded, nor the central part to be put on a pedestal or put in charge, but truly an integral part to be trained, cared for, honored, and respected. Further, the mind is not the central part of the self, but only maintains that position by subordinating the body and distancing the spirit.

©2010 by Christopher Drysdale.
Edited by Sheta Kaey.

Footnotes

1. Way of the Shaman (2nd Ed.), Michael Harner, 1990
2. Modern Magick: Eleven Lessons in High Magick, Donald Michael Kraig, 1988
3. Chosen by the Spirits: Following Your Shamanic Calling, Sarangerel, 2001

All magical practices, western or eastern, from tribal incantations to dudes drawing magic circles in their mom’s basement, every jot, tittle, and trickle of magic boils down finally to two fundamental laws: similarity and contagion. Cognitive scientists now regard these as “faulty thinking,” and from a strictly materialist perspective they are. But seen through our lens of Neoplatonism, we can see just how rational these two ways of viewing the world can be.

The first law of magic, the law of similarity, says that any two objects that share characteristics are, in some sense, connected. One of the implications of the law of similarity is the doctrine of signatures, which says in short that any object announces its inner nature by its outward appearance. Crudely, and rather ineffectively, we can imagine that ugly people are immoral. But it’s really much more subtle than that.

From a Neoplatonic perspective, an object’s outward characteristics are symbolic of the ideal form from which it springs. These characteristics include shape, color, taste, smell, and feel. In other words, an object announces to our physical senses its nonphysical characteristics. A ruby therefore, being red, takes on characteristics of all those things we regard metaphorically as “red.” A thorn, being sharp, represents all acts of penetration and aggression. Asafoetida, being smelly, represents repulsion and banishing and Indian food.

Actions, too, can be categorized by the law of similarity. If I walk around clockwise in a circle, I become the sun which also seems to “walk” clockwise around the earth. If I eat a piece of the body of Christ, I become his disciple because I share in the same last supper. In fact, all ritual actions evoke a metaphoric (but not unreal) similarity to archetypal or Ideal events. Knocking in a pattern of ! !! !!! !!!! doesn’t just make noise: it creates the universe. On the world of physical interaction, it’s noise, soundwaves, with no meaning (because, after all, on the purely physical world nothing can mean anything: you need a mind to mean). But in the world of Ideals, I have climbed the ladder a bit and reenacted the tetractys, a symbolic description of how the four elements produce all of creation.

We can sum up similarity in two phrases: like proceeds from like, and as above, so below. These statements are both two ways of saying the same thing. Imagine that we have an Ideal Form existing in the world of forms. Call it A. From it are produced two like things: a, and alpha. We can see the relationship of a to alpha, and so we can say that both of them must be connected, having both proceeded from the same like thing. Therefore, we can say, that the A in the world of forms is “like” the a and the alpha in the world of matter. This “like” is the hinge of a simile, and the principle of metaphor governs the relationship of objects to their ideal forms.

Similarly, we can have an idea — “solar,” let’s say. From this ideal Form proceeds a number of material things: the body we call the sun, certain round and golden flowers, emotions in our bodies that make us feel warm and powerful, and a shining golden-red stone. By similarity, I can use one thing to affect all others. If I want success, that event that causes a warm and powerful feeling, perhaps I could carry that particular stone, make a tisane of that flower. Or I use various mathematical relationships and abstract images regarded as solar, and inscribe a hexagon on paper or in my mind. Or I could mix the approaches, and use both the worlds of matter and the world of mind to climb the ladder back to the original Form, and from it to descend again into reality. If I wish to go from a to alpha, I can climb back up to A and then back down again.

The law of contagion, simply put, says that once together, always together. A hair from my head is me, no matter how far it is removed. In the world of Forms distance doesn’t matter, nor do the boundaries we draw around ourselves. We are now what we have ever been, and anything touched by me is, in some sense, me. Dirt from my footprint, for example, contains my identity: it is where I have trod, where I have been, and therefore where I am.

So to affect me, one needs some part of me. It could be as simple as my name, but it could also be some physical object I have touched. Ideally, it is some combination of physical things and abstract ideas.

Frazer, who first codified these laws (see my December column), does not speak highly of magic. He regards it, with a fervor only a late 19^th century rational man could, as abominable superstition and failed science. But leaving aside his vitriolic assessment, these laws have been found to be nearly universal. No matter where you go, among which people, they will regard objects once together as always together. A somewhat famous experiment involved gathering a group of subjects, unwrapping a brand new flyswatter, sterilizing it before the group, then stirring a pot of tea with it. No one would drink the tea, not because it was physically contaminated but because it was emotionally contaminated. A similar experiment involved used clothing, some of which was announced to have belonged to a murderer. Despite the clothing being identical in all other regards, no one wished to wear a murderer’s shirt.

Perhaps these laws are universal because, as some suggest, all people are inherently irrational. Or perhaps they are universal because they are, in fact, laws governing reality. Will those who drink from the tea stirred with a sterilized flyswatter become ill? No, probably not. But they will become contaminated, and they will know it, in the world of Forms.

We can see how these laws play out in two diverse systems of magic, which reveal themselves to be stems of the same root. You can’t get much more diverse than the traditional Renaissance ceremonial magician and the Hoodoo root doctor. The ceremonial magician creates a careful working table inscribed with the appropriate symbols. The Hoodoo doctor rubs some oil on a John the Conqueror root and puts it in a red flannel bag. The ceremonial magician offers a prayer to Venus while wearing green robes; the Hoodoo doctor adds a pair of natural magnets, carefully selected to lock together, into the bag. The renaissance magician draws an image on a piece of paper consistent with the planetary positions, and carries it with her; the Hoodoo doctor “dresses” his bag with special oil, with an evocative and catchpenny name like “Come to Me” or “Bend Over” (or, my personal all-time favorite, “Follow Me Boy,” although this particular imaginary Hoodoo doctor don’t swing that way).

It seems they’re both doing very different things. But in reality, although their outward actions are the same, in the world of Forms what they do is identical, and will, all things being equal, have identical effects.

Now, keeping in mind that I’m no Hoodoo root doctor, let me start by analyzing the easier of the two for me: the Renaissance magician. The table is the universe: the symbols inscribed thereon share, through similarity, the qualities of the elements and planets. Thus, when the Renaissance magician sets something on this table, she sets it in the world of manifestation. For her, green, the color of new plant life in the Spring, is the color of Venus, the planet of fecund fertility. Again, the two things are united by similarity. Finally, the seal itself borrows a traditional image that shares, in metaphoric images, the qualities of the particular stellar configuration. In an elegant bit of contagion, the planetary configuration at the time of the working is deemed to be “fixed” by the talisman. By making such a thing during a time symbolically propitious for love, the Renaissance magician has created a sort of astrological bubble of contagion that will always be “together” with that stellar configuration.

With some help from Catherine Yrenwode’s website, Lucky Mojo, let’s look at our Hoodoo doctor. First, John the Conqueror is a brown, bulbous root from the plant Ipomoea jalapa. When dried, it very much resembles a testicle. By similarity, therefore, it represents sexual passion. It also gains some of its power through contagion. John the Conqueror was, according to legend, an African prince who, captured into slavery, maintained his inner freedom and spirit by tricking his masters. When he returned to Africa, he left the root behind so that other oppressed people could call upon his wit and cleverness in his absence. The root, therefore, shares by contagion with overcoming and conquering through wits rather than main strength. The lodestones or natural magnets, obviously, sport a signature of attraction. And the oils used for anointing are derived from more or less traditional recipes, all of which can be similarly analyzed.

But wait: one magician uses green to attract love, while another uses red. That should surely betray an underlying inconsistency in magical practices that must point out a crack in the whole edifice. After all, if science worked this way, we’d be unable to build a bridge. If e were 2.7 to one group of people, and 1.8 to another, we’d soon see nature collapse in confusion.

But what we find here is not an inconsistency. It’s important to remember that the signature of physical things is a reflection of the perfect form. Some forms reflect very clearly: e is 2.718 in Spain and in France and in New York City. But other forms reflect faintly, and are seen through human eyes. In Cabalistic magic, red is anger and energy and violence; in Hoodoo, red is love and sex. In Cabalistic magic, green is love and nature and growth; in Hoodoo, green is money. How can we account for these differences and still claim that both systems work, and are in fact ultimately the same Form of magic?

First, remember that Hoodoo is American magic. It began under a certain social situation — and let’s not be coy. It began because of slavery. European Americans took people from Africa, brought them to a continent with different flora and fauna, and took away their languages, their traditions, and their families. I think it’s difficult for a lot of people to understand the underlying trauma of this: not just a trauma to individuals but a trauma to culture itself. And not just Black American culture. Americans of every race find themselves in a culture shaped, sometimes for evil and sometimes, strangely, for good, by this trauma. While I loathe racism, I wouldn’t want to give up rock and roll, for example. And my ancestors were still digging potatoes in Ireland when slavery ended, yet I am shaped by this history because I am an American.

The spiritual technicians of various groups and subgroups might find themselves mixed together in conditions as traumatic as these. Africa is linguistically rich; even if you speak a relatively common language like Hausa, there’s no guarantee that the slave you share your quarters with speaks the same language. You must learn to communicate in the same creole you use to talk to the white people who claim to own you. Furthermore, your spiritual technologies were based largely on the power of ancestors, but you were in a land where the very soil was different. Moreover, the cult objects of your people were all gone, and while you remembered the songs and chants you couldn’t teach them to others because they didn’t have the language.

What you did, then, was simple: you made do. You found herbs and fauna and reanalyzed their signatures. You took the spiritual system imposed on you and used it to replace your cult objects, your store of ancestors. And you looked again at your traditional color symbolism. Since you lived in an agricultural environment, you knew that the fecundity of the land remained the source of prosperity. But in this new place, they traded the green of the land for green paper, a ritual that you recognized. It was simple symbolism: and so green could remain prosperity.

Seen in this light, the green = money equation of Hoodoo isn’t terribly different from the green = love symbolism of Renaissance magic. Both begin with contagion: the green of nature becomes green in general. For the Renaissance magician, this fecund green is love; but for the Hoodoo doctor, it’s money. But it’s still, ultimately, derived from the same contagion.

Similarly, red symbolizes love in Hoodoo. But consider what love was in this place. Even if you found love, and your master let you love, you could lose your love in a moment. To love was an act of reckless courage, and it ended in blood: either the blood of childbirth or the blood of death and separation. To the Renaissance magician, blood was the result of violence. Even the blood of childbirth occurred behind a door, in the presence of midwives, and not on the dirt floor of a hut. But to both, the redness of the blood, by contagion, became red itself.

Both systems, then, grow out of the same set of laws, and even borrow the meaning of their colors, often, from the same things. Of course, slavery did not last forever. Once free, Black Americans found themselves on another kind of precipice. Again, clinging with fingertips over the abyss of poverty, in a land of prosperity, magic changed in reaction to the circumstances. But the underlying principles of all true magic remain the same.

How many Renaissance magicians knew about Neoplatonism? All of them, presumably. But among Hoodoo doctors, or English cunning folk, or Pennsylvanian hexmeisters, or Native American medicine men, how many knew of the philosophy of Plotinus and Iamblichus? The answer almost certainly is “a few.” Black American magicians, for example, were voracious for reading material, once literacy became legal among them (and probably before). But not all. Yet they discovered, by trial and error, the same principles that govern all other systems of magic. We find, when we probe the surface of nature, that under her robes lies the shining light of Forms, no matter our color, our language, or the outward forms of our practices.

©2010 by Patrick Dunn.
Edited by Sheta Kaey.

This is the first in a series of articles in my column “Faith and Healing in Paganism.” I must say that I am eager to see where the discussion will go, and I hope you can share some of my excitement along the way.

The focus of this column will be on healing. The advantage of this focus is that it allows for articles on healing, pagan and comparative religious experiences, and cross-cultural perspectives on many pagan and magical practices. My specific approach as a healer is usually embodiment, or the experience of a person being inside their body, rather than being “in their head.” I am looking forward, in future posts, to writing on aspects of healing that seem to be problematic, but because of the larger debates going on, it is probably important to start with “faith” as a topic.

I feel some trepidation using the word “faith” in a pagan context. Certainly, I am unwilling to use it unexamined and undefined. That, then, will be the purpose of this first column: to look at the meaning of faith as a basic human experience of the numinous, and to look at what other meanings have been added to it, so that they can be stripped away, allowing the flowering of something that is more wholly pagan. In discussing faith in a pagan context, it will be critical to cut the core idea away from many of its associations and, in the long run, pagans will need to redefine “faith” to match pagan cosmology and theology.

Faith does not mean what we think it means.

An examination of the meaning of faith is, I believe, timely. In the news media, in current books and magazines, and on the internet, there are ongoing discussions of the meaning and importance of faith. The many authors all have different meanings for the word. Some imply belief alone, some mean unquestioning belief in a religious context, and others hold it to be an irrational belief in a system opposed to humanist rationality. While these may all agree with one another on some points, none of them reach to the core of the idea, or more accurately, the core of the experience of faith.

Faith is associated with the dominant monotheistic religions, as well as with “blind” belief. Just this week, as I was writing, Newsweek (February 22, 2010 edition) had two discussions about religion: one about Moderate Islam, and the other about the debates around teaching religion at Harvard. The cultural pitfalls that surround discussing religion and faith, the social dangers of disagreeing with someone else’s protestations of faith, and the general humanist vs. religious aspects of faith are all apparent parts of the cultural landscape. In short, everyone is talking about faith.

“Faith” is a dirty word in some circles, even, or especially, pagan circles. Yet at the same time, a religion free of “faith” would be a hollow thing. I believe that pagans should come to their own understanding of what faith is, recognizing the differences and similarities of their experiences to those of other religions. Faith is what happens to the human mind when it is confronted with spiritual presences that are vastly greater than us. For pagans, however, that is not some distant, solitary God. In my experience, there is an immanence to our spirituality, the awareness of the spirit in all things. This “spirit” is not somehow separate and directing, but interwoven and integral with the world. For pagans, such experience is not tied to removal from the world we live in, but rather it ties us more closely to this world. The clear experience of the “numinous other” does not have to happen only in some distant Heaven, but is just as valid as we stand here on the Earth.

Faith has come to mean many things, mostly as a result of our cultural exposure to Western Christianity. What has happened is that the simple, unclouded experience we could call faith has been redefined and informed by two thousand years of tradition based on different underlying assumptions of the universe — ones that, as pagans, we categorically reject. Perhaps the most important of these is the belief that the world of the spirit is remote, and somehow greater in power than the world in which we live. To hold the earth as sacred disrupts this separation; to hold the earth as inherently and simultaneously physical and spiritual is to begin to recognize that these divisions are not “outside” of us but “inside.” At the same time, as members of our culture, these are mental associations that we often unthinkingly accept. They are simply part of the way our culture and language are “shaped.”

For example, I would like to critique the idea that faith and belief are synonymous. This suggestion is not true, at least not as I am going to define faith below. Faith is a spiritual experience which can lead to belief, but it is not the same thing. Culturally, faith has come to mean “unquestioning belief.” Let’s look at the simple sentence, “I have faith in Sarah.” What does this generally mean? Well, if I read it, I would say that it means that the speaker has an unquestioning belief about Sarah. It probably does not mean that the speaker has had (or is having) a spiritual experience based on Sarah. This is a co-opting of the word “faith” for much more mundane reasons. It is this understanding of faith that I wish to escape. It might be easier, with all the associations that come with the word, to turn our backs on it, avoid it, and dodge the debate. That would mean that we have taken the easy way out. Instead, I suggest that we embrace the term, taking our place in the great intellectual and religious wrestling match that is going on around us. Some might argue that the specific word “faith” is not important. However, in the end, I cannot use a different term because faith is the best term for the experience I am discussing.

Faith is personal and spiritual.

What I would like to do now is momentarily step aside from the above debate and talk about what “faith” means, not so much as a word, but as an experience. Behind the many uses of the word, I would argue, there is a simple experience of the Divine. Faith begins in the moment that one travels the road from “I believe in higher powers” to “I have direct experience of higher powers.” That is what faith, as a word, means here. This is not about blind belief, but about beliefs that seem blind from the outside because the person who carries them has based them on experiences that are personal and cannot truly be shared. Faith is about experiences that are beyond words.

Faith is a spiritual experience. The ideas attached to that experience, and used to interpret it, are actually a mental filter between the numinous and the everyday mind. Religion, in the context of numinous experience, is not so much a set of beliefs as an interpretive construct for understanding that which is purely spiritual — or perhaps more accurately, outside of everyday experience. Traditionally, in Western culture, religion tries to codify, interpret, and pass down to future generations these valued experiences. What the culture is less good at, in my opinion, is accepting that these beliefs are interpretations of something that was intensely personal and contextual. The words, and not the spirit behind them, are recognized as sacred. It is in this way that faith and belief have become entangled.

Faith is a key part of human religious experience.

What is faith, then? If it is not a set of blind, non-rational beliefs that we pass from generation to generation, then what? Faith, as I mean it here, is directly analogous to the Christian “state of grace,” the direct communication with something (usually represented as a god-figure) that informs and directs our experiences in the world. That sounds pretty heady, doesn’t it? Well, it is. This is not an experience that belongs alone to the Christian Charismatics, or the Sufis of Islam. It is a basic experience that belongs to all people. The religions themselves, the sets of beliefs that we share, are ways that we use to find meaning and relate these experiences in words. Faith, itself, goes beyond words. Faith does not belong to the part of the human mind that uses words.

Years ago, when I was being social with friends, a woman turned to me and asked, “Do you believe in witchcraft?” I looked back at her and responded, “Do you believe in rocks?” “But rocks exist!” “Yes, exactly.” My point then, as now, is that only ideas and beliefs can be analyzed for truth value, and that once we have experienced something, it is not a matter of belief. Moments of faith, therefore, are transformative. They realign our perceptions of the world. To wax metaphorical, belief alone can do no more than sow the fields of faith. That is not to say that belief is without merit itself, but it does mean that belief is not faith. Belief, however, does allow us to interpret and ascribe meaning to our experiences of the other.

With our hands, we reach out and touch rocks, and we know that they exist. Certainly, we can argue the implications of the idea of “exist,” and say that the meaning of “exist” that we use in our culture is probably horribly wrong, but we have no doubt that they exist. We can say that they do not exist outside of our own minds, and while that might be true, we can nonetheless pick them up, admire them, or make houses from them. By placing existence in our minds, we have simply changed the value of the word “exist.”

With our spirits, we can reach out and touch the numinous. With our spirits, we can look around us and see the effects of that spirit within the world. This is not something that is solely the purview of certain religions, but is instead something that is a part of all humans. Insofar as we are in touch with our own spirits, we are aware of the spirits of others. This recognition of the spirits of others is called “compassion.” This compassion is in fact a key aspect of healing work. It is important in Christian and Muslim faith healing, it is important in such modalities as Reiki, and is important in the practices of Buddhism. I am suggesting that these religions are all pointing to the same experience: the awareness, by means of our own spirits, of the existence of the spirits of others. But, let me throw in a word of caution. Compassion is not simply “being nice.” Compassion is not a weakness. And compassion is a virtue, but not the only one.

Like compassion, faith is an opening of a part of the human spirit to the outside. As a healer, I would argue that the opening to faith is a valuable part of being a healthy human. Faith is as much a part of us as “instinct” or “being grounded” (a term which I will argue in a later column has two separate meanings, depending on context). Of course, while we might like to be paragons of virtue, the purpose of virtue is to have something for which to strive, not berate ourselves and others for not living up to our beliefs.

Pagans will need to redefine faith to match pagan cosmology and theology.

For faith to be a useful thing for pagans, we must reexamine the foundational ideas out of which all other notions grow. These foundations will be different from those of the monotheistic religions of the world, but not unrelated. Faith should be a part of pagan religion, as should belief, but it need not be the sole foundation.

For this, we must remove from the term a belief that faith alone is the cornerstone of religion. With all this talk of faith, it would be very easy to slip into a position that it is the core of religion. But for pagan religious experience, it is important to relegate faith to a place where it is balanced with other aspects. Faith can be a guide, but reason, compassion, and grounded experience of both our culture and the world at large must be balanced as well. Faith offers one kind of truth, but that truth should be recognized for its value without being placed on an untouchable pedestal. The beliefs that come from faith must be recognized as personal and contextual. The experiences can be powerful, but it is sheer hubris to believe that they are more “true” or more “valuable” than other kinds of knowledge.

Pagan faith lends itself to being integrated into the wider, global world, without leaving us helpless to act in it. Pagan religions are, by their nature and creed, more accepting of a wider world in which there is a polyvocalism, rather than a single voice of Truth. For this, we must focus on living in the world as it is, not as we believe it should be.

©2010 by Christopher Drysdale.
Edited by Sheta Kaey.

Agnostic

(Gnostic) Someone who claims that they do not know or are unable to know whether God exists.

Altruism

(Philosophy) Actions performed for the sake of others are altruistic. Altruism is the hypothesis that morality involves acting for the sake of others.

Belief

Trust.

Clairvoyance

(Magick, divination) Literally, “clear seeing,” also known as skrying or scrying. The astral art of acquiring visions, images and other information. The actual technique used is very similar to Astral Projection. Clairvoyance has been taught by numerous magical orders in order to investigate the archetypal nature of magical symbols, or to view real-life locations. It was extensively used in England during WWII to spy on the Nazis and again in Russia during The Cold War to spy on the U.S.

Foundationalism

(Philosophy) An epistemological view which maintains that there are two kinds of knowledge or beliefs: basic beliefs, which are obvious or self-justifying, and non-basic beliefs, which are justified by basic beliefs. The basic beliefs explain why the justification of knowledge does not involve an Infinite Regress.

Hatha Yoga

(Yoga) Sanskrit. Gives mastery over the breath, and leads to the control of the physical body and vitality.

Iosis

(Alchemy) The third and final stage of alchemical transformation. Because it is marked by the purpling or reddening of the material during the Coagulation operation, it is also known as the “Purple Phase.”

Kala

A ray, star, digit of time, radiance, essence, perfume. The vital psychosomatic essence which is manifest as a result of Maithuna (linking, joining, as in Tantra), these are considered to be 16 in number, 8 manifesting from the female and 8 from the male. The Tantric “glow” of the Kala will be different according to the digit in time where, when, and with whom the Tantra is worked.

Logic

(Philosophy) The branch of philosophy that deals with the formal properties of arguments and the philosophical problems associated with them. Central questions in logic include: What is a good argument? How can we determine if an argument is good or not? What are paradoxes? Can they be resolved? How can we talk meaningfully about objects that don’t exist, such as God or fairies?

Paten

(Ecclesiastic) A plate, usually of gold or silver that is used to hold the host during the Mass. Also called a “patina.”

©2010 by Gerald del Campo.
Edited by Sheta Kaey.

Alembic

(Alchemy) In alchemy, the top part of a still. Often used to refer to a complete still. An instrument used for distillation.

Archigenitor

(Gnostic) The “first begetter”. A Greek reference to Yaldabaoth.

Cenobite

(Ecclesiastic) A member of a religious order choosing to dwell within a convent, monastery or a community, as opposed to a hermit, who lives in solitude.

Evocation

(Magick, Religion) Literally, “calling out.” Evocation is the application of magick to cause the physical or astral guise of a spirit to appear. See Invocation.

Filtration

(Alchemy) A process of separation, in which material is passed through a sieve or screen designed to allow only pieces of a certain size to pass through. In alchemy, the procedure is illustrated by the sign of Sagittarius.

Gunas

(Yoga) Sanskrit The Gunas are the three basic principles in Ayurvedic medicine that represent the process through which the subtle becomes gross. They are defined as consciousness or essense (sattva), activity (rajas), and inactivity (tamas). These principles also correspond with the alchemic principles of Mercury, Sulfur and Salt.

Psychological Egoism

(Philosophy) The doctrine that a person actually pursues nothing but his own interests. Note carefully how it differs from Ethical Egoism.

Rationalism

(Philosophy) The doctrine that genuine knowledge is not established by sense-experience, or at least not by sense-experience alone, and so is wholly or at least to a significant extent A Priori. Contrast Empiricism.

Triangle

(Alchemy, magick, general usage) One of the most stable geometric designs. In alchemy, the triangle represents the three alchemical principles: Mercury, Sulfur and Salt. In magick, demons are invoked into a triangle.

Undine

(Alchemy) One of a class of fabled female water spirits. They have the advantage of receiving a human soul by intermarrying with a mortal.

©2010 by Gerald del Campo.
Edited by Sheta Kaey.

Earlier, I said that every single modern, western magician is responding, in one way or another, to Plato. We are all either Neoplatonists, or reacting against Neoplatonism. The strange thing is, in most of our daily lives, we are not Neoplatonists at all — in fact, in most other contemporary intellectual fields, Neoplatonism has been set aside so firmly that one doesn’t even have to react against it anymore. Most scientists embrace material monism, which denies even the possibility of a nonphysical existence. In many of the humanities, scholars embrace postmodernism, which denies the possibility of an ideal or original meaning. And even in popular music and art, we have thrown away the mathematical harmonies thought to be fundamental in ancient times; if you doubt it, just listen to a Metallica song.

So how is it that we magicians are still acting like Neoplatonism is the Thing? It’d be as if scientists still included disclaimers against the existence of Aether in their papers, or if Metallica thought they were clever because they avoided the complex mathematical counterpoint of Bach. Yet we either embrace Neoplatonism (perhaps not knowing that’s what we’re doing) or we reject it explicitly (again, perhaps not by name, but Chaos magicians argue against its ideas). The reason comes down to a particularly influential, and particularly useful, formulation of Neoplatonism that arose in the Middle Ages, although its roots stretch back long: This is the mystical, religious, and magical system of the Cabala.

Briefly, the Cabala is a system of number and word mysticism that grew out of the medieval Jewish study of the Talmud. In its original formulation, if an oral tradition can be said to have such a thing, it concerned chiefly the relationship between and meaning hidden within words. But it also taught a system of emanations from deity, probably borrowed from Greek Neoplatonism. There are ten such emanations, the sephiroth, corresponding to the ten numerals, and each is given a correspondence to a direction, a body part, and so forth. Finally, the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet are seen as a sort of intermediate between these emanations.

Every single modern magician in America and England, whether Wiccan or Hoodoo root doctor, Chaos magician or Brit Trade Witch, has made some use of the Cabala, knowingly or not. Catherine Yrenwode points out that Hoodoo, for example, borrowed from European grimoires such as the The Key of Solomon which themselves borrowed from the Cabala. Even the “Charge of the Goddess,” which reads in part:

Upon Earth I give the knowledge of the Spirit Eternal, and beyond death I give peace and freedom, and reunion with those who have gone before. Nor do I demand aught in sacrifice, for behold, I am the Mother of all things, and my love is poured out upon earth¹.

is a borrowing from Crowley’s The Book of the Law, a book filled with Cabalistic and Neoplatonic ideas:

I:58 I give unimaginable joys on earth: certainty, not faith, while in life, upon death; peace unutterable, rest, ecstasy; nor do I demand aught in sacrifice².

While this sentence may not, out of context, seem particularly cabalistic, it is surrounded by a suggestion that the Hebrew letter tzaddai should not be associated with the tarot card The Star, as well as bits of complex numerical mysticism.

So how did this system become so popular, while similar systems did not? After all, we could all be practicing some system based on Sufi mysticism, or even Merkabah rather than Cabala. So what is it that made Cabala so ubiquitous? We could explore historical accidents of all kinds, from the invasion of the Mongols to the fall of the Temple, but ultimately, it comes down to utility. The Cabala is a Neoplatonic formulation of the universe with an eye toward use, and later developments and refinements of the cabala, such as Hermetic Cabala, emphasized and built on those uses.

The primary utility of the Cabala is as a system of classification, which might sounds rather lame — a Dewey decimal system for magic? — but is in reality foundational. The Cabala offers a system of symbols that interlock coherently. Obviously, any system of symbols could work, but just as one individual might find it hard to invent his or her own language (not impossible, mind you, but hard), so an individual might find it hard to invent a symbol system of such richness. If I take any two symbols from any two domains, I can relate them together in the cabala and figure out which shape in Plato’s cave they ultimately point to.

Think about the implications of that. Take a planet, a big gassy one with rings, orbiting out there at about the limit of our ability to see it. Take an herb, bitter, astringent — a gum actually, used as an embalming agent. Take a metal, dark, heavy, often used to seal containers in ancient times because of its low melting point. Take a grave. Take a womb. The Cabala tells us that all of these things are connected, that they all are reflections of the same shadowy shape in Plato’s cave of images: specifically, one named Binah. These are things that mark limits: the limit of our sight, the boundaries of life and death, the inside and outside of containers. Binah is about limits and boundaries. This Binah manifests in the world in numerous ways, but each shares some of that essence of limiting, and each is touching all the others in the world of ideas.

This system acts as a calculus of leverage. I know that to push this thing here — a poppet made of lead and anointed with myrrh — might push that thing there — an enemy. Of course, you can use this same leverage for good. I can gather things associated with Hesed and create an expansion of power or wealth, or I can call up the powers of Tifareth and manipulate the shining light in the center of everything that gives it the impetus to be what it is.

So everyone should run out and study the Cabala. Or perhaps not. After all, we often use it without knowing that we’re using it, and other systems can do the same thing. It’s just that the Cabala is an example of a system that’s so well-developed and carefully defined, it’s hard to ignore. It’s also hard to keep away from: if you study magic in the west, you will at some point or another study the Cabala, whether you like it or not. And sometimes whether you know it or not, because the Cabala is an amoeba.

What I wrote about above, the connections between Saturn, lead, and myrrh, actually wasn’t originally Cabalistic. The Cabala incorporated those associations like an amoeba eating a paramecium. And there’s no reason not to imagine that the Cabala won’t absorb anything else set near it. There are Cabalistic associations with tarot cards, musical notes and genres, and the characters of the The Rocky Horror Picture Show. This amoebic nature of the Cabala means two things: First, there are thousands of doorways in. Second, everything is a tool.

There are a thousand doorways into the Cabala. A lot of tarot readers, for example, begin studying it because the cards’ associations with the sephiroth and the paths can lead to illuminating connections during readings. And the cards can even be used in the opposite direction: Donald Tyson has a splendid little book about using the tarot as an entire temple, and while he doesn’t make a big complicated deal out of it (one of the things I like about his books), it’s all quietly and calmly Cabalistic. Whatever you’re into, whether it’s herbalism or epic poetry, you can find a way into the Cabala from there.

Second, as I suggested above, everything is a tool. You can use the tarot as a set of magical tools once you understand their Cabalistic associations. But in a pinch, you can use anything. Once you see what idea an object reflects, you can use that object to represent that idea. This notion sounds counterrational, and I suppose to some degree it is. But you can literally do magic with some pocket lint and a few spare coins, if you realize the ways in which those things connect to the platonic ideal reality. And the Cabala is a handy heuristic for figuring that out.

Now let’s interrupt this paean to the Cabala to say that, in fact, it’s more complicated than this. For example, while most Hermetic Cabalists place Saturn in the path of Tav, others place the Moon there. While most place the sun in Tifareth, some place Mercury. It seems, indeed, that they get results. So which is it? Who’s wrong?

Well, they are. Not because their associations are wrong, but insofar as they insist that they’re the right and true associations. Because the Cabala is, at its most basic level, a language for describing ultimate reality. It’s not a map of that reality, or an image of it, or even an abstraction of it. It’s just a set of symbols set into relation to describe it. And ultimate reality can be described in multiple ways, some useful, some useless. Putting Mercury in Tifareth has some negative side effects (it screws up the order of the Neoplatonic crystal spheres which the order of the planets in the sephiroth is based on, for example) and some benefits (it creates a balanced tree in terms of binary oppositions). We can imagine hundreds of useful organizations of the sephiroth, and in fact we should remember that the current popular diagram is only one of many historical diagrams of them, and one of the oldest simply places the sephiroth as rays from a central point.

To say that the Cabala points to an ultimate reality implies that reality exists, of course. But it doesn’t say how it exists. Some people pretend that there’s a “true” cabala pointing to a “true” reality, but “absolute” doesn’t mean “objective.” It doesn’t even mean that our symbols are anything but arbitrary. We could imagine a useless Cabala, probably, but that doesn’t mean that there’s one better than all others: we can imagine a useless language, but that doesn’t mean that one language is better than another.

It’s not so much a matter, then, of unlocking ourselves from the chains in Plato’s cave and walking back, grabbing the shadow images, and saying, “Oh, look, it’s really a paper swan!” Instead, it’s more like walking back and saying, “it appears to be the sound the color blue makes when it’s cast out of tin and struck with a hammer at the speed of joy.” We don’t have eyes to see that ultimate reality. All we have are crude sketches that show some links between them, and no guarantee that what you see is what I will see. And yet, if we’re Neoplatonists, even for a few moments when we’re practicing magic, we have faith that these absolutes exist — even if we can’t know them.

Footnotes

1. http://www.sacred-texts.com/pag/gbos/gbos26.htm
2. http://www.sacred-texts.com/oto/engccxx.htm

©2010 by Patrick Dunn.
Edited by Sheta Kaey.

In my last column, I suggested that the western magical tradition can be seen as a response to Plato’s theory of Ideas. If we imagine that magic interacts with a world of more primary forms than our physical senses can detect, we are Neoplatonic. If we argue the opposite, that there is no such Ideal world, we are Aristotelian and, usually, materialists who do not do magic at all. However, even if we are Chaos Mages who suggest that magic is mostly a matter of internal belief, and that there is no world of Ideas external the mind of individual magicians, we’re still responding to Plato.

If Plato is right, and there is an essential world of Ideas, for magic to be real would mean that it must appeal to that essential world. If such an essential world exists, its essential truths must be universal. Perhaps the shape of those truths would be different, but any culture of any time that perceives that truth, will perceive the same.

For example, every culture that looks into the geometry of a circle will discover that the diameter of the circle encircles the circumference of the circle 3.14 times. If they have sufficient mathematical sophistication, they will even recognize that this number is irrational and continues an infinite number of nonrepeating digits after the decimal point. It doesn’t matter if we call this number pi, or Liu Hui’s constant, or the Archimedes Constant. It remains true, regardless of our ideas about it. We cannot legislate pi.

Even though we cannot know pi in its totality, we do not propose that there is not, for example, a ten billionth digit of pi. In fact, we know there is, and we know that it is one of ten numerals, although we may not know which one. And since there is no perfect circle in the physical world, we also know that it does not rely on any physical object whatsoever to calculate.

Similarly, if magic is real and we believe in the Platonic ideal, then we know that there should be some things about magic that are essential, and some that are incidental or contingent. Those contingent things will change, from society to society or even from practitioner to practitioner. But the essential things, for real magic, for magic that works, will remain the same. Of course, some people may do magic that doesn’t work, just as someone might try to calculate the area of a large circle using the approximation that pi = 3, and find themselves receiving an incorrect answer. At the same time, we cannot suggest that the essentials of magic boil down to a popularity contest. If a million people think that pi = 3, they will be wrong, no matter how persuasive they are. It doesn’t matter how many votes it gets: pi is not a popularity contest.

Yet we can say, with some certainty, that diverse cultural practices operating on the same principles may be pointing to an underlying essential truth to magic. Of course, they could also point, as a skeptic would argue, to an underlying flaw in the capabilities of human reason.

For my purpose I am content to point out a few of the similarities across cultures as possible pointers toward an essential truth about magic. I am not pretending to be exhaustive, and certainly there is room for argument.

Fortunately, my work is done for me by Sir James George Frazer, whose The Golden Bough (1922) was one of the most influential books of the twentieth century. Frazer pointed out several similarities between the magical practices of diverse peoples. He did not suggest, as I do, that these may point to some underlying truth about magic, but he did suppose that it represented an underlying structure of culture.

Frazer identifies two principles of the practice of sympathetic magic: the law of similarity and the law of contagion. The law of similarity says that any two items that appear the same are, in some sense, the same. This recalls Iamblichus’s practice of using symbols of divine forces to direct those forces. A hawk is Horus, because the two are similar. Similarly, gold is the sun, because they partake of similar signatures. In non-western magic, we see the same thing: a plant with a human-shaped root might stand for a person, or a mantra might be regarded as the God it invokes. Contagion suggests that any two objects in contact remain in contact. We see this practice in the Christian mass: the bread that Jesus broke is still in contact with all other bread, which is itself in contact with the flesh of Christ, and therefore is the flesh of Christ. In nonwestern practices, it’s common enough to require hair or other leavings of someone for or against whom one wishes to work magic. Frazer regards both of these ways of thinking as “mistakes,” of course, but really they represent the very basis of fundamental symbolic thought.

Symbolic thought is that ability of abstraction that allows us to say “this word ‘water’ represents this substance.” Moreover, it allows us to say “this substance in this cup is the same as the substance in the ocean; I can abstract them with the same symbol.” We find, then, that one of the roots of magical practice, the world over, is symbolic thought. Magic cannot work unless the world is abstracted into ideas.

It’s worth noting that it is the process of abstraction, not the result of the abstraction, that matters. In other words, it doesn’t matter what collection of sounds you choose to use to represent the concept of water: “water” or “agua” or “mayim.” What matters is that you do the abstraction and that you share that abstraction with others. Of course, if you say “mayim” and no one around you speaks Hebrew, you’ll be in trouble. But “agua” isn’t an inherently better word than “mayim.”

Looking back, I find it interesting that I ended up using language as my metaphor. Of course, it makes sense: what are words but symbols? And what are symbols for, if not to communicate? The importance of communication brings me to the next universal of magic: magic operates on the principle that we are communicating with something or someone outside of our physical perception. Ancient Greeks threw tablets down wells to communicate with the chthonic gods, while medieval European magicians conjured angels. Yoruba magicians make offerings to gods. Tantrikas invoke protector deities. Even our etymologies betray the magical importance of communication: evoke and invoke both contain the root “vocare,” meaning “to call,” and “enchant” means “to sing into.”

We also, in looking at magical practices the world over, find the notion of separation nearly everywhere. The Shaman is separated from society, the medieval wizard draws a circle, and the “hedgewitch” lives on the border (the hedge) of the village. This separation amounts to a cutting off not just of society but of the physical world; there is a turning inward which is in its final analysis a turning outward into the world of ideas, a mental world no less real than the physical. Physical objects are merely means to that end, symbols that are meant to stir something in the mind.

Few magical practices fail to emphasize the importance of mental preparation. Even medieval magic focused on mental preparation, although the grimoires we have seem more concerned with the proper furniture and clothes in the temple. If one looks farther, at the works of — for example — Giordano Bruno, one quickly finds that there’s an emphasis on mental training. That mental training is not simply trance work, either, although that is certainly present. There’s also training of memory and philosophical training.

It’s easy to imagine that our culture’s practices are, in essence, absolute. But obviously we must have some ways of thinking of things that are curtains on the window, and not the light itself. We must have decorative notions that are not essential to magic. It’s worth while, in looking at the commonalities, to look at what is not common to all cultures as well.

The first thing that sticks out for me is “energy.” Few cultures recognize the concept of energy as essential to magic. Certainly, Chinese magic has qi and Polynesian magic has mana, but neither of these are energy. Qi literlly means “breath,” and could probably better be translated “life force.” Force is not a synonym of energy, as any basic physics student could tell you. Similarly, mana means something a lot more like “embodied authority” than “energy.” And if you doubt that our ancient predecessors lacked a term for energy, do try to translate the term into Latin. You may find yourself stymied: the closest similarities to the word in even its mundane sense fall short of what we mean by it. The ancients did not have the concept of energy divorced from work or power (which are, again, distinct concepts).

So why do so many magicians in modern America talk about “magical energy?” It’s not ignorance and it’s not laziness. Just as the word “agua” means “water” in Spanish, the word “energy” represents, in a magical context, one of the essential characteristics of magic. It’s not some mystical energy that any physicist will ever discover in any lab, be her instruments ever so advanced. But “energy” in western magic fulfills a simple role, easy to determine if you read this signifier in context. Every time a book on magic mentions “energy,” it hastens to point out that this energy responds to intention. It’s not like electricity, or light, or heat, or kinetic energy, or anything else, because unlike those kinds of real literal energies, it pays attention to what we want. In fact, it represents a quality essential to magic: willful action.

Magic, always and everywhere, is not an accident; it is a willful action. Of course, there are accidental powers that we would classify as magical, and seem to share some similarities. For example, in Timor some people believe in a malignant power which comes out of an unsuspecting woman and does harm to the community. And of course there are spirits or other entities who might act according to their own wills. But, like fire, while it may get out of hand and do damage, magic is a technology that we use, like all technologies, deliberately.

Energy is a symbol of that intentionality. Other cultures provide other symbols. Ainu shamans sit under cold waterfalls, for example, as a sign of their willingness to suffer to heal others and speak for the dead. And we can see that mana and qi are, then, similar to the symbol of energy in that they represent, in culturally specific and different ways, the intentionality of magic.

Obviously, there may be more essential shared characteristics; it would take a book to examine them all. But we can sum it up in a simple definition: magic is an intentional and symbolic act of communication with a nonphysical reality.

If magic were only the wishful thinking of deluded people, we would not expect it to share any similarities across culture. And we can expect the trappings to differ, as long as the essence remains the same, just as we can expect the name of “pi” to change from culture to culture, while its value remains the same. At the same time, one could argue that magic is delusion, but that delusion has some essential quality, and so shares similarities from culture to culture. This possibility, while perhaps appealing to skeptics, would be hardly any less amazing than magic itself. Both possibilities point toward some essential quality of the human mind, or perhaps of consciousness itself.

©2009 by Patrick Dunn.
Edited by Sheta Kaey.

If you’ve read much of my writing, either online or in books (especially DIY Totemism), you’ll know that I have a tendency to advocate working with totems other than the Big, Impressive, North American Birds and Mammals (BINABM) that so often show up in totem animal dictionaries. I’ve worked with extinct totems, microscopic ones, and even the totems of “food” animals that we commonly think of only in terms of eating their flesh. And I’ve done more work, since starting on a specifically shamanic path, with the totems of local species.

However, I do believe there is a certain cultural value to the BINABM. As I’ve developed therioshamanism, my own non-indigenous, non-core shamanic path, I’ve paid close attention to how my cultural context — white, middle-class, college-educated American — has affected my approach to shamanic practice. And I’ve also paid attention to how other shamans in my culture, core shamans and otherwise, are informed by that culture.

The animals that are the most common totems in a given culture are animals that are important to the people of that culture. In indigenous cultures, these are often the animals who are most commonly hunted for food and other resources, though this is not universal. In our culture, we actually often vilify the domesticated animals we rely on for food and resources, and even the wildlife we hunt is seen less as a living being, and more as a rack of antlers to be turned into a trophy of one’s supposed prowess. (What sort of prowess may be left to the imagination.)

The animals that are valued as totems in this culture are generally the BINABM. They’re big and impressive, noticeable and showy, and generally are strong (and usually predatory). These limitations have often been criticized, and I’ve been a frequent critic. It’s not that these animals don’t deserve attention, but there are others besides the few dozen BINABM that keep showing up in the dictionaries. However, when trying to construct a cultural shamanism in a culture that doesn’t really have a cohesive shamanic path, you have to meet the culture where it is.

By this I mean we’re going to introduce shamanism into a culture that, while it may be influenced by cultures that have had some form of shamanism, has never had a shamanism of its own, at least not recognized as such. Animism really isn’t a central, recognized part of what is thought to be mainstream American culture. This is why I sometimes question the wisdom of trying to be “a shaman” in this culture, at least if the goal is to try to work for people besides white middle-class New Agers with a lot of money to throw around. There are a lot of American demographics where that just won’t fly.

But besides that, we can be pretty confident that a lot of the wild animals that are valued by this culture are also the most common totems in this culture — Wolf, Brown Bear, Eagle, etc. So if we’re going to weave any sort of animistic practices, whether shamanism or otherwise, into the culture at large — or at least connect with more individual people — then the BINABM can be an excellent gateway, as it were. The charismatic megafauna already do their part to introduce concepts of ecological preservation to people who might not otherwise even think of themselves as environmentalists, so why can’t the BINABM function in a similar way with animism and spirituality in general?

I honestly think this is a big reason why, even with my work with lesser-known totems, as I’ve become more involved in shamanism I’ve had more of the BINABM wanting to work with me more deeply. A lot of my work is going to be with people who may not consider themselves animistic in any sense, but who could still benefit from, say, the imagery of animals, and who may find the BINABM to be familiar and comfortable due to cultural connections. I have, for example, a deck of Susie Green’s Animal Messages deck that I’ll have available as an icebreaker once I start my counseling practice — if a client is having a hard time getting started talking, I can have them pick a card out of the deck and then tell me why they feel like that animal that day. The deck is mainly BINABM, which should help more than a deck of obscure animals a client may not know how to connect to.

So please don’t think I dislike the BINABM. They definitely have a place, and I’ve become more aware of that in a cultural sense. It’ll be interesting to see how this develops.

©2009 by Lupa.
Edited by Sheta Kaey.

Lupa is the author of Fang and Fur, Blood and Bone: A Primal Guide to Animal Magic, A Field Guide to Otherkin, and co-author of Kink Magic, among other works. You can read her blog at http://therioshamanism.com and see her website at http://www.thegreenwolf.com.

Akashic Record

(Yoga, Theosophy) A term invented and popularized by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky. The idea is that the Akasha is a thought substance which can be imprinted by experience, making it possible to retrieve otherwise inaccessible information from the past, such as a person’s past life. This is remarkably close idea to the concept of Jung’s Universal Unconscious and may in fact be a reference to the same phenomena.

Aponia

(Gnostic) Literally, “Unreason.” The act of misusing thought.

Child

(Alchemy) A naked child symbolizes the perfect intelligence, the innocent soul. In alchemy and in magical tomes, the child represents the Union of Opposites. A crowned child or child clothed in purple robes signifies Salt or the Philosopher’s Stone.

Descriptive Meaning

(Philosophy) A statements or declaration whose meaning is shown in terms of reporting or describing actual or possible facts have descriptive meaning. Compare to Emotive Meaning.

Egg

(Alchemy) The egg represents the hermetically sealed vessel of creation. In alchemy, corked retorts, coffins, and sepulchers represent the same principles.

Gold

(Alchemy) The most perfect of all the metals, gold in ages past represented the perfection of all matter on any level, including that of the mind, spirit, and soul. The Sun is often used to hint to gold.

Maggid

(Qabalah) Hebrew Master or teacher. Synonymous with the Holy Guardian Angel, Higher Self, etc.

Mercury

(Alchemy, Roman mythology) The smallest of the inner planets and the one nearest the sun. The Roman god of pranks, thievery and commerce, which says something of how Romans conducted their business affairs. Called Hermes by the Greeks, Mercury is the messenger for the other gods, as well as being the god of science and travel, and patron saint of athletes. He is typically represented as a young man wearing a winged helmet and sandals and holding a caduceus. Mercury is also a heavy, metallic silver poisonous element that is liquid at room temperature. Often used in scientific instruments. Also called also quicksilver, alchemists acquired it by roasting cinnabar (mercury sulfide). The mercury would sweat out of the rocks and drip down where it could be collected. When mixed with other metals, liquid mercury has a tendency to bond with them and develop amalgams. These properties seemed to make mercury the master of duality in solid and liquid states; earth and heaven; life and death, and the Above and Below.

Philosophy of Science

(Philosophy) The branch of philosophy which scrutinizes the nature and results of scientific inquiry. Central questions include: Do scientist describe reality or just appearances? Can we have good reason to believe in the existence of unobservable entities (e.g. quarks)? What happens when one scientific theory replaces an older theory?

Ruach ha Kodesh

(Qabalah) Hebrew The child of the Supernals, she is the unmanifested essence that lingers like a curtain beneath her parents. Marked on the Tree of Life by the illusive, non-Sephirah Daath, or Knowledge. It is a portal through which the Absolute may enter to intervene directly with existence. Mystic Christians think of Daath as The Holy Spirit.

©2009 by Gerald del Campo.
Edited by Sheta Kaey.

Gerald del Campo has authored three books on the subject of Thelema: A Heretic’s Guide to Thelema, New Aeon Magick: Thelema Without Tears, and New Aeon English Qabalah Revealed. He is a photographer, musician and CEO for the Order of Thelemic Knights, the first Thelemic charitable organization. You can visit his blog at http://solis93.livejournal.com and his websites at http://thelemicknights.org and http://egoandtheids.com. Gerald serves as Senior Managing Editor of Rending the Veil.

Paganism is rife with those who deem themselves helpers of departed souls “trapped” in some earthly desire or other and reluctant to move on. I cringe every time I hear or read the words “into the light,” unless I am watching Poltergeist. These eager ghost hunters frequent cemeteries and old buildings, seeking spirits to usher into the great beyond, as if any human being alive can possibly know more of the spirit world and spirit daily affairs than the spirits do. This time of year, the month of October in particular, is the worst of all.

We’ve all heard at least one person remark on the thinning of the veil around Halloween, how spirits otherwise (reputedly) unreachable become much more chatty and expect to be served dinner on All Hallow’s Eve. While some have ancestral relationships that incorporate this tradition, the bulk of those yammering on about the veil thinning have no idea what they’re on about. And yet there is evidence that spirit communication is at an all time high, at least in the modern era. Certainly my work has in the last decade steadily uncovered more and more people who are either very convincing to my skeptical viewpoint or else are having genuine experiences with those who’ve “passed on.”

The 1990s saw the peak of the phenomenon of trance channeling, during which the medium or psychic (such words leave a bad taste in my mouth) gives up control of the body to his or her spirit guide so that the spirit can speak directly to the audience (perhaps of one, or perhaps of a thousand, depending upon the intensity of — spirit or human — desire for attention and revenue). While this sort of relationship is still easy enough to find, it’s being overshadowed by the much more commonplace and much more blasé method of conscious channeling, wherein the medium or human partner simply allows the spirit to speak without giving up control of his or her faculties. I’ve done both, and while it can be cool to gather the evidence that a trance channeling session can provide, there’s a lot to be said for being a conscious partner. You remember a lot more, for one thing.

A little .pdf book called Thinning of the Veil: A Record of Experience by Mary Bruce Wallace has a few points to make on this regard. While I haven’t had a chance to read the entire book, I can appreciate what she has to say on channeling:

“I felt from the very first perfectly normal, not losing consciousness in any way, but I could not guess what the next word would be until I had heard it. ‘We just give you one word at a time, and then wait to see if you have grasped it,’ said my friend.

“The voice seemed to speak not to my outer ear but to my soul-ear, and I heard every intonation of it, suiting the nature of the thought, tender, grave, encouraging, hopeful, joyous; every human emotion that is true and beautiful seemed expressed in tones more musical than any outward voice can reach.”

This book was published in 1919. Ms. Wallace writes at length on the relationship between herself and her spirit teacher. A single, unexpected encounter with a departed friend led to meeting this teacher, and then a floodgate opened and she began to see angels as well as other departed souls. Exhibiting a much more grounded approach to these experiences and recording them without coloring her encounters with more modern garbage such as, “We’ve lived 10,000 lifetimes together and he loves me more than anyone has ever been loved before [a sentiment I've actually heard before],” her prose is a breath of fresh air from a time we can no longer relate to. As children of the Information Age, our attention spans are minuscule, and our capacity for reason not much bigger. Mediums, shamans and psychics, or just sensitive people as I prefer to be called, would do well to emulate our cultural ancestors, such as Ms. Wallace and Ida Craddock.

It’s the opinion of Ms. Wallace, and I fully agree, that the veil is thinning — oh yes, but it’s not restricted to the seasons of Samhain and Beltane. The thinning of the veil is a progression, a gradual change year after year that allows normal, ordinary people to encounter spirits of various ilk on a daily basis. I’m constantly receiving emails and requests for help from people who’ve had their first encounters with spirits and don’t know what to do. But the one thing the bulk of them have in common is that they’re enraptured and want to learn to strengthen and continue this contact. Only paranoid religious fanatics tend to see these spirits as dangerous or demonic.

The veil is thinning. It’ll still be thinning in November, in February, in August, in 2012 (and 2012 — that’s a bitch-fest for another day). If you haven’t had an unexpected encounter with a spirit yet, odds are you will. Just do us all a favor, and don’t lose your rational mind in the experience.

©2009 by Sheta Kaey

Agape

(Ecclesiastic) Greek αγαπη Unconditional love. Godly love. The love feast of the primitive Christians, being a meal partaken in connection with the communion. Originally a Hebrew funerary ceremony during which wine and milk were poured into the earth over the grave, and food was passed in to the corpse through a hole in the tomb.

Agnoia

(Gnostic) Literally “ignorance,” or the act of not paying attention.

Book of Gospels

(Ecclesiastic) Or “Black Book.” A book containing all the church’s readings for the year. It can be ceremonially carried into the temple as part of the entrance procession or put in a special place before the celebration begins.

Circle

The circle is symbolic of unity, the One Mind of God. According to Saint Augustine and a host of others, God is a circle whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere.

Collective

(Psychology) Psychic contents of the mind that belongs not to one individual but to a society, a people or the human race in general.

Desert religions

(General religious usage) Typically refers to Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and Zoroastrianism.

Equivocation

(Logic) A type of fallacy where an ambiguity arises because a term or phrase has been used in two different senses within the one argument. For example: “The state has a food stamp fund designed to meet the needs of the poor. My friend says that I am one of the poorest people he has ever known so I think that I should receive a scholarship.”

Karma yoga

(Yoga) Sanskrit Gives mastery over activity, and leads to the control of powers of action.

Mantra yoga

(Yoga) Sanskrit Gives mastery over sound, and leads to the control of the powers of sound vibrations.

Stole

(Ecclesiastic) A vestment worn around the neck to signify that the priest is celebrating one of the Sacraments.

©2009 by Gerald del Campo
Edited by Sheta Kaey

Gerald del Campo is the author of A Heretic’s Guide to Thelema, New Aeon Magick: Thelema Without Tears, and New Aeon English Qabalah Revealed, among other works. You can visit his blog at http://solis93.livejournal.com and his website at http://thelemicknights.org. Gerald serves as Senior Managing Editor of Rending the Veil.

Over on my LiveJournal, I have a significant number of furries on my friend list; I’m not a furry myself, but I enjoy the artwork folks post, and we tend to have other things in common as well. (Lots of pagan furs, for one thing!) Something that got posted a few weeks back was some controversy over “soft taxidermy.” Basically, there are a handful of artists in the furry community who take whole pelts and stuff them like plush toys. (There are also apparently people who stick bows and other cutesy things on them, but I haven’t yet seen these pics.)

This has caused somewhat of an uproar, even among folks I know who have various hides, bones and other animal parts in their possession. Even folks who are okay with traditional taxidermy have found the real-fur plushies to be creepy, especially as they sometimes seem to be treated like toys (as though being a trophy is any better . . ?). And it’s brought about one of my periodic assessments of my own use of animal parts in my spirituality and artwork.

For those who don’t know, for over a decade I have been creating ritual tools and other artwork from hides, bones, feathers and other animal remains. It’s been an integral part of my spiritual practice because an animist, as I work with the spirits of the animals who once wore those remains. And it’s something I’ve always struggled with, ethically speaking, because I know and understand that by buying some of the things that I do, I’m directly supporting the fur industry and the deaths of numerous animals. Granted, I also support the deaths of animals by eating meat, though that’s due in part to a metabolic condition in which I need to have meat protein to maintain my health.

I always have a few options to choose from when I do this periodic questioning:

• Keep doing what I’m doing: Obviously, this has been my choice up to this point. When I talk to the spirits of the animals themselves, they express appreciation that someone has actually taken the time to work with their remains in a respectful manner. This is especially true of things I’ve “rescued,” such as old fur coats and taxidermy mounts. What I create is intended to be respected in a spiritual manner, to include the gravity of the fact that yes, these were once living beings, and they didn’t have to die this way. I really ought to emphasize that latter part more.
• Only use secondhand and found animal parts: In some ways, this would be a more ethical choice, because there’d be less of a direct impact overall, and I’d still be recycling. Honestly, the majority of what I work with is either old coats and other reclaimed remains, or things that other people have gotten rid of. I actually buy very little of anything new. But still, there are animal parts that I do buy new, and I do own up to that.
• Use up what I have, and then quit: I have a lot of things I saved up over the years. When I lived in Pittsburgh, I went to one of two huge flea markets on a daily basis, and almost never came home empty-handed. Plus I do a lot of barter, and occasionally people will just give me furs and other things that they don’t know what to do with because they figure I can make something neat out of them. So I’d still have enough to keep me busy for quite some time.
• Quit entirely: Or I could just sell off everything I have that can’t be safely buried (hides, for example, are generally tanned with nasty chemicals that we don’t need concentrated in the soil).

But the thing is — and this is the selfish part, and perhaps the biggest motivator — I enjoy my artwork. I can’t paint worth a crap, nor can I draw, or sculpt. This is really the only visual medium that I’m any good at. It’s one of my biggest stress-relievers, and it’s also a small stream of income for me. But mostly it’s the enjoyment I get out of it.

Also, it is a significant part of my spirituality, and has been since just about the beginning of my paganism over a decade ago. I have some personal skins and bones that are in my own set of ritual tools, and I work with those spirits as well as their corresponding totems on a regular basis — from the skins I dance in, to my horse hide drum, to the bear skull rattle, and then some. Maybe it’s all in my head (and maybe all spirituality is wholly subjective and used to justify personal preferences), but the spirits enjoy working with me as much as I enjoy working with them. When I dance a skin, it gives its spirit the chance to ride my body. When I create something out of remains that would have ended up incinerated or left to hang on a wall as a trophy, the spirit gets a chance to be a part of someone else’s practice — or maybe a participant thereof.

Yet I do realize the physical, real-world implications of what I do. Which is why I still mostly stick to second-hand remains, and why I donate a portion of the money I make from artwork sales to the Defenders of Wildlife and other nonprofits. I know that none of these choices will have as much of an impact as if I were to quit entirely. But I have my reasons for continuing, and I follow those reasons with the understanding of the consequences.

I’m not going to go and criticize the soft taxidermists, or the people who wear fox and coyote tails as a fashion statement, or those who wear fur coats, because in the end I know that I don’t have room to talk. My spiritual and personal reasons for what I do don’t make me a better person for it. But they do add value to my life, and I balance that out with the knowledge of the impact of my choices.

©2009 by Lupa
Edited by Sheta Kaey

Lupa is the author of Fang and Fur, Blood and Bone: A Primal Guide to Animal Magic, A Field Guide to Otherkin, and co-author of Kink Magic, among other works. You can read her blog at http://therioshamanism.com and see her website at http://www.thegreenwolf.com.

Note: This is my last column for the Occult Author Spotlight. While there are many other authors to discuss and I hope someone will take over and write about those authors, the demands of several of my own ventures as well as some changes in my spiritual life prohibit me from continuing.

I was first introduced to Bill Whitcomb’s work when a friend bought me The Magician’s Companion for my birthday one year. I immediately saw the usefulness of this book as a compendium of information about various magical systems, symbols, archetypes and other information that could prove useful if you needed to quickly get information on a particular subject within occultism. I’ve used it on a few different occasions to improve the efficacy of my works, and it remains a book I consult on a regular basis. The book looks at both western and eastern systems of magic and discusses succinctly the elements of those systems, while also providing reading lists for people who would like to go more in depth with the materials. Another added benefit is that Whitcomb lists the systems by their use of numbers, so you’ll see a few systems with the number seven. Reading through the entire book can be quite novel and useful.

I met Bill shortly after I moved to Portland and became good friends with him. During that process, I learned about his second book The Magician’s Reflection, which had gone out of print some time ago and didn’t look like it would come back into print from the original publisher. With some wheedling on my part, he eventually got the rights back and decided to republish that book with Megalithica books.

The Magician’s Reflection is an instruction book in how to create your symbol system for magic, with an encyclopedia of possible choices you could make for that. Naturally you shouldn’t limit yourself to what is presented in the book, but the various examples that Whitcomb provides can provide useful inspiration as you develop your own system of magic. Whitcomb also includes the alphabet of dreams, a magical language with its own cipher, and an appendix about a system of time magic called Nar, written by a friend of his, which utilizes different patterns and colors to help a person manipulate possibilities in time. Both the alphabet of dreams and Nar provide some intriguing ideas about where a unique system of magic can be created and developed. The Magician’s Reflection provides you your own key for doing that as well.

Bill is currently working on the Dream Manual, which is a book with art and some phrases to be used for meditational purposes. If you go to his website you can learn more about this project. He and I are working on another book together, which is a best practices of magic book. It’s still very much in the rough draft phase, but will be available at some point in the near future.

Recommended Reading

• Whitcomb, Bill. (1993). The Magician’s Companion: A Practical and Encyclopedic Guide to Magical and Religious Symbolism. St. Paul: Llewellyn Publications.
• Whitcomb, Bill. (2008). The Magician’s Reflection. Stafford: Megalithica Books.

©2009 by Taylor Ellwood
Edited by Sheta Kaey

I’m pleased to offer myself as a regular columnist on these august though entirely electronic pages. As those who have read my books or know me personally know, I’m an academic through and through, and so my conversations have a tendency to turn to lectures, and my dinner parties often become seminars. This column therefore will play to my strengths. My goal, ultimately, is to trace the connections between occult practice and schools of academic thought. I’m hoping to make this less boring than it sounds on its face, and at the same time offer something practical that the working occultist can take away.

It’s fitting that this first column begin at the beginning, the foundation of most Western occultism. Many people will tell you that Western occultism began in Egypt, and even the ancients thought so. But really, most of western occultism began in a cave, and not even a real cave but an allegorical one.

Socrates was perhaps the first professor. He liked to walk around and profess his own innocence and ignorance, and ask probing questions that quickly revealed that everyone around him was just as ignorant. He was eventually asked to kill himself, possibly because he was tedious at curriculum committee meetings. One of his students, Aristocles, a jock who no doubt offered a letter from his wrestling coach every other Friday excusing him from class, ended up rising to the top and writing quite a few books of his own. We know him by his wrestling nickname: “Fatty,” or, in Greek, “Plato.”

Now, Fatty had a problem, aside from an embarrassing nickname. He couldn’t figure out perception. It was common knowledge, of course, that we perceived the world by engaging it with our senses, but Plato had learned from his old professor to question common knowledge. And in doing so, he dug up a few problems that have plagued philosophy ever since. For one thing, he realized, we can’t really see the whole of anything we look at, touch, taste, or smell. We get only a momentary perception. Sure, we could turn a pot over and over in our hands really fast, but how do we know that the side away from us doesn’t turn another color, or even disappear entirely? Common sense, of course, but how do we come by that common sense, and how is it that everyone has it?

Plato said, or rather reported that his teacher said, Imagine a cave. In it, you are chained next to a group of like people, all facing a wall. You grew up in this cave, chained up thus, and no, Xenophon, it doesn’t matter how that happened, just shut up and listen. Now, behind you is a big fire, and people walk between you and the fire holding objects. But you are chained such that you cannot see behind you, so all you see are shadows. Now, being raised in this cave, all you know of the shape called “elephant” or “horseshoe” or “vase” are the shadow shapes on the wall, and if you could be freed and look suddenly at the real thing, you would be amazed that it looked as it did, not to mention how they fit an elephant into the cave.

This allegory describes perception. We seem to see things, but really we see their shadow, and another, more perfect world than this contains those real items. So we know that the pot continues around to the other side not because we can perceive that it does, but because we remember the ideal pot, the Form of pots, of which all other pots are mere shadows. And that’s how we can also recognize the pot-ness of a squat pot, a tall pot, a wide pot, a purple pot, and a blue pot. We know that they are all pots because, just like the shadows on the wall, much depends upon how we look upon that ideal.

Plato had a student of his own, Aristotle, who threw the whole thing into the soup by saying that there was no such perfect, ideal world. Aristotle argued that we know the Form of pots only because we have seen a heck of a lot of pots and called them all “pot.”

Thus began the epistemological (meaning, the study of knowledge) split between magic and what would eventually become empiricism. But I’ve written about that before, and so will let it go for now.

Aristotle opened a school and wrote some deeply influential books of his own, and eventually we hit two interesting fellows who founded much of what we now imagine to be magic. Conveniently, these two figures stand as symbols for two paths of magic, two ways of knowing the unseen, ideal world. We call them “Neoplatonists,” because they began with Plato’s idea that there was such an ideal world, a world of Forms, and pushed it to its natural edge: if such a world existed, and we could perceive it, could we also perhaps interact with it? Could we, in fact, use it to change this world? Could we reach behind us, as it were, and grab that elephant and yank it around, so that we could make its shadow in this world dance?

Plotinus answered, essentially, in the negative. That ideal world was perfect, and perfection by its very nature cannot change. But what we could do, according to Plotinus, is change ourselves to rise up to that world, and thus gain a clearer image of ultimate reality. If we understood what was going behind us, we could manipulate things in this world of shadows more sagaciously.

For Plotinus, and his student Porphyry, the way to do this consisted of contemplation. Sadly, we lack descriptions of what to contemplate specifically, but we can reconstruct some of it by understanding what he taught. He taught that all reality, this world of shadows, was an emanation from a perfect reality. The highest perfect reality was the One. This One was beyond all characteristics, because all characteristics imply their opposite. If the One is big, then it’s not small and therefore not perfect — by which he meant something closer to “complete.” It has to be beyond bigness or smallness. From the One comes the Nous, or Mind. This is the first thing that can be given characteristics, and the characteristic it has is “goodness.” From Mind comes the rest of the world of shadows in a successive series or ladder of emanations.

This contemplative approach survives in a lot of practices we might regard as Eastern. One contemplation, in the spirit of Plotinus and Porphyry, would be to take one’s perception of oneself and begin deleting things. For example, try to remove your sense of physical position by sitting very still. Then try to remove your emotional feelings. Then abandon mental activity and remain as pure awareness. In other words, we climb the ladder of emanations back upward to the One.

We also see Plotinus’ influence in the contemporary understanding of the Qabala, and there’s some convincing evidence that the Qabala was Neoplatonic before it was strictly Jewish. Whether you believe that or not, it cannot be denied that a ladder of emanations really does describe most understandings of the sephiroth. And the practices of traditional Qabala — recitation of names, permutation of letters, and so on — smack of the contemplative practices of Plotinus.

On the other end of the teeter totter we have Iamblichus, one of Porphyry’s students, who suggested that contemplation was fine and good, but also difficult and impractical. Most people, he said, are so engrossed in the shadows that they simply can’t get anywhere with contemplation; it’s like trying to grow eyes in the back of your head. Better, he suggested, to turn around, and the way we do that is through ritual action. That ritual action, of course, was accompanied by contemplation, but contemplation alone could never apprehend what was not rational. If you tried the previous contemplation, you may have found it incredibly difficult; Iamblichus would say, “exactly.” Ritual provided an easier way.

Ritual action for Iamblichus consisted of recognizing the symbolic relationship between ideas. After all, if we can recognize a picture of a pot as a pot, it must be partaking of some bit of pot-ness from the world of ideas. If we manipulate this symbolic image, we can begin to train our minds to perceive and perhaps manipulate the ideal Form as well. How this worked exactly we don’t really know, but certain objects were thought to embody the ideal more intensely than other objects, just as a profile of an elephant is easier to recognize in a shadow. These objects or symbols included such things as the tools of ritual sacrifice, as well as — probably — various objects held sacred to deities. By ritually manipulating these objects, one could gain a clearer view of the ideal world.

A ritual in the style of Iamblichus might involve a series of ritual sacrifices of bread or wheat, each of which represents a return of some faculty to the One. So we might symbolically enact a sacrifice of our passions so that we can more easily contemplate the One as an Ideal without passions. Of course, we don’t know exactly what Iamblichus’s rituals looked like, but we can imagine that they looked quite a lot like the ordinary religious rituals of the time, but accompanied with appropriate contemplations.

Now, of course, most occultists mix these two approaches, the contemplative and the ritual. But the old argument between the two schools still exists. Some contemplatives talk scornfully of rituals as “crutches,” for example, an idea that might well have come out of Porphyry. And even those occultists who do not profess an ideal world of forms still engage in ritual actions in which a concrete object (the athame, say) represents a mental idea (will, or defense). Finally, most occultists will decry mindless ritual for ritual’s sake. We are to remember, as Iamblichus would argue, that every ritual action is an action in the world of Ideas as well.

No matter which approach you take to magic, whether you regard it as a contemplative practice or a ritual one, you are — if you’re involved in the western magical tradition — a Neoplatonist. Of course, chaos magicians might argue that there is no actual world of ideals, and a postmodern magician might argue that ideals are just clumps of self-referential symbols, and not meanings in themselves. Yet every school of western magic must situate itself in regards to Neoplatonism; they must begin by affirming or denying the central insights of that chubby wrestler.

The root of the whole endeavor of magic is in Plato, as is the root of all Western philosophy. Magic, then, rather than being a fringe effort of a few strange men and women, is a branch of philosophy itself, with its own epistemological and ontological claims. We diverged from philosophy in the same way that chemistry and alchemy diverged, or where mathematics and engineering diverged. Where philosophy began to dedicate itself to the analysis of ideas, we began to learn the practical arts of manipulating them. In future columns, I hope to explore some of those issues of knowledge and being, with an eye toward the practical implications of the philosophical positions we take.

©2009 by Patrick Dunn
Edited by Sheta Kaey

Agnosia

(Gnosticism) The state of not having insight or Gnosis. This is the root for the word “agnostic,” also meaning a person who does not have Gnosis.

Barbelos

(Gnosticism) A very confusing concept due to plethora of ways it has been used. It is masculine gender, but is used to stand for Sophia as a woman who is “the first male virgin.” Sophia has hermaphroditic associations. It is the highest or lowest form of Sophia depending on the myth, with Zoe being its countercharge.

Ceration

(Alchemy) The alchemical Fermentation process in which a waxy substance (the ferment) flows from the putrefied matter. This substance is forerunner of the Stone.

Mysticism

(Religion, magick) Immediate consciousness of the transcendent or ultimate reality or God. A mental exercise designed to still the mind so that it is able to experience the highest and most abstract conception of Godhead. Traditional forms of mysticism can be found in the The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola and the The Spiritual Guide of Miguel Molinos, as well as in many of the writings of Sufism, Yoga, Buddhism, Zen, and Taoism. Unorthodox forms can be found in Gnosticism and the Hermetic Qabalah, etc.

Personal Unconscious

(Psychology) Opposite of Collective Unconscious. It includes forgotten dreams and memories, shocking and unbearable ideas (purposely oppressed), and perceptions not yet accessible for consciousness.

Prana

(Yoga) The breath is seen as one of the primary source of life-giving energies or forces of the universe. Similar to the Chinese concept of Chi.

Self

(Psychology) The archetype of personal totality and the governing nucleus of the psyche, and that influence that surpasses the ego.

Trituration

(Alchemy) To grind or pulverize a solid into a powder with a mortar and pestle.

Wine

(Alchemy, Ecclesiastic) A symbol to allude to the process of Fermentation and the spiritualization of matter. In Eucharistic religious ceremonies, wine is symbolic of the Blood of God by virtue of Transubstantiation. See Transubstantiation.

Yechidah

(Qabalah) Hebrew The level of the soul that connects the individual to God. The most ephemeral level of the soul, corresponding to Kether.

Gerald del Campo is the author of A Heretic’s Guide to Thelema, New Aeon Magick: Thelema Without Tears, and New Aeon English Qabalah Revealed, among other works. You can visit his blog at http://solis93.livejournal.com and his website at http://thelemicknights.org. Gerald serves as Senior Managing Editor of Rending the Veil.

©2009 Gerald del Campo
Edited by Sheta Kaey

Gerald del Campo is the author of A Heretic’s Guide to Thelema, New Aeon Magick: Thelema Without Tears, and New Aeon English Qabalah Revealed, among other works. You can visit his blog at http://solis93.livejournal.com and his website at http://thelemicknights.org. Gerald serves as Senior Managing Editor of Rending the Veil.

I first met Isaac Bonewits a few years ago at the Fall Gathering of the Tribes in West Virginia. It was quite interesting to talk with him and it was at that time that I was introduced to his work. Bonewits has been involved in the occult since the 1960s. He’s the only person to have graduated from a university with a degree in magic. Bonewits has founded and belonged to various pagan magical organizations, as well as having written a number of books on paganism and magic.

My familiarity with Bonewits’ work has focused on four books by him: Real Magic: An Introductory Treatise on the Basic Principles of Yellow Magic, Authentic Thaumaturgy, Bonewits’s Essential Guide to Witchcraft and Wicca, and Real Energy: Systems, Spirits, And Substances to Heal, Change, And Grow, which was co-written by his wife Phaedra Bonewits. Bonewits has written other books as well (see below). What I’ve most enjoyed about his work, beyond the sense of humor, is the attention to detail Bonewits provides in his works, as well as his ability to explain different tangents and concepts. Real Magic, in particular, is one of the first attempts I’ve seen to provide a coherent set of laws which explains how magic works.

I recommend Bonewits’ books for the detail and variety, but also because he maintains a rigorous academic approach to his works. Consequently, it is very easy to trace where he got his sources from, which can provide additional places of research and reading for people who are interested.

His website is http://www.neopagan.net.

Bibliography

• Real Magic: An Introductory Treatise on the Basic Principles of Yellow Magic. (1972, 1979, 1989) Weiser Books
• Authentic Thaumaturgy. (1978, 1998) Steve Jackson Games
• Rites of Worship: A Neopagan Approach. (2003) Earth Religions Press
• Witchcraft: A Concise Guide or Which Witch Is Which?. (2003) Earth Religions Press
• The Pagan Man: Priests, Warriors, Hunters, and Drummers. (2005) Citadel
• Bonewits’s Essential Guide to Witchcraft and Wicca. (2006) Citadel
• Bonewits’s Essential Guide to Druidism. (2006) Citadel
• Real Energy: Systems, Spirits, And Substances to Heal, Change, And Grow. (2007) New Leaf. Co-authored with Phaedra Bonewits.
• Neopagan Rites: A Guide to Creating Public Rituals that Work. (2007) Llewellyn

Taylor Ellwood is the author of Space/Time Magic, Inner Alchemy: Energy Work and the Magic of the Body, and Pop Culture Magick, among other works. You can visit his blog at http://magicalexperiments.wordpress.com/ and his website at http://www.thegreenwolf.com/.

©2009 Taylor Ellwood
Edited by Sheta Kaey

I had a nightmare last night — about bugs. Scorpions, spiders, biting flies, centipedes, and other creepy-crawlies that could potentially do damage to the soft flesh wrapping my endoskeleton. (Why couldn’t it have been butterflies? Or snails?)

Back when I was a kid, I spent countless days when the weather was warm overturning rocks to catch various insects and other bugs. I walked through the grass scaring up grasshoppers, and while I never touched spiders, I did marvel at them, particularly the big, fat yellow and black garden spiders in their webs with the little zigzag. I had no fear in handling what I found, as long as it wasn’t poisonous. However, as I got older and more detached from the natural world through circumstance, I found myself picking up the common revulsion associated with bugs. Instead of being wowed by the structure of an arthropod’s body, I found the prickly, sharp sensation of the exoskeleton to be unnerving at the very least. Eventually I found myself yelping in fear at the sight of a bug on the floor, no matter what it was. (To be fair, I got startled as a child whenever I found bugs in the closet, or under the bed, or wherever else they hid themselves in the house — but it wasn’t as bad a reaction!)

I find myself regretting this change in my behavior. While I’m still quite comfortable with the warm-and-cuddly animals (and even the cool and scaly ones), the creepy-crawlies still bother me to a degree they didn’t used to. As I’ve become a grown-up and, unfortunately, lost some of the seemingly easy connection to Nature that I had as a child, my discomfort with the “icky” things in Nature has grown. Like most Americans, I’ve become antagonistic towards those parts of Nature that don’t fit my comfort level.

There’s a lesson in all of this, of course. A large part of why I became a neopagan in the first place was to reconnect with Nature, to try to rebuild what I lost somewhere in my teens. For years I focused mainly on the abstractions, the symbols, the nice, safe, distant representations. Once I began practicing (neo)shamanism a couple of years ago, though, I could no longer distance myself, and was in fact encouraged to dig in to the earthy, raw bits of Nature as much as I could. It’s been good for me — I’ve come to appreciate the joys of compost as I’ve gardened, and I’m more liable to let myself go out and get muddy in the wetlands near my home. But I still have issues with the bugs, and that’s who I need to be learning from.

Some people would try to categorize the totems of these species as “shadow totems,” totems which scare us and, through that fear, teach us about things we may not want to face. If that’s the case, then I have a lot of shadow totems to work with! However, this is a complex situation. It’s not just a matter of “I don’t want to get my clothes dirty” or “EEEEK! SOMETHING JUST LANDED ON ME!” It’s an overarching detachment from the natural world, through my perception of it, as well as the decrease in the amount of time I’ve spent in it.

I can shut myself away from lions, tigers and bears, and so forth. However, the Little Ones won’t let me forget that, even in my nice, warm home, I’m part of Nature. From the tiny brown ants that persist in poking into the kitchen and garage (and occasionally the bathroom), to the moths that attempt to gain access to the pantry, to the wandering spiders who find shelter and food in the corners of my home when it rains, they all let me know that there’s no place to go where Nature doesn’t touch me. If it weren’t those critters that were reminding me, it would be the tiny beings in my digestive system, or the food that I eat. It just so happens that the creepy-crawlies are the ones who make the biggest impact, for all their size, right now.

And I write this as I have a healing spider bite on the inside of my left elbow, probably sustained while I slept. (There was no dead spider in the bed, so I’m guessing it got away!) I’ve been thinking about the creepy-crawlies in the couple of weeks since that happened, because if nothing else the bite made it clear that I do have to live with their existence, even in the comfort of my own home. This is my decision on how to deal with it, rather than the typical “GET OUT THE BUG BOMB!” reaction that most Americans would have.

I am a natural being; I am a mammal. I eat, I breathe, I drink, and I live in an environment populated by numerous other beings, large and small. They don’t exist according to my convenience, and the creepy-crawlies especially remind me of that. Time for me to remember that lesson.

Lupa is the author of Fang and Fur, Blood and Bone: A Primal Guide to Animal Magic, A Field Guide to Otherkin, and co-author of Kink Magic, among other works. You can read her blog at http://therioshamanism.com and see her website at http://www.thegreenwolf.com.

©2009 Lupa
Edited by Sheta Kaey

Air

(Alchemy) One of the Four Elements of alchemy believed to carry the archetypal properties of spirit into the visible world. It is linked to the process of Separation and corresponds to the metal Iron.

Cassock

(Ecclesiastic) A full-length gown with sleeves and collar worn priests, bishops and helpers.

Nephesh

(Qabalah) Hebrew The animal soul that corresponds to animal/ vegetable levels of consciousness. It is said to reside at the level of Yesod and Malkuth. It is mostly corresponds with the automatic bodily functions and ego. Also known as the automatic consciousness. This body does not survive death, as does the Ruach and Neshama. This really upsets people who practice Astral Travel as a way to cheat death, since the Astral Body is a projection of the Nephesh.

Neschama

(Qabalah) Hebrew Corresponds to the purest aspirations of the soul and the Soul itself and corresponds to Binah on the Tree of Life. It is where the individual Soul merges with the Oneness or God. From this plane we may approach the collective unconscious. The Neschama is composed of three parts: Yechidah, Chiah, and Neschama.

Omnipotence

(General religious, Philosophy) Omnipotence is all-powerfulness. Many religions view God as omnipotent. Descartes (and most Gnostics) postulated the possibility of an omnipotent demon who could manipulate our thoughts and deceive us.

Path of Zadek

(Qabalah) Hebrew A reference to the path illustrated by the Temperance tarot card between Yesod and Tiphareth. This path traverses the path of normal consciousness between Netzach and Hod. It is the border line between the ego and the true Self. It is called “the path of the honest man” because it is only accessible to those rare individuals who have liberated themselves of self-deception and psychological slothfulness.

Qlipha

pl. Qliphoth (Qabalah) Hebrew Literally, “shells” or “excrement.” A reference to the remnants of the previous, failed universes. The pieces of these shattered vessels are said to have fallen into Assiah, where Malkuth is now engrossed in them. In their present state, they serve to test and prove worthiness. The Qliphoth project the illusion of duality, making it so that we perceive one another as separate and isolated individuals. Largely due to superstition and a lack of understanding of the purpose of duality, the Qliphoth have been unfairly labeled as evil.

Ruach

(Qabalah) Hebrew Literally “breath.” It is one of the three parts of the human soul corresponding to personal self-awareness or false self, the emotional self, intellect and ego. It resides within Sephiroth 4 through 9, between Meschamah and Nephesh. The Neschamah seeps into the Ruach, but it is rarely noticed by the ego, which is a shame since the effects of the Neschamah can only observed by the Ruach.

Samadhi Yoga

(Yoga) Gives mastery over the self, and leads to the control of the powers of ecstasy.

Zodiac

(Astrology) An area of the sky (sometimes called a “belt”) divided into twelve parts through which most of the planets appear to move. Each part has a name and symbol, and is connected with an exact time of year. According to Hermes Trismigestus, “As Above, So Below” indicates that the direction of the stars correspond and allude to the course of human evolution.

©2009 Gerald del Campo
Edited by Sheta Kaey

Gerald del Campo is the author of A Heretic’s Guide to Thelema, New Aeon Magick: Thelema Without Tears, and New Aeon English Qabalah Revealed, among other works. You can visit his blog at http://solis93.livejournal.com and his website at http://thelemicknights.org. Gerald serves as Senior Managing Editor of Rending the Veil.

I picked up all of Fries works a few years ago at Edge of the Circle, an occult bookstore in Seattle, which happens to stock these otherwise hard to find books. The main reason these books are hard to find is they are published by a U.K. publisher and have to be special ordered. However, it’s well worth your while to special order these books, as there is a wealth of information in them about diverse topics including Norse Runes, Seith shamanic practices, freestyle shamanic practices, in sights on the Tao, and practical magic experiments and exercises.

Fries is from and resides in Germany, and is apparently a musician, as well as a writer. For his books, he draws on Taoism, Celtic magic, Thelema, Maat Magic, and Austin Osman Spare’s techniques for automatic drawing as inspirations and sources which inform his own approaches to magic.

I have only read two of Fries works at this time: Visual Magick, and Living Midnight: Three Movements of the Tao. I found both works to be informative and filled with exercises that could easily be incorporated into a magician’s practice. At the same time, Fries definitely shows that he is able to provide his own perspective to the material. While he draws on Taoist and Buddhist material, he also makes it clear that he has his own approach to using the material, which is informed by a desire to make it as practical as possible. This is a very useful approach for any magician to utilize and Fries models it admirably.

I haven’t read his other three works, though I do have them. However, having spoken to some other magicians who have read his works, I’ve been told that they are of a similar quality as the other two works I mentioned, and I definitely believe it. What also impresses me about this author’s works is the bibliography and level of research that clearly has gone into each work. While I’d like to see more overt in-text citations, Fries does make an active effort to quote the works of others, which adds to the overall efficacy of the writing.

I highly recommend getting copies of Fries work. It’s a worthy investment for any magician’s library and will provide you a unique perspective on magical practices.

Below is a list of Fries’s works. It’s definitely in the interest of any magician to pick up Fries’s writing and incorporate it in your personal practice.

• Visual Magick: A Handbook of Freestyle Shamanism (Mandrake, 1992, 2001)
• Helrunar: Manual of Rune Magick (Mandrake, 1993 & 2002)
• Seidways: Shaking, Swaying and Serpent Mysteries (Mandrake, 1996)
• Living Midnight: Three Movements of the Tao (Mandrake, 1998)
• The Cauldron of the Gods: Manual of Celtic Magick (Mandrake, 2003)

Taylor Ellwood is the author of Space/Time Magic, Inner Alchemy: Energy Work and the Magic of the Body, and Pop Culture Magick, among other works. You can visit his blog at http://magicalexperiments.wordpress.com/ and his website at http://www.thegreenwolf.com/.

©2009 Taylor Ellwood
Edited by Sheta Kaey