Recently I taught a class on
the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram. The class got a pretty
positive response because a lot of what I went over was outside of
what is normally discussed. We talk about things like the four kings,
conjuring spirits, animism and the magic circle, and how to use the
LRP as a practical ritual in addition to exploring it's more standard
use as a mystical exercise.
In the end of the class I
refer to the ritual as magical aerobics, a phrase I used to describe
a lot of modern ceremonial magic in an episode of Rufus Opus's
ROpocalypse.
Off the cuff some people
might think that this is kind of a flippant dismissal of the Lesser
Pentagram Ritual or of late 19th and early 20th
century magic. It isn't. Whenever I use the term it's always in a
context of talking about how even for practitioners of more
traditional magic there is a utility to the developmental aspects of
modern ceremonial magic or the Western Mystery Tradition as filtered
through the lens the Golden Dawn and later groups. Outside of my
magical life I coach a college fencing team and a youth fencing
program. I'm constantly trying to convince them that it's important
to keep up with running, weight lifting, and aerobic training outside
of their fencing training. I don't really give a shit about getting
people to do aerobics for the sake of aerobics, I have no real
interest in inspiring people to run for the sake of running. I want
my athletes to be successful, and developing themselves is part of
that. Same for magicians.
Instructions in some books
of conjuration talk about the importance of using daily conjurations
outside of ritual to acquaint oneself with the ritual and to keep
those magical elements of the day active even when not being used.
Traditional magic works have all sorts of preparations and cleansings
for the magician. Traditional systems of sorcery have initiations and
preparations to empower the magician. The religious systems which
inspire traditional grimoire magic use systems of sacraments to
prepare and orient participants. Priests and mystics developed
systems of spiritual exercises to more fully expose their adherents
to the divine forces they believed they needed to experience. We see
magicians pointed towards similar spiritual attainments in texts like
Liber Juratus and The Sacred Magic of Abramelin.
I don't think all of these
elements of magic are quite the same as spiritual or magical
aerobics. But when we look at a lot of the exercises included in
Golden Dawn magic and later systems, we find little daily rituals
like the LBRP, Resh, instructions in pranayama and asana, the
meditations given to the grades of the GD, and the rest of the small
daily magical exercises that make up modern magic. Almost none of
them have a direct practical result that they create, if we define
practical magic as magic which creates an effect in the world. By in
large these rituals have mystical elements, they open us up to
spiritual forces, they change how we see and experience things, but
unless they're tweaked they don't do the stuff we would traditionally
associate with magic. They get us ready to be more successful at
magic by building skills and acquainting us with esoteric forces.
So for those who have only
tried traditional magic, there may be some useful things to find in
looking at modern magic. Some of the initiations present us with
access to things and experiences of things which we can apply when
working with spirits. For people who only work with modern magic,
that can be all well and good if you want to be a mystic using
ritual, but if you want to do magic you need to step out of that box,
which after all, was the purpose of the original Golden Dawn system.
You went through the initiations, the exercises, and then did alchemy
and worked with the handful of grimoires they had access to.
