Beginning Conjuration and Spirit Magic pt. 2: Devotion

Yesterday's post kicked off this week's special series of posts giving an introduction to various elements of spirit magic and conjuration. This is post 2 out of 8. Please like and follow us on Facebook so that you won't miss any of the action, and please share the series so others you know can also enjoy it.

Beginning Conjuration and Spirit Magic pt. 2: Devotion

So this topic was actually one I was planning to post about on its own initially but it definitely has it's place within our discussion of beginning conjuration. I had a conversation with a friend recently about the importance of devotional work in magic. The A.'.A.'. system assigns Devotion to the work of the Philosophus and it is with this work that initial elements that could lead to spirit conjuration start to pop up. Aside from that though, devotional work with spirits and divine figures helps with conjuration work, and also, with life in general. It has a lot of elements which overlap with magical practice without necessarily being magical practice, so it can also be a good practical starting point.

So what do I mean by devotional work? Devotion, for many people, would imply some sort of religious commitment to some deity or saint. In our context it could mean this but it does not have to. All we're talking about here is creating an on going relationship with a spirit or spirits who will act as allies for you, both in life and magic. This borders on religious practice and can look like religious practice.

Some theorists on Indo-European religion talk about the guest-host principle as a basic ordering concept of the universe and society. This suggests that at times an individual may be a guest or a host, and that as a guest he must act in a certain way out of respect for his host, and the host must therefore provide him hospitality, and further in the future he will at times act as the host, and his former host is therefore deserving of being welcomed and treated well as a guest. This does not necessarily mean a literal house guest scenario, but rather, if you help your neighbor it should be expected that your neighbor will appreciate the help, and also make efforts to help you later, and that you will show the same appreciation and seek later to again help your neighbor; creating then a cycle of mutual appreciation and aid. Devotional work with spirits works much the same way.

So if it is a God or Saint that you select, you are not necessarily selecting them as an object of worship. You're selecting them as a guide, or source of inspiration, perhaps, or more simply as a benefactor who will help and protect you. The God or Saint receives the offerings you make, the benefit of any prayers you make as part of your devotion, and at times perhaps public recognition. It does not necessarily receive you as a devoted worshiper, but rather a devoted friend. You make routine offerings, spend time in prayer or meditation for them, maintain objects for your devotional work such as an altar, or perhaps simply a statue, an offering bowl and some candles. The means of outfitting your devotional efforts can be between you and the spirit. But having some physical central focus is both helpful in bringing your focus onto the spirit, but also it can provide faster means of connecting with the spirit. If there is a space dedicated for the spirit to take up as a residence, or some tool used as a conduit for contact with the spirit you may be able to more easily reach out and communicate with spirits with whom you have some alliance.

Other than Gods or Saints, the ancestors or the dead are common, and very good, choices for devotional work. Again, you're not entering into this as some kind of religious self subjugation or some deification of your ancestors. You're keeping open channels of communication, and maintaining, strengthening, and creating connections with spirits who can be powerful allies. I've spoken before about the benefits of work with the dead including the fact that they were once alive, and because they were alive they are aware of and ready to work towards the concerns of average people. It's also easy because we see this kind of relationship in historical magic as well as in folk customs and practices. It's a lot easier to sit down having prepared a deceased relative's favorite food, and then leaving out a plate of it for them while telling them all about what's happening in your life and your families' lives than it would be to do really hardcore necromancy. Fortunately you're probably not conjuring a deceased person to bind them in a pact. All your devotion with your relatives needs to be is routine contact to maintain the relationship, and the offering of food, drinks, or gifts periodically to not simply assure their favor but also to assure their strength and their connection to this world.

Both with the dead, and with Gods and Saints, our devotional work will often involve meditating at an altar or before some devotional object or picture. Frequently you'll give gifts and talk about what's happening with you. There may be prayers involved for the benefit of the spirit, or simply generally for your blessing. Otherwise most of your devotional sessions don't need to involve you asking for something. A lot of modern society associates all prayer with asking for something. Sometimes it's just about pausing to connect. Other times you might be thanking the spirit, or you may have discovered the spirit just likes certain poems or prayers and so they become part of your offering.

So by in large the basic devotional work of a magician can be pretty simple, or it can get more complex. It doesn't need to be tool heavy, but it can be if that's how you're called to approach your spirits.

Your spirits. In this case it means those spirits with whom you have a relationship. But it could also mean a familiar spirit, or a spirit given to your charge by a higher spirit. Some people build living vessels for their familiars and so work with the familiar may be very much like devotion work. For now I want to treat them as separate. Devotion work can be a little more casual, than other spiritual work. You don't have to seek to control the spirits, or move them from some far off place. For this, you're largely working with spirits that already have some overlap or connection with the world. But you're strengthening it by inviting them in and making gifts to them. You're asking them to work in this world and you're feeding them substances of this world. You're not just strengthening their spiritual capability by feeding it more spiritual substance; you are linking the spirits to the world by stirring up memories and desire.

So why go through this trouble, why not just get to the magic? Well, this is part of the magic. It's not just the act of magic, but also the preparatory acts which make us ready for magic which are a big part of success. When you have allies in the spirit world they become a spiritual currency for you, or spiritual street cred. Your ability to call upon and command spirits should increase as you strengthen the spirits who work with you and they are able to help provide you with authority in the spirit world. They can also help with controlling unruly spirits and keeping them to task. Another benefit though is the sort of invisible hand effect. They want to help you and they want to keep enriching your relationship with them. So as things happen in your life your spirits, especially those who have been alive previously, may recognize issues you encounter and help you with them prior to you asking because your spirits know you, they know what you need. So those little catastrophes in life might get smaller, or they might bring about less extreme problems, or problems from fewer converging sources than what we might expect with no one helping. With these things in mind, it's a good idea to keep your household or personal spirits in happy conditions.

So what does a devotional practice look like?

Let's say you have three ancestors you're working with as your personal spirits. You do your initial rituals to set up a connection and awareness. Then after that maybe you keep an altar with a picture of the three ancestors, a candle for each of them, and an offering bowl, or maybe one for each. Basically simple things. Maybe small possessions belonging to the departed. Perhaps once a week you light the candles, make a small offering of whatever their favorite drink was and say a prayer or two or simply tell them about your life. You might mark special occasions like birthdays, and other holidays, particularly May's Eve, and November's Eve with extra ritual work or prayer work or special gifts. For saints you might use their prayer candles and cards and other Catholic resources. Similarly for Gods obtaining a statue or image and other devotional gifts can be simple. But all in all this model can work fairly easily regardless of which type of spirit, though for Gods and Saints it's useful to draw on the traditions to which they are native and accustomed.

As you put together this part of your practice sometimes there is a tendency to pick one spirit, usually a God or Saint, and think of them singularly as your patron. Or conversely some people grab on to every God, Saint, and Ancestor they can find and try to juggle two dozen at once. Start small. I started with one ancestral spirit, and then selected a few others who felt significant. Then, and this can be an interesting devotional task in ancestor work, began exploring stories of my family's past to flesh out my sense of my pleroma of ancestors. Now your ancestral practice does not need to involve setting up devotional shrines for each ancestor or markers to remember all of them. Your personal maiores (great ones), the handful to whom either you or your work are most connected maybe two or three early on, those should have objects set for interacting, others can be considered and acknowledged more generally. If you're working with a God, don't jump to tie yourself down to a patronage but note two or three who might help with your work, similarly you don't need to set altars for a whole pantheon of deities, the same is true for Saints.

Beginning Conjuration and Spirit Magic pt 1: Books

As mentioned in yesterday's post, this week will kick off a special series of posts. This is the beginning of an eight part series of posts giving instruction in how to get started with spirit conjuration. Please like and follow us on Facebook so that you won't miss any of the action, and please share the series so others you know can also enjoy it.

Beginning Conjuration and Spirit Magic pt 1: Books

A few months back a brother from a neighboring body reached out to ask for recommendations for people looking to get into conjuring spirits and grimoire magic. Rather than give a simple quick answer I figured it would make more sense to put together a list of book recommendations and post them because others might benefit from it too. Unfortunately for the last couple months some stuff has gotten in the way of blogging for the most part, so I'm a little behind, but we're going to get started...with that book list. In thinking on it though, there's other stuff we can talk about than just books. So we'll do a few posts going over some practices and skills as well.

In thinking about what books to read you probably want to also think about what kinds of spirits you want to conjure as well as what skills you'll need to develop to work with them. A lot of basic beginner magic books don't really teach traditional magic or the worldview or practices involved therein. Instead they teach stuff like developing mental awareness, capability scrying, an understanding of correspondences, the elements, talisman construction, and basic ritual techniques. While a lot of elements of modern magic are used for different purposes and in different contexts than in traditional magic, a grounding in modern magic can be useful.

Israel Regardie's Tree of Life, and The Golden Dawn, along with Crowley's Liber E, and Liber O will provide a lot of the basic modern foundation that you'll find useful. Norman Kraft's Ogdoadic Magic will give a bit more accessible approach to describing modern magic. More to the end of developing as a ritual magician, and one which I enjoyed as a teenager, is Steve Savedow's Magician's Workbook. Steve also wrote a book on modern Goetia based on working with the Goetia of Solomon, and released an edition of Sepher Raziel HeMalach. So his approach to Golden Dawn style magic was at least focused towards the kind of ritual magic that fit a Golden Dawn interpretation of the grimoires, even if some of his interpretations of spirit work aren't perfectly aligned with traditional magic.

As for actually looking into spirit conjure work or the grimoires...

Angel Magic by Geoffrey James (who also released Enochian Evocation of Dr. John Dee) was a significant influence on me as a teenager. His book is a survey of ideas and history surrounding the conjuration of angels. It introduced me to understanding some of the mechanics of talismanic work that I later found described more fully in alchemical philosophy and the work of St. Thomas Aquinas. This book won't teach you to conjure spirits but it will introduce some useful ideas and stories.

For more on gaining a grounding in the ideas and ideological context of grimoire work, the books in the Magic in History Series are incredibly useful. With these it really depends on how deep you want to get into exploring grimoire tradition and the history of magic as to how many of these you should read. If you mostly want to get into practice, I'd recommend checking one of these out, preferably one containing a grimoire, but you probably don't need more than that. If you want to develop a full sense of how grimoire magic developed and various forms of traditional magic, exploring as many of these history books as you can would make sense.

Some options for Magic in History books...

Forbidden Rites by Richard Kieckhefer

Ritual Magic by Elizabeth Butler

Conjuring Spirits by Claire Fanger et al

Invoking Angels by Claire Fanger et al

For books for actually developing as a grimoire magician...

1. 4^th Book of Occult Philosophy by Agrippa et al, edited by Stephen Skinner

The book is not actually a sequel to three books of occult philosophy. Most of it is not written by Agrippa. On Magical Ceremonies may have been written by him and is largely a practical summation of the information provided in Three Books of Occult Philosophy. Three Books of Occult Philosophy essentially presents the system of magical thought from the grimoire period, but it is a pretty large book and takes a lot to get through. If you want to get started, On Magical Ceremonies is a lot more accessible.

The collection also contains The Heptameron and The Arbatel. I definitely would recommend the Heptameron as a baseline for looking at the grimoires. It contains a lot of the grimoire orations and conjurations which appear in other popular grimoires. It presents a lot of important correspondences for spirit magic which also show up in later texts.

The Arbatel is one of the simplest approaches to spirit magic. The Olympic Spirits are powerful and interesting spirits. They also are very eager to work with magicians who approach them correctly. There really isn't ritual or tools or a ton of correspondences involved. Work with the Olympic spirits could be one of the easiest ways to get started.

2. The Magical Calendar

The Magical Calendar includes a lot of correspondences used in the grimoire tradition broken down into numerical tables. Three Books of Occult Philosophy contains similar tables, which are more extensive, in Book Two. These correspondences can help you with picking spirits with which to work, or determining how the various spirits relate to each other and to various situations and times and locations.

3. A Treatise on Angel Magic by Dr. Rudd edited by Adam MacLean or The Keys to the Gateway of Magic by Dr. Rudd edited by Skinner and Rankine

These texts collect together manuscripts by the somewhat mysterious Dr. Rudd. Rudd most likely was around a generation or so after Dr. John Dee. Like Agrippa and the Magical Calendar Rudd's work explains many correspondences useful in medieval/renaissance spirit magic. It also has Rudd explaining various concepts of magic such as talismans and image magic, explaining various types of spirits, various symbols of astrological magic and other similar topics. Rudd also presents info on spirits less commonly addressed in modern approaches to spirit magic, and he is a good example of linking Scholastic Image Magic with Grimoiric Ritual Magic. Rudd's work also includes Rudd's own grimoire and his approach to blending Enochian material into grimoire magic.

4. Art of Drawing Spirits into Crystals by Johannes Trithemius

This is a pretty short text which you can get online. This presents a very simply form of crystallomancy or conjuring a spirit into a crystal. It's based on working with the seven planetary spirits but the system can be used for any sort of spirits. It uses very few tools, and not a lot of rituals, just a few simple prayers. In particular it is a very good introduction to how an altar has specific elements for manifesting spirits in grimoire magic. For a lot of magicians this work inspires their standard means of working with spirits.

5. The Clavis or Key to the Magic of Solomon by Sibley and Hockley edited by Peterson

This book is pretty big and expensive. But it is fricken beautiful. It has images of the original manuscript pages, and these take up the bulk of the book. The manuscript pages have beautiful illustrations of the talismans and the book is printed on a really nice glossy paper. On the negative end, the actual “critical edition” of the text is only a very small portion of the otherwise huge book. That said, the book is essentially a pair of grimoires, with a handful of spirit conjure rituals sandwiched between them. The section by Sibley is very useful because unlike most grimoires which just collect prayers and descriptions of tools, Sibley is writing something halfway between a grimoire and a book about grimoire magic. Sibley was writing only a few generations before the occult revival that produced the Golden Dawn, so by this point books about magic, as opposed to simply books of magic, were starting to appear so Sibley gives a much more accessible series of instructions than we find in a lot of grimoires.

6. The Key of Solomon the King edited by S.L. MacGregor Mathers

This isn't the best version of the Key of Solomon available but it was the standard version everyone had for a long time. This was what I used for my first formal approach to spirit conjuration. It provides talismans for a lot of different purposes, and clear instructions for making tools and putting together your ritual. This is kind of the baseline of Solomonic instructions.

7. The Veritable Key of Solomon edited by Skinner and Rankine

This is probably the best version of the Key of Solomon currently available. This collects several different variants of the Key of Solomon. In addition to providing a full exposition of how to create the tools and how to do Solomonic Magic, but more importantly it provides several ritual instructions aside from the main conjuration method, and provides several different purposes for the system far beyond what one might generally connect with Solomonic magic at first consideration. It shows the breadth of Solomonic magic as a system.

So, in addition to these, again, I would recommend Agrippa's Three Books of Occult Philosophy. But don't let that slow you down in getting started. Read a handful of these, especially the ones that are easily accessible, and then start doing the work. As you do the work, keep studying and reading and expanding on how you work. Look into other traditional forms of magic like the Papyri Graeco-Magicae. Traditional Witchcraft, and traditional forms of European and Caribbean syncretic sorcery because these can also present ideas that are useful for consideration in spirit conjure and sorcery.

Sex, Your Angel, and Starting the Ritual

A lot of my work lately has been focused on helping people who are maybe ready to look at reaching out to their Holy Guardian Angel and seeking Knowledge and Conversation bridge the gap between maybe being ready and going ahead and going for it. I try to make resources available and try to help answer questions. One question which has come up a couple times in the last month or so is “Do I really have to be chaste? I'm not sure my wife will like that.” It's something that's reasonably at the forefront of a lot of people's minds when they consider a big ritual like that, and is easily a bit of a turn off for people. Some people might say if someone isn't willing to go through that effort then they don't deserve the benefits. I don't think that's the right answer.

In general, to a lot of people, the Abramelin working looks big and daunting and inaccessible. In reality, Abraham of Worms talks about a whole lot of things in his long story of his journey and his exposition of his ideas, many of which magicians who have done the Abramelin don't carry into their work once they've done the ritual, even if they argue for kind of an Abramelin purism. But in terms of the ritual itself, at least in the German version, a lot of it is kind of left to your own devices.

Your angel should be guiding you on a lot of specifics of what to do and how to do it. This is true too on the question of chastity. But, a lot of people want some human advice as well, so let's look at the question and why I don't think it's a deal breaker.

In general there are benefits to ritual chastity even outside of the grimoires and the Abramelin. Making a choice to be chaste for a time presents a feeling of self sacrifice and a test of being able to focus and execute your will despite other drives and desires. This feeling can be useful in creating a sense of capability in a ritual setting. Fasting can create the same kind of mental benefit. Piggy backing off of that idea, many of us also tend to associate asceticism with spirituality, even if our own spiritual practices don't call for it, because it's just a common cultural association. So these purifications can help us feel more spiritual because of those associations.

They can do more than this though.

Ritual chastity and fasting change our biological states, and so they create alterations in our mood and, depending upon the extremity, our awareness. These changes can be positive or negative depending upon how they affect us as individuals.

Along with these biological changes, refusing a bodily impulse can create an added focus, desire, and increased drive, but not necessarily for the thing we are denying. We can eliminate indulgence in sex and in pleasurable foods and focus the need for satisfaction on our spiritual desires. The energy that we would focus on fulfilling our bodily desires becomes focused on our angel, the tension we experience from desiring becomes a tension surrounding the desire for our angel. We become one pointed by eliminating those things which could otherwise distract us from our one pointedness.

Or at least, maybe we do.

For some people it might create a preoccupation with fulfilling the denied desire. Or they might become fixated on their success at denying themselves to the point that the exercise becomes more about self-restriction and less about orientation towards the goal. Fulfilling healthy human needs can keep us on track when doing things that are difficult because we alleviate a natural biological distraction. Most people can probably think back to adolescence and how much easier homework was if you took a few minutes of “me time” when focusing became otherwise impossible.

So yeah, there is potential utility and potential detriment in both choices, depending largely upon you as an individual.

The big thing, regardless of whether you end up being chaste or not chaste, is to not let physical sexuality and other physical desires subvert your focus and commitment to the ritual. It goes a little beyond that though...and because it goes a little beyond that, yeah, some of you might need to be chaste.

The Abramelin doesn't tell you to give up things just because they might become distracting. A lot of the rules regarding abstinence are pretty clearly modeled on ritual purity rules that occurred in other forms of magic. There is a significant overlap in my view between the Abramelin and the early Jewish mystical traditions associated with the Merkavah.

In the Merkavah tradition we find descriptions of Rabbis being pulled from visions of heaven by having a rag which touched a menstruating woman being brought into contact with them, because even that indirect disruption of their ritual purity was enough to make them no longer pure enough for angelic contact. In the associated apocryphal scriptures angels refer to man as smelling like a “white drop” or semen, suggesting that the angelic hatred of mankind stems from the offensive nature of our physicality and how filthy they perceive it to be. Angels are presented as being pretty anti-human in a lot of cases and this perception seems to creep into some elements of medieval and renaissance magic.

But this isn't always the case. In Liber Juratus angels don't hate humans, humans can do magic with angels because they share in their love for the creator. In Hermetic and Neo-Platonic worldviews it is again the human ability to reconnect to the divine or to mirror the divine image that drives our work with spirits. Even in Jewish magic it can be argued that God is the God of magic, and as that is the case humans do magic based upon God desiring it to be so, and so angels aid in that magic because it is in harmony with the divine will that man experience magic. Taking any of these view points, the idea that spooge disgusts angels so much that they need us to be chaste for 6 to 18 months in order to talk with us makes a lot less sense. In fact, if that were the case, everyone who achieves knowledge and conversation would have to maintain that level of purity, and that certainly isn't the case.

So why would you need to, or not need to be chaste?

In my experience, angels don't hate humans the way they do in stories. Rather angels hate the stupid shit humans do that gets in the way of humans being awesome. They hate when we are lazy, they hate when greed or lust for things distracts us from what we are supposed to be doing.

It would stand to reason that the real problem is when we try to fill our God sized holes with sensory indulgences so we can ignore the beauty and harmony of the cosmos despite the fact that engaging the cosmos would fill the hole.

Angels want us to be awesome. When they're accused of being dicks it's because they force us to work on ourselves in ways that can be difficult. People like working with demons because when you want something they say "sure, easy" but if you sit and have a chat with an angel, even if they'll help you out, a lot of the time they want to lead you to improve yourself or work in some way that will be beneficial to you from a big picture perspective rather than just looking at the specific instance you want help with.

Angels want you to be awesome.

When they look at you they see their creator, and they love their creator. When you aren't embodying who you are and who you can be it obscures the reflection of God in you. When you think on your own life, if you care about someone and see potential in them and they aren't working towards that potential, you want to help them get there, you want to push them a little, give them advice, maybe even be hard on them if it will help them. You want to see their success and all the glorious sense of completion that that success conveys. Same thing here.

The Holy Guardian Angel operates in this way even more so than other angels. Its job is wholly to get you to that point of awesomeness.

So again, in my experience, the angel directs you to fix stuff that you need to fix. In my presentations on preparing for the Abramelin I talk about getting your life in order, something which apparently a lot of people don't address when talking about this ritual. If you don't have stuff together in your life you'll have a lot of trouble committing to the work you need to do once your angel begins guiding you more fully. The more distracted you are by random problems the less focused you are on the work at hand. So part of preparing is really exploring yourself and seeing what work you need to do on you, but also looking at your life and seeing what fires you should put out or things you should situate in a more stable and balanced fashion. As you're prepping for the ritual you may find the angel even helps you with this.

As you get closer to the ritual the angel will also make it clear what things you should be giving up or what things you might need to add to your life in order to help straighten yourself out for him to connect with you. Personally, I used chastity as I described it above, as a means of focus and reorienting my drive and desire, but I only used it in the penitent days at the beginning of the ritual, and when preparing for and during the final phases of it, the stuff I had to change had more to do with healthy living. I have one friend who did the ritual and their angel was very clear that they needed to be chaste. A reduce in interest in sex followed the ritual for this individual, and so I would guess the angel felt that was something particular to that individual's needs. Another friend had to reduce consumption of meat, but not fully eliminate it, and had to get rid of alcohol, and their angel took measures during the working when this person stepped outside of those instructions to reign them back in. Once the ritual was done this person recognized that while consuming meat and alcohol was again ok, there was probably a need for a change in behavior from what it was prior to the ritual. I know a handful of well known magicians who successfully used Liber Samekh or variations thereon in lieu of doing the retreat based on either the French or German manuals, I doubt that they were all chaste during it.

In the end, trust your angel. If sex is a problem for you, your angel might inspire you towards a period of chastity...but it will probably be good for you and help you not just with your working but with other elements of life. If sex isn't a problem your angel probably won't be pressed about it so long as it isn't disrupting the ritual, and you consider points in the ritual where either chastity or sexual activity might be beneficial from a magical perspective, you can go ahead and keep having sex. If your problem is junk food, or meat, or alcohol, or gambling, or shoe shopping, or whatever, your angel will let you know, and the need to be chaste regarding that problem will be pretty clear. But it's between you and your angel. So if your angel hasn't told you sex isn't ok, it's probably ok, but like all things, in moderation.

So, one thing that you can skip the moderation on, is this blog. We're going to be running a special series of posts starting this week. So like and follow us on Facebook, and please share with your friends, so everyone can enjoy the special series. And if you have questions about seeking your HGA feel free to leave a comment.

The Stele of Reggie Scott or Thoughts on Daily Prayers

In my last post I made a quick mention of the idea of reciting the prayers and conjurations for the days of the week even when not working a conjuration ritual. Some modern authors stress the idea of repeating the conjurations for the power which is conveyed through the presence of mind and the smooth ritual feeling created by reciting a memorized conjuration. There is some truth to that, but for that to be the case the magician can't simply memorize and recite...if he does he has essentially the same distraction as he tries to focus on recall. He has to embody the experience of the conjuration prayer so that it becomes natural to him, not simply memorized. When I was learning to celebrate the Gnostic Mass one of the Priestesses (now a Bishop) who helped train me pointed out that you can't rote memorize the Mass and then try to paint the magic on later, you have to run the magic from the beginning so that the celebration of the mystery is natural to you. When working with Novice clergy I often recommend that they find ways to explore the passages of the Mass in meditation to deepen their understanding and then utilize them in building other magical rituals so that they are used to running with those forces in the ways in which the Mass stirs them. Working in that manner there can be an added element to memorization. But memorization can be a draw back if you're constantly worrying about whether or not you remembered it right or missed a word or phrase, or if the attempt to recall causes a stilted broken delivery or detachment as one blankly recalls and says words. Reading can create the same problems, but we can also read in an engaged fashion with feeling in which we embody what we are reading. In fact, references to the book as a tool in medieval and renaissance magical literature suggests that it is used in the ritual, and therefore likely read from.

So, why pray the conjurations when not working the rituals? Another suggestion is that we can, without conjuring the spirits, still stir and stimulate the planetary forces in our lives by working with the conjurations. Similar to the suggestion to work the Mass into our other work. Considering this from the perspective of a Priest we can compare this to the practices of those who developed the medieval grimoire system, people with a clerical background. Catholics had a rich system of prayers and rituals for all elements of life, and prayers for various parts of the day to keep them in touch with the spirit and focused on a life enmeshed within divine grace. They inflamed themselves with prayer by invoking often. Working with the daily conjurations and prayers allows us to do that with the planetary forces which form a central system of categorizing the universe in grimoire magic and much of the Western Mystery Tradition. Similarly working with prayers that connect us to ancestors, saints, local spirits, or our intermediaries can be of value for our personal spiritual routine maintenance.

When we work the Abramelin a lot of the preparation is this immersion in repeated prayer and meditation. It focuses us on the goal but also draws us towards the angel. In modern magic the Holy Guardian Angel, whether contacted through the Abramelin or related rituals is a focus as far as what we should draw ourselves towards. One prayer that frequently is associated with this is the Stele of Jeu, or the Headless Invocation as it is presented in the Golden Dawn system, the Bornless Ritual, or the A.'.A.'. system, Liber Samekh.

The Stele of Jeu is an exorcism ritual. People question this assertion sometimes because they're used to seeing the modern version which removes the exorcism verbiage and instead replaces it with the verbiage about subjugating spirits that is otherwise only found towards the end of the invocation. To be clear, when I say exorcism in this case it is in reference to subduing and casting out a spirit, not the more general earlier verbiage simply of binding spirits. In most cases, that isn't precisely what we'd be looking for by working with the Stele. At least, not all the time.

In Reginald Scott's work there is a “conjuration” which doesn't actually conjure a spirit, but rather implores the Trinity, primarily Jesus, to establish a relationship with the magician which will allow him to conjure spirits and make them obedient. For people who want to work in a Christian context this prayer would be a great daily prayer for establishing a relationship with divine authority and receiving the consecration needed to call and command spirits subject to that authority. For those working in a Thelemic context or some other modern context, the prayer can be reworked to be appropriate for your context or simply used as an example for how to build such a prayer when we look at its pattern in comparison with the Stele of Jeu.

For now, here is the conjuration from Book XV of Scott.

In the name of our Lord Jesus Christ the + Father + and the Son + and the Holy Ghost + Holy Trinity and Inseparable Unity, I call upon You, that You may be my salvation and defense, and the protection of my body and soul, and of all my goods through the virtue of Your Holy Cross, and through the virtue of Your passion, I beseech You O Lord Jesus Christ, by the merits of Your blessed mother Holy Mary, and of all Your saints, that You give me grace and divine power over all the wicked spirits, so as which of them soever I do call by name, they may come by and by from every coast, and accomplish my will, that they neither be hurtful or fearful unto me, but rather obedient and diligent about me. And through Your virtue straightly commanding them, let them fulfill my commands, Amen. Holy, holy, Lord God of Sabboth, which will come to judge the quick and the dead, You who are Alpha and Omega, first and last, King of kings and Lord of lords, Ioth, Aglanabrath, El, Abiel, Anathiel, Amazim, Sedomel, Gayes, Heli, Messias, Tolimi, Elias, Ischiros, Athanatos, Imas. By these Your holy names, and by all others I do call upon You, and beseech You O Lord Jesus Christ, by Your nativity and baptism, by thy cross and passion, by Your ascension, and by the coming of the Holy-Ghost, by the bitterness of Your soul when it departed from Your body, by Your five wounds, by the blood and water which went out of Your body, by Your virtue, by the sacrament which You gave Your disciples the day before You suffered, by the Holy trinity, and by the inseparable unity, by blessed Mary Your mother, by Your angels, archangels, prophets, patriarchs, and by all Your saints, and by all the sacraments which are made in Your honor, I do worship and beseech You, I bless and desire You, to accept these prayers, conjurations, and words of my mouth, which I will use. I require You O Lord Jesus Christ, that You give me Your virtue & power over all Your angels (which were thrown down from heaven to deceive mankind) to draw them to me, to tie and bind them, & also to loose them, to gather them together before me, & to command them to do all that they can, and that by no means they contemn my voice, or the words of my mouth; but that they obey me and my sayings, and fear me. I beseech You by Your humanity, mercy and grace, and I require You Adonai, Amay, Horta, Vege dora, Mitai, Hel, Suranat, Ysion, Ysesy, and by all Your holy names, and by all Your holy he saints and she saints, by all Your angels and archangels, powers, dominions, and virtues, and by that name that Solomon did bind the devils, and shut them up, Elhrach, Ebanher, Agla, Goth, Ioth, Othie, Venoch, Nabrat, and by all Your holy names which are written in this book, and by the virtue of them all, that You enable me to congregate all Your spirits thrown down from heaven, that they may give me a true answer of all my demands, and that they satisfy all my requests, without the hurt of my body or soul, or any thing else that is mine, through our Lord Jesus Christ Your son, who lives and reigns with You in the unity of the Holy-Ghost, one God world without end.

Oh Father omnipotent, Oh wise Son, Oh Holy-Ghost, the searcher of hearts, oh you three in persons, one true godhead in substance, which did spare Adam and Eve in their sins; and Oh You Son, who died for their sins a most filthy death, sustaining it upon the Holy Cross; oh You most merciful, when I fly unto Your mercy, and beseech You by all the means I can, by these the holy names of Your Son; to wit, Alpha and Omega, and all of his other names, grant me Your virtue and power, that I may be able to cite before me, Your spirits which were thrown down from heaven, & that they may speak with me, & dispatch by & by without delay, & with a good will, & without the hurt of my body, soul, or goods, etc: as is contained in the book called Annulus Salomonis.

Oh great and eternal virtue of the highest, which through disposition, these being called to judgment, Vaicheon, Stimulamaton, Esphares, Tetragrammaton, Olioram, Cryon, Esytion, Existion, Eriona, Onela, Brasim, Noym, Messias, Soter, Emanuel, Sabboth, Adonai, I worship You, I invoke You, I implore You with all the strength of my mind, that by You, my present prayers, consecrations, and conjurations be hallowed: and wheresoever wicked spirits are called, in the virtue of Your names, they may come together from every coast, and diligently fulfill the will of me the exorcist. Fiat, fiat, fiat, Amen.

For comparison sake here is Alex Sumner's version of the Headless Invocation.

Thee I invoke, the Bornless One!

Thee that didst create the Earth and the Heavens,
Thee that didst create the Night and the Day,
Thee that didst create the Darkness and the Light.
Thou art Osorronophris, whom no man hath seen at any time.
Thou art Jabas; thou art Japos.
Thou hast distinguished between the Just and the Unjust.
Thou didst make the Female and the Male.
Thou didst produce the Seed and the Fruit.
Thou didst form Men to love one another, and to hate one another.
Hear thou me, for I am Mosheh thy servant, unto whom Thou hast committed thy Mysteries, the ceremonies of Israel.
Thou hast produced the moist and the dry, and that which nourisheth all created life.
Hear me, for I am the Angel of Paphro Osorronophris: this is Thy true name, handed down to the prophets of Israel.
Hear me: Ar, Thiao, Rheibet, Atheleberseth, A, Blatha, Abeu, Ebeu, Phi, Thitasoe, Ib, Thiao.

Hear me and make all spirits subject unto me: so that every spirit of the firmament and of the ether; upon the Earth and under the Earth; on dry land or in the water; of whirling air or of rushing fire; and every spell and scourge of God may be obedient unto me.

I invoke Thee, the terrible and invisible God who dwellest in the void place of spirit: Arogogorobrao, Sothou, Modorio, Phalarthao, Ooo, Ape, The Bornless One.

Hear me and make all spirits subject unto me … (etc)

Hear me: Roubriao, Mariodam, Balbnabaoth, Assalonai, Aphniao, I, Thoteth, Abrasax, Aeoou, Ischure, Mighty and Bornless One.

Hear me and make all spirits subject unto me … (etc)

I invoke Thee: Ma, Barraio, Ioel, Kotha, Athorebalo, Abraoth.

Hear me and make all spirits subject unto me … (etc)

Hear me: Aoth, Abaoth, Basum, Isak, Sabaoth, IAO.

This is the Lord of the Gods;
This is the Lord of the Universe;
This is He Whom the winds fear;
This is He Who, having made Voice by His commandment, is Lord of all things - king, ruler and helper.

Hear me and make all spirits subject unto me … (etc)

Hear me: Ieou, Pyr, Iou, Pyr, Iaot, Iaeo, Ioou, Abrasax, Sabriam, Oo, Yu, Eu, Oo, Yu, Adonaie, Ede, Edu, Angelos Ton Theon, Anlala Lai, Gaia, Apa, Diachanna Chorun.

(Pause)

I am He, the Bornless Spirit! Having sight in the feet - strong, and the Immortal Fire!

I am He, the Truth!
I am He, who hate that evil should be wrought in the world.
I am He who lighteneth and thundereth.
I am He from whom is the shower of the life on Earth.
I am He whose mouth ever flameth.
I am He, the Begetter and Manifester unto the Light.
I am He, the Grace of the World.
“The Heart Girt with a Serpent” is My name.

Come thou forth and follow me, and make all spirits subject unto me, so that every spirit of the firmament and of the ether, upon the Earth and under the Earth, on dry land and in the water, of whirling air and of rushing fire, and every spell and scourge of God, may be obedient unto me.

IAO. Sabao. Such are the words!

Both invocations have a similar structure. They begin by by imploring the presence of the divine by combining references to divine names and characteristics. From there power over spirits is requested. After that more divine names and attributes, more requests for authority, and so forth. Other spiritual forces and heroic figures are referenced as part of the invocation of power and authority. Interestingly the Headless One is described as having a mouth that always flames, and Scott specifically asks that the mouth of the exorcist be blessed. This imagery seems important because it is by words that the magician will continue his work in commanding spirits. A major difference is that the Headless Invocation follows a pattern of identification which we often see in modern magic, possibly partially influenced by the Headless Invocation. We don't see identification with divinity in Scott but rather a series of requests that the magician be consecrated in such a way that he will have authority over the spirits. Both conjurations are comprehensive in the authority over spirits. The Headless Invocation references spirits in different locations...firmament, ether, upon earth, under earth, air, fire, dry land, water, basically covers all places spirits can reside. Scott's focus is on devils and fallen angels, but the spirits are referenced first as angels, and then given the added descriptor of being angels who have been cast down, additionally wicked spirits and devils are specifically referenced. There is no break down of spirits in different elemental localities, but it would seem to suggest that all spirits not in the heavens are made subject, and the spirits of the heavens are implored as part of the structure of gaining power over lower spirits.

So between the two we can get a feel for how to invoke authority as a conjuror. We would build a cycle of invoking the divine and asking for authority, referencing the specifics of the power requested, and repeating, then modifying the cycle to ask for consecration in ways that improve our ability to interact with spirits such as consecrating the mouth and speech, imbuing with sight, preventing spirits from being set against the magician, imbuing the magician with the virtues of previous recipients of divine grace.

If you experiment with developing your own prayer for this purpose or try Scott I'd love to hear about it so come back and comment. And stop by and like us/follow us on Facebook, should have some interesting stuff coming up soon.

Magical Aerobics

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.

Complete Ritual of the Pentagram Class Recording

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 19^th and early 20^th 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.

Ain't No Holla Back Mystic

Last week for the Feast of the Annunciation Fr. James Martin, SJ, wrote an interesting reflection on having a profound divine experience...and then the facilitator of that experience, in the case of Mary the Archangel Gabriel, ends up leaving. And you have to go back to normal and you have to go back to day to day life. From Fr. James's point of view “and then the angel left,” the words which powerfully but subtly describe the singular nature of the moment which Mary experienced, are the words which are most important for Catholics trying to relate to this passage, or this event in scripture.

And then the angel left.

This describes the fact that moments of peak religious experience end, and then like Mary, you have to go back to dealing with your day to day life.

Fr. James's point about the Annunciation is a pretty interesting one. Especially, perhaps, from the perspective of a magician. We engage in some pretty amazing experiences. We do some epic stuff on a mundane level, like cool rituals or initiations, or traveling to interesting places to discover unusual things, or reading interesting forgotten histories and stories, and various things like that which most other people just don't think about. On a more directly magical level, we experience stuff like visions and revelations, foreknowledge of the future, awareness of things we shouldn't be aware of, conversations with angels, demons and other spirits, and moments where we mold our world to our will, or where we experience the coalescence of the divine. All of these things can pepper our lives with amazement.

But then the angel left.

We go back to school, or work, or taking care of the kids. We vacuum the rug and sweep the floor, make dinner and do the dishes, pay the bills, and find time to make it to bed at night to get just enough sleep to survive. All that other amazing stuff happened but it's just that, it's something that happened, in the past, and it was cool...but, what about the rest of the time?

People often ask “what's it like for the hero of the movie after the movie is over and his life goes back to normal?” In a way, that can be what our lives are like when we do magic. We have our spiritual adventure and then we're back to the grind, knowing that we get to do amazing stuff and be amazing...but just not right now. Right now we get to be humdrum.

That shift can be ok, depending on what our life is like; but it can also be miserable. Because it's fun getting sweet talked by a good looking angel...

Until the point where the angel left.

I think some of what we see online, or even in offline occult communities, is explained in part by this. Sometimes people get into magic because they feel small, but they want to feel epic. Sometimes they get to experience a moment that lets them know that epicness is there...but it's fleeting, or it might even be scary and so pursuing more epic moments might not feel comfortable. It's a lot easier to go online and be a mystical magical bad ass in your spare time, and that way your magical adventure movie is part of daily life.

But there are better ways to avoid that awkward feeling of waiting for the angel to call you back after what you thought was a great time.

Maybe, just don't be humdrum. Maybe you can be epic as a magician, and you can also fill your life with other epic things. Not to brag, but as a financial adviser I have multi-millionaires who ask me what to do with their money, and the bulk of my non-work non-magic time is filled with teaching people to use swords. In conjunction with that last part, this past summer I watched the Olympics, with an Olympian, who has complimented me several times on how well I train people in her sport. To me this seems not quite humdrum. My life has some cool stuff but that said I might not always feel epic, and I might totally hang out in the valleys of mental and emotional experience sometimes, but I keep my life pretty interesting even when I'm not talking to angels and seeking visions of the whirling potentials at the beginning of the cosmos. I think we all have that potential to live our lives in ways that are cool. So staying legendary is one option for diminishing that sense of banality.

The other option is to be a proper mystic. Because...when I had my most vivid experience of an angel, and it made its annunciations to me of those things it had to announce, the angel didn't leave. We have knowledge of one another that allows us to converse as needed. Your angel is there with you. You just have to build the relationship where you can keep in communion with it and where you can learn to rely on its contact and inspiration.

So yeah, in a lot of religious contexts, there are peak experiences and then the rest of life is the doldrums. But not so for adepts. The Sacred Magic is all about the angel showing up and not leaving.

Now, you won't always be in a place where you're grooving on mystical consciousness, but that's fine. There will be times in life where your angel might seem further away because you're in a place where you just can't do whatever it is you're called to do, and you can't do the magic, and you can't look to your angel, because, sometimes life is just like that. It may even feel like you're cut off. But, once you claw out of that place, and you reach out to your angel, and you show you're ready to get back to your work, your angel will be there ready to jump right into it with you.

So even when you're not riding high on spiritual experience, it's not because the angel left. The angel is still there with you, waiting for you to be ready again. To me that's a lot better. I'd rather know my angel is still there for me than know that after he's said his message he's going to bounce, and he may or may not ever be back.

I guess part of this difference is because we're choosing to be mystics, we're choosing to be magicians, we're actively seeking to create a relationship with the angel rather than going about our days until some flash of brilliance appears for a fleeting moment.

With that in mind, the practical piece of this is that we have to do the work to meet our angels. That doesn't mean we all have to dive into the Abramelin working. But being mindful when we engage in our developmental magical exercises how they might engage our angel is a start towards forming that connection.

Find prayers and rituals that connect to your angel. For instance I really like the Anthem from the Gnostic Mass for that purpose. With the Mass in mind, reflect on how the Eucharist connects you to your angel. Dive into that connection as your feel it.

Maybe set an altar for your angel and do devotional work with it. Come up with some prayers to use for the purpose of communion or opening lines of communication. Consecrate a candle or lamp to your angel and light it when you talk with the angel. Get some Abramelin or temple incense, or at the least frankincense, to offer to the angel while you're working at the altar.

There's lots of options short of the retreat. The PGM has several useful prayers that can help with this or be an inspiration towards it. Find what suits you and do it. And when your angel helps you determine it's time for the retreat you'll be all the more prepared.

In A Word? A Witch

“The obiya is a forest power. It is also a sorcerous gift and somehow different from genuine ‘witchcraft’ that is focused on transmission through blood, while obiya is transmitted by through breath and spirit. Hence you can find the ‘witch-blood’ in vessels void of understanding its own blood, as you are born with it, but it is not like this with a sorcerous transmission as you have to receive it. There is great truth in a saying like “A witch is born, a sorcerer is made” and because of this a sorcerer can strictly speaking be ‘unmade’, while a witch cannot really be ‘unborn’ as such.” - Nicolaj de Mattos Frisvold

I've seen a few conversations online lately about more clearly defining what is and what isn't a witch. People seem to finally be done with the silly idea that we can't define a word and that anyone who wants to call themselves a witch can be one. Clearly that's not how words work.

Unfortunately, no one is defining it the way Nicolaj Frisvold is, despite his being the accurate view historically. People are comfortable with the Neo-Pagan point of view popularized in books from the 60's up through today. But we know a lot more about magic now, and we know a lot of what came from the occult revival, and from Gardner, and from the growth of NeoPaganism is incomplete. We know we need to move away from a lot of the practices and ideas popularized in those movements. There's good stuff there that we need to keep, but we need to critically review what's there and let go of what's not tenable. Like the idea that witch is about some sort of feminine empowerment, or worshiping the god and goddess of nature, or drum circles.

People claim we can't look at historical evidence about witches because Inquisitors were mysogynists and medieval people believed things we take as nonsensical. But the wrongheadedness of some people who used the word witch doesn't mean witch had no meaning until we assigned it a new one. People say we can't take historical meanings of the word witch because witches were supernatural monsters, I say you can't be a witch if you're not a supernatural monster. If we don't want what the word meant, worts and all why would you want the word at all? There are so many other things we as modern magicians can call ourselves other than witches, words which are more accurate, so why do we need the word witch?

Witchcraft is only a part of what I do. It's not the main thing I spend my time on. But it's been part of it since the beginning. I accept the word, as one of several that describe me, because when my mom was four years old, she was routinely locked in a closet by a woman who was punishing her for being born a witch. And while she wasn't happy when my dad tried to introduce magic to their relationship early on, because she rejects her magic, both of my parents shared things that helped me develop magically as a child. I dismiss the popular view that says that people want to claim to be born witches because they want to be special. My mom didn't want to be born a witch and doesn't want to be a witch. I personally think my upbringing doesn't make a great “old gramma tale” and is pretty boring, in fact I grew up assuming everyone was taught the same stuff as a kid. Most of my magic comes from hard work and study. And my sister readily admits that she didn't do anything with familial witchcraft, which is a good example of how being born with something doesn't matter if you don't do anything with it. It's like being born left handed, or with natural musical talent, it's one of many traits, that may or may not result in something.

When I got into magic, a lot of the serious, knowledgeable, successful magicians I know were from families that held a belief in witch blood. None of them were people who needed to claim witch blood to legitimize themselves. They were all pretty awesome without it. Most of them only talked about it in private. In fact, that's part of why I'm making this post. Well, for one, yesterday was Halloween. For two, I was having a conversation with a friend and my view on traditional witchcraft came up. I ended up getting a lot more detailed into my point of view and into my own experiences, and those of my friends, than I normally would. I still don't intend to get to detailed about myself or my family or my friends here. But I do want to present in detail my view of what a witch is.

Historically, there are a couple ways to become a witch. There are the fully supernatural varieties, like Circe, where they are semi-divine figures. There are also the fully supernatural ones that we often see in tribal stories where the witch is something of an evil sorcerer but is often described almost as if it is some sort of malevolent fairy or spirit creature. We also see historically ones that are a little more tenable. Witches are often born as witches. Either through some circumstance of the timing of their birth, or coincidental occurrences that make them a witch, or based on some familial element such as birth numbering or simply being born into a family of witches. This idea of being born a witch plays out in folklore with witches being born with unusual or particular physical features.

We also have stories of people encountering a faery or spirit and that faery or spirit offering to serve as a familiar spirit as part of some deal. The spirit performs magic for the witch and teaches them witchcraft. In modern pop culture we see this playing out in The VWitch with Black Phillip.

In stories of conspiratorial witchcraft, or witchcraft involving covens we see a different sort of pact. Witches meet the black man in the forest, who incidentally is very similar to spirits described in some forms of sorcery. Der Teufel is cast as Satan in the witch trial transcripts, but we can find non-Satanic antecedent figures who fit this shadowy spirit who teaches magic, grants power, and binds familiars in various magical and religious systems.

In history though, the witch is a witch because of birth or because of a spirit contract. Not because they just decide they're a witch, or because they dance under the full moon and love the earth.

What do witches do? Well, in Thessaly, they mostly did black magic and necromancy. Again, there seems to be some overlap between the Witch and the sorcerer, but they're also not precisely the same. The witches trace back to figures like Circe and Medea, the semi-divine witches of the silver age and so they seem to avoid some of the problems associated with necromancers, while still being characters treated pretty unsympathetically.

In more positive Mediterranean depictions, and in later folklore and in trial confessions witches seem to also do stuff that looks like folk magic and pretty standard sorcery. They don't sing about reincarnation at drum circles, and reclaim their person-hood with pearl pentacle rituals. Sometimes they do things for the good of the people in the community, sometimes they do things for themselves, sometimes those things are pretty neutral or positive looking, sometimes they're pretty awful looking, like Isobel Gowdie and her friends killing all the children of an unjust land owner. In general it looks like witches in history did what they needed to do, or what they wanted to do without considering anything other than their own view on what they should and shouldn't do.

I think this to me gets to one of the most important parts of the witch. This is one that we see in the character of the witch in stories, and fairy tales, and in my own experience what I've seen of real witches. The witch is more than anything else an example of Otherness. The Other represents an individual or idea that stands outside the cultural norm and is potentially disruptive to that norm. The Other is by its nature transgressive and when approached correctly there is power in that transgressive nature. Alternatively the witch could be described as Queer. In cultural and queer studies otherness is often associated with homosexual figures. In our concept Queer doesn't necessarily mean homosexual, but more so “blurry” or something which is between various potentialities and is able to move between them and inhabit them as they choose to. This ability to choose, to navigate, to inhabit more than one space at once is a key to the witch's power.

This Otherness addresses also the difference in modality between a witch's magic and other systems of magic. Based on what we've touched on so far, witchcraft involves sorcery and folk magic, necromancy, work with fairies and nature spirits, and magic taught to the witch by spirits. There is also an intuitive element. This is actually how I got to discussing witchcraft with my friend the other day, as the place of intuition in learning magic came up. I think it has a higher place in witchcraft than in other systems, where magic is more learned and studied. A witch, by virtue of being a liminal creature by nature can explore the spaces between potentialities within his or her own liminal state, and this gives a certain access to magical awareness, and is likely why being born a witch historically is associated with being born with the Sight. A witch also works magic through connecting with the natural world, not to worship or honor it, but to move and manipulate it through that connection. Similarly bewitching animals and people is based on this connection and internal multiplicity.

The word witch does not come from a word meaning “wise one” but rather a word meaning “to bend.” A witch is a bender. This multiplicity and the ability to self select ones state of being is the operant element of witchcraft outside of what it shares with other systems of magic. The witch joins him or herself to the object they wish to bewitch or shape, and the witch changes so that the thing being spelled also changes. This isn't, in my experience, how most systems of magic work. When I was about 4, and then again at 6, the first couple pieces of magic my father taught me were based on this. He didn't describe it in this way, he simply explained how to lock someone into you (create a connection) by looking at them, and then how to control them based on how you felt inside (bend and bewitch). As a boy I didn't think of this as “magic” or “witchcraft” or anything other than just stuff dad's teach their kids. But as I hit my twenties and began to refine my idea of witchcraft from talking with familial witches, and then studying under one, it became evident that the difference between witchcraft and other systems I was learning was that a witch engaged in activities to, as my teacher called it, “become a good animal” or return to a state of being connected with the natural world, so that they could shape themselves in a way which would result in changes in the world around them.

So in short, in my mind, if you're a witch, you're born a witch. Either because you had witches in your family, or because of some special thing that happens with your birth. This idea isn't even foreign to Neo-Paganism, Gardner had to prove witch blood to join the coven he was in before he started Wica. Sybil Leek's coven worked the same way. The handful of pre-Wica covens out there seemed to include proving a witch ancestor as a standard. If you're not born a witch but wish to be one, you might also become a witch by making a deal with a fairy, tossing a toad skeleton in the river, or going to a tree at a crossroads in the night and making a deal with the Black Man who encounters you there. The last of these seems to be the easiest and most common. Once you become a witch, you consort of the dead, maintain business relationships with underworld gods, talk to nature spirits, fairies, and potentially other sorts of demons on the regular, and do folk magic and sorcery. Most importantly, you become something which isn't what everyone else is, something liminal and queer, and you use that transgression not to empower yourself, but to have power over other things around you.