UNTITLED MAGIC BOOK - 12/29/2021 (Patreon)

OUTLINE

SAUCES

Magic: A History - Chris Godsen

The Golden Bough - James A. Fraiser

The Aurora - Jacob Boehme

Occult Philosophy of the Elizabethans - Frances Yates

The Hidden Church - A.E. Waite

The Oxford Illustrated History of Witchcraft and Magic. - Oxford University Press

The Handbook of Contemporary Animism

Experiencing the Impossible: The Science of Magic - Gustav Khun

The Myth of Disenchantment - J.A. Josephson-Storm

A History of Western Astrology - N. Campion

Ancient Mesopotamian Medicine - J. Scurlock

Magic in Ancient Egypt - G. Pinch

WHAT IS MAGIC AND WHY SHOULD YOU CARE

“Magic is an impossible thing to define. It is something felt, something done, and a quality something can have. It is the difference between the house and the home. It is the held hand. It is what we fear about the dark.”

In my time as an occultist, the question I am asked more than anything is “I want to learn, where do I start?” and I have been frustrated for lack of an acceptable answer. The Occult is a broad and diverse field. There are texts on alchemy, on witchcraft, on spiritualism, and ritual magic, but nothing that quite covers everything an interested mind could be looking for.

If you are interested in magic, welcome. My goal for this text is to give the burgeoning practitioner all of the tools they need to build a practice that feels like their own. ”

Further Reading: Claude Levi-Strauss, James Frazer The Golden Bough,

WHAT IS “THE OCCULT”?

The word Occult comes from the Latin word “occultus” meaning “that which is hidden, secret, or clandestine”. Occult knowledge is knowledge of the strange, esoteric, and paranormal, as opposed to knowledge of the measurable world.

As a theologist studies the religions of the world, the occultist studies the magic of the world. The occult is a broad umbrella, one that covers corners of history, anthropology, sociology, philosophy, psychology, cults, and conspiracy theories. It requires understanding a broad range of topics, including science and religion, for to understand what the Occult is, one must understand what it is not.

The relationship between magic, science, and religion is complex and intertwined. They are distinct, but braided together in the yarn of history. Magic and religion often blend, coexisting in the same space, defining themselves by the other, or existing in open conflict. Magic and science have been intertwined for most of history, before there were chemists, there were alchemists, before there were scientists, there were natural philosophers, before there were doctors, there were exorcists. The split between magic and science is a recent one historically speaking, and while magic and science are distinct from each other, magic is the soil in which science is grown, and magic is the frontier beyond where science has tread.

Magic, religion, and science exist as a triple helix, an eternal golden braid. The shape of that braid changes depending on the culture of study, and the historical moment.

LEARNING HOW TO LEARN ABOUT THE OCCULT

If there is a first rule of magic, it is this: “Do your homework”

THE SHORE OF NIGHT: A PREMIER OF THE ESOTERIC

Herein lies the branch: Beyond Dacia, Beyond the Danube. Perpendicular to the world of light and thought and waking men.

Herein lies the now: A now before time and sky and the reign of men. A now after in turn, when the wheels have ceased their turning and the weavers have aged to dust.. An eternal now, cthonic-deep and endless.

Here upon the empty page did the acolyte fall, slipping through the cracks in the world to the darkened sea which was not a sea, cthonic-deep and endless. .

Said the acolyte “Who are you? My work remains undone, bid me return to my study.”

Said the god: “I am Lord of the Lethe-Font and Soporific Crown, Foot of the Ebony Bed, Bearer Keeper to the Gates of Horn and Ivory. I am sleep, dear guest.”

Said the acolyte to Sleep: “Honored am I for your kind assistance, and though I am fearful I have incurred a debt that may be impossible to repay, I must ask a question.”

Said Sleep “Ask.”

Said the Acolyte: “Pray tell me master, where are we? The world is dark and silent. Even held in your divine grasp I feel as if I am falling.

Said Sleep: “Fallen you have, dear guest, down through the cracks in my demesne. Hold still, dear guest, for we alight on the deep shore, on the realm of my dearest mother.”

And lo did the gods alight upon the shore, cthonic-deep and endless. Here the sand was soft-white and cool. Here the shore grass of deepest violet swayed in the wind-that-was-not-wind. Here the sea was starlit night, and it did shimmer with pale stars, distant and iridescent. Here did the acolyte gaze upon the deep shore, to where the horizon was not, to the sea of stars that reached up to the sky-which-was-not-a-sky.

Said the acolyte: “It is beautiful here.”

Said Sleep: “Yes.”

Said the acolyte: “I am afraid.”

Said Sleep: “This is natural. This is wise.”

Said the Acolyte to the god: “Dear master, I do not wish to linger upon your shores overlong. Duties you must have, and mine own work remains undone, but it is beautiful here. I would ask...”

Here did the Acolyte falter, eyes wide upon the deep and sleeping world, their eyes like stars.

Said the Acolyte: “I would ask to stay, to wander, if only for a while. It is beautiful here.”

And with these words did a great darkness sweep across the shore.

And so did Sleep kneel upon the pale sand. “Mother comes.”

And so did the Acolyte kneel in turn.

And so did Night come.

For but a moment did the Acolyte behold the form of night. Borne was she in gossamer veil, in cloth-bound eyes, in shroud. About her neck was a chain of darkest metal, bound with a lock. And in her hand was a lightless lamp.

Said Night:

Said the Acolyte: “My lady, I do not understand.”

Said Night:

Said the Acolyte: “My lady, I am sorry. I do not understand.”

Said Night:

Said the Acolyte: “My lady, I wish to understand.”

And night was gone.

It was then that sleep did rise.

Said Sleep: “Are you curious, dear guest? Do you wish to learn?”

Said the Acolyte: “Yes.”

Said Sleep: “Then follow.”

A SHORT HISTORY OF MAGIC

(Start Here, Considering cutting previous section, or moving it to the middle of the text after the history bit. This is the tone we want to hit.)

If one wishes to build a practice from scratch, they must first count the stars.

27,000 years ago when the world was harsh and cold, in a place now known as Dolni Vestonice in the Czeck Republic, three boys were buried. Their faces were painted ocre-red and their bodies were decorated with bones and teeth and warm clothing made from plant fibers. Near the grave were the fragments of a limestone rod with twenty-nine marks upon it, written in a pattern of 5,7,7,5,5, commonly interpreted to be a notation of a lunar month.

If the marks upon this relic do indeed represent a lunar month, this broken limestone rod represents the earliest known record of a human being gazing at the night sky, and attempting to understand what they see. In this we find the root, the soul of magic; to look beyond, and desire understanding.

WINTER - THE GREAT BEFORE:

50,000-10,000 BCE - The Ice Age

If one wishes to understand magic, they must start at the beginning. Ever since humanity emerged blinking and hungry from the mud and long winter, magic has been a part of us.

But before there was writing, there was oral history, and before there was oral history, there was silence. Before this, nothing can be known for sure. China, Africa, and Australia all bare evidence of ritualistic rock art and complex burial practices. It is impossible to know the specifics of these practices, or if they can even be considered magical in nature, but they are the first glimmers of a human relationship with something beyond. Before there were words, before there were stories to understand, magic itself had yet to take shape, existing in a primordial state.

And then there were stories. The myriad indigenous cultures of Australia and the Torres Strait Islands to this day practice a form of historical record-keeping in which stories are passed from parent to child with other relatives ensuring the story is repeated accurately. This method of sharing storytelling has allowed these cultures to retain ancient stories with incredible fidelity.

The Ngarrindjeri people of what is now South Australia tell stories of Ngurunderi, a legendary ancestral character who features prominently in their mythology. In one story, Ngurunderi chased his wives until they sought refuge by fleeing to Kangaroo Island—which they could do mostly by foot. In anger and frustration, Ngarrindjeri caused the seas to rise, turning the women into the series of rocks that now line the strait between Kangaroo Island and the mainland.

Scientists have recently confirmed that the rise in the sea level which drowned the Kangaroo Strait occurred roughly 9,800 to 10,650 years ago. The story can presumably be dated in kind.

Magic is culturally defined. It shifts and changes and grows along with a culture, blending and warping as it is influenced by other cultures, it blends, fractures, branches, and takes root in an eternal waltz with the tides of history. Two magicians separated by seas and time may dance to the tune of history, but the dance will be different, defined by how they learned, where they learned, what dance means to them, to their family, their people, and their culture.

A magician from cuba may dance the rumba
with a waltzing mage from france,
the jazz-hall magi may swing and jive,
but all of them will dance.

10,000 - 6000 BCE - The Spring Age

Ritual structures begin to appear as humans become less nomadic, Catalhoyuk, Lepinski Vir, Star Carr. The first evidence of items constructed for explicit ritual use.

The Ice Age fades. The air warms. Humanity pulls itself from long winter. One does not need to travel as far for food. The climate grows steadily warmer and humans grow steadily less nomadic.

In the hills of what is now southeastern Anatolia, a sprawling stone structure was unearthed. It was carved into the peak of a low hill, far from any rivers or wells, its great cisterns open to the sky to catch the rain, an island in a sea of grass.

Göbekli Tepe features carvings of animals, arms, and hands. It is impossible to know the significance of these carvings, they could have served an important ritual purpose, or been simple decoration for a place of residence. We cannot know the meaning assigned to these objects, because we cannot understand the minds that made them.

6000-1000 BCE - Dawn of the Magicians

[fold this into the next section]

The climate becomes warm and stable enough that humans are able to construct farms and form regular migratory patterns. The first magic wands appear in northern africa. Early magical practices emerge in connection with metallurgy. Humans begin to create permanent settlements. Evidence of consistent magical and religious practices emerges around grain storehouse temples and ball courts. Oral histories describe explicit magical practices. The first cuneiform tablets describe early forms of astrology and alchemy. China and the middle east begin to show evidence of ancestor worship and divination practices. Europe develops magical practices associated with the home. Humans are found buried with large quantities of bronze. Beliefs in angels, demons, astrology, and wards emerge.

METRODYNE - MAGIC IN THE AGE OF CITIES

[Cut this section down. We want to give an overview of magical history, not a treatise of it. Examples of individual spells should be given in later sections that detail each spell type. The goal of the history section should be to detail the sheer diversity of relationships that humanity can have to magic.]

The long winter falls, summer rises. As the world changes, so does magic.

With the ice age gone, the climate becomes stable. In the river-valleys of the world, humans begin to watch the floods, and how seeds flourish when the soil is soden and dark. Wanderers stay put, leaving seeds in the soil and tending to the crops when the water recedes. Permanent homes are made, agriculture emerges. From the tender earth rises a monolith of stone, the temple. It is along the banks of these agricultural civilizations that the first temples arise, but why?

It is important to understand that carving the earth into cities of stone, civilizing, is not necessarily an improvement in the grand scale of humanity, but it is a choice. There is an idea that the story of history is a train track, an unchanging rail of iron, a process of growing and reinforcing and upgrading in a straight path towards a “perfect” culture. This idea is inaccurate. Consider the ancient historical peoples who have made their homes in the rugged heights of the Andes mountains. There are those who look down on the Andean peoples of antiquity, for they never invented the wheel. This is folly. Wheels would serve no purpose to the Andean people. The terrain of their home is winding and mountainous! Much better served by the likes of goats and pack-llamas. History is better viewed as a tree, it branches and spreads its boughs. When a single bough splits into two divergent branches, is one branch greater than the other? No. Humans had to survive the long winter, some chose to wander, to migrate in time with its frigid tide, to make the wild their home. Others chose to build, to till by the river, to shape stone and soil and grass into home.

Agriculture allows for many things, but first and foremost the production of enormous quantities of grain, which in turn requires storage. The construction of great stone temple-complexes became commonplace. With a surplus of food came specialization of labor: A culture could make so much food that some people could afford to do things that were not making food. With the surplus of food, humans could now afford to do things like “make things out of clay” or “make tools.” With diversity of labor comes trade. Now there are things to trade for!

Someone has to record what is being traded, and for what. Therefore, with trade comes writing. With writing comes a class of humans whose job is to learn to read and write. With writing comes a class of formal magicians.

If a traveller in the year 3000 bce was approaching the city of Uruk, they would see a mountain.The zigguraut of the White Temple towered an astonishing 12m (nearly 40 feet) above the plains of mesopotamia. This was the temple of Anu, the god of the sky, its roots were said to dig down to the underworld, and its peaks were said to sit among the clouds. Its walls were washed stark white with lime and decorated with beautiful mosaics.

The stars up to the temple were cut into the artificial cliff. Along the walls were carved recesses bearing statues of the gods, their cores made from wood and covered with sheet-gold, complete with eyes of polished lapis-lazuli and obsidian that shone in the half-light.

The gods, like us, wished to be cared for. As you passed the statues up the processional stair, you would find offerings of cooked meat and refined drink, incense of frankincense, cedar, pine, juniper, and terebinth. On festival days, the great asphalt pit upon the ziggurat would be filled with some unknown liquid, which would flow down through channels to the gods.

As life became hierarchical, so too did magic. The Mesopotamian world of spirits and gods was a pyramid, a ranked ladder of spirits of increasing power and influence. At the bottom were basic spirits, the dead, animist manifestations of individual trees or homes, and demons. Above them were the petty gods of nature and trade. The gods of winds, the god of blacksmiths, animals even had their own gods. Above them were the middling gods of the netherworld, entities like Nergal the god of war, and Erishkigal goddess of the underworld. Above them were the gods of the astral realm like the sun god Shamash, the moon god Nanna. At the peak were the Mesopotamian big three: An, father god of the sky. Enlil, son of An and god of the air, life, breath, and kingship. And Enki, god of fresh water, wells, rivers, technology, knowledge, and magic.

[above section is a bit cramped]

The gods were not necessarily personifications of the world, but the engines that moved the world. They were irascible, and routinely fought with each other, with losers routinely being relegated to becoming rivers or constellations.

The temple complex at Uruk was made from mud-brick. The cuneiform tablets upon which the temple records were written were made from soft wet clay, and fired for recording. The Tigris and Euphrates gave life in the form of dark and nutrient-rich soil from their flooded banks. Mesopotamia was a culture of earth and water, a culture of mud and clay and soil after rain. When the gods looked out at a universe in need of taming, they saw that they needed help. When their divine hands were set to the task of creating us, what else would they shape us from but the mud; dark, soft, and full of life.

Mesopotamian religion was complex for its ever-shifting nature. The Tigris and Euphates were unpredictable rivers which flooded irregularly and violently. The gods were much the same, giving life and bounty one day, death and destruction another. The routine catastrophe of Mesopotamian life was an unstable foundation for politics. Bouts of bounty and famine saw the political landscape of Mesopotamia change as quickly and violently as the rivers. Gods had different names in Sumerian and Akkadian. With the rise of the Babylonians, the god Marduk gained unchallenged supremacy.

Roughly one thousand years after the emergence of the temple came another structure: The palace. Where there are gods and kings, there are god kings. The Epic of Gilgamesh saw the adventures of a man who is part king, part god. Gilgamesh wrestles, often literally, with ideas of mortality, divine morality, and meaning. In this struggle, Gilgamesh asks the readers: What does it mean to be a god?

A difficult question, and one with no true answer. For an occultist, the important part is the fight. The moment we believe we understand, the moment we believe we hold in our hands the nature of the strange and divine, this is the moment we are thrown and pinned to the earth.

To the mesopotamians, our responsibility as humans was to assist the gods, to feed and clothe them, to venerate them at festivals with song and dance and wine. Their statues were not simple representations of the gods, they were the gods, a physical vessel for them on earth, constructed of ritually pure materials and specially animated through unique rites. Chief among these rites was the Opening of the Mouth, which allowed the gods to breathe and speak.

--

You are an Asipu. A mesopotamian magical practitioner. Your parents were probably Asipu, as well as their parents, as far back as any of you can remember. Your family has lived in the same home in the city of Assur for generations. Your neighbors know which house to go to if they need healing, rituals, or simple advice.

From your youth you learned to read and write Sumerian, Akkadian, and Aramaic, as well as the strange and obscure forms of each text. This was part of your magical training. The inscription of text upon clay is a deeply magical thing, and an important part of your magical practice. You spend hours reading over tablets of arcane knowledge, from temple rituals to ceremonies, to healing, to invocations, exorcisms, and divination.

Your practice is the closest thing that Mesopotamia has to medicine. To you, the body is not a machine that breaks or an ecology that becomes destabilized. The body is flesh animated by the spirit, and it can become crowded. Much of your work is taken up by the ritual treatment and exorcism of demons, spirits, and malign magic. You treat everything from impotence to nightmares to the rigors of childbirth.

[save this for the esoterica]

A city built by satyrs will be a twisting and cavernous thing. Water would come in thin aqueducts along paths of high steps and thin promenades, where they would water the terraced gardens of pipe-reeds and wine-grapes. Homes would be cut into the rock, fit with echoing caves for dancing and drinking and the playing of music.

A city built by harpies would be a tall and soaring thing. Water comes in open cisterns of deep, wide pools, where fish are bred and caught. Homes are built as high towers, great pillars for nesting connected with long open bridges fit for diving and soaring.

To a harpy, a satyr-city would seem cramped and unlivable, the work of a poor civilization who does not understand the proper construction of living spaces. To a satyr, a harpy-city would seem equally unlivable, with its treacherous and indefensible spires, without any of the comforts of wine or song, the work of a frigid and musicless culture.

We must look at satyr-cities as both satyr and harpy.

[old draft begins below here]

Here in the west, magic begins with Egypt and Mesopotamia. The climate has become regular enough to settle down, dig some holes, stack up some rocks into a ziggurat, and form magico-religious relationships with the world. Society is different now! Some people farm, some people run around with swords, and some very very lucky people have big houses and fancy hats. The world is becoming more hierarchical, and therefore so do the gods.

Humanity looks to find its place in an increasingly arcane ladder of gods and forces. Magic in this period is often described as a cosmotheology: There are many gods whose nature transcends human power and comprehension, but the universe as a whole is also worshipped, and can be engaged with on an individual level.

The Mesopotamian pantheon was a complex and shifting thing, but like most early religions, it was rooted in observation of the physical world. Anu was god of the sky, Sin was the moon, Ishtar was venus, but with the rise and fall of the various mesopotamian empires, the god or gods considered supreme would regularly change. One year it was Anu, the next it was Marduk.

The mesopotamian relationship to the gods was one of reverence and transaction. Humans were made from clay and blood and the body part of a god, and our half of the deal was to feed and clothe and celebrate the gods. In return the gods would make the crops grow and keep the weather clear.

The gods were incarnated on earth through their statues, the physical likeness of a god was considered to be a physical manifestation of the being itself. The statues were not simply images of the gods, they were the god; living things that required food and water and entertainment. The gods were the peak of the hierarchy of being, they had to be kept happy, but they were closer to forces of nature than beings who could be bargained with. To converse directly with the gods took a special priest-king, whose position higher up the metaphysical ladder allowed them some divine privileges with the divine.

One of the first official practitioners of magic in recorded history were the Mesopotamian Asipu They were a respected and highly trained class of clerics, scholars, healers, and workers of the minor spirits that plagued everyday life in 7th century BC Assur.

Every Asipu was familiar with a body of work known in english as the Exorcists Manual, a compendium of spells and rites and rituals that was necessary reading for any aspiring to master the craft of išippūtu, or exorcism. It details a myriad of rites and spells, including incantations to be spoken while fumigating an insect-infested field with juniper wood, the correct invocations to free the body of evil spirits brought on by scorpion stings, as well as rituals that give protection during travel, or divine the correct place to build a home or settle a city.

One of the most important jobs of an Asipu was divination, which itself fell into one of two broad categories: astrology and extispicy. Recovered mesopotamian astrological texts like the Enuma Anu Enlil detail over 6,000 different omens and signs that the Asipu must be aware of. The moon’s appearance on the first day of a month was an omen of good fortune, a halo around the moon was an omen of success for the king. The sheer amount of omens detailed would be impossible for any one practitioner to remember, though it is likely that only knowledge of the major omens was a necessity for astrological work. Much the same is true of extispicy, which was structured as a dialogue between the haruspex and the gods. A question was asked and an animal was gutted, the answer could be found in the shape of the entrails to follow.

The Asipu held a respected place in society. Being a magician was a good and honorable trade that took time, study, and focus to perfect. Entire family lineages would pass on the trade from parent to child. In turn, there is also evidence of less savory magical practitioners. The essebu (owl-man), snake-charmer (muslahhu), and the quadistu-woman all offered their services in the streets of ancient Mesopotamia. While the specifics of their work is unknown, it is known that they were regularly accused of witchcraft.

Magic in Mesopotamian society functioned on the basis of perception. The world was understood to be a logical place that followed logical rules, even if the specifics of those rules existed beyond understating. Magic was a question of knowledge and perception, of being able to observe the world and to know what was significant, and what was not.

There is a phrase that marks the end of many mesopotamian divinatory texts, and I believe it summarizes the whole of mesopotamian magic. “He who knows, may see it; he who does not know, may not.”

--

EGYPT:

"The Tigris and Euphrates rivers are temperamental gods. They flood when they wish, with all the storm and force befitting a god. The God-Kings of Mesopotamia were intermediaries to the awesome and terrible, the warrior rulers with strength and courage to stand before the gods and bargain on our behalf.

The Nile breathes. It inhales in the fall, the same time every year, pulling itself into a swift straight line upon which the trade ships fly. It exhales in the spring, flooding over its banks with silt to create soft and fertile earth. The soil here is so rich that crops can be sewn by walking barefoot in the fields and pressing stray seeds in with the heels. Your ancestors found old bodies in the dunes. Some were bone-bleached and stripped of their meat, others were naturally preserved by a process they could not comprehend. You wonder why some were chosen to be preserved by the sand, and others were not. You pity foreigners and their gods of rage and death. The gods here are gentle, mysterious, and full of so many wonders."

Egypt occupies a more significant space in magical history than Mesopotamia. In the early third century AD Clement of Alexandria referred to Egypt as 'the mother of the magicians.' and this holds true today. To understand magic, we must understand Egypt, and its place in occult history.

The nature of magic tends to follow the nature of the place, and Egypt was a whole made from many. Where the city-states of Mesopotamia were locked in constant conflict, The Nile valley delta was likely unified by conquest. Egypt was a culture made from a myriad disparate peoples all doing their best to live in harmony, and the same holds true for their gods. Egypt was a deeply syncretic place. The idea of Divine Harmony or “Ma’at” played a central role in their conception of the universe. More on this later.

For most of history, knowledge of Egypt has been difficult to come by. The major sources we have were from foreigners, mainly the Greeks and Romans, who didn’t always have the best relationship with Egypt. To properly understand egypt, and thus the nature of magic, we must divorce our understanding of Egypt from the greco-roman worldview.

The gods of ancient Greece were personifications of the natural world and human activity. Zeus was the sky, you prayed to him for clear weather. Aries was war, you prayed to him for fortune in battle. The philosophy of ancient greece dealt with ephemeral, untouchable ideas. What is knowledge? What is an object? What does it mean for something to be created? But Greek theology and Greek philosophy were separate. Apollo’s nature could be pondered, but ultimately, he was there in the sky.

Where the greeks deified physical phenomena like the sky, rivers, and human attraction, Egyptians deified complex philosophical ideas like creation, order, and chaos. A scarab beetle lays its eggs in a ball of dung, and rolls it to a new nest, where the larve hatch, seemingly created from nothing. Every morning the sun rises in the east, seemingly created from nothing, where it rolls across the sky to repeat the cycle. Both of these things are considered aspects of Khepri, the god of creation. The gods are not watchmakers tending to the machinery of the world, they are the machinery given life and will.

Khepri was often depicted with a scarab for a head, but this does not mean that the Egyptians believed there was a scarab-headed man wandering the sahara. The gods were fundamentally unknowable, ephemeral things; concepts with no consistent forms or bodies. Just as the Nile would flood to meet seed and soil, only to recede for another year, so too did the gods split and merge and recombine.

Ra was the Egyptian god of life. He was the life-giving warmth of the sun, the light that controlled when the crops flourished, the source of all things that live and flourish. But Ra was not only Ra, he could also manifest in combination with Horus, god of kingship and the sky, Atum, god of substance and completion, Khepri, god of creation and renewal, and most commonly with Amun, god of transcendence and self-creation.

In 2006, Anthropologist J. Baines wrote: “Recent scholarship has consolidated a consensus that “magic” was integral to Egyptian thought, in which it was a basic cosmic force, not a marginal or disruptive phenomenon.”

This brings us to Heka. Heka is the unique Egyptian conception of magic. It is a fundamental force of the universe, like heat or gravity. All humans and gods are both subject to Heka, and able to manipulate Heka, though some humans are explicitly trained in its manipulation. Egypt is often called “The Mother of the Magicians,” but there is no word for magician in any Egyptian language. This is why. All are able to manipulate Heka. There is no distinction between those who can do magic, and those who cannot. Heka is not a “deviant” element of Egyptian life, it is an essential element of their cosmology and religious worldview.

Additionally, Heka is both a force to be manipulated, and a god that is worshipped. Heka is the god of magic and medicine, often depicted as holding a pair of crossed serpents. Egypt was a magico-religious culture, unifying both concepts into a single worldview where magic was essential to religion, and religion essential to magic.

This magico-religious worldview, in combination with Egyptian imperial syncretism, placed strong emphasis on ideas of transition and flux. The world was a constant ebb and flow between order and chaos, where gods and ideas would split and meld and recomine several times over. At the center of this worldview was the idea of Ma’at, or Divine balance.

The practice of heka varied greatly, from simple rituals could be performed to heal illnesses and protect a home from minor spirits, to priests with a lifetime of training in the nature of heka. Priests had defined duties that they were required to perform for the public good, but were also not barred from engaging in private magical practices (for a fee).

Temples were state-funded, larger temples held a scriptorium where texts were produced and copied, a library where the texts were available to read, and a series of classrooms where the intellectual and religious arts were taught. They were designed not for group worship, but for solitude. Though solitude which was broken regularly by festivals.

Words were essential to Egyptian magic, and given the ever-shifting nature of the Egyptian universe, stories came in cycles. A foundational narrative was the struggle between Osiris and Seth, Osiris being associated with order, and Seth being associated with chaos. Their rivalry spans all of time, with Osiris being killed and mummified after Seth defeats him in combat. The exact nature of Osiris’s death is never explicitly told, as it was believed that words could bring the situation into the world, make it more “real” in a sense.

Symbols were seen to have similar power. Some of the oldest magical artifacts known to magicians are crescents of ebony or ivory inscribed with images of the gods. The gods were depicted with a myriad of human and animal parts, and the act of creating their image was a deliberately magical one akin to giving the gods the attributes of the animals they were incarnated as; the strength of a hippo, the swiftness of a crane, the ferocity of a lion, etc.

Additionally, all images and depictions could exist in active and dormant states. If the practitioner could perform the correct rituals, say the right words, the image would activate.

Additionally, the ancient Egyptians had no concept of a separation between worlds. There was no higher realm only accessible to divinity, no hidden dimension of spirits and the dead, the world was a single continuous whole, with magic and religion existing in the same space.

The Egyptian conception of death was a foundational element of their magico-religious culture. To die well, one wants their akh, or soul, to reside eternally in Duat, the realm of Osiris, where it will be happy for all eternity. However, to reach Duat, the Akh must navigate the dangers of the underworld. The dead were often buried with maps of the underworld featuring hazards such as lakes of fire, rivers of fire, mounds, and demons with knives. To do this, a person's vital force, their Ka, was necessary. Ka stemmed from the physical body, which must be preserved after death for the Akh to reach Duat. Such maps are laid out in the Book of Two Ways.

While learning about Egypt and its relationship to magic is of historical importance, its legacy in western magic is arguably more important. It was in Egypt that the idea of The Occult first emerged. Egypt was, to the rest of Occult History, the mother of the magicians.

It is here that the anthropological history of the world and the occult history of the world diverge.

[conclusion section about the end of the new kingdom and the occult diaspora of egyptian spirituality within things like copticism and hermetica ]

[move the below section to the center of the magic section, during a discussion of the whole Osiris and Seth dynamic.]

Your name is Ani, you are a scribe, and you have just died.

You were recently mummified by a team of priests. They removed your major organs and placed them in canopic jars, your body was stuffed with natron salt and wrapped in resin-soaked linens woven with spells, all held closed with a scarab amulet. The entire process took about two months. The reason is that your Ka --your spirit-- needs to be able to recognize your body when it gets back from Duat. You were buried with a 78 foot long papyrus scroll that will help you navigate the afterlife. It used to be that only pharaohs could get scrolls like this, but the economy is great right now, and regular people like you have a shot at reaching Duat.

Your “Book of the Dead” is customized, prepared with the spells and declarations you might need to navigate to the hall of Ma’at, Goddess of truth and justice. There, you will be judged by a panel of 42 assessor gods, whom you must convince that you have lived a good and righteous life. Each must be approached and assessed by name.

“Have you eavesdropped?” asks the god. “I have not eavesdropped.” You say in return.

“Have you made others cry?” asks another god. “I have not made others cry.” You respond.

You are lying. The scarab amulet on your ethereal chest is inscribed with the text “Do not stand as a witness against me” in reference to your heart, the source of intelligence and emotion. You wear this enchanted object so your heart does not betray your guilt. When the trials are passed, your heart is weighed against a feather, if it is heavier, it will be devoured by the monstrous Ammit.

If you are successful, you will enter the field of reeds. Your parents will be there. In the field there is no sadness, no pain, and no anger, but there is work to be done. You will be given task to cultivate a field, with the help of the shabti doll you were buried with. Here you will spend a happy eternity, working and laughing and living with your loved ones before you.

[Notes begin here]

3100 BCE - Narma Pallete depicts a pharoah smiting a subject. He is donned in a headdress depicting a falcon, the tutelary deity of the city; horus.

Depicting a human with an animal head is a sort of combination of their aspects.

Kartush - An emblem that represents a pharaoh as an individual.

The egyptian pantheon is full of ambiguities, there is no one-size-fits-all narrative.

The pharoah is a personification of horus on earth. After the pharoah dies, he becomes associated with the god of the afterlife: Osiris.

Some texts depict Osiris as Horus’s father, others depict them as brothers. Egyptologists have denoted these as “horus the elder, and horus the younger.”

Ramses the second had four army divisions, each named for a different god. Amun, Ra, Set, Ptah.

Horus: God of the sky. Tutelary Diety. Falcon head.

Osiris: God of the dead, green skin.

Isis: Father of Osiris. Resurrected Osiris.

Amun:

Ra: Also has a falcon head. Often displayed in fusion with Amun, called Amun-ra

Set: Chaos, natural disasters, violence. Associated with the invading hicsos people of the 2nd millennium bce. Set killed osiris, his brother. Isis ressurects osiris, and concieves Horus, who takes revenge on Set. Not dissimilar from the story of the Cannanite god Maat, who killed Baal before being ressurected to take his revenge. Set has an animal head, what animal is up for debate.

Ptah: God of craftsman and architects. Patron god of Memphis.

Nut: Potentially related to the Abzhu

Wtf is the sphynx?

Once a pharoah reached the afterlife, they would have to sit before a jury of 12 gods, who would weigh their misdeeds against a feather.

It was essential that the body be preserved so the life force could recognize the body.

The sand graves of early egypt could do well in preserving a body, some scholars speculate that this could have led to beliefs about whether some people were “chosen” by a higher will for preservation.

Conversation with an egyptologist:

Me: Is there anything you REALLY want me to know?

Thatlittleegyptologist: Discussions on Magic in Ancient Egypt are heavily Christianised (like a lot of the ancient world tbh), so bear that in mind when looking at it. Egyptology as a whole is trying to move away from these associations which have a habit of devaluing the meaning associated with words. Like Heka is divine power not 'magic' but we say magic because over time we've divorced it from the religion and we shouldn't have if that makes sense?

Me: No that absolutely makes sense. At least what ive gathered from Chris Godsens work, they had what was essentially a magico-religious culture.The two were not separate at all within egypt. Heka was closer to a fundamental force of the universe like heat or gravity than it was to modern ideas of magic.

Thatlittleegyptologist: they do indeed, they're intrinsically linked and where we've gone wrong with discussions in the past is to belittle and 'woobify' these practices, when we should be looking at them seriously as they show the Egyptian's understanding of their world

yes you are absolutely right

Ritner's book is excellent because it wades through a lot of that to explore it properly

Me: Like, anyone could theoretically manipulate Heka, but the priest-magician-scholar class was explicitly trained as such.

Was there a term for an individual who professionally manipulated Heka?

Thatlittleegyptologist: not really? doctors (swnw) used it, the wise woman (deir el medina) used it, the priests used it, but it was only through the will of the gods that they did. Heka is both divine power and a god in his own right. He personifies the divinity and power of the gods.

Avatar

Me: Ah right! That makes sense! And like, yeah of course they didn't have a name for it if its something that everyone is subject to

Thatlittleegyptologist: Ritner has a section on Heka in his book where he explains in more detail than I can lmao

Me: okok thank you so much for your time!!

Thatlittleegyptologist: no worries! hmu if there's anything you don't understand!

Scarab amulets were an important element of burial. Scarab beetles habit of rolling balls across the earth was representative of the rising and setting of the sun. THe god who moved the sun was Khepri, a scarab-headed god.

Obelisks! Big pointed stone pillars, pointed towards the sky. The romans fucking LOVED these, and stole as many as they could.

Brem Narind papyrus, from the ptolmeic period, but still contains important information about gods. Ritual and ceremony that anyone can undertake to help the sun god defeat his big snake enemy.

Also why was Set worshipped by the 19th Dynasty? The story is different depending on where and when you were in egypt.

The stars were considered dieties called the Imperishable ones. The egyptians distinguished the planets from the stars; stars that were always visible were known as the Stars that Knew No Rest.

Mars is horus. Mercury is Set.

Amunhotep means “Amun is pleased” changes his name to Akenaten

The egyptian people did not like akhenaten. Religion in egypt was diverse and somewhat loose doctrinally. Despotism was frowned upon.

The Great Hymn to Aten is considered the first expression of monotheism in history.

After the old kingdom, egypt became increasingly involved in the politics of other countries, and never really experienced the same level of prosperity. The greek period saw significant syncretism with egypt on the part of greece.

Isis was worshipped by greeks as well as egyptians. Osiris became Serapis. This eventually trickled into the roman world, but exactly how and why is complicated.

It wasnt until roman christendom with its iconoclasm that we see kemetism become antiquated. IT wasnt reawakened until the late 18th and early 19th century.

Interesting tidbit: Ritner says that early greco-roman terms for magicians quickly developed connotations of hucksters and fraud, the same isn’t true for egypt.

Ritner:

“However magic may be defined, in Egypt the practice was in itself quite legal. Only one trial for sorcery is preserved from ancient Egypt, involving the use of wax figures in a plot against the throne, but the trial record is careful to state that the books of magic used by the prisoners came from the king’s own collection. Sorcery against the king, not sorcery per se, was illegal. ”

“If magic is to be retained as a category in the study of egyptian thought, it is because the egyptians themselves gave a name to a practice which they -not others- identified with the western concept of magic: [coptic text, inscribed as Hori-Yota-Kabba, pronounced “hik” rhymes with leek] Selected by Coptic scribes to translate the Greek [Koine text, inscribed as Mu-Alpha-Gamma-Epsilon-Upsilon-Omega-Nu, pronounced “mageyon” rhymes with “day gone”] this term appears to describe the “magic” of Simon Magus, to do [hik]

Jewish Magic

If Egypt is the mother of the magicians, the levant is her daughter. Prior to the 9th century BCE, religion in the kingdoms of Israel and Judea resembled those of mesopotamia, with their tiered hierarchies of gods and spirits. They were polytheists, the tutelary gods of each city-state existing on more-or-less equal footing with the others, but as the world changes, the gods change in kind. The bronze age collapse saw a cataclysmic restructuring of life in the mediterranean. The ancient kingdom of Israel, battered by occupation from Egypt on one side and Mesopotamia on the other, began to coalesce around adherence to a single deity that was wholly theirs.

For our purposes, Religion in the Levant began with what is known as the Canaanite religion. This is the mesopotamian-pattern religion with its tiered hierarchy. At the peak was El, with his consort, the goddess Asherah; beneath them were Baal, Shamash, Yarikh, Mot, and Astarte, each with their own unique orders of priests, priestesses, and prophets, beneath them was a third and fourth tier of minor divine beings, including the mal'ak, the messengers of the higher gods, who in later times became the angels of Christianity, Judaism and Islam.

Magic within Judaism is difficult to define over the course of history. Records from before the Cairo Genizah are vague, and further research is still being conducted. Around 70 CE, Jewish magic comes into focus. Babylonian incantation bowls, protective amulets, spiritualized medicine, all become common as the Jewish diaspora mixes and interacts with different cultures.

The advent of the Second Temple Period saw a notably greater focus on monotheism, which itself raised questions about the role of magic in Jewish theology and society at large. Where does magic come from when there was a single, all-powerful god? While the answer may seem obvious, the mechanics of Jewish magic shifted from the invocation of a single God, to interaction with their lesser aspects like demons and angels.

Prior to the Second Temple Period, jewish magic was difficult to pin down, information was orally transmitted and rarely written down, but available knowledge paints a diverse spiritual landscape still evolving out of the earlier mesopotamian mold. A key development at this stage was the introduction of “demons” or Shedim to Judaism. Some believed shedim were the children of angels cast out from heaven, others believed they were the empowered malicious ghosts of the departed, similar to the dybbuk, a form of evil ghost that would later enter the jewish lexicon. No matter their form, demons could be exorcized through ritual means, given the exorcist had the proper materials and equipment. It is not clear who exactly these exorcists were. Sometimes they were temple priests, specifically learned and trained for the arts of exorcism, other times they were more akin to traveling shamans who made a living through their magical works.

Additionally, the presence of demons was met with the presence of angels. A foundational narrative of jewish demonology can be found in the story of Raphael and Ashmedai from the book of Tobit. In the story, Sarah has lost seven potential husbands to the actions of the demon Ashmedai, a powerful recurring demon likely derived from the Iranian Aesma daeva, or “demon of wrath.” The solution to this demonic problem was to smoke the heart and liver of a particular fish from the River Tigris, which drove the demon from Ectbana (in what is now Iran) to Upper Egypt, where the angel Raphael was able to bind him. Naturally, Ashmedai escapes, for, as Gideon Bohak says, “he will be one of the stars of Jewish demonology for centuries to come,” though not without sustaining some injury, and in later depictions, would come to walk with a limp.

Just as insects could be killed with smoke fumigation, Demons, like any pest, were highly sensitive to smells. A good exorcist could learn of a demon causing trouble and know the exact combinations of plants and animals capable of producing the smell to repel them. We see the roots of the Medieval myth of the mandrake root in early jewish lore, with the ba’aras root. Josephus, writing around the time of 75 CE, details the following advice for manipulating the dangerous and elusive plant. The root “eludes the grasp of persons who approach with the intention of plucking it, as it shrinks up and can only be made to stand still by pouring upon it a woman's urine or menstrual blood.” Experienced ba’aras root-pullers “dig all around it, leaving but a minute portion of the root covered; they then tie a dog to it, and the animal rushing to follow the person who tied it easily bulls it up, but instantly dies - a substitute, as it were, for the one who intended to remove the plant, since after this, the root poses no danger to those who handle it.” If the plant is then strapped to a patient or otherwise brought under a demon's nose, it will flee. The magical use of roots for the mediterranean at the time cannot be understated. Greek society had a name for an entire class of magicians who focused their business on the practice of raising and manipulating roots for magical means, the Rhizotomoi, or “root-cutters.”

The mediterranean was a rich tapestry of magical practitioners and traveling magicians from dozens of different cultures. Nestled firmly in the center of this magical milieu is the figure of Jesus, who followed in the mold of charismatic holy men like Elijah, Elisha, and Moses. Charismatic figures as such were important to the growth of their respective religions and cultures. While it is beyond the scope of this text to comment on the historical truth of Jesus, it is well within the scope of this text to say that the figure of Jesus did not come from nowhere. Traveling miracle workers of myriad backgrounds were not uncommon in the 1st century BCE, while some may have invoked the name of god, others may simply have engaged in more “secular” practices like astrology, physiognomy, palomancy, gorallot, geomancy, caldology, hemerology, bibliomancy, and many, many others.

In 160 BCE, a group of jewish warriors called the Maccabees rose in revolt against the Seleucid Greeks, who had conquered their home thanks to Alexander the Great. This revolt failed, and led to the mass killing and deportation of Jewish people, and later the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE. As Jewish people began to form communities in their new homes, we see the emergence of Synagogues, the community of Rabbis, and myriad practices that blend Jewish, Greek, Roman, and Egyptian magical concepts.

Most common among these new magical developments is the incidence of so-called “Mesopotamian Incantation Bowls,” mass produced clay bowls of similar size and use to the ones found in any modern kitchen, inscribed with rings or spirals of text, usually Aramaic or Mandic, –often verses from the Hebrew bible– leading down to the center. Unfortunately, most of these bowls come from “Illicit Digging” and their broader archeological context is difficult to discern, but there are some fairly safe inferences which can be made simply based on their design. Consider the use of a bowl: holding things. As a physical bowl is used to hold physical things, an enchanted bowl is likely used to hold magical things. Many bowls are inscribed with the figure of some malicious demon or entity, presumably trapped at the very center. What exactly one did with a demon trapped in a 5th-century cereal bowl is up to historical interpretation, but when it comes to magic, human creativity has no bounds.

(Talk about jewish magic because it’s going to come up again. Run this shit by experts because this needs to be solid as hell.)

*Jewish magic defines demons and angels. Talk Raphael binding Ashmedai.

*Talk about Ashmedai’s possible lineage from the iranian Aesma Daeva

*Further reading: Gideon Bohak

*Talk about sheydim being sensitive to smells

*mandrakes, Ba’as root

*Charismatic ideas (mention jesus)

*gorallot

*Note the significant change from worshipping statues

*Shift from the first to second temples and monotheism

*How magic changes under monotheism

(Talk about the roman empire)

*how it overlaps with jewish magic (Thanks roman-jewish wars)

*macabean revolt

**Talk about babylonian jewish magic vs Palestinian jewish magic

*babylonian incantation bowls

*Western Jewish magic and its thing for engaved amulets and jewels, Lamelle

*Greco-roman Tabulae Defixiones

*Voces Magicae

*Note the first emergence of magical papyri and books

*GREEK MAGICAL PAPYRI

*Coptic Magical Codexes

*Tetragrammaton

*Interplay with the greek world.

*CHARACTERES (Probably Graceo-Egyptian)

*Sepher Ha-Razim

*Greek assignment of numerical values to letters

*Mention the importance of sound to incantations

*Speakin in tongues

*Salian Incantations

*ABRACADABRA

*Word Traingles QPRGYH

*Jewish relationship to astrology (Ask someone about this)

*Shimmush Tehillim (medival text)

*Index Librorum Prohibitorum

*Sepher Raziel ha-Malakh (Practical Kabbalah)

*”Jewish Magic still exists in the present, and it s msot famous when practiced by non-jewish celebrities; shorn of almost all its truly a magic for the modern age.”

*Zohar

*There is so much here but we have to shorten it

GRECO-ROMAN MAGIC

*Oracles in the big temples

*Seers: Manteis, Chresmologoi

*Incanters: Epodoi

*Wonder-workers: Thaumatopoioi

*interpreters of wonders: tetraskopoi

*speakers to the dead: Goetoi

*root-cutters and herblorists: Rizotomoi, pharmakeis

*Greek culture spreads to the borders of india and northern africa, many combinations are common

*Rise of the Polis

*egypt annexed in 31 bce.

*constantine becomes christian in 312 bce

*Christianity becomes the state religion in 391 bce

*Greek religion had no dogma, no official creed, no holy book, no priesthood, and no church.

*started around 800 bce.

*Its less accurate to consider roman imperium in the same way that we think of, say, british imperium. Roman imperium did not seek to wipe out conquered cultures, it sought submission. Rome was not a predator consuming prey, it was a parasitic vine growing over a tree. Ideas were not siphoned per se, they were circulated throughout the empire.

*Talk about Julia Kindt and her views on greco-roman religion.

*The greek gods were instantiations of aspects of the world, things that could be bargained with on a transactional basis.

*Rome had a similar view, as evidenced in Do ut des: “I give, that you might give”

*None asked a question without getting an answer, what no mortal knew was what the god would say.

*Esther Eidinow’s views on greek religion, less as individualism and more as a way of dealing with the anxiety of an unpredictable world.

*phthonos, envy driven spells, greco-roman magic had an air of enjoying the suffering of others

*People were not necessarily religious, and as one travelled, worshipping at local shrines in the local way was seen as practical and good

*Scholars are still unravelling the christian mindset when trying to look back on greco-roman religion.

*Greeks especially believed that everyone worshipped the same gods in different ways. A greek travelling to judea would see their god and say “damn, yall really like apollo huh”

*While there was no dogma or doctrine, impiety was still possible, early philosophers like Anaxagoras were exiled for claiming that the sun was a rock not a god.

*Oracles were deeply important.

*Temple of Apollo

*Delphic Amphikitiony

*THE PYTHIA, and her social and political importance

*

MAGIC IN THE MIDDLE AGES

• Ends with Newton
• Humor theory
• John Dee
• Saints, tinctures, demons and angels

Medieval magic

• Kieth Thomas “The medieval church...appeared as a vast reservoir of magical power, capable of being deployed for a variety of secular purposes.”
• Godsen: “It is impossible to understand Medival magic without embedding it within the context of the church, and medieval society more generally.”
• Talk about how the roman empire fell in like 410 but continued to influence life
• Talk about humorism here, as an example of as above so below
• Talk about the spheres of the world, medival cosmology, ideas like the sublunary world and the Primum Mobile and empyrean heaven
• Robert Grossteste
• Demonology
• NEOPLATONISM
• Poltinus
• The texts of Alfonso X of Castile
• Lapidario
• Picatrix
• Libro de las formas e imagenes
• Libro de astromagia
• St Augustine, everything has its own angel

Everyday magic of the medieval world

• Harley Roll
• Abrahams eye
• Holy water Godsen 364
• Communion with angels, Angelology in general
• Ars Notoria
• Notae - Magical medival diagrams
• Cecco d’Ascoli and floren
• Simon Magus
• Isidore of Seville
• Magic and early pogroms
• Paracelsus, Giordano Bruno, etc
• Agrippa

Magic in the renaissance

• What changed?
• Godsen: 367 “Magic did not die out at this point, but transmuted into something new. Underlying much Renaissance thought was the search for the hidden and for allegorical links between things that might appear different; the term occult had a positive element in the sense that many magicians felt they were revealing and bringing to light hidden aspects of reality.”
• Iatrochemistry
• HERMETICA
• Marsilio Ficino, Plotinus, Iamblichus, Porphyry
• Pico della Mirandola: “The elemental fire burns, the celestial gives life, and the supercelestial loves”
• The chain of being

Alchemy

• History of the term alchemy
• The emerald tablet
• Chains of being
• Jabir Ibn Hayaan, Gerber
• Robert Chester, Book of Composition of Alchemy
• 12th century Toledo
• Albertus Magnus
• Roger Bacon
• Akkadian distillation and Ur-Material
• Paracelceus

Astrology

• Simon Foreman
• Richard Napier
• Elias Ashmole
• “The human body is where alchemy and astrology meet” Godsen 377

John Dee

• Aa crucial criticism of Catholicism by Protestants was that it was magical.
• Both were interested in light
• Newtons ideas about gravity were prefigured by dee
• Philosophia naturalis principa mathematica
• Dee was a neoplatonist, and not a charlatan, he worked from an existing body of theory
• Dee was particularly influenced by kabbalistic ideas, specifically those dealing with the geometry of letters
• Dont forget edward kelley
• Mysteriorum libri quinque
• Book of Enoch
• Dee as inspiraion for Prospero

Newton

• Newton did practice astrology, though to a lesser extent
• Newton was an alchemist
• Transmutation
• “Newton was searching for material transmutations that occurred down at some micro-structural level.” Godsen 384
• (Include that cool ass sketch from his notes about the philosophers stone)
• Consider including the quotes godsen did in 385

Witchcraft

• Put this section before Newton
• Ideas about black magic and sympathy for the devil
• Deaths from witchcaft number about 80,000
• Be sure to note that most of those people were probably not witches
• Trial of Peter Stumpp
• Maybe touch on paranoia here
• Helen Duncan and the HMS Barham

Early Modern Magic:

• Perhaps cut this, unsure of the structure
• The idea that demons were mesmerized by a line
• Hexafoils
• The reformation personalizing relationships with god and how that effected magic
• “Spiritual Middens” godsen 393
• “Astrological practice for Physick”
• WITCH BOTTLESSSSSS
• The idea that newmodern witchcraft represents some unbroken line of paganism is probably wrong 395
• A false decline of magic
• Appalachian witchcraft, the prominence of divination and cunningfolk despite writing to the contrary
• Newton being the last alchemist
• BLAVATSKY

MODERN MAGIC

• SPIRITUALISM
• ANIMAL MAGNETISM
• Ghost Club (.org)
• Society for Psychical Research (.uk)
• Dickens,
• YEATS
• Seances (Incude that anecdote about seances being a common tool for black leftists in america)
• Anti-Native sentiments
• Houdini, A magician among the spirits
• Conan Doyle, Edge of the unknown, The History of Spiritualism
• Clashes between enchanted worldviews and empiricism
• “Were people divided into body and spirit, with the latter surviving the death of the body?” 401
• Communication between worlds
• FREUD and the unconscious, its relation to psychometry
• Mention that time that freud was a medium in the 1920s
• CROWLEY, his inspiration from Wilde and Nietzche
• Book of the Law
• The New Age
• Temple of the Golden Dawn
• Ordo Templi Orientis

Contemporary Magic

• “Around 75% of the adult population hold some belief in magic and the paranormal (source??)”
• Pew research mentions that 79 percent of those polled felt miracles still occur today as in ancient times (2007)
• Ouija board
• Gerald Gardener
• Freemasons / Rosicruticans
• Hermetic order of the Golden Dawn
• Ordo Templi Orientis
• Wicca
• Neopaganism
• Chaos Magic
• Satanism?
• The New Age

Magic in the modern world

• Where does this leave us?
• Let me show you
• Hence the rest of the book
• 
  
• Extending being beyond the body
• Being as Ecology
• The sentience of matter
• “Where science asks ‘Can we do this?’ Magic asks ‘Should we?’” Godsen 432

THE ROOTS - MOUTH OF THE LABYRINTH

Said Sleep to the Acolyte: “Behold with thine fast-shut eyes dear guest, for herein lies the vale deep.”

And the Acolyte did behold a strange and twisting valley like a bowl carved into the earth-which-was-not-earth. It was here that the night sky like seawater did cascade, flowing down down down the great spiraling aqueduct through mountain and forest and ruin to the great cistern below.

Said the Acolyte: “It is beautiful.”

Said Sleep: “It is treacherous.”

Said the Acolyte: “What lies at the center?”

Said Sleep: “The palace umbral, manse of my dearest mother night.”

Said the Acolyte to Sleep: “How must I reach it? These cliffs are tall and steep and I bare not wings.”

Said Sleep: “Along these dream-carved cliffs must you walk, through the forests and mountains and ruins old.”

Said the Acolyte: “But where, master sleep, do I begin? From this high place the vale seems a maze, a labyrinth of bridges and knots and false paths. I fear I will be lost.”

Said Sleep: “And fear you must, dear guest. For here the dream is deep. To be lost here is to be lost for good.”

Said the Acolyte to Sleep: “Will you not guide me?”

Said Sleep to the Acolyte: “I cannot. This place is not mine to know. The work must be yours, dear guest, and yours alone.”

Said the Acolyte: “I understand.”

Said Sleep: “You do not, dear guest, you do not. I must leave you here to your exploration. I have mine own duties to which must attend.”

It was then that the Acolyte did walk, along the dream-carved paths of stone-which-was-not-stone

Ever deeper.

THE FIRST BRANCH - WINTER

And the dream said: “Close your eyes.”

Beyond these walls there is nothing but the endless dark.”

And the Acolyte did close their eyes.

And the Acolyte was quiet for a long while.

And the Acolyte said in soft whisper: “In my dreams I have felt this before. A pinprick in the shroud, a glimmering, so distant, so faint, so far away.”

And the Dream said: “Go. Seize it. Take it in your hands.”

And the Acolyte said: “I dare not. I feel if I reach for it swiftly it will vanish, blown into nothing like an ember on the wind.”

And the Dream said: “You must be gentle.”

And the Acolyte said: “It is so far away.”

And the Dream said: “You must be patient.”

And the Acolyte said: “It is so fragile.”

And the Dream said: “You must be humble.”

And the Acolyte said: “It is mine.”

And the Dream said: “Open your eyes.”

It was then that the light did return,  rushing in to fill the gap. There in the Acolyte’s hand was an unember, a speck of velvet dark, fragile, distant, and wanting.

From the folds of his quilted robe did Sleep draw a lantern. “Place the ember within.”

And the Acolyte did place the ember within the lantern, but the oil did not light.

Said the Acolyte: “I do not understand.”

But Sleep was gone.

THE SECOND BRANCH -  STONE

THE THIRD BRANCH - SEA

THE FOURTH BRANCH - HEARTH

THE FIFTH BRANCH - CORPSE

THE SIXTH BRANCH - MACHINE

THE SEVENTH BRANCH - LIGHT

THE PALACE UMBRAL

SECTION TWO: THE THEORY OF MAGIC

Magic comes in three overarching forms. These archetypes are defined on the overall goals of the practitioner; Transcendent magic, Transactional Magic, and Transformative magic.

Transcendent magic is used when interacting with forces that are beyond human control. The universe is bigger than us. The wheel of fortune is turned by the tide of fate and we humans are here to bear the consequences. Storms level our homes, mysterious relatives die and leave us fortunes, electronics catch spontaneous fire, every moment of every day we are subject to forces that we understand, but are beyond our ability to effect.

An astrologer checks the signs for the betrothed, determining the most auspicious day for marriage. A monk sits in silence, pondering the nature of god. A young woman chooses a green dress for her date, dates always seem to go better when she wears green.

We read the stars, we cast runes, we draw cards, all in an attempt to gain insight into the machinations of the world, to touch something untouchable. For are we not made of the same matter as storms and gold and fire? Are we not pulled by the same gravity? Are we not warmed by the same sun and cooled by the same night? For all its marvellous and ineffable complexity, we are not distinct from the world in any way that matters.

Transactional magic is used for forming, maintaining, and breaking contracts with the universe in its myriad forms. Payment made, bargain kept. A priest offers prayer to god in hopes that a sinner will be pardoned. A shaman bangs a drum as the people dance, offering the sound and frivolity to the spirits in hopes that they will bring rain. Students rub the head of a bronze dog statue for good luck on their finals.

There is often an element of personification to transactional magic, to make a bargain with something implies an intelligence with which a bargain can be made. However, this Other is not necessary for transactional magic. A campfire warms us at the cost of burning through its wooden fuel. The actual mechanitions of the bargain are often irrelevant.

The universe is an easy thing to personify. If there is beauty to be found in the human experience, it is found in our ability to see ourselves in the world. The sky may storm and rage and we ask it what is wrong. Is it upset? Is there anything we can do to help? Perhaps if we cooked some meat and wine over a fire, the smoke would drift up to the sky and it would stop raining.

Transformational magic Is used to turn one thing to another, and to imbue things with special properties. A priest stands over a basin of water, making it holy. A viking warrior kills a bear and brings its bones to the smith, who will burn them in the kiln to turn iron to steel. A mother stares over the counter to her children as she stirs a pot with love.

The wonders of the physical world are endless. Today we understand every chemical reaction that facilitates the fermentation of grape juice into wine, every step has been recorded, catalogued, and fine-tuned with the sharpest tools available to science. None of this has made the transformation any less magical.

Understand that hard distinctions are antithetical to a proper understanding of magic. These three archetypes are not hard categories. They are a triple intersection that mix and blend and overlap. Consider a place where a mountain range, a forest, and a grassland meet. There are no hard borders between the biomes, forest fades into grassland, the woods climb the slopes of the mountain, as do the grasses and flowers.

MAGIC AND RELIGION

Magic and religion do not have a fixed relationship. Every culture has a unique balance of the two. Godsen lays out five major relationships: Magic as dominant force, magic with an emphasis on lineage, magic and religion as equals, religion dominant and magic ambiguous, and a dominance of science religion and magic in that order.

Where does current western society fall? It is difficult to say. Attempting to define the interplay between science, religion, and magic in the modern world would be a tall order for any anthropologist, and I am not an anthropologist, I am an occultist.

That said, there are practitioners of magic from every religious background on earth. Each religious doctrine and culture will create a different relationship with magic, and ultimately it falls to the practitioner to determine what they want that relationship to be. A practitioner can be Christian, Musilm, Atheist, Hindu, Buddhist, Jewish, or anything else under the sun. There is no gate.

In fact, dear reader, if your religious beliefs are an important part of your life, I would encourage you to look at your religious history. Every religion on earth has its esoterica.

THE SEVEN LAWS OF MAGIC

Magic is a narrative force. Where religion has doctrine, magic has rules. I have attempted to define the rules here.

The Law of Contagion - The part of the thing is the whole of the thing. Once together, always together. Magic performed on a strand of hair will affect the entire body. Magic performed on a shard of a building will affect the entire building. Not all connections are made equal, magic performed on a cup with your lipstick on it will have less of an effect than magic performed on a phial of your blood. Magic using this law is known as Thaumaturgy.

The Law of Sympathy: The image is the thing. Like attracts like. A drawing or representation of something can gain its properties. A photo or drawing of you will have a similar thaumaturgical connection to you. Combining sympathy and contagion is the basis for poppet magic.

The Law of Correspondence: As Above, So Below. The gods are like us and we are like them. When viewed closely, atoms resemble solar systems. The big effects the small. The idea that there is a sort of harmony between similar patterns no matter their size. This is the basis behind astrological magic.

The Law of Resistance: Some things are more magically conductive than other things. Everything exists on a spectrum of “magical“ to “mundane“ and the less magic something is, the harder it is to effect with magic. The same extends to people who, for whatever the reason, simply have a harder time interacting with magic.

The Law of Balance: Magic seeks equilibrium, and therefore, every magical action has a cost. No magical act takes place without some sort of power behind it. Energy will not move unless something is moving it, be it a practitioner or the natural energy of the moon. A body in motion will stay in motion, a body at rest will stay at rest unless acted upon by an outside force.

The Law of Reciprocity: If you don’t know where its pointed, its pointed at you. If it doesn’t have enough energy, it will get energy from you. The process of getting hit with your own improperly constructed spell is known as Recoil. Safe practice often involves setting up wards to act as a barrier between you and any mistakes.

The Law of Reversal: That which is done by magic can be undone by magic. For every spell there is a counterspell, for every ritual a counterritual. Every ward can be hexed, every curse can be dispelled. This does not mean countermeasure will be easy or efficient.

THE FIVE QUALITIES OF A MAGE

Elphias Levi, in his 1896 book Transcendental Magic, outlined four essential qualities of a mage. They are as follows: Scire, Velle, Audere, and Tacere.

Noscere - To Know - Associated with the element of air, intelligence, and discernment. A practitioner must know themselves and their practice. They must know the lore of herbs, stones, symbols, or whatever they may be working with. They must understand the hard facts of their craft, and be able to discern reality from illusion. One cannot manipulate an image if one does not understand its bounds. Additionally, one must understand that magic is not free from the mechanics of the world. If an idea does harm, the mage must leave it behind.

Velle - To Will - Associated with the element of fire, with belief, discipline, and willpower. A practitioner must apply their knowledge! To do magic is to make art, to make art is to be known. This is terrifying! A practitioner must have the willpower to be known, to put themself into their craft, to allow themselves to fail and practice. We are steel from the kiln, and we must hammer ourselves into better shapes if we wish to grow. Pain is not necessary for growth, but hammers a heavy; to wield the tools of growth requires effort and careful focus. Magic is a constant effort of refinement and re-analysis. It is called a practice for a reason.

Audere - To Dare - Associated with the element of water, with challenge, tenacity, and ambition. A practitioner must be able to do things with their whole heart. Far too many practitioners are embarrassed by their practice, this will not do. It is human instinct to second guess ourselves, to response to criticism and mockery with indignance. When a practitioner is called cringe, two paths open before them. To take the path of the reed is to simply not respond, to allow others to think you are silly, and continue on your merry way. To take the path of the oak is to hold strong, to recognize that magic is, at the end of the day, a bit silly, and to respond with a resounding “yeah its cringe lol.”

Tacere - To Keep Silent - Associated with the element of earth, with calm, with understanding and humility. A practitioner must understand that the world is always stranger than it seems, that there are ideas beyond what words can convey, and experiences beyond what the mind can comprehend. There are things that cannot be explained, only learned firsthand. This is the Esoteric. Most of all, a practitioner must remain humble. True understanding of the Occult --real Esoteric Knowledge-- can feel powerful, and the practitioner must not allow this to make them arrogant. Remember, no matter how many books by historical weirdos we read, we still have to use the toilet.

Each of these qualities is a corner of a pyramid, when combined, they form the foundation for:

Ire - To Go - Associated with the spirit. A practitioner must remain balanced, and a practitioner must practice.

TYPES OF SPELLS

Warding is magic that seeks to protect. It is the magical defense of people, the scaring away of evil spirits, the consecration of places or objects. Warding is proactive, it is the construction of magical defenses.

Synmancy is a broad and common form of magic. As people move through their lives, they form relationships with their environment. Bonds are formed with people, places, animals, plants, things, ideas, anything that can be important to a person. Synmancy is magic that forms, strengthens, breaks, changes, or manipulates those bonds.

Divination is any magic that deals with foretelling the future. This can take many forms and many scopes, from a single person drawing tarot cards in preparation for a date, to an oracle foretelling the fate of a nation.

Augury is the complement to divination, where divination seeks to understand the future, augury attempts to understand the past. Roman settlers often kept an augur with them when a city was in need of construction. The augur would disembowel birds to examine their entrails. Was the bird hydrated? Well fed? Did it show signs of disease? A well-fed, well-hydrated, healthy bird, meant a place rich in natural resources, and ideal for settling.

Necromancy is any magic that deals with dying, death, and the dead. It deals with ideas of how to die, what happens after, and how to stay dead with elegance and poise. Common practice involves speaking to the dead, ensuring they are comfortable, and ensuring that they do not bother the rest of us.

Zoimancy is magic that deals with the body; medicine, sickness, health, healing, and possession. Where wards are proactive, dealing with the defense of something, zoimancy deals with management and repair. Wards are the walls around the castle and the guards who patrol them, but zoimancy are the masons who maintain the walls, and the soldiers who come to repel invaders. Before there was germ theory, there were spirits.

Alchemy is magic that deals with understanding and effecting transformation. This also covers Artifice, the construction of magical objects.

Amoramancy is magic that deals with the manipulation of desire. The magic of love, sex, wanting, and yearning.

ON CURSES

A curse is essentially any spell done with harmful intent. A hex is any form of spell meant to unravel or dispel other workings. If wards are walls, a curse can be a battering ram, a stealthy assassin, or an invading army who lays siege to the castle. In this same fashion, a hex could be the pots of tar used to burn down the ram, the patrols who catch the assassin, or the legion of riders who break the siege into disarray.

Magic is culturally defined, and it is rare to see forms of magic that are either inherently good or inherently evil. The common dichotomy of White Magic versus Black Magic is, in my opinion, limiting. A scalpel is a tool of medicine, but can just as easily be used to gouge out an eye. Magic is much the same.

For a more occult analysis of this concept, let us look to the idea of the Left and Right Hand Paths. The right hand path is often associated with adherence to a sort of moral code, where the right hand path is associated with resistance to the current social and religious paradigm, the incorporation of sex into magic, and general rejection of social conventions.

Within this conception of magic, those who define the normal, the orthodox, also define the abnormal, the heterodox. Those seeking to reject the dominant order of the world are themselves slaves to it. It is my belief that participation in the occult should be one of curiosity, an exploration of the wondrous and strange things that humans can do, any notion of arcane power or higher wisdom must come after.

ON MAGICAL ARTIFICE AND SALVADOR DALI

Thoughts on art:

• The Work must impress without touching you
• If the classics are cold, it is because their flame is eternal
• The eclaat of the romantics is that of a fire on a strawpile
• If you understand the painting beforehand, you might as well not paint it

STRUCTURE OF A SPELL

A spell has three components; Will, Act, and Energy.

Will = Thelis / Volus

Ritual = Praxi / Actus

Energy = Dynami / Vis

Let us say a magical practitioner has an apple tree in their backyard, and they wish to use magic to cause the tree to fruit. Their first step would be to determine intent. What do they truly wish of the tree? Do they want it to fruit early? Do they want the apples to be large? Delicious? Do they want many apples from the tree? If so, how many? The practitioner's intent must be distilled in some way, focused like light through a telescope. Let us say that the practitioner distills their intent to a few simple statements, or axioms.

“May your fruit be many.”

“May your fruit be bountiful.”

“May your fruit be delicious.”

When choosing the number of axioms, a spell must have at least one axiom to function, and the functional upper limit appears to be thirteen, beyond this, workings become increasingly unwieldy and chaotic. Generally, the sweet spots appear to be at three, four, seven, ten, and twelve. Keep in mind that the number of axioms will determine the shape of the ritual. Each axiom is a plate the practitioner must balance if they wish to see their desires manifest.

As for how specific the axioms may be, this is something that must be learned through practice. If the practitioner is too specific, they run the risk of constricting the spell, causing it to overload and burst like a clogged pipe. If the practitioner is too broad, the spell runs the risk of becoming dilute and ineffective, a lack of metaphysical water pressure as it were.

The practitioner has their intent, their axioms. Now the practitioner must structure that intent. Generally, spells can be represented visually as a circle inscribed with shapes representing the axioms. A spell with four axioms would be represented as a circle with a square inscribed within, six axioms would be a hexagon, and so on. This spell, in its most basic form, is structured as such:

[Image of a circle with a triangle inscribed within. Circles are drawn over the points of the triangle.]

The greater circle represents the spell itself. The smaller circles represent the Axioms. Now, we must tie each circle to each axiom. There are many, many ways I could accomplish this. For "May your fruit be many" I might draw a sigil for Demeter, goddess of the harvest. For "May your fruit be bountiful." I might draw a sigil for dionysus, god of feasting. For "May your fruit be delicious." I might draw a sigil for Hestia, goddess of cooking. Or I could write special text around the edge of each circle corresponding to each axiom. Or I could place an herb or stone in each circle corresponding to each axiom.

Now the spell needs direction. We have three effects we wish to impart, but upon what? To aim the spell, the practitioner might place a little piece of the trees bark at the center, or inscribe the circle on paper, and pin it to the tree itself.

The spell is nearly ready. The cannon is loaded and aimed, but lacks propellant. Magic seeks balance, energy will not flow without cause. To power the spell, the practitioner might place the bark of the apple tree in a little phial of moonwater, and leave it at the center of the circle. The practitioner could place a drop of blood upon the bark at the center of the circle. The practitioner could place some candles along the perimeter of the circle, which power the spell as they burn down. Keep in mind that not all magical power sources are alike. Just as batteries are constructed with different capacities, weights, and voltages depending on what needs to be powered, magical power sources have different qualities that may be more or less appropriate depending on the spell. Moonwater is a common power source, useful for its stability and flexibility. Candles are higher energy, but single-use. Blood is akin to magical rocket fuel, energy-dense, explosive, and runs the risk of overloading a spell if too much is used. Experimenting with different spell structures and power sources will be a necessity for any burgeoning practitioner. And just as experimenting with electronics requires precautions to avoid being electrocuted, experimenting with magic requires precautions to avoid being cursed. This brings us to wards.

WARDS

While magic can be done anytime, anywhere, many practitioners take to the construction of a sort of magical workbench, a specific place with tools and amenities where they can perform their craft with greater efficiency.

Warding can take many, many forms. The construction of magical tools for manipulating high-energy spellwork from a distance, additional spellwork placed like a firewall around a spell, cleansing a space before magic is done, a ward is any proactive defense against malign magic. Keep in mind that the warding procedure will vary depending on the working in question, but here are some best practices:

WARDING YOUR SPACE:

1. Cleanse the space. This is the magical equivalent of clearing off your desk. Wave some smoke around, chant a bit, the goal here is to dust up any ambient energy that may be bouncing around.
2. Clear your mind. Meditate a bit. Chant some more. Sit yourself down and do whatever it is you need to do to get yourself focused and in the zone.
3. Once the space is ready, set up your wards. This could be drawing some simple runes to create a boundary around your workstation, protecting yourself as if creating magical armor, or lighting candles to power defensive workings you’ve already set up.

WHAT DO YOU NEED TO PRACTICE?

Before we discuss what is needed to practice, let us discuss what is not. Know this and know it well: Magic will never be something that can be bought in a store. A witch who purchases beautiful crystals and hand-made candles and custom-ordered bone engraved runes is practicing the very same magic as the witch with river stones and old bottles and the bodies of insects kept in matchboxes. While things can be purchased, magic cannot.

Magic is not in the blood. There are no “magical bloodlines” or special arcane heritages. Coming from a long line of witches does not make one more or less magic than the practitioner who started yesterday. Magic is defined by culture. So while there may be spells, magical ideas, and practices unique to the experience of a people or ethnicity, none are greater than or less than the others. Magic can be felt by all, touched by all, and moved by all.

Draw symbols on printer paper with ballpoint pens, tape them to your closet door. Wash the labels off glass bottles, fill them with used matches. Learn the names of all the local plants. Learn to spot the birds. Learn their habits, their histories, and understand that you are a part of that history. It will help you find the magic all around you.

For what makes a thing magic but its history? Gold is the kind of its metals for it shines like the sun and naturally ,silver is the moon. Copper is good for defense because the greeks polished it for hand mirrors, and when combined with tin, it formed the weapons of the ancient world. Iron for its strength.

THE FIVE STAGES OF UNDERSTANDING

(learning)

1 - Data - Cast a wide net, absorb as much relevant data as possible, draw the lines around what will become the body of knowledge.

(collation)

2 - Information - Structured Data. Take the raw data and organize it, form tables, draw diagrams, find relationships between the data points, place events on a timeline.

(analysis)

3 - Knowledge - Useful information. Once information is understood to the point where it can be applied effectively, it becomes knowledge. Understanding that the data points follow a formula. Look for conflicting information, learn why it conflicts. Apply common sense, weigh the evidence.

(Experimentation)

4 - Insight - understanding the underlying forces behind Knowledge. Understanding that the formula can be used to predict future data points. When conflicts are found, what resolves them? Where did the information come from? Is that source reliable? What does the source have to gain? Who pays their bills?

(Practice)

5 - Wisdom - Application of that deep knowledge. Understanding when to apply the formula, when it will or will not be useful. Resolve those conflicts. What is the most likely course of events?

BUILDING YOUR CRAFT

• Learn to meditate

LEARN TO MEDITATE

Before everything, learn to meditate. Take some time, it doesn’t have to be much, to sit down and think about nothing. Practice centering yourself, grounding yourself. Meditation is a good way to transition between mundane and magical mindsets. An open mind is all well and good, but sometimes the door needs to be shut tight.

LEARN THE RULES OF MAGIC

• If you plan to venerate something, learn about it
• Learn the rules of YOUR magic, not all spell structures are created alike
• Setting up a workspace
• Practice building spells
• Research research research

Common sorts of spells

• Intro to summoning
• Intro to Sigilcraft
• Intro to herblore

Building your craft

• Customizing your practice

HOW TO LEARN ABOUT THE OCCULT

If there is an unofficial rule of magic, it is this: “Do your homework.” But this is easier said than done. Before one can really learn about the occult, one must learn how to learn about the occult. Doing research into ordinary topics can be difficult, and doing research into the occult can be a minefield of racism, pseudoscience, and predatory ideologies. In this section, I will cover how to do research, as well as cover some red flags to look out for.

• Start with a google search
• Find a text
• Understand the context of the text
• Understand the author of the text
• Where do these ideas come from?
• What were they used for?
• Is this okay for you to use?
• Avoiding cults
• Red flags
• Avoiding racism and appropriation

RUNES, ESOTERIC TEXT, AND OCCULT AESTHETICS

Said the acolyte: “Master, what does it mean for something to look magical? When we say something looks magical, what do we mean? Why are aesthetics important to the arcane?”

And sleep said: “Let us explore this line of inquiry.” and from the thin air of the dream did sleep conjure a roll of parchment and a quill of ebony tipped with poppy flowers.

“Behold!” Said sleep, as they turned the parchment to reveal what they had written. Upon the page was a series of letters which read: “ZKANITFYWJMEBVSDQUOHLGCPRX”

Said sleep to the acolyte: “What have I written?”

Said the acolyte: “It appears meaningless text.”

Said sleep: “This is correct! The text is indeed meaningless. Now-” and again did sleep begin to write. “Behold!” Upon the page was a new series of letters which read: “ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ”

Said the Acolyte: “It is the alphabet!”

Said sleep: “Indeed! Correct! But understand dear acolyte, the text is the same. Both pages contain the alphabet. The first written out of order, the second written in-order.”

Said the acolyte: “What does this mean?”

Said sleep: “Mean? Questions of meaning will be left to your philosophers. The important thing for our purposes is the moment of recognition when you beheld the text. Now behold:”

Again did sleep turn the parchment, revealing text that read: “ABCDEFGHIJKLNMOPQRSTUVWXYZ”

Said the acolyte: “Again it is the alphabet! But, wait a moment…master you have swapped the positions of the N and the M.”

Said sleep: “Indeed I have! Pay attention to your words dear acolyte. You say this is the alphabet, for you recognize it as such, but the order is wrong as it was the first time I showed you text, yet you recognized it nonetheless.”

Said the acolyte: “Not so master! The order is largely preserved! The change you made was small. ”

Said sleep: “Indeed. But then when, dear acolyte, does recognition fade to meaninglessness? How many letters would I have to change before the order was destroyed, and the alphabet rendered unrecognizable?”

Said the acolyte: “I know not master. But this is something that may be tested with science. Say we show a transformed alphabet with a single pair of swapped letters to 1000 strangers. They would likely recognize it as the alphabet, no?”

Said Sleep: “I would expect so.”

Said the acolyte: “What if we repeated the process, this time with two pairs of swapped letters, and showed the page to 1000 new strangers. Most would likely recognize it, but perhaps fewer this time?”

Said Sleep: “Indeed, I would expect so.”

Said the acolyte: “Let us perform the process again and again and again, each time further degrading the order of the alphabet. Surely, there will be a point where it fades into meaninglessness for the majority of onlookers.”

Said Sleep: “Some may think of it as a spectrum. On one end, perfect comprehensibility. On the other, incomprehensibility. This is less useful, however, than in thinking of it as a venn diagram. One circle is comprehensible, the other incomprehensible. Where they meet, this is where the laws of magic take over. That space between the recognizable and unrecognizable, this is where the magicians dance.”

My goal with this sub-project is to produce an esoteric text that was uncoupled from any existing language or culture.

MISCELLANY

• I silently admitted to myself, “I want to paint like Ingres,” and it turned out to be like Bouguereau. Nevertheless I irresistibly paint like Dali.
• Allow your practice to be yours.
• “Do not fear perfection, you will never attain it.”
• “Learn to paint like the old masters, then do what you like. Everyone will respect you.”
• “No lazy masterpieces”

Dali’s Painters Slumber:

• Slumber With A Key
• Sit in a chair with your arms hanging off the side.
• Hold a heavy key in one hand, dangling over a plate.
• Wheny you fall asleep, your hands will relax, dropping the key onto the metal plate, creating a great noise that will wake you up. This hypnagogia is ideal for painting.

Dali’s Perch Eye Slumber:

• Take four perch eyes
• As you get into bed to sleep, place three on a board or small book on your legs.
• Place a fourth on another small book over your groin, and fall asleep with it lodged under your finger.
• The goal is to stare cross-eyed at the eyes until two eyes become one, as you stroke a third, creating the sensation of touching several objects at once.

“Egnage in the hypnotic doubt of your sensations.”

Dali seems influenced by freud.

“His eye lives only sympathies and antipathies, by continual affinities, relations, and choices.”

Dali’s Aranearium:

• A hoop of olive wood atop a box of olive wood in which holes are drawn. Allow a spider to nest in the box and weave its web in the hoop.
• Viewing landscapes through the hoops of several Araneariums creates an effect that transfixes and captivates

Dali, Three Rules for Controlling Dreams

• Only the last dream, the one closest to waking can be influenced.
• Choose carefully the fragrances and perfumes which evoke concrete periods of your adolescence. Have your valet pour one of these fragrances or perfumes on your pillow an hour before you wake. Things associated with this fragrance will appear in dreams.
• This also applies to music. Play the music very quietly.
•