The Magical Castle: Motte (Part 2), 13th November 2022
We can think of magic using this analogy of the Motte & Bailey castle: when we do a magical act, the assumption is we are going to take the throne. We're the person who's going to be in charge, we're going to take it for ourselves. The magical act that we're going to perform, it's going to give us what we want but, behind that is the presumption that we will capture magic itself. We will take magical power. That's what we're after.
Learning the magical techniques, getting the right clothing, learning the words, spending a fortune on very fancily-bound dubious-quality texts, researching old grimoires, that kind of a thing - that's us attacking the magical castle. Learning the techniques, practicing them.
And moving into the Bailey is like when we've learned how to dress like a magician. We've learned all of the ideas. We have all of the tools that we need.
The Example of Sigils
A simple example of this is the use of sigils. So last time, I gave you some homework, which was to practice Kasina, and then use Kasina as a way of ‘charging a sigil’, so to speak - the language depending upon whether or not we stay true to Spare, or we think about the Chaos Magic approach.
Now for some of you that did that, maybe you've had an experience with the manifestation of the intention.
And the reason why I wanted you to experience a magical act was for you to understand how the analogy that I'm talking about would relate to that act and the experience. Just the intention of creating a sigil to make something happen is like the intention of taking the throne - the person that's going to be in charge, the person who's going to take the castle and possess it for themselves. And have that power to impose their law on the land which the castrum inhabits.
How this relates to doing magic is the notion of moving appearances around to create the illusion of change. Moving appearances around to create the illusion of change - because there's no connection with the actual source of life itself. There's no connection with the origin of creation itself or the process of creation.
Now, if you experienced a result from your attempt at doing a sigilisation, whether from the formal practice itself, or in the occurrence of a synchronicity - despite not actually finishing the procedure, a synchronicity that coincided with the intention that you had. I'll say more on that in a second - you will have seen that magic works. As people say, it actually works. It's not something that's just made up. You can actually do these procedures and something will follow.
But what I want you to understand is that when I say ‘moving appearances around to give the illusion of change’, that's exactly what I mean: magic working, the synchronicity, the occurrence of the thing you intended to happen.
The Example of Servitors
Now, we only looked at sigils, but there are many things that you could do, ritually speaking. You could make a sigil that is a servitor. A servitor is a familiar or a being that you formulate its nature with a sigil and then you talk to it or interact with it as if it's a living being and ask it to do things for you.
So you could write a statement of intent, something like, my function is to discover long lost treasure. So you write that out, you make a sigil, and then you can give it a name if you want to give it a name. And you can make a name from the same sigilisation process, but instead of making it a geometric pattern, you can make it into a mantra. Or a barbarous word, so to speak, something like that, and give it a name. You maybe even draw a little image for it, what it looks like. You can get creative, get your crayons out. You could make an effigy of it, and then you can talk to it, and ask it to do things for you.
A full blown equivalent of this, that's more sophisticated and more complicated, would be like conjuring a demon to visible manifestation and asking it to do stuff for you.
Although we've only had a little look at a sigil, I hope it makes sense how all the different kinds of magical acts that you might do fit within this domain of the Bailey, what I'm saying about the Bailey.
Now, if you take the Bailey - let's say you managed to break through the fence, you learn the secret techniques and the methods, you get the books, you raid the library, you can command the soldiers in the barracks and the blacksmith to work for you - you can bind entities to yourself to get them to do things for you. So I just mentioned a servitor, you could get some kind of book and summon a demon and then threaten it and make sure that it becomes bound to you such that it will, when called upon, perform what it is that you want it to perform, that kind of a thing.
But we're still in the Bailey and we haven't left it. And we have all the appearances of doing magic. Got all the aesthetic and so on. Anything that you might identify with magic, that's all in the Bailey.
So you can be a practical magician. You can be the black sorcerer versus the wise man. You can be the evil witch versus the wise woman. I think I talked about this last time, but that's the idea. And you don't leave that domain to the extent that you just do this practical magic. That's as far as it goes.
In the Bailey, you do this practical magic, but the actual mystery of magic itself, what it is and how it works, remains in the tower that looms, that casts a long shadow over the Bailey, and everyone knows that the mystery hides in there. And there's someone in there, so there's someone in charge, and it's not you. You haven't really grasped the mystery.
But you're quite content ordering your slaves around, your servants around, moving appearances around, to create the illusion of change.
But unconsciously you know that tower's there, and it's unnerving. And sometimes you catch glimpses of it out of the corner of your eye. Like when you're going to do a magical operation, and you get the result without really doing the magical operation. What's going on there? How's that possible That's strange, isn't it? Best to ignore the glimpses of the tower.
Maybe the idea that we have of controlling these appearances to create change isn't what we think it is.
Leaving the Bailey
Now, some of you will have experienced this precisely because with Magia practice we've already moved out of the Bailey. It’s extremely important for you to understand how this practical magic relates to something like Magia practice and how they fit together.
In the library in the Bailey, you'll find people there who discover the plans for the tower. They know they've not taken the tower and they don't know how to do it. There are horror stories about people trying to take it and they don't come back. After a while, people think of this tower in terms of an academic discipline. You can study the idea of the tower, and the nature of the tower, and how it's been handed down through generations. Until it is just an idea.
Sometimes, if it's admitted that there was someone who built the tower, or knew about the tower, they're discounted as bad people, maybe. They're not models that we wish to follow. Or maybe we even say, any talk of a tower's got nothing to do with magic. Because everything identifiable as magic is here in the Bailey.
So it's ours. And people do their magic, they experience their magical results, maybe they speak to entities, they have synchronicities, strange things like this. But they never leave the Bailey. And sometimes they even get spat out of the Bailey again, while still thinking that they're engaging with magic.
The more they try and claim the throne for themselves, the further away they get from it.
Sometimes, you see someone in the Bailey, who's come down the flying bridge, and they say, ‘The tower's real! You should check it out!’ Everyone hates this person. They call them bad names and they kick them out. ‘You can't take this guy seriously.’
So maybe you venture out the Bailey and up the flying bridge. And then you see the tower - corpses littering the moat where they've tried to take the tower.
You can see someone up ahead. They're trying to bash the door down. They're throwing themselves at it. They're throwing themselves at it until they're exhausted and they come back looking all dejected. And they say, ‘Forget it. Forget it. You're never getting in that tower! It's probably empty anyway. What's the point? What's the point?’
But you decide to approach the tower. You walk over the corpses. And you get to the door and you're just about to try and kick the door in when you think, ‘Well that didn't work for the last person. But someone's claimed that they have been here before and they didn't look tired.’ So then you try something - you turn the handle and the door opens because it was never locked. And you walk in and discover that it's your house! It was always yours. The castle was already yours. Therefore it was impossible for you to take it. It was always impossible for you to take it and the attempt at trying to take it is the reason why you couldn't realise that it was already yours.
By the way, this lines up very nicely with the story of the Garden of Eden, and the fruit that human beings are forbidden from eating. They wish to try and take it, don't they? And they're told not to. But how do you take something that's already yours?
If you try and take something that's already yours, you have the fall. You end up leaving the garden.
The Motte as inheritance
The keep was already yours. The mystery's already yours. The castle's already yours. It's your inheritance. You couldn't take it in the first place. The law of the land is already your law.
It's only something that you had to say yes to.
It does not involve the appearance of anything esoteric. All of that's in the Bailey: the magical books and the weapons and the tools and the robes and all of that stuff.
And it can't be taught. It's not something that you go to a library to read about.
It's something that's already handed down to you. Magic can't be taught in that regard. If I say magic can't be taught, this is what I mean. It's the exercising of an inherited power. It's the same thing as your nature.
And then you decide to tell everyone the good news. You come running down the Motte, doing cartwheels. You can hardly believe it! With a smile on your face and the sun shining and the birds singing. And you run into the Bailey and you say, ‘Good news, everyone!’
And they pelt you with rotten tomatoes. Tell you to get lost, and that it can't be true.
Making the Transition
Practically speaking, however, how do we make this transition? What is it that we do?
There is this idea that you can pursue practical magic to possess the throne. ‘I'm going to take it. It's going to be mine.’ And if you're serious about it, and you pursue it seriously, eventually you end up on the path of the wise, to quote Crowley. Because if what you're concerned with is personal power, you're always asking, ‘What's above the horizon where I'm at, in terms of magical power or prowess?’ or something like that.
And eventually you're looking up vertically to the highest power and you're saying, ‘I want that. I want to be that. That's what I want.’ So you invoke it. And at that point, the flip happens. That's like going to the tower. You've left the Bailey and you're in the tower - now you're not the one in charge, so to speak (in the sense of trying to take the throne with technique).
Unbinding Practice is just like that, isn't it? Unbinding Practice is recognising that you're not going to ask for something particular and specific. Rather, you're going to let some part of yourself that knows you better than you know yourself, to be brought into this world and to manifest and to exercise its nature.
And you get everything you could possibly want that will fulfill you as a human being in the very ordinary sense. But usually it's of a nature that you couldn't possibly have worked out for yourself in the first place. It's brought to you and it's beyond what you could have figured out. Not only is it beyond what you could have figured out for yourself, it's actually beyond what you would think possible.
So the fact that the throne is already yours, the keep is already yours, the whole castle is yours, already - that's too much. It's like, ‘How can that be the case?’ Not only is it yours, but it's always been yours.
It's been waiting for you.
Traditional Magic: Abramelin
Okay, so now we'll have a look at some traditional magic - the most important traditional lineages of magic that we have in the West.
The first one is the Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage. There's now a much improved translation, The Book of Abramelin. Yes, by Abraham of Worms, Abraham von Worms.
You may have heard of this ritual. Much is made of the traditional requirements being something very hard to meet. Crowley attempted it. It stipulates having a specific kind of room to do the ritual with something adjacent to the room, could be outside or it could be in another room where it's covered in sand - three inches of sand, something like that - and that's a space where you'd call demons into it.
And Crowley attempted to do this because he was wealthy enough to furnish a building in such a fashion. But for whatever reason, he had to abandon doing it that way. And he ended up doing something else for six months. And then he had the Knowledge and Conversation of his Holy Guardian Angel, which is the aim of the ritual in The Book of Abramelin.
But a lot of people say he didn't really do the ritual, because he didn't really follow the methods as it's described. And it's a great example of what I've just been talking about -
people mistake the appearance of the esoteric for the esoteric itself.
If you read The Book of Abramelin, the structure is that you are going to acquire for yourself a Holy Guardian Angel, and then the angel will allow you to then command evil spirits, and that's how you perform your magic in the world.
But the instructions are very interesting. Abramelin says what you need to do - and it takes about a year and a half in total, but what you need to do is, it's actually very simple - you need to pray every day. You need to pray every day, pray to God to send you an angel. Now, if you did that for six months, every day, twice a day, something like that, your reason for asking for the angel and the way in which you're asking is going to be exposed for what it is. If you want God to send you an angel, the right relationship is one of devotion, humility, piety. It's the first thing, piety. You're going to pray to God. You're going to pray to God and ask him to send you an angel.
You do that for a long time. Then you start to prepare the environment within which you're going to work. So you have a room, you have a lamp, you light the lamp, and you pray in this room. And then there are certain other little things that you might do. You get some oil and you anoint the room in different places, you burn incense, and you continue to pray. You continue to pray.
But what prayer? What prayer do you say? The funny thing in the book is that Abramelin says, ‘I'm not going to give you a prayer to parrot. You should be able to pray yourself. You should be able to put it into your own words. And if you can't, then you're not capable of praying.’
So you should make it up yourself. Make up the prayer yourself, because then you're being genuine. And then if you're being genuine, over time, you'll learn to pray, and then over time you'll also get instruction in how to change the prayer from an inner guidance. So that's very interesting!
At a certain point, the angel will appear, give you instruction, and then tell you how to command the demons that will appear in this other room with sand (or it could be outside). The demons should not be able to walk into the room that you're in.
Why? Because after a period of, let's say, a year, something like that, you've become a pious person. Evil spirits can't stand the pious. Now I am using this word in the sense of it being virtuous, not in the sense of it being overbearing and annoying. Usually people use it that way, don't they?
But someone who has a right relationship with God is someone that evil spirits don't - they don't want to be around that person. The room itself as well has been consecrated, anointed with this oil. There's the incense and there's the prayer, and it's built up over time. So the demons won't be able to come in. But you can command them and get them to do stuff.
And then what does Abramelin say to do with the magic? He says, you should only use the demons to do good things for people. Don't do anything corrupt. Let's put it that way. Because if you do that, you'll end up being corrupted. And so the orientation comes from the religious devotion. It's an interesting text because he's talking to an audience that's Jewish, Christian, and Muslim. And the right relationship is found in all three. So he can speak to all three.
No money is to be exchanged for helping people with this magic.
So there's an orientation, and it all starts with this, what we might call then, consecration. Oh, and you do make a stick. There is a stick, and you can, oh, wave it at the demons if they're being annoying.
If we think the important part is the room, then you might say, ‘Oh, if you don't have that room, then you can't do it.’ But if we understand that the most important aspect of the practice is this consecration, this turning to God - so you start off saying you want to control demons or have magical power or something like that. How do you get it? You have to aim at the highest. That's your first move. Then you make the space that you're in an expression of that decision, of that choice. And that's what consecration means.
Consecration
Consecration, you can say, it means ‘to make sacred',’ but it's another way of saying ‘to decide on a purpose for it.’
If you consecrate yourself, you've given yourself a sacred purpose. Your purpose is sacred now. That's what it is.
Consecration: starts with that. You can look back through time and see numerous examples of people doing this working without the room. They consecrate themselves and they do that devotional practice every day and it leads in a certain direction.
So hopefully you can see how that relates to ideas of Crowley doing the Abramelin ritual. What did he do? He turned inwardly. He received instructions. That's what you do.
Traditional Magic: Solomonic
Okay, the next thing to consider is what's called Solomonic magic. Solomonic magic, despite its name, is not Jewish. It's actually Greco-Egyptian. Same with Abramelin. It goes back to Egypt.
Now we can trace the magic all the way back at least 2, 000 years, and it has the same elements each time, and there are six stages and it follows a similar pattern. The first step is consecration. So no banishing rituals or anything like that. Consecration. You turn to God and you pray, you pray. And you set up the environment within which you're going to do the work and you consecrate it. For this purpose. Aimed at the highest.
After consecration comes invocation. And who's invoked? Gods, angels. Things of a good spiritual nature. First. That's what gets invoked first. So far so good.
Now, the next step would be evocation. And that specifically relates to calling forth evil spirits. Spirits or demons that might harm you.
Sometimes you'll come across authors in today's milieu who don't like talking about demons. They think it's not politically correct. So maybe another way of putting it is ‘a wild spirit of the underworld.’ Okay, ‘wild spirit of the underworld.’ Either way, it'll hurt you unless you have protection. And this is where we find in Solomonic magic, or this Egyptian-Greek magic, the circle, the protective circle.
So with evocation, it's like now you introduce a circle, and there are a number of candidates for what you would evoke the evil spirits into. Could be a triangle, could be a brass vessel like a lamp, hence Aladdin. Sometimes a scrying bowl. Sometimes you don't need anything. You just call it outside the circle.
And then there's a number of steps where you constrain the evil spirit, then you bind it, you get it to swear to do what you want it to do, and then you give it a license to depart. It's free to go on its way, and what that means is whenever you call on it, it will come and help you, because you've already done that working. You don't keep repeating the working. You've done that working, now you have that spirit.
Circle as cosmology
What is the circle? If you see any images of circles in grimoires they're often extraordinarily elaborate. The most recent, historically speaking, that we find in the goetia - which is part of Solomonic magic, it's one version of it - you see a very elaborate circle given, in one of Crowley’s books, and on the outside - and you see this repeated throughout history, at different points - you'll see an Oroboros.
Now, from what we've already talked about on this retreat, we know that the Oroboros is considered to hold the world together. In ancient cosmologies, you see the Oroboros on the outside, and then you have descending or concentric circles that shows different astrological levels. So you have the Oroboros, then you would have Saturn, then Jupiter and so on. So you have a cosmology.
So what's the circle?
It's a cosmology on the floor.
There's equipment that you might use. A magic ring, a lamen, which you hang around your neck. It's almost like a breastplate. You might use the famous black-handled knife. But something for pointing.
What are all these things? They are ways of identifying who you are. If you're stood in a cosmology, that means that you understand who you are and where you are, and what it is that you're doing. What does the ring do? It identifies who you are. What are the magical weapons for? They identify who you are, what your authority is.
In other words, they're an expression or a putting into words of the consecration that you've done. You've made a choice about who you are, you've aimed at the highest, you've made a choice about who you are, and then you're putting that into words. You're identifying who you are.
Consecration, invocation: you can have the circle and then you can talk to gods, you can talk to angels, spirits usually considered divine. You don't need anything other than the circle. In fact, you don't need the circle at all to speak to those spirits.
The cosmology helps to put something into words, but if you're someone that's already been practicing the consecration and aiming at the highest - and therefore you're a pious person - wherever you are in the working that you're doing, you're already expressing that consecrated nature.
The True Nature of the Banishing Ritual
Another way to think about what you might do in that situation, ritualistically speaking, is - although there's no such thing as banishing rituals in any of this traditional magic, that doesn't mean you can't use a banishing ritual if we understand what it is.
A banishing ritual is really the 2D cosmology of the circle made into a 3D performance. That's what a banishing ritual really is. A banishing ritual isn't really telling something to get out. You actually invoke the different parts of a cosmology to make a consecrated space.
So there are these options. As long as the consecration is done, you don't need a circle if you're working with gods or with angels. Or good natured spirits, something like that.
You can have a circle, do that invocation. You can have cosmology on the floor. You can do the banishing ritual. As long as we understand it's not really a banishing. It's an expression of the cosmology and your place in it. You can do it with all the regalia that I talked about to identify yourself. So all of these are different options and they're all the same thing.
It's only when you get to commanding evil spirits or demons or something like that, that you then need something outside of the circle. As we saw in the Abramelin ritual, there was no circle, but there was a demarcation between two rooms. One room that's been consecrated over a long period of time, so it's holy, and then the space designated for the demons to appear.
Now, the amusing thing is, the fashion in esotericism or practical magic has gone back to the traditional grimoires. So you're supposed to read all the traditional grimoires and follow the methods. And it usually goes hand in hand with the bizarre flex by practical magicians, where they boast they've made all of the tools, they've used all the methods, they command these spirits and they can do real magic with these spirits.
It's a bizarre flex because even if we decide that they're not demons and we say they're just ‘wild spirits in the underworld’, binding yourself to a wild spirit in the underworld is just not the flex you think it is.
If you own a dog, that lead goes both ways. That's what it's like. Why would you bind yourself to a demon? Ha! And think that's a flex. It's very strange.
And then the outcome from that is always, ‘Hey,’ - and this is the spirits that do it, the demons that do it. It's always - ‘Hey, that magician over there is going to kill you. You should kill him first.’ That happens with Ayahuasca. That happens with African diaspora. Traditional Chinese magic.
Anyway, interestingly in Solomonic magic - in some of the books, especially the oldest, I think it's a 7th century Greek version - there is talk of doing this magic without the consecration part. It's possible to do it with bad consequences. And I think that's mostly what people do when they do it.
Magia Practice as Traditional Magic
What do you do when you do unbinding practice? You light a candle, you light a lamp. Why are you lighting a lamp or a candle? It's an offering on an altar - facing west, but - it's an offering on an altar. Whose altar? God's altar. You're lighting a candle. What's the candle for? What does the candle have? It has a divine purpose.
Why are you doing the practice? Because you're saying yes to your divine inheritance. You have a purpose. So you're consecrating yourself. The lamp is an expression of that consecration. The space within which you do the practice. Do you need a circle to protect you from God? Do you need a circle for the cosmology?
In the practice that you do is the cosmology. There's three different versions of the cosmology. The Fire, the Underworld, and the Beloved. Three different ways of thinking about cosmology. And there's the tree, with the four steps. It's as simple as you can make a cosmology without it being wrong.
You do your consecration, you do a prayer, and then you act out the cosmology.
I've said this before - haven't I? - about Magia. This is why we have the name Magia for it, because using the old European root-word for the word ‘magic’, it honours this understanding that the oldest understanding of magic is the bringing into this world of the divine, from this other world, into this world to cause a change to happen which actually perpetuates creation itself. That's what we're doing.
We're walking past the Bailey straight up the flying bridge and into the dominium and sitting on our seat. That was already ours. We're not even trying to take it.
And we participate in the natural expression of a law that governs the land as far as your riders can reach.
Sometimes you like to go out and enjoy hunting in the forest that's nearby.
By the way, that actually seems to be the likely reason for many castles being built where they were built. Nothing to do with strategic position.
Speaking with the Gods
There's something else we could do here. What if we wanted to speak to a god? What if we wanted to speak to an ancestor in the lineage? What if we wanted to do that? What if we just wanted to speak to the gods, plural, that make up the body of Aion?
Now this then ends up looking like much of the traditional magic that's been done. So you would do your prayer. You would consecrate the space. Maybe you would have your tools. Maybe you have a ritual for setting up the cosmology. Maybe you have the cosmology on the floor. You don't need a triangle. You wouldn't need one. And all these things are optional, that I just talked about.
And then you'd merely invoke the gods and speak to them. You would need to make sure that there's an available means of manifestation. The traditional setup is you have an operator, someone who does the rituals, and you have someone who's a scryer, someone who has a visionary ability.
But, like I said, there are options. You can do water scrying, there's even fingernail scrying. These days, some crazy people use some kind of weird radio setup and listen to the white noise with a bag on their head. Yes, ‘Whomst would do such a thing?’ But there you have the available means.
And then, so you can ask, why would you do this?
If you're doing it aimed at the highest, the structure of the experience that you have will demonstrate that consecration. So again, it's like the consecration being put into words.
I'd like to give you an example. Me and my friend Duncan Barford back in 2007 or 8 or something like that, we decided that we'd speak to the gods. Or the Divine Council, or the Arcanum Arcanorum, or the Great White Brotherhood. But we would just say the gods standing in the fire of eternity.
So we tried it, and we spoke to the gods. And someone turned up, Tempe.
Now, we were already following a thread in terms of consecration. We were aiming at a divine purpose. Even though there was an element of, ‘Let's try this to see if this works.’ It was never as an experiment just to see if it works. It was to see if it works in terms of - the language I would now use, because we're using it - consecration. Does it follow that thread? Is this a thing for following that thread?
And then we promptly ruined the whole thing. How did we ruin the whole thing? We promptly scuttled off into the Bailey. We asked questions about really stupid stuff. Really silly things. We reverted back to questions that were an expression of us trying to take the throne. So, ‘Is the world really run by evil beings? Will there really be a UFO invasion?’, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
Those are all questions for acquiring something, aren't they? Like knowledge, secret knowledge or something like that. I'm trying to take something that's already been given to me. And the interaction was with an entity, a god, who was saying, ‘You don't understand, it's already given. The thing that I want to give you, that's already yours. It's already here and you're not understanding it.’
And a natural result of this is inevitably prophecy. So a description of a future event concerned with one thing and one thing only, and that's your divine birthday.
You can put it that way. Trying to tell you the good news. Listen, it's your birthday soon. What do you have to do to attain your birthday? It's just going to happen. It's something that's an inheritance of yours. It's something that your parents wish to do, to celebrate just the sheer fact that you exist. It's in their nature to do so, it's your birthday.
And no matter how many times Tempe wanted to tell us it's our birthday, we were more concerned with taking the throne.
Anyway, we did learn our lesson over three workings and then came to understand - that's it, okay, there's just the thread. If you're going to do this, talk to the gods, there's only one reason to be consecrated, it's aiming in that direction, and flowing from that is the news that what you're seeking, in terms of consecration, has already invaded time in the future.
Eternity has already invaded time in the future, and that's why the thread's there in the first place.
Good news, it's your birthday, your birthday's coming! That's the virtue of doing that kind of a working. You can gain insight and a way to participate in prophecy with intention. You can do that intentionally.
We can fall from the throne that's already ours by trying to take it.
Another example of that, by the way, is when you get direct messages and through the process of trying to take the throne, something about that attitude, the communication becomes depersonalized and decontextualized and the person gets lost in esoteric symbolism. It's like a miniature version of the magical castle.
You get a symbol and ‘I'm now going to assail that symbol. What does it mean? I'm going to possess its essence for myself. I'm going to learn what it means. What could it be about?’ When someone does that, you speak to them two weeks later, and they'll be rambling about some other kind of symbol that's come along through some synchronicity, and they're not even talking about the original symbol anymore.
And they've not ascended the Motte. They think that they're dealing with the mystery of magic. And they've not left the Bailey. They're enamored by the appearance of the esoteric. And they're assailing it.
What's nice about this, by the way, if you think about it, is it's like the mystery of magic defends itself from the unworthy. If you approach it with the wrong intention, it's like a magical mirror. It's like a magical mirror and it reflects back your intention and plays the opposite side of the role for you.
Transforming the Dark Arts
What about then if you invoke the gods and then what you want to do is instruct demons to do things for you, the dark arts?
If you do the consecration, you accept what's already yours. You then return to the Bailey. Now, you can use whatever's in the Bailey, because it's all yours anyway. The soldiers in the barracks, except they're not your slaves. Instead, they express loyalty in terms of their rightful place in the hierarchy of the Lord of the Castle, something like that.
This is expressed in The Book of Abramelin when he says, you can use this magic, but you do it for virtuous reasons. It's to help people. You don't do it for self gain. And in fact, if this is a natural outcome from the consecration that's been going on for a year and a half, all magical power, practical magic power, is given - but you don't care about it.
You don't care about it in the way that you did before the consecration. So it's all given, it's all given, but do you care about it? That doesn't mean that you can't use it, however.
Incidentally, as a side note, the structure of the Arcanum Arcanorum - the Magia branch of the Arcanum Arcanorum - follows this structure.
The requirements for the Order of the Lamp is something like six months daily practice, doing unbinding practice, and you master unbinding practice, and you can do practice vows and so on. Then you do a prayer, you light candles, you do a prayer. It's basically the Abramelin ritual.
Next you learn binding practice which is the flip side of unbinding, really.
And then when you're in a position to - after an awakening or two, because if you're going to master binding, which means cosmological binding, you have to have had an awakening to do the cosmological binding on, which requires no outside authority to either deny or confirm one's attainment. So it's all contained in the practice. That's why we just have to focus on mastering the practice. Self-sufficiency, honesty with oneself, cultivation of vision, all of this happens - and then in the final grade you get taught incubating practice, which is a magical practice for doing intentional magic.
But here's the difference: you get to see the action of magic - in terms of the moving of appearances around to create the illusion of change - you get to see the entire mechanism for that and where it comes from. Versus how it is when you're just in the Bailey.
So those examples of people who, they decided to do a sigil, but then they get a result without having gone through the entire procedure. You think, ‘What is that? How is that possible? How does that work?’ Let's say even if you just do the procedures and you keep having synchronicities happen. You don't know what the mechanism is. When you return back into the Bailey from the Motte you get to see how that plays out from above. When I’m talking about incubating practice by the way, you get to see it…from below. You get to see the mystery of magical reality from a different perspective. You get the full picture.
Now, the same can be true if we just follow the practical steps of summoning an evil spirit. You do your consecration, you have the inner guidance, you have the realisation, you can speak to the gods. And then, if you need to, you can do the dark arts. But what are you doing them for? Why are they being done?
How do you relate to them? You don't relate to them in the way that you do as someone might who's just in the Bailey. You relate to them in a very different way. It's all freely given but you don't care about any of it because what you care about is just one thing. And you've been exercising that devotion and you continue to exercise that devotion for the entire run up of the practice and for the rest of your life.
So maybe you do some magic to help someone out, maybe you do it to help yourself out with something very specific, but that's where practical magic fits in. If you wanted to do it intentionally.
It's fully possible to have a version of Magia that has a different ritual expression that's the same thing. So maybe we'll look at that.
Practical Instructions: Consecration
But what I would say, for your homework this week, if you are willing and able, is to think about this notion of consecration.
So it's very simple. You continue doing your unbinding practice. You light your candle. Now maybe you use a windowsill as your altar, facing west. If you wanted to - so this is all optional for you but I would say at least do one thing to move in this direction, if not everything - maybe what you want is a dedicated altar.
So you actually have an altar to put the lamp on, rather than just the windowsill. And you introduce incense. So now you don't just light the candle, you also light incense. Maybe you introduce oil and you use the oil for anointing. You can anoint yourself when you do the practice. You can also anoint the altar. You might anoint the corners of the room or the doorway. If you want suggestions for what type of oil or incense, classic Abramelin is a win. I think it smells wonderful. Do not consume the oil. It's poisonous. Some versions can also be a skin irritant, so be aware of that.
So there's oil for anointing, incense for sniffing, you've already got your lamp and then an altar. You could introduce all of these things or one of these things.
This would be you building up the ritual expression of consecration as part of your usual practice.
And then what we will do next week is, I will introduce a ritual for establishing the circle. We'll look at that.
So as we progress, we will build on what you're already doing and then give a framework that's like an alternative ritual expression of the thing that you're doing, so that you can see how it all fits together.
Evil Spirits & the Circle of Creation
Why is it specifically evil spirits you'd call on to do good deeds?
Where are we? And what is this place? Now, you could argue that, if you want treasure - the acquisition of stuff - essentially speaking, that is a concern in a world of absence. So it's appropriate that you would speak to the spirit commensurate with that aspect of existence.
There's also this idea of turning things the right way up, but the way things are turned the right way up is by completing the circle of creation. If you start off at the highest and then you end up at the lowest, you’ve brought down or expressed not only your identity, but the nature of the divine. You've established or expressed that law from the top to the bottom of creation itself.
So the act in and of itself extends beyond the practical action. And the result, it actually is an expression of completing that circle.
The Magical Mirror
What is a servitor as far as its existence is concerned? When we create one, are we creating a new shadow or is it a preexisting independent spirit that we've now found and named a call to some sort of service? Or are we actually forming some completely new being out thought?
Ritual is the expression of the meeting of the microcosm and the macrocosm in the human being. The microcosm and the macrocosm. And therefore ritual is a magical mirror, it's like a magical mirror.
Now for some of you people who have experience doing magical acts and speaking to entities and so on, you may have noticed that the entity that you're speaking to can seem like a composite of the characteristics of the people making up the working. However, it's obvious that what you're engaging with can't be explained away as a psychological artifact. Because there's this thread running through it and it can lead you somewhere.
So with the Tempe working, there were things that were said that I only understand now that were contained in that working, it was so dense. And then I even had longitude and latitude coordinates given for the place where I would be on the planet when I had my awakening!
Where does that come from? What is that? This whole process involves a growth in understanding the nature of creation, the nature of this world, its relationship to another world, your place in it, who and what you are, what your fundamental nature is. There's a growth involved.
If you're going to look into a mirror and use what you see there to go beyond what you see, you end up interacting with the entity that's appropriately assigned for being responsible for that level of insight.
You know if you talk to a tree, and then you see a tree spirit, and it's the spirit of the tree, and it's responsible for the tree? Okay. If you try and speak to the gods, you will speak to that spirit appropriate to that level of profundity. It's their job to maintain it and run it, something like that.
And this is the difference between the spirits you might call inside a circle, and those you would call outside. The ones inside are self-transcending. Self-transcending. So you can have this expression, and it's a real expression, and it's not denied. And it has its place in the cosmology, and it serves a function, and it's perfect the way that it is. But it also goes beyond itself. It points beyond itself.
In some ways, you might say that's what a human being is: a self-transcending symbol of God.
You can understand why working with the idea of a holy guardian angel, you have a symbol that represents something and it might appear a certain way to you and over time the symbol changes and it grows in profundity in terms of what it's expressing and it gets larger and larger in that regard.
So the interaction is with something real, but it's self-transcending. It's not denied, but it goes beyond itself.
You will notice that the unbinding practices honour what it is that I'm talking about. I'll just use the example of the beloved practice:
Divine self. My divine self. That's all it says. My divine self. It doesn't say, ‘My divine self with wings, my divine self that looks like an old dude on a cloud, my divine self a holy turtle.’ It doesn't say any of these things. It doesn't give any description.
You're interested in your divine self - and just the phrase itself goes beyond itself - but it can accommodate the most profound leading edge of your practice and how it might present itself spiritually speaking in vision, whilst also demonstrating the way to travel through it. So it's always going beyond itself, which is the point, isn't it? We want to travel up the tree.
If you do a magical working - even if you do that kind of magical working - but then you attempt to take what's already yours, all you will see are impenetrable symbols that make no sense. Like miniature versions of the Bailey again, and it becomes a broken connection, and you can't understand what's being said, and the entity you're talking to can get frustrated. It's trying to give you the good news, and you just cannot hear, because you keep relating to it the wrong way.
You've retreated to the Bailey.
If you just do a practical working, you make an entity, or you find a traditional book and you summon an elemental, in terms of how I've just described things, the question of, ‘Do they pre-exist as independent spirits or are they just made up?’ doesn't apply.
There is an appropriate divine bureaucrat for everything nameable. The act of naming calls the bureaucrat.
I hope that makes sense.
Sometimes people bring up the question, ‘What is a god? Do they pre-exist? Do we make them up? What is it?’
We're exactly the same as the gods, except incarnated.
That's the only difference. If we weren't in a body, we'd be exactly like those gods. If I speak to Ganesha and you can speak to Ganesha [at the same time], and you're like, what's going on there? That would be the same for us if we just weren’t in a body.
Back to the magical mirror: and it all comes back to this choice. If you try to take the throne, if that's what you're doing, what's reflected back to you will be an impenetrable illusion.
Now that doesn't mean that you don't get the illusion of change from that, because you will. But that's what you get. How do sigils work? What's the mechanism? You can come up with a mechanism if you want, but do you see it? How do you know? Who cares? It works, doesn't it? Right? There's a mystery there. What is that mystery? Who knows?
You can decide not to do the consecration thing and just summon a demon and work with it, if you want to do that. I have stories about people who've done that. It's not recommended.
What will be reflected to you is the relationship that you have with the mystery of magic.
That's what you get.
Hopefully what I've said, it makes it clear that, the question of, ‘What are these entities? Are they independent or are we just making them up?’ Is like a question that doesn't make any sense.
Here's another example. summon something, you have a chat with it, and it tells you some stuff. The question of, ‘Is this information real or not? Or what's the identity of this thing that I'm talking to? Is it pretending to be something that it isn't?’
It only remains a mystery to the extent that you think you're going to take the throne for yourself.
So there's an ambiguity. You're left with this ambiguity.
If you know that the throne is already yours, the nature of what you're talking to isn't hidden.
There's no such thing as a nature being hidden.
You get exactly what you ask for. Now with the mystery of magical reality, that phrase, you get exactly what you ask for, can be easily misunderstood. Because if what you're asking for is due to a result of a case of mistaken identity, then you're getting the opposite of what you want, but you are getting what you're asking for.
Understanding Practical Magic with the Mystery of Magical Reality
One other thing I will say: with our binding practice, we look at events in our lives where we draw conclusions, non-verbally, about our own nature, based on an impression, based on an appearance. And then we play it out. And the mystery of magical reality means it's not just that we're projecting images onto a blank surface, rather we're emanating the circumstances with the actors to play the roles in the first place. It's more profound than the idea of just projecting on a blank canvas or something like that.
The magical act, what are we doing? It looks like we're arranging an appearance that means something (statement of intent), and then putting ourselves in a position where we can draw a non-verbal conclusion from that impression (the ritual experience), such that it then manifests.
How to identify the nature of an entity
Do different spirits want different things? Or do they all want us to understand who and what we are and put down the burdens we unnecessarily carry?
So this is a great question. I'm glad you brought it up so I could mention this, it’s very important. I'll go over this again next time as well.
Identity isn't hidden. Identity isn't hidden. Those - what we were calling the gods - that are self transcending, they only want one thing. They only want one thing from you. That's you to sacrifice yourself to yourself. Which is another way of saying they don't want anything from you. They don't want anything from you.
So consecration, you can think of that as an offering, but what you're offering when you do your consecration is yourself to yourself. That's what you're doing. Self to yourself.
If a spirit wants blood, what are you dealing with? It's not a god, it’s something else. It wants blood. Why does it want blood?
If you're dealing with an entity that would like to possess your body to experience the bliss of strong, usually unpleasant, but strong physical experiences like strong tobacco, cigars, really cheap harsh liquor, and plenty of it. What kind of an entity is it? And it does this in exchange for something. Again what kind of entity is it?
You can think about that sacrificing yourself to yourself, for you to realise a divine inheritance - but if you're not doing that, if that's not what I'm doing, say when I interact with you, instead, what I'm doing is I'm giving you cash and you're going to fix my leaky pipe. We're doing a trade, aren't we?
One of them is the domain of the spiritual. One of them is the domain of the profane. One of them is unconditional. One of them is conditional. Yeah.
Again, they're supposed to be there. It's part of the cosmology, isn't it? It's part of creation. But it's a great question and a very important thing to keep in mind.
What does something want from you? What does it want?
If all it wants is to tell you that your birthday's coming.
Yeah, what's its nature?
The origin of something is the same as the nature that it expresses. It's not hidden.
Consecration is the Test of Faith
I'll end with this. With consecration - I don't know if this is obvious to everyone - but we would just call it the test of faith. A choice that's made. You make a choice. Do you follow this silent knowing, this thread, the promise of something else, even though you don't have the words for it, and you exercise it through faith, and you aim at it, or do you listen to other voices, do you follow appearances, that says no such thing is true.
Anointing, and the incense, and the offerings, all of that is an expression of you making that choice. It's a demonstration of having made that choice.
So elaborate on that. Do what you think is the best thing to do. Think for yourself, decide what you think is a good expression of it, what you want to do. Yes. So there can be some creativity in there.
This might be another way of thinking about it: what's the best I have to offer?
That could be another way of thinking about what would be appropriate. Maybe you want to get yourself a dedicated altar, or maybe you want to add incense, maybe you want to bring in the oil, maybe you want to do all of that. Maybe you could have an altar that you put your lamp in, your incense and your oil when you're not using it. And then you bring it all out when it's time.
At minimum, maybe introduce one thing. If you want to go all out, that would be fantastic.
Audio: Magical Castle, Motte (Part 2)