Review: Ritual Versus Ceremonial Magick

A while back I received a copy of Joseph Lisiewski's Ceremonial Magic & The Power of Evocation as a gift from a fellow magician who bought it based on the promotional description and of course the cover art, which is just plain cool. When I read through the book, though, I found it absolutely infuriating. Lisiewski is convinced that the only kind of magick that can ever work has to be performed by following one of the old grimoires to the letter, without making any changes or innovations to the ceremonial forms. He even goes so far as to equate someone who spends years learning and perfecting modern magical forms to the sort of idiot who makes statements like "I set up my magical circle when I put on my belt" - simply because Golden Dawn magick is not a literal reproduction of a grimoire text dating from before 1350.

As I thought more about it, though, I realized that part of my reaction was due to the fact that what Joseph Lisiewski and I do magically are fundamentally different - Lisiewski is a ceremonial magician whereas I am a ritual magician. To most people, and even the majority of practitioners, “ritual magick” and “ceremonial magick” are synonymous. However, there is an important difference between the two terms. In a magical and/or spiritual context, ritual is defined (http://www.dictionary.com/) as:

1. an established or prescribed procedure for a religious or other rite.
2. a system or collection of religious or other rites.
3. observance of set forms in public worship.
4. a book of rites or ceremonies.
5. a book containing the offices to be used by priests in administering the sacraments and for visitation of the sick, burial of the dead, etc.
6. a prescribed or established rite, ceremony, proceeding, or service: the ritual of the dead.

Ceremony, on the other hand, is defined somewhat differently in the same context:

2. a formal religious or sacred observance; a solemn rite: a marriage ceremony.

The difference between the two is that a ritual consists of the necessary instructions for performing a ceremony, whereas a ceremony refers to a specific performance of a given ritual. Ceremonial magicians like Lisiewski work from grimoires. They do not write or develop their own rituals, but rather adhere as closely as possible to the ritual as specified in the text. The reason that Lisiewski's book is annoying to me is not that it is wrong, exactly, but that he covers ceremonial methods while asserting that they are the only possible way that anyone could get magical results. Also, his condescension toward anyone who thinks otherwise doesn't help matters. While there is nothing wrong with practicing ceremonial magick and ceremonial techniques work for many magicians, for me such an inflexible approach is not particularly compatible with Scientific Illuminism as it tends to enshrine past magical techniques as unchanging dogma.

A ritual magician looks deeper into the mechanics of magick and designs ceremonies based on his or her understanding and insight. In my own professional field of software development, the difference between a ceremonial and a ritual magician is similar to the difference between a coder and a designer. Purely ceremonial magicians like Lisiewski are essentially technicians – they know their rituals and understand when and how to use them, and possess the technical skill to produce good results. Ritual magicians work at the level of liturgy and rubric, creating and testing new magical forms in order to buildup a repository of innovative magical techniques that can address new problems beyond the scope of the old grimoires, or address the same problems more efficiently and effectively.

The fundamental problem with the "pure ceremonial" approach is that even the grimoires written before 1350 must have come from somewhere. The Renaissance "Faustian Grimoires" are almost certainly fakes - they came out after the Faust legend became popular and detail remarkably similar ritual procedures to those found in the fictional account - so an earlier cutoff date is not completely out of line, but for earlier grimoires some ritual magician must have sat down and put the text together. I see no reason why a magician who lived during the Middle Ages would necessarily be able to write a better ritual than I can, given the sheer volume of information that the modern world makes available to me as sources.

It would be truly fascinating to see how these Medieval ritualists complied and tested their texts. The Enochian system of John Dee and Edward Kelley enjoys a fearsome reputation among modern magicians, perhaps because it is literally the only example we have of a complex magical system where the actual transcripts of the spiritual operations that led to its creation are available. This leads to a lot of controversy among practitioners, but it is also a goldmine for ritual magicians everywhere - the building blocks of the system are laid out for study in their original context. The system is also by most accounts particularly effective, maybe because of all the innovations that this open structure enables or maybe because the older grimoires have been degraded by centuries of copying errors.

In the end, it is more Lisiewski's exclusivist attitude that makes his book less worthwhile than it might otherwise be than any particular technical errors. He includes an annoted version of the Heptameron, a famous Medieval grimoire, and gives solid instructions on how to use it. I prefer ritual magick to ceremonial magick simply because I'm essentially a hacker by nature and I'm always looking to enhance and improve my techniques. On the other hand, a ceremonialist will probably that find the book does have some useful advice as long as he or she ignores the pontification.

Want to buy your own copy of Ceremonial Magick and the Power of Evocation by Joseph Lisiewski? Order from my Books and Media page and you can help support Augoeides.