Magicians Do Magick

There has been a steady slew of articles over the last year about how witchcraft has been going more mainstream and becoming more popular. You would think that would be a good thing for occultism and it probably will be in the long run, but it also has led to the rise of witchcraft as a fashion statement rather than a system of magical practice. I'm not going to link to one article in particular, as it shouldn't be too hard to Google up a long list. I am firmly of the opinion that if your "magick" is little more than a fashion statement, you shouldn't call yourself a magician.

There have always been people whose idea of being a "witch" consists of wearing lots of black Renaissance fair garb and running around with crystals and maybe a Tarot deck, neither of which they have any idea how to use effectively. But the mainstreaming of witchcraft seems to have brought them out in force. As I don't really think of myself as a witch I will leave it to practitioners who do to comment more directly. I will say that as I see it if you don't do magick you're not a magician, regardless of what you call yourself.

To be clear, I don't mean that you have to follow my philosophy of using practical magick for everything, all the time, for your work to qualify. I think that works of illumination designed to expand and enlighten your consciousness count too, though with operations of this sort there's a fine line between magick proper and mysticism. Basically I don't really have a problem describing a mystic as a magician, since in the Thelemic system ceremonial magick and mysticism work hand in hand and our definition of magick is broad enough to include both microcosmic and macrocosmic change in conformity with will.


There's also a flip-side to this that yields the same results. Let's say you join an allegedly magical tradition and ask how to do magick, but nobody will tell you. Instead, they insist that you have to do all this psychological and "self-development" work and maybe even pass a bunch of tests before you ever pick up a wand. That's just silly - you're still not doing magick. While it's true that a lot of those internal practices will make your magick better, you can still do cool stuff without having mastered them.

The caveat applies that as I said above, I do consider mystical work performed with the objective of causing change in consciousness to be just as magical as a healing spell or a money spell or whatever. But whatever you do should be performed with change in mind and should be done as effectively as possible. An example - some practitioners will tell you that you should go through a course of psychoanalysis before starting magical practice. But not only is the psychoanalytic model of the mind entirely wrong, it doesn't even work. In controlled experiments, so-called sham therapy yields identical results.

No, that doesn't mean I'm saying that you shouldn't get psychotherapy if you need it before working with magick. What I do recommend, though, is to go through a course of therapy that works. Cognitive-behavioral approaches do produce better results than sham therapy in the same studies. So I would recommend working with a therapist who is at least familiar with the method, even if he or she combines it with other more psychodynamic techniques. But again, that's if you need it. I don't subscribe to the Freudian idea that everyone is fundamentally broken and can't function well without it.

If you go through my Magical Instruction program I start by presenting the practical work and then moving on to the path of initiation. This is deliberate and is a feature, not a bug, and is a reaction to the idea that you need to do all sorts of preliminaries, maybe for years, before you can really do the work. The latter approach means that to learn magick you have to do all sorts of things that really aren't magick before you have any idea whether or not magick is for you. Do the magick right away. You'll be thanking me later if you follow that advice.

Your first few spells will probably fail or not work as optimally as they could. But so what? I'm convinced that the key to learning magick is to practice doing magick. Evaluating your successes and failures will often give you some insight into the nature of your will, and it is completely reasonable to require certain material conditions to facilitate mystical work like union with the Holy Guardian Angel. I highly recommend that you not listen to anyone who tells you otherwise.

And whether or not I'm right about this, keep in mind that my practical rituals combine theurgic and thaumaturgic techniques as parts of their basic structure. What that means is when you use my stuff, you get enlightened whether you like it or not. But you also should get powerful and effective probability shifts that will help you deal with almost any life circumstance that comes your way. As the Buddhists put it, they will bring you the two kinds of benefit, happiness and enlightenment. Isn't that what we all want from the spiritual path?