Rowe B-Essencial Skills Of Magick, en

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THE ESSENTIAL SKILLS OF MAGICK
Benjamin Rowe
Copyright 1999
The Three Essential Skills
All effective magick stands on three legs: IMAGINATION
,
EMOTION
,
and
FEEL-
ING; everything else – all the words and gestures, the implements and cos-
tumes, the elaborate circles and furniture – serve only to reinforce and focus
these three capacities. If any of these three is lacking, then the work is likely
to fail; once you are skilled in using all three, you can dispense with practi-
cally all the other things people sometimes insist are essential to the practice.
Of the three, EMOTION is the power that drives the whole show; emotion
from the guts, and from the heart. I will go even further; it is not just emo-
tion, but
passion
that is the power behind magick. Passion in the sense of an
intense desire to be connected to that which you are seeking to invoke; a
desire that places no restrictions or limits on the connection, but which is so
one-pointed that nothing save that which is sought is included within its
focus. And passion in the sense of a boundless enthusiasm for the acts by
which you seek to create that connection. Admittedly, this is the ideal case;
but the closer you can get to it, even for a few moments, the more likely your
work is to be successful.
This passion-for-connection is what creates the
magickal link
between
the magician and that which he is invoking; or, if the link already exists,
expands it and strengthens it. The emotion literally creates a channel or
umbilicus between them, through which energy and knowledge can flow in
either direction. The stronger the emotion, the stronger the link becomes;
the less energy is lost in side-thoughts and distractions, the stronger the link
becomes. Thus a one-pointed focus is most desireable.
But conversely, restrictions the magician places on the connection
become constrictions in the link, reducing the potential flow of power
through it. If a magician insists that a spiritual force or being manifest itself
in a specific way, then it is less likely to appear, or the manifestation with be
weaker. But if his desire for connection is
unconditional
, then a response is
much more likely, and will be more powerful when it comes. Similarly, if a
magician doing a ritual to obtain money desires that money to appear in the
form of a cashier’s check, he is less likely to obtain it than if he was willing to
accept it in any form.
In its highest form, this unconditional passion becomes almost indistin-
guishable from what is called “Divine Love”, which is the closest that one can
come (within the worlds of manifestation) to the transcendental state of the
Mother aspect of divinity. Passion-for-connection transforms into a state of
pure
relationship
, pure Love, in which all distinctions are erased; both the
nature of the magician and the nature of that being invoked disappear,
totally lost in the link between them.
IMAGINATION provides the medium (rather, an opening to the medium)
through which magick produces its results. The personal imagination seems
to blend seamlessly into the astral light, the larger magickal universe; the
point at which one becomes the other is impossible to define clearly. An
object that begins as a purely internal construct – created and sustained by
the imagination of a magician, propelled by the power of emotion – can
move out into the astral light and take on a life independent of its creator. It
can gather or become a container for magickal power, and act back on its
creator (or on others) in ways that are impossible for him to produce
through his imagination alone. Conversely, beings and powers operating on
levels the magician cannot yet perceive can make themselves known to the
him through his receptive imagination, opening his awareness into new
realms of experience.
The symbols used in magick are forms that, when created in the imagi-
nation, tend to gather specific types of power from the astral light, which are
further limited by the intent of the magician. The shape of the container, in
effect, determines what can be put into it; the simpler, rigidly geometric
forms (such as the pentagram and hexagram) draw relatively pure, funda-
mental forces; complex symbols – e.g., god-forms – draw correspondingly
complex assemblages of forces.
When the magician projects the image of a symbol onto his sur-
roundings, an extended magickal space is created in which the astral light
becomes conditioned into conformity with the symbol. The area becomes
more attractive to the types of power invoked, more comfortable for mag-
ickal beings having the nature represented by the symbol. The world of the
powers and the world of the magician then intersect, making interaction
possible.
(A detailed series of practices for developing the imagination and cre-
ating a general-purpose magickal space can be found in my article
A Short
Course in Scrying
. This present paper is aimed towards showing by example
how it is used in formal rituals.)
FEELING is the third leg of the tripod, and the final key to success in
magick. In order to bring into being the conditions you desire, you must cre-
ate in yourself the sensations and feelings that the things you have created
through your imagination are real, and that
the goal of the operation has
already been accomplished
. In the magickal universe, when you act with all
your being as if something is already real, it becomes real. This feeling of
reality is the trigger that causes a symbol to move from the imagination into
the astral light.
This key to magick is simply stated, but in practice it seems to give the
greatest difficulty for most people. The usual culprits are intellectual doubts
– “I know I am only imagining this” – and fears of various sorts, e.g., “what
if it makes me go crazy?” Both of these have to be ruthlessly eliminated from
the magician’s consciousness for the duration of the operation. After the
work is completely over, you can be as doubtful and fear-ridden as you want;
a certain amount of doubt, of critical examination, is healthy and appropri-
ate at that time. But during the work, you must be completely focused on
feeling (
not
thinking) that what you create is real.
Some might be concerned that this “believing makes it real” idea is
actually a form of self-hypnosis, a way of fooling oneself by reducing the
critical faculties. A genuine success in performing the ritual will dispose of
this concern. At some point in the work a threshold is crossed; the strength
of the invocation produces an even stronger response from somewhere out-
side yourself. Events in your magickal space take on a life of their own, at
least partially independent of your will. And – most significant – they begin
to manifest an intensity, richness and texture that it is utterly impossible for
you to produce through your imagination alone, no matter how adept you
might be in its use. Once this has been experienced even a skeptical mind
must grant that the events are “real” in some sense, even if not in the same
way as mundane happenings.
So for magick to be successful, EMOTION must push a link outwards into
the magickal universe, IMAGINATION must aim it towards the desired goal,
and FEELING must affirm the reality of that which is sought. Full success will
not come on the first try; for some people, not even on the fiftieth. It takes
time to condition the mind to the proper performance of these practices.
But once a single success is attained, additional successes follow at more fre-
quent intervals.
The Golden Dawn’s Pentagram Ritual
, these were expected to be
the subject of verbal instruction, or were simply assumed to be too obvious
to mention. Regardless, it was the absence of such descriptions that
prompted a student to request the elaborated version of the ritual that fol-
lows.
The Pentagram is a symbol whose power is partly innate, and partly a
matter of the magician’s intent. Its natural tendency (in the astral light) is to
attract a dynamic, active mix of the elemental forces; in contrast, the equal-
armed cross attracts the same forces but tends to keep them fixed and dis-
tinct from each other. But when the Pentagram is used to invoke a specific
element, the element is determined largely by the magician’s habitual meth-
ods of usage and his intent of the moment. There are several methods of
encoding the desired element in the way the Pentagram is drawn; all of these
are more or less arbitrary, and depend on
consistent
use
and practice
to be
effective.
\
A
\
Z
r r
Banishing
Invoking
A
C
D
B
Figure 1.
The Pentagram Ritual is an excellent practice-piece for developing profi-
ciency in these three essential skills. Its physical and verbal elements are sim-
ple and easily memorized, enabling the student to give most of his attention
to the visualizations and the feelings attending them. But for all its simplic-
ity, it is capable of producing profound effects on the consciousness of the
magician. Performing it is also of long-term benefit; it purifies and strength-
ens the magician’s magickal body, and increases his general sensitivity to
events in the magickal universe.
Oddly, the most frequently referenced descriptions of the Pentagram
Ritual make almost no mention of its imagery and feeling components. Per-
haps in the Golden Dawn and Crowley’s A
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