The Essential Skills of Magick by Benjamin Rowe.pdf

THE ESSENTIAL SKILLS OF MAGICK

Benjamin Rowe

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.

r r

Banishing

Invoking

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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