Such is the nature of man that he can't wait. Such is the nature of Time that eventually it delivers all things. Let's grab the power first, they say, and worry afterwards about whether we have acted wisely or not. But of course warnings serve only to sharpen all the more the appetites of callow youth. In fact, we have been warned that we would do better to avoid conjuring altogether. And even Christ refused to be daunted by Satan's insistence that stones are not easily turned into bread. The yogi must not succumb to the call l to develop siddhis. True, we've been admonished time and again that the genuine traveler shouldn't be distracted by mere conjurings. This is all rather like a dog complacently assuming that you will give him the whole turkey if he merely sits on his hind legs and limps his forepaws. Or, even worse, we act as though magic were just another toy - a superbot, an FTL spacecraft, a cybernetic data cruncher, a revolutionary dimension-splitter, a meta-matter transmogrifier - that we confidently expect some great cosmic Santa Claus to deliver, once we've achieved, say, celibate purity or some pinnacle of self-hypnosis.
We tend to imagine that it's just the childlike, fairy-tale belief in the ability to work miracles - as though ordinary reality isn't miracle enough.
Magic in particular, we've all secretly fantasized, is a search for "powers". Many of us have, with monumental smugness, shoved magic into one corner, metaphysics into another and religion into a third. Therefore, we are able to cease acting horizontally in the hopeless trap of cause and effect and can begin acting vertically to link the celestial to the terrestrial, avoiding, if possible, the much easier connection of the infernal to the terrestrial.
The magician's aim is to recognize that we are in now way separate from the universe and need to reaffirm our direct and total connection to it. The goal of the magician, or one might also say the alchemist, is psychic transcendence and not just the manipulation of the material world for the puffing up of the ego or for changing the outward face of things. In all magic, the figures summoned, *daimones* (good and bad), are summonings from the self, but that is not to say that they don't have their own steam and direction. On the other hand, there are a good many magical buzz words that everyone takes for granted as self-evident, when the truth is, hardly anyone really understands them at all, so I've included some of those as well.ĭespite our infatuation with contemporaneity, magic must be tied to tradition - for, once stripped of tradition, it immediately and bleakly sheds all meaning and quickly degenerates into "black" magic, or the search for private power. I've made it a practice to concentrate on the more esoteric arcana and most misunderstood philosophical or related terms. Avoiding as much as I can the words and concepts which are abundantly defined elsewhere. Where the wise of the past and present fail to provide, I've interpolated my own quirky insights.
ready, as greater and greater numbers of seekers are putting it, for "specific" instruction, even though postmodern minds scarcely understand the words. Thus, neither ordinary religion, with its parched, subnatural separation from physical, supposedly "unclean" bodies, nor science with its tedious and incessant denial of all "taint" of self, can be called magic.Ĭontinuing in the spirit of that Renaissantial pizzazz which began in the 1960's to raise Hermetic studies from their immemorial grave, we are now entering a much more psychically advanced era. But what we are painfully learning for the first time is that magic comes out of our connectedness to the world and is in no way whatsoever the wielding of some mystical power over things from "outside" them. Nature itself endlessly engages in creatively magical acts every moment. It's true that only deliberate action which produces a visible ripple over the surface of reality is a magical act. In only the most ordinary sense are we "already" magicians. Moreover, the so-called "New Age" (which is anything but) has produced already so much over- merchandised junk and shadow without substance, that it's clear no mere grain of salt, appearing alongside that sea of sugar, can expect much attention. mcmlxxxxvi, minvs iii: era apocalypt.Įverywhere we can see now how the trappings of M/magic(k) are strewn around with such mindless and perfunctory abandon that it's obvious to everyone that the morning of barbarism is well advanced. E E Rehmus The Magician's Dictionary THE MAGICIAN'S DICTIONARYĪn Apocalyptic Cyclopaedia of Advanced M/magic(k)al Arts and Alternate Meaningsĭie jovis, xxxi oct.
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