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THE REVIVAL OF MAGICK By THE MASTER THERION [Aleister Crowley]
Published in the International New York, New York, U.S.A. (pages 247-248)
The obvious course for one who wishes to write on Magick is to invoke the God Thoth, for He is Lord both of magick and of writing.
In truth, that is the very apt slip for our leash of silence. The word used by Sir Walter Scott for Magick is "gramarye," and a ritual of magick is a "grimoire," "grimorium," or grammar; all from gramma, a letter. Thoth, scribe of the Gods, was probably just a man called Tahuti—the Egyptian form of the Coptic word Thoth—who invented writing. Fust, one remembers, who invented printing, became Faust, the "black magician.” The first great miracle of progress, after the conquest of fire, was this art of writing.
Magick then may be defined for our present purpose as the art of communication without obvious means. Curiously, the new harnessing of that form of fire—I use the word in its old magical sense—called electricity to the shafts of the car of progress was followed by a new art or rather series of arts of communicating without obvious means; the telegraph, the telephone, and now Hertz's discovery (exploited by one Signor Marconi) of wireless telegraphy.
Now no man doubts the existence of a supreme and illimitable power, whether he conceive of it as soulless, unconscious and mechanical, or as spirit, self-conscious, and self-willed. You may think the Sun to be God; some very ignorant and some illuminated people have done so; but the fact is disputed by none, that the Sun, within the limits of its own system, is, physically speaking, the source of all light, heat, Energy in all its forms, as well as of the earth itself, Being or Matter in all its forms as we know it.
Now if we wish to obtain heat from the Sun, we can go and sit on Palm Beach; or we can dig up solar energy in the form of coal—and so on; in a hundred ways we can make communication with that material source of heat. Very good; magick pretends to be able to do the same thing with the Secret Source of all Being and all Form, all Matter and all Motion.
It claims to be able to draw water from the Fountain of All Things, according to its needs, by certain methods. And though ordinary prayer is a part of Magick, this point is to be considered, that in the purely religious theory, God may or may not think it fit to answer prayer. This then is the great heresy of Magick—or of religion, if you happen to be a Magician! The Magician claims to be able to force a favourable answer. If he tries to make the Elixir of Life, and fails, he has simply failed. He is a bad Magician, just as a chemist is a bad chemist who tries to make Oxygen and fails. The chemist does not excuse himself by saying that it was the Will of God that he should not make Oxygen that day!
The explanation is simple. What the Magician calls God is merely the divine Emanation in himself. And the reconciliation with orthodox theology follows at once. The Magician is using the formula of Hermes Trismegistus, "That which is below is like that which is above, and that which is above is like that which is below, for the performance of the miracles of the One Substance.” That is to say, in order to perform his miracle he must call forth his own God in the Microcosm. That is united with the God of the Macrocosm by its likeness to it; and the Macrocosmic force then operates in the Universe without as the Magician has made it operate within himself; the miracle happens. Now then it follows that unless the will of the magician be really at one with that of the Will of the Cosmos, this likeness does not exist, this identification does not take place. Therefore the magician cannot really perform any miracle unless that be already the Design of the Universe. So that he who sets out by saying "I will impose my will on all things" ends "Thy will be done."
It is possible, indeed, to perform magic in other ways by other formulae, but all such efforts are mere temporary aberrations from the path; at the best they are mistakes; persisted in knowingly they become black magic; and in the worst event the sorcerer is cut off by his own act from the Cosmos, and becomes a "Brother of the Left Hand Path.” This truth is taught by Wagner in Parsifal. Klingsor was unable to comply with the requirements of the Graal Knights; he could not harmonize Love and Holiness; so he mutilated himself, and was for ever debarred from even a possibility of redemption.
It was because the Church misunderstood this doctrine, and saw in magic but a rival power, that she strove with all the agony of fear to suppress it. Soon only charlatans dared to practice it, because they are known to be harmless. The whole thing fell into contempt.
When I was twenty-two years of age I devoted myself to the attainment of adeptship, or whatever you like to call it. That was indeed the question: what should I call it? (For I am first of all a poet, and expert in the use of words.) I decided to call my life-work Magick. For this very reason, that it was fallen so utterly into disuse. I cut myself deliberately off from the modern jargon "theosophy," "occultism," and so on, all words with an up-to-date connotation. I would make my own connotation, and impose it on the world. The only chance of confusion was with prestidigitation, and that not being of the same universe of discourse, hurt no more than the homonymity of "box," "game" and a hundred other words. There was something of boyish defiance, too, no doubt, in my choice of the word. However I labelled myself with it, and I used good gum!
It has been necessary to insist that Magick is done by an identification of the magus with the Supreme in order to show how in practice one goes to work.
There are two branches of this one tree; we may conveniently call them the Catholic and Protestant.
The Protestant method is that of direct prayer. As a child asks its father for a toy, so the magician asks God to cause rain, or whatever he may need at the moment. The prayer book is full of such spells, even to the extreme use of "Oh, Lord, who alone workest great marvels, send down upon our Bishops and Curates the healthful spirit of Thy grace.” But there is no record of any favorable answer to this particular prayer!
In the supreme prayer of Christ in Gethsemane we find the advanced magician speaking. "If it be Thy will, let this cup pass from me; nevertheless not my will, but Thine, be done.” This ends in "My will, which is Thine, be done" for bye-and-bye Christ tells Pilate that if He wished He could have twelve legions of angels to defend Him. But he no longer wishes the cup to pass from Him; his will is one with the Father's.
Now, in order to persuade the God addressed that it is right to grant the prayer, or in order to convince oneself that one is asking for a proper miracle, one resorts to commemoration of other miracles wrought by that God in the past.
Thus the talisman made by Dr. Dee, which raised the tempest in which the Spanish Armada was destroyed, has figured upon it a symbolic image of a face blowing forth a great wind, and around it is the versicle "He sent forth His lightnings and scattered them"—or some similar words. God is reminded that in the past He brought victory to His chosen people by raising a storm at the proper moment. There is, in legal phrase, a precedent for the miracle.
The conjurations of the Grimoires abound in this sort of recitation before the God of His previous exploits.
Here then is the link with the second form of magick—the "Catholic.” For in Catholic magick the formula is this; the story of the God is enacted before Him; He is moved by the sight of His own sufferings or adventures (Here we must remember that most Gods are deified men) and at the same time the sympathy of the actors with the God is stirred to its highest point.
The Bacchae of Euripides is a perfect example of this kind of ritual. In fact, almost all Greek drama of the classic period is of this kind. The "deus ex machina" speech at the end marks the identification complete.
Similarly, the Eleusinian Mysteries celebrated the adventures of Demeter; those of Adonis and Osiris and Mithras tell the story of the Sun, and thus invoke his power. J. M. Robertson goes further, and says that the story of the Last Supper, Trial and Crucifixion of Christ is not a history but a scenario. Nor is this view confined to rationalists and anthropologists of the type of Spencer, Frazer, and Grant Allen; many Christian mystics uphold it, and say that their reverence for the Logos is not lessened but increased by the identification of the legend of His life and death' with that of the Cosmos.
I must again call attention to the necessity of this formula of identification in order to show the impossibility of evil in magick. Evil is synonymous with failure.
With the low class sorcerer who sells himself as a slave to some "devil" we have nothing here to do. That is the antithesis of magick. The aim is to command the spirits. Very well; suppose we begin in a gross, selfish, avaricious way, and try to get the Spirits to bring us gold. We call Hismael, the Spirit of Jupiter. Nothing happens. We learn that Hismael will not be commanded but by his proper Intelligence, Iophiel. So we call Iophiel. Equal recalcitrance on the part of Iophiel, who is only amenable to the orders of Sachiel. His Angel. Same story with Sachiel. We go to Tzadquiel the Archangel. Still no good; for Tzadquiel obeys none but El. Good; we invoke El, The God. We must then become El; and having done so, having entered into that vast divine essence, we cannot bother any more as to whether we have any money. We have left all that behind. So then we see that to perform any miracle we must show a divine reason for it. I have often asked for money and obtained it; but only when the money was really needed for some manifestly cosmic benefit.
In fact, with whatever work one begins, one is led up to the Great Work. This is a logical process, and even if one were tempted to be illogical, and turn to Black Magic, those great forces whose names one has (perhaps ignorantly) invoked are invisibly about one, and bring one into line with a jerk—and none too gentle a jerk at that!
Eliphas Levi defines Black Magic as the result of the persistence of the will in the absurd. One does not go mad on seeing the devil, because before invoking him one must be already mad.
It is extraordinary how the formula of Hermes Trismegistus holds throughout; Magick is but the extension of the microcosm in the macrocosm. And as the macrocosm is the greater, it follows that what one does by magick is to attune oneself with the Infinite. "In myself I am nothing; in Thee I am All-self. Dwell Thou in me! and bring me to that Self which is in Thee!" concludes the great prayer of the Rosicrucians.
This, however, explains why those who meddle with magick out of curiosity, or who try treacheries on magicians, find themselves in trouble.
The Magician is an expression of the Will of the Universe: the meddlers rebel, and suffer. To oppose a true Magician is as silly as to put your hand on a circular saw in motion. But the handless blames the saw.
I know of one modern Master who has been often attacked. In every case the attacker has come to absolute ruin. One woman came to him, a woman old and sly, and wormed herself into his confidence. He knew her for an enemy, and trusted her absolutely. He left her his check-book duly signed, and she embezzled his money. He left his wife in her care, and she tried to corrupt her. Bye-and-bye it became obvious to the woman that the Master knew everything. He only smiled, and continued to trust her. So she went down with meningitis, and that was an end of her.
In such a case the only mistake the magician can make is to defend himself in the normal manner. He leaves his castle; he will be slain. You must not go on to the enemy's ground. Perfect love, perfect faith, perfect trust, and you are unassailable. But use the weapons of the flesh, and you are lost.
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