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A Talk on Magic and Occultism to the Study Circle of a Congregationalist Minister
by
Introductory
Occultism has many forms, some noble and some degrading. It can be divided broadly into two streams. One is passive and quietist, deriving from Oriental Yoga and that form of Neo-Platonism which influenced early Christian thought. The other is active and represents the magical tradition of paganism. It is with this latter side that I will deal tonight, because it represents the pagan attitude of mind that Christ came to correct. As and when Christianity declines—and it is now less powerful in the world than it was a century ago—so does magic raise her ensorcelled head once more. Christians should recognise what they are fighting and should not underestimate what hides behind the mask of occultism.
I propose to restrict my talk to certain practices which are still fairly common, though they are not always connected with magic by those who do them. I will start with that side of modern Spiritualism which dabbles in necromancy, go on to sorcery, and conclude with divination, dreams and visions. We can then develop these and other points in discussion. Before however I go into details, I want to make quite clear to you the difference in approach—in emphasis—between the Magician and the Christian. Both believe in God and a hierarchy of angels and spirits who act as intermediaries between God, man and nature. But the Magician as a pagan tries to become God, and as God to cause change to occur in accordance with his, the Magician's will. On the other hand the Christian, even after he has experienced the Unitive Vision, tries to follow Christ in doing the will of the Father. He does not try to emulate the Father, or like Satan to usurp God's Throne.
Necromancy
The nearest which most people come to magic is when they attend a Spiritualist séance, which is a modern and degenerate form of the old art of necromancy as practiced by the Witch of Endor. You can, if you like, get in touch with something that really does seem to be your late Aunt Mabel, or any historical figure you chose. At a séance the medium usually sees her as in a dream. You yourself see nothing and only hear the medium speaking in what is often the exact intonation of the deceased. A magician on the other hand uses a crystal or special mirror, into which he or his sensitive looks, and there sees Mabel in miniature and silently communes with her. As at the séance you yourself see nothing, but merely hear the Sensitive's replies to the questions you put. In either case the experiment is interesting but unless there is fraud, you will learn nothing that your aunt did not know when alive. In my opinion she herself is never there.
Although the results are similar, there is a vast difference between the techniques of the Spiritualist and the magician. The former begins a séance with prayer and a few hymns, but the rest of the proceedings are left in the hands of what is called the "spirit control," and no steps are taken to challenge or to question the phenomena. This is breaking the first rules of magic, namely that everything must be under your own control, capable of repetition at will, and subject to continual checks against deception.
Now you cannot be a magician without being religiously minded. To get results you must start with a belief in the existence of non-human spiritual forces. Without this belief neither magic nor any kind of religion is possible. Traditionally these forces are grouped in three orders, that of angels which help, of demons which harm, and of powers which are not concerned with humanity. Each order is subdivided into a hierarchy in which each component has a definite place, a specific type of work, and an individuality. Each has an appropriate form in which it appears in either the mind's eye or the mirror.
All major religions, whether living or dead, but with the exception of Buddhism, teach similar hierarchies of good, evil and neutral powers. The names of the various orders and individuals differ, but there is a close correspondence in their main arrangement. You will only find traces of them in the Bible, where you read of Seraphim, Cherubim, and Thrones of angels, Principalities and Powers. You can, however, find more details in the early Fathers. This Christian arrangement is based largely on Hebrew tradition, in which the four Archangels are called Michael, Gabriel, Raphael, and Uriel; while their opposite numbers, the four chief servitors of Satan are Samael, Azazael, Azael, Mahazael. One doctrine, however, is taken from Ancient Egypt via the Neo-Platonists, namely the belief that we each have a guardian angel or Daimon to look after us. It is not safe to meddle with the harmful or neutral forces until you have first been in conscious touch with this angel.
Several years of work are required before you can be certain of conversing with what appears to be Aunt Mabel in a mirror. In the first place it is not safe to use a mirror until you have consecrated it. But you cannot do so effectively until you have attained what is called traditionally "the Knowledge and Conversation of your Holy Guardian Angel." If however you are a Roman Catholic, you would substitute for this angel your patron saint, who would forbid the whole affair, if a pagan your family deity. This is done by repeated invocations in which you inflame yourself with prayer. Before however you can see or hear one of these spirit forms in vision—and a vision is like a coherent dream, only more vivid and you are awake—you [need] practice in visualisation: that is in seeing God and angel forms in your mind's eye.
They must be like their traditional description, complete in all their parts, and steady without flickering. It may take you years to acquire this technique. Suddenly they are there and it is THEM. Finally you must so acclimatise yourself to their presence that you retain consciousness. Not until you have done this are you qualified to consecrate your mirror, and until you have done so you cannot trust results when you work with it.
Mere consecration is not enough. You still have to get Aunt Mabel into the mirror, and to be certain that it is a true reflection of her, as opposed to some deceitful spirit in her guise. As usual you begin with a prayer to your Holy Guardian Angel, or whatever it is in accordance with the system which you are following. Then you perform the Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram. This you do mentally, seeing the various forms and figures in your mind's eye. It is a short ceremony which should never be omitted as a preliminary to any magical work. Every night you should do it in your room before sleeping—it is a variant, possibly the origin, of the nursery rhyme:—
Matthew, Mark, Luke and John Bless the bed that I lie on
You start by making the Qabalistic Cross. Touch your forehead and say "Ateh" (To Thee); your breast "Malkuth" (the Kingdom); your right shoulder "ve Geburah" (and the Power); your left shoulder "ve Gedulah"; (and the Glory); then clasp your hands over your chest and say "le Olahm, Amen," (for ever and ever Amen). Turning to the East you outline a pentagram (a five pointed star, point upwards) and repeat one of the Hebrew names of God—JHVH (Jehovah); do the same in the South, West and North, but substitute the names ADNI (Adonai), AHIH (Eheieh) and AGLA respectively. Then extend your arms in the form of a Cross and say "before me Raphael, behind me Gabriel, on my right hand Michael, on my left hand Auriel"—and you see them there in all their glory with wings outstretched, the tips touching so that they make a square outside the circle. At first you will find it hard to see Gabriel, behind you at the same time as the other three in front and to the side, but you should have no difficulty in feeling his presence. Then you go on; "For about me flames the Pentagram, and in the column [that is above your head] stands the six-rayed star [the seal of Solomon in the form of a hexagram]."
Having done all this you invoke your Guardian Angel into the mirror by prayer, and, when he appears, ask him to fetch Aunt Mabel. When she shows up you challenge her by placing over her, if you are a Christian a Cross, if a Buddhist a swastika, if a Qabbalist a pentagram. To start with you will be surprised how often what you see in your mirror or in your mind's eye will disappear when challenged this way.
In this case all is well, Aunt Mabel remains there smiling, and you ask her where she left her Will, or whatever it is that you want to know. She replies, you have a gossip, thank and dismiss her. You then thank your Guardian Angel, and perform the closing ceremony. This is extremely simple. You make the sign of Harpocrates, that is you place your thumb on your lips, and mentally reabsorb the force or virtue which theoretically has gone out of you to form the bodies of the archangels and flaming pentagrams still around you. They dissolve into a mist and this in turn flows back into you.
I expect that most of you have spotted the snag. It has taken you years of work to ensure the presence of a reflection of Aunt Mabel in your mirror. In the course of this work you will have become convinced through direct personal experience, that Spiritual forces called Gods, angels, daimons, and other less pleasant manifestations of the Deity do in fact exist. Competent magicians do not therefore practice Necromancy, still less do they attend séances.
Sorcery
Just as Spiritualism is a modern but degenerate form of Necromancy, so the wearing of a lucky charm is a survival of sorcery. It is based on the belief that the world which we perceive through our senses is a reflection of the world of the spirit from which we come. The Gods, angels, spirits and demons, with whom a magician must be familiar before he can practice his art with any effect, people this world of the spirit which les behind that of form. Each has its particular attributes of colour, scent, rhythm and shape, through which it can in part be understood, and by which it can be attracted. Thus in pagan cults a Virgin Goddess is always associated with the colour blue and a crescent moon, while the God of War wears scarlet and holds a sword or spear in his hand. The appropriate English plant for the former is a rose, for the latter a nettle. The corresponding words are laurel and oak. The quickest way to find out what a magical ritual means—what is the nature of the force with which that particular ceremony deals—is to burn the appropriate incense. Thus the holy consecrating oil of Abramelin is made from Myrhh, Cinnamon, Galangal, and olive oil, while the ointment for the Witches' Sabbath is based on Ambergris, Civet, and Musk. If you place a minute spot of either on your upper lip and close your eyes the feeling suggested by the one will be very different from the emotion aroused by the other. You have to learn your way about this jungle of correspondences before you can get anywhere in magic.
At first sight most samples of sorcery culled from mediæval textbooks seem to be nonsense. Yet if you apply the principal hinted at above and use a little common sense, much becomes intelligible. The grimoire of Honorius tells you that to have diabolical dreams you should anoint your eyelids with the blood of a bat before sleeping. If you just do so nothing will happen. These books seldom tell the whole story, but they provide clues, in this case the bat. Outside China bats are associated with the powers of darkness. Concentrate on these powers while catching your bat, sacrifice him ceremonially and collect some of the blood. Dine off frog's legs and red wine, evoke the demonic forces and, as a last emotive gesture before going to sleep, anoint your eyelids with the blood. By then you are at least in the right frame of mind to have a diabolical dream.
As a white magician you might do this once to see if it works, but you will prefer to have a dream inspired by your higher rather than by your lower nature. And so you seek a message from Mercury, the messenger God, known in his Egyptian form as Thoth the God of Wisdom. You sup off fish and white wine, and, if you are not squeamish, substitute the blood of a white cock for that of a bat. Inflamed with prayer you fall asleep, have your dream and most probably misinterpret it.
A simpler, more effective, but more dangerous technique is to substitute the drug Anhalonium Lewinii for the blood, and so have a vision instead of a dream. But those who do so run the danger of becoming drug addicts, and, unless skilled in this manner of working, are more likely to experience the reverse of what they are seeking, a visitation from Samael the False Accuser, otherwise known as the Ape of Thoth.
Let us take another example, this time a formula for discovering a woman's secret. The text-book tells you to pluck out the tongue of a live toad and place it on her heart while she is asleep. It is a cruel and useless thing to do, for nothing will happen. But the third of the 72 evil spirits who serve Beelzebub is Bilfares, who manifests as a great toad with a black head. He is the opposite number to Vassago, that mighty Prince whose office it is to declare things past and to come and to discover things hidden and lost. And so this concise instruction for maltreating a toad conceals an operation in which Bilfares is constrained to make a woman talk in her sleep.
Again suppose you want to give someone a sleepless night, you are told to pick a lily in June, moisten it with laurel sap, and bury it in dung. There it is said to breed worms, which you collect, dry in the sun, reduce to a fine powder and sprinkle on your victims pillow. This is not a mediæval variant of the itching powder so popular with school boys. You pick the lily in June under a waning moon, because then the demon Shimri is potent. The lily represents Lilith, the Queen of the Night, the laurel A'arab Zaraq the Raven of Dispersion. After they have been conjured, their joint attack is well calculated to give a sleepless night to an atheist who will not make the sign of the cross or who has not learned the banishing ritual of the pentagram.
Finally here is a safe and simple way to commit a murder. Buy a hen's egg without haggling and get some of your enemy's urine. Replace the white of the egg with the urine, seal the shell with virgin parchment, and bury. As the egg decays, your victim develops jaundice and dies within the year. In this type of sorcery no evocation or knowledge of demonology are required. As a result it will now only work in places like East Africa, where people still believe that, if a death spell is put on them, they will die, and die they do.
Sorcery is by no means the nonsense that most people imagine it to be. Where it is concentrated with selfish ends, or with forcing your will on another, it is evil, and so to be avoided. Christians are seldom tempted to try it, but some magicians fall by this way-side. Pride and lust for power are responsible.
Divination, Dreams and Visions
As we have seen there is a murky side to magic, which we will banish with the formula of Synesius:—
Blessed sire, do not allow soul-wrecking hounds within these bounds, that they should burke my prayer, my soul, my life, my work.
Synesius has always been one of my favorite early Christian fathers. He was a pupil of Hypatia—and if you read any Kingsley, you will remember how she was torn apart by Theophilus to become Bishop of Ptolemais, he replied that he was not baptised, was married and means to live with his wife, but that, if they would accept his pagan views, he would shepherd them. And so he became a Christian Bishop and Hymn 77 in the English Nymnal was written by him.
What you may ask, had he to do with magic and its modern bastard occultism? Well one whole branch of magic is concerned with divination, on which Synesius wrote an excellent little book. You will find it in Volume 66 of the Patrologiae Cursus Completus: for the Catholic Church in assimilating paganism adopted at least for a time many non-Christian ideas. That is one of the reasons why you Congregationalists threw Popery overboard and stick closely to your Bible.
According to Synesius, and to magical tradition, "the most beautiful of all gifts is divination," for through it a man can touch that divine knowledge by which Gods differ from men, as men from Beasts. The means he used were dreams, astrology, and what he called "the song of birds, their sittings and their flights." We no longer divine through birds, or by gazing at the organs and entrails of some sacrificial victim—which is just as well—but we still use astrology, geometry, the tarot and a Chinese system called Yi King, With their aid you can find out beforehand the type of play—to use an analogy—and the setting in which you do in fact appear, and this still leaves you plenty of free choice for your actions when on the stage. It is not however an automatic process. The answers that you get are either so complicated—as in astrology and the tarot—that many different interpretations are possible; or else the answers are so vague and general that they leave you where you started. Man does however possess in a latent form the faculty of foreseeing the future, and this faculty can be developed by some through any of these systems. The difficulty is that to judge any given figure or answer you must be impartial, which is seldom the case, and never when the question concerns yourself. You twist what you get to fit what you want, and are led astray.
As Synesius grew in wisdom and became a Bishop, he gave all this up and relied entirely on his dreams. As he put it, all you need to do is to wash, pray, and sleep. We all have dreams, but few of us remember them. We should, therefore, as Synesius and some psycho-analysts recommend—keep a bedside book in which on waking to record what we can recall of our experiences in sleep. You will be surprised how quickly the faculty of recall will grow, and at the wide range of your dream life. You can, as J.W. Dunne showed in his An Experiment with Time, foretell the future in this way. But as Synesius put it, you should seek:—
"Not dreams of gold to serve some idle needs, but golden dreams to urge to splendid deeds."
So a Christian God does in fact send messages during sleep, though seldom more than once or twice in a lifetime. If, however, you are a pagan, you will believe that one or other of the Gods, if a magician that your Guardian Angel is responsible, Those divine dreams have a quality of their own, an inner vitality which is quite unmistakable, and they teach through parable: for as the schoolboy howler out it, "a parable is a heavenly story with no earthly meaning."
Now many people make use of the way their mind works during sleep to help them in their work. I myself do so when writing. You go to sleep turning over in your mind whatever it is that you want to solve, and sometimes you wake up with the answer clear in your mind. A divinely inspired dream, however, is a different type of phenomenon, because it depends on something outside yourself which manifests and speaks in the symbolic language of dream. It is hard, some say impossible, to come by at will, and if you seek it, you may easily be taken in by a counterfeit inspired by what Christians call the devil, and certain occultists "the Dweller on the Threshold." The quality of a vision is not a test of its divinity, but the result is on you if you accept it.
Modern occultists love shortcuts and modern magicians insist on controlling what happens to them, so they tend to ignore and distrust their dream life. They rely on astral visions, which are self-induced, on the subject of choice while awake. The simplest technique for doing this is to close your eyes, and imagine yourself in a narrow corridor. In front of you is a closed door on which you imagine the symbol which represents traditionally what you want to examine. This can be a letter of the Hebrew or Enochian alphabet, an astrological or alchemical sign, one of the tarot cards, a god-form, the Agnus Dei or what you will, provided that it is taken from some historical system of symbolism. You then open the door, go through it, and describe what you think about or see. Quickly you develop the technique of day-dreaming in this way.
The world that you enter is a mental or astral world, a dream world with laws of its own. Your object is to visit a given plane or country and investigate it. Your passport is your aspiration, the visa on it the symbol that you have chosen, for the latter gives you access to the particular country or plane of which it forms part, so that you enter an alchemical, astrological, Enochian, pagan or Christian world—in fact any given realm of ideas that you will.
With practice the experience gains in validity, so that instead of vaguely day-dreaming, you live what you think, see and feel. At first you are merely spinning a web out of your memories and imagination, and the pattern that it takes follows now your aspirations, now your repressions. The landscapes, buildings, plants, animals and beings that you see are at first part of your own mental and psychic make-up. They are polite, obey your will, which they seldom do in dreams, and you have a grand time. This, however, is all delusion, a form of spiritual onanism, for you have not got outside your self. You have still to meet the real, independent, inhabitants of these astral or spiritual worlds. When you do so, you get a shock, for they are alien to you; they are not human. Your object is to meet and learn from them. Once met they are unmistakable. For one thing they are self-luminous, they shine with what can only be described as a living light, sometimes so strong that you have difficulty in retaining consciousness in their presence. They live, are of a different nature to yourself, and you never doubt their existence once you have met them. Your object as a magician is to meet those of your choice, not others. You learn, not by thinking the thing over, but by direct experience of it.
On each plane, or in each country, of this dream world you can have experiences on many different levels, but you cannot penetrate beyond what you can understand at the time. Your object is to refine your spirituality, to deepen your understanding, tearing veil after veil apart until you stand in the very presence of God—Very God of Very God, behind all veils and planes. This, of course, you and I cannot do, for we are not so spiritually advanced as to be able to be in God's presence. We can however enter at least the forecourt, and probably the outer halls of the Temple. We have of course no difficulty in wandering about in the basement.
There is another technique more difficult to acquire, but beloved of magicians, because it is a shortcut. It enables you more quickly to pass through the realm of delusion caused by your memory, by the thought that you carry with you. This involved consciously developing the body of light or astral body. Imagine a double of yourself standing before you. When this clear and well defined, transfer your consciousness to it, and then go on your travels, investigating the planes through their symbols. You can, moreover, visit in this body any place on earth, and be seen there by anyone who is clairvoyant: you will not, however, be able to move anything off a friend's mantle-piece. Incidentally if you travel westwards you arrive before you started.
A word of warning is here essential. Unless you learn the rules of challenging everything that you meet, see, or feel; unless you deny each vision in order to learn the higher, more spiritual truths behind what you have seen, felt and lived, you will treat the little that you have experienced as the whole. You become a minor fanatic. Then there is another danger. This dream world is more vital than the normal wake-world, in the same sort of way that the experiences of the heroin or opium addict are more vital to him than the facts of normal life. After a time you tend to lose interest in the world in which you were born, and wherein your mission lies. A Chinese mystic said to one of his pupils:—
This was a wholesome experience. But there is no danger of not coming out of your dream, and then you go about saying and thinking that you are a butterfly, Napoleon, or God—and you soon find yourself in a mental home.
I incline to the belief, for there can be no proof, that the realms that one can enter through vision in the ways I have described, are the realms that one does in fact enter when one dies. Those more easily accessible may resemble purgatory. There is danger in penetrating thus far while alive. After all we are born to do a job on this earth, and, though it may be beneficial to leave it at times in search of Truth and understanding, earth is the sphere in which we are meant to work.
Magicians and occultists love this sphere of faery, as the opium addict his pipe. You can learn spiritual truths in this way quicker than by any other means. But all short cuts are dangerous, as they lead to spiritual experiences and trials before you are ready for them, and they are then more likely than not to shatter you. It is the same here, as in all magic. You should not develop this technique until you have attained what is called the Knowledge and Conversation of your Holy Guardian Angel.
As a Christian these ways are not for you. You can, if you are called to do so, lead the contemplative life, possibly on your own, but certainly in the Anglican and in the Roman Catholic church. Then if it be God's will, you will develop these powers by God's Grace. Grace is a concept which is meaningless to a magician.
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