From: Thyagi@cup.portal.com (Thyagi Morgoth NagaSiva)
Newsgroups: alt.magick
Subject: Ritual without a Framework
Date: Mon, 25 Jan 93 13:40:59 PST
Organization: The Portal System (TM)
Distribution: world
  <C1CLEE.CC8@techbook.com>

93!01.25 e.v.

Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.
The word of Sin is Restriction.


Nancy Parsons writes:

It is our great talent, as human beings, to enfold our world in a 
"framework" of ideas, to understand it, predict what will happen,
and to control (as much as we can) the outcome of events.  Yet 
it seems to me that our great strength can be in some sense a 
weakness when it comes to magick.  Our effort to understand magick
can rob us of the ability to fully experience it.  It seems to 
me that ritual is in part an effort to enfold our experience of
magick into our structure of ideas, to make it comprehensible and
capable of being manipulated in at least a passably rational fashion.
As such ritual is very much a double-edged sword; we can become 
so accustomed to dealing with the metaphor for the noumenon that
ritual is that we lose sight of what that metaphor represents.  
I don't know how to deal with magick without a framework of some
kind, at least not yet, but I wish I did. 


Response:

I feel this is a very important point.  Many who I meet in the
ceremonial and even Wiccan community don't seem to understand it.
It regards the fine line between Mysticism and Magick, and is
to a large extent, what Crowley focusses upon in his writings
(I was just recently contemplating a passage from _Book Four_
which spoke directly to it, which I include at the end of this
post).

My own practice focusses on magick without a framework.  I am quite
hard-pressed to work with people, at times, who require one.
 


Nancy:

It seems to me...that when intention, personal or
otherwise, gets into magick, that something is lost.  Dawn said
earlier how she doesn't DO anything after casting the circle any 
more.  I wonder, sometimes, whether it is so necessary to do anything.
Maybe just being there is the thing.  


Response:

This is why I call my magick 'taoist' and find the metaphysics
inherent in Chinese philosophy to be so well suited to magical
application.  At a certain point 'doing things' becomes an obstacle.
This is perhaps reflected also by the seeming differences between
thaumaturgy and theurgy.  Crowley seems place the latter in a more
distinguished position in his writings, as I hope to show below:


"Of the Invocation

"...The secret of success in invocation... is an exceedingly simple
one.  It is practically of no importance whatever that the invocation
be 'right'.  There are a thousand different ways of compassing the
end proposed, so far as external things are concerned.  The whole
secret may be summarized in these four words: 'Enflame thyself in
praying.'

"The mind must be exalted until it loses consciousness of self.
The Magician must be carried forward blindly by a force which,
though in him and of him, is by no means that which he in his
normal state of consciousness calls I.  Just as the poet, the
lover, the artist, is carried out of himself [ekstasis] in a
creative frenzy, so must it be for the Magician.

"It is impossible to lay down rules for the obtaining of this
special stimulus.  To one the mystery of the whole ceremony may
appeal; another may be moved by the strangeness of the words,
even by the fact that the 'barbarous names' are unintellible to
him.  Some times in the course of a ceremony the true meaning
of some barbarous name that has hitherto baffled his analysis
may flash upon him, luminous and splendid, so that he is caught
up into orgasm.  The smell of the particular incense may excite
him effectively, or perhaps the physical ecstasy of the magick
dance.

"*Every Magician must compose his ceremony as to produce a
dramatic climax.  At the moment when the excitement becomes
ungovernable, when the whole conscious being of the Magician
undergoes a spiritual spasm, at that moment must he utter the
supreme adjuration.*... [Author's emphasis.]

"*Inhibition is no longer possible or even thinkable, and
the whole being of the Magician, no minutest atom saying
nay, is irresistably flung forth.  In blinding light, amid
the roar of ten thousand thunders, the Union of God and man
is consummated.*... [Author's emph.]

"The subsequent invocations, the gradual development and
materialization of the force, require no effort.  It is one
great mistake of the beginner to concentrate his force upon
the actual stated purpose of the ceremony.  This mistake
is the most frequent cause of failures in invocation.

"A corollary of this Theorem is that the Magician soons discards
evocation [of spirits] almost altogether - only rare
circumstances demand any action whatever on the material plane.
The Magician devotes himself entirely to the invocation of a
god; and as soon as his balance approaches perfection he
ceases to invoke any partial god; only that god vertically
above him [the HGA] is in his path.  And so a man who perhaps
took up Magick merely with the idea of acquiring knowledge,
love, wealth, finds himself irrevocably committed to the 
performance of *The Great Work.* [Author's emph.]

"It will now be apparent that there is no distinction between
magick and meditation except the most arbitrary and accidental
kind....

"[Noted:] There is the general metaphysical antithesis that Magick
is the Art of the Will-to-Live, Mysticism of the Will-to-Die; but -
'Truth comes bubbling to my brim; Life and Death are one to Him!'"
 

Aleister Crowley, _Magick_ [Parts I, II, and III of _Book Four_],
published by Arkana Books, 1989, pages 251-2.  Bracketed comments
are my own.


Invoke me under my stars.  Love is the law, love under will.

I am I!

Frater (I) Nigris (666) 333