Ritual Magic

Magic in History

by Elizabeth M. Butler

Elizabeth Butler's classic study of the traditions and practices of ritual magic uses a wide range of texts and sources - from the pre-Christian rites of the Akkadians and Chaldeans to the Salomonic Clavicles of medieval Europe - to create a lively, detailed and absorbing history of human attempts to achieve mastery over the spiritual world. Througout, there is extensive quotations from the documents themselves, providing the reader with an authentic sense of the richness and power of these texts. Professor Bulter also examines the careers of noted magicians of the fifteenth to nineteenth centuries, and considers the history of ceremonial magic in England, the myth of Satanism, and thr rituals involved in the Faustian pact with the devil. Ritual Magic is a work of deep scholarship which wears its immense learning very lightly, and which will be essential reading for all interested in the history of magic and in the way magic traditions have altered as they move from culture to culture and from century to century.

Genres: History, Religion, Occult, Magic, Nonfiction, Magick, Esoterica

Paperback

First published January 1, 1949

About the author

Eliza Marian Butler was born in Lancashire England in 1885. She was a professor at Cambridge University. Her most famous books were The Myth of the Magus (1) & Ritual Magic. (2) She briefly cites the Great Beast, Aleister Edward Crowley. In her first book she casually mentioned him simply as "the amanuensis of Aiwaz." (3) She does not give any indication that she ever actually met or personally knew him. However, Butler did know Crowley & often used the name "Old Crow" when discussing him in her 1959 autobiography Paper Boats (4) which contains priceless stories which no biography on Crowley, to date, has ever bothered to review. She admits that she "cavalierly treated" him in her books & claims, "I have been blamed for this; but somehow, one way & another, I could not take him seriously." (5)
How did the two first meet? Well, it all began with her desire to visit Hastings & interview Crowley on the subject of magic while she was writing her first book, The Myth of the Magus. A friend who openly admired Old Crow gave her Crowley's address so that she could write him a letter. Crowley briefly mentions these letters in his diaries as "Chit from Prof Butler." (6) After corresponding she finally decided "to go down to Hastings & see what I could learn." (7)
On January 1st 1946, Butler found herself setting off from London by train to the Beast's lair at Netherwood. Upon arriving at Crowley's boarding house, a "small dark man, announcing himself as the manager, greeted me in the hall; & as we were exchanging banalities a seedy figure in light tweed knickerbockers materialised on the stairs & a grating voice was heard to utter: 'Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law'." Butler claims that her direct response to Crowley's statement was an unspoken comment which immediately ran through her mind: "In that case...I'm for the next train back"-but somehow she decided to stay. (8)
Her initial reaction to Crowley was that "he was more repulsive than I had expected, & his voice was the ugliest thing about him: thin, fretful, scratchy-a pedantic voice & a pretentious manner." (9) Unfortunately Crowley didn't give her time to get a second impression due to the fact that he quickly ran back upstairs to get an injection of heroin for his asthma.
Later they shared lunch together with Crowley discussing at length numerous theories regarding magick & "quoting grandiloquently from his own works." (10) While this was going on she states that "I began by detesting, loathing & abominating Old Crow, not so much on ethical as on aesthetic grounds." (11) After all the stories, rumors & horrendous things that Crowley had supposedly done throughout his life this woman simply didn't like his appearance! She describes Crowley as having "thick eye-glasses, a perpetual tear in the corner of one eye & a flattish yellow face." (12) During the meal she began to wonder what kind of pressure had been brought upon the management of such a nice, clean, cheerful little place as Netherwood which would have persuaded them to allow Crowley to establish residency there. His occult rambling attracted much attention in the commonplace British dining room, to the point of discomfort for Butler who watched several guests leave, wishing she could follow them.
Still, she stuck to her interview & after lunch she "followed the magus & the brandy-bottle up to his room." (13) As to Crowley's apartment, Butler states it had a feeling of "squalor, airlessness & indefinable atmosphere of pollution...it would need a Kafka to describe it." However, she later admitted she learned quite a lot from Crowley. All in all, Butler conducted four interviews that day from noon until 9:30pm with small breaks in between for Crowley to inject himself with heroin & for herself to clear her head & stiffen her morale.
At one point he tried to convince her that he was an instrument of Higher Beings & in order to prove this, he offered to make himself invisible on the spot! In some

Reviews

[Gordon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Butler's text focuses on two different schools of magic: Solomonic and Faustian. She recounts how both were inspired by the Egyptians and Akkadians, poetry (The Epic of Gilgamesh, The Odyssey, The Persians, The Aeneid, etc.) and Judaism. After which, the book can be divided into the two thoughts of magic, their texts and practitioners; though, for Faustian magic, Butler adds two more chapters devoted to (1) critically reviewing two versions of The Discovery of Witchcraft as well as The Magus, a Complete System of Occult Philosophy, and (2) the inclusion of fairies, crystals and a brief look at the exploits of the magician known as Eliphas Levi. The book ends with an examination of why Satanism and black magic, in the most literal sense, is fictional. This is the second book Butler has written that is a part of Penn State's Magic in History series; her first book was Fortunes of the Faust.

Link to Penn State's Magic in History webpage: http://www.psupress.org/books/series/...

Note: the books and texts that I have linked to may not be the best versions available.

[reqbat · Rating 2 out of 5]

It’s taken me almost a decade to get through this- summaries of other books I don’t have access to but written in a muddled way… probably better to grab PDFs of the books themselves.

[Alex Neville · Rating 5 out of 5]

good, opinionated intro to the history of western ritual magic