Kindle Notes & Highlights
I do my thing and you do your thing. I am not in this world to live up to your expectations, And you are not in this world to live up to mine. You are you and I am I. And if by chance we find each other, it’s beautiful, If not, it can’t be helped. Fritz Perls
A creed much needed by the magickal community
The best magic stands in the service of life. The magic of creating communion with our holy daimon is one of the most powerful forms of serving life—not only our own lives, but especially those of the many beings, large and small, visible and invisible, around us.
Being able to converse and commune with this powerful force, that forms the essence of who we are, replenishes us like very few other sources of resilience accessible to our species. She/he literally breathes in our pain, tiredness, and exhaustion, and breathes out the substance that rebuilds our spiritual bodies.
The resources you have at your control on this journey of aspiration and exploration are limited: a finite number of days, a select group of loved ones, a fistful of dollars, and another fistful of liminal chances to prove yourself. Our holy daimon is the one exception to that rule. She/he will keep on giving if we find a way of allowing her/him to. Today our human personalities are the valves that hold back her/his force. Our holy daimon is the force that not only never runs dry, but that also knows the nameless place we keep on looking for, the place where we become who are meant to be, and
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Students have become customers, coming and going, dipping in and out of practices, quickly getting bored and treating magic like a menu to order from with the expectation of instant gratification.
It would be foolish of us to aspire to be flawless in the thousands of encounters we pass through each day. Flawlessness is for tyrants and the mythical dead. As living humans, our hands are always stained.
Even our ‘noble self’ will still struggle and fail; it is defined not by its perfection, but by its persistent aspiration. Despite being surrounded by constant proof of the opposite, our noble self holds fast to the ideal. This Platonic idea of who we are meant to be is at one with, and yet entirely separate from, our mortal personalities. It is waiting for us within our holy daimon.
One doesn’t pray with words, one prays with their hands. Whoever is praying with words is begging. One doesn’t beg. The spirit knows quite well what you require. When the palms touch each other, the Left is closed by help of the Right inside man to form a chain. That is how the body is bound firmly, and through the tip of the fingers, pointing upwards, a free flame arises.—That is the secret of prayers, which is not mentioned in any script.
A secret of prayer
The possibility of the direct ascension of man, of his becoming a godlike being in his own right, was never part of the Chaldean worldview. Just as they didn’t strive to synthesize the plethora of gods into a single higher divine being, so they didn’t strive to free man from the confines of his essential nature as a being caught in an eternal struggle between chthonic and celestial forces. The goal of Chaldean magic was to win the battle one day at a time, not to transcend it altogether.
The purpose of man can be thought of as the work of a stonemason: to set free an invisible shape caught in rough matter, to bring to light a perfect idea in a world of unruly senses. The logos is man’s chisel, the thumos his hammer, the eros the stone he works on, and the nous the light that shines in his mind. A good sculptor is guided by vision and well supported by the skill of his craft. A bad sculptor, however, is not necessarily led astray by an evil daimon; more likely he is simply insufficiently skilled to tame his stone’s unruliness.
‘Does it work,’ not ‘can it be objectively scrutinized,’ has always been the mantra of the successful magician.
Genuine Initiates do not grasp for powers they are unqualified to use beneficially, but they do seek to extend their capacity for rightdoing, so whatever power comes to them will be properly applied.
From Prometheus to Faust, for more than twenty-five centuries magicians have been characterized by their disregard for social norms and rules in their pursuit of personal power. The nature of their lifelong voyages stood in stark contrast to the increasing levels of social regulation which slowly evolved into the threefold separation of powers (legislature, executive, judiciary) that all democratic governments respect today. Apotheosis or deification, the idea that an individual through their own choice, hard work, sweat and tears could raise themselves to a godlike stature, was the ultimate
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In light of this it is no surprise that we find the magician standing at the crossroads of the paths of taboo and power. Countless generations of aspiring magicians have sought to leverage practices that are taboo, but which promise to increase their personal power. The chances were high that such an approach would get you quite far on your magical path—or at least on your way to the pyre. It is helpful to remind ourselves, that for centuries these two paths were one and the same.
Magia is the mother of eternity, the being of all beings, because she creates herself and is understood in Desire. Within herself she is nothing but a Will; the same Will is the Great Mystery of all wonders and secrecy. (…) The Desire, however, creates such a nature in the Will so that the Will is within itself. The true magia is not a being, but the desiring spirit of the being. She is a matrix without substance and yet reveals itself in being.
Mystery is nothing other than the magical will, which still lies caught in desire. (…) The Magician has power in this Mystery to act according to his will, and can do what he pleases. But he must be armed in that element wherein he would create; else he will be cast out as a stranger, and given into the power of the spirits thereof, to deal with him according to their desire.
Singing a statement of magical intent can grow to become one of the most powerful and immediate forms of magic open to us. Spirits love (or depending on the song and their nature, fear) listening to the voice of humans.
