Adventures in Magic and Mysticism

I've finished reading Stephen Mace's Stealing the Fire from Heaven, and it appears that although I've incorporated the preliminary work like banishing rituals and neither-neither sigil charging into my daily life, there's a bunch of other self-work left to do that is currently in a state of gradual becoming. That's fine, but in the meantime I think I should carry on reading more about magic, on top of the reading and practice for things like energy work, shadow work, dream work, etc.

The little voice in my ear is pushing me to Alan Chapman's The Camel Rides Again. I'll work a bit more on my current to-do's and let them cook before I start on that book. My heart though tells me my practice is missing a devotional aspect to a higher power. I'm reminded of something I read in one of Scott Cunningham's books: combining personal power, earth power and divine power for more... oomph. I don't know what to do about that yet.

Cue training montage...

Continuing from my previous post, here is my personal plan for sorcery training and learning loosely based on Mace's recommendations. In later chapters of Stealing the Fire from Heaven, the reader is instructed to combine sigil magic, automatic drawing and astral projection to make contact with various entities in the psyche. That includes energy centers, personal powers, dark complexes, etc. With that in mind I've included training for astral projection and automatic drawing practice. I threw in remote viewing because my personal intuition tells me that while it's different from astral projection, the two are connected by a spectrum of states of consciousness - my consciousness. The Jocko Willink part feels a little... corny, but I'm also going to trust my intuition on this one.

I've been busy with banishing rituals, the Neither-Neither, and sigil magick for some weeks now. Picking up from my previous post on a chapter of Stephen Mace's Stealing the Fire from Heaven:

To Know Self

Mace recommends three books.

Journey to Ixtlan by Carlos Castaneda

Tales of Power by Carlos Castaneda

The Dream Game by Ann Faraday

To Control Mind

Mace recommends yoga although we aren't to pursue it as actual yogis, but as sorcerers. He also discusses yoga through the filter of Crowley's Book 4 and what I assume is Patanjali's formulation of the 8 limbs of yoga. Mace prescribes a practice of an hour a day for two years.

To Develop Will

To this end Mace again taps into Crowley's ideas, namely Magick in Theory and Practice. The practice itself can be briefly described as such: taking an oath to not do an arbitrary action that has no moral or emotional significance. The idea is to strengthen our will with "innocuous" denials and not corrupt it with desire. Later once our wills are stronger we can attempt to work this on our actual "dark nasties" and bind them.

To Enforce Prudence

Mace dedicated an entire to chapter to this, and once again takes his cue from Crowley. Several points from Liber AL val Legis or the Book of the Law are quoted in relevance to the stated aim.

My Own Intuition

Prior reading that I've done on writers like Castaneda and Crowley have probably poisoned the well a little, so to speak. But I'm open to trying new things and giving them half a chance. Having said that, I can't ignore my intuition when it's pulling me in certain other directions. I have a list of substitutions for the recommended practices. I'll discuss them in a later post.

There's one more chapter in Stephen Mace's Stealing the Fire from Heaven that I marked "For Now" (in contrast to "For Later"). It deals with troubleshooting common issues the would-be sorceror might have while traversing the forest to become an actual magician. It's meant to address problems like a difficulty in visualizing while performing the banishing ritual taught in one of the beginning chapters, for instance.

There's 4 points that Mace outlines in the main:

To know self

To control mind

To develop will

To enforce prudence

It reminds me of something I've previously read elsewhere, namely the 4 Powers of the Sphinx. I think it was Eliphas Lévi whose teat I was suckling from, and if I'm not wrong, Crowley picks up on that too in his own work.

This is one of those chapters that contradicts the stated aim of the book: to design a system of sorcery not dependent on the beliefs, metaphysics or symbol sets of preceding traditions. I'm personally not bothered by the thought of incorporating earlier thought and techniques into a personal bag of tricks, but if that's what we're doing, I'd rather not be told we'll be doing otherwise 😆 But meh, it's a minor quibble and I'm happy enough to continue.

These past several days I've been experimenting with sigil magic as taught by Stephen Mace in Stealing the Fire from Heaven. Here are my findings so far.

Firstly, the method taught is not very difficult. Sigil creation is easy enough. Memorizing and repressing the sigil in my subconscious is also not hard. The charging method itself while not technically challenging takes a bit of time. Creating vacuity by performing the banishing ritual Mace taught is easy enough, but the practice of generating free belief from the Neither-Neither principle has me searching and reaching for juxtapositions of beliefs with strong enough emotional contents. That aside, imagining the sigil burning white hot in my field of vision as it charges is both a simple and stunning exercise in mental visualization.

Secondly, the results of this method of sigil magic is simultaneously impressive and disappointing. There are some things it's immediately good for: effecting change directly within myself, e.g. behaviors and thought patterns. There are some other things that it clearly has little to no sway over, generally things and people external to my mental environment. At least that's how it seems for now. The metaphysics of Mace's sigil magic method involve planting the sigil deep enough in my mind until it reaches the Mind of God. Maybe I just haven't learned how to go deep enough yet.

Back to the lab I go.

So this is the process I learned for sigil magick:

Write a simple statement of desire. Cross out duplicate letters. Make a simple sigil.

Memorize the sigil. Then repress it in the subconscious. If it ever rises up in your normal stream of thought, actively repress it. This activates the sigil and prepares it for when you're ready to charge it with free belief.

You generate free belief by performing a neither-neither, i.e. you come up with one statement of 'truth' and then find all the ways in which it isn't true and oppose the two together.

You water your sigil with free belief and visualize it glowing white hot. When that dissipates, you repress the sigil in your subconscious again.

Repeat multiple times until the objective is achieved.

The point of repression is to 'make the desire organic'. Charging the sigil with free belief and burning it into the imagination is meant to push it deep into the sorcerer's psyche into the 'Mind of God'. That last part I guess is the underlying metaphysical rationale behind the magic, a kind of monism.

What I left out in the numbered list is the banishing ritual that's to be performed before and after any magical operation, since that depends on when the sorcerer has any free belief with which to charge the sigil.

I'm gonna experiment with this for the next few days on several objectives of varying orders of likelihood of occurrence and see how it goes. For science!

"The Neither-Neither principle asserts that there is no truth anywhere that is not balanced by an equally true opposite somewhere, and there is only perspective and circumstance to determine which seems more true at any given time. To apply this principle to conjuring, wait until you are absolutely positive something is true, then search for its opposite. When you find it, oppose it to your 'truth' and let them annihilate one another as well as they may. 

Any residue you should oppose to its opposite, and so on until your truth has been dismembered and the passion behind it converted into undirected energy—free belief. By applying the Neither-Neither we can gut the meaningless convictions that obsess us every day and use the power released to cause the changes we desire."

Stephen Mace, Stealing the Fire from Heaven

Mace gives the example of our homes as they stand and exist right now. We simply need to look ahead in time and see the house gradually becoming dilapidated and falling into ruin, and even further ahead in the future to a point in the next ice age maybe when glaciers slowly move over the place where our house once stood and absolutely erase any memory of it.

"Once vacuity has been attained, the sorcerer will muster whatever free belief he can and use it to visualize his design. He can fo­cus this into his will for his objective by closing his eyes, visual­izing his sigil, and using his imagination to fill it with power. The sigil should burn bright under this stimulus, white-hot against the hazy background, until the free belief is gone and the original emotion nearly forgotten. Then the design will fade away and the wiz­ard will turn it out of mind until a new source of free belief pre­sents itself and he calls it up for recharging. He will continue to soak his free belief into his sigil until his objective has been achieved."

Stephen Mace, Stealing the Fire from Heaven

This is so much different from my friends' "magic cum doodles" 😂

" ... when a sigil pops into the sorcerer's normal thought stream, he must deliberately push it out, forgetting it by an act of will. This activates it so it 'dominates at the unconscious'... In this way his sigil is planted, ready to be watered with whatever free belief he can pour into it. To perform this watering in actual practice, the wizard must enter a state of vacuity, generate free belief, and focus it into concentrating on his sigil. Vacuity is a state of no thought, a cleared space much like what a banishing gives... "

Stephen Mace, Stealing the Fire from Heaven

Mace reports that among the several things that Spare recommends for achieving vacuity is solitaire

" ... his sigil must be special; not just any design will do. It must be psychically meaningful even as it gives no indication of the desire it represents, and so we may not use traditional symbolism... The wizard simply writes his desire down in a concise sentence, eliminates the duplicate letters, and then uses those remaining to make a linear design... Once the wizard has designed his sigil, he must commit it to memory. It must be so firmly in place there that he can call it into his imagination whenever he has free belief available to charge it. As soon as he is sure of his sigil's shape, the wizard must begin to keep both it and his desire out of his thought. He will simply not permit himself to consider them."

Stephen Mace, Stealing the Fire from Heaven

The main objective of the whole book is for the sorceror to create a personal system of sorcery not dependent on traditional symbol sets or metaphysics. I get that, but I wonder if relying on ready-made power from traditional sources is such a bad thing. More later on free belief and how a sorceror might generate it.

Over the past few days since my last post I've been practicing the banishing ritual from Stephen Mace's Stealing the Fire from Heaven. I wanted to give myself some time to observe any difference before proceeding to other techniques. I performed the ritual 5 times a day for about three days and here are my observations. There were no problems in visualizing the three rings around me and the central line as glowing white, nor the central pillar of flame expanding outwards and consuming my distractions and external intrusions.

Instantaneously I felt a slight buzzing in my whole body. I don't know if that's just an inherent ability in me for visualization or psyching myself into realizing physiological effects from thought. There has been an overall feeling of calmness and I've been going to bed earlier the past few days instead of clown-scrolling the internet 😂 so ultimately I think the banishing ritual is a win.

I think I'll retain the central process of the ritual and add to it with complementary practices. A bit of reading ahead shows that Mace delves into concepts like chakras or power centers. He also recommends yoga and meditation, although his opinion is that we're doing that as sorcerors and not yogis. I've been looking around and found a book called Energy Work by Robert Bruce who has also written books on astral projection, another concept and practice Mace introduces later in the book. Although, Mace seems to have a slightly different conception of it and approach to it. I'll play it by ear and see how it goes.

"To work Spare's technique, the sorcerer does not use ritual to call up the power he needs to accomplish his desire. Instead he obtains his desire by stifling the thought of it. He does not permit himself to consider it, and if it should sneak into his thought-stream, he suppresses it as soon as he notices its presence.

Spare called this deliberate repression 'making the desire organic.' When we dwell on a desire in our conscious minds, we involve ourselves in rational attempts to satisfy it, attempts that bind our energy into structured schemes that defy the fluid essence of power. We waste our energy weaving dreams—tapestries of method and motivation, expectation and fear of failure—veils that keep us from seeing ourselves as nodes of power linked directly to Infinity. But when we repress our desires, they shrink away from consciousness to turn in on themselves—becoming discrete entities—and if we can pour enough energy into them (even as we keep the thought of them out of our waking minds), they will sink down into the well-springs of Fate, where the energy will be able to adjust Fate's flow according to our wills...

Of course repression is better known as a pathological function than a cre­ative one. It is considered a primary cause of neurosis, particularly hysterical neurosis, and even poltergeist phenomena have been attributed to it. But that's sickness, not sorcery, and the only powers brought forth are demonic—of no use to anyone. With Spare's method the repression is only a ruse. The wizard is fully conscious of his purpose and plan before he begins; for his operation to succeed, the whole of his will, desire, and belief must be behind it. It is only when he has everything in order and begins his work that he must purge his thought of his purpose."

Stephen Mace, Stealing the Fire from Heaven

In Chapter VII of Stealing the Fire from Heaven, Stephen Mace makes two points:

"Sorcery is only a tool; what you do with it, for good or ill, is your own responsibility."

"It is safer to conjure to improve your ability to do your will than it is to conjure to make the world conform to your will. When you change yourself, you send no waves of power out into the world, and so you need not fear a splashback. But when you try to make external events respond to your bidding, such repercussions are a constant threat." (a survey of such dangers can be found later in Chapter IX)

"We will define conjuring as any attempt to use 'psychic' or 'spiritual' power to cause a deliberate change, either in the wizard's self or in his circumstances... In sorcery skill is everything, faith very little, and perseverance takes the place of devotion... But then perseverance toward what? That is, why conjure at all? To help you do your will, of course, whatever your will might be."

Stephen Mace, Stealing the Fire from Heaven

Mace then lists a few short examples of how one might use conjuring and summarizes it all as such: "In short, call up the powers that will help your natural genius take flight, and imprison the demons that work to pull it down into their mire."

He continues to say: "But when looked at in this way, sorcery seems like no way to make miracles at all, but only (as we have said) a psychotechnology. This is a good way to look at it, but even a psychotechnology can offer 'miracles' if you can extend the limits of 'psyche' far enough. In theory our unconscious minds ultimately merge with the Mind of God, so if we can work that deeply, All Things will be subject to Our Wills."

"Sorcery is the art of capturing spirits and training them to work in harness. The arena wherein this ensnarement and instruction take place is within the imagination of the sorcerer, the field whereon conscious intention meets unconscious tendency. But before the wizard can use this field, he needs some way to clear it, both before he begins any operation and after he finishes it. Before he begins he must cut down the stray thoughts, popular songs, and chronic resent­ments that may intrude upon his work. When he's finished he must send his spirits back to their own dwellings, for otherwise they might hang around his consciousness and meddle about out of control, eventually bringing about an obsession."

Stephen Mace, Stealing the Fire from Heaven

Mace then makes reference to the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram, but reminds the reader of the objective: to design a personal system of sorcery not tied to a traditional system's baggage of symbols or beliefs (although in a bit of reading ahead I find out we unavoidably have to go a little bit against that objective anyway 😂 but more on that later).

He goes on to describe a sort of banishing ritual taught to him by his teacher, and supposedly passed down from Austin Osman Spare, but by his own admission he has never seen it elsewhere in print. Here are the steps:

Close your eyes and visualize a vertical line of white light, from your feet to the top of your head, passing through a central point behind your eyes.

Visualize a spot of light about two feet in front of that central point. Use that spot to trace a horizontal circle around your head.

Use that spot of light again to trace an ellipse from the top of your head, down your back, under your feet, and then up again to the top of your head.

Trace another ellipse from the top of your head down one side (left or right), under your feet, and up the other side back to the top of your head.

It should end up looking a little like the diagram below with three rings and a central line (one of the rings is in the same plane of view as the central line in the diagram)

Image source

6. And now you "clean out your imagination". You turn the first line you visualized into a pillar of fire and expand it outward through your three rings. As you expand that pillar of fire, cast all distractions or intrusive thoughts into the flames, and visualize them burning until all that's left are your three rings glowing white.

"By this point the careful reader will have concluded that sorcery is not an overnight operation... Actually it's a lifetime sort of thing... So it takes years. When that's the case, pacing is important — you have to know what to do when, and how long to take at it."

Stephen Mace, Stealing the Fire from Heaven, Chapter V

And then he promptly brings up 3 sets of practices coming up in later chapters 😂 Things should probably be dealt with in order of appearance, but if you bring something up, it's kind of hard for me to dismiss. So I read a little bit ahead to the chapters containing the practices Mace mentions:

a sort of banishing ritual

conjuring with a sigil and free belief

possible problems and solutions (Mace introduces yoga and a "technique for developing will" borrowed from Aleister Crowley)

I'll post about them in the order I read and practice them.

"Our sorcery is thus a psychotechnology—we identify components within our psyches, discover the mechanisms behind their movement, and use various techniques to manipulate them. But the best way to approach any effort at technology is sci­entifically, and the essence of science is keeping accurate records."

Stephen Mace, Stealing the Fire from Heaven

I've read about beginners keeping magic diaries to keep track of their work and progress, so this is nothing new, I guess. A short list of what Stephen Mace wants me to keep track of:

record what I do so I know what methods work for me, what methods don't, and what methods work after some practice

record what happens when I succeed to gain insight into the nature of the power I've encountered and how to examine it further

record my mental and emotional states so I know what problems tend to reoccur (and could possibly have a "demon" as a root source)

describe my powers as I find them (names, symbols and apparent natures)

record the effect my practice of sorcery has on my life in general