My Problem With Grimoire Purists and Strict Traditionalists

"My wand is better than your wand!"

There seems to be a never ending argument between those who espouse the literal adaptation of Grimoires as they currently exist and those who follow a path of eclecticism, experimentation and creative adaptation. Neither point of view has any kind of absolute correctness or truth about it, because in many ways both approaches have their own virtues and failings. What bothers me about those who are strict followers of tradition and who declare that the old grimoires are the only pure source of magical lore is their smug certainty and absolutism. If someone wants to use the methodologies and tools as they are depicted in one or several of the old grimoires then that is wholly their own choice and personal obligation. If they honor a particular traditional path through their unstinting adherence to every detail and nuance then that is clearly their chosen path, and I say more power to them. However, the moment someone says that their path is the only legitimate way to practice ceremonial or ritual magick then they have completely lost me.

I have written about this issue in previous articles where I have discussed what I consider to be the actual issues facing anyone who wants to use one of the old grimoires. I have also talked about the obvious fracture in the community between those who are engaging in a creative adaptation against those who advocate a strict adherence to the old traditions. You can find those articles here and here.

The real issue here is whether the magic that one practices actually makes a difference in the life the magician. The core question is whether the magician is competent at working magic and that he or she can produce tangible and verifiable results through their magic. In the final analysis, it doesn’t matter if one is using a grimoire in an exacting and precise manner. It doesn’t matter that his or her magical tools are perfectly fashioned according to the dictates of the tradition or that the rites and liturgy employed are accurate and valid. What is important is whether the methods and tools employed by the magician are executed with the magician’s full intention, realization, and personal empowerment; that they ultimately produce the intended results.

What I have found in over 40 years of working magic and sharing lore with many magicians is that magic is a very individualized phenomenon. That magicians can employ many tools and techniques whether from traditional sources or modern inventions and still get the same comparable results. Whether the wand was made out of alchemical gold engraved with rare arcane symbols and glyphs or it was just an unusual stick found in the woods, the magic generated doesn’t seem to vary much. Esthetics are a good mechanism for refining tools and techniques, but still, a competent magician makes do with whatever he or she can afford to buy or make themselves. Just to make certain that my point is completely understood by everyone, esthetics, by itself, doesn’t produce better magic. There is no point in arguing how much better your wand is than someone else's, not to mention that it sounds a bit like grotesque posturing.

One of the more popular tropes going around these days is the grimoire-only purist or traditionalist approach to performing forms of spirit invocation and evocation. The argument goes something like that the magicians of the previous age knew what they were doing and the grimoires that they wrote represent a true tradition of magic, and that now, after centuries of neglect and omission, we should pick up what they unwittingly passed down to us and use that above all other methodologies or techniques to work magic. In fact, it has been implied that we would be better served if we tossed out all of the current magical lore collected over the last hundred years or so and started fresh with one of the more older grimoires.

It is believed by these pundits that the older grimoires represented a purer time when magic wasn’t so encumbered by the corruption and fallacies of our modern times. In fact, I have heard it said that the better magician is one who didn’t bother to learn any of the modern systems of magic. They say, start with one of the old grimoires and master it over time, and only then you will be guaranteed to be competent, powerful and masterful in all things. Well, that is the ideal, but in my humble opinion it falls quite short of producing the awesome results that some have said it would. Why is that? Is there something more to mastering magic than just mastering one of the old grimoires?

That is an important question, in my opinion. If you follow the supposed traditional lore, how could you possibly go wrong? Well, I believe that you would be missing quite a bit, since the culture and mind-set that produced that grimoire has long since vanished from our world. We can attempt to approximate that culture and mind-set, but then we are entering into the debatable world of reconstructionism instead of actually attempting to learn how to work magic in this current time and age. That is a problem, but it is only one of many problems.

The grimoires available to us today are translations from original manuscripts or in some cases, rare published documents. The manuscripts can include additional or appropriated materials not part of the archetypal original, and some of early published books are sometimes distillations of several manuscripts. The fact is that there wasn’t one definitive version of a grimoire. There were hundreds of variations of a specific titled grimoire, and many of these variations didn’t survive to the current age. What we have today is only a small fraction of the actual grimoires that were available to savants in the 16th and 17th centuries. We know this is true because the notables who collected books and had their own libraries often employed someone to compile lists of the books that they possessed, and these lists varied over time. From these lists of books library historians today have been able to determine that over one third of the books owned by notables in that time had something to do with the occult. (A smaller number were hard-core grimoires.)

So today, we have only a small portion of that written expertise, and from that small fraction of lore we are supposedly capable of reconstructing a culture and world-view that has been gone for over five centuries? It is hard enough to derive meaning and significance from occult books written in the 19th century. Attempting to do this with books written in academic Latin from the 16th century would be a daunting challenge. I know that I am not skilled enough to do this, and I doubt that most magical practitioners are either. A few of us might have this skill, but in the end, I think that it won’t make up for all of the missing cultural beliefs and the mind-set of the time. That, I believe, is lost to us forever, and it is one of the more important keys to being able to reconstruct the grimoire tradition from the previous age.

If reconstruction to that degree of viability isn’t possible then what is? It doesn’t matter what you do to learn how to practice magic nor does it matter what tradition or technique you use; you will have to spend a considerable amount of time developing, practicing and experimenting. It doesn’t matter how much material, knowledge, expertise you or your mentors might possess. In the end it is simply and clearly necessary for you to practice and experiment, and to do this intensively and consistently for a period of several years. Over time you will discover what works for you and what doesn’t work. You will discard things that are unworkable or clearly wrong and you will pick up ideas from your own experimentation or from books or other magicians. Your early years will be frustrating and you will likely experience many more failures than successes. Clearly, whatever intentions or ideals that you brought into this enterprise will change over time, and it is more likely that they will change quite a lot. When you finally build up a competent practice of magic, you might not even recognize the lore that you started out with.

What I am saying is that in order to master any system of magic you have to first learn how to practice it. Another important point is that each magician is tasked with developing a magical system that works for them, and this is, as I have said, an evolving process. I believe that we, as magicians, are tasked with making our magic relevant, workable and effective in this post-modern world that we live. We learn, we adapt and we evolve our own system of magic, even if we are engaged in a traditional path, or we are learning experientially by the seat of our pants. This is a process that has been a part of the regimen of learning and mastering the art of magic for a long time, and it has probably been that way since the very beginning or origin of magic itself.  

Therefore, with these important points in mind, it does seem foolish for someone to claim that all magicians must practice their magic using a specific approach or by adopting a methodology that was used in the previous age. What is important is engaging in a system of magic that works and is relevant to our current epoch. We can’t go back in time to try to determine how people thought, believed and practiced their magic back in the 16th century, so we might as well admit that our modern approach is to adapt, evolve and develop something that is actually new and different than what has been practiced in the past. I think that admitting this common approach to all forms of magical mastery is not only important, but it is also honest and inclusive. There are no absolute rules associated with a competent practice of magic and I think that chaos magicians have shown this to be abundantly clear.

That being said, if someone seeks to use one of the old grimoires then there will be some substitutions and adaptations that one will need to make in order to successfully perform the operations listed in it. Of course, this is where one’s own particular spiritual perspective comes into play. If you are a Christian then you will can take the prayers and the spiritual hierarchy found in the grimoires at face value. I do think that Christians who evoke demons and deal directly with the various Infernal Princes and Chiefs is likely compromising their faith, but that’s just my opinion. I am not a Christian nor a monotheist. Thus I wouldn’t approach any of these entities in the same supposedly hostile manner that adherents of the Abrahamic faith would have to in order to maintain their religious integrity. Giving offerings and making deals with various spirits is a necessary part of the magic that I do when fully engaged with the Spirit Model of magic.

However, I don’t have much spiritual affinity with Satan, the Devil, or any of the other many names that this entity has been labeled over the millennia. My religion doesn’t have an dualistic archenemy who must ultimately be vanquished, so I don’t believe in the Devil. I also don’t think that the name Lucifer signifies what either present day Christians and/or grimoire traditionalists believe that it signifies. As a Witch, I have reserved the name Lucifer to be understood using the actual Latin translation of “Light Bearer” and therefore would consider it to be an alternative name for the Sun God. When I encounter the name Lucifer or Lucifuge Rofocal in a grimoire, I am not convinced that the entity's name is synonymous with Satan. I also think that the name Beelzebub sounds kind of silly and I would have a hard time trying to summon that entity without laughing out loud, but I digress from my topic.

When it comes down to the names of the Infernal Princes, I find that these entities are more silly and childishly bugaboo than dark, evil, scary and awesome spiritual intelligences. Many would disagree with me on that particular point, and it is after all, just my opinion. Still, if these entities represent the kind of spirits that you want to engage then that is your business and it is none of my business. Just don’t tell me that what I am doing is not being true to the magic of the grimoires, or spirit magic writ large, if I happen to pass up dealing with those entities. If that is the basis to your magic then so be it. You can treat them like demigods or as hostile and evil intelligences, but it will not affect me nor what I do. We can just agree to not agree and move on with our collective work.  

One point that I will make about engaging with these entities as they were depicted and perceived in the 16th and 17th centuries and written about in the various contemporary black magic grimoires is that they seem to perpetuate and glorify what I believe to be the ignorance and superstitions of those times. To push this theme forward and to lionize it as an important part of the work with old grimoires is, in my opinion, perpetuating the vices and blindness of the previous age. I believe that what we should be doing is basing our work on a foundation of modern thinking and scholarship. We should not promote the superstitions and absurd notions of a previous age, however legitimate they might contextually seem to be. I think that those who have taken this approach would be better served if they instead questioned what is authentic and real in these books regarding our present post-modern world.

Once you have to actually work magic and engage with the spirits found in the old grimoires then you end up being schooled on what is real vs. what is legitimate. This is one of the many ongoing battles between pragmatic and creative practitioners of the magic and those who seem to have a more scholarly and reconstructive bent, but I think that there really isn’t any battle since both methods appear to produce useful and workable systems of magic. The difference is that no system of magic performed today by magicians is like what was practiced in the previous age.

Thus I feel that the snobbery of traditionalist, grimoire-only practitioners and purists is completely unwarranted and exaggerated. Their swagger and smugness is only a pretentious and shallow act hiding their obvious insecurity and likely incompetence. Let us not give them any more credence than what they actually deserve, which is none.

Frater Barrabbas

To Change or Not to Change?

Continuing in the same vein as my previous article (where I defended making a talismanic variation of the Portae Lucis working), I would like to further explore the issue about changing (or not) traditional magical lore. I think that this is a complicated issue, and it is one that seems to have produced a polarizing disagreement amongst members of the ritual and ceremonial magical communities. So I would like to look at all sides and see if there is a responsible and ethical way of resolving this issue.

One of the most complicated and difficult considerations for anyone who follows a specific spiritual and magical path is to be able to determine when certain rituals or methodologies need to be changed, revised or augmented. I think that except for the purist (who would be loath to change anything for any reason), the rest of us realize that lore can age and degrade over time, or even become ineffective or irrelevant. Change is a constant and relentless process, and in the material world, nothing ever stays the same. People and cultures are constantly changing too, so it would seem that rituals and magical methods or techniques would also need to be changed and updated as well. What is relevant today might not be relevant tomorrow, and I believe that it’s important for ritual lore to reflect the times in which it was developed so that it’s current and can thereby represent the cutting edge in magical thought.

Even my own magical lore, which was first developed and written by me in the 1980's, requires a periodic reworking or rewriting to make it more relevant and efficient. If I just left it where it was back when I first developed it, then the rituals would not be as elegant or esthetically pleasing as they are today. However, since I wrote most of this lore in the first place, then I can assuredly make changes without having to consult anyone. I am free to take this perspective to its ultimate conclusion, where I can seek to perfect what I have been developing over the last three decades.

So if you own the lore that you are using, then there is no argument that it’s yours to conserve or change as you see fit. But what about occultists who have been given ritual lore as part of their initiation into an established tradition? Do they have the same right to change, revise, augment or adapt their magical lore? Answering this question is much more difficult because there are a number of important considerations to make before individuals should seek to change an existing tradition. Was the lore given to you without any restrictions on its use? Did the initiating authority give you the right and privilege to make changes? Is the lore owned by an organization and therefore, it would require anyone who would change it to go through proper channels?

These are a few of the questions that must be asked when the lore that you hold is not owned by you. It’s important to know the answers to these questions when anyone agrees to accept an initiation into a tradition and receive specific teachings, rites and liturgy. If the initiating authority doesn’t explicitly tell their initiates when, how or with whom they might share this knowledge, or whether or not they might change, revise or adapt it for any reason, then it is the responsibility of the initiate to get that information officially documented. It’s important to understand that a strict adherence to a tradition is just that; it is strict and undeviating. Such a regimen, once imposed, will automatically require the body of initiates to preserve the lore exactly as it has been handed down, including all of the obvious mistakes, errors and omissions. If the tradition that you have been initiated into imposes this regimen, then you will have to obey it or violate the very principles of your own initiation. Because of this, it’s important to know what you are getting yourself into before accepting an initiation. You might find that such rigorous requirements are more trouble than they’re worth, and often it represents the fact that a given tradition has become dogmatic and its lore, ossified.

Additionally, we should also consider who might be capable or privileged to make changes to the existing lore of an established tradition. Often, those who are allowed to even consider changing ritual lore are individuals who have many years of experience and a great depth of knowledge. Such individuals have either been entrusted with this privilege, or it might be wholly vested in the approval of a committee or a group of adepts. In other words, changes might be accepted on any given lore for the tradition if a majority of the group agrees to them. Obviously, a new initiate or unproven member wouldn’t be given that privilege, since such work would have to be entrusted to someone who actually knew what he or she was doing. Someone who would seek to change or revise lore within a tradition should also be someone who is competent at doing so, and enforcing this regimen ensures that the lore would have a certain continuity between individuals and groups. Making changes for their own sake in the lore of an established tradition could be deemed either unacceptable or unwarranted. A person who would change traditional lore is someone who is authorised to do so. Of course, we are talking about officially changing the lore, which includes passing it down to others in its changed format.

Still, if you want to tailor a working or to experiment with a new technique, even a conservative occult tradition should allow its students the creative flexibility to do this, so long as they don’t try to pass on these changes or augmentations to others as the original lore. All of the original rituals and liturgy should be kept apart from the magician’s work to make certain that none of it is permanently changed. The original lore is also there in its pristine state so that the initiate will have them to compare and examine at any point in his or her evolution. Also, it is this original lore that should be passed to a new candidates when they are initiated. If warranted, the initiating celebrant can pass down any augmented lore to the candidate, as long as it is documented as having been changed (including when and by whom), but this might require authorization from the tradition’s lore keepers.

In my opinion, the most important factor for any initiate who is making use of ritual lore is that the lore must be made a part of his or her personal magick. What that means is that the rituals should be completely understood in regards to how they work, when they should be used, and what other ancillary practices should be employed to make the working fully functional. The magical and spiritual disciplines practiced by a ritual magician are always tailored to the magician’s specifications and personal tastes - there is no way around this fact. You can’t take a body of ritual lore and just adopt it without giving it a personal context.

One of the most important questions that occultists can ask about their ritual lore is to question themselves with this insight: “What do the symbols and philosophic verbiage contained in these rituals actually mean to me?” If they are meaningful and individually relevant, then the ritual will have a powerful effect when it’s performed, otherwise it will hardly function as it should. In order to grasp the symbols and verbiage of ritual lore, the practitioners must study and also work to make them meaningful and important. They must use the technique of contemplation to focus and powerfully activate that symbology within them. This operation is best accomplished by focusing on each key symbol independently, one at a time. Through a concentrated effort, the symbology of a tradition must become the active symbology within the mind of the practitioner. If an initiate fails to internally incorporate the symbology of a tradition, then it will make the adopted ritual lore empty and meaningless. Most traditions will teach this key technique to their initiates, but sometimes, due to omission or neglect, this important operation will not be passed on. That omission would represent a critical handicap to anyone who is seeking to practice ritual lore that they haven’t themselves written.

In order to be proficient at working ritual magick, magicians must own, in some manner, the rituals that they are using. You could say that ritual magicians are not fully functioning practitioners unless, or until, they own the rituals, and they are owned by being wholly internalized. If in order to achieve that end, ritual magicians must add, amend, revise or create the rituals contained in their personal grimoire, then such modifications become part of the overall process of magical mastery. In other words, ultimately, every ritual magician will create their own ritual lore, either based loosely or tightly on that tradition which they have acquired through initiation and revelation. Every magician has their own way and sense of style about how they work magick, and this individual praxis is the magician’s personal lore. Magicians can’t easily pass on their idiosyncratic methodologies to their students, and in fact, for various reasons, they shouldn’t. Instead, they should instruct them in the basic lore that represents the common foundation for their own work.

When I decided to teach others how I worked magick back in the eighties, my system of magick was too personal and idiosyncratic. I had to rewrite my personal magical system into a more generalized lore so that my students could more ably adapt this lore to their own personal style. If I had been initiated into a magical tradition, then the original lore that I would have been given would have been passed to my students. Whether fortunately or unfortunately, I did not have any traditional ritual lore to pass on, so what I gave them instead was a generalized distillation of what I was then using as my personal magical lore.

In fact, when the members of my first proto-temple came together, they insisted that the lore that I possessed be rewritten so that it would thematically fit into the overall scheme of the lodge and order that we formed. I happily complied with their request, and the results became the burgeoning ritual lore for the Order of the Gnostic Star. However, unlike traditions that require strict adherence, I allow anyone who joins the Order to modify the rites and liturgy according to the desires and consensus of their group. However, I do ask that the original material be kept, and that changes to the lore for that temple be documented. Otherwise, I have absolutely no problem with anyone adapting the lore that I originally developed. In fact, I not only expect it, but I also urge it as part of an initiate’s training.

I may be a proponent for allowing individuals to modify, change, revise or even create their own magical lore, but I also believe that they should be completely transparent and ethical in how they go about this task. Magicians tend to borrow, copy or even steal whatever they like for the ongoing purpose of building up their ritual and occult lore. I don’t have any problems with this activity, since even if I did, it wouldn’t stop it from happening. Ideas are like easy money, and they quickly pass from one magician to another, often without their sources being citing or credit being given to fellow magicians. I believe that imitation is the highest form of flattery, so I wouldn’t be bothered if someone borrowed a few of my techniques and added them to their own lore. That is how ritual magick evolves over time, and if a bunch of ritual magicians were to copy my ideas and incorporate them into their magick, I would actually be quite pleased. Perhaps this is the only way that any magician can acquire a kind of immortality.

Those who promote the idea of a strict adherence to any tradition or body of lore, be it archaic grimoires or even recently developed lore, are likely to find my opinions about this matter to be quite problematic. You see, because I believe that magicians are required to own their own magical lore, it becomes nearly impossible to do that while at the same time preserving the written lore as if it were holy writ. I don’t agree with what I call “cook-book” sorcery, and I am steadfastly against the popular movement of “grimoire-only” praxis. These two methods are analogous since they both promote a strict adherence to the actual written formulas and texts.

Someone can swear that the grimoire that they are using is pristine and perfect, as it was hundreds of years ago, and that the best results occur when the practitioner literally follows what is written in that book. First of all, nearly every grimoire has anywhere from a few to over a hundred different variations, some of which are completely unrelated except in their titles. Secondly, unless the magician has a facility for archaic languages and special access to either the original texts or good facsimiles of them, then the published book that he or she is using is based on a synthesis or amalgamation of those different texts. To be a real purist, then the would-be magician would have to read and use the grimoire in its original language. The belief system (as well as the culture) behind antique grimoires has long since passed out of this world, so in order to produce a reliable reconstruction, the magician would have to engage in imaginative speculation to fill in the unknown elements. Even so, if the purist is not an orthodox adherent of Christianity or Judaism, then much of what passes for the spiritual foundation of the grimoire would be missing, and such an omission would likely cause the working to fail, at least initially.

Since practicing with an incomplete reconstruction of a grimoire-based magical system would hardly give anyone an excuse to be an elitist, I find the whole reconstructionist creed to be no better than having to invent a magical system from scratch. In fact, unless the purist magician was able to completely “own” that reconstructed grimoire based system, then the invented system would be superior. In my opinion, there isn’t a person on this planet anywhere who has the Medieval mind set of an early renaissance magus, so adaption is the real rule of the path of ritual magick, whether one uses the old grimoires or not. So my opinion of the strict adherence “grimoire-only” crowd is that they are actually a bunch of pretentiously fake elitists who seem to know less about real magick than someone who is just a beginner. They have artfully created a series of myths about magick that make learning and mastering it far more difficult and complex than it ought to be. I am, of course, referring to Joseph Lisiewsky and his book “Ceremonial Magic and the Power of Evocation,” which has created a minor movement within the ritual and ceremonial magick communities. I have already commented extensively on this tome (and its author) and I have found it to be unconvincing and unrealistic.

Since that book came out, a number of magicians have jumped on the Lisiewsky band-wagon, and they have solidified into what I call the “Grimoire-only” purist movement. This is because Lisiewsky has promoted the idea that the only thing that magicians have to do is unerringly follow the written text of an antique grimoire, and “poof,” a real spiritual materialization will occur. Of course, one of the elements of that line of reasoning is that one must also faithfully engage in an orthodox religious faith, such as Catholicism, to gain the necessary spiritual foundation required to perform this kind of magick. Because I have no desire to become a Catholic, I think that I will completely pass on Lisiewsky’s methodologies. However, I have little patience for anyone who declares that the Grimoire-only methodology is the one, true and perfect methodology, and other systems are to be suspected as fraudulent. I don’t like being called a fake by anyone, so I think that I will let everyone know that this supposed “cutting edge” type of magic is, in my opinion, just hyperbole.  I wish anyone luck who seeks to get this methodology to work in a consistent and practical manner, since they will surely need a lot of luck and maybe some powerful hallucinogens as well.       

So I have covered the full spectrum of considerations for whether one should or shouldn’t change their lore in accordance with their own praxis. I have also demonstrated that magicians should have a certain flexibility in how they adapt their traditional lore to their own personal work. I am probably quite lenient in this regard, but it’s really up to the individual, and also, to the members of the tradition to which they belong. Ethical behavior in regards to passing on lore to students is very important, but so is allowing those students the latitude to adapt what they are using and thereby succeed in owning it. I have also recommended that the student use contemplation techniques to focus on the symbology and strategic verbiage of the ritual lore so that it might become internalized and fully active. I have also shown a certain degree of contempt for what I call a strict adherence to written lore, since I think that it’s impractical, dogmatic and too restrictive. Magicians are artists, so they need to have the flexibility for adaption, revision, modification and even creation when it comes to their adopted ritual lore. Restriction and inhibition are the killers of true creativity. Avoid them wherever possible.

Frater Barrabbas