Right Tool for the Right Job?

Since I have Frater Ashen Chassan as a Facebook friend, I have seen quite a number of photos of his magical tools, and I must say that they are magnificent artifacts, cleverly and beautifully crafted and quite opulent. If I were more inclined towards traditional ceremonial magic I might be quite envious of his magical tools. They are incredibly awesome indeed. But the main question that I am sure many people ask themselves, and some undoubtably believe is true, do such perfect ritual tools make for a more potent magical outcome? That is to say, is an interesting branch or stick found in a special woods or forest, and used as a wand, unadorned by any clever craft a lesser tool than a beautifully crafted golden wand with ancient symbols inscribed upon it? That is the question which I am asking, and it would seem that there are two automatic opinions on such a question.

Opinion 1: This is the most obvious opinion, and it states that a beautifully crafted wand has far greater power than an unadorned stick. The greater the esthetics associated with a tool will naturally grant a greater power. If the tool is beautiful and also an antique, or even a relic from some past magician’s collection, then it would be even more powerful. Such an opinion would presuppose that the serious ceremonial magician should use whatever resources they have available to acquire the best tool, or the one that is the most beautiful, and even one that is an antique magical weapon. Ceremonial magicians have been known through history for their expensive looking and rare single-purpose tools. In fact, the best tools would be owned and used by the greatest magical practitioners, and the quality of the tools that a magician uses would represent their prestige and importance in the art of magic. Of course, if magicians happen to also be master craftsmen then they could manufacture such tools themselves, and those not so inclined would have to either seek out someone to make these tools for them, or find some rare artifacts or already-made and then adapted tools. 

Opinion 2: Since the lower class itinerant magician or witch in the previous age would have to make do with whatever they could find for magical tools, they were often common tools made magical through use. A knife, stick, walking cane, and maybe cast off priestly garb, plain dark cloths or even nudity would suffice for their working tools and vestments. They might have a pentacle engraved on a wax disc, and bits of parchment for making witch marks, bits of tin for the same, and maybe a plain wooden offering cup to top off their collection. If they were literate, they might have a couple of cheaply bound note books with spells and recipes written in them. With such a lower class accumulation of junk to work magic, would the magic be pathetically weak as well? If we look at our history and folklore, we will find that the cunning folk did quite well, and were reputed to be the most consistent and reliable producers of magical effects. As poor as they were, they got results, and their price was quite accessible to their poor neighbors.

Now, because I am a witch, and in fact my use of tools was extremely rudimentary in the beginning of my magical career, I have carried with me the idea that the actual material tool was nothing more than a simulacrum for the ideal magical symbolic tool, and that the intention far outweighed the esthetics of the actual material or configuration of the tool. Since I am not inclined to forging, crafting and artistically embellishing my magical tools, and that I found what I use today in various stores and online markets, what I have accumulated over the years was more than sufficient to perform magic. In fact, being the packrat that I am, I have a number of nice and also junky items in my collection - but very little of high quality. Does this mean that I am a lousy magician because my rites and ceremonies lack any kind of esthetic glamor, making them weak and barely effective? Because my tools are not awesome and therefore seemingly powerful, then I must be a fake magician, or just a pretentious fool. Really!

Yes, that was pretty funny. Since I have decades of practicing magic, the quality of my magical tools for me is quite irrelevant. I could go into the forest and find a stick, a nice straight branch, use my utility knife as both an athamé and a tool to prep the stick as a wand and the branch as a staff, and a use a plastic cup and plate for a chalice and paten and I am ready to work magic. What transforms those rudimentary tools into powerful magical weapons is my magical intention and my imagination, not to mention years of practice. Garbed in my ordinary clothes and coat without any jewelry or any rings other than my wedding band, and I am fully vested for the magical work. It may not be as amazing as turning a pumpkin and field mice into a horse drawn carriage, but it has some of the transformative aspects, except functioning in a much more mundane manner.

So, because I am just a humble Witch who selects various odds and ends as my magical tools, and I have always practiced my magic in this manner, having magical tools that are works of art or museum pieces of the same quality is not important to me. What is important in my magical workings is my mental state, my depth of knowledge and experience, and my powerful imagination. Armed with these capabilities, whatever I use to direct the lines of force, point at the various nodes of my temple or grove, and following my internal magical script or extemporizing a series of cantrips and spells in my mind’s eye, I should arrive at the same place as if I had the most esthetically amazing tools and temple at my disposal. Thus, the outer tools, vestments, temple furnishings, and various other accouterments do not make the magic happen. What makes it happen is my internal mental conditioning, years of practice, and my magical discipline. If I loose everything in a fire or a disaster but remain alive and well, then I can still work my magic.

You could take someone who had a model’s beauty, vest them in sumptuous and expensive robes and vestments, wearing magnificent jewelry, and armed with priceless magical tools and equipment, and place them centrally in a perfectly lit and furnished temple, with expensive incense wafting around them, and have them adroitly pronounce a powerfully intoned invocation using antique barbarous words, and would it really be magical? It would very visually esthetic, and perhaps could be caught on video, but still, unless the actor or actress had the proper mental state and years of practice, it would be empty of magical effect and probably meaningless. All the eye-candy of a Hollywood production would not be able to produce any magical effects or generate meaningfulness unless the cental practitioner had such a capability in them to begin with. Such a trained magician would be able to produce powerful transformative effects or make things happen in the material world with only a small percentage of the accouterments that I have described here. 

It is said that the most accomplished magical practitioner would not need any tools to perform magic, and I have done that as well, since my magical imagination can override any material deficiencies. That means that magic, for me, is part of my person, which we should expect after years of practice. I could jokingly say: “Magical tools? Magical tools! I don’t need no stinking tools!!” All these considerations show that magic is a mental state developed over a long period of practice and experiences. We start this path with humble examples of what Hollywood dreams about when depicting ritual magicians, and depending on our nature, we may stay that way until we master our art and ourselves. Then beyond that mastery is just the magic without any material representation. That is a true practitioner of the art of magic.

While I deeply respect and appreciate what Frater Ashen Chassan has crafted with his own hands, and I also find inspiration in the work that others have done to build up their tools, vestments, furnishings and other esthetically pleasing attributes to make their temples quite awesome, I know that real magic that is materially effective and transformative doesn’t require such things. Therefore, I urge my fellow practitioners to love what they do regardless of their tools and trappings, and if they have the money, time and expertise, they can create amazing temples and groves to work their magic. However, snobbery of any kind is meaningless, and it only shows how much someone really knows about magic when or if they declare that expensive and artful tools and vestments are the only way to perfecting the art of magic.

Frater Barrabbas

Thoughts About Good and Evil

As a Witch, I see the world infused with the ever-changing power and wisdom of light and darkness, where the changing seasons are represented as the cyclic balance of these qualities that is ever changing. They take turns being dominant, ascending and then diminishing. Through impermanence, resilience, fulfillment and interdependence, nature teaches us its greatest mysteries. It is a perfectly harmonious blending of natural phenomenon that is always tending towards balance. I use that idealistic perception to examine and judge the world around me, noting to myself that this balance has a powerful effect on the various elements of the natural world as well as the spirit world. 

Being out of balance is characterized as sickness and the diminishment of life for individual living creatures and the totality of life in the world, including and especially for humans. When the natural world itself is out of balance in a given geographic domain, then that situation produces an extinction event purging such a place of unadaptable life forms. Nature can change drastically by itself, such as the occurrence of ice ages and warming or cooling trends or by cataclysmic collisions with comets and asteroids. It can also be changed by the activities of human beings, such as the careless introduction of toxic pollution or greenhouse gas emissions. Ecological balance is the key to a living in a sustainable and habitable world.

“The balance of nature is not a static state; it is a dynamic equilibrium.” - John Muir

I have equated the occurrence of the transcendental cycle of light and darkness with the cycle of life and death, but where I stop short is to equate light and darkness to the qualities of good and evil. This is because they do not seem to be attributes associated with terrestrial life in general, and they are more concerned with the moral beliefs and values of both individual and collective human beings. There is no good and evil in nature, so these attributes are concerned with the sentience and the spirituality of human beings living in the world. Good and evil cannot, therefore, be considered transcendental attributes. By taking this naturalistic perspective about good and evil and making it a part of my religious practice, I have declared myself as a moral relativist. That, by itself, introduces the whole topic of the nature of good and evil, and whether or not it transcends human religious moral tenets and socially based laws. Certainly, there are rules against certain practices, and some of them are obvious and completely agreeable, and others are debatable. The human arbitrated laws of the land are the final determiner of what is legal and lawful in our socialized world, but bending or even abrogating those laws is the unfortunate practice of criminals, ruthless politicians and oligarchs.

Followers of moral relativism or cultural constructivism, as it is called, declare that all laws and moral values are simply relative to the cultures to which they apply, thereby making them more like social constructs. I believe that this perspective ignores that there are indeed some universal moral laws despite the different cultures in different geographic locations and times. The distinction of good from evil may be just an evolutionary adaptation to assist human survival and social cohesion, but there are boundaries that define civilized behavior. It is only when these human-determined moral values are grounded in transcendent precepts that they are taken out of the human sphere. 

Many philosophers have argued about the issue of whether these laws are based on transcendental precepts, such as how religion typically sees them, or whether they are merely human values determined by politics and established for the benefit of the elite and then cloaked in religious theology to give them a more absolute quality. This certainly seems to be the case for the mundane idiosyncrasies of religious laws and practices. Avoiding pork may have been an expedient law to protect individuals from harmful diseases, but coercing women to wear head scarves to protect them from inciting lustful thoughts in men seem to be more about controlling and sequestering women from the body politic than maintaining the purity of intent between genders. 

Outside of religious law and moral prescriptions, there is a body of thought that good and evil transcend human values, and these would be those philosophers influenced by the teachings and dialogs of Plato. Plato believed that good was an archetype and had a transcendent form, which he proposed was part of the highest reality, and that human beings perceived this archetypal ideation with intuitive approximations, since humanity cannot see the ultimate reality. Plato believed that if the Deity decreed the nature of good without good being a universal value, then it would be arbitrary and not truly good. From this perspective, Aristotle declared that good and evil are grounded in the nature of being itself, and defined it as that which either fulfills or damages the essential nature of a person, thus,  making it above and beyond the basis for determining cultural laws and moral sentiments. 

Good and evil, therefore, were archetypal qualities that were a natural part of the world as perceived by humanity. Christian theology, through Thomas Aquinas, incorporated Aristotle’s ideals into its natural theology, making good and evil a core essence of the manifestation of the world through the power and wisdom of the Deity. Of course, raising the idea of good and evil to the level of a godhead brought all sorts of difficulties to a monotheistic creed, such as the nature and origin of evil, and whether God was the source of both good and evil, which this certainly implied. 

Making good and evil transcendent also introduced into the framework of religions and mystical speculation the idea of duality, since if God is good, merciful, compassionate and loving, then evil has its origins in either an opposing supernatural being, such as the devil and various demons, or it becomes a mistake or aberration in the formulation of the world itself. Early adherents to Judaism had no problem in seeing a Deity that did both good and evil to individuals and nations, and to a lesser extent, Islam held this view as well. Seeing the Deity as the source of both good and evil had an ancient precedent, which was believed by most early pagan civilizations. Yet Mesopotamian religious adherents had long developed the idea of demons, and this was picked up by other religions in the Middle East, especially the Persians. However, Judaism and Islam both adopted the concept of demons and devils later on in their development, likely due to the influence of Persian Zoroastrianism, which was a true dualistic religious creed. 

Abrahamic faiths declared that their Deity was singular and had no competition, so theologians attributed the incidence of evil and the phenomenon of demons to the fact that human beings had the power of choice, to choose to do either good or evil, and they were tempted to do evil by demons. Followers of Luriannic Kabbalah believed that evil was the result of the shattering of the first emanation of the Sephiroth because they could not hold the absolute glory of the supernal Godhead, and therefore allowed the sparks of divine glory to fall into the underworld of non-being, which became the Qliphoth. This event allowed a contrary force to manifest that opposed the will-to-create that drove the Deity. Only within the Ain Soph was there the absence of good or evil, but from the emanations proceeding from Kether, there were tensions between a duality of severity and compassion resolved in the middle pillar, yet ultimately formulating in the distinction of good and evil in Malkuth. The Gnostic bishop, Valentinus, also promoted the idea that evil was introduced as an error of material creation, and not the fault or flaw of human nature.

Christianity developed the idea of the devil, or Satan, and legions of demons and their overlords as the principal source of evil, and that God gave them the kingdom of Hell from which to tempt humanity into committing sins. The rationale was that those who were destined to be bad and had led sinful lives were culled from the collected and departed souls from those who were good. 

While the authors of Christian theology proposed that their religion was nominally a monotheistic creed (as inherited from Judaism), they also pushed it to deviate from that base over time so that they could  more powerfully build up the role of devils and demons. They declared that those who were not forgiven for their sins or had not atoned for them in some pious manner, their immortal souls would be delivered to the powers of evil once they died, to be tortured forever in the underworld of Hell. It was a simple binary approach and explained why evil was allowed to exist, but only active in the material world. This belief functioned as a means of testing the faithful, who were given the dispensation of choice and wherever it might lead them. Thus, Christianity, while pretending to be a monotheistic religion of the Abrahamic faiths, was actually a dualistic religion that sequestered good and evil and made them morally transcendent. This Christian sentiment about good and evil, has, over time, influenced popular Islamic beliefs, but not so much Judaism.

More modern philosophers, like Emmanuel Kant taught that moral law, regarding good and evil, is considered a categorical imperative that is derived from pure reason and is independent of cultural determinants. That means good and evil are universal tenets which are binding whether individuals or societies adhere to them or not. Another perspective is the modern philosophical idea of moral horror that stipulates certain actions, such as mass murder or genocide,  are genuinely wrong, and it is referred to by scholars as Moral Realism. Either of these approaches specifies that certain actions can be considered universally evil, and by inversion other actions could be considered universally good, and neither of these categories can be reasonably refuted. 

Thus, Nazi officials who assisted in the killing of millions of Jews, or Japanese military officers who murdered prisoners of war, raped, injured or executed innocent civilians cannot hide behind the excuse that they were not responsible for their crimes. It is because the crimes they committed were against humanity as a whole, and judged independently of any national laws or directives, which  allowed or compelled  such actions. The excuse of just following orders was not enough to mitigate adjudicated war criminals from being sentenced to death. I, for one. would not want to argue against or disagree with such agreed upon international laws, and I would expect the politicians and combatants of any branch of the military in my country to adhere to these conventions as if they were sacred writ.

It would seem, then, that some laws that humanity has determined as a whole could be considered universal and applicable to everyone, such as crimes against humanity. Other laws and moral tenets could be considered to be relative to the place and time. Some of them approach universal laws and others would be socially or culturally determined. While universally accepted laws ordained by the conventions of nations could be considered candidates for transcendental qualifiers for the definition of evil, qualifying good is not as direct. 

I think that on the transcendental level there is something more like what I originally discussed in the beginning of this article as the archetypes of harmony and disintegration, life and death, creation and dissolution, or expansion and contraction as symbolic qualities of light and darkness. These attributes are above the domain of the human mind and the social milieu of the human race, and so they are only dimly recognized in the human definitions of good and evil. From this perspective, good and evil are mostly relatively defined, but there are conventions and definitions of evil, and laws adjudicating them, that amount to universal tenets in the human domain.

In the occult and spiritual sciences, one can deduce a concept of good and evil as the overall polarity of creation and dissolution as found in the concept of balance and its product, harmony, or imbalance and its product, disintegration. I would propose that love produces harmony, and hatred, disintegration, and that these could qualify as representations of good and evil in our world of consciousness and unconsciousness. These qualities are the light and darkness within our minds. We all have the ability to love and hate within us regardless of whether our personal affectation is to identify with good or evil. 

We have the freedom and power to chose good over evil, evil over good, or to even avoid making a choice. Externally featured is our outer persona and its associated values, and within us, hidden from view, is our shadow, which contains those things suppressed or deemed valueless. Therefore, the duality of good and evil reside in our very being and they may be in a constant state of conflict if our internal balance leans too far to one pole or the other. Our goal in becoming spiritually evolved and enlightened is where we can unite the light and the darkness within us, so that the polarity of good and evil are neutralized, and thus become whole and complete in emulation of the One.

A person who has mastered the light and the darkness within their own soul and has become completely unified so that there is no internal conflict, only unity, has finally become a whole person. You might ask me what a person who has gained this state would be like, and I would reply: “Harmony, love, compassion, mindfulness, imperturbability, and total submission to the One and the ever present Now; this is their ultimate state.” This does not mean that they are blind to the suffering of others, nor are they immune to the vicissitudes of human existence and its fragile mortality. They are, in fact, more human than what is typical of humanity. This is the goal that we should seek, but there are any number of different ways to achieve it. For a ritual magician, magical shadow work is the key to achieving wholeness and completeness, such as what I have proposed in the workings of Ordeal XV.

Frater Barrabbas