Another Look at the Purpose of Magic

[I took a sabbatical from writing over the last couple of months, and then I thought that I should at least write something on a semi regular basis so that folks don’t forget who I am or what I have to offer the erstwhile student of ritual magick. So, I decided that short articles are better than no articles, and I will try to write short articles on a more frequent basis. We’ll see how that plays out in the weeks and months to come.]

I have written on this topic previously, but it is something that I should discuss again because I often hear someone saying that they have achieved everything that they need from their magical system and there is no need to pursue anything further. This, of course, is referring to magical-based material acquisition or at the very least, control over (most) occurrences of one’s destiny. It is a form of self-empowerment that can deceptively put someone into a comfortable niche and then keep them from aspiring or gaining any new perspectives.

Whether magicians use forms of simple or complex elemental magic, planetary and zodiacal magic, invoking and evoking spirits or performing various forms of thaumaturgy (or a combination of all of these forms), he or she ultimately comes to that great stumbling block of complacency and inertia called comfortable self-empowerment. The logic behind this complacency is that when something works well and consistently then why change it?

When magicians strive to become proficient and they have the tenacity and endurance to over-come failure through a period of years, to research and analyze that failure and to start over, and do this cyclic process many times over, they will eventually develop a magical system and methodology that will gain for them some modicum of success. Ah, there’s nothing more dangerous and problematic as becoming a successful magician. Let me explain why I think that this is so.

After all, life is something of a gamble, and the only thing that one can say about it for certain is that good fortune and bad fortune are part of the process. Like death itself, the joys, sorrows, and yes, even the boredom, are all a part of life whether one works magic or not. If you are experiencing a long period of material and psychic stability, and you feel like you are in control of the various capricious elements of fate, then you are likely due for some challenges or even some misfortune. Thinking this way is not pessimism, it is just a matter of odds, of course. Yet truly, if you live in a stable and dull part of the world then it will be more likely that you will lead a stable (and dull) life. Living in an unstable part of world can increase the odds for adventure and excitement, but also misfortune for nearly everyone, even those practicing magick. Instability can be caused by natural phenomena or the hazards of man-made conflicts and destruction. Nowhere on the planet is there a place that is indefinitely immune to either human or natural causes of instability.

So, if you have achieved magical competence and you feel empowered and it seems like you are in control of your life then you might also be succumbing to hubris, complacency, inertia and even a bit of self-delusion. Why stop progressing when you have finally become competent, since that should be the opportune place and time when one’s spiritual process could accelerate and thereby bring one to greater ascendency? I guess the real issue is more general and even foundational in regards to the art and practice of magic.   

This brings me to ask the most important question that one could ask regarding magical techniques and systems, and that is, what is the purpose of magic? Why do we work magic, and what do we do after we achieve enough material gain to consider ourselves competent and perhaps, even content with our lot? This question had eluded me for decades because until the last decade or so, magic was often hit or miss. It wasn’t until I had practiced magic for nearly thirty years that I finally felt that I could accomplish whatever I needed to accomplish. My career was in great shape, I had money, the means to acquiring a successful relationship, and I was able to develop and practice any kind of magic that my mind sought to experience. I even wrote up my own versions of the Abramelin ordeal, the Portae Lucis ordeal and numerous others.

I was quite successful at performing invocations and evocations, and I had a system of magic that could be developed to accomplish nearly any goal I could imagine. It just took time and effort to research, develop and to practice, but nothing seemed outside of my ability or scope. However, all during this time, I understood that magic should cause psychic transformations and push the ritual magician into ever greater states of conscious being. My ultimate destination was to experience full union with the One, although it took me many years to understand that concept as clearly as I do today. That was the goal, but the foundation that I spent so much time on was developing one’s internal and personal godhead. Without that most important component, one would attempt to realize the One in vain, or even worse, in complete delusion.

Therefore, over many years, I had determined that the purpose of magic was to achieve union with the One, and that it required me to realize the most intimate aspect of godhead within myself. I was a God, fully and completely (as are everyone else), and I was a seeker attempting to realize that Godhead within myself, and to ultimately understand that it was one and the same with the Union of All Being, which I call the One. I implicitly and intuitively knew this from my earliest days, but I was unable to articulate this truth for many years. That is what I have come to believe, and it becomes an important consideration for me when I have reached and achieved that point of magical and material competence, since that is the starting point for achieving the highest level of spiritual and magical being. The object is there within grasp, if only we can extract ourselves from that most comfortable of ruts, which is magical and material success. 

Despite the comfortable place that I find myself in these days, I force myself to action and to not cease in my magical work. I must continue seeking to undergo magical ordeals that challenge me to the very fiber of my being from time to time, or else I will the lose the path that I have spent so much effort to build. My life’s work really doesn’t end until the very day that I die, but until then I must seek to realize the holy God/dess Within. Full realization of this internal Atman is the key to realizing full cosmic consciousness and complete at-one-ment with the All. I believe that it is the key to full enlightenment and also to a form of conscious immortality.

I believe that each and every one of us can attain this pinnacle of accomplishment in a single life-time. It is, in fact, our destiny, and it is one that we are all programmed to achieve, but only if we remove all of the obstacles in our path, especially the ones that we have placed there ourselves. As the old saying goes, we are our own worst enemies, and this is especially true when considering the highest forms of magical and spiritual attainment.

So next time you find yourself thinking how much you have accomplished or that you have all that you need as a practicing ritual magician, I would hope that you begin to ponder about your own complacency and hubris. Thinking this way just seems to invite adversity and calamity, as if the point of earned stability is just a calm period before another storm blows through. It is as if the Gods have an evil and pernicious sense of humor, and they don’t take lightly to anyone who thinks that they have it made.

I have previously written on articles on this subject, and I would urge you to examine them if you haven’t read them previously. The first is about the five archetypal trials found in the path of the ritual magician. What I have discussed in this article would cover trial number 3, which is Indolence. Trial number 5 might also apply, which is Hubris. You can find that article here. Also, I wrote an article some years ago where I discussed the relevance for working ritual magic in the post-modern world. It could also shed some interesting light on why we work magic and what we expect to gain from it. You can find that article here.

Frater Barrabbas

Purpose of Working Magick - IMO

Over the course of several weeks, perhaps even months, various writers in the blogosphere have been opining about using magick to cause shifts in probability, bending reality or producing outright miracles, either through the “Black Swan” paradigm or by just expecting magick to produce what it has been advertised to produce since earliest times. It would seem that magick is perceived as just a mechanism for causing change to occur according to the magician’s will, in some form or another. However, as the ever dissenting voice that is raised in contrast to the present ululations of how magick should work (miracles vs. probability shifts), I wonder aloud if the real purpose of magick has somehow been lost or just omitted.

This brings to mind a question that I have probably answered more than once over the course of the last year and a half, which I have written in articles posted to this blog, and that question is “why do we work magick?” Do we work magick to just make our lives more advantageous, blessed with material success and personal power? Is that the purpose for magick? Or do we work magick to cause godlike miracles to occur, showing ourselves to be godlike and almighty. Does magick, properly coordinated and worked, make the magician operator into a guaranteed winner?

Of course, for every winner there are a lot of losers, this is true in sports as well as life. For every miracle sought, very, very few ever manifest.  Still, a more simplistic judgement is that the only success in life is survival, and that everything else is merely superfluous. That would translate into the rule of thumb that if you have survived your ordeals in life, no matter what they are, then you are a success. The downside to that logic is that eventually everyone dies, so at some point in life, everyone is a loser.

Success, just like any condition of good fortune is, unfortunately, very ephemeral, whatever ruler you use to judge it. In the greater scheme of things, a person is born, lives, and then later dies, regardless of how great, successful, humble or inadequate - death is great equalizer, as always. This is why the Tarot Trump, “Wheel of Fortune” is such a compelling study for those who seek to master their lives, or at least, it should be. Next to that card in importance is Death and the Hanged Man, but that is another topic altogether.

Yet we still haven’t answered the most essential question as to why we work magick. If life is full of chance occurrences, opportunities, disasters, and a lot of boring same-ness, then applying magick to life situations may improve them, perhaps slightly or even better, but more often it doesn’t make a real lot of difference in the long run. The real purpose to working magick, in my humble opinion, is to cause just one great but essential miracle to occur, and that is the miracle of total godhead assumption and all that proceeds from that achievement.

Other names for this achievement are enlightenment, achievement of Atman (God/dess Within), conscious illumination, cosmic consciousness, Godhead realization, the immortality of individual consciousness and the ability to accept the role of divine mediator, to do whatever is required, however great or small. To be a functional spiritual avatar doesn’t mean that you are suddenly a great person endowed with godlike powers, it means that you understand your purpose and role in life, and seek to unthinkingly and selflessly perform it.

What that means is that the petty ego and it’s needs for status, power, wealth, love and happiness are completely subsumed to the point where they are no longer even relevant. It requires the greatest sacrifice that one can offer. That sacrifice is the willing abrogation and elimination of the outer external self, which is shown to be an illusion and an obstacle to perfectly channeling the Godhead. That, in my opinion, is the purpose of working magick. Wealth, career success, fame, glory, the adoration of the crowd, sexual gratification, these are the many illusions and delusions that confront both mystic and magician alike, and seek to upend and thwart the simple and pure aspiration for union with the One.  

If you think for a moment of what it must be like attaining union with whatever you perceive as the Godhead, and then trying to imagine how that would personally affect you if it did indeed occur, it would suddenly seem kind of odd to think about all of the small things that beset you in your current life situation. They would have receded far into the background of what would be a completely new and redefined existence. It would also make the endless pursuit after the various material accouterments of a comfortable and successful life seem sort of small and petty, and indeed, in the larger scheme of things, they would be.

Does that mean that striving to better ourselves in the material world is a fruitless pursuit, a folly that will cause us to be distracted at best, suborned in our spiritual search at worst? No it doesn’t somehow mean that all material pursuits are wrong or misguided. We do what we have to do to maximize our potential, but we do it both within a material and spiritual dimension. All the while we are living and struggling with our material existence, we should never loose our focus on that ultimate achievement, which is union with the Godhead. Everything that we do should selflessly and relentlessly promote our ultimate spiritual apotheosis, anything else is a distraction. Our True Will should be to achieve that perfect union with the One, and all that we engage in and encounter should merely aid in that process.

In my first published book, “Disciple’s Guide to Ritual Magick,” I wrote some pretty compelling things in regards to the seeker and what he or she is seeking, and also what can cause that search to fail or come to grinding halt. I would like to quote from that section of the book (chapter 3.6, pages 83 - 85), using the more raw pre-published text because it manages to express these ideas in a more direct manner. I’ll let you be the judge, and see if this section doesn’t succinctly answer the question as to why we should work magick and what our ultimate goal should be. To achieve at-one-ment with the Godhead is to take a profound journey through the strata of higher consciousness, but the goal is never to glorify in the achievement or the outward effects, but to unswervingly seek the goal itself.

“Ken Wilber, in his book, ‘The Atman Project’ (chapter 13, p. 183 - 185) outlines the difficulties and the challenges that one must face in order to truly gain, in a permanent fashion, these higher states of consciousness. Whether one is aware of it or not, we’re all seeking enlightenment. It’s the fundamental drive that pushes all of us through the vicissitudes of life. However, there are forces within us that disguise our motives or lock us in a static mental state of development where complacency and comfort are far more important than gaining any kind of new vista or spiritual perspective in life. We all begin our paths with the same objective, union with the All, but very early we are thwarted by the necessities of life, and we must at some point return to the fundamental quest of all being-ness, if we are to find true fulfillment and completion. We should make certain we always question our motives and the nature of our quest in life, so that we have not substituted our goal of perfect at-one-ment of Atman for some kind of imperfect and shallow surrogate, an ‘Atman Project.’

The ultimate nature of reality, according to Wilber, is an emptiness or voidness, but one that is not a true emptiness that is void of all forms or features. It is also a unified field of holism, where all space and time, and even consciousness itself is part of one seamless whole. The ultimate reality and the ultimate state of consciousness are one and the same, a kind of ‘super conscious All’ (p. 184). This unity is the only true reality, and all else is an illusion, particularly anything that is egoically or independently real. Even in the nature of Deity itself, there is only the timeless, transcendent one-ness, and so there is no difference between anything, even between man and God. What this entails is that we’re all part of a greater whole, and that magick is a process that has validity and power because of this wholeness, and cannot be comprehended outside of this unity of being and its various conscious derivatives, since it operates on and through that wholeness.

To be an individual, even an individual god, is to exist in an illusion, since everything is truly one and indivisible. We exist as separate entities glorifying in our uniqueness and our individuality, but we are also seemingly always seeking for something apart from ourselves, and that quest is also an illusion, since everything is whole and subsumed into the oneness. Therefore, living beings, in order to function and survive, have learned to suppress this perception of one-ness, since at the level of the undeveloped or Typhonic state it would lead to a disintegration of the self. At the trans-personal or Centauric level, the boundaries between the oneness and our individuality must be breached, and done so in a manner that does not destroy that individual, but illuminates one instead. Therefore, we live through the illusion of individual entities existing in space and time in order to function, but the irony is that we must transcend this state because it is a barrier to attaining the highest levels of consciousness. What this means is that whether or not we are aware of it, our ultimate quest is for oneness and unity, the ‘rediscovery of this infinite and eternal wholeness’ (p. 184).

Before the emanation of spiritual creation, where Spirit was imbedded in matter, there was the wholeness that is oneness, and we seek that wholeness that is [a] oneness within ourselves. That is the nature of the spiritual quest that the seeker seeks - to be one within the wholeness of the All, our perception of Atman, or God/dess Within.

However, the means to obtaining this sublime state necessitates the death or dissolution of the ego. This perception of ego death is frightening to the individual, especially at the Centauric level, since the ego has become invested with autonomy, and seemingly drunk on its own empowerment and uniqueness. The irony is that to die, the seeker learns to truly live and perceive reality as it actually is, without the limitations of time and space. But getting past that boundary is the most difficult task that seekers can face, and usually they become trapped into accepting their own ego as a surrogate god, thus denying their ability or willingness to evolve to the next higher level. Many occultists have failed this greatest test. Yet the desire for attaining those higher states, and the union of All-Being continues its alluring and seductive siren call, and we as seekers always seem to hear and are drawn to it. It is the ultimate approach-avoidance conflict.

It’s for this reason, because we greatly desire this ultimate achievement and we also greatly fear it, that we end up choosing surrogates instead of actual transcendence. Substitutes range greatly in terms of their variety, and they are usually huge distractions that take the seeker far away from true attainment, such as the usual sensual additions of food and drink, drugs, sex, fame, money, power, and knowledge, but also hidden addictions, such as hubris, self-righteousness, prejudice, misplaced or false piety, cynicism, apathy, and a loss of soul. All seekers truly seek for is the attainment of oneness, but what they actually get if they fail the test is a substitute gratification that makes them think that they have achieved the great quest. Therefore, we must always carefully examine our motives, and ask ourselves the fatal question - are we truly seeking Atman, or are we engaging in a diversion? That question can’t be quickly or easily answered, but we must be aware of what is motivating us, and at what level of our being. At some point in the career of magicians, they must step outside themselves and transcend all of these prior limitations, or be faced with living out their lives with those same limitations forever haunting them. They must [instead] cease working magick, and instead become the magick.”

I hope that this helps to convince my readers that the true purpose of magick is union with the One, and that all else is a potential diversion, an “Atman project” instead of true Atman.

Frater Barrabbas