I attended Norwescon this year, and one of the panels I was on was entitled “The Science of Magic.” I was surrounded by engineers who were kind to have a non-scientist on the panel, and one of the interesting questions posed by the moderator, Mickey “Meowse” Phoenix, was: “Did the invention of the Gutenberg printing press kill magic?”

To which I replied, “Gutenburg killed myth and invented religion.” Which was as equally contentious, but I had been sitting there for the past few minutes as the other panelists answered his question, thinking furiously about whether or not the statement was true. And while I could find reasons to agree with it, there were as many reasons why it was false. Mostly because printing enabled the spread of knowledge–for good and ill (I think the jury is still out which side is winning).

And mostly because I had just recently been to the release launch for Ouroboros Press’ latest book: Elias Ashmole’s Theatrum Chemicum Britannicum. Ouroboros publisher, William Kiesel, in his talk at the launch, spoke of Ashmole’s project: how Ashmole produced an errata sheet immediately upon publication of the book in 1652 (because typesetting was a bitch back then), and how later research discovered a seventh part of the Thomas Charnock’s Breviary of Natrurall Philosophy not available to Ashmole in 1652. In fact, Ouroboros’s edition is the first truly complete and correct version of the text. And while Kiesel utilized a number of more modern printing techniques, he maintains strong ties to the older traditions. Without Ashmole and Ouroboros, this collection of English Alchemical poetry would be lost.

Saved by Gutenberg, if you will.

The Ourboros Press page about the Theatrum Chemicum Britannicum can be found here.

“A human being is part of a whole, called by us the ‘Universe,’ a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest – a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.” 

The above is a quote from Albert Einstein, and the Internet tells me that it is sourced from a private letter that Einstein wrote to a distraught father in Feburary of 1950. The quote came across my desk today as this morning’s daily affirmation of zen, and it struck me as being relevant to the post from yesterday where I mentioned the impact the Universe has on our beings.

The Universe is my shorthand for the Ineffable, the Unknownable, GOD, whatever name you wish to call that thing that is greater than our individual being. Einstein encapsulates the definition nicely in his first sentence: “A human being is part of a whole, called by us the ‘Universe’ . . .”

I suffer from a lack of being able to breathe, in a metaphorical sense. I’m pretty good about the physical act of breathing. It is the more spiritual and conscious act that escapes me, all too often. Today was one of those days where I neglected to pause, take a deep breath, and remember that I am part of a whole. If I were a cog, I would have locked and frozen much of the machinery that was dependent upon me.

Later, I had to drop the car off for service and I went wandering up the block. At the corner past the car dealership there is a Buddhist temple. The building was decrepit and looked as if the Buddhists may no longer be using the site, though I am sure the spirit of Buddhism still resides in those walls. If it had been open, I may have gone in and sat for a little while, quieting my spirit.

When you get frozen, it can be difficult to un-stick yourself. To reintegrate yourself with the whole, as it were. One must re-establish connection with what Jung referred to as the lumen naturae.

The magickal part of it has been the realization that all of existence is but our individual perception, and whatever we are faced with can be dealt with in a multiplicity of ways, but ultimately, the choice is ours to face these things positively. To grow is to live; to hide or flee or otherwise pretend we are not changed by what the Universe gives to us is to die. Maybe only a little bit, but we do die nonetheless.

Life is worth every single excruciatingly raw second of it. Because it makes you realize what is important, what is a distraction, and what truly offers you peace and love and illumination.

So, I look forward to 2012 as a year of self-actualization, of realization of my own potential, as the singular opportunity that it is.

I hope you embrace it similarly.

Scarlet Imprint, one of my favorite esoteric publishers, recently republished their first book, The Red Goddess, in an unlimited paperback version. As this was one of the few books of theirs I didn’t have, I eagerly jumped at the opportunity to procure it. I’ll been working my way through it this summer. While the author, Peter Grey, has written it as a manifesto for magickians, it also serves well as a call to arms for writers. We, too, know a little something about the Red Goddess, though we tend to call Her by a different name.

Unless you can fall in Love all your works are as nothing . . . Your mind must be consumed with passion for Her, your body resonating to Her pulse. If your devotion is pure the Holy Whore will receive you in the body of her Priestess. If you have never been in Love then stop reading now. There is no point in reading a book on the Goddess of Love when you have not experienced it. (pp. 43-44)

Isn’t that the way every writer got their start? Falling in Love with someone else’s words, wondering how that magic could be accomplished. Lying awake at night, staring into the darkness, thinking of how you were going to write differently, better. You were going to change the world with your words. You were going to seduce your Muse.

Loosen up. Have a drink and allow yourself to be intoxicated with Love for the Whore Goddess. If that is not enough She will quite happily spike your drink and drag you down to he’ll. Some of us can meet Her over a cocktail, others of us will need rohypnol and ravishment. (p. 56)

Suddenly, the point of a writers’ convention becomes astonishingly clear, doesn’t it?

Grey is a bit hyperbolic in his soap-boxing, but it is entirely forgivable, given his subject matter. He is, after all, taking on several thousand years worth of patriarchal nonsense when it comes to occult thinking. We could use a bit of inflammatory rhetoric to kick us out of our moribund ways of thinking. In the first part, Grey walks through a history of the Red Goddess, from Sumeria to Egypt, from Jerusalem through the holy apocalypse of Revelations. Throughout these periods and places, there were cults and sects who looked upon the face and body of the Goddess and found what they were looking for. Mary Magdalene was kissed by Jesus and held in higher regard than any of his companions, and this devotion lasted until his death upon the cross.

And then everything fell apart. As it does.

Grey offers lip service to the stories of the Holy bloodline–the descendants of Jesus and Mary who fell into the myth of the West–but, much like his earlier discussion of Her story, he says that all of these tales are but the dusty record of who She was. His concern–and what every modern magickian should be thinking about–is the presence of Babalon in our lives now.

[more to follow . . .]

If reality is the consensual lie agreed upon by the group mind, then each person’s thoughts contribute to reality. How each person understands reality informs it, and by extension, what you think of reality shapes it as well. While we currently define thoughts as extremely ephemeral states of existence, each and every thought has the ability to create change. Firstly, in our own selves; secondly, and by virtue of their adoption by the larger group-mind, the world can be shifted as well.

Descartes’ axiom–”I think, therefore I am”–can be extended to “I think, therefore I can.”

There are, of course, some physical considerations to address concerning the “I can” part of that last statement, but generally speaking, all change has come about because an individual had an idea and strove to extend that idea beyond the mere thought.

One of the basic complaints held against magick is the “Yes, but why don’t you visualize winning the lottery and be done with it?” argument, and Crowley provides some escape hatches in his definitions for this sort of argument.

Argument III.3: “Every failure proves that one or more requirements of the postulate have not been fulfilled.”

Argument III.4: “The first requisite for causing any change is through qualitative and quantitative understanding of the conditions.”

Argument III.5: “The second requisite of causing any change is the practical ability to set in motion the necessary forces.”

Forcing the lottery to conform to your Will is complicated, after all, and there are a lot of moving parts. Better to stick with things you can influence. Certainly, you can argue that these caveats render Crowley’s entire system nothing more than a thought experiment, but I believe that these caveats simply point out the importance of a more fundamental understanding of Will and Thought.

Before we go galavanting off to making lottery numbers fall as we imagine them, let us consider a corollary to above definitions. Essentially: How we interpret reality is also a magickal act. We are all magicians, and every system of magick is a personal one because it is nothing more than how we Act and React.

Change flows both ways, and our thoughts are constantly creating our understanding of the consensual reality. While we can imagine winning the lottery, our thoughts are not strong enough to effect that change to the consensual reality of the lottery. We, in turn, react to this lack of change by abandoning our vision as being the dominant one. In effect, we retract our Desire when it fails to come to pass.

Yes, I know that wishing does not make it so, but the point here is one of scale. Thinking of change doesn’t mean that it doesn’t happen. A critical part of being a magician is being receptive to the possibilities that change has occurred. Reacting is necessary piece of participation in the systemic flow of other magickal systems in play.

We are not alone, after all. Everyone else is trying to make Magick too.

Click on the cover of either book to go to the Amazon link.

If you’d like a little more convincing, please visit the Codex of Souls site, where all the requisite details about the books can be found.

To that end, here’s the current state of my Faust education.

If one is to believe Wikipedia, Goethe’s Faust has, as one of its inspirations, Jacob Bidermann’s play Cenodoxus, though without digging into the text, it is hard to say where the inspiration lies, as Cenodoxus appears to dance around the question of the price of secret knowledge rather than addressing it directly. Goethe’s Faust, even, does not appear to be as dark and as much as a morality tale as the myth that is burned in my brain–the random bits of literary mythology one picks up in course of an classical education. Faust, the man–notably one Dr. Johann Georg Faust–appears to have been a 16th charlatan of the classic sort: a racounteur, a traveling alchemist, a magician, and a scoundrel. Exactly the sort of man that would be a perfect source for the hubristic hero of the tragic plays.

Christopher Marlowe wrote a play about him within fifty or so years after he supposedly died, and I find it almost most interesting than the play itself that Marlowe wrote a play about a man’s pact with the Devil–a suspiciously Christian theme, and I’m hard pressed to think of a Shakespeare play which has a similar theme. Old Bill relied on much more pagan sources for his fantastical elements. Odd, don’t you think? Or was it simply a matter of Shakespeare knowing who his real audiences were and playing more readily to them?

Anyway, Faust the charlatan was purported to be sort of man who would have dabbled in the Black Arts, which makes the historical provenance of Praxis Magica Faustiana certainly easier to swallow. And given the subject material of the text, it follows that this could be source of that type of grimoire known as ‘Faustian.’

Dan Harms has posted a link to a digitized version of a 18th century German grimoire, which falls under the category of Faustian magic. Of course, the comments are insightful and filled with smart people talking all manner of things that will send you spiraling off into other corners of the occult world. Including Dan’s original commentary on the idea of the liber spirituum, the type of book that this MS. purports to be.

According to the commenters, the Herzogin Anna Amalia Bibliothek is a hothouse of Faustian magical documents. Who knew there were enough of these that a library could specialize in them? The digitization of the Liber Spirituum Potentissimorum is of exceptional quality, and it makes my fingers tingle as I look at it.

I suppose any magician who seeks knowledge from spirits is engaging in Faustian Magick, though I wonder about the veracity of that statement. Dee, Crowley, and so on sought to communicate with otherworldly creatures in order to gain knowledge. Was Faust, in the 16th century, the first one to do this? Or was his story simply the most readily available and comprehensible to the masses? There certainly had to be other seekers before Faust . . .

In the beginning there was one. From this came two and three. Two and three were polar: yin and yang. As they came from one they were the energetic expressions of the creative force, perpetually changing into each other and, through change, evolving. However, their changes needed to be controlled by some higher consciousness. Looking closer at the yin and yang symbol it is evident that its dynamic form is kept in place by a circle. This circle represents the first idea–the prima materia, the word, the origin of duality, the source of creation yet also the limitation of creative expression.

- Dr. Josef Margraf “Morphogenesis and Plant Signature: The Tao of Connectedness” (Alchemy Journal, vol. 11, no. 1, p. 8 )

The grimoire is a palingenesis. The hack and paste of overlapping ages. Some made to look old, others seeming younger in candlelight than the centuries make them. These texts are the lost, the rediscovered, the rescued from flames, and the outright invented. It is a dog-eared tarot gallery.

- Peter Grey, from his Introduction to Howlings [Scarlet Imprint]

Scarlet Imprint is putting on an event called the Summer of Love. In Brighton, on August 20th. In case you were wondering what to do on a summer evening while in the UK.

On the second night, I called out to my soul.
“I am weary, my soul, my wandering has lasted too long, my search for myself outside myself. Now I have gone through events and find you behind all of them.”

- Carl Jung, The Red Book, Liber Primus, folio ii (r).

I really need a second desk, just so I can leave The Red Book out. Let myself get lost in it a few times during the course of the day . . .

Visualization, or using the power of your imagination creatively, is a very important part of magick. We are generally brought up in this society to ‘look down’ on the imagination; imagination is somehow thus removed from reality and not very useful in daily life. Nothing could be further from the truth. I have often heard people say, ‘Oh, it’s just imagination.’

Just imagination! The imagination is the most powerful faculty we possess. We are taught to believe that there is only one ‘real’ reality and that the imagination is removed from that reality; but everything that human beings have created in the world existed first only in the imagination of one person. In order to create something in this outer reality, it first must take form in your own inner reality, then be made material through the application of your Will.

- Rodney Orpheus, Abrahadabra, p. 29

In consider issues of ‘reality’ and ‘being,’ I am reminded of Chapter One, Verse One of the Gospel of St. John: ‘In the beginning was the word, and the word was God.’ The act of naming something–providing the word–is more than just a way of distinguishing it from something else; it’s a creative act, and in a sense anything that has a name has an existence, even if it is a ‘subjective-objective’ one.

- Jonathan Back, Spirits Walk with Me, p. 5.

It’s a wee thing, the Praxis Magica Faustiana, and is just a collection of eleven lithographs (text and illustrations) that offer techniques for binding Lucifer and Mephistophiles (who appear as respective components of light and darkness) in order to gain access to the generative forces of the universe. The last lithograph is a picture of two lions embracing a plant, which the Caduceus edition’s commentary points out is probably a mandrake root.

The Praxis Magica Faustina crops up in Arthur Edward Waite’s Book of Ceremonial Magic in the chapter on Black Magic (filed away under the section of Miscellaneous Texts Which Are Probably Quackery, But Let’s Be Thorough And List Them), and he cites its history as being contained in a manuscript added to the Municipal Library of Weimar in 1571. Which, if true, suggests that municipal libraries were much different than they are now. Waite bases his notes on an unprinted translation by Major Irwin, which he owned, and which is now held by the Cleveland Public Library in the United States.

Some public libraries are still havens for esoteric texts, I guess.

Anyway, Waite points out that (a) there was no Municipal Library in Goethe’s birthplace, and (b) the collection as it existed in his era does not contain this MS. Either way, this little grimoire has been published in a fine edition by Caduceus so that we may lay our eyes on its particularly odd incantations and make our own assessment.

The interesting historical tidbit this grimoire provides is a reference point for where Goethe might have sourced the name ‘Mephistopheles,’ as the Praxis Magica Faustiana may be the first historical record of the name. Believed to be of Greek origin, it translates (roughly) to “not light lover,” thereby setting him up as the opposing force with Lucifer, who was still enjoying the “light-bearer” sobriquet.

The pictures and incantations themselves are not very complex, and most of them are exhortations to various named demonic and angelic figures to abide by the commands of the magician. The seventh page, in fact, shows a picture of a cock (the creature who summons the morning light and who is a symbolic stand-in for Lucifer) above the text “Lucifer amicus meus dilectus et Servus”–”Lucifer friend, my love and my servant.” These Infernal Conjurations and Oaths as practiced by the good Doctor certainly appear to be of the kindler and gentler variety.

The Irwin text contains an additional page which contains an interesting depiction of a small creature–perhaps a homunculus–that may be related to the mandrake root drawing of the MS. The Caduceus commentary goes into some interesting discussion about the figure, which I’ll save for another post.

* Somewhat foolishly, I was thinking that Faust was an entirely literary creation, making the real-world existence of an actual grimoire penned by the good Doctor not unlike the Necronomicon as written by Abdul Alhazred, but in the process of educating myself about the history of this text (read getting called on my assumption by a sharp-eyed reader), it turns out out that Faust really existed. Praxis Magica Faustiana is noted as being written in 1527, well within the range of Faust’s lifespan, though it was added to the Municipal Library of Weimar in 1571, after his death. It’s still very likely that the grimoire was used by Goethe as part of his inspiration for his play, though Christopher Marlowe’s play (written in 1604) also used Mephistopheles.