Author: vanessa

Do what thou whilt shall be the whole of the law.

Many have ventured to answer this question in the title and there’s been about as many answers as there are practitioners. Crowley defined magick as “…the Science and Art of causing Change to occur in conformity with Will.” It is a similar statement to a statement attributed to Dion Fortune “The art of causing changes in consciousness to occur in accordance with the will.” Personally I find these definitions frustrating. In the case of Fortune it ignores the demonstrable external effects of magick. For Crowley, it makes basically anything you do magickal. I wouldn’t describe turning a doorknob to open a door as having performed magick and I think most don’t hold that idea either.

Scott Cunningham defines magick as “…the projection of natural energies to produce needed effects.” This is a fine enough definition but it assumes you define natural in the way Wiccans generally mean when they use the word. It’s also limiting things to just the energetic model. Not all things apply to that conceptualization of how it all works.

In Llewellyn’s Complete Book of Ceremonial Magick there’s a lengthy description but it cites the following as being how magick is often defined; “…the manipulation of spiritual forces for specific, usually material, ends.” By the book’s own admission this definition is insufficient and rather unsatisfactory.

In Self-Initiation into the Golden Dawn Tradition the Ciceros describe magick as “…a spiritual science. It is a specialized system of discipline which has a spiritual rather than material goal.” That’s all well and good for a theurgic tradition like the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn but it ignores thamaturgy altogether.

The free dictionary defines magick as “In Wicca and certain other belief systems, action or effort undertaken to effect personal transformation or external change.” This definition is closer but it doesn’t include divination which is something I would.

For myself, I define magick as doing rituals to make things happen. “Make things happen” is intentionally vague as is “doing rituals”. It could be thamaturgical and be done for some practical effect like getting more money. It could be theurgic and be done to get closer to the divine. It could be divinatory and done to obtain information through magickal means. In much the same way the rituals could be elaborate ceremonial exercises or as simple as shuffling and drawing cards out of a tarot deck. To me this definition gets at the very essence of the practice and is a much better definition than any other I’ve come across.

Love is the law, love under will.

An effort to convey my previously posted diatribe in simpler language.

Audio Version

Do what thou whilt shall be the whole of the Law.

The Book of the Law (Liber CCXX) and Crowley’s extrapolations thereof predicted so many things accurately. Liber CCXX, written through occult ritual via angelic transmission, described in 1904 (and was then expanded upon in Liber CCCXXXIII published in 1912) what would only be later scientifically proven by the Schrödinger equation which wasn’t published until 1926; that of the superposition. This is something Crowley could not have known having been published after the fact and was so far outside his general milieu that there’s no chance he could have heard of it otherwise. The nature of the superposition was later expanded upon by the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle; that the probabilistic division described by the superposition can only be determined at the time of measurement when the wave function collapses but in so doing that measurement changes the thing it measures rendering discovery of further information impossible and the value of the result of that measurement cannot be accurately predicted; only described in probability. Truth can only be measured in instances when their value is changed by the mere act of measuring it.

This is the creation of the world, that the pain of division is as nothing, and the joy of disillusion all. -Liber Al vel Legis I:30

Truth only exists in relationship to other things; a measurement. The dissolution, i.e. collapse of the wave function, is as nothing, which is to say it’s undetermined, until the measurement, or disillusion, which is how all things that are can be determined to be “real” in material realty.

To beget is to die; to die is to beget. Cast the Seed into the Field of Night. Life and Death are two names of A. -Liber CCCXXXIII, The Sabbath of the Goat

Described poetically here, Life here refers to truth and death uncertainty. To measure and determine truth is to cause change in the system in response and destroy that truth. That which we call reality only exists in relation; devoid of that it is all but a measure of possibilities.

That Liber CCXX purports to describe reality and does so before it was known empirically is not at all insignificant.

The consequences of this are described finally in Liber CCCXXXIII in poem 39:

Vague and mysterious and all indefinite are the contents of this consciousness; yet they are somehow vital. by use they become luminous. Unreason becomes Experience. This lifts the leaden-footed soul to the Experience of THAT of which Reason is the blasphemy.

Love is the law, love under will.