Introducing and Announcing the Azoth Academy and our first course. Bare Bones Magick: The Fundamentals of Spellcraft!
What is magic? What is a spell?
Questions like this often seek a definition to stabilize the discourse, to provide a reference point or an anchor to refer to to further analyze what emerges through the exchange. This definition will often morph and change as the discourse continues, taking a final agreed-upon shape. This is how we communicate our experiences. However, when something as uniquely and deeply personal as magic and spellcraft enters the equation, we find it becomes rather difficult to settle on a definition that fits the experience of the masses, even a mass as fringe as the occult and/or witchcraft.
Thus, as the root of our discovery is to gain a greater understanding of the mechanics and composition of spellcraft and, by proxy, magical workings in general, we would naturally seek to locate a definition. Given the enigmatic nature of the topic in question, I will first seek to explore through an apophatic or negative approach, exploring what spellcraft is not and stripping the nonsense from the discussion until we find the structural components that cannot be removed.
For a spell to be a spell, it should have efficacy. Definitions don’t always provide efficacy, but they can provide misleading ideas ripe with connotations and illegitimate beliefs. Take, for example, the common idea of spells being somewhat akin to wish fulfillment. In popular culture, a spell is often portrayed as a magical act to fulfill a wish. A person acquires, sometimes, a sacred token or has access to a nexxus, example a shooting star or magical well. They declare their desire, and BOOM! Magic! Happily ever after.
This is a theme we have seen played out repeatedly, and even if we have been studying magic, it persists deep within our psyche. IT is in effect a spell itself. One that should be rigorously dispelled if we are to make a proper approach.
Spellcraft can bring about a change to our circumstances or perspective, and that might lead to receiving a specific wish. But spell craft is not wish fulfillment. This must be dispelled. Spellcraft elicits a change first in ourselves and our multidimensional being, then and ONLY in the world around us. It does so by shifting how we show up in the world, and by shifting that key element, the world responds differently to us, often and in many cases in the way we intended or desired. Is this wish fulfillment? No. It is a recalibration of the micro to elicit a response in the macro.
Thus, the focus of this text and its constituent parts will be on using magic and spellcraft to shift and change YOU and how you respond to life. It is less about effecting the external world and more about eliciting a more powerful and potent response within you and shifting the way you show up and choose to be in the world.
The classical difference between the use of ritual for spiritual evolution and attainment and the use of casting spells for personal gain in the mundane has long been a divergent discourse. We often hear it stated that magic used for personal gain is antithetical to the spiritual attainment of a higher order. This ideology rests on a dualistic framework wherein spirit and matter are incompatible and, at times, divergent.
Nothing could be more evidently false in my own pursuits and personal experiences. We humans occupy a critical nexus, as beings both spiritual and mortally material we stand at the crossroads, capable of manipulating both the spirit and the material. We are both the result of creation and masters of it by divine decree of the gods. Various hermetic, kemetic, platonic, and many other ‘ICS’, speak of a divine duty. The gods created the cosmos, we are here to complete their work.
Thus, denial of any of our constituent parts, spirit or material, immortal or mortal, is an affront to divinity. The primary mode of thinking in the Western world has been a wrongfully attributed dualistic paradigm, wherein the goal of spiritual attainment is to resist the material in favor of the spiritual, to elicit a return to the spirit away from matter.
This assumption that things are amiss, that creation or our participation in it are some form of curse or fall are grossly over stated, causing all manner of diluted and depraved thinking. The persistence of spirit and matter coexisting in harmony, producing the wonder and awe of our world and place in it, should have been enough to prove this concept out. But we, as humans, are stubborn, and because we are made of both a rational and an emotive way of being, we struggle to find harmony and look externally for a scapegoat.
This is not meant to be an exegesis on the nature of being, but one can see very quickly how a simple belief of the polarity of spirit and matter can twist the mind so that one can be made ineffectual in their mental state and it is this resistance that we seek to overcome with employing magic to influence and shift both our perception and external events.
If we are fighting a war within ourselves and competing with the vast ocean of influence and force that exists with all sovereign beings, we are naturally going to fail in our pursuit, both in the mundane and especially in the magical. If we persist with a dualistic framework, we are not simply rudderless on the open ocean; we are also without the wind needed to propel us to our destination.
Can we truly hope to subvert the natural world with our own mental and spiritual will if we are locked in a paradigm that is in constant tension against itself?
It is this rigid structure built by the rational, based upon a response to the emotive, that we get the paradigm of dualism. This is not to say that there is not duality that we experience. Surely, duality exists, and it plays into our experience heavily, but its importance has been vastly overstated, in particular within the realm of modern magical discourse.
For what exists above and beyond the power and essence of duality, but Unity. This unity, born from the ONE, the limitless, is the first principle of our being so far-reaching that duality holds no sway, no power over it. Above duality exists the limitless ocean of possibility that emanates forth into our being, penetrative and interweaving within everything we experience. This is the core of what we are and what we experience. Duality, for all its power, is secondary to this and must be understood as such if we are to make a reasonable attempt to manipulate reality with magic or the mundane.
So too, below duality exists the trinity, a synthesis of one and two, made whole again not diametrically opposed, but brought back to balance in three. Magic, at its core, is about taking what seems like disparate parts of wholes and crafting them into something new, be it a new experience, a new perspective, or a new reality entirely.
Thus, our millennia-long love affair with duality’s rigidity must be challenged and a new model installed before we can proceed. Dispell duality’s stranglehold and enter a world of possibility and synthesis, where difference is not a boundary but the key to transformation.
In the interest of moving things along however, a note on the topic of magic and ritual for spiritual attainment versus spellcraft and personal gain. If we have properly done away with the concept of spirit or matter being hierarchically more preferable, then we can proceed with exploring the possibility of using spellcraft, or LOW magic as it has been so dubiously labeled, as both a method for achieving or influencing an outcome AND as a method for spiritual growth.
For if we utilize the powers granted to us by the unity that pervades and permeates us to grow, to change, to perceive said unity, are we not, in truth, doing the exact thing that the spiritual attainment guru is attesting to? Is this a simple case of Rupert and Steve? Rupert has his way, and Steve has his. Rupert’s way is the common way, but Steve, he does it differently, thus Steve must be casting spells, doing magic. The connotations of which classically have been demonizing, sub-human, and with a lick of evil on the tongue of the person casting words against the other. What makes this scenario even more hilarious is that the Rupertarian, who states publically that Steveicians are evil, is in effect casting a spell, weaving perception and influencing events and outcomes with his mental will, he is in fact, casting a magical spell against Steve. Even though Rupert and Rupertism clearly states, that the use of magic is not permitted within their paradigm.
So who is right, and who is wrong? Neither. Of course, this is a matter of perception, one steeped in dualistic thinking and issues we have already illuminated.
Thus, as we explore terms like magic and spellcraft, as is the basis of this exploration, let us always keep in reference that the terminology used is LOADED dice. When we cast them, we are eliciting a response in our minds and the minds of others. Our main work in casting effective spells for our own aims, is in dispelling and shedding the things we think we know in favor of liberally engaging in the process of creation and watching as things unfold, quite NATURALLY, when we as the operant get involved in the unfolding of the natural world, through embracing our very natural way of being as magical beings.
Stay tuned as I roll out this course here on Magick Circles!
I will drop some free content here, and there sprinkled into the regular day-to-day throughout the site, some on Aether, some on the social feed, and some on the codex. But if you want the full force of the mechanics of spellcraft, stay tuned for the release of the course over the next two weeks, next up will be a course outline to tease out just how deep we are going to go in this exploration!
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