Recently, I made a comment that criticized the writings of Joseph Lisiewski and referred to anyone who proposed that ceremonial magick must produce verifiable material results in order to be considered successful. I decided to dust off and edit the critique of the book that started this whole movement. It is a rather long article, but I think that it's important and represents my opinion in regards to the camp of materialistic forms of evocative magick. The problem that I have with Lisiewski's book is that he states that a successful evocation must produce outstanding psychic phenomena, such as poltergeist activity, howlings, fire and brimstone, full physical manifestations or else the working has failed. Unfortunately, he has spawned quite a following, so now there are some other practitioners who taken up this argument. I believe that it is my duty as a magician to dispute this movement and point out its obvious flaws.
A while ago, when I read over Joseph Lisiewski's book, Ceremonial Magic to base one's magick on the Golden Dawn and its various ritual techniques, or to use the old grimoires as they exist in print. However, the Golden Dawn had rituals to perform most of the workings required for practical magick, but evocation appeared to defer to the old grimoires as well. Mathers passed around manuscripts and published a few of the old grimoires in English for the members of his order. Since that time, many have used both approaches, but anyone who has sought to master the art of magickal evocation has managed to put together a system of magick based on experimentation, research on the old grimoires and other published materials, and the ritual structures of the Golden Dawn. Whether a magician is a Thelemite, pagan, witch, member of the OTA ("Poke" Runyon's organization), or some other occult persuasion, he or she will use these sources, since there are few if any other sources to examine. What seems to happen is that anyone who masters evocation has to have first developed their own personal system. I honestly can't figure out why this is such a bad thing. I, myself, have gone this route, and I produced a system that not only worked for me, but also worked for others as well.
Joseph also makes a great deal of noise about the inaccuracies that appear to plague the writings of the Golden Dawn, and that those errors came about from the misspellings and omissions found in the book, The Magus, by Francis Barett, which was the supposed source of occult lore for that organization. Of course, The Magus was a poor plagiarism of Henry Agrippa's four books on Occult Philosophy, but for many individuals in the 19th century, it was their only source book for that material. Joseph goes on to say that because of those errors, the entire body of lore belonging to the Golden Dawn is spurious and suspect, and so is all the other lore based on the Golden Dawn, including all of the writings of Aleister Crowley and his spiritual descendants. That would implicate Lon Milo DuQuette as well as yours truly. Joseph has determined that the reason why modern systems of evocation or theurgy don't work is because of these errors.
To impugn all of the writings on practical and evocative magick, from the Golden Dawn to the present, because they contain the errors and omissions first presented in the Magus would assume that no one ever went back to Agrippa's work to find a better source for their material. It would also assume that such errors, if they occur, are either relevant or even important. Occult publications and manuscripts are notorious for containing errors. I had to fix some of the squares that I wanted to use in the latest version of the Book of Abramelin because they had errors in them, and this book was produced from a supposedly purer source, a German version of the same genre that was superior to the original produced by Mathers.
While it is true that there are errors and omissions in a lot of the occult material in print, does it follow that whatever is based upon these writings, errors and all, are themselves egregiously in error? Joseph uses this logic to propose that we should all use the original occult sources, particularly the old grimoires, since they were used by generations of practicing magicians and were therefore, tried and true. Yet anyone who knows anything about the old grimoires will quickly realize how facetious and misleading this statement really is. First off, every manuscript of a given grimoire genre had differences, some had more and some had less - the variances could be quite startling. Secondly, most of the published works are from manuscripts that were much later than the originally proposed dates of origin. What has gotten into print is often from a poor surviving manuscript or redacted from multiple copies. Often, published grimoires are edited and produced by individuals who are historians and not practicing magicians, so errors and lacunae are reproduced so they can be examined from a historical perspective, not a magickal one.
So is Joseph saying that we should go back to the actual manuscript in its native tongue? How many occultists can speak archaic written forms of French, German or Italian, and then, have access to rare books that would be kept in special collections under strict environmental controls. Only certified academics would have access to such works, since few of these books have been electronically reproduced and disseminated. Most occultists and magicians are reliant on those works that are published and made available to the general public, so getting back to the source has its limitations.
Another example of how erroneous this claim is can be found in the example of the grimoire Book of the Sacred Magic of Abramelin, which was translated and published by Mathers in the late 19th century. This book has been revered by occultists and practicing magicians. The book even has urban myths associated with it, that the magical squares contained in it are so potent, just having the book in one's possessions can cause all sorts of phenomena to occur. However, recent scholarship has revealed that the original manuscript used by Mathers was incomplete and full of errors. A new version of this book, which was derived from an earlier and more complete German manuscript, shows, when compared to the older version, just how incomplete and flawed it was. There are more magick squares in the German version than the French version, all of the magick squares are complete (although some have errors) in the German version, and an entire chapter was omitted in the French version that is faithfully reproduced in the German. The ordeal in the German version is 18 months, while it is only 6 months in the French version - the list goes on and on.
Despite all of those numerous errors or differences in the French/Mathers version, many magickal practitioners have attested to the potency and efficacy of this grimoire, even though the version that they have used was published from a flawed and incomplete source manuscript. Were the magicians who used it delusional? Can we trust a published book version of one of the original grimoires without recourse to the spectrum of different original manuscripts used to produce it, ensuring that what we have is correct and authentic? Obviously, the answer to both questions above is "no", so it can't really make much difference. This example alone shows the fatal error in Joseph's declaration, and we must acknowledge that all occult lore has errors, typos and omissions, but that doesn't negate the potency of the magic produced.
Perhaps it might be just as easy to just fix the errors wherever they are discovered. Maybe that would alleviate the problem, although from the perspective of the purest it would make the magickal workings that relied on them doubtful, whether the errors were fixed or not. However, that being said, errors and omissions can't seem to completely negate the efficacy of the grimoire. It comes down to the fact that nothing is perfect, not even the old grimoires had that distinction. Yet Joseph seems to believe that if a page is missing, a letter transposed or a name misspelled, then somehow the whole operation will produce nothing.
I find his logic to be quite challenging even though I strongly disagree, and with, I might add, extreme prejudice. It would seem his opinion is well founded in the older practices of ceremonial magick, where even a minor mistake could nullify the whole operation. However, my experience with magick has shown that such attention to detail is superfluous and even irrelevant. There is an important reason why this is so, and it is simply stated that the domain of Spirit is neither described nor defined by occult symbols even in their most abstract or absolute form, so a variance in them will not alter the outcome. So it would seem that the intent has a greater relevance to the practice of magick than the perfection of ritual execution or the purity of the source of ritual lore.
If someone invokes a spirit named "Duke Imos", and instead calls him "Duke Inos", will that cause the rite to fail? One might expect that something as important as a spirit's name would have to be correct in order for the invocation to succeed, but actually, it does succeed anyway. I have witnessed individuals invoking Welsh pagan deities, massacring their names in a manner that would set a Welshman's teeth on edge, but it doesn't seem to mar the ritual or keep those deities from appearing in some manner. Are such productive outcomes delusions? Are the individuals who made such glaring errors and the people who were also in attendance, mass hallucinating? Of course not! The question that this issue begs is this: Is it the form or the intent of the rite that is important? A medieval magician would say it was the form, but then if he made a mistake and didn't know about it, the magickal operation would probably have worked anyway. I would say that the intent is far more important than the form and experience has shown this, time after time, to be true. Joseph decries minor discrepancies between variations in the lists of spirits and correspondences and deduces that only the use of correct versions will guarantee a successful outcome. This rule has been proven to be wrong, so either Joseph is being highly disingenuous or he is showing a decided ignorance about how magick really works.
Joseph decries the "march to your own drumbeat" mentality of the New Age that has allowed some gross and vulgar practices when it comes to ritual writing and performance, and these include sloppy research, poor substitutions, a lack of practice and shoddy execution. I find that I must agree with his opinion to a certain point, since I often find poor ritual practices exacerbated by the mixing of different spiritual or occult systems with no regard to esthetics, simplicity, continuity or elegance of form. These rituals sometimes even work, although not as effectively as they would if they were written in a consistent manner. Yet this often occurs from a lack of expertise and practice, which can only be gained by experimentation and the evolving of one's work over time.
There are a lot of people working at a beginner's level of expertise in magick and when one examines their rituals, their lack of sophistication is glaringly obvious. However, for some reason their rituals can still work as long as the intent is clear and simply expressed. This is a paradox, but as I have stated, magick is not based on the existence of absolutely and verifiable truths, even in symbolic form. One can actually make a lot of erroneous substitutions and the magick will still work, if the intent is clear. So magick relies first and foremost on the intent of the magician, secondly on her will, thirdly on her imagination and passion, fourthly on her personal practices and mental disciplines, etc. Somewhere down the list of important criteria, one might find that the symbology should be consistent and that the magician should not mix systems, but that is not particularly important. I have seen individuals perform powerful rites using nothing more exotic in terms of magickal regalia than their own index finger and their mundane clothes, and the magick worked. Where Joseph lays down absolute rules about the practice of theurgy, I would make suggestions and establish guidelines for esthetically superior rituals. Unlike Joseph, I am not a snob nor am I a purist - and still, the magick works anyway!
Joseph then gives a rather gloomy analysis of the history of magick, which is interesting but proposes questionable ideas, such as that each age of magick laid the ground work for the next age, and that there is a continuous tradition practiced down through the ages, from the Hermetic Era in antiquity through the Gothic Revival of the 19th century. I don't believe that at all, and there is little to verify any kind of actual unbroken historical lineage from antiquity to today. In my opinion, each age reinvents magick, certainly using ideas and material from previous ages, but in a way that makes it completely new.
For instance, anyone who has examined the Greek Magical Papyri of the Hermetic Era currently in vogue amongst modern practitioners of magick will find that the rites and spells are quite different than anything practiced today, since they represent a very different, if not, lost way of perceiving the world. Whatever is used from these archaic documents must be intensely reworked and rewritten in order to make them useful. Joseph seems to think that the process of rewriting such a ritual is an egregious sin, since the original ritual is lost amidst the rewriting. He gives as an example, the Bornless One rite, which was remade by the Golden Dawn members into one of the most beautiful and powerful rituals in our current arsenal of modern lore. The original ritual is inelegant, crude and was used as a means to perform a powerful exorcism. Yet the new version corrupted some of the words of power or omitted some of them altogether. A modern magician could extract a version of the "Headless One" rite from the original text and make it work, and the Golden Dawn version can be performed, and it works as well. Of course, the magician who uses the original rite isn't actually reading and performing the rite in Koine Greek, but that doesn't seem to matter at all.
This example supports my argument above, that the old rites are given new life by being rewritten and reformed into something new. It is a process that has been used for untold centuries and represents how new ritual lore is developed from the old lore of a previous age. But according to Joseph, we lost our way in the last two centuries, and the magick used today is groundless and ineffective. Of course, I don't agree with him, and I find his statements rather strange. Has he ever tried to use any of the modern rites that he so caustically condemns? The fact that they work is proof enough for the modern practitioner, and if they didn't work, they would have been discarded and replaced with something that did work many years ago.
