Magic—that is, occult magic—can be defined as creating effects through means that are generally regarded as supernatural. It thus differs from stage magic or sleight-of-hand magic, which relies on mechanisms and manipulations to produce apparently supernatural effects (making a coin disappear, causing a girl in a box to vanish).
A friend of mine, from a family of distinguished French stage magicians, assures me that all supposedly occult effects can be produced by such means, although of course that does not mean that all of them are.
The modern educated world tends to assume that the existence of supernatural phenomena has been debunked, but the opposite is the case. Paranormal researchers over the past century and a half have demonstrated real and statistically significant evidence for powers such as telekinesis, precognition, and clairvoyance (although these are very weak in most people). Indeed the scientific research supporting the reality of psychic phenomena is more extensive and better replicated than it is for most of the medications we trustingly take every day.
Present science indicates that the greater part of the universe is unknown to us. By one account, dark matter and dark energy constitute ninety-five percent of the mass and energy of the universe. These entities are known only indirectly, by their effects on ordinary matter and energy, but that is only to say that they cannot be detected by current scientific apparatus. It remains possible—and likely—that this unknown stuff of the universe may be detected by the human nervous system, which is after all far more powerful and refined than the crude contraptions of science. This could very well include ghosts, spirits, and other invisible entities, whose existence is taken for granted in every part of the world that has not succumbed to naïve materialism. Conventional science sneers at such phenomena because its devices are too rudimentary to detect them.
Occult magic, shamanism, and similar practices would thus be methods of perceiving and interacting with this otherwise unknown part of the universe.
Usurping permission to investigate in this way, we can look at occult magic in more detail. I will focus here on magic in the Western occult traditions, because this is the civilization most familiar to us, although it would be possible to find similar effects in the magical and shamanistic practices of many cultures worldwide.
Here it would be most useful to think of Western magic in terms of three basic categories.
The first has to do with interacting with entities normally invisible to us—angels, demons, nature spirits, the shades of the deceased. This is known broadly as goetia (from the Greek goēs, sorcerer). Examples stretch as far back as Odysseus’ evocation of the dead in book 11 of The Odyssey; King Saul’s conversation with the soul of the prophet Samuel in 1 Samuel 28:8–19; and more recently, the French occultist Éliphas Lévi’s evocations of the shade of Apollonius of Tyana in London in 1854, resulting in “the revelation of two Cabalistic secrets, which could, if they were known to the world, quickly transform the foundations and the laws of our entire society.” (We are not told what they are.)
Another dramatic example, from 1535, is described in The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini. Cellini encounters a Sicilian priest who is also a magus and who enacts a rite for him in the Coliseum of Rome that invokes hundreds of spirits, terrifying all the participants.
Invoking spirits is always a tricky business. Calling them up is like calling up a human being you don’t know: you have no idea whom or what you are going to get on the other end. Since goetia usually does not involve contact alone but entails compelling the entity to perform some act, even at its best it is highly unreliable: after all, you are trying to impose force upon a being whose powers are unknown to you (but must somehow be greater, since you are asking it to do something you cannot).
In his entertaining memoir My Life with the Spirits, contemporary magus Lon Milo duQuette details his evocation of the spirit Orobas, described in the grimoire The Lesser Key of Solomon the King as “a Great and Mighty Prince, appearing at first like a Horse; but after the command of the Exorcist he putteth on the Image of a Man.” His “Office” is, among other things, “to give Dignities, and Prelacies, and the Favour of Friends and Foes.”
DuQuette, down on his financial luck, needed Orobas’s help. He gave the spirit a tough assignment: he wanted his fortune to reverse itself—and within an hour.
The ritual worked. Within one hour, a friend of DuQuette’s showed up in a beat-up but functional car and gave it to him unasked. DuQuette was able to use the car to find and keep a job, and things improved from there.
Inevitably something in these affairs doesn’t go quite right. According to the principles of Solomonic magic, the magus has to keep the spirit’s sigil, written on a small piece of parchment, in a secret place. No one should touch it or even look at it.
DuQuette taped the sigil inside his guitar, which he allowed no one else near. Unfortunately, Kurt, a student of DuQuette’s and a talented woodworker, offered to refurbish the guitar in exchange for lessons. DuQuette agreed, having forgotten about the sigil, which, along with the guitar, left his possession for five days.
Kurt brought back a beautifully refinished guitar, but he told DuQuette he couldn’t stay for his first lesson, because he was off to the racetrack. Kurt had never had any particular interest in horseracing until the previous day, when he and his father went to the track. “I just fell in love with the horses,” he told DuQuette. “They’re so beautiful. They look like gods! When they look at me I feel like a horse!”
Remember that Orobas appears “at first like a horse.” Conceivably the spirit had gotten out (Kurt had handled the sigil while refurbishing the guitar), and despite DuQuette’s best efforts, continued to obsess the ill-fated student for the next fifteen years: “Sadly, his addiction to horseracing and other forms of gambling rendered him a social cripple. The last time I saw him he was living in a small industrial shop—the walls of his cell surrounded by hundreds of color photographs and posters of racehorses.”
Of course there are many warnings about invoking evil spirits. But how do we know they are evil? Éliphas Lévi tells of a séance in which the spirit was asked to leave some evidence of its existence. A pencil and paper were provided. The pencil was thrown across the room, and on the paper were found “three qabalistic signs which nobody understood. . . . They were traced forcibly, and the pencil had almost cut the paper.”
The paper was brought to Lévi, who describes and interprets it in his Key of the Mysteries. Lévi saw no good in these markings, saying they represented “the negation of mercy and love…. the affirmation of the absolute reign of force” and “the glorification of tyranny and revolt.”
All very dismaying, to be sure, but was the spirit really a soldier of the Evil One, or was it merely expressing, in the only way it knew, its annoyance at being disturbed?
The inherent unreliability of the goetic process—wherein it is almost impossible to avoid unforeseen and undesired results—no doubt contributed to goetia’s decline in popularity, even among occultists, over the centuries (though some are trying to revive the art today).
Another category of magic has to do with using the doctrine of correspondences to draw down celestial influences. As The Emerald Tablet of Hermes Trismegistus says, “that which is above is like that which is below, and that which is below is like that which is above.” This process makes great use of astrology, which divides the human body, for example, into twelve parts, each ruled by one sign of the zodiac. Henry Cornelius Agrippa writes in his Three Books of Occult Philosophy, published in 1535: “The signs of the zodiac each govern their respective parts of the body: thus Aries rules the head and face; Taurus, the throat; Gemini, the arms and shoulders. Cancer rules over the chest, lungs, stomach, and forearms; Leo, over the heart, stomach, liver, and back. Virgo has to do with the intestines and the lower digestive tract. Libra governs the kidneys, the thighs, and the buttocks; Scorpio, the genitals, vulva, and womb; Sagittarius, the thighs and the area below the groin. Capricorn rules the knees, Aquarius, the shins; and Pisces, the feet” (my translation). These rulerships suggest remedies for ailments in those parts of the body, which would be treated with herbs and potions associated with the planets ruling each respective sign.
These two categories of magic are by no means mutually exclusive: a magus may use astrological correspondences to select the most auspicious days and hours to perform a ritual such as invoking spirits.
But perhaps the most common form of magic practiced today in the West was described by Éliphas Lévi, notably in his Doctrine and Ritual of High Magic, published in 1854–55. The magician makes use of the “astral light,” which Lévi describes as “the primordial light, the vehicle for all ideas, . . . the mother of all the forms . . . the great magical agent.”
The astral light is mind-stuff. It is the matter of which all thoughts, dreams, and mental pictures are made. The primordial symbol for this light is water, because, like water, the astral light is extremely fluid. It can be shaped into different forms, but it does not hold these shapes well. That is why most mental images and dreams are so evanescent.
Nevertheless, all physical forms have their prior basis in the astral light. In Kabbalistic terms, the astral light is Yetzirah, the world of forms, which precedes and gives rise to Assiyah, the material world.
In order to manifest results in the world, the magus forms an image in the astral light. If this image is not to evaporate without results, the magus must also project vital force—also known as life force, prana, chi, and under countless other names—into it. Then it has a chance of holding together and manifesting in palpable reality.
For Lévi, essentially all magical operations use this process. It can be reinforced by rites, objects, and corresponding symbols and scents, but these are all mainly to reinforce the will of the magus, which is the ultimate operative factor.
This process at least has the advantage of avoiding contact with irascible entities who may not want to be contacted. But it is equally prone to unintended and unwanted results. Hence the dire warnings appended to most magical texts. Molding the astral light is like sculpting with nitroglycerine, a viscous but explosive substance.
Often teenagers will try to perform some operation they have read in a magical text they have come across. A frequent result: “My God! It works!” Intelligent teenagers take this as a warning and decide to stay away from such practices. Unintelligent teenagers continue to play with them until something bad happens—which it can and often does. But perhaps the most intelligent ones, having had their fingers burned, avoid these practices while realizing that they must indicate some deep mysteries in the universe. From this a spiritual search sometimes emerges.
At this point, the scoffer usually cracks, “If this magic stuff works so well, why doesn’t everybody use it?” The answer is simple: magical practice requires powers of will and concentration that are far beyond the capabilities of most people. You have trouble getting up fifteen minutes earlier than usual; do you imagine you have the one-pointed focus of energy and attention to perform magic? As any primer on the subject will tell you straight out, you will get nowhere without will and concentration. The twentieth-century occultist Aleister Crowley famously wrote, “Magick1 is the Science and Art of causing Change to occur in conformity with Will.”
These powers are not merely inborn: with training, they can be developed and strengthened in almost anyone, but that person must already have enough will and concentration to begin and persist.
As Lon Milo DuQuette’s experience suggests, unexpected and unwanted consequences often ensue upon magical rites, making them as a rule less than useful for attaining specific goals in the world. As one occultist quipped, “Love magic never works—except in reverse, on the magus.” Spirits can be unruly, and the astral light is a sloppy substance.
The same holds especially true for practitioners of black magic, which is performed with intent to harm or manipulate. Many people think of it in the form familiar from Hollywood horror films, with upside-down pentagrams, skulls, loathsome potions, and other unseemly items. No doubt there are some who indulge in such practices, if only in obedience to that universal rule: if you can think of it, somebody has tried it. But the results are widely agreed to be the opposite of beneficial, even and especially for the practitioner. “There are no old black magicians,” says one quip. “They just look old.”
Why, then, bother with occult magic at all? The most obvious answer is that some people are interested in it. This interest may not be merely idle. The classic magus of the Renaissance—represented by Cornelius Agrippa, John Dee, Prospero in The Tempest, and the semilegendary Doctor Faustus—is above all in search of knowledge. And this knowledge is quite different from mere factual information, which even an AI device can manipulate. Such knowledge, said G.I. Gurdjieff, “cannot belong to all, cannot even belong to many. . . . Knowledge, like everything else in the world, is material.” It can be thought of as an extremely fine and rare substance, which, like the noble gases, are present only in minimal amounts and, also like them, mostly undetectable. Occult magic may be one way of sifting and gathering this knowledge. Although this knowledge is rare, those who genuinely seek it are rarer still. ◆
Sources
Cornelius Agrippa, Henry. De occulta philosophia libri tres. Edited by V. Perrone Compagni. Leiden, Netherlands: E.J. Brill, 1992.
Crowley, Aleister. Magick: Book Four, Parts I‒IV. 2d ed. York Beach, Maine: Samuel Weiser, 1994.
DuQuette, Lon Milo. My Life with the Spirits. York Beach, Maine: Red Wheel/Weiser, 1999.
Iamblichus. De mysteriis. Translated by Emma C. Clarke, John M. Dillon, and Jackson P. Hershbell. Atlanta: Society for Biblical Literature, 2003.
Lévi, Éliphas. The Doctrine and Ritual of High Magic. Translated by John Michael Greer and Mark Anthony Mikituk. New York: Tarcher Perigee, 2017.
———. The Key of the Mysteries. Translated by Aleister Crowley. New York: Samuel Weiser, 1970.
Ouspensky, P.D. In Search of the Miraculous: Fragments of an Unknown Teaching. New York: Harcourt, Brace, & Co., 1949.
Smoley, Richard. “Initiation: Present and Absent.” In Jedidiah French and Angel Millar, eds. The Art and Science of Initiation.
Shepperton, Surrey, U.K.: Lewis Masonic, 2019.
Smoley, Richard, and Jay Kinney. Hidden Wisdom: A Guide to the Western Inner Traditions. 2d ed. Wheaton, Ill.: Quest, 2006. See especially chapter 5.
Stratton-Kent, Jake. Geosophia: The Argo of Magic; Encyclopedia Goetica, volume 2: From the Greeks to the Grimoires, Books 1, 2, 3, and 4. N.p.: Bibliothèque Rouge, 2010.
This piece is excerpted from the Fall 2024 issue of Parabola, THE WAY OF MAGIC. You can find the full issue on our online store.
- Crowley used this archaic spelling to distinguish occult magic from stage magic. ↩︎
