I’ll tell you something that gave me concern when I was just graduating my Apprenticeship and coming into my own as a Warlock. At that point I’d been doing magic for a little over ten years, mostly freelance with no structured learning environment, and I was really starting to enjoy finally being part of a magical community. Fortunately for me, the Bay Area was a fine place to be in my situation, having as it does a wide variety of magic-using traditions and perspectives. However, there was one thing I noticed that seemed to unsettle me just a bit.

I was in my very early twenties at that point, and I had the opportunity to be around magical folks who were of all ages, even well into their sixties and beyond. What I noticed was that, while it seemed that I was always involved in some sort of ritual work, many of the older magic-using individuals were not. Some of them, it seemed, hadn’t performed any sort of ritual in years, and when I did see them perform ritual publicly, it was awkward and didn’t flow well. I began wondering why, with the ridiculous amount of power to be gained from magic, so many people in the magic-using community didn’t seem to be using it anymore.

I didn’t understand it myself for another decade or two. I had at the time a rudimentary knowledge of the connection between ritual and magic, but neither my books nor my various instructors had been able to present it as more than a “cookbook” formula – “By performing certain actions, certain results follow.” Magic was basically a result of combining certain physical actions and substances, usually under the direction of spoken incantations, and the proper combination of physical, somatic and spoken components produced the desired results (or sometimes a charmingly ironic misfire), and that was the best I had. This model of magical physics had served me well enough for the past ten years, and there didn’t seem to be any reason to trade that in for another model, even if one had been available.

DAILY RITUALS

As per the instruction of Israel Regardie in “The Complete Golden Dawn System of Magic”, I was performing the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram twice a day. Regardie gave very little explanation as to what the ritual itself was actually designed to accomplish, apart from being a “banishing ritual”, but it wasn’t exactly rocket science. According to Regardie, and later by Aleister Crowley, the regular performance of this ritual was the key to transforming the magician into a Master.

Was it the ritual itself? Partly. Was it the fact that it was advised to perform it daily? Mostly. Something becomes a “ritual” when it is done regularly, and regular performance also helps ingrain the desired result in the magician’s psyche. Just as Pavlov’s Bell only began producing results when the dogs saw the same pattern played out enough to make the connection between the bell and being fed. Like Pavlov’s dogs, the magician must perform his rituals on a regular basis before he’ll see their greatest effects manifest.

What does this mean for the magician? That depends on his understanding of how ritual works. The classic model of magical physics teaches us that the power of a ritual lies in the symbolic actions performed. Like a cake recipe, a ritual script contains elements symbolizing the desired effect and, arranged properly, it is these elements which create change in the magician’s world.

Comparing rituals to spells is like comparing one’s daily workout to climbing Mount Everest. Rituals (in the strictest sense, being the ceremonies performed on a regular basis) are for maintenance of your spiritual nuts-n-bolts, while spells are done to manifest a particular change in the world, or in one’s consciousness. Rituals function by creating a certain amount of constant tension, “shaping” you under pressure until you’ve achieved the desired state, and then maintaining that state for you. Much like working out, our daily rituals are a recital of change, a daily repetition of our vision of a desired future for ourselves.

The key here is to select the proper ritual for the desired outcome, which requires absolutely that the magician fully understands the mechanics of the rituals he uses. The key to getting more bang for one’s magical buck is to know exactly how his goal can be achieved.

For example, the LBRP, a ritual everyone uses and most people fail to understand. It’s generally used as a “circle casting” ritual, but the very thing that makes it useful for this purpose also makes it so much more versatile than the uses to which it’s commonly put. The LBRP functions, on its most basic level, by banishing the element of Earth. What does this mean, in practical terms? Earth is the element of manifestation, of solidity. Therefore, banishing Earth has the effect of “softening” the world, and preparing it to receive the stamp of the magician’s Will. Much as the blacksmith puts his irons in the fire to prepare them for the hammer, the LBRP removes the “locks” that maintain the status quo and keep the world manifested in its current arrangement.

After performing the LBRP, all the other opening rituals become progressively easier, whether the magician is invoking or banishing planets, stars or other elements. At the heart of the ceremony, after all the opening rituals have been performed, the magician actually casts his spell. This generally involves performing some sort of symbol-manipulation representing the desired change, such as crafting a sigil, reciting Words of Power, applying tools to a wax doll, etc. If desired, the magician then re-equilibrates the invoked or banished elements back to their original state (there are situations where this is not desirable) and then performs the invoking Ritual of the Pentagram. The effect of this is to lock in the changes he just made, essentially the same function as saving the changes to the web page you just spent six hours editing. You don’t want to lose all that work, do you? Of course not. Invoking Earth at the end of the ceremony helps bring those changes into manifestation quicker and more powerfully.

Over a long enough period of time, the regular performance of magic-enhancing rituals does in fact transform the noob into a Master, making his world soft enough to be manipulated by sheer force of Will. To this end, I recommend strongly that at least half of all Work done by the magician be directed toward creating a “standing effect” of progressive spiritual evolution designed to create exactly this effect. From a certain point of view, we are re-creating ourselves every day. Why not create ourselves more powerful?