Magical Work:
Guidelines and Boundaries
Our early forays into magical work come from a very personality-based place. Often, the experiences we have can be likened to looking through a kaleidoscope of exciting internal effects to provide new experiences—and like Wilfred at the beginning of his studies, we wonder how authentic these are. Cut off from our proper relationship to feeling, we, like Hugh Paston, need sensation to prime the pump: like Wilfred we may crave excitement, to try to redress the sense of imbalance we have about our position in the world. None of this is of concern if we trust that these surface reactions mask a profound and holy intent: to come into a harmonious working relationship with the evolutionary current. We can call this nature, or divinity, or leave it unnamed, and can picture it in whatever way helps us explore that process.
Now the way to learn to make bread is not to read a hundred recipes, but to try making bread—and to keep on trying. Similarly, it is through practice and experimentation that our underlying vision gradually comes into focus. That vision has been concealed because its scope is so awesome as to make us shy or embarrassed about acknowledging it, for we arrive at the idea of the connection to divinity, which has been so misused and subverted through the ages.
Dion Fortune is waiting to fine-tune our intent when we come to that place:
We take spiritual initiation when we become conscious of the Divine within us, and thereby contact the Divine without us. 73
Then we are about the true business of the soul, and, instead of an internal kaleidoscope, we discover a telescope to the relational nature of the worlds, which will faithfully report on the cosmos, bringing distant vistas into sharp focus. It will allow us to connect our lives to the wider whole and the spirit that is the inspirer.
Hopefully this workbook will aid in the process of initiation that started—maybe many years ago—with being moved by the stories, just as Dion Fortune intended. Consciously now, we will work, through our engagement with the structure and pattern of each story, to interpret those themes through the fluid connections of the Tree and reach a place of deep and authentic internalisation.
Before starting, we need to remember the basic guidelines of magical work by asking simple questions about the stories as we read them:
1. How Often Are the Characters Interrupted
in Their Magical Work?
The only example of interruption or disruption is in the black magic ceremony in the Winged Bull, when Ted infiltrates the ritual. It is a sloppy, showy performance, to pander to a dissolute audience. It comes from the wish to impress, with the eye very much on the main chance—a cheap aim that dishonours the sacred nature of ceremony.
So, by default, we learn that the ethos supporting true magical work is discipline and integrity, not personal advantage. We set up our space to be private, as the work deserves. Our motivation is to align with the progressing current of the cosmos, and our evolution as a species, and we set our intent before every ritual.
2. What Emphasis Is Placed on
the Magical Temple?
The making of the temple is a core element in each book; it is both actual and externalises an inner process: making the temple changes the characters into the priests and priestesses fit to inhabit it.
We also will make or adapt real space, and construct one on the inner planes.
The making of the inner temple rewards the student in direct relation to commitment and energy expended: these things build up gradually. And what should it look like? There is no right answer. The “temple” is crafted by you to be an intimate and safe space: it does not conform to any stereotype. Allow it to unfold in the inner realms, and allow it to be whatever it is—a pavilion in the forest, a cave with natural pillars … even an Egyptian temple, as in Moon Magic! You will construct it as a unique expression of your dedication. And here is how Lilith tells us to do it:
So I … let him get used to things, and waited. We described our visions to each other—the visions I built and the visions he saw, going over the same ground again and again till they were utterly familiar to us both. This is the mise-en-scene of magical working that creates the astral temple. Our temple was now built, though Malcolm thought it was all imagination, and the next stage was ready to begin—the stage of making a priest of him. People try and make priests of themselves in order to be fit for the temple, but it should be the other way about—make the temple first, and then make the priest. There are good reasons for this. 74
3. How Do the Characters
Make Time for Magical Work?
Swathes of time are made available to them, whilst we have the problems of many legitimate calls on our time from family and friends, which must be honoured. So we must put thought into this: what, from the areas of our lives that we can legitimately simplify, are we willing to sacrifice, to free time up?
Read the previous passage again, noticing the slow, repetitive nature of the building of images. If we read between the lines of the passages dealing with the training of the characters, we find that a few paragraphs actually indicate weeks and months of dedicated work. In The Winged Bull, for example, Ted studies until the images become a background to his waking life. He is not confusing the worlds by this extra awareness; rather, through internalising the images, he has successfully awoken the capacity for another way of understanding that in most people is permanently dormant. It is a slow, organic process.
We need to address our time-poverty attitude, determine to make space, and decide how to structure our lives to make time: regular time, no matter how short each day. The reward is that with dedication come the synchronicities that smooth the way for us—not as drastically as in the books, perhaps, but significantly.
Maintaining a regular practice is the most difficult aspect of esoteric training, so two considerations might help.
First, be aware that it is more difficult to do now than in Dion Fortune’s day. We have a million more possible distractions—our mobility giving more opportunities, more disposable income and time for leisure pursuits, iPads and their like, home entertainment systems, and a more stressful work environment and increased communication making us available 24/7.
Second, remember that slowing down is a subversive act. By going contra to the treadmill of mundane life and asserting our right to claim time free from pressure, what we are doing will benefit society, our families, and us. We must keep looking to the wider, deeper, more nuanced and mysterious world and the other planes to remind ourselves why.
From our reading we get our first guidelines:
• We must be committed to our practice.
• We must be ethical.
• We must make an internal/external space fitting to the work.
• We must be free from interruption.
• We must make time.
The next question then is …
4. What about Doing Mundane Business
Whilst on the Magical Trail?
The answer is that the characters never mix the two—although the magic they set in train will be working in their lives all the time. They interact with the everyday world but are secluded for their magical work, not only physically but also mentally and emotionally.
It is a matter of spiritual hygiene to be clearly in or out of the appropriate space for the differing aspects of our lives, and opening and closing procedures that take us from, and bring us firmly back to, our mundane selves are essential. You will find reminders to this effect repeated throughout the chapters that follow. The state of “in-betweenness” can be very alluring, but is at best self-indulgent and unhelpful to the serious student, who concentrates on clarity and intent in every area of life.
We must keep our differing states of consciousness separate, and develop the habit of clarity about what we’re doing and why at all times.
5. How Do the Characters
Begin and End Each Ritual?
The wonderful descriptions in the books clothe the essential guidelines of magical work. The preparation to the rituals need not be taken literally; rather, it is indicative of basic guidelines. Nothing mundane, says Dion Fortune, should be taken into the temple, which we can interpret as our inner state rather than as a strict clothing guideline. We need not have dedicated robes, though they are helpful in making the psychological and magical shift. But we should have a way of symbolically divesting ourselves mentally of our mundane encumbrances. Washing hands, cleaning teeth, taking off shoes, or donning a special scarf or garment are all physical acts that can help to move us into the right mental space. They are the first stage in allowing the temporary quieting of the mundane personality, so the magical personality can blossom.
Then each time we go through the same mental and emotional process to open to the inner working temple. The pathways and structures hold us securely and bring us back safely each time. Like Wilfred in his back garden, we “break trail” through the undergrowth to make a track that, with use, becomes an easy path for us. In our expanded state, we recognise Dion Fortune’s evocative descriptions of travelling, of ascending to upper rooms, reaching out to liminal space, and descending to the deep inner temple as representations of our inner experiences in picture form.
Our ritual acts of preparation, opening, and closing make the chalice that holds our work. They are essential to supporting us and enabling us to shift through the planes easily and effectively.
6. With Whom Do the Characters Discuss
Their Magical Work?
This inner world is withdrawn from, and never discussed with, the servants, the shopkeepers, and the everyday characters who people Fortune’s fiction.
Our culture has trampled boundaries so we live in the context of sharing every aspect of life as the norm, with celebrities as role models, selling their most intimate secrets. But magical work, like any personal undertaking, deserves and needs respect and discretion and privacy. There is nothing “secret”—in the way that implies “shameful” or “wrong” about it—but magical students do not apologise for respecting their own sense of privacy, and will only discuss work with colleagues of like mind. Anyone can read this book, but only those who do the work will gain anything from it. The secret of magic is that it is experiential. As Hugh says, objective evidence may be lacking, but no one can doubt the profound changes this work effects when they have committed themselves to it.
This comes with a proviso, of course: it is wrong to wilfully withhold information from our loved ones, who are entitled to be interested in what we do. Magic is not about power plays or indulging a self-conscious mysteriousness for effect, but there is no need to discuss the minutiae of your work with people of a different persuasion. Just explain that it is the experience of meditative techniques that is important, and that they can try them for themselves if they wish. Usually they just want reassurance, a broad outline, to know that you are safe and that they’re not excluded. Be kind, be fair, be sensible.
Discretion is the watchword.
7. What Guidelines Do the Characters Have?
They work from their own deep inner instincts, and the more they trust them, the more these become a vibrant conduit for messages from the wider world, indicating the path ahead. If it is legal, sensible, safe, and fair, we owe it to ourselves and the greater work always to follow our instincts.
We will always be guided by our intuition and common sense.
Preparing to Use the Workbook
With these guidelines in mind, here is the workbook for your use.
The ideas are not to be copied slavishly, but held lightly, handled and examined, experimented with, explored, and made your own, so you will develop other guidelines or instinctively find your own way of doing things. And you will adjust the suggested timescales—you will know when a section of work is complete and when more is needed.
Unlike most magical workbooks, this one invites you to sit quietly and regularly with uncomfortable, challenging aspects that find their reflection in the stories, so the preparation exercises and the Body of Light exercise are vital to the process.
In our everyday state, we frequently rehearse/reprise arguments, supposed slights, and frustrations in our minds—a process that feeds these feelings, leaving us churned up and with no resolution. This is part of the internal “spinning wheel” dialogue (described in section one) that blocks our progress.
By engaging with difficult emotions through the body of light, we can calmly observe the underlying feelings that prompt our reactions. Really working at simply holding and observing them in the crucible of our awareness then becomes an alchemical process. We allow space, and find that, gradually but magically, they begin to change. It is a sure incremental process, and the time it takes is the reason that so many fall by the wayside in magical studies.
Going back to the “common sense” clause just discussed: the challenging nature of the work means that current stress and trauma are a clear signal not to engage with inner work, but to deal with your current situation and resume only when your emotions and your life are back on an even keel. First and foremost, magicians take responsibility for their own wellbeing.
Being in the right state for the work, with the template of the Tree and its paths to our deeper understanding before us, we can allow time to explore, and to return again and again. By so doing, we are parting the veil and allowing the influence of a deeper, more connected and more profound energy to permeate and inform our relationship with the everyday world.
In conjunction with what is given in this section, we can use a number of techniques to encourage the emotional response that magic demands. Some might be …
• Reading selected passages out loud
• Cultivating creativity—draw, sing, dance, make music
• Using the mysterious place between waking and sleeping
• Following Dion Fortune’s lead—exploring the mysteries of our own lands, wherever we may live
• Allowing and expecting the process to be organic, not mechanistic
“The gods … are lenses that wise men have made through which to focus the great natural forces,” which are made of “thought-stuff,” 75 we’re told in The Winged Bull. But our connection to them is activated by “feeling stuff.” By head and heart, by logic and emotion, combined with a deep embodiment and firmly held by the real and more-than-real world, the elemental makeup of our land, sea, and sky, we join ourselves up with the quivering web of the cosmos, to fulfil our potential.