The Magick Cup
The magick of the cup comes not from its form or its beauty
or the material from which it is composed. The magick of the cup
simply comes from its ability to embody profound and perfect emptiness.
The magick cup is the magician’s understanding—not so much the active intellectual understanding (which is the function of the sword), but the profound and passive understanding of the heart—an understanding that transcends the reasoning processes. It is through this understanding that the magician’s work is purified. The cup is the first letter H (Heh
) in the Great Name: Yod Heh Vav Heh,
. It represents the element of water and the second-highest aspect of the human soul, the “soul intuition.”21
It is impossible to properly comment on the nature of the cup without also discussing the wand. Indeed, the cup and wand are a team, supreme cosmic lovers—the wand the ultimate active, positive projection of light, energy, and love, and the cup the ultimate passive, negative receptacle of all light, energy, and love. If we were to use familiar astronomical allusions, the wand is the sun, which projects and radiates light, and the cup is the moon, which passively receives and reflects the sun’s light. Continuing with that theme, the wand is all galaxies of stars, and the cup is the infinite womb of space itself.
If we were to speak in religious terms, the wand is the active process of worship, of chanting or of prayer, while the cup is the still, silent waiting for deity’s response after the worship. Formal magical ceremonies usually begin with cleansing of the temple. This is done with water from the cup. Even before the magician starts the ceremony, he or she bathes in pure water and puts on clean vestments. The cleansing of the body and clothes is a function of the cup.
Christians are initially baptized, and Muslims perform Wudu before praying in the mosque. Jews of old were fully immersed in the mikvah pool outside the temple, and many initiatory societies ritualistically bathe the candidates for initiation. The magician sees all these gestures of purification as the function of the magick cup, and without a cup the magician is just not ready to do business.
Obviously all this translates neatly into the familiar allegories of human sexuality and all the wondrous issues that accompany the concepts of physical and emotional love. For us, sex is the clearest, simplest magical metaphor for the mechanics of creation, and the cup represents the female aspect in everything … in everyone.
Making (or Selecting) Your Homemade Cup
Once again, I confess that I did not make my own magick cup. I just don’t have the skill or resources to fashion a viable cup. My cup is a simple stemmed brass chalice that was given to me as a gift from a dear friend on the eve of the very first Gnostic Mass that Constance and I celebrated in 1978. We have used it for every mass since. I can think of no more sacred, magical, or precious cup for me to use in magical ceremonies.
You could say I am in the process of perpetually consecrating my cup. For me, this process is the essence and the power of the cup, so I would like to take a bit of space in this book to share what exactly that means to me. I hope it will help with your understanding of what your cup can mean to you in your magical journey.
As I just mentioned, my cup is a simple brass chalice. Brass tarnishes easily and quickly, so each time I intend to use my cup, I must first polish it to pristine brilliance. You might think that taking time to polish brass prior to every magical operation is an inconvenience—and you’d be right. It’s a real pain! I grumble out loud as I dodge the deadly black-widow spiders in the garage as I search for the brass polish and rags and newspapers and paper towels.
The brass cleaner is nasty and toxic, which is why Constance makes me keep it in the infernal depths of the garage. It stinks so strongly, I have to do my polishing on the patio in the backyard. I don’t dare wear any clothes that I ever intend to wear again, so I strip down to just a pair of old swimming trunks (even in the bitter Southern California winters). I’m sure the neighbors over the fence must be disgusted at the sight of a crabby, half-naked old wizard muttering to himself, but I don’t care. Once I begin, I just want to get the job over with. I’ve got magick to do!
I vigorously shake the can of brass polish, pop off the crusty lid, and soak my rag with a generous dose of the caramel-colored liquid. I slather my cup inside and out with that vile-smelling poison and start to rub it in. Everything on the surface of the cup almost immediately turns black, a sign that the chemicals are working on the brass.
Then, just like clockwork, my whole attitude changes. I become focused. I become inspired. I actually start to enjoy my work. I see my labor for what it really is—a magical operation, a consecration ceremony. This is not a household chore. It is alchemy, prayer, worship, devotion, adoration, love.
Every smudge, every stain, and every lip mark and fingerprint left on the metal from the vicissitudes of my last magical operation—my last incarnation—I now see as the traces of so many karmic debts, stains upon my soul; stains that I can now wipe away with the polish of my devotion, my love, my understanding.
I change rags and start to wipe away the excess polish. As my cup slowly turns from black to gold, I begin to take an almost obsessive interest in buffing away every blemish. I turn the cup over and over in my hands, seeking out any remnant of past laziness, selfishness, thoughtlessness—anything that could have left its shameful smear upon my beloved cup. Some marks are very stubborn, so I have to reapply the polish several times.
My fingers are now black. The cuticles of my fingernails have become blackened crescent moons, but finally my beautiful cup (now warm from the friction of my ardor) mirrors in immaculate detail the golden glory of the sun. In those few moments, I have become the soot-blackened Vulcan-Hephaestus clumsily caressing in my brutish hands the delicate pink body of my bride Venus.
I stop polishing only when I understand in my soul that I now hold in my hands the Holy Grail itself—until I understand that when I put this sacred vessel to my lips I will be drinking the Life of the Sun, the Elixir of Life, and the Dew of Immortality.
Your Magick Cup
Not everyone is as inept as I am in the workshop. You might be more handy with metal or wood or glass and have all the necessary resources to fashion your own cup from scratch. If so, you might want to look at a few images of examples of magick cups that are found in abundance on the Internet. One classic example of a magick cup has a triangular base, a spherical center stem, and a crescent moon for a bowl.
Because of its association with the moon and water, silver is a most appropriate metal for a magick cup. But glass, brass, pewter, and wood are also popular materials. Blues, silvers, and sea greens are perfect colors.
Even though I’ve never made a cup myself, a friend of ours described how her husband once made one himself. Before her death in 2003, the DuQuettes were privileged to be friends with Helen Parsons Smith, the widow of two great American magicians, Jack Parsons and Wilfred Smith. Helen told us how Jack had made his own crude cup.
He purchased two very thin sheets of pure silver, one perfectly round, about eight inches in diameter, and the other square, about five inches square. He took the round piece of silver to a beach in Malibu and laid it on the wet sand at the water’s edge. He then carefully proceeded to pound the center of the disk with a wooden pestle. It took quite a long time, but eventually he beat the round disk into a semblance of the bowl of a cup. Back in his home workshop, he used a jeweler’s saw to cut three identical crescent “moons” from the square piece of silver. Once those were cleaned and polished, he soldered the moons to the sides of the bowl to form three legs. Simple, beautiful, and he did it all himself.
Ideas for an On-the-Road,
Improvised Homemade Cup
About ten years ago, I was speaking in Oslo and had need of a magick cup for a magical operation I intended to perform the following evening. I was staying with friends, and my “temple” was the guestroom of their home. Before retiring, I performed the water section of the Preliminary Invocation of the Goetia 22 with the object of locating an appropriate “travel” magick cup. No sooner had I concluded the ritual than my host knocked on the door of my room and announced we would be visiting the Vigeland Sculpture Park in the morning.
The park is one of the most breathtakingly beautiful places I have ever seen. I toured with about a dozen local lodge members who had all been there many times. Before we headed home, we all wanted to visit the gift shop. A young lady from our party called my name and motioned me over to an exhibit of tiny pewter wine cups, replicas of ancient Norwegian ritual cups. My face lit up, and she sensed that I liked them very much. “I buy one for you,” she said. I made a most insincere and feeble attempt at protest. It has been my travel cup ever since.
Once you’ve designed and made (or obtained) your cup, you will have in essence installed it permanently in your magical self. That’s where it truly exists. That’s where you use it. From that point on, any material receptacle you choose to be your cup is your cup. It’s desirable, however, that it be somewhat “cup-like” and evocative of the spiritual attributes of water.
Here are a few things I’ve used on the road for my magick cup:
• A wine or cocktail glass
• A coffee cup
• A bottle
• A bottle cap
• A tree leaf
• A nutshell
• A gourd
• A rose
• My own cupped hand