Abraxas

Magic of the Image

In a being who has become alive, the mind is no longer “thought.” Rather, it is activity that instantaneously determines reality through images. Through images the magus creates, destroys, and transforms into matter feelings and sensations that are within himself; through images he acts on his own organism; through images he operates on other people. To the material actions and “will” of ordinary people he substitutes the power of the image.

But in order to do so, it is necessary to awaken oneself to timeless speed in feeling, conceiving, halting, and intervening. The ordinary, slow, obtuse, and sluggish consciousness usually manages to perceive things at the speed of a sleepwalker. Acts escape it; consciousness opens its eyes only when the “precipitate,” the “fallout,” of the fact (the thing, the sensation, the material movement) is already there. Thus, what consciousness perceives are the shadows of phenomena and a world of knowledge as acknowledgment, but not of action (magic).

In this sense you also understand the world you call “inner” as being of external phenomena and lunar; thus, you do not know and live the image as action, but as image. Its action is too fast, and you are not present in it. A mere echo, the image either “appears” by itself, or it may be simply “evoked.” You do not know the creative relationship through which it could act from deep inside yourself (Latin imago [“image”] = imo ago [“I act from the depth”]).

In order to acquire and perceive this rapidity of what is not yet “physical,” the mind must succeed in wresting itself free from the organ of the brain. The necessary condition for this is to “descend into hell”—that is, from the head into the “heart,” as we have mentioned before. This is also the “bath” that breaks the chains of “gold” and frees it, drawing out of it the “winged” hermetic-alchemical symbol of rapidity that corresponds to the antelope, which in Hindu esotericism refers to the subtle “center” of the heart.

You already know that this “descent” leads to the perception of the “subtle” and the “volatile.” But the “subtle” is the second dimension of reality—in which reality is no longer exteriority in space and time, or discursive thought, but rather activity and rhythm. Then you are “reborn backwards.” No longer hypnotized by the spectacle of things and ideas, you can detach yourself from them and perceive them in the act of their prenatural birth.

However, this is a consciousness in which the image is transformed into a projection, or into an action in the pure state. Will is effort: desire is the tendency toward something that one does not have; the force is a middle point between a goal and a reality into which it tries to be transformed by overcoming a resistance. In the magical image, on the other hand, there is no effort, nor striving, nor an interval of fulfillment: it is acting that amounts to seeing, and a seeing that amounts to acting. The process of ideation is realization ipso facto. It does not have a future, and it is more rapid than the antithesis: its law is IT IS—the command-presence.

Through images you can successfully stand up to feelings and passions, whenever they descend upon you, a struggling ascetic. If desire, fear, anger, sensations, hatred, lust, all of a sudden appeared in your mind, in your feeling and will, jump back and fix the feeling in an image: act upon it and the mental act will produce transformation and annihilation in the corresponding element. We read for instance in the Majjhima-nikâjo, XX, the simile of:

“a young man who all of a sudden realized he had the rotting corpse of a serpent, or a dog, or another human being wrapped around his neck, being scared and overwhelmed with disgust, he would rip it off and throw it away.”

The feeling needs to be quickly associated with the image of a corpse, while the mind realizes the horror of the situation and the gesture of ripping it off and throwing it away. The mental act, when it is strengthened in a material action, generates ritual and symbolic practice. I will discuss this later, though you may already perceive the meaning of it. In some mountains of northern Africa, for instance, there are found little mounds of stones, which are considered to be saturated with an evil power. They have been created by a materialization of the mental act, with which, by fixing the effort of the ascent in the image of a stone, this very stone is hurled away. Assume in a flexible way any thought or image of negation, mistrust, distraction, or that you simply do not wish to entertain; immediately imagine a hand pulling out a splinter that has pierced the skin and casting it away. And if the element has already penetrated and sapped your strength, get rid of it “as a strong man, seizing a weaker man by the head or by the shoulders, compels him, crushes him, throws him down.” If a pain, an illness, or a sense of fatigue overtakes you, fix it in a flake of snow that melts when it falls on a mass of glowing white-hot metal. If any anxiety, restlessness, desire, or mental fever attack you, turn them into the shadow of smoke that, in the fire of the mind, is dispersed in the pure, clean, blue sky. The mind is fixed through the image of a fist that holds a little defenseless animal, until it stays still, motionless, inert; or through the image of an arrow shot at its target; or that of an ever-present iron bar that always parries every blow; or a hand that systematically grabs and leads the unstable mind, which runs away every time an involuntary association of thoughts arises, back to its proper place (at the center).

In order to free the mind, imagine the open sky, the air, or remember that “[l]ike a deep, clear, and transparent lake, this is how the wise become calm” (Dhammapada, VI, 82); or that “[a]ll desires flow into him as waters flow into the ocean, which, ever-filled, never overflows but remains unchanged” (Bhagavad Gita, II, 70); or “Like a lamp that shines unmoving in a windless place” (VI, 19). This last image can be represented through determination by imagining a flame that is still enveloped in smoke and mobile, in which a state upset by modifications that have not yet been dominated is eventually fixed.

About all this, be aware that first of all it is necessary to stop a thought or a feeling as soon as it emerges. It must be caught in midair, before it puts down roots in your soul and spreads there: you must prevent it, suffocate it while it is still in embryo. Become agile, elusive, ready to detach and extract yourself.

Second, notice how well practice leads you back to the preparation of the Caduceus: the emotional state acts like a fluid mercury that is fixed in the image, which is then ignified by the mental act ; in other words, everything depends on the rapid and complete amalgamation of sentiment and image, and on the active attitude to be maintained before the image. The entire mind must be concentrated on this image, as a bundle of solar rays is gathered up in the focus of a lens.

In theurgical invocations, all the various images that express the attributes referring to entities or deities must be actualized in the fluid sense of one’s entire being. The mind will shift from one to the next, performing a series of transformations that serve to produce the necessary exaltation, so that sympathy and communication may be established.

A general image of great power is that of a dark body that is consumed and falls down, surrendering its place to a body made of radiant light and glorious strength. This image actually flashes at all moments of sudden or mortal danger, in an instant that is too fast to be perceived by ordinary human consciousness. It rises up and restores and transmits strength to the organism as the latter abandons itself and falls asleep. There is another image of such great power that it may overwhelm hostile forces even in the body: the image of a gigantic white skeleton, made of lightning bolts.

If you persevere in these practices you will grow in the knowledge that thoughts and feelings are not incorporeal and “spiritual,” floating in the air, but rather almost tangible moving objects, which can be handled, moved, projected, changed, put down, loaded and unloaded, each one endowed with its own form. This form can be seen and derives from the “sign” of the being that emanates those thoughts or feelings.

Magical images can be invented, but you need to understand how much more efficacious are those that resemble the forms and the real signs of the states that they fix. Those who see may suggest images that afford more leverage for mental magic. These people also know the symbols that, having been realized plastically in the imagination, shape it and inform it, so as to establish a real, effective contact with the corresponding powers. The slow ascent of the Moon on the horizon and the Sun that rises, scattering the darkness, are two image-ways for communicating with the cosmic forces of destruction and creation, respectively. The sense of Light as well as that of Fire that are evoked during the phase of concentration propitiate the experience of the two aspects of the subtle body, and so forth.

Having denied, exhausted, and extinguished everything that in his feeling and willing is craving or aversion, sympathy or antipathy, mania of affirmation, attachment, selfishness, and instinctive reactions, being endowed with a steady, calm, collected, impassible mind, the magus, with a sovereign glance, sees as figures the feelings that have descended upon him or on other people he is looking at. He can act directly on these images at will: it is enough for his mind to assume them and to project them transformed, or for his eye to change them with a glance of command, to produce a corresponding change in the soul of the other person.

Likewise, if he wishes he can evoke in himself the image of a certain feeling, turn it on, and saturate it with his fluid. If then, by focusing his mind on another person, and by inwardly actualizing the gesture of taking it from one place and placing it in another, he sees the image in the other person, in the heart, and that same feeling or state will be infused in him/her.

These operations are possible even when one has not yet attained the vision, through images that are not real—meaning those that do not correspond to “signatures”—but invented, provided they have a sufficient suggestive and analogical power; provided that one knows how to fix in them the relative and given element; and, in the end, provided that the action does not go too deep, for then there will be very energetic resistances.

Finally, at its highest potency, the image stirs, enflames, and provokes resurrection even in the world of natural things.

The substance of nature is desire .

In the intelligence and in conscious will, the goal of movement is an idea, or an ideal to be fulfilled, or something that may be and yet is not: in other words, it is a possibility to be realized. But the appearance of desire ushers in identification, a dark directness of contact, and necessity. It brings the act increasingly closer to the realization it is striving toward: the duration of the movement contracts, virtuality is confused with tendency and tendency with action. With the gradual shortening of the interval separating movement and its purpose, the idea can no longer be distinguished, but is confused and precipitates in the act and in the object: it increasingly takes on the form of the being, and it becomes the being itself. Nothing now separates the agent and the action, the ideal and the real, the subject and the object. This intelligence that sinks in its own act, which is blind yearning, thus becoming instinct, mechanism, automatism, or a vibrating and convulsive force absorbed into its objects—such is the deep essence of what appears to you as nature. Nature is the identification of the end with the beginning of an act, the degradation of freedom into something mechanical; it is the precipitation of elementary intelligences that are lost in the blind tendency to persevere in the very act that constitutes them, in the substantiality of their “images.” Thus, imprisoned in the materiality of things, signs and symbols are asleep, as abysmal images of light, gestures of power and illumination that the law of yearning has obscured and crucified in the sphere of fate.¹²⁶

And even this contraction and acceleration, by which the idea leaves the sphere of freedom and degenerates into sensation, instinct, and nature, shows the timeless speed of acts that cross your mind without it being aware of them and retaining their perception. Thus, the mind itself sees only facts—things, beings, already in a form of exteriority, of ex-istence—and material movements in a series: these are the precipitates (in the chemical sense) of the subtle world.

But when you have succeeded in slaying desire, yearning, and dark striving within you; when you succeed in stopping and in fixing the irrational effort that dominates the depths of your being, and adjusted yourself to the magic rapidity in conceiving and in intervening—then you will be able to turn to an analogous realization in the sphere of nature. You will then stop in your spirit the acts of beings before they precipitate in the form of material things. At that point you will no longer be confronted with a material world, but with a world of images and your knowledge will consist in action, rather than passion. In your Yes (love, consent) you will live the dark forces of beings transfigured as intellectual acts. In your No (opposition, dominion), by projecting your strength into the image that sustains the being’s body of craving , you will create a transcendental transformation that will be translated into an invisible following of your command on the part of that which, in the order of nature, depends on that being. This will happen because your consecration as the Released, the Uprooted, the Escaped One, is a power of freedom that imposes itself on the demonic realm and on the law of necessity of the forces made of yearning, bringing them to a halt.

Thus, as you progressively fix yourself, pulling yourself out of the “Waters,” your capability to intercept and to maintain the various energies and impressions at their subtle state will increase. Corresponding images will naturally flow into you, instead of the representation of reflected phenomena and apparitions recorded by physical senses: at first, the images of your inner psychological world (thoughts and feelings) and your own “figure”; more deeply, the images buried within the organs and movements of your body. Deeper yet, the signs of the kingdoms, the natural and stellar forces and influences, the Twelve and the Seven.

And if it will be given to you to achieve adeptship, nothing will ever be able to act directly and contingently on you. Everything will confront you in the sudden apparition of an image that tries to be accepted and willed: the same will happen with fatigue, love, sickness, sleep, and what gradually awakens and arises from the subterranean realm of instinct and physiological automatism. According to the law of necessity, the only images that will be allowed to overpower you are those images that your mind is unable to hold on to, in order to transform its obscurely demonic nature, its blind spontaneity, into Sun.