Intrinsic and Inner Magick
opular culture conditions us to link magick and ritual tools together. Think of the wizard Gandalf’s staff in Lord of the Rings, and Frodo’s sword, Sting, that glowed when the evil orcs approached, and of course the One Ring itself, so filled with power that the fate of the world rested on it. Or consider Harry Potter and his friends at Hogwarts, relying heavily on their wands, brooms, and invisibility cloaks. Movies and novels are filled with magickal rings, swords, staffs, talismans, amulets, wands, goblets, hats, and all manner of knickknacks. Even in a work of fiction, this can be overdone: “Begone, Frost Demon, lest I smite thee with the Mitten of Power!”
Of course, real magicians do use ritual tools, as covered elsewhere in this book. But an entire branch of magick uses no material tools, costumes, or physical props at all.
In the first edition of True Magick, this was covered briefly under the name hermetic magick. Alas, that name means somewhat different things in different traditions and was not the best word to use in a general book on magick. For this edition, I searched for a better term that was universally accepted in the magickal community. Many terms were suggested, from people’s personal experience or particular traditions in which they were trained. Very quickly it became clear that there is no universal term for propless magick.
In order to fill this void in the vocabulary of magick, I discussed some possible new terms with some friends who are Witches and magicians. As a result, I propose the term “intrinsic magick,” meaning magick where the only tools are the ones that are part of you: your mind, body, voice, will, energy field, and emotions.
As a subcategory, I suggest “inner magick,” which is performed entirely in the mind, without even the use of movement or voice.
And for even more precision, “virtual magick” is intrinsic magick that uses tools, props, and costumes, but only visualized ones.
This may seem unnecessarily complicated to some, but do you know what? We are “technicians of the sacred,” working with subtle and complex energies in a culture that has little regard and less vocabulary for our Art. We need new terminology because that, too, is a tool.
The Tools of Intrinsic Magick
So if we use no material-plane things to perform an act of magick, what intrinsic tools do we have always with us? Remember the Witches’ pyramid? All of its qualities were internal: imagination, will, silence, faith, love, and knowledge. Look at the four qualities of an adept, similar to the pyramid but not identical: to know, to will, to dare, and to keep the silence. Daring is included because it has always been understood that it takes courage to explore the further reaches of reality.
So all these are tools for intrinsic magick (and any other form). Here are some more:
Mind: We can visualize energies moving, events occurring, and symbols influencing the inner and outer worlds. We can imagine possibilities, focus attention, and mentally call on the aid of Younger Self, Higher Self, deities, allies, and guides.
Senses: We can observe the elements of Earth, Air, Fire, and Water in the environment around us. We can see, hear, and feel what energies are most available to us so that our minds can use them. (In New Mexico, we can sometimes smell rain, sunlight, and dust simultaneously; remembering sensations is a wonderful way to connect with the genius loci or Spirits of Place.)
Breathing: By changing the way we breathe, we can calm ourselves, focus our intent, raise energy, or change our emotional states.
Voice: We can call spiritual powers and entities through making the sounds of elements, evocation, invocation, invitation, prayer, and animal calls. We can raise power by chanting, singing, vibrating names, and wordless ululation. We can direct or focus energy by affirmation, incantation, storytelling, the recitation of names, and describing magickal goals as already met. We can change consciousness with trance induction, poetry, and commemoration. Because some of these terms may be new to you, they are defined here:
- Sounds of Elements: The quarters can be called to a circle with imitative magick: with practice, you can make the sound of wind blowing, flame whooshing up a chimney, water chuckling in a brook, or rock grinding against rock.
- Evocation: The calling of “lower powers,” such as elemental spirits (sylphs, undines, salamanders, and gnomes) or any entity less evolved than humanity.
- Invocation: The calling of “higher powers,” such as angels, archangels, spirit guides, or deities. Invocation is sometimes a prelude to aspecting, drawing down, or assuming the godform, in which a priest or priestess hosts a deity in their body.
- Invitation: A less powerful or commanding form of evocation or invocation, in which a spirit is simply invited to be present.
- Prayer: Communication with Deity, or an aspect of Deity, in which a request or plea is made but no power is raised, unless the emotional content is high.
- Animal calls: Making the characteristic sounds of an animal species, usually when calling a totem animal or ally to your assistance.
- Vibrating Names: Calling the name of a higher power, usually a deity or archangel, in a loud, extended, and resonant voice; either as part of invocation or energy work, such as the Middle Pillar exercise.
- Affirmation: Repetition of a carefully designed sentence with the intent of changing consciousness and/or external reality. For example, “I am filled with strength and confidence, I will run faster than ever in Saturday’s race . . .”
- Incantation: Verbal recitation of a charm or spell to produce a magickal effect.
- Trance induction: The use of words and sometimes visual cues to change one’s consciousness to a more focused and suggestible state; used in trancework or hypnosis. Example: “You may be feeling relaxed and light, as though floating on a cloud, so peaceful, inhaling serenity with every breath . . .”
- Recitation of names: A calling of names of spirits, gods, or qualities in order to build and focus power. For example, “By Eurus, Notus, Aeolus, and Boreas do I call the power of the winds . . .”
- Commemoration: Another kind of recitation, in which the names of great magicians are called in order to build confidence before a working. For example: “As Hermes Trismegistus has done before me . . .”
Dancing: Many kinds of dance can be used to raise power or enter a different mental state. You can dance freeform as the spirit moves you, dance your power animal, do a circular folk dance, dance in honor of your chosen deity, do a slow and meditative trance dance, raise energy with a belly dance, or just dance joyously and ecstatically to celebrate abundance, health, or love.
Other Movement: You can use walking as a meditation for changing consciousness. Climbing and swimming can be used to raise power. Any of these can symbolize movement toward a goal. Rhythmically clapping or slapping one’s body can generate energy. How many ways can you use your body to perform magick?
Mudras and Asanas: Mudras are gestures or positions of the hands and arms that have sacred meaning, and asanas are positions involving the whole body. For example, if you stand with arms outstretched and curved to the sides and up, you become like a chalice receiving the energy of the moon goddess. If you stand with your arms crossed in front of your chest, hands touching your shoulders, you have assumed the Osiris position, which honors the god of death and resurrection.
With Any of the Above: As a more advanced technique, you can set and fire sensory anchors. This is part of the array of techniques in Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP), which offers psychological and sensory tools for personal change. In brief, anchoring means that you go into a particular mental state (confidence, serenity, etc.) and mark that feeling with a sensory cue: touching the middle finger of your left hand with your right index finger, for example. (The cues of triggers can also be auditory or visual, like a tune or the sight of a certain object.) When you repeat that same action later, firing the trigger, you tend to experience the same mental state. In other words, you can train yourself to recapture a feeling or mental state at will, change consciousness at will, and thus perform magick.
Inner Magick
Inner magick requires your mind and senses, nothing more: just what’s in your skull and what you perceive around you. In its pure form, you use no breathing techniques, your voice is silent, and your body is still. It is magick wrought by mind alone.
It will come as no surprise that inner magick is most effective for changing your state of mind, emotional state, or habits of thinking. In all these cases you will work very closely with Younger Self. You can also visit other realms of reality—the astral planes and the underworld—without moving a muscle. Tasks such as shamanic healing and soul retrieval are possible with inner magick alone. Psychic skills like telepathy, precognition, and remote viewing can be developed and used.
Four tools you have in your head are memory, visualization, imagination, and othersight. Each of these can be oriented toward visual, auditory, or kinesthetic sensing.
Memory
Your Younger Self has a vast store of memories from this lifetime and past lives, most of which are not instantly accessible to your conscious mind but can be retrieved with Younger Self’s help. They might be visual memories (images), auditory memories (voices and other sounds), or kinesthetic memories (touch, movement, smells, tastes, temperatures). They may be flat and superficial, like watching an old movie, or rich in all the senses, as when you experience past-life regression and vividly relive every sensation.
Jungian psychologists might add that you can tap the “collective unconscious,” which holds the memories of our entire species back through time. And according to some adepts, you can also learn to access the Akashic Records, where all knowledge of the entire cosmos is collected.
Memories can be used to re-create a state you have experienced before and (since many memories have an emotional charge attached) to raise power. The wisdom of the collective unconscious and Akashic Records can enhance your magickal understanding and guide you in your workings.
Visualization
This is the ability to imagine something very clearly. The name comes from being able to picture it clearly in the mind’s eye, but being able to add the other senses enhances the effect. See it, yes, but also hear it, taste it, feel it, and know what it feels like to be it or be in it. Whatever your magickal goal is, and whatever style of magick you prefer, you must be able to visualize success vividly.
Imagination
With this tool you can create something new on the astral planes, and with the help of Younger Self and Higher Self, charge it with power so that it becomes manifest on the material plane.
As with memory, there is visual, auditory, and kinesthetic imagination. To be effective in astral creation, imagine the thing or state with all your senses, not just the sense with which you are most comfortable.
Remember Robert Kennedy’s famous words, “I dream of what never was and ask ‘Why not?’” With the focused energy of magick, you can “Dream of what never was” and send power to make it real.
Note that you can remember, you can imagine, or you can blend memory and imagination. For example, you might recall an incident that ended badly, and then replay it with a different, more satisfactory ending, and put energy into the revised memory to influence how you handle such situations in the future.
Othersight
This is the ability to sense realities that are not evident to our normal sight, hearing, or touch.
One of the chief barriers to othersight is the limited consensual reality that we grow up with. We are taught that certain experiences are real, like eating pizza or adding two plus two and getting four. Other experiences, like sensing emotions, seeing dragons, remembering past lives, or hearing trees sing are labeled as “make-believe” or “crazy talk.”
The narrow world of consensual reality is relatively predictable and “safe” (or at least the hazards are pretty straightforward and understandable). But it is also false in a way, because it is so restricted that most of “what’s out there” (or “in here”) is left out. It is like eating an ice cream cone and declaring that only the shape and size are real, and the coldness, flavors, colors, and textures are make-believe.
Scientists usually know a wider reality; at least they can measure invisible radiation, or the spectra of stars, or the movements of one-celled organisms. Their trouble, from a magickal viewpoint, is that they usually have a consensual reality where certain kinds of curiosity, or lines of exploration, are ruled “impossible” from the start: discarnate spirits, psychic talents, and the power of magick are examples.
Well, most people choose to live in very small boxes and pretend that anything beyond the cardboard is unreal. But magickal folk can peek outside, reach out a hand to feel the breeze, and occasionally crawl out of the box altogether. You can experience currents of magickal energy, the colors of auras, the underworld of the shamans, the astral planes, and the worlds of spirit.
Where to begin? Start by remembering what you knew as a child. What was repressed and stuffed away because your experiences didn’t fit into the consensual-reality box? Could you see things, hear things, or do things that adults did not believe? Things that you gave up because you wanted to be “normal,” to be loved? Perhaps it’s time to revisit the wider, more magickal universe you knew as a child.
Secondly, trust your senses. If you cast a circle and can see or feel the energy boundary, assume that what your senses are telling you is real, and go from there. If you call the quarters and sense elemental beings hovering just beyond the circle, act as though they are present and see what happens. If you invite Goddess to your circle and feel a wave of power, love, and joy, believe it—she is with you.
Last but not least, be still. Stop your constant activities, your business, your chatter. Turn off the radio, the television, the computer and cell phone. Get away from crowds and cities and traffic. Be in a solitary and peaceful place: then listen . . . watch . . . feel . . . sense. Then will you discover other worlds.
Energy from Emotions
Your emotions are an inner tool. Some emotions will be linked to memories: the rage you felt when the teacher humiliated you in Potions or chemistry class at school; the joy you felt when you realized you had won your first quidditch or chess match. Imagined events can also evoke strong feelings: the passion when you visualize a hard-won goal achieved, the joy when you picture your beloved returning to you after a long journey. You can also visualize real events or things you have seen on a newscast, such as natural disasters, and feel a powerful sense of compassion for the victims.
The point is that emotions are powerful, and you can evoke them intentionally, then use their energy to work magick. Indeed, magick done without emotion or passion tends to be feeble and ineffective. Thinking is important, but thought alone will not make magick happen.
Direct Mental Manipulation of Energy
Some magicians have an intuitive, natural affinity for certain kinds of energy and can manipulate them almost instinctively. We have all known potential elemental magicians. These qualities are especially clear in children; some can’t keep away from fire and act like budding pyromaniacs, while others are “water babies” from the beginning, fearless in backyard kiddie pool or ocean surf. Some kids are ethereal, intellectual Air types, and others remind us of the Earthy “Pig Pen” from the Peanuts comic strip.
You may recognize yourself already. If so, you have a double challenge: first, to develop and focus your natural talent for your favorite element, and second, to explore the others enough so that you maintain a balance in your life and your magick.
Your particular affinity might not be one of the basic four elements. Perhaps you connect deeply with solar or lunar energy, or the stars, or the night, or trees, or something else in nature. Whatever it is, pursue the connection and play or practice with the associated energies until you can actually “touch” them, concentrate them, and use them to influence the world. Once you have some real skill and experience with the energies that come most naturally and easily, then you can challenge yourself by working with others.
Visualization Plus Energy
An inner magick that almost anyone can do from the beginning is to visualize what you would like to happen, then raise energy and pour it into the image. Granted, some people have a much easier time “seeing” things in their minds, just as others can remember music or exactly how a dance step should go. But visualization is a skill that anyone can develop with practice (see the exercises at the end of this chapter). There are three important things to remember when doing this kind of magick:
- Visualize your desired outcome in great detail, with bright colors and images, and all the auditory and kinesthetic sensations included;
- Raise energy and put it into the image; and
- As with all magick, act in accord, taking practical steps to assist the magick in manifesting.
Inner Ceremonial Magick
Inner ceremonial magick is just like outer ceremonial magick, except that all the steps of ritual are performed in your mind.
The more rituals you participate in, the more easily you can create one in your mind. Still, even if you have limited experience in the circle, it will still be useful to rehearse the steps in your mind.
A lovely thing about inner rituals is that you can perform them anywhere in the world (at least within your mental landscape) or outside the world, with all the wonderful decorations and tools you like, and with as many participants as you wish. How about a Fire ritual on the lip of an active volcano, or re-creating the Eleusinian Mysteries in a Greek temple? Would you like twenty-foot banners with dragons embroidered in silk, floating in the breeze overhead? Perhaps a hundred flautists, piping a call-and-response from hidden places in the surrounding hills, would be evocative.
And there’s no sweaty hauling of stuff up the side of a hill, or trying to light candles in the wind, or realizing at the last moment that you forgot the chalice.
BUT—remember that a pleasant and colorful visual fantasy is not sufficient to perform magick. You must smell the pungent incense, taste the tang of the wine on the back of your tongue, feel the thunder of the drums vibrating through your whole being, and feel your perspiring body whirling in an ecstatic dance. The ritual must be vivid enough to open your heart and strong enough to raise the cone of power. That takes practice.
Magick with Virtual Tools
One of the pleasures of working magick, for many of us, is collecting, creating, and using the ritual tools. Younger Self really enjoys the taste of a cool wine or juice from a beautifully shaped silver goblet, or the feel of an elegant and well-balanced athame in the hand. There is nothing wrong with appreciating good tools as long as you don’t become dependent on them.
So it is useful to learn to do magick without material tools, and then without any traditional tools at all. After all, in an emergency you don’t want to tell the other shoppers in the supermarket, “Just one moment! I can handle this, but I need to get my magickal tools out of my car’s trunk. Oh, and could you trim these candles so they fit better in the candlesticks?”
Using virtual tools is a great transitional stage between ceremonial magick and intrinsic magick. You can use ritual tools exactly as you would in a normal ceremony, but instead of a material object, you rely on your visual, tactile, and auditory memories of objects that exist on the material plane but are not physically present with you. With as much intensity and detail as possible, visualize your favorite chalice, its color and the way the light moves on its surface . . . remember how it feels in your hand, its weight, its shape, its texture . . . touch it to your mouth, notice its coolness or warmth, how it feels against your lips . . . and so on. A tool used in this way is just as effective as one that takes up physical space on your altar.
You may also use virtual tools that do not exist on the material plane but are created on the astral. You can own and use any ritual tool that you can create in your mind. Want a wand of water-clear diamond, infused with molecules of gold at one end and silver in the other? It’s yours. Would you care for an athame with a handle of black Irish bog oak carved by the Sidhe into intricate faery patterns and a blade of alloyed gold and bronze forged by dwarves? Why not? Such a tool costs nothing, and you can have the best one in the world.
Allegorical Inner Magick
An allegory is a story that is not literally true but uses fictional characters, events, and places that resemble or symbolize actual things. Each “made-up” figure or place represents someone or something real in the human psyche and the universe, and when we understand the story, we understand ourselves and our world better. Allegory is related to myth, and one purpose of myth might originally have been to effect inner change by helping us identify with heroic figures who undergo transformative experiences. When we hear about Persephone’s descent into the underworld and how she becomes its queen, we identify with her on some level and learn to accept the cycles of life and even the need to descend into the dark places to find our power.
We can create stories that represent our lives and control the action so that the story affects what happens to us. For example, if you are facing major obstacles in your life, you might transform them into mythic boulders that block your way into a fabled land, and call upon Ganesh (the elephant-headed Hindu god known as the “Remover of Obstacles”) to help you move them aside. If you are struggling with an addiction, transform the craving into an evil king deep in a cave who tempts you with riches and comforts that will enslave you to his will. If you would have prosperity, ask yourself what qualities, skills, or actions would bring you wealth; then create a story in which you are the pure-hearted pilgrim who must find each of several magickal objects on a difficult journey in order to discover the dragon’s treasure hoard.
By creating your own allegory and putting energy into it on both magickal and mundane levels, you can make it come true.
Symbolic Inner Magick
Most challenging, in some ways, is the inner magick of the manipulation of symbols. The most common symbols we use are words, either written or spoken. Since we are discussing inner magick, we refer only to words seen or heard in the mind, not spoken aloud or physically written out.
Words are symbols because they are only a shorthand way to evoke or reference a thing, not the thing itself. Nonetheless, they can trigger strong emotion and move people to accomplish great things. To the degree they transform our consciousness and thus the world, all words are words of power.
Perhaps, in the real world, two armies face each other, fear and anger in their hearts, death in their hands. In your mind, a third “army” of ordinary people—children, women, and men of all ages—moves between them, chanting the word “Peace.” Could this visualization make a difference? It might. Billions of people believe that prayer is effective, and what is prayer but strings of words offered with heartfelt intention?
We can also use such magickal symbols as the tattvas (Hindu elements) and other elemental symbols, alchemical signs, runes and bindrunes (combinations of basic runes), the Tree of Life, I Ching hexagrams, and tarot pictures. Of course these are only useful for inner magick if you have memorized the symbols and their meanings.
All this can be difficult for Younger Self, which relates very little to abstract symbols unless they are closely connected with powerful memories or with strong sensory impressions. For example, a red equilateral triangle, point up, is one symbol for the element of Fire. If you have used this in a ritual that involved a huge bonfire, then Younger Self might have a strong association between this shape, the color red, and the physical embodiment of Fire. Otherwise the symbol might mean nothing to Younger Self; it has no more relation to “Fire” than a purple hippopotamus would. So you must be careful when using symbolic magick that you are not just performing a sterile, intellectual exercise: there must be feelings, juice, power, mojo attached to them.
Many symbols are strictly personal and have power or emotional impact only because they were important in our individual lives. Remember our earlier discussion of personal correspondences? Perhaps when you were small, your mother held you on her lap at bedtime and read to you from a book with a picture of a teddy bear on the cover. Ever after, that picture is a symbol of love and nurturing for you. You can work such symbols into your inner magick workings.
How does one use symbols in magick? If you have trained yourself, simply visualizing the symbol may trigger a certain kind of energy flow: you need extra strength, you picture the Strength card from the tarot major arcana, and suddenly you are more powerful. Alternatively, you can charge a symbol with energy, so that what it represents will manifest in your life. You can manipulate the energies behind the symbols by changing their size, color, or brightness in your mental picture. You can combine energies by visualizing two symbols connected or merging, such as combining the runes for “wealth” and “growth” into one bindrune. You can change your reality by “morphing” one symbol into another; for example, transforming a Saturn symbol into the sign for Mercury if your life is “stuck” and you want more travel and freedom.
One Goal, Five Inner Methods
As examples, let us look at five very different ways to do weatherworking with inner magick. Suppose you live in an area suffering a prolonged drought, while other parts of the country are flooding. After careful thought and discussion, your magickal group decides that it will be appropriate to bring some rain to your region. However, it would be difficult to gather for a ritual just now, so you will all do inner magick at the same time, each in your own home or workplace. How might you structure this work?
Direct Manipulation
You can pull the moisture in the air toward you, “calling the wet.” Remember how it feels to stand in a rainstorm: the cool wetness, the veils of swiftly sheeting water in the gray light, the sound of constant, myriad drops pattering on the ground. Your experience and memory of moisture allows your kinesthetic-psychic sense to reach out and detect a kindred state far away, and then attract like with like.
Visualization
You can visualize the clouds coming to you, picturing their great gray shapes looming over the horizon, spreading across the sky, blocking out the sun, filling the sky overhead. Raise power with a mental chant and pour it into the image. As an example, adapted from another chant:
Weave, weave, weave us the storm clouds,
Bring us the falling rain;
Weave us the hope of a new tomorrow
The land will bloom again!
Ceremonial
In your mind, create a temple with hangings of silver, blue, and green, and a statue of a rain or water deity (such as Tiamat, Tefnut, Zeus, Ganymede, or Thor) on the altar. Include a fountain with crystal-clear water cascading from a high place. Then perform a complete mental ceremony: asperge with water alone, cast the circle, and call the quarters as Water of Air, Water of Fire, Water of Water, and Water of Earth. Invoke the rain god or goddess, state your need, and raise power with thunderous drumming; since this is in your mind, you can have a corps of a thousand drummers of you wish, pounding on really huge drums, such as the Japanese kodo. Release the energy to its intended purpose, give thanks for the coming rains, and close out the ritual as you normally would.
For a simpler approach, you can visualize a virtual wand, either your own or the perfect weatherworking wand (perhaps wrought of lodestone and crystal in the eye of a hurricane); then focus your will, powerfully drawing the clouds closer and closer.
Allegorical
Visualize the spirit of the land around you, the genius loci, as a lovely queen in her beautiful castle. Her responsibilities keep her from venturing far from the palace. One day she discovers that the castle cisterns are dry and the fountains have failed; her people begin to suffer. She dons her robes of magick and climbs to the highest tower; there, she creates a shining beacon to call the elemental sylphs and undines, spirits of Air and Water who can bring the rains.
Symbolic
You can visualize the tattvic symbol “Water of Air” (a silver crescent superimposed on a sky blue disc). Make it into a gateway for cloud and mist, an irresistible funnel that draws similar energies, then expand it and reach through it to the distant rain clouds, drawing a filament of energy to connect clouds with the gate.
Intrinsic Magick, Pluses and Minuses
There are some obvious advantages to using intrinsic magick, at least at certain times and places. You do not have to carry props and tools, nor do you need to be in a natural environment. And the more work you do, the more confidence you develop in your own powers.
A potential disadvantage is that workings have less allure for Younger Self, since there are no colorful costumes, wonderful smells, or pretty tools on the material plane. And you need Younger Self to complete the circuit, so you may have to work extra hard on movement and a vivid imagination to keep it interested.
A second possible disadvantage is that you may lack skills in dance, singing, or other intrinsic sorts of tools. Yet this has its positive side, in that you are motivated to “push your boundaries” and improve your skills if you want to use intrinsic magick effectively.
To the extent that modern, well-educated, sophisticated people are willing to believe in magick at all, they find it easier to believe in magick with tools and props than in mind magick. Perhaps we are such dedicated tool-users, ever since the time that homo erectus broke a rock to get a sharp edge, that we have trouble imagining anything worthwhile happening without tools—whether they are stone hand axes, nuclear accelerators, or magick wands.
Yet amazing things, miraculous things, happen all the time with no tools at all. People have ideas that blossom into a Bach oratorio or the Declaration of Independence. People discover new ways to look at the world, perhaps seeing commonalities or connections and love instead of differences, alienation, and fear. People roam around inside their heads and hearts, and they discover beauty, courage, forgiveness, and the strength to continue.
So it is true that, with nothing but the resources within us, we can change ourselves and the world. It’s hard to do. Swinging a hammer or diagramming DNA chains on a computer is so much easier. But when you perform magick with your body and voice and heart and mind, not only do you get the desired effect, but you also have evolved inside; your intrinsic and inner tools have acquired a little more strength, and you have greater skill and understanding.
Exercises Toward Mastery
1: Breathing Varieties
Try breathing in a way that fills you with energy and makes you vibrate. Now try breathing so that the energy gently flows into the earth. Now breathe in a way that calms and relaxes you, almost to a trancelike state.
2: Voices You Didn’t Know You Had
Find a poem you like. Read it aloud in an Earthy voice; then Fiery, Watery, and Airy. Do it again, but speak for a longer time in each voice. Speak in a commanding, godlike voice and a compassionate, goddessy voice. Now speak in a compassionate, godlike voice and a commanding, goddessy voice. Speak in a voice of thunder and a voice of gentle breezes. Suck a cough drop.
3: Dancing Free
Put on loose, comfy clothing. Find a space where you can be alone and have lots of space to move. Do some warm-up stretches. Now dance all the same elements and deity energies that were listed in the previous exercise.
4: Make Mudras
Find a ritual gesture or posture that represents your favorite aspect of deity. Assume the posture or make the mudra. Now do it again, but visualize yourself as that deity; do it with depth and feeling and intensity. Make another, different posture/gesture to represent a sun deity, a moon deity, a warrior, a sea deity, a deity of abundance, a deity of love.
5: Imagination Calisthenics
As vividly as possible, imagine yourself as a truck driver. Now a Buddhist monk. A fisherman in a storm. A Russian ballerina. A Baptist preacher. A nun in a cloistered convent. A cowboy. A singer in a Las Vegas lounge.
6: Othersight Experience
Look at the world around you, allowing yourself to see what others will not, using other senses as well. Keep looking, off and on, for a week if necessary, until you see/sense something that is not part of consensual reality. It might be a human aura . . . a nature spirit . . . a ghost . . . an elemental spirit . . . a Sidhe . . . an energy charge in a talisman . . . a magick circle . . . or something else.
7: Sensing and Feeling Energy—One Kind
Choose one form of energy that you feel you have an affinity for and would like to explore further: Earth, Air, Fire, Water, Oaks, Stones, Chamomile, Rain, or whatever. Spend a full hour in the presence of that energy, discovering everything you can about it through observation and mental exploration alone.
8: Visualization of Your Future
In your mind, create yourself ten years from now, living the best life you can possibly visualize. Include all aspects: home, work, family, friends, activities, and so forth. Make it detailed and include all sensory modes.
9: A Virtual Tool Masterpiece
In your mind, create the most stunningly beautiful and powerful athame ever imagined. Do the same for a chalice, a wand, and a pentacle.
10: Intrinsic and Inner Ritual
Perform all the steps of ritual (attunement, cleansing the space, casting the circle, calling the quarters, etc.; see chapter 15) using intrinsic magick. Now do the same using inner magick.
11: Your Own Allegory
Describe your life in terms suitable for a myth, a fairy tale, an epic, or a heroic poem. Think of three directions the story could go from the present.
12: Magickal Symbol Systems
Choose a symbolic system and read one book about it or discuss it with your magickal teacher. It might be about the Qabalistic Tree of Life, runes, tarot cards, astrological symbols, alchemical signs, or anything that intrigues you.
Blesséd be.
To follow this path further, read:
Frogs Into Princes: Neuro Linguistic Programming by Richard Bandler and John Grinder (Real People Press, 1979)
Magic in Action by Richard Bandler (Meta Publications, 1992)
NLP: The New Technology by NLP Comprehensive (Harper Paperbacks, 1996)
The Structure of Magic: A Book About Language and Therapy (Book 1) by Richard Bandler (Science & Behavior Books, 1975)
The Structure of Magic: A Book About Communication and Change (Book 2) by Richard Bandler (Science & Behavior Books, 1975)
Trance-Formations: Neuro Linguistic Programming and the Structure of
Hypnosis by Richard Bandler and John Grinder (Real People Press, 1981)