sleep. If not, you will need to work around this problem.
Something borrowed, something made…
There is a powerful magical tradition that everything used in a magical operation should be manufactured for the purpose by the practitioner. I seem to recall Crowley saying something along these lines: that the ideal would be to dig up the iron ore and smelt the iron, to grow the tree used for the wood, and so on. It is true that there is special power in a magical object that is consciously constructed from raw materials with the specific magical purpose constantly in mind.
But there is another magical tradition about the four magical implements that says something along the lines that the Cup should be given to the magician, the Dagger (or the Disk) should be bought by the magician, the Wand should be found by and the Disk (or the Dagger) made by the magician. This is also interesting, because it opens up the creative process to embrace many more valid forms of interaction. You could, for example, argue that it is impossible to mine that iron without first finding it, in which case it would be a gift from Mother Earth.
My recommendation when preparing for this, or any other magical operation, is not so much to be bound by a set of rules but, rather to expand one's awareness of the preparation to a more holistic appreciation of the provenance of everything that will be used. Buying a robe, instead of making it, need not be a passive act: for some people, buying things is a lazy option, for others it is a hunting activity that involves investigating, assessing, budgeting and many other skills.
In whatever manner you obtain your magical paraphernalia, do so consciously and all the time explore the symbolism of its provenance. If someone breaks one of the cardinal rules of magic and gives you their old robe to wear, should you refuse it? Or might it be more appropriate to first cleanse and deconsecrate it, and then use it in the spirit of a gift imbued with goodwill and kindness?
What I am implying is that each item in the ritual should not just be an object that fits certain specifications, but also something that has come into your life in a significant and appropriate manner.
CHAPTER FOUR
Notes towards a better understanding of my diary
A Thelemite's approach to a Judeo-Christian retirement
One big attraction of the Abramelin operation is that the book allows one to adapt the practice according to one's own religious beliefs—Christian, Jewish or pagan. And when it comes to prayer the text advises: “let each one speak his own language”, followed by some very sensible advice about not reading from a rigid script but rather praying from one's heart with conscious intention.
That looks pretty simple until one gets down to detail. There are plenty of instructions along the lines: “place yourself upon your knees before the altar”. These present some difficulty for Thelemites, who are exhorted never to bend their knees in supplication!
A more profound difficulty for me was that my religious inclinations at the time did not embrace any personal deity—I was closest to Taoism and a sense of a universal “way” that directed the course of nature. So, however freely I was permitted to adapt my prayers to my “God”, I was effectively praying towards nothingness. For some people that might present an insurmountable difficulty.
About a year later, however, I was writing the first chapter of Thundersqueak in which Lemuel Johnstone says: “what some people call hypocrisy, I call freedom of spirit”. The decision I finally made was not an easy one; I wrestled with it for weeks, but eventually decided to perform the operation in the thoroughly magical spirit of acting “as if”—as described by Austin Spare—or what is popularly advocated as “fake it till you make it”.
It will help you to understand what is happening on the following pages if you bear that in mind. During my oration, and at times through the day, I was adopting the attitude of one who believed in a personal God and prayed earnestly and with the greatest sincerity from that perspective. As you will see, that imagined deity did take on certain characteristics and behaviour during the course of six months, even if it did not take on visible manifestation.
The meditations
It was one thing to ritually throw myself into a state of theistic “energised enthusiasm” two or three times a day for the duration of an oration, but it was quite another thing to orient my whole life in that direction for six months. I also needed to adapt the operation to accommodate my True Will as best I could.
My inclination at the time was towards a sort of quietist Taoism that saw everything in terms of flowing states along the lines of yin and yang, with the paradoxical feature that each of these opposing qualities contained the seed of the other, and that kept them locked in the eternal dance of existence. My intention was to extend my “religious” Abramelin practice along the lines of Taoist meditation, circulating the light within the framework of the body, and so on. I took The Secret of the Golden Flower as my guide, together with books on Taoist meditation by John Blofield and others.
I think there are far more practical instructions available nowadays, but what was available at the time were mostly translations using teasingly far-eastern terminology that gave my western mind nothing very solid to chew on. Therefore, I was strongly influenced by the clear and sternly ascetic instructions provided by Crowley in his Eight Lectures on Yoga—summarised by Regardie (or someone) as: “Sit down. Shut up. Get out.”
Typically, I would sit in meditation, and control my breathing while circulating from the base chakra up the spine and down the front of my body, in a pretty standard fashion. I could not physically sustain a cross-legged posture, so I adopted the thunderbolt kneeling position. This lead to screaming pain in my legs as I arose after what was often an hour and a half of stillness three times a day. (Amazingly, I did get used to the pain, but it left me with varicose veins.) On the days when I write that the meditation was “good” or “successful”, it typically means that I reached and sustained a sense of utter stillness, mental silence, and often a feeling of being detached from my body as if floating far above it.
Strictly speaking, that state of still detachment was all that I should have aspired to, and any more complex or interesting phenomena should have been dismissed as mere distractions along the way. But I was not that accomplished. Instead I was often aware of things happening and “energy” shifts taking place inside me that seemed impossible to express in words. For these my guide was certain texts of western alchemy, especially those such as The Book of Lambspring that had illustrations that spoke to me.
I cannot explain all of this in a short introduction, but I will give one simple example. At the beginning of The Book of Lambspring there is a figure with the heading: “BE WARNED AND UNDERSTAND TRULY THAT TWO FISHES ARE SWIMMING IN OUR SEA”. Under the picture it says: “The Sea is the Body, the two Fishes are Soul and Spirit”.
It goes on to say paradoxical things about the two fishes being only one and yet two, and gives advice to cook all three together. What was the relevance of this?
As I sat circulating my breath in my body, at times I became aware of a duality within me that might be called yin and yang, or soul and spirit, and that there was value in simply holding awareness of these two, gently “cooking” them in the body rather than trying hard to analyse or differentiate further. And so on, with other alchemical images and books: I was reaching a state where words failed, but I could still find meaning and some measure of guidance in images such as these. At one point late in the operation, I describe God splitting into two: a very vivid experience at the
