Methods in Magick: Pythagorean Training
You ask for method, my friend? The method is in you, in hard work, a deeply lived life, and unabandoned visions. Paraphrasing master Goethe, you yourself are the learning.
Day and Hour of Jupiter
Like in sheet music for a symphony, every method in magick is a separate line of mentalese notion, that should be harmoniously arranged with others. It is not merely the utility of the act, but its aesthetics, simplicity, virtuosity, inner composition and beauty.
Not a single magickal symphony may be repeated, it is improvised a vista with each ceremony, ritual, act, performance. It is simultaneously composed, conducted, played and enacted. Similar to generating ingenious ideas with breakthroughs and moments of realization, ecstasy, silence and equipose, the process of magickal symphony is employing the whole of humaneness to the highest possible effort for reaching the greatest ground of metaphysics in the sphere of magician’s performance. It is a performative-intellectual sport of highly-pitched senses and a trained apparatus of “ecce homo” that requires no flatterers. It should be as natural as a homage accepted by an emperor, that no regular man would stand, blushing and shying away suspicious of the situation and sensing some deceit.
Indeed, we receive both homage and inspiration from various worlds that others undreamt of, yet - all for the sake of duty, beauty and destiny, as it unfolds and plays out to its utter completeness. Attempt but once reveal your succesful working to the vast majority of humanity and you will be laughed away and mocked, the reasoned will sceptically discard you, the naive will listen with interest to no true effect, the fools will attempt to claim the same, the fraudulent with employ charlatanry to emulate for the sake of gain! Yet the hardest ordeal is to be alone with the alone, solitary in the world of men in a crowded invisible world that others relegate to phantasy. Be prepared either for a great company, complete alienation and misunderstanding, or a nuthouse, if your leg happens to slip and your mind will be thrown into a disastrous state!
Here, rallying all the finest things that we may conjure, evoke, invoke, focus, catalyze, conduct, contain and master, we stand for what we truly are, we show our honest, true mask to the world. Mark of genius is the capacity to feel greatly and deeply, to harness oceans beyond one’s trifle single mortal life, and to envault the beyond, the orchestra of living majestic torrent of Platonic ideas into a single point of concentration that scrupulously notes down the observations than in a Socratic irony may not be conveyed otherwise than by a crooked, insufficient medium: be it in writing; performance; science; musical composition; theatre; acting; engineering, or any discipline that needs either passion, derangement, masterful self-control or great understanding, precision and technical acumen.
When you transpose a great work, a mere notation into the phenomenal human world, and elevate it back to the transcendent, the whole that encloses a man in perfection of the creative moment it stands monolithically above the uncouth, boorish ear, and only a figment of it may be heard by a trained, sophisticated ear, lastly only those who let the symphony lead them back into the artists magickal focus may catch the starry thread, that lifts an individual back to the genuine place from whence it stemmed.
Poor art may be immediately captured inasmuch as it leads to garbage. It requires no effort, or has very little to convey, for it is ultimately the creator that stands in front of his work. On this note, when the creator is poor in mind or understanding, even inspiration of all Gods, hellish glare, depths of Tartarus, and starry expanse of divinity will not be able to inspire him sufficiently, for him to remake it into anything of worth. A poor magician will never perform any thaumaturgy, at best he will be ensnared by his own delusions, at worst, captured and pocketed by a small cacodaimon that will create illusions in his head, merely to turn him into a plaything and watch how the poor idiot falls prey to his own bombastically inflated mind.
The prime responsibility of the artist is thus to develop his workshop, training, skill, coupled with experiential knowledge, intellectual humility and learning so that his mind is sensitive and receptive enough to the silence of inspiration. Whether that will make anyone into a genius?
That is a different issue. Great artisans and technical players are not necessarily marked by genius, and the genii is easily spoiled by pampering and lack of solid foundation in technical approaches that should be improved and embettered throughout one’s life. What they give on Earth is a by-product of work, no matter how handsomely done, one should think that his genius gives fruition on the other side, posthumously, where the toil in perfection is continued. Fixed with worldly affairs, one quickly loses the point of furthering his act, his art, his accentuated existence and rests on laurels that were never received, verily.
Yet, yet, how to achieve this method? For I indulged in theory and remarks for much too long!
The first stage is the synergetic Pythagorean pitching of senses, which is a method similar to sense-consciousness training in the yogas. This is a highly extended and perfected method of visualization for images held in in mental field, audializations for sounds held in mental field, for tactilization for haptic sensations held in the mental field, olfactorization, for scents held in the mental field, gustatory sensations for taste held in the mental field.
Mere enumeration, but at first extending the separate senses and focus on each one of them propels into consciousness of these separate systems, they need to be mastered in a degree capable of providing enogh backbone for further training. They should be treated as separate entities at first to delineate where they begin and where they end. When mindful enough, we may proceed to synergy and training visual-olfactory, or gustatory-auditory descriptions of the world.
At all times, these should be repeated and trained despite further progress, we can deepen them and combine them at will, preserving a sound mind. There are dangers to developing strong sense-consciousness, especially when the psychic energy is clogged in one of the arteries of senses, or when a malignant entity abuses our training for the purpose of generating false illusory stimuli. Let us remember, that sense-consciousness training should be at all times tied tightly with focus and concentration training, mindfulness, or meditation. The sense-consciousness should go where it is commanded, not where the “jumping monkey of the mind” tells us to, especially that our focus and concentration in the early phases of our training may also be abused by external entities.
This is the law of enantiodromia, the pressure of dualities; Even the finest focus, concentration and intelligence may be cut short by a leverage at the root from an unfriedly entity, if it did not resolve itself in a transcendent third that operates in a different proportion and allows safe work. The more we are swung left and right, the easier to exploit us, but also the easier to ingrain habits of radicalism on both side of polarities, killing the middle. We don’t want to become hardliners of two polarities, we should seek the middle ground at all times, if the middle is transcending the polarities, all the better, but that is a question of individuation and experiential and cognitive phenotypization of the person concenred.
When we mastered sense-consciousness we may progress to the illusory generation process, to visualize and subtly materialize objects, sounds et al. In the aethyric realm. We may visualize a triangle that tastes like an apple, smells of gasoline, and sings “My way” by Frank Sinatra. It is preferred to create things within one’s own aesthetics, and the old adage goes “you are what you eat”, and that is adequately self-explanatory, if you create ugly things, you will get an ugly mind and degenerate. That’s your own choice, as I don’t meddle into one’s preferences, but it has long-term consequences on the Karman and inclinations, disinhibiting oneself completely in chaos is only as good as you may re-integrate into something useful later, otherwise it’s a terrible mess.
Methods in magick will be an extensive course on technicalities and fine aspects of the art, that I would like to share for the benefit of some.
Genius Loci:
Music: Strauss: Death and Transfiguration - Hindemith: Symphonic Metamorphosis of Themes by Carl Maria von Weber, The Philadelphia Orchestra, Neeme Järvi.
Place: National Library of Poland, Warsaw.
Astrological Setting (Morinus):
