Methods in Magick X: Proportions and Ratios

To draw order from a world of apparent chaos, we must recognize patterns. We must arrange these newly found patterns into proportions and intelligible, reciprocal relationships, frames of reference, and points to each other in order to arrive at any hermetic science at all. Normally, this pattern recognition is innate and readily available to us. Let us take the example of face recognition without getting into the neurocognitive aspects. The face is an external principle of our identity. When it is damaged, our fleshly identity can suffer, whether it is somber, grimacing, silent, or cheerful, vividly representing the character's movements. Its gestures and expressions represent ideas, emotions and feelings. The sculpture of our face represents traumas, dreams and reflections, rawness, roughness or a carefree, easy-going life. We can call the sum of facial expressions a general tendency, or let us put it this way, the accumulation of tendencies of facial expressions over time is directly proportional to a general inclination, if it really represents the inner states and masks, a manifest karman of that person.

The faces we encounter, the faces we forget, our loved and hated faces, it's like a great Greek theater of masks, so where is the essential personality? The Greek theater constructed identities through masks, and the masks we wear consciously, learned or unconsciously, are a social game of appearances. The Greek theater was honest, the actor did not grow into the role, but delegated his skill to a mask and acting. The most essential appearance by which we recognize our spirit is our face. I once saw the most beautiful face in the world on a starry night. It was the face of my old love whose spirit was consecrated to the Magna Mater, it instilled awe and wonder, sorrow and transience in my wretched, mortal mind, moved my old, dead heart to a form of semblance feeling. When I caught sight of it in the starry night, I turned my face away, I could not bear the pain of loss and longing, for somehow I knew there would be no happy ending in this story, either in life or posthumously.

Let me hurriedly explain why I have organized a short declamation on faces. Because the patterns of our identity resemble the patterns of daimons or inner values, worth and spirits, because between known and unknown faces we choose proportions of relations and ratios of beautiful and ugly, of qualitative and quantitative. We are all somehow in relationship to the world and to ourselves, and in the end the finger points to the universe, suspended in a direct question, "Why?" points back to us and asks "How?".

All hermetic approaches to high magic must recognize proportions and ratios and extract order from apparent chaos. "Every model is wrong, but it is useful" - wrote George Box; "The map is not the territory" - wrote Count Korzybski; Nevertheless, models and maps are necessary, and those that work approach our success as we bite through false ideas and delusions to arrive at diamonds of insight and experience-saturated, reasonably derived knowledge.

The open model of a hypothetical inductive-deductive method is a way to test hypotheses supported by the hermeneutic-heuristic model of imagination, the imagination supported by the knowledge of the sciences to prevent ideas that are intuitively correct but generally unfounded. How does this apply to high magic and metaphysics? Let us begin with an example.

We begin with the axiom "there are gods." What are the gods? We back this up with the Iamblichean argument that "gods are incorporeal, objective, and dispassionate, that they are in everything, and that they can be omnipresent." We continue the argument that "there are realms of entropy and gradation, and that the World is neither symmetrical nor chaotic, but at some level is unitary and indivisible." We have three hypotheses that we are trying to prove, the patterns that we need to order.

Let us start with the first one and assume conversely that "there are no gods". From a realist point of view and a materialist worldview, there are no gods, because a materialist has not seen, touched or experienced any gods, his model collapses in his worldview. If he sees an autophanic manifestation of a god or if a god avataraizes his body, he can further declare, "This is a delusion, a hallucination, I am going crazy." If he was religious in his childhood, he can retreat into religion as the nearest known explanatory atavism, like a frightened animal saying, "I am possessed, something is wrong".

Experience is everything, no one will convince anyone that gods exist, unless they have their own idea, conception or experience of them, blind faith is simply put, plain ignorant. All theologies derive from the axiom that "gods exist". A materialist may brush all that off and go about his life, convinced that he is dealing with a fantasy. And yet we are dealing with people who acknowledge the existence of gods who have experienced them, seen them, or been inspired to believe in them. And now the second argument: how do we know that gods are "objective, passionate, and in everything?" Since the scale between unity and difference, order and chaos is a gradation, we can assume that more unified forces in the universe are directly proportionally extended, so that what is extended, like space, must necessarily be objective and profound. The more diverse the forces are, the more subjective, quarrelsome and combative they become. They are incorporeal, so they are not subject to the passions, the instincts of the generative biological world, but neither do they contradict it.

It is a different vantage point of perspective and perception, and we can't exchange perspectives with daimons and Gods, until we become them. When space and objectivity are connected with incorporeality, they can be omnipresent, there is no "above and below" here, there is only the right or deceived perception, perceive in the right way and you will see gods, perceive in a distracted, strongly materialistic way and you will see only what is in front of you. How is it that a girl in the USA summons Hecate and another in Greece, Athens, does the same and when they are successful, the delegated masks of power called "Hecate" appear to support their operation? This is because they are invoking a manifestation of a reflection of this goddess who is omnipresent as a force in their domain. Reminds me of the title of Campbell's books "Masks of God", well - E Pluribus Unum.

As you see, we have a pattern, we establish certain proportions and try to explain them, then we experiment with them to reach conclusions. Similarly, we can encode certain laws in symbols, in sigilia, in rectified concepts and usee them as signs of condensed experiences that we can manipulate and play with finesse. In this way we build our own library of a Glass Bead Game that we can operate on mental, astral, pneumatic and artistic-intellectual levels with high degree of success.