Barbelith Underground > Temple > Making Magic Up vs. Learning through Tuition

Blake: "I must make my own system or be enslaved by another man's"

Now there's a little bugbear of mine, and here's a perfect place to look at it more closely. That Blake quote is reeled out time-and-time again as a special dispensation from on-high to create your own system of magic off the top of your head. So people sit down with a pen and paper and dream up "Rupert Wishbone, the God of Apricot Jam" or "Lenny Orthodox, the Saint of Rocksteady", they fashion a divinatory system based around the number of times the word "Stunner" appears on page 3 of the tabloids in a given month, or maybe feed their Cat some out-of-date tuna and try to see the future in its sick. This - to me - is a really superficial reading of what I think Blake might have been getting at.

I can't think of a magician of any consequence who has worked exclusively within the parameters of another magician's system. I think the task of any magician is to create their own system, their own personal understanding of the universe based upon their first hand experiences of magic, or else be enslaved by the second-hand accounts of others. You can't help it. You must create your own system or be enslaved by another's.

Now I don't think that this is necessarily the same thing as sitting down in a comfy chair and pulling a fantasy world of untested entities and untried techniques out of your arse. I think it's more a process of uncovering your own "system" through experiential work, trying to find the "truth" of your own personal magic, the heart of what you are about. I think its something that you uncover over the entire course of your life, over the entirety of your magical career, like chipping away at a sculpture and gradually revealing its true shape over time. It's not a fun little diversion, but a practical fact of the business of magic itself.

My problem with the whole approach of coming up with a fully worked out pantheon of spirits in the manner that you might design the cast of a comic book or create a scenario for a role playing game is that that is not "your system" in what I would call the Blakeian sense. All it is, is a creative game, a starting point that might lead you somewhere, but not the destination. You don't uncover and understand your magic by dreaming up its outward trappings in an armchair. You have to take the journey, and the sum total of where it gets you is "your system". William Blake's "system" was not a single closed creative work invented one spring morning, but something that was relentlessly explored and developed in word and image throughout the course of his life's work.

I think you can see this process of refinement of understanding, and constant elaboration on the various tropes of interest, in the work of anyone who has practiced magic for a significant period of time. Old interests that you thought you had put aside come back and reoccur in new forms and new interpretations. You begin to see the entirety of your career as one coherent inquiry, a single narrative drive that might weave through different stages but has a certain consistency to its nature. Your nature. Your system. Your magic. You literally can't work anybody else's and nobody can work yours. You cannot follow another's system to the letter, all you can do is grasp something from how another has gone about uncovering their own magic, and use that as an example of how you might go about uncovering yours.

I don't think the outward symbols, techniques, trappings and cultural setting are really what constitutes the individuality of a Magician's own system. For instance, I work with the Lwa and Orisha. I can think of two people in my immediate circle of friends who work with the same deities. There are obviously points of similarity here and there, but the whole process of interaction, the way we go about doing things, the place where each of us is coming from, is fundamentally different. I actually have a teacher in this stuff - in a very informal sense - but the way he does things, his magic, is totally different from my own. It's a whole different thing. Our individual working methods have developed out of our own unique individual work. The spirits we work with have imparted different aspects of their mysteries to us, things that are most relevant to our separate individual nature. Ostensibly similar nuts and bolts produce something unfathomably different in practice when interpreted through the magician's own personal creative vision. Our magic, if it is truly alive, cannot fail to express something fundamental about us and our nature.

Even traditions of magic that appear on the surface to be far more rigid and less welcoming of experimental divergence, such as the scripted forms of ceremonial magical procedures like the LBRP, are subject to the same phenomenon. I doubt there are two people in the world who interact with the form of the LBRP in exactly the same way. MAR's account of what he gets from it in the meditation thread sounds utterly unlike my own response to it. But my own responses to that ritual seem to change on a weekly basis and they always have done. It's never static. I'm always recording new insights and new understandings that I've gleaned from its apparently rigid structure in my journal. A parallel might be to watch a room of senior martial artists performing the same form, and observing how each of them interpret the motions slightly differently, how their different body sizes/shapes express the same intended movement. To really understand a martial arts form, you have to make it your own, find your own expression of it, bring it to life in your own way. I think magic works in much the same way.