Hands-On Chaos Magic: Reality Manipulation through the Ovayki Current - Andrieh Vitimus 2009

Basic Magical Tools

Basic Magical Tools

Before we talk about spirits, let's talk about magical tools a bit. Every paradigm and system will have a different set of tools to work with to get the desired result. To cover all of the different tools would be a ridiculous effort, but we can cover how to sanctify and empower objects using the techniques we already have learned.

Whole books could be written on the subject of artifact creation, and this should be considered only a basic primer to get us started. As you work more with the objects you create, new and inventive ways to work with physical objects will come to you.

Depending on the system, a tool might be a chalice, an athame, a bell, a wand, a staff, a rock, or even a dried pile of feces (and no, that wasn't a joke). Anything can be a tool. The symbolic meaning (and often the practical use) of the tool in many ways dictates how the tool should be empowered. Let's start off with some exercises. Again, it's impossible to describe the underlying process of creating a tool within every possible system and model, but these experiments will attempt to get you familiar with the process.

The first hurdle in developing a magical tool is what to make a tool out of. The first question to ask yourself is what type of magic are you going to be doing with the tool? While multipurpose tools are very compact, most people find it more difficult to reuse tools. If you have a general theme of magical work you are thinking about exploring for a while, such as love, prosperity, or vengeance, that theme will guide your subconscious mind toward a specific tool or class of tools.

Your Ideal Tool for the Job

Relax, clear you head by banishing, and sit in a comfortable position. Let yourself slide into a trance state while deeply relaxing, and think about what types of workings you are going to do (remember to keep a general category in mind). See yourself doing the workings entirely and feel the workings being done. What do they smell like? What is the temperature? Add as many sensory details as possible. What tools seem to come to mind as you are seeing yourself walking through multiple rituals with the same purpose?

Focus on the one tool that seems the most important in your meditation. If any thoughts come to mind regarding the impracticality of your item, let those thoughts go and try to relax to a deeper level until there is no internal critic. Use a mantra and a sigil to help get into a deep enough trance state. Take some time (thirty minutes at least) to study the tool. Come out of the meditation, and write down as many details about the tool as you can possibly remember. Drawing a picture of the tool or describing it is not a bad idea. Write down all the details, even the details that seem impractical or unworkable. Continue describing and drawing the tool until you think you have a good grasp on what you were seeing in the visualizations.

It's quite possible that no physical tool came to mind, and that you received a gesture or hand mudra for the work. However, your hands might have some markings. Pay attention to the fine details in your meditations because a tattooed body could be a great magical tool.

Often, if people have a lot of magical training under their belts, the tools that come to mind will be analogous to traditional tools. Their subconscious minds understand those systems of magic, and bring those "expected" images forward. This is perfectly acceptable, but if you want to try to do some more experimental stuff, ask yourself to provide answers outside of systems you already know (which may or may not be possible).

Once you have the description of the potential tool written down and drawn, put the description away for a few days. When you look at the description again, see how you can make the tool you saw, but be practical. For example, a human skull might be an impressive magical tool, but they are horribly difficult to acquire. Monkey skulls are much cheaper and easier to acquire. A fake human skull made out of plaster may be much cheaper to acquire, and a skull candle or a plastic skull (depending on the working) is even less expensive. A fully automated staff that moves and transforms in an anime style is indeed cool, but quite impractical given current reality and technological constraints (however, if you can make one, please, by all means, send me one). Likewise, a lightsaber has some technological implementation problems. However, the core of the tool is what we want to access.

Relax and clear your head. Focus in on the tool again. This time, look at the details of the tool and try to reduce the complexity to the minimum you feel comfortable with to do the series of workings. Relax, but focus on practicality. Many forms of motion, or beams of energy, can be incorporated into how you use the tool itself. Keep reducing the complexity of the tool till you feel like it is at the minimum level of complexity and you still feel like it can "do the job." Keep telling yourself that you intend on making the tool in the physical world and that the tool must be bound by the working rules in that world for its creation. Write down all the descriptions of the tool in its simplified format. The simplified "core" tool probably seems a lot more doable. Once you have a simplified description, do a divination to see if you can work with the tool you are thinking of building. Don't limit yourself; a tool could be as simple as a large rock, or as complicated as a laptop.

Once you have the essential description of the tool, add the diagrams. Plan out how to actually make or find the physical tool. First and foremost, an object that is given or found makes a good base for a magical tool because it is already "special" This notion could also be encompassed if you have to make a sacrifice (like saving money) to acquire the tool. If you have put this much work into developing a magical tool, it has the tendency to appear. Certainly, you can take everyday items that you already have and make magical tools, but you have to imbue those tools with a sense of specialness. We can speed up this process by using a sigilized mantra spell, as we were demonstrating in earlier chapters. If you want to use the tool for a specific type of working, make sure to use a similar state of mind and energy.

Some of the more fantastical elements of the original tool idea can be incorporated into the essential tool by using art. You can draw and paint the fantastical elements of the original on the tool you have found. Artistic expression is a way to imbue items with specialness.

The first time I did this, I saw myself with headphones, staring at what I thought was a PDA. I was looking at images on the PDA, while listening to loud music in a forest. The screen of the tool had a huge vortex spiraling out if it, bolts of lightning around it, and spirits appearing out of thin air. Of course, special effects were not the core idea of what I was trying to tell myself. The core idea was a small, portable device that would be used with inhibitory body gnosis while tuning out outside sounds. I didn't get a PDA, but I have an iPod Video that I do use for this sort of purpose, often for self-healing work (which was my original intent). It was the core of the idea that I had. My tool's name, Iggy, came from a passing joke someone else made, and it stuck (although my iPod has the full name of Iggy, the Techno-Shamanic Wonder).

The earlier meditations give you insight and direction on how to use the tool as well. In a pre-made system, that is handed to you. These might include states of mind, energy work, even visualizations or a certain series of motions to use with the tool. In essence, the tool itself is a link back to the ideas about how to use the tool to get results.

Charging the Tool

Regardless of whether or not you are pulling the tool from your subconscious mind or using a tool from a more traditional system, there are some underlying ways to work with and strengthen the tool. We have covered some techniques that can work. Before you charge a tool, you have to understand how the tool is going to be used. First, what does the tool correlate with? In Wicca, a wand might correlate with the Persian element of fire. Charging the tool would be as simple as repeating the exercise where we made spheres of fire energy. This time we would simply continuously push the "fire state" into the tool. Repeat this for the tool continuously for thirty minutes a day. After a while, do other people start to notice something different about the tool? Now, if it was a tool we had made for prosperity workings, we could imagine what prosperity felt like for us in all five senses and then push the energy into the tool, just like we did when we were making different energy spheres. If you have already developed and linked in an alphabet of desire sigil for a particular area of interest, that sigil (and any corresponding mantra) can pull forward that state of consciousness to push into the tool.

Although we have the sigil that links to that state of consciousness, we can certainly add gestural motions (similar to how the tool will be used) or body motions (such as seething), breathing experimentation that maps to the state of mind trying to be produced, and incense (or oils) that for you correspond to the state of mind. Anything that generates a deeper trance state that is in line with that state of consciousness can be added to the charging ritual for a tool. Keep in mind that a charging ritual for a tool could be as simple as getting the herbs needed to empower the tool and washing the tool with the corresponding herbs. A second charging could be as simple as giving life force energy to the tool, possibly in the form of blood.

For this method of charging to work, we must understand at an intuitive level how a tool will be used. For elemental systems, this means having a personal understanding of what each element is, and using that personal understanding to generate the force needed. Some systems use tools specifically keyed to one entity or one specific concept. Tools are used in so many different applications that you may just push your energy into the tool, or you might have to figure out how to map a sequence of memories that "represent" what the tool would do. Any established system of magic will usually have detailed instructions on how to charge or develop a tool within the system. If you do the rituals by the book at first, you can register the effect the rituals have on your consciousness and then rework the original rituals to something more personal and something you can effectively use at any time to really empower a tool. Your brain does not know the difference between a ritual state and a "real" experience. Focus in on the memory(s), bring forward the state of mind, and imagine it flowing into the tool. We have been practicing this with all the energy exercises.

I personally believe that if you are going to use a tool, you should charge it. There are several reasons for this that I will go into.

The Benefits of Using a Tool

Within a system, it is well known that tools serve as a focus for ritual work. Most systems will swear up and down that you need all of these tools. It has rarely been my experience that you need all of the tools, but I can't tell you what balance of tools you personally will actually need. The props get a person out of the "everyday" state and into the "I am doing magic" state. As suggested earlier, this is a critical step in downplaying the psychic censor.

Many of the techniques I am presenting suggest another benefit for using tools that even a master magician can benefit from. Tools can serve as energy batteries. While the people themselves might not be able to generate the "energetic" force for a particular working at the time they need the energy, they can continuously charge tools (possi ble with evocations) until there is enough energy for the desired effect, and then release that energy at the ritual. This is exactly what was going on with the shadow framework. In that example, we were charging a liquid (the tool in this case), so that when we actually swallowed it, we were imbuing the energies and information of a spirit. That spirit had been condensed into the liquid due to the repetitive nature of the charging. A more potent connection to the entity is possible. In my article, "Guerilla Conditional Lynch Pin Magick," which appears in Konton Magazine 3.1, I explore this possibility of condensing rituals into containers with sudden releases.

Using a tool as an energy bank has a couple of neat benefits that I personally like. First, it makes getting results in an actual ritual easier because charging the tool is a lot like a training exercise. Essentially, this loads a lot of the work of a ritual into a non-results-oriented setting. This is a good step because it removes the pressure to succeed, and I truly believe that when you are starting out, you need to do everything in your power to make the rituals work and get results. This will condition you so that you get results. Because the tools are so "aligned" with the energies and resonate better with the symbolic logic of whatever system you are working with, it becomes easier to have something happen in ritual.

Second, if there is an "energy bank," you can draw the energy from the tool itself, instead of expending your own energy for a given task. For instance, burning charged incense can release the energy contained. When you get really good at drawing energy from your tools in this manner, you can preload specific tools made for rituals that allow you to do more complicated workings, or workings that you believe will take more energy, since it is possible to break the rituals into steps. Later on, we will discuss this aspect of magical work a little more.

Third, charged tools like these can often form the physical basis of servitors, entities, and thoughtforms. In a way, if you are going to tie a physical base to a servitor (which we will talk about later), it is paramount to understand how to actually charge the base and make it sacred.

Physically Feeding a Talisman or Tool

In some cases and some systems, tools are fed physical food that prayers were said over. This is especially true of Afro-Caribbean systems of magic. Often, rum or a specific food is used to appease and get the blessing of a deity. But more than that, food, herbs, and prayers are often offered to the musical instrument, fetish, or physical base of an entity. Specific African and Caribbean systems aside, there is certain logic to this. When we experimented with the resonance and the sympathetic aspects of magic, certain fluids or combinations of herbs may have produced better results for a particular experiment. In themselves, herbs and various food artifacts do have some energy if you are working within that model. Obviously, human beings convert the stored chemical energy of food into useable energy. Indeed, sexual fluids and blood are often used as means to charge a fetish doll, or a tool you yourself have created. Both fluids do have life force energy in them.

This isn't to say how exactly a tool or talisman feeds off the energy in food, but who is to say general tools can't use an alternate method (outside of digestion) to pull the energy out of the food? I could use the life force argument again, but I leave that as an exercise for you, the reader, to decide for yourself. Of course, we don't need to know how this works in a detailed process, only to understand that it does work. From here, like the resonance magic, we can use certain types of food or herbs with the desired feeling to charge our tools and talismans, but the exact combination is one that you will have to figure out on your own. Now, in hoodoo, and most Afro-Caribbean systems, there are exact recipes you can use for certain tools. With tools tied to specific entities (generally known as fetishes), this is a tremendously easy and useful technique. However, in some of those cases, the prayers said over the physical offerings and the specific processes of finding the food are very important. Can you think of some ideas for tools that are fed energy from only physical sources (and not just blood or sexual fluids, although certainly try that as well)?

The Limitations of Using a Tool

The biggest limitation of using a tool is that you cannot always bring the tool with you. Reliance on the tool means you must have that crutch when you need to do something, and if you could do a magical operation without the tool, it becomes less important to have it. This is often the "critique" of tool use you see on the Internet. In practical terms, it is correct that if you rely exclusively on a tool to produce magical results, you will be in serious trouble if you have to produce a magical result without that tool. The classic case of a situation where you need to produce a result is "luggage lost in the airport." You need your luggage, and the magic has to work. Now, I have personally had lots of moments where I needed to produce a result without any tools. One time, I had to do a quick spell so my car would pass an emissions test (it should have failed). In this case, I merely cleared my head, picked a mantra from my internal glossolalia, and visualized my car passing the test. This was after many years of magical work, however, and after finetuning my visualization and spot-trance ability. Besides, I have always been good in a crisis, magically speaking. In this situation, however, if I had needed a tool as a crutch to do the work, I would have been in trouble. This is a very strong argument to try to wean yourself off being dependent on tools as much as you can. My personal take is that as you do magic, toolless ways of doing things will come to you. Many of the trance and energy manipulation exercises lead down this road.

This critique is not an argument against using tools. The energy battery, as well as staged working examples, suggest that there is more going on than merely the ability to produce results with or without a tool. In the resonance experiments, herbs were used as the tool for spell work. At least in my experiments, herb and mineral mixtures that seemed to work when linked to a purpose did hold a resonance longer than substances that were not linked to that purpose. In the case of energy batteries, I have used bottles to store pre-made spells that I did multiple workings over, which then get released. These spells had more power than what I could have produced in one sitting. Really, as is the theme of the book, the sky is the limit on what you can try. As you evolve, you will be able to produce results without the crutches, and your tools might evolve as well.

Generality of a Tool

The final topic in this chapter that I am going to address is how specific or general a tool should be. In some systems, a tool such as a wand is used for every evocation or invocation. In other systems, a tool might have a specific purpose such as summoning a certain entity. In general, the specifics of a tool depend on how it will be used. Now, in the earlier example where you were meditating on a general type of working, the intended tool you were thinking of probably could be reused. Sometimes, when I do this meditation regarding a particular working, I will use a tool that can only be used one time. It is important to understand and keep reminding yourself that any physical artifact can be a tool, just like any extreme mental state or memory can be a magical tool that can be used to get results. Sure, I have used common tools like the herbs, but I have also used uncommon tools in spell work, such as gasoline-filled light bulbs, a physical gun (shooting sigils at legal and safe ranges, a la William Burroughs), electromagnets, hydrochloric acid, and a lot more.

When I started to place spells into bottles and then redo the spells over the bottles several times, I would break a bottle to release the spell. This has a pleasant dramatic effect for me. Additionally, many hoodoo or folk magic spells use herbs or candles only one time. While it might not seem like it, these are magical tools, and you can charge them before using them, just like any other tool you intend on using in a ritual.

This might seem counterproductive, but remember that the point of a magical operation is to get the results you desire. If your intuition comes up with a way to do that, and you get successful results, does it matter? (Before answering this, remember that breaking some tools might cost a lot of money or cause other problems.)

Now It's Your Turn

Think about a few intents that you want to try to manifest in your life. First, do some research on candles and candle magic. Use any correspondence from any system that appeals to you. Do a simple sigil spell focusing on the sigil and mantra while the candle burns. Now in a different intent, charge the candle with the general energy you associate with that intent. So, for some extra cash, charge the candle with prosperity as you understand it. Do your sigil ritual and mantra with the candle. Now try this process with a third intent, but this time charge the candle with the general energy several times before doing the sigil operation. Which worked the best? Which ritual felt the easiest and the most natural at the end?

Now think about how you could use a laptop as a tool, or how you could use trading-card games, kid's games, a spatula, or even peanutbutter-and-jelly sigil spells you eat. You are only limited by what you can imagine. Experiment and play!