Low Magick: It's All In Your Head ... You Just Have No Idea How Big Your Head Is - Lon Milo DuQuette 2010
The Dogma & Rituals of Low Magick (Dogme et ritual de la bas magie)
Were the world understood.
Ye would see it was good.
A dance to a delicate measure.
ALEISTER CROWLEY4
I confess that the title of this chapter was intended to be a gentle poke at the great nineteenth-century esotericist, Eliphas Lévi, and his classic work, The Dogma & Rituals of High Magic.5 Please don’t assume that my irreverent little presumption is in any way an attempt on my part to compare my own work with Lévi’s immortal text. Indeed, they are as different as day and night—or should I say high and low? (See how easily I have given myself a segue.)
I feel the necessity to establish here at the outset what I mean by the words “high magick” and “low magick.” To be perfectly frank I’ve become very uncomfortable with both terms. They are each, in my opinion, universally misunderstood, misused, misapplied, misrepresented, and misinterpreted.
Some ceremonial magicians label their craft high magick to haughtily distinguish their art from the low magick of witchcraft. Conversely, some witches and Neopagans use the term sarcastically to brand ceremonial magicians and their ilk as snobs. Practical Qabalists, who presume their studies to be the only true high magick, use the terms to distance themselves from both ceremonial magicians and witches.
There are others who simply define low magick as being all things nature-based (outdoor magick), as opposed to ceremonial magick, à la the formal rituals of the Golden Dawn6 or Aleister Crowley7 (indoor magick). Here the terms low and high are diplomatically construed by both schools as being morally neutral; the two merely differing in character and application, and appealing to different spiritual personalities and tastes. Here, both the high and the low magician are relatively happy in their own worlds performing their own brand of magick.
There are many others, though, who define the highness and lowness of magick in ways that go way beyond discussing the differences between working in a lodge room temple or outside in a grove. For these people, “high magick” refers to a formal process of effecting change in one’s environment by enlisting the aid of God and a heavenly hierarchy of good archangels, angels, intelligences, and spirits; and “low magick” refers to a formal process of effecting change by enlisting the aid of the devil (or devils), fallen angels, and infernal evil spirits and demons.
Obviously, in order to seriously consider the virtues of this perspective, a person must first be committed to a very particular (some might say “draconian”) view of spiritual reality—one that is supported (or so the argument goes) by the scriptures and doctrines of the Christian, Moslem, or Jewish religions. For convenience sake, I will henceforth collectively (and respectfully) refer to these Bible-based religions by a term I coined just for conversations such as this. The word is:
“Chrislemew.”8
One popular interpretation of these doctrines posits that humans are caught in the middle of a perpetual war between the armies of an absolutely good God in heaven above, and the minions of an absolutely evil devil in hell below. For reasons known only to God, the devil and his team have been placed in charge of human life on earth. Furthermore, according to this theory, God has especially charged the devil with the duty of tempting and tormenting human beings—perpetually prodding us to rebel against a curiously complex catalogue of commandments and divinely decreed roster of rules, irrational beliefs, and blindly obedient behavior that (if we follow the program faithfully) might9 earn for us after death a ticket to eternal happiness in heaven with God and his good angels.
This parochial and highly polarized way of looking at things makes everything pretty simple. God is good. The devil is bad. Angels are good. Demons are bad. Heavenly stuff is high. Infernal stuff is low. For those who subscribe to the Chrislemew worldview, the choice of whether to pursue the path of high or low magick is a no-brainer. After all, who in their right mind would prefer to dabble with dangerous and deceitful evil demons from hell when instead one can safely seek the heavenly aid of the wholesome and well-behaved good angels of God Almighty?
From his high horse of spiritual piety, the high magician looks down upon low magicians who, in order to accomplish their nefarious ends, stand ready and willing to proffer their reprobate souls to the evil spirits in exchange for the fleeting power to be naughty—to harm an enemy, bewitch a neighbor’s cow, or bed an otherwise unwilling partner.
There are many people in the world today (magicians and non-magicians alike) who believe quite literally that the above arrangement is the only spiritual game plan in town. It is certainly their right to do so; after all, for many of us this God/devil, heaven/hell, angel/demon morality play is the familiar foundation upon which the perversely comfortable “faith of our fathers” was built.
While I certainly do not wish to offend anyone’s sincere spiritual beliefs (and I hold my hand up and swear, “Some of my best friends are Chrislemews!”), I must, however, be honest. I do not believe in such an all-good anthropomorphic god. Neither do I believe in an all-evil anthropomorphic devil. I don’t believe in a heaven where I’ll be rewarded for believing correctly or a hell where I’ll be punished for my unbelief. In fact, I believe there is something terribly wrong and spiritually toxic with this entire picture—dangerously and tragically wrong—a wrongness that has plagued the Western psyche for millennia; a primitive and superstitious phantasm of the mind; a nightmare that has infected the human soul with the virus of fear and self-loathing; a cancerous curse that demands that every man, woman, and child surrender to the great lie that would make us believe that our very humanness makes us unclean and damned in the eyes of a wrathful deity.
Does my rejection of a too-literal interpretation of the scriptural worldview of the Chrislemews make me an atheist? For those who adhere too tightly to their doctrines, I guess it does—but it certainly does not from my point of view.10 I most ardently believe in (indeed, I worship) a supreme consciousness that is the ultimate source of all manifest and unmanifest existence. I believe that you and I and every other monad of existence are components of the supreme consciousness. My morality (if you insist on calling it that) is based on my conviction that the ultimate nature of this super-existence is transcendently Good—a Good we can never adequately define with our words or understand with our meat brains—a Good so all-comprehensively infinite that there can be nothing outside of itself—not even nothing.
There can be no opposite of this great Good. The Goodness of supreme existence is spelled with the largest capital “G” imaginable. I call it the:
“Great G.”
(There I go again, making up words. Well … get used to it, because I’m going to use this one a lot!)
This Great G swallows up the concept of duality. It neutralizes all concepts that remain so small that it is possible for them to have opposites—ideas such as a god who is so small and incomplete that there is an outside-of-himself where a pesky devil can go running around causing trouble; ideas such as darkness and light; good little goods and evil little evils; little highs and little lows.
Perhaps the brains of our ancestors were not developed enough to grasp the idea of the Great Goodness of supreme existence. After all, in the ages when the Chrislemew and proto-Chrislemew doctrines were invented, our minds were yet unexpanded and unburdened by thoughts of gravity, or the speed of light, or the rotation of the Earth or its orbit of the sun, or black holes, or the nature of space-time. Perhaps back then it was impossible for us to wrap our minds around a reality that didn’t spring solely from the primitive fear-based motivations of reward and punishment, pain and pleasure. Perhaps then—but not any longer!
After nearly forty years of magical study and practice, I’ve come to the conclusion that magick is magick. It is a spiritual art form by which we collect and direct a natural and neutral force whose source is the supreme intelligence—the supreme consciousness. In the right hands and under the right circumstances, the application of magick can be creative or destructive, helpful or harmful. It is not the magick is that is good or evil, or high or low—it is the magician.
No matter how pious and virtuous one may believe oneself to be—no matter how seemingly altruistic one’s motives—no matter how precise and eloquently one executes the invocations to enlist the favor of God and the services of his angels, a magician who has not yet grasped this big picture and achieved a significant measure of spiritual maturity, mental stability, and purity of heart is not yet equipped to recognize relative good from relative evil. Like a marksman firing a powerful weapon in the dark, the naïve or superstitious magician is incapable of accurately hitting the mark or determining what magical actions will or will not be in his or her best interests. Conversely, if the magician is in touch with the Great G, there is no devil too evil, no angel too fallen, no demon too foul to be redeemed and pressed into the service of the Great Work.
And so, at the very beginning of my little book, I hereby confess that my title is a facetious and mischievous blind. It is with my tongue planted firmly in my cheek that I use the term “Low Magick” to describe the magical operations that follow. However, please don’t think that by using the term I am being silly for silliness sake.
Many years ago, as a naïve and desperate young magician, I evoked Orobas, a demon from the Goetia,11 for the purpose of turning around my impoverished and chaotic life circumstances—to save my family, to provide materially for my wife and child, and to give me the emotional stability to pursue the Great Work. In my naïve and inexperienced mind, it was an act of black magick—an encounter with the devil himself that I was prepared to perform against my teacher’s wishes. In fact, when I told her I had become so desperate that I intended to go through with it, she flatly forbade it. When I asked her if she had ever performed such an operation, she said, “Certainly not! That’s low magick.”
In an act of magical disobedience, I did it anyway. I knew I had to. I had to succeed because the consequences of failure at that point in my life were unthinkable. I was fearful and clumsy. The operation almost immediately turned into a terrifying and traumatic comedy of errors that more resembled an industrial accident and a nervous breakdown than a magical ceremony. The climax of the ceremony was a life-and-death confrontation and struggle with the real demon responsible for my miserable situation—me.
The whole crazy business seemed to pull out of my guts the very worst in me—my worst fears—the worst aspects of my character—my worst insecurities and feelings of shame and guilt. I didn’t know it at the time, but that was exactly what was supposed to be happening. That’s what Solomonic magick is all about. The worst in me was my problem. The worst in me was the demon. When it finally dawned on me that I had successfully evoked the demon, and I had the worst of me trapped in that magick Triangle, I had no alternative but to harness and redirect its monstrous power and give it new marching orders. From then on, that particular demon would be working for me rather than against me.
I’ll spare you the details,12 but suffice to say within minutes of concluding my bumbling act of low magick, a dramatic event occurred that set into motion a chain of events that, with breathtaking speed, accomplished everything I asked Orobas to deliver. But the real miracle was not the magical quid pro quo of a demon bent to obedience by the will of a magician, but the miracle of a magician who had redeemed a better demon of his nature. When the fiasco was over, I was a different person—a person who would save his family, provide materially for his wife and his child, and in the days and months and years ahead, clutch onto just enough emotional stability to pursue the Great Work.
In the first sentence of this chapter, I referred to Eliphas Lévi as “the great nineteenth-century esotericist.” I did not call him a magician. Even though Monsieur Lévi is universally lauded as the father of modern high magick, he was not a practicing magician. He was a brilliant scholar, a holy man, a teacher, and a magical philosopher, but, with the exception of one curious necromantic experiment that he confessed was not at all successful, he did not practice magick.
I do practice magick. In fact, I now view my entire life, waking and sleeping, to be a continuous magical operation. And so, gentle reader, for the duration of this book, the stories I shall tell of magical operations that I have actually done rather than just read about, performed rather than just discussed, experienced rather than just fantasized, and executed rather than merely mused upon—I will affectionately and unapologetically call acts of “low magick.”
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4 Aleister Crowley, Collected Works, Orpheus. Vol. III (Homewood, IL: Yogi Publications, 1978), 217.
5 Eliphas Lévi (1810—1875), pseudonym of Alphonse Louis Constant. Dogme et ritual de la haute magie was first published in 1854. Published most recently as Transcendental Magic, translated by A. E. Waite (York Beach, ME: Weiser Books, 2001).
6 Founded in 1888, the Order of the Golden Dawn was arguably the most influential magical society of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Aleister Crowley joined in 1898 and would soon become the catalyst in the events that would bring about the Order’s destruction. The basic degree structure of the Golden Dawn would serve as the model for Crowley’s own magical order, the A
A
7 Ibid.
8 See my book Angels, Demons & Gods of the New Millennium (York Beach, ME: Red Wheel/Weiser, 1997), 156.
9 Unfortunately, for the Christian born without “grace,” right belief or good behavior in life will not be enough to save him or her from the dreadful flames of eternal hell. Sorry.
10 After all, I can’t be an atheist. I’m a Freemason!
11 The Book of the Goetia of Solomon the King. Translated into the English Tongue by a Dead Hand and Adorned with Divers Other Matter Germane Delightful to the Wise, the Whole Edited, Verified, Introduced and Commented by Aleister Crowley. Most recent edition with engraved illustrations of the spirits by M. L. Breton and foreword by Hymenaeus Beta (York Beach, ME: Samuel Weiser, 1996). Known as the Lesser Key of Solomon, it is the First Book of the Lemegeton (c. 1687). Translated by S. L. MacGregor Mathers (the “Dead Hand” referred to in the full title above). From the British Library Sloane Manuscripts nos. 2731 and 3648.
12 I describe this incident in greater detail in several other places in my previously published works, especially My Life with the Spirits: The Adventures of a Modern Magician (York Beach, ME: Red Wheel/Weiser, 1999).