Original Magic: The Rituals and Initiations of the Persian Magi - Michael M. Hughes 2018

The Ritual Mind
Preparation for Ritual

Working effective magic requires that you learn how to shift your consciousness into what I call the “ritual mind,” otherwise known as an expanded or altered consciousness or trance. You enter light versions of it when you’re caught up in a good novel or when you’re driving and forget how you got from point A to point B, and you can slip into it when you’re hovering between sleep and waking. But doing it intentionally requires a little practice. Without the proper focused and heightened consciousness, your rituals will be empty actions, with no more magical effectiveness than brushing your teeth.

Luckily, ritual itself is an effective tool for getting into the proper headspace.

The ritual mind is similar to a meditative state, but different in that while meditation is largely an inward-focused experience, usually with closed eyes, ritual mind requires physical action and outward-directed activity. It can be thought of as an active meditation.

A large number of time-tested techniques can help you transition from normal waking consciousness into the transmundane realm where magic manifests. Those techniques include stimulation (or dampening) of the senses, controlled breathing, visualization, words of power, posture and gesture, chanting, drumming, dance and movement, music, and psychoactive substances.

Combining techniques tends to work synergistically. In many of the spells in this book, you’ll utilize breathing, posture, visualization, movement, and words of power. You’ll stimulate your senses with colored candles, music, and incense.

Let’s look at some of these individual elements:

Stimulation or Dampening of the Senses

Sensory stimulation involves light, color, smell, taste, and touch. Sensory dampening is created with darkness, closed eyes, and silence. Sensory deprivation (float) tanks are the ultimate in sensory dampening technology, and a great way to experience deep relaxation and heightened inner visionary states.

Controlled Breathing

Focused breathing is a critical tool for magic. Slowing, deepening, and holding of the breath has powerful physiological and mental effects, calming the body and mind, while quickening the breath stimulates and energizes. Unless otherwise specified, always breathe slowly and deeply when working magic.

Visualization

Some people are better than others at visualizing, but everyone can get better by practice. If you’re feeling frustrated by instructions to visualize during your spells, try your best to imagine or experience the visual instead of seeing it. The more senses you can involve the better. If you’re invoking elemental water in a consecration ritual, for example, feel its coolness, hear its rushing currents, and taste it on your tongue. If a spell suggests visualizing your candidate winning an election, feel the endorphins rushing through your bloodstream as the winner is announced, hear the crowds cheering, and imagine yourself celebrating with friends. Feeling can be just as effective as traditional visualization in spellwork.

Words of Power

Spells utilize words differently from casual speech. Ritual words are weighted with meaning and depth, and the best spells resonate like great poetry. Some words can be intoned—drawn out and vibrated. Sometimes words that sound nonsensical or meaningless (voces magicae) can trigger powerful energies. Words or phrases can be sung, chanted, or whispered to create specific effects.

Posture and Gesture

Many spells call for adopting specific postures or using gestures to change consciousness or channel energy. The hands are frequently employed in ritual to sense, direct, contain, or concentrate energies. In Hinduism and Buddhism these hand gestures are called mudras.

Chanting

Repetitive chanting can induce a very deep state of expanded awareness, which is why it is widely used in many different spiritual systems.

Drumming and Percussion

Drumming is one of the oldest methods of trance induction and is a staple of many indigenous shamanic systems. Modern trance and electronic music works similarly to bring large groups into altered states, and it is often combined with psychoactive substances to further heighten consciousness. If you own a drum, practice different rhythms to see how they change your consciousness. You can also purchase recordings of drumming for shamanic induction.

Dance and Movement

Dance is often accompanied by drums and rhythmic instruments but can also be done in silence. One of the best ways to enter trance is to put on simple, rhythmic music and let yourself free-form dance. Let the energy of the music drive your body and avoid conscious control. Like the saying goes, dance as if no one is watching—which should be easy if you’re alone.

Of course, that begs the question—if you believe in an animist universe, are you ever really alone?

Music

Music is an amazingly diverse tool for altering consciousness. A song can inspire men to march to war, lift a crowd to ecstasy, or bring a rapt audience to tears. Think of songs from your childhood and adolescence and the immense depths of emotion they can stir, taking you back to peak moments in your life.

Music can also enhance ritual consciousness and help direct magical energy during magical workings. I suggest using sacred music, which is specifically designed to transport you from the monkey-mind into the realm of the spirit. Not the music you listen to solely for pleasure, but music that tunes the frequency of your environment.

This is a matter of taste, of course. I’m not a fan of anything that you’d hear coming from a boom box while getting your chakras adjusted at a holistic healing expo — in fact, I’m allergic to most music that falls into the new age category, especially Native American flutes played by non-Natives and backed with incongruous tinkly chimes, tablas, and synth swirls. Blech.

Chants (especially Gregorian and Tibetan) take me very deep very quickly, but try to get the straight-up vocal recordings and avoid those layered with synthesizers and other superfluous aural junk. Singing bowls are nice, too. Indian classical ragas and devotional chants can be powerful trance inducers, and if you’re into Western classical music, Chopin’s nocturnes are exquisitely calming and elevating preritual options.

You might want to try environmental recordings, particularly of ocean, woodland, and jungle settings. The Tintinnabulation CD (see resources), composed of layered, computer-modulated bells, is more of a deeply felt than heard soundscape and is useful for all sorts of meditations and magical workings when melodic music would be a distraction.

If you’re working with deities of a particular pantheon, such as Greek or Egyptian, you can seek out music reconstructed from their classical worship. When invoking Hermes, for example, I often use re-creations of ancient Greek music played on traditional instruments like the lyre and kithara. Streaming music services make finding such music easy, and the goddesses and gods seem to appreciate the effort.

I don’t use music during most workings, but I do use it beforehand to tune my environment and to help me get into a ritual mindset. Experiment and see what works best for you.

Psychoactive Substances

Although I find psychoactive substances extraordinarily valuable in many ways, I generally avoid using them before or during rituals. Your goal should be to reach powerful altered states via focused ritual activity alone, particularly when you are a beginner. Adding the unpredictable effects of drugs or alcohol will slow your progress considerably, and may give you an illusory sense of progress.

Once you are competent at getting to the proper state of consciousness through ritual, you can then consider experimenting with substances. But that is a road for very experienced witches and magicians, not novices, and even then, it must be done conscientiously and intelligently. If you want to explore shamanic paths that utilize entheogens be sure to use adequate precautions (especially in regard to the quality of your materials) and take care to know the laws in your region.

Under no circumstances should you ever take a psychoactive plant just because it’s in a book about witchcraft. Many witchy plants in the historical record, such as henbane, belladonna, Datura, and mandrake, can seriously derange or even kill you. Be wary of plant-based concoctions bought over the internet. The recent popularity of psychoactive “flying ointments” concerns me, as someone using too much or having an adverse reaction could easily wind up in an emergency room (or worse). Please exercise extreme caution when working with traditional psychoactive “witch” plants. My best advice is to avoid them.

Ground

When you finish a ritual, it is important to ground yourself and return to normal “mundane” consciousness. Stand up, shake a little bit, stomp your feet, and jump up and down. If your hands are feeling tingly and energized from your magic, shake them off as if you’re flinging water to dry them. The goal is to get back into your body and out of the deep ritual mindstate. If you don’t ground, you may continue to feel spacey, particularly if your ritual generated a lot of power.

It is also helpful to have a bite to eat. Chocolate is particularly good for grounding (not to mention delicious), as are spicy foods and sweets, and cakes are traditional postritual foods in witchcraft. Coffee tends to do the job quickly, too, as does an alcoholic beverage.

There are exceptions. You may want to go from a ritual directly to bed in order to cultivate dreams or hypnagogic visions. Or you may want to continue working on a project while still in the ritual mind state. But in the majority of workings be sure to ground, setting a clear demarcation between your altered state during magical workings and your Muggle mind.