RITUAL THEORY AND TECHNIQUE

[icymist]

This essay attempts to say something useful about magical ritual. This is difficult, because ritual is invented, and any sequence of actions can be ritualised and used to symbolise anything ... but then something similar can be said about language, and about words, and that doesn't prevent us from trying to communicate.

My motivation for writing this is my belief that while any behaviour can be ritualised, and it is impossible to state "magical ritual consists of this" or "magical ritual consists of that", some magical rituals are better than others. This raises questions of what I mean by "goodness" or "badness", "effectiveness" or "ineffectiveness" in the context of magical work. I intend to duck this with a pragmatic reply. A magical ritual is "good" if it achieves its intention without undesired side effects, and it is "bad" if the roof falls on your head.

Underlying this definition is another belief: that magical ritual taps a raw and potentially dangerous (and certainly amoral) psychic force which has to be channelled and directed. Traditional forms of magical ritual do that and are not so arbitrary as they appear to be.

A difficulty in trying to understand traditional ritual is that it is framed within the world view of a time and culture. An example of this was the belief throughout medieval times that magic operated through the agency of an evil power. There were other explanations, such as the "natural magic" of the cultured Renaissance mage, or going back to the late Roman Empire, the highly sophisticated theurgic model of the Platonist philosopher Iamblichus. Each culture has interpreted magical ritual according a deeper theory about how it works, and it happens that many modern magicians have modern "deep theories". These have been strongly influenced by an eclectic mixture of philosophy and psychology, and I would say that this is one such deep theory about how ritual works, and hence a basis for understanding what works well, and what doesn't work so well.

An outline of ceremonial magical ritual (in the basic form in which it has been handed down in Europe over the centuries) is that the magician works within a circle and uses consecrated tools and the magical names of various entities to evoke or invoke Powers. It seems to work. Or at least it works for some people some of the time.

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