A Manifesto for Man’s Place in Magic
In 2014, I carried all my ritual tools into a remote Bavarian forest and put them to sleep in the land. As part of this experience, the spirits of the land spoke back to me. I wrote down what I heard from them, and published it in 2015 as a two-part “Manifesto for Man’s Place in Magic”. At its heart, this message is about what we can afford, teach and relate to each other – the spirits to mankind, and mankind to the spirits. What I heard that day was the simplest, yet most profound message the spirits had ever spoken to me.
Looking back ten years onwards, I realize how central these thoughts have become to my attempt of reviving the ancient form of spirit practice called goêteia. Only once I had handed over – without reservation – my magical paraphernalia to the wet, black, soil, had I made myself lightweight enough to hear the message of the spirits. Just as a string of an instrument cannot resonate when it is overstretched and bound too tightly, so too was I unable to pick up their call before. What I heard then I called a manifesto — and I still call it that today — for those words struck me like the blow of an invisible hand - and opened my eyes to a new horizon.
Manifest, late 14th century, from Latin, manifestare - “to show plainly” or “to display by actions”. Probably from manus “hand” and -festus “struck” or directly from Latin manifestus “plainly apprehensible, clear, apparent, evident”.
In honoring the spirit’s address a decade later, I offer here a carefully reworked version of the original message. What follows remains faithful to its first form, yet carries with it a few small eureka moments that have revealed themselves to me along the way.
May the next decade of goêtic work be as raw and humbling, as real and sincere as the initial one.
LVX,
Frater Acher
I.
Magic was never meant for men. We made it our own. We tore it out of the earth and pulled it down from the skies. Think of Prometheus as a man who volunteered for a death of fire. Walking up the pyre all by himself, lighting the torch, throwing it down to his feet. Offering himself in the pursuit of what he believed to be withheld unrightfully.
Magic is the language of spirits. A language in which human boundaries of inside and outside, of thought and word and deed are all dissolved, and all forces coexist as one – on your tongue, in your flesh. Magic is a language in which every word comes for its price. As goêtes and magicians, we can choose to speak as many words as we’d like, even sentences, whole chapters or entire books. But we will pay for every word in blood and skin and heart and health – the only currency spirits can accept. Not out of greed, but as we have nothing much to offer up to them except for our selves.
Signing the spirits’ pact in your own blood is one of the most cynical metaphors our ancestors came up with. True magic will not just take your signature. It will take your fingers, and your hand, and your arm, and your chest and your heart pumping in it. It will take it all. Unless you stop uttering its words.
The paradox of magic is this: When you receive your end of the bargain, it will be too late to return it. Magic is a one way street and always has been. When Prometheus finally learned about the true nature of fire, it was through the burning of his own body. Like radioactivity, so also magic will never be met by the human eye, and yet it will affect the magician’s life more deeply and sustainably than any wound to the flesh.
At the edge of the Abyss all roaming ends and the tightrope begins. The Fool has no habitat here – and neither has the Wand, the Cup, the Pentacle or the Sword. From here on, we all walk naked – daemons, deities, and humans all alike. The only difference is that the spirits were meant to walk these lands, whereas we intruded them. We tried to steal their fire, to drink their water, and breathe their air. And look where it got us? Look what it did to us?
Once upon a time, this bargain was meant to be struck the other way around: Not for the human mind to penetrate the spirit world, but for the spirit world to penetrate the human body.
The human mind, once set free in the spirit realm, becomes destructive almost immediately: it roams and overrides, it opens locks and doors, it likes to sniff and smell and lick and pinch. And it’s by its greedy touch that the human spirit turns the inner world raw and infertile. Such effect is not ill-spirited, but only natural. The human mind follows the urge of curiosity, just like a virus follows its urge to multiply. Unfortunately, both are hugely destructive if not contained. That is why nature decided to lock the human mind into the most complicated of prisons and seal it with the thickest of walls: Inside the human brain, buried behind neurons and under deep tissues, hidden behind layers of blood and bone skin. And yet, it escapes… The physical world is intended to be a prison for a good reason. Because in 99 out of 100 cases, we do not hold the capacity to control the powers we were granted. Which is why magic is a language humans were never meant to speak.
Instead, once upon a time, this is how the bargain was meant to be struck: The spirits and us, we both hold access to vast resources of very different kinds. The spirits guard and embody the raw and powerful forces of nature and beyond, all according to their hierarchy in the eternal chain of life. We, the human species, on the other hand, hold access to the most fleeting, the rarest and most ephemeral of substances of all: free will.
So, rather than stealing the fire from them, in this original covenant, we were meant to teach the spirits how to apply the burden of free will with prudence. In turn, the spirits would learn from us, may they copy recipes for disaster or true attempts of walking in wisdom. The spirits, on the other hand, were here to teach us about the force interwoven in their own nature: about fire and wind, soil and moisture, about life-granting, death-granting and dream-granting plants, about ores and minerals, fauna and flora, and the knowledge that awaits us in caves, under trees or at mountain tops. This covenant was intended as a balance of natural affordances – each species offering fallen leaves from the book of life they had turned with their own feet, that is, from what they knew through flesh and lineage…
II.
Now, different from the idea of signing a spirit pact with blood, the above is no metaphor. It’s as literal as magic will ever get: us as the teachers of the spirits in applied free will; the spirits as teacher of us in understanding creation. A pact of mutual affordances that seemed perfect when first struck; and yet revealed so many cracks and fissures to be derailed… Let’s examine a practical example to ground our understanding of these dynamics in everyday reality.
Think of the smallest of spirit creatures you can think of: the mighty elemental beings. They govern all the forces around us. They are the carriers of rain and wind and fire. They follow the moon, the seasons, and the patterns in the land. To them, we are the one exception from everything under this sun: this one species that doesn't follow any rhythm, except the one of their own hearts. Over centuries we have taught them to live in remote areas, retreat from humans as far as they can. Yet, they once liked to live right amongst us. Because by nature they are curious like we are.
Now, for humans to interact with elemental beings it takes no magic at all. We are constantly surrounded by their substance. In fact, we are made up of their echoes. All we need to do is to work on the matter we are created from, our own flesh.
Before human nature began to derail creation, leading a spiritual life didn’t mean to withdraw from the physical world. Quite the opposite. It was meant to immerse ourselves as much and as deeply as we could into this created world. Because we are born into substance and meant to die in substance. This is our prison for a reason and from within it, we explore, we understand the world. And by doing this well, and in covenant with the spirits, we begin to spiritualize matter. We do this not through magic, but through applying our free will in the flesh. It’s a path little travel, as we know today, as it demands a lot: We walk it by realizing, by understanding the full extent of our powers first, and then constantly constraining ourselves from exploiting them. For the Adept, it’s the effort of a lifetime to keep the sword in its scabbard. By this seemingly simply act - by not touching and uttering, despite knowing how it would be done - that’s how we affect change in the world.
As mentioned, to the spirits every human act is an example of applied free-will – even when we do not consciously act upon free will, but follow habits and routines, urges and intuitions. Not God is watching us constantly, but they are. Now, fortunately or unfortunately, the last thing the elemental beings do is judge us. Rather, they mimic us. Whichever way we behave, they perceive us, our human behavior, as the matrix for their own - within the tiny echoes of will that they own. Despite our miserable qualification, nature has us down as one of the spirits’ essential teachers when it comes to all matters of will.
That’s how man is creating the world he deserves. Not through physically destroying this world alone. But by teaching the very consciousness cells nature is made up of about the principles of egoistic, self-induced destruction. Our greatest good, our only own natural resource – the way we choose to apply our free will – leaves a mark on anything we touch. On the substance of life, on spirits, and, of course, on our selves.
I guess that tells us why the Old Greeks specialized in two forms of taming the beast that we are: Mystery cults and philosophy. The latter aimed to tame the beast of free will; the former the one of our souls. Whenever these two disciplines were pursued in parallel, there really was no need for much magic. Because why speak the language you’ll pay for in blood, if you can speak with all spirits of creation, simply by taming your own blood?
III.
This covenant of mutual affordances is not something we can opt out of. Neither the spirits, nor us. However, the spirits can choose to withhold large parts of their wisdom from us; our current scientific and technological endeavors are nothing compared to what we could learn from them in direct communion. For our part, humans are fated to teach the exercise of free will, whether what we have to offer is heaps of trash or a grain of truth.
Both etymologies of the words ethics and morals relate back to the idea of man’s character. The etymology of the word character in return is deeply connected to the idea of leaving a mark on something, of engraving a specific symbol or shape into something. As goêtes and magicians, we want to be particularly focussed on this process — of deliberately engraving the shape of our character in the words we speak, the acts we do, the flesh we enliven.
This strikes me as a crucial and often overlooked point: far more important than all the instruments of grimoire tradition — circle, robe, incense, book, and dagger — is this keen-edged sword: character. The blade with which we inscribe ourselves into the world, whether we will it or not. The blade of character cuts its mark not only into the outer, physical world but equally into the inner world. To know our character, to align and to raise it, to cultivate it like a garden whose tending never ends — that, I believe, is the most urgent work we can undertake as magicians.
Yes, to all magical techniques: we must learn to leave the physical body behind on visionary journeys, to orient ourselves in the inner worlds, to establish spirit contact with care, and to tend and nurture these connections upon returning to the physical world. Yet at least as vital as these techniques is our stance — how we show up, how we hold ourselves, how we let that tiny spark of free will, once placed within us, shine forth with prudence.
Do what you will, says the Auryn in The Neverending Story, echoing Michael Ende’s long engagement with the writings of Aleister Crowley. And in truth, each of us bears our own Auryn, each of us carries that emblem over our hearta. Do what you will, it proclaims, while celestial and chthonic spirits witness us, and attest to our own neverending story as we struggle to become a worthy expression of the divine gifts.
