From Book to Practice
On Reading Magic with a Goêtic Lens
Trying to learn goêteia is a practice steeped in paradox. One such paradox we encounter early on in our goêtic journeys is the fact that this practice is primarily taught by spirits, yet it would be foolish to throw aside all books on magic. How then can we engage with the literary tradition of Western Magic, knowing we need to be suspicious of its practical value for the experiences we seek to gain? In other word: How to read magical books with an explicitly goêtic lens?
It was in my 2021 book INGENIUM - Alchemy of the Magical Mind that I tackled this problem in some considerable detail. I want to share this section here and expand on it a little, to help address this essential paradox more openly for any aspiring practitioner. Like the raw ingredients of a great meal, books are the most wonderful resources to supply us with mental nourishment. And yet, like everything else that happens in the kitchen, our meals will be tastier and part of a better diet if we have a basic knowledge of the nutritional value of all the ingredients and how to prepare them.
INGENIUM can be purchased as a Kindle version for $9 on Amazon. Personally, I prefer the hardcover version, as Joseph Uccello has done a truly masterful job with the design of the book, which doesn’t come across in the electronic version. Please note, as it’s a high quality print on demand the hardcover version may have a slightly longer delivery time. The book deals in detail with the question of how we open ourselves to an oral tradition with non-human persons. In addition, it explains the basics of Paracelsian magic, the magical tools of the adept and the magical practice of vision. In short, INGENIUM is the best introduction I can recommend to immerse yourself in the magical ecology I invite you to explore for yourself.
LVX,
Frater Acher
May the serpent bite its tail.
From Book
to Practice
Let’s shed a light on a core aspect of goêtic practice. This is the tension that a practice personally transferred from non-human persons to humans has with the written word. The practice of goêteia stands unapologetically outside the classical traditional literary lineages of Western Magic. We must ask then: How can we read traditional books on magic with a goêtic lens?
The answer I propose in INGENIUM is anchored between four key terms. If we can locate any book-knowledge neatly between these four concepts, we will have taken a major step toward our own authentic practice.
The easiest way to illustrate these four concepts is to ask two either/or questions. Of course, we find hybrid forms in many books, so these two questions are best thought of as two dimensions with extreme poles. In addition, it must be called out that these comparisons are gross simplifications in order to initiate a simple differentiation process. The questions then are: Is the content you are reading meant to be entertaining or safe to practice? And secondly, is it meant to help you think clearly, or practice cleanly? (See Figure 1 below.)
Let me expand on this a little. Initially, when we read a text, we must ask ourselves whether the content portrays a mythical or realistic practice. Here in our context these terms are not to be confused withe the opposites of fantastic versus factual. On the contrary, mythical here means that we are dealing with knowledge that requires a high degree of understanding and skill in order to validate its objective truth. For most people, occult explanations of the battle of Osiris with Seth, the Kabbalistic Qlippoth, or the events leading up to the Germanic Ragnarök are entertaining reading, without access to verify the veracity of these myths. This is not only okay, but essential to be aware of. As average practitioners, we are unable to test the phenomenological substance of these ancient stories – and return from such undertakings in one piece. The opposed reading experience is the encounter of content that is explicitly meant for personal practice, inviting not for orthodox repetition or acceptance, but the gathering of genuine first- hand experience. – Let’s keep this first dimension in mind, as we examine the second.
The second pair of terms we should establish for ourselves is the dimension between clear thinking and clean practice. This is the distinction between whether a text is trying to sharpen our intellect or inviting us to make first-hand experiences with our own senses. For most people, reading the Homeric epics, about practical alchemy, or the biography of John Dee provides insights that help refine and sublimate their mental treasure trove of knowledge and their inner sense-making of the world. However, reading an entire occult herbarium, magical primer, or grimoire through this lens would be incredibly boring. These latter books would be examples that, at their best, when they live up to their genre expectations, serve to sharpen the saw of our own practices and lived encounters.
Now we see that these two dimensions have similarities in what they help to distinguish, but also significant differences. Their value as a reading tool only unfolds when we superimpose them and recognise four quadrants (Figure 2 below). Now we have in our hands an instrument that helps us to see whether a text is meant as orthodox education or a record of oral tradition, as philosophical speculation or ancient myth.
In INGENIUM I present these four concepts in the two diagrams below. If you are in the business of extracting your own practice from the magical literature of the West, it may be worthwhile to take a closer look at them. I reproduce them here, followed by a longer excerpt from INGENIUM that elucidates how these considerations might guide our approach to goêtic practice.
In the course of the book it leads us to consider magic not as a craft, an art, or a science, but as a living relationship. For now at least, this is the most important foundation of practical goêteia that I can think of. It is only from this perspective that we begin to see how much work we as practitioners have to do when we read a magical text. For most of the literature of Western and Eastern magic is rather stunned and helpless when it comes to enabling us to form living relationships with non-human persons around us. Instead, they overload us with myths that have been embellished by human hands, with rites that must be performed this way and no other, with elaborate terminologies that are mainly meant to preserve interpretive sovereignty, or with encrusted layers of lore that obscure the meandering and messy reality of what were once oral traditions. As such, and in order to inject a healthy dose of iconoclastic attitude, I close the chapter in INGENIUM with this polemic:
I suggest, we look back for a moment to most of the magical source-texts of the Eastern and Western traditions, and ask ourselves how helpful their instructions are in terms of conscious relationship building? I’d argue most of this material isn’t even as refined and sophisticated as what I once read on a tea mug: “Be friendly if you want to fuck.” (p. 74)
Excerpt from INGENIUM (pp. 67)
[…] As lone practitioners we need to own the hard truth that there will never be a path paved for us by others. By the very nature of our work we walk alone, we learn and take from everything that is useful, and yet we don’t allow ourselves to be taken by the hand for more than a few steps. We will never feel the oozing social warmth of being fully embedded into a spiritual community of equals, let alone of handing over the map of our journey to a saint, a guru or a perfected master.
We are goês wherever we go, be it in Tibetan mountains or on Mediterranean shores. We work and learn from the spirits themselves, not from man-made tradition. The scaffold of ascent that organised religion is to many, is a fence to us. With this in mind, we do not accept any kind of human power hierarchies. We challenge ourselves to look at everyone as an equal or a role model at best — from Enoch all the way to Padmasambhāva. We don’t pray to humans, deceased or alive, however deified they might have become. Instead, we work with them and follow their path in our own footsteps.
Not because we want to, but because our work requires us to, we embody the unruly, comfortably walking on the edge of waywardness, driven by the pursuit of clean practice and first-hand experience. We allow the doors of temples to close behind us as we walk out into the wild. We are the stone fallen from the altar, never compromising freedom for comfort or critical thinking for social cohesion.
Where others seek a sound place of arrival, we seek the tension of possibly failing all by ourselves. Where others strive for gnostic ascent or enlightenment, we strive to become one with the inhabitants of the sky and the land. Where others aspire etherealness, we embrace all things created as divine. And where others idolise joy and happiness, we understand that a muscle that isn’t ready to be strained is a muscle vanishing.
Now while they might sound condescending to some, these reflections on the path of the lone practitioner do not entail any sort of judgement. A scaffold or a fence, enlightenment or ecosystem — natural objects do not carry any intrinsic value judgment; it’s the human desire to categorise and to control that adds the judgmental component.
When I contrast spiritual pathways in the above manner, it is precisely to highlight the diversity and richness of choice that we all have. Walking all by yourself bears the risk that you won’t make it very far; walking in the footsteps of others bears the risk of running in circles. Both risks are real, and the one isn’t any better than the other. But it is my sincere desire with this book to expand your choice. There is a lone practitioner’s path that doesn’t even need a name. It only takes you to walk it. You can take inspiration freely from all traditions of this planet, dead and prosperous ones, orthodox religions and heretic fringe cults, left-hand and right-hand, celestial and chthonic. And yet nothing should escape the probing hammer blow on the anvil of your own practice. Our concern is not syncretism versus purity of man-made traditions, our concern is the reality and first-hand understanding of the magical realm.
This is an important point that needs to be emphasized again and again. Scholars of comparative religion, especially in the last sixty years, have spent an enormous amount of time and paper trying to categorize and map various “traditional” paths of ascent up the mountain of magic. For the purposes of their studies, such “traditions” must be pinned down as much as possible and stripped of ambiguity and fluidity so that they can be (ab)used as personal battlegrounds over interpretive sovereignties and master narratives. In fairness, however, it must be conceded to the oft-maligned researchers of academia that these same battlefields existed long before their arrival, except that they were populated by religious and spiritual functionaries who, for millennia, sought to confine and secure the same paths of ascent up the mountain of magic (i.e. esoteric traditions) with the barbed wire of dogma and capital-T-truth. From our, the lone practitioner’s point of view this is obviously missing the point entirely. For the mountain of magic does not want to be ascended, it wants to be lived with.
The very notion of an “ascent” is underpinned by implicitly colonialist undertones of conquest, competition, and human takeover. The topography loses its ontological reality, its integrity as an ecosystem of itself, and is turned into a narcissistic mirror of human agendas. As a goês we could not care less about the purported orthodoxy of pathways of ascent, the comparison of this path versus the other, nor about coming first or last. We care about the mountain, we live with the mountain, we aspire to become one with it. For that we walk slowly, we speak to blades of grass and listen carefully to what will answer us. Our true ancestors have lived on the mountain of magic for centuries, and yet never attempted to “ascend” it. Unfortunately, that also implies most of them never attempted to write books about what to them simply was the reality of their existence. Magic from such a vantage point is not a tradition, it is not a craft and neither a discipline. It is the furthest thing removed from another spear hurled onto the battleground of orthodoxy.
If you commit to encountering magic in such a way, you will quickly realise how much hard work comes with it. A single paragraph in a book might take you several months, if not years, to put into practice and to probe against through your first-hand experience. The name of a spirit, a deity, a natural force, dropped in passing in a book on an entirely different subject, can become the work of a decade. If — and that is the essential point — we truly have the courage to not accept anything unless it has passed through the needle eye of our own practice.
Earlier above we touched upon magic’s strained relationship with natural sciences, and it is worthwhile returning to this point before we begin to look at things through a more practical ocular. I mentioned that rather than accepting the gauntlet the sciences had thrown at the magical tradition, we turned to seek refuge in glorifying our past or leaf-gilding foreign traditions we hardly understood.
Now, picking up this gauntlet, in my humble opinion, does not at all mean attempting to apply the paradigm and methodology of modern natural science to magic. Obviously this can be done, and Dean Radin’s Real Magic is one of the latest and very thought provoking books that attempt to do precisely that. Personally, though, I see a third way that can lead us past the extremes of either hiding in mystery or dismantling it. To me, such a third way of overcom- ing the lack of reliability and validity much of the magical tradition holds both in the East and West, lies in radically redefining what the term magic really describes.
Most often in the pertinent literature we find magic described as a spiritual technology, often alluded to as a craft in a traditional sense i.e. an either inborn or/and learned activity involving skill in making things by hand which in return bestows the practitioner with access to certain amounts of power. As stated above, if this was the bar for excellence for the magical tradition both East and West, it has miserably failed to live up to the common standards of functionality, reliability, and utility of other traditional crafts.
Considering that at least some of our ancestors were actually quite good at what they did — and yet still, our tradition cannot live up to the standards of any other common mundane craft — we might want to consider if we have actually chosen the correct benchmark? Are the standards of a craft really the adequate measure for assessing the elegance and impact of one’s magic? I want to suggest that they are not. For whatever it is worth, from my own experience as a practicing magician there is something else magic holds much more in common with than artisanry, liberal arts or modern sciences, even though it freely borrows from all of the three. Magic, I want to suggest, is not a craft, but a relationship. […]
