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Eleven Traditions of Working Will Upon the World

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Eleven Traditions of Working Will Upon the World

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Magical Disciplines gathers eleven traditions that work to shape events, protect, heal or harm through ritual, will and craft, ranging from formal Western ceremonial systems to living folk practices carried through the African diaspora.

Ceremonial magick is the most formal current, drawing Kabbalah, astrology, the elements and the invocation of angels, demons and gods into one learned system worked through consecrated tools, its texts running from medieval grimoires to the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and Aleister Crowley. Enochian Magic grew from John Dee and Edward Kelley's recorded angelic conversations of 1582 to 1589 and passed into that same ceremonial current. Necromancy, summoning the dead for prophecy, and sigil magic, encoding intention into a charged symbol, sit within the same tradition.

Witchcraft spans an older folk magic and its modern revival, most influentially Wicca, with its worship of a Goddess and God and eight seasonal sabbats. Chaos magick, from 1970s England, treats belief itself as a tool to adopt and discard, and the Left-Hand Path names traditions of self deification set against traditions of self surrender. Seidr was a Norse practice of prophecy and shaping fate, associated with women and with the god Odin.

Hoodoo and Obeah are the group's two registered restricted traditions, named only by what each has published: Hoodoo an African American folk magic blending West and Central African practice with Christian elements, worked through roots and herbs, and Obeah an African diasporic Caribbean healing and protective practice with no single canon, historically criminalised by British colonial law. Shamanism, entering an altered state to reach a spirit world, closes the group as its widest member.

Cross-Tradition Connections

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Source Encyclopedia of ReligionMircea Eliade (ed.); Lindsay Jones (ed., 2nd ed.)
Sources
Encyclopedia of Religion
Mircea Eliade (ed.); Lindsay Jones (ed., 2nd ed.), Macmillan Reference, 2005View the Source
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