Ceremonial Magick

Ceremonial magick is the formal, learned end of Western esoteric practice, ritual conducted according to written instruction, with a documented textual tradition running from the medieval grimoires to the present.

An operation in the older manuals has a recognisable shape. The magician undertakes a period of purification, fasting, abstinence, prayer, sometimes for weeks. Tools are made and consecrated to specification: the wand, cup, dagger and disc or pentacle, corresponding to the four elements, plus the sword, the lamen worn at the breast, and the robe. Timing is set by planetary day and hour, since each operation belongs to a planet. A circle is drawn and inscribed with divine names, and the operator does not leave it. The spirit is called by its name and constrained by the names of God, and its sigil, a graphic seal, either transmitted in the text or generated from a magical square, is used to focus and to bind.

The theory underneath is the doctrine of correspondence: that everything in the cosmos belongs to a chain descending from a divine archetype, so that a plant, metal, stone, colour, perfume, hour, angel and letter all sharing a planetary nature can be used to reach that nature. Agrippa's Three Books of Occult Philosophy of 1533 is the great compendium of these correspondences and the single most influential book in the tradition.

The distinction between theurgy and goetia runs through all of it. Theurgy aims at union with the divine and at knowledge of one's own higher genius; goetia commands lesser spirits to practical ends. Almost every writer in the tradition insists on the priority of the first, and a good deal of the surviving practical material is concerned with the second.

Nearly all modern ceremonial practice, and a great deal of modern witchcraft that does not describe itself as ceremonial at all, descends from one short-lived London society.

The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn was founded in 1888 on the strength of a cipher manuscript and a supposed German adept who is now generally accepted to have been a fiction. What it produced regardless was a curriculum of extraordinary coherence: a graded system of initiations mapped to the sephiroth of the Tree of Life; the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram and the Middle Pillar, which remain the standard opening exercises of the whole field; the Hexagram rituals for planetary work; a complete set of tarot, astrological, elemental, angelic and Enochian correspondences; and a method of visionary work called scrying in the spirit vision. Its membership included W. B. Yeats, Arthur Edward Waite and, briefly and disruptively, Aleister Crowley.

It collapsed within about a decade in a series of quarrels and schisms. Its material survived because Israel Regardie published the order's papers in the late 1930s, over the objection of surviving members, on the ground that the system was too valuable to be lost with its keepers.

Crowley took the system, added the material of his own reception in Cairo in 1904, and built Thelema around the axiom that every person has a true will and that the work is to discover and do it. His Liber 777 tabulated the correspondences, and his order structures carried the method into the twentieth century.

Two later developments are worth noting. Wicca, as constructed by Gerald Gardner in the 1950s, took circle-casting, the elemental quarters, the tools and much of the ritual grammar directly from this source. And chaos magic, from the 1970s, kept the sigil technique while discarding the metaphysics, treating belief itself as the variable to be manipulated.

The Golden Dawn's system of initiation is a ladder, and the rungs are mapped one-to-one onto the sephiroth of the Tree of Life, counted upward from the bottom. The notation is two numbers, the first counting up from the entry grade and the second counting down from the top, so that the ascent runs 1=10 to 10=1. Knowing the ladder makes sense of a good deal of later occult vocabulary that uses its rank-names loosely.

The First or Outer Order taught the theory. Neophyte (0=0) stood outside the Tree; then Zelator (1=10, Malkuth), Theoricus (2=9, Yesod), Practicus (3=8, Hod) and Philosophus (4=7, Netzach).

The Second or Inner Order, the R.R. et A.C., was where the practical magic actually began, entered only after a portal grade. Its grades were Adeptus Minor (5=6, Tiphareth), Adeptus Major (6=5, Geburah) and Adeptus Exemptus (7=4, Chesed). In practice almost all of the celebrated members never advanced beyond Adeptus Minor; the higher adept grades were largely notional.

The Third Order lay across the Abyss and was held to be occupied by the 'Secret Chiefs', not by living initiates: Magister Templi (8=3, Binah), Magus (9=2, Chokmah) and Ipsissimus (10=1, Kether). In the original order these were unattainable by definition.

Crowley's later A.'.A.'. took the same ladder but treated the grades above the Abyss as goals an aspirant could actually claim to reach, and claimed them himself, which is the source of the modern use of Magus and Ipsissimus as titles a person might hold. The general terms Initiate, Neophyte and Adept have since drifted out of the system entirely and are used across modern occultism for, respectively, anyone admitted, a beginner, and an experienced practitioner, with none of the precise placement the ladder gave them.