The Basic Business of the Magician:

If magick was always hypnotic and if the kabbalah always taught that
the inner microcosom was the key to personal transformation, then
why, for the past hundred years , have we been skipping over, or
completely ignoring, the fundamental principles of magick? Lost in a
maze of quasi-masonic initiations, and quasi-Freudian sexual
speculations, we have forgotten that the basic business of the magician
is to command spirits (i.e. components of his personality). He summons
them to visible appearance and then compels them to perform tasks for
him – well, that’s what he used to do back in Renaissance times, but
our more recent Victorian forbears of The Golden Dawn were not able
to reconstruct the old method of magical evocation because they
refused to accept its hypnotic basis.Certainly there is more to magick
than evocation, but that is where it starts: in the magick mirror of Yesod
with the ritual of the Goetia of the Lemegeton.(2.) This hypnotic
system, if properly employed in the Jungian psychoanalytic process of
individuation, can be a cornerstone of successful lodge work.
Before we discuss the characteristics of magical hypnosis, we
need to look a little more deeply into the historical and philosophical
reasons why this essential principle of the art has been overlooked and
underrated.

The Victorian and Edwardian magicians were more
reactionary and superstitious (relatively speaking) than their
Renaissance counterparts. They bequeathed to us a legacy of quaint
and whimsical ideas about magick. We still find ourselves grappling
with their outdated conceptions of “secret chiefs” who come from an
“astral world” that might as well be another planet. Hypnosis was a
dirty word in this Victorian fairyland not because it was scientific, but
because it was subjective. In this case the tendency to objectify magical
phenomenais characteristic of philosophical dualism. It will be
recalled that the dualist believes God to be separate from his creations,
whereas the monist holds that God is present in all things. (For a more
lengthy discussion of these ideas see my Negative vs. Positive Gnosis
in Gnostica, No. 40 )(3.)

The Kingdom of God is Within At this point the romantic reader may be
experiencing something of a let-down. Am I saying that angels, demons,
Goddesses and Gods of old are only figments of the individual imagination?
Certainly not! The Gods are real and their power is awesome. Hypnosis is
the key to entering their kingdom, the Olam Yetzirah, or astral plane; but we
must realize that this other dimension begins within ourselves, in our
subconscious mind. If we go deep enough we venture beyond our own
personal dreams into what Carl Jung called the “collective
unconscious”, that vast realm where the archetypal Gods abide.(4.)

Make no mistake about it, the collective unconscious is a reality that
goes beyond anyone’s individual conception of it. It contains the entire
history of the human race and probably the destiny of mankind as well.
It is certainly linked to the Anima Mundi, the World-Soul-Earth-
Goddess of the Renaissance magicians. I hold that its sensitivities
extend throughout the solar system, and I suspect that it is intrinsically
relatedto the DNA code. These ideas are philosophically monistic in
accordance with the teachings of Hermes Trismegistus and the doctrines of
the kabbalah.(5.)

When the student fully grasps the significance of the collective unconscious
in relation to the Hermetic kabbalah, he will not need to ask such questions
as Carlos Casteneda put to Don Juan: “Did I really fly?”The objective vs. the
subjective argument will no longer involve a value judgment, but only a
matter of relative perception. This may be a difficult hurdle for some to leap,
but the rewards are infinite. The dualist seeking objective phenomenon – e.g.
photographable ghosts, apparitions formed from “ectoplasm” and the like –
is constantly in danger of disillusionment. The more he tries to justify his
beliefs, the more antirational he becomes. For him occultism is a long,
down-hill slide away from the intellectual position – whereas, if properly
pursued on monistic-subjective principles; the study and practice of magick
should expand and extend the consciousness, thereby improving the intellect.