For all of the people out there who are looking to spiritual systems, whether exoteric or esoteric, or who look to sorcerous systems and metaphysical pursuits to make themselves into better people, find peace, increase their overall well-being, to them I say “keep looking and good luck.”
Exoteric religions alone among those various interests may give someone the impetus or inspiration they need to become ‘good’ (at least according to some specific definition unique to the religion) but the rest of those pursuits aren’t really about that.
The practice of Sorcery, in any of its genuine recensions, isn’t primarily about moral growth or peace and tranquility, though some people may, by happenstance of Fate, find some element of that inside it. But you can’t come looking for that, or you really won’t find it, and for an important reason.
Sorcery is impossible to pin down, just like the wind.
Few people have the constitution to deal with such an insubstantial Art, such an unpredictable and indescribable metaphysical reality.
But far from discarding Sorcery, or the pursuit of it, most people take the other route- they just change it to suit them.
By changing it, by telling the wind that it has to be earth now, they actually lose it altogether, but they keep holding on to something they describe as “sorcery”.
You’ll know these people easily, if you keep your mind on the wind- they tend to talk a good deal, but yield nothing in the way of tangible results.
Can the intangible yield tangible results? I must say, it can; but its results are often very subtle.
Don’t feel let down- when its results aren’t subtle, they are as visible and unquestionable as a thunderstorm.
But sorcery, like wisdom, is good at hiding, and good at avoiding people who aren’t yet ready to be like the wind.
It scorns the people of inflexible concepts, who have to have everything explained and “locked down”; it looks kindly upon the people of fire and wind.
And this insubstantial nature of Sorcery is more profoundly insubstantial than you think- sometimes, right when you think you don’t have it, is when you discover that you do.
Sometimes, or oftentimes, in my experience, the unplanned workings, the unplanned and rather spontaneous trances, visions, conjurations, and works are the most powerful.
That should trouble anyone who wants a formula-book; formula books are only good for one thing- they orient the mind and the desire towards the sorcerous worldview and aesthetic.
After that, if you are lucky, the magic comes and begins to find you, largely spontaneously.
Our friends in “Golden Dawn” type magical lodge-working are champions at planning out every detail of a magical work; for the wicked life of me, I can’t begin to imagine how that can be “magic” as I have come to understand it.
It may be an almost yogic sort of mind-conditioning, a transformative practice in some ways, but certainly not sorcery in the ancient and visceral sense.
If it’s authentic sorcery you want, as the ancients had it, you have to be able to do impossible things- like tying the winds together, or making a dead tree come back to life.
Maybe braiding the hair of a toad, or capturing the sound of a cat’s footfall in your left hand might be called for at times.
These “impossible” tasks force a person’s mind into a helpless quandary, which is right where you want to be.
Paradox? Of course. But an initiatory one. Ordinary people don’t want to be confused or helpless or befuddled.
The sorcerer knows how to adjust to those kinds of situations and make them work, because like air, like the wind, they can take any shape, move around any obstacle, fly over any mountain, cut through any person, and, over time, even wear the great mountains down to sand.
Helplessness can be strength. Silence can be noise. Death can be life.
You should welcome challenges, as a test of sorcerous cunning- an opportunity to learn and sharpen one’s subtle skills.
The problem with the above mentioned “sorcerous tasks” isn’t that they may be impossible, but that you are reading them and thinking about them while connected to your red fetter- the body.
