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From The Maze Where Realities Converge - the psychedelic encyclopedia of reality from The Ultimate Comment
Sorcery is the branch of magick that deals with creating specific psychological or physical effects for practical purposes. It is also called spell-casting. Hoodoo is a pretty pure example of sorcery.
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Divination
Divination is using magick to allow yourself to perceive things you would not otherwise be able to. In his essay on 'Sleight of Mind', Peter Carroll - a writer on Chaos magick - gives a good introduction to divination, making the important distinction between divination by hallucination and divination by sortiledge.
A skeptic could explain divination as being the result of subconscious intuition. That's cool. Your brain notices all sorts of facts that you don't consciously notice, but taken together might suggest something significant. For example, a boxer might look like he's going to win a fight because the outer edges of his eyebrows are slightly upwards, while his opponent has some tension in his cheeks. You won't consciously notice these things, but your subtler subconscious faculties will, and you'll get an intuition. Divination provides a vehicle by which this subconscious knowledge can express itself.
Divination by hallucination
One method of divination is scrying - staring into a mirror, crystal ball, your own dilated pupils in a mirror, or still water, like the mirror of Galadriel in The Lord of the Rings. You will see things in the reflections. There was a study of scrying done by Dr. Raymond Moody which found that ordinary people with no beliefs in the paranormal experienced visions by scrying, many of them experiencing what seemed like contact with the dead.
Ask yourself a question. Close your eyes. Do you see an image in your mind's eye? That's your answer, whether in symbolic or literal form.
Looking for the meanings of dreams or trying to induce prophetic dreams by autosuggestion could be considered divination by hallucination.
Shamanic divinatory techniques, also come under this heading, like travelling out of body to find a spirit who can answer your question or travelling to the place in time and space you wish to know about.
Divination by sortiledge
Divination by sortiledge requires some sort of symbolic representation of the universe and the events that happen in it. Tarot, I-Ching and runes are all symbolic maps of the universe, giving a symbolic category for any and every Thing That Can Happen. Ask a question, cast the coins on the ground or pick a card from the deck and the symbols you get are considered to be the Things That Will Happen in your particular situation.
Enchantment
Enchantment describes any procedure in which you take a particular desire and bring it to reality.
This is commonly done by creating a bud-will, as described below.
In some systems of magic (like Goetia and various shamanic traditions), the magician gets spirits or demons to do the work for them. This may involve travelling out of body to the Underworld and striking pacts with spirits there, or it may involve performing a ritual to summon a demon and commanding it to help you. "Avaunt thee, fiend! The power of Christ compels you!"
Bud-wills
To create change in conformity with the will, it is often necessary to allow the will to work uninhibited by conscious mentations. (Exercise for the reader: List three reasons why this might be so. List five times in your life when thinking too much about something prevented you from doing it well. Magick doesn't work if you just read about it; you have to do this to understand. Go on, it won't take you long.) The magical techniques of spell-casting and servitor creation create entities independent of the conscious mind - called bud-wills - which carry out your will in the aether or subconscious (depending on your dogma of choice).
Spell-casting
In sorcery, we create a pure, mindless intention with no abilities or interests other than finding fulfillment. This is the bud-will. Phil Hine has devised the S.P.L.I.F.F. model as a blueprint for spell-casting:
- Specify intent
- Link intent to a particular form, which we'll call a desire-form. This can be anything, limited only by your imagination: a sigil, a voodoo doll, a mojo bag, a mandala, a mantra, a spoken charm etc. Use whatever you're good at: if you're an musician, translate letters into chords and thus turn the statement of desire into a tune. If you got one of those candle-making kits for Christmas when you were ten and never used it, now is the time to crack it out. If you're good at drawing, draw. If you're good with words, write a poem.
The idea is to get rid of the consciously perceived desire and replace it with an abstract representation. You are no longer focusing on "I need money", which caused all kinds of emotional abreactions, anxiety and lust for result; you are focusing on something abstract and irrelevant, which is nonetheless subconsciously linked to the desire. - Intense trance or indifferent vacuity. While concentrating on the desire form (not the original intent, mind you, but the abstract representation of it) enter a state of consciousness in which attention is heightened and is focused on the desire-form alone.
- Fire the spell. Release it from your personal concern into the universe. Let the bud-will go off to do its work.
- Forget about it. You no longer have to consciously worry about the desire. That would show a lack of faith in the spell. Just leave it alone and let the bud-will do its work. If the desire pops back into consciousness, ignore it or treat it with what Jan Fries aptly calls "friendly indifference".
That is all the theory you need. Start experimenting.
The magical link
"If we analyse the principles of thought on which magic is based, they will probably be found to resolve themselves into two: first, that like produces like, or that an effect resembles its cause; and, second, that things which have once been in contact with each other continue to act on each other at a distance after the physical contact has been severed. The former principle may be called the Law of Similarity, the latter the Law of Contact or Contagion"
- James Frazer, The Golden Bough
Though the desire-form should be sufficiently different from the statement of intent to conceal its purpose from the conscious mind, it has to have some sort of connexion with the desired outcome. This connexion is traditionally called the "magickal link". According to my model, there are at four kinds of magickal link:
- Link by resemblence. As Frazer says above. A photograph of someone is magickally linked to them. Hex the photo and you hex the person.
- Link by contact. As Frazer says, in magic, two things in contact with one another continue to influence each other. Quantum mechanics provides some justification for this. In mathematical models of quantum mechanics, two particles that are linked share quantum states. You can seperate them and move them to opposite sides of the world, but they will still share quantum states; change the state of one and the other will also change. This is known as quantum entanglement and is exactly what Frazer said of magic: "things which have once been in contact with each other continue to act on each other at a distance after the physical contact has been severed". This is why someone's clothing, hair, fingernails, pee-pee or whatever is so commonly used to cast spells on them in sorcery.
- Link by mental association. Someone's name is magickally linked to them, because when you think of the name, you think of the person. Write out the name and use it in a spell and you've got a link to the target. Sigils are an example of a link by mental association.
- Link by imagination. This is really a form of the link by resemblence, except the desire-form is not physical, it is a mental image. If you take a stone and visualize someone's face on it, you can then use that stone to represent them in a spell.
Mojo bags
A magical practise common to all traditions of sorcery is placing an assortment of curios representing the desire into a bag or box or bottle or other container. For example, placing the hair of your enemy in a black bag with animal bones, rotting flesh, rusty coffin nails, graveyard dirt, the yantra of Kali and red peppers and burying it in their garden on a Saturday it won't have any effect, of course, because magic doesn't really work. Interesting, eh? Names for these include mojo bags, nation sacks and witch bottles.
Elements to consider when making a mojo:
- Contents representing the target of the trick e.g. a person's photo with their name written on the back, or parts of their body
- Contents to represent the desired effect e.g. a magnet for an attraction spell
- The number symbolism of the contents e.g. seven pomengranate seeds in a mojo for healing
- The colour of the container
- How the container is to be used. Sometimes it is buried or hidden in a specific location, sometimes worn concealed on your person, sometimes thrown into the sea or burnt.
- The time and date of the working
Some systems of magic concoct potions to acheive effects. This is exactly the same process as a mojo bag, except the ingredients are gooey instead of bumpy.
The Kongo people (from, as you may have guessed, the Congo) use the hollow belly or head of a statue as the container. This combines the servitor method with the mojo bag method.
Servitors
Servitors are bud-wills with some limited intelligence and power of independent action. Phil Hine's Evocation Without Sniffles, Marik's essay 'Sigils, Servitors and Godforms' and 'Creating Magickal Entities' by David Michael Cunningham give instructions on building servitors.
Talismans and amulets
Talismans, amulets or fetishes are physical things which store mental energy. If you have a teddy bear or something from your childhood you'll understand the power of this. How is that different from a teddy bear you see in the shops? (There's no such thing as magic?!) The key concept here is cathexis - investment of psychological energy a thing.
Traditionally, the word 'talisman' is used when the item is designed to attract something (such as love), and the word 'amulet' is used when the purpose is to repel something (such as danger). If it is in humanoid form, it would be called a 'homunculus'.
Talismans or amulets may be created by anchoring, evoking a spirit into a talisman or praying to it. Focusing on the talisman when in a highly emotional or otherwise altered state of consciousness should put more energy into it.
Links
- An Introduxion To Sorcery by Phil Hine.
- Sorcery tested
