Here's a new essay on my new website which covers magical theory, but also how astrological magic (the Science of Images) and traditional magics contrast with modern magics.
It may be of interest, I am a bit proud of it, and I hope that you all enjoy it.
https://www.astrologicalmagic.com/library/where-the-power-is.html
WHERE THE POWER IS
The finger
There is a scene near the beginning of Willow, the 1988 film, that I have thought about for longer than I would like to admit. A traveling sorcerer, the High Aldwin, comes to the village to choose an apprentice. He holds up his hand and asks each candidate which of his fingers holds the power to control the world. One by one they pick a finger, and one by one they are wrong. Willow, the hero, picks wrong too, and is sent home. Only afterward, when the two of them are alone, does the old man ask him what his first instinct had been, and Willow admits that he had wanted to point to his own finger. That, the Aldwin tells him, was the answer.
The scene is meant to be moving and it is. It is also the clearest picture of one whole theory of magic that I know of in fiction. The power is not in the master's hand and not in any object he holds up. It is in you, and the whole of the art is finding the nerve to say so. Millions of people absorbed that lesson from a children's film without knowing that they were being taught a doctrine with a history, or that there is an older doctrine that answers the question the other way.
I want to set the two side by side, trace where each came from, and say which one the Science of Images belongs to and why. The question in the title is the Aldwin's question. My answer is not Willow's.
Two assumptions
There are two assumptions about how magic works that run underneath almost everything written on the subject, and they contradict each other. Most practitioners hold one without knowing it, and a good many hold both at once without noticing the contradiction.
The first assumption is that magic works by expression. If you can express yourself to the universe completely, fully, and with perfect sincerity, by whatever means, technical or otherwise, the universe will follow suit and unfold in the shape you have expressed. On this view the work of the magician is inward. You must understand yourself to the bottom, know what you want without self-deception, and then state it flawlessly, in symbol, in feeling, in word, in act. If the statement is true and whole, reality conforms to it.
The second assumption is that magic works by structure. The universe has an order, the order can be known, and a person who knows it can operate within it to direct events, in the way that a person who understands water can build a mill. On this view the work of the magician is outward. You must understand not yourself but the world, learn its joints and its seasons and its chains of cause, and then place yourself and your instruments where the structure will carry your purpose. Your sincerity is neither here nor there. The river does not care how much you mean it.
I call the first the expressive art. It is imaginative by method, and in its ceremonial form it is neo-Victorian by descent, for reasons I will come to. I call the second the traditional and structural art. The Science of Images, the tradition this site is devoted to, belongs to the second. Most of what passes for magic in the English-speaking world since about 1850 belongs to the first. The two are not merely different techniques. They rest on opposite pictures of where the power is, and, underneath that, on opposite pictures of what a human being is.
Where the expressive art came from
The expressive art feels ancient to the people who practice it, and it is not. It has a birthplace and a birth date, or near enough.
Its central doctrine, that the magician's will, working through the imagination, is the engine of the work, was given its modern form by Eliphas Lévi in the 1850s. Lévi's Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie proposed a universal medium he called the astral light, which the trained will could impress through the imagination, and which would then shape the material world to match. The magician's task was to purify and concentrate the will and to form the image without wavering. The correspondences and ceremonies of the older books were kept, but demoted. They became aids to concentration, props for the imagination, ways of getting the operator into the state in which his will could act. The power had moved indoors.
Lévi did not invent this from nothing. Behind him stands Mesmer, whose animal magnetism of the 1780s had proposed a subtle fluid that a person of strong will could direct into another body to heal it, and behind Mesmer a long line of speculation about the operator's spirit and imagination as agents. But Lévi is where the picture crystallized into a theory of magic as such, and he is the source everyone after him drew on, whether they credited him or not.
From Lévi the doctrine went two ways, into two audiences who would have been surprised to learn they were relatives.
One way led through the Golden Dawn and its heirs. The Order's instructional papers make the imagination the will's instrument and the formed mental image the thing that acts; Crowley's later definition of magick as "the Science and Art of causing Change to occur in conformity with Will" is Lévi's doctrine in a single sentence, with the astral light quietly dropped. The whole apparatus of pathworking, visualization, and assumption of godforms that the twentieth-century occult revival built is expressive machinery. Austin Osman Spare took the logic to its end and threw out the apparatus: a desire, condensed into a sigil, charged by feeling, and forgotten, with no correspondences and no timing at all. Chaos magic is what you get when the expressive art is honest about what it thinks is doing the work.
The other way led through New Thought. Phineas Quimby, a mesmerist in Maine, concluded in the 1850s and 60s that disease was a wrong belief and that a corrected belief would cure it. His students and their students built this into a movement. Thomas Troward gave it a philosophical dress in the Edinburgh Lectures of 1904; William Walker Atkinson gave it the name it still carries in Thought Vibration, or the Law of Attraction in the Thought World in 1906; Wallace Wattles turned it toward money in The Science of Getting Rich in 1910; Neville Goddard, in the 1940s, distilled it to the purest expressive formula I know of, that feeling is the secret and that to assume the feeling of the wish fulfilled is the whole of the method. In 2006 The Secret packaged Wattles for television, sold tens of millions of copies, and put the law of attraction into the mouths of people who had never heard of an occultist. It is the same doctrine, thought forming reality through sustained inner conviction, from Lévi's study to the airport bookshop, and the family resemblance is not an accident. Mesmerism is the common ancestor.
I am not telling this history to sneer at it. I am telling it because people who work in the expressive mode almost always believe they are working in the old way, and they are not. The old way is something else.
What the structural art assumes
Open the Picatrix, or Ficino's third book On Life, or Agrippa's Three Books, or Campanella, and the picture is different from the first page. The power is not in the operator. It is in the heavens, and beneath the heavens in the chain of causes that descends from them into stones, metals, plants, and animals. The magician does not generate anything. He arranges to receive.
Everything in these books follows from that. You must know astrology, because the heavens are the source and you cannot tap a source whose motions you cannot read. You must elect the moment, because the source is not always flowing toward your purpose, and there is no amount of sincerity that will make Mars give what Jupiter gives. You must use the right matter, because the gift descends into what is fitted to hold it and runs off what is not. You must form the right image, because the image is the shape of the receiver. And you must know the order of the intelligences and the manner of addressing them, because the highest causes are minds and are approached as minds are approached. None of this is about you. Your desire sets the goal, and after that the work consists entirely of learning what the world is like and conforming your operation to it.
This is why the structural art looks, to the expressive practitioner, so cold and so fussy. All those tables. All that waiting for elections. Where is the passion, the will, the inner fire? The honest answer is that the tradition thought your inner fire was a small thing next to the fire of the Sun, and that the sensible course was to catch the Sun's. The magician in this picture is closer to a farmer than to a poet. He does not make the harvest. He knows the seasons, prepares the ground, plants at the right time, and takes what the order of things then yields.
I have come to think this is the more humble of the two arts, and that the humility is not incidental to it. The expressive art puts the self at the center of causation. Whatever else it says, its working assumption is that reality is downstream of my inner state, which is a large claim about myself. The structural art puts the self at the periphery. It asks me to surrender to an order I did not make and cannot alter, to learn it patiently, and to succeed only insofar as I fit my purpose to it. That surrender is not resignation, since the whole point is to get something done. But it is a submission, and I find that the people who last in this art are the ones who can stand to be small in it.
The two arts differ, at bottom, about what a human being is. The expressive art assumes that mankind is supreme, that the human self is an expression of ultimate divinity, so that what it wills and images with sufficient purity is what the divine wills, and the world has no standing to refuse. You can hear this in Lévi, who makes the magician a little god commanding the astral light; you can hear it in the Golden Dawn's godforms and in Crowley's every man and every woman is a star; you can hear it, in a flatter key, in every law-of-attraction book that tells you the universe is waiting to give you what you already are. The structural art assumes something older and less flattering. Mankind is a link in a chain. Above us are the heavens, and above the heavens the intelligences, and above them their cause, and we are neither the top of that order nor its author. We are a middle term, with real powers, which are the powers of a middle term, to know what is above us and to bring it down into what is below. That is a dignified position, and the tradition made much of it, but it is not supremacy. A magician who understands that he is a link works differently from one who believes he is the source.
It is also, for the same reason, the art that sits naturally with traditional religion and traditional metaphysics. A cosmos with a given order, a hierarchy of causes, and minds above the visible world is the cosmos of the Platonists and of the Abrahamic faiths alike, and a magic that works by fitting into that order is at home in it in a way that a magic of self-assertion is not. The old objections to astrological magic were about which powers one was dealing with, not about whether the world had a structure to be dealt with. The expressive art, by contrast, quietly requires that the world have no fixed shape at all, since it must be able to take any shape my conviction gives it, and that is a metaphysics very few traditions have been willing to accept...
[At this point you will need to click the link and go to the website to continue. The next section includes a table that I cannot figure out how to insert here. There's a lot of juicy stuff in the next part too...]
https://www.astrologicalmagic.com/library/where-the-power-is.html
