What does regular ritual practice look like?
You often hear about it, but what even is a daily ritual practice?
I’ve done a lot of bitching and speculating lately. My posts have been soaked in paranoia and bad vibes and I think it’s about time that I broke out of that cycle and did something productive. I’ve been meaning to write this for some time. Ever since Georgina Rose posted her How-To video in which she talks REALLY FUCKING FAST but also drops some real valuable gems on how you can put together a sort of spiritual workout to buff your soul’s stats. I strongly recommend you watch it and if you do the whole sosh-meed thing, she’s a pretty busy bee.
EDIT: Georgina’s full of shit. I leave this article unchanged since it’s important to learn from your mistakes and atone but she’s just recycling material from other, less social media savvy magicians in order to drive views and engagement of her own stuff. Ask Marco Visconti about it sometime.
Regular, daily magic practice is what separates the dabblers from the magicians. And I don’t mean this to sound snobby. Some folks just can’t pull it off. Some have physical limitations which cannot be overcome. And that’s fine. In this case, regular practice is just as important as daily practice. But what exactly does a regular practice look like? The ways in which the occult is portrayed in popular culture, the avenue by which a lot of folks end up on this road, makes occult practice look like a seriously involved thing. The Magus, enclosed in an envelope of thick incense smoke, in a room lit entirely by candle light, dressed in a black tau robe, their head entirely covered by a cartoonishly huge hood, meditates and fasts for days on end, performing grueling rituals which take hours upon hours of laser focus, gesturing symbols endlessly in the air with their fingers. Or maybe you’ve come to the occult by way of witchcraft and your perception of witchy practice is occasionally mixing up herbs and oiling a candle whenever you want to manifest something and that’s it! The actual mechanics of occult practice are often, ahem, occulted from folks trying to seriously approach it.
Much of the problem stems from the occult publishing world. The spread and propagation of the occult primarily takes place by the written word and out there in the world there are, like, three publishers that control the flow of that information. In recent years, that arena has broadened a bit with short-run volumes from boutique publishers but their volumes often cost obscene amounts of money and sell out to ebay resellers before a single collector gets a copy directly from the publisher for its original retail price. And so we’re all sort of stuck between Llewellyn and Weiser and their allergy to publishing anything that isn’t Wicca 101 or a 150-page paperback about how to make money with angel magic! Scott Stenwick has written on this topic a bit and I really feel for the dude. He’s a very competent magician with some great ideas that I’ve put into practical use. The other side of this coin is the rare publication of a truly advanced manual.
Look at the fucking size of these things! Yes, they look great on your shelf and on your altar and both of these volumes are crammed with wild knowledge of the beyond, but until the latest edition with JM Greer’s excellent editorial, The Golden Dawn was known, colloquially, as The Black Brick and I’ve written at some length about how desperately the Voudon Gnostic Workbook is in need of an editor to make its material a little more practically workable. An expanded edition was the last thing that fucking book needs! If anything, it needs to be way less murky. Ever read HP Blavatsky’s The Secret Doctrine? You know how you’ll be reading along and think, “Holy shit, this is awesome! It’s like Doctor Strange!” and then you turn a few pages and start to re-read passages and flip back and forth, trying to get it all straight because you have no idea what she’s talking about? Yeah. The VGW is like that and just as big.
But if I had to recommend a book or two to get you on the path to a regular practice, I recommend these. There are no finer, more succinctly put, explain-it-like-I’m-five volumes on the ins and outs and regular magical practice and the why of why you want to do this.
But as much as I like them and as much as they explain what you can be doing, they’re still very much Ceremonial Magic 101 volumes that won’t push you to new heights and into a practice that you’re likely to sustain into the future. That’s where I come in. Let’s talk about what I do on the regular.
Establish the sacred
This is probably the hardest part of ceremonial magic. More than remembering the spoken rituals, the pronunciations, the planetary hours and days, the thing about ritual magic that can be the hardest for people is finding a place to perform it.
It is absolutely vital that the place that you perform these rituals be a dedicated space. Think about a church, a mosque, or a synagogue. Those places are consecrated and dedicated to prayer and worship. Nothing else happens in them (theoretically, at least). Candles are lit, incense is burned, music is played, and prayer is intoned. In this place, you commune with God and because of its explicit purpose and use, that communion takes place that much more easily. You can pray wherever you are but no place on Earth will make you feel more at one with divinity than in your sacred temple. Consciousness and mindset are central to the practice of magic. You have to fully believe in your heart of hearts that what you’re doing is a supreme act of conscious divinity and if the space you’re working in is also the space where you sleep, watch TV, have sex (unless we’re talking ritual sex), etc., then you will also be aware of its purpose apart from the magic. The mundane has no place in the temple. Fuck outta here with that shit.
My temple is in my basement and as such, it currently has this kind of creepy vibe to it. Like something out of Saw; bare cement wall and floors. The circle and the altar sit on those foam mats you find in gyms. There’s a Templar flag to one side on the east wall and the Jerusalem flag on the other side. The basement is wide open but this one section of it is my sacred temple space. I’ve been meaning for years to a build a sort of enclosure around it to fully separate it from the rest of the room, but I’m also kind of broke right now and drapery don’t come cheap. Cross my palm with some silver, if you feel so inclined and in the future I’ll post photos of my temple, properly decked out.
They key here is sanctity. It honestly does not matter where you perform your dailies. The thing that matters is that that space is used only for ritual. Got it?
You have to have your tools!
I admit that my practice has a lot of stuff. I really like the practice of building shit. I’m not particularly good at it but I like it and there isn’t a more powerful metaphor for the act of magical creation than taking an idea and rendering it to reality with your hands and willpower. Your mileage may vary, obviously, but I use the following items in my practice.
Black and white pillar candles to represent Boaz and Jachin
Waist-high double slat altar from Poke Runyon’s plans
Elemental magic circle made from plywood and masonite
Incense censer with copal/frankincense blend and loose white sage leaves, dry
Triangle Iberian dagger
Masonic Tyler’s sword
A black candle for my Holy Guardian Angel
Stones/Gems
Shewstone (You know? A crystal ball.)
Cup for water
Bell
You don’t really need any of these things to perform these rituals but like I tell everyone and I repeat, endlessly: We’re trying to cultivate a magical environment here. The more in-the-moment your consciousness is, the more easily you’ll be able to perform these rituals and the stronger your magic will be. At a minimum, you should have a candle to light and some incense to burn. The candle sends up a symbolic signal flare to the astral and grabs the attention of the spirits you’re trying to attract. The incense is an offering. You should always put something out as an offering.
People have a lot of differing feelings on gemstones, god help you should you ever look at TikTok for people’s thoughts on that whole scene… But at a minimum, you’ll want chunks of amethyst, quartz, and selenite.
A note on garb: You’ll want to strongly consider some sort of, for lack of better term, costuming. A lot of people fall back on the classic Tau Robe. They’re easy to make, and in the absence of a sewing machine, there’s a million styles that you can buy for short money on Etsy. I, personally, don’t take this route.
Are you going to feel magical in a pair of basketball shorts, a Dragon Ball Z shirt and some Nike Slides? Of course not. But you can still do it all and come out the other side feeling properly energized even if you look like you’re about to charge some teenagers too much for a few grams of shitty weed.
Until I began working the Points Chauds system with the Congregational Illuminists, ritual garb never entered the equation. I just stepped into the circle in whatever I was wearing. Since then, I made it a habit to wear my CI garb while doing any sort of ritual work. To this end, I bought a white tai chi suit and a white kufi cap. Like everything else, you only use these tools and wear this garb while performing ritual work. Sacred, sacred, sacred. Always remember this.
The rituals
Let’s get into it. This is the part that really matters. Everything else is just tweaks and adjustments to get the environment right and shift your consciousness more easily.
This is what I do, in order:
Dress, change into garb.
Symbolically brush off the mundane by brushing my face, arms, legs, and chest with hands as though I’m shaking off crumbs or something.
Kneel before the circle, facing east, sign of the cross in the Catholic style.
Part the veil with Golden Dawn gesture.
Enter the circle.
Light candle and charcoal in incense burner.
Kabbalistic Cross.
Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram.
Lesser Invoking Ritual of the Hexagram.
Crush white sage and put it on the charcoal.
Deosil circumambulation around the circle, carrying the incense censer, repeating my magical motto in Hebrew. I do this until I feel like I’ve done enough. How much that is varies.
Middle Pillar Ritual.
Add copal/frankincense incense to censer.
More deosil circumambulation around the circle, repeating my magical motto in Hebrew, carrying censer.
Preliminary Invocation of the Bornless One.
The Rose Cross Ritual.
Analysis of the Keyword.
Formal prayer.
Silent meditation.
Ring the bell and release each archangel.
Ring the bell to close the temple.
Step out the circle.
Golden Dawn gesture to close the veil.
Change back into regular clothes.
Looks like a lot, right? It is. But front to back, the entire ceremony takes a little under an hour. It’s a bit like going to mass, really. This gets a bit longer, obviously, if I perform any sort of formal operation or work a spell or whatever.
You don’t have to do all of this to have a regular ritual practice. You can perform the LBRP every day and call it quits and still have an adequate daily practice as long as you’re doing it on the regular. But at a minimum, I want to strongly recommend that the Middle Pillar Ritual be in your ritual routine and incorporate some silent meditation. Yes, everyone recommends the Middle Pillar. There’s a reason. It fucking rules. And silent meditation is key. You’ll struggle with this but all of this is a struggle. Work on it regularly, hold that no-mind consciousness for as long as you can. Eventually you’ll start to notice the intrusive thoughts popping in again or that song you’ve had stuck in your head will come back. Take note of it and reset.
The Bornless One serves a lot of functions. You primarily want to use this one when invoking anything in your temple. The reason being, often times, this shit is invisible and you have to go by instinct in order to trust that it is what is says it is. You eventually get a feel for all the different varieties of spirit out there and can tell when the presence in your temple is coming from an authentic place but even still, the Bornless One invocation allows you to assume the mantle of the highest divine. Read the wording of the invocation. You begin by calling down this incredible power but by the end, you’re announcing to the cosmos that you’re the one with sight in the feet and whose mouth ever flameth. Performing this on the regular does a couple things:
It’s the longest of all the rituals I perform and there’s so much you have to remember when you do it. Ultimately, you want to do this one without looking at a book. So doing it a lot will get you there.
We’re trying to unite with our native divinity here, folks. Every one of these rituals gets us a little closer.
Take it slow
My practice wasn’t always this elaborate. When I started I simply performed the LBRP and then meditated. I’d throw an altar cloth down, light a candle, do the banishing, and then meditate in silence. But as my temple began to come together, I started adding more and more elements to it until two years later I had this whole thing in the basement. Take it slow, practice, and learn. Develop your own daily rituals. Practice them on the regular. If you fall off — I fall off all the time — acknowledge it and get back to work.
Without a solid foundation of spirit, you really don’t want to be working practical applications of magic that manifest an actual outcome and you certainly don’t want to be evoking demons. Your divine flame, or avatar, burns on the astral. That’s what reps you there, not some crude representation of your body. What these spirits and forces see is the Virgin Baby Witch vs the Chad Sorcerer and will react, accordingly. Act like you know!