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As I've posted in the past, the proper use of "magick" as a specific term for the spirtual arts makes Google searches a whole lot easier. When I'm interested in searching for information on ritual techniques I'm really not interested in getting back pages describing the cups and balls trick or how to pull a rabbit out of a hat. Similarly, if I'm looking for good card tricks I would rather not be pulling back pages on reading Tarot. Using "magic" for stage magic and "magick" for ceremonial and ritual techniques really works - or at least it would if people would follow the convention.
This brings me to a recent article referencing "magick" that completely misuses the term. This weekend in Tacoma, Washington a self-described "magickian" named Gf Kanick put on a performance. From the article:
Kanick spells magick with a "k" to distinguish his art. Magick with a "k" is a linguistic signal pioneered by Victorian bad boy, mountain climber and legendary mystic Aleister Crowley, who used the word magick, with a "K," to distinguish his explorations of consciousness and other psychonautic systems from the stage work of everyday magicians. Kanick, like Crowley, is no everyday magician, and says his goal is to take people out of their comfort zones to a place where magick is more than an act.
I'm sure Kanick is quite good at what he does, but if he's comparing himself to Crowley on the grounds that he does innovative illusions all I can really do here is call bullshit. Aleister Crowley spent his entire life developing an innovative spiritual system for personal development and beyond. Anybody who would compare that level of work to putting together a compelling stage performance doesn't really know anything about Crowley and shouldn't be appropriating his terminology incorrectly.
Let's face it. This:
A master of many arts, Kanick's talents will be offered as part of Hypothesis, a synthesis of illusion, comedy, sideshow feats, juggling and vaudeville variety.
Has absolutely nothing to do with ritual or ceremonial magick, or with Crowley's work, and it is exactly the "counterfeit" from which the science of the Magi needs to be distinguished.
For what it's worth, though, I'm happy to see that the article describes Crowley as a "legendary mystic" rather than as a baby-sacrificing Satanist. Maybe after more than fifty years some of the media nonsense surrounding his life is starting to die down.
I recently read an article by Jason Miller who complained about other writers using the term "model" when talking about a type of magick that they work. You can see his article here. I would have to say that I agree completely with what Jason said, but whenever I have used the term "model" I have always made certain that my audience knew that I was talking about a theoretical construct. In short, a model, in regards to magickal practice, is just a heuristic device, which is a fancy way of saying that it is a learning tool. I have often said that no one works with just one of the several models of magick that I have proposed, and that in the real world, magicians work magick using several of them simultaneously. It's useful to talk about magickal models because it allows one to see a distinct quality of magick that may or may not be operating in what a person really does when they work magick.
The bottom line is to not confuse a theoretical discussion of a magickal model with the real thing, which is more complex and dynamic than what a single model would entail. Like all mental structures that are useful for classification, they have their uses and limitations. In the area of magick, one should never confuse a model, diagram or structure for what it is representing. We are dealing with phenomena that is difficult to classify, so if we simplify things to better understand it, then that doesn't mean that the simplified explanation or theory is the thing itself - it is a theory that is useful for understanding something, nothing more.
When I discuss the energy model, or the spirit model, the psychology model, the chaos model or the rhetorical model of magick, I am discussing theoretical approaches to understanding magick. No one uses just one model, and even if they did, there would be more to what they were doing than what is understood by the model. However, using models as a theoretical construct allows us to see the various aspects or techniques of a magickal system, which otherwise, would be opaque and incapable of analysis. The purpose of classifying something is to categorize it in a general manner so it can be compared to other analogous things.
I believe that I set the tone for this discussion early on in one of my articles, where I said:
"Like the analogy for food, there are also several different theories about magic, and all of them take a very specific model and methodology and apply it exclusively. So there is a theory of magic that is based on Spirit, another one based on Energy, and still another one based on Psychology. All of them are correct as far as they go, but all of them are limited to a single model and their associated assumptions. I would also consider them to be gross generalizations, but models are good learning devices, since they challenge and help us to accurately think about the way something really works."
And also, the statement:
"Witchcraft has the unusual advantage that liturgy and magical crafts blend together to form a single praxis. Devotional invocations to the gods can also be magical spells meant to cause changes in the material world. As we will see when examining the other theories, witchcraft is a hybrid, combining many theories into a blended and practical perspective."
So as you can see, I have been careful about talking about the various models of magick. I never state that a true system of magick conforms to just one model, and in fact almost all of them have at least three or more models active in them. Yet I will be certain to state this fact from time to time when I talk about models so no one gets any ideas that they are anything more than a learning device.
Frater Barrabbas
Suggested ebooks:
Solomonic Grimoires - The Emerald Tablets Of Hermes
Anonymous - The Laws For Witches
Hey guys, I am hoping to formulate an anointing oil dealing with manifestation upon the physical plain, as represented by the Sephiroth, Malkuth, on the Qabalah. Anyway, I was wondering if anyone here-- perhaps more knowledgible on all things Crowley than myself-- could aid me in locating Uncle Al's herbal-, E.O.-, and perfume-attributations to this respective sphere in the Qabalah [Malkuth]. Some that I have found so far are:
* GALANGAL: According to the Wikipedia entry for Abramelin Oil, "This oil is compounded of four substances. The basis of all is the oil of the olive. The olive is, traditionally, the gift of Minerva, the Wisdom of God, the Logos. In this are dissolved three other oils; oil of myrrh, oil of cinnamon, oil of galangal. The Myrrh is attributed to Binah, the Great Mother, who is both the understanding of the Magician and that sorrow and compassion which results from the contemplation of the Universe. The Cinnamon represents Tiphereth, the Sun -- the Son, in whom Glory and Suffering are identical. The Galangal represents both Kether and Malkuth, the First and the Last, the One and the Many, since in this Oil they are One. [...] These oils taken together represent therefore the whole Tree of Life. The ten Sephiroth are blended into the perfect gold." However, upon checking my copy of Crowley's "Magick, Book Four, Liber ABA, I could not locate this citation.
* POMEGRANATE: from his 777. Recently I have found a supplier for Pomegranate Absolute (or was it an oleo resin?)!
* DITTANY OF CRETE: Malkuth's attributed "perfume" in 777.
* LILY: 777's attributed "plant" to Malkuth; probably because Lilith is associated with this Sphere, according to Crowley. Hmmm...I wonder if I could find a Lily Tincture somewhere, as I do not have access to enough fresh flowers to presently yield my own.
* STORAX: Now, I don't know if Crowley specificaly attributes Malkuth with STORAX, but, he attributes it to "Earth of Earth" in his 777; after all, Malkuth is associated with the Earth.
Take Care
CONJURELLA FEVER: TRANSCENDING TIME & MK-ULTRA
Science Fiction Truth by award-winning CREEPY writer T. Casey Brennan
This is the story of the Abominations. This is the story of Those Who Wait. Like L. Ron Hubbard and H.P. Lovecraft, my late father, St. Clair County (Michigan) Board of Education member William J. Brennan worked for that Citadel of the Old Ones, the pulp magazines of the 1940s. Two issues of the 1940s Street & Smith companion to WEIRD TALES and THE SHADOW, LOVE STORY magazine, carry my dad's stories, under the
authorship, Bill Brennan.
To serve the pulps was to serve the Old Ones; to serve them, was to behold the NECRONOMICON, if only in dreams. Herman Slater, owner of the old Warlock Shoppe in Brooklyn, after he published ME, the blood-stained legend, in the square-backed summer 1975 edition of EARTH RELIGION NEWS (not to be confused with EAST WEST JOURNAL November 1984, page 13, which also carries a write-up on me - but that happened in Berkeley, when they tried to kill Manson, so I must talk about that later, much later),
published his own fictitious NECRONOMICON, what the Necronomicon "might be like". No... No, this is the story of Lynette Fromme, one of my
friends, a girl from Ann Arbor, met her while she was being transferred from one prison to another. It was a girl I lived with for a long time, she was never my lover, she was just my landlady, but we got introduced by the late Ernie Brown, of Ann Arbor's cable channel 9, host of
numerous Ann Arbor cablevision shows, the last being entitled SIMPLY YOU. Ernie died of pneumonia in December of 1996, at the age of 39, after introducing me to the girl who had met Lynette Fromme.
But now the Conjurella Fever begins, now the story comes forth, now the bleak memories of things that cannot be...
No, this is the story of Eponymous Hawking, and the Chandrashakar Limit, of dinosaurs that take back the earth, of black holes and time warpsof the boy who shot John Kennedy, who, still a boy in Berkeley, witnesses the aftermath of an attempt on Manson's life...
Eponymous Hawking fears the night. Eponymous Hawking fears the long, dark night. His tongue has been cut out, his mentor has proven himself an MK-ULTRA agent, he has only one ally: his mentor's wife. He will survive. Like the other MK-ULTRA experiments, like any life Dr. E ever touched, he is made of steel. He will survive. Like Howard Brennan, he lied. He knows.
In the known universe, there are about a hundred million galaxies, each with about a hundred million stars. To my knowledge, there is no proof that ANY of these stars has a planetary system, like our own sun, Sol.
This observation is extremely significant,,, vis-avis, the Chandrashakar Limit. The Chandrashakar Limit determines which stars have sufficient mass to collapse into that paradox of physics, the black hole. Beneath the Chandrashakar Limit, a star, upon expiring, collapses into something at least comparable to ordinary matter, a White Dwarf, at the extreme. A White Dwarf is still matter which obeys the ordinary laws of physics, unly under extreme density.
Above the Chandrashakar Limit, the star collapses into a black hole. A black hole is a virtually infinitely compact mass of time-space, drawing adjacent time-space into its core. The event horizon of a black hole prevents the entire universe from falling into such a collapsed star.
The event horizon is a kind of shell surrounding a black hole. Yet, worm holes escape from a black hole, sending a warping effect to all
time-space within their reach. A planet falling into a black hole can reverse in time, can enter parallell worlds, and it's own distant past.
The Abominations. Where man rules now, they ruled before, where man rules now, they shall rule again. Man's rule upon the earth has been but a whisper, a heartbeat, that "fleeting moment" of Goethe's Faust, one brief moment compared to endless ages when the dinosaurs ruled, when no mammal walked, when serpents ruled, masked and mystical, cowled and crimson, cold and dark, of the night, of the night...
The Conjurella dream is so difficult to tell. In 1975, my career as an award-winning comic book writer for the Warren magazines, CREEPY, EERIE, and VAMPIRELLA (Marilyn Manson has a tatoo of Uncle Creepy on his arm),
was virtually totalled. I was reduced to writing essays claiming to be the reincarnation of Roaring Twenties "satanist", Aleister Crowley, as published in such magazines as Llewellyn's GNOSTICA (#30, 31? Ciurca
1977), EARTH RELIGION NEWS, and a mid-1970s issue of the British zine INSIGHT, from Crowleyan Deric R. James. Anyway, it all led to two links to Manson.
This is the first link to Manson.
In 1975, I was head over heels in love with my plan to have all
Crowleyans everywhere declare me the reincarnation of Aleister Crowley.
Support for this camp[aign, which preceded my work against smoking in comic books, as noted in CONGRESSIONAL RECORD - SENATE, Voil. 128, No.
131, September 28, 1982, page S12435, was scarce, so I conceived that I would approach a well known cult figure, Charles Manson, for an
endorsement. I told Daddy about my belief in witchcraft and Crowleyan Magick. I sure as hell didn't know he was going to pull what he did, or I would have changed the subject, talked about school taxes, or horse racing, or football, or that kind of crap that he liked.
Daddy says: "Would you believe you could kill a squirrel in Michigan, and that would kill John Kennedy in Dallas?"
I pause nervously. I don't like to talk about the Kennedy assassination.
"Yeah, sure," I say, hoping to avoid JFK by going into a long, involved explanation of the principles of witchcraft, "It's called 'sympathetic magic'. The macrocosm and the microcosm. Well, the spell involves a miniature, a replica, which REPRESENTS..."
Daddy says: "I'll make it easyv for ya. Voodoo."
"Okay," I say.
Then he tells met it's not voodoo. Then he tels me about the Conjurella memory, and again the boy is lifted up. Again the voices, again the operating command, again the murdered President...
I remember flying into Chicago's O'Hare Airport in 1975. We hasd always respected Moslems. Sometime in the mid-1950s, my Uncle, Charles Goodrich (not Uncle Johnny of CONJURELLA, the one that got us involved with David Ferrie), was involved with the Aladdin Temple Shrine, on Stelzer Road, in Columbus, Ohio. David Ferrie lived in Cleveland. We're not supposed to say, but he had to do with my Aunt Patty, who wasn't really my aunt at all, and wasn't really Patty at all. Like David Ferrie, she was an Ohio cancer researcher, author of LIVING WITH CANCER by Edna Kaehele,
1952, Doubeday & Company. Her name was Edna Kaehele, but her friends called her Pat. She founded the internationally acclaimed anti-cancer group, Fear Fighters, much touted in the 1950s Columbus press, and wrote about me in her book, TRAINING THE FAMILY DOG, 1953, Lantern Press, page
180: "The hardiest individualist I know..Casey Brennan, a three-year-old friend from Avoca, Michigan."
Anyway, that was us in Ohio in the 1950s, and one day Uncle Charley took us to the Shrine Circus. He wore his fez, and I even got my picture taken with a little fez that said "Moslem" on it. I think that must have gotten us all respecting Moslems, and thinking of them as more durable allies than they eventually turned out to be.
So I flew into O'Hare airport in 1975. The next part of the memory, I was sitting beside Louis Lomax, on a bench, outside, in as remote part of the airport. I had read Louis Lomax's biography of Malcolm X, WHEN THE WORD IS GIVEN. In the preface, he takes note of the almost religious aspect of the Universal Pictures horror films ofv the Golden Age: THE WOLFMAN, et al. I had copied that style of melodrama in my own stories for the Warren magazines of the early 1970s, and my later comics, as noted in my 1997 and 1998 WHO'S WHO IN AMERICA istings.
I don't remember what Lomax asked me. I don't remember what I told him.
I only remember this. I was sitting beside Lomax on that bench. There was no one else in sight. Suddenly a car pulls up full of black guys. It all happen so quickly; they all jump out. The leader says, just like this:
"Put on your LIPS!"
They instantly pull thin gas masks over their faces. It's a low instant whisper, but the word "LIPS" is a shout. Silent machine-gun fire riddles Louis Lomax. I have only a nanosecond to look and see the wounds
erupting from his body, as the rapid-fire shells hit. Then another
nanosecond to look around and see pink gas being sprayed on us from tubes.
No, after they try to kill Daddy and me, Daddy says: "Do you still want Charles Manson as an endorser?"
I say: "No." This is the second link to Manson.
In February of 1977, I went to Toronto, to secure an introduction to HOLLYWOOD BABYLON author and film-maker, Kenneth Anger, from my then friend, Captain George, of the shop, Captain George's Memory Lane. I had some Canadian ties; I'd attended comic book conventions as a panel guest at Winter's College at York University. I'd signed autographs (following publication of my award-winning "On the Wings of a Bird" in CREEPY #36),
done radio interviews, and hobnobbed with other celebrities. I had some action in Toronto.
I stayed at the Carleton Inn; they had a pool and a sauna on like, the eighth floor or something. It was nice, but it was 40 below outside.
Forty below, is, by coincidence, the same temperature on both the
Fahrenheit and Celsius scales. Also, the fire alarm went off, and I ran down twenty-three floors. Then they said there was just something
smoldering in the basement, and I threatened to sue them.
But I got the introduction to Kenneth Anger, who, at that time, was preparing a sequel to his highly acclaimed film, SCORPIO RISING. The new folm was to be called LUCIFER RISING, and, in no time, I had arranged a part in it, written by anger himself. I had been slated to play the ghost of Aleister Cowley, who appears behind Anger, as Anger performs a Magickal Spell.
Name stars associated with the movie included Marianne Faithfull, and Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin, who had written the musical score. But
Page's music was scrapped in favor of that of Bobby Beausoleil, which Anger seemed to pronounce "Bobby Beloy", and the T. Casey Brennan scene was eliminated altogether. I asked Anger if Beausolil, in prison for murder, was one of the Manson Family.
Anger says: "He killed one of the Manson Family." This is the third link to Manson.
This is Berkeley in the early 1980s.
On October 17, 1983, Linda and Susan bought me a plane ticket to San Diego. They distributed Jack T. Chick comics; they disappeared on a road trip shortly thereafter. Jack T. Chick didn't give a damn; none of their family has seen them since. I soon migrated to the San Francisco Bay area, and in March of 1984, I moved into the Berkeley Krishna Temple.
Well, it was sort of a Krishna Temple, but for them too, things had gone from bad to worse. An early leader of the Berkeley Temple, a priest named Jiva, had gone bad, engaging himself in a variety of criminal activities, prior to his murder. This was all before my time, but around the time of Jiva's fall, and his death, Srila Hansadutta arrived.
Hansadutta was born in Germany during the war, the son of Hitler's
personal baker. He had been thrown out of Germany, and I had seen a copy of DER SPIEGEL, the German version of TIME and NEWSWEEK, calling
Hansadutta and his followers "more dangerous than the Bader-Meinhoff gang". I have trouble believing that; he wasn't BAD, he was just
hot-headed. According to the Berkeley police, the Berkeley press, and others, he liked to crusise around Berkeley with the passenger window open, firing on buildings. I don't think he ever shot anybody, even by accident. He was just letting off steam, but it was crazy as hell; me, I'll just fire off a few rounds in the air when I'm like that. Not
Hansadutta.
Anyway, I'd promised Linda and Susan I was going to make some smart career moves in California. Joining the Krishna Temple wasn't one of them; the Hansaduttas treated me like dirt - I wasn't even a eal
devotee, I was just their dishwasher. A typical memory of Berkeley was washing pots on July 4, 1984, while the Hansadutta almost blew up their parking lots with repeated blasts from "firecrackers", manufactured from sticks of dynamite at their secondary temple, "The Farm", which I'd never seen. I was told later that someone had talked "the Farm" right out from under Hansdadutta. He'd signed over the deed in a supposed business ploy, then, it was lost, and he'd never get it back. I was interviewed on the UC Berkeley radio station, KALX, by Donna Fox, and on KBLX by Keith Jenkins. I went on KTEH in San Jose as a member of a San Francisco Regional Mensa team soliciting funds for the station, during a Dr. WHO marathon. I even took a call from a San Jose police officer on camera, calling in a donation. I was mentioned in some issue or other of the CATHOLIC VOICE in Oakland, I created a short-lived comic character called "Capt. KALX" for the KALX PROGRAM GUIDE, I appeared on CALIFORNIA TONIGHT on KFCB in Concord (at that time, one of the Jim and Tammy
Bakker stations), I was written up in EAST WEST JOURNAL, November 1984, page 13, and I was an also-ran guest, with a free table, at a comic convention in one of those buildings by Sproul Plaza.
That was Berkeley, 1983 to 1985, a hodge-podge of memories; a hell of free meals, long penniless walks to the AA meeting at 2910 Telegraph for free coffee, a career being shattered, and a servant's life in a commune of inexplicable cultists, who, like myself, were being pursued by their own deadly enemies.
This was the hit on Manson.
That afternoon, I came back to 2334 Stuart, the Berkeley Krishna Temple, to find the community abuzz with some astounding news. The LOS ANGELES TIMES had called...a former Berkeley devotee had attempted to kill
Charles Manson. The TIMES was adamant: Manson was DEAD, or should be considered so; he'd been burned over 90% of his body, they said. Some time after that, we were given a more detailed account of the attack, so detailed that I suspect it may have come from law enforcement officials, or even a call from the attacker himself, though I suppose the LA TIMES could have given it.
It went like this.
The ex-Berkeley devotee, first a priest, then a cop killer, then a
convict, is trying to chant aloud on his Krishna rosary. This gets on Manson's nerves. Plus, probably Manson still thinks the Krishna people are a bunch of sissies, the way they were when he went up...whatever happened, now they're often mean as hell, especially ones from Berkeley.
Anyway, after much wrangling with Manson, the priest conceives an
assassination attempt. He has clearly studied Manson's habits, in that he knows that Manson frequents the prison hobby shop. His thinking is the elementary thinking of a warrior (of those objects around me, which can be used as a weapon?), not the subsidized kind of thinking, where they GIVE you a weapon that DOES the job. He chooses his make-shift weapon, a can of paint thinner used in decorating model cars sold there.
He awaits Manson, throws the fluid in his face and lights it. Some
combination of prison guards and other inmates put out the fire, which leaves Manson with only a few scars...but instantly the story is brought to the Berkeley Temple, where the priest once lived, that Manson is bu rned over ninety percent of his body, and is not expected to live.
This is the fourth link, the link that cannot be.
Scientists have determined that our sun, Sol, is well within the
Chandrashakar Limit; that there is no possibility that it will
eventually implode into a black hole. But the Chandrashakar Limit was based on the atomic weight of suns with no known planetary systems. Sol, combined with its solar system, particularly if one adds the outer
planets that are speculated to revolve beyond Pluto, is doubtless well above the Chandrashakar Limit.
You could just LOOK, and the sun could turn into a black hole! Long before our planet pierces, or is shattered against the black hole's event horizon, worm holes of distorted time-space will escape from the black hole, encompassing whole worlds, even travelling back in time to before the black hole took place.
Time will turn backward. The earth will become as it was. The
abominations shall rise up, their wait has been endless, the serpents of the old times shall rise up and take back the earth.
This is fiction:
Squeakanella sees the matrix, falls, has an epileptic seizure, then pockets the gun. Two operating commands repeat themselves in her
frenzied head:
1. Fire on command.
2. It isn't real.
Someone has erred. The commands will conflict. Squeakanella has fired guns in dreams before, she knows how a dream gun works, you just draw and fire. You don't have to DO anything, it ruins the dream.
You don't have to take off the safety.
Squeakanella raises the impotent automatic, and pulls back a rubbery trigger, just like a dream gun should be. She has shaken off the blood, she did what I could not. Then she looks to the sky and she beholds them, the serpents of the old places, for endless ages they ruled before man, their yearning is endless, they yearn for the earth, they yearn to come forth, and even to be used by them once is to know that yearning eternal.
"The first version of this article was published on 6/19/2006 on the previous version of this blog. "
A hundred years ago most men belonged to fraternal orders of one sort or another, many of which had initiatory rites largely copied from those of Freemasonry. These days many books on magick and witchcraft support the concept of "self-initiation" and the popularity of secret and semi-secret fraternal orders has waned. Does that mean that formal initiation has become a quaint anachronism, or is it still an effective spiritual technology?
What the concept of self-initiation gets right is that regardless of the rituals and ceremonies you go through and the degree titles you hold, you have to do the corresponding spiritual work yourself. There is no real way around this basic truth. Spiritual realization is experiential - it cannot be taught or even directly explained. Because of this a degree title does not guarantee spiritual wisdom or power. In many organizations, advancement to higher degrees is contingent upon service to the organization rather than actual spiritual attainment, and the fact that someone is a hard worker in the mundane realm says nothing about their capacity for magick or mysticism, or the quality of their realization.
Nonetheless, formal initiation is a powerful method for imprinting the mind with concepts and ideas that will facilitate the spiritual evolution of a dedicated spiritual practitioner who takes those lessons to heart. The secrecy that surrounds initiatory traditions is related to a powerful psychological techique - the mind becomes more sensitive and attuned to information when it is placed in a situation of uncertainty, so an initiatory ritual will create a much more powerful imprint if the candidate does not know what is going to happen. Enough has been published that it is possible with some diligence to locate the degree work of most initiatory orders, but if you ever plan on taking the degrees all you are doing is cheating yourself.
I am convinced that this is the sole practical reason for secrecy surrounding initiation rituals. For much of human history it was believed that secret knowledge was somehow more powerful, but I suspect this belief was due to a misunderstanding of the mechanics of mind. When a candidate knows what is going to happen it is not that current of magical energy is weaker but that the mind expects the form of the ritual and is less moved by it. As a result, the magical effect of the initiation is reduced and a reasonable person might conclude that the power of the rite somehow grows if few know its details. What really happened is that the mind anticipated the actions of the rite, conceptualized them, and processed them ahead of time so no effective imprint was formed.
So does this imprint hypothesis mean that initiations are merely psychological? In a sense the answer is yes, but there is no "merely" about it. All magical rituals raise energy if performed by skilled practitioners. The difference with an initiation is that the psychological imprint allows the psyche of the candidate to be more open to that energy than they might otherwise be, and gives that energy a framework in which to work toward creating change in the candidate's life.
One of the wonders that the Internet has brought us is the concept of "astral initiations" that is, a group of magical practitioners will ask candidates to send them photographs or some other sort of magical link and then perform the initiation rite on the magical link, presumably to transmit a current of energy to the candidate corresponding to the energy summoned by the initiation rite. While the people doing this work may be sincere, I have trouble believing that it is all that effective. Without the imprint, the initiation will not work nearly as well. A magical force may be set in motion, but the effect will be reduced if it has to travel over a magical link and there will be no imprint created since the candidate has not gone through the physical experience of the initiation.
A couple of people have reported to me that they took astral initiations and felt some sort of tangible energy effect, and I believe them - I just think that the effect is unlikely to be any greater than that of performing a self-initiation rite and perhaps that would have been a better route to take. For one thing, it's free. Second of all, I think that any magician will learn a lot more writing and conducting his or her own initiation ritual than he or she will possibly pick up going through any sort of "astral ritual" conducted by others, regardless of how talented those others might be. Better still, though, would be to find a friend who is also a talented magician who can write a ritual that will be completely unfamiliar to the candidate so that an imprint will be properly formed.
Because this can be a difficult situation to set up, existing fraternal bodies still have an important role in initiation. In general, the rituals they perform were originally developed by talented ritualists and improved over the years based on changes that were found to work better for initiating candidates. Such improvements are based on empirical observation that a single individual could never undertake on short notice, and as a result the rituals themselves are cleaner and generally work better. While groups like Ordo Templi Orientis are more explicitly magical, the Masonic fraternity also puts on good initiation rites that have been tested for centuries on millions of candidates, a very impressive track record. Also, Masonic initiations are not only available to men - American Co-Masonry (http://www.co-masonry.org/) offers initiation to both men and women and has lodges in many areas of the country.
If Masonry is any indication, today more and more people are becoming interested in initiation and fraternal orders and seeing the value in joining such organizations. After losing members for a long time, it seems like Masonic lodges are finally starting to find more qualified individuals seeking initiation. The Internet helps make these groups easier to find, and it is clear that this is where many of the inquiries are now originating. My Masonic lodge has a very nice website at http://braden.org/ that has a lot of information, and I am also an initiate of Ordo Templi Orientis (http://oto-usa.org/) and a member of the local OTO lodge (http://www.leapinglaughter.org/) here in Minneapolis. Feel free to check out the links for more information.
Suggested ebooks:
Aleister Crowley - Magick
Aleister Crowley - Magick Without Tears
