On Character in Magic
On Character in Magic – Extracts from Henry Clay Trumbull’s
Character-Shaping and Character-Showing (1889)
Here is the second, slender volume in the series titled Büchlein Morgenstern. On less than twenty pages it offers an introduction to some of the essential thoughts on character-shaping and character-showing as concisely summarised by Henry Clay Trumbull in his 1889 book of the same title. As it might seem unusual to see his name appear in the context of practical magic, I am sharing my own short introduction and a personal note below.
As I have to presume the PDF version will travel all by itself through the internet, I have included my introduction there as well. The actual extracts from Trumbull’s excellent work begin on page 10.
If Western Magic today still deserves to be called an unruly craft, one that undermines authority and resits orthodoxy in whatever disguise they appear, it should continue to take lessons from all sorts and walks of life. As heretics ourselves, we should remain open to learn from present and past, from grimoires and Christians, from folk people and noble people, from East and West.
It is in this spirit, and quite to my own surprise, that I find myself sharing magical life lessons from a once famous American clergyman, a lecturer at Yale Divinity School and a life-long believer in “personal evangelism”.
LVX, Frater Acher
I. On Character in Magic
In the hypothetical situation that Henry Trumbull (1830-1903) and I spent a night out on a long walk under the moon, and a few hours in front of a fire with a whisky or two, it is likely we would have not seen eye to eye on many things. Quite certainly we would have disagreed on a broad array of topics, such as relating to lineage, loyalty and hierarchy, to nation-states and the military, to religious orthodoxy and evangelism, and most obviously on topics such as magic and the occult. – At the same time, I would have considered it a privilege sharing a toast with this man, and walking out under the moon with him.
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This is a lesson it can take a while to come to appreciate: That people we consider peers or teachers, whether dead or alive, will never be flawless or perfect. Quite the opposite: In most cases we will discover as many admirable as well as regrettable character traits in them. Unfortunately, as it is true for all of us, wisdom has the tendency to appear in small doses. It tends to break through the clouds of our minds momentarily, only to withdraw again behind the dim light of our mundane minds.
This short pamphlet is not meant to be an introduction to Henry Clay Trumbull’s work, and neither to his biography. It rather is a homage in its simplest form: Trumbull’s work have long gone out of copyright, and thus have never been as freely available as they are today. Unfortunately though open access does not automatically create application, and neither relevance. At least to my knowledge his thoughts have never been picked up and woven into a context of magical practice. Thus, as an appetiser to more in-depth study, we present short extractions from his work Character-shaping and Character-showing (Philadelphia: John D. Wattles, 1889).
Now you might ask what the subject of character-shaping has to do with applied magic?
Whether the latter is perceived as an art, a science or a craft – isn’t it the precise privilege of a current, that was forced to remain underground for millennia, to be open to all heretics? Isn’t the opportunistic focus on pure impact and efficacy one of the most marked character traits of magic in the West? Isn’t the deliberate neglect of moral boundaries and ethics, of ought, might, and should, the very reason that pushed magic into the social underground, and yet allowed it to resiliently survive and prosper there?
Perhaps, I would dare to answer. Perhaps that is true and we can disregard the following extracts of Trumbull’s work. Perhaps what you’ll find on the following pages is not only a distraction from your practical magical work, but a poison in spirit that might render it void?
Or perhaps it is time to return to an appreciation of ethics and morals not as topics of social, but equally of magical relevance? In this case the very terms require careful resetting: Here, ethics and morals would no longer relate to social dimensions, to Bourdieu’s habitus and behavioural categories of reward, repentance, and retribution. Here we would utilise the terms through the lens of animistic spirit practice.
The collective they would need to be embedded into, or drawn out from, is no longer one of humans alone, but of spirits and humans. Ethics in this case would turn into a field of study in an inter-species setting. If there ever was such a novel faculty as inter-species ethics it would have to beg, borrow and steal insights from a vast range of existing faculties: From social science and psychology, from anthropology, intercultural study, comparative religious studies, as well as of course from biology and chemistry. Most essentially, however, it would need to be open to learn from the spirits.
Most 21st century ritual magicians seem to be comfortable with a staggering amount of cognitive dissonance: For all the right reasons, most of us have come to appreciate the vulnerability of the ecological balance in this world. Since the socio-ecological apocalypse that was the industrialisation of the 18th and 19th century, the field of human empathy slowly and gradually has expanded again to regain appreciation beyond one’s closest family and self-interest. Today, for many of us it includes again large parts of the animal, the plant and now also the broader ecological realm. Still, judging from many recent publications, it seems considerable parts of the Western Magical community’s interest in spirits is strangely stuck in a consciousness of industrial exploitation and colonialism.
Ironically, the modern-mechanistic worldview has prevailed in the very domain that once was understood as its precise opposite: the archaic and occult, the organic and ambiguous realm of telluric and celestial spirits.
By no means do I advocate for a naive or infantile attitude towards the spirit realm. Just take modern wildlife protection as a field of comparison: Despite its positive intent, its work can have grave negative consequences, unless it is undertaken from a foundation of deep respect for Otherness, of a thorough understanding of ecology, and most of all, of first-hand knowledge and study of the respective animal species. Magic, i.e. the cultivation of our relationship with spirits, should be studied, explored and practiced in the exact same vein.
With such an approach to magic character matters greatly. I suggested before that it is our character that spirits see first when we encounter them on the inner realm. Just like human-to-human interaction is greatly informed by physical presence, visual and tonal cues as well as nonverbal communication, so spirit-to-human communication is informed by the presence of our human spirit and the way it expresses itself through our character.
II. A Personal Note
I encountered Trumbull’s work as part of the research for Ingenium (Scarlet Imprint, 2022), a book that will delve deeply into matters of occult ethics and how these might be utilised for practical purposes in magic. The sections I am quoting below resonated strongly with me, and I want to share some personal context of why that might be.
Of course, I was and remain fascinated by the conciseness and simplicity of Trumbull’s voice - and how much his words require repeating 130 years after their first publication. Additionally, Trumbull’s words immediately wove themselves into the thought process of several subject I have written about recently: The ecology of the spirit world according to Paracelsus, the idea of our own Forestedness, the possibility of reforging our alliance with spirits through the lens of Rosicrucian Magic, the importance of wrestling with the thorny idea(l) of Authenticity in Magic, and equally the restoring of the idea of a tradition of White Magic from cliche and ridicule.
None of the above, even is a remote possibility without a strong foundation of knowing what shapes and shows our own character.
So, in reading the following extracts form the first three chapters of Trumbull’s work, I invite you to participate in a small experiment: As you come across sentences that strike a chord with you, take a moment to pause, and consider what their meaning is to you within the magical circle as well as in your mundane life? How does your character reveal itself today to the world around you - that is made up both of humans and spirits? Considering your magical practice, which implicit ethical choices have you already made? If you attempt to look at yourself as a magician through the lens of a spirit you have worked with: What would they say about your reputation, your conduct and eccentricities, and finally about your character?
In my own work, I recall at least three defining moments when I invited spirits to help me change my character, my conduct as well as ultimately my reputation. Neither of these works were undertaken with particularly high-standing ideals in mind, but rather to help me avert the demons I am trying to hold at bay inside.
Looking back at my own biography, I come from a place where ethics seemed a privilege of the safe and the protected; and for a long time I didn’t consider myself in that camp. Before I even got a conscious grasp of my own character or reputation, both had already deteriorated into tools of manipulation and self- protection. Like we all, I was a teenager at the time, discovering the magical and daunting powers of free will - and yet looking into the mirror of myself for the first time and seeing how much I had abused them already.
When I listen to Trumbull’s words that ten year old within me is still listening in. I can feel the shame as well as the fascination he holds with this old man’s perspective. I can sense him teetering on the threshold of leaning forward and following their call, or falling backwards and rejecting it all. Luckily, fate allowed me to lean forward, and not fall back. Or at least not as hard as I could have.
Years ago now my magical and mundane life begun to blur into one. Either the ritual circle broke, or it expanded to entail all of life? Today, character to me – much more so than sigils, wands, chalices or lamens – is a word that holds great magical power.
Just like the Babylonian brick maker Trumbull references, it speaks of the stamp with which we mark each one of our actions, or each brick we lay in the house of our life. And it is this stamp that is seen and read by humans and spirits alike. – To me, aspiring to make this seal the most decent, perhaps even noble, under the inner and outer conditions I live by, is the mark of a good life.
LVX,
Frater Acher
May the serpent bite its tail.
Note: I resisted the urge to modernise the use of gender terms in Trumbull’s original text. As unfortunately often the case with older texts, we need to make the effort to read either wo/man or human where the text says man.