So, why study Western Magic – at IMBOLC? In this article I am sharing my personal answer to this question. Obviously, you will find your own. The reflections offered here are meant to be helpful in that process of yours: To decide whether the proper, fully committed study of the solitary practitioner’s path in Western Magic is for you, as well as more specifically, the distance learning course offered by the independent training institute that is IMBOLC.

Run since 1992 by Agrippa (the magical pen-name of its founder), I enrolled with IMBOLC in 2001 and continued my active studies until 2011. Trying to condense what I learned during these years into a few paragraphs is impossible. That’s why I will be focussing on a few essential points, that might help you in making your own decision.

Back in 2001, through a matter of synchronicity as they happen in life to all of us, I enrolled at IMBOLC almost at the same moment, when I also enrolled at my university. In the same year, I started my daylight studies on Anthropology, Communication Science and Intercultural Communications, and I also started my dawn and dusk studies on ritual magic with IMBOLC. During the first five years, rigorously, I got up at about 6am every morning and dedicated myself to the respective theoretical and practical magical studies for an hour or two. Then another training slot would follow on many evenings, and longer practice sessions on the weekends. This was just my personal choice of pace and investment, and it might be different from yours.

However, it helped me realise quickly that being successful at university was rather straight forward, compared to being successful at IMBOLC. Of course, I had to do a lot of the same chores one also does at an academic university for IMBOLC, such as reading, remembering, and reproducing specialised content during theoretical exams. Personally, I hold an arbitrary aversion to writing exams and taking tests. Yet, all in all, over the course of my ten years at IMBOLC, I wrote significantly more and much longer exams on Western Magic than I ever did for my academic studies.

So, given there are some parallels to an academic education, why then was studying at IMBOLC still so much harder than succeeding at a university? Well, it would be wonderful to discuss this over a bottle of wine in front of an open fireplace in an old pub. As that’s not going to happen unfortunately, let me condense my answer into three essential points: (1) Becoming adept at magic mattered immensely to me. (2) The work at IMBOLC continuously had me walking on the edge of my fears, i.e. what I thought I simply could not be doing. (3) And – in line with the idea of the solitary practitioner’s path – IMBOLC’s unique didactics enabled me to learn how to stand alone and all by myself.

Let me expand on all three of these aspects. I hope this offers some help and insights in making your own decision, if this or a similar path is for you.

LVX,
Frater Acher

1. Knowing How Much It Means

How much does mastering magic matter to you? Knowing your personal, your real answer to this is essential when you consider enrolling in IMBOLC. See, like many others, I did my university studies because I had to do something. However, in contrast to my questionable motivation for academia, I threw myself into the work at IMBOLC like I was going to war. A war, this would be, against my own stupidity. My blindness, my inability and not knowing.

Especially during the first five years I was in daily combat training against myself. Now it’s important to differentiate here – and you will learn to do this as well, should you choose to follow this path: I was not at all in combat against my genuine self. I was fighting the many layers of lies that I had become, which all were hiding my real Self. I was battling the rock I was hidden within. I fought against the boy that I was still trapped inside.

I shouldn’t be writing this, as it will sound desperately entitled, but this is what it was: Even at that early age, I knew magic should be familiar territory to me. I intuitively knew that I had done these things before; and yet my incarnated brain did not remember a single thing. Here I was, literally, back in school again, needing to learn the simplest of things. I was rowing out onto the ocean of my own shortcomings, led only by the naive hope, beyond that horizon I would bump into an island of distant memories, of echoes of skills I once possessed. – That island, many years later, I actually found it. Today I call this island my Holy Daïmon and wrote a book about how we recovered each other.

So the lesson is, if carving out your own magical path, if winning back your own magical identity does not matter to you, safe your money, safe your time, and all the hassle.

Gustav Meyrink, in his novel ‘The Green Face’ (Das Grüne Gesicht) gave a fierce account of just how much this goal needs to matter to us, so that we have reason to hope that someday we will become magic.

“If you seriously want your destiny to gallop, you must - I warn you against it and at the same time advise you to do it, because it is the only thing man should do and at the same time the gravest sacrifice he can make! - you must call upon your innermost core, the core of your being without which you would be a corpse (and even not that), and command it - that He leads you the shortest way to the great goal, - the only one worth striving for, however little you realize it now, - mercilessly, without rest, through sickness, suffering, death and sleep, through honours, wealth and joy, always through and through like a speeding horse pulling a chariot forward over fields and stones and past flowers and blossoming groves! This is what I call: Calling God. It must be like a vow before a listening ear!"

Well, dial that down a little. But what I am reaffirming is this: For this path to work out for you, becoming a magician needs to be one of the few essential life goals you hold for yourself. Maybe next to being a good father or mother, and leading a happy life in general. Whatever your choice will be, becoming magic needs to feature in the top three, so that this journey can be fuelled with sufficient will and perseverance on your end.

2. Accepting Fear As A Companion

In retrospect this is the point I benefited most of – initially unintentionally, especially outside my magical practice. A lot of the suffering many of us inflict upon ourselves is caused by our attempt to bypass our fears. Most people’s life-maps are full of wiggles and mazes that make no sense at all and lead nowhere – except for away or around what they are afraid of. Humans are great at wasting entire incarnations meandering around their fears. This becomes really tragic, once we realise that most of our fears are nothing but shadows we cast ourselves. They hold no substance, no spark, no ontology by themselves. This is what I learned to break through at IMBOLC.

In my essay On the Path of the Ritual Lone Practitioner I have provided several examples of such breaking-through; so we don’t need to repeat these here. Let’s rather get to the essence of it: The work at IMBOLC is hard because there is no success-formula to it. Every Teaching Letter comes with challenges of entirely different nature: Sitting in my asana for two hours straight without moving eyelids or shoulders was a challenge. Bringing up enough money to rent a remote cellar in the middle of the city, fitting it out into a ritual temple, and showing up at night to perform my first rituals was a challenge. Years later, taking that temple down again, and explaining to the owner why I had painted 270 square feet – plus ceiling and floor – in night-dark blue that was now impossible to get back to white, was a challenge. Walking out into the woods at midnight, marking my magical circle with flour, lighting my candles and speaking to the spirits was a challenge. Explaining to my wife, why I needed this time every day from 6am to 8am for my practice, as well as many weekends of solitary work in our cellar, was a challenge. – Many of these things now seem easy in retrospect, but I still recall how daunting and sometimes insurmountable they seemed when I faced them for the first time. The point is: IMBOLC will take you through many gates of first-times. And many of these will seem tightly locked when you first walk up to them. IMBOLC only reveals itself to be an open path, if you are willing and courageous enough to overcome yourself.

From these ten years of training there is now a pattern, deeply embedded in my muscle memory, that I had never experienced in the same way before: This pattern equals a concoction, mixed from the same amounts of excitement, fear, and intimidation. We all know the beginning of this pattern: It’s the dream-like thought of ‘What if I really did this...’. Then years of imaginations easily follow, and the pattern dilutes. We imagine ourselves in the situation, how different and bold it would feel, how we’d come to manifest so many of the qualities we desire, and yet we flinch to embrace them in real life. Such daydreaming can carry us forward into entire epics of ‘What Ifs’. And yet nothing ever happens in real life.

IMBOLC helped me to actually do these things. To go on adventures that I thought would only happen in books. Until I did them. And Agrippa (the pseudonym of IMBOLC’s founder) was always there to ensure I didn’t go about these adventures in a reckless or juvenile way, but with determination, preparation, and care. He was also always there to kick my ass, when I was about to bow out in the last minute.

The irony is, these adventures taught me a lot about my very real personal limits. As a human being, it’s our natural state to be surrounded by limitations. Many of these are imagined, and some of them are real. Walking out into adventures, which you thought only happened in books, helps to differentiate the two. You begin to learn about your real limits. And that respecting these has absolutely nothing to do with cowardice. On the other hand, whenever we are not talking about meaningful limitations that should be upheld for a good reason, fear is nothing but noise signal. It is a noise signal that is trying to disturb the actual message from coming through, from the message to materialise in your life. That message is the genuine, noble self you deserve to be.

“The role of the good citizen requires that he be predictable, because our hankering for security, for not taking risks, our fear to be authentic, our fear to stand on our own feet, especially on our own intelligence — this fear is just horrifying. So what do we do? We adjust.” Fritz Perls, Gestalt Therapy Verbatim, p.49

3. Learning To Stand Alone

At some point on this journey one thing will become incredibly clear to you: Agrippa is not teaching you, you are teaching yourself. Agrippa is not there when you are walking out into the woods all by yourself. He will be equipping you with all the skills to do this safely, and then he will be kicking your butt so you gather the courage to do it all by yourself. At the end of the day, though, it is you alone who is slowly growing into a magician.

Again, Gustav Meyrink expressed this notion sharply and slightly polemically in another section of his initiatory novel ‘The Green Face’.

“I understand very well that what you have heard before must only confuse you. Nevertheless, you can derive great benefit from it, if you take it as the first teaching and seek spiritual instruction not from others, but within yourself. Only the teachings that our own spirit sends us come at the right time, and for them we are ready. For the revelations in others you must become deaf and blind. The path to eternal life is as narrow as the sharpness of a knife; you cannot help others when you see them staggering, nor can you expect help from them. If you look at others, you lose your balance and fall. Here there is no stepping forward together, as it is in the world; and as absolutely necessary as a guide is: He must come to you from the realm of the spirit. Only in earthly things can a person serve you as a guide, and their way of acting should be your guideline to judge them.”

What IMBOLC offers is a scaffolding to the tower of power you will build all by yourself. IMBOLC offers a map, boots, equipment, and years full of training to acquire and master essential techniques. But laying down each stone after stone, that you will do all by yourself. Intentionally so, you will never know how others laid their stones, how they designed their own tower of power. You will have heard them talk about it, you will have read about it in books. But during many years of training you will ever only see your own tower grow out of the ground, as you continue to lay stones upon its walls.

I have spoken about this aspect in the above-mentioned essay. What I did not mention there, is that this is one of the greatest tricks to lead an independent, mature and most importantly happy life. Orientating yourself against others, is the worst thing you can do in magic; and often the same is true for life in general: Your ambitions, your art, your skills and dreams could be so much more unique, colourful, creative and strictly speaking, your own if you stopped looking at what others do. Whether these others are dead or alive does not at all matter.

Once you have mastered the essential techniques, how e.g. Aleister Crowley performed certain rituals is not only irrelevant, it is at risk of fading out your own voice. Now, let me be explicit on this notion, as it is easily misunderstood: Real magic is not at all a course in navel-gazing and psychological self-realisation. However, real magic will cause incredibly painful and taxing side effects unless your genuine self shows up to do the actual work. Being present as an authentic, independent, mature human being is not at all the purpose of adept level magic. It is one of its many prerequisites.

Conclusions

In this short text, as you might have realised with disappointment, I did not speak much about traditional ritual magic. I did not mention swords, daggers, wands, chalices, incense, smoke, circles, etc. All of these magical paraphernalia feature heavily in the work that you would be doing at IMBOLC. But I’ll leave it to you to explore these, and to turn them into your own real life experiences. What I wanted to point out here is something different: By walking this path in earnest, with sincerity and commitment, the magic you will create, will create yourself in return.

Whatever we read about magic, must be tested against the evidence of our hands and hearts. And yet, as humans we are fragile objects, wrapped in skin that bleeds and hearts that crack. Learning how to manage this balance, of putting magic into practice, and yet enabling our selves to grow and not degenerate as part of this work, is the long road into a magical and happy life.

Not many of our ancestors achieved to walk it: Take a look at most magician’s biographies and you stand in the bright light of awe-inspiring magical explorers and yet deeply broken everyday biographies. Taking the time to build thorough foundations, taming your desire to exhaust yourself on the first 300 yards, but finding the calm rhythm of walking an entire life into the magical realm, is what makes all the difference. Few of us are capable of creating such journeys by themselves. They are the lucky ones. For all the rest of us, places like IMBOLC exist.