Writing about the Myth in Ritual Magic I often had to think of two stories I heard during my time at university. Back then I studied Intercultural Communication and discovered a lot about what each culture teaches its members and how this process works. I also learned a lot about the often highly specialized skills acquired and passed on during socialization. Many of these cultural skills are taken for granted or even assumed to be universal by its members - whereas in reality they aren't. In fact it is these skills that often shape and limit the worldview of any culture's members.

Today the boundaries between myth, legend and folktale often are blurred. Often what we are left with is a palimpsest touched by many voices and pens, overwritten, cut short and expanded again in multiple layers and times. That is why going into the mythical structures ourselves in vision and ritual and bringing them back to life again is essential. Only by embarking on the mythical journeys ourselves can we explore and ultimately judge if they are true patterns of spirit power - and what type of beings lie waiting at their sources. 

Lately I have been asking myself: What’s the role that the myth played in ritual magic in ancient times? There is a stark contrast between the colorful myth of the Egyptians, the Greeks or even Chaldeans and our more recent tradition of Western Magic since the time of the late Gnostics. While the former is full of stories about relationships between humans and gods, between divine offsprings, their battle for freedom, their protection of the land as well as direct encounters of pleasures and threats of the spiritual world, we are faced with a strange silence and absence of such stories when surveying the latter.