Here is how to get started in practising Babylonian Magick.
The first two things you will need are:If you have these two, you can get started right away.
See yourself standing alone in the
desert. It is sunset. You are a traveller from a far off
land. You have been travelling for so long, through so
many lands and peoples, that your original home is only a
memory. Overhead the bright stars are beginning to twinkle
mysteriously, and the waxing half moon beckons brightly
above you. You are weary, and in the gathering gloom you
are looking for shelter from from the cold and sand. In
the dark distance ahead you seem to see a dim glow, over
the dunes. Faint strains of music, and human voices coming
disconnected fragments, reach your ears, as if some
festival were going on. The odor of sheep and goats, and
the salty smoke of cooking meat wafts past your nostrils.
Although tired, you press on to the promise of an oasis, a
place to rest and refresh.
If it's a festival, you're
thinking, they will welcome travellers, and there will be
plenty to eat and drink.
As you go towards the brightening glow, the voices get louder, the music wilder, sounds and smells mingling in the chilly air, your body nervous with excitement, your imagination racing with ideas of what you might find on the other side of the dunes..... you trudge on through the sand, and as you are about to reach the top of the last dune, a strange thought enters your mind - why does it all seem so familiar? With your heart pounding in your ears you reach the summit and see ......
.........nothing. There isn't a sound: the light, the music, the voices, the inviting smells and the promise of warmth all gone. Nothing but the chilly breeze biting your cheek.
You tighten your coat around you and begin to descend the dune, when your foot strikes something in the sand, as hard as a rock. It is warm. You bend down to see what it is, and, clearing away sand you find a single brick, almost too hot, as if it were just taken from a fire. You pick it up and, holding it close, notice that it has writing on it. Angling it in the pale moonlight, you try to read it and see inscribed what looks like........... your own name.
Imagination is the doorway to magick. Reading this story, you undoubtedly filled in many details for yourself, which are not in the story and which are very different from the way I imagined it. But imagine it we both did. My power to evoke images in your mind is one form of casting a spell. The word spell means exactly that - to tell a story, to make a word, to spell. The purpose of the spell above was to enchant and entertain, and to illustrate the very simplest and most very profound, power of magick, which is to make you see and believe something that is very different from what you normally see and believe, or what you think you should see and believe. And in seeing something different, you may come to new knowledge.
All arts are spells, and some arts are stronger than others; these overwhelm the senses, they induce wonder. In the moment of wonder, when your view of how things happen is temporarily challenged and suspended, a doorway opens - a doorway where anything seems possible. Sometimes, with the uncanny and the weird, this is frightening. But a magician is someone who lives permanently in a state of wonder, and tries to understand these things without fear. With understanding comes knowledge, and with knowledge, power. The stage magician induces wonder only in others, but real magick also induces wonder in ourselves - it educates and leads us outward. The complete magician must be able to do both.
