Low Magick by Lon DuQuette (the reading strategies book TXT) 📕

interpretation of the scriptural worldview of the Chrislemews make me an atheist? For those who adhere too tightly to their doctrines, I guess it does—but it certainly does not from my point of view.10 I most ardently believe in (indeed, I worship) a supreme consciousness that is the ultimate source of all manifest and unmanifest existence. I believe that you and I and every other monad of existence are components of the supreme consciousness. My morality (if you insist on calling it that) is based on my conviction that the ultimate nature of this super-existence is transcendently Good—a Good we can never adequately define with our words or understand with our meat brains—a Good so all-comprehensively infinite that there can be nothing outside of itself—not even nothing.

There can be no opposite of this great Good. The Goodness of supreme existence is spelled with the largest capital “G” imaginable. I call it the:

“Great G.”

(There I go again, making up words. Well … get used to it, because I’m going to use this one a lot!)

This Great G swallows up the concept of duality. It neutralizes all concepts that remain so small that it is possible for them to have opposites—ideas such as a god who is so small and incomplete that there is an outside-of-himself where a pesky devil can go running around causing trouble; ideas such as darkness and light; good little goods and evil little evils; little highs and little lows.

Perhaps the brains of our ancestors were not developed enough to grasp the idea of the Great Goodness of supreme existence. After all, in the ages when the Chrislemew and proto-Chrislemew doctrines were invented, our minds were yet unexpanded and unburdened by thoughts of gravity, or the speed of light, or the rotation of the Earth or its orbit of the sun, or black holes, or the nature of space-time. Perhaps back then it was impossible for us to wrap our minds around a reality that didn’t spring solely from the primitive fear-based motivations of reward and punishment, pain and pleasure. Perhaps then—but not any longer!

After nearly forty years of magical study and practice, I’ve come to the conclusion that magick is magick. It is a spiritual art form by which we collect and direct a natural and neutral force whose source is the supreme intelligence—the supreme consciousness. In the right hands and under the right circumstances, the application of magick can be creative or destructive, helpful or harmful. It is not the magick is that is good or evil, or high or low—it is the magician.

No matter how pious and virtuous one may believe oneself to be—no matter how seemingly altruistic one’s motives—no matter how precise and eloquently one executes the invocations to enlist the favor of God and the services of his angels, a magician who has not yet grasped this big picture and achieved a significant measure of spiritual maturity, mental stability, and purity of heart is not yet equipped to recognize relative good from relative evil. Like a marksman firing a powerful weapon in the dark, the naïve or superstitious magician is incapable of accurately hitting the mark or determining what magical actions will or will not be in his or her best interests. Conversely, if the magician is in touch with the Great G, there is no devil too evil, no angel too fallen, no demon too foul to be redeemed and pressed into the service of the Great Work.

And so, at the very beginning of my little book, I hereby confess that my title is a facetious and mischievous blind. It is with my tongue planted firmly in my cheek that I use the term “Low Magick” to describe the magical operations that follow. However, please don’t think that by using the term I am being silly for silliness sake.

Many years ago, as a naïve and desperate young magician, I evoked Orobas, a demon from the Goetia,11 for the purpose of turning around my impoverished and chaotic life circumstances—to save my family, to provide materially for my wife and child, and to give me the emotional stability to pursue the Great Work. In my naïve and inexperienced mind, it was an act of black magick—an encounter with the devil himself that I was prepared to perform against my teacher’s wishes. In fact, when I told her I had become so desperate that I intended to go through with it, she flatly forbade it. When I asked her if she had ever performed such an operation, she said, “Certainly not! That’s low magick.”

In an act of magical disobedience, I did it anyway. I knew I had to. I had to succeed because the consequences of failure at that point in my life were unthinkable. I was fearful and clumsy. The operation almost immediately turned into a terrifying and traumatic comedy of errors that more resembled an industrial accident and a nervous breakdown than a magical ceremony. The climax of the ceremony was a life-and-death confrontation and struggle with the real demon responsible for my miserable situation—me.

The whole crazy business seemed to pull out of my guts the very worst in me—my worst fears—the worst aspects of my character—my worst insecurities and feelings of shame and guilt. I didn’t know it at the time, but that was exactly what was supposed to be happening. That’s what Solomonic magick is all about. The worst in me was my problem. The worst in me was the demon. When it finally dawned on me that I had successfully evoked the demon, and I had the worst of me trapped in that magick Triangle, I had no alternative but to harness and redirect its monstrous power and give it new marching orders. From then on, that particular demon would be working for me rather than against me.

I’ll spare you the details,12 but suffice to say within minutes of concluding my bumbling act of low magick, a dramatic event occurred that set into motion a chain of events that, with