The Art of Shaking Oneself Off

As we have said, one of the most important requirements that the need to interact with the Power imposes on the Magus is Ritual purity.

At the same time, the notion of Ritual purity includes, above all, the purity of the Magus’s energies — that is, the greatest possible freedom of his actions from factors outside himself (that is — both forces and beings dwelling in the Macro- and Psychocosm).

The state of Ritual purity is absolutely necessary for achieving the aims of any realization; moreover, one can say that the more ritually pure the Magus, the more successful the realization will be (other things being equal).

This state can be attained in three ways: 1) avoiding the formation of extraneous bonds; 2) severing those bonds; and 3) disassociating oneself from them.

Let us briefly consider these options.

Western myth, oriented toward action, tends to view any restriction negatively that arises at the upper levels of manifestation. Therefore, the option of isolating oneself in a sterile environment to prevent contamination is, to say the least, not the best for the Magus. That said, the Magus naturally strives to avoid interactions with contaminating factors — whatever energies are disharmonious to him — whenever this is possible within the general logic of his Way.

We have spoken about severing superfluous bonds. These include the many cleansing and exorcism rituals developed over millennia. Despite the high effectiveness of many such rituals, they all require a fixed location and are often laborious to perform; therefore, they are not always applicable in field conditions, in the heat of battle, or while being tracked.

Therefore, magical schools developed ‘express’ cleansing methods that allow one to achieve rapid balancing of energies that, while perhaps not as deep or long-lasting, are nevertheless acceptable and suitable for use in combat conditions.

The essence of these methods comes down to the Magus learning to disassociate himself from those parts of his Adira to which extraneous influences are attached. It is clear that the larger the areas of energy included in this disassociation, the fewer resources available to the Magus; therefore, a Magus’s mastery in this area is determined by how well the Magus can find the “points of intersection” of his energies with others’, and how precisely he can extend only the minimal part of his energy beyond the borders of the Adira — that is, with how little energy he needs to exclude.

In other words, in order to temporarily disconnect extraneous influences (that is — to attain a state of Ritual purity), the Magus finds the points of contact between his energies and foreign ones, and “blocks” those points. It is obvious that this strategy must be followed by basic cleansing rituals so as not merely to distance oneself but, where possible, to remove extraneous influences.

In fact, the search for such points of contact resembles methods for tracking foreign energies, and may, depending on the situation, take place both at the level of the higher layers of the mind (thoughts, feelings) and at deeper, intuitively visionary levels.

Once the “hook” is found, the Magus “excludes” that area from what the mind can manipulate at the moment, doing so deliberately and consciously. The Magus does not merely “brush off” his limitations, weaknesses, or imperfections; he does not ignore them but rather disassociates from them — as if locking them away in a dungeon for the duration of the battle so they will not trip him up — and returns to them later in calm conditions in order to achieve more fundamental results.