The Creative Word

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made.”
«Ἐν ἀρχῇ ἦν ὁ Λόγος, καὶ ὁ Λόγος ἦν πρὸς τὸν Θεόν, καὶ Θεὸς ἦν ὁ Λόγος.»

(Gospel of John 1:1-3)

 
The notion of the creative power of the word underlies the lion’s share of practical magical concepts and beliefs.

Yet despite the obvious importance of this fact, its nature often goes unnoticed, and the Magi merely state it.

At the same time, knowledge of the System — Adeptship — demands a clear understanding of the mechanisms of any effect; without it the Magus risks becoming a dabbler, blindly copying other people’s schemes and methods.

The notion of the creative power of the word is a simple consequence of the magical description of the world. We have already said many times that, according to this description, at the foundation of “reality” lies an assemblage of differential Energies — “dharma” — which constitute the field of self-knowledge of the Great Spirit in the totality of its aspects.

Individual Energies may interact with one another due to an intrinsic affinity stemming from their nature as parts of One. These interactions form discrete blocks of energy, and the forces that sustain the unity of these blocks are called Logoi. As mentioned, every block of energy is supported by its own logos — from the smallest interactions to the macrocosm as a whole. The levels, the “cross-sections” of differential logoi accessible to a given level of mind are called ideas, eidoses, or Me.

Cosmic creation is the process of restoring the unity of Being and Mind of the Great Spirit, which occurs across differential aspects — the filling with Mind, that is, the actualization of all interactions of individual energies.

Accordingly, the task of any individual mind is to recognize as many Logoi as possible and to align the energies in that mind’s field with them.

Any Logos can be described by a mind of the corresponding level and represented as its “representative” within the Psychocosm, as well as expressed in symbolic form. Since ancient times, the symbolic expression of logoi has underpinned human language as a means of correlating macrocosmic and psychocosmic reality.

At the basis of this correspondence lies the Law of Analogies, which notes the “cross-sections” of each logos present in every plane of reality.

Practically all languages, with greater or lesser precision, have striven to reflect logoi in their elements — letters, sounds, and words.

Each letter was considered a symbol of a distinct energy or a logos of lesser order, while a word functioned as an expression of a logos of greater synthetic degree.

It is clear, then, that the inscription of a word was regarded as the objectification of the Me of that object, and the pronunciation of that word as its actualization.

Uttering a full phrase composed of correctly chosen and pronounced words signifies the emergence of a whole process — magical creation. Thus the idea of the Spell arises.

Any effective spell must include logos of two levels — Names, that is, the objectification of active agents (gods, spirits, angels, or demons) of the process being initiated, and the field (nukvot) — the expression of those aspects of the process toward which activity is directed.

The more precisely names and fields are matched, the more fully the composite Logos of the spell is expressed, and therefore the more effective the spell. It is unsurprising, then, magic places great emphasis on establishing correspondences between symbols and their properties (in the Golden Dawn system, for example, establishing the correct correspondences represented the core of the entire teaching), for the wider the field mapped to the agent, the broader the scope of actualization. When the Lemegeton says, for example, Flauros “will speak of the Creation of the World, and of the Divine, and of his own fall and of other Spirits, … will slay and burn the conjurer’s enemies… will not allow temptation… commands 36 legions,” it is not only indicating that this Spirit should be summoned to learn about the “fall of the Spirits,” but above all delineating the field of that spirit — establishing its authority.

Thus, the creation of a Spell is an attempt to actualize the corresponding logos.

The correct pronunciation of a spell brings it into the manifest world.

In the act of uttering, the formative power of the voice, reinforced by mind, intelligence, and feeling, tears articulated words and phrases from the homogeneous “white noise,” and this action is what the will relies on when it actualizes, from the homogeneous energy field, of energies the Telesmi corresponding to the logoi. Any magical act occurs simultaneously on the level of the psychocosm and the macrocosm, of Being and Mind, and the efficacy of that synchrony largely determines the success of the realization itself.

In fact, life itself, considered as magical realization (and it is such), is effective insofar as “internal” and “external” processes are synchronized, and magic — including nominative magic — is a powerful aid in increasing the effectiveness of that realization. By clearly understanding how “narrow” spells work, the Adept learns how realization in general occurs, and this gives him the chance to move to a new qualitative level, to transform from an object into a subject of world-creation.