Purity of Energies

«Hekas, hekas, este bebeloi»

Throughout the history of Magic, its various schools and currents have remained fairly isolated from one another, and all the more so from the “external”, “profane” world.

Usually this insularity is explained either by the magi’s desire for secrecy or by the need to avoid social oppression. This is true to some extent. One must not discount the danger of profanations of Magic, which can distort it. Yet there is another, no less important, reason for the closed nature of magical organizations — their striving for energetic purity.

It is clear enough that the capacity for accomplishment increases with greater potential difference. We have said many times that it was precisely the division of primordial unity that gave impetus to the formation of the world, and any undertaking requires such marked polarity.

And magical work is, of course, no exception. We already know that the impeccability of the Magus is the path to his wholeness, and the chief value of that wholeness lies in the fact that internal contradictions and misalignments stop dissipating the Magus’s power, and therefore his effectiveness increases.

The first important consequence of this understanding was the striving for maximum ceremonial purity: a ritual is more successful the more aligned the participants’ energies are, the greater the resonance between them, and so it is obvious that the Magi sought to avoid the presence of outsiders, the “profane”, not only out of reluctance to share their knowledge and skills, but also for reasons of effectiveness. Any outsider present at a ritual disturbs its flow, and overcoming those disturbances consumes a significant amount of power, so there may simply not be enough left for the main task. Moreover, by interacting with the forces awakened by the ritual, an outsider’s mind can entirely change the course of the ritual, even reverse it. Despite this, it is often overlooked today, which leads to regrettable outcomes.

The second important consequence is the direct dependence of the Magus’s effectiveness on his wholeness. The fewer mutually contradictory components the Psychocosm contains, the greater its capacity to generate power. From a practical standpoint this means it does not matter whether the Magus is guided in performing a ritual by love or hatred, attraction or repulsion; what matters is that this power be as pure as possible — that is, that the Magus be as impeccable as possible.

This means that a Magus torn by inner contradictions has very good prospects for development, but very low effectiveness in practice. Conversely, a Magus who experiences no inner conflicts is highly effective in the realm of practice, but stalled in his development.

Therefore an essential art for the Magus must be the ability to balance between the necessity of striving for authenticity and the importance of the wholeness of the impulse. The Magus must be able both to “condense” and to “coagulate“, and to “rarefy”, to “dissolve” his being — to be unified, while not forgetting his internal enemies.