The Magus’s Inspiration

We have mentioned that a Magus’s success depends not only on Power but also on inspiration.

And if we have already devoted enough attention to questions of acquiring power, inspiration has so far remained almost outside the scope of our discussions.

Yet it is precisely the lack of inspiration that often becomes a serious obstacle to victory, and the Magus who seems to be “doing everything right” nevertheless is defeated.

No wonder the honey of poetry was so hard for Odin to obtain and so highly prized by him — Odin knew that Odin’s power is not without «vod» — magical frenzy — the highest form of inspiration. Such is the sense of Old Norse óðr (Od; cf. Gothic woþs, “raging”, and Latin vates, “poet”, “seer”).

Contrary to common opinion, magical inspiration, vod, is not a shamanic trance, not a passive receptiveness, but an actively creative state in which the Magus does not merge with the great flow of the cosmos but comes into harmony and resonance with it.

Inspiration spreads like an avalanche: once it washes over someone, it embraces the whole being, and just as suddenly it departs.

Etymologically, the word “inspiration” (inspiratio) points to the original notion of the cause of this phenomenon — it was supposed that a foreign “spirit” enters the person and more or less fully takes possession of his soul’s faculties, elevating and enhancing them. The quality of this foreign spiritual force entering the mind or finding it (inspiration = an afflatus) was thought to determine the difference between positive inspiration (“inspiration from above”) and possession or frenzy. At the same time, inspiration is not a force external to the mind; it is an awakening of the mind’s resources. Inspiration is accompanied by the highest tension of all one’s spiritual and physical powers, an emotional uplift, clarity of thought, focused inner attention, and heightened imaginative power.

Inspiration is a particular excitation of the mind in which it begins to operate differently than usual, not following binary opposites, not proceeding from thesis to antithesis, but passing from synthesis to synthesis. In this respect inspiration is close to intuition, but whereas intuition pertains to knowledge, inspiration pertains to action. Plato already regarded inspiration as an inner effect accompanying the soul’s elevation into the sphere of contemplation of the truly-existent or of eternal ideas — the synthetic foundations of the cosmos.

It is precisely inspiration that matters for victory in the battle, because in this state the Magus reaches the utmost unity, and without any effort — it simply happens that all his forces are seized by a single involuntary impulse — and therefore are maximally focused.

Where does this “impulse” come from? In fact, we can speak of inspiration when the mind shifts from the perception of objects to the perception of logoi — the “ideas” of objects — and this shift of perception is accompanied by a change in the mode of action: it turns out that interactions at the logoi level are different from those at the level of phenomena, and thus possibilities open that are closed in the “ordinary” state of the mind.

Usually such a transition occurs involuntarily, but for the Magus it is important to learn to cultivate these states, because any ritual is far more effective when performed in a state of inspiration. The best way to catch ‘vod’, the wind of inspiration, is by means of self-observation: carefully track the internal and external circumstances that contribute to the sharpening and release of creative forces, “switching” the mind.

At the same time, the Magus must use the inspiring forces of myth and tradition that surround him and have been absorbed into his Way. This is why Magi surrounded themselves with all manner of paraphernalia, objects, and images: they drew the power of inspiration from them. And in every ritual one must distinguish “technically” necessary things from those that impart inspiration: the former are universally obligatory, the latter are individual. For example, to summon a Ministering Spirit three things are strictly necessary: the Magic Circle, the sigil, and the Triangle of the Spirit. Everything else — garments, incense, etc. — serves chiefly to induce inspiration.

In the same way, poetic incantations have an advantage over prosaic ones precisely in their ability to shift the mind into an active state of inspiration.

Thus, the art of attaining the state of magical inspiration, vod, is one of the most important areas of a Magus’s training, and all too often is neglected by practitioners.