Emergent Magick (EMK)
views the practice of magick as an evolving art form starting from the very
beginnings of the Homo genus. Archaeological evidence shows that even
Neanderthal’s honored their dead.
In this view, magick
progresses from era to era in different forms. However, even though the
practice has evolved, it does not make older forms of magick less valid. While
EMK provides the most useful philosophy of magick for modern magi in our
current culture, there remains much to learn from older forms of magick. They continue
to reveal their secrets through advances in archaeology and history. They also
benefit from being practiced in a culture that universally believed in magick
and having the best minds of their eras tasked to the magical arts. While EMK
takes a progressive, postmodern approach to magick, it also seeks to learn from
and in some ways emulate the shamanic magicians that practiced magick for tens
of thousands of years of human pre-history.
Understanding what makes
EMK unique requires a passing knowledge in the magical philosophies that have
come before, especially its direct predecessor, Chaos Magick. Be forewarned,
however, that the following history comes from an EMK perspective. Also, by
virtue of its brevity, it omits large parts of magick’s history, which would
take volumes to tell.
Pre-history
By the archaeological
evidence, magick before civilization was practiced by tribal wise men who
learned to talk with spirits, both alien spirits and spirits of the dead. The
term shaman originally referred to the wise men of certain Siberian
hunter-gatherer tribes, but it has been adopted to mean any wise person from a
tribal culture who uses altered states of consciousness to travel to other realms
and contact spirits.
They were the lynchpin of
tribal society, responsible for maintaining the tribe’s social bonds. Since
they could communicate with the ancestors, they served as their representative,
passing on traditions and keeping the tribe’s history.
They also maintained the
bonds by leading group ritual. The shaman talked the plant spirits and learned
the properties of plants and the processes of turning them into a sacrament.
The sacrament almost always consisted of a mixture of alcohol and psychedelics.
The shaman used the sacrament in their own spirit quests, and distributed them
to the entire tribe in times of celebration. Using ritual that contained
dancing and drumming, the tribe would build a communal consciousness.
The shaman also provided
healing and divination for the tribe through contact with the spirits.
Antiquity
Throughout its history
magick has been intertwined with religion. As civilizations developed the role
of the shaman changed to that of the priest. Priests in ancient civilizations
talked to the highest spirits—the gods—and learned from them the preferred
social order. Their ever growing, sedentary populations required stricter forms
of social control. The priesthood tried to maintain a monopoly on magick and
those who continued the shamanic or “folk” ways were persecuted. In some parts
of the world that persecution continues to this day.
Magick became as
structured as the society. Priests maintained the star charts and calendars
that told the best times to plant, when animals would breed, when the rivers
would rise, and when the rainy season would come. They also maintained the
strict rituals necessary to talk to the gods and their representative spirits.
Magick became about saying the right words, with the right offerings, at the
right time. The communal aspect
dissolved as the priests attempted to keep more power for themselves. The
sacrament became a metaphorical shadow of the former tribal celebrations.
Middle
Ages
At this time our history
splits into the history of Western magick, as it is the forbearer of EMK. Later,
Eastern magical traditions will have great influence on later Western
practices. By the Middle Ages, the three religions of the Book dominate the
West—Christianity, Islam, and Judaism. All magick was shoehorned into a
paradigm that had a single, all-powerful god. Former gods became demons or
angels. The priesthood kept catalog of these gods and continued to use them in
magick according to their altered form. What survives of magical writings of the
time include a combination of folk magick spells and goetia—the art of
summoning demons or angels to do your bidding. Unlike today where any willing
contact with the demonic is considered an affront to God, the magicians in the
Middle Ages saw evoking demons to do God’s work as perfectly natural. They were
God’s creation and they should be made to work as punishment for their wicked
nature.
Renaissance
Like everything else in
the Renaissance, magic was influenced by the revival of literature from
antiquity. A greater access to books (at least amongst the upper class) meant
more practicing magicians and a great number of the new magicians came from
outside the priesthood. The Renaissance gave rise to many more secular forms of
magick like—hermeticism, alchemy, geomancy, Kabbalah, and astrology. Complex
forms of divination like tarot also developed in this era.
However, for those outside
the gentry, fear and persecution rained. While the rich could practice their
more intellectual and more complex forms of magick without trouble, those who
practiced folk magick suffered greatly from church inspired zealots.
To be sure, the “Burning
Times” are a modern neo-pagan fantasy. There was no holocaust of true witches during
the Renaissance. Most who were swept up in the hangings and burnings were
simply women who for one reason or another angered men in power. Most likely by
asserting themselves of actual human rights. But it would also be a mistake to
believe that no true practitioners were put to the stake.
The
Magical Revival
As the Renaissance
progressed, Europeans developed increasingly dim views on magick. All forms of
magick became associated with the Devil and thus anti-Christian. The
persecution moved beyond just attacking peasant women. Witch trials became
opportunities for rich landowners to accuse and steal land from other rich
landowners. Soon, very few wanted to be associated with magick. For almost two
hundred years magick stalled and went underground in the West.
The Revival started in
France in the mid 19th century, where masonic groups like the
Rosicrucians had kept the hermetic secrets alive. As the church lost power and
society became more secular some wealthy scholars, like Eliphas Levi, were able
to come out and produce books and gather with likeminded individuals. This
spread across the channel to the English with their penchant for forming social
clubs. Three English gentlemen, William Robert Woodman, William Wynn Westcott,
and Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers, formed the most influential magical
society of modern times–The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Around the same
time, Helena Blavatsky formed the Theosophical Society, which studied religion,
practiced its own forms of magick, like spiritualism, and was heavily
influenced by Eastern mysticism. Once again, there was very little interest in
folk magick, and those outside the upper and middle classes seldom participated
in these societies.
Many people in these
groups practiced highly-ritualized magick based on Hermeticism and bastardized
forms of Jewish Kabbalah. That’s when they actual performed any magick at all.
Eliphas Levi is famously quotes, “To practice magic is to be a quack; to know
magic is to be a sage.” Left in the hands of the English gentry, magick
became an intellectual exercise.
Thelema
Despite his numerous
flaws, one can easily argue that one man broke the mold and brought magick
kicking and screaming into the modern era. Aleister Crowley, born to parents
who were members of the ultra-conservative Plymouth Brethren, was a member of
the Golden Dawn and well known for his anti-establishment ways. Already an
accomplished magician, in 1904 Crowley and his new bride, Rose, took a trip to
Egypt. There, the couple channeled the spirit of an ancient Egyptian priest and
wrote a book called Liber AL vel Legis, or The Book of the Law. Liber AL was
the foundational document for a magical religion called Thelema.
Thelema means “will” in
Greek and refers to a person’s true will, that which they were born to
accomplish. The most important commandment of Thelema, called The Law by its
adherents, Thelemites, is: Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law. Love
is the law, love under will.
In 1915 Crowley co-opted a
German masonic organization called the Ordo Templi Orientis (OTO) and turned it
into his own religious organization based on Thelema. Crowley also wrote
numerous books, and formed the purely magical organization, the A.˙.A.˙..
Crowley’s magical system contained a mixture of Eastern and Western magical
techniques from yoga to Kabbalah. His mythology included obscure Egyptian
deities and co-opted figures from the Book of Revelations. Crowley’s
organizations continued to use masonic style initiations and grade systems.
While Crowley had a turbulent
personal life and died practically a pauper, his writings lived on. His mixture
of using Eastern and Western styles and using magick as a journey of
self-discovery dominated magical practice in the English speaking world and
beyond. His legend earned him the attention of the Beatles (most likely John
Lennon) and he was included on the cover of their album Sergeant Pepper’s
Lonely Hearts Club Band. Crowley’s adherents would say this was the result of
his magick and influence on the age. Crowley’s organizations grew after his
death and are now more popular than when he was alive.
Neo-Paganism
In 1951, the United
Kingdom repealed its witchcraft laws. A man named Gerald Gardner, a known
associate of Crowley, took it as an opportunity to introduce a religion called
Wicca to the world. Gardner claimed that Wicca came from an old tradition passed
on from families that had kept their practice hidden for years. However, many
of the Wiccan rituals he wrote of were obviously watered down versions of
rituals created by Crowley and the Golden Dawn.
Gardner presented Wicca as
a religion practiced by witches from ancient times and the religion centers on
eight holidays based off, equinoxes, solstices, and traditional festivals.
Wicca became the catalyst for the formation of other types of neo-pagan
religions. Some tried to emulate the few known practices of the ancient Greeks
and Celts. Others used a combination of folk traditions and records from
witchcraft trials and other documents to develop a practice of “traditional”
witchcraft. Most of these groups performed various forms of magick from the
high rituals based on the Golden Dawn tradition to various traditional
festivals still alive in England and other European countries. Some even incorporated
magical practices from African diasporic religions, under the belief that these
religions reflected true pagan practices from ancient times.
Today, many find magick
through neo-paganism, and some move on to other forms of magick after
discovering it through these religions.
Chaos
Magick
In 1976, two men from West
Yorkshire, Peter J. Carroll and Ray Sherwin, both interested in various forms
of magick began meeting with a few others above Sherwin’s bookstore. They
developed a new system of magick and later founded The Magical Pact of the
Illuminates of Thanateros. Chaos magick was heavily influenced by the Aleister
Crowley, Austin Osman Spare, and the fantasy and science fiction authors of the
time.
Chaos magick does not
advocate for any one form of religion or belief. It is essentially a system of
techniques. Those techniques mostly teach the magician to develop altered
states of consciousness (called gnosis by chaos magicians), that are used to “empower”
a practitioner’s magick. The central tenant of chaos magick is that belief
itself is a tool. You can apply the techniques of magick to any belief system
and get results.
Chaos magick measures
success by achieving results, although it admits to only being able to change
probable outcomes, with spectacular effects being few and far between, or some
believe non-existent. Chaos magick advocates for changing one’s own belief
system in its entirety if needed to achieve results. It also advocates for
belief systems based on a magician’s personal likes and interests rather than traditional
systems. This leads to chaos magicians basing their practice on pop culture,
which they claim is more effective than unrelatable ancient deities.
Emergent
Magick
On June the 21st,
of the year 2010, a small group of magicians, including Frater Zentra El,
wandered the late-night streets of Manhattan in a state of deep chemognosis. He
spotted a book lying in the gutter, he at first mistook it for one of his own
magical journals, which are kept in similar composition books. Zentra El took
it with him and spent the rest of the night studying its contents which appeared
to be the ravings of madman (see the Gutter Bible by Scroll of Thoth Press).
Zentra El used it as the
foundation for his own magical practices and began teaching and performing
rituals based on its contents around the world. He stuck to a strict code that
all of the mythology and beliefs created for his new magical system would only
come from acts of magick itself. Zentra El and his associates used magick to
discover the entities and cosmology of their new “emergent” practice.
As Zentra El developed his
own magical society (The Order of Emergent Magi), he taught the theory of
Emergent Magick (EMK) to others and a new magical philosophy developed. Unlike
its predecessors, EMK centers on group magick. Each member of the group is
encouraged to develop their own central paradigm or belief system. Like chaos magick,
a practitioner of EMK may switch paradigms from time to time, especially when
participating in group rituals created by other members of their tribe.
However, they also keep a single, personal paradigm that they develop through
magical revelation. This devotion to their path, while it may change
dramatically through continued revelation, remains the core of their magick and
spirituality.
EMK focuses less on results and more on
personal development and harmonious group dynamics. It intends to reintroduce
the world to tribalism in a modern, accepting context. It allows people from disparate
beliefs to come together and form cohesive, loving, personal connections
through group ritual practice. It eschews the masonic grade system for group consensus
and decentralized leadership. It also reintroduces the use of psychedelics in a
shamanic context to bring back the initiatory experience lacking in materialist
societies.
