Learn a proceedure. Do the procedure to the letter. If it works, do it again. Do this enough times and with enough different proceedures, and you’ll have a working knowledge of what is effective and what is not.
Then, synthesize all your knowledge and do something new. But don’t pretend the proceedures you followed to figure this shit out were your invention. And don’t pretend that you’re the only one who could do it. Proceedures exist to pass knowledge to each other because anybody can do magick if they learn the right skills.
My counter to this would be from my own personal experience. Whenever I follow a procedure to the letter it seldom works for me. When I adapt a procedure to my own paradigm and personal experience, I have a much higher rate of success.
I would say that doing the exact procedure was beneficial, and I learned from doing it. But I am not sure if it is absolutely necessary.
This observation comes from someone who has a few years of experience. Not saying I’m some great magus, but Iv’e done some work. Others may have a different experience.
Overall, I think people are better off learning as much as possible about any given magical operation before trying any version of it.
Yeah I mean, I definitely am not saying “do every proceedure ever”. You don’t need to try every operation.
I think it’s a very useful exercise to comb through different types of proceedures and analyze them. What’s the purpose as a whole? What does each step do? What are each of the tools for? Are there parallels to other proceedures? Are they exact, or are there extreme points if distinction? And on and on. That way you know what these things are for and why you’re doing them.
Over the years, I’ve definitely done some things to the letter that didn’t work. I put those in the “revisit later” pile, and not the “garbagefuck trash” pile, though. But I don’t know if I can buy that those things didn’t work because of who I am inherently, y’know? I think they didn’t work because I missed something, and have to go back and annotate and compare again. I think most things, if they’re grounded in a solid foundation, ought to work. If that makes sense lol
The thing is your reality is the foundation in which things grow. That which doesn’t fit into the paradigm gets ignored or attacked which creates dogma.
The “best” designed rituals are those which are universally understandable on an inherent level. Meaning that no matter which culture or symbolic tablet is your preferred, it somehow still has the ability to speak to the individual performing the ritual. This is where I think archetypes come into play.
Each ritual in this sense has a personality/spirit to them. Some people jive better with different people, yet some people are just some people just know how to get along with almost everyone. I figure in this sense, magic and ritual is a sort of dance with the individual and “the other” which sometimes is nice and choreographed, other times improvised and flowing and other times something that resembles a mosh pit with no ethics for people who fall down.
I just want to say that this is what a magical discussion on tumblr should look like. I respect everything people are saying and it obviously comes from the point of view of someone doing the work.