Elementary
Ritual

The Ritual Frame

In some systems of magick, the work is conducted within a consecrated circle. The circle is, almost literally, a frame that defines the ritual. Everything within the circle is part of the ritual—outside it’s still just your spare room. Certain behaviors also mark off the time when a ritual happens; you step in and out of the circle, the ritual has an opening and closing, or the invocation ends when a particular goal is reached. The simplest ritual frame starts with the decision to begin and stops with the decision to end.

We encounter ritual frames every day. Ritualizing seems to be a fundamental human behavior, something we use and experience in many aspects of our lives. For instance, if you choose to have a romantic dinner with someone special, the ritual is simply to ensure that every aspect of the situation is aligned with the goal: the lights are dimmed, the candles lit, the champagne chilled, the food perfect, the music soft and suggestive. If you manage to arrange the circumstances for maximum woohoo, then an altered state is produced—a comfortable sharing, excitement, or erotic feeling—and your desired outcome of romance is achieved. This ritual can be repeated with variations to achieve a romantic effect time after time.

Similarly, most of us have rituals that we use to prepare for a day of work, a night out with friends, a shower, or a sneeze. These are all delineated by space, time, behavior, and even state. The sneezing ritual might require fast hands and proximity to Kleenex; it might be over in just a moment, but it is a goal-directed ritual nonetheless, invoking qualities of health, safety, and cleanliness. The sneeze itself is just a reflex action and doesn’t quite rise to the level of ritual without the frame that is applied by covering the mouth, using a tissue, cleaning up, and perhaps saying thank you for the ritual “gesundheit” or “god bless you” offered by someone nearby. The frame aligns behaviors toward the goal. Each of these actions is elicited as a kind of anchored response. The first tickle in the nose and you look around for the tissue box, and so on. The ultimate outcome is the state of feeling well.

For the most part, magical ritual can be described as a sequence of anchors enacted within a frame. An anchor may be a word, a gesture, an object, a symbol, or any other ritual component. Information is attached to the anchors through a process of practice, preparation, and study.

Consider a ritual commonly practiced by ceremonial magicians, the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram.¹ Ritual anchors include a circle, crosses, pentagrams, a hexagram, gestures, names, and Hebrew words. Imagined geometric figures will convey submodality information—a bright, blue pentagram three feet tall at arm’s distance away will influence state differently than a dim, red pentagram that is way across the room. In addition to that information, the student is encouraged to anchor meaning to the geometric figures, movements, and words by study and by practice; esoteric information becomes associated to the symbol along with the state information. Hebrew words, acronyms, and names are used throughout the ritual—and serve remarkably well as anchors as they are otherwise free of meaning to a non-Hebrew-speaking practitioner. These anchors and anchors-to-other-anchors form a shape and sequence that also conveys state information. Each anchor reinforces the next. The ritual helps to establish a mind-state that is conducive to further practice of magick.²

Wholeness

What bit of woohoo turns a complex of anchors into a mind-state? One important factor is the idea of wholeness. Just as the mirror neurons use various visual, auditory, and kinesthetic cues to identify something as an entity, the brain’s theory of mind functions recognize patterns of information that reflect the whole. Our minds operate on the world through a map or model that is as complete as possible, holding as much as we can possibly know through our experience, thoughts, and education about the world. While the emphasis of that map might change as our consciousness shifts through different states and mind-states, each of those maps still, as much as possible, reflects our universe at the moment. In effect, that map is also a map of our consciousness at the moment, a model of our mind-state. It is the job of the theory of mind functions to recognize the difference between random fragments of information and a more-or-less complete map.

Let’s sum this up in a simple way: Our minds create an ever-evolving map of the universe at large. The minds of the entities that we create within our minds have their own holistic map. Like Russian dolls, each entity within an entity has a smaller, more simplified map. Thus, the lover that you dream about—a representation of a mind within your own mind, created via mirror neurons and theory of mind functions—probably has a slightly more limited or different range of choices than you do (or the actual person he or she is based upon).

As the entities get smaller and simpler, the symbols of the map become more generalized. At the most generalized level, a symbol for the whole can be created that has a single component—the encompassing circle that we use in ritual, perhaps. The next tiny step toward complexity might jump to two components. We have these symbols in almost every culture: the circle divided into the yin/yang symbol, the two triangles of the hexagram, the Rose Cross, and the binary one/zero. As we begin to add complexity, the number of symbols can increase. We may jump to the four elements of Western esotericism: earth, air, fire, and water; or add spirit for the five elements of the pentagram; or the five elements of Chinese tradition: earth, air, wood, metal, and water; the ten sephiroth of the Qabala; the twelve signs of the zodiac; the sixty-four hexagrams of the I Ching; the seventy-eight cards of the Tarot; the over 600,000 words of the English language; and so on. Each of these represent a map or model of the human mind, as well as the universe reflected in it. The symbols become more and more specific, the world divided into discrete qualities as they become more numerous. Short of the actual universe itself, if we can ever fully know such a thing, the most complex mind-state model that we generate is composed of the millions of perceptions, representations, and memories that we have of our world.

For practical purposes, when working with our meta-magical deities, we can choose to represent them with a limited number of generalized elements. These can be chosen consciously and deliberately, based on any theory or practice of world-modeling, such as those listed above. Or the elements can be selected through a process of feedback and revelation, using entities and parts of entities as model-generating tools.

Exercise 7.1 Identifying Elements

 

Choose a major life goal to work with. What is something in your life toward which you put large amounts of attention and energy?

 

Create a state entity from the (imagined) feeling of having attained this life goal.

 

Communicate with the entity and ask it to give you a short list of the most important qualities that are necessary for this life goal to be attained.

 

Write this list down.

 

Thank the state entity and absorb it back
into you.

While it may not reflect the entire world in a balanced way, this list of qualities symbolizes everything necessary to attain that goal, a micro-microcosm, if you will, with a narrow focus. This list can now be used as the elements of a ritual, and there are many ways to apply them. One simple choice, as explored in the following exercise, is to create an entity for each element and then arrange them in a geometric shape in relation to where you sit or stand. These can be state entities or full-blown deities that contain any number of state entities.

Exercise 7.2 Magical Entourage

 

Create a dissociated god/dess image for each one of the elements revealed in the “Identifying Elements” exercise. Create these using the methods explored in previous exercises: Start with a dissociated image of yourself, tweak it to have properties associated with the particular quality, develop a state entity for the quality, and place it into the dissociated image.

 

When you have created one god/dess for each of your elements, arrange them in a shape around you. Ask them to accompany you on a walk.

 

Take a walk with these god/desses as your magical entourage. Notice how it feels to move with them accompanying you.

 

As you walk, imagine that you are walking into various situations in your life with these entities protecting or supporting you. Notice how you feel, imagine, or talk to yourself about these situations.

 

Thank the entities and absorb them back
into you.

In addition to experimenting with the complexity of the entities involved, you can also experiment with the number of elements and ways to arrange them. Do different ritual qualities seem to work better with different shapes? Is there a particular general arrangement that works for most of your rituals, or do the shapes need to be unique for each one?

Different schools of magick sometimes have characteristic ritual structures. For instance, there’s a configuration that’s found in the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram, as well as many pentagram and hexagram rituals that lets you know it comes from the body of work associated with the Golden Dawn tradition. Many of Aleister Crowley’s Thelemic rituals also used a very similar structure.³

The Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram uses entities and concepts that are arrayed upon a symbolic map of the four elements: earth, air, fire, and water. It is quite literally a map, with elements attributed to the compass points and a geometric form that the magician can explore by turning or walking around within the circle. When the magician has explored every quarter and contacted each entity, the result is a unique, ritual-induced mind-state.

If we borrow some bits and pieces from that particular ritual and use them with our self-generated symbolism and content, we take our Meta-Magick a step closer to full-fledged ritual work.

Exercise 7.3 Lesser Banishing
Ritual of the Entities

 

Imagine a circle around you. Clear it with Expansion/Contraction breathing.

 

Using the elemental qualities identified in the preceding exercises or an entirely new set of elements created by the same methods, create a set of god/desses and place them as symmetrically as possible just outside your circle.

 

One at a time, ask each entity to project its quality through the circle, filling the circle and yourself with that quality. Note if this projected quality has color, sound, feeling, taste, or smell associated with it. Let each entity fully project its quality and then finish before moving to the next entity.

 

Create an energy flow in yourself that represents a powerful resource state. Adjust the submodalities of that energy flow until it is exceptionally powerful.

 

Express the feeling of that energy flow as a sound and a gesture. Repeat the sound and gesture several times.

 

Thank each entity (and yourself!), then absorb all entities and imaginings back into yourself.

 

Pay attention to any feelings or thoughts that you may experience as a result of this operation.

There are no limits to the variety of rituals we can create like this and an equally infinite number of ways to apply them. The kind of Meta-Magick we’ve been experimenting with is designed to give you some understanding of how our minds work when we are performing invocation. With that understanding in hand, you have the means to apply magick to all kinds of woohoo with your own self-designed rituals.

Exercise 7.4 Bonus Exercise

 

Create your own ritual structure using multiple god/desses. Factors which you can experiment with include elements, complexity of entities, sequence of entities, location of entities, whether entities project qualities or draw them in, whether you step into the entity or it steps into you, which ritual participants (you and the entities) are in motion and which are not, use of gestures and other anchors—and any other factors that strike your magical or aesthetic fancy.

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