I once read a review of a course in ceremonial magic whose verdict, repeated twice, was that there was nothing new in the book. The reviewer meant it partly as a warning and partly as a compliment, and was right on both counts. The author had admitted as much in the first chapter. Then the review said something that I have thought about ever since. The book's great virtue, it said, was that it never let the reader forget that the work is in fact work.
I have read a good many such books, and worked through more of their exercises than I would like to count. Nearly all of them could carry the same verdict, and nearly all of them would deserve it in both senses. This essay is about what that means for the student holding one.
Why nothing new is no fault
The material of the Western tradition is old. The meditation exercises, the rituals of the pentagram, the correspondences, the elemental grades, the diary: all of it was in print by the early twentieth century, and most of it long before. A book that claims to offer something genuinely new in this field is usually offering something untested, or something old under a new name. The value of the old material is precisely that many people have used it for a long time and reported what happened.
What differs from book to book is not the content but the teacher's voice, the order in which things are presented, and the structure that holds the student to the work. These matter enormously. A student may fail with one book and succeed with another that teaches exactly the same practices, because the second author speaks in a way that student can hear every morning for a year.
Choosing a book
So choose by voice and by structure. Read the first chapters of two or three candidates and ask whose company you could bear for a long time. Prefer a book with a clear sequence and some means of telling when a stage is done. Prefer a book that is honest about difficulty: one that tells you the middle will be dull, that you will want to stop, and what to do when you do. Be wary of books that promise speed, demand expensive equipment or claim a secret lineage. And having chosen, stop choosing. Our page on working alone sets out the case for following one course to its end.
The long middle
The beginning of any course is exciting. Everything is new, the first exercises produce small and pleasing effects, and the diary fills quickly. The end, if one reaches it, has its own satisfaction. Between them lies what I have come to call the long middle, roughly the third month to the ninth, and this is where most students stop.
The forms the stopping takes are remarkably consistent. I have read accounts from students working through published courses at home, and the same sentences recur. One exercise has stopped me. I have missed the daily ritual for some weeks. The schedule is so strict that I fail at it every day. I will begin again from the start. None of these is a disaster. Each is the ordinary friction of a long undertaking, and each has a remedy.
Adapt the form, keep the substance
One student I read about was working through a course whose exercises for the element of air called for standing unclothed in the open, breathing in the element through the skin. The student pointed out, reasonably, that not everyone has a private forest, and decided to do the exercise outdoors in shorts and a shirt, and to do it as well as possible.
That was exactly right, and it is a principle I taught for years in another field. Every exercise has a purpose, and the form is a means to it. This one exists to bring the student's attention to the skin and the air, to the element as a felt thing rather than an idea. If the form as written is impossible for you, find the purpose and serve it in a form your life allows. What you must not do is use adaptation as a way of avoiding the part of the exercise that is difficult. The difficult part is usually the purpose.
The minimum that never stops
The single most useful thing I can recommend to anyone in the long middle is a minimum: the smallest practice you will do every day, however tired, busy or discouraged you are. For most people it is five minutes of stillness and one line in the diary. On a good day you do the full practice. On a bad week you do only the minimum. The one exception is the one given on our page on ethics and safety: if you are ill, or the practice itself is causing distress, stop altogether until you have recovered, and note in the diary that you did.
The minimum matters because the real danger of the long middle is not the bad week. It is the gap that follows it, when a student who has missed two weeks feels that the thread is broken and that the honest thing is to start again from page one. It is not. The honest thing is to write down that you stopped, and why, and to resume where you were. Starting over feels like integrity and works like avoidance. A course begun five times and abandoned five times in its second month has taught its student only the second month.
Strict or gentle
Courses differ in their temperament. Some fix the length of every stage, forbid outside reading and require each exercise to be mastered before the next is attempted. Others leave the pace to the student. Neither is better. For some people strictness is a support, the outside structure their own discipline has not yet grown. For others it is a weight that crushes them within a month.
Self knowledge decides, and it can change. If a strict course is leaving you with a daily sense of failure, it is not making you stronger. Drop to the minimum for a few weeks, keep the diary, and let the strength come back before you take up the full load again. If a gentle course is leaving you drifting, write yourself a stricter rule. The art lies in noticing which of the two is happening, and the diary is where you will notice it.
The work is work
I said that the review's last point stayed with me. I have come to think it is one of the most encouraging sentences in the literature of magic. It means that the work is not a talent that some people have and others lack, not a secret kept from all but a few, and not a gift that arrives or does not. It is work: something that anyone can do, a day at a time, with ordinary means. Most of what it asks is that you keep doing it after it has stopped being interesting, and that is something every one of us already knows how to do, because we do it in every other part of our lives.