A friend of mine, who is a careful person in every other department of life, once told me that she had done a working for a new place to live and that within a week a flat had turned up. I asked how many workings she had done that year. She thought about it and said perhaps a dozen. I asked how the other eleven had gone. She could not remember.
I do not tell this story to make fun of her. I tell it because I have done the same, and because the difficulty it points to is the central intellectual problem of practical magick. How would you know?
The problem
The claim made for practical magick is that a ritual act, properly performed, makes a desired outcome more likely than it would otherwise have been. Put like that, the claim is very hard to check from within a single life. The outcome either happens or it does not. If it happens, we cannot see the world in which we did no ritual. If it does not, there is always an explanation to hand: the timing was wrong, the intention unclear, the result is still on its way.
Meanwhile the human mind, left to itself, is a superb machine for finding confirmation. This is not a weakness peculiar to occultists. It is how everyone's mind works, and the list of its habits is well established.
Five habits of the mind
- We remember the hits
- A working followed by a striking result is a story, and stories are remembered. A working followed by nothing is a non event, and non events leave no trace. After a few years the memory holds a string of successes and the conviction that the method is reliable.
- We read vague aims generously
- An intention such as more abundance or a new direction can be matched to almost anything that happens. The less exactly the aim was stated, the more certainly it will seem to have been met.
- We move the deadline
- If no date was fixed for judging the result, it can arrive at any time, and any later piece of good fortune can be credited to the working.
- We forget what we did besides
- The person who did a rite for employment also, as a rule, sent out applications. Afterwards the rite is remembered as the cause.
- We work at the bottom of the curve
- People tend to do workings when things are at their worst: when ill, when lonely, when out of money. But things at their worst tend to improve in any case. Whatever was done at the low point will appear to have helped.
None of this shows that magick has no effect. It shows that the ordinary sense of it worked is not evidence either way, and that anyone who wants to know has to do something more deliberate.
The old answer
The tradition's own remedy is older than the psychology that explains why it is needed. It is the record. Not a diary of impressions written afterwards, which merely preserves one's biases in ink, but a record in which the intention is set down before the outcome is known.
The procedure I use, and recommend, has five parts.
- State the aim exactly. One sentence, concrete enough that a stranger could tell whether it had happened. Not better finances but an offer of paid work by the end of the month.
- Set the date of judgment. Write it down. After that date the result does not count.
- Write down what you expect without the working. How likely would you have said this was? Be honest. If you would have put the chances at nine in ten, success will prove little.
- Record everything else you do toward it. The applications, the telephone calls, the conversations.
- On the date, record the outcome plainly. Yes, no, or partly, with the facts. Then leave it.
And then the essential step: record every working in this way, and at the end of a year, count.
What the count shows
I have kept such a record for a good while. I will not give my figures, because they are evidence about me and not about the universe, and because I would like you to keep your own. But I will say what the exercise does.
First, it corrects the memory, usually downward. The proportion of clear successes is lower than one had supposed, and the proportion of ambiguous results much higher.
Second, it improves the workings. The discipline of stating an aim exactly turns out to be most of the battle. A surprising number of intentions dissolve when one tries to write them in a checkable form, because one did not really know what one wanted. That discovery alone is worth the notebook.
Third, it shows patterns that no theory would have predicted: that workings done in a certain state of mind fare better, that some kinds of aim never come to anything, that the ones accompanied by the most anxiety do worst. This is real knowledge about one's own practice, and it cannot be had in any other way.
And fourth, it leaves the large question open. A private tally, however honest, cannot separate the effect of a ritual from the effect of having clarified an aim, committed to it and acted on it. I have come to think that this does not matter as much as I once believed. If the ritual works by making me the kind of person who brings the thing about, it has worked.
The results that can be seen
There is a class of results that does not suffer from these difficulties, and it is the class the tradition cares about most. Whether your attention holds for ten breaths or forty is something you can count. Whether you kept your resolutions this month is on the page. Whether you lose your temper less often is known to you and to everyone who lives with you.
The Great Work is the transformation of the worker, and that transformation is observable. On this ground the art can be tested by anyone, and here I am willing to state a result: steady practice, honestly recorded, changes people. I have watched it happen. It is slower than the books suggest and less dramatic, and it is real.
Living with not knowing
It takes a certain temper to practice an art whose theory is unsettled. One has to be able to perform a ritual with full commitment and afterwards to examine the outcome with full detachment, and not to let either attitude leak into the other. Belief during the working, doubt during the review. I do not find this contradictory. A scientist does much the same in pursuing a hypothesis wholeheartedly while trying to break it.
What is not compatible with the work is the need to be certain, in either direction. The believer who cannot bear to count the failures and the scoffer who will not make the experiment are making the same mistake. Both have decided in advance. The record is for those who would prefer to find out.