The Practice page gives the six parts of a working: preparation, opening, statement, operation, closing, and record. That structure can hold almost anything. This page is about what goes into it: how a working is designed, how it is carried through when something goes wrong, and how the practitioner learns from it afterward.
Most of what follows is common sense, and much of it is borrowed from crafts that have nothing to do with the occult. That is deliberate. A working is a piece of deliberate action, and the habits that make any deliberate action reliable serve it well.
Begin With the Aim
Every working begins with a single sentence that states what it is for, written down before anything else is decided. The rest of the working is built backward from that sentence. Some practitioners describe the method as reverse engineering: start from the outcome, and ask at each step what must come before it.
A good aim is specific enough that the record can later say whether it was met. Compare these.
- "I want to grow." This could mean anything, and the record will never be able to say whether it happened.
- "I examine my fear of being seen to fail, for ten minutes, and record what it does in my body." This can be done, and the record can say whether it was done and what was found.
- "I mark the beginning of a month without alcohol." This is an aim for a single working, and it names the larger commitment it serves.
An aim that cannot be stated in a sentence is usually two aims, or none. Divide it, or wait until it is clearer.
Map the Steps
Once the aim is fixed, write out the steps of the working in order. Some practitioners draw them as a row of boxes on a page of the record, with a diamond wherever a decision has to be made, and describe each box underneath. Break each step into smaller steps until every one of them is simple enough to be done the same way every time. A step that reads "raise power" is not yet a step. A step that reads "breathe slowly for twenty counts while holding the image of the aim" is one.
The reason for this is consistency. In any craft, the secret is not the occasional brilliant result. It is the ability to produce a result reliably. Complicated workings are built from simple parts that are already known to work, and a practitioner who has mapped their steps can tell, afterward, which part did what.
Prepare
Practitioners of every current say that preparation is most of the work. Decide the time and the place. Gather whatever the working needs, and nothing it does not. Arrange not to be interrupted. Attend to the body: a practitioner who is exhausted, hungry, overfull, or ill will produce a record of exhaustion, hunger, fullness, or illness. Many bathe before a working, as a plain marker of the passage from ordinary time, and some clear and set the space as described on the page The Altar.
Write the aim, the steps, and the plan for interruption in the record before beginning. If the working later goes differently, the record will show where.
Plan for Interruption
Something will go wrong. A phone will ring, a candle will gutter, a neighbor will knock, the mind will refuse to settle. Experienced practitioners plan for this with simple rules written in advance: if someone knocks at the door, I close and begin again tomorrow; if I lose the thread of the operation, I return to the breath for twenty counts and continue. A rule decided in calm is better than a decision made in the middle of a working.
Something will also go wrong that no rule anticipated. The advice here is to hold the structure and adapt the detail. Finish the working if it can be finished honestly, close it in every case, and write down exactly what happened. Decide in advance, too, what would end a working early: fear that cannot be held, a sense that something is wrong, any reason at all. Stopping is never a failure, and the stop rule in First Workings applies within a working as well as across a life.
Open, Clear, and State
The opening marks the boundary between ordinary time and the time of the working. The Order uses the Gesture of the Open Ring, but any clear mark will serve: a bell, a word, a candle lit, a single breath taken deliberately.
Many traditions follow the opening with a clearing, often called banishing: a rite meant to drive out unwanted influences before the work begins. Practitioners who do not believe in unwanted influences have found another use for the same step, and describe it as returning the space and the mind to neutral. A minute of stillness does this as well as anything. The Order's gesture neither summons nor banishes anything, and makes no claim to.
The statement of intent comes next, spoken aloud exactly as it was written. Mean every word. A rite composed by someone else can be used, but a practitioner who recites words they do not understand is like someone running a program they cannot read: it may work, and if it does something unexpected, they will not know why. Many practitioners build their rites from borrowed parts and parts of their own, and say only what they mean. The page The Spoken Word considers ritual speech at more length.
The Operation
The operation is whatever the working was designed to do: a meditation, a confrontation, a recitation, a sigil, a gaze into a dark mirror, a piece of writing. Do what was planned.
Small checks during the operation are useful. Is the attention on the aim? Is the body steady? Small corrections can be made as they are needed. Large ones should wait. An ingredient added on impulse, because it felt right in the moment, is how a laboratory catches fire. If the operation seems to want something that was not planned, note it, finish what was planned, and consider the new element for the next working.
Close, and Come Back
Close as clearly as you opened. Never skip the closing, however short or uneventful the working was. A working that has not been closed has not ended, and a practitioner who carries its mood into the rest of the day has not returned from it.
Then come back. Write the record first, before anything else, while the working is still fresh, because small details that seem trivial at the time are often the ones that matter months later. Practitioners report images noted in a meditation whose meaning became clear only a year or more afterward, which no one could have connected without the written note. When the record is written, eat something small, drink water, and rest for a few minutes. Practitioners of many currents describe a short routine of this kind. Do not go straight to sleep, and do not go straight back to a screen.
Review
Workers in many trades use a four-part cycle for improving any repeated task: plan, do, check, and act. Plan the work. Do it. Check what happened against what was expected. Act on what the check reveals, by changing the next plan. Then begin again.
Applied to practice, the cycle asks for a short review after every working and a longer one at intervals. After each working, note in the record what went as planned, what did not, and what to change next time. Make small corrections in the next working. Keep larger changes for a deliberate replanning, perhaps at the monthly review described in The Nightside Record, so that you can tell which change did what. Write review notes as dated additions, and never alter the original entry.
Never Do
The following list gathers the warnings that practitioners of very different currents give most often, adjusted to the Order's own rules.
- Never work with a vague aim.
- Never work in rage, despair, or panic. Strong feeling distorts intent, and what is done in that state is seldom what the practitioner would choose afterward.
- Never work intoxicated. The reasons are given on the page Sobriety and Recovery.
- Never work exhausted or ill, except to record that you are too exhausted or ill to work.
- Never work unprepared, in clutter, or in a hurry.
- Never work distracted. Turn off the phone.
- Never ignore a sign that something is wrong. Pause, and reassess.
- Never skip the closing, or the return.
- Never direct a working at another person without their informed consent.
- Never make a promise during a working that you have not considered beforehand. See Vows and Dedications.
- Never add an unplanned element because it felt right in the moment.
- Never write the record later, from memory.
Common Mistakes
Beyond the outright errors, a few mistakes are made by nearly every beginner, and are worth naming so that they can be made consciously, if at all.
- The grand first rite. An elaborate working attempted before the simple ones have been mastered. It is impossible to tell afterward what any part of it did.
- Too many changes at once. A practitioner who changes the time, the place, the words, and the method between two workings cannot learn anything from the difference.
- Generous counting. Results remembered and failures forgotten. The record exists to prevent this.
- Abandoning a method after one failure, or keeping it after twenty.
- Accumulation. Buying tools, books, and courses in place of practice. The page The Altar describes the trap.
- Theater without seriousness. Performing a rite one does not take seriously, and does not record or test. Some practitioners call this empty play. Whatever one believes, a working not taken seriously is not a working.
From Workings to a Method
After some months, read back through the maps and the review notes. Some parts of what you have been doing will have worked reliably. Most will not have done much of anything. Practitioners who have done this often find that perhaps a fifth of what they did as beginners mattered, and that the rest was noise. Keep the part that works. Discard the rest without regret.
What remains is a method, and it is your own: something no teacher gave you, made from your own record. This is the work of the sixth coil, the Rising. When the method is clear enough to be written down for someone else, the seventh coil asks you to give it away.