The Order's texts speak of workings and seldom of magic. This is deliberate. "Magic" is a word that arrives carrying claims, and the Order prefers to make no claim it cannot support. But the question cannot be avoided forever. A practitioner who traces a ring in the air and states an intent aloud is entitled to ask what, exactly, they suppose themselves to be doing.
This page sets out the answers that have been given, and the Order's reasons for asking only that you test them.
A Definition
The most quoted modern definition calls magic the science and art of causing change to occur in conformity with will. It is a good definition, and a very broad one. By its terms, posting a letter is a magical act.
The Practice page gives a narrower one for the Order's own purposes. A working is a structured, deliberate, symbolic action undertaken for the purpose of transformation. What distinguishes it from ordinary action is that it proceeds by symbol and by concentrated attention, and that its first object is the one who performs it.
Inner and Outer
The changes sought through magic are of two kinds. Some are changes in the practitioner: in what they perceive, fear, want, believe, and are able to do. Others are changes in the world outside the practitioner: in events, in circumstances, in other people.
Different traditions rank these differently. Popular imagination supposes that the second kind is the real thing and the first a consolation. One of the most carefully reasoned currents of the left-hand path holds the opposite: that magic worked on the practitioner's own inner universe is the greater art, and that influence on outward events is the lesser. The same current adds a piece of plain advice, which the Order endorses without reservation. Whoever works for an outward result should also do the ordinary things that bring it about. A working for employment is not a substitute for an application.
Every working in the Order's texts is of the first kind. The Inventory, the Descent, and the Name, described in First Workings, and the Other Voice, described in The Blind Maker, aim at nothing beyond the practitioner. This is not because the Order denies the second kind. It is because the first can be verified by anyone, from their own record, without first settling any question about how the universe is made.
Four Models
Practitioners have explained the effects of magic in four principal ways. Each model has serious adherents, and each has a weakness that its adherents tend not to mention.
| Model | A working acts because | Its characteristic risk |
|---|---|---|
| Spirit | Independent beings are addressed, and respond | Handing one's judgment to a voice |
| Energy | A subtle force is raised and directed by the will | Mistaking sensation for effect |
| Psychological | Symbols reach parts of the mind that argument does not | Explaining away what one has not examined |
| Pragmatic | The cause is unknown; any model serves while it is used with commitment | Believing nothing long enough to be changed by it |
The spirit model is the oldest, and is assumed by nearly all the grimoires. The energy model became common in the nineteenth century. The psychological model belongs chiefly to the twentieth, and one current states it bluntly: ritual is a drama staged for the emotions of the performer, and needs no other justification. The pragmatic model is the contribution of chaos magic, which treats the other three as tools.
The Order adopts none of them. Its practice is built so that it works, to the extent that it works, under all four, and so that a practitioner can move between them as their record requires. The second of its principles of practice is that every working is recorded. The third is that every method is tested.
What a Working Reliably Does
Whatever else is true, a working done with care does several things that can be observed and that do not depend on any model.
- It gathers attention. For the length of the working, the mind is on one thing. For many people this is rarer than they realize until they try it.
- It marks a decision. An intent that has been written down, spoken aloud, and enacted has a weight that a private resolution does not. The practitioner has, in effect, made a promise before a witness, and the witness is themselves.
- It gives feeling a form. Fear, grief, anger, and desire that have no outlet in ordinary life can be given one, within limits set in advance, and looked at.
- It interrupts habit. A working is unlike the rest of the day. That difference alone can loosen patterns that have run unnoticed for years.
- It makes the hidden visible. This is the special work of transgression, described in Venom and Remedy: a prohibition that could not be seen becomes visible at the moment it is crossed.
These effects are modest to describe and considerable to undergo. They are sufficient reason to practice, and a practitioner who never comes to believe in anything further has lost nothing.
What Is Claimed Beyond That
A great deal more is claimed: that workings bring about outward events, that the future can be read, that spirits can be met and questioned, that one mind can touch another at a distance. The Order neither asserts nor denies these claims. The Frequently Asked Questions put its position in a sentence: some practitioners conclude that their workings affect the world around them, others that they act on the practitioner's own mind, and both can practice.
It does ask for a standard of evidence, and the standard is set out in The Nightside Record.
- Write the intent before the working, so that the result cannot be adjusted to fit afterward.
- Record the failures with the same care as the successes. A method that works one time in ten has not been shown to work.
- Note the ordinary explanations first: what you already knew, what you did by ordinary means, what was likely to happen anyway.
- Treat a striking coincidence as an anecdote until it repeats under the same conditions.
- Keep observation and interpretation in separate places on the page.
A practitioner who applies this standard for a few years will know more about what magic does, for them, than any book can say. They may be surprised in either direction.
Common Techniques
The literature of the left-hand path describes many techniques. The following are the ones a reader will meet most often. This is a survey for orientation, not a set of instructions. Of the techniques listed, the Order's own texts teach only stillness and the recording of dreams.
- Meditation. The training of attention. The Order calls its form of it stillness, and treats it as the foundation of everything else.
- Visualization. The deliberate building of images in the mind, held steady, as a rehearsal or as a meeting place.
- The sigil. A statement of desire reduced to an abstract mark, concentrated on intensely, and then put out of mind.
- Invocation. The calling of a figure or a quality into oneself, so that for the length of the working the practitioner speaks and acts as it.
- Evocation. The calling of a spirit to appear outside oneself, to be questioned or instructed.
- Divination. The reading of cards, signs, or patterns for knowledge not otherwise available.
- Dream work. The recording of dreams, and in some schools the attempt to direct them. The Order's night pages belong here.
- Ritual drama. The enactment of a myth, with the practitioner in one of its parts.
- Ordeal. Fasting, vigil, solitude, or cold, undertaken to reach states that comfort keeps out of reach.
The Order's texts keep to stillness, the record, and four simple workings because these carry the least risk and require the least belief, and because, in the experience of the Keepers, they do most of what the rest are used for. Practitioners who go on to other techniques are asked to carry the record with them, and to read the cautions under Dose in Venom and Remedy before attempting an ordeal of any kind.
On Black Magic
The phrase has two meanings, and they should not be confused. In common speech, black magic is magic done to harm. In some currents of the left-hand path the phrase has been reclaimed, and means something else: magic done for the self's own ends and by the self's own authority, as opposed to magic that petitions a god and asks for its will to be done.
The Order uses the phrase in neither sense. As to the first meaning, its position is fixed. Its texts contain no curses, and they will not. A working aimed at harming another person makes that person the material of the practitioner's will, and the Order's Statements of Position hold that no person may be made the material of another's initiation. Whether such a working would have any effect on its target is a question the Order leaves open. Its effect on the one who performs it is not in doubt, and is described in Venom and Remedy under the signs of poisoning.
On Failure
Most workings produce nothing remarkable. The practitioner opens, states the intent, does what was planned, closes, and writes a record that says, in effect, that it was quiet. This is normal. It is true of every discipline that the greater part of practice is uneventful, and the literature of magic, which is written almost entirely from the eventful part, gives a false impression.
A record with many quiet entries is an honest record. A record with none should make its keeper suspicious.
Three Rules the Order Keeps
The Order prescribes no rituals, and it holds no authority over anyone's practice. In its own texts it keeps three rules without exception, and it recommends them to practitioners who design workings of their own.
- Sober. No working of the Order requires an intoxicant, and clarity of mind is treated as a precondition of the work. A mind that has been altered cannot report reliably on what altered it.
- Recorded. Every working is written down at once, honestly, in the form described in The Nightside Record.
- No one else is material. No working is directed at another person without that person's informed and freely given consent, and no working requires harm to any living thing.