Of the four models of magic described on the page On Magic, the energy model has the richest vocabulary. Its practitioners speak of raising, storing, directing, and grounding a subtle force, and of a body within or around the physical body through which the force moves: centers, channels, and a coiled power at the base of the spine. Much of this vocabulary comes from the yogic and tantric traditions of India, and some of it was invented in the last hundred years.
This page describes the model and its maps as reference. The Order teaches no practice of this kind and makes no claim about whether the subtle body exists. It does ask that anyone who works with these maps keep a record of what happens, and remember that a map is not the country.
The Energy Model
Practitioners who think of magic as the handling of a force tend to describe it in six operations. The terms vary from teacher to teacher, but the sequence is constant.
- Build. Raise the force: by breath, chant, movement, concentration, desire, or emotion. Many say that strong feeling, fear included, is the quickest source.
- Store. Hold it, for the length of a working or longer.
- Control. Keep it steady and directed. Every teacher who uses the model says that this is the hardest part, and the most neglected.
- Release. Send it toward the aim, either gradually or all at once.
- Ground. Discharge what remains, so that it does not linger in the practitioner or the room. Some practitioners compare this to the small wicks on the trailing edge of an aircraft's wings, which bleed off static charge so that it does not build up.
- Transfer. In some accounts, carry the force into another state of consciousness or another place.
Some practitioners distinguish the intensity of the force from its quantity, the way one might distinguish the pressure of water in a pipe from the amount of water flowing through it. The analogy is useful for thinking about the experience, whatever its cause. It is an analogy, and the vocabulary of physics borrowed for it, of frequency, vibration, and voltage, should not be mistaken for physics.
The Coiled One
The tantric traditions describe a power that lies asleep at the base of the spine, coiled three and a half times, pictured as a serpent and named kundalini, "the coiled one." Through practice the adept wakes it and draws it up a central channel along the spine, through a series of centers, to the crown of the head, where its union with consciousness is liberation. Two further channels wind around the central one, and the breath is said to move through them.
The page The Serpent and the Open Ring notes the likeness between this image and the Order's own image of gathered strength, and says plainly that the Order teaches no practice of this kind and claims no connection with the traditions that do. Some practitioners of the left-hand path identify the serpent power with the Black Flame. The tantric traditions are living ones, with teachers and vows of their own, and their account of what the serpent power is for differs from any Western one.
Chakra Systems
The centers through which the serpent power rises are called chakras, "wheels." The classical texts do not agree on how many there are. Different texts describe four, five, six, or more, and give them different positions and attributes. The familiar system of seven, from the base of the spine to the crown, became standard in the West through the translation of a single sixteenth-century text in the early twentieth century.
Much of what is now taught about the chakras is more recent still. The assignment of the seven colors of the rainbow, in order from red at the base to violet at the crown, dates from the later twentieth century. The linking of the chakras to the glands of the body goes back to writers of the 1920s and 1930s, and the long tables of stones, oils, foods, and planets that accompany them in popular books are mostly later still. Some modern teachers describe twelve chakras, or more, adding centers above the head and below the feet. These systems differ from teacher to teacher, and no two agree.
None of this makes the tables useless. A correspondence table is a tool for focusing attention: a color, a sound, and a place in the body can be held together in the mind more easily than any one of them alone. A practitioner may use any system that helps. They should know that it is a system, that it is young, and that the claims attached to it about health and disease are not supported by evidence.
The Middle Pillar
The Western tradition has its own map of the subtle body, taken from the diagram of the tree of life described on the page Symbols of the Left-Hand Path. The tree has three columns, and the exercise called the Middle Pillar places the spheres of the central column on the body: above the head, at the throat, at the heart, at the groin, and at the feet. The practitioner visualizes light descending from the crown through each center in turn, intoning a name at each, and then circulates it around and through the body.
The exercise was set out in the 1930s by a writer trained in a successor of the Victorian ceremonial order mentioned on the page Origins of the Left-Hand Path, and it is often said to be much older or to come from the East. It is neither. Later writers related it to the chakras, and some left-hand practitioners have adapted it to their own figures and to a descent rather than an ascent.
Grounding
Practitioners of every current that uses the energy model insist on grounding after a working, and their methods are mostly physical: feeling the weight of the body and the feet on the floor, touching the earth, eating something, drinking water, washing the hands. Whatever one believes about residual energy, these acts end the altered state and return the practitioner to the ordinary one, which is the purpose of the closing in any working. They belong to the short routine described on the page Designing a Working, where they follow the writing of the record.
A Breath Exercise
One exercise common in left-hand practice uses the image of the coil without requiring any belief about it. It is offered as a description, not as part of the Order's practice, and some use it before stillness, before charging a sigil, or before sleep.
- Sit upright, as for the stillness exercise in First Workings, and close the eyes.
- Let the day go: notice the tension in the face, the shoulders, and the hands, and release it.
- Slow the breath, and lengthen both the inhalation and the exhalation, without forcing either.
- On each inhalation, imagine a long thread drawn in through the nose and down, coiling in the lower belly. On each exhalation, let it pay out again.
- Continue for three to five minutes, or until you feel settled.
- Open the eyes, and write in the record what you noticed.
Practitioners who use it say that, with practice, the steps fall away and the state can be reached in a few breaths, anywhere. That is true of most such exercises.
The Seven Centers and the Seven Coils
Readers sometimes ask whether the Order's Seven Coils correspond to the seven chakras. They do not. The coils are stages of a life's work, recognized in the record over years. The chakras are places in a map of the body. The number is shared and nothing else is. A practitioner who finds it useful to set the two side by side in contemplation is free to do so, and should note in the record that the comparison is their own.
Cautions
- No health claims. The belief that a blocked chakra causes illness, or that a color, a stone, or a supplement cures one, has no support in evidence. Illness is a matter for a doctor. Practice can sit alongside medical care. It cannot replace it.
- Intense practice has reported risks. Accounts from several traditions, and some recent research on meditators, describe distressing experiences in long or forceful practice of this kind: heat, involuntary movement, disturbed sleep, fear, and feelings of unreality. The traditions that teach the serpent power teach it slowly, under a teacher, for this reason.
- Herbs are drugs. Several plants on popular lists for opening the chakras are toxic or interact with medicines. Take nothing by mouth on the strength of a correspondence table.
- Stop when the signs appear. The signs listed in the chapter When to Stop in First Workings apply here as everywhere.
Testing
The sensations reported in subtle-body work are real sensations, and they belong in the record as observations: warmth in the hands, tingling along the spine, a sense of pressure at the brow. What they mean is an interpretation, and should be written separately. A practitioner who wants to know whether the work does anything can also look further afield, at things the record can measure: sleep, mood, concentration, the number of times attention wandered during stillness. If those change over months, something is happening. What it is may remain an open question, and the Order is content to leave it open.