I know a witch who follows astrology so closely that she
lets it topically guide her magic. For
example, if the moon is in Jupiter, it must be time for prosperity work. When Venus is prominent, it’s time for love spells
and so on. I have no objection to this
type of astrology-led work. There’s
something to be said about witching in harmony with the stars and someone who
can stick to that as a guide obviously has other admirable witchy qualities
like discipline, persistence, imagination, and the ability to stay open to a
spiritual framework long term.
However, there’s an old Left Hand Path saying that goes something like, “The
more of you there is in your magic, the more powerful it will be.” In other words, the more you distance
yourself from spiritual frameworks and try to learn about your own cycles,
desires, and qualities, the more your metacommunication with the world (i.e.
magic) will be pure and direct relative to your goals.
The great modernist magus, Aleister Crowley, who has been called “magic’s Picasso” and for good reason, articulated it like this in chapter 1 of Liber AL vel Legis: “For pure will, unassuaged of purpose, delivered from the lust of result, is every way perfect.” One way of interpreting this, as Marcelo Motta puts it in his commentaries, is that “One is not to do Yoga, etc., in order to get Samadhi, like a school-boy or a shopkeeper; but for its own sake, like an artist. ‘Unassuaged’ means ‘its edge taken off by’ or ‘dulled by.’ The pure student does not think of the result of the examination.” Likewise, pure magic doesn’t conform to the perceptual categories set up by others; it just flows organically through the practitioner toward its purpose. Its telos guides and shapes it.
This is an advanced concept and a hard thing to realize in one’s personal work. We start out with books and teachers, following rules, pouring our imaginative energies into pre-existing ideational structures. For example, we join a coven whose patrons are Diana, Dianus, and Aradia. In so doing, we’re no longer having midnight conversations with Bast and trying to chat up Lugh. We’ve deliberately and practically invested our magical imagination in the godforms of our coven. This is good. It gives us focus (power) but also limits us and demands that we deemphasize (or sometimes even sacrifice) existing connections with other deities.
In the process of ritual and introspection, we discover that Diana, Dianus, and Aradia are independent beings with their own personalities and aims. They are not merely subjective psychological constructs—not merely, as a psych student once said to me, “externalizations that allow someone to talk to otherwise hidden parts of themselves.” The gods are that, without a doubt, but they’re also more than that (at least in the experience of many witches). And they seem to function autonomously like we do. Our magic can work through them, through their signs, symbols, and power structures, quite effectively.
Nevertheless, there’s a time when a witch passes out of an intermediate stage of understanding and into a more advanced (less defined) realm. In this place, the gods do not speak as much and do not confer their comforting resonance through magic and spiritual symbolism. The advanced witch only has what she can create from within herself. Basically, there is now far more of her in her magic than any other structure or form. The gods still exist and she may still follow their rituals, but her work has become, as Crowley put it, “unassuaged of purpose” and “delivered from lust of result.” She is doing magic from a place of knowing who she really is inside—a place organic to her being, that transcends rules and methods given to her by others.
The Book of Shadows and Book of Mirrors she’s maintained now become more like memoirs, records of who she tried to be, not who she is. She’s reached this point not by making herself more like others, not by conforming to someone else’s initiatory rubric and following the assumptions and practices handed to her by spiritual authorities, but by surfacing who she has always essentially been.
Verse 70 of the Gospel of Thomas (which is mirrored in Doreen Valiente’s poetic “Charge of the Goddess”) implies this mystery: “If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.” The “saving grace” here is that of the true self (cf. “True Will” or “Pure Will”), something which cannot be taught but which the individual has to discover through long effort and hard work.
This is, incidentally, the meaning of the grade title “Ipsissimus,” (one who is wholly himself) used to indicate the ultimate stage of attainment in most ceremonial magical orders. Crowley thought that one couldn’t get there in a regular human life. Other groups and systems disagree. Not being that advanced, I can’t speculate. But I do understand, insofar as I’m able, what the word and its idea mean. They mean that the deepest mysteries, the most advanced practices, can’t be related from one practitioner to another but emerge from within. They mean that it's a lonely road. And each of us has to walk it by ourselves.