Make Your Own Difficulties: January 12, 2015
When I began to write this piece, a spin off from the quote on the Invocation of the Holy Guardian Angel Text, I was quite certain I had the "create your own difficulties" quote correct. I generally 'retain' things I have learned in the practice and study of both Medicine and Magick quite well, at least better than I do in other realms. To my frustration I could find no other text on the web that had this exact quote by early 20th Century artist and occultist Austin Osman Spare. That sent me digging through old books and texts until they started piling up around me. Finally I found in a footnote to his "The Book of Pleasure (Self-Love): The Psychology of Ecstasy" which was very close to the quote I had used.
The full quote was a footnote of the section called "The Complete Ritual and Doctrine of Magic" and read more fully as "The means being simplicity, he is comparatively free to make his own qualifications and difficulties..."
What I find interesting in this quote, which I had 'retained' as "create your own complications", is that Spare was not necessarily saying to not use any techniques, formulas, ceremony or practice (the "qualifications and difficulties") in the making of Magick. Indeed, Spare used his own "methods" and "means" as he saw fit in the workings of his art and magick.
These 'things', 'ways', 'practices', etc. were often used to produce the inner states of 'vacuity' and 'exhaustion' so prominently emphasized in the magicks of Zos. I have mentioned how Spares work influenced my own magickal journey on the main page.
The line, "This exhaustion is a desired state as it frees the energy necessary to charge the new belief..." from the The Book of Anubis: Liber 369--The Grimoire of Axis, mirrors what I refer to in the above line.
Again, in the passage, "Until we are free to believe we will not be free to think. Therefore it is said, 'Inspiration is always at a void moment', at a time when a belief has been exhausted and the desire which informed it is free to create anew." from Book Two, resonated with this awareness also.
No, what Spare was talking about was not being in 'bondage to formula', that there was no "necessitation" in his "Complete Ritual and Doctrine of Magic" to conform to any particular belief system, religion, order, "school of thought" or particular ritual "performance." That we who traverse magickal realms could be, in fact had to be, free from dogmatic beliefs.
Austin Spare's method of sigilization, (he once referred to as "monographs of thought", but could easily be thought of as monograms of desire or 'wish'), is his own unique contribution and simplification of the ceremonial magick he had been briefly initiated into in Crowley's A.A. (Argentium Astrum) and later grew to detest, as evidenced in his rant against "Ceremonial Magick" in the Book of Pleasure.
Looked at from another vantage, one could easily understand that the elaborate ceremonial, ritual gestures, emphasis on symbol and sound, etc. in Western Ceremonial Magick to serve the same purpose as Spares Sigils, again functioning as as symbolic 'monographs of thought, desire, wish' or what have you. The "enactment" and bodily performance of such then seen as serving the purpose of creating the "exhaustion" referenced above. Seen from this perspective, the "enactment" or "performance" of ritual becomes strangely close to Spares 'as if' act. ("The belief being, that by the 'as if' act the wish is fleshed when endowed by continuity, ecstasy on ecstasy.")
Spare, like Heyoka, does not answer to common "Laws of Belief and Bondage", and answer only to that voice much deeper and vaster than cultural "normalcy."
There is one last line of Spares I would like to quote here, for it points to an 'organic' morality of sorts I have read in different contexts in many of his writings, "...he who injures none, himself does no injury."