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John Michael Greer is my favorite occult writer, and I find this piece-- a talk given at Pantheacon 11-- particularly helpful and inspiring. In Greer's introduction to the Picatrix, a very important medieval grimoire, he wrote:

> The author of Picatrix conveniently lists the qualifications for a sapiens ["wise man," or wizard] in Book IV, chapter 5; they include a good working knowledge of the following topics: agriculture, seafaring, and politics; the military sciences; "the civilized arts by which people are helped," including grammar, languages, law, rhetoric, writing, and economics; the four traditional branches of mathematics— arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music; logic, with the works of Aristotle specifically singled out for study; medicine; the natural sciences, and metaphysics, with Aristotle's writings on these two subjects again specifically referenced.

In this talk, Greer outlines a broad plan of study for the modern magician. It's well worth reading in full, but here are some snippets:

>For the would-be mage, the most important "secrets" of magic aren't secret at all, and they're not even particularly exotic.

> What are these secrets, then? They're exactly the same factors that bring success in any other human activity— a point that's led more than one magician to argue that all human activities, no exceptions, are forms of magic.

> Imagine for a moment that instead of wanting to be a mage, you've decided to become a guitar player. You're not going to get there by wishing, or by decorating your place with posters of your favorite lead guitarist, or by reading lots of novels about rock bands, or by buying guitars and leaving them all over your apartment for visitors to admire, or by attending a concert and listening to someone else perform eight times a year. You need three things in order to get from the desire to the reality. First, you need to decide what kind of guitar music you want to play, and learn as much as you possibly can about it, while picking up a good general knowledge of music theory and some background in other styles and instruments. Second, you need to get a guitar and practice playing it for half an hour or an hour a day, seven days a week, fifty-two weeks a year. Third, you need to learn from your practice, and to compare what you can do with what you want to do, not so you can puff up your ego or wallow in how bad you think you're failing, but so you can see what you need to work on next and measure how your learning process is coming along.

...

> To become a competent and well-educated mage, you need to learn about magic. You need to learn a lot about magic. Of course you need to start by learning the rituals and teachings of whatever system of magic you happen to fancy. You need to learn them by heart, by the way. Reading a ritual out of a book or off a sheet of paper is fine to begin with, but to make the ritual really catch fire you need to be able to concentrate on it totally, and that's not going to happen while you're trying to read the next line through the incense smoke. In the same way, you don't really understand a piece of magical theory or philosophy until you can explain it in your own words, without looking at the book you got it from.

> But you can't stop there, not if you want to become the sort of well-educated mages we've been talking about. Too many people who know their own system of magic very well don't know any other system at all, and this has a variety of problems. It gets in the way of talking shop with other mages at gatherings like this one; it can also lead you to make a fool of yourself by assuming that your tradition's approach is common to every other magical tradition, when odds are it isn't. Thus it's a good idea to read about other magical traditions, and once you've got your feet under you in your own, it's a good idea to practice another magical tradition now and again. Johann Wolfgang Goethe used to say that someone who only knew one language didn't really know any language at all. In the same way, if you only know how to practice magic using one system, there are things about practicing magic you don't know, and you'll never learn.

> I like to encourage students to practice magic that isn't just from a different tradition, but from a different cultural and linguistic background than the main tradition they practice. You learn most by challenging your boundaries. If you like to practice a refined, intellectual, stuffy magic like the Golden Dawn tradition, the system I originally trained in, do something entirely different: break out the mojo bags, the High John the Conqueror Root and the goofer dust, and take up hoodoo.

...

>So you're studying your own magical system, and you're learning something about one or two others, and picking up a general knowledge of world magic, and learning French so you can get access to some of those amazing 19th-century French magical textbooks written by people who out-Gothed today's Goth scene a hundred twenty years in advance. Does that complete your education as a well-rounded magician? Not a chance. Dion Fortune, who was an excellent practical mage as well as a first-rate magical theoretician, and launched a magical order that's still active today, wrote that a good well-rounded education for a magical initiate should include a solid general knowledge of all the natural sciences, plus history, mathematics, logic and philosophy, psychology and comparative religion. A modest goal! Of course the amount of information to be had in any of these fields has soared exponentially since she wrote, and there are also quite a number of other sciences that didn't even exist in her time, but have plenty to teach the aspiring magician. Cybernetics, systems theory, semiotics, ecology— the list could go on for days.

...

> A lot of people in Pagan magical traditions study mythology, but most of them limit their studies to the myths and legends of whatever culture really turns their crank. That's a good starting point, but Goethe's comment about languages also applies to mythologies; if you only know one, you don't really know any. Choose at least one other to study, from the other end of the world, and learn as much about it as you know about the myths of your favorite culture.

...

> This might be a good point, by the way, to mention that you aren't reading all these books to find out what the truth is and then cling to it like grim death. Jiddu Krishnamurti used to say that truth is a pathless land; you won't get there by following anyone else's map. You're reading these books and studying these subjects to learn how to think, and to give yourself relevant things to think about. Most people in our society these days don't think. Remember what I said about prosthetics? The media is the prosthetic mind. Listen to conversations these days and most of what you hear is quotes from the media. I remember a political argument I overheard a few years back in which every single word was a sound bite from TV ads for one candidate or the other.

...

> The second thing I'd recommend that every aspiring magician study is at least one natural science. Which one? Any one you like. Depending on the kind of magic you do, one may be more useful than another. If you like doing magic with herbs, botany is going to be quite a bit of help. If you ever plan on taking up laboratory alchemy, a good background in practical chemistry is essential. Astrology and astronomy used to be the same thing until four hundred years ago, and the best astrologers know their planetary astronomy inside and out. And the list goes on. It's crucial to actually get your hands grubby, to practice the science you study and learn the technical language, rather than reading the stuff that gets written for laypeople.

...

> The third thing I'd propose as essential study for mages is a basic grasp of philosophy. Magic used to be considered the highest form of applied philosophy; there's a reason why Cornelius Agrippa's great book, the most notorious sorcerer's manual of the Renaissance, went by the title Three Books of Occult Philosophy. Again, to become a mage you need to be able to think like a mage; that implies that you need to be able to think; and the way to learn how to think is to think about what you're thinking, to turn your attention to your own thoughts and see if they actually make sense. If you can't critique your own thoughts and opinions, you don't have thoughts; your thoughts have you.

...

> So there you have it. Study, of magic, including the magical traditions of other places and times; of mythology and folklore; a natural science; philosophy; and a foreign language. Practice, including a daily magical working, but also including practical workings of various kinds, divination, and any auxiliary arts that might interest you. Keeping a magical journal. A lot of work? Yes, but no more than you'd expect to put into becoming a good musician, or a martial artist, or a schoolteacher, or a dentist, or anything else. Magic is work; it has to be learned, studied, practiced, for years— like anything else worth doing. The payoffs, for those willing to do the work, are literally beyond imagining.

Apologies for not posting sooner. I was sort of waiting for the Cicero deck to arrive, which it did on Monday. I like it a lot better than the Regardie deck on many levels. I don't think there are too many boobs ;)

Lingering things from Lesson 1, I did finally start a dream journal, but I know I could be better at it than I am so far.

On to Lesson 2's questions:

On question 1, I have a double cubical altar made from two of these, but it takes up a lot of space so more often than not, I find myself leaving it in the East and working in the center of my temple space. I have a robe, but don't usually wear it unless I'm working a "bigger" ritual than just daily practice. It was made for and used with the rituals from the Cicero Self-Initiation book, primarily.

I do not yet have a set of tools for this specific work and I plan to be making the tools as described in MM. I have obtained a disk and paints for my pentacle, so I'll be getting to that in the next week or so. The Moon is favorable for that, having just passed through New. When I do work with the altar in the center for the daily practice, I've only had on it my journal, Tarot cards and a pen. Of late the altar has sat in the East not only because of space constraints, but also because I currently have an Enochian Chess board set up on it.


Regarding question 2, I have not yet started with the Solar adorations with any regularity, but thank you so much for your summary of them. From that I have written a cheat-sheet and will hopefully get to doing them more regularly. I have often thought about them even if I haven't been doing them yet. In my regular daily practice developed before starting to read MM, I have a "first thing in the morning" ritual and a "last thing at night" ritual, so the Solar adoration parts ought to slot in with those neatly.


Question 3 about the LBRP, I'd written this part for question 1, but will move it here: I've been practicing the LBRP for over a year now and in the context of this working I have only used my finger. In past working, I have tried a variety of tools including a very sharp dagger which belongs to a member of one of my groups, but I only use that when working the LBRP in their space when it is my turn to open/run the ritual. OK, that's what I had above, and now I'll add that even though I have been working with this ritual for quite some time, I still find my visualizations weak and my vibratory results quite variable. I have had a few experiences, usually when working this "for" others, where I could tell the ritual as a whoe was quite effective. When I work alone, though, I have a much harder time judging the effectiveness overall and can only pick out things like, "wow, Auriel was really present there."


For question 4's topic of the Tree of Life, this again is something which I have been aware of and doing cursory study of for a couple years. I have Lon Milo duQuette's Chicken Qabalah and love it dearly. One of my magickal groups has done semi-regular pathworkings, and certainly the Cicero Self-Initiation includes a lot of pathworking also. I can draw the Tree from memory and name all of the Sephirah, but still as yet cannot letter all the Paths. I can put the Tarot trumps on about half of them (mostly the lower half and that's due to the work I've done w/ the Self-Initiation book).


Regarding question 5 and the Tarot, I have a lot of Tarot decks and have been using them to lesser or greater depths for over 30 years. I still don't feel like I "know" any of them all that well, mostly because it's been a lot of "lesser depths" until the past few years or so. Daily practice makes such a huge difference, as well as trusting first impressions rather than saying, "no, that can't be right," and then looking up in a book what I was "supposed" to get. That Cicero deck is really intriguing and I've barely scratched the surface of working with it. We'll see how I feel about it in another week or two. I've switched over to using it for my daily Tarot Contemplation Ritual, but that's only been a day or two. It's also kind of a pain to want to use the whole deck for reading versus using only the Majors for the TCR, and I haven't yet made a bag for it, so we still have a lot of setting in to do, that deck and I.


Question 6 and the format has me a bit stymied. I was very happy to see that you went from, "I wanted to put chapters 1 and 2 into the same post," to "Chapter 2 will be split up into 2 posts." DMK pitches MM as a "one lesson a month" sort of deal, and I can see value in going more slowly than that as long as I keep to a daily practice. I actually haven't even cracked MM open in the past week, but have kept up my daily journals (dream, ritual, general). I know I could be doing more to contribute, so I'll try to step up my commenting, maybe make it a daily practice ;)

It just occurred to me that when we get to making tools, it could be good to break the tool-construction topics out into a separate thread from the main lesson material. Maybe talk a little bit about it in the main lesson topic, but then also point to the tool-specific topic for going into more detail on the actual practicalities of construction. I'll need to go back and re-read what I've read of Lesson 3 to really know if that's a good idea or not, though.


As far as question 7 goes, I don't think I have much more to add at this point, other than I do feel like I ought to be doing more to contribute to the sub. I'm not yet sure how, though.

Thank you again!

This is my own personal view, but I'd also heavily suggest reading Cosmic Trigger by Robert Anton Wilson. I believe one of the biggest pitfalls awaiting beginning users of magick is lack of humor, and Robert Anton Wilson's (or RAW as he's sometimes known) works have done a lot to fix that.

RAW isn't everyone's cup of tea but I think this book does a lot to help explain how magickal work (and other esoteric weirdness) can be healthily ingrained into your life. You might spend time contemplating extraterrestrials from Sirius, but you also have to be able to connect with your friends and family. Cosmic Trigger does as good as any work I've read in leading the reader through radically different points of view, and leaving them at the end a bit more grounded but still able to make the occasional great leap.