Creative Visualisation – An Empty Handed Ritual.
Probably the most powerful tool in the Chaos Magickian’s arsenal is the process of creative visualization. It is most powerful when given the length and breadth of the magickian’s imagination as it’s workplace. It involves simply, imagining the processes and outcomes of what would normally be a physically performed ritual action. It leads us ever onward, toward empty handed practice, where the tools of ritual are no longer necessary and magick becomes intrinsically bound to our existence as prayer is to the devoutly religious.
The individual’s imagination is the playground of magick via visualization and as such the ability of the individual to imagine an event or a possibility with the greatest amount of clarity tends to become the determining factor in the success or failure of the visualization. When one treads this path, it is important to remember to keep challenging yourself, thinking new thoughts and pushing new boundaries. Your magick will fill and roam all of the possibilities you can imagine, but it will also be limited by your ability to imagine such possibilities.
Ritual through visualization can be achieved in several ways. The practitioner may simply achieve gnosis through visualization, may charge a visualized sigil or may go into far more detail, imagining an entire ritual event. It is also a particularly good way of banishing or creating wards against spirits. This seems most likely due to the increased performance of the subconscious in such procedures, bringing the practitioner closer to an astral nature.
And it is here that the link occurs and creative visualization becomes a pathway toward magickal results. Certainly initially, in each visualization there will be a lot of work done by the conscious mind, creating a picture, filling in details. But now make that picture move a bit, go through a doorway or two and you will notice quite quickly your subconscious running in to fill the background for you as you go. Be careful how many doorways you go through though, this also touches on Dreamlands visualizations which seem inherently linked.
So, we have a pathway built to the subconscious, we have gnosis as the wind in our sails and we start imprinting directly from our conscious mind onto our subconscious mind which just loves to be spoken to in pictures.
This method is of course well suited to working within fictional paradigms. When the imagination is in charge it matters little as to whether the subject matter is real or fictional. Unfortunately this also creates the need for care as the traps you imagine become real also.
So now we have the theory down, how about the practice? The simplest starting point is basic adaptation of sigil casting. Create and draw your sigil and then spend some good quality time with it. Get to know it’s lines and curves and make sure that when you close your eyes you can still see all those lines and curves clearly. Now start using gnosis to feed it. Visualise it as emitting a soft dirty orange glow that is barely visible at first, and as you feed it with gnosis let it slowly flutter into brightness until over time it becomes a piercing white. Now send it and end gnosis, opening your eyes becomes all the banishment you need and it is done. As you can see, even in this form there is an enormous reduction in time from determining your desire to sigil casting. More detailed banishments may be visualized if it seems suited. I have often performed Pete Carroll’s Gnostic Banishing of the Pentagram as pure a visualization and at times merged it with elements of kabalistic cleansing visualizations.
As practice progresses, you should be able to imagine yourself performing entire ritual processes from start point to end point. Eventually progression will lead you to a point of not so much imagining a whole ritual but in visualizing simply your will being released upon the aether, impacting and rippling outwards. In it’s extreme, the use of magick becomes a reflex action.
You may wonder what I mean by “reflex action”. I throw this up as an example. Some time ago, I was traveling home from work via train. It’s not a mode of transport I enjoy very much as all the being bumped into begins to grate on my nerves after a short time. I had disembarked from one train and was making my way down the platform to catch another train out of the city. Half way down the platform, I suddenly couldn’t walk any further, people were moving left and right but something was blocking the way forward. I soon realized it was a man in his 40-somethings getting a big testosterone rush from harassing a group of 5 youths who I would guess ranged from about 8 to 16. He was building his aggression and was openly threatening to the children. This being the kind of situation I find it hard to ignore and walk past I stopped and told him to get on his train and leave, transferring his aggression to me, a more realistic target. A few comments to and fro were enough to realize that firstly, he was only changing the target of his aggression because I was interrupting him and that he would return his aggression to the children straight away if I left to get the police and secondly, he was not going to back down even if it meant a fight as this would mean backing down from children. That is when the magick kicked in, I dropped into gnosis, my eyes widened and fixated upon him, my voice dropped and I simply said “You may think you frighten this lot but you don’t frighten me one bit. Now get on your train and leave.” At the end of this sentence I felt the familiar rush of magickal energy and his face dropped and went blank. Shaking his head he walked away and got on board the train as I watched and the children called out names from the platform.
Now in the case related above, my entire magickal process was reduced to the length of one vocalized sentence which was then thrown in the man’s face. It required no set-up time, no reagents, no ritual blade (though certainly that may have enhanced the effect at the time *grin*) but simply the casting of the will as a reflex.
It is possible to build visualization into all sorts of magickal procedures. For some time now it has also been a part of my tarot process. This process was built on the theory that it is the shuffle that determines the accuracy of the spread. Before shuffling, close your eyes and imagine looking down at your hands. See the cards being held in your hands side on so you can see the edges off all the cards. Now notice how it seems to give off a dirty orange glow at the moment, with some patches so dark they are almost black and others, glowing brighter towards white. Begin shuffling and shuffle until the deck becomes close to white. There may still be some patches that are a dirty colour or black, so take them out and move them to a different place in the deck until you get as close to a solid glowing white block of cards as possible. Now open your eyes and lay the cards.
So, what can be done to improve the visualization ability? Unfortunately, it’s practice as usual. Reading is an important training tool, particularly science fiction or fantasy work as it is far removed from actual experience and requires a stretch from the imagination to build a picture of the scene being read about. Similarly, magick through visualization relies upon the ability of the individual to imagine a thing as possible. The more you read, whether it be fictional, real, scientific or magickal in nature, the more your ability to imagine a thing as potentially possible increases.
Secondly, take the time while reading to picture the scene you are reading about. If it is talking about a landscape, try to see that landscape. If it is describing characters, picture those characters. How tall are they? How broad? What do their voices sound like? What is their dominant facial expression? What happens when they move?
Visualisation should be practiced by everyone, but is certainly a tool more comfortably held by the experienced magickian. It is by no means a new technique; in fact I was reminded of this only recently while browsing articles that have come long before this one. In recent times however, there has seemed to be a search for dogma in chaos magick which has been letting something very simple slip through our fingertips. We believe that magick is an outward expression of our will, empowered by our belief. While physical performance of ritual can aid the process of projecting our will and focusing our belief it is by no means essential to success and may in many cases become our limiting factor.
Mirzam