The Magickal Art of Drugs

By Julian Vayne - November 4, 2009 

 

A paper delivered at the Exploring Consciousness conference June 2004 at The Sophia Centre at Bath Spa University College and Psychonaut UK. Reproduced in my book Magick Works.

I'd like to begin this presentation by explaining my understanding of what magick is. I'm going to provide an overview of the development of the Western Occult Tradition and then show how and why the emerging technology of magick can be deployed with particular regard to pharmacological approaches to self discovery.

So what is magick?

For me, as I have explained in my book Pharmakon, occultism is the study and practice of engaging with mystery. Magick is the technology of exploring the occult, those hidden aspects of the universe. Magick provides mechanisms whereby we can learn to cause changes in the observable processes of the universe by interacting with the 'invisible' realm of mystery. Today we might describe some of these changes as 'psychological', others we might call parapsychological.

Occultism is quintessentially the study of the world of the between: between fact and phantasy, between divine and demonic, between matter and mind. Occult experimenters, those people who deploy its methods as 'magick', position themselves in this liminal space. If we are seeking to understand consciousness (especially in cultures where there is an apparent split between matter and mind), magick can be a powerful ally, for it is this space between duality that is its natural habitat.

The occult tradition exists as the esoteric body of knowledge within many different beliefs. Within classical Paganism it existed as Thergia, within Christianity as Gnosticism, within Islam as Sufism. The key point is that these esoteric, mystical, magickal discourses within a larger religion are crucially about praxis. They are based less on doctrinal knowledge but instead emphasise the experiential. These are bodies of technique, of experiment and exploration clothed in the language of the religion into which they are woven.

Today, occultism is beginning to emerge on its own terms. For occultism is a study, an area of enquiry that, whilst it may utilise the language of religion or science (or art, or many other things), is itself a complete body of knowledge.

The grandfather of contemporary Western occultism is undoubtedly Eliphas Levi, who attempted to formulate a general theory of magick (indeed he always claimed to be primarily a theorist rather than a practitioner of the occult arts). It was Levi's The Dogma and Ritual of High Magic (1856) that began the process of de-coupling magick from any specifically religious viewpoint. Levi sought to cut through the complexity of the subject in order to identify 'principles'. What he was doing for occultism, his contemporaries were also doing in creating a scientific language (devoid of explicitly religious content) to explain such phenomena as mesmerism.

Levi's first principle of magick was that of the Will which, as in mesmerism, was imagined 'as steam or the galvanic current', that is as a 'real' force. Levi suggested that paraphernalia such as robes, incense, magick circles and the like were primarily important as aids in supporting the Will. Their virtue was in their effect on the Will of the magician and not primarily from any inherent property. With this principle Levi, at a stroke, jettisoned the magician's reliance on virgin parchment and the blood of pigeons, and recast the material mechanics of magick into what the 20th century occultist Israel Regardie would later call 'an artificial system of props and aids'.

Levi's second principle was that of the astral light. This light was the medium or dimension of reality which permeated all things, and of which the material world was only one of innumerable projections. Levi's conception of the astral light was similar to ideas such as that of the luminiferous ether (the medium through which electromagnetic radiation was conjectured to pass by 19th century physicists) and the all-pervasive 'odic force' of Baron von Reichenbach. The fundamental principle of magick that the doctrine of the astral light reaffirmed was 'all is one and one is all'- everything in the universe was intimately interconnected. Today we might well describe this astral light using the mythology of quantum mechanics.

Levi's third principle concerned correspondences or 'like attracts like', what James Frazer went on to examine in The Golden Bough as 'sympathetic magic'. For Levi the doctrine of 'as above, so below' affirmed that what was within the macrocosm was reflected within the microcosm. Today models such as the holographic or fractal universe expound essentially the same belief. On the most superficial level one might say that humans are 'the magickal mirror of the universe' so that the constellation of Leo related to the breast and the organ of the heart. However, for Levi these chains of symbolic meaning were not to be taken strictly literally, rather it was the principle or quality that these symbols represented that would have a sympathy or connection. Thus, the principle represented by the god Mars would correspond with activities such as conflict and qualities such as passion in the soul of the magician. It was this conception of the doctrine of correspondences that paved the way for the dream analysis of psychoanalysis and the archetypes of Carl Jung.

Following Levi, groups such as The Hermetic Order of The Golden Dawn successfully nurtured the growth of occultism as a corpus of knowledge. The schema of the Qabalah formed the primary skeleton upon which this body was fleshed out. The doctrine of correspondences expanded utilising concepts, myths and images drawn from ancient Egyptian religion, Classical symbolism, Buddhist meditations and a formidable range of other sources to create an extensive and coherent system. What was happening here was the recreation (in a modern context) of a language of the imagination, a series of metaphorical associations, not 'true' in themselves but pointing to the process that has been called the re-enchantment of the world. No longer was the universe composed of discrete, separate objects, rather it could be seen as a fabric of meaning and association, woven together by the power of the imagination.

The adepts of the Golden Dawn emphasised the principle of imagination in magickal work. They suggested that the Will was blind and impotent unless the Imagination had been sufficiently developed by practices such as visualisation. The Will and Imagination were seen as the twin forces that accomplished magick. By furnishing the Imagination with the correct symbolic vocabulary, through knowledge of correspondences, mental images thus created could be given reality by the controlled use of the Will.

It was during the 1970s, with the second phase of the modern occult revival in full swing, that the depth and range of esoteric systems appearing in the West made it increasingly hard to justify using only one approach (such as the Qabalah based iconography of post-Golden Dawn magick). The increasing amount of information emerging about Eastern occultism, as well as new scientific developments (for instance in parapsychology and quantum physics) led researchers to propose another two key magickal principles. The contribution of these additional principles was closely linked to the emergence of the school known as chaos magick. There were:

Belief shifting - The method of the operation (ie magickal work) is not as important as one's firm belief in its effectiveness. Belief shifting was a principle that was particularly in tune with the emergence of post-modernist philosophy into mainstream culture (in the 1980s). Belief (and the ability to adopt different beliefs) seemed to be the factor that combined Will and Imagination and framed the space within which magick could take place.

Gnosis - The operation should be conducted in an altered state of consciousness. Whether through biofeedback, dance, sex, psychedelics or any number of other methods, entering a 'trance' state appeared to be a key element in successful magick. Today, generating and successfully managing various states of gnosis is seen as pivotal to the pursuit of any magickal practice.

 

So how can the emerging body of knowledge that magick comprises enhance the use of drugs to explore consciousness?

Ladies and gentlemen, these are truly blessed days - our species has created and catalogued a vast array of chemicals that can radically change the way our minds operate. From the ancient ayahuasca beverage to laboratory synthesised materials such as MDMA, if we are interested in using pharmacological methods of exploring consciousness then we have the greatest array of allies in our journey.

Within many different communities we see drugs being considered as a legitimate method of enquiry and exploration, aids in discovering who we are - from the academic and scientific community through to groups such as the Red Path and the Santo Diame church, and in wider society, through rave culture. Even in those countries where the government is vehemently anti-drugs many of these materials are ubiquitous - personally I'm sure that I could step outside this room and within a few hours score a variety of powerful, illegal consciousness changing agents.

Why are drugs so interesting when it comes to exploring consciousness? Well one answer is because, like magick, they occupy a liminal space. A drug is an objective material, yet its effect is primarily subjective. Moreover the nature of the subjective effect is a blend of three intertwined variables - set, setting and substance. Like consciousness itself, a drug's effect exists partly within the molecule and the nerve synapse, partly in the expectations and predispositions of the individual mind of the user and partly in those relationships between the individual and their environment. It is the subjectivity and, indeed, the variability of drug experience that makes it so interesting.

At this conference we have an assembly of many investigators who take the subjective seriously, who would undoubtedly have laughed in the face of B.F. Skinner's assertion that there is no such thing as consciousness. We have people such as Susan Blackmore who, in her quest to understand the phenomena of alien abduction has personally subjected herself to extreme magnetic effects to experience the subjective changes that result. We have Alexander Shulgin, the alchemist who, with his circle of adventurers, has explored numerous new psychedelic materials and Benny Shannon who has developed a rich and deep relationship with the ayahuasca brew and closely analysed that experience through the tradition of phenomenology.

In all these cases it is the re-valuing of the subjective realm that is critical to these people's work.

And it is in this emphasis on the subjective that we all share, that I believe magick has a role to play.

Magickal techniques can help us interact with and discover the contents of the occult, subjective, 'imaginal realm'. This realm is the place of the metaphorical rather than the literal. Rather than trying to circumvent the subjective realm, as attempts at objective experimental science have done, magick embraces this space and seeks to deploy a wide variety of approaches to explore this world.

So when a belief says 'there is a sleeping serpent, coiled three and a half times around the base of your spine' only a fool would take this literally and call the zoo, or dismiss this statement as coming from the biologically ignorant. The magickian says "Hey that's great, what happens when she wakes up, and how should I feed her to keep her happy?" So for Kundalini yoga we have the paradigm, the envelope or context within which a subjective effect happens, and the magickal techniques themselves (visualisation, mantra, paranayama) are the methods for navigating this world. Engaging with the metaphorical language of the belief, and deploying these techniques to explore it, is the magickal approach.

And one key point about magick, about this practice of manipulating and learning from the imaginal realm, is that anyone can do it. Essential human processes such as the development of a successful theory of mind, rely on the imaginative process, they rely on us all finding ways to navigate the imaginative, subjective world. In just the same way that a sane waking life depends on being able to dream, so attempts to create an objective world, to inhabit our cultural, inter-subjective reality, necessitate the existence of the imaginal world. I believe that imagination is the link between our inner and outer world, and in some senses we might say that consciousness itself is primarily structured through the imaginative ability. It is the creation of a consistent, apparently external world built from our inner memories and the external input of our senses.

Consciousness is enfolded in the world, it is part of the world, so techniques of creating apparently objective knowledge about it (ie Popparian science), however valuable, can only illuminate certain aspects of what it is. Clearly some approaches to any given phenomena are better suited to exploring some aspects of it than others. (What use would it be if an art critic only talked about the chemical composition of the paint used by an artist?)

This emphasis on the subjective realm and techniques of accessing and exploring it (what I have called magickal techniques) is essential if we are not to miss out on some splendid opportunities for discovery. Especially when we come to deploy those great changers of consciousness - drugs.

As an example; in the UK at the moment there are a series of experiments being conducted using ketamine. The aim of the experiments is to look at the dissassociative effects of ketamine and to examine these using fMRI techniques. The subjects that have been chosen for these experiments have been carefully screened so that they have as little drug experience as possible. When the ketamine is administered it will be in the usual double blind way but the doses used will be very low.

Now this experiment may well yield useful and interesting results, and I don't doubt for a moment the capability of the team undertaking it. But let's think about this - why use ketamine in this experiment? Well because of how it makes you feel - in this case, disassociated. If this is the case, why only choose people who have no previous experience of this feeling, or indeed of any (illegal) drug induced dissociation? The raison d'être of using this drug is because users feel dissociated - but to fail to engage directly with this subjective experience is a sad lack in this enquiry. It is as though we have decided that we are interested in understanding how art works on the human brain, so we have gathered together a group of people who have hardly been exposed to art before and have never set foot inside a gallery. We have asked them to wear sunglasses so they don't get too high a dose of the art and then rather than asking them what they made of their, admittedly, impoverished tour of the gallery we limited ourselves to looking at the results of an EEG trace from each subject.

 

So how, in practice, would an understanding of the importance of the subjective, imaginal realm and the magickal techniques used to address it, change an experiment such as this?

In the case of the ketamine experiment this would mean including experienced psychonauts in the study, giving equal value to the subjective accounts that subjects produced, as well as the fMRI data, also developing useful ways of interpreting and analysing these texts, and indeed exploring the deployment of non-drug methods of changing consciousness (for example asking ketamine explorers to try paranayama methods during their voyage) and examining how these modify the ketamine experience. Crucially the experiment, if it is particularly interested in the phenomena of disassociation, would explore more deeply the individual subject's notions and experience of this phenomena before the experiment. Our minds are not tabula rasa and even though someone may never have had a drug induced disassociative experience that does not mean that they will not have experiences and expectations that will significantly modify how they relate to the ketamine when it hits.

I think that increasingly we shall see a move away from the idea that Drug X=Experience Y and instead an emphasis on exploring the set and setting rather than substance components of any given drug experience. In the world of subjective exploration it ain't what you do, it's the way that you do it. Techniques derived from shamanismsm and tribal cultures will cross fertilise with insights generated by contemporary scientific practice.

I believe the next step for our community is not the creation of yet more novel materials or the discovery of previously unknown organic psychedelics (although there is of course value in this avenue of enquiry). It's not a question of new drugs, rather a question of deploying these in different contexts, using those technologies of the imaginal realm to explore the interaction of the mind and molecules. Drugs provide us with one of the great laboratories to explore our selves, and when combined with the techniques of magick they can be the fuel that allows us to venture into the hidden architecture of consciousness. The process of successfully blending these elements together is why I describe this as an art.

The use of the term art recalls Aleister Crowley's definition of magic as being both an "..art and science". Artists, as Oliver Sacks points out, are "the antennae of culture."

I believe that drugs, wisely used, can provide humanity with a new art. I believe that drugs are an important way to renew and revive our global culture. A culture that legitimised the use of drugs would be a culture that did not fear change. A society that validated and encouraged transformative experience would be a 'spiritual' culture. It wouldn't be a static utopia with everything 'sorted', rather it would be an environment where individuals could move towards authenticity and self-actualisation - a society that was both challenged by, but also supportive of, these goals.

And this is a culture that we are all helping to forge, right here, right now.