I haven't done any serious work with Ceremonial Magick since the storm. I lost most of my working tools then, and just never had the focus necessary to get back to it. Five years on, and some changes to my regular routine and activities (this community included), the time to get back to it seems right.
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I came to Ceremonial Magick long before I came to witchcraft as a belief system. My interest in CM goes back to reading Katherine Kurtz's Deryni novels. Kurtz is a solid writer of medieval fantasy, and her life experience with Christianity/Catholicism is reflected in her tales. The Deryni are a magical race, and in her fictional kingdom of Gwynnedd, they run afoul of the Church.
Ritual is a significant part of the Deryni's workings. While they have inherent talents they can call up on a moment's notice, they use a ceremonial magick framework to delve deep into the unseen world. Katherine's church heirarchy and it's behavior made sense to me, a history education major, but the elaborate magickal rituals she describes didn't. I had no clue about the real-life background.
Mind you, this curiosity of mine began in the pre-Interweb days; no all-knowing Google or Wikipedia searches available back in the day. In one of her non-Deryni novels, Lammas Night, Kurtz listed a number of people in her acknowledgements whose names I'd seen on books in the local New Age bookstore/headshop. I started to skim books by Dion Fortune, Migene Gonzalez-Wippler, and Doreen Valiente. Once pulled into the CM/Golden Dawn shelves of the bookshop, I was quite impressed with Gonzalez-Wippler's book The Complete Book of Spells, Magic, and Ceremonies. One of the nearby books was Donald Michael Kraig's book, Modern Magick: Twelve Lessons of the High Magickal Arts. Regardie and Crowley were there as well, but their works were a bit intimidating to me as a newbie at the time.
Of the two books, I got more comfortable with Kraig's framework and style. I committed to working through his twelve lessons, but never really did make it all the way through. Rather than pick up where I left off, I figure it wouldn't be a bad thing to start anew. Kraig's book is now in its third edition. I bought the ebook version (for my Nook), since it's pretty thick and would be difficult to haul around on my various work trips.
Modern Magick has a lot of roots in the Golden Dawn tradition, but it isn't limited to GD teaching. It's designed for the solitary seeker, and that's always a preference of mine when choosing a book. When first published, the book (and Kraig personally) were resoundly thrashed/trashed by many in the magickal "establishment." These are the purists who see any attempt at synergy, much less simplification of concepts and techniques they had long studied nothing short of blasphemy. A similar thing happened to Scott Cunningham when he wrote his books on "solitary Wicca." That both books have withstood the test of decades in print speaks volumes for these men and their approaches to their respective esoteric beliefs.
The twelve lessons in Modern Magick are devided into two parts, the "Outer Order," and the "Inner Order." Of course, the "good stuff" is in the latter six, but you can't really get there without committing to the former. I'll share thoughts on the lessons as I re-acquaint myself with the ones I did, years ago, as well as when I hit that point where I'm moving forward again.
Thoughts on all this? Feel free to comment! Tell us what you think of Ceremonial Magick--if you practice, how do you approach it? Which authors do you enjoy?