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So I've been reading Lehrich's The Language of Demons and Angels: Cornelius Agrippa's Occult Philosophy and he present's Agrippa's ceremonial magic in a very interesting way.

The ceremonial magic (and by ceremonial magic Agrippa really meant the evocation of spirits of varying types) of Agrippa's time, as evinced by the writings of Dr. John Dee or Thomas Rudd, was based on lengthy prayers, evocations and instructions, praises and threats to the spirits invoked so they both know what the magus wants and go off and do it. Agrippa, though, was different. Not that he didn't teach about evoking spirits. No, he certainly did; book three of De Occulta Philosophia is about ceremonial magic and Christian Kabbalah (which for Agrippa go hand-in-hand). It is interesting, though, that he gives no rituals or even directions for rituals. Instead the sum total knowledge necessary for such things is present within De Occulta Philosophia, you just have to know how to read it first.

So, what does Agrippa describe? Essentially, a self-indexing index, or a symbol that both contains its own meaning and refers to itself in doing so. The interesting thing is that both the magus and the spirit are built into the index, thus they become part of the symbol and are bound within its meaning. But I get ahead of myself. Agrippa's ceremonial magic is itself a type of language to be read or composed. A ceremony of evocation is composed in a very particular way, with rules as to how each part goes together, just as there is in music and, in fact, in language in general. Each part of the ritual has meaning within it (it is meaning that exists because 1) God said so and 2) the person understands it, so it is both ontological and psychological, connecting the mind (which in Agrippa's Neoplatonism is very high on the soul-scale) with God). Thus the correct time is chosen for the ritual based on planetary hours and the best day is chosen based on horary astrology. These times are considered significant and only good for specific things, thus there is meaning in them. The type of spirit chosen to call forth is chosen specifically for what it does, the sigils employed are representative of the spirit in such a way that the sigil is the spirit. The ritual space is purified and consecrated using things from "natural magic" that correspond directly to the nature of the working at hand. If there are any regalia they to are geared towards the purpose of the ritual. Etc. etc.

Now, here's the tricky part. The ritual itself does not consist of prayers and evocations, etc. The ritual consists of the proper creation of the place and the bringing together of all the elements. That's it. The question is why? The answer is because everything that has lead up to the ritual has been dedicated to the goal of the ritual. Not only is the timing of the ritual itself significant, but the creation of all the tools would have been done at a time and place that corresponds to the purpose of the ritual. The sigil of the spirit would have been created again at the correct time, and so on. Each piece of the composition fulfills the requirements of the song exactly and when brought together the opera is complete and the spirit, being an explicit part of the music, performs on cue.

This in itself is interesting because the ritual is not something to be played, it is the act of playing itself that is the ritual, suggesting a nearly complete disconnect between the ritual script and the ritual performance. Only one is actually ritual, the other is not, in truth, anything at all. In this it is also a hieroglyph, or a symbol that contains within it a volume of meaning, but only so long as the reader knows how to read it. Further, one does not need to know what this particular hieroglyph means in order to read it, instead one must know the web of meaning contained within its structure, much as one does not need to have heard a particular sentence before in order to understand it.

I like this sort of cermonialism I think. It more directly connects the worker to the work. In Agrippa's occultism, which in its theories quite similar to Jewish Kabbalistic thought, the placement of the magus in the symbol connects the magus to the work and the power that the work is indexing. This means that the magus grows with each working, so long as the work remains properly dedicated and the spirits are correctly called (which is to say an error in the personality or spiritual purity of the magus can call forth a negative spirit rather than a holy one, thus spiritually weakening the magus rather than strengthening him or her).

OK, Lehrich puts it better, but it was his dissertation, not mine.

So, aside from comments on the obviously Abrahamic cosmology Agrippa is employing, thoughts, ideas?

So, why this discussion of language? Simply put, ritual is language. Dramatic, wot? OK, ritual is a type of language.

How so you ask (followed by you asking if I always talk to myself like this, I'm sure)? Let us look again at the features of language:

1. Conventionality
2. Openness
3. Displacement

Ritual has all of these. I would go so far to say that just as these are the design features of language they are also the design features of ritual, magic or otherwise. No, wait, hear me out. Lets look at them one at a time, though I think we shall go in reverse order (and yes, there is a reason for it beyond me being difficult . . . though I must admit being difficult is a large part of the reason twisted ).



This is extremely important in magical ritual. One might argue that without it magical ritual would be impossible. Displacement allows us to deal with the abstract, and there is little more abstract than the concept of magic or the divine, both of which are generally involved in ceremonial magic (one might argue that in many way in such rituals the distinction between "magic" and "religion" is blurred at the very least, obliterated as the very most). Ceremonial magical rituals use the feature of displacement to make the abstract concrete. It, for instance, allows the ritualist to not only talk about something as abstract as "initiation" but in fact allows us to actually go an initiate someone into, well, something probably just as abstract, like a magical "current".



This is how we go about creating rituals. Like any other language, before you can put together a sentence that makes sense you must first learn the rules of grammar and syntax. Before Shakespeare could make up a new word, he had to know how the old words worked and how the sounds within them were put together. The same is true of ritual, and especially magical ritual, as magical rituals, especially, is a like a statement that you expect someone else to understand and act upon. If you do not know how to put together the sentence the person or people you are talking to will not understand and will either not act, or act in a way other than your intension. Alas, we learn the rules of our native language while we are growing up; our brains are actually hardwired to do this. This is not so true with any other language though, and for most of us the older you are, the more difficult it is to learn a new language. This is equally true of ritual.

OK, where are we then? #3 dealt with idea, #2 dealt with structure, #1 deals with very symbols that structure puts together and that relate the ideas we are concerned with.



What does this mean? It means that language is both arbitrary and symbolic.

So is ritual.

This may be the trickiest part of the whole deal. While we may all understand that rituals are symbolic and contain many symbols the idea of arbitrariness can completely throw us. If its arbitrary then it doesn't really matter, right? The answer is one of those frustrating "yes and no" things. But there is more no than yes; do remember that most of us would not ask this about the language we speak nor simply start making up words while expecting people to understand us. Its arbitrariness is of a certain kind.

What does this mean? It means that while any grouping of sounds attached to a meaning is, ultimately, arbitrary, the meaning attached to it is not and the attachment of sounds (i.e. verbal and visual symbols (or a double layer of symbols, visual symbols that refer to verbal symbols that refer to and idea or thing)) to ideas goes about in a very particular way in each language. Certainly you can create a new language (though almost no single person has been able to do this with any efficiency), but that language, to be viable, will function under the same features.

Again, what does this really mean? It means that the arbitrariness of a particular symbol does not mean the symbol is meaningless, so long as it means something to the person using it and to whomever the symbol is being spoken/shown/whatever to. Without both of these communication is, well, very difficult to say the least.

And there's the magic word (if you'll excuse the joke, and even if you don't): communication. Magical and religious ritual (whether or not they are the same thing) is a type of communication. In the case of magical ritual the ritualist is saying "hey, go do this for me, huh?" Now, there are many different ways to say this. You can speak in formal language, you can speak in every day language, you can speak in slang or use a Pigeon or any number of other ways of speaking. Regardless of how you speak (i.e., the nature and coherence of your ritual), if you can't make yourself understood, nothings going to happen. If you're lucky.

Agrippa adds emphasis to something that I have mentioned above, and I think it very important. Agrippa stresses that a symbol is only efficacious when the magician understands the meaning of the symbol (and for Agrippa, this means the full meaning of a symbol). This means that just gong through the motions will cause nothing to happen. The reason for this, according to Agrippa, is found in the nature of human imagination. In Agrippa's Neoplatonic cosmology imagination is what connects the physical world with the celestial and spiritual worlds. This is why magical rituals have all that stuff in them. They provide both meaning and food for the imagination. Now, Agrippan ritual is a bit more complex than this, but this does sort of get us where we are going.

So, metaphors then. A ritual can be poetry, a ritual can be a monologue, it can be gibberish, it can be slang, it can be insulting or uplifting. But in order to do it at all you must first learn the language.

N.B. My apologies that the above is largely gibberish, filled with half-thought thoughts, poorly spoken and more so written. Please feel free to disregard it as the blatherings of an insane mystic, as this is what I surely am.

I must admit that I did nick part of that from my anthropology notes. Mind you my anthro students rarely seem to understand it, but I'm OK with that.