Every member of the Guild begins the day at the Lamp. Newcomers sometimes ask why a school of ceremonial magic should open with what looks very like meditation, and a few have been told that meditation is a recent import from the East with no place in a Western art. This page answers both points, and describes the contemplative practices taught in the course.
What we mean by contemplation
At its simplest, contemplation is the deliberate cultivation of attention: the power to notice, to stay, and to return. The word meditation comes from the Latin meditari, to think something over, to rehearse it, to practice it in the mind. For a Roman it was nothing exotic. It was what an orator did before a speech and a soldier before a march: a disciplined returning to what mattered.
The Guild uses the word contemplation for the whole family of such practices, and the name of the Lamp for its own first exercise, described under The Daily Practice. It does not much mind which word a member prefers. The skill is what matters, not the label on it.
An old Western discipline
If by meditation is meant sitting cross-legged with closed eyes, following the breath in the manner of a particular Buddhist or yogic school, then that form does belong to particular traditions, and is owed the respect due to them. But the training of attention belongs to no one part of the world, and the Western traditions have practiced it, under many names, for as long as there is any record of them.
- The philosophers. The Greek word theoria meant contemplative seeing: not thinking about an idea but training the mind to dwell with it until it showed itself. The philosophical schools of Greece and Rome kept daily exercises of self-examination, an evening review of the day's conduct, and the rehearsal in the mind of misfortunes not yet suffered. An emperor's private notebook of such exercises, written for no reader but himself, is still in print.
- The theurgists. The philosophers of late antiquity taught withdrawal from the senses and the cultivation of an inner silence in which the soul might perceive its source. Those who added ritual to philosophy insisted that no rite would succeed without inner preparation: a purified mind and a trained imagination.
- The Jewish mystics. The Qabalists developed a contemplative practice of great sophistication, including the visualization of the divine names, meditative seclusion and inner dialogue with God, and the cultivation of a state of cleaving to the divine. These practices passed by way of the Christian Qabalah of the Renaissance into ceremonial magic.
- The Christian contemplatives. The hermits of the desert practiced a prayer of inner stillness. The monasteries of the Middle Ages practiced a slow and repeated reading of a short text, meant to change the reader rather than merely to inform.
- The magicians. The handbooks of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance assume a reader who can hold a complicated figure in the mind's eye, sustain attention through a conjuration lasting hours, and pass at will into a visionary state. Such powers do not arrive with the book.
- The folk. Wherever people have watched the flight of birds, the drift of smoke or the movement of water for a sign, they have trained their attention, for no one can read a sign whose attention is scattered. The quiet of winter and the stillness before dawn were part of the religious life of the old countryside and are not accidental to it.
The history of these practices is told more fully under The Western Tradition.
How "meditation" became the common word
The present use of the word is quite recent. In the nineteenth century Western scholars and occultists encountered Indian and Buddhist texts, often through the scholarship of the colonial powers and the new religious movements of the day, and the translators needed English words for several distinct states of concentration and absorption. They settled on meditation for all of them, although English already had contemplation, recollection and prayer. The magical orders of the late nineteenth century added visualization and the stilling of the mind to their ceremonial work, drawing both on Western sources and on the newly translated Eastern ones. In the 1960s meditation passed out of the orders and into common life, and by the 1980s the word had come to cover almost any practice of focused attention.
The result is a useful common vocabulary, and one confusion. Because the word is newly common, many people suppose the thing is new. It is not. It is a modern name for one of the oldest human capacities.
Members who are drawn to the meditative practices of the Buddhist and yogic traditions should learn them from qualified teachers of those traditions, in their proper context. The Guild teaches none of them and forbids none of them.
Why it comes first
A rite, as the Guild understands it, is an engine for holding attention on one thing. Without trained attention it is a recital. The Lamp therefore precedes every other work of the course, and it is the one practice that no member, of any grade, ever leaves off.
There is also a modern reason. Practitioners of earlier centuries contended with hunger, fear, exhaustion and illness, but few of them lived, as most of our members do, in surroundings designed with great skill to break attention into pieces and sell the pieces. The constant summons of the telephone and the screen is a new texture of distraction, and it calls for a deliberate counter-practice. The Records of the Guild suggest that it does real and measurable harm to the work, as one member's figures in Counting the Lapses show.
What contemplation restores is not mysterious. A member who keeps the Lamp learns to notice the movement of his or her own thoughts and moods; to tell imagination from intuition, which is the first skill of divination; to hold the focus a rite requires; to know how the inner landscape actually behaves; and to remain steady under strain. These are not spiritual luxuries. They are the working skills of a practitioner.
The contemplative practices of the Guild
The Lamp is the first of eight practices taught in the course. Each is added to the daily work as the grade that introduces it is reached. None replaces the Lamp.
| Practice | Introduced | What it is | What it trains |
|---|---|---|---|
| The Lamp | Apprentice | The flame held in the attention, with the Fourfold Breath, for up to twenty minutes | Concentration; the habit of returning |
| The backward review | Apprentice | The day recalled in reverse order at bedtime, plainly and without judgment | Memory; the honesty the Record requires |
| Slow reading | Scribe | One paragraph of a Paper read aloud three times, followed by five minutes of silence | Receptivity; the reading of symbols |
| The walk | Artisan | A quiet path walked at half the usual pace, with the attention in the soles of the feet | Attention in movement |
| The open gaze | Artisan | The eyes rested, unfocused, on water, sky or smoke | A quiet eye; the preparation for scrying |
| The repeated word | Journeyman | A single name or short phrase intoned many times on the breath | The steadiness invocation requires |
| Listening after the rite | Journeyman | The silence kept after an invocation or a divination, before any word is written | Receptivity to what the work returns |
| The Silence | Elder | Contemplation without object, as taught in the Book of the Silence | Of this the Papers say little and the Elders less |
The place of these practices in the grades is set out under The Course of Study.
Contemplation and ceremony
The Guild teaches contemplation and ceremony together because each fails without the other. Contemplation without ceremony tends to drift: it has no object, no form and no end, and the practitioner is never sure what has been done. Ceremony without contemplation becomes theater, correct in every gesture and empty of attention. A rite is contemplation with the body added, and the Lamp is a rite with everything removed except the attention. The member who keeps both finds that each improves the other, and the Record usually shows it within the first year.
Not everyone sits
Some members find sitting with the flame very hard for a long time, and a few never find it easy. The Guild does not count this a failure. There are excellent practitioners whose attention is best trained in making things with their hands, in walking, in devotion, or in long acquaintance with a particular piece of land, and mentors will help a member find the form that serves. The Lamp is kept by all, but it may be kept briefly, and other practices may carry more of the weight.
The real question is not whether a member meditates. It is whether he or she is learning, in whatever way suits, to pay attention.
I have never once managed to empty my mind. I have managed to keep coming back to the flame, some thousands of times, and that turns out to be the whole of the skill.
Margit Anselm, letter to a member of the Hearth Course, 1991
Contemplation and health
Most people find contemplative practice steadying. A few, especially those already under great strain, find that it stirs up more than they can comfortably hold. If the practice leaves you shakier over a month rather than steadier, halve the time, tell your mentor, and take ordinary advice from an ordinary doctor before you return to it. No practice of the Guild is offered as a treatment for any illness of body or mind.