The Western Tradition

The methods taught in the Guild are older than the Guild by some thousands of years. This page gives a short account of where they came from, as far as the historians can now tell, and explains why the Guild honors that inheritance without claiming descent from it.

A family of methods, not a line of succession

Practitioners have long spoken of a Western tradition of ceremonial magic, handed down unbroken and in secret from an origin in ancient Egypt. The story is a fine one, and it has been told with conviction for five centuries. It is not, on the evidence, true. No society of magicians can be traced from the temples of the Nile to the lodges of the nineteenth century, and every claim to such a descent that has been examined closely has turned out to rest on a misdated text, a lost charter that no one else ever saw, or a theory that the historians have since taken apart.

What can be traced is something more modest and more useful: a family of methods. The same small number of techniques appear in Egypt, in the Greek handbooks of the Roman age, in the Latin manuals of the Middle Ages, in the learned magic of the Renaissance and in the orders of the revival. They were lost and found again, copied and miscopied, translated and mistranslated, combined with whatever else was to hand, and each time adapted by people who believed that they were restoring something older. Imogen Castellane, who spent her working life among such copies, called the result "a thousand years of mishearing," and meant it as a description, not a complaint.

The Guild therefore claims no lineage older than 1971. It does claim a debt, and the rest of this page is an attempt to say to whom it is owed.

Egypt and the ancient Near East

In ancient Egypt magic was not a rival to religion but a part of it, practiced by temple priests and by ordinary households alike. Spoken formulas, written spells, figurines and amulets were used for protection, for healing, for safe childbirth and for the welfare of the dead. Two convictions from this layer have never left the Art: that a name, rightly spoken, gives a kind of access to what it names, and that writing is itself an act of power.

From Mesopotamia came a second inheritance: the systematic reading of omens, the identification of the planets with gods, and the conviction that the movements of the sky correspond to events on earth. Spirits of disease and misfortune were named, described and bound by formula. The astrology of later ages, the planetary correspondences, and the practice of binding a spirit by its name all have roots here.

Greece and Rome

The Greeks borrowed their word for magic from the magi, the priests of Persia, and used it with a mixture of admiration and suspicion that has never quite worn off. Greek and Roman practice included divination of every kind, protective amulets, and the curse tablets of lead on which people bound their rivals in love, law and sport. Much of it went on alongside the civic religion, and some of it in defiance of it.

The mystery cults of the same world prepared their candidates by fasting, silence and instruction, and led them through rites designed to bring about a direct encounter with the divine. Their influence on later ideas of initiation has been very great, though their actual rites were well kept and are known only in fragments.

The Egyptian handbooks of the Roman age

Under Roman rule, in the cities of Egypt, there grew up a learned magical culture whose working handbooks, written in Greek on papyrus, survive in some numbers. They are the oldest substantial manuals of ritual magic we possess, and a modern practitioner opening one feels at once at home. They give rites of protection and of consecration, the drawing of characters and seals, the timing of operations by the Moon and the planets, the summoning of spirits into a vessel or a bowl of water, and invocations in which the worker speaks in the first person as the god. One of their commonest operations is divination by the flame of a lamp, which the Guild's members may regard, if they like, as the oldest ancestor of their own daily practice.

The handbooks mix Egyptian, Greek, Jewish and Near Eastern names without embarrassment. Much of what later reached the Latin West under the names of ancient kings and Egyptian sages had passed, at some point, through hands like these.

Philosophy and theurgy

In the same centuries the philosophers of the Platonic schools taught that the soul could ascend, by purification and contemplation, toward the source of all things. Some of them added ritual to this program and called it theurgy, the work of the gods: rites that required careful inner preparation, a purified mind and a trained imagination, and whose aim was not any outward advantage but the union of the soul with the divine. The distinction between this kind of work and the practical magic of the handbooks has been argued over ever since. It is discussed under The Art of Ritual Magic.

A collection of Greek wisdom texts from this period, cast as dialogues and ascribed to an Egyptian sage, taught that the human being is a small world made on the pattern of the great one. That idea, shortened in later centuries to "as above, so below," is the ground on which every table of correspondence stands.

The three religions of the book

Judaism, Christianity and Islam each received the magical inheritance of the ancient Mediterranean and reshaped it. The gods of the old handbooks became angels and demons; the authority by which a spirit was commanded became the name of the one God; and the letters of the sacred alphabets became objects of study in their own right.

The medieval Middle East was the crossroads of this history. Arabic-speaking scholars gathered Greek, Persian, Indian and Jewish material into learned treatises on the stars, on talismans and on the spirits of the planets, and those treatises, translated into Latin in Spain and Italy during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, did more than any other source to shape the learned magic of Europe. The planetary talisman as the Guild teaches it is, in its essentials, their work.

In the same period, in Provence and Spain, Jewish mystics developed the speculative system known as the Qabalah, with its ten emanations of the divine and its twenty-two letters, and its practice of meditation upon the divine names. It entered ceremonial magic by way of Christian scholars of the Renaissance, and supplies the diagram on which the Guild files its tables, described under Elements and Planets.

The medieval handbooks

The Latin handbooks of conjuration that circulated in the later Middle Ages, often copied by clerics and usually ascribed to some famous king or sage of antiquity, gave the Art most of its furniture: the circle and the triangle, the consecrated instruments, the long purifications, the catalogs of spirits with their names and seals, and the formal license to depart. They assume a reader who can concentrate for hours, visualize at will and hold a complicated figure in the mind's eye, and they say very little about how such a reader is to be trained.

Beside this learned magic ran a practical folk tradition: charms for sickness, for lost cattle and stolen goods, for safe journeys and difficult births, recorded in the remedy books of every European language. The learned despised it and borrowed from it. The kinds of book that preserve both are described under The Books of the Art.

Both were dangerous to practice. Magic was condemned by the clergy and, in time, made a crime by the state, and the great persecutions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries fell most heavily not on learned magicians but on ordinary people, most of them women, accused of a witchcraft that few of them can have practiced.

The Renaissance

In fifteenth-century Florence the Greek wisdom texts were recovered and translated into Latin, and were thought, wrongly, to be among the oldest writings in the world. For two centuries the most learned men in Europe regarded magic as the summit of natural philosophy. Christian scholars read the Qabalah as a confirmation of their own faith. The great compendia of occult philosophy, divided into natural, celestial and ceremonial magic, gathered the whole inheritance into a system. A mathematician at the court of an English queen spent years in conversation with angels through a scryer and a polished stone. The planetary number squares described under Talismans and Sigils were printed and widely copied in this period.

The same century saw the beginnings of experimental science, which drew heavily on the natural magic of its day before it learned to disown it.

The long eclipse

By the end of the seventeenth century the educated classes of Europe had largely abandoned magic. The new sciences studied many of the same things the magicians had studied, the stars, the metals, the body and its remedies, and worked hard to put a distance between themselves and the old learning. Those who went on practicing did so quietly, and increasingly explained what they did in the language of natural philosophy and, later, of psychology.

Some practitioners of other living traditions say that Western magic has never recovered from this period: that it became a magic of the mind, skilled in inner work and weak in practical results. The charge is worth hearing, and a member's answer to it is printed in the Journal under What the Old Magic Kept.

The revival

The modern revival is usually dated from 1801, when a London student of the occult sciences published a compendium of magic and alchemy for the small circle that gathered around him. In the middle of the century a former French seminarian, writing under a Hebrew pen name, restated the entire tradition in a series of eloquent books that bound together the Qabalah, the tarot and ceremonial magic, and became the teacher, directly or at a remove, of almost everyone who followed.

The revival grew in the same soil as Spiritualism, as the movement that brought Indian and Buddhist ideas to Western readers, and as the higher degrees of the fraternal orders. In 1888 these streams met in a small London order which arranged its teaching in a series of graded initiations, each attributed to one of the ten emanations of the Tree. It drew up comprehensive tables of correspondence, taught the elemental and planetary rites, the banishing of a place and the consecration of instruments, and required written examinations at every stage. It quarreled and divided within twenty years. Its rituals were published in the 1930s, and through that publication and its many offshoots it remains the source of most ceremonial practice in the English-speaking world, the Guild's not excepted.

The twentieth century

The century that followed produced a bewildering variety. A gifted and notorious member of the London order founded a system of his own centered on the training of the will. A revival of witchcraft, presented as the survival of a pre-Christian religion, grew from the 1950s into a living religion with its own rites, though the historical theory on which it was first founded had been abandoned by historians before the century was out. Psychologists read the old symbols as a map of the mind, and practitioners began to read them so too. Printed courses for the solitary student removed the need for any lodge at all. In the last quarter of the century a pragmatic current treated belief itself as an instrument, and made the sigil and the principle that a method is judged by its results into a school of its own.

At the same time the history of magic became a subject of serious study in the universities. Much of what this page says is owed to that study, which is described under Magic and the Scholars.

The layers of the tradition

Each age kept what it could use and added what it had found. The table below follows the main contributions into the practice of the Guild.

What has lasted

Historians who have surveyed the whole tradition have noticed how few its enduring techniques are, and how stubbornly they recur. The Guild's own list, drawn up for the Summer School of 2026, has eight entries. Every one of them can be found in the Egyptian handbooks of the Roman age, and every one of them is taught in the Guild today.

1. The prepared place. A space marked out, purified and closed for the length of the work. See Ceremonial Practice.
2. Purification. Washing, clean clothing, abstinence from distraction, and the banishing of whatever does not belong.
3. The name of power. The conviction that a name rightly spoken gives access to what it names. See The Body in Ritual for the manner of speaking it.
4. Timing by the heavens. The choice of day, hour and lunar phase. See Planetary Days and Hours.
5. The made object. The amulet, the talisman and the consecrated instrument, which go on working after the rite is over.
6. The address to an intelligence. Invocation and evocation, the calling in and the calling forth. See Invocation and Evocation.
7. The sign. The character, seal or sigil that stands for a power or an intention.
8. The question put to a pattern. Divination by lots, figures, cards, flame, water and sky. See Divination.

To these eight the Guild has added only one thing of its own, and it is not a technique of magic at all. It is the Record.

Heir, not descendant

The Guild regards itself as heir to the whole of this history and captive to no part of it. It takes its methods from wherever they have been shown to work, and it asks its members to know where they came from, because a method whose history is understood can be used with judgment and one whose history is invented cannot. It does not ask anyone to believe that the Art is older, or more secret, or more unified than it is.

We are not the heirs of anyone's secret. We are the latest readers of a very old and much-corrected book, and our duty is to correct it a little further.

Imogen Castellane, Thirty Letters from Lantern Court