On Ritual Trance - Part3: Selected Resources

This is the last post on ritual trance in a series of three.

Let's take a look at some resources that are available to learn more on ritual trance. If you are working in a group or with other magicians one of you can work as a dedicated seer or medium of the spirit in question. While this doesn't come without risks it is a completely different approach than one has to take as a solitary practicing magician. Working solo you need to be the seer and the actor at the same time, or at least within the same rite.

If you have worked through a full-scale magical education such as in the G.'.D.'., Aurum Solis, Servants of Light or similar orders it might well be that you have never heard the term 'ritual trance' but your techniques might be very advanced. It's just a matter of language: What I call 'ritual trance' is often referred to as the 'altered state of consciousness' that most acts of magick require.

What all types of ritual trance inducing techniques share is that they don't induce such a deep state of trance that your consciousness is lost in trance. All of them are content with altering your consciousness sufficiently to leave your everyday consciousness behind and become fully present in the moment. While this definition might work for any type of meditation, the difference with ritual trance is that it allows your awareness to become fully present in a slightly altered state of consciousness. 

The author of the wonderful John Dee novel 'The Angel of The West Window' and early G.'.D.'. member, Gustav Meyrink, referred to this state throghout his life as his foremost magical goal. His own words were to achieve a state of consciousness that allowed him to be 'Hüben und Drüben' (On Both Sides) at the same time... Lifting the veil between Malkuth and Jesod, being aware of the material and astral realm at once, at any moment in time.

As we can see from Gustav Meyrink's example the journey to a perfect ritual trance can take a lifetime. But the journey itself can be wonderful, inspiring and life enriching if we allow it to... Personally I only learned to enjoy the magickal ride about a year ago, give or take. Before that I always had my eyes fixed on the step to come before completing the one ahead of me. I was much faster than I am today in adopting new techniques, paradigms and believe systems. But my heart couldn't follow. Only once I let go of my obsession of 'efficacy & efficiency' of magick and started to wonder about my actual relationship to the spirits did they start talking to me in ritual trance...

To finish off this here are a few resources on inducing ritual trance that I found very helpful. All of them are complementary for larger magickal rites but can equally be used in isolation...

• Leveraging Your Fears - as explained by Tsultrim Allione 
• Enduring Concentration - as explained by Abraham Abulafia
• Active Imagination - as explained by Ralph Tegtmeier (German) 
• Choreography of Movement - as explained by Steven H. Lonsdale
• Divine incenses - as explained by Christian Rätsch 
• Self-hypnosis - as explained by Poke Runyon

I am sure there are many more great recommendations out there that allowed you to work your way into 'a different state of consciousness'. In that case please leave a comment and let me and others know and learn from it...


Here is to all we do not see, hear, smell, taste and feel as long as our minds are 'clear'.

On Ritual Trance - Part2: Science vs. Art

This is the second post on ritual trance in a series of three. 

For the third learning on ritual trance let me come back to my initial thought: Ritual trance induction needs free-styling just like an artist needs creativity. While there are many great techniques out there, not all of them will work for you. Actually, I must admit only very few blended successfully into the choreography of a longer ritual for me.

Earlier on I recommended Donald Michael Kraig's books as a potential starting point. Let's take a look at a related topic where I disagree with him:

" (...) There is no in between. Likewise, either the laws of magick are valid or they are not. There cannot be any type of rule saying that sometimes they are valid and other times, under identical circumstances, they are invalid. Remember, magick is an art and science, and a basic tenet of science is that under the same conditions an experiment will always have the same results."

(Kraig, Modern Magick, Llewellyn 2008, p.317)   

Well, I guess anybody familiar with Schrödinger's cat will find a lot to debate on this quote? From what I can tell, science itself is going through a significant crises since researchers found out that there is no such thing as 'identical circumstances' unfortunately. It is the fact of observing an experiment, the pure presence of the observers themselves that influence any result already - and at least for now in pretty unknown ways. These influences might not be strong enough to impact Newton's laws such as gravity. Yet, when one moves to matters of particle physics they seem to be just as strong as any other 'natural force' in the experiment. 

Let's think about this: Is a magickal evocation on the astral plane closer to the law of gravity or the laws of quantum mechanics? I leave that for you to judge... The point I am trying to make is: in my world there is plenty of space for 'in between', plenty of grey and - to be brutally honest - much more successes with art than science.

Why is that? Because my consciousness is simply so much less powerful than my hands, my heart, my will and - most of all - my subconsciousness. If I tried to rationalize everything that happened to me in rituals, it would have never happened in the first place and certainly I wouldn't have entered into a state of ritual trance. I kept myself confined in the same space we are locked in during most of our days - and keep the door to any successful ritual trance firmly shut. At some point we have to start believing in ourselves, in the success of our rites, in the power of our trance and the beauty of the things we will accomplish... None of this has any space in science; so personally I am much better off without it.

Statue of a fear ritual I performed
in the Indian desert years ago

I guess that's my third learning: learn from many people and cultures, but only trust your own approach. The most underestimated power in magick is your faith in yourself and in the intimate way you are preparing and conducting your ritual actions. Staying true to what feels right for you is a key that unlocks a lot of doors.


(Well, and unfortunately we only know what feels right for us after we have learned it the traditional way first and made all the mistakes necessary...)

My final point on ritual trance induction is simple: For most of us the most accessible form of ritual trance is being afraid. Maybe I should share a personal story on this... More than a decade ago when I started my ritual work I was living in a large city and didn't had the money or luxury of having an 'in-house' temple. I was preparing my first cycle of elementary rituals for weeks and hit a dead end when I couldn't find a space to perform them. Luckily I had a very experienced teacher who had lived in a Bon monastery in Tibet under very raw and harsh conditions. One day he told me: 'What is keeping you from doing these rituals is not the lack of a temple but fear. This week go into the woods at night and just do it.'

And that's what I did. I cleared a space sufficient for the rite in the brushwood of a forest close to the city where I lived. I prepared a circle with flour on the ground and stuck torches in the ground in the four quarters of the sky. Then I came back the following night and performed my first 'open sky' ritual... What sounds relatively straight forward took me huge overcoming back then; I thought of a million things that could have gone wrong in such a public space - me being dressed in robe with all my magickal tools around me, torches lit and vibrating angel names under the night sky... 

What I didn't know back then is, that this type of fear became my best friend in creating a proper magickal trance. Granted not very sophisticated, but very efficient. This dread still accompanies me today, even though I now have a large room set up as an exclusive temple. Yet, every time I take my ritual bath, I prepare for a rite, I count the minutes towards the planetary hour my heart trembles and my mind is electrified. And if I wrote my fear turned into excitement over the years - I would just be lying. Every time before a ritual I really am afraid of the unknown that I am about to explore - until the first banishing ritual is performed and my ritual trance has left my day-consciousness behind...

(click here to read 3rd part :: click here to read 1st part)

On Ritual Trance - Part1: Our 2 minds

How to enter and maintain ritual trance turned out to be one of the key points in my accounts of the Arbatel rituals of the Olympic Spirit of Ophiel and Phul. As not a lot of books on Western Occultism deal with this particular topic I wanted to share my personal view and hope it might be helpful to others. I have split this topic into three shorter posts:

Part 1 - Ritual Trance or Our 2 minds

Part 2 - Ritual Trance or Science vs. Art
Part 3 - Selected Resources 

Let's get the obvious question out of the way first: Who am I to tell you how to achieve a proper ritual trance? There are plenty of good books out there on the topic from people with way more experience than myself. One might start from a point of view of Western ritual magick such as in Donald Michael Kraig's books or directly from a perspective of self-hypnosis. Both avenues will help to achieve results and a thorough understanding of the topic... Yet, this space is about sharing my personal experiences and so here we go... Or as Jodorowsky put it: "The wisdom that you do not give, you lose."

I will try to keep this short: The one thing I have learned about ritual trance is that you won't get anywhere unless you are prepared to freestyle - and find your own approach. Your teacher might be able to evaluate your ritual vibrations, the quality of how you draw your pentagrams or how long you endure in your asana without movement, but no one except for yourself will ever be able to judge the quality of your magical trance. Well, to make things even more tricky - in many cases not even you will be able to judge it, except from the results you achieved. It's the nature of many modes of trance that the person who is in trance - you - doesn't actually recognize the altered state of consciousness. This is not always true and sometimes there won't be a trace of doubt that what you are experiencing is part of a magical trance. Yet even in the cases where I did realize that my consciousness had changed, I never reflected on my state of consciousness as such, but I was busy staying in it and being aware of the contact and communication I made in this altered state...

So let's capture this as the first thing we can learn about ritual trance: you will remember it like things that happened to you in a dream or very long ago. There is a door that shuts at the end of a ritual trance, breaking the consistent stream of consciousness that we are used to in our everyday awareness. This closed door creates the impression that everything that happened in the room on the other side is much further away than it actually is. Don't allow your non-ritual-trance mind to talk or look down on the things you experienced in ritual. Our non-ritual-trance mind simply needs to accept that it wasn't part of the experience and therefore cannot judge. Our everyday consciousness has to learn that it's not an only child anymore - but that from now on there is a sibling just as lovable and dear as itself, called ritual-trance-mind. Get over it.

Maybe we should call this out as the second learning: never identify with your non-ritual-trance consciousness - especially when it comes to reflecting on what happened during a ritual! It's just one sibling talking about another sibling... If anything, try to identify with your subconsciousness, which is basically all there is to learn in magick.


(Click here to read 2nd part)

On communicating with spirits

Thanks for your feedback on my account of the Arbatel Experience - Ritual of Phul. Let me follow up on a specific question I received from several readers.

Many of you asked questions on the chapter that I called 'Communion' and specifically about communicating with spiritual entities. Now, before I go a bit further into this topic I need to repeat that all of this is my personal experience and opinion only. E.g. I haven't worked with Goetic daimons and therefore cannot talk about their ways of interacting with us. However, I did have a chance to work with many kabbalistic, planetary, elementary and shamanic entities and all of these experiences confirmed the below.

Let's start at a source most of us think of as a trustworthy authority on this subject. Agrippa of Nettesheim speaks about the 'tongue of angels' and shares the following:

"But now how Angels speak it is hid from us, as they themselves are. Now to us that we may speak, a tongue is necessary with other instruments, as are the jaws, palate, lips, teeth, throat, lungs, the aspera arteria, and muscles of the breast, which have the beginning of motion from the soul. But if any speak at a distance to another, he must use a louder voice; but if near, he whispers in his ear: and if he could be coupled to the hearer, a softer breath would suffice; for he would slide into the hearer without any noise, as an image in the eye, or glass. So souls going out of the body, so Angels, so Demons speak: and what man doth with a sensible voice, they do by impressing the conception of the speech in those to whom they speak, after a better manner then if they should express it by an audible voice."

(Agrippa, Henry Cornelius, Three Books of Occult Philosophy, Book III, Chapter XXIII, link to Joseph Peterson's full online version or ref. page 530 in Donald Tyson's highly recommendable edition with comments)

Now, there is little left to say after this very precise description of how one communicates whit spiritual entities: Their words come from within. We are our own little radio station; our heart is the transmitter and our mind is the receiver.

All of the banishing, the hexagram work, the charging of our consciousness, the tight choreography of bodily movements and divine words to be vibrated - these are the tools that allow us to tune into the right radio frequency in order receive the signals sent by the entity we wish to communicate with. If one compares this approach to other traditions like Shamanism, Merkabah or e.g. the kabbalistic exercises compiled by Abraham Abulafia it becomes apparent that there are many more methods to achieve the same state of mind and 'sacred communion'. 

At the end of the day 'truth is what works' - as Jodorowsky put it so simply. We all have to find the method that is most accessible for us and our own predisposition... This reminds me of the early days of my magical training. We were working all on our own but had a teacher and would meet at his house once a month to discuss progress, challenges and insights and receive new instructions for our work. On many of these occasions I learned how different our disposition as humans are with regards to magical operations. Some of the students sat down for a 2h asana meditation - and by chance left their body and entered into the astral realm. That is to say without any prior training; this experience was highly disturbing to them and it took a good teacher to learn how to handle their talent. Unfortunately I wasn't one of them and didn't know what I have understood today...

Back then I worked feverishly to 'see' with my physical eyes into the astral realm. I studied Tratak methods and stared for hours against a single spot on the wall or tried to see the aura of a random object like an apple or a egg. I assume this was a good training of willpower and concentration and does help me in my work today. However, I made very little progress and felt highly frustrated after months of daily training.

At some point I decided to let go and simply continue with my magical operations - as a 'blind'. Rather than giving up or getting stuck any deeper, I decided that if I couldn't accomplish to gain astral sight I would enter in blindness. This was a hugely important change of mind at that point in time for me: To never get stuck, but to practice Aikido with your own mind and goals as required.

The results I achieved since then as a 'blind magician' worked very well for me - and I don't feel blind anymore at all even though my astral sight still isn't any better. I discovered that my astral sense of 'hearing', i.e. being a precise yet adaptable radio station was very good. I guess I would have never discovered this talent, had I not decided to let go of pursuing to become a magician with astral sight...

What I am trying to say is: find your own talents and discover your astral senses without goals in mind. Your sense of sight or hearing might be numb or rudimentary, but maybe your astral sense of touch or even taste will work great for you. 

This is not to say that hard work isn't necessary and we don't have to endure moments of frustration or even desperation. Any 'Great Work' is a rough and tough journey at times. Yet, there is a difference between a living tradition that we allow to fill our personal lives and experiences - and banging your head against the wall at the end of a dead end path.

I guess that is the only thing I would add to Agrippa's quote: The 'tongue of angels' can be heard with any sense in our bodies that is sufficiently evolved. The transmitter of our radio station will always be our heart, yet the receiver is to be found by your own practical work and explorations.