People write to me asking how they can improve their faith and belief in magick. My answer is that you don’t need to believe. But you should do some magick that works. Start with something small and simple. Once you see a result, you will believe and the whole process becomes free of doubt.
Belief is not a requirement for magick to work. Although some magickal systems work with belief as the main source of power, belief isn’t even necessary.
Belief is difficult to generate out of thin air. It’s difficult to have faith in something you don’t really have any faith in. You can pretend to believe for a while, and then after a while you will start to believe. That works. But thankfully, belief isn’t even required for you to get magickal results.
I know this because I’ve experienced it myself, and I receive many messages from people telling me that they weren’t even sure the magick was going to work, and yet it did. Others tell me they had doubts, but they did the magick anyway, with the results coming soon after. Some even go so far as to test the magick scientifically, having no belief at all until they see results. (This is not an approach I recommend for most people, and I’ll explain why later – but for some people, there is no doubt that this works.)
Whether you’re a skeptic or a believer, once the results start to come, the question of ‘belief’ may seem alien to you. It’s almost like somebody asking you if you believe in electricity. You know that if you switch on an electrical device, it works. You don’t need to put any effort into believing in electricity, because you have sense of knowing . You know that it will be there and that it will provide you with what you need. Magick is no different. In time, you come to see it as something that works. This doesn’t mean you have faith or belief – only that you are connected to magick, and have seen the results often enough to know that magick is real.
I like to approach magick with a playful confidence. The reason for this is that it gets rid of doubt and fear. Although you don’t need to believe, you do need to free yourself of fear. If you’re worried about the results, and keep trying to check for results, or stressing about when results will manifest, and how they will manifest, that can stop results from manifesting.
This is why people who lack belief can get good results. They just do the magick as instructed, and because they’re not obsessing over the results – but sitting back without any real concern – they are in the ideal state to receive a result. Strange as it may sound, this is more effective than having really strong belief and performing your magick with complete faith but then worrying about whether the magick has worked. The calm skeptic who has no concerns about results is more likely to get results than a worried believer.
Results come when you are not looking for them, or when you already feel relief that the result is inevitable. In my books, I instruct you to perform magick with the feeling that the result has already been achieved. You don’t have to force yourself to believe this, you just have to imagine the relief you would feel if the magick worked. This is a powerful way of switching on the magick. It’s far more powerful than belief.
With time, when you use magick and get results, you will find that you do believe in magick, even if you don’t know why it works. You see results, and even though they might seem like coincidences, you eventually see there are too many coincidences for them to be pure chance. You know that your magick is having an effect.
Skeptics can get results too, as mentioned above, but this is not the approach I recommend, because true skepticism is a sort of extreme detachment where you are fully prepared to see a positive or negative result, with no investment in that result. This kind of detachment is difficult to achieve, and most people who ‘test’ magick are actually doubting that magick. They call it a test because they are worried it won’t work. This is not ideal. The scientific approach can work for some people, when they can truly detach from results, but for most people I think that having a calm confidence is a more surefire way to get results. Even if you just pretend to have a calm confidence, that is better than waiting doubtfully.
This is why you need to practice magick. Practical magick brings real world results. There are many people who read books and never actually carry out the rituals. That’s fine if you just have an interest, but to really know magick you should experience magick and get a result you desire.
You don’t need to believe a thing. Just act as though the magick might work. That means you perform the magick as though it is real, generating feelings and images as instructed. If you perform magick, and then free yourself of doubts, results will come whether you believe or not.
Yes!
And I keep checking every other day or so for the other 48 on your Amazon page.
I wrote a comment for one of your earlier posts. I wanted to know if you were releasing the rest of the Magickal Angels. I wanted access to their seals, and I wanted to build cases for use of them like I had for the given 24.
It’s okay now. I figured out the details to the seals in Magickal Angels. And I can use other resources cross-referenced with your limited 24 to determine likelihood of results with their Calls, Powers, and my amalgamated Seals.
Anyway:
All the words around the outer ring in Hebrew are words you used in Words of Power. They are the same 10 words every time. The sections are divided equally, so 36 degrees per section, halved on the vertical bisector (for orientation). I haven’t yet divined their purposes for their inclusion, nor all their meanings (the tetragrammaton, adonai, and yah were obvious to me, Sabaoth and Elohim not so obvious but I got them), nor their intended orientation. Perhaps they have a connection to the first 10 Hebrew letters’ gematria?
Ten is an important concept. But it is not twelve, which marks it different from the zodiac, which many occult sources seem to really like; it’s comfortable because its construction is natural, not religious. Nor is 10 related to the archangels; there are the 4 for the cardinal directional winds. Nor is 10 related to the Bagua, which has only 8 sections, and which I have seen . That’s why I think 10 is somehow related to the first 10’s gematria.
The middle ring contains reverse-lit-print of the Latin “call sign” (like radio call letters, WXYZ or KLMN) from the corresponding verse in Psalms. It must have taken a lot of playing with size/thickness of the white letters, thickness of the ring, to get it right. It is reminiscent to me of the Qabala-ic tradition of “Hebrew letters blocking the light so holy patterns are understood by man”. But it’s Latin. So I would call this the “binding” ring. Perhaps the “focusing” ring.
The square circumscribed by the outer edge of the middle ring, side-center-tangent to the inner circle, (Masons call it Squaring the Circle), contains the Hebrew equivalent Kosu Harim Silah Va’Anafeha Arz El, the Call Sign for Arzell/Raziel given in Magickal Angels. *It is important to note that the phrase is centered on each side of the square, and completely inside the inner edge of the middle ring.* It too is reverse-lit printed.
The hexagram circumscribed by the inner circle has the angel’s Hebrew-written name in the lower horizontal 30% of the hexagon; in the top 30% is found the same name written right-left in angelic script. I found that your book did not include the Gallery’s version of Shin, Gimmel, Qof, or Tzaddik. Studying the other 18, I came up with guesses for Gimmel, Qof, and Shin. Then I researched them using Google’s image search, and found a variety of them. I found that the sets closest to yours had letters strikingly similar to my guesses for Gimmel and Qof. I was way off about Shin, and ended up using one the data suggested I should for Shin and Tzaddik (most popular/most common in the couple hundred sets I looked at).
The middle 40% of the hexagon is taken from sigils of the Shem Angels that I found on a site that had correspondences for the zodiac (the symbol inside-the-circle-outside-the-hexagram on the right). The first 4 angels in Magickal Angels all correspond to Aries, and their letter Heh (diametrically left from the zodiac symbol) was constant for each. I consulted a prior resource for Alef-Bet correspondences and found they matched.
I also noticed a slight variation on the horizontal bars of the hexagram in the seals in Magickal Angels: they did not line up equally with the outer ring’s sections. I guessed whoever designed the seal used “r” for pi/3, a good approximation, but not perfect.
The Square inside the Middle Ring is also not perfectly set.
But the magick works. This gives more credence to your main attitude, “perfection is a waste of time, go for Intent.”
If you haven’t guessed yet, Mathematics and Scientific reduction (thank you, Francis Bacon) are fundamental tools I used to get this close.
I would love any commentary on my details. I would also love to know the source(s) for what I have not divined yet, primarily the reasoning for including the 10 words, my 5 unknowns’ meanings, and their chosen orientation.
Hello. Great to read all that. I’m on vacation so can’t answer at length. The source material for the sigils and the text is mixed, and is not the same source material that is used by many modern books. So we have different Latin to even, say, Joseph Peterson (who generally has better Latin than really popular books). With all that said, you could probably create sigils that are close to ours with half-decent source material, because the intent is more important than the exactitude. The design of the sigils has never been done by myself, although I work with those who do the design – offsets and errors are sometimes nothing more than offsets and errors, due to the exact imagery being unimportant. In other cases, slight offsets are there for magical reasons. Some of the circles in Magickal Protection, for example are offset ever so slightly to create a crescent, although nobody seems to notice consciously. (It’s also possible we will bring out the other 48 sigils before too long – we keep changing our minds on this, but the latest thinking is that we will do this after all. Fingers crossed.)
That is so Cool! Is there any sort of “activation” or “charging” ritual used for them? I’m imagining saying the Angels’ names 5 times while standing on my head in the full moon’s light trying to wave a wand and sprinkle water from a hyssop branch in a circle filled with oak leaves, while an acolyte dressed as Pan dances to Crowley’s favorite salon song, or something.
There will soon be a second Magickal Angels book. I announced it on the Facebook page yesterday. This should give you what you want. Here’s what I said. “We’ll be bringing out a second book of Magickal Angels soon. The first book gave a method for accessing 24 of the Shem angels. This second book will reveal the powers and sigils of the remaining 48 Shem angels. It will also include methods for empowering sigils to increase their energy and additional information on choosing the right angel, along with methods for communicating directly with angels. If you own both books you’ll have access to 72 angels, with over 200 powers. There have been so many requests for access to these 48 angels that we thought it was worth putting in the time to make this available. Expect this book fairly soon – we can’t say exactly when, but within a few weeks.”