ENOCHIAN MAGIC: SCRYING THE AETHYRS

I admit that my visions can never mean to other men as much as they do to me. I do not regret this. All I ask is that my results should convince seekers after truth that there is beyond doubt something worth while seeking, attainable by methods more or less like mine. I do not want to father a flock, to be the fetish of fools and fanatics, or the founder of a faith whose followers are content to echo my opinions. I want each man to cut his own way through the jungle.

Aleister Crowley

Visions.

Whether you view them as psychic explorations of higher planes or something more akin to Jungian active imagining, visions are an essential part of any magician's career.  It's the oldest magic, really, with roots deep in the shamanic experience.  To cross over into the Otherworld (however you wish to define it) and bring back treasures is the core of the magic experience.  It is what makes a magician a magician.

It's also a nearly universal motif, a classic feature of what Eliade, Campbell, Leeming, and Vogler understood as the Monomyth, or Hero's Journey.  The Hero sets out of his quest, and at some crucial point crosses over into the Unknown, which can be represented as an Underworld, an Otherworld, or an Inner or Outer world.  There he faces challenges and trials, gains wisdom and strength, at at some crucial point crosses an Abyss that leaves him irrevocably transformed.

Magic is interacting with Myth as much as anything else.  The magician deals habitually with gods, demons, and spirits liberated from story and fable.  For those seeking such visionary experiences, there are scores of systems available to the modern practitioner.  For my part, I have always had extraordinary success with the "Enochian" magic of John Dee.  I have operated other methodologies with varying degrees of success, but invariably and without fail, the process of chanting an Enochian Key or Call lights up my brain.  By the end I am flying.  The visions are the most coherent, the most vivid, the most intense.  And they have also had the most profound effect upon me.  Naturally I do not expect this to be true for everyone, and magicians all need to experiment to find which techniques best trigger visions for them.  I am hardly alone, however, in attesting the efficacy of the Enochian Calls.

I have been scrying the 30 Enochian Aethyrs or Aires for thirteen years now, keeping careful records of these sessions, as well as work with the spirits or "angels" of the Watchtowers, in notebooks set aside purely for Enochian work.  Recently, I crossed the 10th Aethyr, which in the Enochian cosmology is the Abyss, the gulf or chasm separating the phenomenal universe from the noumenal one. This was a transformational experience, reordering my priorities and changing the way I view things.  One side effect of the experience is the decision to share my experiences of scrying the Aethyrs, not with dogmatic intent but to--as Crowley states above--"convince seekers after truth that there is beyond doubt something worth while seeking, attainable by methods more or less like mine."  By making these records public, I hope to show others the type of experience that is possible, fully aware that these experiences are mine and naturally cannot mean to others what they mean to me.

I invite the reader to check out the links above first, to familiarize himself or herself with the Enochian system and cosmos.  The short version, however, is a gnostic cosmology in which the physical world is surrounded by 30 concentric "Aires" or "Aethyrs," the 30th being the innermost and closest to physical reality, the 1st bordering on the Divine, or "Ultimate Reality."  The Enochian magician experiences each in a series of visions, moving ever outwards.  The best example of this is probably Aleister Crowley's The Vision and the Voice, which provided many crucial elements of his system of Thelema.

In subsequent posts, I will be sharing abridged journal entries of my own journey across the Aethyrs, starting with the 30th Aethyr of TEX back in 2004 and moving forward.  My methodology has been more or less consistent.  I perform a banishing/purification followed by an invocation.  In my case, these are specifically The Star Ruby and The Star Sapphire, but again any equivalent rituals will do.  I then recite the 19th Enochian Call or Key, inserting the name of the Aethyr I intend to visit.  This is followed by intoning the names of the Governors associated with that Aethyr with my eyes closed.  The vision usually comes on fairly quickly.

I tend to narrate what I see and hear aloud, either recording myself or working with a partner who keeps a record.  

In the next post, we will start out journey with TEX.