Magic of the North Gate 2 MAGIC at the NORTH GATE
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JOSEPHINE MCCARTHY 1 Magic of the North Gate 2 MAGIC AT THE NORTH GATE Dedicated To my partner Stuart Littlejohn And To Robert Henry A magical brother who walked into the West on Dec 25th 2012 JOSEPHINE MCCARTHY 3 Josephine McCarthy Magic of the North Gate 4 MAGIC AT THE NORTH GATE Copyright © Josephine McCarthy & Mandrake of Oxford 2013 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted without permission or in accordance with the provision of the copyright act of 1956 (as amended). Cover art/design and illustrations © Stuart Littlejohn By same author Magical Knowledge Book I - Foundations/The Lone Practitioner Magical Knowledge Book II - The Initiate Magical Knowledge Book III - Contact of the Adepts JOSEPHINE MCCARTHY 5 Contents Foreword ................................................................................................... 7 Introduction ........................................................................................... 12 1 The Body and Magic..................................................................... 15 2 Living Magically – Home/Temple ............................................................................... 49 3 Magic and the Land Part I: Ground zero... the environment and its powers .......... 74 4 Magic and the Land Part II: Practical Applications ..................................................... 97 5 Magic and the Land Part III: Shrines ........................................................................... 123 6 Working with the Magical Elements ........................................................................ 144 7 Divine Power and its Containers ............................................................................... 184 8 The Dead, the Living and the Living Dead ................................................................... 204 9 Weaving Power into Form ......................................................... 236 Appendix ...................................................................................... 255 Index ............................................................................................. 268 6 MAGIC AT THE NORTH GATE Acknowledgements Thanks to the following people who all inspire me, bully me and keep an eye on me: Cecilia Lindley, Toni Paris, Anthony Thompson, John Plummer, Christin Cleaver, Frater Acher, Karen McKeown. A special thankyou to Paolo Sammut, a magical co worker who was kind enough to look over the mss for me, and to Mogg Morgan for being a wonderful publisher and all round great guy. I also want to give a special thanks to my partner Stuart Littlejohn, a vastly talented man who has endless patience and a wicked sense of humour. JOSEPHINE MCCARTHY 7 Foreword By Frater Acher Before you dive into the depths of the magical teaching, techniques and wisdom this book offers, I recommend that you ask yourself a very simple question. It is so simple that it might be considered the most essential question of magical practice at all: ‘Why use Magic?’ Being truthful and honest with yourself why you are using magic is not only important for defining your own magical path; it is maybe even more important because the first thing that any spiritual being will look at is your magical intent. Ten years ago if someone had asked me why I walk the path of magic I would have answered ‘to gain conscious knowledge and conversation with my Holy Guardian Angel’. Maybe I would have hesitated and then added: ‘Oh, and of course to discover my True Will!’ Today, I don’t think either of the two are relevant answers. Today I think of this essential question as a Zen koan. It looks deceitfully simple at first glance. Yet, if you were to approach your Zen teacher with your intuitive answer, there is a high chance he would smile and turn you away. So you would return to your meditation place and meditate over this most simple question again. ‘What possibly could have been wrong with my answer? Isn’t contact with my Holy Guardian Angel a most worthy goal in life? Isn’t peeling away layer after layer of ego-driven wishes and desires to finally find and fulfil my True Will what drove mages for at least... well, at least since Crowley succeeded to establish the highly ambiguous term ‘True Will’ as the most successful fig leaf since the philosophy of hedonism to turn 8 MAGIC AT THE NORTH GATE your life into a self-centred journey of narcissism...? So what is wrong with my answer?’ Well, that is exactly the question we need to ask ourselves: what can possibly be wrong with such a simple answer to such a simple question? To be honest, I spent most of the last two years searching for a better one, an answer that passes with approval by the Zen teacher we call Life. I guess Life doesn’t like this answer, because it works against a much broader horizon than I or most other humans normally do. Life simply isn’t confined by the limits we often take for granted and it doesn’t need to break down its lessons into chapters by years or decades like we do. It is free to perceive obvious and painful challenges we encounter as essentially positive and deeply enriching, and it is never driven by angst or fear like we as humans will always be to a certain extent. Life, being what it is, doesn’t even bother too much about my personal conditions or reasons for giving this answer? In fact, Life again might have a much broader frame of reference when asking the question ‘Why use Magic?’... Let’s use a little role play to illustrate how Life might look at this question. For a moment let’s swap roles between the spirits we tend to work with in magic, and us as humans. Let’s listen to Life as it poses a very similar question to these spirits or even to our very own HGA: ‘Why use Humans?’ And as our HGA looks completely gob smacked, Life goes on to say: ‘Look, it takes years of dedicated hard work with a single human being to train them on the most basic steps like how to deal with large amounts of energy, how to talk to us, how to be okay with not seeing us on the physical plane, etc. It takes all this effort to raise humans to the essential level where they can actually be JOSEPHINE MCCARTHY 9 of help. And then what? How many humans have you seen who - once they reach this threshold of understanding and power - actually offer themselves up in service, who let go of their personal agenda, of their human wishes and desires, of their dreams of individual eternity, of personal remembrance by their offspring, and - worst of all - of their deeply engrained craving to experience god-like significance?’ ‘Well’, the spirit would turn away from its Zen teacher and ponder, ‘truth be told, I haven’t exactly seen a lot of humans like this...’ So why use humans? My point, I guess, is quite straight forward. As long as our answer to ‘Why use Magic?’ revolves around ourselves as the central pillar of our universe, we can’t expect Life to have any specific interest in it. Because whether we fail or succeed doesn’t matter to anybody but ourselves. If this is good enough for you - go right ahead. Many generations of magicians went ahead before and I fear many more will follow. When I draw a line under the dozens and dozens of magical training manuals I have read and practiced on in my life, what remains is some highly powerful, many average and a lot of feeble techniques to optimize yourself and the narrow world you call your life. Most of these books give you techniques to engineer yourself into a better version of yourself: to grow from Neophyte to Zelator to Adept to Magister; to continuously over your life-time climb a rung of the eternal Hermetic Ladder of self-improvement, one step at a time. The aim is to one day finally emerge as the master of all arcane disciplines, the stone of the wise, impersonated in a suit of flesh and bones that you can be proud to call yourself. Don’t get me wrong. I followed this path for more than a decade intensely, practicing everyday for hours like many of us did or still do. 10 MAGIC AT THE NORTH GATE And I still believe the motivation to climb this ladder is a wonderful motive to set out on the magical path when we are young or start out completely fresh. But... there comes a time, there comes a point in our lives as magicians when we have climbed this ladder high enough, when we need to ask ourselves if this original motive still holds true? Is it still good enough, to simply focus on ourselves, given all the things we have gained through the support of spirits and divine beings way beyond our capacities? In other words: at which point do we owe back to life and all its forces that helped us become who we are? If every spirit you have ever worked with was allowed to direct one wish at you - what would they ask for? How would this long list read? And how many of these wishes have you fulfilled so far? The most essential question I can think of for us as magicians to answer is ‘Why use Magic?’ Whatever answer we come up with, it should also answer the question Life might pose to the spirits: ‘Why use Humans?’ How long do we give ourselves to realize that the ladder we were feverishly climbing in reality is not only a ladder, but is also a chain: it is the Hermetic or Golden Chain, the one that connects all beings, small and large, weak and powerful, through threads of life and power. The question I needed to ask myself was: How long do I give myself to find my place in this chain - and when should I start working not my own agenda, but on the ones that matter beyond me? I don’t know where you are on your magical path.