Dolores Ashcroft-Nowicki - The Ritual Magic Workbook: A Practical Course of Self-Initiation

The Ritual Magic Workbook

by

Dolores Ashcroft-Nowicki

A Practical Course of SelfInitiation

Samuel Weiser, Inc.

York Beach, Maine

First published in 1998 by Samuel Weiser, Inc.

Box 612 York Beach, ME 039100612

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Acknowledgements

More than most, writers need the backup of other people. They provide encouragement, endless cups of coffee, and a willing ear when you hit the inevitable dry period and nothing you put down on paper looks or reads the way you see it in your head. Without the following friends and relations my life would be a lot harder.

My husband Michael and Sonia Hackwell who took much of the office work off my hands and gave me time to write. Emily Peach and Alan Richardson who listened with untiring ears to my ideas, even the wildest of them, and kept my spirits up when I thought it would never get done. Anne, Laurel, Cathy, Raffi, Jamie, Gordon and Sheila in Sydney who tried out the material, and survived!

Gary Farmer who came up with some beautiful incense recipes and allowed me to use some of them.

Mike Herivel, Nick and Chris who keep my Apple II going and always have a smile even when I call them out and the darned thing starts to work the moment they walk into the office!

Last, but never least, to Simon Franklin whose friendship and encouragement spurs me on to try a little harder each time. Thank you.

Foreword

You are holding in your hands the best practical introduction to the art of magic ever published. Not

'one of the best' or 'arguably the best' or 'possibly the best', but simply the best. It is lucid, down to earth, well structured, accurate and easy to understand. It is a superb tool for the individual who wants to understand what magic is all about not in theory, but in practice.

Dolores AshcroftNowicki, who wrote the book, is an experienced ritual magician and head of a world-wide esoteric fraternity/sorority. In the very earliest lessons she will force you to discuss your motivations for magical study; and she warns, as others have warned before her, that you should not undertake the work laid out in this book if you are depressed; nor should you mix magical training with drugs like mescaline, or lsd, or even pot.

You will want to know why. And here I think I may be able to help you.

When I was even younger than I am today, I drove a horse and cart through those three warnings. I was attracted to magical study without much insight into my real motivations. I began work in a depressed state. And on one curious social occasion during training,

I smoked cannabis. Since there is always considerable entertainment in someone else's misfortune, let me describe what happened. Then let me tell you something you will probably not be able to find elsewhere: the reason why it happened.

First, the question of motivation. We all do things for the best possible motives, of course; and nowhere more so than in the esoteric arts. It is relatively easy to discover that the only really acceptable excuse for magical study is embodied in the statement I desire to know in order to serve. That was the answer I was prompted to give to the ritual question during my own initiation. I dutifully gave it; and it was a lie.

What actually attracted me to magic was not service but power. Nothing grandiose, of course. I had no burning ambition to rule the world or enslave hordes of beautiful women. (Well, maybe just one or two beautiful women...) But I was undoubtedly a prey to a disease which is becoming even more prevalent with the increasing complexity of modern society: a feeling of helplessness.

There are many reactions to such a feeling. Some people embrace political credos. Others get religion. A few (usually male) take to beating their spouses. I turned to magic, which seemed to me to be the ultimate antidote: for what is magic if not a secret system which promises control of damn near everything?

You will be desolate to learn it did not work. Although I spent some nine years in daily Qabalistic training and learned a great deal in the process, I remained Clark Kent: no amount of magical leaps into ritual phone boxes could turn me into Superman.

Because I did not recognize my motivations at the outset (for while my pledge of service was a lie, I did not know that either at the time) I was driven to ignore the warning on depression. I began formal training while at a low ebb, emotionally and mentally. It was the sort of mood swing I had been through before and I thought little of it. Such moods inevitably passed over, usually quite quickly. This one did not. A few months into my initial magical training I had my first full nervous breakdown, which was mercifully brief. A year and a half later, I had my second, which was not. I was soon under psychiatric care, wondering whether to mention magic to my shrink, or whether news of what I had been up to would persuade him to refer me to the funny farm.

In the end, I played down my esoteric involvement and we decided between us that my problem was Oedipal. I now know it was nothing of the sort, but more of that presently.

The problem with arrogance is that it is a quality for which I have a sneaking admiration. Consequently it plays a greater part in my character than it really should. A few years into my training, when the worst of the psychiatric symptoms had died down, I decided I knew enough to make up my own mind about matters like psychedelic substances.

In those prehistoric days, they were, thank God, a great deal more difficult to come by than they are now and since I had no source for mescaline or LSD, I was forced to settle for cannabis. I expected a relaxed and pleasant experience. What I got was a nightmare. I was dragged from my body and hurled in and out of reality in a horrid slow pulse rhythm which, subjectively, went on forever. My spacial perceptions were so distorted I was unable to move unaided. I did not know where I was and my thought patterns were brutally disrupted. Objectively, the experience lasted more than seven hours. All on a single joint!

I have no doubt any reader with experience of such things will consider the above description grossly exaggerated or outright fiction. Or, more charitably, that I was smoking something other than cannabis.

Pot simply does not affect people this way, as even the most fervent antidrug campaigner will reluctantly confirm. But that's the way it affected me and continues to affect me even now. God knows what I would be like on harder drugs: I have never tried them. Nor have I tried pot since. I even stopped taking alcohol.

Experience is a great teacher, but it only teaches you the What, not the Why. Why should esoteric training increase depression to such an extent that it will push you over the edge into neurotic breakdown; Why should it change one's reaction to drugs to such a ludicrous degree? (I am no advocate of drug usage, but I do recognize that the vast majority of pot smokers do not go through what I did.) The answer to both these questions lies in the structure of the human body specifically, the part of the structure which falls under the heading of Esoteric Anatomy.

Interlocked with your purely physical systems, which are superbly well charted by Western medicine, is a further highly complicated system of energy flows which are not terribly well understood in the West, but which have been studied and categorized in the Orient for millenia especially in India and China.