Course Four: Rites 157
these rules are understood, they can be used by the
magician just as a chemist uses the laws of chemistry.
Eliphas Levi, in his Dogma and Ritual of High
Magic (1856), described three fundamental Laws of
Magick:- The Law of the Human Will. The success
of magick depends upon the will summoned and
directed by the magician. - The Law of Astral Light and the intermedi-
ary ethereal principle: an energy permeating the
Universe, which the magician can access and use
to effect changes at a distance. - The Law of Connectedness, linking inside
and outside, the material and the ideal, assuming
there is no difference between the microcosmos
and the macrocosmos.
To these, another law was later added by the Order of
the Golden Dawn:- The Law of Imagination or Visualiza-
tion, calling upon powers within and without.
The terminology and Laws of Sympathetic, Imitative,
and Contagious Magick were coined by Scottish an-
thropologist Sir James Frazer (1854–1941) in his com-
parative study of myth and magick, The Golden Bough
(1890). Other writers have categorized the laws dif-
ferently, and there are many traditions, all of which
can work. The Laws of Magick are not legislative laws
like traffic laws, but, like those of physics or of musi-
cal harmony, are practical observations that have ac-
cumulated over thousands of years, with remarkable
similarity in almost every known human culture.The Law of Resonance
Some believe that all the Laws of Magick can be
summed up in a single Great Law or Principle. Dutch
Grey Council member Luc Sala calls this:The Law of Resonance: The fundamental prin-
ciple of magick is Resonance (“echo”), in and between
the material world, the world of ideas, and the Spirit
World. Resonance in time, form, content, frequency,
and is-ness (the deeper essential quality of material
and immaterial things) is what makes a connection
meaningful. Acts of magick consciously (willfully)
use these resonances, but the efficacy (result) often
depends on greater resonances, and therefore defies
the laws of normal causality (cause and effect).
This refers to the correspondences listed in chap-
ter 3.VI, and includes Sympathetic, Contagious,
Theurgic, and other forms of magick. It also includes
the notion that resonance in Time is a magickal tool
and that the past and the future are mirrors, both ac-
cessible from the present. Love is the Great Resona-tor and connector and therefore essential for magick.
The three factors of magickal work—and in fact
of all spiritual development—can be summed up as:
Love is the key, Truth is the goal, One is the prize
(as the connectedness we sometimes experience can
be seen as the prize, the result of the work).
Another development is that in modern physics
the “normal” causal reality is slowly giving way to
insight and laws like Quantum Dynamics, the Uncer-
tainty Principle, and the Non-Locality Paradox,
whereby the role of the observer and even conscious-
ness plays a role. These effects are only noticeable at
the extremes of our cosmos, at the very small and the
very large dimensions, like inside the atom and at the
stellar levels. But at a more normal level, the quan-
tum effects are sometimes noticeable, as in “quantum
tunneling,” when particles manifest across a mechani-
cal barrier they could not normally pass.
Quantum effects—where the wave and particle
characteristics of elementary building blocks at the
atomic level are subject to probabilities and are in a
sense unpredictable—resemble magickal acts, which
are similarly unpredictable in the sense that 1+1 is
not always 2, but sometimes 0 or 1. Science and
magick are re-converging in the notion that all and
everything is connected. According to Luc Sala, the
Laws of Nature as we know in science are therefore
only a subset of the Laws of Magick, and normal re-
ality is likewise a subset of the wider and Ultimate
Reality. However, according to Dragon Singing, the
Laws of Nature are a SUPERset of the Laws of
Magick, as magick is only a small part of what hap-
pens in the infinite Multiverse!“There is no matter as such! All matter originates
and exists only by virtue of a force... We must as-
sume behind this force the existence of a conscious
and intelligent Mind. This Mind is the matrix of
all matter.” —Max Planck,
Nobel Prize–winning father of Quantum TheoryLesson 7: The Magickal Process
“Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin
it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it.”
—Goethe“The only difference between the Possible and
Impossible is just that the Impossible takes a little
longer to pull off.” —Marc BolanIt is often said that any great work is 1% inspira-
tion and 99% perspiration. This is certainly true. And
there is a step-by-step process in working magick that
is just like creating any other kind of manifestation in
our life. These steps can be listed as: Inspiration,- Rites.p65 157 1/15/2004, 9:08 AM