All effective magick stands on three legs: imagination, emotion,and feeling; everything else – allthe words and gestures, the implements and costumes, the elaborate circles andfurniture – serve only to reinforce and focus these three capacities. If any ofthese three is lacking, then the work is likely to fail; once you are skilledin using all three, you can dispense with practically all the other thingspeople sometimes insist are essential to the practice.

Of the three, emotion isthe power that drives the whole show; emotion from the guts, and from theheart. I will go even further; it is not just emotion, but passion that is thepower behind magick. Passion in the sense of an intense desire to be connectedto that which you are seeking to invoke; a desire that places no restrictionsor limits on the connection, but which is so one-pointed that nothing save thatwhich is sought is included within its focus. And passion in the sense of aboundless enthusiasm for the acts by which you seek to create that connection.Admittedly, this is the ideal case; but the closer you can get to it, even fora few moments, the more likely your work is to be successful.

This passion-for-connection is what creates the magickal linkbetween the magician and that which he is invoking; or, if the link alreadyexists, expands it and strengthens it. The emotion literally creates a channelor umbilicus between them, through which energy and knowledge can flow ineither direction. The stronger the emotion, the stronger the link becomes; theless energy is lost in side-thoughts and distractions, the stronger the linkbecomes. Thus a one-pointed focus is most desireable.

But conversely, restrictions the magician places on the connectionbecome constrictions in the link, reducing the potential flow of power throughit. If a magician insists that a spiritual force or being manifest itself in aspecific way, then it is less likely to appear, or the manifestation with beweaker. But if his desire for connection is unconditional, then a response ismuch more likely, and will be more powerful when it comes. Similarly, if amagician doing a ritual to obtain money desires that money to appear in theform of a cashier’s check, he is less likely to obtain it than if he waswilling to accept it in any form.

In its highest form, this unconditional passion becomes almostindistin- guishable from what is called “Divine Love”, which is the closestthat one can come (within the worlds of manifestation) to the transcendentalstate of the Mother aspect of divinity. Passion-for-connection transforms intoa state of pure relationship, pure Love, in which all distinctions are erased;both the nature of the magician and the nature of that being invoked disappear,totally lost in the link between them.

Imagination provides the medium (rather, an opening to the medium) throughwhich magick produces its results. The personal imagination seems to blendseamlessly into the astral light, the larger magickal universe; the point atwhich one becomes the other is impossible to define clearly. An object thatbegins as a purely internal construct – created and sustained by theimagination of a magician, propelled by the power of emotion – can move outinto the astral light and take on a life independent of its creator. It cangather or become a container for magickal power, and act back on its creator(or on others) in ways that are impossible for him to produce through hisimagination alone. Conversely, beings and powers operating on levels themagician cannot yet perceive can make themselves known to the him through hisreceptive imagination, opening his awareness into new realms of experience.

The symbols used in magick are forms that, when created in theimagi- nation, tend to gather specific types of power from the astral light,which are further limited by the intent of the magician. The shape of thecontainer, in effect, determines what can be put into it; the simpler, rigidlygeometric forms (such as the pentagram and hexagram) draw relatively pure,funda- mental forces; complex symbols – e.g., god-forms – draw correspondinglycomplex assemblages of forces.

When the magician projects the image of a symbol onto his sur-roundings, an extended magickal space is created in which the astral lightbecomes conditioned into conformity with the symbol. The area becomes moreattractive to the types of power invoked, more comfortable for mag- ickalbeings having the nature represented by the symbol. The world of the powers andthe world of the magician then intersect, making interaction possible.

(A detailed series of practices for developing the imagination andcreating a general-purpose magickal space can be found in my article A ShortCourse in Scrying. This present paper is aimed towards showing by example howit is used in formal rituals.)

Feeling is the third leg of the tripod, and the final key to success inmagick. In order to bring into being the conditions you desire, you must createin yourself the sensations and feelings that the things you have createdthrough your imagination are real, and that the goal of the operation hasalready been accomplished. In the magickal universe, when you act with all yourbeing as if something is already real, it becomes real. This feeling of realityis the trigger that causes a symbol to move from the imagination into theastral light.

This key to magick is simply stated, but in practice it seems togive the greatest difficulty for most people. The usual culprits areintellectual doubts – “I know I am only imagining this” – and fears of various sorts,e.g., “what if it makes me go crazy?” Both of these have to be ruthlesslyeliminated from the magician’s consciousness for the duration of the operation.After the work is completely over, you can be as doubtful and fear-ridden asyou want; a certain amount of doubt, of critical examination, is healthy andappropri- ate at that time. But during the work, you must be completely focusedon feeling (not thinking) that what you create is real.

Some might be concerned that this “believing makes it real” idea isactually a form of self-hypnosis, a way of fooling oneself by reducing thecritical faculties. A genuine success in performing the ritual will dispose ofthis concern. At some point in the work a threshold is crossed; the strength ofthe invocation produces an even stronger response from somewhere out- sideyourself. Events in your magickal space take on a life of their own, at leastpartially independent of your will. And – most significant – they begin tomanifest an intensity, richness and texture that it is utterly impossible foryou to produce through your imagination alone, no matter how adept you might bein its use. Once this has been experienced even a skeptical mind must grantthat the events are “real” in some sense, even if not in the same way asmundane happenings.

So for magick to be successful, emotion must push a link outwardsinto the magickal universe, imagination must aim it towards the desired goal,and feeling must affirm the reality of that which is sought. Full success willnot come on the first try; for some people, not even on the fiftieth. It takestime to condition the mind to the proper performance of these practices. Butonce a single success is attained, additional successes follow at more fre-quent intervals.