44 of 45 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Wonderful, March 26, 2006
This review is from: Instant Magick: Ancient Wisdom, Modern Spellcraft (Paperback)
Are you tired of magick books that require you to buy out an entire store to cast a few dozen spells? This book is all you need to create instant magick. No candles, no incense, no stones or fancy altar statues. You have everything you need right in your own mind.
Mr. Penczak offers a course of study that truly demystifies what magickal practice is all about. The book opens in Chapter One with an easily understood explanation of what instant magick is. Although the author states that he wrote the book for the beginner, I feel that this book is highly useful for all except the most advanced practitioner of magick. His direct writing style is pragmatic and enjoyable.
Chapter Two breaks down spell work into its basic parts: Altering consciousness; focusing will; and directing energy. These three actions are what all spell work is about, something that is often overlooked in the more common spell recipe books. Instead of listing a number of ingredients and laying out a set procedure, the author teaches the reader how and why a spell works. This book for all practical purposes is like the proverbial "teaching a man to fish" lesson.
Each chapter has detailed exercises that are like meditations. Each exercise is meant to build on the ones from previous chapters. The exercises help the reader to become more focused and aware of the intimate connection between the mundane and magickal planes. Exercises include such things as Elemental connection and balance, the inner temple and controlled breathing. The reader is taught how to create a magickal trigger that can be utilized to achieve in a matter of moments, the heightened awareness necessary for spell work for any daily need. The magick in Mr. Penczak's book is the anywhere, anytime kind of magick that makes a real difference to the individual and the immediate circumstances in that person's life.
The exercises later in the book are open-ended, leading to the creations of personal spells that are more meaningful to the individual, and in the process much more likely to actually work than any pre-formulated spells one finds in many books on the market. After all, a custom tailored suit will naturally fit better than one off the rack.
The book ends with an appendix containing a number of correspondence charts for Deities, Elements, planets and colors among other things, making the book that much more useful.
I recommend this book as an excellent addition to every magickal studies library.
W. Lyon Martin Author/Illustrator of An Ordinary Girl, A Magical Child
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32 of 36 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
WONDERFUL! A must for those who wish to actualize their practices., February 15, 2006
This review is from: Instant Magick: Ancient Wisdom, Modern Spellcraft (Paperback)
Yet another amazing work by Christopher Penczak. Unlike traditional spellbooks, Instant Magick stresses that practitioners can actualize their magick by using it outside of ritual circumstances. In all actuality, we are CONSTANTLY weaving magick and creating our reality. Penczak understands this well. This book is concerned with focusing thoughts and using Willed-intention to bring forth manifestation; to truly utilize our ability inside ritual and out. This book fills a much-needed gap, and I recommend this directly alongside "The Circle Within" by Dianne Sylvan. The two are very important works focused on taking ritualized magick to the next, and most necessary, step: letting be a living part of our everday existence. This book is a key, and I'm so happy to own it and pass it onto my own students :)
~OakRaven~
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12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
An Instant Classic, June 10, 2008
This review is from: Instant Magick: Ancient Wisdom, Modern Spellcraft (Paperback)
This is my first book written by Penczak, and I liked it so much that I went ahead and bought two more of his books by the time I had read up to the third chapter.
Anyone who reads books about magick knows that the market is flooded with authors that are all fluff and no substance. And then of course, there are those on the other extreme that write about magick in a manner that is utterly dry, condescending, and devoid of everything that makes magick worth learning in the first place.
Similar in style to Scott Cunningham, Penczak is one of those rare authors in the field that can take a potentially complicated subject and present it to the reader in a delightfully simple and practical manner, while clearly speaking from a wide breadth of knowledge and experience. He maintains a fast and friendly pace throughout each chapter that not only explains the concepts of Instant Magick but inspires you to START USING THEM INSTANTLY!
More than once I found myself torn between putting down the book to try out the next sample spell or meditation, or reading on to the next chapter.
Although more experienced practitioners are sure to find a lot of familiar material here, I doubt they'll find such a wide variety of it, contained in such an easily digestible package.
For newcomers, especially Wiccans, this book is simply a "must have." I certainly wish I it had been around when I started out!
So why only 4 stars? Well, I want to make clear that in my opinion, Penczak is a 5 Star Author. I just felt that he missed the mark slightly with this title.
Here's Why:
First and foremost, a fair amount of the book is actually a collection of meditations and breathing exercises that are probably best (or most easily) performed at home or at least with some level of privacy. In this sense, the title is perhaps a little misleading.
I wanted to see more examples of how Penczak himself performs Instant Magick in "real world" situations - while stuck on a crowded subway car or standing in shopping lines, etc. While he certainly provides the tools and the encouragement to do so yourself, I would have liked to hear more from his own day-to-day experiences in which spells are cast "instantly" while dealing with the hustle and bustle of the external world.
Which leads me to my next minor criticism, while he encourages the reader to find their own personal and spontaneous style of practice, the contents of the book are predominantly restricted to innovations on Wiccan traditions. This is of course great for Wiccans, but I would have liked to see a little more variety and creativity in his examples. I think some mention of Chaos Magick or perhaps a little advice on how one could employ popular culture as part of their spellwork (if the reader is so inclined) would have been appropriate here. For a book that is meant to present a new, adaptive approach to magick, it lacked some of the modern creativity I had hoped for.
Lastly, there was, in my opinion, an over-abundance of traditional magickal correspondence lists (astrological, herbal, stones, Deities, etc) throughout the book followed by a whole section of Correspondence Charts in the Appendix. Although he includes these lists with the intention of giving the reader a variety of options to pick and choose from, in my opinion, these lists may potentially divert the reader from far more vast resources - their own imagination and creativity.
For most experienced practitioners, these lists are already well-known territory. For beginners, they are probably better learned elsewhere, more throughly, and prior to employing them with the techniques of "Instant Magick."
I personally felt these last pages would have been much better spent discussing in more detail the potential of using one's imagination to forge new paths in the realm of magickal practice rather than picking and choosing from already well-traveled routes.
If I sound excessively critical, it's only because this book is in fact so well written, that for me, the few imperfections it has were all the more noticeable.
But all criticism aside, this book is just too good to pass up. Don't miss it!
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