Customer Reviews

Living Magical Arts: Imagination and Magic for the 21st Century

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RJ Stewart manages every time to write the most solid of books. This is a book outside of the over-published Wicca tradition. He does work very much from a Western magical perspective however. I worked with this book alongside books by John and Caitlin Matthews, aswell as WG Gray. It is due to be re-published in an omnibus edition along with "Advanced Magical Arts". RJ's work is always trustworthy. His books go well beyond much of the new age nonsense generally available, and working with them is not for the faint-hearted. He leaves you with no illusions as to what is involved with doing the work. Highly recommended for anyone serious about their magical work.

Stewart's book made me get out my highlighter, because he states basic truths succinctly and clearly -- truths I want to come back to again and again. This book derives from Stewart's personal experience, and unlike other texts on "magic," it is no pastiche of the work of others, or a mere catalog of magical correspondences. Stewart offers clear instructions, rationales and a coherent and profound magical philosophy for what he presents. As he defines it, "magic is a set of methods for arranging awareness according to patterns." These patterns catalyze a transformation: "the purpose of magical arts is to enable changes within the individual by which he or she may apprehend further methods [of magic and transformation] inwardly."

The ultimate goal of magic, for Stewart, is not the acquisition of mysterious powers, wealth, health, control of others, etc. These are the vaudeville tricks of inferior and negative books on so-called magic which give the art a bad name. Yes, Stewart calls a spade a spade, from his point of view. His reasoning is simple: "magic attempts to relate human consciousness to divine consciousness through patterns inherent in each." So anything that obstructs that goal is unnecessary and even harmful. Magic is not a religion, and certainly not anti-religion, but rather "a coherent set of traditions regarding human potential." The god(dess) images of a religion are imaginative images "engineered to a high standard of performance." So magicians, without ever denying the power or value of such images, work through and beyond them because they want to experience and work with the reality which lies behind images and which energizes them.

Stewart's style is educated and not a breezy, colloquial one. Though it can feel a little stuffy at first, this book should be in the hands of anyone interested in developing awareness, transforming consciousness and inner growth. I say this not because I expect everyone will (or should) agree with Stewart. I don't always. But his common-sense, grounded, utterly practical outlook is refreshing and unusual when you look at the sometimes careless, unscholarly, irresponsible and misleading books on the market which promise a lot and don't deliver. Use your reason and intelligence fully, as Stewart would urge, because they're tools too. He remarks late in the book, "if the intellect can be turned to prove to itself that conditioned life patterns are false, it becomes a useful tool towards liberation." No quick fixes (I'm usually suspicious of books which promise those anyway), but a path worthy of prolonged dedication.

If you are interested in practicing true magic, this book will give you a solid background without a bunch of mumbo jumbo. Unfortunately, here are a lot of misleading and foolish books out there on the subject of magic. Most of them avoid the real life-transforming truth of what living magic really can be. This book is one of the few exceptions. It leads you step by step through exercises that (if you take the time to practice them) will awaken your spiritual understanding and transform your reality. The author brings his considerable knowledge and experience of magic into all his books and I highly recommend them all.

If you are looking for Harry Potter adventures with waving wands, spells, and bubbling cauldrons, you won't find it here. What you will find is a doorway into the inner reality that inspired the Harry Potter stories. This is a mysterious reality that lives within each one of us, and it is freely available to us if we should dare to open that door and explore it. Of course, one book can only offer a glimpse into this reality, but it can be the beginning of a lifetime of growth and deepening wisdom.

I have read, or tried to read, a number of books by RJ Stewart, yet unfortunately I continue to find them invariably flat and dull. I found this book, ostensibly about the "Living Magical Arts", to rather accomplish a deadening of Magic. Appalachian folk wisdom says, "If you would walk the Witches' way, observe with care the child at play", but Stewart has no use for the wisdom of children, and prefers that of the adult scientific mind.

Clearly there are some who benefit from his work, and I tend to think that they, like Stewart, are by nature more practical, sensate, scientifically or intellectually oriented, and rather "basic." Though Stewart does say that Magic can't be intellectually or conceptually presented, yet he sadly does just that, and kills off any magic that might have existed in this book by trying to present it intellectually and conceptually, and taking a possessive, narrow view of it. To read Stewart, you'd think that anyone with a view on Magic that didn't mesh with Stewart's own dull view, was a deluded idiot. For Stewart, magic simply MUST be part of a "tradition", cannot be discovered on one's own or "made up", and takes an onerous and overwhelming amount of practice and work to develop. Forget sigils or symbols, too: Stewart has decided that these are "corrupt" (pg 133) and irrelevant. And you must, by the way, read this book and all his others strictly in order, page by page, not doing the exercises first, not leaping ahead, or in fact following your intuition at all: for what emerges from a survey of his work, is that Stewart has no intuition. He's a follow the step by step instructions kind of man. If that's your cup of tea, then you might like him. However if you have enough intuition to be able to skip steps, you'll bound far ahead of him and learn in three days what he might accomplish in three decades.

I think a good way to put it, is that you can basically get from magic whatever you want. If you want a serious, disciplined, step-by-step follow the directions onerous and unimaginative, unintuitive, non-straying from the approved path type of approach, you can get that. However if in spite of the ubiquity in our culture of stolid adults and uninspired teachings, you have managed to retain something of your inner child, who knows in her heart that magic is actually something children can do quite easily without years of study and instruction and the tyranny of step-by-step, you can do magic much more effortlessly and creatively. The choice is yours.