The Magical Personality: Identify Strengths & Weaknesses to Improve Your Magic [Paperback]

Mike Leslie (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 8, 2002

What is your magical personality? Dragon? Pegasus? Mermaid? Since personality is central to the success of magic, knowing your type - and its corresponding shadow - can give you insight into why your magical work sometimes fails despite your best efforts. This book outlines twelve different personality types based on the four elements of the ancient world. Identify strengths in your magical practice and learn techniques for developing the weak elements in your nature.

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About the Author

Mike Leslie holds master's degrees in occupational psychology and psychotherapy, and has worked in career counseling, psychiatric nursing, and psychotherapy, with extensive experience in psychological assessment in both clinical and nonclinical settings. He lives in England where he currently works as a psychiatric nurse.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

1

The Science

of Magic

Before going into the main subject of this book--magical personality--it is apropos to begin by ex-ploring the nature of magic itself. There are several ways to approach this task. Magic may be conceived as a goal, as a method of achieving a goal, and as the goal itself. It can therefore be viewed simultaneously as aim, process, and outcome.

There is also a difference between high and low magic. High magic is predominantly a structured method of personal and spiritual development. Low magic is predominantly concerned with the manipulation of the physical world in some way. This is what most people mean when they refer to magic, the casting of spells, and such like. Some high magicians even regard low magic, in all its forms, to be black magic. This is an extreme viewpoint that is

difficult to uphold if healing and other beneficial outcomes are included. It does, however, indicate that the black versus white dichotomy is not so easily resolved as one might imagine.

Magic is not magick. Magick is the spelling adopted by Aleister Crowley to distinguish his own magical system from what he considered to be the inferior methods that he was trying to supercede. Modern writers, almost without exception, use Crowley's spelling to refer to a set of concepts and methods of working that owe little or nothing to Crowley's own. For this reason I have stubbornly adopted the traditional spelling at the risk of appearing old fashioned and less sexy than my contemporaries.

This may seem pedantic to some. Call it magick if you wish. It is probably true that the people who are interested in the kind of ceremonial magic that was practiced by the Golden Dawn, or magick as practiced by Crowley, will not be offended. They are not much interested in the practice of magic as it is understood by the general reader of occult works, or by most New Age enthusiasts. It is this type of magic, the magic of spells and spellcasting, of hedge magic and obstacles to the success of this activity, that is the subject of this book.

One thing we can take from Crowley is the oft-quoted definition of magic as the art and science of causing change in conformity with the will. This notion of causing change in the physical world by nonphysical means immediately separates high from low magic, and leads us into the realm of ethics and black versus white magic, of which we'll read more later. Practitioners of high magic are those aforementioned ceremonial magicians whose principle aim is spiritual development, and for whom the casting of spells--the aim of which is to bring about changes in the physical world (rather than in oneself)--constitutes low magic.

The pejorative connotations of this term low are obvious, especially considering that some authorities view all but high magic to be black. That would make this book a work about black magic, but only if we adopt the same high opinions as these practitioners of high magic. However, most people do not regard the practice of low or practical magic as inherently bad. Much depends on intention and outcome, and as I have indicated, intent and success are functions of personality.

If magic is a means of producing change in conformitywith the will, how is this achieved? Magic may be conceived of as an aim (like electricity), as a process (like the building of a circuit), or as an outcome (such as the lighting of a bulb). However, unlike electricity, magic does not fit into the generally accepted framework of modern science. The inverse square law, for instance, states that a light becomes weaker the farther away the light source becomes, and the weaker the gravitational pull between two bodies the farther apart they are. Magic seems to defy this basic law regarding weaker effects over increasing distances. Apparently magic remains as effective over a distance of a thousand miles as it does over a few feet. Moreover, magical intentions expressed today may not exert an effect until some months later, which means that magic does not even respect the time barrier.

Clearly this is anathema to classical physics but it is more understandable given the discovery of hitherto unknown properties of the universe, such as black holes and the peculiarities of subatomic phenomena that also seem to defy the accepted laws of time and space. It is more widely appreciated now that unscientific ideas can actually encapsulate profound truths about the universe. Up until about thirty years ago, though, science and spirituality did not mix. Since then the teachings of Eastern mystics, particularly those espousing Taoist and Buddhist philosophies, have been found to converge with modern scientific discoveries.

One of the implications of modern thinking is that we have the potential to know everything because we are everything. This rather bizarre claim can be understood through ideas such as those of Bohm and the implicate order. Put simply, the implicate order refers to the universe as an undivided whole, the ground from which springs the explicate order, the physical world we experience and are a part of. Because we are a part of this world we tend to regard it as the only world, and to be unaware of, or ignore, the invisible world beyond. Here we have an example of the ancient Hindu concept of maya (illusion) finding expression in modern thought. The Hindus long ago described the physical world as an illusion beyond which lies reality, poetically referred to as the dream of Brahma. This suggests that the apparently solid world around us is no more than a dream dreamt by the divinity and that all will vanish when Brahma awakens.

Modern atomic theory (itself a rediscovery of an ancient Greek idea) shows the atoms...(Continues)

Product Details

• Paperback: 288 pages
• Publisher: Llewellyn Publications (April 8, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0738701874
• ISBN-13: 978-0738701875
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 7.5 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,377,214 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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6 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Acceptable Pre Occupations of your time, November 6, 2002

By 

chris davis (greenwood, mo United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Magical Personality: Identify Strengths & Weaknesses to Improve Your Magic (Paperback)

not too intrigueing although fun , if you like to spend your time learning about yourself , and would like to know about mythological archtypes to the human pschye you might enjoy this book , has some nice rennisance type images and follows the basic astroligical correspondences decked with quite a few mumble jumble repititve words that could be simplifed , the test scoreing process could be a little more detailed in instructions ,otherwise it is quite a nice addition to your bookshelf and may provide fun in your times of boredom.