PARIS 11 July 1972
In the beginning was the WORD …
That’s all there is to know about magic, all there is to know about most things really. On the very off-chance that anyone else ever reads this book, this book of magic and strange experiments, writings, dreams and diagrams, and also just to remind myself, the important thing to know is that I don’t believe in these things, not in a simple-minded way, blinded by the glamour and the trappings and the seductive song of mystery, the subtle sense of being elect, initiate, adept, chosen, powerful, privy to secrets and occult knowledge.
Because there is none.
The greatest secret ever kept is that at the centre of every religion, every set of mumbo-jumbo ceremony: there is no secret. There is only the sense of secret, sense of mystery, sense of the sacred. All meaning is what we make, all gods and monsters spring from the hidden world of the human imagination.
But this is not to say they don’t exist, or don’t have power. The Word is the thing. To name the world is to claim it, to wield power over it. To invoke the absent, the abstract, and the ideal. Impossibly things do indeed exist. But only if we name them. Love, Justice, Honour, Truth and Lies, Jealousy, Hatred, Beauty. God. Magic.
The world is constructed by our language, manipulated by our poetry and rhetoric, pinned, pierced and played with by our signs, symbols, scripts. We name, and thus possess; we articulate, and thus put into motion, into meaning, into story. The spoken word, the written sign, the grand gesture … These are our primary tools. The image and the melody our next.
The symbols, archetypes and cartographies that we have created are a glorious system to understand and organise our world and our place in it. Magic is writing. Alchemy is poetry. What else is either but the working by the will of transformation and correspondence? To be awake is to read the world, to achieve one’s will is to write it. That is all, really, there is no other secret. To believe literally in gross magic, vulgar angels and demons, the mystification of initiations and words of power is as wrong-headed as to believe in the literal truth of Genesis. And yet both are true, metaphorically, powerfully true.
But then if all is true, nothing is true, and everything is permitted. And it is. Do What Thou Wilt shall be the Whole of the Law. But one must be careful what one wills, what one wishes for. For no deed goes unpunished. And so I would rather live in respect of the one Golden Rule: Do unto others as you would have (or could accept) them doing unto you.
For myself, and this is not the case for everyone who takes one of these strange paths, I declare that Love is the Law. If all is done with Love, then there is no Sin, no Wrong, no Death. With that said, I dedicate this Book of Words, Book of Shadows, maybe, of the World, Leabhar Draíocht, Grimoire – yes, for Grammarye rules the articulation of Words – and thus, a personal Book of Grammar is a Book of Magic.
Malachas Ivernus
Magus. Hierophant. Mystagogue. Simulacrum.
Professor Emeritus at Université de Paris-Nouvelle Athènes
