I’m always slightly reluctant to break radio silence about magic on my own blog. This blog started out as a blog about teaching and learning in middle school and there are some readers who disapprove of me coming out and saying “I practice magic”, and I’ve lost other readers completely. It’s always a risk, balancing the daily tai chi work against the school stuff against the magical and ritual work. Oh well.

I’ve been an off-and-on student of magic for a long time now, more than a decade I’d say — the art of causing changes in consciousness in accordance with will. In all of my work, there’s been five things that I’ve found that really work for me, reliably again and again: tai chi, DOGD-style druidry, Rufus Opus‘s brand of Hermetic ritual, and Jason Miller’s Strategic Sorcery. Even the book on Tantric Thelema, which I so liked, has not influenced my work in magical studies nearly as much as Jason has. So when Jason announced he had a new book out, and effectively a new kind of book, on advanced planetary magic, I bought it. I especially like that it comes with links to audio files that demonstrate pronunciations.

And I have to say, this is an elegant little collection of magic. For one thing, as Jason says, it’s advanced. Yes, he includes the calculations for the planetary hours, and lets you know which hours are which and why; yes, he explains Chaldean order of planets, and why it matters. That’s in dozens of other books.

No, what’s valuable here is the wealth of ritual material for daily and even hourly practice. Jason has quite cleverly linked reasonable and useful seals for the planetary forces (and these seals have hung in my own temple space, so I feel that they work) with a series of forty-nine calls: calls that cover every astrological hour of day and night in a week (and he explains how to spread the work over two weeks).

I just bought the book. I have had the chance to recite two or three calls: not much; and to read cover to cover, because it’s short. But I can already say that this is a rich collection of material to dive into. It’s sometimes said that the magician’s four powers are memory, imagination, courage and will. Jason has created a collection of magic that draws on these four powers in new and intriguing ways, and useful ways as well. But more than that: the practice of this planetary magic will have many effects, but the most important effect is that it will awaken those four powers in you. You’ll be taking a step into a larger universe, and you’ll find yourself learning, growing, and projecting powers in unexpected ways you could never have imagined.

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