This is a slight departure from my usual subjects, but not much.
Hypnosis is about influencing people by speaking directly to the unconscious mind. This topic is about Magic(k), which is defined as The Art and Science of causing Change to occur in Accordance with One's Will.
This blog post is also about Power, as defined by Robert Greene in his 1998 masterpiece The 48 Laws of Power.
Magick
Aleister Crowley was a powerful soul, a man not afraid to experiment with magic as a form of domination. His occult experiments involved drugs, prostitutes, ceremonial and ritual magic, and raja yoga.
It was while he was married to his first wife, Rose, that Aleister was inspired to form his own religion, Thelema, whose most profound and foundational teaching is Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law, For Love Is The Law - Love Under Will.
According to Thelema, Every Man and Every Woman is A Star, each possessed of their own Will, each charting their own course. Magick, as taught to Thelemites, requires alignment of the Will with the Universe. With such Unity, the Will has the backing of the Universe behind it.
Power
In 1998, Robert Greene published a book, The 48 Laws of Power, which was followed by five other titles - The Art of Seduction, The 33 Strategies of War, The 50th Law, Mastery and The Laws of Human Nature.
Among the 48 Laws, Robert included such precepts as "1: Never Outshine The Master," "14: Pose As A Friend, Work As A Spy," and "34: Be Royal In Your Own Fashion: Act Like A King To Be Treated Like One."
Drawing from sources as diverse as Balthasar de Gracian, Niccolo Machiavelli, the seductress Ninon de l'Enclos and Napoleon Bonaparte, Robert Greene's book analysed political power - its source, its price, how one can claim it, hold it and fall foul of it - and wrote a book which has itself become a symbol of power, as much as Machiavelli's The Prince and Sun Tzu's The Art of War.
Power As Magick
Both these spheres appear to be so different to one another. On the surface, Aleister Crowley's Thelema seems like an exercise in mumbo jumbo, making no sense at all to a 21st Century materialistic observer. How does one go from sitting in a circle drawn on the ground to becoming some sort of Great Being to whom others bow and scrape, one who can supposedly smite their foes with bits of hair and toenail from a hundred miles away? Where is the mechanism? Where do the chants turn into occult power?
Magical practice depends on four Pillars of Wisdom - To Know; To Will; To Dare; and To Keep Silence. Knowing comes from long study of the Arts, both Sacred and Profane. To Will - that is "Do What Thou Wilt." To Dare, the act of defiance against people's expectations of what magic is about, is the third Pillar. but everything hinges on the fourth Pillar, Keep Silence.
The 48 Laws of Power has a specific Law for this - Law 4, Always Say Less Than Necessary. The less you say about what you are doing, the less likely that you will encounter the sort of negative scrutiny and skepticism which destroys your workings. Ideally, apply Law 3, Conceal Your Intentions - tell onlookers that this is performative theatre or something, whatever works to allow the mundane mind to stop pondering and close down, fitting your actions into the category of Somebody Else's Problem and letting you and your working drift into invisibility.
Practical Results: You need to turn your workings into practical results, where you made a thing happen - or you can claim ownership of a thing that seemed to happen right after you completed the working and fired it off, because Synchronicity is still another word for Magic in some circles, and there is a Power Law for this, too: Win By Your Actions, Never By Argument.
One personal example: I was sick of the corruption and nepotism in my local town council, so I opened up a Chaos Magic portal directly over the building, planting markers to act as Watchtowers. That night, I dreamed of the portal opening, a diamond-shaped portal revealing a window upon churning, stormy skies overhead in a clear, blue, sunny sky.
Literally the following day, the council chamber erupted in a major fistfight. The Party which had ruled the council for 82 years was, furthermore, ousted within a few weeks at the next election by a landslide.
Magick As Power
Where does the knowledge that you practice magick turn into power? For one thing, you can use it to leverage a powerful reputation through Laws 5 and 6 - So Much Depends on Reputation – Guard it with your Life, and Court Attention At All Cost.
So much depends on your being able to apply Law 25 to Recreate Yourself, and Law 27 - Play On People's Need To Believe To Create A Cultlike Following. Keep your followers on your team by applying Law 43, Work On The Hearts And Minds of Others, and keep showering them with gifts from whatever comes your way. Your blessings, your kindness, your dispensation of valuable precepts, keeps them at your side, and motivates them to never let you go. Your followers are all good and worthy people, and they come to you for answers and reassurance. You can offer them that in abundance.
In public, Law 34 applies - Be Royal In Your Own Fashion. Act Like A King To Be Treated Like One. You might not have a name in Burke's Peerage or Who's Who, but your genuinely loyal followers will back up your play. You mean something to your followers - others may defer to you if they feel that there must be some good reason why they follow you.
Power And Magick Together
The 48 Laws of Power may seem like a book of sorcery to some people. Thelema might as well be devil worship to the uninitiated. All magic looks dodgy and suspicious. Occultists keep their secrets for a reason - the term "occult" literally means hidden - and anything hidden, most especially motives, always seems dodgy to people who want everything to be blatant and out in the open.
(Let's be more specific - the people don't want everything to be blatant and out in the open, they want everything that you and other people do to be blatant and out in the open, so they can scrutinise and judge them and you, while keeping their own actions and motivations hidden and unquestioned because privacy.)
Both Robert Greene's workings and Thelema have been dismissed by literally the exact same people as "demonic," "evil," "psychopathic" and so on. And yet if you see what both have, at their core, you'll discover an important fact.
Both are about being able to chart your own course through the universe, and letting nothing else interfere with you. Both are about influencing other minds through the exercise of your True Will, hopefully without compromising their own True Will in the process. And the mechanisms of both sets of teachings are incomprehensible to anyone outside of the circle of students of each discipline.
In that light, Aleister Crowley's teachings could be interpreted as Machiavellian ... and Robert Greene's precepts could be read as being magical.
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