‘High Magic’ by Frater U∴D∴
Frater U∴D∴, High Magic: Theory & Practice, Woodbury: Llewellyn Publications, 2005, 432 pages
reviewed by Dan de Lyons
It’s time to face the music. This book needs to be reviewed and there is no justification for continued delay on my part. Well over a year ago, I excitedly wrote a post […] praising this book and expressing my intention to work through the entire thing and then write a review. I was also pretty drunk that day, and there were certain implications behind that expressed intention that didn’t become apparent until much later, one of which was that it would almost certainly mean the review wouldn’t get written for years; that’s about how long it would take to actually go through the entire book, doing each recommended exercise and practice in order. In other words, it was a pretty brash way of putting off writing a book review. This was especially true because I, uh… never really did stick to that plan of working through the whole book.
Not to sideline the review, but rather by way of addressing statements previously made at my Substack Dark Twins, I’ll give some background behind what was going on there and why I haven’t followed up before now.
It’s impossible for me to separate this book from my life circumstances at the time I first read it. I’ve been very candid about it, particularly in some of my earlier posts, but briefly: I was living in a sick and abusive household, and to a great extent, the trauma (and I mean trauma as in sexual abuse, and not in some watered-down sense of the term) that accrued while I lived there was one of the major influences behind the very fact that I had found myself drunk and writing that post in the first place.
See where I’m going with this? That post, along with the intentions behind it of “mastering” the curriculum of High Magic and only then writing this review – all of it was largely a cascading trauma response. I had studied and dabbled with magic(k) for years, I was stuck in a severely disempowering family situation, I had a vivid sense of the power I might be able to gain to change my life for the better by getting more serious about my magic(k)al practice, and given everything that was at stake, that goal became seared into my mind.
Unfortunately, the entire book is also now somewhat neurologically associated with that house and that time; because the curriculum in the book is so neatly and intentionally organized and practice of the LBRP is a major focus in the earlier parts of the book, there is also a sense in which the mere act of practicing a banishing ritual (and I mean any banishing ritual) recalls many unpleasant and difficult emotional associations for me. I am only just now realizing this consciously as I type this: These realities have probably been my main obstacle to fully dedicating myself to magic(k)al work, and for more than a decade, I didn’t even realize it. I was just starting to unpack and work through those sexual traumas in 2023 when I renewed that vow to work through High Magic and write this review. For whatever reason, I became extremely fixated on carrying all of this out in a very specific, pre-determined and planned way, because in my mind I had come to believe that only once I had jumped through those particular hoops in order to “prove myself” would I be able to say I had set right all that had gone wrong by training my magic(k)al will and taking full control of my life.
After over a year of sobriety, I’m ready to move past that self-imposed limitation. No, I haven’t done everything in this book; and yes, like almost every other magic(k)al training manual of its kind, the author made it a point to urge the reader against cutting any corners, mainly because all experienced magicians know (funnily enough, from… well… experience) how tempting it is to look for shortcuts, to slack off, etc. Hell, for many of us, a thirst for shortcuts, advantages, and other forms of worldly power were among the main reasons we ever looked toward magic(k). Putting one’s nose to the grindstone and summoning the humility to recognize the value of thorough, consistent, even tedious practice is a rite of passage that most Western magicians go through. There’s a “type” that tends to be drawn to Western esotericism, and that “type” usually does need this particular reality check. That is exactly why these kinds of messages are included in these books. The practice of magic(k) often consists of the methodical laying down of layers of solid training on top of a looser substrate of curiosity, inherent laziness, and daring.
I took to heart the ethos of diligence and thoroughness that is inculcated all throughout High Magic, understanding the reasons well – so much so that I have overlooked for quite a while now that although this book was with me at the very beginning of my ceremonial magic(k) journey and I haven’t followed its curriculum closely, I would nonetheless say that my current level of magic(k)al experience does qualify me to write an informed review of the book and it’s time for me to stop telling myself otherwise. This really sank in as I looked back on The Hylian Banishing Ritual, thinking to myself, “Anyone who could compose that ritual can review this book. Get to work.”
By the time I read this book, I had originally learned “magic(k)” as a set of “energy work” techniques imparted to me by a friend, had dabbled in some basic witchcraft, had studied Peter Carroll’s Liber Null & Psychonaut and Phil Hine’s Condensed Chaos, read Levi’s Transcendental Magic and Regardie’s Tree of Life and The Middle Pillar. In other words, I already had a pretty thorough theoretical grounding in both chaos and ceremonial magic(k) along with some witchy adventures under my belt. I had devised a rudimentary “system” that was really more of a glorified shoal of sigils, now that I look back, to curse someone once and had gotten into some trouble with a love talisman I accidentally made, but had never actually practiced a banishing ritual. I’d hung out with ceremonial and chaos magicians in chat rooms and stuff, but never was committed to beginning a structured ceremonial practice … until reading High Magic.
I thought of myself as, like, a “punk rock magician,” and I thought I was some hot shit because I could make and fire off sigils on the fly while I walked down the street talking to my red dragon; if I had these little tricks I could do that could potentially accommodate pretty much any magic(k)al intent that could be verbally articulated, what more did I need? Why learn a bunch of antiquated techniques if the bleeding edge of magic(k)al theory had rendered them essentially obsolete? I understood, for example, that my ceremonial magician buddies had their beliefs about their little angels and planets and Qabalahs which were indeed fascinating, but I also understood (or so I thought) the deceptively simple paradigm of chaos magic, which was “above all that.” I couldn’t see why anyone who enjoyed the freedom of such a broad and high-minded point of view would even want to limit themselves to the arbitrary rules and dogmas of a paradigm like ceremonial magic(k). What would be the point?
I think it’s a commonplace to be stuck in our magic(k)al development, especially given a general survey of the occult marketplace, which is a bit of a different beast these days than it was when High Magic was first published. It’s an irony that Chaos magic(k) is probably the most accessible form of magic(k) there is; anyone, even a small child, can grab hold of the basic principles of sigil magic(k) and put them to work. In a trickster-like fashion, it reminds us how simple magic can be, how very little real magic even has to do with trappings like candles, sigils and incense, and that can be deceptive because being able to make a sigil work once in a while is a very different matter from truly mastering the currents of magic(k). The latter is generally something that requires structure and attention to details that may seem arbitrary because they are “merely” meaningful in some voluntarily-adopted, artificially-constructed context, but within that context, hold untold power that will never be appreciated by someone looking in from outside of that context.
The greatest and highest potentials of chaos magic(k) are the ones which can only be fully appreciated and applied by someone who has lived fully within the constraints of traditional forms. Those forms hold lessons that can’t be found anywhere else. Now, dear reader, you know one of the reasons I spent so much time going over everything that I did above: Because it helps to establish just what is so special about this book.
Yes, I had read a lot about a whole spectrum of magic(k)al theory, and I’d also had enough bewildering and even frightening experiences to know all of that theory led into some deep and treacherous waters. I had a lot of ideas about how to reconcile the apparent discrepancies between the ceremonial and chaos magic(k)al worldviews, but what High Magic offers (among many other things) is a robust and detailed framework that does the hard work of actively integrating the two perspectives, whereas other books had either pigeonholed themselves into the framework of Golden Dawn magic(k) or left things theoretically open-ended in a way that is eminently satisfying for creative and artistic types, but less so for philosophical types (like me).
The amount of previous study I had undertaken is relevant here in that I can say that after doing all of that study, High Magic stands out in the amount of care taken to assemble and present the information it contains in a way that managed to bring me to a whole new level of understanding. My basic comprehension of the landscape of magic(k) was indescribably expanded upon and deepened after studying it. Even without following the curriculum closely, I can confidently say that I owe almost all of the magic(k)al progress I eventually made to High Magic. Certain tidbits of theory presented in the book went on to become foundational concepts in my practice, such that I wouldn’t have had the insight to take most of the exploratory leaps I eventually took in magic(k) if I hadn’t followed all of that previous study with High Magic. What this means is that the book is suitable for magicians of a great many skill and experience levels. It is thorough enough (and starts at a basic enough level) that if this is your first magic(k) book, you can consider yourself fortunate and will be well on your way to an enriching and exciting magic(k)al career, but you will also be served very well by giving High Magic a study if you’ve been busy with other stuff for a while.
Frater U∴D∴ is the kind of experienced and well-balanced magician that the synthesis he crafted for this book is fun, creative, and open even while it’s also one of the most logical and rational books on magic(k) I’ve ever read. There are fun experiments and exercises to try, but there are also entire sections detailing the theory behind magic(k)al formulae presented in the form of “equations” that express things like the wide spectrum of factors that go into shaping the outcome of a magic(k)al working. These are ideas that work so directly with fundamental principles that the reader who studies and understands this material well while also doing its key practical work will be armed to create and perform magic(k) at extremely subtle levels; such a magician will have everything one needs to construct not only one’s own magic(k)al systems, but to weave entire paradigms or even sets of paradigms, on top of the ready-made ones all chaos magicians have laid out in front of them.
The curriculum seems to alternate between lessons like that and lessons with simple and concrete ritual practices (like the Lesser Banishing Rituals of the Pentagram/Hexagram), lessons about constructing and working with one’s Magical Weapons, and techniques for building raw skills like visualization, magical perception, etc. All of this comes after one of the best introductions to the theory and practice of sigil magic(k) I’ve ever encountered.
After studying and working with High Magic, the reader will have enjoyed a more detailed outline of Golden Dawn rituals than can be found even in most books that are explicitly focused on the Golden Dawn tradition, including an accurate elucidation of the view from within such traditional orders, as well as a more postmodern theoretical perspective that transcends and subsumes the more traditional viewpoints. In essence, one gets “the best of both worlds,” and truly, following the lesson plan Frater U∴D∴ offers is probably the best way, as someone who identifies as a “chaos magician,” to understand why it’s worth bothering to learn systems like the Golden Dawn. He explains the Order’s history, its initiatory purposes and how those objectives tend to differ from those of a chaos magician. He gives a dignified and well-informed presentation of its ontological views about things like “God” and archangels that highlights and emphasizes the strengths of working within such a paradigm. I appreciated this because other authors of books I had read about chaos magic(k) seemed to instead take the approach of assuming that the perspective of chaos magic(k) tends to be “wider” and “bigger”than more limited paradigms and thus tending to condescend about them.
Years of experience have taught me this latter approach is a major misstep, because even if you view the world from a more variegated and open perspective than the traditional Golden Dawn did, the so-called “limitations” of that worldview still result in an experience of a dazzlingly dynamic universe; a chaos magician may recognize that a system like the Golden Dawn is a construct and thus shed some of the more superstitious beliefs surrounding the system, but if you actually adopt the system’s limitations and work within them, you will learn firsthand that while the paradigm may be arbitrary in the more relative sense, shit will still get very real when working within it. The waters may be clearly marked and delineated, and may even be made-up in a sense, but that makes no difference at all in a magic(k)al universe that is as responsive to the thoughts and actions of a magician as Frater U∴D∴ teaches.
The only way to find out is to fuck around, and the particular road for “fucking around” that is paved and laid out in High Magic is excellently balanced, informed by decades of experience, and optimized so that the practitioner can make the most out of it.
At no point in this book does Frater U∴D∴ simply spill out a list of instructions and then tell the reader, “Give this a try and see what happens.” By the time you are given any practical instructions, you will also have been so well-instructed in the theory that there should be no serious confusion on your end about what you can expect from entering upon the practice… except, that is, for those ineffable lessons that can only come from doing the work itself.
Probably the most invaluable lesson I took from this book was Frater U∴D∴’s theory of “The Symbol-Logical Fuzzy Relation,” which is a straightforward, yet sophisticated model for understanding the deeper nature of all magic(k)al paradigms at a level that will empower the practitioner to develop their own entire mythic landscape if one so desires. It basically starts where the axiom of “Nothing is True, All is Permitted” leaves off, gets down on all fours and examines in detail how symbols and entire symbol systems take root within the psyche and begin to not only influence, but outright determine the reality experienced by the magician. It is very hard to explain how and why this more detailed approach is so much richer and more useful than the intriguing, but less explanatory adage popularized by “Pope Pete.” This added level of detail and theoretical refinement gives the magician the tools they will need to carefully and intentionally “steer” their larger magic(k)al voyage, to willfully construct one’s reality piecemeal rather than just fumbling around with a few switches and dials here and there just to learn what they do. This single lesson has been the cornerstone of my path ever since Frater U∴D∴ handed it down to me in High Magic.
To illustrate this, the study of High Magic eventually led me to study Golden Dawn magic(k) more directly, and I worked through the Pentagram and Hexagram rituals on my own. Eventually, I came to a point in my development where I felt ready to apply my knowledge and skills to a puzzle that had personally intrigued me: I understood that ceremonial magic(k) involves a much more rigid and fixed worldview than chaos magic(k), and that from the chaos magician’s perspective, Golden Dawn Initiation works for the same reasons all other magic(k) works, and none of its import is truly held within the signs, symbols, words, and correspondences that make the system up; Golden Dawn Initiation works because magic(k) in general works. However, the fundamental differences in worldview between chaos magic(k) and ceremonial magic(k) are glaring enough that most who call themselves chaos magicians aren’t necessarily interested at all in the principles of Initiation around which systems like the Golden Dawn are built; because the particular spiritual context of such systems is not generally regarded as “objectively real” and “absolute”, the whole prospect of Initiation is often viewed as equally illusory; most self-styled Chaotes are more interested in Getting Shit Done™ than in seeking to experience spiritual unfoldment that only even makes sense within a native religious context.
What if I wanted to apply the principles of chaos magic(k) to Initiaition, though? Could I do that? Could I take the theory presented by Frater U∴D∴ and the basic practices prescribed by the Golden Dawn, and design my own Self-Initiatory ritual using mostly idiosyncratic symbolism? Could I color outside the Golden Dawn’s prescribed lines, but get to the same place?
In the post Ten Years Gone, I describe the resulting ritual, which was meant to hold roughly the same place on my personal path that the Adeptus Grades do in the Golden Dawn; I’ve often been reluctant to state this outright for fear that perhaps people who follow the Golden Dawn system closely might look at what I did and think I’m frankly full of shit. However, some 12 years later, I will stand behind that assertion and say that even if a Golden Dawn Adept were to look at the structure and symbolism of my ritual and come away unable to clearly see how I got there from the Golden Dawn system, it really doesn’t matter because they aren’t the person who was intended to be initiated by my ritual; I am. In many ways, it’s a much better “proof-of-concept”if the gap between the official Golden Dawn adept-level work and my own ritual remains obstinately wide, the means of closing it difficult to see; after all, that would better demonstrate the principle that the real magic(k) isn’t in the symbols themselves, in the explicit meanings constructed and maintained by those symbols; it truly is the mind of the magician that is the ground of transformation here, and when it comes to Self-Initiation, the magician oneself is the only one who really needs to understand the symbol-logic at play.
I did not cover all the same bases as a genuine Golden Dawn Initiate, of course. I did not even cover all the bases laid out by Frater U∴D∴. My path was more unstable, more fraught with obstacles and difficulties, sure… but I didn’t mind, because I wasn’t doing all of this out of a desire to explore someone else’s map. That’s not what Self-Initiation is about. It’s about exploring one’s own inner landscape, making maps out of that territory, and using them to get to the places within oneself that one wishes to explore.
It took some extra years, some extra work, probably even some extra psychotherapy on my part if I’m being honest; but I can say that I proved (to my own satisfaction at least) that the principles of Self-Initiation are sound, even when carried to the practical extent of custom-built, self-created magic(k)al work.
This is a bit more nuanced than saying that I uphold the basic chaos magic(k) worldview, or that I uphold the Golden Dawn’s Initiatory worldview. The chaos magic(k) worldview basically holds that “Initiation” is a construct but that most magic(k) can get you practical results if the core principles are understood and followed. By contrast, the “Initiatory” worldview may recognize that chaos magic(k) and its core principles are valid, but might also be likely to draw a firm distinction between what a chaos magician does – usually regarded by “Initiatic types” as “sorcery” or “low magic(k)” – but that because of this difference in context, you simply don’t turn to chaos magic(k) if Initiation is what you’re really after.
What I was interested in exploring – and what I have sufficiently demonstrated to myself and hopefully others via my writings – is, in a nutshell, this: You can have your cake and eat it, too. Chaos magic(k) can be Initiatorily effective and even spiritually profound. Its rejection of dogmatic viewpoints and absolutism seems, from a more “devout” spiritual/Initiatory perspective, to sort of belittle and mock the very premises of Initiation. I am saying that Initiation is both “true” and “permitted” in a paradoxical way that cannot be Englished.
High Magic is the book that made such theoretical speculation possible, along with the practical work that put it to the test.
You may never want to involve yourself with the Golden Dawn and its Christian motifs. You may think the concept of actual archangels is hokey and you might feel more at home in an abstract, postmodern vision of the world that upholds all of the relativism of a chaos magic(k)al perspective. As a result, you may find that even a large and complex system like the Golden Dawn cramps your style. You may balk at the thought of ever practicing the actual LBRP because you’re perfectly happy with another frame rite that works just as well if not better. That’s all well and good… but like I said, I didn’t follow this book’s curriculum to the letter, either, and nonetheless:
The things I learned from Frater U∴D∴ in High Magic are among the most important that I’ve picked up from books. Quite simply, you either understand magic(k) at a level conducive to what’s written in this book, or you don’t. Even if you don’t put all of it to use, I can’t even fathom the worth of the lessons I picked up here… and hey, I’m still not done, either. There is still a lot in this book left for me to apply and incorporate into my practice; that doesn’t detract from my ability to vouch for High Magic. If anything, that’s an endorsement in and of itself.
I extensively studied both ceremonial and chaos magic(k) prior to studying High Magic, but in hindsight, I didn’t actually understand either until I had done so.
I’m not really sure what else to say; I’ve read quite a few of these types of magic(k)al training manuals and there is a lot of overlap between them. Every one of them is absolutely worth reading and learning from regardless of how closely you follow any one specific book. I’ve reviewed two already and am planning reviews for several more; honestly, I think it’s best to read them all. I treasure all of these books and would not want to see what my magic(k)al practice would look like if any of them were missing. Yet, if I had to pick one such book as my one “Desert Island” book on general magic(k)al practice, this would be the one. It is because of the sheer breadth – Frater U∴D∴ covers elemental magic(k), planetary magic(k), sigil magic(k), mantra magic(k), all the classical magic(k)al tools, and loads of deeper magic(k)al theory, including cutting-edge sections on cybermagick) and depth (Frater U∴D∴ really fleshes his ideas out with plenty of additional resources and in-depth explanations of his own) – of High Magic that I was even able to make use of some of the more advanced stuff I’ve found in other books.
I would not have even been able to recognize the genius in books like How To Become A Modern Magus by Don Webb if it weren’t for the time I have spent with High Magic. If you could only budget for one book on magic(k), I would strongly suggest this one. Nothing I’ve written over at Dark Twins would have happened without it. There are certain books regarded as “classics” of Western esotericism, like Agrippa’s works, the Lesser Keys of Solomon, Dee and Kelley’s journals on Enochian, etc. I would wager High Magic is just about as important in terms of understanding the state of postmodern schools of magic(k)al thought as those books are for understanding the magic(k) of ages long past.
If you’ve never read it, get your copy today.
