‘How to Become a Modern Magus’ by Don Webb
Review: Don Webb, How to Become a Modern Magus – A Manual for Magicians of All Schools,Rochester, VT: Destiny Books, 2023
by Nicholaj de Mattos Frisvold
Note: This review is based on a digital copy of the book in advance of its upcoming publication in January 2023. Since the page numbers of the digital copy have not yet been finalised, citations are given here without page numbers to avoid confusion with the final print edition.
Don Webb’s How to Become a Modern Magus poses three interesting questions with its title. What is a Magus, what is magic, and is there a difference between a Magus and a Modern Magus?
The idea of the Magus was in Antiquity tied to Chaldeans and the class of priestly wonderworkers that surfaced e.g. as the three Magi at the birth of Jesus Christ. Over time the idea of the Magus became fused with sorcery and came to carry the meaning of someone who can manipulate the spiritual world. With Barrett’s publication of The Magus in 1801, the office of the magus as someone versed in ceremonial magic, natural magic and the talismanic art was established. The Magus could be good, evil or a trickster, like someone who was not only a Magus, but also a stage magician, or an illusionist. The traditional Western Magus was someone who commanded the legions of nefarious spirits in the name of God and the holy trinity, it was someone who captained evil in the name of the Christian faith, whether the expression was heretic or orthodox. A great example of this traditional Magus is exemplified in the French symbolist and occultist Joséphin Péladan (1858 – 1918) and his 1892 publication Comment on devient Mage, published in English under the title How to Become a Mage: A Fin-de-Siecle French Occult Manifesto in 2019 (Llewellyn Worldwide).
Péladan’s Magus is someone who is a devoted Catholic, who lives a life in dedication to the magical arts, a celibate and serene person who prefers contemplation to pleasure. As he writes: "Magical asceticism reduces gross sensibility to sublimate it into spirituality; and the sore spots of the ordinary man, the triggers for lust and anger, are almost dead in the Mage." We might define this as a “right-hand-path” towards magic, whilst Webb’s How to Become a Modern Magus is more occupied with using and tempering vice and virtue in a more all-embracing attitude. Yet, there is a red thread that brings these two manuals together, namely the importance both Péladan and Webb give to discernment and self-awareness as qualities for the Mage. Beware the example of others, think for yourself, is a mantra in Péladan’s book that echoes in Webb’s How to Become a Modern Magus. The two authors’ respective aims are quite different though.
Whilst Péladan sees the Mage as a mystic who connects to the supranatural through ecstasy and deep contemplation, Webb depicts the Mage as someone in control of his world, someone who can manipulate the visible and invisible worlds, someone who discerns ethics from morals and is not afraid of realising his desires. And it is in this that the difference between a Magus and a Modern Magus is found, namely their respective worldviews. The modern worldview is dominated by scientific and atheistic materialism that, since the late 18th century when disbelief and unbelief in God started to become a valid philosophical option, has generated a world with a very strong individualistic calibre. It is only natural that Webb, working within this paradigm, will accordingly devote his attention to the evolution of the Magus from these parameters. This means that magic is often equated with energy, be it psychological or scientific. This energy is usually regarded as something random that can be affected through human conscious intervention leading to the reasoning that magic can be explainable through science. A pre-modern worldview will insist on the cosmos consisting of a helix and matrix; a pattern that makes connections between all things possible. These differing worldviews affect our ideas about meaning, purpose, past, present and future. If you then took Péladan’s How to Become a Mage and relate this for instance to Francis Barrett’s The Magus and then to Webb’s How to Become a Modern Magusyou would conduct a very interesting exercise in understanding the difference between “The Mage” and the “Modern Magus”.
The greatest issue between a modern worldview that takes seriously its scientific materialist tenets is the consequence it has for the concept of meaning and fate, and this Webb addresses in the book, chiselling fate away from destiny as he writes: “That means I have a destiny and not a fate. Fate is a fixed pattern that a being moves along, like a train on its tracks.” I feel this is a very important observation in understanding the pre-modern and modern worldview, as the modern worldview indicates that meaning is what we create ourselves and the more self-aware we become the greater the clarity with which destiny can be forged. The traditional idea of fate is tied to purpose and connectedness wherein we have a deep sense of meaning that affects our spirituality as well as existential questions.
Atheistic and scientific materialism also opened the doors for pragmatism and eclecticism that can easily lead to the practitioner becoming a jack-of-all-trades with no foundation in anything solid that can lend a direction to the Magus, the attitude of “if it works, I’ll use it”, with little or no thought around why it works and the sorcerous context for the technology used in a different situation. This uncritical pragmatic eclecticism was something that bothered me immensely with another manual of Magic, namely Donald Kraig’s Modern Magick, (Llewellyn Worldwide, 1988). This book was, like How to Become a Modern Mage, also a course in magic, more specifically ceremonial or high magic. Kraig’s book was largely a conglomerate of the teachings of Golden Dawn and Aleister Crowley, with a strong focus on kabbalah, and it was written in the spirit of modernity, but it was lacking quite a lot in terms of critical thinking and discernment and became contaminated by uncritical eclecticism.
Eclecticism is one of the tangents of Modernity together with individualism, urbanisation, globalisation, and capitalism, as well as industrialised and digital civilisation marked by the importance of the individual himself to make his choices and fortunes in the world. Different from the pre-modern world before the industrial revolution, where man saw himself as a part of a magical and enchanted world, where the visible and the invisible were bringing the threads and parts of the two domains together in mysterious ways, the scientific illuminism of modernity persistently tends to undermine the naive sense of magic that was prevalent in the pre-modern world. Modernity wants facts and reality rather than mystique and dreams, unwilling to realise that no reality can come into being if it is not first a mist taking shape in dreams, the mist of imagination. Modernity often insists that the scientific explanation of a phenomenon is the entire mystery, whilst a pre-modern worldview will assert that there is always a spiritual and mysterious dimension to every phenomenon that cannot be explained or understood by a scientific approach alone.
When it comes to How to Become a Modern Magus, it is quite an eclectic work, but not in any uncritical, ill-reflected manner, and therein lies the difference that makes this text great in so many ways. This book takes modernity seriously and deliberately works this angle in a studied, informed, critical and amazing fashion. Webb operates from the premise that it is important to return to the root of a concept in order to make it magically functional for the practitioner. This entails that some understanding of how a concept or an idea was used in its original context is crucial in the process of making this idea your own and hence magically impactful, what Webb prescribes an “integral approach”. This modus operandi is defined as “a pragmatic approach combining Neoplatonism and balanced self-improvement.” Or, as he writes early on: “This book is about using the magical structures that you have inherited in the last two million years of your species’ evolution to create and use that integral approach.”
Webb, being well-read and studied in psychology, anthropology, linguistics and quantum mechanics in addition to being a writer of fiction and fantasy, manages to give an example of how this integral approach is something different from an “anything goes as long as it works” avenue. This work is also different from books and manuals that present a “personal magical system” based on more solipsist eclectic modalities as the importance of becoming self-aware, to know and understand why you do what you do is fundamental. This fundament makes the spiritual and religious domains, whether personal or not, become of little relevance as compared to the importance given to forging a sentient and reflected Magus to take shape in the world.
The book itself is structured into 12 chapters (with additional material for group workings and sex magic) and these chapters are focusing on three main categories of magical knowledge, namely the elements, Egyptian Soulcraft and time.
Webb is presenting a course that is based upon the building blocks of being and existence where the way we act in the worlds invisible and visible is mediated by an understanding of these building blocks and the three modalities of time. Each chapter is given the name of a deity that serves as a mask for the subject matter being discussed. Some of these masks make immediate sense, others not so much. For example, the chapter dealing with fire is assigned the mask of Agni, which instantly makes sense, whilst the association between earth and Freya is perhaps not as straightforward. And as Webb demonstrates with his erudite and casual tone throughout the work, both the immediate acceptance of an idea/mask and the ones that hit a barrier in your consciousness are chosen for specific and good reasons, namely to make you reflect. Questions arising from the masks and the content of the chapters concern the “reality” of these deities. Webb uses them as “linguistic masks”, but consequently this use of masks also makes you wonder if these gods are seen as having an independent reality or if they are being viewed as archetypes of the psyche. Webb doesn't adopt any definitive stance on this, although his Neoplatonic foundation would give a natural leaning towards a world more enchanted, whilst his pragmatism insists on the use of magic for practical and real-life situations or, as he writes:
The Greek view of the universe is one of being, meaning it is real and good and eternal. This reached its purest articulation in Plato’s idea of the Forms (eidoi). The Egyptian idea of what is real and therefore sacred are things that are self-sustaining and self-creating processes (Khefferu). The primal god created the universe first as imagination (what we have referred to in this text as the subjective universe), and then projected it outward by Heka (magic) through an act of masturbation. The objective universe came into being in perfect Ma’at with the creator, but began to evolve into imperfect fragments, so the primal god had to send part of Itself into the objective universe to repair the universe. This myth reflects the human dilemma: we begin in a certain clear direction, but we deviate, sometimes even going in the opposite direction to the one we had originally taken.
Webb is occupied with providing a template for how to be a “greater” magician, as opposed to the narcissism plaguing “lesser” magicians. And it is easy to see how this is established, as going through these lessons with some diligence will make you a more aware human being through perpetually opening up to the “unknown”. For Webb, magic is a force, occult and transformative that can be used for whatever end, benevolent or nefarious, yet his focus in this work is on how magic can transform the magician. This is done on basis of the goals Webb set out to provide in this work, and some of these are:
A systematic approach to self-chosen self-change through magic
A mind-body-soul system that supports self-change and empowerment
Methods for removing unwanted social conditioning
Methods for helping friends and family
Methods for learning bravery and embracing the Unknown
It’s quite evident that just on basis of these five points we see that the focus on self-aware conscient change is central and this, in turn, will make you a more aware social actor and enhance control of your environment.
Given that magic in its most neutral definition is “a force of transformation” that binds the unknown to the known, it can also be applied wilfully and with determination to sort out our psychological knots and entanglements and get a handle on our social conditioning. In becoming a more aware human being we also realise how everything is connected and how nothing can really thrive in a vacuum or in the vanity of self-absorption.
Hence, this work is predicated on the idea of magic being a force of transformation thereby allowing the world to be an important realm of transformation. As we are working with an amoral force here, Webb warns: “[…] if you develop the mental and emotional discipline to be a magician, this means you are a better person. This is a self-generated lie: ‘I can control the sylphs of the air by will alone; it’s okay to treat my spouse/students/random waiters like shit.’”
This is a good observation as magic as a force or power can corrupt as much as bringing personal growth. The underlying question in this work is really about the reader/practitioner constantly questioning why they are doing what they are actually doing. It is a simple question, but an all-important one: why are you practicing magic? — As Webb writes:
Magic is the art of changing the subjective universe and, by so doing, producing a change in the objective universe. The mechanism for this is not just semiotics (Tambiah, Flowers), nor contagion/similarity (Frazier) but blended reality… Magic makes you aware of the circle of the self.” What this entails in practical terms is that the Magus must be a self-aware individual that accepts to effect the necessary changes within him- or herself. This self-awareness makes you understand magic as “becoming able to wish and knowing what to wish for.
This is very well demonstrated in the first section of the book dealing with the elements. As an example, let's take the Agni chapter, focused on fire. This one is not about conjuring salamanders; rather, fire is taken as a symbol of the soul itself. Webb weaves in the Neoplatonic idea of the central cosmic fire that generates being and life. This not only places the fire rituals in Hinduism dedicated to Agni into a meaningful cosmic context but it also becomes deeply personal. Fire is the ignition of something to happen and so fire, this ignition, is also a movement. It brings the soul into activity so something can happen. It is here that awareness is important, because fire itself can soothe and give comfort to the cold soul and body as much as it can burn down a house or ignite the blaze of Hell. In gaining mastery – and understanding – of fire, it will enable you to set fire to logs, and understand anger as well as the heat of sexual drives. You will appreciate that fire requires fuel and you will realise how the celestial fire is the heat of deep contemplation and the blood surging to your eyes in the moment of destruction. In other words, understanding fire will ultimately provide you with self-mastery through awareness of this element and its applications.
Self-awareness being the first red thread in this work leads the way to the second red thread: intent i.e. to know why you are doing what you are doing. This aim is enhanced by the practice in the book which, the theory having been discussed, suggests that this material is worked through on a mental, emotional, magical and physical level. This alone makes this manual unique, worthy and praiseworthy and I can only see a betterment of not only the practitioner in question, but the human race, coming from every single person that actually works through these lessons. This because I sincerely believe that change does start with us changing ourselves and if we thus change into a better version of ourselves, it is this better version that will touch the world and eventually generate changes.
And in this regard Webb gives us a piece of fantastic golden advice:
all magicians in the world need some quiet time to see what thoughts, half-thoughts, earworms, and impressions are bubbling inside them—and to empty the trashcan before taking it with you to dreaming, that is to say, processing. If this Western presentation in terms of signal acquisition is too boring, you can say that living in the (post-)modern world leads to excessive pollution of your life force, which is why you need to spend time in the rawest natural environment you can find. A week of rough camping is equal to four months of rituals in your apartment.
In other words, if you are constantly saturated by the world, how can you even hear yourself, your soul? If you have no contact with the campfire, the earth, the wind and the myriad of waters in nature, how can you understand the full depth of these elements if you didn’t bother getting your hands dirty, your body tired and your soul dazzled by “raw nature”? This is a thing of beauty in this work that is quite ceremonial in its ritual suggestions.
But ceremony is always better understood if the raw basics of the elements deployed have been fathomed first. So: why the bell, why the candle, why the ritual? Webb’s work does this all the time, makes you ask that most important question, embedded in that three-letter word, consistently: why? But of course, the why asked by a five-year-old has a different intent than the why asked by a 50-year-old. The difference lies in the level of self-awareness; as Webb writes: “If you seek to change yourself, you need to know what you are changing.”
The first four lessons dealing with the elements aim towards cultivating this knowledge and sensibility for self. This knowledge is then used to develop a sensibility and understanding for microcosm and macrocosm, that the magician lives in a permeable world, where the world or cosmos affects you all the time, but that the Magus can also affect the world in a conscient and direct way.
The second part of the book is the more extensive one and discusses “Egyptian Soulcraft” where we meet Horus, Isis, Anubis and Set representing the various parts or masks of the soul. The goal of this section is to generate a more authentic being through a soul-searching where “Your differing strengths and needs are not tied to current world ideas, but are best worked on using the disciplined power of magic and the transcendent truth of myth. By empowering and knowing each of your parts, you gain a plethora of strengths, joys, and mysteries.”
These parts of the soul consist of the Kat, the physical body, and the Akh, the effective body as the prime anchors of the Soulcraft, as it is through these components we experience time, which latter constitutes the subject matter for the third section of the book.
The Kat: your body experiences time in a linear fashion and participates in the world through a simulation – or remembering – of the past that is brought into the present. The Akh is the component that can cause effects across the timeline, past, present and future. Yet the mystery of Akh is that its changes in the present will affect the past, due to this faculty being generated and can be strong or weak in a person’s life. The Akh needs to be supported by Ba, Ka and Ren. Ba represents your memory and the passion to live. The Ka represents your imagination and is the faculty that is active when we make choices and discern what action to take. Ren is your name, your reputation in the world.
All these faculties can grow or diminish in relation to how they are used. In addition there are also Jb, which represents what is mysterious to ourselves, our hidden depths so to speak, which is the faculty of self-creation symbolised by Khepra, the scarab. Then there is the Sekhem, our divine connection, which might be similar to a daimonic guardian angel or the agathodaemon which is balanced by Sheut, our shadow or personal demon, or kakodaimonos. All these seven parts understood and being brought to work together lead to the secret eighth faculty, which Webb calls Xepher, the hidden soul fuelled by self-love that generates the important concept of “becoming”. As he writes: “Magic is a process of extending yourself into the ‘future,’ guiding creation, and then absorbing the knowledge that you have done so as power.”
The last section of the book deals with time, past, present and future. It does this through the use of Gurdjieff’s Enneagram and discussions of time, both from quantum mechanics, the Edda and even mindfulness. The ideas in this section of the book bring important threads already laid down in the work into a new octave of awareness where we are invited to understand how the timeline actually might work, both personally through memory and decisions and more behavioural strategies and the scientific, cosmic and magical connotations of time that might be summarised as follows in terms of its magical use:
At a certain stage of their development, magicians discover that the innermost hidden part of themselves is in constant feedback with the most unforeseen future. They learn that the problem is not does magic work? but the fact that it does and they now have something else to fret about. Their lives are guided by two constant goals—and the interference pattern between them. The first goal is to refine the self so that your desires are purer, stronger, and stranger than those of average humans, and the second goal is using those desires to move outside the box that is currently holding them.
Going through these lessons, performing the exercises and the rituals accompanying each chapter is bound to change the practitioner – and I would say likely for the better. Just like Péladan, Webb is critical towards the self-absorbed “occultnik” and the self-centred wannabe magus. Whilst Péladan is not afraid of vilifying these people as “imbecilic”, “abominations” and ridden with “unspeakable ugliness”, Webb uses reason and reflection in the name of growth, assuming we all were once upon a time “imbecilic”. But this can change if “The magician takes responsibility for her universe.”
It is this stance that makes it such a great book. It does teach you a very wide array of magical modalities without suggesting any spiritual or religious – or even magical – path for you, but above all it focuses on making the Modern Magus come forth, to take shape. The Modern Magus then is a person that is not only self-aware but also socially and magically efficient, a person who takes responsibility for his or herself and the world.
Thus, in summary Webb writes of the Modern Magus’ purpose:
The magician can learn to see and affect the past, beckon a greater variety of possibilities to the present, and make more choices about the future. This book will get you there, if you are willing to practice.
How to Become a Modern Maguswill for sure make you a more reflected person, more self-aware and more conscient. And in this it will also help you realise that your world or your universe depends on many elements working together in harmony for magic to become a reality – and that magic starts with the self-aware Magus. In this case, the Magus is someone who manages to keep his or her sanity and serenity in a world saturated by media and an excess of stimuli, someone who manages to move in worlds visible and invisible with agility, understanding and direction. A book that teaches all that deserves to be read, to be used and to be applauded!