The Essential Skills of Magick
Benjamin Rowe
Copyright 1999
The Three Essential Skills
All effective magick stands on three legs: imagination, emotion, and feel-
ing; everything else – all the words and gestures, the implements and cos-
tumes, the elaborate circles and furniture – serve only to reinforce and focus
these three capacities. If any of these three is lacking, then the work is likely
to fail; once you are skilled in using all three, you can dispense with practi-
cally all the other things people sometimes insist are essential to the practice.
Of the three, emotion is the power that drives the whole show; emotion
from the guts, and from the heart. I will go even further; it is not just emo-
tion, but passion that is the power behind magick. Passion in the sense of an
intense desire to be connected to that which you are seeking to invoke; a
desire that places no restrictions or limits on the connection, but which is so
one-pointed that nothing save that which is sought is included within its
focus. And passion in the sense of a boundless enthusiasm for the acts by
which you seek to create that connection. Admittedly, this is the ideal case;
but the closer you can get to it, even for a few moments, the more likely your
work is to be successful.
This passion-for-connection is what creates the magickal link between
the magician and that which he is invoking; or, if the link already exists,
expands it and strengthens it. The emotion literally creates a channel or
umbilicus between them, through which energy and knowledge can flow in
either direction. The stronger the emotion, the stronger the link becomes;
the less energy is lost in side-thoughts and distractions, the stronger the link
becomes. Thus a one-pointed focus is most desireable.
But conversely, restrictions the magician places on the connection
become constrictions in the link, reducing the potential flow of power
through it. If a magician insists that a spiritual force or being manifest itself
in a specific way, then it is less likely to appear