Definition and Diagram of a Magical Operation

A magical operation—sometimes called a “magical working”—is a comprehensive, goal‑oriented process of magical activity. It is an undertaking directed toward achieving a particular result, executed in its entirety from initiation to completion.

It is more than a magical technique, may be informed by or feed into a magical method, and typically functions as part of a larger magical system. None of this terminology is perfect, nor is it universally recognized among practitioners.

components of a Magical Operation: Breaking down spell mechanics

To build anything it helps you to know what the thing being built is made of. The components of a magical operation are magical acts and techniques.

Magical techniques are built upon fundamental movements and intentions. The foundation for these nuts and bolts is desire, intuition, and purpose; the structure is added by basic knowledge.

It Begins with the Paradigm

When you begin to study and practice magic, typically your first steps are reading a few pages or watching a video to get oriented. This gives you a general idea of the paradigm – or model – maybe a definition or two, and a direction to move in.

This initial exposure and ongoing learning give you the knowledge to dress the desire and purpose you probably had before you picked up your first magical book. Your intuition, which led you to the book you chose over the other options, helps you make sense of the sometimes-strange new things you are learning.

You don’t need to memorize this. It’s included for the sake of thoroughness.

foundational spellcraft: Fundamental Intentions and Movements of magic

These are the nuts and bolts that make techniques.

Fundamental Intentions

Examples of fundamental intentions include positive expectation, or setting your mind to anticipate the desired outcome and holding that. Emotional generation is another good example, wherein you deliberately produce an emotion like joy, fulfillment, anger, or any other emotive condition and sustain it.

Intentions shape the internal conditions techniques rely on.

Fundamental Movements

Magic is by no means constrained to the mind and emotions. Nor is the body’s participation limited to the processing of feeling states and verbal components.

Magical work often involves physical effort and activity. Obviously, there are tasks like drawing symbols and lighting candles. There are also special techniques like using a wand or crystal point to direct magical currents or using your hands and posture to channel and project energy, perhaps while holding a mineral to harness and move the energy.

Movements elevate intentions and seal them into the work.

When building your operations you can of course draw from existing techniques or movements, like the ones found in this book. You may find that you want to revise existing techniques or just come up with your own from scratch.

A valid fundamental intention or movement will naturally feed into a technique. Any potential intent or motion you wish to build from should do one of the following:

• An intention should be progressive and/or directional, either pointed to an outcome or setting up a movement, or both.
• A movement should involve more than physical motion, and should transfer or direct thought, emotion, subtle energy, or magical forces.

Be sure any foundational thought or motion you plan to use for building a technique satisfy the above criteria.

Magical Techniques

Afte the fundamental pieces, the base building blocks of magic are the techniques. Look at how the examples from the previous section form a chain of intentions that build a technique.

1. You focus the mind on the desired outcome.
2. Next you choose to make this an expectation or foregone conclusion.
3. You then create the emotions of satisfaction and elation.
4. You hold these states in the body and dwell upon or even within them to charge your expectation with power.

A couple of things happen naturally from there. First of all, sustained emotions impregnate the body and become feelings, a more potent expression of emotive qualities. Second, the culminated feelings led by the initial expectation are transferred into projected intention underpinned by affirmative expectation, which is the most basic form of magical will.

Together these steps make the techniques of noetic adoption and affective induction. Noetic adoption occurs after step two and is defined as deliberately taking on a premise with the intent of treating it as real, i.e. to believe it. Once the emotions are engaged and become sustained feelings you are executing the technique of affective induction.

You don’t need to memorize these terms. It’s enough to identify the specific technique, then practice and improve it.

Let’s sequence some physical movements along with basic intentions to build another magical technique.

You could trace the pattern of the pentagram of fire in the air with a wand or crystal point while focusing on the energy of the fire element. This combines movement and intention into a complete technique for connecting to elemental fire.

A magical technique represents a full step from point A to point B. The completion of a technique represents a micro process that accomplishes a magical task or creates a magical effect.

In the example of the pentagram of fire, the magical technique completes the task of drawing the conjuring or invoking pyramid. The created effect is the quality of elemental fire emerging in the environment or responding to your contact from a subtle plane of reality.

The tasks and effects generated through magical techniques are often progressive grades moving towards a desired end result. On the occasion that a technique also creates part or all of the magician’s desired end result, the technique serves as a magical act or operation.

When evaluating a technique you are considering or formulating a technique of your own, ask if the sequence of intentions and movements produce a magical effect or fulfill a specific magical task.

Magical Acts

Magical techniques are combined and sequenced to form magical acts. An act is a single, short process with a definite objective.

This differs from a technique, which completes a task or generates an effect. A task is a component of work, which in turn is activity towards an objective, and an effect is an event or state that contributes to an objective. An objective is a higher order of resolution than either a task or an effect and is one step towards attaining a magical desire or completing a magical goal.

Consider the previously mentioned technique of using the pentagram to contact the fire element, which can be drawn in two ways. Both manners of drawing connect to elemental fire, but one carries the intent to call it forth while the other contains the desire to expel it.

Building a Magical Act with Techniques

For example purposes assume the intention is to conjure fire and use its energy.

1. Trace the pentagram in the air with a crystal point, beginning from the topmost point and making the first line down to the lower right point (attributed to elemental fire). As you make the line send vital energy or life force down your arm and into the crystal, then send it through the crystal into the line it traces. To send vital force simply intend to do so and push your intentions to make a line of energy along the path described. See a line of red or orange light form where the point traces. Complete the pentagram by making the next four lines while opening your solar plexus chakra and focusing on the fire element. When done, visualize the pentagram of light in the air in front of you.

This is one technique. Now let’s add a couple more to form an act.

2. Draw an equilateral triangle (standard, all sides equal length) in the middle of the pentagram. See the triangle appear in lines of flame as you trace it. Shift from focusing on fire to assuming a connection – do this by creating the felt-sense of belief that you are communicating with elemental fire; transfer the felt-sense into your solar plexus.
3. Then raise the intensity of the fire energy with your intention. Put some emotion into it. Liken this to playing a song with a musical instrument and adding feeling to every note struck.
4. While clearly seeing the red pentagram with the fiery triangle in the middle before you, pierce the center of the triangle, which is in the center of the pentagram by thrusting your crystal point through it. Understand this configuration represents the quality of fire as a subtle energy raising into your body and aura. As your crystal passes through the center of the image say “Ignus Ortus!” (fire rise) and feel the energy of fire radiate from your center through your entire body and out into your aura to form a blazing egg about you. Let the pentagram, triangle, and flames around you vanish from sight, but know the energy conjured remains.

This is a complete magical act with the purpose of invoking, or bringing into the magician, elemental fire. It is performed through three techniques.

The three techniques used were:

1. Tracing the pentagram of fire to make contact with the element.
2. Tracing the triangle of fire to establish command.
3. Piercing the triangle and star to call the fire into yourself.

You can clearly see the various intentions and movements that make the techniques. To draw the pentagram required projecting vital force impregnated with intention, making a deliberate stroke with the crystal point, seeing the line of light form as you traced it, and holding the intention to connect with the fire element. This sequence was combined for all five lines of the pentagram drawing technique.

Each full technique is composed of multiple fundamental intentions and movements.

Intentions and Movements > Techniques > Act > Objective.

The objective for the full pentagram of fire act is to usually to bring the energy of elemental fire into the aura and body of the magician; it can be modified to bring the fire energy into the immediate environment but not into the acting magician.

Be sure any magical acts you create or adopt accomplish a magical objective.

Magical Operations

The magical operation is the crown atop the magical hierarchy of work. It is the main working part or method within a methodology, or framework of operation. As such, an operation is the building block of a magical system.

Relevant magical operations are deployed through specific magical methodologies. Methodologies are strategies executed within a magical system.

You don’t need to memorize the relationship of operations to methodologies and the latter’s role inside a magical system. This information is relayed solely to orient you to the larger schema involved with magical practice. If you advance to the point where these things matter, you will have been exposed to the concepts beforehand.

The purpose of a magical operation is to fulfill a magical desire or achieve a magical goal.

A magical desire is something you want for yourself or someone else in the context of your life. More money, better health, a new doo-dad, the answer to a question, the right opportunity, victory over an adversary, are all examples of events or circumstances you might desire and fulfill through magic.

A magical goal is a complete outcome, but in the context of magical work or esoteric and spiritual development. This could be as lofty as contacting an ancestor or travelling to the astral plane or it could be as simple as banishing energetic debris, ill thought forms, and unwanted spirits from your persona and/or environment.

Returning to the magical act of the fire pentagram, let’s say your goal is to infuse yourself with all four elemental energies prior to a ritual or meditation. In this case you would perform three more invoking pentagrams using the elements of water, air, and earth.

The four magical acts of drawing and piercing the elemental pentagrams would be done in a particular order. You might face the compass direction that corresponds to each element while enacting each pentagram. This would constitute the operations of invoking all four elements.

If your goal was simply to invoke the fire element and then proceed with a ritual – the next magical operation within a larger operational schema – then the pentagram of fire act would serve the purpose of magical operation. A magical act fills the role of magical operation when it completes a magical goal or fulfills a magical desire.

Your magical operations should be aimed at fulfilling a desire in the real world or achieving a goal within magical work.

An Imperfect Language

The metaphysical grammar of this structure is solid and tight, but the everyday language we use to describe it is less than perfect. These guidelines should not be treated as rules or dogma.

While the workflow holds up under most circumstances, there are contexts where the distinctions between components naturally blur. Ultimately, what defines a movement, technique, act, or operation is determined by how the practitioner applies it.

A single magical act can function as a complete operation if it fulfills the magician’s intended purpose, i.r. fulfills a desire or accomplishes a goal.

A technique can stand alone as a magical act if it completes an objective. It is only a technique when its result leaves further work to be done by completing a task or creating an effect that contributes to but does not finish an objective.

Even a fundamental intention or fundamental movement can serve as a magical act if it accomplishes the same functional need of completing an objective. In that role—as an act—these smallest units of magical effort can constitute a full operation when they finish operational work by fulfilling a complete desire or achieving a magical goal.

Breakdown of resolution terminology for magical work

The following unpacking restates and defines the terms used in this article to refer to different endpoints in magical work. This is not standard canon across magical literature, though it or something like it should be.

outcome – general term encompassing any points of resolution

directional – in this context, moving forward or towards the next outcome level

task – small action-resolution, outcome of technique and one phase of an act

magical effect – one step towards or unit of creation, change, or preservation

magical objective – resolution or endpoint within magical working, end of one phase or step within greater session of work

magical goal – the endpoint or fulfillment of magic within the context of magical work; for esoteric magic can be the final resolution; in practical magic the completion of one part of the work being done towards the magical desire

magical desire – the ultimate purpose of the magical working, i.e. what the user wants to have, do, be, or see happen in the world or within the self

I will always use the words above as defined here to maintain consistent dialog across channels. The utter lack of uniform, coherent language across magical instruction in content is appalling; basically what uniformity exists is tied to terms and definitions from the 19th century with a handful of 20th centuries catch-ons. Maybe together we can set some new standards along these lines.

Hierarchy of Magical Work and Aligned Targets

The table below shows how each working part relates to a specific outcome.  

Fundamental Movement or Intention	Directional, moving towards outcome or setting up next movement; transfer energy.
Magical Technique	Completes a task or creates a magical effect.
Magical Act	Complete magical objective.
Magical Operation	Fulfills magical desire or achieves magical goal.