Book Review - Visual Magick
This weekend I finished reading Visual Magick, by Jan Fries, and I had enough thoughts about it that I thought I’d do a review, of sorts. This is an interesting one to review because one thing that became very clear while reading the book is that it’s not really “for me.” But that being said, I still came away from it with a lot of stuff that I found helpful and valuable, even if there was plenty of other stuff that made me roll my eyes or wince.
The book provides an engaging overview of things like sigil creation, automatic drawing, and generally using the imagination as a tool to interact with things outside normal human perception. It also clearly comes from a ‘magic’ perspective rather than a ‘mystic’ one; all the books recommended alongside it involved spell theory, chaos magic, and so on. This is all actually exactly what I was looking for in a book right now. My preference toward magical work tends to be highly visual and symbolic, using art and image to the best of own ability. As I try to get back involved in the more ‘effects-based magic’ side of thing, I was looking for something that would deal in practicalities.
In that sense, the book fit the bill: It dived in almost head-spinningly quickly into the theory behind sigil-creation, outlining the usual Austin Osman Spare method and then delving deeper into both the thinking behind it, and alternatives to it. From there, the topics expanded out with abandon. It included some wonderfully direct and practical advice on how to loosen up one’s drawing-hand to make it easier to do the sort of “inspired” (if not actually “automatic”) physical work that works well for art-as-ritual. It described a multi-sensory mindfulness practice as a means for trance induction and visualization. It talked about taking walks in the forest, bringing back bits of plants that speak to you, and arranging them intuitively to make a “mandala” to connect better with spirits of the land. All of these are things that I’ve already adopted, or plan to.
Through all that, the reason I say the book really felt not-for-me comes down to the core philosophy, or at least the way the core philosophy is presented to the reader. While the book is subtitled “A Manual of Freestyle Shamanism,”* it seems like Fries has a tendency to go out of his way to avoid espousing an animistic worldview. There are certainly times when the author gets close to talking about gods and land spirits and all the other inhabitants of an animistic world, but he never lets the thought close without say “well they could also be aspects of your self.” He doesn’t really come down strongly on either side, which is part of what kept me going with the book, but all that made it ever more clear how the perspective was couched in the realm of things like modern hermeticism and chaos magic, at least when it came to the expected audience.
What’s funny (and in turns gratifying) is that Fries doesn’t seem to have much patience for some of the tendencies of the archetypical chaote or ceremonialist. There’s a number of rants in the book against the need to make a huge elaborate expensive ego-focussed production out of magical work, something that had me nodding along. But at the same time, he’s almost always talking in terms of ‘deep mind’ and ‘true will’ and things that, to me, still center the self rather than the spiritual ecosystem. It’s not to say that it felt selfish or solipsistic, but it did feel like it’s written largely for the sort of person whose first question with magic is “what’s in it for me” even if their perspective of “me” is cosmic and holistic.
If I were to give Fries the benefit of the doubt, I might suggest that his own inclinations are closer to the animistic (or at least the panpsychist), and that wording is more about playing to the expected audience, trying to meet them where they’re at. Indeed, I lost count of the times when it danced close to saying “hey what if we treated them all as real spirits” before once again pulling away. From my perspective, this is a bit befuddling, but then again I am specifically a person who abandoned that sort of belief-shifting chaos-magic perspective because it worked better for me to really put my belief and effort into deep relationships with the spiritworld.
In the closing pages, Fries says “No matter whether you agree or disagree with my ideas, this book will have done its work if it gives you the daring to construct unique new methods of magick to suit your own development and the evolution of the current.” In that regard, this book worked for me. It gave me things to think, and things to do, even if it frustrated me. It’s a rare magic book I read where I don’t mentally throw large fractions of it into the wastepaper bin. This was no different, but the reasons why I was trashing things were themselves an interesting cause for thought.
* I’d be remiss of course if I didn’t mention that using “shamanism” in a culturally-neutral magical text is a ding against a book by itself, and having it in a book that took pains to steer clear of animism-as-such makes that matter worse. I’m not at all giving a book a pass for this; in fact I’d probably be easier on it for all those related matters if it hadn’t use that word.