Descriptions:
Video Description
A book is not a dead object. It is a spell waiting to be cast again, and Lyam Christopher would like to restore that old sense of reading as a magical act. He points to the words sitting silent on a shelf, pages full of stories and meaning that can be drawn out again and again by the mind that opens them. Reading used to be understood this way, and in the age of endless scrolling, recovering that feeling is its own kind of initiation.
The challenge he names is wonderfully honest. Digital screens imagine everything for us, which is easy and comfortingly in our control. A page of plain words asks more, it asks us to build the scenes ourselves, and that small effort is exactly where the magic hides. The hardest part, he says, is simply beginning. Pass the hump, put the phone aside, and reading starts to run on its own, just as a writer with a block often finds the words once the first sentence is down.
The result is more than information. Good writing can brush against a new level of awareness and leave us longing to reach it, especially when we learn to notice how a story does its work. He suggests joining that study to a real ceremonial path, a blend of mythology, literary craft, and the required reading found in Kabbalah, Magic & the Great Work of Self Transformation. In that practice, the ordinary page begins to glow again, not from a screen, but from the imagination talking back.
Full Video Transcript
All right, in this video, we are talking about reading as a magical act, relearning how to read in the digital age, because the way we tend to read nowadays is less effective than it used to be.
um reading it used to be considered a somewhat magical act you’ve got these words on the page
and they get stored on the shelf and then somebody can just go to them and then extract the stories
from them again through code right and so uh it’s very helpful to restore the magic to it and i
I think a lot of people who watch this channel will tend to say that I am making magic merely
psychology, you know, or I’m merely pointing out scientific things.
I’m not really pointing out magical things.
I think that misses the point.
The point is to basically restore the word magic to the things that have always been
magical, that have been usurped by the scientists and the scholars, you know, who now want to
claim that it’s something else.
Okay, so many of the things that we think are quite ordinary are magical, and I think many of you are discovering that, you know, this channel has a tendency to restore some enchantment back to the world, or at least I would hope so.
So can initiation into the depths of magic happen just through reading?
So many people who write occult books or who give occult lectures are very fond of saying that,
well, you can’t get it from a book. You got to get it from me. I’m a teacher, right?
You got to get it from somebody who’s a qualified teacher. Well, maybe they’re protecting their
business so you can pay them temple dues and then you have to go through them in order to get
the instruction okay uh to to say that you can initiate that you can’t initiate yourself through
reading can be a bit suspect okay i mean granted many people try to become you know wiser and
enlightened uh and discover the hidden meaning in the depths of the universe through reading
and they don’t succeed no doubt okay or and of course what happens is they get into reading and
then they go down these paths of reading that are like you know thriller mysteries or comedy or
something like that you know and uh they allow themselves to become distracted by same the same
stuff that distracts them in their daily waking worlds uh so let’s propose for a moment that
self-initiation can happen through reading if it can then reading needs to be restored to a magical
act and the way that we do it might need to change and if we are to suppose that it’s possible to
initiate yourself through reading then we have to confront one of the problems of the modern age
especially now and that is the information bias okay so to believe that learning is merely the
act of acquiring information now anybody who works in education and anybody who’s been through
education will know that’s not true, that learning is a transformational process. It involves
changing. It’s kind of an initiation process. And yet we can’t seem to break out of the perception
that learning is simply a matter of acquiring information and downloading it into our head
right off of the screen, right? Or just right off of the page. The information flies off
off of the page into my head. I now know it. I can even recite it. And therefore, I have learned.
So something else has to happen for true learning to happen. Learning is a transformational process.
And if we want to restore that transformation to the learning process, we have to see beyond
the information bias. Okay. Now in the modern age, the habit of searching the internet and
then scanning for something some piece of information it’s made this has made it even
worse because now we think oh I’m looking for something oh I found the fact I’m looking for
thank you very much it’s a street address or something like that or a review of a business and
suddenly we’re off and running I got what I needed so now the our habit with reading is to simply
regard it as that I am looking for information I found it I’m retrieving it I’m storing it in my
brain and now i go off and do something okay it merely becomes an act of mind and matter and
that’s it there’s nothing else apparently going on so if we want to restore the magic of reading
there are some things available to us already that aren’t necessarily occult in nature they’re
right out there in the uh in the religious world and in the college world uh lectio divina i should
to put that in italics because it’s latin lectio divina means divine reading it’s a it’s a way of
reading the bible uh that can extract divine messages from god out of it it’s a way of reading
the bible that allows you to communicate with god or perhaps even the saints okay sounds a bit
heretical actually because when you look at when you look lectio divina up online and and gets
instructions and how to do it uh it kind of is uh enticing you to try to establish
communication with god directly without going through your priest or without going through
the church which which used to be considered heretical okay which makes it much more
interesting doesn’t it when it becomes heretical and then in the college world we have something
called close reading usually close reading involves reading something first like you
would normally to absorb the effect of it and then reading it again very closely because you’re
looking for something you’re extracting various bits from it and you you might already have an
idea of what you’re looking for because you’ve read it once and you think you know what’s going
on and so you go back and you’re looking for certain things okay and close reading has a
number of techniques uh in it as well okay and you know requires some training to do because
there’s rhetorical analysis there’s literary analysis these these are techniques that we
learn in the in the college world maybe a little bit in high school so these are things are in
uh invaluable to the magician as well to the occultist these kinds of reading uh and especially
the kind you would learn in college okay the interesting thing is that the many of the things
that we have available to us as magicians we have learned in school but these things these
various skills have been subverted towards other objectives in the modern world okay and as
magicians we reclaim them and harness them towards the process of enlightenment and self-empowerment
things like that okay it’s kind of an interesting idea too because many of the things that i present
on this channel are quite ordinary i’m simply repurposing them towards a tantric path or towards
a path of western tantra or western uh initiation in the system of the golden dawn or in hermetic
hermetic magic right theurgy so before we look at how to do reading in a magical way how to read
like a sorcerer right we need to restore something to our outlook okay the modern
human being tends to look at the world in terms of spirit and matter only okay or mind and body
there’s talk about the mind body split split or with the mind body connection right and so when
we when this is what causes the problem with the information bias simply all i need is the
the information that’s encoded and if i can download into my head verbatim now i know it
and it’s stored in my material memory banks and i go off and do physical things with that
knowledge and i get lots of reward in terms of paychecks and things like that i go get more
knowledge uh downloaded into my brain and then i use that knowledge to get physical things again
the entire world of the soul is left out of it okay so when i say spirit you could say mind
okay and body is uh matter and physical things right the soul is the level of the imagination
okay and in the modern world uh one of the mental illnesses that we suffer from is that we believe
that imagination is not real it’s not real that was merely imaginary okay in magic something
imaginary is not really imaginary. It’d be better to refer to it as imaginal. It’s imaginal. It
exists in the imagination. That dream you had last night, well, that didn’t really happen. It was just
a dream, right? Of course it happened. Was it real? Yes. As a dream, it was real. Is the wizard
Gandalf a real person? No, he’s not an actual person. Is he real? Yes, he is, as a fictional
character. He is quite real, okay? Is he powerful as a fictional character? Yes, he has changed many
people’s lives, and he continues to do so. The imagination has its own level of reality. When
we acknowledge this, then we know what to do, or we begin to know what to do, when we attempt to
restore reading back to the way it was or back to the way it should be as a transformational
process of initiation. So reading can’t even become a discipline. And of course, as many of
you are discovering, when you take up a discipline or a curriculum, such as you will find in the
Kabbalah magic book, there’s some required reading. It’s kind of like being in school,
right? It’s a school of magic, right? And there’s reading required. Uh-oh. And of course, you have
to get it done before you can move on to the next grade and you have to establish a discipline like
well i will read several pages every night at least something like that right or every morning
okay and as we attempt to do this as we attempt to establish a reading discipline to get some
reading done every day we encounter reader’s block you may have heard of writer’s block
there are barriers that keep people from sitting down to write writing can be a painful process
Okay. And reading can be similar. It’s not as difficult as writer’s block, but it is
difficult, especially when we have modern technology that is constantly pulling us away
from the act of true reading. Surfing Instagram is not the kind of reading that I’m trying to
restore to you here. Okay. We’re scrolling through YouTubes. So we’re watching YouTube
videos where everything is kind of imagined for you okay the idea is that when you sit down to
read that you enter imagination and there are reasons there’s a reason why you have books and
books and books lining the shelves of the occult bookstore that have no pictures in them just words
and maybe a few diagrams because it’s not up to the author to fully imagine things for you
It’s up to you. And that’s where the magic is. Okay. So if you read a book and go through that
as a transformational process, it’s deeply ingrained because you had to imagine it very
much on your own terms as best you could. Okay. If you watch a movie, it’s all been imagined for
you. It still can be powerful, very transformational, but there’s a difference. Okay. It’s
out there it hasn’t really sunk in because it hasn’t required you to make something out of it
okay so the very act of you participating in the imaginary imaginal process of the author’s writing
this is what begins to make it a magical transformational thing for you okay because
you are now involved okay i’m not saying that going to see a movie isn’t magical that is too
definitely i’m watching a very powerful drama right now actually on tv um so um the key to
restoring uh reading to its magical nature again is your ability to enter imagination okay and we
have something called uh basically reader’s block or just getting over the hump okay so what you’ll
find is you’ll sit down to read let’s say in the evening or or in the morning or your designated
time to read, and you reach for your smartphone and start scrolling through something like
Instagram or YouTube or something like that, right? Because it’s so much easier to have things
imagined for you. Plus, you’re in control, sort of, right? And there’s something about just looking
at words on the page that requires more energy and more participation, okay? And there’s something
in us that doesn’t really want to muster that energy or do that creative participation. This
is the hump to get over the interesting thing is though um you you you resist the temptation you
put the phone away you pick up the book nothing but words right and you begin to read and then
suddenly you’re in and it’s like wow i’m off i’m off and running now and this is oh this is really
rewarding this this is good now now i’m starting to unpack things and now the process is going
why was it so difficult to start wow the only the main challenge of sitting down to read every day
is simply starting okay same thing goes for writer’s block writer’s block once you sit down
to write if you get going then suddenly very often you can’t stop okay and reading is even a better
example of that okay so if you have trouble sitting down to read you might want to remind
yourself that just getting over that hump or getting over the threshold and into the imagination
that’s the only real challenge there and you can you might even see that there’s that threshold of
plunging into the imagination, into the imaginal world, right? And what is it that’s keeping you
from doing that? There’s almost like a dweller on the threshold, isn’t there? Who’s kind of a
guardian. So even in the process of reading, there’s a guardian at the gate already keeping
you out of that transformational process. And there’s something required of you to bypass that
guardian some extra energy some kind of commitment some kind of participation okay a level of
awareness and willingness to create and to to play along yeah okay so that’s not enough though i don’t
think and so um what i want to point out to you then is uh when the when you’re diving into
imagination there are actually three levels of it at least three levels of imagination okay and if
you are aware of what level of imagination you’re functioning at it can help you dive in and start
playing with it in a way that’s going to really be now transformative hopefully okay so let’s dive
into the different levels of imagination and you can even look at this and you could say well
which levels am i really good at here okay all right let’s say you’re reading something um well
you’re reading a book. Okay. And so it’s as if the author is standing at a podium or something
like that and reading to the audience and you are in the audience. Okay. So you, when you begin to
pluck the words off the page or sound them out, you are imagining the author speaking. Okay.
Because you’re decoding phonetic symbols on the page. And in order to move deeper into the
imagination, you first have to hear the author’s voice in your head, okay? Reading is an auditory
process. One of the mistakes we make is that we think we can just go straight to the story.
We can go straight to what the information is telling us. We can’t. There’s the first level
of imagination is actually hearing the voice, hearing the voice of the author, okay? And if
reading is a challenge for you, sometimes it’s because you’re not doing that and you need to
slow down, and then hear this person talking. In fact, what do they sound like? Do they sound
like a lecturer at a podium? Do they sound like they’re sitting down by the campfire telling a
ghost story? Do they sound conspiratorial, like a friend who’s tapped you on the shoulder?
What’s the tone? What do they sound like? And of course, if you have trouble imagining the
author’s voice, you can read it out loud as them to try to mimic what they might sound like.
uh and if you’re in an environment where uh you have to be quiet um you can just mouth the words
that will help you imagine what’s being said as well okay but of course it pays to sort of work
the imagination like a muscle to get better and better at imagining that voice okay level two of
imagination as you can see the audience not only is listening to the person speak okay so you’re
not only imagining that you’re listening to the person speak at the podium you are now beginning
to imagine what that person is describing level two so what they are literally describing is some
kind of story let’s say right here it’s a story of perseus cutting off medusa’s head and so we’re
we are literally visualizing what the author is describing the story okay as it comes out okay
and this is where it starts to become very much like astral projection you pretty much are now
in the story and these scenes are unfolding before your eyes and the action’s happening
and you imagine what it feels like to be these characters etc etc right and then um then there’s
level three level three is where you’re capable of analyzing the story or whatever it is that’s
being presented into its parts okay you’re able to diagram it in various ways many different ways
uh to figure out how it works okay so you might even say if somebody is um doing a ritual or
casting a spell um then uh they there’s the incantation part of it but then there’s a
visualization of what they’re describing which is pretty wild right but then also there’s the
methodology and the rhythm of it and the moving from scene to scene of it that has its um sequential
formula that brings you through a process an initiation process a transformation process
okay you can’t just have somebody cutting off a deuce’s head and walking away no there’s a
whole story there and the story itself is capable of bringing about profound transformation and of
course in order to experience this it helps to then learn how to function on all three levels
okay for many of us i think it involves remembering that reading is a process of
auditory imagination so we imagine the author speaking we have to start doing that again
that means slowing down and allowing that voice to come out and speak as it wants to as it as it
suggests it sound it sounds okay and then of course diving into imagination and taking time
even even to put the book down and fully visualize what was just described then then look again and
keep going fully processing i don’t know i say processing fully visualizing and fully immersing
yourself in that imagery as it unfolds okay what does it feel like to be these people in the story
ouch and then of course um then to uh experience the the structure of the story as well the rhythm
and the flow the incantational quality of it the transformational beginning to end process
the uh in invocation aspects of what themes are being called in to now work their magic upon me
as i experience all the stuff happening in the story very magical okay all right so in order to
appreciate how this works it really would be very helpful for all students of magic to take a course
in literature maybe take two courses in literature very easy to do you can do it online for free
they’re like they’re websites like Coursera where you can take courses in this for free
and uh I learned the various devices that are used in literature and this is lo and behold
these are magical things symbolism symbols magical symbols metaphors foreshadowing okay
foreshadowing is like divination it’s like predicting the future reading the future
through signs and portents foreshadowing okay uh similes metaphors okay um of course drama
suspense these are all magical things and they have a transformational um impact on you they
you can experience things in imagination which can bring you to a higher level of awareness
and the nice thing about doing that in your reading is you can experience them in the
the imagination without having to suffer terribly like the people in the story are suffering you can
experience that cathartically and so the nice thing is what you begin to learn is that oh my gosh
i can process my karma in the imagination i don’t have to wait for it to come out into the physical
world and beat me over the head and give me a harsh life i can process it internally before it
reaches outward manifestation to give me hell this is true magic okay and many people sort of
instinctively know this and that’s why they read high quality literature so that they can process
all this this really dark scary stuff um so that it doesn’t come out into their lives and wreak
havoc okay to some degree so um and that’s what magic largely is too you learn to purify a lot of
this karma before it can manifest and you begin to sort of lead a charmed life okay no guarantees
we still face challenges in life but you might notice that people who are really truly doing
magic they have it pretty easy okay if and if they’re not doing magic correctly um they get
beaten up by life pretty badly okay because magic will prod things out to be dealt with and if you
don’t deal with them properly on the imagination then they’ll come out into the manifest into
manifestation and then trouble you there okay so what that’s one of the reasons magic has a bad
reputation because if you don’t do it right it does cause bad things to happen one of the things
about the lesser banishing ritual the pentagram as many of you are discovering is that it inflates
the ego that’s what it does it’s not an unfortunate thing oh my god like so many people are getting
ego inflated by magic it’s like lesser banishing ritual the pentagram inflates egos that’s what it
does it prods our demons to the surface to trouble us some more but they trouble us really in the
realm of imagination where we can deal with them before they become major hassles in our life okay
if we fail to do that then all that’s happening is that we become affronted by them offended by
them and we get puffed up against everything around us okay that’s how kind of how it works
okay um and you can see that um the ability to confront various imaginal entities like that
um that’s what happens when we read especially when we read super high quality literature
okay so we it’s a process known as catharsis we are purifying the soul making it clearer so we
can live more magically and of course literary devices that we learn all those things like
similes metaphors foreshadowing those kinds of things personification anthropomorphism
of course there are rhetorical devices which are pretty much the same but of course rhetorical
devices apply to non-fiction more i guess and rhetorical devices also apply to the spoken word
auditorily like during speeches okay and so you can analyze what you’re reading or what you’re
hearing in terms of the rhetorical devices that people use like if you’re listening to
martin luther king’s i have a dream speech you could analyze that not only for the content and
the techniques used in the written speech you could also analyze it for the vocal inflections
and the power of the voice how the voice is used to the cadence of it okay and the rising and the
following how does it work to stir the audience why should we do literary analysis why should
we learn that isn’t it enough to just go through and read these stories well if you want to be a
magician you have to learn how magic works okay so you got to learn all these little tricks that
writers use and writers and speakers use okay uh in order to um stir the audience and change the
world this is magic okay the ability to speak in an incantational sort of way to change people’s
lives your own life mostly why would we want to learn literary analysis or rhetorical analysis
okay there are two reasons so that you can learn how to do it too so you read this great work of
literature and and you say wow that’s powerful so you analyze it to figure out how it works and
then you figure out oh i can do that too now that i see the pieces that are being so effectively
utilized i can see the literary literary devices that are being used i could do that yeah now that
i see how it works and uh also for rhetorical analysis same thing so you can see how the
various rhetorical tricks work when somebody’s giving a very stirring speech okay or has written
a very powerful essay how is it that that essay is so powerful you learn the tricks that the authors
used to achieve those effects okay and some of these tricks are also underhanded in terms of
propaganda fallacies you also learn them just to see how people can be tricked into believing
something that isn’t true you learn how propaganda works okay when you learn how to use words and
speaking as a form of mind control okay but of course the second reason why we learn literary
analysis and rhetorical analysis is so that that sort of mind control will not work on us we will
become immune to it so there are two reasons to do literary analysis and rhetorical analysis is
so that we can do it too it’s almost like casting spells on people right but also so that we become
immune to it we will notice when somebody’s using the same tricks on us okay now that might take a
little bit of the magic out of what they do to us but we still have a choice as to whether we fall
under the spell of that person we can still say just play along and go wow this is yeah this is
awesome like so um okay so to be a good magician involves learning what many of you have probably
thought to be quite ordinary mundane knowledge what’s a symbol what’s a metaphor what is
foreshadowing okay what is imagery and how is it being used effectively these are essentially what
magic is. And what you’ll find is that in the great works of literature, there are many leveling
up experiences presented. Not many people who do literary analysis recognize them. You have to be
more of a magician to see it, or more of a sorcerer or a shaman. But you’ll notice that
many characters face opportunities to level up, like in other words, to be transformed and emerge
in a new level of understanding and you know if very often they succeed and we see how they did it
but they also fail and we also learn why they failed how they failed what was what was the
problem that’s also a lesson okay uh so there are many um and yeah you guys might want to contact
me too um in the comments and you you might say well which literature should i read to
and to see some of these opportunities to level up okay in other words in the great works of
literature there are many initiatory experiences presented that the protagonist may or may not
succeed at passing to emerge on a new level of consciousness okay does this render magic
ordinary and just bring it down to the level of literature no it restores literature to the level
of magic because it has always been magical. Okay. And many things out in the world are quite
magical when you learn how to repurpose them towards self-initiation. And so in this regard,
yes, it is possible to initiate yourself via reading alone without doing fancy rituals and
dressing up and using daggers and magic wands and cups, right? Yes, it’s possible. And it has
happened will you succeed if you try to do that probably not but of course most people will not
succeed even when they do all the fancy rituals and stuff like that too because they um uh it
requires um expertise and guidance usually can you succeed without a teacher yes you can okay
with the kabbalah magic work most people will probably not succeed in doing it there is
possibility of that um the most important thing is to stick to the work just as it’s described
um if you want to make changes to it you can contact me and i might be able to help but i’m
not going to be your you know teacher holding your hand every step of the way so yes i already
answered this question can initiation happen through books yes but it is unlikely what you
will catch from when if you see you uh if you read really high quality literature let’s say
or really high quality um essays um you’ll feel that brush with something like an opportunity to
to emerge at a new level at a new level of awareness you’ll you’ll you’ll catch a brush
with it like it passed you by and it’s like what was that but it’ll leave you pretty much where
you are and make might make you feel bereft like it’s like i i know what that is i’m going to go
after it and maybe someday i’ll get it you know someday i’ll get to that new level okay
But of course, if you learn how to do rhetorical analysis and literary analysis, you can begin to see what’s happening better and better.
And of course, doing work with theurgy or ceremonial magic, you’re really directly hardcore working with this type of imagery in a formulaic way.
okay uh what i recommend is that what you do ceremonial magic a curriculum in ceremonial magic
and study mythology and literature and rhetorical analysis as part of your work all right hope
that’s clear i think this was a shorter video than they usually are thank god right all right
so until next time
Source: Lyam Christopher