Persuasions of the Witch's Craft by T. M. Luhrmann

Author:T. M. Luhrmann [Luhrmann, T. M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Religion, History, Spirituality
ISBN: 9780330329460
Google: TcpVPwAACAAJ
Barnesnoble:
Goodreads: 62118
Publisher: Harvard
Published: 1989-03-01T00:00:00+00:00

VISUALIZATION

The second technique central to the magical practice is ‘creative visualization’ (their term), ‘seeing’ vivid mental images. Like the meditation, visualization is explicitly part of the magical technology, the means by which the magic works. The mental image is often thought to be the link between the subtle, ethereal energies of magical ritual and the physical world, so that the skill in ‘bringing the power through’ depends directly on the ability to visualize. When magicians learn how to visualize, they understand – or at least, their concepts allow them to understand – themselves to be learning to use the mechanism which makes the magic work. Every training manual emphasizes the need for imaging proficiency. There are even manuals devoted exclusively to its cultivation.27 Most courses have daily imaginative exercises to improve concentration and detail.

It is essential to understand that visualization is a skill. Individuals vary widely in their imaging ability, their ability to ‘see’ the image clearly. Indeed, the degree of variation probably fuels the active philosophical debate over the felicity of the term, ‘mental image’. Mental images clearly do not have position, opacity, and the sorts of things commonly associated with ‘images’. But the term is a useful metaphor because many people do feel as if they experience dream-like images when conscious, and in fact may behave as if they scanned those images (mentally ‘rotating’ them) for information. Practice can improve this mental-imaging ability: pictures become clearer, more detailed, more picture-like.28

Magicians quite specifically and systematically train this ability. Both of the correspondence courses I took began the training by having me look at my room, and then shut my eyes and replicate the surroundings in my imagination. The next step, for one of the courses, was to take a ‘walk’ in a place I knew well, and then one in an imaginary land. Then I was instructed to imagine a magical ‘temple’, a room to which I would imagine myself to travel each time I meditated. Over the next four months, during my daily practice, that imagined room became progressively more vivid, and I could ‘remember’ it more clearly each time I returned.

The exercise par excellence for visualization is a ‘pathworking’. This is a guided fantasy, a story read slowly to allow a deeply relaxed audience to picture its images as they sit, eyes shut, in the darkness. This short example comes from one of the central texts in feminist witchcraft.

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