We have to learn how to put our power into the service of something greater than ourselves.

To become a magician we have to become a gateway for significant (spiritual, elemental, celestial, chthonic, you name it) power.

Objectivity – the deliberate elimination of every subjective aspect of an experience – has become an unquestioned and seemingly universal standard in every field of research. While objectivity is certainly necessary in, for instance, medicine and some fields of physics, it causes real problems when it is applied to all modes of human enquiry.

The idea is this: that from the moment of birth until we leave our mortal bodies, a good being is assigned to us, watching over and supporting all our efforts to draw down the divine into matter and so make matter sublime.

This particular kind of extended ritual practice is taught as part of the curriculum of the magical training organization IMBOLC. This organization was founded in 1992 by Roland Gabler in Kempten, Germany, as an independent study institute, and it offers an in-depth magical training for the solitary practitioner in all aspects of Western

swear to interpret every phenomenon as a particular dealing of God with my soul.34 This is strikingly similar to Socrates’ guidance on how to achieve communion with one’s daimonion or divine mentor: to comprehend the gods in the deeds they perform in the world that surrounds us rather than waiting until they reveal themselves.

What roles do the other planets play in this process? If Saturn is the guardian of the alchemical stages of life, then what functions do the other planets have?

The unexamined life is not worth living. – Socrates

HE ORIGINAL technical meaning and the etymological origin of the Greek δαίμων (daimon) is lost in the darkness of ancient history. Our understanding of the word, ‘a lowly spiritual being of a preponderantly dangerous and evil character’17 is strongly influenced by the works of Plato and Xenocrates, which were composed between 396 – 313 BCE. The