Thoughts on Adapting Practices

I love just about every genre of music, and one of the things that I love to pieces is covers—I absolutely love a good cover song! With cover songs, there is a continuum of how close to how far away the cover is from the original. The quality of a cover is more than the sum of its parts; if a cover is 60% like the source, 40% like the covering artist, the cover can transcend both the original artist and the covering artist through the synergy between the original material and the artist's craftsmanship.

At times, the cover is so good, so powerful that it stands completely on its own and transcends the original work (e.g., Bob Dylan's "All Along the Watchtower" as covered by Jimi Hendrix). New covers sometimes become less about the original and more about the cover that transcended the original.

This same principle can apply to the practice of magic. When adapting practices from one magical tradition to another, there is a continuum of how close to how far away the adapted ritual is from the original. By crafting a ritual that blends elements from different traditions, the practitioner can create a unique practice that transcends the individual traditions from which it was adapted. This type of syncretism can lead to a deeper understanding and appreciation of the different magical traditions involved in the marriage, while also allowing for greater flexibility and personalization in the practice of magic.

What I aim to do here is to explore the motivations for adapting rites and rituals from one practice to another, as well as the virtues, the pitfalls, and the potential rewards one gets along the way.

But before we get started, we need to delve into some definitions.

Definitions for along the way

Rites and Rituals

Since time immemorial, people have wanted actionable steps that they can perform to bring about X or Y result. Nowadays, the key difference in common parlance between magical and non-magical recipes is whether or not the relationship between the steps and the result is obvious. These recipes are primarily called rituals.

The word "ritual" gets thrown around a lot, especially in eclectic Wiccan or neo-pagan groups; it's not uncommon to hear someone asking for a ritual to help with getting a job, a cord-cutting ritual (i.e., a ritual to help someone "cut ties" with someone or something), a ritual to help someone recover from an illness because they're desperate, or almost anything else you can imagine.

With a lot of folk magic or eclectic witchcraft rituals, symbols get substituted based on the needs of the practitioner; adaptation is a necessity because circumstances are never identical. If a witch named Greg were doing a cord-cutting ritual to sever ties with someone who did him wrong, he would want to insert items and symbols representative of the wrong-doer at the other end of the cord.

That said, the adaptations presented on this site are intended to be performed exactly as is, rote, every time.

When someone refers to the Lesser Ritual of the Pentagram/Hexagram, they are referring to the unique set of steps taken to complete the ritual. While the effects are important and relevant, Lesser Ritual of the Pentagram/Hexagram are akin to rites of passage; by performing the ritual, we are transformed, bit by bit.

Consider the Pentagram ritual's name: Lesser Banishing/Invoking Ritual of the Pentagram. Ignore the word "lesser" for now. We know it either banishes or invokes, but what does it banish or invoke? Either: it banishes/invokes the Pentagram, we are banishing/invoking on behalf of the Pentagram, or, what I think is more likely, it invokes the Pentagram, which in turn is itself then doing the invoking/banishing (rewritten, the ritual's name could be: The Pentagram's Lesser Banishing/Invoking Ritual).

If you take the principles from here and apply them to what I've said above, you'll see where I'm coming from.

Correspondences and carryover

There was a meme that floated around for a while that I thought was brilliant. Paraphrased, it went something like this: "The reason almost all girls go through a witch phase is because it's [one of the] only feminine archetypes where the woman does not get her power from a man." They are the source of their own power—which is a beautiful thing.

One of the main reasons people engage in magic is to gain agency where they had none before. For mundane things in our reality, we act in mundane ways; for exceptional things that seem beyond our control, we engage in magic. To have influence over things normally outside of our control, we interact with things within our control.

This is where correspondences come in.

A correspondence is one thing standing for another. It should be noted, however, that even though one thing can be substituted for another thing for the purposes of ritual, there are nuances in meaning that each of them has. Rather than thinking of correspondences as a chain, think of them as nodes that stretch out to other related concepts. The more correspondences you develop, the greater your web of associations and magical vocabulary, and the greater your associations and vocabulary, the more ways to express and bring things into alignment with your Will.

Traditions and their egregores (but also cultural exchange, appropriation, and syncretism!)

When performing Lesser Ritual of the Pentagram/Hexagram in the standard fashion, we are drawing from a hundred-and-change year old tradition that has been inspired by many, many others before it. Old places, old things, old stories, old actions have a character unto themselves. By engaging with them, the character can empower us and our actions.

The older and more engaged the character, the more powerful it is—at least, so goes my suspicion; your mileage may vary.

We rarely start with a tradition to pull from, particularly in the USA. If we want to lean into something old, it probably wasn't ours to begin with—but is it a problem if it wasn't ours to begin with?

It depends. 🤷

One thing that can happen is cultural exchange, which is when we draw and learn from a living culture where at least one member is openly sharing and giving out its practices. We can also drawn and learn from dead cultures, which can either resemble grave-robbing or venerating people of the past. Another is syncretism, where one cultural idea is absorbed into another culture's idea and the two become something of an amalgam (consider: Minerva and Athena are, contrary to popular opinion, not identical (although they are similar); Menrva (opens in a new tab) existed prior to Athena's import to Rome, and the two were ultimately fused into Minerva). Practices also split and diverge to the point where, even sharing the same name, they no longer wholly resemble each other (compare Kabbalah and Qabalah, where the latter split from the former as late as the Renaissance and developed independently into its own discrete system; or for something less spicy, consider Arabic versus European Geomancy, which have their own separate approaches to divination, even though European Geomancy has its roots in Arabic Geomancy).

The above are largely fine. The problem is when engaging in cultural appropriation, or cultural colonialism as it was originally called, which occurs when a target culture is commodified and exploited within the context of the home culture. To exploit something is to benefit from something while harming it in the process.

Given that for most of us our practice is relatively private and non-professional, we do not make money from it; the practice is not a commodity we benefit from under traditional capitalist activities. Even so, there is no question we benefit from learning and practicing rituals of another culture's tradition—but are we harming the practice?

This is something that you have to answer for yourself because, at the end of the day, you can only sleep for yourself at night; if you keep completely silent about your personal practice, no one can take you to task for what they deem unethical behavior. Even if you share your practice and its experiences with others and people judge you, people of a given practice are not a monolith and are unlikely to all judge you the same way—so that's not the most effective way of determining whether you can engage in a given practice, let alone whether your actions are harming the practice.

My two cents: approach the tradition as an outsider and study it enough so that you can get a taste of the character of the practice. As you get to know the character of the practice, you will get a sense of how to honor it, how to do right by it, what will offend it, what will sadden it, what will anger it. Once you can do that, you will know how to make the practice your ally versus your enemy, and it will accept you as one of its own.

There are some things that will always be closed to you—accept that and be okay with that. For instance, with ancestor worship and magic, you generally want to use your own ancestors, not someone else's; as a white American, it would be a cardinal sin for me to invoke and command the ancestors of African Americans for what should be obvious reasons—so I don't do that.

Adapting rituals and synthesizing practices

If we change a practice, we are changing part of its character and its personality; we lose some of its strength, ideally substituting the strength of another practice in its place. Sometimes the synthesis is harmonious, other times less so. Sometimes crucial parts of a practice's character are lost, sometimes only superficial details are replaced. Sometimes the result resonates deeply with anyone who sees it, other times the new practice is too idiosyncratic for anyone but the author to engage in. This is all case by case.

But why change things when there are so many amazing characters available to us already, all of which are incredibly powerful?

The best way to explain is indirectly; below you'll find my reasons for the Enochian versions of rituals present on this website.

This here Enochiana

Here are a few (but not all possible) reasons:

1. To practice ritual creation (i.e., it's an intellectual exercise).
2. To get away from elements in one tradition in favor of those found in another tradition.
3. To craft something custom that resonates deeply with the practitioner.

(1) is worth doing for personal development and growth as a spiritual practitioner, but there isn't much else to say about it.

(2) and (3) account for a lot of why rituals are adapted, by my reckoning, and they often go hand-in-hand. For instance, if someone finds a binding ritual that involves invoking Arachne where everything but the Arachne part is excellent, they might find better success with Anansi if the character of Anansi feels more like their ally than Arachne. The character of the ritual and its effect take on a different personality than they originally had because of the substitution, but the practitioner might find it suits them and their design better.

Likewise, I decided to alter the practices on this site from their original forms because of a combination of (2) and (3). For me, the Judeo-Christian elements in the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn feel weirdly inaccessible to me, or at least give me feelings of discomfort and unease. My own sense of the character of the Judeo-Christian God is like that of the Gnostic demiurge: blind to their own nature—something like a spirit conflated with divinity itself, so much so that it becomes divinity itself (except... not quite). In its arrogance, it sees itself as the be-all-end-all without having any of the dignity or maturity of the ineffable.

But then, why not avail myself of one of the already written Hellenistic or Norse or Egyptian versions of the rituals, like Regardie's or Delores Canon's Egyptian Pentagram Ritual variations? And if one of my issues is the character of God, why Enochian versions that presumably use the same figure?

That's the thing: for me, based on my workings and experiences (note: this is all Unverified Personal Gnosis), the Enochian IAD, who is syncretized and quasi-synonymous with the Judeo-Christian God, has neither ignorance nor arrogance of the Judeo-Christian God; I perceive IAD as much more aware of what they are, their nature, their relation to the cosmos and divinity. Like the angels, the Enochian IAD is the Christian God just as the Enochian angels are Christian angels—but they transcend that and have only become as such because that is how we have learned their existence.

To put it another way: we put a filter of our own understanding onto gods and goddesses and spirits. Sometimes things make it through the filter that are wholly unique to them, but the filter is still there and shapes them. Sometimes, it’s the humanity’s collective mind that informs the entity—which is how the Judeo-Christian-Islamic God winds up in its state of being quasi-synonymous with divinity itself while remaining as a spirit (by my reckoning). So, Enochian angels are Christian in as much as that’s the filter through which people understand them, but they transcend that. Likewise, the Enochian IAD is effectively syncretized with the Christian God, but also transcends and exists apart from that.

As for why Enochian as opposed to any other flavor of practice? The material is fascinating to me, and it strangely resonates—it is something that feels like it is (non-exclusively) for me.

I also didn't care for the Enochian versions I found scattered about the Internet.

So yes: I have lost the character present in the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn rituals, but I preserved their spirit as much as I could during their synthesis with the Enochian material. In a sense, there are three characters behind these rituals: that of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, of the Enochian material, and myself—and by engaging in this practice, I honor all three.