This project intends to create the ultimate magician's modern magical diary - a very potent and useful tool to any adept or initiate of the Occult Sciences in this eon.
Salomo Baal-Shem (of the Brotherhood of the Eternal Light) makes it clear:
The magical diary is one of the most important aids of practical occultism.
In spiritual work it is most important to keep records, because these records do not only preserve our experiences in a durable form that enables us to compare our memories at a later date with our real experiences, but keeping records is also an important part of processing the results of the meditation.
Very often realisations and experiences of meditation and ritual are kept in our consciousness only in a subtle and ephemeral form. Our consciousness can only keep these kinds of experiences in our memory to a limited extend.
Only by means of the process of recording our experiences and finding precise verbalisations for our experiences our realisations will gain a form comprehensible to our consciousness mind. For that reason keeping records is not just a necessary chore but a very important part of spiritual work itself.1 (By the way the same applies to eastern spiritual traditions - although in that case the written record is often replaced by a verbal record to the teacher.)
Without this translation process into our language, our conscious mind cannot assimilate these realisations because our mind thinks in the form of language.
Very often, the lack of this translation process is the reason why even after years of meditation some people only make very little spiritual progress (moreover, in some unfortunate cases the lack of recording even leads to self-deception regarding their own spiritual progress).
It is much better to do one single meditation with records rather than three without. Meditation - similar to dreams - takes place at a different level of consciousness. After waking up we tend to forget our dreams very fast unless we retrieve them to our wakeful consciousness. In the same way meditation realisations will slip our conscious mind unless they are "grounded" immediately. The meditation diary has a similar function as a dream diary which helps to make the level of dreams accessible to our wakeful consciousness.2 The real benefits of meditation are bestowed upon us only if we can integrate our realisations into our personality and into our life.
Especially for meditations the notes of our realisations should not be to elaborate in order focus the mind on learning to concentrate on the essentials (a maximum of 10 to 15 lines should be sufficient). For records of a ritual it is different - of which more later.
For students and adepts of Thelemic schools, it must be clear how much stress Aleister Crowley placed on the importance of the Magical Diary. Take for example this quotation from the wiki section about Crowley's life at the Abbey of Thelema:
Hirsig suspected Shumway's black magic foul play and what Crowley found when reading Shumway's magical diary (everybody had to keep one while at the abbey for reasons explained in Liber E) appalled him.
An elaborate stress of it's importance in Thelema, that I found at the Thelemistas!
Keeping a diary of one's spiritual exercises, experiences, and reflections is one of the most important and effective activities the aspiring magician can dedicate themselves to mastering.
Crowley was fond of describing his approach to magical training with the motto "the method of science, the aim of religion". This motto was used in every issue of his massive publication The Equinox. This idea of a scientific approach to mysticism and Magick is a key component of the Thelemic tradition, and is at the basis of the usefulness of the diary as well.
Try to write something every day, even if it's "did nothing", because if you get that down you haven't done nothing, you've at least worked on your diary. Crowley would not advance anyone past Probationer in A∴A∴ unless they could keep a complete diary for a year. He didn't care if what was attempted in it was completely successful, but they had to do something, and there had to be a record of it. Try holding yourself to the same standard and see what happens. I guarantee that whatever practices you are doing or experiences you are having, they will be enriched by writing them down. The self-reflection necessitated by the nature of the activity will act to deepen your spirituality.
And finally, In Aleister Crowley's own words, in Letter A (probably the very first he wrote to "the" student of the Occult), he says:
It is absolutely essential to begin a magical diary, and keep it up daily.
Interestingly, it's not just students of the occult that need (or keep) diaries or journals (as they are better known especially in scientific circles). I did find a couple of non-occult arguments for why it's important for one to keep a diary/journal of their practical work, theories, lessons, etc. Here are some of them...
At Planting Science, they say this concerning the importance of this concept:
A research journal, or a laboratory notebook, is a very detailed record of every aspect of a scientific investigation. Scientists keep records of their investigations for a number of reasons. A very practical reason is that if a detail is not written down, it is likely to be forgotten.
In order to publish in a scientific journal, a scientist must report the details of how the investigation was conducted: how was the experiment designed, what kinds of data were collected, how often were data collected. Scientists also give credit to other scientists for their ideas, and they need to note the source for the “facts” and ideas that are a part of their background research. So, a research journal serves as the primary document containing all the information needed to create a final paper or public presentation.
A research journal also serves as a personal reference document for a scientist to guide future investigations. All the notes of what worked well in an experiment, and what didn’t, are in one place for quick review. This organized system of tracking your research process saves you a lot of time and gives you a big jump on planning new research projects. In this case, a research journal is a tool for improving science.
In summary: a research journal is a tool for improving science, the same can be said of the magical diary for the Occult Sciences.
And then, in an article on the Self Directed Learning site, Maurice Gibbons tells us that:
You journal your way to success by copying the techniques used by thousands of successful people over the last few centuries in their journals.
He goes on to say:
Scientists are in the business of solving problems or answering questions to increase our knowledge about the world and how it works. They might see something or get an idea anywhere and they need somewhere to write it down and keep their findings organized.
He does stress the difference between a diary and a journal, but personally, I think the magical diary has elements of both:
The difference between a diary and a journal is that a diary is about what has happened to you and a journal is about ideas, plans and actions. The key is finding out and then putting it to work as purposeful action.
And his most important argument for journaling being:
The real magic of the journal is that it holds things together in one place, and then something strange begins to happen. Information leads to ideas, ideas to action, and action to accomplishment. And what we know from research now is that we learn from all of these stages, and learn well because the stages are integrated into a process, and the process is burned into memory.
I can't push the argument any further than this. Go get (or setup) one...
I have previously kept my notes in small tidbits scattered in various directories, on various devices, that I use. This has made it a bit difficult to sometimes mine information from these records, assess my progress (e.g it becomes hard to determine on which days of the week I've tended to perform successful rituals in the past, what kinds of thoughts I have on most saturdays, when did I last dream about rocks?, etc etc..)
So, it hit me that in this age of information technology, and given that I have the will and ability to build a better tool for the job, that I should solve this problem for me and all the other students and adepts of the Occult Sciences out there (that need such a systematic approach to the craft). And so, I started this work (interestingly, on the very day I got the idea - 10th Sept, 2013).
It is my wish that I create 1 platform that can allow the me to record the following kinds of records:
- Ritual Formulae
- Performed Rituals (with reference to their formulae)
- Realizations (desires/ideas made manifest)
- Lessons learnt/created
- Reminders of things to do (eventually, I shall implement a mobile app that can sync these reminders and alert/remind the magician as necessary)
- Reflections done (e.g moments of enlightenment obtained outside of normal meditation)
- Meditations (e.g especially capturing the method and experiences)
- Important Dreams (e.g recollections of Lucid Dreaming)
- Art created/collected in relation to magical work (e.g Sigils created / collected, symbols observed/learned)
- Miscellaneous Entry (anything else that can't fit in the pre-defined categories, e.g a journal entries of one's own life?)
All of these having the following mandatory attributes:
- Title
- Summary
- Date
- Kind/Type (see list above)
- Originality (original / derived / quoted)
- Privacy (public / private)
And the optional attributes:
- References
- Tags
- Purpose
- Details
- Partners
- Time
- Place (name of location)
- Location (latitude,longitude)
- Reminder-Date
- Reminder-Time
- Reminder-Frequency (none / once / daily / weekly / monthly / annual)
- Primary Image
- Secondary Image
- Related Entries (references to other diary entries)
1. The ability to search effortlessly from thousands (or even millions) of records in the diary
2. The ability to view trends/patterns and statistics from these entries (e.g time-series of various kinds of work)
3. The ability to share publicly some ritual techniques / methods I discover or develop along the way
4. The ability to have the system remind me of things I ought to repeat periodically (e.g performing certain rituals at specific times / days)
5. The ability to trace the distribution of my magical work in space (the diary should support geo-tagged entries), allowing me to trace where (geographically), certain events, rituals, meditations, etc occured, and how often...
6. The ability to access this magical diary on the move (I expect it to be possible to host one's own private magical diary, so they can access it via a public / private uri or ip-address)- so, having a mobile app or ability to read and edit the diary remotely
7. The ability to publish some entries onto other platforms
8. The ability to export the magical diary into other portable (or useful) formats - PDF, XML, JSON, Excel, CSV, etc so that they can be used elsewhere or saved to a backup.
9. The ability to destroy the entire magical diary remotely when desired - this might be a security feature but also a critical one for that matter.
10. Ability to customize the diary as one wishes - change color themes, fonts, etc
Some of these features listed above I have already implemented in the current working version (check it out here), but some are still pending (as I also await to recieve feedback from the first users of this technology). And some might eventually be scrapped off the list if they are found to be useless.
I shall definitely expect that the community shall provide feedback, feature requests, commit improvements to this technology and criticisms of it, so it can evolve into a more robust and useful tool for every serious occultist.
As I am the only one currently using this, here are some screenshots showing how my diary (which can be found here) currently looks:
- Default Home Page (shows magical diary entries you have decided to share publicly):
- After you login ("Enter the gates" link), you can later view a personal magical diary stream like this:
- It is important to note that the current implementation (as will all the future ones) allows any viewer of the diary to select a theme for the diary they find best / most suitable, directly on the stream interface. Here's another theme (currentl, I include 3 themes), for the stream...
- Then, for the owner of the magical diary, once they login, they can manage their entries using a simple and intuitive admin interface. Here's an example of the entry listing for a logged in user...
- And finally, when logged in, one can use the admin to add/edit/delete (or even search) magical diary entries/events. Here's what the add form looks like...
I hope that other people using this (or similar) technology shall share links/urls to their magical diaries so everyone can get inspired / informed.
For now, here's the list:
For those with technical knowledge of the web/servers, installing one's instance of the magical diary is as simple as cloing this repository, following the installation and customization procedures described in the INSTALL file.
For those who don't own their own server, or those who can't install on their own, you might contact me on any of the links I offer in the "About" of my magical diary. Eventually, someone might probably want to pay a little fee for support/maintainance or whatever... Let me know.
Otherwise, this is FREE and OPEN-SOURCE sofware, which means you can grab it and do whatever you will (to the extent allowed by the included License)
Please share this project with all your friends, students, masters and all those seekers on the path. This is my will... let's make it happen!
This project is one of my on-going experiments in Chaos Magic, in an attempt to adhere to (and develop) a modern, pragmatic occult curriculum.
Am releasing this project under the GNU General Public License V3 (copy included).
All works and technologies derived from retain their respective Licenses.
(c) Nemesis Fixx