In the old year (feh! Fooey!) someone asked if I would write about Dion Fortune and the magical Battle of Britain.
Happy to oblige. Before I do, let's set the scene a little and talk about ritual magic.
Ritual magic, in Western traditions, is all about the big favors. You use it when you want to achieve a major result. In fiction this is sometimes with machines and modern (or at least modernist) technology. The Electric Pentacle and peculiar devices of Thomas Carnacki are an example of this type. You never know exactly what makes those devices hum. That isn't the point; the point is that they work.
Same with rituals. If you really want to, you can find out how they're supposed to work. I have proof of this: academic tome after academic tome, Histories of Magic, long lists of names and attributes. All wordy, windy, esoteric. Filled with forbidden knowledge and tempting illustrations.
However, from the point of view of the observer, how ritual magic works isn't the point. How impressive rituals are, is the point.
The peculiar technology used by Doctor Frankenstein in the early films (and later, in Young Frankenstein) are in this tradition. Again, the desired result is something spectacular: the creation of new life, from dead clay. To achieve it an appeal is made to the heavens, and peculiar technology is used to make that appeal heard.
Early cinema, and plays like Marlowe's Faustus, latch on to this scene-play. They have those central dramatic moments when someone goes out to the crossroads on a dark night and evokes the weird. There's a suggestion that Faust and the rest are completing an esoteric ritual, but the details of that ritual are, at best, sketched in. So long as the visual is suggestive the means of getting there can slide a little bit.
Video games pull much the same tactic. Whether it's the Rite of Thorns in Baldur's Gate 3 or any one of a dozen summoning rites in World of Warcraft, the implication is that so long as you get enough people chanting faux Latin and standing in something approximating a circle, you've got yourself some ritual goodness and can expect great results.
In the historical record this often causes religious qualms. Appealing to forces beyond reality? Clearly diabolic. Burn those books. However, even the religious are not beyond a little magical temptation, so up springs a series of tomes that promise power from angels instead. Know the right angel, make the right appeal (in the Lord's name, of course) and you too can have whatever it is you desire. Or, if you're into slightly less work for slightly less reward, you can practice simple bibliomancy. Take out your bible, flip to a random page, and take the advice offered. A very simple ritual designed to produce a simple result.
But the key to ritual, whether religious or otherwise, is to know your terminology. You need to know the proper name of the angel (or whatever it may be) you're appealing to. You need to know the offerings that being wants, or the tools you'll need to make the appeal. You need to be able to recite the prayers exactly right each time, in the right order each time, as often as the ritual requires. You need to be able to do this while fasting, or while only drinking or eating the right things, or by only consuming the holy spirit, or whatever it may be. You need to get everything exactly right, possibly over a period of several days or even weeks.
Get one little thing wrong, and the whole effort is for naught. Or, in the case of devils, get one little thing wrong and put your body and soul in peril.
The interesting thing about a ritual, I think, is that it doesn't rely on the magician, or the magician's innate power. This is the magician asking for a favor. Commanding a favor, really. They know the cheat codes, they press the correct button sequence, and boom! Magical gifts. Angels, demons, deities of the hearth or saints in charge of who-knows-what, beings that have existed before Man and which will exist after him, beings that have seen the face of God and tasted the eternal joys, suddenly bow down to some clown from Croydon, so long as that clown pronounces their name correctly and chants in the appropriate tempo.
In RPG terms, naturally the Bookhounds (or whoever it may be) aren't really appealing to angelic or devilish forces. They're relying on the Mythos to power their Megapolisomancy, their Rough Magick, or whatever else it may be. The ritual found in that collection of scrolls may reference Thoth, but to those who know it's really talking about [insert Mythos here].
Which raises a question. Most Mythos forces aren't interested in humanity and certainly aren't interested in anything humanity wants. Cthulhu could care less. Nyarlathotep is probably interested to a degree but isn't about to fetch and carry for any mortal sorcerer.
There are at least two ways to answer that question.
The first is manipulation. Humanity isn't drawing directly on Mythos forces. Rituals are ways of channeling power, leeching power that would otherwise go to waste or be used for something else. This may be deliberate manipulation, or it may be an accidental effect, something that's survived from the days of Mu and which some mortal lucked into. When a sorcerer uses a ritual to achieve an effect that sorcerer is accessing Mythos forces that exist around us all the time, in the same way that we might dam a river or redirect a stream to irrigate cropland. We didn't create the river. We merely adapted it to our use.
The other is natural tendencies at work. Humanity is Mythos. There's some lurking corruption at the heart of us all, and when we manipulate forces to create a ritual result we're drawing on the Mythos inside us to do it. We bring ourselves closer to Cthulhu, or whichever Old One it may be. Perhaps that's what is meant by 'the stars are right' - not that some anticipated conjunction of heavenly bodies will bring about a result, but that we are the stars spoken of in prophesy, and when our devotions over however many millennia finally bear fruit, we will be the reason why Ry'leh rises and why the Old Ones return. Like ants building a mountain, we strive in our own cause, but build something beyond our scope or our ability to understand.
Now, next time - Dion Fortune!
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