The Canon / Living / Ceremonial Magic & Occult
Living · 1974
SSOTBME: An Essay on Magic
Witchcraft & Chaos MagicSSOTBME: An Essay on Magic is a witty philosophical essay arguing that magic is best understood not as a competing physics but as a distinct and valid way of thinking. Its central claim is that magic, science, religion, and art are four models for engaging reality, each useful in its own domain.
The argument, informed by its author's mathematical training, locates the value of magical practice in how it reorganizes perception and attention rather than in any literal supernatural force. From this follows the pragmatic stance of adopting belief-models provisionally, choosing whichever frame best serves the task at hand.
The essay supplied a cornerstone of chaos-magic epistemology, lending practical occultism a sophisticated intellectual defense and licensing the deliberate, results-agnostic switching of belief that defines the current.
Practices it teaches
Treat It As If Alive — the animism experiment
Ramsey Dukes (Lionel Snell) proposes that one of the oldest and most useful magical moves is simply to drop the mechanistic view and relate to the world as if it were alive.
Switching the Four Modes — deliberately think scientifically, religiously, artistically, then magically about the same thing
In SSOTBME, Ramsey Dukes (pen name of Lionel Snell) argues that human beings make sense of the world through four fundamental "ways of thinking" — Science, Religion, Art, and Magic — which he describes as "as…
Lineage
The author
Ramsey DukesMagic as a way of thinking Full voice →Kindred books