Part of the reason for this, fortunately or unfortunately, is that the ‘secrets’ of advanced magic are the results of the facility that comes from practice. The first time one plays a chord progression on a guitar, one is likely to be awkward and weird. You do a funny thing with your lip, you lose control of the pick at the same time you shift from G to D, you can’t play the strum-pattern at the same time that you shift the fingering for the chords. The better musicians get asked onto the stage for open mic night, or to try out for the band in the garage; the best musicians have been playing for two to four hours a day for a decade. You get better with practice.
In the same way, the apprentice carpenter spends a lot of time building cruddy-looking boxes out of pine and other softwoods. They’re cheap, they’re easily glued, they’re amateurish, their proportions are wrong, and they were cut and assembled with dull tools. The amateur artisan that has learned a thing or two about a thing or two, sharpens their tools before they begin, and all through the working; their mallet strikes are precise; they work with the wood rather than forcing it to conform to the plans in the book; they work with better materials as accents, but they’ve learned to accept pine and fir’s limitations and its beauty. The master and the professional, they work with hardwoods and high quality softwoods; they stop to sharpen their tools often; they’ve found ethical sources for the rarer materials, and have replaced their first tools with higher-quality ones (or made their own from scratch). I know one fellow who makes mouldings for bookcases and fine furniture, and he built 38 carpenter’s planes for making those mouldings from scratch. He got better with practice.
A tailoring instructor of my acquaintance is much better at sewing than me. After twenty years of practice, she ought to. But she knows the same twenty or so stitches that I do, yet uses her sewing machine, and her hand sewing techniques, at a much greater level of dexterity than I do. She’s not afraid of any kind of fabric, but she’s also not above telling me that I’ve made a project much more difficult than it needed to be by my textile choices, and why. She can pick out my sewing mistakes from forty feet away. She’s better because she’s practiced.
When one cuts away the trappings of my practice as a druid and a magus, most of what I do magically is based on materials I learned in my first three years as a ritual magician, and my first three years as a druid, and my first three years of study in astrology — nine non-consecutive years of practice, out of twenty, inform most of what I do. Tarot, vegetable alchemy, geometry, drawing, scrying, pathworking, ritual work, geomancy, memory arts… none of what I do magically is particularly complicated or difficult. I just have twenty years of practice at it.
Carpentry and tailoring and guitar-playing are all like magic in that, from the outside, they look mysterious and arcane and weird, and probably narrowly-framed skills, but capable of producing marvelous things — from inside, there’s a deep awareness of both the potential and the limitation of both materials and the skills.
So if you think of your magical practice as being like carpentry or tailoring or guitar playing, rather than being secret information naturally separated into grades of “neophyte”, “practitioner” and “adept”, or 1-2-3, you may find that you get farther in your practice. It’s a skill-set that must be practiced, and practice makes you better.
So neither I nor anyone else can hand you twenty years of knowledge in a 45-minute class, not even after you’ve been practicing for five years. I can only look for glimmers of insight in your eyes, smile, and say, “great! Keep Going.”