LaVey’s Greater Magic
While the purely psychodynamic interpretation of LaVey's methods fits with the agenda of his apologists uncomfortable with the magical aspects of LaVey's Work it does not match his own sense of what he was doing. He was axiomatic about the importance and value of Greater Magic as a means of creating change beyond mere psychodynamics, making it a foundational piece of his Eleven Satanic Rules of Earth.
Emotional release in the models that LaVey was using for understanding magic drew heavily from the works of Wilhelm Reich. Reich's model was that of a bio-energetic psychology, where psychological processes accompanied a real energy phenomenon. This energy could be channeled and directed in LaVey's interpretation of Reich through the concentration and focus provided by Greater Magic. While he was one of the first to articulate this sort of Reichian magical theory a similar model appears in Israel Regadie's works.
This energy model underlies many of LaVey's insights towards magic in The Satanic Bible. In particular, the argument against animal sacrifice in "On The Choice of a Human Sacrifice" rests almost entirely on a Magico-Reichian notion of both death and emotional discharge releasing energy capable of being molded through ritualization.
This in part explains the basic outline of LaVey's key rituals: a performative utterance of the magical intention, a method of full emotional engagement through a complete emotional cycle, and a daimonic capping of this experience through the use of the Enochian Keys. The pattern of performative utterance, emotional cycle, daimonic capping can be adapted to other idioms than the Enochian and forms one of the simplest and most useful approaches to operative magic.
There is a decent introduction to Reich's ideas by Danny Lowe available at
http://www.philhine.org.uk/writings/ess_reich.html
Performative utterance can be a fairly complicated topic but is well worth investigation. Both Ipsissimus Flowers and Ipsissimus Webb has written on the importance of the concept of performative utterance on the topic of magic. There is a decent short introduction to the idea in the following video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LgmpbXIGpcc
As far as daimonic systems go Setians are of course free to explore as they will. If there are no particular daimonic systems that strongly call to you but you want to get started with Greater Black Magic I would recommend a kind of returning to our roots. Use Dr. Aquino's Word of Set material as a means of your daimonic capping in your Workings, connecting what you do both to the roots of the Aeon and to the Work of Ra-En-Set. It is available as a part of Dr. Aquino's Temple of Set.









