Solvitur Ambulando
As a Gemini with a lot of Gemini in my chart I tend to have the habit of intellectualising everything. I have to logically understand something before I even attempt to use it. When I was learning to drive I had to understand why I had to shift gears at certain points, what revs meant, and I got caught up in why we had to turn to 3 on a clock during parallel parking. Turns out driving is not at all difficult, but my own brain and the way it is wired made it so.
I have been doing the same with magic, luckily I got a lot of that out of my system early on. I found Thelema and its hijack of the Hermetic Qabalah and found a system that had logical sense. At least it did at the time to me. This meant I could jump straight into the practice which is where the real fruits begin to form- from real labour.
More recently, the past four years to be exact, I have been looking into the system of Michael Bertiaux. A controversial figure in modern occultism, some people believe him to be a charlatan, others believe him to be a magician with good intentions, others believe him to be one of the few true masters currently still alive. One could have said the same about Aleister Crowley.
Anyone who has tried to read the Voudon Gnostic Workbook will know how jumbled it appears and how strange it is. Most of it makes little sense at first glance. It is an amalgamation of many different spiritual systems into a form of gnosticism that is truly different to anything else I have seen.
What a lot of people don't understand is that you are meant to start with the Monastery of the Seven Rays materials. Which start out quite simple and then take a turn into the weird and wonderful and you are left scratching your head thinking "What the hell am I reading?"
So why bother? Because I could sense power there. There was something in those writings that called to me. I couldn't logically understand it, I couldn't even tell you what exactly the intentions were. But I knew there was something there that was more than just a madmans theories. So I continued to research and try and make sense of it all.
The truth is, this is a very spirit led system. It is a system to be engaged with. You have to work with the material and allow the spirits and the material to speak to you. I recently started doing that and now suddenly the lessons make sense. More than that I feel like an idiot for not understanding in the first place. It is a strange feeling, it is as though the knowledge was locked until I was ready. It was always present but the required understanding could not be brought forth.
I am degree educated, I hold a masters degree, I love researching and understanding theories and problems. The issue I had was certainly not a lack of intelligence or even understanding the background theories. The issue was I was approaching this system, and indeed magic itself, from the wrong angle. I was trying to make sense of something that is beyond the mind. I was trying to confine something limitless within the form of thoughts and facts.
This reminded me of a Crowley quote from Magick without Tears: "Solvitur ambulando" which does not mean: "Call the Ambulance!" Solvitur Ambulando is latin for 'It is solved by walking'. If you are struggling understanding something in magick or indeed in life in general. If you have a system that makes little sense but you are drawn to it sometimes it can be useful just to dive in, learn through trial and error, and allow the spirits of the system to be your allies.
