Reinventing the Wheel

There is a trend amongst magicians these days that I find curious. Just today, I had a chat with someone where they said, more or less, that the descriptions of the Goetia demons, as well as of deities and other spirits in general, are wrong, and that these spirits are unrestricted in their power.

This could not be further from the case. Are the descriptions of these spirits complete? In my opinion, no. But are they useless boxes? NO!

The current trend I speak of is that of magicians trying to recreate Magick. They disregard tradition and slap whatever labels they want to on things to make them more to their liking. The most common of these is calling on a spirit like Andras, a highly dangerous demon who is stated to be able to kill his conjurer, to ask him to "kill their bad habits" or some such. Vast leaps of logic are used to try to justify working with extremely dark and dangerous spirits for very positive means, and that is not their purpose.

Am I saying not to blaze your own trail? Absolutely not. In fact, by all means, do so. Build your own path. But, in so doing, respect the other traditions that you encounter. Treat each system as it's own, and let it be what it is. Don't assume that just because you can make a logical connection for how a spirit for one thing can work for another, that it will be so.

In other words, don't sacrifice efficiency for the sake of working with the wrong spirit because it sounds cool.