One of the great myths about magical tools is that magic has always used four of them: the wand, the cup, the sword and the pentacle. This is actually a rather modern consolidation of the magician’s toolkit. Throughout history (and even more throughout geography) many different implements have been preferred. Especially pentacles, at least in the modern understanding of them, seem to be quite new.

There is nothing wrong with newness and innovation, but it is good to know that something is new. Some traditions of magic didn’t even contemplate the use of tools, and were wholly talismanic in nature, while there are strands of folk magic (like some traditions of Italian witchcraft) that use many everyday items as tools (chairs, dishes, needles, dolls, brooms, etc.)

One recent-ish idea about tools that has essentially crystallized into a dogma is that the implements are simply extensions of the practitioner. This is largely a consequence of our current egocentric view of magic and of the world, and its helpfulness escapes me. I ain’t crap. Why should an extension of the crap I ain’t be of any value?

I also started out with that idea, partly because it was the most readily available to me, partly because it was taught to me by some of my mentors. But the more I study, practice and move forward, the less I see the implements as tools and the more I see them as thresholds on otherness.

Otherness is the forgotten component of our magical worldview. The idea of tools as extensions of the magus shrinks otherness by inflating the role of the magus’ self through those extensions.

But quite on the contrary, tools as thresholds become meeting spaces between self and other, between the magus’ consciousness and the powers he works with. In this sense they are also filters through which those powers come to us in ways that are fruitful and measured.

The magus himself is a good magus in as much as he becomes a (discerning, filtering) threshold, and in this sense, one’s magical consciousness is one’s most important tool. This is not to say, as is often repeated today, that our consciousness changes the way the universe is.

But the way we approach the universe does change the results we get, simply because it changes the shape our filtering system, of our inner threshold. It is akin to an app or computer program: software programs allow us to use certain functionalities of the computer that would be inaccessible by using another software. If you keep trying to write an email on the pinball minigame you’re in for a world of problems.

MQS