Visual Magick, Jan Fries
Mandrake Press, 2004.

Jan Fries’ Visual Magick is often recommended to relative beginners as an introduction to sigil magic, but that’s honestly not where this little book’s strength lies. After all, Frater U.D.’s Practical Sigil Magic and Stephen Mace’s Stealing the Fire from Heaven are far more comprehensive guides to sigils, and there’s nothing in Visual Magick that can’t also be readily found in Peter Carroll or Phil Hine’s work. What this book offers are guidelines not to specific techniques but toward one’s overall approach to magic. Fries has subtitled his book “A Manual of Freestyle Shamanism,” and it’s those last two words that really encompass what it is about. Fries offers numerous insights, exercises, and examples of tuning one’s consciousness, perception and imagination towards an overall magical worldview.

The first few chapters do indeed deal with sigils, and although Fries doesn’t really offer anything new, he does give a detailed explanation of the theory behind them, introducing his concept of the “deep mind,” which he will return to again and again throughout the book. The section on automatic drawing is also useful, and although he doesn’t go as deep into Spare’s system as some might have hoped, he does offer some very concrete ideas and experiments to help separate the hand from the mind.

The real meat of Visual Magick, however, starts with Chapter 5, where Fries begins to exhaustively cover the magical imagination, from deceptively simple visualization techniques up through a number of different exercises to access and enhance magical trance. As the subtitle suggests, the approach throughout is very “freestyle” and borders on hippy – he actually suggests hugging trees – but this relaxed attitude is a helpful antidote to the overly formulaic approach contained in most beginner’s books on magic. His recommended techniques for inducing trance, many of which seem to be based in hypnosis and autosuggestion, are inordinately useful both for developing magical perception in a general sense and in more specific, practical operations such as evocation and invocation, and seem particularly well-suited for magicians who have a mental block in one or more of their senses (i.e. vision, hearing, etc.).

In the latter half of the book, Fries expands on his basic techniques by exploring such operations as the invocation of god forms, the evocation of nature spirits and working with “beast spirits” (what Spare referred to as “atavistic resurgence”). While his approach again seems geared towards pagans and hippies with its focus on exploring nature, building mandalas from seeds and branches, and hugging trees, Fries makes it clear that he’s only offering examples, not explicit instructions. Regardless of one’s opinion on his aesthetics, the techniques he presents are valuable building blocks for the development of one’s own personal systems of magical work. As an author, Fries also has a very easy tone, and his manner of discussing elemental spirits alongside psychological concepts – again emphasizing the essentially magical nature of the “deep mind” – makes this a little easier to take in, especially for those students who may be put off by the “airy fairy” approach of most other pagan-oriented material.

Visual Magick isn’t an instruction manual, per se, but it’s a very useful adjunct to the more systematic approach of Liber MMM. Fries’ advice makes it significantly easier to bypass Carroll’s “psychic censor,” and his laidback, freewheeling approach should be particularly useful to those of us who become easily seduced by the rigid dogmas of Qabalah or what-have-you. Perhaps most important, this book offers clear, simple techniques for letting go of oneself during magical work; this is an important lesson in particular for students interested in performing group rituals like those carried out within the Pact.