The Complete Magic Primer
By David Conway
Aquarian, HarperCollins, 1988, 1991
ISBN 1 85538 174 5

This excellent book takes you through the core practices of ritual magic. Being ritual magic, the focus is on Hermetic practices, rather than the more commonly described witchcraft. Whilst there is much in common, there are also major differences and it is great to have such a good, clear book available that covers ritual magic.

The book is divided into two parts: Magical Theory and Magical Practice.

Magical Theory sets the scene by taking you through the underlying principles that allow magic to work. Chapters are:

• Magic and Natural Law
• The Magical Universe
• The World and the Magician
• Visualization and the Training of a Magician
• The Meaning of Ritual

These chapters do an excellent job of giving you a very sound basis for future work. The chapter on Visualization and the following one on ritual are particularly good and reward careful study.

Magical Practice gets you into activities and is divided into the following chapters:

• The Preparation, covering The Intention and the Correspondences, The Time and The Place
• The Master Rituals, covering a Kabbalistic and Egyptian master ritual
• Astral Projection
• Talismanic Magic
• The Art of Prophecy
• A Word about Demons
• Three Magical Intentions
• Death and the Meaning of Life
• The Way of High Magic

The Kabbalistic Master Ritual includes the LBRP (Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram) and thus includes the Kabbalistic Cross, working with the archangels and directions and other core practices of ritual magic. While I have seen somewhat clearer descriptions of this ritual (including full translations of the Latin into English), it does do a pretty good job. The other chapters do a great job of covering their intended topics.

Three appendices cover magical recipes for oils, salves, tonics and cosmetics , magical scripts and an occult who’s who. The scripts cover the various alphabets and scripts used in magical writing for talismans and spells. The occult who’s who is obviously now dated but covers all the classic magicians and significant ones up to the time the book was published. This is useful as it puts many people into context with the short paragraph descriptions each receives.

This is an excellent introduction to ritual magic with good, solid information that clearly comes from real experience. Highly recommended.