For the Love of the Gods: The History and Modern Practice of Theurgy - Brandy Williams 2016

The Living Tradition

Part One of this book described the lives of the Pagan teachers in context. The stories of their lives gives us back our ancestors so we can honor them and understand ourselves as their inheritors. We are their students and their successors in the theurgic tradition. We have seen them teaching in the classroom, and we have seen the results of their rituals. But what exactly was the knowledge they taught, and how did they perform their rituals?

We don’t have to guess what the teachers said to their students. They wrote down what they taught and they wrote about each other, and those texts have been copied, quoted, and analyzed right to the present day. The teachers have generated a great deal of material, more than one person can understand in a lifetime. As long as we are theurgists, we will be continually learning.

As we learn from the texts, we also practice the rituals of our teachers. The proscription of ritual practice separated Pagan religion from Pagan philosophy, but despite the attempt to suppress the religious and magical rituals, they have survived, and further, they have been reconnected with the philosophical texts that describe them.

Studying the writings alone is half the journey. Only when we light incense before the images, make invocations, and invite the gods into our lives do we fully understand what the teachers were saying.

In this section of the book, we study the works and practice the rituals of the teachers. Before we can do that, there are steps we must take to prepare ourselves so we can be receptive to learning and to the direct experience of divinity.