Crosspost. I will not update this article, so please check the latest version on the wiki.

As magic is already “defined”, it should not be strange if it is possible to start talking about talismans without defining them, because anything can be interpreted as a talisman. This is evident even in the writings of Israel Regardie: in How to make and use talismans he says that

A TALISMAN IS any object, sacred or profane, with or without appropriate inscriptions or symbols, uncharged or consecrated by means of appropriate ritual magic or meditation. […] It is made to serve a specific end […].

It should be noted that even an immaterial object can be a talisman. To consider talismanic magic as a subfield of planetary magic is way too limiting. The magician should make a choice on what to consider meaningfully a talisman: a pencil is an object, profane, with appropriate inscriptions (“HB”) consecrated by means of appropriate ritual (the production) and it is made to serve a specific end (writing or drawing).

Even if not all the magical acts have a talismanic flavor, it is useful to notice that both magic and talismans have the structure of a communication. With this structure in mind, it is possible to classify talismans and build systems of talismanic magic.

Communication Magic sender magician recipient magician/world context paradigm medium technique message intent

As dissolving the mysteries of the self is the final task of the adept (“crossing the abyss”), it is probably pointless to discuss a classification of the sender and of the recipient. From this point of view, it is possible to consider these two elements as fixed. Two notes of caution are necessary. Firstly, this does not want to suggest that self-analysis is pointless or that the magician is never changing, but that giving labels to the sender (“young”, “INTP”, “initiate”, …) for further classification of a talisman is not useful and such analysis should be done for the message component. Secondly, the interpretation of the recipient is paradigm-dependent.

Also, while it is important to know the context and to explore several paradigms, there is no explicit, useful structure on the set of paradigms: there is no Liber 777 with all the paradigms of the world as a key scale! While talking about the map-territory relation, it is important to keep in mind the following quote by Crowley.

In this book it is spoken of […] many other things which may or may not exist. It is immaterial whether these exist or not. By doing certain things certain results will follow; students are most earnestly warned against attributing objective reality or philosophic validity to any of them.

So the territory (or a territory) might not exists, but this should not hinder the magician while talking about these concepts. To understand the relations between paradigms, it is possible to use a geometric analogy. There is an intrinsic difference between a plane and a sphere: it is possible to cover the plane with just one map, but at least two charts are needed to map the whole sphere. Truth might be like a sphere, impossible to be charted with just one paradigm. Nothing is true, everything is permitted.

The medium is easier to classify as it is composed by several subcomponents: techniques used to produce the talisman (construction, gnosis, rituals or meditations, …) and characteristic of the physical medium, if present (material, shape, colors, inscribed symbols, …). It is easy to try (and fail) to constrain a classification of gnosis (inhibitory-ecstatic) into an Eros-Thanatos duality, but I’m not satisfied with this classification.

The classification of the message will be discussed in the subsequent article about the progress in magic. Both the mediun and message classification can benefit from studying the Liber 777 or building a personal system of correspondences.

Further Reading

Israel Regardie, How to make and use talismans

This is an easy, but advanced, book on talisman production from a Golden Dawn perspective. A proper review will be later available.

Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver, The Mathematical Theory of Communication

Frater U.D., Models of Magic

Together with Ferdinand de Saussure, Charles Sanders Peirce and Roman Jakobson, Shannon is a classical author that developed a model for the act of communication. Frater U.D. is a good first reading on (meta)models of magic, but his view of the information model is now partial and obsolete.

Wikipedia, Manifold

The motivating examples give a straightforward introduction to this notion for the layperson.