Lessons in Magic, Part II: The Veil-Breaker’s Star

One of the most basic skills that an aspiring magician can learn is how to prepare a ritual area for their magical working. While there are a great many variations on this ritual – casting a circle, calling corners, the Cone of Power, the Chaos Gate– I choose to call it the Veil-Breaker’s Star. 

At its core, the magic circle is simply a place infused with magic, sufficiently enough to temporarily suspend the laws of Consensus Reality. The pocket of suspended reality created by the Star is known as a Free Area. In this Free Area, alternate, symbolic laws can take a small amount of precedent, just long enough to make a piece of ritual magic possible, so that stormwater can become a liquid form of anger, mirrors can be used to scry into distant places, and an easy but tedious journey can be taken in a single step if you so please. 

The ritual of the Star is simple. Find four sets of opposites, and place them across from each other on a wheel with eight spokes (or a star with eight rays). You may do this in your mind’s eye, draw the array, or collect a set of items that represent your chosen opposites and arrange them around you on the ground. These are some opposites you might choose to use:

Hope and Fear

Light and Darkness

Chaos and Order

Dreaming and Waking

Love and Hate

Truth and Deceit

Wind and Stone

Water and Fire (or Ice and Fire)

Good and Evil (be careful with this one)

Speak the Opening Incantation, using the selected opposites:

“By Hope and Fear, by Light and Darkness, by Chaos and Order, by Dreaming and Waking

I turn the wheel and open the gate! I pierce the veil and gaze at Fate!“

In your mind’s eye, begin to rotate the wheel, faster and faster, until it becomes a blur and you can hardly bear to continue looking at it. Focus on the point in the middle, where all of the opposites meet; try to imagine what it would be like if all eight of those concepts had to occupy the same space. Then, with all the force you can muster, mentally shove that point open, widening it into an aperture into the beyond. There will be a space of perhaps three breaths, and then the portal will remain open, a well of power suspended at the point that you cast it. If you have placed it on the ground, you are standing in a Free Area- a place where possibility is malleable, and whatever you choose to be true, is true. 

For me, this means that in the Free Area, the laws of reality no longer apply- the laws of magic take precedence. And with an understanding of how those laws work, I can manipulate the Free Area as I would the inside of my own mind- conjuring tools, speaking to distant entities through mirrors, affecting the weather with my emotions. 

After that comes the part of magic that nobody really understands, but that nonetheless continues to achieve results: what you do in the ritual will be reflected in the world; it will be as though you tossed a stone into the fabric of reality at the point that your Star was cast, and it will create ripples that go out into Consensus reality and eventually find their way back to you. 

In order to safely work with a Free Area, it is probably not a good idea to leave gaping holes in the astral fabric of space-time open for long. So, when you have finished, start to spin the wheel the other way, and recite the Incantation of Closing:

By Waking and Dreaming, by Order and Chaos, by Darkness and Light, by Fear and Hope

I turn the wheel, and close the gate! I stitch the veil, and seal my fate!

Notice that the incantation lists your opposites backwards from their original order; this is to symbolically ‘undo’ what you did by casting the Star. 

This mental exercise is the foundation of most ritual magic I perform, personally– and it can take some practice to build the mind’s eye up enough to consistently perform the ritual. Always record your successes and failures, as well as anything that goes right or wrong in your ritual process! These notes will be important later.