Making a Choice

The Power of Intention

What it means for us

Intention is a strange concept to some. It means to be deliberate, to want something, an objective to be seized, all of these - but how does that translate to our purpose, and what does it really mean?

Intention is a power, featured in ancient lore and modern minds alike. Some take it for motivation, seeing goals within reach that they only must grasp to gain. For some, it is a way to clear their head, to start a day with a plan and to be productive. For some, there are good and bad intentions, and the question of how they rule against the methods carried out. Intention is a measure of will, and a measure of the heart, and for that reason it is considered a most potent psychic force indeed.

Intention is, to wit, the manifestation of will. That has many practical, day-to-day applications, but it also has a great deal of meaning in the traditional, the mystical, and the occult - and these are what we will focus on today.

Wicked Rites Most Ancient

In many belief systems, across every permanently inhabited continent, the power of intention is woven firmly into systems of magical belief. Whether it is witchcraft, curse tablets, or the evil eye, or even blessings, medicine, and the act of prayer itself, intention is at the heart of it all. The  idea of the human will made manifest is the key that sets things in motion, whether consciously or unconsciously, and this takes several forms.

In antiquity, across the Mediterranean, there is ample evidence of the use of intention in different rites of cursing and divination. The biblical narrative mentions the casting of lots, chiefly separated by whose intention they rely on. To the Romans, these were the rites of Etruscans, a people seen to them as a more mystical, more superstitious sort, whose reputation held as far as late antiquity well past the demise of their language and distinct identity. Tacitus wrote in his Germania described a means by which ancient Germanic peoples would cut a fruit-bearing branch into pieces, mark them with meaningful signs, and scatter them only to blindly select three, one at a time, and interpret them accordingly - thus was the will of the gods worked through mortal flesh to determine the untold. This was recorded still practiced in Scandinavia in the early medieval period. These ideas are scarcely limited to Europe, with biblical mention both in the likes of Haman trying to divine a death date for his victims, and the priestly practice of the Urim and Thummim, the practice of I Ching divination in China, Ifá divination among the Yoruba of Nigeria, and the practice of Waltes among nations in the American Northeast.

Cleromancy was not alone, for there was augury, haruspicy, and all sorts, but let's focus in for now on the more human side - what would be termed historical "Witchcraft", Black Magic, or a number of other names.

Witchcraft is generally considered distinct from divination and medicine in that, instead of channeling the natural and supernatural through themselves, they instead seek to enforce their intention over it. While the cunning folk, curanderos, shamans, medicine men, and various others were considered benevolent, helpful, and countering Witchcraft, the practice of Witchcraft itself was usually seen in a fairly negative light, and associated with very real misfortunes like injury, disease, famine, and even just plain bad luck. 

Now, to be clear, this wasn't something that was so direct. Witches aren't shooting fireballs out of their hands and summoning lightning on a whim. What they are doing is seizing the reins, steering causality to a desired result. The future is undetermined, there are branching fates that await, and the butterfly effect is a symptom of this greater condition. If your neighbor has a rotten beam ready to collapse at any moment, that's a risk factor - it collapsing on top of him after holding fast for so long, seriously injuring him when it could have collapsed any other time, that's Witchcraft. The intention was to cause harm, and fate decided that the beam would finally give way once he was standing under it. 

The Evil Eye is an example of this idea in action. It is something deviously subtle, such that the person inflicting it might not even be aware they are doing so. To look at one's neighbor with envy, to covet them, their things, these negative feelings manifest as unconscious intention that then curses the object of the gaze. Biblical warnings about coveting far surpass simple jealousy, they are a warning against allowing one's own soul and spirit to be weaponized so. They say the eyes are the window to the soul, and what does it speak of one whose eye casts curses?

While the Evil Eye is a clear and highly prevalent manifestation, though, very often the idea of Intention in magic relies on rituals and material components that go along with it. Some means to formalize, to project outward what is inside. Curse tablets are a famous example of a more simple and direct means of Witchcraft in this traditional sense, known in the ancient Greco-Roman world and in somewhat different forms in some nearby cultures as well. Egyptians, for instance, made clay poppets with victim's names engraved thereon, which were then smashed and buried - a practice that might remind one of the importance in Egyptian belief of the spirit recognizing itself, and of the inherent magic of writing and letters itself shared with nearby Canaanite cultures, and how Akhenaten had his name desecrated and his likeness smashed all over his own tomb. A damnatio memoriae of extreme importance. For the Europeans, writing curses to control or harm others on tablets and burying them or tossing them in a well was often enough, though they also dealt at times with poppets - that is, small dolls with intent to be a stand-in for the victim - which they would bind hand and foot.

This isn't an extensive list of practices by any means. In fact, these are just some of the more simple, direct, and easy to grasp customs. More complex rituals existed in these societies and many others across the globe, and still do - but the act of tying up a doll with someone's name written on it, or etching "Please love me Claudia and may Apollonius suffer" on a lead tablet and giving it in offering to spirits and deities is about as direct a projection of intention as I can think of, and it really helps get across the idea of how it interacts with systems of magic and belief.

The Not So Ancient

Relatively modern Western esotericism has not lost the sauce on the power of intention. Quite contrarily, it features prominently in occult thought of the past century or two. Very modern is the present internet concept of the Tulpa, a bit less recent are the Servitors of Chaos Magic, but the classical occultism of the 19th and early 20th century brings us the Egregore.

The modern concept of the Egregore in occultist thought can be traced to one Alphonse Louis Constant, known otherwise by his adopted name Éliphas Lévi Zahed. Alphonse was not Jewish, but adopted a Hebrew name because it has long been the vogue in esotericism to trace magic back to Jewish practice, which has for many centuries been interpreted as inherently more mystical and closer to the divine. Rabbis would be asked to bless fields, Jews were considered sorcerers and conjurers par excellence, some accused Jews of being in league with the Devil as a sort of anti-Christianity or anti-Islam, in Ethiopia Jews were considered were-hyenas, and Christian "Cabala", Hermetic "Qabalah", and medieval and early modern daemonology, all made use of abundant (pseudo-)Hebrew to emphasize their mysticism. Cabala/Qabalah are named for the Jewish magical/mystical practice itself, but neither is close to an accurate reflection or representation of the alleged source, they're just trying to claim legitimacy and credit by their ancestral custom: ripping it off of their predecessors, while oppressing and suppressing said predecessors for continuing to exist and contradict them.

That bit aside, and I do believe it is an important thing to note in any discussion of late occultism, Alphonse was born in 1810, died in 1875, and wrote of this in his The Great Secret in 1868. He was a practitioner of Ceremonial Magic, played a significant part in the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, and was instrumental to the philosophical development of Edward Alexander "Aleister" Crowley, who developed the Thelema system. Before the use of the term "Egregore" to define this concept, Alphonse declared that the popular concept of spiritualism surrounding autonomous ghosts was a falsity, and that spirits were born from mental projections and astral forces were the crux of the matter. These were things that a skilled magus like himself could control, he claimed. The spiritual manifestations reported throughout Europe and America, he claimed, here naught but currents inviting deeper psychic input.

So, it is said, that an Egregore starts - a current, a wave of psychic energy, of thought and feeling and concept roiling together but not yet consolidated. The power of suggestion, the power of intention, made manifest.  René Jean-Marie-Joseph Guénon, 1886-1951, was no less important to this development. He hadn't used the term "Egregore" for them, but recognized this concept as a Collective Entity. Guénon wrote that such entities manifest from the collective will and intention of a community past and present, thus the age of the community and its size both reflect on the strength of their collective, but a lack of cohesion and communal identity can foil any such collective manifestation. Guénon's stance was essentially in symbolism and meaning transcending the merely physical, but crossing boundaries, manifesting in analogy or reflection with a metaphysical concept or truth. Ironically, Guénon was an opponent of his contemporary esoteric traditions, considering them inauthentic, forging histories and misinterpreting Eastern concepts and philosophies. He was also an opponent of Jung, decrying the conflation of the psychic (or psychoanalytic) with the spiritual and effectively declaring that they had it backwards. The man was a firm traditionalist in more than one sense, despising alike the demystification of the mind, and the syncretic mish-mashing and inauthenticity of many of his peers, regarding that spiritual paths they often claimed (Celtic and Egyptian particularly) meant nothing without a chain of transmission and initiation, that one cannot initiate themselves just as a mantra has no meaning without a teacher to guide it in the first place, and that these should not be mixed up with traditions like Christianity which was a path distinct from and incompatible with them.

For Guénon, his idea of initiation and the spiritual path was very distinct from what he considered mysticism. To him, mysticism was more or less blind following. It was doing something like reading about Egyptian magic and then founding a new order to create a soulless mimicry of it. It is something entirely passive, while what he brands "Initiation" is instead a dogged pursuit, an active push by the individual of their own initiative toward realization, toward gnosis...

And thus rears again the head of intention.

So, what's the point of all this rambling?

How Does This Apply?

Gnosis, as well as The Lost, and I would imagine all games of this series, ask the player to undergo an initiation of a sort. You willingly subject yourself to the influence of the game, the story it has to tell, the mysteries that it contains, entirely of your own accord. You are never thrown into the mix, but presented with the option of whether or not you want to bear witness to it. It asks you to not be passive, to not let it merely happen to you, but instead to be an active participant and pursue it.

Intention is a cornerstone of this series, its message, and the meta-narrative surrounding it. It is something of a throwaway line early in Gnosis that comes to as it progresses, but the transmission traces itself to the figure of The Gloaming Mistress Avarkad, a figure given no explanation otherwise outside of what can be interpreted and inferred from the game's presentation and what is buried in its files, its code, hidden even in some of its art. She is the source of transmission, the spiritual influence that guides the player, and presumably whoever it is speaking on her behalf through the introduction. What lies beyond the introduction, when or if the narrator ever switches, is what I consider one of the lower layers of mystery presented.

The Lost begins by presenting players with a crossroads. The player is put into a liminal space, not the popular internet kind, but the very traditional kind that parents used to warn their kids about meeting fae or ghosts or the devil at - hardly anything is more classic in this sense than the crossroads. It not only represents, on the shallow level, that the player is being asked to make the active choice to engage, that there is a divergence they must willingly pursue, but it also touches on something deeper in that liminality. This is a point of transition, one not marked by the regular, the purely physical manifestation, but a symbol of something deeper. It is a place of intersection, of change, where things should not linger or stand still. It is uncomfortable and unsettling, a place where the veil with the supernatural is thin - there is no certainty, there is no clear direction, and take into account what we discussed about witchcraft and its determination of fate when you regard this point. It is ambiguity and disorientation, it is a place and a time outside of the regular order, it is a condition lacking the protections of either side. In anthropological terms, it is marked by the separation from the familiar, the comfortable, thrown into a marginal state of inbetweenness, and then returning to a new condition in the aftermath. It is death, limbo, and rebirth. 

In such a place of contradictions and boundaries blurred, who can say this crossroads even exists on the material world? It may well exist between.  You can reject the offer to explore beyond, return to what is familiar and comfortable, and thus never advance - or you can accept it upon yourself, bear witness to what dwells in liminality, what experiences wait to reforge you and ascend you. You can parlay with the fae, you can deal with the devil, you can meet people from another place in another time. 

As a side note, I enjoy the idea of a seance being not a summoning, but rather the manifestation of liminality. Blurring the lines, weakening the veil, and going somewhere between. Transporting your own space into a crossroads, at least temporarily - and that explains, too, why the rite and ritual is so important, so strict. It's a far more compelling narrative to me. 

Approximations will suffice, intention can fill the gaps. That's like how a poppet works. The right ritual objects can help channel this, focus it. Starting off by invoking the target, acknowledging them, that makes a connection. Telling their story, that builds it. You already know the ending, maybe tell it backwards? Reveal more detail in glimpses, strengthen that projection, give a clearer idea to grasp at...

Reverse what was done.

Anyway, I ramble. That'll be all for now, folks. Ta-ta!