A full course, personally would avoid invocation/evocation till you had some experience under your belt. But that is one of the great things about magic, its all personal. Only you can truely know when you are ready. (Course you need to be completely honest with yourself about that too.)
Well , I suppose it is a rather advanced study and should be done after some experience.
But , I still find it a study that might hold some relevance and importance to future studies , and so , the practioner should have some knowledge about it in the first place.
I personally completed everything else on the list , which took me quite some time , moved on to study High Magick and came back to invocations and evocations after a few years.
Back in my heyday I did all the studying and ritual. Forgot what I was doing for a long time but am slowly remembering it. Magic never leaves us, we just turn our back to it. This site helped me a lot, to remember how to do things, and why I got into it in the first place. (Course now I don't use much in the way of tools, or rituals. I find a well programmed servitor can do anything a spell can do. But that's me, and what works for me.) If you are new, I recommend starting with the basics and using the tools.
I find your list of basics you designated and accredited quite interesting, Sphere. It made me think we you enumerated some practices here which probably have no association with the basics, which are necessary for magic starters. I find some of them superfluous.
To begin with, we should define the word 'basics' and their importance. Definition of basic: of, pertaining to, or forming a base; fundamental: a basic principle; the basic ingredient.
Shortly the basics are practices that will help and guide us with all of the other form of magic(k)s we are going to study in the future, thus they are necessary.
I find your list interesting because I can't say they will help us later with our path. May you explain yourself more for a bit?
- Astral projection is the most confusing phenomenon you've mentioned here. Astral projection is certainly not necessary to keep on with our practices, and of course that they aren't what we'd do in the beginning. There is also a saying that astral projection is not necessarily associated only with magic, and it isn't always considered 'magick'. I'll make this short and relevant this time and say that the reason is that every projects at least once naturally during life ; Secondly this is a form of practice that people who aren't magick practitioners can perform either.
- Trance work is a bit confusing as well. Mostly people do not nominate this in basic list and I see no reason to know about trances and how to perform them as basic practices. This is a step we take a bit later, after knowing what we're dealing with.
-Invocations and evocations aren't something i'd recommend for a beginner, and I see no association with the basics. Well, that's just me.
- Deity work is obviously not associated with beginnings of magic(k)s performance. I've no clue why you brought this up.
-Divination is a huge form of magic which includes many studies and practices, all of them deal with similar thing. Divination is basically an ancient concept of drawing information from a higher source, the world around you, or from deep within yourself to attain knowledge of what is not obvious or directly in front of you. Why shall we get this is a basic knowledge? We do such things *AFTER* we know our basics.
May you explain more, Spehere? It sounds irrelevant to me.
I'd read the sticked thread in 'general info' forum section, there you have the accurate list of basics.
