Portable Magick

By Donald Tyson

I love this book, and it’s one of the most underrated works on the occult, in my opinion. It’s really influenced my practice for two reasons:

Practical lifestyle: I move around the tropics and embrace a minimalist lifestyle, so the fact that the book is about constructing a magickal circle with only tarot cards works for me.
Clear explanation: The way Tyson explains magick, although not the main focus of the book, really clarified my own understanding.

Tyson is not only an advanced practitioner, but he also has a good, clear writing style.

A Brief Overview of Tyson’s System

I’m not going to present his whole system—you should definitely buy the book—but I’ll give a brief explanation of a bit of it.

You lay out a magick circle using major arcana to represent the zodiac. You do this in the inner body as you are doing it (or at least, this is how I do it).

Major Arcana Representing the Zodiac:

1 – Emperor (Aries)
2 – Hierophant (Taurus)
3 – Lovers (Gemini)
4 – Chariot (Cancer)
5 – Strength (Leo)
6 – Hermit (Virgo)
8 – Justice (Libra)
9 – Death (Scorpio)
10 – Temperance (Sagittarius)
11 – Devil (Capricorn)
12 – Star (Aquarius)
13 – Moon (Pisces)

Then, three cards are used to create a triangle of manifestation on the outside: Fool, Judgement, and Hanged Man.

The elements are represented by the four aces in the center of the circle, along with a court card representing yourself. Your magickal objective is placed as a series of up to three cards from the minor arcana within the triangle of manifestation.

Lords and Ladies of the Minor Arcana

Wands

Two of Wands: Lord of Dominion
Three of Wands: Lord of Established Strength
Four of Wands: Lord of Perfected Work
Five of Wands: Lord of Strife
Six of Wands: Lord of Gain
Seven of Wands: Lord of Valor
Eight of Wands: Lord of Swiftness
Nine of Wands: Lord of Great Strength
Ten of Wands: Lord of Oppression
King of Wands: Fire of Fire
Queen of Wands: Water of Fire
Knight of Wands: Air of Fire
Page of Wands: Earth of Fire

Cups

Two of Cups: Lord of Love
Three of Cups: Lord of Abundance
Four of Cups: Lord of Blended Pleasure
Five of Cups: Lord of Loss in Pleasure
Six of Cups: Lord of Pleasure
Seven of Cups: Lord of Illusory Success
Eight of Cups: Lord of Abandoned Success
Nine of Cups: Lord of Material Happiness
Ten of Cups: Lord of Perfected Success
King of Cups: Fire of Water
Queen of Cups: Water of Water
Knight of Cups: Air of Water
Page of Cups: Earth of Water

Swords

Two of Swords: Lord of Peace Restored
Three of Swords: Lord of Sorrow
Four of Swords: Lord of Rest from Strife
Five of Swords: Lord of Defeat
Six of Swords: Lord of Earned Success
Seven of Swords: Lord of Unstable Effort
Eight of Swords: Lord of Shortened Force
Nine of Swords: Lord of Despair and Cruelty
Ten of Swords: Lord of Ruin
King of Swords: Fire of Earth
Queen of Swords: Water of Air
Knight of Swords: Air of Air
Page of Swords: Earth of Air

Pentacles

Two of Pentacles: Lord of Harmonious Change
Three of Pentacles: Lord of Material Works
Four of Pentacles: Lord of Earthly Power
Five of Pentacles: Lord of Material Trouble
Six of Pentacles: Lord of Material Success
Seven of Pentacles: Lord of Success Unfulfilled
Eight of Pentacles: Lord of Prudence
Nine of Pentacles: Lord of Material Gain
Ten of Pentacles: Lord of Wealth
King of Pentacles: Fire of Earth
Queen of Pentacles: Water of Earth
Knight of Pentacles: Air of Earth
Page of Pentacles: Earth of Earth

Elemental Correspondences

Each suit has an elemental correspondence, crucial for selecting the most appropriate cards for a ritual:

Wands (Fire): Willpower, ambition, expansion, and creativity
Cups (Water): Emotions, intuition, relationships, and healing
Swords (Air): Intellect, communication, action, and change
Pentacles (Earth): The physical world, finances, work, and stability

Practical Applications of Tarot Magic

Tyson explains how tarot can be used for various practical magical purposes, including:

Creating a sacred space: The cards construct a symbolic temple with the circle representing the magical boundary and the triangle symbolizing the projection of the magician’s will.
Communicating with spirits: The court cards represent specific individuals or entities, while other cards embody and direct elemental forces.
Achieving specific goals: Minor Arcana cards can be selected based on the desired outcome. Planetary modifiers refine the ritual’s intent.

Final Thoughts

Tyson’s “Portable Magic” is grounded in the correspondences of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and offers a comprehensive guide to using tarot for magical purposes. The book is genius and really changed my practice for the better. Highly recommended!

General Manifesting Ideas

Take each of your manifesting goals, and make a small mental sequence representing the wish fulfilled, involving the senses, for each of them (as instructed elsewhere). But, also assign each one a tarot card and a gesture/mudra (a hand gesture, such as pressing the thumb to the ring finger). Only use these images to anchor the state. What that means is, have the mental sequence fire, when you feel the emotions (state of the wish fulfilled), switch the mental screen to a picture of the chosen tarot card, and perform the gesture/mudra.

Over time, these things will become associated, and the gesture and mental pictures can be used during the waking day to reset the stream of thought and feeling as required.

Abundance Meditation

Hold the feeling of faith, naturalness, exclusively, for a long time. Imagine what you want to manifest. Have it now, the state, the thusness, and hold it for long periods. Bathe in it.

Look for ‘the TINGLE’. A kind of joy. It’s linked to your wishes, but it’s also free.

Let it be totally free. Learn to have it alone, just you and it. Fall asleep loving it, and wake up looking for it.

Energy

Hold your intentions as Nembutsu while raising energy, and then direct it outwards.

Visualisation

Have gigantic images, intense feelings and vivid colours.

Imagine others receiving every good thing you are creating for yourself. Your magick will always be wide.

Vision boards

If you are using a folder of images, when you add a new image, write down your intent for this image, what you want to occur, then reduce it to a number as I taught elsewhere, and reduce that number into the current, this makes your intent very clear.

Night Practice

At night in bed, when you are reviewing the day, try and link things that happened to you to repeating mental themes you uncovered over time. If you realised you often have worries about money as thoughts, link that to things going badly financially, going accidentally overdrawn, before revising the past and re-imagining things the way you want them to be.

This linking encourages positive mindfulness, i.e. disipline of thoughts, as their condequence becomes starkly obvious.

Nembutsu

Sparks

If stubborn negative sensation persists during chanting practice with nembutso, ask diety/higher self for a flow of energetic grace to clear it. It (the negativity) will be existing somewhere within your ‘sphere’ as at least an image, probably a sensation also. Concentrate on your crown and ask for it to be taken. Feel an energy descend and flood the negativity with pure light.

Healing Sparks

When you have identified a theme (of emotion) that keeps arising in consciousness, make a composite image to represent it. When it arises in the future, locate the sensation of the emotion in your aura, disregard any mental picture on the mental screen, superimpose the healing image that represents it into that space, and then banish it from your aura by breathing it into the earth.

When using CBT, link a tarot card to each of the ten distortions (or other image such as something relevant from classical art, then use that as a replacement thought. This way, CBT isn’t just a journaling practice in retrospect, it becomes a type of active mindfulness, holding healing images to replace distorted trains of (manifesting) thought.

Don’t forget, you are not just replacing thoughts, each has an associated state (feeling and sensation) and you are replacing it all, thought, inner-voice, state and sensation.

Speak directly to the imagined you in the past. Remember, it is a real version of you in another reality. Boom your voice down to them in reassurance and encouragement like a god speaking to them, because this is what you are in the present.

Minimalism

You actually only own the state, not the manifestations. There are no identities other than those needed in the passing moment. Just claiming the state and letting go is the ultimate magickal minimalism. Then you can choose voluntary discomfort is a stoic fashion, because there is nothing other than the state and when you have it you have everything.

Renunciation/Surrender

The goal is ultimate surrender

Magick can be a type of time travel in a way. You take an intention – a desired future, and have feeling it will inspire in the present. So in a way, the magick is feeling good in itself.

Yet there are repercussions to feeling good in that way. It’s oh too easy for this feeling (based on the future) to become grasping—a kind of subtle desperation. The reality of the present moment (perceived externally) doesn’t match the desires of the mind.

This issue can be solved by focusing on the sensations of happiness, which are essentially an energetic representation/expression of the future—though with sustained practice of this… constant sensate happiness, a reaction will occur—unhappiness. It’s inescapable when it happens.

The problem is threefold. One, we aren’t meant to be happy all the time. Two, you don’t want to be happy all the time. Three: the goal is awakening—not necessarily to be happy all of the time.

The best practice will establish intention—and then consider impermanence—that ultimately any future you are creating with magickal will be lost and fade away—as will everything.

Then you can consider the suffering people—your own future suffering—and have a deep sense of compassion within yourself. Perhaps, to evoke a strong feeling, you could recall a time you saw an animal being hurt or someone you love in pain—until there is a deep sense of sadness and compassion in you—and then focus on the sensation—the physical sensation of this, which tends to be lower down in your body—perhaps around the midsection or wherever you are generating the strong wish for people and beings to be free of suffering.

Focus on this sensation, which is love, and send out this well-wishing into the physical universe from your midsection and out through your shoulders into the world.

Do not rush this. Sit with it for a while.

Switch to your happy, positive intentions. Notice that the feelings will be higher up—though in a way similar—if all your goals are aligned to altruism.

The magickal sensation moved up from the solar chakra (considering compassion) to the crown chakra (considering altruism).

Disavowal of the Senses

A central part of manifestation and spirituality is based around the inner world being the foundation of the outer. We can strengthen our ‘spiritual senses’ and awaken in the world beyond because THE MIND IS A PLACE, and that place shines out into the world we can see. Because of this, to both awaken and create the circumstances desired in life, it’s necessary to orientate feelings and experience from the inner senses, and disavow the lie that is being perceived ‘out there’.

Because this is so central I’m providing a seperate page here with ‘sparks’, i.e. shorted pieces of writings and ideas specifically on this subject, which I might collate into a longer piece at some point.

DISAVOWAL SPARKS

A great exercise is to look at what you do not want with the outer eyes while seeing a correspondence of what you do want with your inner eyes. For example, if you wake up and there is a spot on your nose, look in the mirror while holding the mental picture of the face you see without the spot, as you want to be, and if you FEEL as if that is true, then you have cracked it.

Touch the joy of the inner-picture and let it go to see the outer alone. The point is to feel joy or equanimity at the dead world, no matter what you are seeing.

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Give everything to your ghost. Whatever is good on the outside is only felt on the inside. Be very aware of this, when you are enjoying something, it is not ‘out there’, it is being recreaed ‘in here’ and depends on nothing ‘out there’ to exist. It’s all made up and recreated for the ghostly version of yourself you see in your mind.

Create many things and be free.

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Nirvanah is the decentralisaation of yourself.

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Use symbols as an anchor for feelings. E.g. you can use a tarot symbol such as the three of cups, which means pleasure from social interactions and friendships. Make an image for a shrine or vision board which incorporates this symbol and have some statement on it such as ‘I love my many friends’.

Then, when you are enjoying company, concentrate on the emotion of happiness your friends are causing. Imagine the symbol on your mental screen and hold it there. Link the joy to the symbol. Yes, you are feeling happiness and joy, but it isn’t caused by all your friends at the party you are currently attending, although they are linked to it, it is because this possibility of friendship, a thusness of it exists within you and you can create it at any time. This is where the joy is coming from, the thusness represented by the chosen symbol. This image in your mind.

Therefore, what you are doing is delinking joy from the world outside to its true source, the inner you – where it can never be lost.

Go to some place, far from your friends, bring the symbol to the visual field (create it in your light) and feel the free emotion.

Do this with all your feelings, turn memories and wishes into a set series of pictures, and feel all emotions around these pictures, and never from the dead world beyond your senses.

The reason why tarot cards are good for this practice, because there are so many symbols and they pretty much cover the whole of life, but there are many ways you can adapt this, great works of art for example. Be creative, the point is to be free.

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In the old testament (I am an aethiest, for the record) in hebrew language, the name of the father is yod heh vah heh, which I think means hand, window, fire (emotion) window, meaning a formula of creation, high mood creates reality. But the name of the son is the same except the last letter means tooth, and so it means to devour, i.e. to live ‘in the inner window’, in the mind. To devour reality (disregard reality).

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Day Practices of Spirituality and Manifestation

A miscellaneous collection of ideas to aid spiritual and manifestation practices in the waking day.

Have a piece of jewelry, such as a watch or wrist beads. Only wear it when you are in an acceptable state, which is mostly most of the time. If there is a period of negativity you can’t shake, take it off and only put it back on when you regain a desired state.

Boredom is a good thing to practice with; simply decide it is never allowed. If it comes up, then hold a replacement image steady, such as a manifestation or nembutsu image, with high emotion, for as long as it takes.
An extension to this is enjoying NOTHING. If you can go to a place with nothing to do, then do nothing and be joyous based on the present alone; you are successfully free.

Have a replacement bottle, meaning a little bottle of water that you can carry. When you have negative thoughts, locate them within the fluid. Pour the water out once a week onto the bare earth and state your intention to be free.

Find a book about how to make talismans. Make one for your desire, then practice until you can hold a very steady visualisation of it. Use this as a replacement thought for any contrary thoughts or doubts. Remember, it needs around a minute of steady holding to reset the stream of concoction.

Find a spell book and do a spell for something you want. At the end, before you clean up, look at the spell, the candle and herbs or whatever. This image of the spell cast or whatever is a replacement thought in itself for any doubt or negativity.

Rest in the star. Practice letting go throughout the day. Each time you catch yourself in some negativity, immediately freeze the mental picture, locate it, and fade it’s location and energy to the central image in the chest, then hold an awakening image (nembutsu) steady on the visual field.

Tail-up meditation. Do a meditation, but each time a thought arises, if it wasn’t already, turn it to a positive thought before letting go and returning to the breath.

Practice metta on a regular basis, but the short period before this is the one time you allow worry and negativity in your mind. Other times, if it comes up, push it out of your mind, thinking, ‘No, it’s not my negative time now; I’ll think of this before metta.’
Then, when it is time, worry and be negative for half an hour with a cup of coffee or whatever. You can wallow in it a little, as long as it’s all widened to be compassion around other people during the metta practice. This way you are never repressing or ‘burying your head in the sand’. Negativity is allowed, but under will.