REVIEW: MAGICAL DESTINY by DAMON BRAND / GALLERY OF MAGICK

I used to love to write reviews, but I must admit I really don’t anymore. We live in uber-polarised times, and unless you deliver a glowing endorsement, you will almost surely annoy a good number of people when you have something critical to say.

Still, one of the constant requests I get during my YouTube livestreams is to give my opinions on this or that author, this or that book, this or that magical practice.

You can see the issue at hand already.

So why am I reviewing Damon Brand’s Magical Destiny?

A couple of reasons.

First and foremost, the book’s theme is one of the crucial steps in Thelemic practice and initiation: the Knowledge and Conversation with the Holy Guardian Angel. Kinda. More on this later.

Secondly, I have heard about Brand and the Gallery of Magick books for the past few years since I became public with my own teaching offering, but I never read anything from them until now.

And finally, a substantial number of the current students of my Magick Without Tears introductory course have moved their first step in magick through Brand’s offering and were asking me to chime on its validity.

As I mentioned already, despite having been involved with occulture for the best part of my adult life, I became aware of the Gallery of Magick only when I became a “public figure” in it in the past few years.

Which makes sense, of course, since I am not their target audience.

This is an essential part to stress because since reading the book, I also took a few days to explore their website at length, and it’s clear that Gallery of Magick is an incredibly clever marketing operation — and one that has been carefully constructed over the past 10 years.

I guess no one really believes that “Damon Brand” or “Adam Blackthorne” are real names, and while pen names have always been a staple in occulture, I find their continued use a little problematic. To a degree, I can see why some folks might want to protect their identities, especially as the fires of Satanic Panic 2.0 keep being stoked by the ultra-reactionaries far right. But, at the same time, in Magical Destinies, Brand constantly appeals to his authority as an experienced magician of three decades — without giving us any proof of any kind. At least the Golden Dawn founders forged provenance documents, and Crowley did receive documented initiation from them!

The self-referential approach irked me, especially when it was reflected in the absence of footnotes and bibliography and when all the suggestions for further readings were more Gallery of Magick books.

This speaks of marketing techniques to maximise market share and profit, not a sincere wish to share magick with the world. But I digress.

What about the book itself?

To be perfectly honest with you, the first part isn’t too bad at all. If you are a complete novice and want to understand the concept of the Holy Guardian Angel in magick, this book will give you enough to chew on. It does a decent job of telling you what to expect, how to ward yourself from self-doubt, and preemptively answers some of the most common questions about this practice.

It also fails to tell you that none of this is Brand’s original thought, as he’s simply rewriting in more straightforward, more contemporary words what Crowley told us already, scattered across all of his corpus. Yet, as someone who also did precisely this in my own book, it would be hypocritical of me to fault Brand for doing exactly as I did. I left the footnotes, however.

This is also the section where the book admits that everything Brand promised — a simple and quick way for making contact with your Holy Guardian Angel — was yet another sensational claim and little else since it clarifies that all the book’s Protocols — not rituals, more akin to mindfulness exercises — can offer is a way to become aware of the Angel’s presence.

And this is one of the biggest problems with the book: none of these “protocols” are needed because they are nothing but common sense! And I want to be 100% clear on this: EVERYONE embarking on a magical path with sincere and earnest dedication WILL begin to “feel” the Holy Guardian Angel. In the system of the A∴A∴ this is called “Vision of the Angel”, but it doesn’t have to be a vision at all. It can be dreams, synchronicities, or anything at all. And they will happen when you honestly and sincerely promise yourself that you will persevere in magical practice. This is, of course, the simple part.

Brand will tell you that you will need a lot longer to achieve Complete Contact — as he calls Knowledge and Conversation, the original term. But he doesn’t really drive this idea home, not convincingly enough. And it seems to me this is why so many of those who read this book are convinced they are in complete Union with the Angel, while, in fact, they only begun the journey and are then left stranded on the road to Heliopolis.

The problems with this book continue, however. After discussing the Protocols, Brand offers a series of “seven energy-raising sigils to align you with Angelic power”.

According to the author, all you have to do is stare at them intently, and the presence of the Holy Guardian Angel will strengthen. Apart that the Enochian system has nothing to do with the nature of the Holy Guardian Angel. What seems to me is that Brand is cleverly using an incredibly potent and “active” system — the Enochian — as a way to give the novice a bit of embodied experience.

I have done this myself in my Enochian Explorations during my Patreon years by suggesting my students become familiar with the Enochian Alphabet, crafting a rosary connected to its letter and chanting them for several repetitions.

Still, the type of energetic shift the Enochian Alphabet brings has nothing to do with the experience of the Holy Guardian Angel. Instead, Brand tells his readers to trust him because “the Gallery of Magick systems and ideas have been tested for decades”. I am afraid I need a lot more than that, Mr. “Brand”.

I think it’s also important to point out that while Brand does a decent job at highlighting the history of the rituals connected to the Knowledge and Conversation practice, introducing the Abramelin Rite, the Akephalos from the Greek Magical Papyri, and finally, Liber Samekh by Crowley, he conflates all of these without clearly stating that, for instance, the Holy Guardian Angel of the Abramelin is a very different concept that the Holy Guardian Angel as understood by Crowley and thus in Thelema — where it’s akin to the idea of Nirvikalpa Samadhi from Patanjali.

This is not an uncommon mistake. And maybe presenting these nuances in a book for beginners would be detrimental. But that’s the crux of the matter: the Holy Guardian Angel isn’t nor should be a concept the novice should worry about when they first begin their first steps in magical practice.

To fulfil the Union, one must spend the right amount of time (months at the very least, more likely years) in purifying their own Body of Light to become a vessel for the Fire of Heaven.

And to do so, no amount of quick-and-dirty approach will ever do the trick.