Well, there is always tarot, kabbalah, mysticism.
Personally I don’t believe jack shit anymore, but I really don’t care either
I’m just going to have to accept it may be something that just doesn’t work for me at all, so my time and energy are best put forward in the mundane world.
As I mentioned earlier, my friend, start with some Spare-style sigils.
They’re simple enough, just create a statement of intent, turn it into a glyph, get into an altered state and fire it off. No spirits or accoutrements required.
@Norski did a great write up on how to frame your intention statements as an “afformation” so they invoke emotions, like asking how something came to be:
Give them a try.
This depends what type of magic your seeking to practice. Ceremonial magicians of the golden dawn do LBRP, LBRH, and the middle polar exercise with a period of mediation daily.
I mean you should specify what type of magic your trying to work.
Depression is best worked with meditation.
Dude… choose one thing. One thing and one thing only, be the spare-style sigils the Knight said or anything else. But pick one thing and roll with it, focus on it, for some time. Let’s say… four months. Keep at it no matter what. Practice every single day of your life. Devote time to it. Insist. Fail as much as needed, but always fail better. One day you won’t fail. But magick will never have a 100% success rate.
You don’t need tools to do magic. At its most base level, magic is simply a change of perspective that convinces your subconscious to perceive the world differently so that you allow (not force) results to come to you in alignment with your desired worldview.
Forgive me if I sound harsh but I see you ask a lot of questions, almost daily. And now you say you’ve given up on magic and you’ve decided it doesn’t work for you, in the exact same thread where you’re asking how to stop being an armchair magician and start actually practising.
Again, echoing others, pick ONE thing. Like one system, and stick with it. Like Neville Goddard’s LOA works, Demons of Magick, or Sigils of Power and Transformation, or Universal Magick or something.
Don’t be flying around reading 80 different books about different types of practice at the same time.
@Nightside your descent is very troubling over the last few months all your posts and topics sound the same. They can be summed up as “boo hoo my magick isn’t working” I like you but your posts are becoming tiring.
Please buy ONE single book and follow the instructions. The magick works. Lots of people suggest Damon Brand…I personally avoid his stuff…you have Henry Archer, Gordon Winterfield etc. super easy instructions more doing less typing Fuego
Thanks all, you all give great advice all the time.
Perhaps lower my expectations and check my attitude as well!
I read the responses all, and you all have great input. I have books, just not the popular one a lot of folks have. I’m still stuck in the dimension of 2010 
@ReyCuervo … @Mulberry … @sailing … @Veil … @Angelb1083 … @Mike_Bee … and anyone else I missed, I appreciate you all and will take your advice as well .
I have to continue through with My Celtic Adventure.
I am going to check out Quareia as a system and current, but will have to go with Modern Magick I guess.
I can do pretty much all the work, at least up to a practicus level, but the spirit communications thing is annoying.
Would you like my honest opinion on what to do? Read on if so.
Drop everything that is related to the Golden Dawn, and do not do Quareia or Franz Bardon or Modern Magick or astrology or anything along those lines. Those aren’t wastes of time, but if you feel the need to make a post about getting out of the armchair, then I don’t think they will help you.
Have you ever undertaken a pathworking with demons? I don’t mean that you opened a sigil one time and made a petition, I mean summoning demons most every day and making a request every time you do so? Angel magick would be fine as well, but there is something about the speed and directness with which demons usually act that make magick power very apparent to you and immediately useful in your life.
Stop wasting your time with random stuff. Macaroni portraits and huts made of popsicle sticks aren’t going to make you into a powerful occultist with great skill in magick. Some people think that magick is in the wands and gestures and intellectual correspondencing, but it is not. This is all the mind avoiding magick because it is afraid of magick.
Have you ever experienced a demon being so obviously real and present with you that you scare yourself because of what you see you are capable of? Have you ever experienced a demon manifesting exactly what it is you asked it to do, the very next day?
I’m gonna guess no, to both of those. Would you like to change that? Then remove yourself from all the arts and crafts bullshit and do magick to make things happen in the world around you and to directly control human beings.
Have you ever done that? It’s easier than it may sound, although there is much to learn. All these humans, bumbling around, bouncing off of each other like the ball in a pinball machine, rolling around, believing they have some say in where they go. I find it’s usually best to let them believe what they want to believe.
Here are three book recommendations. I’ve used the first two, and they both played a part in making me into who I am today, living the lifestyle that I now enjoy. Whenever I tell people just a small part of what I get to do in my life, many of them get jealous, and the ones that don’t usually look befuddled and change the subject because they can’t believe it’s actually possible, so why would they pay attention to what they believe is nonsense?
There are pathways through life that can bring you greater freedom, greater power, wealth, whatever it is you want out of life, than most people can accept is possible to achieve, unless you were born into immense privilege. Blind fools, for they cannot see that magick is far greater an inheritance than any sum of money, for magick is what makes anything possible.
Don’t believe me? Ok, that’s not my problem. I get a lot of pleasure out of writing, especially about the occult, so I’ve already gotten what I’m here for.
Demons of Magick by Gordon Winterfield
Lucifer and the Hidden Demons by Theodore Rose
The Magick of Angels and Demons by Henry Archer
The first is more comprehensive than the third for Goetia magick, although the third is an easier method, especially if you don’t just print out the sigils like I did. Ah, my goodness, you didn’t hand-craft 72 complex sigils and instead used your time to live your life and actually practice demonic evocation? The second is my preferred method for pure demonic magick, but you can use any of these books instead of wishy-washy no results time wasting blah magick.
And do you really write down every time you do a banishing ritual or raise magickal energy? I write down summonings usually, but magick is not a chore to be completed like taking out the trash or dealing with taxes. As a wise individual once said, magick is an act of reality manipulation. Maybe I’m just super cool or something, but I have never, never ever ever had a problem with setting aside time for magick, including when I was working like 12-16ish hours per day. If anything, it made me cut out the crap and focus on getting what I fucking want.
Any advice with this book? I never managed to make it work.
If all we are talking about is Goetia, then I have DuQuettes Illustrated Goetia and Ford’s Goetia Magick and Luciferian Witchcraft.
I don’t have money to just go buy something. I have to bust my ass to buy something, and after rent is paid, which means 2-4 weeks to buy a book.
I will get them however.
Circle or no circle? If circle, standard Hebrew circle like solomonic magic, or Crowley style?
Let’s do this. Must be outside.
None of those books @shinri recommended require a circle, or anything other than just the seals in the book itself and some quiet time.
Okay, so meditation or pathworkings, and evocation via sigil and enn?
And what about communicating with them?
No enns. That’s a demonolatry thing, and none of those books follow that religious system.
Lucifer and the Hidden Demons is pathworking ie using elemental imagery to connect with spiritual realities. The names of the demons are derived from the grimoire The Sacred Magick of Abramelin the Mage.
Demons of Magick is a simplified form of Kabbalistic magick, and uses divine names and ruling angels. The book has three different ritual forms. Ritual 1 is a petition method, Ritual 2 is connective evocation (which is basically evocation to presence) and Ritual 3 is full evocation.
The Magick of Angels of Demons is similar to DOM, except the ritual process is quite a bit simpler, and it doesn’t include full evocation. It calls upon both the Shem angels and the demons of the Goetia, in what the author calls a “union of power.”
As far as communication goes, you speak your will in a short, precise, sentence.
Thanks … Will get my hands on one asap.
It is a Great book.
Alright, how about this Fuego…if you are serious about switching to something else, id be happy to loan you the demons of magick book through Amazons kindle loan program. If you agree, i can send you an Amazon invite to read the book free of charge for 2 weeks. I agree with @shinri and the folks telling you to switch into a more modern, streamlined system. You remind me of someone else on here (whose name i will not mention) who is failing with magick, but refuses to let go of the dated ceremonial/solomonic stuff that isn’t working for him. Its the definition of insanity. Doing the same thing over and over again expecting different results. I don’t care about his progress whatsoever anymore, but I do care about yours, and I really don’t want to see you devolve into the mess he is. If you really want to drop the other stuff to give something new a try as shinri suggests, then my offer is here for you.
I agree with @shinri that you should drop everything related to the Golden Dawn. It is literally just putting more boundaries and roadblocks in your own way: “oh I can’t do magic because I need 4x ceremonial robes, a wand, an athame, a chalice, a cauldron, an incense burner, a universal circle, a triangle, the entity’s seal hand-carved in bronze, need to have a ritual bath, wait until the right moon phase and planetary hour, a compass that points true north, Mercury can’t be in retrograde…” – NONE of that matters at all. It can be helpful if you have the mindset to capitalise on those associations, but otherwise, it’s just a complete waste of time. Fuck all of that off and go back to the basics, but actually practice them instead of just reading about them.
Golden Dawn is closer to a religion than a practical system. It teaches you the basics (Modern Magick is good for this) but at the same time it enforces restrictions like “don’t even THINK about trying to summon an entity until you’ve done the LBRP without fail for 365 days in a row”.
Fuck all of that off. If you want to do magic, ACTUAL magic, then pick up something by the Gallery of Magick, or by Corwin Hargrove or Jareth Tempest, or better yet, read something like Liber Null & Psychonaut.
Again, forgive me for being harsh, but you seem to have formed or to be forming this idea that magick is some rigid, structured, hidden (=occult) set of rules and regulations. I promise you, it is absolutely not.
If you can’t afford even the kindle ebooks of titles mentioned in this thread, that’s perfectly fine. If that is the case I would HEAVILY recommend reading something like Feeling is the Secret by Neville Goddard (all of Goddard’s works are out of copyright and available free online). The book is like 50 pages long and it is universally applicable; in my personal opinion this is THE mechanism by which ALL magickal systems work.
Good luck 