Kinesic Magic: The Yoga of the West

Readers, please enjoy this guest blog post by Donald Tyson, author of several books, including the new Kinesic Magic.

Why has there never been a yoga of the West? India has its hatha yoga, an ancient system of static physical poses said to maintain health, extend life, and enhance vitality. Another Hindu system called kundalini yoga awakens spiritual centers along the spine and revitalizes both spirit and flesh. In Buddhism, hand gestures are used to control esoteric energies during meditation. China has its tai chi, a discipline of moving poses that flow into one another like a slow-motion dance and channel esoteric energy through the body. In Korea and Japan the martial arts use katas, similar dance-like series of moving body poses that simulate combat, but which also have the esoteric function of driving occult energies through the body to liberate its power.

Strangely, no such system of postures or movements evolved in Europe. This may be due to a difference in the general philosophical outlook of East and West. Outward-looking Europeans sought to control of their external environment through the use of machines and the sciences. In Eastern lands the perfection of life involved living in harmony with the environment, not conquering and subduing it. Eastern minds tended to turn inward rather than outward for the purpose of achieving control over the body and the mind.

Recognizing this curious void in traditional Western culture, and seeing no reason why it should continue, I decided to fill it. The result is Kinesic Magic, a book that sets forth a system of hand gestures and body postures for manipulating occult energies and controlling spirits.

Using the system of kinesic magic, almost any ritual purpose that a magician might seek to achieve with conventional ritual tools, esoteric substances, robes, a magic circle, an altar, and so on, can be achieved with only the body and the mind. A person possessing knowledge of kinesic magic who was stripped naked and locked in an empty room in complete darkness would have the same ability to work magic as a magician in full ritual regalia in a furnished occult lodge.

This was not an easy book to write. It took more than two full years, and it evolved slowly and painfully. I did not set out in the beginning with an awareness of what I was going to create, but rather opened my mind to spiritual teachers, and allowed them to guide my writing and my experiments. Every part of kinesic magic—every gesture, every posture, and combinations of both—had to be tested and verified, to insure not only that it was esoterically correct, but also that it functioned together with all other parts to form a complete and integrated system.

The result is a new language of magic with which you can say whatever you can imagine. The 24 hand gestures are its alphabet and the 24 body postures are its grammar. What you choose to create with it is completely up to you. All you need to do is learn the language, and then you can use it to express anything you desire. No one can ever take it from you, because it will become a part of you, as intimately yours as a part of your own body. It is the final liberation of Western magic from the tyranny of the material world.

Our thanks to Donald for his guest post! For more from Donald Tyson, read his article “What Is Essential for Working Magic.”