Ceremonial magick, as practiced in the Western tradition, often appears ecumenical at first glance. It contains gods and spirits from across mythological systems, angelic hierarchies, planetary intelligences, Enochian calls, and Kabbalistic diagrams. Practitioners may work with Egyptian, Greek, or even Thelemic symbols, seemingly unbound by religious allegiance. Yet beneath this eclectic surface lies a foundational structure that is deeply Abrahamic and in truth, cannot be cleanly excised from it without collapsing the system. It’s so deeply embedded that removing it would render the system incoherent.
This is not a matter of personal belief, but historical architecture. The Western ceremonial tradition as we know it, from the Solomonic grimoires to the Golden Dawn to Thelema, is built upon a Judeo-Christian cosmology. Its ritual methods, hierarchies of angels and demons, use of sacred names, and its metaphysical assumptions are all shaped by centuries of religious syncretism rooted in the Abrahamic worldview.
Take the Key of Solomon, the Rosicrucian manifestos, or Agrippa’s Three Books of Occult Philosophy. These are not simply magical texts; they are deeply theistic in orientation. They assume a monotheistic creator, a moral order, and an authority structure in which divine permission is necessary to command spirits. Even the so-called “demonic” grimoires like the Goetia rely on invoking the names of God and angelic powers to constrain spirits, a practice meaningless without the metaphysical weight of the Abrahamic God behind it.
Kabbalah, the esoteric heart of many ceremonial systems, is Jewish mysticism reinterpreted through a Christian and later occult lens. The Tree of Life is not a universal map of all religions; it is a specific cosmological model derived from the Sefer Yetzirah, the Zohar, and later Hermetic adaptations. The names on the spheres, Elohim, YHVH, Adonai, are not placeholders. They are invocations of a particular theological lineage. To use them as generic power-words without recognizing their origin is not liberation from dogma, but unconscious dependence on it.
Even Thelema, which outwardly departs from Christianity, still draws heavily from this legacy. The Gnostic Mass, the structure of the A∴A∴, and the very formulae of its ritual magick are steeped in the same framework. Crowley may have reinterpreted God as a dynamic polarity of Nuit and Hadit, but he never discarded the scaffolding. He simply repurposed it.
This is not to say one must be a Christian, Jew, or Muslim to practice ceremonial magick, but rather to acknowledge that the operating system remains Abrahamic in syntax and logic. Like trying to run a program on a different OS, efforts to remove ceremonial magick from its roots often lead to dysfunction, shallow symbolism, or incoherent metaphysics.
For those seeking to build a truly non-Abrahamic magickal system, the solution is not to retrofit ceremonial magick with pagan aesthetics, but to develop new models from the ground up. Until then, we should recognize that the angels we summon, the names we vibrate, and the circles we draw are all part of a ritual grammar written long ago, one that still speaks, whether we believe in its god or not.
