Hello! Looking For Some Guidance. Options

Firstly, HELLO!
Hopefully I can grow from everyones experience and knowledge, and hopefully help someone also.

So I am very new to Magick.
I was hoping someone could explain the different forms of magick to me.
I would like to find something that fits me, but (maybe due to incompetence or just not knowing what to look for) i can't seem to find a cut and dry list of the differant orders of magick.

I have started to read "Modern Magick: Eleven Lessons in the High Magickal Arts" and I also have Fries Visual Magick, and Liber Null & Psychonaut. To be quite honest I have no idea what I am reading. To try and start I picked up The Golden Dawn tarot today at my local Occult store.

So what are the different forms of magick?
What is Chaos Magick? What is Ceremonial Magick? What is Witchcraft? What is High Magick? What is Sorcery?
Do these have anything similar? Are they very differant? How would one begin with the Tarot? Is the Tarot involved in any magick "spells" if you will, or just Divination of grey magick?

Please help point a new fawn toward the herd.

I was hoping someone could explain the different forms of magick to me.
I would like to find something that fits me, but (maybe due to incompetence or just not knowing what to look for) i can't seem to find a cut and dry list of the differant orders of magick.

I have started to read "Modern Magick: Eleven Lessons in the High Magickal Arts" and I also have Fries Visual Magick, and Liber Null & Psychonaut. To be quite honest I have no idea what I am reading. To try and start I picked up The Golden Dawn tarot today at my local Occult store.

So what are the different forms of magick?
What is Chaos Magick? What is Ceremonial Magick? What is Witchcraft? What is High Magick? What is Sorcery?
Do these have anything similar? Are they very differant? How would one begin with the Tarot? Is the Tarot involved in any magick "spells" if you will, or just Divination of grey magick?

Hey Tynody! Welcome!

The best way I've found of understanding the different schools of magick has been by studying magick's history of development. You can learn about this in brief by referring to John Michael Greer's "The New Encyclopedia of the Occult," and especially by tracing the references between the articles. Reading about the Golden Dawn, for instance, you'll see references to occultists who founded their own movements based on the Golden Dawn, such as Dion Fortune, Israel Regardie, and Aleister Crowley. Similarly, you'll be referred back to persons and movements that inspired the Golden Dawn (these in turn inspiring other occult movements before and after). Since any article you read is inevitably connected to many other articles, eventually you'll be lead to see the differences and connections between the schools of thought. This will give you a good intellectual understanding to at least move in the direction you want to move.

In general, occult thought is like any other discipline, with various interpretations that disagree to a certain extent but also influence and reference one another. Because so much material is shared between disciplines, there are also many fundamental similarities between schools.

I love Donald Michael Kraig's book, "Modern Magick," and think it's a great introduction to magick in general. The orientation is based on the Golden Dawn model, but I think this is fairly compatible with most other schools of magick. And Kraig's newest edition of the book makes even greater reference to different schools of magick that have many similarities with the G.D., such as Chaos magick and Wicca.

I'd say DMK's instructions for learning to work with the tarot in MM are a pretty good way to start. Yes, the Tarot can be used for purposes other than divination, e.g. for path-working exercises on the Tree of Life.

This post has been edited by monkman418: Sep 10 2010, 11:04 PM