>>67763
Concept 3: it all depends on the use of the 5 elements, the 7 hermetic principles, the recognition of spirit, the various powers described in Personal Power (Desire, Faith, Reason, Thoughtforming, etc.).
Magick is governed by mental laws with precise effects just like physical laws.
Knowledge of those laws and their operations will allow you to get precise results.
Rituals are little more than symbolic correspondences created to make certain operations more efficient.
If you put on a ring and induce a trance in which you go mentally to a specific house, and you do this over and over, eventually all you got to do is put on the ring and the rest follows automatically.
Same thing with rituals.
I myself am capable of creating very elaborate rituals for absolutely anything and I take into account so many things all at once that a neophyte might not think about.
I also perform rituals while under trance that tend to be even MORE elaborate and profound that I never formally planned out beyond "I'm going to go into trance and I'm going to do a ritual to do x" and never think about the details of the ritual, they all just happen.
It helps though that I've prepared my mind beforehand with years of study, putting lots of information into place there, ready to be drawn upon by the "subconscious mind" to fling stuff together without me having to think too much about it all.
>spoken words don't matter
They do a little but they aren't necessary. The spoken word can be imbued with intentions, emotions, hypnotic influence, etc. and be a carrier or reinforcer for these things. Also depending on the individuals present in the working, certain words will resonate with them more than others. If it's just one practitioner, then with the right conditions the specific words for him will be used, and it's a group then some approximation that works for the whole group will be typically used.
Now, how do you know which words to use? They might not even be in a language you know consciously in your mind. You can use trance, thoughtforming, and mediumship techniques to get yourself speaking the right stuff or you can think about words you might want to use and then observe your feelings about the word. Does it make you feel silly, impotent, inspired, purposeful, motivated, sombre, etc.? You'll want to choose words that produce the rights feelings that correspond with the results you want to manifest. So it's not "entirely arbitrary" but it's also not exactly universal, which words work best depends upon the magickal operator(s) engaged in the working. Same for many other correspondences. At the same time, language is not arbitrary and random, and there are magickal languages that have certain features like being very rhythmic and there are tribes all around the world who've been separated for at least thousands of years, basically no contact with each other, but their shamans / initiates speak a magickal language and the words are the same or almost the same. There also speech patterns, tones, etc. and a certain type of poems that are better for magick.
So again, it's not completely subjective, and there are certain correspondences that will crop up more often because they work better and they are close to some underlying mathematical objective framework that underpins all of this.
NAP is shit, any true adept wouldn't put together a book like NAP, as they'd realize how stupid it would be to write a bunch of rituals people could try out when nobody would need to read and try out rituals like those if they knew how to make rituals to begin with.