Who Made Your Alphabet?

“Wie lange noch hält diese Kette von Ereignissen an, bis Ich nicht mehr bin, gedanklich geordneter Stein.”¹

Autumn is coming to the City.  Autumn, and the trees are turning shades of rust, and soon the concrete jungle will be empty and bare.  Everything will look larger, then, clearer without the shield of a canopy.  And any wildlife we see in those melancholy streets will be wanderers in alien territory.

But, for now, autumn is coming to my City and I find my thoughts turning inwards and to the deep waters we share.  Skipping stones across the great unconscious sea.

In the same way that we wonder, occasionally, whether a banana might appear blue from behind another’s eyes;  it often occurs to me that we have no conception of what normal thoughts might be.  Our thoughts, translated as they must be through the medium of communication, are shaped by the restrictions of language and understanding² - even filled, as it is, with words defining things we might not recognize if we encountered them “in the flesh.”

Enlightenment.

Freedom.

Love.

I think that the very fact we possess some words is perhaps more important than their meaning.  How would we begin to approach some concepts without symbols to manipulate?  To stack alongside other symbols.  To compare, size up, rearrange and -ultimately- dismiss.  Some of our words, I think, are seeking words.  Existing in order that we might one day hold them up against the thing itself and say “yes, thou art that.”

I wonder whether the rest of the search is then in recognising where we have strayed, in killing the Buddha.³

My magical practice has always been prone to crises of faith, to moments of indecision, of silence.  There are days when the pattern of life is nothing but air traffic and dead leaves.  Days when, despite any of the incredible things that magic has brought into my life, I find myself doubting that it exists.  It’s ridiculous, I know, like doubting in the existence of beauty, of Kung-fu, of vector mathematics.  Some things simply cannot be submitted to doubt.

Not once you know.

Sometimes, my return is a breath of fresh air. A moment of certainty. One of my entities contacts me, a project comes to fruition, a magpie lands at my window and I remember. These are truly beautiful moments, I can actually feel a sort of golden flower unfurling in my soul. Returned as quickly as it had disappeared.

During this most recent sabbatical, I decided to keep my nose to the grindstone:

I have been trying, for years now, to learn to read simple playing cards. Divination isn’t exactly my forte and I decided that, since it was always going to be difficult to develop my skills, I may as well select a medium that appealed to me personally. I have already made some meaningful progress although the implications of certain cards still elude me, playing cards simply do not offer the creative prompts that the Tarot provides…

…in any case, an issue had been weighing rather heavily on my mind, and I spread my cards.

The prognostic was not good: I was venturing out from a position of strength into a situation which promised to make me suffer. It outlined pretty clearly the reasons, the players, and offered absolutely no way out. So the message was clear.

Get out. Get out, now.

I didn’t, of course.

I drew the cards again, and again, and finally put them away as nonsense.

(You might ask, at this stage, why I didn’t draw up a sigil to fix the problem – I don’t work on people without their agreement. I have heard some great arguments as to why it’s absolutely fine, but it makes me uncomfortable. It works, it seems harmless, and it feels profoundly wrong.)

You probably guessed it by now: everything played out very precisely as the cards foretold.

I was even able to predict the whys and wherefores of the situation, identify the players and circumstances involved, surprise people with knowledge of the events leading up to it all… one of my rare 100% hits, apparently.

I’m miserable as all hell, of course, but I can feel it tickling inside my ribs again.

A smug little golden flower.

Should have listened.

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¹ Anon., plainly graffitied on a row of granite blocks in a disaffected Russian military airbase outside Berlin.
Aprox. translation: “How much longer will the chain of events hold until I am no more thoughtfully ordered stone.”
² Samuel R. Delany, 1999, Babel-17, Gollancz; (ref. Whorfian Linguistics)
³ Attrib. Linji, ca. 850, Killing the Buddha

 

 

Oh, Buddha-bodied Ganesha

Namaste [nuhm·uh·stey] is a religious salutation derived from the Sanskrit and meaning something along the lines of “the light which is divine within me perceives and adores the light which is divine that is also within you.“

I’m a big fan of words that convey the broad strokes of an idea they could never capture, words that attempt to harness something bigger than mere syllables can possibly possess.  Tathata is one of the these words, Namaste is another.

I can remember the first time someone stuttered over themselves trying to explain to me what it means.  A long few minutes of “well, it’s kind of” and “but really, it’s like” and “it’s hard to explain“ at the end of which I was left standing there with a shit-eating grin on my face thinking “Wow, that makes so much sense.  It’s kind of perfect, really.“

Because it does make so much sense, and it’s wonderful to me that a single word could have accrued so much meaning, so much strength.  That a greeting could at once say “there is a greater spirit that we share, that is a part of all of us and knows itself through our words and our actions” while at the same time echoing “my share of this great unconscious sea adores and respects the share which you are carrying.“

I do not know you, but I love you.

And so it should be, whether you’re talking to a ghost, a goblin or a pretty girl.  This is our world, we share it and care for it together.  That ant on your donut has very precisely the same claim to the universe as you do.  It lives here.

Namaste, Mr. Ant… get the fuck off my bun.

This kind of sprung to mind when I was thumbing through Taylor Ellwood’s post on Elephant (here) and he mentions that Elephant could pretty easily kill him.  I figure he can, yes, and I could kill Mr. Ant even though he probably reckons he has a pretty good setup right here.  His people outnumber us by far, and they build all their clever little cities.  What I mean is that this isn’t an even playing field on the physical plane.

I have no idea if it’s any more even on the mystical plane, but I have a feeling that Ant packs a pretty mean punch if you give it half the chance.  Gotta be extra polite to the little guys, their memory goes back to the dinosaurs and they watched us poking with a stick and knuckling around like mindless toddlers long before we thought we were all that.  All I’m saying is that the spirit of Ant can probably take you.

Give the ant your donut, there’s no need for anyone to get hurt here.

And this puts us in something of a conundrum, doesn’t it?

On the one hand, Mr. Ant is a citizen of the universe, a bonafide living entity with every right that matters being equal to mine.  When the show is over, we’ll be bowing side by side and he can look me in the eyes and say “I was with you in our world, we were there together,” and damned if the little tyke won’t be right on the ball.  This deserves recognition, in my mind, it deserves a certain companionship.  We’re all eating each other and stealing form each other, but we’re doing it together.

On the other hand, Ant is an ancient soul with millennial memories of wisdom rooted deep in prehistoric times.  His people build towering cities, complex societies, and use other creatures.  Some of his diminutive subjects are still built the exact same way they were back when they first feasted on Tyrannosaurus flesh, imagine a design good enough that it hasn’t changed in millions of years*.  That deserves a certain recognition, too, a certain respect. Doesn’t it?

So our options in terms of communication must lie somewhere between: “Yo, ant-dude, could you score me some wisdom?” and “Grandfather ant, your halls are great, your people without number, look to me now.”  This is pretty cool, I can live with that.

I tend to think of Ganesh as my path to magick, my gate and key to the invisible world.  He’s looked after me over the years, I try to look to him as often as I should and he deserves.  But there’s always a little smile on my lips when I rib him about his gut.

“Oh, Buddha-bodied Ganesha, Remover of Obstacles, Thanks for sticking around.“

---

* Edited because Scribbler very politely pointed out that I utterly suck at History, and my fragile ego can only accept that once.  For the sake of posterity, however, and the amusement of the masses, the original text read “in the last ten thousand years.”  Yeah, yeah, laugh it up.

 

Your Actual Milage May Vary

Namaste folks,

I believe that it was Aleister Crowley who said (and when I say I-believe I mean, I-am-reliably-informed-by-the-Internet-that) “I have never grown out of the infantile belief that the universe was made for me to suck.” With that in mind, I just wanted to begin a no-doubt long and illustrious career of moronic meanderings in the magical world with a Public Service Announcement.

(Just read it out loud as fast as you can with no apparent enthusiasm)

Any ideas proposed in this here blog should not and cannot be constituted as actual wisdom so much as somewhat creative accounts of what essentially amounts to magick. We are not professional magicians, not extraordinary people, not prodigies – merely a fistful of inquisitive minds looking to make sense of an ever-more-wonderful world the only way we know how.

Do not attempt to replicate any of the ideas proposed in this blog without the supervision of a bonafide adult specimen, sober and fully informed of your intention and sources. These posts are not suggestions, they are not recommendation, they are not even the merest hint of such a thing.

I cannot emphasize this enough, do not (repeat: DO NOT) attempt to skin a cat. Cats are stupendous badasses of the most stupendous kind, who train from the cutest of kittling age in martial arts which Bruce Lee and Tony Jaa dream about in their very stickiest dreams. Samuel L. Jackson and Chuck Norris both fearfully refer to Bast as Ma’am and so should you. These creatures are not to be trifled with and, if you mess with them…

They. Will. End. You.

You have been warned.

Your actual milage may vary.

Having said that, I would heartily encourage those of you who know better to tell us so. We do some things pretty well, some things pretty badly, some things nowhere near as often as we want to. The whole magical point of the Intermawebthing is that smarter, faster, stronger magicians might get a chance to stick their noses in this mess and scream blue murder…

Stephen, David, Scribbler, Rob, I am looking at you. Thank you.

I will also be writing some halfway meaningful stuff, I hope.

I swear I’ll try really, really hard.

 

Am I Dreaming, Right Now?

“Once Zhuangzi dreamt he was a butterfly, a butterfly flitting and fluttering around, happy with himself and doing as he pleased.  He didn’t know he was Zhuangzi.  Suddenly he woke up and there he was, solid and unmistakable Zhuangzi.  But he didn’t know if he was Zhuangzi who had dreamt he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming he was Zhuangzi.  Between Zhuangzi and a butterfly there must be some distinction! This is called the Transformation of Things.” ¹

A couple of years ago, back when the possibility of a second volume was still fluttering on people’s lips, I gathered my shiny coins and purchased a crisp copy of Gyrus‘ Dreamflesh: A Journal of Body, Psyche, Ecological Crisis & Archaeologies of Consciousness, Volume 1. (and with a title like that, I could hardly afford not to).

It was a Strange Attractor -esque collection of articles, loosely connected by an arcane system of Gyrus’ own devise, and I lost myself into it with the self-same abandon I had devoted to the other journals.  I adore these provocatively covered soundbytes of inspiration, filled with little pieces of the weirdness in our world, which leave you itching to camp in the library until you finally understand.

Yesterday, amidst a ritual feast of cheap red wine and home-made vegetable curry, arose the topic of lucid dreaming from a meandering argument on dissociative identity disorders and the potential uses of Peter Carroll’s metamorphosis.  I am still internalising some of Stephen’s points regarding my Lines in the Sand, and I think best when I am arguing my point (public service announcement: this process requires very understanding and patient friends).

“The trick,” says the psychologist, “is to ask yourself regularly, throughout your everyday routine: Am I dreaming, right now?” The idea being that you train your subconscious to question it’s waking state, and it will ask itself the same question while you dream, thus presumably freeing up a The End of Mr. Y-esque² cheat console permitting you unrestricted access to your dreaming consciousness.  I cycled home with a mind filled with half-remembered snippets of my notes, and a crystal clear image of Dreamflesh’s salacious cover art.  No sleep for Api, clearly.

In her article My Dream Self and Me, in Dreamflesh, Jennifer Dumpert writes an enthralling account of a particular condition I have never encountered before or since:

Her dream self exists in a consistent parallel to her meat self.  It has a consistent dreamscape environment, made up of aggregated scenes from her past.  It has consistent memories and experiences of its own, different likes and dislikes, skills and abilities…  an ongoing dreamside existence, which Jennifer becomes more and more aware of over time, and eventually seems to culminate in a joint ritual between her dream self and her meat self (which may or may not have ended the experience).^[³^]

I cannot do it credit, so please read her account yourself.

Jennifer’s article, and the crumbs of information I was subsequently able to gather about her and her ideas, radically changed the way that I approach dreaming.

It finally got me to keep a reasonably constant dream diary (barring the occasional hiatus) and to work on actively directing and manipulating the shape of my personal dreamscape… this is really the part that gets my juices flowing.  I conducted a handful of experiments at the time, the notes of which have largely survived my travels and are now splayed in front of me.

I think that dreaming is important to what we do.

I remember reading about the aboriginal Dreaming, way before I discovered that magic didn’t exist (and then that it did, afterall) and finding something inherently correct about the concept as I understood it.  A feeling which lurched back into my gut while I read about Jung’s Collective Unconscious, and again when I overead snippets of the Doctor’s “Garden of Ancestral Memory”, in the Authority, and many times since.

So I suppose that, when I first started to actively construct a dream city, I was really looking to replicate Jennifer’s results.  I borrowed from exercises on creating an astral temple, on lucid dreaming, on dream evocation… filling my metaphorical backpack with such tools as I thought I might require, I will look through my notes again later and tell you more about them.

My first few attempts were depressingly unsuccessful, I drew up my sigilised wish to visit my dreaming city, went through the motions I had prepared and went to bed… waking up in the morning with nothing to report.

Nothing except…

…I started to write about the project constantly.  Endless and minutious descriptions of the city, which borrowed elements from the countless I had visited and lived in, but seemed stubbornly grounded in the past.  Unusually (for me) there was no story, nor were there many characters, but descriptions of streets and buildings and activities the style of which I almost certainly owe to Calvino’s Invisible Cities, in retrospect.

It was on my fourth or fifth attempt that I was/watched a young girl spying on a huge grey tiger through the world I had been describing.  I met four more of the city’s denizens over the next two dreams, and a fifth that fell prey to the tiger during my fourth or fifth visit.

The tiger, I believe, was/is important to the city, as much a part of it as the girl or the other residents – including the unfortunate circus master who, perhaps tellingly, had been the only person capable of approaching the beast in my earlier ventures.  I believe that Emmett’s death was deeply significant to the city’s residents, although I have not actually visited the city since.  I watched the whole event unfold with my guide from the safety of a belltower.

She was terrified, but I remember thinking that I had reasonably little to fear.

It occurs to me now that, were the city to reflect my unconscious, I am likely responsible for the tiger.  Which would imply that it is my responsibility to deal with it.

This, presumably, calls for a montage.

---

¹ Burton Watson (tr.), 1968, The Complete Works of Chuang Tzu, Columbia University Press
² Scarlett Thomas, 2008, The End of Mr.  Y, Canongate Books Ltd.
³ Jennifer Dumpert, 2006, My Dream Self and Me, Dreamflesh, Dreamflesh Press
 Italo Calvino, 1997, Invisible Cities, Vintage New Ed.
 Anthony Stevens, 2001, Jung: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford Paperbacks, New Ed.

 

Lines in the Sand

“Then he showed those men of will what will really was.“¹

I know, I know, we’re all very grown up about what we do.

We make it all sound very sensible and controlled, we have our own industry best practices, our very own little acronyms and abbreviations.  We mostly shy away from labeling anything as “right” or “wrong”, but we’re generally happy to point out that some things are “right-” or “wrong-er.”

All in all, this is a pretty good thing : we’ve stuck training wheels on our engine.

Almost every starting magus with half-an-inclination to read-up on their work will be saved from making the big mistakes.  They’ll be encouraged to practice all the good stuff, all the breathing and visualisation and energy focus they’ll need to stay on top of things when the machine starts to buck.

Being something of a pupate in our world, there is something ironic about my writing this but…

“Darling, do you think we’re teaching our child to be weak?  Do you ever worry that we might be protecting it too much, keeping it from lessons it should learn?  Do you think the other children will pick on it at school?”

Well, do you?

(Where the hell is Api going with this, I know).

Let me explain:

For one of my projects, the details of which will no doubt come out on some sunny first day of the waning moon, when I have finally gotten my self to constructing the accursed thing, I require cat bones.

Ideally, I would require the bones of two reasonably small cats.

Actually, I should ideally kill them myself.

I know this as surely as I know that I cannot and will not do this.  It simply isn’t who I am, and I am far too proud of who I am to sacrifice anything that makes up my self.  I do not kill.  I do not hurt.  I do not make feel bad unless I can’t help it.  This is basic be-a-good-person stuff, it is not negotiable.  Ever.

This means that, from the word “Go,” I am compromising.

The question therefore becomes: How much do you compromise?

At the risk of dipping too heavily form one source, allow me to quote a short passage from Stephen Grasso’s Dreams of a Midwich Planet:

“Black Jacky Johnson, who outwitted the devil and walked with a perpetual limp from the night he spent in hell back in 1862.  The terrible shopkeeper of “Blackened Fortunes” that once stood on Grainger Street in Newcastle and sold cures and curses to those brave enough to ask for them.  The cruel ex-blacksmith who could speak with dogs and horses, who carried a stick that had its own heartbeat, and who gave a wink and walked out of the world one cold spring morning.“²

Do you think Black Jacky Johnson would have killed two kittens for his ghost fence?

Damn right he would have done.  He’d have grabbed a couple of young strays and wrung their necks, boiled them in a pot for a day and a night, until the skin and meat sloughed off the bones and he could just shake those little skeletons clean.

Does that make him a bad person?  Certainly, by conventional standards of the expression.  Did it also make him better at this than us, though?  Because, you see: I’m drawing my line right here, close to my self-image and my beliefs, well within the bounds of society’s tolerance.  But he drew his line way out there, where no one’s comfort zone stretched to offer him any shade.

What did he sacrifice, I wonder, to do what he did?  How did he get that limp?

Do you think that, perhaps, Black Jacky Johnson cried when he wrought his first curse and some poor sod lost a leg?

You see, I worry that he did.

Because, if Black Jacky Johnson cried, if the cruel ex-blacksmith wrung his hands in shame, that means he started right here at my doorstep.  It means every step he took away might have made him the man Grasso tells us about.  It means that my ghost fence will forever be a weak expression of what it could be because I do not have the will to do what needs to be done for it to be strong.

In the Liber Null³, Peter Carroll describes the need for Metamorphosis, for breaking down the barriers of who you perceive yourself to be.  He goes on to expand this idea in his writings, which I sadly do not know well enough to reference here for you.  It makes sense, every preconception and societal reflex limits our access to the liminal realms with which we work…  I can buy that.

So, how much do I get, if I quit smoking?
How much for my love of walking?
How much for my self-respect?

So I have three tiers of options, really:  I could find a dead cat, skin it and slough the flesh from its bones…  except that I can’t do that either.
I could contact taxidermists and attempt to buy some damaged skeletons…  it’s what I will do, I suspect, but it’s clearly weak ju-ju.
Or, I could mould bones from Fimo and imbue them with as much cat-like energy as I can muster…  this seems like the most modern thing to do, but it is clearly weak.

So this is my line drawn in the sand, this is who I am, I buy cat bones on eBay.

I hope I don’t come to regret this, one day.

Here is another extract from Grasso’s article to make us all feel better:

“Tony Cunningham, who lived in a crooked house filled with umbrellas.  Who was terrified of the night sky on midsummer’s eve, tended a garden of curious plants and unknown vegetable life, and consorted with pale hopping creatures on the moors at night.  Who packed a suitcase one morning and traveled the length and breadth of England on a tandem bicycle, with his invisible benefactor Yellow Morgan in tow, dispensing his sorceries to those in need.  Who saved the lives of eighteen miners trapped beneath the earth by striking a hard bargain with oak, ash and elm that he regretted till the end of his days.“²

I guess Tony Cunningham would probably have looked at his notes, shrugged and said: “No ghost fence, then, let’s find another way.”

---

¹ Kevin Spacey as Roger “Verbal” Kint in The Usual Suspects
² Stephen Grasso, 2005, Dreams of a Midwich Planet, Generation Hex, Disinformation Company Ltd.
³ Peter Carroll, 1987, Liber Null & Psychonaut, Red Wheel/Weiser

 

Spray Paint Letters

“What god do you pursue in cities?
Do you see him, briefly, from inside a moving tram?

There – is that his name, those spray paint letters?
Is that him, broken, crazy, speaking tongues?

There, is that him? Can you demonstrate?
Can you mouth or call his unsaid name?“¹

I recently picked up a copy of Jason Louv’s excellent Generation Hex², which I could not recommend enough.  It was packed with inspirations and ideas, gut-written articles which left me reeling and my pad filled with fevered notes.  I read it, reread it, and still pick through it regularly for half-remembered morsels.  It deserves a scintillating review – which I will sadly not accord it in this article, but which you can find on Hedge’s BookMyrk blog.

I want to talk about Stephen Grasso, English hoodoo and dérive.

You see, amidst the nuggets of Louv’s compilation were three articles by Mr.  Grasso:
Learning to Open to Haunted Kaleidoscope,
Beneath the Pavement, the Beast, and
Dreams of a Midwhich Planet.

I finished every one with the same wrenching disappointment I felt when I turned the last page of The Discovery of Heaven, knowing that it was over and there was no more of it to read.  I love the man’s style, I love his ideas and I love his sweat-and-grime perception of our world.  I have no idea why, but I find it hard to imagine the man working through the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram.  This, particularly after reading Dreams of a Midwhich Planet.

In Beneath the Pavement, the Beast (the bulk of which you can find in his online article The Drift), Grasso talks about “Dérive” as a cross between a spirit walk and a scavenger hunt.  As I read it, morsels of Robert Archambeau’s Citation Suite kept popping into my head, along with a piece of dialogue between John Constantine and London in Gaiman’s Sandman : Preludes and Nocturnes.

“Hullo London.”
“Hullo John Constantine.”
“How are you then, London?”
“All right.  Full of people.  Raining.  You?” ³

I have a sort of hang-around-and-hope-it’ll-come-over-and-speak-to-me teenage crush on urban magic, you see, and I absolutely adore the concept of a dialogue between a magus and a city.

More to the point, I love the idea of treating an urban environment as a medium of communication with the invisible world (and no, I still haven’t read the Invisibles, it’s because I suck, okay?).  So I more or less had to investigate this new idea.

I’m quite picky about the components that I use for my spells, and I have been looking for a few pieces for almost a year now.  Since Grasso’s article specifically suggests the use of Dérive as a means of finding ingredients, a scavenger hunt seemed like a good basis for my experiment.

I noticed a long time ago that my projects tend to take shape at their conception, long before any actual work is done, and this was no different : once I had reread the few articles I had found on Dérive, and resolved to do the deed in the morning, I headed out for a spot of dinner and immediately noticed several posters for flea markets and Signs which seemed to be pointing me in a specific direction.

(Since I generally find that these Signs and omens are rather subjective and inexplicable, I won’t bore you with their specific form, merely the impressions which they left me with).

In the morning, having resolved to get up early to avoid excessive pedestrian traffic, I slept straight through my alarm and finally woke up around 11am.  I filled an old cough-medicine bottle with old spiced rum and a chewing gum bottle with scented rice, made a list of the pieces I was despairing of ever hunting down, among them:

• An antique gold-leafed picture frame,
• A tall metal oriental lantern,
• An old-style bicycle dynamo,
• Two matching ceramic jars, and
• A set of six Matryoshak dolls.

…and marched out into the city streets in the direction which I was drawn to the day before.

I walked past several busy crossroads with the gut-clenching fear that I might spot a Sign forcing me to embarrass myself in front of a score of middle-aged weekenders, but eventually rounded on a quiet crossroad which thankfully reminded me strongly of the stories of Papa Legba (thank you for that mercy, old man).

So it was under the gently frowning gaze of a handful of patient old pensioners that I muttered my respects to Papa Legba, Yog-sothoth and Ganesha, pouring first the scented rice, then the old rum onto the tarmac and petitioning their assistance…

…then, as I started looking around for my first clue, my mobile vibrates its crazy little dance and a girlfriend reminds me we were going to have breakfast together.  I haven’t forgotten, have I?  Well of course I have, but don’t try to explain that my date with a crippled old saint is more important than a Latte in the sun.

I tell her where I am, hang up and go back to looking around – determined to make something of this experiment against all odds.

I follow graffiti and posters and lettering on old vans, stand between two mirroring graffitis until a car howls in outrage, spend several minutes staring into a bin, pick up a handful of rusty screws and leave them elsewhere, watch people behaving strangely and jump out of my skin when my friend meets up with me…  my wanderings have taken me into her path, despite the fact that I started in completely the wrong direction.

I take this as a good sign and smile when she asks me how the hell I knew which way she was coming.

We walk into town and she takes me along a series of roads and alleys I have never used before, throughout which I carry the same tingling sensation that always assails me when I am working on a project.  We have breakfast, chat for a few hours, and resolve to visit one of the nearby flea markets… things are looking good, actually.

Over the course of a few hours, I find a set of heavy old dynamos stamped 1943, a dusty old lantern on which half the work I planned has already been done, and an antique gold frame for which the dealer asks the usual completely-reasonable-but-utterly-out-of-my-league price but, after a few minutes of weather-talk, inexplicably drops the price to peanuts and wraps it up for me…

No luck on the dolls or the jars, but they also happen to be the items I have been hunting for the least period of time, so perhaps the city decided to help me out with the tough stuff.  My treasures are carefully wrapped, vibrating with potential.

I’m stunned into a contemplative silence.

On my way back home, I drop by the crossroad and walk around it 4 time, voicing my thanks far clearer than the morning’s muttered words.  The rice and rum are gone, cleaned away by the midday showers, I suppose.  I look like a complete idiot, but these guys have been good to me, they deserve a little sacrificed dignity.

In a few days, I’ll start cleaning the pieces, buying the paints and mundane ingredients that I need to turn my concept into something meaningful.

The overall experience was quite intriguing.

I felt the buzz of active magical work throughout the day, catching glimpses of words and images and performing all manner of nonsensical actions which just seemed right.  I still feel much more in tune with it all now than I did a few days ago, and I suspect I will perform a slightly more aimless Dérive later, to get in touch with my city…  find out if it needs anything from me.

It’s only fair, afterall.

---

¹ Robert Thomas Archambeau, 1997, Citation Suite, Wild Honey Press
² Jason Louv, 2005, Generation Hex, Disinformation Company Ltd.
³ Neil Gaiman, 1991, The Sandman: Preludes and Nocturnes, Titan Books Ltd.

 

Silence is Golden

“Forming a kind of initiated priesthood, secrecy is the general rule. A modern occultist cult sums up this almost primordial urge for secrecy in one of its dicta: Knowledge is Power; Knowledge shared is Power lost”¹

This rule has always been a problem for me… I mean, I’m writing a blog about my magical works, for crying out loud! While they may not think of it as a “problem” per sé, I can only assume that all the blogging magi out there have also been faced with this self same question: How much do you say?

Because there is Power to be lost in saying too much, I have no doubt of that.
You have to wonder whether a charm is still as powerful once its recipient has watched you gather the ingredients and drilled you about their purpose. Once you give them a chance to deconstruct the thing into its components (if only mentally) and understand your logic, is it still as effective?

Is it, in fact, still effective at all? I simply haven’t tried.

On the other hand, I do this because I love it. It fascinates me and shapes the manner in which I approach every other aspect of my life. The thrill that runs down my spine when I uncover new influences and inspirations is absolutely addictive, and what poor fool hunts down such exciting treasures only to bury them elsewhere and never tell a soul? Of course I want to talk about magic, it’s the best thing I know!

When I started this blog, I had resolved to publish here all my works in progress – all my sketches and musings leading finally to the creation of each œuvre – but there are too many details that would make no sense without an introduction, and too many components whose fragile energies I am simply not sure would survive divulging.

So what am I left with?

I can’t publish the skeletal user-friendly remains of my work, stripped of all their secret meat and precious tendons to leave you with nothing but skin and bone to view.
Neither can I, presumably, bore you with the convoluted difficulties involved in my shamanic scavenger hunts… where do you get cat bones while still abiding by a basic respect for life? If you use some sort of animal-friendly alternative, are you not stepping back from a line and limiting the game?

Furthermore, if you can accrue enthusiastic interest from your entourage – if those with whom you share your unsavoury graveyard escapades are drawn into your world, forced to ask and inquire and keep up with the game… well then are you not gathering more energy for your work?

Could it, in fact, add to your Power to share your metaphysical treasures with others?

If they know how hard you have fought to make their talisman, how long you worried over every detail and how pedantic you were in the timing and setting of the construction… might they not accord it a certain respect? Could their enthusiasm in fact serve to feed the thing itself?

This is only my second post, and I am at a quandry: the best magi that I know speak but rarely about their work, yet they must be every bit as addicted to it as I am. Am I proposing to make a farcical show of weak will in breaking the golden rule?

Tricky.

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¹ Idries Shah, 1956, Oriental Magic, Octagon Press, (possibly quoting Aleister Crowley)

 

the Crack of Dawn

“My father says almost the whole world’s asleep. Everybody you know, everybody you see, everybody you talk to. He says only a few people are awake. And they live in a state of constant total amazement.”¹

This blog is an experiement in awakening, in a sense, as much as it is an attempt at spontaneous and unguided communication.  It is just noise, for now, but should take shape and gain momentum as the next few entries are added.  The plan being to fill it with reviews, ideas and diary entries as time goes on and -who knows- perhaps attract the attention of a few like-minded souls.

Even given some rudimentary reading on blogging and its do’s and dont’s, I’m sure that it will take a little while for these sporadic entries to find the right flavour and tone.  This blog is as much for my benefit as for yours, and will toy with a variety of concept games.  I hope those of you that do read it, enjoy it.

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¹ Meg Ryan as Patricia in Joe vs. the Volcano.