Hello ladies gentlemen and those of you who know better! I am the enchanting Artemis, and this is the laughing craft! I thought, on this brisk and tenebrous evening I would reflect on reality. It’s a shame there isn’t any. Of course, there is. Existence is. The grocery stores, the underpaid pornographic content creators, you and your lovely eyes reading my delightful blog. The world exists. Tragically there is the fact that Shakespeare and Terrance McKenna both agree on, and it makes “the world exists” into a very, very strange phenomenon. To quote the bard “There are more things in Heaven and Earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy”. To quote McKenna “Nature is not only stranger than we suppose, it is stranger than we can suppose.” Magick will evoke strange things, a bizarre paradigm for reality as much as a raucous thunder god.
Before I continue down the rabbit hole to the whole rabbit at the bottom, I want to express some intense dangers. Not demons, not the wrath of a scorned god from beyond man’s history, not the enunciation of a new aeon of blood and darkness. The primary threat I need to address is a three letter word. You. The ego of a magician will inflate as magick is performed. Not can, will. Imagine for a moment catching lightning in a bottle. A gift from Marduk or Odin or Susano-o Mikoto, precipitously gifted in your empty beer bottle. How would you proceed from this event? A resplendent chunk of sky-fire rests impossibly in your small inconspicuous glass container. Are you blessed, or even chosen? Are you clever, or even more wily than Ol’ One-Eye? As we process events in our normal lives biases emerge from the coincidences between events. If you can do the impossible with literal garbage, what else could you do? Aliester Crowley and Gerald Gardner both made sure to include a practice of silence on the subject of witchcraft for protection purposes. The ones that don’t know and would set fire to the devil worshippers, and the ones that know but don’t understand. The scariest truth of magick is this. It is real, and the world is exactly the same as it was before you knew it was real.
With that grim business set, I mentioned Aliester Crowley for a reason. As I mentioned in my first article, most mages I know refer to his definition of magick. “The art and science of causing change to occur in reality in accordance with one’s will” is a pretty solid definition, but it isn’t the only one. If you prefer a more methodical ritualism you might like to focus on the Science aspect. You could steal from Moore’s Hellblazer and say that magick “is the science of coincidence.” The right impulse, at the right time and place, in accordance to a mysterious shadow of logic pieced together from the sequence of events in proportion to a mythological prescencent. There is a feel to magick, something that resists simple theory. Plenty of individuals would put a stronger emphasis to the Art aspect. They might quote Tom Parkingson-Morgan’s Kill 6 Billion Demons and say magick is “the art of lying to the face of god and getting away with it”. Magick is a living practice, a continuous experiment of reaching beyond one’s ability. The cheek of a small simple mortal, bargaining with powers beyond its comprehension. Threats of failure, oblivion, and damnation weighed against that barbed wit of a rude barista that showers once a week. It’s a miracle that we lasted this long. In all fairness Kyle Kinane said that the “secret to happiness is defining a miracle as anything unexpected.” That the sky holds as much wonder as it does horror, that anything is possible. It’s enough to give a girl hope at the face of death’s door. I take this to heart, personally. I define magick as “aligning one’s sense of humor with the universe’s own.” The world is vast and filled with secrets. Life is weird. Take it easy, but take it.
Beyond the general definition you give magick, there are also four specific classifications to the witchcraft method to keep in mind. The Psychological paradigm is the easiest one to understand. You are in your brain, your brain is weird, if you do funny stuff your brain does weird stuff in your favor. Gods and demons are named we assign to shadows and it is our power they wield to shift things around. Yggdrasil, Hell, Indra’s Net, all of these metaphysical realms are just dreams and symbols we use to define our world and ourselves.
The Energy paradigm is one step closer to the classic wizard stereotype. Elemental charges and screaming anime noises abound in this paradigm. A primary point in energy focused paradigms is a theory of motion applied to life and death equally. Drawing your kundalini up your spine and chakras, or the practice of tai chi, or even fervent prayer all rely on the notion of metaphysical motion. The ebb and flow of things. Aliester Crowley famously said “He who is doing his true will is assisted by the momentum of the universe”. By “true will” Crowley means life’s purpose, and by “momentum of the universe” he means the kinetic energy remaining in the universe’s unresisted motion.
The Informational paradigm is another step closer to esoteric chalk circles and dazzling wardrobes. The informational paradigm focuses on a loose understanding that “information doesn’t have mass so it’s not limited by energy or environment”. To put the armchair quantum mechanics butchery aside, this model is just voodoo dolls with memes. When you invoke a spirit, you’re not calling a ghost on a mysterious phone made of dirt and dark groves. You’re trying to get certain qualities to show up in a place of your choosing. To accomplish this you make conditions for such qualities to arise. You quote certain individuals with the qualities, you arrange items that have correspondences with this quality and such so that when you do The Thing, the quality has a place to exist. Can’t have fire without oxygen, and so on.
The Spirit Paradigm is the full stereotype. You draw sigils from the book of Solomon because the demon said he liked that one. You pray to Amaterasu in a certain way or she won’t grant your request. Cthulhu sleeps in R’lyeh and awaits the stars to align in a very literal sense. The spirit model, for my money, is no fun. All of the agency is with the mysterious and rigid people on the other side of the sky. It ignores the march of history, cultures clashing and commingling and fusing their gods as a form of political syncretism. Odin is not Balor, Artemis isn’t Bast (I would know), and despite how his priests depicted him the sun lacks the eight arms of Aten. A literal religion is a failed religion, and I will die on this hill.
This is a long article with some strange implications. Strange, and potentially frightening. Between the very literal and unforgiving spirit model to the ancient notion that reality is a divine con-job, it is a very common feeling to feel paranoid in ways you can only say are spiritual. What does it mean if a pigeon breaks through my window and dies upon impacting my Nataraja idol? An energy model might say that “It was the dance of destruction showing itself!” where a spirit model might say “Mara is trying to tempt you away from the Most Auspicious One!” An information model would tell you what these abstract concepts have as opinions, and I would tell you that “you should clean up the glass and dead bird.” Life is weird, and I certainly don’t qualify as an omniscient life coach. I’m just a cheeky bitch writing a funny blog about witchcraft.
If there is one lesson this article leaves with you, it must be this: Don’t Panic.