Magickal Redundancy & Complacency In An Information Age

I have spent a significant amount of time in the last year reading books on Magick - introductory and otherwise - and noticed something interesting. About 3 or 4 books in, it became obvious that they contained a great amount of information that was repeated between them, very little being truly unique.

Greyer Jane and I have discussed the difficulty she had finding Occult books of any quality while growing up in the 70s, having to wade through bookshelves of dross to find anything worth reading. That problem still exists, I grant, as there are a lifetimes worth of bad Occult books floating around, but the general quality has greatly improved.

No, now our main problem seems to be sifting through generally informative books for the few genuine nuggets of new or even differently explained material. Now, don't get me wrong - I definitely see the upside to having many people explain techniques in different ways. Who knows which one will strike you the best and enable you to gain a new skill, but I believe this new problem has created an insidious new threat to Magick.

Complacency - it's a trite word, but one I feel accurately describes this stumbling block. Now people can pick up a decently written book by someone like Christopher Penczak (and no slight to him, I enjoy his work greatly) and feel they have mastered Magick after they read it. Because they don't have to search out new sources of information to piece together a magickal roadpath like people used to, there is no impetus to seek out new and exciting magick. This problem is exacerbated by the already mentioned problem of redundancy.

Imagine you are self taught, or even have a mainline magickal mentor. You have been practicing for a while and you pick up some books to see if there is anything else to learn and it's the same old stuff over and over. That is going to shut down your desire to poke into some new dark holes or bits under the staircase.

To combat information overload I feel like we need to fight it with organization. Is anyone interested in working with me to put together some sort of listing of magickal operations and the books they appear in, and also pointing out to each other the good bits we may be missing? Or entire epochs of magick we have all missed.

Complacency is the enemy of Imagination, and is thus the bane of Magick.

Magic Word Magic

“ The study of magic is not a science, it is not an art, and it is not a religion. Magic is a craft. When we do magic, we do not wish and we do not pray. We rely upon our will and our knowledge and our skill to make a specific change to the world.

This is not to say that we understand magic, in the sense that physicists understand why subatomic particles do whatever it is that they do. Or perhaps they don’t understand that yet, I can never remember. In any case, we do not and cannot understand what magic is, or where it comes from, any more than a carpenter understands why a tree grows. He doesn’t have to. He works with what he has.

With the caveat that it is much more difficult and much more dangerous and much more interesting to be a magician than it is to be a carpenter.”

Lev Grossman - The Magicians

Magic is magical. Trite, I know. It's a word that has been used so much that it has lost almost all meaning. So much so, in fact, that many people write it Magick (myself included sometimes) in a vain attempt to give it back a little of the meaning it has lost.

It's funny that a word that symbolizes the very essence of unknowable power, unending mystery, and unresistable force could become so... mundane. Maybe it's very nature encourages people to try and make it as normalized as possible, simply so our pea-sized brains can avoid a permanent and overwhelming paralyzation.

I think the world is full of people who want to avoid at all costs what goes bump in the night, and a few of us (crazies) who desperately seek that bump out. It's the ultimate passive-aggressive revenge to take the unknown, the mystical, the magical or any other form of supernatural and drain it of it's essence by these people who dare not speak it's name.

Well, I'm taking Magic back. No, i'm not going to resort to whimsical t-shirts and bumper stickers. I am taking it back by making it real in my own life. I am doing my daily practice, I am seeking out teachers and students, I am collaborating with many fine practitioners (yoo hoo book club! *waves) and I am making it a reality. And I am making it real because I am writing it here. It's easy to tell yourself that you will do something or that you will make a commitment or take a stand, but when you write it down it becomes real. That is Magic.

As Ramses II said in the Golden Age of Hollywood, "So Let It Be Written, So Let It Be Done."

Let's Make A Deal: Modern Covenants For Modern Mages

I am part of a really good book club and we have been working our way through a book on chaos magick. This has led to some really wide-ranging discussions, and really caused my mind to really re-examine some magickal concepts.

One of the areas we have recently delved into is the concept of "god-slaves", as well as the correspondences for invoking and evoking with deities, as well as the idea of pagan reconstructionism. I am going to delve into that a little here. If that is your thing, just let me say this is all my own musing and attempts to work through this, and not some kind of slap in the face.

Let's Make A Deal: Modern Covenants For Modern Mages

First, let me say this, I am an eclectic. Phew! Got that off my chest so that I can admit that my cosmological view of the heavens is very fluid. That's really important to me, because I want to play Let's Make A Deal!

I personally ascribe to the idea that whatever you consider a god [be it truly divine, an empowered thought-form, or what have you] it has a function that it performs, and desires to perform, and it is both empowered by and empowers those who call on it. This relationship is symbiotic I believe, and because of this, I feel we live in a golden age of "deal making".

There is an entire cosmological constellation of deities out there who have the desire and impetus to act, but lack the willing workers they used to command. They are smart enough to know that the whole setup of these matters has drastically changed in the past few years, but let's not ignore how matters changed even in the heyday of their particular faiths.

For example I have been really interested in the Ogdoad (hence my username) who were a group of 4 frog headed gods, and their 4 snake-headed goddesses from Ancient Egypt.

[The Egyptians believed that before the world was formed, there was a watery mass of dark, directionless chaos. In this chaos lived the Ogdoad of Khmunu (Hermopolis), four frog gods and four snake goddesses of chaos. [Balance in infinity]
These deities were Nun and Naunet (water), Amun and Amaunet (invisibility), Heh and Hauhet (infinity) and Kek and Kauket (darkness).

The chaos existed without the light, and thus Kek and Kauket came to represent this darkness. They also symbolized obscurity, the kind of obscurity that went with darkness, and night]

Even in the time of the Ancient Egyptians, the beliefs surrounding these goods and goddesses changed at least 3 times in a major way, so I decided they could go with another. I have started calling on them and trying to work with them as much as possible and it has born dividends. A frog showed itself to be my animal totem after long striving, and the elemental sea of chaos they represent meets me in my meditations with power (sometimes too much). 

I believe the time is ripe for those who would find deities of worth, but who are not called upon, and try to work with them. Much like the internet and mass media has made our world much smaller, easy availability of arcane and occult texts has made the cosmological world of the gods much more available.

Let's make a deal.

I'm done wandering in the wilderness

I was raised in a strict Christian household my whole childhood. My family's life was completely involved in Religion. I thought Jesus lived in our car because we prayed to him so much while driving places. But, one of the earliest remembrances of Church that I have is how much I wanted to believe, and how hard that was because I didn't.

Magick has always interested me. It was a dark and forbidden thing, and that excited the imagination of a young boy who was told exactly what he would and wouldn't believe about every single thing. My family, unlike many main-line Christians, fully reinforced in our childhood development that Magick is real. That powers beyond our human ken exist all around us, and that they can be harnessed by the human mind and soul. But, of course, the people who used these powers were evil.

I think I knew I wasn't destined to sit in a pew as young as 10 or so. I started having prophetic dreams, dreams that absolutely came true. Now, it was no great or portentous  things that I dreamed out, simply my own life and the things that would happen to me in the future. It scared the crap out of me at first. I thought I was cursed or doomed or something, but I knew I had not done anything to bring this fate upon myself. Thus began my quick disillusionment with a system of religion that would condemn me to hell for a natural ability.

I grew and kind of put this ability by the wayside, well it never went away but I didn't focus on it. I finished school, tried college like many others my age and did some reading about Chaos Magick along the way. I dabbled, as it were. Enough to know what was believed in those communities, but not enough to mar my soul, or so I hoped. It took me many years to get where I am now: free of personal doubts about my path.

I can't claim to be some powerful Mage or Priest of a delighted god but I am slowly finding the pieces that work for me and putting them together into a system. What I do know is, I'm done wandering in the wilderness.