I often hear magicians and occultists speak about how they first got into magic: how they led a childhood filled with paranormal encounters, or regularly talked to the ghosts of their dead ancestors. I’m frankly sort of envious when I hear about these experiences; they could not be further from my own.
I grew up in an environment that had all the markers of being conducive to supernatural experience. As a child I lived in a rural area, spending much of my free time running around in the woods. My family never went to church, but they were definitely open to spiritual experience. My father was quietly agnostic. My mother attended Catholic school as a child, but by the time I came along she mostly dabbled in neopaganism and new-age spirituality. Both my parents are well educated with wide-ranging interests, so my home was filled with books on every topic. When I was curious about spirituality, it was easy to pick up books on it around the house, ranging from the Tao Te Ching to the Book of Mormon. I was very much encouraged to do my own exploration and draw my own conclusions.
Despite being steeped in such a richly nurturing environment, I have all the natural spiritual sensitivity of a brick wall. I never had unexplainable experiences, never interacted with non-physical entities, never had strong intuitions that turned out to be miraculously correct. I rarely even remembered my dreams. Despite this, I always felt the call of magic. I always wanted there to be something more. Some secret power of the select few to reshape the world according to their desires.1
I came of age in the late nineties and early two-thousands. Neopaganism was flourishing as an eclectic hodge-podge of ancient pantheons blended with new thought. All gods were one god. All goddesses were one goddess. Intention and visualization were all that mattered. This was a little before The Secret broke onto the scene, but that movement was very much built on ideas that were already popular: that the infinitely beneficent universe would give you anything you could imagine if you just visualized it hard enough.
I dabbled with this sporadically throughout my teenage years. Both paganism itself (à la a slew of Scott Cunninham “Become a Witch In Your Own Backyard” kinds of books) and purer new thought (“use visualization to help the universe manifest the reality you want!”). In college I wandered from neo-Wicca to chaos magick, essentially a techno-absurdist re-skin of the same core ideas: the universe manifesting things in response to weaponized belief.
I struggled with how low the barrier to entry for this kind of magic was. If all it took to attain your desires was masturbating at a made up symbol, why wasn’t everyone living their ideal life? If the road to finding your soul mate just involved burning a pink candle and reciting some bad poetry, why would anyone ever be lonely? It seemed too simple – too trite.
Sometimes the magic I tried seemed to work (mostly in inconsequential ways that were hard to distinguish from random chance). Many times it didn’t. When things didn’t work, the conventional wisdom was “it didn’t work because you didn’t believe firmly enough that it was going to work” (or, the related chaos magick version “it failed because you were lusting after results”). Even without much magical experience, this never sat well with me. It seemed to explain everything and nothing – tautological to the point of uselessness. How can I believe my magic will work if I know it won’t work unless I believe in it? What good is magic if it has near-omnipotent power to change reality, but only in ways that I don’t care about reality changing? It was impossible to bootstrap myself into belief in such a tenuous thing.
By the time I graduated college I had largely abandoned magic. It didn’t feel worth continuing to explore, given the results I was seeing. Then, around 2012, I had one of the most blatantly serendipitous moments of my life.
I was working my first real job out of college, and had some time to kill before I could catch my bus home. I passed the time (as one does) wandering aimlessly through a Barnes & Noble. It was in the section on folklore that I ran across a book titled Monsters, by some guy named John Michael Greer.2 It’s an analysis of monster folklore through the lens of the author’s understanding of the non-physical universe. It attempts to answer questions like “why are werewolves vulnerable to silver?” and “why is scattering seeds in front of your doorstep a traditional way of keeping vampires at bay?”
The contents of the book, while interesting, were almost beside the point. It was the first book I had encountered that tackled magic and the occult in a rational way – that treated the non-physical world as something real, ordered, and classifiable. It briefly mentioned both natural magic and ritual magic, with a few offhand remarks about how the latter was where the real power could be found. Conveniently, the same author also had a book providing an introduction to ritual magic in the style of the Golden Dawn. I picked up a copy of that as well, and began working through it. It provided a fairly standard syllabus of foundational Golden Dawn work: meditation, banishing rituals, the Tree of Life, the tarot correspondences, etc. It also included references to other recommended reading – titles by Israel Regardie, Dion Fortune, W. E. Butler, and William G. Gray, among others.
For the next couple years I worked my way through Greer’s Learning Ritual Magic. I meditated regularly, and practiced the Qabalistic Cross and the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram until I could (and in some cases did) do them in my sleep.3 I studied the symbolism of the tarot and the Tree of Life. I also devoured the works of early Golden Dawn members, especially Regardie and Fortune.
I had stumbled across a whole current of magicians that treated magic as a real thing. A thing that worked consistently, irrespective of your belief in whether it was going to work or not. Something that – like other real things – took hours of dedicated practice to become any good at. This matched my understanding of how the world worked. And what’s more, I started seeing results! They were mostly results in my own body and mind, but they worked both predictably and reproducibly. This led me to the coining of what I now think of as the first axiom of magic.
The First Axiom of Magic: Magic Isn’t
As in, magic isn’t magic. There is no free lunch. Magic is a real skillset, and like every other real skillset, it takes consistent study and practice to develop. The first time you do a thing – be it a ritual, a divination, or a spell – chances are good it won’t do much. Not because magic isn’t real, not because you weren’t positive enough in your thinking, but because magic is hard and you probably suck at it. I’ve been doing it for a while, and I’m still discovering new and interesting ways in which I suck at it.
But at least now I know how to get better.
This post is part of a two part series. You can find the second part here.
- Growing up with Harry Potter may or may not have had something to do with this. ↩︎
- Greer is a prolific author on magic, occult, and environmental topics. He served a long stint as Grand Archdruid of the Ancient Order of Druids in America (AODA). He is also, most importantly for this story, a magician classically trained under the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. ↩︎
- My magical journals from the time detail several instances of partial or full performances of the LBRP carried out in dreams. ↩︎
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