I started this blog post back right when the series ended, but had a conference to go to, got sick with con-crud and then was in holiday mode. So, pretend you’re back in the beginning of November and enjoy!
Contents
Reflection on the Witches’ Road
The First Challenge
The Real Challenge
The Road in Marvel Comics
The Ballad, MCU, and You
Conclusion
Thanks and Opportunities
Reflection on the Witches’ Road
I’m glad I decided to wait until after the end of the series before writing about the Witches’ Road. I think episodes 8 and 9 may have made a little of my interpretation of Agatha in “Agatha Harkness, Our Lady of Fear” seem a little shaky, but overall, it mostly supported and illustrated a lot of what I think the earlier episodes presented and drew me to conclude. If you haven’t checked that one out, it covers a lot of useful thinking that is probably pertinent especially now.
The Witches’ Road feels different after the revelations in episodes 8 and 9. The Ballad drew us all in. Everyone played it on repeat, learned to sing it, posted online about it. I’ve seen at least one well known author write about it and a few other teachers and leaders talk about how they expect many people to use it in ritual. Articles in online publications have even interviewed popular witches who have expressed how the Ballad touches on things that seem to ring true for witches.
With episode eight, we learn the road was never real. When Agatha told Billy it wasn’t real, she was, for what might have been the first time regarding the Road, telling the truth. Billy created it to serve his needs much like Wanda created the TV-Land version of Westview. In a way, to me, this deepens how we can utilize the Witches’ Road for inspiration. It makes taking inspiration from the story and the song make a lot more sense, since it was an adventure a witch created in order to challenge himself and prepare him to find the solution to his problem. It makes a lot more sense than a wish granting obstacle course.
Episode nine, however, gave the Road a bit of a darker origin. While Billy created the real road, Agatha and Nicky created the fake-lore of the road. The song initially appears as an innocent way of passing the time while a displaced mother and son wander from village to village. Then, it becomes clear that Nick’s singing voice and innocent boyishness were being used to turn the song into a trap. He would sing it, and lure witches in and then Agatha would absorb their power and kill them. Eventually, Nick turns from the plan, there are no dead witches to keep Death busy, and she finally comes and takes Nick.
By that point, the song has become an entrenched piece of fake-lore and witches who were not caught in their trap have heard it, know it, and believe it to be real. When Agatha realizes it, she continues to use the song. She develops a reputation as the only witch to have survived the Road. So when witches come to her like she’s a travel agent about to guide them on their journey, she can take their power and their lives with no one being surprised that a group of witches who went looking for the Witches’ Road had died.
By the time of the events in Agatha All Along, it seems like this con is no longer an option. When Agatha initially approaches witches about the Road the response she gets is “who would walk the Road with you?” While the grift may have not been uncovered, Agatha’s reputation and her fate as a covenless witch are ingrained and people neither like nor trust her. The flashbacks suggest she was at least able to continue using her trap successfully through the 1980s.
To me, the fact that the song was a con doesn’t really take away from it. It actually adds kind of a cool meta-discourse element around fake-lore. Fake-lore when it’s artificially constructed, the way Agatha did with the song, is more or less a con. It lets people create stories, merchandise, or books with too-easy-to-be-true answers. It lets people flash some glitz and take people’s money. It also overwrites actual folklore and real cultures, sometimes living cultures. It can make things awkward and uncomfortable for people whose lives are touched by the real folklore that is marginalized by fake-lore
But the song wasn’t only artificially engineered fake-lore. It became organically accepted and spread because it touched a need and sparked inspiration. It doesn’t always happen, but, sometimes when something new clicks and spreads like that it unveils something just as true as earlier organic folklore because it spreads through similar needs and processes. It can also turn out that those things which people invent but that seem to have a life to them, actually do become vessels for older truths looking for new faces through which to interact with people. Maybe the fake-lore is close enough for an actual spirit to latch onto it and wear it as a new suit to maintain connections and possibly bring people back towards a more authentic knowledge of them.
Just like it can be a tool of survival on our side of the fence, it can be a tool for survival for the Other-side as well.
I don’t want to give a blanket justification and apologetic for all fake-lore. I mostly am not a fan. I do recognize it can have flashes and moments that connect with reality and utility. For all of us Disney+ subscribers pulling up YouTube and jamming to The Ballad of the Witches’ Road in its multitude of forms (that method of release even mimics the sense of spreading folklore), the Ballad is one of those flashes or moments where fake-lore ties itself to reality and utility. The song has some really interesting lines to think about for magic and a ritual journey, but it also has a bunch which are just aesthetically pleasing and not super meaningful. It’s not some well crafted spell or a deep piece of ritual poetry. But it feels like it could be, it inspires excitement, it fills some need, and maybe it has swept up some actual magic in the whirlwind of its reception.
So the grift doesn’t taint the song. The murders don’t taint the song. Agatha didn’t see any other option after being forced to survive on her own. She was a survivor of repeated traumas. This was how she understood how to survive and how to keep her son alive. After losing him, and being approached about the Road as she buried him, something probably broke inside and she couldn’t see a different way forward. We can understand what she did, even without forgiving this fictional bad behavior. We don’t have to get bogged down by that being part of the song’s fictional origin.
The different feel the song has now is because of the death of Nicholas Scratch. Agatha was singing it as she buried him. The song reflected their bond and the fact that they only really had each other. It puts an added weight and sadness there. In fact, I’ve listened to it less since then. The last time I was in the mood to listen to it a bunch, I listened to the Lorna Wu version repeatedly, which was a version that hadn’t interested me a lot before.
Lorna’s version is also a good example of how fake-lore, once it spreads, if it does touch on something real, can morph and reshape into new and useful things. It’s an invitation for us to use the song in a similar way - building with it to riff off in new directions or to inspire our own magical work without being bogged down fully in the origin. But that origin can still speak to us. Just like Billy creating the Road to solve his needs because he was inspired by the song, Agatha’s loss and sadness connect us with the idea that such a journey must be rooted in a real need, and a deep longing, in order to have the power to bring meaning to it.
The First Challenge
So, before we get deep in the weeds…or deeper in the weeds, as we’ve already waded through the rushes…I want to toss out an easy challenge.
Everyone was going crazy for the Ballad of the Witches Road. People were posting variants of the song from the show. People were discussing its impact. I’ve seen a few FB/Insta Reels of people getting their families together to sing the song. One of my high school students - who is also training in Opera singing - said she made all her siblings learn to sing it with her.
The song deserves a moment like The Never Ending Story theme had a couple years ago when it was on Stranger Things. Why don’t we add some levity to the internet by filling it with witches everywhere singing their own Ballad of the Witches’ Road. Maybe you can even weave a spell into your performance, but it could also just be for fun. It can be a way to take a breath, share, keep the excitement going that the song gave us for the last month. Everyone singing because a queer campy witchy TV show inspired them, could provide a community of singing faces to remind us all that we don’t just walk hand in hand with death, but also with each other.
So challenge one, either by yourself or with some friends, pop up a video on YouTube or Reels (or anything that isn’t TikTok/Red-Note) of you singing The Ballad. Maybe a door will open.
I will plan to do one myself when I get over my post-conference cold. But I might not want to show up with my face, so, I think anyone else who doesn’t want to be up there face to face with the world singing, it’s fair to sing and attach it to some image if you’re more comfortable. We’ll still all know there are smiles behind the curtains.
Now, a few months later, the obvious need for happy queer-inspired witchy singing filling the internet is all the more obvious.
The Real Challenge
In addition to the fun of a community offering of song, there is actual magical stuff we can think about with the Witches’ Road. From day one, people have talked about how they might use it in rituals or how they expect they’ll start to see it getting used in ritual. When people were first saying it, I didn’t really get it. The show didn’t stick for me as a witchy show, it stuck for me as a comic book show with witchy and magical elements. It’s a bit of a different feel, and it kind of drew it outside of fully feeling like either for me. But, I liked it a lot. I wasn’t feeling a ton of magic inspiration either. I felt the same way about the song initially. It was catchy. I liked it. It had a neat vibe. It did not however strike me as a good description of much of what people do magically, at least, not initially.
After a little while, as it became more of an earworm and I wanted to listen to it more, I noticed it was often making me think of a ritual journey I’ve been formulating, but haven’t fully mapped out and planned yet. It was something I felt was important and wanted to do, but wasn’t especially focused on. I wasn’t thinking about it a lot, but I’d get the itch to listen to the song, then the song would stir up those creative juices and I’d think about the plan. Eventually, I realized that the song, being about a magical journey, might also have some things for me to consider as I set up what I want to do.
So, that’s the real challenge the Ballad presents to us. How do we build magic that is useful to us that is inspired by this story and this song which seems to have touched a bunch of us and made us feel like we want it to be part of the magic in our lives.
Personally, I think just taking it on as a ritual song or chant interchangeable with others that are already in use is not a great plan. Tacking it on to existing rituals and just using it as a song to get into a magical headspace seems misguided. I think I feel this way because the song is initiatory in nature and so it would seem like initiations would be the sort of rituals where people might want to use it as a chant for raising power or getting into the right mental space. But, for new initiates, that could feel a little goofy if they aren’t already immersed. In another generation or two that goofiness probably wouldn’t apply and it would have a neat tie-in to background culture effect. The other issue is that the song has some cool lines with cool magical things to think about and other lines that are just cool sounding. So, you’re feeding your initiates material that isn’t necessarily teaching them your system, but it will feel like it’s supposed to. Even the lines which could impart magical teachings might not fit the teachings of the ritual or even your system.
So, I’m not a fan of the song as plug and play. I do think the song, its place in the show, and the way the Road works in Marvel comics, can be useful for providing a framework to think about magical journeys and ritual challenges to unlock things or create powerful transformative encounters. That’s the value, in my opinion. I’d use them as a scaffolding or map and build something new. While elements of the song might work into what I build, I probably wouldn’t open my journey by singing it. But, if it was just me alone, and it wasn’t going to make it weirdly pop-cultural for anyone else, and the song actually referenced real elements of the work I was about to do, then maybe opening the ritual with the song wouldn’t be bad.
This is honestly, pretty reflective of how I often see the utility of fiction for magicians. I’m not a big fan of naming things we’re doing, or places we use, or even ourselves, after things from fantasy novels. I don’t think LARPing a fantasy novel or movie adds to magic, in fact, it often detracts from it. There are a few exceptions to that, and I think those exceptions will grow as we have more and more magicians, witches, and occultists, actively working in TV, movies, and mainstream media. Chilling Adventures of Sabrina and Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell are my obvious favorite examples of fiction that has real enough magic that you can learn from and utilize little elements that were woven into these IPs. Most of the time, I think the utility of fiction is how it inspires us. I think the emotions fiction can stir can help us jump off the armchair and actually want to do something. Fiction can make us want to dig deep in the living soil and get our hands dirty with the wonder of the spiritual life of the world. What we actually do doesn’t have to take the shape or form of the fiction, fiction just has to make us feel.
Agatha and the Witches Road are kind of in the middle. The show is very much a fantasy-leaning comic book show. It’s not at all something displaying real or useful magic except in a few very small instances because the show neither needs nor wants to be realistic. But, it doesn’t just inspire us through aesthetic strings that stoke the fire of our feelings. It actually has some shape and form that touches useful ideas to build that aesthetic. So instead of just inspiring movement, it can also inspire direction, even if we have to bring our own knowledge to the table to map and shape that direction.
So, the REAL CHALLENGE is to design a ritual, journey, or transformative experience with the Road as inspiration drawing on the media which has presented it to us. You don’t have to incorporate the media, or the song. Just use them as a guide to think about what to call upon, what to encounter, how to challenge yourself, and various other considerations about what to include and how to include things to create a powerful experience.
This challenge isn’t communal, it’s personal. It could be a community thing if you’re building something for a coven or a working group, or even a group of friends to go on a magical adventure together. It could also be one-hundred percent just for you. So the challenge doesn’t include posting anything. If you go do something amazing, have a great experience and decide you want to write about it I’d love to see some shares of such things, and would love to see this article referenced as a tool in that process, but I also think deeply moving transformational things can often be private. It really depends on the individual and on the experience they are seeking to have.
The Road in Marvel Comics
I might be a bit of a comics geek, but I’m pretty much entirely a DC pre-New 52 geek. Or pre-the-travesty-which-is-Geoff-Johns geek. My exposure to Marvel growing up did include occasionally reading some Thors, an X-title here or there, and a couple issues of Spider-man. For the most part, I know Marvel through the cartoons, TV shows and movies. Those can be a lot of fun, but they exist in a different timeline than the comics, so sometimes huge elements are different. The Witches’ Road is one of those.
After the reveal that Billy created the Road, I became curious. Prior to that, the Road seemed like a weird concept. Who would create, and then set aside, this pocket dimension just for witches to walk along a road, encounter challenges, die, and then get a wish granted if they made it to the end? So far, witches hadn’t been shown by MCU in a way which really justified the existence of the Road. In fact, so far, the witches only seem to tenuously fit into the MCU continuity. Because of this, I wondered if the Road existed in the comics and if it was different there, or if the showrunner had just decided to explore a dark Wizard of Oz inspired fantasy-quest context for telling her story. Realizing Billy created it made me wonder even more what role it had, if any, in the comics.
It turns out the Road does exist in Marvel Comics, and seems to be multiversal. It apparently exists as a separate dimension but linked to a handful of the various continuities in Marvel. The Road can be accessed by witches, but perhaps not by all witches, just those with a link to it.
Agatha’s ghost does journey along the Road in the comics, but with Wanda. At the end of the Road, Agatha is brought back to life.
In Marvel Comics the Road seems to be a manifestation of the Goddess of Witches. The condition of the Road is related to the well-being of the Goddess. The Goddess is who the witches are able to connect with by reaching the end of the Road. Along the Road, the challenges include battles with demons, encounters with ancestors and other spirits and various personal challenges. The strength of the demons and the nature of the challenges also reflect the condition of the Road and therefore the power and condition of the Goddess.
So, the Road does seem to have an element of being created or shaped in part to challenge the particular witch, but as an extension of the nature, presence, and power of the Goddess of Witches. So, where as Billy created the Road in MCU, and it was shaped specifically based on his perceptions and assumptions, it seems like that isn’t far off from how the Road may operate. The difference in the comics is that the context of its idiosyncracy is the will and power of the Goddess, who seems in a way to be the Road Herself, rather than just the imagination of the witch pursuing the Road.
Personally, I think this gives us a much cooler backdrop for understanding the Road and working it into actual ritual. So what does the comic’s version of the Witches’ Road point towards for our new and transformative experience?
Invocation and conjuration. If the journey is predicated upon the presence of the Goddess and her life empowering and adding meaning and magic to the path we walk, then she must be invoked. If the Road gives us challenges through spirit encounters we need to consider what spirits we need to encounter and how to get them on the Road with us.
When we invoke the Goddess, if she is the Road, and she is part of the end that we seek, how does that shape the invocation? And, in case it isn’t obvious, maybe we should also ask…which Goddess is the Goddess in this case?
As far as I know, Marvel doesn’t explain who the goddess of Witches is. In our world, maybe there are a few contenders from different cultures. There is one, who seems exceptionally interested in furthering her presence in the world today. She has made in roads into NeoPagan witchcraft, traditional witchcraft, contemporary sorcery and contemporary grimoire magic as if she has always been prominent in these spaces. Now, in a way, she is the literal setting of one of the most popular programs produced by one of the most popular franchises in media today. Hekate is not only the goddess of witches, she is Enodia, the goddess of roads.
For those looking to walk the road, the first step is to conjure forth the road by invoking the Goddess of Witches. Ask her to guide you in planning your challenge. Ask her to lay out and populate your challenge with the elements it needs in order to bring you to a powerful encounter with her, the goddess who teaches witches their craft.
The Ballad, MCU and You
To start, we’ll need to look at the lyrics. I’m sure most of us know them - at least more or less - but it’ll be handy to have them right there to look at as we’ll need to pull out bits and pieces. Some parts of it are just fun words that sound cool. Some parts could inspire things we want to draw on for our journey. I’m going to select the lines that I think can be inspiring. You’ll have to also select the ones that have meaning for you. They might be the same as the ones I select, they might not be.
The Ballad of the Witches’ Road
By Jean Christophe Beck, Robert Lopez, Kristen Jane Anderson, Michael Alexander Paraskevas, Andrew Asemokai
Seekest thou the road to all that's foul and fair
Gather sisters fire, water, earth and air
Darkest hour, wake thy power, earthly and divine
Burn and brew with coven true and glory shall be thine
Down, down, down the road
Down the witches' road
Down, down, down the road
Down the witches' road
Down, down, down the road
Down the witches' road
Circle sewn with fate
Unlock thy hidden gate
Marching ever forward
'Neath the wooded shrine
I stray not from the path
I hold death's hand in mine
Primal night, giveth sight
Familiar by thy side
If one be gone, we carry on
Spirit as our guide
Down, down, down the road
Down the witches' road (down the witches' road)
Down, down, down the road (down the witches' road)
Down the witches' road (down the witches' road)
Down, down, down the road (down the witches' road)
Down the witches' road (down the witches' road)
Blood and tears and bone
Maiden, Mother, Crone
The road is wild and wicked
Winding through the wood
Where all that's wrong is right
And all that's bad is good
Through many miles of tricks and trials
We'll wander high and low
Tame your fears, a door appears
The time has come to go
Down, down, down the road (down, down, down, down)
Down the witches' road (down the witches' road)
Down, down, down the road (down the witches' road)
Down the witches' road (down the witches' road)
Down, down, down the road (down the witches' road)
Down the witches' road (down the witches' road)
Follow me, my friend
To glory at the end
“Gather sisters fire, water, earth and air; Darkest hour, wake thy power, earthly and divine” The road leading to all that’s foul and fair is a fun Shakespeare reference grounding us in an image of witchery familiar to the Anglophone world, but it doesn’t really give us much. At least, not in my opinion. Gathering the elements seems like a good start. This could suggest that we want to conjure encounters with elemental powers. It might mean that we want to draw the elements together with us and ba accompanied by the elementals. It might mean we should bring tools related to the elements and utilize them along the way. The specifics will relate to exactly what your road is and what challenges it includes. It could very well mean that all of these things will benefit you.
We’ll return to the relationship of darkness and power, but calling upon the power of the earth and the divine makes a lot of sense. If your challenge involves a literal road or path, invoking the earth on which you will walk seems like one of those obvious needs we could easily overlook. If your challenge is contextualized within the power of the Goddess, we need to invoke her at the outset. Drawing together earthly and divine power, so that the space where we walk is comingled with the presence of the Goddess by invoking the road and the Goddess of the road, together as one we bring ourselves into that weird uncanny space where magic happens.
“Circle sewn with fate; Unlock thy hidden gate.” We aren’t conjuring a magical door to open, at least not a physical one. Your journey might start by walking through a door and so conjuring it may be an important first step. Your journey might involve a series of rituals all in one place, or it might start out on a road or a trail through the woods. Everyone’s transformative adventure can have a shape unique to them. That shape probably doesn’t involve a magic door opening in the floor, and we don’t need it to, for it to be amazing. The real power of this line is fate. If we want the fantastical power of transformation, the powers which shape, twist, weave and thread the course of existence can bring that power. Calling upon the Fates, the Norns, the Wyrd Sisters, or whatever form we understand those powers to take is perhaps one of the most powerful keys to transformation we can turn to. They are not often engaged in magic. They are powers that exist outside of and beyond the powers we typically turn to in magic. They are powers who can even direct the course of the world in ways beyond the control of the gods. It is reasonable that we don’t tend to approach them or call upon them, but it is also reasonable to consider doing so if we are trying to engage the type of transformative power such a mythic journey is intended for.
The next stanza is a roller coaster. In my opinion just about all of it has depth and insight that can inspire us magically.
“Marching ever forward; 'Neath the wooded shrine.” The series didn’t depict a shrine, and what I’ve seen of the comics the road is, well, a road. So, we might wonder what this line gives us. We’re seeking to be challenged. One of the clearest successes in a challenge is our fortitude and perseverance helping us make our way to the end regardless of the frustrations or difficulties. We keep trying. Maybe things don’t end the way we expect or want. Maybe we don’t succeed in each piece, but we keep going. If your journey has you huffing it through the woods, you’ve got the wooded part down, but the real thing is the shrine. The whole road is a shrine. The whole journey, the whole work is the shrine. Your work is a conceptual place drawing together the sacredness of the space, the work, the Goddess, and your own potential. It doesn’t matter where you’re working, if it’s all at one time, all in one place, a contiguous journey or a bunch of separate places in separate moments. The essential power of those places, of your work and commitment, and of the powers you’re calling upon are the powers enshrined by your efforts.
“I stray not from the path; I hold death's hand in mine.” I love this line. At Halloween, I did a lyric scavenger hunt for the kids I teach and this was the line we used from The Ballad. A trope in fantasy seems to be that roads are important. Sometimes the road is the safe place you stay on, sometimes it’s the dangerous place you need to stay off. In MCU’s depiction of the road, stepping off the road was dangerous. In some magical traditions, stepping off the path of training before you complete it is dangerous.
In our context, we’re not worried about stepping into muck that eats us. We’re not even worried about leaving a circle and being vulnerable to dangerous spirits. We don’t want to stray from the path because we want the persevere to the end. We don’t want to stray from the path in the sense that we need to stick to the challenge we’ve asked for. We need to engage the journey before us. We can’t get part way through and decide to look for short cuts and loopholes. We can’t decide we called upon challenges that seem less convenient once we start, try to skip them and think we’ll still succeed. Being able to substitute anything randomly because “intention is all that matters,” has no place on this road.
To remind us of the reality of the magic we’re engaging and the commitment to its ability to change us, we turn to death. Death is something most people fear. Like the Fates, Death is a power many of us don’t call upon except in a metaphorical sense. Death as a transformative power is common in initiations. Death as the actual power that takes us from the world is less common. Your own condition, your own needs, determine what you call upon and what version of it you call upon. Death was Agatha’s lover. The combination of sex and death seems like a powerful transformative juxtaposition. The idea of Death as the River of Life, the flow back and forth of life and death is also an interesting concept to explore which potentially holds immense transformative and instructive power. Engaging Death as a partner to journey with us is also a frightening but potentially powerful proposition. I think the idea of calling upon Death as part of the transformative journey but not simply as a metaphor for transformation or a clearing away of what we want to leave behind is one of the most inspiring elements of the song.
“Primal night, giveth sight; Familiar by thy side.” I said we’d return to power coming from darkness. For me, Primal Night is clearly Nyx. Nyx as the grandmother of Hekate feels like an important power to consider in this endeavor. From an Orphic perspective, all things arise from Nyx. Nyx is the ultimate context for our journey. Darkness has always been a friend of witches. Modern religious Witches might “Draw Down the Moon” as a devotional practice of voluntary possession, but ancient witches in more than one culture drew down the moon by plucking it from the sky to hide their work in darkness and ease the execution of their power. The darkness is our friend and in darkness we find power hidden from those afraid to embrace it. The darkness of night mirrors the darkness of the underworld. The night gives birth to the stars just as the Plutonian depths give birth to the sparkling riches of the earth. The darkness gives birth to power, and to the brilliant gleaming eyes of those who carry the blood of Helios. The night gives us sight, a power that allows us to guide our way through the world. Regardless of how we choose to build our journey and which concepts we prioritize, this is necessary. Whatever we are working to bring forth, or whatever transformation we are attempting to undergo, on some level it is drawn forth from the primal place of darkness from which all things stem.
Navigating that darkness with us, is our familiar. Some people don’t work with familiars. I think it makes sense that I would enjoy a line referencing them. I also think it makes sense for your familiar to journey with you on a transformative magical adventure if you have one. If you are going to conjure a path that truly brings challenges and forces you to engage the spirit world in real ways, having a being on your side who is fully a part of the spirit world seems like a sensible plan.
“If one be gone, we carry on; Spirit as our guide.” I am not really conceptualizing this as something someone does with a coven. I’m not really sold on the idea of covens being a core component of witchcraft so much as a myth of conspiratorial witchcraft that may have been real in certain occasional instances. That, could be a whole other post though. If you are building a challenge as a coven ritual or journey, hopefully your coven members aren’t dying along the way. I think the first part of this pair of lines really only serves as a reminder that the challenges we call upon should actually challenge us. The encounters we have should actually confront us. We also need the fortitude to keep going. The second line points to the need to have spirits guide us through the journey.
We can’t map out and plan every detail. We need there to be elements which are generated by the magical powers we call upon. In that sense, the powers we’re calling upon to establish our particular road are guides. They may not be active guides, walking with us showing us the way. They are still guides in that they build the sign posts and tasks that lead us through. We may also need the spirits we’re calling on more actively as guides. Our familiar, or the Goddess as presences who perhaps engage in a relationship like partial possession, sitting close to us, whispering to us, and teaching and shaping us as we encounter spirits, engage in rituals, or whatever other elements we have seen fit to use to build our adventure of transformation.
“Blood and tears and bone,” I’m not even copying the reference to the Robert Graves influence. Maybe not as meaningful or something people will lean into deeply, but depending on how you’re conjuring spirits and what kind of tasks you want to involve, these could be useful materials.
“Tame your fears, a door appears; The time has come to go.” Most of the last real stanza falls into the realm of “sounds cool but doesn’t have useful meaning” for me. I think this line can. Fear can be a component of magical experience. Whether fear is useful for us in this endeavor depends on what kind of change we’re looking for. If we’re building an adventure to powerfully manifest something in our lives, then fear might not be part of that. If we’re deeply engaging transformative powers to change something about our relationship with witchcraft, the spirit world, or something fundamental, fear might be part of how things get stirred up. It might also be a natural part of such an experience. Fear can also get in the way if we let it run wild. We don’t have to overcome our fears, push them down, or conquer them. We can tame them. They can still be there in a way that is useful, but held onto in a way that doesn’t let them unsettle us to the point of inaction or panicked reflex.
Conclusion
“Follow me, my friend; To glory at the end.” The purpose of the journey you craft, it’s nature and components, they all depend on you and what you want and need from it. We don’t need to slavishly follow the inspiration of a song, a TV show, and a comic book context. We can take some inspiration from them. Where we need to, we should depart from that inspiration. You also don’t have to follow my interpretation of what parts are inspiring or what they mean. This is all an example of what you could take into consideration.
I think it’s easy for people to write this thinking off as playing make believe. That’s also part of why I’m not a big fan of trying to make magic look like fantasy fiction. The shape actually doing any of this would take won’t look at all like fantasy fiction. If you dig deep into the things I’ve talked about here, it should easily be evident that this is very much not about playing dress up. The idea is to powerfully call upon things that will actively engage you and result in a transformation, or give you the things you need to bring about a desired magical goal. The point is to engage them for real, and for them not to be fully within your power or fully dictated by you.
The concept here, is kind of different from a lot of what we see in public magic. We’re not saying to organize a dramatic ritual performance for a group. We’re not using eucharistics to ground the intention of a ritual into bread and wine for us to consume. We’re not shifting our perspectives, or simply looking for an altered state. The goal is to shake things up by means of a quest. That quest could be in your temple as a series of visionary experiences, a successive ladder of rituals, or a constructed relay of conjurations. That quest could also be out in the world involving multiple pre-chosen locations which have some magical meaning or spirit connection, or a journey through a place which will allow multiple spirit encounters. It’s rare to plan magic that is executed that way. I guess it’s lucky for me that as I was looking at doing magic built that way, this series with this song happened to explode into the world and keep reminding me to think about that. It’s also lucky that they happened to build a catchy song which has some inspiring lines.
This blog was, in part, a way for me to reflect on and organize some thoughts about the way these bits of fiction can inspire me. I hope it also serves as an invitation for you to follow in that endeavor, walk the road of your choosing, and find whatever glory it is you need at the end. Thanks and Opportunities
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