Dion Fortune, and the Wizard of Oz or, Don't be the man behind the Curtain

You, my friend, are a bad ass wizard.

You, do magic, and that's really cool, so you're cool.

You are a bright shining star of awesome.

Stuff like that is cool to hear, and empowering to believe. People like that empowered feeling. People like to know they are cool. You can get really fr recognizing what matters to someone and complimenting it because the desire for these good feelings is so powerful. This desire to feel cool is something which affects most people in some way. So for magicians and non-magicians it can be a means for us to be deceived or manipulated, either by others or by ourselves, We might not characterize it as a desire to be cool, but all of us have a way we want to be, and a way we want to be perceived. Having a firm understanding of that desire and it's juxtaposition to or alignment with our reality is paramount in avoiding being manipulated by or misled by people, or by ourselves, based upon how those desires make us feel.

If we know solidly who we are its harder to shake that up with a passing comment, and it's harder to distract us with flattery. It's also easier to succeed at what we want  when we understand fully what we want, what it means to have it, and where we are in relation to it.

Unfortunately, in magic, there is a lot of accepting empowering ideas even if they aren't real. I see frequently people who are open about their inexperience, or lack of practice, lack of success talk about themselves as magicians, mages, and witches. People who don't seem to do a lot of magic, or seem to only do magical exercises prop themselves up as magicians. I recently saw a blog post, which while the overall point was correct and was very important, a line several people quoted involved recognizing a whole group of people as powerful magicians, without asking, are the people in this group doing powerful magic, or are they just doing important work in magical communities.

You are a shining bright star of awesome, just by virtue of your creation, even if you're still working off the muck so that you can see the shine. But are you a bad ass magician who does cool magic? You have to ask and answer that question. Do you do magic? Have you created unquestionable, powerful, observable changes in the world using occult methods? I hope the answer is yes because magic is awesome. But if the answer is no, I hope answering no helps you find what you need to eventually turn the answer to yes, because you deserve that awesomeness in your life.

Don't get so busy being the wizard that you become the man behind the curtain.  The wizard of Oz couldn't beat his enemy, he couldn't get home, he couldn't connect with others because his life was about an image, not about reality. He sent essentially a band is misfits to stop his enemy, and this wasn't a Gandalf cleverly positioning people kind of move, he figured they'd fail and be out of his hair. He's not the wizard you want to be.

Magic is empowering because it gives you access to very real power. If the empowerment is based on a case of the feels you're just furthering your disembowelment. A lot of people go for the feels though, we've talked about reasons why before. The magical community tends to promote catching a feel though because it's easy, and it has been part of our formative literature since the late revival.

Dion Fortune took the reality shaping force of magic away by redefining it as a change in consciousness. Changes in consciousness are powerful and useful for magic, but they themselves are more the provenance of mysticism, yoga, and systems of meditation. They inform and become tools for magic but are not magic itself. Defining magic as changes in consciousness makes it easy for us to credit ourselves and others as being powerful magicians. It makes empowerment, catching a case of the feels, adjusting our worldview or self worth, or even just deepening our breathing or closing our eyes into powerful acts of magic because they all adjust our consciousness.

I would ask though, do you want to be the powerful magician who is empowered by his counterculture vibe? Or do you want to be the magician who is empowered by his ability to find treasure, heal the sick, and destroy enemy forces?

The Real Secrets of Magic

A couple months ago a message board had a question about magical secrets, and whether or not real secrets still existed. They do, but not in the way they were intending the question. They exist in an experiential and contextual fashion rather than things that can be written down and read in books.

There is one important element of experiential secrets that tends not to get talked about. Even people who discuss the nature of initiatics or of the power of experiential mysteries don't talk about a particular sort of secret experience.

In life we all do countless things, and have countless experiences, each with their own consequences both small and profound. People at times talk about the secret life of magicians and initiates, in the sense of exploring deeper planes of reality and hidden things other people don't consider or don't see. With this secret life we experience knowledge, responsibilities and consequences outside of the range of experience of the average person. The propensity to experience wonders, and things of immense consequence both good and bad easily leads to experiences we can't tell anyone about. Things which might be immense, which might really affect us, but which we must deal with alone.

The true secrets of magic are in the the immense power magic holds, and the things it allows magicians to do, that we don't ever tell anyone, and the ways in which these experiences and these secrets shape us.

When I was in college, I took a class called Philosophy of Parapsychology. In it, one of the frequent topics addressed was “fear of psy” it was the idea that people with psychic or paranormal abilities may not be able to repeat them because once they exhibit a power or manifestation that is clear and potent enough to assure them of the reality of the ability the question of responsibility and consequence arises. Once you know you can move something small with your thoughts, or can hear what someone else thinks, you have to ask could you hurt someone with that power? Or if you know something you shouldn't be able to know, and you don't act on that knowledge, are you responsible if someone gets hurt? The idea in Parapsychology seems to be that this concern over responsibility for consequences is crippling to the average person. Most people don't want that level of power.

The same thing comes up in magic. You'd think people seeking out the power of magic instead of just stumbling on it would have addressed that concern prior to beginning. But there is a big difference between the idea of power, that in your heart you probably don't yet believe in, and being faced with the realization that you can really do some amazing stuff. Faced with it, not through some intellectual ascent, but because you experiment, you try things, you plumb the depths and bring back some proof of power. Something you can't un-see, something you can't unknow. It's there. Power is real. It's in your hands. Can you handle it?

A lot of people can't. So a lot of people get involved with magic for reasons related to image, or to a feeling it gives them, or for psychological or emotional empowerment, or to have a community. Many of them believe they are magicians wholeheartedly, but they give lip service to the reality of magic, or they redefine magic into something more comfortable, more convenient, more whitewashed, more powerless. Some of them don't even give lip service to the reality of magic, some of them downplay it, or avoid the topic, comfortable with the use of ritual drama simply used to fulfill emotional or psychological needs.

The truth remains, that magic is real, and has the ability to exert real world power. There is a difference between accepting that from people telling you, and from knowing it because you've seen its power to destroy or create on massive levels. A small spell to help ease financial problems, or to get over the flu faster might not be deeply convincing or might be easy to write off. You tell yourself you did it, you feel good, but in your mind you think even though it makes sense that the magic worked, how can you really know? You know by moving forward, experimenting, pushing deeper, until you have unquestionable results which change your view of yourself, your capabilities, of magic and of the world.

But when this happens...

What if it's something awful? What if it's something you can't tell anyone about because of what it is?

A lot of the time, those things which most easily shake our reality, and which shape our view are the things which we wouldn't want others to know. Those deeply personal secrets of how we fucked up, and something went wrong. Or of how we made a choice, a choice which maybe we regret, or which maybe we're a hundred percent ok with, but other people wouldn't be. We hold onto those secrets, and they build how we see the world and how we understand magic. More so, they reshape ourselves. We hold with us all the great things we've done, all the ways we've helped people, and we hold with us the ways we've hurt people, intentionally, unintentionally, as collateral, sometimes on the road to doing great and wonderful things.

We question who we are, what we did, and what it means for our lives and the lives of others. We question who we can tell, who we can't, who would believe us. This part of the inner experience of the magician, this is part of what's important, but we don't get books, or clubs to hold our hands through it. We have our inner guidance, maybe our close friends, but that's about it.

Some of us run into something bad, and it shakes us and we have to turn from it. Some of us try to turn from it but the reality of magic is so a part of our consciousness that we never really make the turn. Some of us come to a point where we are able to accept whatever happens, process it, and move forward, because, not being magic isn't an option.

So in the end, some of the secrets of magic, the real secrets, are those moments, those experiences, which teach us individually as magicians that magic is in fact real, powerful, and undoubtedly present within our lives. As long as real magicians are doing real magic, there will always be secrets left in the world of magic.

Angels of Emergency Response: The Reality of Magical Solutions

Sometimes when life throws crazy shit at us we don't think to use magic. For prolonged problems, sure, people will turn to magic. But I've also seen people so entrenched in their problem that they don't consider magic until things get way out of hand. People seem even less likely to turn to magic when something sudden and awful happens. You worry, you get scared you think of more effective, real world grounded solutions. But as you become more engaged in magic magic should become an effective, real world, grounded solution.

Like anything we encounter, it will depend on the specific situation. If someone is trying to harm you standing your ground and "shielding" is probably not a good option (if one assumes shielding even has any reality to it). But if you're hiding from someone maybe calling spirits to misdirect them or make you "invisible" is a reasonable way to bolster your efforts to hide. Calling on a martial spirit as you begin to investigate car troubles might make sense. Bewitching an abuser mid-abuse may require a presence of mind the would be too difficult in such a moment. Reality. Magic is real, and like all other tools our use of it should be based on the reality of our capabilities and the reality of the situation.

Skipping magic as a solution because it doesn't feel real, or using magic in an untenable situation because of fantasy ideas or just because you like the good feels are similarly problematic. Both undercut your ability to function as a magician.

These thoughts came up regarding a recent situation that popped up for me.

Two weeks ago I was at work and got a call from my sister. At first I ignored it, I mean who takes calls from their baby sister when they can be planning huge financial movements for clients (or just chatting with work bros about NSFW stuff, that is way more likely). But then I realized my sister doesn't usually call, so it could be an emergency. Sure enough I checked my phone to find a text message "Mom cut her fingers on the electric hedgetrimmers, I'm taking her to the emergency room." I quickly called my sister for more info but she didn't know anymore.

My mother is already pretty dependent on me and has a handful of problems we're already managing. The potential loss of a finger, infection, keeping the finger but with nerve damage or loss of the finger tip, the emotional toll, all of these things swirl in my head, along with thoughts of medical costs and the near impossible task of trying to keep my mom from compounding her injury with house work. So while at my desk at work, I let out a sigh, drew the seal of the Sun from the Heptameron, and wrote Raphael in Hebrew on the back of my business card then conjured Raphael.

About and hour and a half later my sister was at my office with my mom, they were on their way to get an antibiotic. It should have taken my sister about twenty minutes to get to my mom, twenty minutes to the doctor and thirty to me, so she got seen pretty much right away and was treated fast. Ended up not needing an emergency room. Doctor said she was lucky she didn't lose the final digits on her index and middle fingers, she also managed to avoid nerve damage and avoided cutting the tendons. They gave her a shot, prescribed and antibiotic and she was on her way. By the end of the day she could move her fingers again and she had the feeling back in her fingers but without much pain. Two weeks out she's basically better, since she normally heals slowly, and since she grabbed the blades as the trimmer turned on, all in all her lack of injury and swift recovery is pretty impressive. I was fearing major medical bills and on going treatment and problems, but in the end all it cost me $50 for an antibiotic and a sprinkling of red sandal and Abramelin incense that I burned in thanks to Raphael.

Maybe Raphael had no impact and  she would have been fine either way, but we can never know what would have been if we didn't do something. Either way I'm glad, both for my mother's well being and for my own lack of stress that my first thought was "Ok, well I know an angel I can ask for help."