The other day my family and I were playing a game of Triominos. This was the shape we’d put together toward the end of the game. As I looked at it, I was struck at how you could use the actual shape and tiles as part of a sigilistic working. The purpose of the game is to match tiles together by the numbers. You can get some interesting shapes as a result.

I figure you could approach this technique in two different ways. You could do a solo working where you lay all the pieces on the blank side and then start pulling pieces and matching them together until you get a shape that you can use for a sigil. Or you could do a group working, where instead of focusing on winning the game, everyone focuses their intent on building a sigil shape that they’ll use for the magical working. The entire activity could be focused on the actual working you want to accomplish, with the goal being to use the pieces to create the shape or appearance for the sigil to work.

I know it’s a little odd and different. Why not stick with the same old, same old, right? But I like having fun with magic and this has a lot of potential for fun as well as working as a focus tool.

Have you repurposed any games for magical purposes? If so, how?

I love the new show Once Upon a Time. It’s an intriguing mix of Faerie Tale with Modern world. Hopefully it’ll last more than one or two seasons. Perhaps what I love most about is the intersection of symbolism, character archetypes, and reality. In one sense, the show is depicting two alternate lives for each character, and yet in another sense its depicting how people in a small town end up trying to embody and act out faerie tale roles they’ve been assigned by a child trying to find meaning in his life. You can interpret it a variety of ways I suppose, and that’s where I see the show as a kind of magical act/metaphor of reality.

What makes it so evocative is the ability to portray two different realities and while it can be argued that the faerie tale reality is the “past life” of the characters, it’s also their future and present, because they are stories constantly retold and relived in the imagination of the people telling them.

At the same time, this show also explores the modern “real” world as a faerie tale world in its own right, something not real, but just as made up and surreal as the faerie tale world…and why not. It makes perfect sense to treat the modern world as just another faerie tale, but what I find so fascinating is how in one degree or another the characters are playing out the themes of their lives, becoming the archetypes or at least trying to as some part of themselves rebels against the curse.

I have no doubt I’ll have further analysis of this really fascinating show. I’m admittedly geeking out a bit, but this kind of analysis and research is part of how I create effective pop culture magic workings. The more enthusiasm you invest the more real it becomes, and that’s part of what makes pop culture magic viable…Plus in this case it also is combined with my interest in how pop culture reinvent and retells older mythology in modern contexts!

It’s 2012. When you look back on 2011, you might be thinking of everything you accomplished or everything you didn’t do. Maybe you’re also thinking of new year resolutions or how you’ll do what you didn’t get to in 2012.

Stop. Just stop for a moment. Those are all such automatic thoughts, such cultural promptings that its worthwhile to consider a different tact and step out of the automatic grind that is New Years.

Every day of the year signals a new year that is starting, because one year ago that day started and ended. But we only think of the new year a couple times out of the year. We think of it in January and you might think of it also around your birthday or around Samhain, if that’s your thing, but in general people don’t consider that a year can end on any day, and begin on any other day. It’s all arbitrary.

So 2012 is here. What has really changed from yesterday or the day before? Nothing but numbers. Nothing but an arbitrary measurement of what time it is. Take that new year fervor you feel, that burning passion that you will make changes and ask yourself: “How can I sustain this each day of the year, every year, so I actually make the changes I want to make?”

Each day provides you an opportunity to change, to make a difference in your life or someone else’s. Sustaining the momentum is what the real challenge is. People start out with resolutions and then they are ground away. Nothing feels new, everything lacks a certain luster. Sound familiar?

If you want a new you…if you want to keep those resolutions, develop a long term sustainable plan that you can hold yourself to, and if possible get some help with accountability by partnering up with someone else who wants to make changes.

Successful long term magical work is based on a systematic approach to what you are working on. Thus, for example, I have my year long elemental balancing rituals, which serve to focus my internal work on specific themes that I can use to measure my change or lack thereof over the course of the year.

I’m developing an online correspondence course for people who want to learn my approach to magic. It seem to be quite the rage right now…actually I think its been that way for a while. What sustains my approach to this particular project is the idea that once its completed, it’ll be very easy to add changes onto it, while providing anyone who takes it a chance to experiment with my approach to magic. But the only way such a program will work is if the people taking the class actually have a sustainable model for integrating what they are learning into their daily lives.

It’s 2012. What will you do to develop a sustainable process that you can use to create effective change in your life and maintain that change?

Latest Radio Interview

Here’s the archived version of the recent interview I did about my new book Magical Identity with Justin from Sothis Media. If you didn’t get to listen to interview, or just want to listen to it again, click this link!

Book Review Self Comes to Mind by Antonio Damasio

This is an interesting book that presents what I’d consider to be an ontological perspective on neuroscience, identity, and consciousness. The author presents some intriguing ideas about the intersection of these concepts, particularly where consciousness originates from. I’d highly recommend this book as one that will get you to think about your brain and body in a new way, as well as provide new perspectives on what self is and where consciousness fits into it all.

I’m debating right now what my next book will be about, but I’ve already got some good ideas percolating. No it won’t be social media magic…though that could be the name of a chapter.

Anyway, I’ve been playing around with my Facebook Timeline, adding some events to points in the past, mainly where I moved to and where I’ve lived. I wish they would let you create future events on your timeline, but it doesn’t look like they do. However the possibilities of using an FB timeline for a bit of retroactive magic does excite me, especially when you can add pictures and videos to a specific date in time. You can graphically rewrite your timeline and make it into a very creative experience.

For example I’ve added several fiction events to my timeline. I’ve done it for the sheer humor of it, but there’s nothing to say that you couldn’t go in and rewrite portions of your life with modified details, and use that as a kind of narrative that also retroactively rewrites your life. And if you can get people into participating with you via tagging, you can even come up with some clever meta events.

It’s really about having fun, but also getting creative with your life. Changing what happened on the timeline might open up some possibilities for you, or if nothing else give you closure on events in your life. It’s something I’ll keep playing with, as much for whimsy as for any magical purpose. The time line is a graphic and textual narrative of your life. It can represent where you’ve been, who you’ve met, what you’ve done…and it can part fact and part fiction. FB probably wants it to be all fact, but why make it all fact?

What about you? How would you experiment with the Facebook timeline?

I’ve been watching Nikita lately, which is the newest rendition of La Femme Nikita. In one of the episodes, the actress playing Nikita does the famous action of diving into the laundry chute to avoid being incinerated by the missile. You know the action I’m talking about. It’s the action that occurred in both movies and likely occurred in the other La Femme Nikita series as well. It’s what I call an archetypal action, an action that defines and embodies the archetype or character. It makes you think of all the iterations of that character. It brings that character to life for you.

If you’re an actor, or a magician doing that action can also make for an effective invocation, though I’d recommend against diving down chutes to avoid being incinerated. My point being however that if you look at pop culture and mythology in general you will likely find specific actions or activities that a given character, god, etc did and those actions are part of the archetypal consciousness of that being. You may even find that there are actions that repeat across different cultures, with the result being that the action taps into something deeper than the faces that happen to display the action. You tap into the essence of the archetype, something faceless, that nonetheless represents what it is you want access to. An archetype isn’t just the face, after all…it’s the actions that embody the concept.

Part of my work with identity has involved using space and movement to shift identity. Archetypal actions can be a part of that work, particularly when you want to invoke a spirit by embodying it. Actions allow the spirit to take over, to possess and become part of your experience even as you enter into its experience. I’ve done such actions in my work with Elephant and Dragon for example, but also with various characters I’ve worked with. By mimicking the movements and actions, a person invites a different body awareness, and can use that awareness to call to the entity of choice that s/he wants to work with.

It’s a reinvention of identity, both for myself, but also for people I want to market my services too.  It’s an ongoing challenge, because I’m not just writing a new business plan, I’m also doing a fair amount of internal work. For example at our class, we were challenged to rewrite our internal stories into more positive ones. What does it have to do with business? Quite a lot actually, because the internal reality you believe is the reality that manifests in your life.

Each year, the elemental balancing ritual is part of my reinvention. The thematic approach provides enough structure to make consistent changes, while providing enough freedom to allow yourself to experience the lessons needed to make those changes happen. A necessary part of that process involves keeping a journal of sorts, which is why I blog on this journal about the experiences each month. The only exception has been a two year gap, wherein I focused on Magical Identity. You won’t necessarily find such personal entries in it, but it nonetheless encapsulates the experiences of two years of reinvention.

Change is a constant. Embracing change within your magical practice is how you take control of the change you experience and make it part of your identity.

I was doing dual deck tarot readings at the local yule fair last week and what stood out to me was how people would create their own spreads, which didn’t necessarily look like anything I’d create, but nonetheless made perfect sense for those people. What I liked about that realization is that it proves that fixed spreads are not a necessary part of Tarot reading. In fact, I’d argue that the spontaneous creation of new spreads made the reading more effective because the layout of the cards demonstrated the mental “space” of the person, and how the different cards were situated in that space.

Space, mental and physical, is part of how a person defines his/her identity. The manipulation of space via placement of objects is part of that identification process and it can tell a lot about what obstacles a person is encountered. A spread that is chaotic with elements all over the place still has an order to it, even if its an order that only the person who created the spread understands. A reading I recently did initially looked very chaotic. It took asking some questions to really get to the central issue, but once those questions were asked the spread made complete sense and fit the issue rather well.

What makes this approach dynamic however is that if you use a tarot reading as an act of enchantment, you can make the person’s ability to change the spread, to reorganize it an essential part of the reading. In other words, the person changes the spatial identity s/he inhabits by changing how the cards are spatially organized, as well as how s/he understands the underlying message of the card. The result is a different reading, one that plots how the person will make changes to the existing pattern in order to resolve whatever issues are represented.

Here’s a podcast episode where I talk about some of my initial experiments with Tarot.

I learned about process from two different disciplines: Academia and Technical Writing. Both disciplines are process oriented, albeit in different ways. In academia, the process is research oriented. If you have an angle you want to explore, you need to do a lot of research and find corresponding evidence that supports your claim, and protects it from potential attacks by other people. This approach to process is more theory oriented than anything else, but it taught me a lot about how to construct an argument, and develop a defense for that argument. It also taught me to appreciate research and the need to ground any work you do in what others have already laid out. To this day, my approach to magic is always based in ongoing research into various subjects that are relevant to the experiments I’m working on. At the same time, academia also taught me the dangers of being too focused on theory. Within the particular disciplines I studied there was very little application, which caused me to question what, if anything, was really being done with the research academics were conducting. I recognized that while research is a necessary and integral part of a process, it must be balanced by something else.

Technical writing was the other discipline that taught me about process. It likely helped that my first tech writing job was at Boeing, where one of the phrases is: “Process is king” In that position, I learned that good technical writing had to address the right audience, while providing step by step practical explanations of how to use a given technology. Research also still played a role, but the practical application was the most important part. If you couldn’t apply it, it didn’t matter. That made sense to me and I realized it was the missing piece that academia didn’t have. If you can’t apply it, it doesn’t matter. Or in occult terms, if you can’t apply it, you’re just an armchair magician.

That’s how I learned process, but I doubt most people really want to follow my exact footsteps. But the two lessons you can take from those steps are: Anything you do must be grounded in research in order to show others where its come from and If you can’t practically apply what you are working on to improving your life, it doesn’t matter.

So figure out what you need to research and determine if you can apply it to your life. But there’s another lesson I learned from technical writing as well, that can help you develop a process. Everything you do can be broken down into steps.

Once you break something into steps you have a rudimentary process. Apply lessons one and two as well and you have a full fledged process. And lets not forget you also need to measure results. If you have a process, you have a result and you need to measure that result to determine if your process works. A process is only effective if you can consistently achieve the result you’ve designed the process for.

Effective experimentation calls for feedback and input from other people that aren’t familiar with the technique and are willing to test it with the appropriate balance of skepticism and open mindedness that is needed for effective experimentation. As an example, when I experimented with a technique to contact neurotransmitters, I knew that to truly test its effectiveness, I needed to find other people who could verify if the technique worked. I ended up having a variety of people experiment with the technique. Some were from the U.K. and some were from the states, so they didn’t all know each other. The consistent results that they achieved was what verified the technique and made an effective experiment.

You also need to be able to explain how your process works, so that other people can duplicate it. If a reader just gets lots of vague theories about how it works, but there isn’t any practical instructions then what you have is more of an armchair approach to magic. Sounds great in theory, but can I implement it?

Perhaps what is most vital to effective experimentation is curiosity. You have to be curious and open to exploring what’s around you. My curiosity is what has motivated my exploration of magic. I’ve always wanted to know what the real limits of magic are, as well as what my limits are. So if I can test something out, I will, in order to see what I can do, but then I’ll bring it to other people and ask them to test it, to see what they can do. Naturally the people I look for are curious as well.

Effective experimentation is about developing a consistent process that can be done again and again and again, with the achievement of consistent results. Its as simple as that, and yet that simplicity demands careful attention to detail, to ensure your process does work.

One of my favorite mediums to work in is body paint. The body becomes a canvas, which is painted with body paints that can be used to express and explore the magical work in context to the body.

Collage is another medium I’ve always enjoyed. Cutting away the meaning from text and picture and then reassembling it into my own image has always appealed, because it gives a person an opportunity to create something that runs counter to the messages that were previously imbedded in the media.

Painting with water color is another medium I’ve liked using. I tend toward abstract paintings, and there’s something fun about letting go of any shape and just painting, but I think you can have a specific concept in mind and still make it magical.

Singing, whistling, and lately playing with my harmonica has been another creative activity I’ve applied to my magical work. I’m doing some experimentation with Tuvan throat singing as well. I think exploring what your voice can do or what a musical instrument can do in terms of magical work can be a lot of fun. Certainly listening to some of the musicians I enjoy has taken me to some novel spaces with their intentional blending of magic and music.

Wood work is something I haven’t done recently, but I used to do it a lot and actually created a couple of altars. It’s something I’d enjoy doing again, with the proper tools and facilities.

I think applying creativity to your magical work can be a lot of fun. It’s a great way to get flexible about your magical work, and challenge yourself to come up with something that’s customized to you. If you haven’t applied your creativity to your magical work, give it a try and have some fun!