The other day I was having a conversation with one of my friends. She shared she was feeling anxious about the upcoming weekend where she would be doing a lot of vending and she pessimistically said she didn't think she'd sell a lot of product.
Now I'm no stranger to such pessimism, having some of it myself, so after she vented for a bit, I asked her if she was open to some feedback.
Recently I was having a conversation with a friend about results and consequences. Often times in practical magic workings we focus on the results that we want to achieve, but what isn't always considered are the consequences that come with the results. Yet consequences are a natural reality of a result. The problem that happens is that the result is treated as a point of closure. You've created and executed the magical working and then the result has occurred and that's the end of the story. But is it?
In my own magical practice I'm a real stickler for details. The reason is because I like to figure out what is working and how it's working (or conversely what isn't working). Not everyone feels this way about magic. Sometimes I'll hear people say that it doesn't matter how magic works, as long as it produces a result. I always find this response (and variants of it) to be fascinating and perplexing. "Why wouldn't you want to know how something works?" is one of the questions that I ask, along with another one, "What do you do if your magical working doesn't work or produce the results you were going after?"
I never really get a satisfactory answer to those questions.
I find that a lot of people think of magic as something you actively are doing, but sometimes the way magic works has more to do with being in tune with the flow of possibilities into reality and allowing the right possibilities to come through. What does that really mean?
I look at it in this way. Yes, sometimes the magical work involves taking action, but sometimes it involves being in a situation and recognizing how to make that situation work for you, even when it seems to be stacked against you.
Whether you're building a public spiritual community or a private one, there's a couple of factors you want to consider that will help you build your spiritual community and make sure its a healthy one. In this video I share what those factors are and how to strategically approach them so you can build your spiritual community.
The other day I got into a conversation with an acquaintance who said they wanted to be successful with magic. I asked them to define success and they told me that to them success was using intention to create manifestation. It sounded like a lot of new age fluff and the problem is that it basically is new age fluff. Words like intention and manifestation have become ambiguous words that say very little while sounding very buzzy. In the defense of my acquaintance, this was a person just starting out on their magical journey. When I explained that they needed to be more specific in defining success with magic, they had trouble because they didn't know what it looked like.
I've been working with the element of stillness for 2 and a half years, via daily meditations and internal work. The stillness work is part of the elemental balancing ritual that I've used to create a dedicated system of internal work, which I've been implementing in my life since 2004! Today I thought I would share why I've worked with Stillness for so long and share a stillness working with you. Check out the video:
I've lately been on a bit of a simplicity kick with my magical practice, and part of that has involved going back to basics. It may seem odd that a magician with 20 plus years experience would go back to basics. After all, don't I already know this material? And the answer is yes, and yet also no. You see, I think one of the traps I see magicians fall into is one where you take for granted what you know. And actually this happens outside of magic. If you meet an "expert" in a field they know what they know and they sometimes take it for granted. So I want to share with you 5 reasons for going back to the basics and how doing that can help you become a better magician.
In this case study, I share a recent working I did with Glasya-Labolas that shows how focusing on the influence aspect of a spirit can produce great results. To learn more, watch the video below.
Get my 5 secrets for personalizing your magic that produces consistent results.
Did you miss an episode of magical experiments in February? All the shows are below.
Magical Experiments podcast: The alchemical balance of positivity and negativity with Bill Duvendack
Magical Experiments podcast: Pagan Leadership Challenges with Shauna Aura Knight
Magical Experiments podcast: Spirit Conjuration and Magical Evocation with Frater Barrabbas
Magical Experiments podcast: The Tao of Craft pt 2 with Benebell Wen
Book Review: Advanced Magical Arts by R. J. Stewart
Advanced Magical Arts is a follow up to Living Magical Arts, with a particular focus on visualization, ritual and mediation and how these techniques can be used in conjunction with each other as well as what precautions to take when employing them. The author does a good job of explaining the techniques and showing how they can be used to develop a system of magic. I also like that he includes some sample workings in his tradition that you can use to implement these techniques. I found it easy to take the concepts shared and employ in my own workings and systems of magic. I recommend this book as a good resource to learn more about these techniques.
I thought I would share a few examples of how my own aesthetics of magic have changed. The first two examples are recent ones that have to do with art magic, but the final example is really a discussion of how my use of magical tools has changed over the years and why. I'd originally intended to share these answers in a class I'm teaching, but after a bit of back and forth with my friend Felix decided to make a video discussing these examples, because its a good way to continue fleshing my own thoughts on the aesthetics of magic and where that really fits in my own work. I'm sure I'll be doing some further work around this line of inquiry because there's a lot to consider and explore.
In the video below I share the three examples of changing aesthetics in my own magical work.
And if you want to learn more about the principles of magic...
In my previous post I talked about the aesthetics of magic and why that perspective can be a useful part of your process of magic. Now I want to explore why its useful to question your aesthetics and how that can benefit your magical practice. While your aesthetics of magic is useful for helping you understand what makes a magic working magical, it's not a good idea to treat your aesthetics as set in stone. If anything, questioning your aesthetic filter can help you recognize how it might limit you magically, or what you could change about a magical working.
In the example, I used in the previous post, the person mentioned that sigils didn't look magical, which was why trying to do magic with them didn't work. One question I found myself asking was, "What could this person change about the sigils to make them look magical (and therefore buy into them being a viable magical operation)?"
It's important to recognize that the Aesthetics isn't limited to the appearance. When I think of an aesthetics of magic, I'm thinking of what makes the experience magical, which can include (but is not limited to) visual appearance, but can also include the smells, sounds, feelings, taste, as well as movement and stillness (and whatever else you might think of that contributes to creating the experience). This distinction is important to note because if we're going to question our own aesthetics, we need to recognize what we are specifically focusing on.
First you need to decide what is aesthetically part of your magical workings. I suggest looking at a number of magical workings you've done over a period of time to identify the aesthetic elements that consistently show up in those workings. This will tell you which aesthetic elements are considered necessary on your part in order to make a magical working happen.
For example if you find that you consistently use candles in your workings, then candles would be an essential aesthetic element of your magical practice.
Now take a look at what aesthetic elements don't show up in your ritual or workings. For instance, you might not do chanting, because you might think its a distraction or that it doesn't sound magical (or whatever the reason is).
List the aesthetic elements that you consider essential in one column and in the other column put the elements that are non-essential.
Why are the aesthetic elements in the essential column necessary for your magical working?
This is the question to ask yourself. Beside each element write down your response. No answer is wrong. The point of this exercise is to understand what makes a given aesthetic element essential to your magical practice.
Why are the aesthetic elements in the non-essential column unnecessary for your magical working?
Just as with the previous question, write down why a given aesthetic element is unnecessary or not magical enough for you. Again there's no right or wrong answer. The point of this exercise is to help you understand why a given element isn't aesthetic enough for your workings.
You know what the essential and non-essential aesthetic elements of magic are and why they are or aren't essential to your practice, but it can be a useful exercise to try something new with your magical practice. Try putting together a magical working where you don't use all the aesthetic elements you normally use, or where you mix in some aesthetics that you normally wouldn't use. Then record what the results are, but be willing to do this multiple times, to see if there are any differences.
Also if you're using an aesthetic element of magic that you normally wouldn't use, ask yourself what you could do to make it magical. Don't be afraid to make some changes. For instance, in the case where the sigils didn't appear magical, the person could try drawing the sigils differently or using colors or try a different sigil technique.
The benefit of experimenting with the aesthetic elements is that it gives you an opportunity to challenge what you consider to be essential. And even if you come away with realizing that what's essential is really what works to make a working magical, at least you've questioned and challenged your aesthetics and discovered for yourself why those elements are essential.
The benefit of working with aesthetic elements you don't consider essential is that it allows you to discover if you can make them essential to your practice and also provides you an opportunity to challenge your ideas about what is or isn't magical.
Share your results with this exercise in the comments below. I'd love to discover what you learned :)
And if you'd like to see my answers, check this video out.
The other day an acquaintance emailed me and asked me what I thought about sigils. What the person wanted to know is if I thought chaos magic style sigils were an effective form of magic. I'll admit to being surprised by the question, because I've generally found the work, but then I read a bit further and I recognized why sigils hadn't worked for the person. The person explained that the sigils didn't look magical. The issue was an aesthetic one. And it's an important issue actually, because if you look at the practice of magic in general there is an Aesthetic aspect to it that shows up across various systems and traditions, and yet isn't overtly acknowledged or recognized for the most part.
I got to talking with my friend Felix Warren about it, because in the past he's shared his own perspective about the aesthetic of magic and how he uses an aesthetic perspective in developing his magical work and he agreed that if there is an aesthetic quality missing in a magical working that can affect the person's process of magic.
Let's define the word Aesthetic. Aesthetic is a set of principles that underline and guide the work of a particular artist or artistic movement. It's also the appreciation of beauty.
If we look at a given magical working from a design perspective, we see the aesthetic principle of magic show up. The design perspective is concerned with the trappings of magic and what trappings are needed in order for the magical working to happen. For example, what tools you will use, what clothes you will wear, but also how you will get your conscious and unconscious self to align and buy into the magical working.
This is why some people need incense and candles when they do magic. Aesthetically the incense and candles creates the right design that allows the person to fully commit to the magical working, because they've created a space that is magical.
Now what's important to remember is that not everyone's aesthetic is the same. For example, I don't need incense or candles to do magic. My aesthetic of magic is fairly minimalistic in some ways...yet there is an aesthetic that informs the magical work that I'm doing.
I would also say that your aesthetic for a given magical act can actually differ depending on what the magical working is. For instance if I'm doing a chant to evoke an archangel...that chant and the correspondences in it will be the aesthetic that makes the working come together. On the other hand, a painting of a sigil doesn't need a chant, but does need the paints and the experience of paint, and so that becomes the aesthetic.
Now that's just my take on the aesthetic of magic and as you know I'll all about personalizing magic, so to me it makes sense to take an approach to the aesthetics of magic that personalizes them according to the magical working that you'll be doing...but a reasonable question to ask is if a person should develop a universal standard of aesthetics that they apply to their magical practice.
The answer to that question is that it depends on the person. For that matter it also depends on what spiritual system or tradition they are engaged in, because a given system or tradition of magic has its own aesthetic of magic that informs the design of the rituals and how people should show up. You can question that aesthetic and modify it, but you also have to consider whether said modification will be welcomed in general.
If you're developing your own system than you can create a codified aesthetic for that system. That codified aesthetic is essentially your brand and it describes how your magic should be designed and why that design will play a role in the magical work you do, as well as the interactions you have with the spirits that are part of your system. This codified aesthetic should also have some input from your spirits, because of course they'll have their own expectations and correspondences that need to be considering when you're doing a working with them.
I think the aesthetics of magic offers another angle that you can use to help you understand your process of magic and why something is or isn't working. And recognizing that your magical practice should be experienced a certain way helps you to appreciate how you design your magical works, as well as what is essential and what is optional in those workings. Additionally, there's something to be said for simply appreciating the qualities of a magical working that make it magical.
Sometimes your magical working fails. It happens to all of us, but if you don't understand why it fails, you can't do much about it. However if you're willing to take a step back and look at why your magic might be failing, then you can start to address that problem and make changes that help you get consistent results In the video below I share the top 5 reasons why your magic fails and how to account for those variables.
Get my 5 secrets for getting consistent results with your magic.
Sometimes what stands out to me about why someone is having problems with their magical work is that the person is complicating the magical work. It likely doesn’t help that in your average book on magic you find tons of information about magical tools, herbs, crystals, and candles that you are supposed to have in order to do magic. Throw in a magical grimoire and now you need to get golden tablets, and various other arcane tools that the author assures you is absolutely essential to doing the magical working.
Let me assure you that nothing could be further from the truth. And if you come away reading a book that suggests you use a specific tool or do a specific activity, but it’s not clear why you should do it, then you need to back up and liberally douse that book with a bar of salt before doing the working.
The reason why people complicate magic is because there’s a tendency to take whatever is presented and treat it as the final word on the subject. But here’s a little secret for you: You are the ultimate authority of your spiritual practice and you don’t have to do magic the way people tell you to do it.
I’m not saying you shouldn’t read books on magic or try the exercises, spells, or whatever else, but if you find it isn’t working, it’s okay to try something different or take the working apart and figure out what part of the process doesn’t actually make sense. To this day, I do this with much every practice I read about. I try it, figure out what makes sense and get rid of the rest. And the practice consistently works without the unnecessary information.
So how do I simplify my magical work?
I’ve already explained that if you don’t know why you’re doing something or what the purpose of something is, it can be useful to consider discarding it, but let’s explore 5 other ways you can simplify your magical work.
1. Design your own tools. Magical tools have a place in magical workings, but it can be helpful to design your own tools. There’s nothing saying you have to use an Athame, wand, or whatever else. They can be useful tools, provided you understand their purpose, but what if you need a specialized tool?
For example I created a memory box, a specialized magical tool for the purpose of helping me do space/time magical work. No conventional tool would have worked, but the memory box helped me connect with past memories and future possibilities, providing a model I could work with. By designing my own tool, based on my needs, I was able to simplify the magic and get more from the workings.
2. Develop your own list of correspondences. Lots of magic books come with correspondence charts. The purpose of a correspondence is to help you understand how a crystal, plant, etc. is connected to a specific spiritual power. However there’s nothing saying you can’t come up with your own correspondence list, based on your own experiences. In fact, developing you won correspondence list allows you to personalize your understanding of the spirits and forces you’re working with, which simplifies your magic because you aren’t having to remember someone else’s correspondences.
3. Take a critical look at the ritual you want to do. When I learn any given magical technique, I like to take a critical look at it and ask myself what each part of that technique or ritual is supposed to do. This helps me determine what I do and don’t understand about the technique or ritual. And then I can either do further research or cut out what doesn’t make sense and see what happens. Either way by taking a critical look at the technique or ritual I’m simplifying the magic because I’m taking time to figure out what I know and what may need to be modified.
4. Take out elements of a working that are optional. Sometimes you’ll discover that a magical working has optional elements. Well optional for you anyway. The person who put together the original working might disagree and say everything is required, but in my experience you can likely get the same result doing a stripped down version of the working. You can always do the full version of a ritual and then strip out what you consider is optional and see if there is a difference.
For example a meditation technique I was learning had a lot of visualization in it. Trying to remember all the visualization became a real distraction from learning the technique, so I stripped the visualization out and focused on the sound and tactile sensations. As a result I was able to hit some very deep spaces of altered consciousness that were consistent with what the defined outcome of the meditation is. By simplifying the technique and getting rid of what I felt was optional, I was able to focus on what was essential for learning the technique.
5. Use your talents in your magical work. We all have our own talents. I think it’s a good idea to apply your talents to your magical work. For instance, I use my creativity in my magical work, in the form of paintings and writing, collage art and song. By taking what I’m good at and applying it to magic, I am able to develop my own processes and practices. I simplify the magic by using my talents to connect with it.
One of the ways I’ve simplified my magic work is to create paintings that are evocation portals. The paintings contain the sigils of the entities I’m working with and when I need to evoke one of the entities, I can simply use the painting to connect with the spirit and call it forth.
If you want to learn even more about about how to simplify your magic, check out my 5 secrets for personalizing your magic that gets you consistent results.
The other day, in the magical experiments newsletter, I shared a story about why I walked a way from a mentor I was working with. In short, his biggest lesson was showing me how close-minded he was. I don't have time for narrow perspectives of magic, but it got me thinking about how you choose to work with someone magically and what you do to recognize the warning signs if a person isn't a good fit to work with. I share more in the video below.
My magical theme of the year is process. I explain why in this video:
2016 has been a really interesting year for me, all across the board. I think what I appreciate about this year we just exited it how much I ended up growing because of my willingness to step away from what I knew to embrace the unknown.
For 2016 I created the theme of respect. At the end of 2015 I called out the Pagan conference organizers on what I considered a lack of transparency around which presenters were compensated for their efforts, and which were expected to pay to present. That choice made me realize that I needed to reevaluate my relationship with respect, and so 2016 became a journey into respect. I learned 5 magical lessons as a result that I'll carry with me through the rest of my spiritual journey.
If I wanted respect from other people, I needed to respect myself and I realized that in some ways I really didn't. I made compromises because I wanted to fit in or because I was told it as better to toe the line and not stir up trouble. I disrespected myself and my feelings on certain matters because of that and in 2016 (and the end of 2015) I realized I could no longer disrespect myself, especially because it was clear I wasn't getting the respect that I felt I deserved.
I confronted the Pagan conference organizers and then stepped away from the Pagan conference scene because it was clear that the desired changes and the requested transparency wasn't going to be provided on their part. And in doing that I made the choice to respect myself and my work instead of continuing to toe the line and go along with the status quo.
And you know? It's forced me to become more creative, challenged me to step up my game as an author and presenter, and I love it. I am happier (and more profitable actually) getting away from the Pagan conference scene than continuing to be a cog that is basically used, instead of being a person that's appreciated.
Part of my journey toward respect involved recognizing that I needed to capitalize on one of my strengths: Creating and sustaining community. Instead of going out into the larger community, I decided to create my own communities around the interests I have and focus on working with those people. My first attempts weren't very effective, but I learned and ultimately came away with two online communities where people are engaged and actively working on what excites them, and where the space is safe, because the focus isn't on tearing people down, but rather on helping them become better at their magical practices.
Creating community showed me that the best way to reach the people I'm called to serve is to provide them a space to gather. I'm already thinking of new ways to continue creating that space and I'm looking forward to seeing what happens as a result.
I took the last couple months of 2016 for myself, to really drill down into some work I've been needing to do, both internally and process wise. Stepping away from writing and content creation was good for me because it really helped me get clear on what the purpose of any and all my activities should be for. I still have a lot of work to do, but you'll soon be seeing some of the fruits of my work and I'm really excited about this year will bring.
This year I learned how to work with the temple of memory and the value of correspondence charts and oral chants. I felt some resistance toward working with these concepts, and so I decided to challenge myself to learn about what I was feeling resistant toward. The end result: It's provided me a new approach to how I work with spirits that feels more intimate and connected. I still have a lot of experimentation to do around what I'm learning, but opening myself up to what I felt resistant to lead me to some new magic, some new work that really excites me.
It's important to honor the resistance, but its also good to challenge it and see what you learn as a result.
This was perhaps the biggest lesson I learned this last year. By choosing to really sit with and embrace the shame I felt, I could respect myself. This internal work was hard and it really put me face to face with some of my demons and made me recognize how I had hurt other people in my life, as well as myself. But out of that work I could make changes and respect myself as a result.
This is why a consistent regime of internal work is so important. When you put the time in to take care of yourself, to really see who you are and how you show up and then make good changes, it frees you from the burdens of guilt and regret that can other wise hold you back and keep you mired in the muck.
What lessons did you learn from 2016 and how you are applying them to your spiritual work and life?
Note: An advance copy of this article was shared on my Patreon.
As I've been working on my latest book, Pop Culture Magic Systems, one of the frequent topics on my mind is the role of a person's spiritual lineage or history in relationship to creating a system of magic. A system of magic is created as a result of different influences and the spiritual lineage a person has access to is one of those influences. Let me share with you an example, namely my own spiritual lineage.
My spiritual lineage isn't the types of magic I've practiced, but rather specific influences that I consistently integrate into my practice. Those influences can be specific people or specific books or something else. Whatever they are, they continue to exert an influence on my spiritual practice and on the experiments I come up with. When I look at my magical work, the influences, the lineage I see is of specific people: Franz Bardon, Antero Alli, William G. Gray, William S. Burroughs, R. J. Stewart, B. K. Frantzis, Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche, A.R. Heaver and Edward Schiappa. I haven't met most of these people in person, but they nonetheless have exerted a significant influence on my spiritual practices, and while there have been other sources of inspiration they haven't had the same level of influence of lasting power that these aforementioned people have.
I see the mark of these people in my work, in how I think about magic, how I practice it, and how I experiment with it. They are a lineage of sorts that I draw on. Now your lineage likely won't be the same as mine, but you have one. You have people who are significant to you and your spiritual practice, that influence how you think about and practice magic, and when you recognize that significance, it causes you to look at all of your work in a different way. You don't see it as a singular work, but rather as part of a continuum of work.
Your system of magic is shaped by that continuum. Your lineage is alive and speaks through your system to you, and to anyone else using your approach to magic. When you look at your system, take a moment to recognize who shows up in it. When you see who shows up, what it reveals to you is not just your own ideas and thoughts but also how you have taken the thoughts and idea and practices of others and integrated them into your own work. The importance of that recognition is that it teaches us how to make our lineage live on, and also helps us realize that magic cannot be static. It builds on what came before and changes what came before into what is (in the moment).
When we recognize the role of the past in the work of today, we also sow the seeds of the future.
Genuine magical experimentation doesn't occur in a void. It happens in context to whatever else is significant in your life and work. When you look at who came before you and how they influenced your work and then you see it in your experiments, in your personalized systems of magic, you also discover how to take the past and push it into the future, to evolve the work that's been done into the work that can be discovered and revealed.
My experimentation only started a couple years after I began practicing magic, but those first couple years were important for providing the experiences and foundation I needed to be able to experiment. And so its continued to be the case throughout my own practice. I learn from others and bring what I learn into my experimentation, in order to see how I can take what I've learned to the next level.
What is your lineage? How does that lineage show up in your magical work?