Why Magic
It starts with a dream.
I’ve sometimes wondered if that’s how it starts for everyone. You go to bed one night totally unaware. Your body weightless as REM begins to grip, and then you’re somewhere else, someone else. The confines of your flesh and reality grow hyper-exaggerated or fade to vapor. Yet there you still are, faced with the surreality of this place so familiar and alien that you become far, far too aware of how all your hairs are standing on end.
Then your eyes open back in the waking world. You were just in your bed the entire time. Your alarm hasn’t even gone off yet, and it’s still dark out. You get up and light a joint. Whoever, wherever you were slips away with every drag and the weight of mundanity. You eventually make your way back to bed to reclaim a few hours before work. You don’t dream that second time. You’ve already forgotten about it.
Until the next night. Until you feel yourself sink back into that place where the very laws of gravity itself have been perverted to the point of letting you fly. You float inches above the ground, the knot in your stomach that’s so omni-present on roller coasters and sky needles gone.
In this place, there’s no fear and no pain.
Only the pure nuance of curiosity you haven’t felt since you were a child.
On you glide over the terrain, your toes touching grass electric with the dew of ideas. This blade tells you about the novel you’re going to write. This one, the assassination you’re to carry out. These, like this place itself, are fleeting. You forget their half-second occupation in your mind as others flood to fill their space. You take your time crossing, the caress of each blade bringing a familiar sentimentality like it’s been your natural existence. Here you’re a painter. Here you’re a revolutionary. Yet further down, you’re not even you as you know yourself. You’re a woman, a man, an amalgam of the two speaking in a tongue you can’t place.
For every blade of grass an answer to the question you’ve yet to utter aloud.
Then the alarm fires. You blink, staring at the ceiling for a long moment before it hits you that you’re back. You smack the alarm, and shuffle into the kitchen to make coffee.
This time the dream sticks.
The want, the raw desire to remember is too thick and pungent. It’s an odor that sticks to you, even after a shower and a fresh set of clothes. Clacking away at your desk you’re on autopilot. Going through the motions, your mind is rooted in that endless verdant realm of splendor.
It started in a dream.
Maybe it doesn’t start that way for everyone, but that’s how it did for me.
That dream haunted me every moment of every day. It made me anxious, lusting for that place again. Anxious enough that I had vicious, aggressive insomnia that led to me blacking out in public. Pushing myself to the brink of exhaustion if only to touch it for a moment.
Just a second.
A single blade. Just a nanosecond of those ideas, that freedom.
Being a warlock wasn’t something I sought out. I mean, it’s embarrassing you know? Like who the hell admits to being a wizard in 2022 unless they have really weird, purist ideas on gender identity?
Yet, here I am. A warlock all the same. Fighting insomnia once more, with the fervent hope that maybe tonight, I won’t just remain in my bed. I’ll be pulled through the cushions into that place, and perhaps speak to her once more.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Mental Con Games
Before I go any further, I should state the obvious:
Magic and occultism is by and large bullshit. Anyone that tells you otherwise is probably going to follow that up by asking for twenty dollars.
Scream at me about your ouija board experience. Tell me about your cards. Tell me about how your crystals power you. I’d love to hear about how God speaks to you directly, personally. If you’ve a demon story I’m all ears.
It’s not going to change the fact that I think most occult practices and magic in general are bullshit.
I simply know way too much about most of the secret schools and the people behind them. I’ve read all the literature, practiced the spells and been left wanting. Don’t even get me started on how Salem was based in racism and sexism. God, and the devils of Loudun? Shit on a fucking shingle, there’s simping and then there’s simping.
Confirmation bias, the placebo effect, or simply a dash of confidence can explain almost all magical practices. Well, most of the mainstream ones anyways.
I still dare to call myself a warlock. Contradictory enough, I also offer my services as a magus for free to anyone that needs them. Because while I don’t believe in mainstream practices or assumption of craft, I absolutely believe in my version of magic because it works for me. By definition, “occult” used to mean anything simply hidden from the eye.
You can’t repeat occultism like a science because the very concept of sharing something as layered as how we individually experience something is impossible. We can give each other close facsimiles, but it will never ever be the exact same experience for any two people on this planet. Much less across species.
To all you witches and wizards with your familiars, no, they’re not magic. But they sure do love you.
So again, magic is bullshit.
Other people’s magic.
Which is why I can’t tell you a magic spell that’s going to work for you. I don’t have a love potion stashed under my coffee cup. I can’t put you in contact with that rich departed relative who buried gold on the property.
But I can tell you why I’m a warlock.
I can tell you what magic looks like for me.
In doing so, maybe you can find some of your own, so long as you don’t see my experiences as definitive. Deal? Deal.
The Infinite Sea Beneath A Starry Sky
It starts with a dream, and continues with a question.
The occult practices in my humble opinion (and that alone) are an introspective medium of self examination and expression. We don’t always choose magic, but magic pervades in all we do. From the concept of mystery to the kinetic discussion of what being human means, it’s everywhere and in all things. Maybe you call it “god”, maybe you call it physics or science or math. These things and monikers are wholly human creations, perhaps existing in no other parts of the universe save our own. In accepting that concept, all names and mediums are equally part of the occult. To choose, stumble into or find ourselves as magicians, warlocks, wizards, witches or dabblers is to assert the multitudes of what it means to exist.
Those possibilities are ever endless, the horizon ever in view but unreachable. Artists, writers, painters, scientists, physicists, and all within the humanities and sciences are equally magi of their respective fields attempting to answer the same question.
It’s far, far too massive for one group to answer alone.
The philosophers stone, in practice, isn’t an alchemical rock, but seeking to define the hows and whys of We in parameters that are universal to all peoples.
God, it’s a racket, a headache, a task that looms so large that even the expanse of our history can only manage it in fractions. So that’s what we do. We break it down, bit by bit, specialty by specialty, and attempt our best. That’s what directly led to my own version of being a magus, and what moved me to write this today.
The question of Why presents itself to everyone differently, just as our path towards magic does. In my case, it was the gnawing realization that “it doesn’t have to be like this” filtering into every single facet of my life. I tried to ignore it, tried to push it down and away. In doing so though, the cacophony of the question only grew in timbre. The endless possibilities, as filled with splendor and variety as blades of grass, grew to be an amazon thick with vines that ensnared every step.
It was bullshit-but I couldn’t pull away.
So I started studying. I gobbled up every occult book I could find. Wicca and kitchen table witchery. Esoteric kabbalah and chaos theory. The koran, the havamal, the torah. Tomes forgotten and not. No matter how much they harped and preached, no matter how much they swore there was only one true path to enlightenment or damnation…
I didn’t fucking buy it.
Because that wasn’t how it was supposed to be. That’s not what being human meant to me individually, nor what existence itself meant to me. Being human wasn’t a singular path, but a dozen-dozen that twisted and curled and grew gnarly around one another. Sometimes they crossed, sometimes they didn’t. The possibilities were there, still growing, still shaping, always and forever.
It came as no surprise then that my answer to Why turned out to be the concept of love itself. Why do we exist? To love one another, for loving endlessly is divine. Why be a magus? To experience the endless blushing shades of love along whatever paths revealed themselves to me. My magical machinations were cast not with wands, but sex work and the friends, lovers, mentors and more whose paths crossed my own.
Were I to pass from this realm into that endless field of dreams today, my machinations would live on. Through memory, through uploads, through the deeds I dedicated my life to. I hope they enriched those that experience them-and if not, serve as a warning for what magics to not let guide us. Like any artist. Like any researcher.
Like any magician.
I didn’t choose magic, but the world sought to wrap me within it all the same. It saw fit to let me glance, if only for a moment, at a world where things could be different. They could be better. By the time my feet were moving, I was well on my way to assuming my title as a magus. I can only hope that my great works achieve their ends.
The End of The Dream
It starts with a dream.
It continues with a question.
What comes after is entirely up to you.
Maybe you’re just starting your journey. Maybe the path has had you for years now. Regardless, I hope dear reader that your eyes are no less open to every blade beneath your feet or the caress of their dew against your soles. I hope you find yourself ever in wonder, ever in love, and ever receptive to all the world can give.
You deserve no less, wizard.
-j