From Witch to Magician

I have been thinking about the spiritual changes I have undergone in 2008, but admittedly, I am in a frame 0f mind too close to the subject to adequately transform incoherent experiences (stories) into a coherent narrative.  This past year, I have felt suspended in an uncertain state between peace and confusion, and often find myself unable to answer the questions as to why I underwent those changes.  I wanted to post about this on my magical journal here because I believe that you, who have possibly read my previous entries and perhaps even listened to my podcast back when I wholly identified myself as Pagan, will have the advantage of seeing my spiritual progress from a step back.  I hope that you will be able to more objectively than I could ever dream, shed some light on the matter for my benefit.

1997-2003

My childhood fascination with magic drew me to happen upon articles about Wicca on the Internet.  My memory is hazy at this point, but I remember writing spells and then later, performing a self-dedication ritual.  New Age stores began opening up around my neighbourhood and I invested some pocket money in 1998 for a thick book on various forms of fortune-telling, including tarot, runes, palmistry, and graphology.  I began seriously learning about Wicca through the books of Australian author and musician, Fiona Horne, although that was also greatly supplemented by the popular websites available at the time.  I purchased my first athame in 2000 and expected the results to be significant in my magic, but ended up being largely unsure what to do with it.  It was shelved after gathering dust on my altar.  In 2001, I began working at a local New Age store and had even greater access to tools and books.  Having an income for the first time also meant I had greater freedom to seek out events in he greater Pagan community.  I attended the Magick Happens festival in 2001 and 2002, including several workshops ran there, including one memorable one on Tibetan magic and an extremely crappy one run by an Alexandrian High Priestess on creating spell bags.

It is probably also worth mentioning that I made my interest in magic and witchcraft known from the onset and after I began identifying myself as Wiccan, openly shared the fact with my family, friends, classmates and teachers.  I remember making some comments that people’s impressions of me changed after they understood I was Wiccan, but I cannot recall a single event where I was persecuted.  Rather, a lot of people surprised me in how tolerant and genuinely interested and supportive they were of my practice.

I met a girl my age who was also a practising Wiccan although she was still ‘in the broom closet’ from her more conservative (Muslim) family.  We started sharing books and web resources and then sometime in 2001-02, founded a coven together.  Beyond designing it a beautiful website on which I posted my spells, we did not take it much further, largely due to our inability to commit much time to the venture (we were both 16 yo girls who still had to ask permission from parents to go out on the weekends) and our initial ventures were marked by foolish attempts to connect intellectually with fellow adolescent magicians and witches.  I remember one case where a 17 yo boy contacted us and suggested that he was interested in participating in our coven events, only to then insult us for replying to an email of his two days after he sent it as he expected all magical organisations to be prompt with their responses.  He also resisted the term “witch” and insisted that we refer to him as a “majikcian” (yes, with that spelling).  Ladies and Gentlemen, this was indeed the first ‘majickian’ I have had the pleasure of meeting.

2005-2007

The more education I underwent, the more Paganism felt wanting.  I am just stating a correlation here, not downright writing off that the prerequesite of Paganism is a lack of education.  There seemed to be little room in the Pagan community for scepticism and level-headedness.  Constantly seeing new Wiccans and Pagans crop up and validating their path with stories of their supposed paranormal talents repeatedly confirm this.  The romance of Paganism was wearing off for me.  While by day, I read books, observed the Sabbats, and did spells, my motivation came from a powerfully romantic inclination.  That is, the illusion (delusion?) that with every wave of my athame, I was a weaving myself into a beautiful tapestry of long-lost mystery traditions where men and women were equal under the eyes of the God and Goddess.  With every shake of the besom, I would be closer to a lifestyle of perpetual celebration (“Oh look!  A tree, let’s dance and praise the Lady and Lord!”), self-empowerment, and spiritual bliss.

2008-Present

I am not at all convinced that there is anything wrong with Paganism.  There are Wiccans and Pagans out there who not only do not perpetuate the romantic delusions of witchcraft, but actively dispel those myths, so that Wicca and Paganism can progress into the future on a foundation of truth.  Nevertheless, I received those romantic ideals and subsequently had my lofty expectations shattered.  I accept full responsibility for that.  After all, I chose to read simplistic books for many, many years that further accentuated the sense of romance in witchcraft before I thought to myself, “What do the critics of Wicca and Paganism say?”, “Are the legends of an ancient matriarchal tradition true?”

I think this kind of tendency to avoid critical examination can be observed in people of every religious path, career choice and life decision.  But the higher we allow ourselves to drift into a fantasy, the harder we will fall.  And I fell pretty damn hard.

This is where it becomes rather impossible for me to reflect because it is very much still a work-in-progress.  At some point in my disenchantment with witchcraft, I discovered a group of magicians who practice magic separate from a shared, overarching religion, and it was encouraged by their ways, that magic for the first time in my life, felt right.  I was no longer purchasing herbs and oils because some book said so, but doing magic when and how it felt good to do so.  I have subsequently, met Wiccans who also believe whole-heartedly in this philosophy, yet somehow, I feel as though the Pagan ship has sailed for me.

Dark Nights

The Christmas long weekend and New Years break always brings with it a long period of apathy and lethargy.  Especially as here in the summer hemisphere, we go through some of the hottest days of the year and by the time the new year has begun, my brain has melted far beyond intelligent thought.

Following a violent wave of motivation, such as the one on which I rode to make this blog and begin my Qabalah course, I tend to go through a long period where magic is the last thing on my mind.  I didn’t touch my magic books in the last month.  Instead, I finished reading Andrew’s Motion’s biography of John Keats as I eagerly await a film in-the-making by Jane Campion called Bright Star, which will be particularly focussed on Keats’ relationship with Fanny Brawne.  I have been an admirer of Keats since I was about 12-13 and read Ode to a Nightingale.  I hope the film will help alert modern readers to his existence and we may see more of his poetry and biographies in print following the (hopeful) success of the movie.

Of course, I didn’t hijack my magical journal to talk about poetry.  My interest in magic can hardly be considered waned.  Knowing my tendency to become too demotivated to do anything in summer, I continued enrolling in courses at the Firefly Academy to prompt me to keep my magical practice in the back of my mind.  One of the courses I am taking is designed to introduce new practitioners of Wicca to the tool of the Book of Shadows.  The Book of Shadows is a Wiccan successor to the magical records or journals that some more well-known magicians kept.  It traditionally includes the lores and tenets of their coven as well as Wicca copied out from their coven’s official Book of Shadows by hand.  It can also include recipes for incense, oil blends and foods to celebrate the Sabbats and Esbats (full moons), and the step-by-step instructions of rituals and spells.

As a result of this course, it got me thinking about the format of a binder and loose leaf pages as a record of my magical practice.  It is an idea I came across frequently when I was a practising Pagan but never had the chance to take on board.  However, I have found this new project quite useful.  Inspiration struck and I began formulating an invocation ritual where the magician can create and assimilate a Guardian self who works to protect the magician from the malicious actions of others, such as slander, theft and exploitation.  It’s not that I have found a particular need for this magic, rather oddly, it was Isaac Bonewit’s preface in his book Real Magic that gave me the idea that it may be useful for all magicians to create for themselves this Guardian as a kind of insurance.  I probably won’t need to explain to the readers the kind of motivations rampant in the occult and Pagan communities where greed for profit as well as fame and glory is quite common.  I also quite regularly hear of ideas, especially when they are experimental and innovative, to be stolen and claimed as passed down by the culprit’s ancestors, not to mention quite regularly see the ideas of others being distributed (sometimes incorrectly) on the Internet without the permission of its author(s).

Invoking a Guardian empowers the magician to protect them and their knowledge from being misappropriated and misused.  A kind of magical self-destruct for the ideas that fall into the wrong hands.  I will work out the kinks some more and relay the information when I can.

An Unwanted Guest

During my last bout of sigil drawing, I designed a particular one to help me with a troubling issue at the time.  Unlike my journal icons, with which I made digital images to place on my blogs, I drew this one out by hand onto a piece of cardstock.  In July, when my husband and I had recently bought our very first apartment, we heard from a close friend of ours that his girlfriend was very unhappy with her landlord.  Her rent was exorbitant, the house rules seemed unreasonable, broadband Internet was dismal, and the bottom line—they lived on different sides of town and after walking her home from class, our poor friend had about another hour’s worth of travelling ahead to get home.  Luckily, the apartment that we bought was a handy 5 minute walk from his house, our broadband Internet is exceptional, our house rules, well, we had none (and no clue that we needed any), and we offered to lower the rent by $120 per month from her last landlord.

As we began to renovate, warning signs kept flashing, signalling that it would be a bad idea, but we were very reluctant to go back on our promise to our friend.  From the first night she moved in, it was disaster.  Brand new Scanpan knife, a gift from two very dear friends, had it’s tip broken off when we found it the next day jabbed into the wrong knife block, hair littered the floor (which for 3 months, we had thought belonged to us [a premature receding hairline is not uncommon in my husband's family], until she went overseas for a week and the fallen hair disappeared), hair clogging the drains, fridge crammed like a landfill (we would say, have finished our milk and by the time we went to the store and come back with a new bottle, that space would have been replaced by a bottle of Coke), kitchen covered in a sticky film of oil… we watched heartbroken as all the beautiful things that our loved ones gave us for our wedding were treated like they were disposable.

In October, we had a discussion with her and asked her to consider moving out, but she was stressed with assignments at university and said it would be too much work for her.  We agreed that it was unfair to put more on her already full plate, so waited each agonising week out until December, when she started dropping hints that she might stay through February, March or even April.  Even my perpetually cheerful husband was livid with having to clean up after her every weekend when he would much rather be relaxing.

I made a sigil that would prompt her quick departure.  Although we knew it would be easy to ask her to leave in February (when we originally agreed for her to move out), we both desperately wished she would go earlier than that.  By then, the amount of mess she was leaving around the house was in epic proportions.  I designed this sigil, but made very sure that when I charged it, I visualised her leaving without any damage done to her relationship with her boyfriend or her parents.  I definitely did NOT want her to have to leave because her relationship failed or God forbid, one of her family members passed away.  After I charged it, I left the piece of cardstock in her room.

A week passed and nothing happened.  On Christmas, we decided we couldn’t put up with her any longer so we confronted her to asked her to move out by 18th January.  She reacted really badly and it seemed as though she was deliberately leaving more mess and doing things to inconvenience us.  Surprisingly, her boyfriend came to talk to us and confessed that we might not have to put up with her for much longer as he had been contemplating for some time to break up with her.  On the 27th December, he came over to do just that, and by the next morning, she was gone.  This was definitely not how I wanted it to turn out.

The next day, her boyfriend clarified that after their argument, they decided to get back together.  She’s moved in with him (although her things are still here waiting to be packed and transported for good).  Unfortunately, not everything is happy.  One of the reasons why she’s moved out is because being unaware that she was difficult for us to live with, she does not understand why we wanted her to go, and took immense offense with being asked to leave.  Right now, she is angry and bitter and blames us wholly.  My husband is thrilled that she’s gone, but I wish I could do something more to help her overcome her bitterness.

Journal Sigils

I created two sigils yesterday specifically for the purposes of online journalling.  This may interest you if you also keep an online journal or blog.  The first one is quite particular to my needs, which is to learn more about myself and construct a coherent identity through the process.  Furthermore, I can be frivolous with my posting.  I have often set up journals and post feverishly for the first month, only to neglect it, if not forget about it altogether, after a couple of months.  Thus the first sigil is also combined with the objective to commit to the writing:

Identity and longevity

My next sigil is created to inspire respect in its readers, minimising the chances of receiving visitors who feel the need to offer unsolicited advice or simply act out destructive and offensive behaviour for kicks.  It also promotes interest in the journal itself, both enhancing the wit and articulacy of the writer as well as engages the audience.  Finally, it secures the privacy of the journal and protects it from unwanted eyes:

Respect, engagement and privacy

If you feel this may be useful for you, feel free to adapt my technique or take my sigils for your own use.  I pasted them in the user details section of my Livejournal to activate their effects.  Rather than using these large pictures, I drew them as small 50×50px icons. Once again, you are most welcome to take these for your use:

Livejournal

Does anyone here have a Livejournal account?

A good friend recommended I start one so that I may have a medium to post more personal thoughts up, rather than only the magic-related events in my life.  If you are interested, please leave your username with me so that I may add you to my Friends List when I am ready.

Employment Magic

I made a sigil last week using 1337 speak to assist my housemate in finding employment and activated by typing it into the search engine on an employment search website.  This is what it looks like:

/\/\P1Y/\/75Q

She was later offered some paid work by her boyfriend’s partner, however, it is not as stable and sustainable as she would like.

Oddly enough, I was also contacted about doing some paid work during these summer holidays now as well for a course I am tutoring next semester.  The lecturer got in touch with me to draft some quizzes and case studies, which will be a nice, flexible source of income until semester begins again.

Wand-in-Progress

I have recently heard from Jo, my friend and wandmaker, that my wand is almost finished.  Since she took this picture, she has sealed it with cypress oil (cypress is another tree associated with Hades) and is braiding the handle as I write.  You will notice that the top of the handle end with the jet cabochon is detachable.  It actually screws open to reveal a secret compartment in which four pomegranate seeds will be kept.  This is by far the most meaningful piece of ritual tool I have invested in.

What my wand looks like so far

What I admire most about Jo is that she crafts these stunning pieces for passion rather than profit.  Click here for samples of her work.  While I understand some witches and magicians need and/or desire a supplementary income for their well-honed skills and talents, it nevertheless thrills me when I meet some one as gifted and adept as she and yet asks no more than the cost price of her materials for her work.  She has really inspired me to do more with my skills, whatever little I have right now, and expect only the joy of sharing it in return.

A good friend of mine called me on Monday with a fascinating experience.  Has anyone heard of the Old Hag syndrome?  Well, my friend awoke in the middle of the night and he found himself paralysed.  He then distinctively heard a woman whisper in his right hear, “I think you should know” again and again.  I conducted a tarot reading for him to try and uncover what that message could have meant, assuming it was a real experience, and together we interpreted and discussed my free-form spread.

My tarot readings are more often than not “freakishly accurate” in the words of my past read-ees.  Most importantly, they are usually a hoot to do, especially seeing the looks of shocked disbelief on faces, and then getting to find out about their reactions and laugh about it later!  I would love to start doing tarot readings for people on a more regular basis…

What about the practising witches and magicians among you?  What are your thoughts on charging for your magic-related skills and knowledge and is there anything you feel you give back for no monetary profit?