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Maybe we should start a thread on whether the world would change if everyone because interested in the things we are, or whether spirituality and magic would just end up going the way of Burberry, i.e. a lot of people not doing it very well.
Burberry occultism? Chava Magick? Chavospheres? Chavaotes? "Condensed Chava" and "Prime Chava" by Phil Hine? You might be onto something with this y'know.
Actually, I think in a lot of ways, the process you describe is exactly what is happening at the moment but on a smaller scale. It gets touched on a bit in the thread on Gnosis that... err... "Lucky Liquid No.1!" started yesterday. The creation of a post-chaos "pop magic" that reduces a few basic procedures to a functioning "technology" that everyone can utilise in their day-to-day life. On the one hand, it's a potentially empowering thing to give people, but at the same time, this sort of reduction sometimes touts a series of simple magical formulas that are often more marketable than they are especially accurate... and sometimes, to my mind, seem to actually drain magic of much of its beauty and mystery in the process...
I think there does seem to be a large contingent of contemporary practitioners for whom magic is a kind of plug and play activity. Something that you dip into to do a sigil here or maybe a tarot reading there, every couple of months or so. Which is absolutely fine, but it's a markedly different experience to the life of someone who lives it full-on 24/7. But to be honest, I wouldnt really wish the 24/7 thing on anyone. Not everyone can or should function and relate to their magic like this, no more than everyone can or should be a surgeon or plumber. I think there is a difference between levels of involvement with magic, which you're always going to have.
Maybe the thing to loosely work towards is not the unlikely scenario of everyone on the planet suddenly getting into practical magic, but more about everyone on the planet feeling that they have permission to have some form of spiritual life for themselves. There seems to be a lot of low level fear among people of being cast into some kind of distasteful purple gown wearing, stonehenge visiting, crystal touting, gullible hippy caricature – if you even express an interest in any of the broad areas that get lumped together as "occultism" or "magic". For instance, a lot of people visit tarot readers, but more often than not treat it as a kind of half-joke... as if they don't really believe in it, but still have their cards read fairly regularly nonetheless. I think this is quite a sad thing in many ways, because I do believe some form of "spiritual life" is a healthy thing and shouldnt be stigmatised in the way that it is. There does seem to be a hunger there for something, within the general population, and I don't think that hunger is necessarily being that well-sated by the occult community.
I think a lot of the stuff I'm always going on about with relating the practice of magic to community and the world around us is closely related to this. I try to make my magic available to people as a service, whether it's doing work for people, providing divinations, or even holding parties for the Spirits a few times a year, where I invite people along to make offerings to the Gods and commune with the Spirits through eating, drinking, music, dancing, etc – magicians and open minded non-magicians alike are always welcome. At one level, I see it as a process of normalising the idea of magic into other people's lives. Almost making it easier for people to have... I suppose... "magical experiences" and benefit from the various things that magic can provide, without them actually having to become magicians themselves to do so. Why should they? It's as much a specialised body of knowledge and skill set as something like plumbing, or IT support, or family counselling.
Interestingly, and a bit weirdly, in various friendships that I have with people who are in no sense spiritually or magically inclined, it sometimes feels as if my inclusion in their social circle (and the occasional innebriated conversations about such areas) acts as a kind of stand-in for a sense of "magic" or "spirituality" that they're not quite happy or comfortable about exploring themselves. As if going for a beer with someone "who does all of that weird stuff" somehow brings "magic" into the margins of their own life by osmosis, but in a safe way. It's very odd. |
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R, I'd love to hear what you thought of some of the ideas that 