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Vis a vis GenHex, my question, that magic-as-activist-tool is the Big New Idea that holds the antho together, has been challenged in the intervening posts.
I wasn't aware that there was supposed to be a Big New Idea that held the book together. I just wrote some stuff and sent it in, y'know. Of course magical activism and magical practice geared towards social justice isn't a new thing. In the UK, you have things like the Dragon network which has been going for years and is about just that. None of my pieces are really about that stuff, to be honest, but I'd agree with Mordant that the concept could certainly do with a leg up and a greater awareness of magical activism could perhaps be fostered in the public domain. For instance, a glossy high profile book that gets into mainstream bookshops and promotes this sort of thing would probably be a good thing. I'm not sure that Generation Hex necessarily is that book or is even trying to be.
I don't have a Big New Idea that is going to revolutionise magic. Sorry. I might want to ruminate on a few Big Old Ideas that seem to have been overlooked by a lot of contemporary magicians, and which I think are worth directing people's attention towards in the hope of giving the reader something to go away and think about - but that's pretty much it.
Some of the themes in my articles touch vaguely on what you seem to be talking about, but for me it's more about encouraging people to think about the relationships between magic and the world around them, magic and your community, magic and how you keep a roof over your head, magic and how you feed yourself, magic and the day-to-day minutia of a human life. I'm interested in looking at this kind of stuff because it does seem to get brushed under the carpet quite a bit. So many people really seem to locate their practice at a significant distance from their actual life, like they exist in two separate rooms - the mundane world and the magical world. So many people seem to see their magic as something to be kept in a box and taken out every once in a while. So many people don't seem to know how to let their magic breathe, relax their tense grip on it, and just allow it to permeate every facet of their lives like the majestic, monstrous, beautiful thing that it is. I think that's quite an appalling attitude so I'm interested in drawing attention towards this sort of stuff, and hopefully provoking a bit more flexibility and creativity in how people relate their magic to the world - or at the very least giving someone, somewhere, something to think about for five minutes. Can't do much more than that.
I think the stuff mentioned upthread about a "moral imperative" that runs through the book - at least as it applies to my stuff - is not about magical activism and social justice at all. Not really my subject area. But what it is about is the recognition that magic can be an awful lot more than the weird little hobby, weekend escapism, edgy performance art, or diverting parlour game that a lot of people seem to treat it as. There is a point to learning this stuff, and to my mind, it's about actually doing something with it - within the world around you - according to your will (in the Thelemic sense).
I'm not positing any of this as some big shiny idea that I have the patent on and which I'm delivering to the undeserving masses. I'm not trying to be some absurd, contemptible, uber-shiny chaote celebrity with "the new thing" to hawk around. I try hard not to be that much of a cock. All I'm doing is writing about things that I think are worth writing about, and which I think are worth encouraging people to be a little more conscious about.
If you disagree with me, that's entirely your prerogative. |
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