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What drew you to magic and the occult?

  
  

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Blue Eyes Not Innocent
22:01 / 19.04.08
Just as the thread title says; what first drew you to the practice, the craft, occult science, frakkin' magic, whichever term you prefer.

Me, I was always interested in the weird stuff; I grew up in New Jersey, where the weirdness abounds, and my first impressions of magic were shaped by that and whatever I could get out of the local library, which had a large amount of books on the occult and the supernatural. I've still got the first book on magic I ever got, which is a book on Divination and the Golden Dawn, that I took out and promptly lost in the mess of my room when I was about fourteen years old; that book cost me a $25 fine and I found the book soon after I paid that fine, and it's stayed with me for ten years.

When I got a little bit older, I got back into comics thanks to my best friend, and then started getting into Grant Morrison's work through his New X-Men and JLA runs. When I started finding out more about the man, I thought that Chaos Magic sounded like one of the coolest things I'd ever heard, and so looked into that, picking up Liber Null/Psychonaut and reading through it; I tried to work on the meditation and concentration, but never really got up the balls to actually try practicing magic for awhile; things were just too hectic in my life and I thought all I'd do was fail, or worse, manage to bring something else down around my head. General weirdness that I tried to ignore kept coming about, among them recurring shadowy figures that I saw in random places as I was walking that scared the living hell out of me(I'd also seen them when I was younger, wandering my house at night mostly). I don't even pretend to know if it's just my mind trying to fit things into a pattern in hindsight or what, but maybe something(the universe, a god, something) was being unsubtle in saying "shit is not going to go back to normal, you don't get to unthink what you've thought, get moving."

Cut to two and a half years ago, when I moved to Boston. Two of the first books I unpacked when I was getting things into array were Liber Null/Psychonaut and the book on divination; about a week and a half later my grandmother died, and the girl I'd moved up to Boston to be with, the girl I thought I'd been absolutely head-over-heels in love with, broke up with me upon my return from the funeral. So I figured what the hell, right? I was alone, all by myself, my job sucked and I was living with a bible thumper, a burn-out, and a guy whose life peaked at 25(not David Lee Roth). What could I lose, right? I started off with some sigil work that's paid off very well, recently got further into it thanks to a friend who doesn't think I'm a little nuts for believing in this kind of thing, and here I am today. How about you all?
 
 
Less searchable M0rd4nt
09:03 / 20.04.08
That's an excellent first post, TheSauce, and well done for starting this topic. This is one of the most interesting questions to ask and the most fun to answer. We've had threads touching on the subject before and they always turn up some interesting stuff. I'd be very keen to hear from some of the other newbies on the forum as well.

I have been into magic in one form or another since I was a nipper. My earliest magical experiments consisted of trying to get my mum to buy me sweets by thinking about it really hard. I always had this strong feeling that there were non-obvious ways of manipulating the world around me.

I executed my first proper spell at age 8 or 9. It was a flying spell, involving a complicated herbal ointment. It didn't work, possibly because whatever Providence looks after pre-teen sorcerors stopped me from finding any wolfsbane. I put milk out for fairies, I talked to plants, I made "magical" jewellery, I experiemented with astral projection, I read trashy books on Forteana and the occult.

In my early teens I got a bit more serious about things and began to crib "proper" spells out of the book-club and remainder-bin trash I was reading. Some worked, some didn't. Some worked with side-effects, like the time I passed GCSE chemistry at the cost of accidentally summoning an air elemental in my bedroom. Most of what I tried to do was a bust, as you'd expect. This didn't put me off, though, because every so often I'd get this click feeling from one of my endevours, and my desired result would manifest.

I got into the runes and NT magic, and when I was 21 I performed this workng in respect of Loki, asking for change. Resounding success--my life turned to complete shit for the following year and I got so wigged out I ditched magic completely. That lasted almost a full year. Then I started to get the bug again, picking up on chaos magic several years after everyone else.

I'm not convinced by the sigils-as-gateway-drug model because I've seen so many people learn a basic sigil working and then stagnate, but CM did allow me to re-engage with magic in a way that felt comfortable. At that point I was avoiding any system with Gods in it like the plague, and within the loose structures of chaos magic I was able to create a completely non-theistic practice. At first I was working purely within the psychology model, treating ritual as playing mind tricks on myself, but this rapidly became inadequate to explain some of the experiences I was having.

A few years later I got a Reiki attunement, and found myself being addressed by a couple of very nice invisible people who introduced themselves as my guides and asked me to work with them. I have done so happily ever since. A couple of years after that I started practicing a kind of non-denominational ancestor worship. At first I was parsing this as a sort of Gothed-out suitheism, self-worship in boneyard drag; instead of venerating my literal ancestors, I was worshipping those influences that made me me. As so often happens, though, the Ancestors had other ideas and pretty soon I was having experiences that didn't fit into my model.

After about a year of that, I had a very intense visionary experience involving Loki, and swiftly converted to heathenry thereafter. That was three years ago. The intervening time has been rich, strange, fascinating, and mad as a jar of wasps.

Now I'm a dedicated Lokean heathen, currently working most of my magic in the Northern tradition using African-diaspora influenced rituals and filling out the sorcerous end of my practice with hoodoo.

And you guys? What are you up to?
 
 
Haloquin
12:57 / 20.04.08
Fairies. And Ghosts.

I spent most of my pre-teens chasing fairies... I was sure they were somewhere. And at the point of hitting puberty, when the 'realisation' that the grown-ups were right and Fairies were just-pretend, I got embroiled in a pile of weird experiences with ghosts.

Ok, so I was 11... and my best friend got freaked out by a game we were playing because, unbeknownst to me, she'd been playing 'seance' with some other girls, with results.

About 2 years of an intricate world-building, story-creating, final burst of play-time... which had some very very real feeling experiences with disembodied beings... ended when the other girls disowned me and witchcraft at school because their 'friends' were giving them grief for it, and I was 'out' as a Witch and just simply knew it was the right thing for me to do. In this time I'd raided the school and local libraries... initially I was looking for material on ghosts, but I never got as far as reading any of those books because I came across books on Witches and Ritual Magic (next to the ancient looking bible in the school library). During this period my best friend and I engaged in Chaos magic practices without knowing - creating our own pantheons and systems of magic, inventing our own language, rituals and elemental beings. (I still remember the basics, and have the details written down somewhere.)

Eventually my friend got counselling for various psychological issues (iirc) and she has since relegated the experiences she had to part of that self-confessed madness.

I'm not so sure.

As the new-age section grew I devoured so many books of Wicca-fluff and grew bored of the same bubbles over and again. But I still loved fairies.

I turned to the internet, stumbled across the Feri tradition (while searching for any thing on the Fae) and through that came to Reclaiming.

And then A year or two again I heard the name of the Nordic Goddess of the Dead... and realised that the pantheon I 'invented' had at least one real figure, funnily enough she was the one who'd been most real at the time. So I've tentatively begun approaching the Nordic traditions (which I have irrationally avoided up till now).

I'm also currently studying under Thorn Coyle in her Feri training, organising a Reclaiming Witchcamp for 2009, and playing with the Chaos-Magic based system built around Storm Constantine's Wreaththu. (In between these I somehow fit my Philosophy degree and making pretty things! Both of which inform and are informed by my practice... in fact, making pretty things often is my magical practice.)
 
 
trouser the trouserian
13:11 / 20.04.08
Up until I was 16 or so, I thought the occult was a load of tosh. The only reason I looked at books on magic was to ogle the occasional nudie shot of witches. I was idly glancing through a copy of Man Myth & Magic in the school library in search of such images when I happened across a photo of a picture by Austin Osman Spare. I was reading Jung at the time (possibly for a class project?) and somehow the Spare image seemed to 'click' with me - at least I became progressively less dismissive about the occult and started to go through the occult section of my local library - mostly Theosophical tomes like The Secret Doctrine or Isis Unveiled.

One of the first active acts of magic I did was to magically attack a schoolmate who'd I got into an argument with - (much inspired by a TV adaptation of MR James' "The Casting of the Runes"). The first books I had which started me actually doing stuff in more depth were David Conway's Magic: an Occult Primer and a fascimile edn of Francis Barret's The Magus. I led a fairly solitary existence, experimenting with rituals, doing a variety of drugs on the side and generally getting a reputation for being a weirdo.

I didn't meet anyone else who was seriously into magic (or at least as obsessed as I was) until I left my home town and went off to college in 1978. There, I met a woman who was involved in a magical order - the Order of the Cubic Stone - end ended up doing their "probationer" degree - a one-year postal correspondence course in practical Qabalah. I was briefly involved with the Theosophical Society, but left them behind as I began to mix on the fringes of the West Yorkshire Occult scene - mostly centred around the Sorcerer's Apprentice bookshop in Leeds 6 and its owner, Chris Bray, who seemingly, knew everyone worth knowing.
 
 
EmberLeo
05:01 / 21.04.08
I could swear I've answered this in a similar thread here before? *Shrug*

[Edited to add] Wow, this got long! Sorry...

I got it from my parents. Which is not to say that I come from a Family Trad or anything like that. My parents were both raised by Unitarian scientists (from the same church) who were fairly concrete and rationalistic in their beliefs - there may or may not be one God. Three is definitely wrong, and twelve is right out.

So I suppose you could say my parents rebelled, along with at least two of their siblings - they got into the Hippie movement as war protesters, and from there into Mysticism. They all got into Tarot. Mom's sister got into Astrology and Eastern Philosophy. She's still the family Mystic today. Dad's brother got spooked by the Tarot and gave it up for the most part, but it's obvious that the Awareness never left him to the day he died. My Mom went looking for a more ritualistic religion, passing the Mormon church and Hinduism up for Catholicism, which, when they wouldn't let her go to the church she liked, lead her to Episcopalianism. I guess Dad just sort of went along with that part and continued his own studies with the classic Cs - Crowley, Castaneda, and Cayce. Apparently he did a bit with the Rosicrucians, too.

The Man In The Window came to me and my sister separately when we were very young, which did not please my Mom. She had us baptized, and generally blamed that sort of manifestation on my Dad's lack of caution in his esoteric experiments. Before my sister was baptized, I guess He was more pleasant towards my sister. I was baptized earlier in my life, so He was standoffish to my perception from day one - but then maybe that was my own doing. I've since concluded that He's a Ghede, but probably not a very pleasant one. I haven't yet gotten up the courage to deal with that path yet.

I was a sleepwalker, with occasional hallucinations, and to this day I dream very vividly. I taught myself to remember and interpret my dreams with a little bit of help from my Mom. My sister and I occasionally saw or experienced weird shit, but mostly my childhood was normal. At least I think it was...

My school career was periodically punctuated by my classmates bringing random esoteric problems to me - Ghosts, Ouija boards, "Demon possession", dream interpretation, trance journey and such, most of which was probably completely made up. I did my best to help, despite having only a slightly better idea than they did. My Mom taught me basic shielding, invocation, energy healing, and other bits of energy work. My Dad taught me thought forms and bits of will working and a lot of theory. We discussed the nature of spirit manifestations, astral projection, divination and the Tarot, the nature of will, telepathy, reincarnation and Old Souls. New Age stuff - the distilled concepts behind Western Occult traditions, without the vocabulary. When I was 16 I asked my parents to teach me the Tarot, and they refused until I was 18, so my sister helped me buy a deck for my 17th birthday and I taught myself for a year.

Sometime after high school I finally met people outside my family who knew some of the stuff my parents had taught me - and more to the point, they knew better words for it. So they did their best to help me patch the holes in my knowledge base. When the time came for me to do my first serious spell work, to heal a friend who had given up fighting her cancer, I asked for their help, they gathered some of their friends, and we gave it a shot.

I melted the handles off my Mom's brass sugar bowl, set off the smoke alarm, and forgot the names of the runes I was using, but that apparently didn't matter. My spell worked beautifully - the amulet encouraged my friend to fight her illness, helped put her cancer in remission, and may have protected her from sexual assault, breaking in the process. Not bad for an extremely earnest first effort, eh? My friends promptly began teaching me how to do more of this stuff without depending on external tools. I got a Reiki teacher. I liked learning more about magic, but I wanted a religious community too.

So I started searching for my spiritual path. I joined Hrafnar because I fit in socially, but I still thought I wasn't Pagan, and didn't believe in the gods. Then Odin hit me with the butt of His spear and said, "Pay Attention!" When I tried to figure out if my perception that He was really there was accurate, I got a huge runaround, and the implication that the gods wanted nothing of me because I was a Pantheist who hadn't believed in them before, so what did it matter now? I tried working with the Fey, who I'd met through others, and was a bit more sure of. I got that they thought I was lovely, and shiny, and that I should go away immediately. That was fairly traumatic.

I wasn't sure what to do with myself at that point - all the beings I'd wanted so desperately to believe in had managed to show me They really existed, only to tell me I didn't belong and to go away. I started a LiveJournal to try and process it all, and from there got invited to a public Samhain ritual, and then back to Hrafnar, this time on more of an inside track, taking the gods and the magic there seriously.

From there I got a four month crash course in shamanistic techniques and posessory trance, met the Vanir, and the rest is fairly well documented in my LJ if you really want to know.

So... That's roughly how I got where I am now, but I couldn't tell you what in all that was my start.

--Ember--
 
 
Eek! A Freek!
12:57 / 21.04.08
I used to channel spirits and talk with other beings before I knew anything, but I guess everyone did. Some days I remember it so clearly, other days I forget completely, or tell myself it was madness or imagination. The whole magickal thought process of a child: I believed so intensly…
I think that fairy tales and comic books really influenced me as well, after that. I always leaned towards occult/spiritual/mystery themed media. I remember despising the fact that the ghosts and UFO’s in Scoobie-Doo and Project Blue Book always turned out to be fake; it was such a cop-out, so untrue, but I kept watching…
Then there were two sisters, 4 and 5 years older than me, who used to organize séances and read tarot, but with regular cards. They taught me that things were possible, again. One of the girls, Margaret, outlined the idea of astral travel to me, but she called it “Astro-Tripping”. I tried it that night and was instantly successful. It was amazing. I was 11 or 12. Since then, I’ve accomplished it willfully only a couple of times. (You know that quick, falling into icy water, stomach-in-your-throat feeling as you are detaching? For whatever reason I tend to abort at that point…)
My teens were incredibly introverted and spiritual. Well, in the city, that is. I grew up living two lives: one in the south shore of Montreal, on at the cottage in the Laurentians. The cottage was a power place for me; still is. I was freer to be myself there, more at home in the woods, more serene and relaxed.
Since then I’ve read voraciously, but never practiced seriously, only reading cards and some attempts at chaos magick before I knew what it was. I was great at theory, but always let the fear of feeling foolish stop me from trying.
Except recently: I haven’t plunged in deeply, but I’m wading out into the waters quickly. Time constrains me (or so I tell myself), but I’m learning to find ways to make more time for my Magickal development. My wife is very supportive, but not into it herself. She becomes my major sounding board, and while she’s incredibly sympathetic, she doesn’t really get it. She’s fantastic at calling my BS, though, and invaluable with encouraging critical thought. She’s a wonderful balancing point, but at the same time can stifle my learning, which is why I wanted to be here: to meet like-minded individuals, discuss, learn, and motivate me to get off my ass and make some magick.
 
 
EvskiG
15:58 / 21.04.08
I grew up in a religious Jewish family, so I was taught Bible stories and Hebrew prayers since before I can remember. Once I wouldn't have considered that as connected with my magical practice, now I do.

I developed an interest in "true ghost stories" and parapsychology as a kid. The Grey Lady and the the Nameless Horror of Berkeley Square terrified the crap out of me, while experiments with homemade Zener cards and dice never really seemed to prove anything.

An unhappy late childhood and a mild case of obsessive compulsive disorder eventually led to elaborate rituals to ward off danger, like the monsters in those true ghost stories. (Anything that has been touched with my middle finger thereafter must be touched with my pinky, or something bad would happen. Before bed I had to repeat certain affirmations before bed, timed to coincide with the second hand of my clock, a certain number of times or something bad would happen.) Somewhere around 12 I finally got frustrated with all those behaviors, made a conscious, intense effort of will to stop them, and did so, snap, in an instant.

In retrospect, it may have been my first intentional magical act.

Also started lucid dreaming around that time after reading about the concept in a magazine. Could do it pretty much regularly, night after night. Ended up doing a lot of flying and having a lot of astral sex (which, since I didn't have any actual experience in the subject at the time, was a bit fuzzy on the mechanics).

At summer camp one year I asked my mother to send me a deck of tarot cards and a book on the subject. I got the Rider-Waite deck and Eden Grey's The Tarot Revealed. Still have that deck, still suck at pretty much every form of divination.

Sometime around junior high I found a copy of Isaac Bonewits' book Real Magic, which led to Richard Cavendish's Black Arts, Waite's Book of Black Magic and Pacts, LaVey's Satanic Bible, the Simon Necronomicon, and the sorts of things generally available to teenagers at the time. Read a bit of Crowley, didn't really get it.

These eventually led me to the two best magical bookstores in New York, both now defunct: Herman Slater's Magickal Childe and Samuel Weiser. Read a lot, didn't yet practice.

By high school I had developed a serious interest in 60s counterculture. Abbie Hoffman and the Weathermen eventually led to Tim Leary. Read a few of his books. Got curious.

In college I discovered acid and started running with an extremely hardcore psychedelic crew. (Oddly enough, there's a chapter on some of them in Rushkoff's Cyberia.) Leary's The Psychedelic Experience and Lily's Programming and Metaprogramming in the Human Biocomputer served as Bibles for modifying my consciousness and my behavior.

I don't even want to think of how many times I tripped back then.

Leary eventually led to Robert Anton Wilson and his Prometheus Rising exercises, which I did like any good college-age acidhead. Once I realized that Wilson provided a key to understanding Crowley I reread Crowley, picked up Regardie's Golden Dawn, and eventually started practicing Golden Dawn-style magic using Donald Michael Kraig's Modern Magic for the basic structure.

Practiced daily and intensely for several years, often with a heavy dose of psychedelics. Memorized correspondences, drew pentacles and pranced around in circles, manipulated "energy" (whatever that is), visualized lots of glowing blue lines.

At the same time I was taking classes on Eastern philosophy, sitting zazen from time to time, and reading pretty much everything by Alan Watts.

Oh -- and I was fairly involved in radical left-wing politics, which gave me the chance to work quite a bit with Abbie Hoffman, the single best magician I've met in my life. He showed me the magical use of metaphor, and how much you can change reality by changing the way people frame and interpret reality.

After college I spent a little time working at the Jung Foundation as a glorified volunteer, then cut out to SF/Berkeley to soak up early cyberculture and the SF rave scene. Amazingly enough I ended up part of the Mondo 2000 crew as an extremely minor hanger-on. R.U. Sirius -- a big fan of Abbie Hoffman and Andy Warhol -- taught me quite a bit about magic when he created an entirely new counterculture by pretending it already existed. And Queen Mu ran one hell of a salon.

I also started studying yoga seriously at the Iyengar Yoga Institute in San Francisco. Still do it today, although less than I once did. The single most valuable magical/mystical/occult practice of my life.

And on and on, for more than 20 years so far. (This is getting too damned long so I'll skip chaos magic, Rolfing, my increased interest in Judeo-Christian mythology and its connection to occult theory and practice, and my growing skepticism about pretty much everything.)

Every few years I have intense bursts of overt, structured magical practice followed by long periods where it sort of fades into the background of everyday life. And lots of reading -- always lots and lots of reading. (Admittedly, I tend to be a bit overly academic and theoretical about the whole thing.)

About five years back, I realized with a start that I had achieved every single goal (except absolute and perfect enlightenment) I had had when I first started my magical practice. (After well over a decade apart, I'm even married to the woman I was in love with at the time.) Which made me realize two things: (1) this magic stuff may actually work, and (2) I should have had more ambitious goals back in college.

Like being independently wealthy.
 
 
Laughing
16:10 / 22.04.08
This is a great thread, TheSauce.

I remember messing around with magic when I was young, although I didn't think of it that way. I thought of it as: if I want something hard enough, it will happen! That was fantastic enough, until a few years went by and I realized this: It wasn't just wanting it hard enough, you had to want it the right way. What that "right" way may be is still the topic of much internal debate, but the looking was just as exhilarating and terrifying as the finding.

Friends, school, and society in general told me that magic wasn't real, or worse, that it was all a painful self-delusion. But I didn't think I was deluded, and I definitely didn't feel deluded, so I figured I'd just keep on doing what I was doing, and if I ended up being an insecure weirdo with adolescent power fantasies then at least I'd have a neat book collection to show for it.

The first magic I attempted with full knowledge that it was in fact magic was making sigils. I distinctly remember the "Holy crap, it worked!" feeling I had when I was faced with the can't-deny-the-evidence-of-your-eyes proof. Sigils became my new fixation, to the exclusion and derision of any other style, practice, or technique. I experienced the stagnation that This is *my* hole referred to. Also, well, I became a total prick. Because, hey, I can do magic and therefore I'm better than everyone else, especially those other fools who think they need all of that "gods" and "spirits" and "rituals" malarky to get anything done, when all I need is a pen and paper and a little enlightened will!

I like to think I'm better than that now. Thankfully, I met a wonderful person who gently told me to get stuffed, and then opened my eyes to a different way of doing things. I still do the old sigil once in a while, but now I work with animals, spirits, totems, plants, divination, dreams, and all manner of things that I sneered at in my awkward years.

Now my next big challenge is more mundane -- community. Not easy for an anti-social introvert like myself.
 
 
grant
19:39 / 22.04.08
1. My grandmother, a convert to Catholicism, talked to the saints. Like, regular conversations. I grew up asking St. Anthony to find lost keys and whatnot.

2. My father worked for the National Enquirer in the 1970s, when the publisher would actually send reporters to go interview UFO witnesses, before it turned into the all celebrity scandal, all the time paper it is (more or less) today.

2a. As well as issues of the paper, he'd take home books and records. Somewhere, I think I still have an autographed copy of The Search for Bridey Murphy on LP (hypnotic regression tapes!), and I'm pretty sure there are a few Von Daaniken hardbacks around, as well as albums like Edgar Burgess using hypnosis to help YOU activate YOUR psychic powers. Breathing exercises. It's all about the breathing.

3. The Catholic mysticism and the tabloid Forteana/ESP stuff probably goosed me toward the Carlos Castaneda books in the mid-70s. By 1979 or 1980, some friends and I were acting out rituals in the back yard. Unfortunately, we didn't actually have any psilocybin mushrooms or datura. Well, probably *fortunately* on the datura thing.

3a. But one of my friends did give me the last book of the Schrodinger's Cat trilogy when I was... um... 13? It was just the perfect age. Sex, drugs, and man we can alter reality with our MINDS! Soon found the rest, moved on to Cosmic Trigger.

4. CCD classes taught me meditation and prayer at around the same time. Catholic high school had comparative religion classes, and the readings/experiences from 2a-3a probably gave me a slightly different perspective on some of stuff in the textbooks.

5. College. Small. Liberal arts. Experimental (full of hippies and punks). Tai chi classes. Pan worship - only semi-sarcastic. Drugs? Well, Rick Doblin was a classmate, as were the founders of Erowid. Draw your own conclusions. Was initiated into a Secret Fraternal Order with only two other members. Became a mail-order minister. Was part of a group shordurmar celebrated by Rev. Ivan Stang. Along the way, learned some tarot and some stuff about visual textuality. Majored in hermeneutics.

5a. Read The Signifying Monkey in grad school, and started noticing how many Santeria practitioners there were around my home town. Visited one or two botanicas, talked to one or two abuelas about the saints by the door. They reminded me of my own grandmother.

6. I only heard about Chaos Magick after the Internet, I think, although might have heard whispers in Alan Moore interviews, Psychic TV fan ravings or Mondo 2000 articles or something. Really only started looking at sigils and godforms and all that jazz after Barbelith.

7. I'm not sure I'm actually *in* magic. But I like reading... things.
 
 
This Sunday
19:55 / 22.04.08
I grew up in a very religious family, so it was around all the time. Spent some years in boarding school being being convinced the last thing I ever needed to be was a Catholic, while the teaching sisters tried to make a functional priest out of me. Around that time I realized even though I did not buy into much of the Christian system(s), or buddhism or Crowley, et cetera, I couldn't help but take them very seriously, primarily in terms of being contracts.

Things spun out of there, and I'm still finding magick atmospheric and continual in ways that I fear make me appear a bit ignorant/overenthusiastic outside of community. There seems to be more value often ascribed to people who convert to a system very different from the one they were born into, but sometimes it really does just work out to be the best and most useful fit.
 
 
Imaginary Mongoose Solutions
23:29 / 22.04.08
I had always been fascinated by magic and myth and tales of the paranormal. My household was filled with filled with UFO and parapsychology books thanks to my mom's love of the subject and my dad's believing in ghosts and UFOs.

I used to just request anything that sounded remotely interesting via interlibrary loan and that's how I got my hands on Magick in Theory and Practice, Naked Lunch and the Illuminatus! Trology.

Anyway, I found kludged together homebrew Magick just as I found fellow travelers via the Goth scene I was just becoming aware of in my last days of High School. Met a girls who was also on the Thelemic vibe and we did all the stupid shit that Young Goff Magickans in Luv would do. Lots of "wow, this works... a lot" moments.

Found Chaos Magick via research, was an instant convert, found the Invisibles which just prodded me along. Started working with fictional entities pretty exclusively (well, them... and one other).

Magickal drama tore gaping chunks out of my life, buth socially and as the result of very bad Working decisions.

Met another group out of college that was also filled with fellow travelers.. but by then I had burnt out a lot of my magical drama tolerance and they were all on a sort-of Mage the Asecension, meets David Icke, meets Days of our Lives kick. Lots of pre-destined love, epic astral battles and space babies.

I stepped back from all practice for a while.

Then my father passed away. And wandering the streets of Cincinnati, I met the Invisibles in flesh and blood. So back into practice I went and it really helped my start to come to terms with my dad's death and move on.

Time passes, things change I have a nervous breakdown after the death of a toxic relationship. I spend years gently putting my toe back in practice and putting my life back together. Also, I'm introduced to psychedelics.

Today, I find myself re-learning some of the basics Magickaly, practicing a very strongly Feri-flavoured, neo-shamanic tool-laden, Chaos Magick, and wrestling with some magickal issues well beyond the scope of this thread.

But that's the quick version of how I started out and how I got where I am, today.
 
 
johnny enigma
23:48 / 23.04.08
What drew me to magic?
For me, drugs seemed to pave the way - that, and me being the sort of person who reads alot, has an interest in spirituality, as well as being very prone to periods of risk taking behaviour.......years of foolish and or productive periods of dabbling, as well as hundreds of strange, random experiences seem to have solidified into a worldview different enough from what could be considered "normal" to qualify as being "in magic", for better or for worse.
All sorts of other stuff helped.
 
 
Neon Snake
10:29 / 05.05.08
Seems a good place for a first post on this particular forum, seeing as it's also pretty much how I found Barbelith in the first place.

For me, it was the I Ching that was the turning point.

I'd been reading up on Taoism - no particular reason that I remember, I'd bought some books, read through them, and had that 'Holy...crap. That's about as close to my general philosophy as I'm gonna get...' feeling.

I bought some more stuff, including the I Ching, which I at first thought was a mistake when I realised what it was. I wanted more philosophy, not some fortune-telling nonsense.
Taoism, in the form that I'd been reading, seemed to be just a way of living in accord with oneself; not magic or any of that rubbish.

I read through the intro (the Carl Jung version), and thought...well, I know it's nonsense, but what the hell. I posed the question in my head:

'Why should I believe that you work?'

Flicked through the book, opened a page at random, and read the first thing my eyes lit upon. I can't remember the exact hexagram, but it was basically 'Cast aside your preconceptions and see what is in front of you.'

Cue spineshivers and so on. I had a quick look at the other hexagrams to each side, just to be sure that it wasn't a matter of any hexagram could have seemed relevant to the question, and sure enough, they weren't - had I alighted upon the others, the answer would have made no grammatical sense in the context of the question.

Coincidence, surely? So, I did it properly. Raised an arch eyebrow, found some coins, flipped them, wrote them down, formed the hexagram.

And got the exact same one. Cue serious spineshivers as I calculated the rough probability.

That was it really. Soon after, I got back into reading comcis, eventually found my way to The Invisibles. Meanwhile, I was having a whole stack of coincidences piling up, which culminated in my mp3 player randomly shuffling to The Beatles at the point that King Mob was talking about Beetle synchronicities in the first issue.

Took the advice of seeing what was in front of me, and started doing some serious reading, based on a list in the letters page of one of the issues of Invisibles. I've played with some stuff, got results that are, at best, incredibly improbable (I have a maths degree...probability is my strong suit), and convinced myself that it works.

I can't say that I consider myself anything other than a beginner, mind.

I've done very little outside of divination, sigilization, and some stuff with making charms from runes. I've not ventured into any of the stuff some of you guys do with gods and the like; that scares me a bit too much, and also I'm not sure I'm ready to believe in that yet.
 
 
Less searchable M0rd4nt
14:56 / 05.05.08
I've not ventured into any of the stuff some of you guys do with gods and the like; that scares me a bit too much, and also I'm not sure I'm ready to believe in that yet.

Generally speaking I'd say don't worry about that. "Follow your fear" is good advice in magic, of course, but beyond that there's no reason you need to mix yourself up with Persons of Restricted Embodiment at all. You really don't need Gods or spirits in the mix to have a successful magical practice, one that gets you the results you want and also provides healthy personal development. There's nothing kiddy-pool or inferior about running a sorcerous, non-theistic practice as long as you keep it healthy and keep making progress. If the Powers want you to come and play, They will provide you with experiences that'll encourage you to do so.
 
 
Neon Snake
11:07 / 07.05.08
If the Powers want you to come and play, They will provide you with experiences that'll encourage you to do so.

That seems fair. If I consider that a few years I didn't believe in divination, and now I consider it as achievable as cooking a bolognase sauce, then who knows what an extra few years might bring?

Thanks also for the kiddy-pool comment - that was exactly the analogy I had in my head - if I'm not playing with gods/spirits/other-stuff-that-I-actually-don't-currently-believe-in, then I'm still wearing armbands (Has there been a discussion on here that used that analogy? I suspect that's where I've got it from, I've been lurking for a while). Your comment here makes me feel a lot better about that.
 
 
Less searchable M0rd4nt
12:09 / 07.05.08
I think it's important to genuinely find your own way with magic. Don't assume that what you're doing is less valid because it doesn't look quite like what a few other people happen to be doing. Just focus on practicing, seeing what works for you, and never stop experimenting.
 
 
Gypsy Lantern
13:31 / 07.05.08
not playing with gods/spirits/other-stuff-that-I-actually-don't-currently-believe-in

Going off topic slightly, but I'm interested in the "I don't believe in Gods/Spirits/whatever" thing when it comes from people who otherwise are interested or involved in other things that get classed as "magic". I often think its almost a semantic difficulty, because for me the reality of the Powers I work with is self-evident in nature and there's not really much suspension of disbelief involved or required. I think there's often a misunderstanding that the Gods exist as these sort of Marvel comics-type beings in another dimension, which I could understand someone having a hard time believing in the literal existence of. Whilst the Gods and Spirits I work with do have definite personalities, these personalities are generally illustrative of the force of nature they represent and how it is expressed in human terms in an "as above, so below", microcosmic/macrocosmic sort of way.

So for instance, Shango, associated with fire, thunder and lightning, has a fiery and passionate personality. His devotees will tend to have similar natures, and there is a complex of emotions, ideas and experiences that are said to be of the nature of Shango - all of which come back to an observation of fire, thunder and lightning in nature. He is power, virility, masculinity, passion, dancing, excitement, drumming. From these ideas, his personality emerges, and his service is a way of recognising and honouring our own fiery natures, our own passion. How we can be like a tempestuous thunder storm, how we can be like a flash of lightning, how we can be like a blazing fire. Shango IS all of these things, in nature and in us, and when you interact with him as an Orisha, you are not really being asked to "believe in" something so much as giving a name to a certain aspect of nature that is reflected in human experience and honouring it under the name of Shango. We need to anthropomorphise abstract principles in order to better feel an emotional connection to them, and the business of interacting with Gods and Spirits through devotional practice is like a language for opening a more direct dialogue with very real facets of our existence and principles of nature that we actually deal with all the time.

I've just come back from the river. I went down to the banks of the Thames in my lunchbreak and made offerings for Oshun. She is the Orisha of love, joy, pleasure, sex, luxury and all of the good things that make life worth living. She is the Queen of the River, and owner of the "sweet waters" that we can drink. You can easily see how her other attributes are directly derived from an observation of the river, the beauty of the river, its replenishing, life giving properties, its winding course, its hidden currents. By studying the nature of the river, you learn something of the nature of Oshun and her mysteries. One of her titles is "owner of the fan", and standing up on waterloo bridge on a beautiful summer's day and feeling refreshed and cooled by the gentle breeze coming off the river, is the heart of this mystery.

I think what I'm trying to say is that the Gods are perhaps better thought of not as these abstract fictional characters that we must invest belief in the literal existence of, but as very real facets of our experience both within nature and within our own being (which is a part of nature) that the language of deity assists us in describing, understanding and honouring in our lives. This doesn't make them "less real", and it's not really a clinical reductionism that demotes Deity to subroutines of our subconscious mind either. It's more a way of recognising the inherent magic and mysteries of nature, and how these mysteries are directly reflected in our own nature and the experiences available to us as human animals. Does that make sense?
 
 
Less searchable M0rd4nt
13:55 / 07.05.08
I think that's a good point. I experience my Gods very much as living consciousnesses with specific personalities, likes and dislikes. They often act very much like regular people: making requests, cutting deals, gossiping, fighting, getting emotional, and it's useful and meaningful to treat Them accordingly. But They are still sort of chunks of the Universe, mysteries given mind (although the nature of that mind is pretty obscure to me).

It is possible, of course, to approach mysteries like Love or War or Fertility in a more abstract way, without the intervention of a deity. Personally I've come to find that kind of work rather sterile, but that might just be my own wiring.
 
 
--
03:10 / 08.05.08
"The Invisibles."

Well, it's true. I know, I know, cliche.
 
 
EmberLeo
07:18 / 08.05.08
mysteries given mind

That's poetic. I may have to steal that.

As for Sypha

Okay, I'm sorry to be a pain, given that almost everyone else here probably knows what that means but...

What about the Invisibles?!

Or, presuming you're directly answering the subject line - HOW did The Invisibles get you into Magic? What ABOUT them was so interesting that it made you think "this shit is real! I'm going to go try it now!"? 'cause, well, it's not a given to me - I've never read The Invisibles.

--Ember--
 
 
Less searchable M0rd4nt
09:08 / 08.05.08
Can't speak for Syph, but for most people who reckon The Invisibles got them into magic, it was actually the editorial page ("Invisible Ink") that did it. The comic's narrative presented the theory, but in his editorials Mr. Morrison was good enough to furnish his readership with some basic sigil instructions and musings on his own magical career, inspiring thousands of hopeful sorcerers to take up pen and specialist publication in the quest for a better world.
 
 
EmberLeo
10:43 / 08.05.08
Ahh, that's quite direct - which explains why so many responded accordingly.

Thank you

--Ember--
 
 
--
16:09 / 08.05.08
Before "The Invisibles" for whatever reason I had been under the assumption that one had to be born with the ability to use magic, that it was something that not everyone could do. "The Invisibles" showed me that perhaps anyone could take it up, that it wasn't something you needed to be born with... I'm not quite sure how I can explain this in greater detail. To be honest, however, I'm not sure I even believe in the occult anymore like I did back then... as I've grown older I've gotten much more cynical. Or maybe it's because most of my friends these days are atheists and their worldview has rubbed off on me, whereas back when I was involved with the occult I mostly hung out here, with other believers.
 
 
Less searchable M0rd4nt
16:21 / 08.05.08
Or, dare I say it, Syph, you never actually did a right lot of magic and therefore don't have many experiences to reinforce a belief in the occult?
 
 
Less searchable M0rd4nt
16:28 / 08.05.08
...I have to admit, I do twitch a bit when someone announces that ze got into magic via the Invisibles. I agree that it has been and continues to be a useful gateway for a lot of people--self included; although my active interest in magic has been a lifelong thing, I went through a period of aggressively rejecting magic and the occult, and the model presented by GM offered me a "safe" way back in. However, I do encounter a *lot* of people who've basically got as far as Invisible Ink and got stuck, not really developing their practices very much. This in itself wouldn't be too bad if some of them weren't so intense about clinging to that particular model and denigrating all others...
 
 
--
17:25 / 08.05.08
That's not entirely fair, Mordant. I did give it at least three years... I read a lot of the literature, tried out a lot of things (tarot, runes, sigils, studying the qabalah, even a few rituals). I could just never suspend my disbelief, I guess. The most convincing thing that occured was some sort of vision thing, but maybe even that was nothing more than just a very vivid dream. It's not like I took it up for a week as a hobby. Maybe it's the kind of thing where if you truly believe in it it'll work whereas if you don't it won't... who knows? It got to the point though where I saw I was wasting all this time and effort with little to no results, while all my non-magician friends were getting on perfectly well with their lives. So I abandoned it. I can't really say I'm any happier now, though now my depression is more mundane as opposed to cosmic in scope. If anything, I just finished reading "Foucault's Pendulum" today and it did kind of make me thing about how silly a lot of stuff about the occult is, when viewed through the eyes of a non-believer/sceptic.

"The Invisibles" doesn't obsess me as much as it did years ago, and I haven't read it straight through in awhile now, but I do flip through it from time to time and it still surprises me how certain scenes can still move me, even years later. Or maybe it just makes me nostalgic for a time in which I was younger, less of a cynic, more idealistic. Whereas now I believe in nothing. At the very least, that gives me peace of mind.
 
 
Less searchable M0rd4nt
17:45 / 08.05.08
It's not like I took it up for a week as a hobby.

But it's not like you ever buckled down and engaged with it long-term, either. You say you gave it three years and tried out a lot of things, but I'm not sure that you ever got stuck into a regular practice--say, something one would do daily for a couple of months, or weekly for half a year, or whatever. I got the impression from what you wrote here and elsewhere that you read and talked and theorised a lot about magic, but didn't actually get your hands dirty very often. I've only seen you describe a couple of rituals, and your projects always seemed to founder very rapidly.

If you decided that other skillsets were a higher priority for you and you're doing better since you ditched magic then that's great, but it's not really cool to come back here and tell us all how silly we look to you now.
 
 
Neon Snake
18:01 / 08.05.08
In terms of The Invisibles, what did it for me was one of the letters columns where Morrison basically wrote 'If you don't believe it, then at least try it first'. I took the challenge, and turns out the sly dog was right all along.
I'm sure it may seem a little hokey, but it was a pretty important step for me; it's safe to say that I'd never have progressed past the I Ching if not for The Invisibles.
 
 
Neon Snake
18:16 / 08.05.08
It's more a way of recognising the inherent magic and mysteries of nature, and how these mysteries are directly reflected in our own nature and the experiences available to us as human animals. Does that make sense?

Hello, Gypsy Lantern, thanks for the question and the interest.

Can I clarify that I understand correctly?
You seem to be saying that, given that I have expressed an interest and am involved in magic, why is such a stretch to believe in gods? Do I have that right?

Assuming so for the purpose of my answer, I'm not wholly sure that I see the link between magic and gods.

As it stands, I'm able to (sometimes) correctly predict how future events will pan out; and I'm also able to (sometimes) affect the probability of future events turning out in the way that I want them to. As far as I am aware, there is no requirement for gods to be involved for me to do this.

I used the word 'currently' in my statement, because I'm at a stage where I'm a lot more open to ideas than I previously was. Given that I'm not able to do stuff which I once thought was impossible, I'm not ruling anything out; however, I have a 'magic' rule in my head that I have to experience something myself (or be presented with reasonable proof) before I buy into it.

Having read an awful lot whilst starting to practice, I became a little overwhelmed by it all. I decided that I'd only believe stuff that I'd empirically proven, and I'd only move to other stuff when I felt ready.

I note that for you, the existence of gods is a given; evidently you have been on the receiving end of empirical proof yourself. One day, maybe I will be too; if that is the case, I'll hopefully take the proof for what it is, and probably won't waste time questioning it - I'm just not there yet.

I'll admit to not fully grasping/understanding your explanation of gods...on one hand you describe them as abstract anthropomorphications; on the other hand you talk about making offerings and devotions, as if they exist seperately and independantly.

I'd love to talk more about this, but don't want to drag this thread off-topic - is there another thread more suited?
 
 
Less searchable M0rd4nt
18:18 / 08.05.08
I think the most important thing to take away from those columns is less the specific techniques and theories and more the encouragement to *try it out yourself.* If you watch the much-circulated Disinfo vid, what really makes it special is not the RAW references, the on-drugsness, or the Really Great Coat(tm) but the enthusiasm for getting other people to step up and try the techniques out, the exhortation to get stuck in and see what you can do yourself.

[sry, x-post]
 
 
Neon Snake
18:58 / 08.05.08
more the encouragement to *try it out yourself.*,

Definitely; and I'd seen the Disinfo vid at roughly the same time. What impressed me was the certainty, in each of them. If I was going to call 'Nonsense, you crazy man!', then I damn sure had better have tried it beforehand.
 
 
Less searchable M0rd4nt
19:06 / 08.05.08
I can identify a lot with that state. That unshakeable certainty doesn't really stay with you--it can't, not if you are to be adaptable and stay fresh and mobile--but when it seizes you it's like you're indestructable. You go through the "Holy shit this stuff actually WORKS?" panic, and come to the "Holy shit, this stuff actually WORKS!" elation.
 
 
--
01:50 / 09.05.08
Mordant, you wound me. Perhaps I wasn't clear. I meant to imply that I view my own occult phase as silly, not anyone else's. I'm not even saying that magic doesn't work... I think that for some people it works (perhaps because they believe in it) and other people it doesn't (perhaps because they don't, or simply can't). I of course seem to fall into this latter group. But I can assure you that much of what I did was long-term... it would be impossible for me to document each and every single magical act I did over the years, and I certainly didn't mention everything I did on here. So it seems you're just as quick to make knee-jerk assumptions as I am.

Perhaps an interesting thread would be what got one out of magic... the other side of the coin, as it were.
 
 
--
01:52 / 09.05.08
Although I do agree a lot of my projects tend to die out... mainly because my enthusiasm for any one thing never lasts all that long, and I'm constantly seeking new sources of inspiration.
 
 
Neon Snake
10:47 / 10.05.08
That unshakeable certainty doesn't really stay with you

Mordant, by this do you mean that you don't view past works with the same sense of 'holy shit it worked!' that you had at the time? IE. Do you now question that they did work?

Or, do you mean that when approaching something new, you don't have the unshakeable certainty that it is going to work?
 
  

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