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.o0OA survey-"how'd ya get into magic?"O0o.

solid~liquid onwards

11:20 / 29.10.02

brought on from the fluffy magic thread

well, how did you get ino magic, then. Guided by synchronicities? read a cheesy "sabrinas first book of spells" style book? or did a strange experience get you interested?

12:27 / 29.10.02

23 synchronicity. did some reading about it and its significance. kept on experiencing it, even now.
somehow through it, i ran into the chaos stuff, and i wanted to test it out to see if it was all just bullshit...

13:03 / 29.10.02

Lots of science fiction/fantasy reading as a child. LOTR (Lord of the Rings) at the tender age of 9. Thought there was more to it than just fantasy as it was cropping up in a lot of books. The whole 'where there is smoke, there muct be a fire' thing. Haven't looked back since. And with my parents getting into the whole shaman/herb witch/healer area ... now more open about it.

14:29 / 29.10.02

Lots of fantasy and science fiction here, too... I had a shitty growing-up and desperately wanted the fluffy mass market "magic" to work, but was completely skeptical of it; I escaped through books to "better worlds" rather than trying to remake mine (at the tender age of twelve).

Got to college, discovered that I was exceedingly good at reading people and situations and short-term futures, and that I was comfortably experiencing tons of synchronicities that everybody else thought were truly weird.

Fast forward to living for two years with a flat-mate who was a very effective witch/sorceress, then having a ceremonial magician (and his library) camp out in my livingroom for a couple of months... By that time I was too far down the slippery slope to escape; it just took exposure to Grant Morrison for me to realize that chaos magick was where I needed to be.

15:10 / 29.10.02

Magic got into me...

23 guided and exposed me to different areas, and I suddenly found myself in -this- one.

16:54 / 29.10.02

Never been out of magick, only become aware of what humans can and have been doing since the dawn....

The conscious act of study was something that 2001:a Space Odessy and John Boorman's Excalibur triggered, as a child.

Merlin and the Black Slabs.

I've blathered before about using mind games on the aether as a child to locate that elusive lego brick, when hunting through the tin of plenty. Being aware of how my conscious meta-narrative effected the perceived exterior world, only led to the mislabeling of mental illness. Being empathic and mediumistic without guidance in youth is incredibly upsetting and a crime. I'm still healing the upset and hurt from these early years.

Support the children for they are the future,
and our past

19:19 / 29.10.02

Being empathic and mediumistic without guidance in youth is incredibly upsetting

Yea, that's pretty much what started me. I was at least told from the earliest that psychic stuff was ok and we all do it a little, but I didn't get any sort of study going until late high school. In the mean time, having an x-hippy dad toying with psi, a crazy grandmother hateing up poltergeists, a great grandmother pulling strings through the Power of Prayer, a Catholic religious education as only the Italians can give it, and dead pets jumping about in the back yard made for an interesting, if frightning, childhood. Been getting a handle on it ever since.

I pretty much progressed as the Christian Fundies fear most: Fantasy and sci-fi books, Heavy Metal music, D&D, drugs, tarot cards, witches and shamans and magi oh my! It all sort of snowballed once I got out on my own.

Dances with Gophers

09:32 / 30.10.02

I remember at the age of 5 getting a magic set (paul daniels, David Copperfield type thing)for christmas. I set every thing out in a circle and was disappointed when nothing happened

11:31 / 30.10.02

Invisibles. Grant Morrison. Pop Magic. 23. chaos.

11:49 / 30.10.02

did alot of stuff that just seemed right at the time, ways i found to cope with what as goin on around me. then discovered that there were others that did this as well, and treated it as 'magical'. discovered discordianism by "accident" on the web, then chaos magick. Also alot of help in the book department from a couple of friends.

i guess its always been with me. i just needed some time to see it. still discovering new things now.

14:42 / 30.10.02

There were some great sex scenes in the last book of the Schrodinger's Cat trilogy. A friend of mine on the schoolbus said he didn't get the book, so he gave it to me.
Eventually, I found the rest of the series.

14:56 / 30.10.02

Now that's funny.

solid~liquid onwards

17:30 / 30.10.02

...and to add too this, how many ppl consider themselves to be withches/magicians (i dont, i just meddle in things occasionally and happen to be relatively good at it)

i got interested (properly) when i scored very well, consistantly on the zenner test, things went from there until i had my first OBE...which somewhat concreted things... then soon after that i discovered the invisibles by chance, which kina showed a different way, where you dont have to be new agey or stereotypical of what you beleive... made magic cool

19:10 / 30.10.02

started reading magic books as a kid then eventually got into the parapsychology and finally a few summers immersing myself in my uncles collection of Magick books. Then went the whole wicca--> r.a.wilson(discordianism and all that)--> crowely--> chaos route.

00:42 / 31.10.02

What got me into magic was (sigh).... was .... do I have to say it?

(very quietly) The Mage: The Ascension role-playing game. (/very quietly)

Actually, I'm not ashamed at all. 's a great game. And it really did inspire me to learn more about "real" magic out there, as well as providing countless hours of entertainment and good reading material.

Boy in a Suitcase

01:29 / 31.10.02

Mononucleosis when I was a kid, being pulled out of third grade for three months, having blood taken out of my arm twice a week, unable to move from pain, lying in the dark in the living room for months.

Growing up without socialization beyond weird adults and traumatized parents, playing by myself in an abandoned canyon, digging up buried treasure from the 1930s every day. Playing in graveyards.

Family stories. Parapsychological experiences like making grass suddenly turn green, being touched by a ghost, getting cut on my finger and having the cut start talking to me. Psychotic breaks. Mental illness running in my family.

"Ghostbusters" as a kid. Reading all of Frank Herbert and H.P. Lovecraft in junior high. A-ha, Mage: The Ascenscion. The X-Files. McKenna, Moore, Morrison, Wilson (Colin and R. Anton), Crowley, Carroll, E. E. Rehmus, Douglas Rushkoff in high school.

Growing up in homogenized Southern California.

Looking at the history of the world.

Not seeing any alternative.

Friends.

Barbelith.com.

18:40 / 31.10.02

Mage: The Ascension

Right on

Tis actually a workable meta-magickal system, you know.

Wrecks City-Zen

18:57 / 31.10.02

Okay...here goes...

When I was 12 I had a vision of a golden hand with a ruby embeded in the palm both in dreaming and waking worlds. Shortly after I was having surgery performed on my leg and my breathing stopped due to a respriatory condition. I was revived and placed on heavy painkillers whih gave me visions for 3 days.On my 19th birthday I was abducted and then taught sorcery by my abductor for 12 years. (I was not held captive during that time, don't worry.)

Since then, the world becomes more and more mysterious and I fall in love wih the enigma over and over...

(As a side note: Where 23 was the driving force for several of you, mine was 17...)

Re:XXX (with loaded magic wand!)

19:09 / 31.10.02

Hm... Chaote: The Wanking?

Any personal experience, cusm? Character creation as occult system-of-the-day? (I miss running that game, but it hadn't occurred to me to bring it out of the book...)

As for me: Piers Anthony when I was little got me into tarot. My dad taking me to the Bodhi Tree bookstore in Los Angeles for tarot cards led to some pagan/wiccan/occult reading. I wouldn't say that I performed any rituals, per se, but I was on the lookout for talismans, good luck charms--I was big on minerals, and took to wearing jewelry.

I successfully cursed a nemesis in junior high--he probably deserved it, but the fact that it worked was very alarming. I don't know if that scared me off, or if my dad dying just put me too deeply into atheism, or what, but I became a total rationalist for quite a few years.

Then Invisibles, Hine, blah blah fishcakes. It's all on the blog.

19:11 / 31.10.02

PS - What's kept me interested these days is that I don't have to believe in chaos magic for it to work. I have the highest respect for a system that is consistent with both "it's the fairies" and "you're nuts."

19:52 / 31.10.02

I realized something last night: the interest in the magic goes back farther than teenage jerk fantasies.
It was my violin teacher. My sister, a girl down the block and I all went for lessons at the same time, and for part of the lessons, the teacher would be with my sister and the other girl, and I'd be on my own to examine her collection of strange puzzles and (the key part) vividly illustrated encyclopedias of magic (Man, Myth and Magic!). Thin hardcovers with articles on how witches made flying ointment from belladonna and pagan worship of goat-headed Baphomet and hypnotic healing trances of witchdoctors and all kinds of great stuff.
Often with lurid color photos alongside old engravings and classic paintings (one volume had a Bosch on the cover). Anything eye-catching.
Loved 'em. I must've been 8.
Probably paved the way for Castaneda in 6th grade or so, which led to Wilson's smutty books in the next couple of years.

19:58 / 31.10.02

[rot]

Any personal experience, cusm? Character creation as occult system-of-the-day?

Not as much as I'd like, but I did create a Dreamspeaker urban shaman once with the purpose of getting in contact with urban shamanic spirits that was sucessful. He used hood orniments of cars and the like as fetishes to contact the great animal spirits manifest in the Dodge Ram, the Ford Thunderbird, etc. As a beggar, he used coins as offerings, and I worked with the magickal uses of coins in this way. Both of these things I ended up adopting for my own uses in different ways and still mess with now and then. It was cause for a funny afirmation once, when I got my Thunderbird back from the shop and found in the trunk a styrofoam cup full of coins that were collected from under the seats etc, and one of the t-bird emblems that came off one fo the seats. It made me realize that I can do magick of that sort, I just need to become Marty to do it, which isn't hard for me. It wouldn't be the first time I've elevated an RPG character to the level of avatar. I still have the cup et all, too. I'm no dummy, I know a talisman when its handed to me on a silver platter.

But otherwise, I mostly found it useful for meta-magick. Its a useful perspective for developing your own systems. Just ignore most of the suppliments, they're a lot of wankery, though the new marauder's book has some juicy CM in it

20:09 / 31.10.02

I had a severely Gnostic moment at age fourteen, after overdosing on Hermann Hesse and H.P. Lovecraft.

After that I was...different.

[Cue SDFX: Creepy theremin music]

The Return Of Rothkoid

21:08 / 31.10.02

I'd always had an interest in supernatural/occult things - from the age of about six, I think. I felt some kind of... well, some kind of twinge whenever I read about magick or whatever. But it wasn't until I came here that I actually started USING the Tarot cards I'd had for years, or started actively thinking there was something tangible, something real about becoming a practitioner myself. And it's because people here I trust have given examples of their own experiences; it's that solidity that's offered here that made me think it was a goer...