Very cool blog post by 2022 Phil Hine disagreeing with 1994 Phil Hine, exploring what "I am changing my magical practice because it no longer works" can mean.
(my response in the next post)
Very cool blog post by 2022 Phil Hine disagreeing with 1994 Phil Hine, exploring what "I am changing my magical practice because it no longer works" can mean.
(my response in the next post)
And answering that Phil Hine post, as I can't seem to post a comment there:
What does “working” or “not working” constitute in relation to a particular practice? Is it just about “feeling good”? Is something more involved? What (if any) are the criteria used to assess how much a particular practice is “working”
I think, for me, theism has formed a really important part of my journey - not "what works" but "what do I actually believe", which is an additional axis. Consequently, a lot of my early experimentation in easily accessible was derailed by my desire to believe in what I was doing and agree with the cosmological map underpinning it. For example, I am absolutely not invoking angels (or universal-cosmic-energies-masquerading-as-angels) in my living room - and that continued to be true *even after* I experimented with ceremonial magic and found it pleasurable and effective. A cosmological framework which has been designed around Abrahamic monotheism, or a Wiccan fertility binary, can't ever truly be repurposed to a new worldview - at least, not in ways that satisfied me.
So these things I tried, even when they felt good, even when they had a fun aesthetic, or had tangible results - didn't fit this criteria (and it's taken me a long time to figure out that this is what my criteria was). I feel like I'm probably matured into my permanent practice now (I'm in my 30s), and by a lot of criteria it would be seen as "failing" - I don't do a lot of practical magic, and a lot of my daily work is very hearth-craft and minimally ritualistic; I have the capacity to be a technical magician, but not the interest - but it's satisfying a holistic need, a sense of rightness in the universe - and it turns out, to me, that is what was important.
And ultimately, "ceremonial angel magic works - but I don't believe in it" was not as satisfying as "I know my faith is the one true religion, I believe it in the way I believe in mountains - as something real enough to touch, real enough not to question - but no, I can't do effective results magic, I can't make it 'work' " was the answer for me. As frustrating as this will be to people of a more "scientific method" bent, who will argue that surely the magic that 'works' is the magic that is 'real'. But I guess I have a sort of anti-capitalist aesthetic resistance to this, that the purpose of magic is to be put-to-use and to "produce" improvement and advancement and success; instead of a more sensory, nebulous thing that exists for its own pleasure and its own secrets. Rather like a cow or a landscape does not exist for the profit you can extract by it or the work you can do with it or the achievements you can win through it.
A history of girls-dressing-up-as-boys-and-going-to-sea folk songs!
As ever, such a rich strand of history and culture, which straddles potential feminist readings - women claiming agency and going on adventures; lesbian readings - women and genderweirds living and loving women in plain sight; homoerotic readings - the erotic frisson of men desiring pretty sailor boys who turn out to be an appropriate partner, or can be imagined in the role of women in their lives; and transmasculine readings - boys before there were words for boys like us, living bravely.
& look, fighting the borderlands between these categories can get quite fraught - which I see very little value in. There's room enough for imagined people and the silence of the dead to speak for all of us, whatever stories we wish to make of them with our living voices.
Greetings, friend. Sit by the fire, and we will share hot drinks and tales of long-forgotten lore.
☉☽🌣
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