Magic, Mistakes and the multitude of the matter

Abstract

Any form of magick - like the future - is ultimately unknowable. We can try to explain, analyse and justify how magic works, but it will never be the same as experiencing its effects directly on your own skin. In today's materialist culture direct experiences tend to raise sceptical eyebrows, or be dismissed as archaic and all together irrelevant. However, such experience is able to take us outside of structured time and allow us to grasp our intrinsic interconnectedness with other beings and environments. It doesn't matter that we can't put it in words, we just know, that we are just this…

When we let go of expectations, predictions and judgements for a while, we can absorb and start to see things as they are and see what bubbles up. There are many traditions, techniques and situations to produce these experiences - meditation, parenting, physical exertion, sleep or sensory deprivation, prayer, walks in the park, psychedelic trips, gardening, computer programming - for each of us it is something different. What is common in all of these experiences is the intensity and abundance of experiencing the moment.

Magick - as we see it - is a way to channel this intensity of experience to transform the person and their environment. Magick allows us to temporarily step outside of the mundane, consensus reality. It broadens our perspective and shows the hidden faces of reality as a malleable, impermanent tangle of relationships that keep flicking in and out of existence. This interpretation can work for both stage magic and ceremonial magic, but also for more informal rites of divination and invocation, such as reading tarot cards or burning demons on winter solstice.