What is Magic?

 

Well, there is the natural question, does witchcraft work? It makes enough sense on the surface. We have seen the movies. We saw Bewitched. We now of people claiming to be witches and we know thar a witch should have some time of “power” so it isn’t unfair to ask if it works, especially when there are any number of so called witches who would better be called pagans, who actually do not engage in magic. And what the person who asks if witchcraft works is really saying is: does magic work?

            Let’s bookmark this, and then come back to the original question. The Craft is one of two or two and a half things. It is a Craft, a Skill, often called the Art, it is like any other art. To ask if it works is like asking: does acting work, or does sculpting work? Does playing the guitar work? It really depends on what you are looking for those things to do, and that is the same with witchcraft. But like all questions about all skills, this question is asking something else: what is your level of skill. You might not be able to ask if “acting works” but you can certainly ask: are you any good at acting?”

            Let’s bookmark that question too.

            The next reason this is a difficult question to get to is because the Craft is religion at the deepest level. It is a way of life that incorporates the whole body mind and soul. It is always happening. It is not a Sunday or Saturday or Wednesday night thing. It also is not based on signing up to one body of beliefs. The Craft is a lifestyle and a spiritual practice and asking if it works is like asking: Does Catholicism work?  This isn’t a bad question. We see many bad or stupid people practicing religion. We also good people praying and having prayers unanswered. For these reasons the answer to: is your religion working? Can often be: I’m not sure… I don’t know. I don’t think so. In the Craft, where there are no dogmas to cling to and no fear of hell for not believing, these negative answers, if one is honest, can be far more shaky.

 

So let’s return to the original bookmark. Does magic work? There are pagans who will tell you the difference between paganism and what they call “Abrahamic” religions is you don’t need faith. This is bullshit. Faith is about how one perceives a thing. Anyone working a spiritual path must have. Asking if magic works is a lot like asking if prayer works. Often as not a thing does not turn out as you wished it, or seems to have not turned out at all. Does that mean your spell was for shit? That you didn’t apply enough will or something like that? It reminds me of being a child and hearing that anything you asked for or commanded in the name of Jesus would happen, and then testing it by jumping off my porch to see if I could fly. And when I didn’t fly, was it because deep inside I didn’t believe hard enough? Because if I’d really believed, I would have risked my life. Or…. Did I not fly because it is written into the laws of nature that people do not fly? At least not by jumping off porches. And can it be that the name of Jesus or the spell of a witch contradict nature rarely?

            Then again, there are those moments of incredible power, both as a Christian and as a witch that have passed through me and before my eyes where it seems like there is no other explanation but the hand of divinity, an answering when I call. Miraculous and magical are the same word in a different way. And yet, anyone with a little bit of sense understands this too is a way of seeing. For the most part anything that looks like magic or miracle can easily be discounted by a doubting mind, and on one level our minds should always be open to doubt as much as belief.

 

Then we must return to that last bookmark: Are you good at it? If we go there, let’s make a few assumptions. Let’s assume that whatever gifts we have are just that: gifts, and that we can develop them faithfully or ignore them. And let’s assume that unfortunately there are people who don’t have the gift for something. This shifts us away from the American cultural narrative which as sold so many many a bad bill of goods. Everyone has a book inside of them. Everyone is an artist. Everyone can be a great baker. Everyone can…. Everyone can’t, and everyone doesn’t need to. The truth is far from the idea that people who have a gift for something also come by it easily, those who have a gift, a great draw at a thing, are working at it or with it constantly. But it is still a gift. The greatest writers or poets or musicians will tell you that when they are doing their good work, they are open to something beyond them, in service and in debt to it. Sometimes ir produces great things and sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes what it’s doing you just have to sit down and wait for to see how it’s going to turn out. This is my experience with magic.

 

Much of modern witchcraft is cheap and American and focused on the practitioner. It imagines the magician calling on things and their skill or power making them happen. The very wise Shani Oates of the Clan of Tubal Cain, who sees magic as only part of the experience of the whole witch, who is a mystic and priestess, a person seeking wisdom, speaks of the Wheel that we all work with saying that everyone is asking for something and if you get a thing someone else often will not, so that at certain times, working in this wheel, you have to understand it is your turn to not have.

 

 

Recently I went through some very rough days. Sometimes life touches on such a level you can only be wounded and move through the motions. That’s as much as faith gets you. You very much wonder where God or the Gods are, not merely because you’re not getting your way, but because the connection, the love, the confidence you once had is gone. Only fear and doubt remain. There are far many people who hve succumbed to suicide or absolute despair for me to think of these moments as “being tested by God.” Some people do not come out of these. These are times of absolute doubt.

            I was fortunate enough for good things to come out of this experience, but as the horror began to ebb away and I could breathe again, I began to wonder, and then to see, that what I had gone through was not the absence of the Gods or the runes, or the magic worked, but a result of them. See, in the view of magic—which may be a useless word—that has developed in the west, which in someway is based in Christianity—a magician is running around commanding demons and making his will happen. But actual magic, that sought in the Craft is working with Gods and spirits and that really means working FOR them, not the other way around. Asking a god to come into your life and help you with something is a dangerous enterprise. Summoning ancestors, a powerful rune or spirit helper comes with risks. Often they know that what needs to be changed and shaken up is you as much as anything else. It’s like a kid trying to get gum out of his hair and then finally going to her parents go get it done. The experience is not going to be pleasant. But in a way, when the child went to the parents they knew that. To practice a magic where the magic fulfilled in comfort and predictably to the exact standards of our fearful lower self, is not to practice at all. Magic is wild. 

 

I remember watching an evangelical program where a preacher was talking about praying for a particular house and how another family wanted it but didn’t get. This preacher displayed little care for the people who did not end up with a home, and in some religions where you imagine yourself more worthy, more saved, more beloved, this attitude is to be expected. But Oates understanding that there is not an infinite supply of anything, and that sometimes you get at one person’s expense and must bow when it is your turn to lose so someone else can have, shows a deep understanding of how interconnected we all are, how the shamanistic—and in my view actual—look at magic is not about your and your skill, but the fact that you are working within a connected web of beings. The sunny day you thought you needed might necessitate a storm someplace else. The rain you’re so glad magically started as soon as you walked inside, is drenching someone else at this moment. The selfish magicians America and western individualism has trained us to be has little to do with the shamanistic understanding of interconnectedness that is part of traditional magic.