What's the Point of What We Do? Or, My Journey to Magickal Skepticism

I've been swimming in the Pagan/Wiccan/Witchcraft pool for 13 years now. It's been largely enjoyable and rewarding, for most of it. I have always had an insatiable curiosity about Life, the Universe, and Everything, and to be able to peek behind the curtain to the inner workings of that Universe (and engineer it a bit) (has felt deeply satisfying.

Since the New Year, however, I've found myself deeply ambivalent about this path. In the past couple of years I began to read widely into ceremonial magick, a bit into Solomonic and grimoire-based magick. Part of this was to understand the roots of the Western Mystery Tradition that I practice, and part of it was to get familiar with the material that the more advanced Witches and Magicians seemed to delving into. It seemed like the next step to becoming the best I could be.

Boy, was there a lot of it. Lots of grimoires, lots of techniques, lots of tools and  materials and not stuff you could order from your mom'n'pop Pagan biz. I was still practicing my own tradition as well as rebooting my small business after an accident left me out of commission for a couple of months, so my plate felt pretty full. In fact, I began to despair how I was going to manage it all.

Then one morning I was reading Franz Bardon's book,The Practice of Magical Evocation. Franz Bardon was a highly-regarded magician from the former Czechoslovakia. Many serious magicians consider his works to be first-rate, quality material. The Magical Evocation book contains his forays into the world of spirits. He identified hundreds of spirits for each element, each planet, and even each degree of the zodiac. They are named, their sigils drawn, and their properties described.

One gets the feeling, reading this material, that a magician could do just about anything with these spirits. They are supposed to be quite powerful. Some of them conferred the ability to hide you, some the ability to get out of confinement or prisons, others were for healing.

I sure wanted a piece of that action, but I was in despair as to how I was going to manage the work on top of everything else. Really, I worked myself into some real turmoil over this. And then, an epiphany. Like a cold slap in the face with an icy branch.

In a rush, the thought sprang into my head: these spirits did not save him. Franz Bardon died in a Czech prison at age 49. You're older now, and freer now,  than he ever got to be.* 

Oh no.

I thought: where were his spirits when he needed them? All those spirits that are supposed to confer invisibility or loosen bonds; and he still ended up being captured by the political establishment and dying in prison. I mean, what the hell?

Whoa. This was .... game-changing. I panicked a bit. Well, uh, maybe he didn't have the right tools or something in prison.

But he'd done all the exercises in his magical training book, Initiation Into Hermetics. He surely knew how to do some of this work outside of a formal temple setup. And why'd he get arrested in the first place?

Well, ---.

Um, .

Silence.

So what is the point of working with them?

Silence.

A month later, my husband and I celebrated our anniversary at the Edgar Cayce center in Virginia Beach. Edgar Cayce was a Christian psychic and medical intuitive whose readings from the "Akashic records" helped make Atlantis and reincarnation, crystal therapy and auras, famous and popular in the U.S. He was a founding father of the New Age in America. And as we Witches and Pagans know, the New Age is a bunch of silly, shallow, wishful-thinking blather that is (1) a watered-down ripoff of Witchcraft, (2) delusional fantasy by starry-eyed fools with more money than sense, and (3) devoid of any real ability to give satisfaction, develop character, or help a person manifest a deeply satisfying life.

That's the party line. I never quite bought into it, because my profession demanded I keep up with some New Agers and a lot of them seemed like really cool people, but I still sneered at them. I had The Real Deal. I was a Witch.

Unfortunately for my ego, the teachers and practitioners I met at the Cayce center that weekend  turned out to be the Realer Deal. A lot were older people who'd been reading, meditating, and practicing their spiritual Art for 30, 40 years. They were grounded and balanced. They were highly intuitive to demonstrably psychic. They practiced interesting meditative techniques that, when I tried them, got impressive results. They took care of their bodies and while some of them had some ailments, considering the mean age, they were pretty healthy. They radiated confidence and serenity. They were prosperous enough to manifest travel to various areas to attend workshops that were much more expensive than most of the Pagan workshops and meetings I'd ever attended.

I  could not think of a single area where any Witch, Pagan, or Magician I knew bested them. 

I enjoyed myself there, but I came away looking at my own practices, and at current trends in the greater Pagan/Magickal world, with a skeptical eye. Because our movement is rushing straight and headlong into ... "the Past," as if "the Past" were a Sacred Book like the Bible that, if we could just understand and practice The Past well enough, we'd have the Real Deal and be practicing the Real Stuff that would get us ... something. If we crack open enough grimoires and hold our tongues just so, if we can summon spirits and partner with the darkest and grimmest of ancient Gods,  if we can find a scrap of archaeological evidence that the XXXXXX ancient priests poured milk on stones while always standing in the southwest and then copy that, then, well, then Mighty Things would happen and they would be Good Mighty Things. Yeah. Really Good Mighty Things. Yessiree.

I look around and I see a lot of people doing grimoiric work, or reconstruction, or going deeper and deeper into the Mound, or getting grittier and more chthonic, or pouring over old writings, or ... lots of stuff. All the stuff that's become cool and trendy amongst the magickal elite. And I don't deny they're having a good time with all this interesting stuff. But I don't see where many people are getting joyful. Or well. Or very wealthy. Or enlightened. Or mundanely powerful. Some, yes, are doing that and writing about it, but not a lot. 

And so, what's the point? Why do we do what we do? What do we expect out of all these practices?

I can't help but feel that a lot of we all consider to be powerful and important is really neither. Fun and engaging and helluv interesting: oh yeah. No doubt! And so, it's important to us. But vastly superior to the practices I saw in the Cayce center crowd - I simply see no evidence of that.

I came into the greater Pagan/Magickal scene with the assumption that we do what we do in order to grow our own spirits, in order to exit this world not only with more knowledge, but with greater gnosis, and also, and especially, with having worked some of the kinks and quirks out of spirits that drag us down life after life into situations of despair. That's what I came in for; I guess I assumed most people did. Magick was to grease the wheels life so that they would turn more smoothly for me and my loved ones so we'd be freed up for spiritual pursuits. Perhaps I was wrong.

Nevertheless, since this winter, I've been casting a cold, critical eye on all of our practices and found a lot that don't seem to live up to the hype. There's gold here, yes, but I think there's a tremendous about of dross as well.

This is the first in a long series of blogs that I will be writing about that "dross." In short, there are trends, fads, and assumptions that have become default assumptions within our greater Scene, and I'm calling them out. This will not endear me to my peers. I understand that.

Next up: The Past as a Pagan Bible, or Our Quest For 'Authenticity.'

* Wikipedia states: "Bardon continued his work in the fields of Hermetics until 1958 when he was arrested and imprisoned [in Czechoslovakia.] Bardon died on July 10, 1958 while in the custody of police."