



There is, in the study and practice of magic, the allure of power. The endless seekers of quick wealth, easy love and societal fame come to the practice of magic looking for personal gain and glory. Inevitably faced with a life time’s worth of work and study these seekers soon turn back, giving up their study and turning to pantomiming some practice made hodgepodge out of a skimmed book or two, or buying some initiation into a “current”, order, or coven.

As well there are those who would sell you either their magic or a “path” in which you yourself can “be a god”, or some such nonsense. Charlatans and frauds who would sell you a path to a glory they do not themselves possess. Shiftless fakers who would have you believe that the quest for power and money is the alchemist’s stone and solvent.

It is by no means a shortcut in life, magic. There are far easier ways to gain love and wealth than through the study of the esoteric arts. Like playing a musical instrument or practicing a martial art the formal, practical and contemplative study of magic requires serious inquiry, endless reading and many hours of solitary working and breathing out in nature.

Magic in the 21st century is all the rage, a counter point to the uncertainty of the world and its geopolitical stage. Endless tv witches in black dresses, spells cast on politicians publicly with a photo op of the ritual included in the press pack. Capitalism has cottoned on to the desire for the ‘otherness’ that witchcraft and magic possess. Humans worn down by the ever encroaching digitalization of life seek again the uncanny. Yearn for nature at its core, a rewilding of the soul that somehow eludes the mundanes in their day to day living.

Yet there is no quick trick, no simple solution, no spell that brings wealth or love, that provides comfort and riches. Magic can do all of those things, of course, but it is a long road to understanding how and making that practical. Better to find a more direct path to the wealth you seek, for the magician seeks not wealth nor glory, only the endless quest for knowledge of the beyond.

Like it has so many times before in history the high tide of popular awareness of magic and its practice will recede. There may be a rough focal point in near history where magic is briefly taken seriously enough that laws start being made and people get hurt, but that too will pass and the masses so enamored of magic’s subtle glamour will move on once again.

Throughout time the narrative of magic has been drowning in a bazaar’s worth of hawkers, fakers, charlatans and frauds. They seek money and fame, and their customers are not guileless in their desires for quick solutions. No innocents are harmed in the racket of selling fake charms and spells to those disinterested in doing their own homework.

The internet provides a boundless sea of garbage about magic. Thousands upon thousands of volumes of mostly rehashed bullshit 20th century nonsense. Crib note style ’dark fluff™’ for the would be witch or wizard with simple instructions and a how to list of ritual items that can easily be purchased from the publisher’s website. Fuck off.

But that is the real initiation into the occult. Having swam through the sea of badly written occult fiction tripe, bdsm ken doll grimoires, and Scott fucking Cunningham wiccan douchery, we emerge like newborn beings out of an abyss of bad knowledge. We see clearly the glimpses of work that have value, and patterns of understanding begin to form.

So read and read and read some more. Look at a book’s bibliography as a guide, if it doesn’t have one its most likely bullshit. Go back to sources before the 19th century, and look at sources outside of the narrative of magic (aka orders like OTO, GD, AA, etc). Look at folklore records not just Inquisition documents, read children’s stories and mythology and know that half of the academics that pretend to objectively write about magic are also secretly practitioners.

Regardless of the interests you have and the path you will find yourself on the only way to understand the mechanics of what you are doing, or the lay of the landscape in which your practice resides, is through a continued year’s long regular consideration and actualization of magic. Only when you can see the wiring under the board will you have the ability to gain riches and fame, the irony is at that point you will no longer seek them.

“Our path is slow, it requires much listening and stillness, learning to see and to hear that which goes unnoticed by society. Only when seasons become like days, when cycles of the moon like hours, will the Veil become clear.” from 'The Tenets of the Folkwitch’

