.:. 1 .:.

Over the last decade a new trend emerged in the field of adult learning. Of course like most modern trends in the arena of human behaviour it was sparked by insights made by neuroscientists. For many decades they had believed the human brain stopped developing once people came out of adolescence. They simply couldn't find evidence for significant mental changes - as tracked in the physiological make-up of the brain - after that formative period. This in return led to the wide-spread perception that after leaving the storm of one's teenage years and slowly settling into one's adult personality around the age of thirty-something our actual core personality would need to be accepted as a relatively stable factor, or more simply put, as a given.

For professionals in the field of adult learning - a vast arena including as diverse subjects as executive leadership coaching as well as intercultural training for refugees - this seeming scientific fact was used for decades as a cop out from aspiring more fundamental behavioural changes with their adult clients. A whole industry and essential strand of psychology simply settled for less - and accepted that at best they'd be able to refine, adjust and smoothen off rough edges of adult personalities. Change was aimed at behavioural competencies rather than the psychological make-up in which these competencies would be rooted. The ladder of mental growth that had led us all from baby to toddler to teenager (a process called individuation in Jungian psychology) was understood to suddenly stop and plateau. And there was little hope for finding another Jacob's ladder extending one's ascent further.

Now, for any practicing magician who has worked through the basics of their elemental rituals we know such attitude towards life and ourselves is complete bonkers. In fact the ancient Egyptians and Greeks knew it already and created a whole segment of their society around the concept of 'adult learning'. Yet, of course they were smart enough to label it much more sexy - calling it 'initiatory rites' or 'mystery cults'. For anyone with sufficient gift and grit there was no end to refining the vessel of their mind. In fact continuously evolving this vessel so it could hold more complex and advanced divine substances of power was the whole point of creating lineages of priests and related initiatory rites in the first place.

But let's return from the ancient Greeks to ourselves. It is important to acknowledge that while these cults may have gone to the grave millennial ago, the actual power of their practice continued to prosper in our magical tradition: Most practitioners who begin their magical path these days still get to work with the elements as one of their primary topics of building skill and understanding of what magic truly is - and how they themselves as humans fit into it.

At one stage or another what unavoidably happens as part of this process is that the magician realises how they themselves are constructed of elemental components. Not only their physical body but also their cognitive mind. In most cases this realisation is born from messing things up: wearing an elemental fire talisman for too long and screwing up a relationship we actually care about due too our suddenly hot temper, falling in love with a water spirit on an elemental journey and realising a little too late how one's emotional boundaries weakened and blurred, or self-inducing migraines or dietary problems by forgetting about a bond we one's created with an elemental air being in the hope they'd help us through our next round of exams... Luckily the possibilities to mess ourselves up and break some glass are endless. Because that's how humans learn best. By realising how these forces not only affect our own skins and minds - but how they form the strands of the very fabric we are made up of.

We are not surrounded by spirits, we are made up of them.

The actual reason why any elemental being can work with us in such simple and yet powerful ways is because our body and mind is made up of cells derived from their substances. There literally is no differentiation between the 'inside' and 'outside' of us - except for the illusion in our own minds. And because elemental beings just like any spiritual being are not subject to our human illusions (but have their own) they can transgress these imaginary boundaries effortlessly - and affect significant change upon us.

So any well-groomed Neophyte will have had to deal with this initiatory paradox of magic: if the constituents of my own psyche are made up of spiritual substance which I can influence and even change and re-arrange through the means of magic - what is left that is truly I?