Three Tales of Magik

A Cautionary Tale

For this last of my “Three Tales of Magik” I want to give an account of my first attempt to cast a spell. This was by far the hardest story to tell and I have spent many weeks considering whether I should tell it. It was a “baneful” working which worked, to the letter, as I intended yet, as I hope you will see, did not bring a satisfactory result – until now.

I should say at the start, I have no objection to baneful workings as such. The very idea of a “baneful working” suggests a moral judgment which we must be careful in leveling against it. Beyond simple banishings and wardings, which often suffice to keep harm at bay, there are moments when some act of violence might be necessary. Most of us would instinctively act to protect those we love from someone or something that threatened them without much regard for the well being of the one who would do harm. The mere act of eating, clothing ourselves, building our shelters, always brings harm to someone (even if we are vegetarians). To come to terms with the grim business of keeping our selves alive is an important aspect of maturity. This is why hunting cultures teach respect and gratitude to the very beasts they slaughter, and an agreement that their blood will water the grass that feeds them when the time comes. A good fight, a good war, the resistance to the spread of a hateful ideology, none of these things are beautiful and yet there is often a legitimate call to draw the sword.

There is a story about a samurai who is sent to avenge his ruler. After many days he finds the man, but as he draws his sword to kill him, the man spits in his face and insults him. The samurai is forced by to sheath his sword and walk away in shame. Why? The samurai was bound by a code of honor which put him completely at the service of his lord. Any violence he might commit must serve only the interest of the one he served. When he was insulted, his temper was inflamed and the planned murder took on the color of wrath. Had he killed the man under these circumstances it would have violated his code.

The story illustrates the notion that violence can only be justified, if at all, in the service of something higher than ourselves. This extends even into the area of self defense. The mature person is always in the service of something: their family, community or some deep truth that becomes their life’s work. The rogue might also defend him self. But since his actions bring blessings to no one but himself, his violence can never be honorable. We will all feel The Reapers blade one day. If this harvest gathers much grain, our people shall eat today and for days to come. What we take to live is paid for by what we leave behind.

The same is true with our works of magik. We may bring great abundance or do great harm by our will and intention. If these works allow our world to thrive, this is their only possible justification, if not, some judgment will be against us, whether this is the wrath of The gods or the bad taste left in the mouths of those who survive to speak our name.

…

The story I will tell today will not be one of honor. I could easily gloss over this fact and simply tell a tale of a working I did, with no experience or understanding of magik, which worked exactly as intended. This would perhaps impress upon the reader how easy it can be to “cause change in conformity to will”. But the real magik comes in the telling, more than 40 years after the fact, of how a successful working can be a failure until it works a change within ourselves. In some sense, this will be the end of a 44 year long working which I hope will bring peace to everyone involved. If I can do this justice, perhaps some honor might be found.

I grew up in a family that was more than a little dysfunctional. There was cruelty and long standing resentments which made my childhood something of a mine field. Like many of my generation, the estrangement threw me back upon my own resources at a tender age. This meant that while my home life was increasingly fraught as I entered my teens, I had enough freedom to explore avenues which brought much meaning and comfort as I began to negotiate the wider world. Music and poetry, spirituality and magik have always been there for me to use, and sometimes abuse, in an attempt to make life meaningful and often bearable.

Even in the late 1970s, the shadow of the 1960s was palpable. Most of my early ideas about art, freedom, and spirituality were born from the flotsam of the “hippy” counter culture. Part of that counter culture was a belief in “occult” powers. Astrology and other forms of divination were right there with marijuana and sitar music. Exploration of higher planes of consciousness convinced many people that it was possible to cause things to happen on the material plane simply be imagining them. I inherited these ideas along with the music of The Beatles and beat poetry. But powerful medicine requires a level of caution and reverence that does not come naturally to a young person who has a lot of unhealed wounds and only the vaguest idea of justice, let alone healing. But it was against this backdrop that, in the summer of my 14^th year, I attempted my first work of sympathetic magik.

One of my principle beliefs about the dead is that we are far more dangerous to them than they are to us. We posses their names and stories but they no longer posses the means to present their version of anything we might say of them. For this reason, our ancestors are, at least here in the material world, at our mercy. Mercy, as I learned much later, was the missing ingredient in that summer. Without mercy there can be neither justice nor healing. I did not know that then. When I started writing these tales of magik, one of my goals was to cast magik as something that is woven into our lives. Although the working I will describe took place many decades ago, what I have learned about mercy in the process of trying to tell it, is the true consummation of that working – or, at least this is my intention.

Because at least some of the people involved now rest in the world of the ancestors, I will refrain as much as possible from naming them. The situation was this. A family member who I was very close to in early childhood, but grew estranged from in my teen years, told a lie which maligned the name of other people I loved and cost me one of my few close friends. My resentment of this person had grown in the foregoing few years in the way it only can in the mind of a young person with a very rigid idea of right and wrong. Many of you might be able to understand what I mean.

So I decided that the way to “get even” was to perform a magik spell. My intention was very simple and clear. I wanted this person to see themselves as others did. This would be accomplished in the form of a dream they would have. I stole a small but significant personal item from this person, one that represented their most positive self image. I stated my intention to the universe and burned the personal item to ash. Then I waited.

A few weeks later it came to my attention that this person did indeed have a dream in which they were committing an act of violence against someone (never learned who). They knew they were hurting their victim badly and wanted to stop but found that they could not. Upon learning about the dream I was shocked at how well the spell worked and even felt a little vindicated. Sadly, I missed the most important part of this dream, “they wanted to stop but found they could not”. This was the part that seemed to trouble my “target” most and yet, I found no sympathy for the conflict it brought to their attention. It didn’t occur to me that there might have been something preventing them from being a “better person”. It is only after one has committed their own crimes that they begin to get a sense of what might drive others to commit theirs. That was a long time in coming.

As I said, the target of the spell left the material plane many years ago. In the time since, I have learned many things about their life’s story and inferred a few more. They had experienced a great deal of trauma in their life. More over, when they died it was revealed that they had been suffering from a degenerative brain disease that had probably been with them for at least a decade before. This means that they were probably experiencing the effects of this disease at the time the spell was cast.

It is a truism that “hurt people, hurt people”. The cycle of abuse is real and difficult to break. The hurts we experience, when not properly integrated, distort our expectations of others. We then punish them for failure to live up to these expectations. We live in a time when those who abuse their “power” are increasingly being called to account. We are sometimes advised to “cut toxic people from our lives”. And although it is no sign of spiritual advancement to allow ourselves to be abused, it is also not always simple to simply cut ties with difficult people, especially within our families. It is also important, without “victim blaming”, to understand the roll we play in our own misery. It is difficult or impossible to do this as children but, as we grow into adults, and eventually elders, it is in our interest, and more importantly, in the interest of those who rely on us, to understand what makes us behave in a less than honorable manner. This often involves laying aside old and sometimes “justifiable” grudges. The best way to begin this work is to search ourselves for those places where our own hurts cause us to behave in a less than charitable way.

Looking back, I don’t know if there was a better way to address the situation which I addressed with a curse. Sometimes we are too locked up in our own pain to reason clearly. This was certainly the case for me, being barely more than a child myself at the time.

One of the advantages of developing relationships with ancestors is the opportunity to say things that may have been impossible when they walked among us. One reason that it has taken so long to publish this essay is the time I have spent in meditation upon the meaning of the working and in conversation with its’ target. I felt a strong need to apologize for the hurt I caused and to try to make myself understood, and also, to ask them about their behavior at the time.

These were difficult conversations. Although talking to the dead allows us to “settle old scores”, this doesn’t always come easily. In one such conversation I asked them, well, in truth, accused them, of knowing that what they said was a lie. I was told that they didn’t know. As I said, this person was suffering a degenerative brain disease at the time. One of the symptoms of this disease is paranoid delusions. Even all these years later, with a strong desire for reconciliation, I still felt a resistance to accept this as at least a partial explanation. But then I had a dream of my own.

I was a kid of maybe 11 or 12 and was sitting with them at a table. We were both being scolded by another family member for acting like “big babies”. In my dream we were both kids. We had seemingly been arguing the way kids do but the argument was apparently over now as I felt no animosity toward them. In fact, the whole thing seemed kind of funny. I turned to them and said, “You hear that, they said we were being big babies”. I expected them to laugh, but instead they put their hand up and told me to “leave them alone”.

I woke from this dream feeling troubled. I was just beginning work on the essay you read now. I knew it was a story I had to approach with sensitivity and had been spending a certain amount of time expressing my regret and assuring them that there were no hard feelings on my part. But I couldn’t quite figure out how to start writing. Then I had the dream and slowly began to realize that they might still be hurt by my actions. It was then that I remembered the brain disease and all of the things I knew about their life that might have caused them insecurity, shame, fear. I recognized how difficult it is to contend with our demons even when in full possession of our mental faculties. How much harder must it have been with a mind sliding into dementia.

The truth is, and was, that when I cast that spell, I perceived myself to be the weaker person when, in truth, even then, I was the stronger. Of course, I could not have known that at the time. This is not an exercise in self recrimination. I didn’t know the power that I had. At the time I wasn’t even sure that the spell would work. It was the desperation of hurt, anger and disappointment that provoked me. And now I remember the samurai code. What could I have done with my power, had I known what it was and been clear minded enough to use it honorably? Finally, it is this question, and my quest to answer it, along with a true reconciliation with a beloved ancestor, which is the final result of the spell.

So Mote it Be

…

After Words

I was walking on a street in Knoxville a few years back. In my hand I held I key I had just purchased from an antique store. I planned to offer this key to Hekate on the upcoming New Moon. I had just began working with her and as I walked it came to me to ask her what I most needed to know before proceeding on the path of magik. “Remember your power to curse” was her emphatic answer. I don’t know what I hoped she would say but this was surely not it. As I tried to understand why this, of all things, would be her first instruction, I started to cross at the light only to be cut off by someone making a turn. My immediate, reflexive response was to let loose a stream of curses that only a city bred guy like me could manage. Of course I immediately understood Hekate’s lesson. Rather sheepishly I began to consider what might befall that motorist had those curses taken root.

There are, as I said at the start of this essay, many good reasons for defensive, even aggressive actions to avert wrong doing. Most of us would like to think that, if called upon, we would have the power to act in the interests of those we love. But power requires strength. Power in the hands of weakness is likely to go astray. Think about the strength required to aim the powerful stream of a fire hose, or a fire arm. This is even more true with magikal power. We need discipline and practice. This is less about making our magik “effective”, (my first spell was quite effective without discipline, practice or even knowledge), rather, it is about avoiding collateral damage, to others and to ourselves. The more power we have, the stronger we must be in order to wield it responsibly as well as effectively.

This is why it is so important to never underestimate our power. When we feel most powerless, most weak, is the time we are most likely to do something rash. This is the very essence of an over reaction or over correction. Let us start then from the assumption of our power. If you are reaching beyond the mundane world for a deeper concord with the powers that guide your fate, you already posses a measure of power unimaginable to those who only see what is in front of them. Strive, therefore, for a strength equal to your power so that when you are called upon to exercise that power, you will have the strength to direct it in a way that leads to thriving.