I spent a few years becoming a wizard and the results were kind of awesome
Fuck Ceri Radford. Right off the bat. Just fuck her and her stupid fucking article for the independent.
Look, I'm a really chill guy and I'm not the type to rail against stupid op eds in newspapers like some anxious boomer with a chip on their shoulder. I've even made my way through some of the most infuriating Vice clickbaits without submitting to that reflexive action of retweeting the link with a comment like "CAN YOU BELIEVE THESE ASSHOLES?" But here I am and the truth is undeniable. I have been upset and the internet must know!
Here's the thing. I travel in politically left circles where people treat Das Kapital like holy scripture and more than a few comrades have turned on me and called me a fascist for the mere suggestion that I based a certain action on something I read in a spread of tarot cards. The occult? That's Nazi shit! Or so Marx says. But again, I let it slide. Not my problem. If someone wants to get bent out of shape because I get up to cosmic woo woo nonsense that Daddy Karl declared fascist, fuck 'em. I think their personal dream of an all-powerful Soviet style central authority is fucking dumb. But at the very least, their concern comes from an informed place. Ceri Radford's does not.
Don't read the article. Or, if you do, at least have an ad blocker running so that The Independent doesn't get the ad impressions because that's basically the operating principle here. Allow me to spoil one thing for you, though. The results were not worrying. Or, at least, what Radford is worried about at the conclusion of her article is stupid: That women who take up burning sage, astrology, and meditation as a result of some hip shit they saw on Instagram will maybe kinda sorta end up anti-vaxxers because... that's a thing that happens, I guess?
She even links to a couple of articles about how, magical thinking aside, ritual behavior like journaling and disconnecting from our hyper-connected world to get in touch with something natural is legitimately good for us but then spits it out on the floor because magical thinking is regressive thought and outright denial of the progress we've made because of science. And then at the end of it all, she recommends that everyone read a book called The Unexpected Joy of the Ordinary.
I read the Amazon blurb about it and this book seems to be a bit of a self-help monologue about how comparing your own adventures with the photogenic adventures of your social media connections is exhausting and that you're not getting the therapeutic values from them that you think you are because the goalposts keep moving. But what Ceri means by recommending this book is: Hey, all you witchy idiots! You need to come to terms with the fact that science has proven conclusively that we, as individuals, are nothing more than motes of dust on a giant rock which hurtles through the frozen vacuum of space and that when our sun eventually swells and consumes the planet, no one will ever know you existed and nothing you've ever done with your insignificant life will have mattered. But hey! While you're here, you may as well find the quirky magic of sitting in traffic on your way into work, or find joy in the idiosyncrasies of eating leftovers for dinner for the third night in a row because all that mystical stuff you're into is fucking dumb and everyone else down here on Earth with me is laughing at you.
My initial embrace of the occult came from something deep inside me that is unsatisfied with a world where we're born, we spend years as children believing in magic and making believe in a world that is limited only by our imagination and then we become adults and trade it all in for a life of routine drudgery. Forty plus hours a week working to pay your bills and fatten your boss's wallet until you're living some austere life as an elderly person, waiting for it all to end because you spent the bulk of your life making other people rich and then passing out on the couch watching TV because your working life doesn't afford you much time to do the things which give your life meaning or bring your happiness in a way that nothing else will.
We take all the power and happiness that we cultivated in childhood and then we throw it away. Why?
I'm oversimplifying the occult by comparing it to childhood make believe, but my thesis is sound. As magicians, we give action to our imaginations and the result is empowering for us in ways that other things are not. We connect to the natural world in ways that Radford does not and cannot conceive of. I find her resignation to the mundane to be sad and her puzzled reaction to those of us who study and practice the occult to be the true regressive thought. Aspire to nothing. Be happy with what you can hold in your hand. There is no magic. There are no spirits and when we die, we're done. It's over. You rot in the ground and that's the only certainty you'll ever have in this meaningless life.
From a gnostic point of view, this stupid article which I've spent far too long complaining about seems like our cosmic captors reacting to a popular wave of gnostic awakening. In the same desperate way that a political candidate might half-heartedly push back against their opponents as their campaign starts to waver, Archons direct our brothers and sisters whose wills have been utterly crushed by banality to push back against those of us who seek something more, something bigger and outside of ourselves. Instagram witches and Tik Tok mystics, teenagers streaming spooky makeup tutorials to Youtube are resulting in a broader cultural awakening than the universe has experienced in the past and the cosmic clapback is resulting in dumb articles like I Spent A Week Becoming A Witch and the Results Were Worrying.
Here's the thing, Ceri. If you're right and I'm wrong, then in the end, the net result is the same. But I'll still have lived a life filled with wonder and excitement and have harmed no one. I will have seen meaning in the patterns and symbols of the world and they will have brought me great joy. I will have aspired to something so much higher than my own self and felt intimately close to a force of creativity that made me feel loved in times when I was at my lowest. It took me this long, but I've finally come to understand God.
All that energy I cultivated as a child will be mine once more and I will see the world with the same sense of possibility that my seven year old son does. I mean, shit! Just thinking about it makes me a little emotional.
The article was written in bad faith, without any true exploration or any meaningful connection to the subject matter. It's a cynical ploy for angry clicks that lead to ad impressions for The Independent but in a world so overflowing with cynicism and nihilism, the malice it takes in a person's heart to drag down the people who wish to fly -- for money -- is a darker impulse than anything Donald Trump could think up on any given day at The White House.