The Narrative of Accepted Magic
The nature of folklore is that it creates a dynamic for evolutionary influences, filtering out weak ideas and impractical solutions to actual problems. An herb that has a pronounced chemical effect will be found in oral tradition much more often than a placebo. A method of purification, an element whose properties are ideal for certain functions, a word that spoken gives true power. These things tend to stay while the superfluous falls away over time.
From handwritten manuscripts handed down from collector and scholar unto the introduction of print many such ideas, both valuable and inconsequential, have been put to ink. From centuries of antiquarian and ethnographic study in hundreds of authoritative volumes over the past three centuries there has grown a substantial body of dross, useless material with no practical knowledge or understanding of the craft. The 20th century’s ease of printing cumulated in decades of uninformed and badly researched material becoming common in the archival record. Ill thought dissertations and sensationalist propaganda that moves now yellow paged pulp paperbacks off of shelves into the hands of naive inquiring seekers.
Practical occultism in the past two centuries has been dictated by the occultists who happen to also be writers. The majority of practitioners (be they witch, wizard, shaman, sorcerer, or priestess), whose practice is as idiosyncratic as the next, have little or no input in the historic record in a post ethnologic environment.
Historically, those who publish books get the say, those who are interested in being public individuals with books (and blogs) and a public persona are the ones that have decided what is and is not occult practice. Across the board witches who are engineers, labourers, musicians, painters, but not writers have had little or no input in the dialog of occultism over the past two centuries outside of secondhand ethnographic reporting.
The ethnographic folklore record is at best 300 years old. It was only in the 18th century that scholars began to gather the stories of common people and publish them. Crofton Croker, the Brothers Grimm, Lady Wilde, those names we associate with fairy tales were actually scholars researching the history of the magic of common people. They travelled the towns and villages, lending an ear to anyone who had a tale to tell. Collating the data and constructing theories about the archetypes of storytelling, about the ritual practices of pre Christian central Europe and the British Isles, about which creatures you should fear most in the night. These words are a solid foundation of knowledge, and the most direct from living sources in the wild. Yet they are still viewed through the mind of the writer who is the folklorist.
Thus the practice of all forms of occultism have been viewed almost solely through the lens of the written record given to us by exclusively history’s writers. Not the painters, not the farm labourers, rarely the words of women, the insights of possibly powerful yet totally illiterate, or antisocial, practitioners of the world having no historic recourse. The thoughts, rituals, and practices of those isolated magicians mostly erased from history. For centuries the narrative of accepted magic has been the domain of those who work in written words, not the smith who works in iron, nor the midwife or the ploughman.
In the age of the internet something new is being born, a kind of veil made of information through which it is seemingly impossible to see. The catalyst for dross that was initiated by the continually less expensive printing process in the past century has finally broken open with online social media. Anyone can write anything and claim it as authoritative, dismissing naysayers as uninitiated or lacking insight. The adage coined by Theodore Sturgeon that “90% of everything is crap” needs to be updated in this age of too much information and not enough knowledge to “99% of everything is crap.”
The internet provides a seemingly endless supply of information on the practice of magic. Cliques of authors and bloggers siding with various historic and ahistoric documents and their infamous authors of the past. The entirety of the grimoire tradition is available online in highres scans, not to mention bootleg pdfs of contemporary analysis and comparison of these historic documents.
Beyond the hallowed halls of accepted occultism lies and vast ocean of cliques and niches, filled with people of every demographic and a few you didn’t know about. Oft naive of any age they are all seeking something, all wanting, praying, believing in magic and witchcraft. These people come to the craft looking for something, often not sure what that thing is. “Power” is a word commonly used, and traditionally magic has been the tool of the powerless. Yet in the 21st century the idea of what power is has become warped. Where centuries ago magic was used to distort and disrupt the common way of things, bending reality to its will, today it is often seen as a path of achievement, as a tool for expanding one’s material gains, increasing one’s positive emotional state, and increasing one’s luck - all buying into the structures of a contemporary society it once sought to destroy.
The illusion of knowledge created by the excess of information in the internet age has birthed an endless stream of fantastical (and that is truly what they are, fantasy) fictions of an imagined practical magic. Adjectives strung together to form infinite new subgenera of occultism without so much as a wink in the direction of its own absurdity. Chain letter blackmail with a whiff of cosplay kneeling before an Esty bought altar of other people’s killings and chinese made shiny things. A Borgesian labyrinth of nonsense parading as a magic it does not understand, as a craft it can only write fanfic about.
You will not find it in books, nor the internet. You may look, and often incredibly good advise on what to do once you’ve found it can be found in that rare book or two, but it is not there in the written word. It is in the world. In the soil and the sea, in the air and the trees. It is that humming vibrant energy that imbues all things. You have to go out and hold it in your hands, breathe of its scents, know its horrors and its delights. Lie in its tapestries of meadow and field, of forest and shore. Listen long and there you will find it. Not even in the dusty pages of the oldest book is it found. It is a secret whispered by the world, you only have to learn to listen.