#albert's thoughts

[petitalbert-blog]

I'm really appreciating how, to do serious magic, you need to have all the symbols already "present" in your subconscious, rich with meaning - whether your symbolic lexicon is the meanings of planets and incenses and letters, or the imagery of the raven, the tree, the spear, or whatever aesthetic and map of meaning is the background to what you do.

BUT

You can only really understand and internalise those symbols by doing serious magic. Learning them off a book is empty and dull. But if you are, say, researching correspondences to do a planetary meditation, and then you do it, that's what fixes it in mind and makes it real and vivid.

It's a cyclical thing. You can't learn signs and symbols in isolation from using them.

[petitalbert-blog]

Regular readers will know, I have a grump against Big Name Pagans - mostly the way algorithms cluster to create them, rather than their ideas or writing.

It comes from a fairly transparent envy and frustration; I'd like to be doing The Real Magic now, please. There dont seem to be a lot of bloggers like me who are both very experienced Pagans, but still headblind, unclaimed, and not getting results: everyone else is either new, or writing about how terribly //unpleasant// continually being ripped apart and reforged by spirit patrons is.

One genre of article which frustrates me very much is the "people need to work harder!" essay. You've read this essay. It goes something like this:

"Witchcraft is work. It is hard. It is difficult. Stop making excuses. You need to put the gods first, and they will test you HARD. I see so many people saying they want to experience the divine - but they are unwilling to actually do the work. When I first encountered my guide spirit at the age of 6, <harrowing initiatory story>, but I did not shy away I threw myself in 100% and -"

...but hold on. Back up. I resent being told I'm not working hard enough by people who got headhunted by the divine. Now of course, that's hard work too. But it does seem counterproductive for people who got magic powers out of the blue, to be advising the rest of us on how to get results. It's like wealthy Tory councillors who believe the poor could better themselves through hard work - but remain poor because they prefer to be lazy. Life experiences shape how we interpret events; the experience of being given or granted something evidently makes it hard to think into the mindset of someone without that advantage.

It's annoying being told to "do more work" by people who evidently didn't do anything of merit to attract attention; here I am, like the last child picked for football teams or an unwanted shelter dog.

You know, it's not a huge deal; and I value a wealth of people writing about their personal experience of magic, and no doubt being neck-deep in spirits is a serious commitment. All the same - it makes me grumpy. It makes me feel envious, and that's not cool or useful. Probably a more positive way of phrasing this post would have been: I'd like to see more posts from people who work hard and feel nothing, or have developed a meaningful practice over time despite not being chosen by anything. For diversity of ideas; for a different sort of inspiration; and because - surely - people with badass spirit relationships are the outliers, not me.

But I have some deeper critiques of these essays too.

Firstly, there's an inherent danger in the do-more-work philosophy of magic. It's how cults work, after all. Witholding secrets until you progress to the higher levels. Requiring payments for specific initiatory steps. You COULD pray away the gay, you know, if you were not so very sinful; if you're still having gay thoughts, you need to pray harder. You're not hearing the gods because you need more instruction; you have been cursed; you have acted wrong; but let me guide you...!

You can see why these situations are ripe for abuse.

Especially when it comes to something as nebulous as people claiming their invisible sky people are real, and yours are not. Maybe the reason I hear nothing is because it's all fake; promising real results, so long as I do more X, is a lure to keep me on the hook inedefinitely.

Because - point two - it's personal. Maybe I'm not working hard enough. I work hard. Now, I'm too sinful. I purge the sin. I'm not contributing enough. I start tithing more. I'm doing it wrong. I start using a new approach. There's no end of reasons why I am to blame. After all, it can't really be anyone's fault //but// mine. Juicy, juicy self doubt.

Part of why I feel so raw about this //now// is two years ago, I actually felt The Real Magic. It was rather profound and unmistakeable. Last year it vanished. I don't know why the fuck, but I'm frustrated to buggery. Did it arise in response to a period of Work? I certainly don't think it vanished because I //stopped// working. It just slowly dried up, and I can absolutely feel the difference. The visualisations are Wicca 101 "Imagine you are sitting in a forest..." pathworkings, not actual spirit flight. When I try and journey before sleep, I drop off immediately. I hate the Do More Work mantra because the only implication is: I fucked up. I was doing something right, and now I am not - how could that not be both personal, and devastating. It doesn't feel Fallow, it feels gone. And I'm stuck trying to divine what happened, when I'm still too headblind to receive any sort of true guidance when I read; and I can’t ask the spirits what happened, because nobody comes when I call.

I have all these stupid fucking regrets about it, like - perhaps I shouldn't have moved house, perhaps the area was crucial or living on the second floor; perhaps I should dump my boyfriend, perhaps I can only do magic when single; perhaps I should start using sleeping pills again; perhaps I need to be dangerously suicidal to do magic, and the visions come when I stop eating and sleeping.

But then you read the Doing Real Work genre of essays, and it turns out that these are par for the course if you are serious about Real Work. Anything less than total sacrifice and willingness is Not Working Hard Enough.

Like fuck, maybe that's even true? But then I don't think we should be popularising the idea of making major life decisions on a promise that may always, always dangle out of reach. If someone from any faith claimed god told them to sell their house, leave their person, go back onto the drugs and cut more, we ought to worry about them first, instead of suggesting that this isn't //enough// and they need do more.

I lost my point several paragraphs back. I'm grumpy and jealous, and these posts were irritating me. That's the tldr.

[petitalbert-blog]

Pet peeve: pagans who write about how *dangerous* a practice is, how *unpleasant* and undesireable it is; then write about doing it themselves constantly.

I just stumbled onto a post talking about how the astral isn’t what it cracked up to be, and how you should ask yourself if you really want to do it, because “its cool” is the wrong reason, its a dangerous and scary place. And then the rest of the blog is astral astral astral. Maybe the reason why people think “I want to astral travel because it’s cool” is, er, your blog...?

And I’ve seen it for every topic. Bone work. Spirit work. Godspousery. Gods period. Wolfdog ownership (“Wolfdog ownership is hard, and soul-wrenching, and nobody should do it. Here’s 15 pictures of my Wolfdog, Mimi!!”). Especially bone work when graverobbinggate went down last month, all the bone-workers coming out of the woodwork to cry about how appalling it was.

I wanted to ask: a) Who posts all the cool pictures of skulls? b) who talks about how bones and blood are more genuinely witchy and cthonic than candles and softness? c) where did whoever started graverobbinggate get the idea to work with bones from?

Because no one worked with bones when I was a babywitch in the 90s. And because nobody did it, nobody did it. Now it’s very mainstream, very desireable, look at @thewitchexchange and everyone’s seeking bits of dead animal.

Idk what the balance to get right here is. I think if the aforementioned posts were personal rather than didactic, it wouldn’t bother me. Personal as in “Recently, I’ve found the astral really tough - not at all what I expected. I think I was underprepared...” rather than “why do you even want to astral? It’s tough. It’s hard. It is not what you expect”.

But this weird back and forth between presenting a practice as really desireable, and then attempting to make it exclusive, or frighten people off from it, doesn’t sit well with me. “You don’t want to astral, it’s nightmarish; I do it constantly, because reasons”

Especially because often a sense of mission/purpose/been chosen is invoked. “You don’t want to astral, it’s exhausting and nightmarish! Of course, I can’t help it. I get drawn into it constantly! My astral work is pivotal to holding back chaos, which I only learnt to do with the help of my personal spirits!” and here we all are, feeling ordinary, headblind, un-touched, kinda wishing we had been chosen to hold back the dark.

(Maybe people do get chosen in this way, and I’m simply mean-spiritedly jealous. But at least I am mordantly self-aware, and upfront, about my envy. I do not think it is good for the pagansphere as a whole for communities to organise around magical stars, because they do not represent the usual experience. The usual experience is my experience - bimbling, hearing nothing back, hoping a lot, intermittently working and giving up. I think babywitches would learn quicker to trust their own instincts by following other babywitches in the dark, rather than developing notions of what it ought to feel like from the rare and unusual practicioners who have these extreme experiences. I’ve written about this before here )

[petitalbert-blog]

Maybe we teach because, beyond a certain stage, we cannot write about our practice any more?

In the past three months things have been *happening* for me. I made contact. I developed three ferocious new skills. But I remain conflicted about how, if at all, to discuss this here? Primarily because of safety, in fact; I’m new to this, and discussing specifics of what I’m doing seems like it would make me spiritually vulnerable - especially as I’m ignoring a half dozen basic safety precautions, and have already been lectured by one friend on how to tighten that up. I’m working on it.

Maybe this is why we teach; we cannot talk about how we met Minerva, but we can talk about how to meet Minerva in a general sense.

[petitalbert-blog]

Thinking a lot right now about tutorial culture.

I tried to get my @30daysofmagic​ Project/Challenge going to help people learn more pagan skillz. I’ve been promoting it on and off for two years, and fundamentally it hasn’t worked, where other people’s have. I’m trying to swallow my pride about that (especially the one which is also called 30 Days of Magic which has started up since I did :p)

Maybe I’m not big-name-pagan enough to promote it effectively, and it just comes down to follower numbers.

But perhaps I’m getting “what people want” all wrong. The goal of @30daysofmagic​ was to support people like this:

”I want to do a magic course; but there isn’t one on my topic. I can write my own course with support from other students here, and in writing the course, I will answer my own questions. And then others can use my course in future! And oh boy, because I finished my course I got cool stuff IN THE POST and a network of other learners”

It’s not popular, for whatever reason - what I want from learning is, evidently, not what others want. Cus I really loved the idea of a structure for unstructured learning.

I think what most seekers want is just some answers already?

I see it a lot in the asks the people I follow get; unsolicited “how do I X” anon asks. I always wonder: who are these anons? Have they googled? What have they tried so far? What would I get out of this as a teacher? As a teacher, what I want is to see the person I’ve advised go out and try it, and then come back and tell me about it. That two-way dialogue is important. And you see it on the @divinerconfessions blog constantly - diviners saying “I just get an anon saying ‘how do I get into my first choice school’, but never even hear a thank-you or any feedback”.

And what I see in the various courses and tumblr things that have been popular are fully laid out programs and roadmaps. I want to make clear there is nothing wrong with that not at all - but it does tap into the diviners’ problem, and the ask problem, and the problem I had with @30daysofmagic. 

That problem, for me, is what do I, as a teacher, do I get out of this?

I enjoy getting asks, and replying to them is an opportunity to write and often solidify my own ideas. But more than that I want to build relationships. All those anons blur into one big sucking vortex that only takes. What are you giving me in return? As a teacher in a mainstream school, I get a kick out of watching my students flourish and grow, and the moments when they challenge me to grow with a new idea. As a teacher online, I’ve never got that - only the feeling that I can provide everything to anons, and then go on anon myself to ask other teachers for help. A circle of one-sided relationships. What I wanted from @30daysofmagic​ was an opportunity to build those relationships, to have an ongoing list of seekers I could periodically drop in on and ask “it’s been two months - how is that technique working for you?”, or send a care package, or similar. Not just watching a dash-full of witches but having a sense that Boris in Oklahoma was struggling with his spirit work, but devoted to crystals, and he’s an acquaintance I can go to with crystal questions, or when I find a new resource about spirits. I also think about tutorial culture, and how increasingly I believe all tutorials are redundant. The best, and universal tutorial is “practice more”. I think about how useful the tutorials I’ve stored up have been vs. the stuff I learnt by doing stuff. I think how useful the tutorials I’ve written probably were to people; probably they read it once, reblogged or liked, and never thought of it again. Like all the tutorials in @petitalbert ‘s archive. Anyway, if this chimed with you then obviously @30daysofmagic is still there waiting for you ;) but more broadly... Is this a fixable problem? Is this just the nature of the internet? Is it even a problem? Am I whining over nothing? How do we develop anons into two-way relationships?

[petitalbert-blog]

What are your strengths?

One good thing that came out of chatting with another witch this evening is this: I feel a lot more confident in what I can do. 

We talked about servitors and thoughtforms and tulpas and stuff, and I said I think I’d done something similar, but wasn’t sure. Afterwards I googled tulpa and...oh yeah I’ve done that total walk in the park. I don’t even need to read these guides I could have written them.

I’ve never felt like that about a magical thing before, or at least not for a long time. And yet, I’ve always known this was a thing I was good at, but somehow it took the question for me to notice.

Over the past year, I’ve been constantly frustrated by all these basic Pagan skills which I don’t seem to have, like headblindness and not being able to hear or sense the divine. Maybe instead of trying to develop these things from nothing, which may not even be possible, maybe I should be working on what I already have (and have in spades), and make that the source of my whallop.

Timely reminder that we all have strengths.