#magic today

[aspeccharactersoftheday]

Trevor from Magic Today is asexual!

[aspelladay]

Magic Today

These are both the best and the worst of times for magic.

On one hand, there is currently less persecution of magical practitioners in more parts of the world than at any time since the rise of Christianity. This very book that you hold in your hands would once upon a time have earned reader, writer, publisher, and bookseller alike a slow and painful death.

Materials, once rare, craved, hoarded, and often forbidden are available and affordable to more people than ever before. Think about that the next time you sip some mugwort tea, an herb that might have branded you a witch just a few centuries ago. Frankincense and myrrh, once the most precious expensive commodities on Earth, may now be purchased in any well-stocked health food store. Salt, packed with magic power, once extracted from Earth and sea with terrible human effort, once very expensive and precious, is now so cheap and common that every fast-food vendor gives away free packets by the handful.

Although fewer people have private gardens, there is greater access than ever before to the botanical material that constitutes the foundation of magic. Some spells in this book refer to what may seem to be very obscure items and plants: virtually nothing is unattainable, however. Once upon a time, a practitioner was limited to local botanicals. Now you can import living as well as dried plants from virtually anywhere on the globe for your private use. Do you want to access the power of Peruvian shamanic plants? Go on the Internet; you’ll be able to buy some. Where botanical material isn’t practical, modern essential oils and flower essence remedies reproduce alchemical methods to bring you the power of even more flowers, available in a simple, easy-to-store, user-friendly, inexpensive form.

Practitioners are unafraid to teach and to share information. I remember when booksellers didn’t generally stock spell-books. Now you can buy them everywhere. Classes are advertised in newspapers. You don’t have to be a member of an inner circle to discover metaphysical companions. There’s little need to hide in back rooms, fearing arrest or worse, as in previous days. In industrialized nations there is new-found appreciation for magical wisdom and traditions.

Yet it’s also the worst of times in other areas—ironically, in those isolated communities where magical knowledge was preserved in such purity for so long. Many of Earth’s surviving magical traditions are vanishing as quickly as the rainforest, coral reefs, or any other endangered species.

While some re-embrace a magical heritage rejected for so long, traditional practitioners who’ve maintained those spiritual traditions for millennia lack similar privileges and protection. Like those vulnerable creatures of the Galapagos, having never before met attempts at suppression, they may never have developed the skills of subterfuge developed over generations among other more frequently oppressed people.

As rainforests are cut down, as ancestral lands are annexed, traditional practitioners and shamans have less access to the botanicals they depend upon than ever before. Instead of open-minded, questing fellow magical practitioners, eager to learn and share knowledge, the only outsiders these traditional practitioners are likely to meet are those who undermine their magical traditions, and pressure them to abandon their own faiths and convert to others.

Every day, somewhere on Earth, a traditional practitioner is pressured to abandon shamanism, divination, or some variant of the magical arts. Sometimes suppression is violent. Tools are destroyed, modes of transmission suppressed. Shamans and leaders of magic are isolated from their communities, or as the Bible so eloquently says, “put away.” The stimulus to reject old magical traditions may also come from within, from a culture’s desire for modernity, to appear civilized and rational. In other cases magic and traditional knowledge are victims of war and political unrest.

It is ironic to observe precisely which information appears to be vanishing versus what appears to be preserved for posterity. Once upon a time, very recently, Western magical adepts and elite scholars of magic alike favored the remote “pure” traditions of the Himalaya and Indonesia. Scholars and adepts journeyed with tremendous personal effort to the far corners of the Earth to meet with Ascended Masters while simultaneously scorning magical traditions found closer to home as superstitious nonsense.

Today it is those previously respected traditions that are rapidly being eroded and are vanishing for a host of religious, political, and environmental reasons. Closer to home, Celtic traditions, once reviled as foolishness, have been revived and energized by a massive number of new practitioners. The Romany people, terribly persecuted for centuries, scorned sometimes precisely because of their magical traditions, have recently re-asserted control over those traditions and how they are to be perceived. Hoodoo, once beheld by both academicians and elite occultists with particular scorn, largely for race-based reasons, appears to have its survival assured, thanks to the dedicated efforts of its own scholars, Zora Neale Hurston, Harry Middleton Hyatt, and Catherine Yronwode.

Silver Raven Wolf, modern chronicler of Pow-Wow, once dismissed as ignorant folk-practices that were unworthy of scholarly interest, writes of scouring Pennsylvanian nursing homes, looking for old people with snippets of information that she may then preserve and share. Perhaps others will fulfill this role for other genres of magic in other parts of the world. It takes only one generation for information to be lost forever. How many traditions, how much hard-won human experience and accumulated wisdom from every inhabited continent, have already been lost? This big book that you hold in your hand is but a tiny portion of Earth’s magical wisdom. In keeping with the inquiring, questing spirit of magical practitioners throughout the ages, don’t be too respectful with the spells in this book. If you find something that suits you or intrigues you, use it. If something isn’t quite right, play with it. Tap into your own magic powers and continue the evolution of our magic repertoire.

(from The Element Encyclopedia of 5,000 Spells by Judika Illes)

[free-queer-books]

Magic Today by Anna McCluskey

Magic is real — and it’s a bitch. Mattie’s life is going through a bit of a downward spiral these days. So when she learns that Tillie, her twin sister, is missing, she drops everything and rushes across the country to join her friend, Trevor, in the search. As they start to dig, they stumble across a secret room in Tillie's condo filled with crystal balls and books about magic. Suddenly people all around them are doing spells, manipulating time, and disappearing into thin air, and they soon realize they're in over their heads. A group of powerful mages is hunting Tillie. Can Mattie and Trevor find her first? Or will they become targets too? Magic Today is the first installment of the fast-paced Mathilda Holiday series. If you love urban fantasy with complicated characters, a hint of intrigue, and a good dose of humor, you'll definitely want to read this today!

Promotion length: Permanently free

Markets available: Amazon, author's website, Barnes & Noble, Kobo

Link to book: https://annamccluskey.com/buy/

[michealbos]

[udayjogiwala]

Coldplay - Magic (Official video)

Director - Jonas Åkerlund. Actress - Zhang Ziyi.

MAGIC Call it magic Call it true I call it magic When I'm with you  And I just got broken  Broken into two Still I call it magic  When I'm next to you And I don't and I don't and I don't and I don't No, I don't it's true I don't, no I don't, no I don't, no I don't Want anybody else but you I don't, no I don't, no I don't, no I don't No, I don't it's true I don't, no I don't, no I don't, no I don't Want anybody else but you Call it magic Cut me into two And with all your magic I disappear from view And I can't get over Can't get over you Still I call it magic Such a precious jewel  And I don't and I don't and I don't and I don't No, I don't it's true I don't, no I don't, no I don't, no I don't Want anybody else but you I don't, no I don't, no I don't, no I don't No, I don't it's true I don't, no I don't, no I don't, no I don't Want anybody else but you Want to fall, fall so far I want to fall, fall so hard And I call it magic And I call it true I call it magic And if you were to ask me After all that we've been through Still believe in magic? Yes, I do Of course I do