Over the last few days I’ve been watching yet another lurid sexual scandal explode in the Neopagan community. There have been quite a few of those over the last few years—fewer, let’s be fair, than in Hollywood or the Roman Catholic priesthood, but the same ugly habits of coercion, exploitation, and hypocrisy that earned their…
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Getting Beyond the Narratives: An Open Letter to the Activist Community
This is my response to a book, Globalize Liberation, edited by David Solnit and published in 2004. Media activists James John Bell and Patrick Reinsborough sent me a copy and asked for my thoughts about it; the result turned into an essay of some length, which got a certain amount of exposure and discussion online.…
Occult History, Part Two: The Purposes of History
Like most things in life, the fusion of dubious history and occult philosophy discussed in last month’s post here on The Well of Galabesis overdetermined; that is, it has more causes than the situation really requires. There are in fact quite a few reasons why occultism is well stocked with misplaced continents and the other…
Foundations of Magical Practice: Meditation
Before we get into the second element of basic magical training—if you will, the second foot of the bubbling three-footed cauldron the novice operative mage, like little Gwion, must keep stirring—a brief glance back at an earlier subject is in order. Regular readers will recall a post in April about the emergence of a witch…
Foundations of Magical Practice: Ritual
Last month’s post, as I noted at the time, was meant as a backhanded introduction to magical training. That sort of introduction is necessary just now, because of a certain bad habit common among those who don’t know a great deal about operative magic. If, like me, you write books and give talks on magic,…
How Not to Learn Magic: An Introductory Note
Lately I’ve been sorting through my collection of books on occultism and deciding which of them still need a place on my bookshelves. That’s a useful chore at intervals, if only because new books are always coming out and bookshelf space is regrettably finite; still, it has a little more importance this time around, as…
Three Lessons in Operative Magic
I really did intend to talk about something other than the vagaries of the Neopagan scene this month. The politics of contemporary Neopaganism deserved a passing glance, if only because those of us who are still practicing magic when the Neopagan wave flows back out to sea will have to deal with the social consequences…
On Beyond Broomsticks
I don’t think much of J.K. Rowling’s lumbering Harry Potter series. There, I’ve said it, and no doubt a tolerably large fraction of the readership of this blog will fling itself at their computer screens in a wholly reflexive attempt to wring my neck. Still, some dimensions of my reaction to that much-hyped series of…
A Plea for Occult Philosophy
I gather, from conversations I’ve had with occultists younger than I am, that few people who weren’t there at the time have any clear idea what things were like before the dawn of the occult boom that’s now fading around us. It really was a different world in those days, and not in any of…
The Twilight of the Neopagan Era
I think most people with any kind of connection to the contemporary American occult scene have noticed by now that the great wave of pop Neopaganism that came rolling up the beach in the early 1980s, and crested right around the turn of the millennium, is flowing rapidly back out to sea. That should come…