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Every Magician is a Thief

Cultural appropriation in magick has always been a sticky issue. From Crowley incorporating yoga into his magick outside of the Hindu belief structure, to the Romans stealing entire pantheons of gods, people seeking
spiritual experience have always seen the neighbor’s grass and felt envy. Most
of this comes from a genuine respect of those cultures, and a feeling that
their own culture doesn’t have what they need to express their own
spirituality. So they steal.

For the magus, the biggest danger here comes from taking
things out of context. No spiritual practice occurs in a vacuum. The people whose
traditions are being stolen have every right to say, “No. You’re doing it
wrong. That’s not how that works.” Because their practice only works in their
specific cultural milieu. In most instances, you will never get it right and
you will never understand because you were not raised in that culture.

Not to mention that this kind of stealing most often comes
in the context of colonialism. Greece was Rome’s colony when they decided to
make off with an entire pantheon of gods.

But this doesn’t mean you can’t learn from other cultures.
It doesn’t mean you can’t use their concepts as a part of your own practice. It
takes some work. But if you’re willing to do it right and put things in the
context of your own culture and your own locality, it’s going to work better
for you in the long run.

Here’s an example. In my attempt to rebuild by own paradigm
with a stronger foundation, I’m still doing a lot of ancestor work, but I am
thinking about the next step. In the working theory of Emergent Animism that
means contacting a wider range of spirits, which includes spirits of place or
spirits of the land. Recently, one of my followers (thank you again @aweandimagination)
reminded me about Shintoism’s strong animistic beliefs. So I did some poking
around, and one thing I noticed right away were the shrines, some huge and
elaborate structures, but others tiny roadside shrines dedicated to local Kami.

They instantly reminded me of the Thai Spirit Houses I
learned about from Jenx and his interviews on Runesoup. (Go and
listen to those episodes if you want to learn how to be respectful to other
cultures.)

So I want to do something similar. I think building a shrine
to leave offerings and make a connection to land spirits would be extremely beneficial
in getting to know those spirits and honoring them. But I certainly don’t want
to build a “Thai Spirit House.” I’m not in Thailand. Why would the spirits near
me understand the symbolism and motifs of that culture? So I did some more
research.

Actually, I already knew that the Ancient Greeks created
thousands of tiny shrines to local ancestors and spirits. In fact, the general
populace in Greece were much more concerned with those spirits than they were
with the fuckery of Zeus, Apollo, and their buddies. Those are gods for the
nobles. They have rich people problems. The commoners were much more concerned
about how they can appease the spirit of that big ass rock so they don’t piss
it off when they go plowing all the land around it. What I didn’t know was that
the practice continues to this day. The names have changed, with the shrines
being dedicated to saints, but they sure look like a continuation of the
ancient traditions.

Chances are, if you see a magical practice in another
culture that appeals to you, dig just a bit, and you’ll find something similar
in your own culture. That practice will probably make more sense to you, and
even if it doesn’t, why not give it a try? You should also be tailoring it to
local traditions and listen to the spirits and ask them what they want.

So I’m not going to build a Shinto shrine or a Thai Spirit
House. It won’t have peaked and curved Asian architecture. I won’t leave
strings of tropical flowers as offerings. I won’t be including Eastern Orthodox
icons either. Incense, water, beads, these things are universal, and
appropriate. But I will be using local products and things that resonant in my
culture.

You should research other cultures and be inspired by their
magick. You should be awed by the great variety of spiritual practice in this
world. But you should also be amazed when you learn that the core concepts
themselves cut across cultures and across time. A true thief steals because they
are lazy and don’t want to do the work themselves. Do the work.

It’s Complicated

It is perfectly reasonable to ask, “If you believe that
these spirits are all doing their thing in some afterlife, how do you account
for ghosts? How about reincarnation and past life memory? Are the spirits out
there, down here, or inside me?”

One, let me state for the record that I don’t know. And I
don’t think anyone knows the entirety of what happens after we die. I don’t
think anyone fully understands what spirits are and how they operate. But I
have some ideas.

Let’s look at our own meatsacks as an example. Non-human
cells in your body outnumber human cells in your body by 10-1. That’s right,
you have ten times as many microbe cells in your body as cells you have
actually grown yourself. Those microbes are small, so they only make up about
3% of your total mass, but 3% is pretty significant. Also, does size really
matter when it comes to the ability of any given cell?

Chances are, our spirit-selves aren’t just some Jedi-ghost
version of you. Just like we have different organs and trillions of microbes
that make up our bodies, it may be a good bet that our spiritual selves have as
much complexity or more.

Let’s turn to our friends the Ancient Egyptians again, and
see what they had to say on the matter. After all, they probably studied the
afterlife more than any other culture on Earth. Keep in mind that Egypt was an
empire that lasted over 3,000 years and things differed from place to place and
in different time periods. The list I give here is not definitive and has some
of my take on the subject.

Depending on who you asked, the Ancient Egyptians believed the
soul had three to seven different parts. Let’s run with six of them:

Ib – The heart: Every person has one drop of their mother’s
blood in their heart when they are born. So it can be said that the heart links
us to our ancestors. The heart is the seat of emotion, all of them—love, hate,
jealousy, compassion, etc. That’s important because when you get judged in the
afterlife it is your heart that will be weighed to tell if you were a good
person. So you could say that it’s not so much bad decisions that you made or
weaknesses that you possess that fucks you, but your intentions. Did you do it
out of love or did you do it out of fear and hate?

Ren – Name: Your sense of self. What you answer when they
ask, “Who the fuck are you?” This would be the part of your own spirit created
by your accomplishments. When they really wanted to fuck you in Ancient Egypt
they erased your name when you died. This breaks your contact with the living
world. Everything here has a name. If you have no name, you’re nobody.

Ba – Personality: The translations become a little tricky as
we don’t really have words for some of these concepts. Your Ba is the part of
you that is fun at parties. Your unique perspective. It’s also the part which
actually travels between the afterlife and the living world. The Ba probably
comes closest to being that Force-Ghost. If you’re being haunted and that ghost
isn’t an asshole, chances are you’re talking to the person’s Ba.

Ka – Spark: Essentially, your battery. Having this makes the
difference between life and death. The Egyptians believed your Ka needs a place
to keep generating energy, which is part of why they preserved the dead. It
needs food and water, just like you do, but after death it comes in the form of
offerings. Prayers will do in a pinch.

Shuyet – Shadow: The shuyet is the symbol of you. It represents
your form, but may not actually be you, but certainly created by you. Your shuyet
inhabits representations of you such as statues and drawings. Which is why we
have that stuff on our ancestor altars, except you need to understand, that’s
not the actual person. Just the symbol. If a ghost comes back and does
random-ass annoying things it’s probably a shuyet.

Akh – Spirit: The akh is different from all the other parts
because it gets created after you die. After you go through the hall of
judgement, the gods slam back together various parts of your soul and you have
a shiny new akh. The akh does not start out as a god, but can become one. The
akh does all the amazing shit spirits can do and we cannot.

That all seems pretty intricate, but nowhere near as
intricate as say, a human body. So I would say the reality is probably much
more complex than that. And non-human spirits may be even more complicated. Add
to this that time is not linear and things can be so crazy you just chalk it up
to “things we weren’t meant to know.”

But for us magi, that’s what we call a challenge. We do our
best to figure that shit out, and we may never know in this lifetime or the
next how it all works. You can ask the spirits, and that’s helpful to an
extent, but they would have to put it in concepts your ape-self can understand,
which it can’t. That’s why magi study endless symbol systems to try and grasp
some iota of meaning out of all of it.

Your spirit may have as many parts as there are stars in the
sky. Keep grasping for them.

After @aweandimagination ‘s excellent question I did some poking around to learn more about Shintoism. Found this video of what is called “Kagura” a ritual dance that pleases the gods. As someone with a background in ceremonial magick this is awe inspiring. This is the kind of precision and clarity that makes a Western ritualist drool with envy. 

(Source: https://www.youtube.com/)

Just meet your blog, nice content and wonderful insights. Do you know about the “six ways: approaches & entries for practical magic”? The author of that book is heavy on animism too. Also, do you think that Shinto can be a nice field of study about Animism in geral? Thanks in advance!

I have not read “Six Ways.” I did a quick search on it and it certainly looks right up my alley. I just put it on my list of books to buy.

The Shinto question is a little more complicated. If you are approaching Shintoism as a way to study an advanced and long-standing animistic system, yes, absolutely Shintoism can be a good example. While Shintoism does not require initiation, it is extremely Japanese-centric, to the point where Shintoism considers Japan as the “holy land” of their religion. Some would say you can’t really practice Shintoism outside of Japan, though that’s a conservative attitude. One can also say of Shintoism, like other animist based faiths, that it is highly accepting of other religions and doesn’t require its followers to adhere to one set of beliefs and practices. I would even say that the Japanese word “Kami” is closest to how I use the term “spirit” in that it encompasses a range of beings from gods to land spirits. 

Thanks for the questions. They really got me thinking. I haven’t studied Japanese religions since college and now I want to go back to that material.

The Old Ways

“Crow Seidr” Trollwood Art, Nov 2016

You may have figured out that I am a huge fan of history.
That obsession with learning stories of our past has been with me my entire
life. In the past fifteen years much of that research has been pre-history.

Let me throw at you an impressive set of numbers. By conservative
estimates, Homo sapiens have been around for about 315,000 years. The Home
genus has been on this planet at least .5 million years, and some say up to 2.5
million years. Some of the oldest indication of any type of spiritual practice
is 300,000 years old, being grave goods buried with a Neanderthal. So our
species started all this before we even evolved into our current iteration and
the first known practice was some form of belief that life continues after
death. By comparison, the first civilization started 5,000 years ago. That’s
310,000 years of human existing on this planet before cities. As the Oracle at
Delphi says, “Know Thyself,” and to really know who we are as a species we need
to have some understanding of how we lived for the majority of our time here.
Evidence shows that we believed in some kind of life after death, and we were
animists. We believed in and had dealings with spirits.

People debate endlessly whether or not our species took a “wrong
turn.” Whether agriculture, or domestication, or if you believe Socrates, even
writing itself were bad ideas. I have my own opinions. But outside of that we
still must accept that knowledge does indeed get lost. While most scholars don’t
even like the term Dark Ages anymore, all will admit that some knowledge was
lost in the West. We lost the recipe for Roman concrete. We lost the recipe for
Greek Fire. Judging by how people seem to feel strongly about spiritual
practice, you can bet that much of what was discovered on that topic has been
destroyed. Think about what must have been lost in those 300,000 years? The
voices of those elders lost to time. I truly hope that Babbage was right and
with enough computing power we can go back reconstruct every vibration that
ever occurred in our atmosphere.

Another point, why do we even care? Certainly our species
has made great advances in the creation and retention of knowledge. Haven’t we
gone well past what our ancestors knew? Maybe, maybe not. One thing that I
think can be said is that the focus of that knowledge, and the uses for the
intellectual capacity of our civilization, has changed. Spiritual matters take
a back-seat to science and economics. Not that those are bad things. But what
does that say about magick? Has the art of magick advanced?

Yes, yes it has. Albeit at a much slower rate and with much
fewer resources. Many ancient cultures believed magick to be the highest form
of learning. All of the intellectual, economic, political, and temporal
capacity went towards the study of magick in a big way. Why am I obsessed with
the Ancient Egyptians? One need only look at the Pyramids and know that their
culture spent a lot of its time thinking about magick. The huge portion of the cultural
records that survive focus on preparing for one’s death.

The point of all this, besides raising some even more
interesting questions, is how it effects our relationship with the spirits. One
question you have to answer for yourself is, are spirits immortal? Many of them
claim to be, and I have no reason not to take them at their word. One can
research the names of many spirits through the gimoires and all the way back to
ancient cultures. Are these the same spirits? Maybe, but at the very least the
spirits seem to have knowledge of those ancient names. So even if the spirits
are not immortal they certainly know their history and the history of their
interaction with us.

What did that interaction look like for the vast majority of
our time on this planet? It seems to have involved a lot of drugs and
journeying through trance states. It certainly didn’t involve brass seals and
contracts written on virgin paper, because we didn’t have any of those things
through the majority of our history. Although maybe those methods are a
refinement of the communication process, a sort of updated technology. But this
does prove that those methods are not absolutely necessary. That the spirits
can be contacted by other means. So while grimoire purists may be advancing the
art, it may not be the only way or even the best way to contact those spirits.

In the end, it is best to remember the magick of your
ancestors. The spirits certainly remember, and what has been said and done to
them in the past will reflect on how they interact with us today.

Reports From Liber F

Can’t lie to you folks, I took two days off from Liber F on
Friday and Saturday. No excuses, just me being a lazy bitch. But I was back at
it today.

I lit one of my Babalon candles, and burnt some incense. I
had chosen to play some of this bad-ass Polish folk music as my background. It’s
got some amazing violin playing, like “sold your soul to the devil to play this
good” kind of playing.

I was shaking my bone rattle along with the music, and
something triggered, I don’t know, an awakening of genetic memory? Gradually,
the incense began to smell like a campfire. I had a strong image of a woman
dancing in front of that fire, her amazing figure silhouetted in the flames. I
felt the sharp texture of the bone acutely in my hand, and I could see the long
line of human beings like me, who for hundreds of thousands of years gathered on
the hilltops, made fire, took the sacrament, played the drums, and danced. We
have always done this. Some of us will always do this. Our numbers are small,
comparatively. But brother, I’m gonna tell you, you have not lived unless you’ve
watched a couple hundred naked Thelemites dancing around a fire in the woods.

“All My Ancestors Suck”

The number one complaint I hear from people when I tell them
to work with their ancestors is that their family is just awful. That they can
never work with their ancestors for X Y Z reasons. I would never belittle
someone’s trauma. I am certain there are a lot of people out there whose
feelings on this are legitimate. I would never tell someone to work with an
ancestor that abused them, or with ancestors that have proven beyond a shadow
of a doubt that they were fucking assholes. I would ask, that if your ancestors
don’t fit in that category you consider a couple of things. And, I have some
work-arounds.

One, work on forgiveness. Forgiveness is as much of a
blessing for you as it is for them. I’m not going to sit here and outline all
the benefits of forgiveness, because it’s something you have to come to on your
own or it doesn’t really work. Just think about it. Maybe take a couple of days
to meditate on the concept of forgiveness.

Two, you may think that all your ancestors were hard-core Pentecostal/Jewish/Muslim/Catholic/etc.,
and they would NEVER understand what you practice. That may be true. Some
spirits hold onto that shit tight. Most learn it’s an anchor for them in the
afterlife. Most spirits of the dead realize almost immediately after they cross
over that the cosmos contains so much more than they ever dreamed of. They know
that us humans have an extremely limited perspective on the nature of reality.
That includes you and I as magi my friends. The only way you will know if any
given spirit is open to your current beliefs is to talk to them. So give it a
try and find out.

But if you really just can’t, you still have options. You
can flat-out adopt some ancestors. Looking to people within your own culture
would be a good start. We all come from Africa. We all come from the same
source. We are all siblings on this little mud-ball we call Earth. If you pick
someone with the same ethnicity, chances are you are related in some way. Do
some genealogy if you really want to know. Certainly you can at least come up
with a picture or something to symbolize what they were known for to have on
your ancestor altar.

You can also have magical ancestors. Not just ones from your
own particular magical tribe. I have talked with the spirits of Jack Parsons and
Hunter S. Thompson. I consider them ancestors of my craft.

If none of that seems right to you, you could go looking for
your ancestors astrally. A couple of years ago at the Babalon Rising Festival,
I led a guided meditation that had people meet their most distant ancestors and
learn about them. I’m proud to say that a version of that guided meditation has
made the rounds in several magical groups. You absolutely can go back as far as
you want. If you want a magical ancestor, why not use magick to find them? If I
get some requests, I would be happy to make an audio recording of that guided
meditation and post it here.

So if you want to work with ancestors you have no excuses.
It may be more work for you, but nothing good comes easy.