i’ve been getting back into magic recently. now, weirdly enough, that statement coincides with me trying out Magic: The Gathering, but that’s not exactly what i’m talking about. magic is…
well, okay. Magic/k. Witchcraft. Sorcery. i’m condensing all that shit down into ‘magic’, lowercase, because i am lowercase and that makes it easier to talk about. i am not someone who aspires to cast Thunderbolt or use a Song of Storms to affect the weather, but i’ve always had a vested interest in systems of magic that play the line between ascribing one’s will onto the world and researching things that ‘science’ generally wouldn’t cover.
i actually have a whole thing written about why i dislike Tarot and prefer to do more freeform modes of cartomancy, unskilled as i am in that definition. sigils and signatures, cards and coincidences, magic really is both what you make of it and what you can discover in it. to me, anyway. don’t let me accidentally knock the foundation of a coven out from under them, or something. mysticism can serve well for those who need it, but i am not one of those (probably).
there’s a good post that i go back to somewhat often for some things i’m currently trying to work out in my art, and i think it encapsulates both a lot of the issue i take with current-year bog-standard (witch insult not intended, i’m sure all your bogs are spectacular) esotericism and also some of the ways that i prefer to think about magic outside of fiction, in the wider world. asserting your will on the cosmos is cool and all, but if it stops there, is that any different from a misguided faith that thinks praying is enough if you pray really fucking hard? and maybe that works for someone like siffrin, but
there’s cathedrals everywhere, for those with eyes to see. we’ve taken the stars and fit them to constellations, we’ve taken the past and drawn fables over it, we’ve given rocks tattoos of light and communicate through their halos. and i don’t mean to come off antiscientific, to reduce advancements to just abstract ideas for the sake of metaphor; it’s genuinely amazing how far we’ve carved our will onto the world, how much power we have over things. and the world might still really suck despite that quality! or because of it, but, i’m going to choose to be optimistic for my own sake. i believe in a boundless potential of the soul, as much as i experience the chains of the flesh, and i try my best to learn my own magic.
(god am i making any sense at all)
i’ve been figuring out what Sigils mean to me as a form of expression and language, as magic. Helvetica Blanc is a big inspiration for me on that, but far from the only one. the instructor in the visdev course i took, my 2D Design professor in college, Studio Trigger, and so many individual posts scattered across the collective conscious of the internet.
Tarot is still fun as a framing device, of course. it’s familiar, it’s sort of standardized, it’s classic. but it will never be personal, not enough for me. and that’s what it all comes down to, isn’t it? i don’t think magic is meaningful if you have to surrender to a decades-old framework that will never receive package updates (let alone any new hardware). that can’t stop others from continuing to use it, and i get to go off and mess with whatever i find fits my needs the most! like, in theory, i could use the monthly themed tags i get from a pin club as a cartomancy deck (and i really might one of these days).
i do a lot of thinking about magic, and i think about a lot of things as magic. much of art is magic. song, dance, illustration, writing, they all have their rules to discover and paths to follow, and crucially, are often at their best when performed communally somehow yet still are possible with a single person. i know a lot of people who only sing in a church choir because they think it’s necessary to fulfill some arbitrary quota of proper form, who can’t seem to grasp how music works, who don’t want to follow its rules or keep in time with others. and when you can’t place yourself on a familiar path or strike off from the group on your own, it makes sense you’ll get lost.
eugh, not a huge fan of how that sounds, honestly. i stand by it enough to keep, but i have a lot of issues with phrasings and habits feeling cult-like from my time uhhhhhh anyway i think the community aspect of magic is something that gets lost a lot in the physical world, at least in popular culture. i can definitely enjoy a good single sorcerer in an RPG, a sage to serve as a reference point in the narrative, but stories like Witch Hat Atelier and Flying Witch are so much more up my alley. Kiki’s Delivery Service, too, as far from inscriptions and alchemy as it is. wizards and witches who don’t stay up in their ivory tower, seeing themselves as inherently superior to the rest of the world. it took me a very long time to find the spark of magic again after i lost it, because so much of it comes off as exceedingly esoteric and individual-focused, like there either can’t be any science to it or that it’s for a separate breed of genius. but even for a system with rules as invisible as Middle-Earth’s, when magic works well, it does have rules.
and maybe one day i’ll figure out what the rules are for our world.
anyhow.
i guess i’m off to keep carving myself into the world. or write a poem (might be the same thing) idk
trying very hard to not dig into why i dislike esotericism for the sake of esotericism (and failing?). bad-faith crystal MLMs are to magic as pseudohistory is to archaeology, i think. magic should be accessible, but it always gets assumed to be either some other flavor of hard science or something too far beyond mortal ken.
do you think magic will ever be truly accessible? can we undo the prejudice that art is for the talented, that being born under the wrong star is enough to seal your fate to being mundane, that there’s geniuses and savants and blockheads left to till the now-metaphorical fields? that doing everything yourself, that crippling independence and isolation in the creative process is supposed to be an ideal? maybe it’s just the bubble of the universe i see most, maybe it’s different elsewhere, but it’s so sad to see people put themselves down because they only ever see the completed magic, never the work that goes into it, because they’ve been conditioned to ignore circles that aren’t perfectly round and incantations that are a bit stilted. because if they can call on a wizard, they never have to actually learn how to talk to their contracted daemons (no shade to computers being difficult, some of those things are fucked, this is more about the weird phenomenon of tech-support-helplessness. i will gladly help with things but it is grating when the other party seems to be illiterate specifically when following instructions.).
honestly, there’s probably a lot more i could say about that, but… not today. maybe later.
i bought a Supernote!!!!!!! i am trying to have fun instead of always dwelling on cynicism and negativity here so i am capping the complaining for right now. plenty of other angels out there passing judgement on stuff.
i imagine the next one will be a companion piece to the video we’ve been working on for a while, or something.