Anecdotes
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This may date me a bit, but do you remember those “What If?” comic books? “What if Superman was evil?” “What if the Fantastic Four were cavemen?” “What if Dr.Doom was a particularly vicious poodle?” There’s too much of that thinking in magical theory, and has been for quite a while.
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This is a relic of the Black Sun Project era. A Dying Book was a riff off the Jewish notion that God writes the names of all who are to survive the coming year during the high holidays. The idea that an inversion of this might be turned into a magical object comes from a…
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Of course Sir Chris was a close friend of Dennis Wheatley and was full of his rather bonkers ideas, but this is still so much fun to watch.
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I’m kind of surprised at how well my “send away storms” magic worked this time.
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True wizards begin their careers when everyone else’s are winding down with retirement in sight. This is because magic is about wisdom as much as it is about power, and all the discernment in the world cannot compensate for the lack of experience of youth. There are no “boy wizards”, nor ever were. I would…
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When I pay homage to the ancestors, I add the names of practitioners of magic whom I have known but are no longer among the living. Most of them got that way because they did some inadvisable magic— in my estimation, at least. One of the debts we owe to the dead is not to make their mistakes.…
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Psst! A reminder. If your money magic isn’t working, stop playing video games where you accumulate treasure or even points. The spiritual powers which you have called upon rarely can distinguish between the virtual cash in a game and the virtual cash in your bank account, and they will almost invariably work on whatever is easier to…
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I think it’s high time to acknowledge that there is a substantial subgenre of magical literature; baroque excuses for why the author’s magic hardly ever works. Some of those may well be good excuses, but they do not frequently illuminate the narrow path to success.
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Hoodoo and related folk magics are good for fast results. Talismanic magic is good for strong, enduring results. Wiccan magic is good for seeing what people look like naked, whether you want to or not. Thelemic magic is good for coming off as a hipster pseudo-intellectual. Chaos magic is good for coming across as creepy and vaguely insane. This delphic wisdom has been…
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One of these days I’m going to have to tell people about the The Three Year Project, which wrapped up around my last birthday. People really have no idea what magic can achieve if it is pursued diligently. I’m not really a patient person, but I am a determined one. This was one of my greatest triumphs…