Hello hello!
I've been thinking a lot about magical paradigms lately, and what that means as a folk magician.
For most of my magical career I have either written my own spells and rituals or I have heavily adapted spells and rituals from other practitioners. This is what works for me; I was taught early on that it's important to customize things, that they will be more effective and impactful.
But lately I've been thinking about what exactly it means to write my own magic, and if I've actually been developing an internalized system of magic this entire time.
Magical Paradigms and Operating Procedures
I was originally drawn to folk magic because it is "magic of the people." I have always abided by the rule that magic should not be expensive, that you can move energy without complicated or rare spell ingredients, that perfect lunar or astrological timing is a nice-to-have, not a need-to-have.
I like to think of myself as a very practical person, which is why I was drawn to folk magic.
My assumption (which I now realize is a pretty big assumption) was that folk magic had fewer restrictions, fewer rules, that it was a magic of the people and for the people and therefore folk magic traditions are more flexible. Coming from my background with my kind of brain it makes sense that folk magic was attractive to me.
But there are whole cultural traditions of folk magic that have their own rules. Some folk magic traditions have strong taboos around doing certain things at certain times, or the use of certain spell ingredients.
There's a difference between folk magic traditions and my initial assumption about folk magic: that it was just magic of the people. But of course we can bridge these concepts when we talk about how culture impacts folk magic. Like everything that has to do with culture, things get messy. People from different cultures are constantly influencing one another - especially in the 21st century, when communication is assisted by global internet connection. Sometimes it's hard to even trace where these influences come from.
A folk magic tradition is one that is passed down from magician to magician, it has a history behind it and there are certain ways of doing things that you need to follow as a folk magician in that system.
However, I fully believe that there are folk magicians who are just out there creating their own internal systems based off of what makes sense to them - and that is completely ok.
Folk magic has been a space of experimentation for me, and I love that, but that doesn't mean that folk magic practices with these kinds of strict rules or taboos are bad or wrong. In my own tradition of Nordic folk magic, there are systems that we use but they are highly adapted to the individual practitioner. Of course, a big part of this is in my own interest in decolonizing my practices, which for me has meant developing my own paradigm rather than following a strict system that has been laid out by other people.
But now, after over 20 years of magical practice, I've realized that the most important thing to me is not what a spell looks like or the ingredients that I use: it's the magical paradigm that underscores my belief system.
What is a magical paradigm?
If you think of the magic that you do as a building, the paradigm is the support beams that keep that building standing. It is the scaffolding on which you build your own practice. The most important aspect of your magical paradigm are your personal values.
So for me, conserving the environment is a really strong value. That's a big part of why animist magic is important to me: seeing the world around me as being just as important as the humans in the world. Seeing other beings as non-human persons really resonated with me, as that was a belief I had held ever since I was a child. Therefore animist principles have become a pretty deep and consistent aspect of my own personal magic. The belief system then deeply informs and influences my magical practice.
Having this magical paradigm also makes you much less susceptible to wanting to steal practices from others because you have a sense of internal integrity and a scaffolding for your own magical system. Finding my magical paradigm has also helped me understand what makes sense for me, personally, to do magically. It has also helped me understand my lane as a teacher of magic - and that lane is definitely helping people create their own systems of belief.
And of course, as happens so often, I learned late in the process that this is actually really similar to chaos magic.
Borrowing Beliefs from Chaos Magic
I realized a few weeks ago that I've been circling the work of chaos magic for a long time without really realizing that's what I'm doing. Sometimes I just need to get hit in the head with something before I realize what's really happening. And that is exactly what's happened for me with Chaos Magic.
- Avoidance of Dogma
- Personal Experience
- Technical Excellence
- Deconditioning
- Diverse Approaches
- Gnosis
Honestly diving into the different beliefs of chaos magic could be a whole series of posts and likely will be. But just looking at this list, in the high-view of it you can see some of how this operates. Chaos magic isn't passed down from one teacher to another, it is a belief system that helps you understand your own magic. This is so in line with my own magical paradigm that I'm honestly shocked I haven't explore chaos magic more seriously earlier!
The first tenet is the avoidance of dogma: there aren't many absolutes in chaos magic, and this is particularly comforting to me. I like having my internal belief system, I don't need dogma to show me how to operate thank you. Personal experience has always been a huge draw for me: I learn by doing, which means that I learn by doing magic and tracking my results. This leads to technical excellence because I'm writing down everything that I'm doing so that I can reference it later, I'm tracking results, I'm seeing what worked so I can replicate it in the future ... and what didn't so that I can workshop it or avoid it altogether.
Deconditioning is its own process and really deserves its own series. This is when we are releasing shame, all of the "shoulds" of society, as well as the "I'm not good enoughs." Deconditioning is a lifelong process for many, and to be vulnerable this is where I've been doing the most work lately. Deconditioning may also be important for you if you come from a particularly dogmatic background - a background in which your spiritual and mundane actions are highly controlled. I'm definitely going to talk about this more in depth later.
Diverse approaches is also central to the chaos magic theory. I think this really ties in with technical excellence; you don't want to do just the one thing over and over, you create different kinds of magic in order to do different things. Some intentions and magical operations will require candle magic, others will require creating a servitor, others will require astral travel or any number of other kinds of spellcraft. There is the desired outcome, and then there is the approach to get you to that desired outcome. Technical excellence is being able to pull on all of these different approaches as necessary.
Kelly-Ann Maddox put it really well in her video summary of the Six Principles of Chaos Magic: Diverse approaches means learning from a wide variety of sources, and going where you find majesty and inspiration.
Finally, the principle of gnosis is about finding wisdom and being in a wise state of mind. This is often achieved through altered states in chaos magic. Much more on this later!
So then what does the "folk" part of my magic mean?
This is the cultural scaffolding of my own personal brand of chaos magic. I come from the Upper Midwest, a land with its own particular cultural context. I'm white, so that's another cultural context. The whiteness of the Midwest is deeply influenced by the scores of Nordic and Germanic settler-colonizers here, which is another added layer of context. And on top of that, I have found ancestor work and veneration to be a really essential aspect of my personal healing and practice. This means that I've dived deep into Nordic folk magic, and I've begun the exploration of French-Canadian folk magic.
So things within Nordic culture - the idea of the nine worlds, the way the Nordic folks talk about elves and hidden folk, the holidays and folk crafts - all show up in my magical practice. This is the cultural context in which I'm writing my own spells and creating witchcraft. When I'm creating my own magical spells, I'll think about using language that refers to the Eddic mythology, or perhaps I'll figure out if writing a Troll Formula makes sense here.
I often joke that I don't understand what culture is because it is so big and vast. I feel like I could spend a lifetime studying culture and still not understand exactly what it is. I do know that culture is very, very important to me and to so many other people. Culture is the beating heart underneath these traditional folk magic practices. To study folk magic is then to study culture, as magic is a part of the culture. It might be hidden! It might be in plain sight! But where there are people, there is culture, and where there is culture, there is folk magic.
It is the cultural belief that provides the what and how of my personal magic, and the magical paradigm that provides the why and the deeper meaning behind it. This is how I'm able to support myself and craft beautiful spells that feel personally fulfilling.
See you next week!
This Week's Top Three:
+ I'm still not over Saltburn.
+ Gilmore Girls, in a complete mood shift, is my current comfort show.
+ Grimes' first album has had a resurgence in popularity and I regret to inform you that I love it.
|
|
|
|
|
Coming Up:
Pay attention on Wednesday as I have a very special announcement.
|
Like the newsletter? Forward it to someone you think would dig it!