Releasing the Witches

The rebirth of magic

My time has come and I mean that both as a spell, and as an observation.

In my mid teens I came to the leaden, heart freezing understanding that the world refused all magic. Modernity refused magic but luckily it could not cast magic out of the world completely, and so it buried it in the arts, mostly in children’s books. Magic, like the heroine of the fairy story, was deposed from her royal birth and sent into the forest.

In our earliest years our souls are allowed to stretch their bounds into worlds of wizards, cave dwelling tricksters, talking foxes and portals in trees and then it’s time up. After a brutal passage through secondary school we are all cast out into the desert of the ‘real’.

In the ‘real’ we are told what we will find at the centre of existence - mortgages, putting shopping in the boot of the family estate, using excel sheets to budget, trying to raise a sufficient level of desire to want the clothes on sale in the shop windows, getting drunk and sex, of course, lots of expectations around love and sex, which consume whatever psychic energy is left after work.

I believe it was Bert Weinstein that said, there is no version B of reality, only version A. For us in the west that means the world of money, materialism and getting by; of science and scientism and of the earthly authority of men and women in navy suits. We cannot for example say, well I prefer to live in a tribe and survive by scavenging, or I don’t recognise borders, or business, or money, or names and birth certificates.

The time has come now for the other versions of reality to rise because version A, monolithic version A, has just a few cracks and not many of us are straining to hold it up. Who wants to send their sons and daughters to die for the current political class? What? No one?! But, but…. our beautiful democracy! Vote for the red team! Vote for the blue team! We’re not like them, we have values!

You know the song.

I spoke about the hollowing in a previous article and now there is a dissolving. the structures are becoming more transparent, more permeable, and I am starting to see through to the space beyond, and out there is the moon, planets known and unknown, and millions of stars.

A rebirth of magic is occurring. It’s only the beginning but it’s, for want of a better word, real. The rebirth of the ‘magic aesthetic’ has been around for a while, the black eyeliner, the candles and incense smoke, the tarot card in the purple-nailed hand, blended in places with the standard ideology of the age, ‘hex the patriarchy’ t-shirts for sale on instagram. This was an initially successful ‘capture’ on the part of system A.

“The first phase of the domination of the economy over social life brought into being an evident degradation of being into having… The present phase of total occupation of social life by the accumulated results of the economy leads to a generalised shift from having to appearing.”

Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, 1967

And since ‘the medium is the message’ on social media platforms all the messages, even those running counter to the dominant narratives, produce separation. The people don’t do magic, they perform doing magic in order to create content and are rewarded with the little virtual snacks of likes and follows. The spectacle produces division—between individuals and their own activity, between people and reality, between subjects and collective power. Market mediation fragments what was once directly lived.

But the market and the belief systems that hold it up like untiring invisible hands, are shaking and the magic is being released.

Magic is now being done by people who don’t even know they are doing it. Florence Given, recently made a video about women’s intuition. Watching it is a shoot of energy. She owns, totally unapologetically, the non rationality of knowing something in your body before you’ve seen the kind of proof a court room might require. She refuses to override her instincts to appear ‘rational’. She said that because she absolutely trusts her intuition, she collapses timelines, even accelerates time because when you squash your intuition and wait to find out if the person is trustworthy or not, you are offering yourself up to potential harm. Conventional thinking has it that only when actual harm is done can we allow ourselves judgement, to do otherwise would be ‘irrational.’ Florence’s collapsing timelines is a quantum technique, bending time, knowing without the chronological unfurling, choosing direct apprehension.

The re-emergence of magic is coming for everyone. It is the inevitable part of the Roald Dahl story when the child defeats the oppressive, stifling, heart-killing adult.

We are witnessing the ‘death of the rules based order’ and the invalidation of the so-called expert class represented by individuals with god-complexes like Bill Gates as we discover with horror just who these people are under the layers of ‘great benefactor’ PR. It is and will continue to be an utter fucking mess, but the way we react should be like witches, people who always knew the real power lay elsewhere.

It is the new era of the witches and pagans. By this I do not mean, satanists, in my view that particular esoteric subtype are part of the older order, where everything is just the same but inverted. I’m talking here about people closer to the traditional societies that modernity supplanted, the ones where interpreting dreams was a common practice, where people read the land for signs and could tell a holy place when they came upon one, even if there was no building, or sign to tell them.

It feels hackneyed, because this too has been commodified, turned into spectacle, but the Hopi had a prophecy about when they would be listened to. They’ve been brought in for photo-ops with politicians, or to add some folklore and colour to a conference but no one has actually listened to them as potential global decision makers. What’s the for and against of an ecological movement when everyone is raised to understand the earth as a living being? It’s time to listen to what the ancestors want, not the shareholders.

It’s my time because I have been maladjusted all my life, living on the uncomfortable fence, neither in nor out, too afraid to put myself fully in the reject class, uncommitted and disengaged at best, often disgusted with the official version of reality.

Here’s an example of how I go about in the world. Yesterday, I had numerous sightings of 444, 4444 and started to wonder what it meant. I most usually see mirror numbers 13.13, 17.17 etc… and was trying to remember if I knew an attached meaning. Was it something to do with angels? Then, about 4 paces ahead there was a spray painted sign on the pavement, the word angel with wings above it. I laughed out loud.

In my version of reality there is ‘participation mystique’ with reality as Gordon White quoting Jacques Vallée would have it. You ask for something, solicit something from the field and it turns up. In my case, I’m not asking for gold and fame, I just want my life to be a metaphysical conversation with reality. Although, to be clear, gold would be welcome.

This conversation is a process of orientation, allowing you to move with energetic currents. You are attached to spirit, which is a constant, but detached from the material systems that believe they can capture spirit or deny its existence. Magical thinking is the antithesis of the ordered mindset, where you have a set of beliefs and values that identifies you with a group and that cause you to promote those ideas, defend them, and even attack people who have a different set.

In the tarot there is a card called the Tower. It shows a round tower being struck by lightening and two people falling. It represents ruin, destruction, that may come suddenly, and change experienced as catastrophic. The tower is the manifestation of systems that were set up to serve the people who created them. This could be a marriage or work contract, or a whole institution, like a government and that over time have become too rigid and dense to allow the natural cycles of growth and decay. The small changes that the system disallowed accumulate slowly over time until one day they constitute a tsunami of pressure and it all falls down. No negotiation is possible, just coping and crisis management. All systems obey the same cycle, unless they are dynamic and living like the flight of starlings, where beings act as one, in a communal, moment to moment response to the conditions of being.

The old world is made up of cities of towers built everywhere.

The magic world is the murmur of starlings. It has resilience built into it because it is not dependent on everything staying the same, nor does it believe that the fabric of reality can be forced to conform to an ideological framework. It bends and flows. It does not think of Qi or Chi as a harmless theory for stressed workers who enjoy non-strenuous exercise but as a fundamental reality.

I’m ready for that world. And ready or not, the masonry is falling and no amount of wallpaper can paper over structural damage. Logos, reason, logic … these are not being banished, just reminded that they are not the only ways of functioning.