Here we are in the hazy lazy days of summer, and as one is wont, while lounging around and having a cocktail, contemplating the unimaginable state of affairs and demolition of a country’s international credibility and standing. I shan’t go on with an enumeration of the particulars. We are all possessed of them.
If not put upon at the moment, this season might provide the benefit of taking stock of what can be done and what resources may be held aside for future employment. There’s always the question, when allowing the concept of magic to be considered as a tool to be utilized, as to whether it has a higher purpose, or only stands as its own end. It’s no different from the pursuit of fame or fortune; all these may exist for their own sake, although they can be used to a better end.
These metaphysical questions are well addressed in a whole brace of modern fiction, Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, as well as The All Souls Trilogy by Deborah Harkness. If for no other purpose, this might just serve as a late summer reading list for you while on the North Jersey Coast rail line train on those days when trapped during its interminable delays.
You might wonder why I’m not referencing actual “magickal” texts, but rather fictional ones. It’s simple. Unless the subject is particularly engaging, the general content of them rarely addresses the reason to utilize them; they tend to read more like a cookbook, a dictionary or a use manual for a particular piece of technology.
These authors, whether intentionally or not, accomplish a fine illumination of the emotional engagement of a magician and the contemplation of the “why.” The aspiration at its best is not to satisfy lust, or romance, or power, or material gain, although these are all magical pursuits, but to comprehend a portion of the enormous interconnected universe we are a part of and to develop a facility to utilize these forces.
I think we are currently living through a period best summed up by one of the more famous members of the Golden Dawn (no, not Aleister Crowley), poet William Butler Yeats, in his The Second Coming wrote:
“Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned.”
After things have fallen apart, after the heartache of their breaking, there is at least the potential of new things being created by mending these fragments together as in the ceramic repair method that’s used in Japan, kintsugi.
There are powers who watch over and govern liminal places formed by these breaks, like Hermes and Hekate. One of the contributions that can be made as the social contract falls apart is for those of us who have sprung up through these gaps, where creation occurs, we can also be the vehicle of healing those fractures, and glue which holds together our mutual universe.
