Tag: magic

All mines are full of spirits. In the lead mines in County Durham, the men always spoke of the rock as an animal, ready to push at you as you made your way along an adit or down a shaft. In Cornwall the tin miners called the mine spirits the Knockers, as they knocked back at any man cutting away at the metal-bearing veins. They were the mine itself speaking. In sixteenth-century Germany, according to the great Renaissance theorist Georgius Agricola, these spirits were “called the little miners, because of their dwarfish stature, which is about two feet. They are venerable looking and clothed like miners with a leather apron about their loins.”

Most of the time the Knockers were gentle and friendly, hanging about in the shafts and tunnels, only turning vicious if the miners ridiculed or cursed them. You needed to treat them with respect. Whistling could offend them, as could intentionally spying on what they were doing. They liked to be left in the shadows or the depths of the mines, or even behind the rock, knocking from inside it. Many miners placed small offerings of food or candle grease in the mine to feed and satisfy them. If you were good to them, they would show you where to find the metal.

As Ronald Finucane, the historian of the medieval subconscious, has said, ghosts “represent man’s inner universe just as his art and poetry do.” Ghosts are what you fear or hope for. The mine, if the gods favored you, could provide a sort of magically immediate richness not to be found in the surface world. But all was hidden until you found it. And that reward-from-nothing was reflected in the miners’ attitudes toward metals. In Cornwall, they thought that iron pyrites when applied to a wound would cure it. Even water that had run over iron pyrites was said to be medicinal. Cuts washed in it would heal without any other intervention. But also in Cornwall, and in the parts of the United States where Cornish tinners immigrated and took their ancient beliefs with them, Knockers were thought to be ugly and vindictive. Miners who were lamed were known to be victims of the Knockers’ rage. Insult them, and they could damage you for life.

It is a commanding cluster of images: lightlessness, the spirits of the underworld, the hope for treasure and happiness, wounding, cures, the half-glimpsed, the dreaded, a realm of pain and power. This is the dark basement of the [Heroic] world, the place that metal came from, emerging through processes that were unknown and unintelligible to most of the population, but somehow providing the power-soaked tools with which the killer-chiefs dominated the landscape.

It is at least a possibility that Homer’s Hades is a nightmare fantasy fueled by the Bronze Age experience of the mine: a place in which spirits are clearly present but not to be grasped; where life has sunk away from the sunlight to the mute and the insubstantial; to beings that are only half there, regretting the absence of the vivid sunlight above; where a mysterious sense of power lurks in the dark. “When it comes to excavated ground, dreams have no limit,” Gaston Bachelard wrote in The Poetics of Space. When you are underground, “darkness prevails both day and night, and even when we are carrying a lighted candle, we see shadows standing on the dark walls … The cellar is buried madness.”

— Why Homer Matters, Chapter 8

One of the important powers of the Egyptian universe is heka, to which both gods and people are subject. This was the power that made creation possible and is often translated as ‘magic’. For the Egyptians, magic was both a force of the universe and a set of practices. A bit like the Force in Star Wars, heka is neither inherently good nor inherently bad: its effects depend on the intentions of those who wield it. There is a moral dimension to heka, but, having said that, there is little sense of black magic or witchcraft. The gods are more likely to misuse heka than are people. And Ancient Egyptians made little distinction between the sacred and the secular worlds: daily life is infused with the actions of gods and demons. As a consequence, there is no notion of a cosmic realm above nature. The separation we have come to make between science and religion did not exist in the same way in Egypt.

Furthermore, magic and religion were continuous: the gods were subject to heka, as well as being instantiations of its power, and some humans had greater control of heka than others. From this it follows that magic was not supernatural. As a practice, magic was one of the instruments available to people to hold the universe in harmony, although obviously complex training and considerable skill were needed for such large tasks; more humble magic could be used to shield from harm or to help cure minor ills. There was a spectrum of practitioners, from the priests of the major temples, with long training in how to wield heka, to men and women in villages who might protect the cattle herd from crocodile spirits when crossing a river, or a newborn baby from demons. For temple priests, written transmission of spells was vital; for more humble magic, oral transmission sufficed, so that we now know more about the former. The priests were also not moral teachers but paid specialists with defined duties. Temple priests could undertake private magical practice, for a fee, and the better-off could employ them in cases of real need, making private use of long state-funded training. Large temples had a House of Life, in which a library, a scriptorium where manuscripts were copied and a classroom were combined. Houses of Life also helped to create learned communities that could debate a range of cosmological and earthly matters.

It is worth bearing in mind the distinctive features of temples compared with mosques, synagogues or churches. Egyptian temples were not designed for congregations to worship; rather the opposite: they were to house gods in seclusion. In the form of their statues, they were clothed, fed and cared for in the temples. Such seclusion was interrupted regularly, when the gods were brought out on festivals, although still concealed in shrines covered in cloth. The town of Lahun had thirty-five annual festivals, some lasting for several days, and the general populace would have participated to various degrees, able to enjoy the food and drink of the temple, along with the gods. Harmony was the aim of the temple, but crisis was built into the magico-religious structure, with the passage of the Sun into the underworld every night a minor threat to life, with no absolute guarantee of return.

— Magic: a History, pp. 97-98

It was inevitable that meteorites should inspire awe. They came from some remote region high up in the heavens and possessed a sacred quality enjoyed only by things celestial. In certain cultures there was a time when men thought the sky was made of stone, and even today the Australian aborigines believe the vault of heaven to be made of rock crystal and the throne of the heavenly deity of quartz. Rock crystals, supposedly broken away from the heavenly throne, do in fact play a special role in the shamanic initiation ceremonies of the Australian aborigines, among the Negritos of Malacca, in North America, and elsewhere. These ‘stones of light’, as they are called by the maritime Dyaks of Sarawak, reflect everything that happens on earth. They disclose to the shaman what has taken place in the sick man’s soul and the destination to which his soul takes flight. There is no need to remind the reader that the shaman is he who ‘sees’, because he is endowed with a supernatural vision. He sees just as far into space as into time. Likewise he can perceive what is invisible to the layman-spirits, gods, the soul. When he is being initiated the future shaman is fed with crystals of quartz. In other words, his capacity as a visionary, as well as his ‘science’, comes to him, at least in part, from a mystic solidarity with heaven.

We shall do well to bear in mind the early religious significance attaching to aeroliths. They fall to earth charged with celestial sanctity; in a way, they represent heaven. This would suggest why so many meteorites were worshipped or identified with a deity. The faithful saw in them the ‘first form’, the immediate manifestation of the godhead. The Palladium of Troy was supposed to have dropped from heaven, and ancient writers saw it as the statue of the goddess Athena. A celestial origin was also accorded to the statue of Artemis at Ephesus and to the cone of Heliogabalus at Emesus (Herodian, v, 3, 5). The meteorite at Pessinus in Phrygia was venerated as the image of Cybele and, following an injunction by the Delphic Oracle, it was transported to Rome shortly after the Second Punic War. A block of hard stone, the most ancient representation of Eros, stood side by side with Praxiteles’ sculptured image of the god (Pausanias, ix, 27, i). Other examples could easily be found, the most famous being the Ka’aba in Mecca. It is noteworthy that a certain number of meteorites are associated with goddesses, especially fertility goddesses such as Cybele. And here we come up against a transference of sanctity: the celestial origin is forgotten, to the advantage of the religious notion of the petra genitrix.

— The Forge and the Crucible, pp. 19-20

Morpheus:

What are you waiting for? You’re faster than this.

Don’t think you are. Know you are.

— “The Matrix” (1999)

Now I faced the black belts. My awareness of time began to slip. These fighters were far more skilled. The psychic tension of fighting is as big a factor as mere matters of technique. I could exert a type of mental force against my opponents, but now they were capable of pushing back. It meant that the pace of the matches was different: a wary circling, a flurry of attacks. Manipulation of the tips of the swords. Deflections, feints. And pushing against me like a force field, I felt the psychic pressure known as seme, communicated through posture and the weapon itself.

— Deshi, chapter 2

Granaries are buildings of specialized design and necessity. Even villages will have one.

Tangentially, where are all the breweries?

Among the ancient Greeks, nothing of any importance could occur, no decisions could be made, without the accompanying flow of sacrificial blood. Funerals required sacrifices, as did celebrations and homecomings, vows and agreements. Risky ventures, such as journeys and wars, could not be undertaken without sacrifices both to reveal the likely outcome and to win the support of the gods. During campaigns, the military leader served also in the priestly role of sacrificer. As historian John Keegan reports of Alexander the Great:

Bizarre though it seems to us…his day began with his plunging of a blade into the living body of an animal and his uttering of prayer as the blood flowed.

— Blood Rites, p. 27

Once upon a time a friend’s psyker Player Character, Toby, decided to take as a student another Player Character, Reiko. Toby did this despite her known erratic personality. Reiko had already manifested some uncontrolled psychic ability. Toby recognized that if he did not teach her, someone else would.

He did not dismiss his concerns about her character’s character. Instead, he emphasized them in a no-nonsense lecture. He made it plain to her that his motivation was as much for the safety of the community as it was for her own. Should Reiko ever intentionally misuse what he teaches her, Toby said to her face, “I will end you.”

This scene predates Star Wars: The Last Jedi with Luke’s aborted killing of his student, Ben Solo. These are the only two instances of I know where a teacher/master is prepared to kill a student going-but-not-yet-gone rogue. The literary trope is a younger student sent against a rogue ex-student of the same master(s), e.g., Enter the Dragon.

In a milieu where great magical and/or psychic powers exist, this vigilance and grim contingency needs to be standard procedure for every teacher of them.

Divination can’t “tell your future.” For one things, there are too many variables involved. And to repeat the wisdom of Isaac Bonewits yet again “fuzzy targets yield fuzzy results.” Ask a vague question and you’re going to get a vague answer. But I see three main things divination can do for us.

Divination will tell you where you’re going. If you keep walking down a path you’re going to end up somewhere. Divination won’t give you the coordinates of where that is, but it will tell you what things will look and feel like when you get there. Does that look and feel good to you? If so, keep going. If not, you probably should make some changes. I strongly believe the future is not fixed, but at some point your accumulated choices start to look like destiny.

Remember any question about where you’re going can never be answered with finality. You’re going to keep moving throughout your life until you die…and even then you’ll move on to whatever comes after death. So if the answer to “where am I going?” seems incomplete, that’s because you’re only seeing one part of a longer journey.

The older we get, and the more difficult the world becomes, the harder it gets to extract yourself from a bad situation and get moving toward what you really want and need. Divination will help you make course corrections sooner and avoid major backtracking.

Divination will help you see what you’re not seeing. Divination isn’t a very good map, but it’s an excellent set of headlights. It won’t tell you how long something will take (or at least, it won’t tell me—I have zero luck with divining time frames. “Time runs differently in the Otherworld”…), but it will show you the major obstacles you’ll encounter on your way. The warnings are likely to be less specific than you’d like—your job is to be on the lookout for something that fits the general description.

Your job is also to take action that is both appropriate and realistic. If a reading says you’re going to get run over by a beer truck, you probably can’t stop the truck from going out of control. You can, however, be somewhere else when that happens, or steer out of its path because you saw it coming a split second earlier than you would have otherwise….

Divination allows you to ask questions of the Gods and spirits. While there is certainly a psychological aspect to divination (particularly when you’re reading for yourself) the word itself points us toward its source: divination comes from the divine. There is no substitute for ecstatic, mystical, and worshipful experiences of the Gods. But sometimes you just need an answer. “Is this sacrifice acceptable?” “Is this candidate ready to be Your priestess?” “Is this message really what You want me to tell this person?”

— A Need For Divination – Under The Ancient Oaks

Author’s emphases.

Doctor Strange:

Oh, Hell. If there’s one thing I hate, it’s incanting in Latin.

— “Doctor Strange: The Oath” #1 (2006)

Used without permission.

This limited series has several humorous lines like this.

Kaluu:

Behold, Stephen! Behold the ancient days of Earth returning—the days when Man was a slave in body, mind, and soul!

…Ghaszaszh Nyirh, of the Old Ones. The scrolls say that he loved the debasement of his slaves the best. And they will go to him willingly. What will they not trade for some food for their children?

Doctor Strange:

And so they give up their souls—allow themselves to be twisted by a horror from the depths of time…for food?

Kaluu:

For food.

— “Strange Tales” #9 (1987)

Used without permission.

Initiation involves forging a conscious, working relationship with disembodied spirits and an existential knowledge of the way they work in our lives and our afterlives. It reveals the way they operate when we are awake, when we dream and when we are dead. We have seen that the histories we have been examining, such as the trials of Hercules, are structured according to different astronomical cycles—the journey of the sun through the months of the year and its precession through the galaxies. The point is that the same patterns that structure life on earth also structure the spirit worlds. Hercules and Job suffered trials in their earthly lives that have been recorded in the history of the world, but they will also have to suffer the same trials in the afterlife—unless they can learn to become conscious of them. And if they can’t, they will also have to suffer them in their next incarnation.

This is the aim of initiation: to make more and more experience conscious, to roll back the boundaries of consciousness.

In our individual lives—and collectively—we go round and round in the circles traced out for us by the planets and stars.

But if we can become conscious of these circles, if we can become conscious of the activity of the stars and planets in our lives in a most intimate way, then we are, in a sense, no longer trapped by them. We may rise above them, we are moving now not in a circle but in an upward spiral.

— The Secret History of the World, Chapter 10

Author’s emphases.

The ward chewed at me. Thin veins of dim green light formed in the empty air—the spell trying to expel me. I held my magic shield. Defensive wards came in different flavors. Some were walls, barriers you had to break through with sheer force. Some, like this one, were designed to cause pain and squeeze the intruder until they retreated. This wall type had to be shattered. Most people thought that the squeezing type couldn’t be broken. Most people were wrong….

— Blood Heir, Chapter 17

“Is that my wolf in your bag?”

“What’s left of it.” I let the bag fall to the floor. The fabric vanished, revealing melted remnants of the [metal] wolf. “I broke it. I’m sorry.”

“You’re standing in front of me, so it must have done its job. Did it serve you well?”

“It saved me. Can you fix it?”

“It is only a machine,” Roland said. “Did you mourn it?”

“I did.”

[He] smiled. “Be careful. I will rebuild it, but the more attached you become to it, the more agency it will obtain. Such is the nature of magical constructs. There may come a time when it will become an entity with an independent will.”

“I will keep that in mind.”

— Blood Heir, Epilogue

Doctor Strange:

…Even for as practiced a sorcerer as myself, there is danger! But in this case, it is a danger worth taking!

Nosmo cobis…holo erasma rabis….

The words sound vaguely Latin—but, in truth, the language predates Mankind by millennia!

Fragments of this incantation were discovered years ago by an aged monk named Montessi. Uttered within close proximity of a vampire, even by one unschooled in the mystic arts, it would cause the unliving creature’s total obliteration.

But Doctor Strange is Earth’s Sorcerer Supreme, and he has the complete incantation! He shall not suffer a vampire to live!

— “Doctor Strange, Master of the Mystic Arts” #62 (1983)

Used without permission.

[Baddie teleports away after stealing the Eye of Agamotto from Doctor Voodoo.]

Damion Hellstrom:

[on his knees, his face in his hands]

You don’t understand.

Spiderman:

No! No, we don’t understand! What has happened? What is the Eye? Where did it go?

Doctor Strange, ex-Sorcerer Supreme:

[holding a hand to his bowed forehead and closed eyes]

Without the Eye of Agamotto, we forfeit.

Doctor Voodoo, Sorcerer Supreme:

[comes to Doctor Strange, weeping]

Tell me what to do. Tell me what to do and I’ll do it.

Mockingbird:

What do we forfeit?

Doctor Strange:

[everyone looks up to the sky as it begins to tear open]

Everything.

— “The New Avengers” #2 (2010)

Used without permission.

He found Master Ibrahim by the prickling of his nape, by the shifting of a shadow, by a whisper in the air. The magus sat in a room gone dim with evening, lamplit and quiet. He wore his wonted black, but he had laid aside his turban. A cap covered his shaven skull; a jewel glowed in his ear, a moonstone waxing with its mistress the moon.

Gerbert bowed as had become his custom, and sat at the mage’s feet. He had learned not to speak until Ibrahim gave him leave. He was allowed to fidget, judiciously.

Tonight he was not moved to. His head was full to bursting with names; he was tired. He did not know if, after all, he wanted to see magic. Had he not seen it already, just in coming here?

Effects only, Hatto would have said. Of causes he had seen nothing.

What use, if he could not do it himself?

He swallowed a yawn. Ibrahim seemed lost in contemplation. The lamp flickered. It globed them both in light; it made all the world without, a featureless darkness.

Gerbert did not know why he moved. He wanted to, that was all. He reached, and the light was in his hands. It was cool, like fishes’ breath. It rested pulsing in his palms. There was something that one could do with it, could will, could wish…

It quivered and went out.

Ibrahim’s voice came soft in the darkness. “Bring it back.”

“But I don’t—” Gerbert broke off, began again. “I don’t know how.”

I can name every one of the Jinn, he wanted to say. I can recite the rolls of all the orders of angels. You never taught me to make a light that sleeps in my hands.

He did not say it. “You know how,” said Ibrahim.

How? With names? None of them seemed to fit, except for Lucifer, and Gerbert was not minded to invoke that one. Not quite yet.

With will? He strained until the sweat broke out on his brow. He willed until his ears buzzed and his eyes went dark. Nothing.

With words? Which ones? They ran through his head, all tangled, all useless.

He slumped, exhausted, growing angry. This was all nonsense, all of it. “Fiat,” he said, “damn it. Fiat lux.“

Inside him, something shifted. Something swelled; something bloomed. He stared dumbfounded at his fingertips. To every one clung a spark of light.

The moment he thought about them, they flickered. He pulled his mind away from them, and they flared up. They coalesced; they settled, round and cool and blinding-bright, in his trembling palm.

Master Ibrahim’s smile gleamed out of the night. Gerbert blinked at him, half dazzled, half bewildered. “Was that an incantation?”

Ibrahim laughed. “Hardly! And yet it served its purpose. Now do you see?”

“I see…” Gerbert found that he could close his fingers about the light, and it would shrink; then it would swell again, if he not quite willed it to. It was delicately improbable, like walking a tightrope with an egg balanced on one’s nose. “But if this is what it is, what are all the rites and rituals?“

“Guides,” the magus answered. “Protections. Defenses against the ignorant.“

Gerbert’s head had begun to ache. The light pulsed. It wanted to float free. He did not want to know what it would do if it escaped. He willed it to go out.

It only swelled larger.

His brows knit. “Words and will are simple. This is hard.”

“It is,” said Ibrahim.

Gerbert glared at the magic he had made. It had grown again. The ache in his head was fiercer. He had lost the way of it; he could not do it.

Half out of temper, half out of despair, he willed it to grow larger still. It quivered and sighed and dwindled to nothing.

Somehow Gerbert had lain down on the carpet. Perhaps he had fallen over. He was not interested, much. “I know children like that,” he said. “Contrary.“

“It is a child,” said Ibrahim, “but it will grow.” He seemed pleased; God knew why. He cradled Gerbert’s head with serene and physicianly competence, and poured into him something cool and bitter-sweet.

Gerbert was too far gone to be wary. He merely blinked at the magus and tried to decide whether he liked the taste. He thought that perhaps he did.

“Here is the secret,” Ibrahim said, “and the price. Magic is not wrought without consequence. The greater the working, the greater the cost.”

“This was great?”

“For you, yes. Were letters easy, when first you learned them?”

“Arabic isn’t,” Gerbert muttered.

“Surely,” said Ibrahim. “Now, sleep, and be content. You have power; you have it in you to master it. I shall take joy in teaching you.”

You haven’t till now? Gerbert would have asked. But his body was far away, and sleep was near, and sweet. He fell into its arms.

— Ars Magica, Chapter 4

Author’s emphases in italic. Mine are in bold.

The Ancient One:

The true power is yours—to allow in, or keep out. What happens to any of us is either invited into our lives or sent away.

True power…is the power to choose wisely. And that you already possess.

You are like the man who sits on the side of the road, begging for pennies, without realizing that he’s sitting on a box of gold. Everything you need is already around you and within you.

Stephen Strange:

If that’s so, then why is everything that comes so naturally to people like Baron Mordo so difficult for me?

The Ancient One:

You come from the world of Western thought. Mordo from the world of Eastern thought. Your soul is rigid, made up of straight lines. His soul is flexible; it has no straight lines.

Stephen Strange:

Then why not make him the inheritor of your work?

The Ancient One:

Because sometimes there is a time and place for straight lines. Because there are some forces before which we should not bend.

And when the night-wind comes, Mordo, I fear…will bend.

— “Strange” #5 (2005)

Used without permission.

[With the Dread Dormammu possessing his physical body, Doctor Strange in his astral form has taken refuge in a New York City street rat. An unexpected ally arrives in the form of Topaz, whom Strange previously helped recover the stolen half of her soul.]

Topaz:

…I know. I’m “only” an empath, a healer. But I did find you, and a magician of power could not have gotten within a hundred miles of Manhattan without having been stopped—or destroyed utterly.

But there are more—and better—things than power, Stephen.

— “Doctor Strange: Sorcerer Supreme” #2 (1989)

Used without permission.

The most important initiation teachings concerned the way the spirit worlds are experienced after death. This was not because a candidate would have doubted there is life after death—such a thought would have been unthinkable then—but because they feared what their own experience would turn out to be. In the first instance they feared that demons, which they had evaded in their lifetime, were lying in wait. Initiation showed candidates how to navigate the after-death journey safely.

— The Secret History of the World, Chapter 10