Principia

• Principia: The Principles of the Practice
  • Mentalism: The Law of Mental Theater
  • Sympathy: The Law of Sympathetic Connections
  • Mutation: The Law of Endless Change

Thus we have the Principia: The Principles of the Practice. First there is Mentalism: The Law of Mental Theater, which holds that we operate in the world of stories. Or as noted in the Ars Holistica, “We Live in the Shadowlands. We die in the Bonelands.” The fields in which we play are the fields of our imagination. Everything you experience is in your mind. The real world exists but is beyond your ability to understand completely. Second there is Sympathy: The Law of Sympathetic Connections, which holds that everything leaves a trace. All connections remain. This is analogous to the occult principle of correspondence. “As above, so below; as below, so above.” Third we have Mutation: The Law of Endless Change, which holds that nothing is still. Everything changes. Or, as noted by Heraclitus, “No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.”

Mentalism: The Law of Mental Theater

The Shadowlands and the Bonelands

We will start with two definitions. The Shadowlands are the realms of the mind and story. The Bonelands are the realms of physics and matter. The human body exists in the Bonelands. The matter that makes up our physical form is anchored in the Bonelands. The human mind does not live in the Bonelands. Our minds are fragile things. They cannot manage the scope and scale of the Bonelands, all pitiless math and equations. The Bonelands are to the human mind as outer space is to the human body, utterly hostile to its continued survival. And so, faced with the unmanageable conditions of the Bonelands, the human mind responded by building itself a narrative space suit or life raft. That space suit is the Shadowlands. The human mind uses the Shadowlands as an intermediary, a way of dealing with the Bonelands without being destroyed by it.

The Shadowlands are how we interface with the Bonelands, with the so-called real world. And that interface is built out of the stories we tell ourselves about how the world is. Magick, at its most fundamental level, is the manipulation of that mental world and the stories that hold it together. No, you may be thinking that this sounds much more mundane than you were hoping from a book of magick. But have no worry. Despite this apparent limitation, what we are going to discuss is more interesting that you might first think. As Lon Milo DuQuette said, “It’s all in your head … you just have no idea how big your head is.”

The Shadowlands can be broadly divided into two sections: the Depths and the Shallows. The Shallows refers to the level of the Shadowlands in which we spend every normal day of our lives. As mentioned before, we are all in the Shadowlands all of the time. Our minds can’t handle the Bonelands unfiltered. And so we live in the Shadowlands. But most of the time, the difference between the Shadowlands and the Bonelands appears minor. In the Shallows, the Shadowlands map closely to the Bonelands.

And then there is the Depths. The Depths of the Shadowlands refers to the realms of story and myth which are divorced mostly or entirely from the world of the Bonelands. The worlds found in the Depths are the worlds of legend and can be entirely fictional. But fictional does not mean they are not real. And fictional does not mean they are not useful. The Holy Land as depicted in the Bible exists in the depths of the Shadowlands. The Greece of Hellenistic Mythology exists in the Depths. The Earth depicted in modern Marvel movies is a part of the Depths. These realms contain our gods and heroes, who exist in story. These worlds are housed within the human mind and in the media where we store our tales. The power of the Depths cannot be overstated, and a wizard can reach the Depths through such techniques as lucid dreaming or meditation. These are fractal realms that exist within us, and which connect us to each other. They are not real in the way we think of the Shallows as real, but they are powerful and influence the Shallows as the moon influences the tides.

Life in the Shadowlands

So the Shadowlands refers to the realm of myth and story. It is the land of dreams and illusions. It is the realm of the mind and the subconscious. When you tell a story, the characters of that story live within the Shadowlands. The Bonelands are the realm of flesh and bone. It is the realm of atoms and physics. It is cold hard reality with no interpretation.

And we will never see the Bonelands. We do not live there. the Bonelands are hostile to the human mind. We Live in the Shadowlands. We die in the Bonelands. The fields in which we play are the fields of our imagination. Color is an illusion. Our brain playing games with the interplay of light as it is absorbed and reflected off surfaces. But that doesn’t make it less beautiful. Taste and touch are illusions. Signals sent through our nervous system. Signals encoded by our brains in a way that tricks us simple apes into responding in an appropriate manner. But I still like steak tartare. You never interact with the Bonelands. You interact with the signals sent by your nervous system to your brain. And those systems can be tricked. Nothing you experience as reality is reality, it is a manufactured simulacrum that you interact with much as you would a video game. Reality lies invisible beneath the illusion in which you live every day. It is an illusion you manufacture for yourself. It is an illusion that allows you to navigate the dark waters of reality. But it is still an illusion. The best way to think of your senses is like the sonar used by a submarine. You can make your way through life using that radar, but the radar is not the terrain.

How are you doing so far? Still with me? Get ready. It gets weirder from here.

Meaning is an illusion. Meaning is a map we impose upon a world governed by Newton’s laws of motion. But that doesn’t mean we don’t need such maps to survive. Even Newton’s law of motion are not correct. They are close enough to correct that they generate useful results. But they are still wrong. They are still part of the illusion. The universe has not plan or purpose that we can deduce. We attempt to impose meaning and purpose upon it, and have done so for the entirety of our existence. Christians think it is a test for the faithful. Buddhists talk about the cycle of rebirth and escaping the wheel of suffering. Capitalists talk about profit margins. Fascists talk about power and divine right to rule.

Lies. All lies told to make the emptiness palatable.

And there is nothing wrong with such lies. Our brain needs these lies. Without these lies, our brain would snap like an over stretched spring. Infinity with no meaning is a hard concept for brain hardwired to seek meaning and purpose. So if there is no purpose, we must choose one or make one. Even if it is a lie. Especially if it is a lie. Because magick is the art of lying so well that you fool the world. So you must have a purpose, you must have a lie. But that doesn’t mean you have to accept any lie presented to you. That doesn’t mean you can’t make your own.

Reality is an Illusion

I said earlier that everything you experience is in your mind. I said that everything is signals sent from your nerves to your brain and then interpreted. Your eyes see a limited spectrum of the available light. There is a world of light that is functionally invisible to our eyes. Chickens can see further into the ultraviolet spectrum than we can.Your ears can only ear a limited range of sound. Your sense of smell cannot detect many dangerous chemicals. You no senses capable of detecting radiation. And thus that part of the universe can only be detected indirectly. Radiation is functionally invisible until it kills you.

The world you experience is a richly layered world of sight and sound, taste and touch and smell. And it is all in your head. It is beautiful, but it is a tiny fraction of the total available experience. The colors you cannot see vastly outnumber those you can. The sounds booming around you, above or below that narrow range of sound you can hear is incredible. The world is unfurling around us and we are blind to it. What does radiation taste like? What does gravity feel like? What color are cosmis rays. We don’t know. We may never know. We have build machines and devices that can expand our senses, that can approximate these senses we lack. But the vastness of what we cannot experience dwarfs those things we can.

We are deaf to the symphony of the universe.

But we can imagine. We can tell stories.

Submariners

The real world exists but is beyond your ability to understand completely. I mentioned earlier that you do not interact with the real world directly. You interact with the interface your brain built for that purpose. Life is no different from a video game. But there is no tutorial. And you have only one life, and no save point. And so you have to learn how to play this game, with the limited interface provided by your senses. The game board is the Shadowlands.

But the Bonelands still exists, and it can kill you. Because, as I said before: you live in the Shadowlands, but you die in the Bonelands. The Bonelands is a lethal place, full of dangers we cannot perceive. How does a human sense radiation? It senses radiation by dying. How does a human detect sarin gas? It detects sarin gas by dying.

I used a metaphor earlier. You are like a submarine, and your senses are the sonar of that submarine. And those senses are terrifyingly incomplete. And on top of that, your brain is filled with cognitive blind spots that makes interacting with the Bonelands through the interface of the Shadowlands even more dangerous. These are the rules of the game. These are the controls and the difficulty settings. You need to understand what tools you do have. And more importantly, you need to understand their limitations and account for them the way a driver accounts for the blindspots in their car.

And all of this, occurs in your mind. Every piece of it is in your mind, from the world with which you think your interacting, to the adjustments you make to your thinking to account for your own blindspots, to the way you interact with this game in which you find yourself. Everything is in the mind. It is all mentalism. And this is the first step to understanding Craft Brew Magick.

“It’s all in your head … you just have no idea how big your head is.”

Sympathy: The Law of Sympathetic Connections

Locard’s Principle

“Every contact leaves a trace… …with contact between two items, there will be an exchange.”

Locard’s Exchange Principle of Forensics

Everything leaves a trace. All connections remain. Locard’s Principle applies to forensics first, but is equally applicable to magick. In his work ,The Golden Bough, James George Frazer recounted numerous accounts of what he referred to as sympathetic magic (coining the term) in folk magic practices around the world. Frazer describes is thus: “If we analyze the principles of thought on which magic is based, they will probably be found to resolve themselves into two: first, that like produces like, or that an effect resembles its cause; and, second, that things which have once been in contact with each other continue to act on each other at a distance after the physical contact has been severed.”

The idea is simple. As Locard’s Principle states, every contact leaves a trace. This is especially true with stories. When you retell a story, you are changed in the telling. You brain rewrites memories when you retell a story, changing the memory. When you retell a story, the story is changed by your telling. Even if you tell the story identically each time, you cannot control how it will be received by others. The listeners will understand the story through the biases and filters that make up their identities. And that understanding will be different than your understanding. At every point a connection is made, and those connections remain. A trail of connections and changes linking things through space and time.

This is related to the Principle of Mentalism. Your mind is your world, and your mind is changed with every encounter. A connection is made in the mind. A fingerprint left on a surface is a physical trace. But the connection between the surface, the print, and the finger is created in the mind. A connection made by a personal relationship is exclusively a connection in the mind. Affiliations, blame, praise, guilt, innocence; all these things exist only in the minds of human beings.

Sympathetic Magic is at the heart of a great deal of magick. Using symbolic representations of other things and symbolic connections to influence the things which the symbols represent. As you work through the later sections of this book, you will notice that much of the content of this book is nonsense without the Law of Sympathetic Connections underpinning it.

The Principle of Correspondence

Quod est superius est sicut quod inferius, et quod inferius est sicut quod est superius.

That which is above is like to that which is below, and that which is below is like to that which is above.

The Emerald Tablet

The principle of correspondence is simply explained: “as above, so below; as below, so above.”

Everything is related. On a macro and micro level, everything is linked. The atoms in our bodies were once part of other objects, and will be part of other things in the future. All the atoms of the universe were once held together in the pre-Big Bang singularity. All of life on Earth is connected through time. If we travel back through time, we find common ancestors for all life. We cannot escape our connections. All humans are related, having emerged out of Australopithecus in Africa some two million years ago. Humans and bananas share forty four percent of the same DNA.

As related to magick, the Shadowlands and the Bonelands intertwine, like yin and yang. We tell stories based upon what we perceived of the Bonelands, and what we tell informs the shape of the Bonelands. Elements mirror and rhyme, things repeat and patterns are fractal. The Shadowlands and the Bonelands are bound together like skeleton and muscles- each supporting the other. To affect one is to affect the other. To affect the Bonelands is to wreck havoc upon the Shadowlands. To affect the Shadowlands is to subtly influence the Bonelands and nudge it from the darkness.

Everything is connected, and every contact leaves a trace. And so everything affects everything. As above, so below. Now, you may be noticing that these principles are basically the same principle viewed and explained in different ways. And to that I say, thank you for paying attention. Locard’s Principle and the Principle of Correspondence are ways of expressing the same idea from different angles. These angles are presented to deepen your understanding of the Law of Sympathetic Connections. This is important, because magick is not science. And these laws and principles are not absolute. They are not like laws of mathematics. They are based upon observation of the subjective experience of humans through history. And as such, these are rules that have caveats and exceptions. Remember that good writers learn the rules so they can break them. And then also remember that all magick is story.

Symbolic Sympathy

We live in the Shadowlands. And symbols are the building blocks of the Shadowlands. Everything in a story is symbolic of something else. All elements of a story are recursive. And within that infinite recursion you can find a multitude of tools. When performing magick, magicians use symbols to make the links built from trace contact stronger. They find a thread connecting two things and they build it up with symbol and story. Superman is linked symbolically to Moses, as an infant immigrant cast out to deliver the helpless and stand against the powerful. But then DC Comics had Superman die to save Metropolis, and provided readers with a empty tomb and then a resurrection. So now Superman is symbolically linked to both Moses and Jesus. And so the connections expand. Connections between Thoth and Hermes were added after the fact, linking the two gods explicitly- where before the link was weaker and purely based on similarity. Connections are metaphor and simile. Symbol and allegory are connections.

Magicians use symbols to strengthen the connections of Locard’s Principle, and they use the Correspondence Principle to effect change upon the Shadowlands, and thus upon the Bonelands. To change the Shadowlands is to nudge the Bonelands. And in return a nudge in the Bonelands creates a cataclysm in the Shadowlands.

Magicians use Symbolic Sympathy to affect change upon their own story, and what is more magic than this?

Mutation: The Law of Endless Change

Everything Changes

Heraclitus said that “no man ever steps in the same river twice. For it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.” Everything changes. The atoms in our bodies were once a part of long dead stars. Electrons are massive clouds of probability. Photons change state simply by being observed. Nothing is permanent. Everything changes. Everything is marks in the sand on the beach.

The tide will come in and erase what you have made. Your time is finite. Things end. People die. Stars go dark. The universe grows cold. But by the same token, the tide will go out and you will be able to draw again. Everything changes. Everything is change.

To oppose change is to change in response to outside forces. You cannot remain unchanged. To resist change is to change. To attempt to remain the same requires that you expend effort. You cannot expend effort without changes.

Resistance is futile.

We are a river and we cannot stop flowing. You cannot stop the river. The river keeps flowing. To be a magician is to swim with the current, and use it as your ally.

Nothing is permanent

Modern Civilization has existed for less than ten thousand years if we are being extremely generous. We have been Homo Sapiens for just some two hundred thousand years. Humans as a whole have existed for maybe two million years. If we are being generous, the first mammals appeared two hundred and twenty five million years ago. Vertebrates jumped onto the scene just five hundred and forty million years ago.

What is my point? No institution is permanent. No rock is eternal. The Earth itself is four and a half billion years old. But the universe is nearly fourteen billion years old. The Earth has been around for only a third of the history of the Universe. The things we think of as eternal are also subject to time.

Humanity is a mere two million years old. And we have changed from Homo Habilis to Homo Sapiens in that time. Our human cousins spread across the land and then passed away. We survived, changed from our original human form as Homo Habilis. Australopithecus is gone. The dinosaurs are gone. Their descendants remain. But they are gone. Things change. Things end.

And to this point, build with the end in mind. Do not assume the world will look like it does now in twenty years time. When my grandmother was born, the horse and buggy was still competing with the motor car. When she died humanity had landed on the moon and the internet was exploding across the globe. My grandmother preceded the founding of the Soviet Union. And she outlasted it by over a decade. What will exist tomorrow may not be what you expect. Plan for things to replace that which exists now.

Resurrection is magick. You will rebuild and resurrect yourself throughout your life. Build with this in mind. Craft your practice with this in mind. Assume that things will change and craft things which can change as well. Build for flexibility. Build for adaptability. Built for versatility. Otherwise, you are building museum pieces. Otherwise you are building for the past.

Tradition is Recreating the Past Anew

Nothing survives. Nothing that exists now has persisted unchanged from the past. Anything that survives today, does so because the new generation rebuilt what the old generation had maintained. Nothing survives without maintenance. And maintenance is the re-creation of the old. And to recreate, you must create.

Nothing lasts. Nothing is forever. The Hungry Empire pretends that the Empire is eternal. But this is a lie. The Empire is young, and yet it is already dying. Things fade. Things wear out. Lines must be redrawn. Buildings require new bricks. Rituals must be learned and enacted by each generation. Each generation must choose if they are going to take up the choices of the previous generation. Civilizations can disappear in a single generation if the younger generation chooses not to follow the example of the last generation. People can and do simply walk away. They rebel. They reform. They tear down. They transform.

The Hungry Empire is obsessed with pretending that history is finished. That the Empire is the final form of humanity. But this is a lie. Nothing is ever finished. Tradition is a lot of work. Tradition is walking a known path. But you must walk it. In order for something to persist, it must be rebuilt. Each participant must put in the work and do their part. Like an Amish barn raising, everyone must contribute to the rebuilding.

Stasis is the goal of the Hungry Empire. And it is a false goal that cannot be achieved. Stasis is a lie. Any culture that survives does so, not by preserving the present, but by re-creating things anew with each generation. True persistence is active rebuilding. But active rebuilding requires participants to buy in voluntarily. Things change, and tradition requires active work. Without active participation, things deteriorate. Without voluntary participants, change is decline.

You can Change

As we have been at pains to explain: everything is change. You are change. From the scale of subatomic particles to the scale of the cells in your body, you are constantly changing. Your brain writes, and thus changes, your memories just by accessing them. Your body changes all the time, using the food you eat to rebuild itself. You cannot remain the same, it is simply impossible. You are a thing in flux. You will change. You must change. You are change. And thus you can change.

What is Magick? Magick a tool that you may use to control and shape that change. Magick is the use of will and story to take control of that change to create and recreate yourself. You are going to change. Even if you make no effort to change, change will find you. And so with Magick you can actively take ownership of the process. You will never be completely in control of the changes the Universe throws at you. But with magick you can adapt and shape those changes. With magick you can put the changes the universe imposes upon you to good use.

You can imagine the Universe as an ocean. The ocean is constantly churning. Vast current roil beneath the surface of the ocean. And massive storms blow across the surface. And you are floating upon this great and chaotic ocean. You can be a piece of driftwood upon the ocean. Or you can be a sailing vessel. Magick is your rudder. Magick is your sail. Magick is your keel. The wind will move you either way, but you can control where the winds and waves send you.

The lesson here is to learn. Learn what changes you can oppose. Learn what changes you must endure. Learn what changes you can put to use. Learn the patterns so that the ocean ceases to be chaos, but instead becomes legible. And once you can read the ocean, you can navigate it. That is magick.

Magick is Shaping inevitable Change.

By now it should be clear that change is inevitable. Magick is accepting the change and bending that change to your will. The key here is perspective. Do not look for a stable place to stand. Learn instead to balance upon the moving surface that is the universe in which we live. Accept that the world will look different from moment to moment. Learn to take advantage of quickly emerging variables. Learn to be adaptive. Learn to be an opportunist. Learn to take advantage of change. But learn also to cause change that benefits you. Take active ownership of change and ride it to victory.

By contrast, learn to accept that the vast majority of the changing universe is beyond your control. This is okay. Focus on what affects you. Focus on what you can affect. This is the Yin to the Yang of the rest of this section. Change what you can. Accept what you can’t. You’ve heard the aphorism. So you know that you must also learn to spot the difference.