Introduction
Story-telling is quite magical. Since it is so magical it can seem difficult to distinguish between story-telling and the performance of magic. For people who do not explore any spiritual dimension, story-telling is about the most magical thing in their lives. The story-teller creates a whole new universe and pulls our minds into it, creating it in each person’s imagination. For the time the story is being told, whether it is told through film, novel or read aloud, people can almost leave behind this world and enter the one new one. It’s almost like a type of astral projection. Leaving one’s body and exploring a new plane of existence.
The main issue I am addressing in this article is that many people make it the focus of their spirituality. Also they have a few story-tellers and make other people listen to it. I’m getting so bored of people who organise their spirituality so they are essentially passive to it. I am helping organise a pagan conference and the main suggestion that seems to be going around at the moment is they hire storytellers to stand around fire pits telling stories so they can sit and listen.
I am drawn to repeat a line from one the strangest movies I love. “Don’t dream it… be it” – Dr. Frankenfurter The Rocky Horror Picture Show. If there is any where there is a chance to explore the way other people do ritual magic it would be a conference like this. Yet people want instead to tell stories which will probably feature people doing the very thing they could be doing. I just see this has being a spectator in your own religion. In Christianity there is a significant distinction made between practicing Christians and those that just call themselves Christians. If you don’t have a spiritual practice… in my honest opinion you’re hardly worthy of words witch, sorcerer or magician. These are active terms that indicate people that practice witchcraft, sorcery and magic respectively. Maybe the term pagan would suit, but the others not so.
Stories are fun…
Okay I love a bit of story-time. Where I practice kungfu there is often a part of the session where the teacher gathers everyone around them and waffles on about something. We call it story time. Often it has a tale about something that happened, something he wants us to remember and if we’re lucky he will throw in a Chinese proverb. Since he is Chinese, it is not as corny as it sounds. I love this story-time. We’re all sat cross legged on the floor feeling like 5-year-olds in infant school, listening to teacher. Story-time inspires us to train harder, it helps us think about the mindset with which we approach our work, however, story-time does not a spirituality make.
Don’t take the rest of this article as a hate on story-time. I also love audio-books. In fact whenever I can’t sleep I put on one and before you know it I’m asleep. Unfortunately, I often wake at an inconvenient hour to realised I missed a lot of the book. But I still love it! (By the way audible comes with a switch off after 30 mins / 1 hour option. I’m not yet sponsored by them, but I really benefit from my subscription). I love a story, especially a story read to me. My favourites are Sci-Fi novels and fantasies novels especially ones which offer parody, commentary on reality. My favourite, the Dune Saga, gives a careful warning about the dangers of charismatic leadership, which should be learned by many leaders in the occult community. So don’t take this as hate on stories, however listening to Stephen Fry reading the literary works of a renowned transphobe, does not a spirituality make.
Story-telling, the start of spirituality
The Order of Bards, Ovates and Druids has Bard as their first degree. It is said that the creative outlet of the Bard is the spirituality to be learned in this grade. They have a great strong-hold on the pagan community. So, this is why they have such influence over the event where I am involved. But paganism includes more than just this. Sitting around listen to other people attempt to tell stories might not be for me.
Creative outlet is such an important part of developing spirituality, but it is not the fundamental end of the spiritual path. Creativity allows us to connect with our very soul and allow us to communicate with the deeper aspects of oneself. One of my friends is probably the most incredible ceremonial magician I have ever met. Yet he often struggles to receive regular communication from the beyond. He is one of the most practiced and devoted of ceremonial magicians and there is definitely aspects of my life which I have modelled after him, by aspiring to certain traits he has. However speaking to his spirits is actually quite difficult for him. This is for two reasons. The first reason is because he likes to exercise scepticism a lot and sometimes this stifles the communication. The second reason is that he does not express himself artistically. He is a scientist: literal, logical, analytical and rational, but not artistic. I even remember a time when he approached learning a musical instrument and picked the most scientific of instruments … a theremin. Even the way he approached learning it was the most scientific of ways, analysis of other players. For all his videos that I watched I never saw him attempt to play something from the heart. It is often this lack of creative expression that gives us a disconnect from our soul. This is why creative expression is so important. However creative expression the beginning of the spiritual path not the end and story-telling is only one method of creative expression.
If the soul can’t express itself and then how it express something else? If you learn to express yourself you create a tube of flow of expression from the soul. That can be used to let the divine flow through you as well. Creative outlet is the paint that the gods and goddess use when speaking through you. However if you’re focusing on expressing yourself then you’re not learning to express them. Learning apply paint to a canvas does not make you an artist, it hardly makes you an interior decorator. When the soul within you moves you to express something deep inside you, then you then become an artist. When the spirit inside you moves you to express itself then you become the medium. This is still not the end of the spiritual path is still only very much the beginning.
Reading authors such as Franz Bardon inform us that mediumship or channelling is the lowest of grades of the magician. The magician seeks not only to express the forces he works with, but also to command them. Obviously unless you have the sensitivity to the spiritual world then you can’t be aware of any changes you make, when trying to command the world so you need to have creativity to sense what you’re doing. Creativity allows the development of this sensitivity, but it’s only one way.
There are other ways to be creative. I don’t really tell stories. Sometimes I type them… I have novel that’s being written, but I have other higher priorities and it’s mostly just full of notes waiting to be fleshed out. I often prefer poetry, I used to write some songs or lyrics, but mostly its poetry these days. I also often write a piece following each ritual I do with my coven to express to the divine what I feel about it and what I felt from it. This is way more two way and allows the creative juices to flow. I also occasionally splash paint on a page. Also the way storytelling is done today (often repeating stories that have been heard before) is hardly creative.
We need to be developing everyone, not the few. So having a few storytellers and everyone else being passive to it, seems to develop no-one, but the storytellers, the few. This doesn’t seem like what we need to me. Unless this is a secret adherence to Nuit’s words in the Liber Al vel Legis “Let my servants be few and secret”.
The storyteller has just begun to step on the path. This is the beginning of the spiritual connection, but not the totality of it. So I am frequently horrified when people don’t seem to have moved on from storytelling in their spiritual practice. If we stop at artistic expression and finished our spiritual progression, we haven’t developed at all. We end up with people able to express 10-20 stories they learned and that’s it! Who can speak to the gods??? No-one, but John can remember a story that was spoken about the goddess in 1960s. Is that really helpful to any goddess? Have we served our deities? Can we use them? Can we truly demonstrate the power of our faith?
The Supernatural Denied
In the beginning I suggested that story-telling is a bit like astral project in that, you create a world and other people’s minds jump into that world. In my experience astral projection is real. So why spend forever focusing on projecting yourself into someone else’s story and not doing this potentially very power supernatural experience? When you learn how to project yourself for real, you can freak your friends out by going to visit them and poking. Okay… okay… perhaps I shouldn’t have done that… maybe it was naughty. But some of the subsequent telephone calls I got confirmed I was going somewhere. I was reminded by the Book of the Law “I give unimaginable joys on earth: certainty, not faith, while in life”. What had happened told me that, whether or not I could actually leave my body, there was some connection between me and my friends that defied science as I understood it. If this sort of astral projection is our aim, then why waste our time projecting our minds into someone’s story and calling that magic. Are we avoiding the supernatural?
Trying to make mundane things seem magic often can kill people’s faith that there really is anything magic to believe in any more. I remember reading about Oberon zel Ravenhart surgically altering baby goats to make them grow a single horn and called it a unicorn. On that day I nearly turned away from my magical practice altogether. Someone so heavily involved the pagan community had to mutilate and disfigure animals to experience something that I would hardly consider to be magical. If he had to act so desperately to achieve something that barely was magical then perhaps there was nothing I could learn… boy was my assumption wrong. Such an act almost showed me that there was nothing truly magical about these people, Oberon and Morningstar, luckily I didn’t assume that to be the case about everyone.
When magic is reduced to storytelling it hardly seems worth the effort. There are so many brilliant storytellers and I don’t need to be one. However there are so few people strict enough, devoted enough and researched enough to actually do magic, and even less people willing to truly ask themselves the tough questions about their results.
If this for all pagans this were to be the end of their spiritual path then no magic will be performed. It will be forgotten. It plays a key role in guiding mankind and it would not longer guide us in our progress. At a key time such as this when those of the old aeon afraid of the new found freedoms are trying to push back on freedom. The power of magic is needed more than ever.
If this storytelling is the limit of your magic… quit. Or at least stop calling it magic. Aleister Crowley often liked use separate terms Magick and Magic to distinguish between spiritual ritual and illusions performed on stage (also he liked the numerology). Yet people want to take a step back and blur the lines. When you do this you cheapen what is possible. You think you’re trying to inspire, encourage and develop, but really you’re turning people away who are really seeking the divine and the supernatural. They will turn to Hinduism, Buddhism and Yoga while paganism becomes nothing other than people dressing up in crushed velvet, drinking mead and retelling snow white from a pagan point of view. You’re embarrassing those of us who summon spirits, speak with the gods and walk the strange planes of other realities with our minds. Yeah you want to feel included. So does a child who wants to walk. Doesn’t mean we have to change the definition of walk to include crawling so the child feels included because we also call their crawling walking. I am losing the will to use terms you have used because you have destroyed them.
I write the odd novel and have creative outlet, but it is the canvas of the Art of Magic not the painting. Don’t confuse the pen and paper for the message that is written with them.
It’s not my Will
I just don’t have time for most of it. For some people story-time is the totality of their spirituality and I can’t think of anything so limiting. Spirituality has this potential for growth, development and more. The focus on storytelling which is becoming more and more popular prevents people exploring that side of things.
Storytelling requires an audience. A huge part of the art of storytelling is bouncing off an audience. Well what if it was no-one’s will to listen? Then you can’t practice your spirituality. How could that even be a spirituality?
I don’t have the time to sit and listen. I live a purpose driven life. My time is powerful and I cannot believe some of the incredible things I have been able to fit into my life. Often my friends will tell me something like this “I was so knackered I couldn’t go out so I stayed and watched the entire second series of Sabrina. What did you do?” I am shocked. I feel the need to play down my evenings “I worked on my art for a bit and cooked.” I just don’t have the heart to tell them that I repaired a train set, added more paint to something I am working on on my easel, cooked dinners and lunches for the next 3 days, practiced all the basics moves of White Crane kungfu and summoned my friendly family jinn (practicing working through one of my latest Occult books). I can’t imagine sitting there and wasting so much time listening to people tell such unimaginative stories when I could be doing so much with it. I would spend the whole time wondering if this was really worth wasting an hour of my time which could be spent so much more wisely.
On average we are alive for 701,000 hours in our entire life. Many of us have already spent half of that. Divide 80 times by your age and then remove that number to give you your potentially remaining hours. A 40-year-old would have about 350,500 hours remaining, a third of what remains is going to be used for sleeping (so divide by 3 times 2 leaving 233,666), a quarter of what remains will be spent doing a job (so times 0.75, leaving 175,250). If you’re anything like me and what to achieve some mastery of something (in my case kungfu and magic) then you’ll need to be aware it is estimated that it takes 10,000 hours to achieve some sort of mastery over something and remember you want to achieve that master while you’re still young and able to use those skills. Does that not leave us with very limited time we can actually use? I want to be an expert in Kung fu and Magic two arts which will probably require more than 10,000 hours especially considering kungfu has so many styles and weapons. Of my limited time on earth, some of which should be spent doing something entertaining. Why am I going to here listening to someone tell a badly written story when I have life to live and a limited life at that. I just don’t have time for it. It’s not my will.
Often people for whom story-time is the be all and end all of their spirituality, pick tales that teach the most basic morals designed for 8-year-olds. Morals which actually when examined provide a very limited view of reality. Golden Rule is a typical example of this… “treat others how you like to be treated” seems like an excellent idea and it really is. That is until you begin to recognise some people are introverts and some are extroverts. If you read the language of love you realise just how different people can be and suddenly a story which has the punch line which is a paraphrase of the Golden Rule seems more like a joke than a spiritual practice. This does not challenge me to grow. It has so little value add in me life. It’s a waste of my previous time which could otherwise be spent doing my Will.
The Magician’s reputation
I don’t want to tell someone I’m a Magician and have them ask me to tell a story. Ask me to summon a demon. Ask me to divine the future. Perhaps I respond by telling a story and then find that because I did not use the typical hero’s journey story arch that I couldn’t possibly be recognised as a magician with a spirituality. What a potential fallacy.
This rant it born from pagans who’s spirituality is limited to storytelling. Why haven’t you moved from the grade of Bard yet Karen? Are you scared you religion wouldn’t be accepted if saw what you really claim to believe in? Is it because it is easier to assimilate people if they don’t know the unusual beliefs espoused by members of the group and they just appear to be storytelling and dressing up in crushed velvet robes with pointy hats? Do you want a harmless reputation? “And it harm none… do what ye will” was just written to try and make “Do What Thou Wilt” more digestible to the masses. When pandering to what other people would like to see you’re not doing your Will.
Does astral projection, theurgy and demon summoning sound scary to people who don’t believe in that stuff? Well I am sorry, but I just don’t care what people think. I don’t need to colour my spirituality in a way to make it acceptable, in fact with normal people I hardly speak about what I do. Often people reduce magic to passive stuff and storytelling to make magic seem harmless and to earn pagans a seat at the table with the major world religions. Peter Grey mentions in his Apocalyptic Witchcraft that we only earned that seat because they do not believe in the power of the witch. They welcome us because we have made ourselves seem harmless to make us more acceptable. As if some form of scepticism should give us some street-cred that we don’t need. It just cheapens what we are capable of and disenchants paganism for those that peak into it. Once upon a time you would not cross the witch for fear she might turn you into a toad… now people just laugh at her putting crystals up her vagina doing Kegel exercises and calling it a spirituality.
I get fed up people wanted to be respected as powerful wizards when all they can do is retell the story of Sleeping Beauty with added pagan flourishes to suit a pagan audience. You want to practice your religion??? PRACTICE IT! Practice is an active activity. Don’t just sit and listen. Do! I call you to do.
Fantasy
So often I run into Magicians that seem so out of wack with the rest of the world. I remember listening to someone talk about voodoo and he spoke of aracnomancers , vampiric frogs and something else I can’t remember … I was like what is this guy on? Eliphas Levi warned us about confusing refractions and reflections of divine light with it’s genuine source. These things can cause divine light to appear in a different place than where it actually comes from. He warns about this particularly concerning the Astral plane and Yesod. The astral plane is very sensitive to our imagination. We can easily craft our own dream world in it. However that dream world isn’t really a part of the natural state of the universe. It is just a reflection of our own imagination. It can be very useful for launching us off into the rest of the astral plane, but if you don’t know how to leave it, it will trap you like the map in inception. You feel like you’re going on and on but really you’re just exploring more of your own imagination.
I have got fed up of magicians that get lost in their own fantasy lands. Their teachings related to whatever is in their own dream space and only really helps with such a small part of the astral plane that it’s just not that useful to me. How did they get here? They never learned to use them to go beyond the storytelling. They didn’t learn to step out of their own imagination into strange planes of existence that go beyond reality. When this happened they stopped being able to start showing to themselves and to others that magic is powerful, supernatural and defies reality as we currently understand it.
How do we fix it?
Finally… the fixes. These are everything we need to do to make our spirituality work. If you notice storytelling is becoming a major fixture in your local area consider these points.
Remember creative expression in your spiritual development. It’s so important. Everyone needs to express themselves, not just a few storytellers. Also remember that different people express themselves differently. Let everyone create some form of art. Don’t worry if it doesn’t tell a full story just let consciousness flow out and see what happens.
Remember to invoke. Crowley said this repeatedly. He was honest that without the gods he was nothing… he committed his life to invocation. He did it all the time. Then having invoked see how your creative expression changes. Pay particular attention to the difference. That change is what you invoked. Try focusing on that to bring through what you called and channel it.
Don’t stop there. Command the forces of the universe. Walk on the rings of Saturn. Transcend time. See the beginning and the end. Fly up to Olympus with gifts for the gods. Summon demons. Rise the dead. Stir the Jinn. Create phylacteries and fetishes. Don’t just sit there listening to someone speak. That’s like the couch potato of the pagan world!
If you are going to listen to a story… choose one that challenges you. That leaves you changed. Hear something that makes you feel uncomfortable. Realise that some stories, don’t just create themselves in your mind, but they come with a gateway to step into a new world. Take it. Don’t stay in the safe fantasy land where nothing happens. Walk through the gate.
In the words of Michael Ende in the Neverending Story
Look your books are safe. By reading them you get to become Tarzan or Robinson Crusoe. But afterwards you get to be a little boy again. Listen have you ever been Captain Nemo, trapping inside a submarine, while the giant squid is attacking you? Weren’t you afraid you couldn’t escape? The ones you read are safe.