The Power of Nostalgia

I don’t know about any of my readers, but I have books I learned from originally which I no longer hold in much esteem. Authors like Silver Ravenwolf, Oberon vel Ravenhart and Ted Andrews. You might not even remember the author. Maybe it was just a purpley-pink coloured cover with what looks like a sphere floating in cyberspace or a person with electricity emanating from their head and in big letters, it says “Develop your psychic powers” or “Awaken your sixth sense”. You guys know the sort of books I’m talking about. I bet some of you are embarrassed to admit you still have these books! Do you hide them away in the attic? Have you taken them to the charity shop and popped them in anonymously so no-one can judge you for once having owned them?

One of my favourite such authors, when I had just started practising Magic, was Konstantinos. I was obsessed with the summoning of spirits. It seemed like a good way to perform experiments to try to derive information about what was the true nature of heaven, what really happens to us when we die etc. I could summon angels and cross-examine them. Konstantinos wrote a pretty good book for starters who wanted to learn to Summon Spirits. It was a heavily simplified version of Franz Bardon’s Practice of Magical Evocation and very accessible to the newbie and when I was really getting started with the Occult it was recently published.

I liked the book so much that I bought most of the author’s other books… not always the best idea. The author identifies as “alternative”. He lives quite a gothic lifestyle and enjoys associating himself with darker themes. Some of his books really reflect this such as Nocturnal Witchcraft and Gothic Grimoire… and don’t get me started about the Nocturnicon which contains a ritual that borders on necrophilia fetishism. At the time when New Agers were quite toxically positive, these alternative themes seemed more realistic than other authors. They called to me and they worked.

Early in my craft, his writing had a focus on energy work which still impacts my practices today. I still create a sort of whirlpool above my head when summoning deity energy down, I’m just less worried about being associated with the night and darkness and that seems his entire focus.

Anyway, last night was a full moon and having recently written about Armchair Occultists, I felt I needed to actually do a ritual. Most of my practice at the moment is back to Magic Mirror Exercises (as might be found in Franz Bardon’s Initiation into Hermetics). I refer to them as the Elemental Grades here. There’s so much work to do there for everyone. There is only very simple meditations and microcosmic work to do. So it was about time I did more practical ritual work. I had pulled out all my old books for my new coven babies to thumb through so I could get an idea of the paths they were personally drawn to. As I looked over this mound of books I spotted Konstantino’s Nocturnal Witchcraft. Since I did not have much ritual-wise that I am working on at the moment, I decided for nostalgic sake to do his full moon rite since it happened to be a full moon night.

The energy was extremely intense at a level I hadn’t felt in ages and I certainly did not feel at the time I had done the ritual in my early practice. There was something very fun about it. For someone like me who constantly focuses entirely on purpose at every point, there was something transgressive about doing a ritual just for funsies and using a ritual that had become so frivolous in comparison to my other work. One of the people to join my coven and learn from me taught me something interesting the other day. He tries not to refer to his spiritual practices as “work”. He would rather not say “spiritual work” or “energy work”, because he wants to maintain the idea that this stuff is not “hard work” and is pleasurable like a game, which it is. But maybe for me, it has become work, the hard task of self-refinement. When I first started practising magic, it certainly was exciting, a bit scary and transgressive of the Christian morals I had forced upon me in my youth.

I have come to the conclusion, it is when we first get involved in magic, we have all the feelings that really got us into doing magic in the first place. When a spell seems to work we get a bit freaked out because it seems like fantasy land has just collided into our sensible and predictable reality. When for the first time, we really felt energy / qi and got a “hit” (as opposed to the hundreds of misses) in a psychic reading, it suddenly told us how special we were becoming. These feelings and mental states are certainly something conducive to magical practice.

When we go back and do ritual work which has a lot of nostalgia associated with it, it’s also tied up with those mental states that got us into magic in the first place. It activates those alchemical states of mind that changed us once already and there is still some untapped power there.

When we start associating with the less physical side of the universe it often relates to us using images or stimuli you might normally associate with the other five senses. You might sense a spirit by smell, feel a warm or cold spot. Pressing yourself against someone’s aura, you might feel your hands physically passing through something. Maybe you look and just see an image in your mind’s eye. It’s a great task to make a dictionary connecting these sensations to stuff happening on the spiritual planes. When I see energy as burgundy red what does that mean? Oh, it’s a certain type of willed, concentrated energy which is refined and purpose-driven. Right, let’s make that an early entry in my dictionary. These dictionaries live with us for many years to come.

When we work our early forms of magic they use those very early entries into what I am rapidly calling our energy dictionary. They are some of the most natural and rooted entries, based on how our own system works. Before we started memorising systems that attempt to make complete dictionaries categorizing every distinct colour in the spectrum, specific metals, notes on a stave, emotions, symbols, lotuses with different numbers of petals, etc.

Regular practitioners of magic are always growing and learning. This means that their rituals are constantly changing. What they rarely do is repeat the same thing. The problem with that is that they are always adding new feelings to their dictionary and rarely revisiting. Yet many of those original entries in their dictionary are the most natural and the most securely in place and so they connect us with our spiritual self in an intense way like having learned first carved into us more deeply than later knowledge.

There’s beauty in going back to the original way we practised. Don’t miss out on this chance to tap into your inner beginner witch, your inner minerval or your neophyte state. Try it. No need to thank me!