Picture courtesy of Taylor Ellwood 2021
I think the conventional image that people must have of a magical experimenter is someone running around with crazy hair, doing all kinds of off the wall magical workings, which may or may not be grounded in conventional magical theory and practice. I can understand if that’s the image that comes to mind, but the reality of magical experimentation is that it is a careful process, grounded in the experiences of the magician and the work they have done up to the point of experimentation.
This year I’ve been fairly quiet on the magical experimentation front. I’ve been dealing with some life changes, which certainly didn’t help, but a lot of the work I’m doing is long term magical experimentation work. For example, I’ve been learning qi gong and applying what I’ve learned to my work with elemental magic as well as the sphere of art practice I’m engaged in. This is ongoing work that is being developed over time and will continue to be refined and developed because its not something that is done as a one of working.
I have other projects I am doing research for. For instead I am steadily working my way through some different books that are related to my interests in space/time magic and I am applying the ideas and concepts to my practices (such as creating an embodied magical space), but again a lot of this work is slow going and requires a patience and focus that can only be realized by taking the time to do the work and research that necessarily goes with it.
In some cases, I have projects I have planned out and I am doing background work for them and getting ready then to write and publish books on the topics. For example I have a book on social media magic I want to write and one on the inner alchemy of wintering. In both cases I have done the work I need to do, but finding the time to write about them requires I finish other projects first. I will admit a lot of my experimentation is driven by what I want to write about and work on, but that’s normal for any writer I think.
A lot of the books I’m writing now are informed by decades of magical work I’ve been involved in. It seems like I put out a lot of books quickly, but a lot of time had to go into the work and research so I could write those books. This is something that will always be true with magical experimentation, because you have to put the time and effort into the work. Any book you read is ideally informed by years of experience and work that were done before the book was even an idea in the mind of the writer.
My one hope is that I’ll have enough time to write all the books I want to write and share all the experiments I’ve worked on. Yet I know such work must come about in the fullness of time and that it is all part of a process. You have to make the space and time in order for it to converge to a point where it becomes a manifestation of everything you’ve put into it.
