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One of the latest sources of inspiration in my magical work is a series of books by Christopher Alexander where he explores how to create life through architecture (affiliate link). While these books admittedly, on the surface, have little to do with esoteric secrets for summoning spirits or the other types of occult lore that is usually so favored by occultists, I nonetheless find them to be quite inspiring because of how they look at the process of creating a building where people feel a sense of life. There is something profound about a discipline that explores how to bring life to the process of building.
And I find that it carries over to magical work, provided one is willing to explore the possibilities and perspectives that are offered. I’m only a bit over halfway through the second book of the series, but nonetheless I have discovered a profound amount of insight and knowledge that be applied to both space/time magic in specific and magic as a discipline in general.
For example, one of the points Christopher Alexander makes is that if you want to build something, you have to determine what is most important, and focus on that first, to the exclusion of everything else. Once that point is defined, you move on to the next important thing, and define it, and so on and so forth, until you have a created a sequence. But it is not an unnatural sequence. Instead it is an organic sequence that naturally unfolds to create a wholeness that embodies the process of life within the building that is created through that process.
How do we apply that to magic?
Define what is important and build a sequence from that to unfold the wholeness of the magical working. For some, defining what is most important could start with the desired result, but for others it could involve defining the specific tools or practice you’ll use. The key is to figure out what is most important in your magical process and start there. Define it and allow it to naturally lead you to the next important aspect of the working and then go from there to the next. You’ll create a process. It may not be an overtly magical process, but it doesn’t have to be.
What it needs to be, what it needs to contain are the elements that make sense to you and are most important to you and allow you to build a magical working that you can then execute. And you’ll discover something fascinating when you take this kind of approach to your magical work.
You’ll discover that the very process of developing the working IS part of the magical working. The act of constructing the working is a performative aspect of doing the working. This is an unstated and often ignored aspect of magical work, taken for granted in light of the focus on the more colorful aspects of magic, but when you examine the act of building a magical working what you can discover is that you are creating both within yourself and the world around you the magical working and setting it up so that when you perform the actions it already comes together and is executed because you built the process and imprinted it on yourself.
This is one of the reasons I like to study other disciplines. What you learn, as a result, is a different way of thinking and experiencing the world and the work you do. It frees you to discover what really matters and allows you to appreciate how it unfolds in your life, because in the other disciplines you uncover facets of reality that you would otherwise miss out on. The idea, for instance, of building an organic process around what is most important isn’t something many people will think of consciously, but when you apply a conscious awareness of this discipline to your magical work, it changes the way you think about and experience and work magic, because you see the world differently as a result. And when we see and experience the world differently, what we truly discover is a way forward that moves us past the conventional and into the unconventional allowing us to embrace the imaginary and turn it into reality.
