spirits, Magic
Taylor Ellwood
The relationship between sacred kingship and ...

One of the books I’m reading lately is King, Warrior, Magician, Lover by Robert Moore and Doug Gillette. It’s a fascinating book that explores the archetypes of the mature and sacred masculine. This is currently part of the spiritual work that I’m engaged in as I explore my own relationship with masculinity and heal the ancestoral and contemporary wounds that I’m becoming aware of as it relates to how masculinity is treated and perceived in modern times.

One of the aspects I’m exploring in particular is related to sacred kingship and the land. I am in the process of exploring the new city and surrounding areas that I live in. While I’ve lived here for a year, I didn’t have much opportunity until recently to really begin exploring the area and developing a relationship with the land. I find it fitting and useful that part of the process has also involved cultivating a relationship with the land, particularly on the basis of the relationship has with their home and how that relationship plays out in sacromagical work one does in connecting with the land.

magic of writing

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Sentence stems as a form of writing magic

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I recently came across a new writing technique that I am using as part of my personal development work, but I’ve also found it has some interesting applications for writing magic. This technique is called sentence stems and it was developed by psychologist Nathaniel Branden. The way the sentence stem works is you are provided a partial sentence and then you fill the rest of the sentence out with your own answer. Below are a few examples of sentence stems:

If I were to take 5% more responsibility I would…

Taking care of myself means…

I am becoming aware of…

The sentence stems provide the core of the sentence, but require you to finish the sentence. Ideally you write out a few sentence stems around an area of your life that you want to work on and then you fill them out each day. A month is typically suggested for working with the same sentence stems. This is a repetitive process, but the benefit of the repetition is you get to see how your answers evolve. A couple of examples of filled out sentence stems would be:

Taking care of myself means I am exercising each day, eating nutritious food and getting the sleep my body needs.

If I were to take 5% more responsibility I would write enough content to be scheduled out for several weeks.

I’ve been applying sentence stems to my magical practice as well. I use a sentence stem as a foundation and then complete the sentence. I use it for several purposes. The first purpose is to refine my awareness around the specific result I want to manifest. By continually writing out the sentence stem over a period of time I get the opportunity to drill into the result that I want to manifest and consider the different iterations of that expression. This process helps me develop a precise awareness of what I want, and allows for more effective targeting of magic.

The other purpose I use it for is sigil generation. After I write out the sentence stem multiple times, I can pick out the best expressed statement of desire and then use the classic method of sigil development, where you get rid of repeating letters first, and then vowels or consonants, if you still have too many letters. The sentence stems make it easy to come up with different statements of desire that you can turn into sigils around whatever you want to work on magically.

I’m also experimenting with using sentence stems in my writing magic practices, with the idea being to pick a specific them and use the sentence stem in my journaling to write that theme into reality. I’ve done some similar journaling practices in the past, but what makes the sentence stem different is the deliberate repetition. The repetition conditions your consciousness to focus more on the theme you are writing about and this in turn allows you to be receptive to how that theme shows up in your life.

Sentence stems is another example of how a writing practice can be taken and applied to magical work in order to get consistent results. It’s also an excellent method for doing internal work on yourself and having an objective record of the work.

Rewriting the narrative of your life through social media

I find social media to be a fascinating tool, as a writer, because of how it has become a journaling tool for people. Each day I’ll read updates where people share fascinating notes about their lives, as well as their various interests. Something which has always stood out to me about social media is that it’s a space where people are rewriting the narratives of their lives through the content they generate and the live interactions they have with other people.

One of the ways that I experiment with social media as a magical practice involves creating a distinct narrative of my life that I want to manifest. I consider social media to be a hypersigil, but instead of creating a character to represent myself, I simply use the medium of social media as a representation of my life as it is happening. The writing and reading of events can create a compelling narrative the speaks to the reality of the person doing the writing, as well as those doing the reading.

As a a writer I become the reader of my life, both in terms of responding to other people’s comments on what I’ve shared but also reviewing the memories of my experiences that are on the social media sites. We are co-creating an interactive dialogue that shapes the narrative between us in written and sometimes graphical form.

From a magical perspective the approach I take is that social media allows me to create a narrative of my life fused with a specific intent that is embedded in the writing. What I choose to write and share is reflective of that intent. One consideration is that the intent is filtered because social media and writing in general is filtered by the subjective biases we bring, but that’s also a strength from a magical perspective, because that subjective bias becomes a magical tool for the writing. Your subjective bias has all the personal attachments connected with it and that fuels the writing and crafts the experience of the narrative.

In my upcoming class the Practical Magic of Writing, we’re exploring how to create a narrative of your life, using hypersigils. Social media can be one of the mediums you use for this kind of magical work, especially when you integrate other elements such as pictures and videos. I have used Facebook to create manufactured memories and on Instagram I’ve been developing some reels and videos as well as stories told through pictures. The stories I tell become part of the magic of my life and shape the manifestation of that life into reality.