Picture courtesy of wikipedia
I always find it interesting when critics of pop culture magic make the arguments that pop culture magic either can’t work or if it does work, the results aren’t as good as other systems of magic. I wonder why they make those criticisms, especially when its clear that for the most part they haven’t actually tried pop culture magic, and therefore don’t have any qualified experience to critique pop culture magic. The conclusion I’ve come to is that such critics attack pop culture magic because they feel threatened by the idea that pop culture magic may supplant their practice of magic. As a result, they feel the need to try and take pop culture magic down.
When I first started writing articles and later my first book Pop Culture Magick, I was on the receiving of similar criticisms. I was told I was reinventing the wheel and that pop culture magic wasn’t real magic. Nevertheless I continued writing articles and books and giving talks on the topic, because I knew there were other people practicing pop culture magic and I also had tangible results from using pop culture magic. And over the years I have heard from people who read my books and articles and told me how they didn’t feel so alone and realized that pop culture magic could be a viable path of magic, one where viable systems of magic could be developed and used.
Even now, we see evidence of the validity of pop culture magic, because so many more people practice it or pop culture paganism. In the Pop Culture Magick Facebook group, we have over 1000 members, which suggests something significant: So many people wouldn’t evince interest in pop culture magic or practice if in fact it did not produce results or wasn’t real magic. And it is safe to say there are more than a thousand practitioners of pop culture magic.
However, we shouldn’t assume on quantity alone that pop culture magic works. As with any other magical system or discipline, we should insist on a rigorous examination of pop culture magic in order to determine if the quality really is there. So, let’s consider pop culture magic for a moment. My definition of pop culture magic is that it is the application of the principles and processes of magic to pop culture, in order to produce results and transform your life. A pop culture magician can also derive magical techniques and practices that are situated in pop culture and draw on those same principles and processes. That’s my definition and it may not be the one you’d agree with or use to describe pop culture magic, but I think it’s a useful definition because it clearly makes a connection between the principles and processes of magic that can be found in any system of magic and pop culture. What this definition argues is that it is possible to achieve similar results as you might find with other systems of magic.
At this point the skeptical magician might query with a demand to prove that such results can be accomplished. My answer to that magician is to simply look at my own life, wherein pop culture magic has helped me manifest a number of results that transformed my life. For example the comic book sigil method, which so far as I know was the first multi-sigil technique to be developed draws up on the design aspects of comic books in order to create panels of sigils that are charged and fired in order to get multiple results. I used this technique several times to transform my life and get results I needed.
Likewise much of my space/time magic system is derived from the Deathgate Cycle, which is a fantasy series where the authors provided a viable explanation of how probability magic could work. I took those principles and applied them to magic and created an approach to working with space/time magic that made sense and could not have been derived alone from traditional approaches to magical work.
Over the years I’ve worked with different pop culture spirits and gotten insights and help that I couldn’t have found with more traditional spirits, because the cultural and modern context of a situation mattered. In working with pop culture spirits what I discovered is that they are just as viable and real as more traditional spirits. The advice and help they’ve provided has helped me solve relationship problems, explore wealth magic from different angles (and get accompanying results, and otherwise inspired my magical work.
No one would practice pop culture magic if it didn’t work and help people get results. The people who feel the need to occasionally assault the validity of pop culture magic are embarrassing themselves over the need to somehow validate their own spiritual path at the expense of another, instead of actually focusing on doing the work of their path and letting that speak for itself. We as pop culture magicians have nothing to prove. Our magic works and transforms our lives.
