Magic for Beginners
(This page is a work-in-progress and will gradually evolve. I'll post content to Mastodon as I add more. If you have ideas, questions, corrections, excitement to share, I'd love to hear it. @-mention or DM me!)
What is this?
I want to talk about magic. Real magic. In the real world. Not in entertainment: stories, books, movies, role-playing games -- but in our everyday lives. Real magic is quite different from imaginary magic (though it is intertwined with imagination in fascinating ways! I think imagination may be a key to magic.) I want to talk about how to find, experience, and do magic. Because I've been looking into it and... there's something there.
I want to talk about this document a bit. About who I am, about what I'm trying to do, about who you might be. Magic is big. I can't do everything and it would be silly to try. What I want to do is provide a map leading into the world of magic for curious beginners. A way to find entrances to this part of the world, a menu of approaches and suggestions about things to try. What's going to work for you is going to be different from what works for me or for anyone else. Magic seems to happen upstream from where we share our world -- it's closer to us and more personal than many more familiar phenomena. Your experience of magic is going to be specific to you, so there's only so much I can tell you or that you will be able to tell anyone else. The details will all be different, but there may be similarities of shape.
I am a beginner. A lot of people have been doing this stuff for a lot longer than I have. I'm not making any claims of authority here -- I'm not an expert, I'm a beginner sharing my experience, hoping it will be useful to other beginners. I'm also not making any claims of novelty. Magic is old. Possibly as old as human culture. It's been practiced by everyone in all times and places. It's not always recognized as being magic -- it can take many shapes. I'm not making any claims of universality -- I'm not trying to tell you how it is for you, how it is for everybody, how it is.
I'm not telling you this is true. Whether magic is true is for you to decide.
Deciding what's true is a lot of what magic is.
This is not a book. It's not intended as a comprehensive instruction on magic, but a sort of base camp to set out from in interesting directions. Eventually you may make your own camp, a home for your own practice, and you might or might not share it with others.
Please remember to have fun.
A Magical Library
I'm starting to make a list of books I've found helpful.
It is already kind of long, so I moved it to another page:
There are sometimes descriptions and sometimes little reviews (which I'll gradually improve). I plan to add sections on Tarot and Astrology, but these are huge subjects, so for now I'm focused on the rest of magical practice.
Practice Skeleton
I want to describe my practice as it is currently and as it is growing. This is not to say you should do all these things and certainly not that you should do them the way I do, but these are elements of practice that I've found important and valuable and that you might want to consider investigating / trying / researching.
I'll start by publishing a pretty sparse outline and then gradually fill in more detail, write little essays, link to books, recorded talks, websites that I've found useful and try to give a sense of how / why they are good.
It can be difficult, as a beginner, to know where to start. It might not be obvious that an entire field of practice even exists, which makes it hard to learn about it! So these are the main elements of my practice to serve as a model or starting example.
You are probably going to need to modify a lot. You're going to need to tune your approach according to what works for you. Parts of the magic culture can seem very committed to Doing Things The Right Way and being very specific and precise about how to do this or that. I tend to take this with a grain of salt. I do have a sense that precision and strict adherence to tradition can be a powerful mode of practice and way of perceiving the world, but it's not the only way. I recommend getting comfortable with picking up and putting down ways of thinking about, looking at, and practicing magic and thinking critically about what their results are. There is no one way that is correct. There is no one way that the world is. How the world is depends (in part) on how you interact with it.
It's good to add one thing at a time. When you try a new thing, give it time to settle in, self-modify, to prove itself true before adding a new practice.
Try not to feel bad (or not for long) if something doesn't work. You don't have to keep anything for ever. It's fine to drop things that aren't working, feel bad, or just lose their spark.
It's good to be a beginner.
(Let's start with a bare list of some elements of practice. I'll fill this out as I get the time and inspiration.)
Meditation
Meditation has been the foundation of practice for me. I had a solid meditation practice for about a decade before I re-engaged in magical work and it has been a deep resource.
Pretty much any good book about magical practice is going to tell you should meditate. Reasons for this range from "You Must Learn To Control Your Mind With An Iron Will" to "meditation is valuable because it allows you to calm down and start to notice subtle things that are going on around you and in you."
I'm interested in meditation's application to magic, but also (in fact, primarily) for its own value.
Meditation also seems to be very good for my day-to-day mental health (focus, prevention of depression, more responsive, less reactive).
I started meditating with the Headspace meditation app, which, like, I get the sense a lot of my peers look down on as meditation "training wheels". I say fuck that. I struggled with establishing a meditation practice for decades unsuccessfully and: this is what worked for me. I've since outgrown it, but, yeah. It was catalytic. Maybe you don't need it. Maybe you can learn it from a book or from in-person teachers. This is just what worked for me.
I meditate every day (in the early morning, before anything can interrupt or distract me) except rare occasions where things are so crazy I forget. When I'm really busy or distracted, I might meditate 10 minutes. There have been multi month stretches where I do 50 or 60 minute sessions every day. Currently I'm doing between 20 and 40 minutes.
When I started I was doing guided meditations on Headspace for 20 minutes a day. When I grew out of Headspace -- I found just wanted silence -- I used a meditation timer app that allowed configurable interval chimes. As I got into Jhana exploration, I'd spend 10 minutes in each state. One day, my timer app (which I had paid for) decided to disable most of its features and start charging a subscription. I took this as a gentle hint from the world that I had outgrown interval timers and now I just disable notifications and set a timer for an hour. I don't usually sit for an hour these days, but setting a timer quiets the worry "Oh no, but what if I get lost in inner space (this... has never happened to me) and keep meditating for hours and am late for work!"
Inside that hour timebox, I'm free. I just do what feels right and/or what I am led to do. Mostly this is Samadhi practice, marinating in Jhana or exploring more free-form Samadhic states. Sometimes it's settling into, like, the third or fourth Jhana and then experimenting with modes of insight meditation. Some times I just need Metta. Sometimes I try to figure out how to get into the fifth Jhana, of which I've had tantalizing glimpses. Sometimes I just sit.
I sit in a posture called Burmese Posture, which is basically "cross-legged, but without stacking your ankles or calves". I recommend this posture over lotus or half-lotus, particularly if you have huge thighs like me (I am a fat powerlifter). Never attempt lotus or half lotus if you feel it in your knees. The ability to do these postures properly relies on hip flexibility that -- if you are feeling big tension in your knees? -- you do not have. If you do lotus or half lotus without necessary hip mobility you can seriously fuck up your knees. Don't do it. Burmese Posture is fine.
I sit on a zafu and zabuton. A zafu is a cylindrical pillow filled with buckwheat hulls. It is excellent support and enables good hip and spine position for breathing, unblocking the Spirit Body, and just, like, sitting on the floor for a long ass time. A zabuton is like a thin futon just big enough to sit on. The zabuton is what let me go from 20 minute sits with discomfort to 60 minute sessions with none. I wish I had got mine at the beginning of my meditation practice. I use a set I got from Bean Products on my friend Taalumot's recommendation. They are awesome and I endorse them without reservation.
Modes of Practice
(TODO: improve these and add links to resources, ideally including good "guided meditation" audio introductions)
Mindfulness
Paying attention to what is happening in a relaxed way, often focusing attention on an object like breathing. This is the sort of meditation you are likely to learn from an app like Headspace (maybe with some basic Metta or Spirit Body awareness via visualization)
Metta
Practice of love/kindness/compassion toward yourself and others (of varying degree of difficulty). Also called Loving Kindness practice. Opens the heart.
Samadhi
Unification of mind and body in a pleasant state through skillful use of focus and awareness.
Samadhi practice (meditation focused on a pleasant unification of mind and body) has opened my awareness of the Spirit Body (or Energy Body or Subtle Body). It can help with visualization and facility with trance states. It has introduced me to the experience of Jhana, altered states of awareness of profound beauty and pleasure. It diminishes Dukkha (a term of art from Buddhism that means roughly "the *apparently unavoidable stuff about life that sucks") The Jhana are also a stabilizing emotional/spiritual support and a sort of base camp for further explorations in Vipasana or Insight Meditation.
Vipasana
Examining reality during meditation from a variety of perspectives that cause liberation from suffering (Dukkha)
Liberation from Dukkha is kind of the Buddhist project. It's my understanding that Samadhi was already well understood when the Buddha started practice, but he was dissatisfied with it because its benefits are transitory. Vipasana was his innovation, a more permanent solution to the problem of Dukkha.
I mean, sounds great? I'm excited to explore more of this!
Imaginal Practice - Enlivening engagement with archetypal figures.
I had already started to encounter... other beings during meditation when I discovered Rob Burbea's work on Imaginal Practice or Soulmaking Dharma.
Burbea extends work done by Jung and followers and integrates them with Buddhist traditions that emphasize interaction with archetypal figures, such as Vajrayana (Tantric Buddhism).
The difference between an Imaginal Figure or Image in this work and something like a daydream or ordinary fantasy is... extremely nuanced. Rob talks about this literally for tens of hours and I am still working through it, but it is magical.
(I'll have more to say about this as I become confident to talk about it.)
When I encountered imaginal practice I had this sense of "Ah! This is the missing piece." This is where magic and meditation fit together for me. This is a vision of the Dharma that has space for, that incorporates my religious practice.
It's that feeling when, exploring a new city by subway, you get big chunks of city geography that are isolated from each other, connected by subterranean travel. Then one day, walking around, you encounter from one transit neighborhood from another and suddenly you know how those parts of the city fit together.
Like working on a jigsaw puzzle and you suddenly recognize that two big formations fit together with this piece right here.
Imaginal practice unifies magic and mysticism for me.
Movement
You need to move to be healthy.
Exercise
Somatic Practice
Walking
Spirit Body Awareness
Dream Record
Keep a book by your bed and a pen. It's good to have a light you can write by without turning the lights fully on. I use an LED candle for this. (I had a cool pen with a light in it, its ink cartridges were silly small and tended to run out at exactly the wrong time.)
Write down your dreams, even if they seem unimportant, uninteresting, or if you are sure you will remember them.
Recording dreams is a fundamental magical practice for a number of reasons. Yes, it's good to have a record of dreams to refer to, but the most important reason is that writing down your dreams improves dream recall.
It improves it gradually over the course of weeks or months of consistent practice. It's almost as if writing down your dreams demonstrates to your unconscious mind that you value what it has to say, so it says more.
But I've also noticed that writing down your dreams improves your dream recall as you are writing.
I'll pull out my book to record a few uninteresting details from a dream already mostly forgotten and find that as I am writing the first sentence I remember more details. While recording these, I recover more.
I've had this process repeat 5 or 6 times on occasion, pulling entire sections of the dream from oblivion.
You don't know how much you remember until you start writing.
Further Exploration
Recording dreams also opens doors to practices like Lucid Dreaming and analysis of dreams for precognitive content and other bizarre chronological / causational effects.
You may also encounter recurring characters or even build relationships with friends and allies native to your dreamworld.
Magical Record
Keeping a record of your magical work is essential. During the 20th Century, there was a fashion in some subcultures for engaging with magic with scientific rigor. However you feel about this, keep in mind: Magic changes things. You do magic, things are going to change. You're going to want a record of how things were. You might want to retrace your steps. Also: things that seem unimportant at the time often turn out to be extremely meaningful years or even decades later.
Another reason to be committed in your recording are peculiar memory effects similar to those experienced with dream recall.
Magical ritual is an altered state of consciousness. When you return to your normal life... not everything may come back with you.
After you do a working, record what happened immediately after. You may be surprised to discover there are whole sections of your subjective experience that you remember only as you write.
If you don't record your magic, there... might be magic you are doing that you don't remember. (Which, I don't know, I feel kinda weird about that.)
A Side Note
ALWAYS DATE EVERYTHING. (Unless there are good magical reasons not to e.g. in the Black Book working) INCLUDE THE YEAR. It's quite likely you will be reading these records decades from now. You will want to know which November 23 or whatever.
Consider recording the time (if you like to analyze the astrology) and location (especially if you move around a lot).
I write dates like this: 2022-10-25 Tue. They sort nicely if you start filenames with them, but I write dates like this on paper too.
Clear and Ground
You want to start work with a clean work area and clean hands. Metaphorically.
Work gets you dirty. Just the work of existing in our culture gets you dirty. Stuff sticks to you. Ideas. Feelings. Hurts. Habits. Spirits.
Some of it you metabolize, somefalls away on its own, some sticks until it is removed.
Some may have stuck for so long, you don't realize it's not a part of you.
So clearing yourself and the space you inhabit and work in is an ongoing process.
It's hygiene, preventative.
But you also want it to be habitual, to know it cold, so that when shit goes sideways, whether for mundane or magical reasons (if there even is a distinction here), your hands know what to do. Your body, your Spirit Body, your mind has good habits that serve you well in crisis.
Clearing Space
Clearing Yourself
Banishing Bad Stuff
Containment
Space and Boundaries
Keeping Silence
Offerings
Hospitality
Sacrifice
Divination
Omens
Tarot
Lenormand
Astrology
Astro Dice
Pendulum
Somatic Testing
Theurgy
Communion
Automatic Writing
Good Company
Images
Practical Work
Models
Spells
Sigils
Talismans
Sex, Drugs, and Rock & Roll
Magic for Beginners is also the title of my favorite short story, by Kelly Link.
Magic for Beginners was published online by the magazine "Fantasy and Science Fiction" in 2006. (Kelly links to an archived copy of it from her website so I feel ok about linking to it from here, but I do encourage you do buy the collection with the same title because it is excellent.)