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Title: Folk Magic as Insurrection
Author: Dr. Bones
Date: December 15th 2015
Language: en
Topics: Egoist-Communist, spirituality. Magic, paganism, Insurrection, Occult, liberation, witchcraft
Source: https://web.archive.org/web/2020*/http://godsandradicals.org/2015/12/16/folk-magick-as-insurrection/

Dr. Bones

Folk Magic as Insurrection

“For me, wherever I go, I know my natural and eternal environment, and I

know it as part of me and me of it. Beyond whatever we think, there is a

darkly glimmering mystery far beyond reason and sanity, but full of the

wholeness of beauty. It perpetually sustains and bestows all things with

their own nature and being- perfectly, fully and without need for

further elaboration or rectification. This is the sorcerous conception

of deity.”— Robin Artisson, The Toadbone Treatise

It’s December and the air is warm here.

I peer out my window with drink in hand, watching the blood-splashed sun

collapse beyond the horizon and into the highway. For a moment I relish

being in a State where drinking a lime-juice cocktail isn’t a desperate

plea for warmer days. Here winter never comes, and as such, we never

need to change our tastes to heartier or heavier food and drink.

The Southeast is the only home I’ve known: a land of sweltering heat,

mosquitoes the size of your arm, and uninterrupted madness via Florida

Man. Where I dwell is nothing special: an average middle class town, the

wonder and mystery of the city far away and only faintly sensed. The

hustle and bustle of modern living remains only a faint rumor on the

wind. Life moves along uninterrupted, save for twinges of change here

and there. I can imagine such a life would not be enough for some, and

truthfully it’s not enough for me. But in the meantime, there’s no rush;

I drink deeply from the land and Spirits around me.

I think about Gordon’s piece on Natural Magic, the equation of

Self+Spirit World+Place. It rings true to me. I think about the natural

world around me, my own slice of it. Underneath the regular suburban

dregs still beats the heart of that wild Florida, in every thicket and

every wood. In them I’ve rattled open doorways between realms in areas

smaller than some public parks, I’ve spoken with Swamp Spirits and

learned the unspoken keys to plant identification, and I’ve traded

payment and favors with the local Dead and seen them manifest right

before my eyes. All these things happened in my hometown not in spite of

it, but through it.

The great lesson of Folk Magick has always been that magick was right at

hand, that you didn’t need a library of books or special clothes and

wands to do it. In Hoodoo a quick trip to the grocery store and some

significant places around town will allow you to hurl just about

anything at people. When I’m particularly stuck for an ingredient I

always go Journeying into the Spirit World and ask my friends there what

might do the trick. And often the most powerful gifts are the simplest.

I came to read playing cards, to cast my eyes into the twisting nether

realm of probability and possibility not through some online course nor

through paid lessons from a teacher. I went down to the crossroads for

nine nights around 11:45pm and called out to the One Who Dwells There to

teach me, the only sacrifice being the time I spent there. And teach me

He did. I found whole new ways of looking at the cards, as books and

ideas seemed to drop into my view from all over; I read what I could,

but the biggest advances seemed to come from just being out there, alone

and in the dark, hearing whispers in my head and seeing symbols dance

before my eyes. I read the cards now with great accuracy, with my window

into the shifting seas of potentiality amounting to an admission fee of

one dollar.

Often in life our own worlds can seem disenchanted, our existences too

far away from any of “the action” to feel meaningful. As in spirituality

so too in politics: the same way my heart longs to stir up the dead in

St. Augustine it flutters at thoughts of joining in armed resistance

somewhere in the streets of Rojava; as I ponder the possibilities of

protective mojos made and blessed with the dirt from Castillo de San

Marcos, I wonder what revolutionary potential I could add to the

people’s struggles in Baltimore, Oakland, Chiapas, and Greece. Economics

and familial ties, at least for the moment, always get the upper hand.

But I do not rest on my laurels. I read, I study, I speak with those

around me. I consider myself the advance guard, the agent behind enemy

lines. I gather folks of like mind around me and we plan, we plot, we

create pockets of resistance and freedom. We are the first cells of the

revolution you see, mitochondria that will one day evolve into a greater

being. We put pamphlets, we put up posters, we engage in Direct Action.

Rather then wait for ‘THE Revolution” I’ll do what I can here and now,

building “the new world in the shell of the old.”

Those that simply wait for monumental change, or worse vote in the hopes

it will come, display a distinctly unmagical air about them: they don’t

believe anything can change unless everything does, they can’t imagine

that their actions could move even the tiniest mole hill, they huff that

the time is never quite ripe, that until some Unknown Messiah arrives

we’d best simply hope for change.

Surely we, through direct experience, know better then this?

Can’t a hidden gesture or half-mumbled phrase move someone’s mind? Won’t

a fervent prayer, a simple oil, and an intensity of Will attract unseen

hands to guide you? Doesn’t the simplest mix of red pepper, black

pepper, and sulpher cause the flames of hell to leap up at our command?

You can’t have it both ways: either you and your allies can literally

shift the movin’ and shakin’s of the luck plane as well as this artifice

we call physical reality, or it’s all a sham.

I don’t know about you but I’ve got notebooks filled with proof that

what we deem “inevitable” or “unmalleable” is plainly not so.

Magic presupposes we can change the foundations of the world around us.

Why do our political beliefs so often not follow this maxim? Why are we

waiting for some Vanguard, some Party, some Candidate, to rip up the

noxious weeds of Capitalism and The State? Did we come by any of our

magical knowledge by waiting or did we simply go out and start doing

what we could? Wasn’t every bump in the road a lesson, every victory a

confirmation that even against the odds we can win?

My tradition courses through the land and was born in struggle: against

the State, against the Boss, against the Police. Under candle light and

shroud of burning herbs I can feel the air thick with those that

whispered or sang prayers in other times; they know, they understand:

the battles may be different, the symbols may have changed, but the

struggle has not. Candle flames burst with the same heat and energy

raging away in my heart, teeth gritting in Nietzschean Will to change

the world and break anything that stands in my way. Road Opener work or

Revolution, what’s the difference?

My tradition is not alone: anyone laying hands on the practical magic of

the past is touching a People’s History. You did what you could with

what you had on hand, including whatever ghosts and goblins happened to

be around. These people were in the same boat we are: under the heel of

an oppressive state apparatus, one that could kill them at any time, all

for the service of an economic elite. They too watched an increasing

portion of all the value they created get siphoned away, hunger pangs

and anxiety the mother of many a prosperity spell. Any good witchcraft

carries with it the sublime scent of necessity; by the time you’re in

the woods at midnight making pacts with unseen things it’s safe to say

the usual channels of change have been blocked.

What else is magic but the metaphysical embodiment of Anarchism, of

politics on a spiritual plane? That YOU could defy the laws of the

“Lord” and make new arrangements for yourself, that YOU could gain

insights and knowledge beyond your “station” in life, that YOU needn’t

wait for someone to save you because you were going to save YOURSELF?

Isn’t that what Sorcery is all about? Wasn’t it a battle against the

dragon Zarathustra spoke about, the one that must be defeated, that must

be slain?

“Who is the great dragon whom the spirit will no longer call lord and

god? ‘Thou shalt’ is the name of the great dragon. But the spirit of the

lion says, ‘I will.’ ‘Thou shalt’ lies in his way…”

The day is dead now, street lights and shabby store signs acting as

artificial suns. The lights manage to keep the hum-drum thoughts of day

still near, a collective religious belief in the firm and unvarying

nature of reality, that nothing has nor will it ever change. The lights

bring stability and safety. In this warm paradise where winter never

comes it’s easy to believe the lie that most things are unwavering, that

some things just stay the same.

For instance, global capitalism or a client’s bad luck?

But I have neither the time nor the inclination for such adult bed-time

stories. I close the blinds and set about the work of changing the world

around me. To succumb to the thoughts of static existence, of even

settled accounts is preposterous. I call out to the Unseen with

techniques and tricks propelled into the future by the most

disadvantaged in this region while the plantations of the past have gone

from places of frightening power to mere relics. While others buy and

sell my soul flies right down to the primal, throbbing tap-root of the

land around me; what was once an altar in any other townhouse becomes

the Crossroads of All Existence; my voice no longer my own, my body

wracked with spasms, I become a conduit for things that others claim

can’t or shouldn’t exist.

Impossible? Can’t? Won’t? Shouldn’t? All these words are nothing to me!

There is only The Will.

And if you Will it, it is no dream.