Resilience Magic 4. Soul Of The World

Magic is an intrinsic part of our world. It is a completely neutral and natural force. It is in some essence, divinity in our everyday. It is yin and yang, male and female, living in harmony with nature. Respect of magic helps us take responsibility for our actions and empowers us to live by a creed of honesty – not to harm anyone or anything by our actions (or lack of actions). Taking a spiritual path like this helps us see the beauty in the world – in our seas, rivers, woods, mountains. It helps us better value the great outdoors and countryside (especially if we have been cooped up in city apartments during the pandemic, glued to apps). Magic helps us gather ourselves, find our inner wilderness, light a fight in our soul and activate hidden powers.

“An, it harm none, do what you will.”

Forces around us change things, they extend our limits. These unseen forces - referred to in Bible texts, Qabalah and Grimoires alike – flow invisibly all around us. The shape us, mould our senses, provide us our subtle bodies, enrich us with deep consciousness and help take us on a trip beyond the rational mind. Magic winds can be harnessed as techniques to mobilise our creative, visual and imaginative faculties. Margot Adler said that “Magic is the art of causing changes in consciousness.” But we must do magic, just like we must do resilience. Both are active and dynamic. In a fantastic course I’m taking by Julian Vayne, he shares that meditation is the key to magic. All major religions had supermen figureheads who went out into the wilderness and meditated. They went within to bring back deep truths to their people. Whether it’s Buddhism, Christianity or Islam much was influenced by Hindu meditation. Meditation is learning to focus the mind through breathing, through repetition of sounds and with stillness of the body. One must practice daily.

So a daily meditation practice (I am trying 20 minutes a day, along with a 60 minute regular yoga practice) helps us. Julian’s course includes some great YouTube and SoundClouds from Bodyscans to Yoga Nidra and other silent mindfulness practices counted in and out with singing bowl chimes. Each technique (like Jon Kabat-Zinn’s Body Scan meditation) is secular, non-religion dependent, yet can align with any faith you have. I’m learning from Julian that shamans are among us; we all have shamanic possibility. A shaman is someone who straddles two worlds (according to Dion Fortune) and who uses his or her body to do so. A shaman has rigorous mental control in order to understand the workings of their own psychology through meditative practice, ritual, and symbolism. Nurturing our shamanic resilience magic within helps us to open Aldous Huxley’s doors to perception, helps our inspiration and imagination flourish. We don’t all need to be a Mage or Magus, nor operate with pharmacopoeia. If we get to know ourselves (see lesson 1 Resilience Magic) we’re halfway there. We might just get to see, as Julian Vayne suggests, “the wiring under the board” that Terence McKenna had vision of, the machine elves inside the system.

“Know thyself and unto thine own self be true”.

Nourishing our own magic inside and following a code helps us remain uncorrupted and peaceful. Bad magic drives domination, exploitation, degradation, land grabbing and over rampant capitalist growth. Whereas learning to honour the nature – soil, wind, sun, moon, stars, stones, trees, land, blood and bones – roots us in our own power in the universe. In a cosmos of Pan and Artemis, we can metaphorically dance with symbolism, the language of the unconscious and ontology of dreams. This magic awakens echoes in deep primitive levels of our human minds. Jung was a prober of these depths of human soul, rediscovering the old gods within, or the “old ones” as Doreen Valiente calls them. These old ones (unlike Lovecraft’s fearsome demonic ‘Great Old Ones’ in the Cthulhu Mythos) are the archetypes of the collective unconscious, or the ‘soul of the world’.

The Soul of the World is the Anima Mundi. It vibrates under foot with words and images of power. Human life is a temple to its power, it’s source of the most high, it’s sacred altar. We are its custodians and stewards on this planet and must protect it. We don’t need to be scryers and seers, nor do we have to dance naked on hilltops at full moons or run backwards around the Rings. The primordial Eve, Lilith, Queen of the Fairies, Hecate, Diana, Brigid and Goddess Mother is within us – along with the djinn, good and bad. Although I’m woman, I also have the male animus represented within too – Pan, Cernuous, Janus, Osiris and Jupiter inside. These spirits live through us day-by-day, in normal life – none of us need run howling into the night! Yes, ceremonial herbs and plants can assist us like tools. For example, Vervain, St. John’s Wort, Wormwood, Orris Root, Mugwort, Rue, Hyssop and Dragon’s Blood – all help protect and guard our wellbeing and serve some good purpose. But we don’t all need to be green men and green women nor conjure healers or cunning folk. We don’t need to be versed in the Egyptian Book of the Dead, nor Hebrew Qabalah or Key of Solomon grimoire. We can honour Roman Saturnalia and Saxon Yule at Christmas, celebrate Ostara at Easter and Midsummer on St. Johns Day, Beltane as Roodmas and Samhain for Halloween – or we can honour the Equinoxes and Solstices of the earth. We can walk over barrow and sacred ring towards country pubs by Down’s ridge. We can believe in orders or elves and nature-spirits (like in my home county of Sussex where in Arundel there’s a Knucker Hole to the Nicor water-demon. Patching and Clapham Woods are also last home to the Fairies in England and there’s a Devil’s Soupbowl). The mage has always been the doctor and practical psychologist to the common people, with her wise knowledge, she was the original futurist strategist, NLP hypnotist or psychotherapist.

In 2020, magic comes more up-to-date. We can see our bodies as receivers of consciousness. We can know that we are something greater than ourselves. We are bigger than our own desires, individual ambitions and wants. We are not just a star, but part of a whole cosmos. Through our dreams, our visioning, our individuation, our connection with the soul of the world, our yoga and meditation etc. We can develop our inner powers, we return from Moore’s Dark Night of the Soul and with boon. We can journey back from the underworld with secrets to pleasure, freedom and power. We can travel into the sacred, we can fight for our soul. Magic helps us stop being rigid and unbending, it provides for us a bright helm to light the way. Resilience Magic transforms us. We continuously change and grow, we overlap and engage with the whole world. We’re interconnected. We are at once individual consciousness and also an element within a greater continuum. Vayne tells us that “without empathy we become automata”. Resilience Magic then is a technology to help us flex our empathy muscle in the everyday by developing our imagination.

This is seen by some as the end of times – as the Kali Yuga, Ragnarök, Armageddon, Apocalypse in Revelations etc. But this eschatology does not serve us. What if we were to see everyday as an opportunity to die (mentally, spiritually), to kill off old parts of ourselves and to be reborn anew with new ideals and values daily. If part of us dies daily (via our Yoga, Mindfulness, Bodywork, Dreams) part of us can be reborn daily at a deeper level of consciousness. Instead of being the end of history, it could be the end of separation and the illusion of duality. Realists tend to reject the fantasy and imaginary as the unreal or a fiction, they dismiss visions as delusions, genius as madness. But for those of us who see further, into hidden worlds, in the occult, on the fringes, at the fertile edges – we see Jung’s “Aeons deep sea”. We see the fluid and the liminal. We see the metaphorical and the daimonic, the soul-full. We see via the Soul of the World. We know the fallacy of separation and “official reality” lens or futures-cones.

In his book Magick Works, Vayne reminds us of James Hillman’s great warning: “The literal is the enemy”. He also imparts Doreen Valiente’s urge, that “effort and visualisation make the magic circle, not material things.” I’ve also really started to realise over this lockdown that – to quote Dion Fortune and Wallace Wattles – it is really true, in pattern logic, that “Thoughts become Things.”

Astrologer Austin Coppick called this the ‘Woodchipper’ time. I choose to hope that there will also be more light.

The light that lit me up this week was connecting to a great blogger, one I have followed for a long time. I finally commented on his work and he linked to my site in a lovely post, that was beautiful for me. If you want to learn about the Qabalah, about Hermeticism, about the Inverse Tree of Life and Lilith, this blog is wonderful and thought provoking and can be read here at Hermetic Lessons. I highly recommend his series of writings.

I’ll keep on plugging away here blogging as stream of consciousness and writing therapy for the soul. I’m working on Gordon White’s ‘Healthy Girl Summer’ and will continue to try to root, earth and analogue-ise more my natural Aquarian tendencies to air. The herbs, oils and plants help me here.

I listened to a wonderful Road Opener visualization Gordon made and it really transported me to the animist world. And I caught up with Austin Coppick’s astrological look ahead at H2. I hope we can empower for the ‘new normal’ world a renaissance of nature, a reverse migration out of smart cities and into communities and rural grassroot settlements. I hope we can all embrace more wild gardening, micro greenhouses, self-reliant food growing, barter systems, local cryptocurrencies and beauty. I actively hope that it’s not all nanobots, VR, simulacra, autonomous drones, smart surveillance, preventative tracking and contact tracing Orwellian scenarios. I hope no one starts re-writing ourhistory to change the future (or our future to change our past). I hope we’ve all enough food, water (no drought), good farming systems, independent capital etc. I hope we eliminate identity politics, billionaire agendas and move to a greener world. I hope we all have love, health, medicine, opportunity, protection, good governance, debt-free futures, empathetic leaders, inspiring writers and change-agents and that we can all continue with re-enchantment of our anima, to go deep into the soul of all things. I hope we have the foresight and power to build the infrastructure we need that really serves us. That could be Permaculture-inspired ‘No Dig’ gardens or Dengue-mosquito free zones and homes. I hope we all become oracles and open roads ahead for others – with our magic. I hope we choose soul psychology and imagination over materialism, and ride the shamanic trip on the rainbow inside our heads. I hope the powers-that-be don’t start grabbing data to replace grabbing land and my wish is that this very Saturnian ‘containment’ time ends soon. Yet the lockdown (plague or otherwise) seems here to stay in this point in the timeline.

Now I’m embracing my own inner magic, my Resilience Magic within, I’m also far more aware of darkness and dark magic by others. There is without a doubt deep dark magic going on here during these crazy times, on a macro and space-weather ritual level. But I choose the magic of restoration, of regeneration, the sacred, the imaginal, the true will of the genius daimon within, the Holy Guardian Angel, the higher self. The good magic weapon, our power in this battle, is how we can change perception – every perceptive moment, how we can charge those moments with meaning. Because “form” is only a transient state of perception – everything changes.

We are in 'the Fall' here folks, at the macro level. But from the fall we find emerging possibilities. If we let our magic hearts lead, into an imaginative and purposeful journey, we can enthral ourselves in the rapture of a new experience. The ‘new normal’ is just a glyph, a new brand logo and economy. To navigate it we can fire-up what Henry Corbin called the Mundas Imaginalis (imagination which has the power to create being into form). This can be our defense against maleficence. A lifeline that will not fray nor unravel but is (like magic itself) a self-transformative process. We need a guerrilla ontology with which to move further up the beach, to find what White calls our ‘Rivendell’, funded via our ‘Helmsdeep’. Symbols, will, spirit, energy, nature, creativity, perception, poetry and the sacred – all these will help us through that forest passage in dark times.

Just like in Permaculture, we need to garden the zone of our selves. Saturn-in-Aquarius and Jupiter-in-Aquarius will be tough, but now we know the landscape to traverse over the decade, over the century. Each resilience magician can walk that path and survive and thrive. This is not the end.  

There is hope left in my Pandora’s box of sorrows. Hope in books and learning and expanding. So I’ve ordered a lot more books, oils and candles. And I finished the week with completing a Doreen Valiente book from Treadwells, an ode to my home Sussex and past. So as we look for answers to plague and scale scary futures of Human+ imaginings, my resilient stand is to share a toast instead to the simple old ways.

“To the Old Ones! Merry meet, merry part. And merry meet again.”

Until we meet again, here's a little meditation video my son made.