I wonder, sometimes, how much other witches – and magicians, sorcerers, wonderworkers, mystics, what have you, those who even talk about their experiences – dial back, tone down, even outright censor their processes and experiences. Not just because somethings are private, but because they don’t want to admit in that forum just how far into the weeds they are.
What got me thinking about this most recently was a post that I wrote for my Patreon supporters, talking about casting and consecrating a series of Jupiter talismans. There were some things that came up in the process that gave me pause. For a couple of those problems, I pulled cards. For others, I consulted my familiar spirits. And I wondered – publicly on twitter – how many occultists just elide that distinction, obscuring their spirit contacts behind cartomancy and other slightly-more-respectable forms of divination.
For all that my brand is radical authenticity bordering on oversharing, I’m certain that I’ve been guilty of this in the past. And I know for a fact that I’ve been guilty of the reason for this: even in the last few days, having written the opening lines of this post, I’ve seen people talking about “the spirits told me” and physically cringed. I remember clearly a moment a few years ago when a woman came into the jewelry store where I was working, asking about making a series of custom Mjolnir hammers because Thor had told her that it was her responsibility to do something about the growing presence of Nazis in the visible Heathen community. The store was (and is) explicitly magical / New Age / Pagan, so this was a little less weird than it might sound, but it was still incredibly jarring. This woman didn’t know me from Adam, and she was – to put it in the least flattering light possible – talking to me about hearing voices. Nor do I think I am alone in seeing any public claim of “channeled messages” (that phrase in particular) as a glowing red flag.
I’ve been thinking about this off and on for the last week, and have not come up with any answers that I’m comfortable with. Public channeled messages are almost always weirdly invasive, and have historically often served as the hook for literal grifts and cons. There are reasons they had to be banned in the Facebook group I helped moderate a few years back. At the same time, spirit contact has historically composed the overwhelming majority of magical practices in the Western mystical tradition (and, to the best of my knowledge, most others, but that’s not my lane). The Greek Magical Papyri is literally nothing but a stack of notes on how to beg, bribe, or coerce spirits into doing something for you. The Picatrix and other astrological image magic revolves around timing your spirit petitions so that they will do the most perfect job of what you want. The Solomonic tradition is just about getting a cohort of very specific spirits to do what you want, based on very specific rites and their very specific specialties. This is not to say that I don’t believe in and practice magic based in the energy and cybernetic models of magic as well, but spirit-model is – to use one of my least favorite neologisms – the GOAT.
Which is all to say that the best magical practitioners are almost all involved in some degree of spirit contact, and are therefore both talking to and listening to spirits. So why do so many of us hold back from talking about that? And why do we – myself very much included here – get so uncomfortable when people break that silence?
Speaking only for myself, it comes partly from my deep-seated fear of institutionalization. I read too much Victorean literature as a child and have spent the subsequent decades in terror of being thrown into a sanatorium. It also comes from how difficult spirit contact has always been for me. I have been able to see and sense spirits since my teens, but only learned to hear or understand them with any reliability in my early thirties, and only developed real confidence with that in the last three or four years. And, finally, I think it comes at least in part from a fear of cringe-by-association: we’ve seen the weirdos and grifters in both physical and online spaces, people who will approach you with a “message from the spirits”, people whose guides and allies seem to be leading them astray, people who think that their cat or dog or ferret is a magical familiar, and we frankly don’t want to be mistaken from them.
So, I’ll talk about how my familiar spirits advise and aid me on the selection of astrological elections, and the consecration of elected talismans. I’ll talk about my daily offerings, and how I came to offer coffee instead of wine – well, in addition to wine. But I don’t talk about the advice they give me about my mundane life. I don’t talk about the adventures we go on together, physically or astrally. I don’t talk about the strange and complex interactions between my familiars, or about the hints I sometimes get of their lives outside of mortal contact.
I don’t even know that these boundaries are wrong or unreasonable. Maybe it’s for the best that we self-censor like this. But as someone who always had a certain amount of physical community, but still mostly learned magic from books and experiments, I would have loved to know more about the nitty gritty details of spirit contact when I got started. Because the idealized form that so many people talk about … well, frankly, eleven years since the conjuration of my Natal Genius and Daimon and the experiments that followed, I still haven’t experienced it.