I think that all of us who practice real magic, real spirituality, real witchcraft, go through periods of feast and famine. Fallow periods, sometimes so long that we forget what magic is like. Periods of growth where everything is sharp and bright and we wonder how it is that anyone ever steps away. Periods of high strangeness where we feel alien beyond words. Periods of deep immersion, where we forget that there are people who don’t devote their lives to all this.
This blog has gone through a long fallow period, interrupted only by project announcements and brief shouts into the void. My personal practice, on the other hand, has been going through a long period of slow growth.
I am approaching eighteen months of daily practice, easily the longest consistent streak in my twenty-five years of magical practice. During that time, I have maintained a regular (but not clockwork) practice of Friday night offerings to the Venus(planet)-associated gods in my life, a regular (but not clockwork) lunar practice, including guiding my pseudo-coven through a daisy chain of Drawing Down the Moon rituals, taken advantage of every astrological election I could squeeze into my schedule, and a grown a magical jewelry business – consisting primarily of Picatrix talismans and Hekate devotional jewelry – from side gig to full time job.
And when I put it like that, holy shit does it sound like a lot. An epic adventure of magic and mayhem. Living the dream, right?
But in the day to day experience of it, it has often felt like a struggle. I will not even begin to pretend that I have managed to bring my A game to every one – or even half – of the 517 and counting daily offerings to my familiar spirits and the eclectic pantheon that live in my altar room. Nor, when I have, did the gods and spirits in question necessarily deign to respond. Nor, even when I really, truly, sincerely tried, did I always manage to clear enough of the mundane static and internal screaming to hear what the gods and spirits had to say when they deigned to speak.
I have been thinking about that struggle over the past couple weeks. I can’t say, exactly, when daily coffee offerings for my gods as well as my spirits escalated to daily prayer, but it did. Every day I pray to Baphomet to awaken the Gnostic fire within me. Every day I pray to Aphrodite to open my heart that I may know that I am loved. Every day I pray to Lucifer to help me throw off the chains of my oppression.
I do know that it was about a month ago that those basic prayers escalated to include prayers for initiation into the mysteries. And I also know that I have cried every morning for the last two weeks.
The slow, careful, methodical work of healing and personal growth and deepening spiritual practices … it’s not the fun, dramatic, glamorous kind of magic. And it often feels like diminishing returns.
At the beginning of the challenge that grew into this daily practice, I was receiving new instructions from my familiar spirits nearly every day. I could barely keep up. Hell, I should probably go back through my journal entries just to see what didn’t sink in. I know that there are some special requests in there that I never got to fulfilling before getting distracted by the next demand or suggestion.
Now, on the days when I can both hear and understand my gods and familiars, my journal entries mostly just read “warm contact with gods; warm contact with familiars; all content; no clear messages”.
It’s worth remembering, here, that I got into magic in search of adventure and high strangeness. I practiced kinds of magic that got me high. And, looking back on my magical youth, I think that sense of diminishing returns is what often led to fallow periods. Then, when I came back, everything would be bright and sharp again. And I wonder if others have had the same experience, if many of us have mistaken deepening practice for diminishing returns. Because, even on days when I’m so tired or depressed that I’m half-glad I’m not receiving potent visions of divinity, or clear instructions from my familiars, I’m also disappointed.
I’ve seen it said often enough that it’s probably officially cliché, but it is still worth repeating that a magical or spiritual practice is practice in both senses of the term: a thing you do repeatedly for its own sake, and doing a thing repeatedly in order to get better at it. How many of my magical and experiences in the last year were made possible by that praxis? If I had not been doing my daily ritual for nine months last Beltane, could I have led the Dionysiac ritual as well as I did? Could I have been possessed, let alone spread that possession as the contagion it was meant to be?
This streak won’t last forever. When it ends, probably after some amazing ecstatic ritual culminating in brain-borking gnosis (or maybe when I just fuck off into the desert), I will enter another fallow period. When that happens, I will probably focus on some mortal art – maybe actually finishing some of the novel drafts that have brought me to tears over the last year. It’s the natural cycle of things. Only the independently wealthy or those with infrastructure support can go forever without breaks.
But I hope that I will be able to carry these lessons forward, and remember that the returns of a regular practice are not diminishing as quickly as they may feel.
I often think that this feeling – chasing the high – is why people tradition shop. Just as the practice and relationship begins to deepen and settle in to something, the gloss comes off and it’s time to try something new. They don’t realize they’re metaphorically knocking their own legs out from under themselves over and over and over again just for the thrill of falling.
My own “fallow period” came when my spirits directly told me to stop, heal from the last few years, and come back with my head and heart in the right place. Not in an admonishment sense but in a “Bro, like… take a vacation before you pop” kind of way. Probably the first time in 20-something years when I stepped back. It’s been… strange.
I think that you’re absolutely right about the tradition-hopping. I’m tempted to make a comparison to people skipping from one romantic relationship (or even platonic relationship) to the next whenever the New Relationship Energy wears off.
I can definitely see myself getting a similar, “dude, chill” message in the foreseeable future. I have already started getting, “nah, that’s excessive” when I do divination about certain planned rituals. And as someone whose life has been so focused on excess that xie took the moniker “Satyr Magos”, that’s … surreal? Concerning? Disheartening?
My own last long fallow period was years and years ago, way back before I moved out of Lawrence. I got to a point where I started wondering if magic was real or if I’d hallucinated it all. I doubt that will happen, again, but I can’t even imagine what the next one will be like.