message for the younguns

Look, magic doesn't have to be this big song and dance with robes and warbly rhyming couplets and shit. It follows from one simple principle: our world is meaningful and not just apparently so. The trick is: make it make sense that things happen for you.

You cannot fake this any more than you can fake a meal (to paraphrase Hassan i Sabbah). The unfortunate thing is that you are never the only person telling your story. The upshot: everyone loves a strange twist. "He was always so quiet, so reserved."

So none of this sounds especially "magical"—well, rightly so: "magic" is freedom from nihilism, and that's all. ... well, let's clarify that. It's the freedom afforded by a certain species of nihilism.

"Why," skeptics balk, "do so-called magicians not make their livelihood off lottos?"—this arises from a basic confusion over the nature of the world we inhabit. The lives of lottery-winners explain the situation adequately.

None of this is to say that the traditional techniques of ritual magic are not effective. Again the question: does it make sense that this would work? Does it make sense that Kubaba should manifest herself when I intone such-and-such a Luwian incantation? To secular atheists and all their irony: clearly no. (Exceptions exist, but these are not generally predictable.)

This is clearly in violation of many "control methods"—the scientific method, for instance. This is admittedly unfortunate but follows from the essential separation of science not from religion but from art.

Now, children, clearly the time has come for practical advice. Well now... despite the relentless efforts of the mainstream to neuter sex, sex magic remains the most effective practice. (This is certainly true for readers of this blog.) Confirmation is close at hand. I will not tell you how to do it because you do not need to be told how to do it. Think this over: what can you do that a sexual climax (including an autoerotic climax) could conceivably power?

Then decide: I don't have sex anymore; I cast spells.