Betwixt, Between, and Listening
It has fascinated me, these past few years, exploring the overlap between intuitive, witchy magic, and the Ceremonial, Grimoire-based techniques. More often than not they are rooted in the same goals, the techniques and desires are serving the same functions. What differs, and means that sometimes the different options require proper mental shifting, is the world in which they are approached through…
Cue Jack Hunter and his talk on ontological flooding.
The Welsh Occult Conference, organised by Sian Sibley and the DragonOak coven, is an event I’ve attended a few times (and spoken at!) and there are always fascinating talks, both during the event and over dinner afterward. This year was no exception.
Ontological Flooding - an attempt to avoid being tripped up by the barriers between world-views. A methodological experiment in bypassing the question of “who is right” to get to the seemingly important question: “what is real?”
Wise words from Sara Mastros’s invocation of Orpheus
I won’t go into the topics of the talks as I know Sef already has, and I touch briefly on how much I enjoyed it in my blog post here. Instead, I’m interested in poking this betwixt-space where the topics blend and blur. The magical gap between worlds. Fitting for a witch, I guess. As a philosopher I had to ask Hunter ‘But what do you mean when you say “real”?’ As a witch, a magic-weaver, I’m not sure that’s really the core of what we were there for.
Reality is slippery. It varies based on our state of mind, our perception, our understanding. Reality is a story we tell ourselves. But this story impacts us, shapes our lives, becomes, heh, ‘real’. So what story do we choose to tell?
What happens when a magical charm is mis-spelled, but apparently continues to work? When a grandson is the grandfather, carrying the same threads of fate and folklore?
What happens when a researcher melds fact and fiction under the ancient, ever-renewing yew trees? (Don’t eat the poison, folks, unless you wish to experience the result.)
What happens when we tap our noses and the top of our spine and slip between mind and matter into the numinous behind the tangible? When we travel into the twelve hours of the night, carrying our sword and carried by the serpent, in the daytime.
Where does story end and reality begin? In our experience of it, of course.
This is something we do as magical practitioners. We re-write our stories, and thus our worlds. This is what makes us practitioners. We are active in our fate, or at least, we hone our skills in choosing where we will weave our own destiny as the still point in the centre of the wheel, or the silver wheel of stars and fate and choice… Between Welsh goddesses and hymns to celestial beings, offerings that become conjurings in the right hands, we get to choose to choose.
What reality are you writing? What magic are you weaving?
The talks called us to investigate, to explore, to follow the threads into truth, to walk the land and listen - to the trees, the gods, the magic, the land. They called us to action, to walk our talk, to listen to the beings on the edges of our expected reality, those ladies from the outside…
So what do you claim to love, to honour, to desire? Will you conjure that story into being?
Within Star Club we explore different techniques, different worlds, and writing different stories for our lives in my favourite way - through ritual and magic.
If you can find your balance on the edge, and fear not the transformation, initiation, dissolution, then all things are possible.
You just need to pick which story you are telling.
Join Star Club - become a Magician - weave your own world and conjure your own fate.
For more writing, workshops, and community events by Dr Halo Quin, visit www.haloquin.net