Magickal Blogging

I've been tinkering with pagan and ceremonial magick ⁽¹⁾ for about 14 years. My studies and practice have not gotten as far as I'd like in terms of traditional study, and I've finally made a commitment to myself to pursue my studies on a more regular basis.

That sounds much flakier as a credential than it probably should... let me rephrase that... for 14 years, I've been a practitioner and student of magickal arts and sciences, whose studies in both Western ceremonial and pagan systems have run a number of feast-famine cycles, dependent on my ability to arrange my life in a manner conducive to study and working, at a given period of time. This has not always been as simple a matter as I might have preferred, and there have been several points at which I've had to lay this pursuit aside, in order to deal with the mundane and mechanical issues of the moment. Some of these moments have been extensive.

The net result is that I have a few areas of deep knowledge and experience, and a lot of tinkering and dabbling in a very broad spectrum of magickal arts running the gamut from extemporaneous expressions of Will to moderately complicated ceremonialist workings. While an eclectic approach has been beneficial in many ways, I think it's also been holding me back in regard to the approach that I've come to regard, intellectually, as both a necessary and better-for-me approach, which has more in common with scientific illuminism than with the less rigorous approach that I see in many segments of the pagan community - and which has certainly been a feature of my own practice more often than not.

For the last several months, I've been on a bit of a bender to tie up my past with my present in some sort of rational package. Reconciling these various aspects has proven something of a trudge, and I find that as much as anything, I lack the discipline to organize properly for what amounts to a self-chosen karma-call and judgement day- in essence, I'd like to hold myself to account for my life to present, in order to prepare for the next part of it, with either a clear conscience or a penance to pay. It seems to me that an approach to this project which will entail developing both the discipline that I need to practice and the form of self-refection is most likely to be accessed through the practice of one of the more rigid forms of western mysticism.

That this approach combines nicely with what I see as my longer term spiritual goal of self-mastery is not chance- my primary interests have always been philosophic in nature. Academically, I got my BA in philo, as much by default as by passion, and my periods of greatest happiness both before and after college involve the pursuit of knowledge in one form or another.

The effective upshot is that either a new HDL blog will spawn, or a category be added to this one, as a record of both the preparatory process and the practice of the discipline itself, whatever specific form that takes.

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1. As distinct from my religious-spiritual practice and beliefs. Sure, yeah, there is a lot of crossover in many places, but not all of my religious-spiritual practices are actively magickal, and a great many magickal systems are non-religious in nature. There's probably an essay somewhere in that.