Get That Magic Back

For this week's post, I've returned to my writings on Celtic pagan theology. This time, the subject is just as the title claims: getting that magic back.

I’m fond of the Proto-Celtic word for magic: *brihtu-. If you have a keen ear, you can identify its modern descendant: bright. The Celtic term likely originates from the PIE term *bherg̍h- (enlighten) and is related to the another Proto-Celtic term *brexto- (bright, beautiful). Taking a cue from etymology, magic brightens the world. Isn’t that sweet? Now, cue the little kitten pawing at the screen or falling into a cardboard box and all is well.

Crowley’s classic definition, “the science and art of causing change to occur in conformity with the Will,” reflects another English word for magic, the PIE root of *magh- (power). These two dimensions cover the range of senses that the word carries today: existing somewhere on the spectrum between a longing for enchantment or the exertion of power. Both are legitimate, but for this chapter, I will focus on the former, distilled in that single phrase so frequently uttered: the magic is gone.

Perhaps someone put it in top hat or it’s on the other side of the rainbow. Or perhaps, as we’ll see, it is less a matter of finding it and more akin to taking the stone off the grass and letting the weeds flourish.

Whatever the reason, behind those four little words hides a shared sense: something fundamental has been lost and longs for reclamation. Childhood and the years of early youth haunt us. We, the singers of this dirge, know that magic is possible, but we know not how to retrieve it. Some abandon the pursuit altogether, dismissing it as a fool’s errand. They grow up and rot within, like a “real adult.” Others hunt for it in Santo Daime drum circles fueled by ayahuasca or touring EDM festivals in Europe. Others, with a bit more discernment and estrogen flowing through their veins, seek it in the precincts of temples or the sacredness of ritual. These are dead-ends.

In my 42 years on this earth, I can count on my hand how many adults I’ve met that bear the marks of an enchanted spirit. Their eyes are bright and piercing. They speak and think incisively. A lightness and brightness suffuses those around them. An infectious fire burns from within them, and they take delight in the smallest of happenings—the spatter of mud on the back of their pants after a stroll, the bubbles rushing to the surface of their soda, observing an old man teeter around the neighborhood on his bicycle. But they also possess a near-inexhaustible will, energy, and appetite. These enchanted men are not without restraint or composure, but there is a directness and honesty in their presence that disarms and charms everyone they meet. They are *brihtu- embodied.

Most of the humans I cross paths with, however, are not *brihtu-. They are wretched, dark, and dreary. You can immediately recognize once you know the type. A shuffling gait. Glassed over eyes. A venom in their breath. A weariness with existence that stinks up the room. This type, particularly among 20+, is so ubiquitous that few can even identify it. It’s like noticing that someone has a nose.

A few examples give a taste of what an enchanted world looks like today. The first is the Italian anarchist Renzo Novatore. He refused all strictures placed upon him, got in all sorts of trouble, and refused to kowtow to anyone. When he died in a shoot out with grenadiers, all the police found were false documents, a Browning gun, a hand grenade, and a ring with a dose of cyanide. Valhalla welcomed him with its door’s flung wide.

Another is Bronze Age Pervert, the aspiring nudist, sex-show podcaster, and wanna-be pirate. His book Bronze Age Mindset is the distillation of the magical mindset—piratical, ambitious, energetic, luminous, violent, amoral.

The greatest of our own era is Donald Trump. He delivers wit, enthusiasm, adventure, and an endless energy that has plowed through political opponents and reshaped American politics in his image.

The commentators who snub their nose at Donald are still caught up in a propositional mindset. People are what they say they believe, but stated positions are far less important than exuberance and splendor of spirit. I would rather be led by Renzo over Mike Pence any day of the week.

These men are the imperfect ambassadors of magic in our insipid time, prophets who point the way to a dimension of ourselves and public life that has been buried hundreds of feet underground in fear of “disruption” and “not being a good boy” and the endless constraints that our open-air prison imposes upon us.

*Brihtu- is not where everyone sits around in a drum circle passing spliffs, healing their trauma, communing with fairies and sprites, and being blessed with perpetual serenity. A druid grove was a grizzly site. Skull sockets gazed from alcoves. Corvid and human corpses dangled from branches. The scent of death and incense mingled in the air. Wild roses and blood were scattered over stone altars. Magic is a bloody business.

Yet say the words magic, and most will imagine either a Disneyfied Cindarella or a young boy carving out parapets for an Arthurian sand castle. Definitely not an Italian anarchist running through the countryside holding up lorries and shooting it out with the police or a ripped Hungarian man laying beside the pool sunning his balls. These Disney images are not completely wrong, but they are incomplete.

Children are the closest analogue to magic we have, and to this degree, the cultural association is correct. Ignore all the deconstructive papers that argue otherwise (whilst citing Foucault a few dozen times about the "socially constructed" nature of childhood). Prior generations had different attitudes towards children due to high infant mortality rates and different economic realities, but they understood youth as the preserve of enchantment. You don’t need to finger through Medieval treatises on children to figure this out. Just look at your own experience of childhood and those around you. It is magical. It is bright. It contains within it whispers of what we long to reclaim.

Though the link is correct, contemporary ideas of childhood are misleading. Childhood has become Baby Shark, Big Bird, and Power Rangers. Adorable, primary-colored, wholesome goodness that society slowly corrupts until children become barely-functional adults in the economic leviathan.

A study of children shows this portrait to be incomplete. Grandparents and visiting friends will usually meet the Sesame Street child: playful, daring, cute. The tantrums and viciousness will be swept aside as abnormal or carefully kept out of sight by anxious parents. When grandpa and grandma go away, another beast comes out. They become violent, screeching animals when ordered to take a bath or eat another spoonful of broccoli. They bite, smash, stamp, break, tear. It is a testament to our stubbornness that anyone in regular contact with children can continue to believe in the Sasame Street toddler.

While teaching my friend’s four-year old son, we would devote hours to building fantastic mansions of sand. We dug moats and channels, foraged for flowers and branches, and carved out windows and doorways. The one thing that boy loved more than anything else: smashing the buildings to bits—particularly if it wasn’t his.

When I returned the favor, he would retaliate. I didn’t tolerate his fits. I would lock down his wrists, squeezing them tight enough to demonstrate his powerlessness. Once physically bullying me was off the table, he would stomp his feet and cry for mommy. The swing from cruelty to self-pity can only be described as demonic—possession by primordial forces yearning to break lose.

Another time, this same boy grabbed his pet rabbit and hurled him into a window, shattering its leg. Twenty minutes prior to the assault, he pressed the creature against his bosom and ran his hand along its length.

The rabbit realized how suicidal staying on was and escaped a few days later. We never learned his fate, but the rabbit took his chances. He reckoned that being devoured by a hawk or starving to death in a culvert was preferable to years of enduring that demon.

When I talk about naivete and childishness, this is what I mean: the full gamut of those early years and, by extension, the magical. Fear of the dark joined with an absolute certainty that you are the center of the universe. The need to instantly satiate your cravings combined with a modesty of ambition that makes adults blush. Murderous vengefulness followed by forgiving and forgetting five minutes later. An ability to conjure universes in a sandbox yet a disinterest in abstractions like democracy and justice. A curiosity that compels them to climb under cabinets and a stubborn terror of the unknown. Talking to imaginary elvish friends and an autistic aloofness among friends.

This is *brihtu. All of it.

The link between childhood and magic—demonic, darker elements included—are perennial and observable across species. You can see those same energies flowing through puppies and kittens. Puppies cut their teeth into everything—bushes, cardboard boxes, sheets of paper, pens. If they can bite it, it will be bitten, much to the dismay of their owners. They bully each other and will let their siblings starve to death without the slightest trace of remorse. They murder and play with the corpses of their prey. Savagery is closer to childhood and *brihtu- than communing with the fairies and finger painting.

Though the longing for *brihtu- is near-universal, few succeed in the endeavor. Seekers have pursued a million-and-one ways to reignite the fantastic. Game of Thrones. Lord of the Rings. D&D. Tarot readings. Worshiping obscure Celtic gods in the privacy of their home. Ecstasy. Armin van Buren. Ayahuasca in the Colombian jungles to meet Pacha Mama. Three-hour sex seshes activating the chakras. Getting sodomized by a Thelema priest. Extensively journaling the unconscious in a Red Book.

So much has been done in this quest for the Grail, yet how many have you met that return with the goods?

These attempts typically fail for one of two reasons: 1) they mistake a vacation for the means or 2) discipline. Allow me to elaborate on both.

The vacation problem is rather simple. We like what sets us in the magical mood. Like a line of coke or a pop of ecstasy, it gives us that high that we know we’ve been missing. Lord of the Rings is a religious experience. Imaginative minds taste, for a number of hours, a realm electrified by the fantastic. Epic battles. Beautiful maidens. Courageous knights. Haunted woods. Pristine kingdoms under the threat of destruction. Fortune telling wells. Mysterious sorcerers. Nerds main-line this stuff like a heroin junkie straight out of rehab.

But it’s just a hit. Then, they have to go back—again again and again and again—to the dreary world called “real life.” A little bit of Tolkeins’ fantasy will bleed into their commute to work or a meeting about the revenue forecast for Q4, but the sense of fantasy and adventure will perish soon after they close the book and move on to other things. They mistake the feeling for the destination. More often than not, the high just gives them the strength to carry on for another day.

Other methods suffer a similar fate. Ayahuasca might put you in touch with the DMT elves and convince you that manzanitas are sentient, but trippers usually return to normal a few hours later. Religious rituals. Workshops at Esalen. Esoteric lodges. Vacations to Varanasi—each and every one of them typically fail to deliver lasting change. They are holidays masked as spiritual ascendance.

A seven-year old doesn’t take a vacation into seven-year old land and then sober up when it’s time for school Monday morning. They are *brihtu. Magic so saturates their blood and spirit that they could as easily exit their ecstasy as remove the bones from their body.

The second reason, closely related to the first, is discipline. Lodge heads and gurus dress this one up in all sorts of lofty language and peg it to the grand old goal of liberation. “If you’re just a good boy, Johnnie, and say lots of prayers and don’t lie and don’t steal and be a devoted son, enlightenment is on its way!” Worse, discipline usually ties back into the vacation—meditation, visualizations, prayers, cold showers, regulated breathing, and so on.

But you have to ask yourself: is this really why children are the way they are? Is this really why dogs are so in tune with their instincts and are endowed with a preternatural joy while so many of our generation guzzle down SSRIs like M&Ms just to get through the week? Is this why the wild cheetah’s eyes shimmer with magnificence? Did the cheetah speak the truth, no-fap for two years, and wake at 4AM to visualize a snake shooting out from its genitals and into the crown of its head?

The answer: these creatures are as they are because they have allowed their instincts to reign supreme. You must do the same.

The knee-jerk reaction to this message is fear. “If I just give free reign to my instincts, I’ll end up in prison or gooning on the couch 24/7 to My Little Pony porn rather than actually being free. Discipline will save me, and escapism will bring me some much-needed respite from my misery. This way shall lead me to ruin!”

This objection is right, to an extent. There is one final point that must be added: you must let yourself go wild in a wild environ. The lynx, furiously pacing back-and-forth in its 3 x 3 m cell is not able to act on its instincts. It is caged, institutionalized, and crippled. The very austerity of its conditions, however, protects it from the most severe cases of rot. Few scenes are more heartbreaking than seeing these noble creatures behind cages, sapped of all their power, their eyes listlessly turning about their space. Animals who live long enough in such conditions become despondent and impotent.

Our own circumstances are little different. Our houses are stuffed with dopamine-soaking devices. Porn. Video games. Food delivery apps. A catalogue of millions of movies. The options are endless, yet most of us remain confined to our little cells , incapable of living wild, and out of touch with the energies and instincts that electrify our souls. Children can resist the effects of their cage owing to the gushing out of vitality and their stubborn refusal to obey, but almost everyone succumbs to the cage by adulthood.

Going 100% hunter-gatherer is impossible. You cannot wander the woods, hunt animals, reclaim territory, drink from streams, skirmish with neighboring tribes, and pluck fruits with relative impunity. The San tribesmen spend only 20 hours a week collecting food. The rest of the time, they lounge, sing, gossip, and luxuriate in their idleness. In the middle of Los Angeles or Yosemite National Park, you will be imprisoned, starve to death, or be brought low by intestinal parasites.

The Iron Age or pre-Industrial period, while difficult, are within reach, and the defining characteristics of these eras are the technology that ushered them in. The easiest way to turn back the clock is to distance yourself from technology, and the easiest way to do that is to spend lots and lots of time nature—eschewing electronics, books, or a pad and pen.

Spend long stretches among the oaks and stars. Sleep beneath the firmament. Take the moon for your blanket and light. Let yourself go. Countlesss restrictions have been imposed upon your impulses, and a flood of signals throughout the day prop-up ossified concepts. These melt away in the absence of reinforcement. The ideas of right and wrong, the long list of shoulds and should nots, the taboos and glorious deeds—these are not concrete fortifications with pillars dug a 100 m deep that will stay with you until you die. They are more akin to muscle tissue. In the absence of nutrients and exercise, they wither away.

I will not list out specific practices. Then, you will turn that into another form of discipline, another conscious effort to make yourself a particular way, another abstraction imposed upon the raw, quivering energy that lies beneath the surface, that slumbers in your tissue and marrow, that awaits not direction or a prodding but the opening of a door, the flinging open of the windows, the leaving of a field fallow. You must let loose yourself as you would a lynx in the highlands.

Enchantment will happen naturally, and the practices that emerge from this primitiveness will be far more real rather than the quirky nonsense cooked up by nerds in their studio apartments, piecing together practices from books like Scatology and Ritual Practice in 6th Century Pictland, to create the perfect ritual.

Magic must come from magic, and magic comes from the wildness of man and land rejoined.