Magick & Me

ALL HALLOWS
The pale moon is riding alone o'er the trees
The doves are all resting in dark boweries
I call to my love come away
Quench the lamp it reminds me of day
Come away, come away,
There's no reason to stay. Come away.

I will plait you a garland of damp forest leaves
We will not be alone in the wild forest trees
The Sabboth of Night comes as last
We will dance in a ring on the grass
We will dance in a ring and we'll merrily sing. Come away.

© Sonia Brock 1965

In New York City, on the Lower East Side, I started writing a novel. The book was called 'Murder by Magic'. I didn't know a heck of a lot about magic, so I got books out of the Library, some of them quite thrilling and, of course, I was influenced by horror movies. I used most of the standard clichés and invented a few of my own. I finished the book. The anti-hero died as part of the plot and I went into mourning for him. A process that I understand is not uncommon amongst fiction writers.

Doing research into the occult, I found it wasn't all according to the movies. Later, in Toronto, I started writing another book, which I never finished. It involved an occult order dressed in black robes with a secret headquarters and secret passages and a heroine – the whole nine yards. The book got sillier and sillier as things went on and it became a bit obsessive, so I dropped it.

I determined to seek out some actual members of the occult community to find out what was really going on there. I had learned a few things already and I thought it would be interesting. I joined an group called the OTO (Ordo Templi Orientis) Now this was Aleister Crowley's Thelemic group. It was sex magick but I wasn't into that part of it. I was, perhaps, the only celibate member of the group but - there you go.

Egyptian gods became important – Amon Ra and Horus and that whole crew around Memphis and thereabouts. Crowley's imaginative flights of fancy, perhaps drug-fueled, became a strange kind of map. He was a trickster with a bent sense of humour, so you had to watch where you were walking, if you were following his lead.

Through my studies in magick I have had experiences that are not normally explainable, like rain happening inside the house and other manifestations for which I have no logical explanation. I was focusing on the Water Elemental in a very concentrated way during one of those times when the world about me seemed wrapped in a misty cloud. I did this on the way home and then in my meditation room in the house, where I continued to focus and concentrate, and when I looked up it was raining inside the room. Sure, it could have been a leak in the roof but it only happened once at that particular time but never again no matter how hard it rained.

A side note here would be that the idea is not so much to control the forces of nature, for instance, as to embody or manifest them.

I concentrated for some months on the Egyptian goddess Sekhmet, a ferocious feline war goddess, and the effect on my life was dramatic. Everything broke. My job changed. My husband died. I had to move out of my digs. Everything broke or changed –

as is illustrated in the Lightning Struck Tower in the Tarot deck.

It's very difficult to talk about magick.
Going back and trying to describe it, even though I have been in it, is almost impossible. I was participating in an alternate reality, a timeline parallel to the 'real' world but not of it.

Even now it is almost impossible for me to reconstruct, to speak, of a world where Archangels and Elementals were as real as the kitchen tap, and possibly more so. Someone said that if you act as if something is real then your actions will have real consequences.

You see, magick works but is very difficult and demanding to practice having nothing whatsoever to do with wriggling your nose and producing special effects. Mysticism eludes explanation.

I stopped attending OTO meetings after a while. I just didn't have the strength or will to focus. My health was not good and you need your health for that kind of extreme concentration. It's not unlike deep meditation practice.

I've also visited the Wiccan community, sat in on their circles, and taken part in their rituals to a certain degree but they do not appeal to me. It is the admittedly darker Ceremonial magickians who hold my attention and to some extent still, my respect.

Note: Thelemic practitioners spell magic as magick