Involution
This morning, I am questioning why anyone needs sigils, or places, or materials to work magic. It is, I think, a little like needing paper to write poetry. You can come up with, invent, compose poetry in your own head, but it isn’t until you have paper and pen (or, I suppose, a screen and keyboard) that you are writing poetry. It is entirely possible that I am missing the import of millenia of unwritten poetry before writing it down became a thing, but it is worth noting that both stories and songs made the transition from oral to written knowledge, while poetry seems to be an artefact of the written word.
So maybe I should be thinking of stories instead. One can compose a story in one’s head, tell it, have it arrive in other people’s heads. One can develop skills as a storyteller without ever writing down the story, so why would you do so? Why use the tool when the tool is not needed?
Or is magic an artefact of materials, etc? That depends on what magic is, and that’s not a question I’m equipped to answer. But I feel like it’s not. I feel like you can work magic with a sufficient imposition of will on something, without saying, moving, or outwardly doing anything. But it’s a hell of a lot easier if you have materials, place, sensoria, words, diagrams, sigils or forms (or whatever other tools) to help focus. If you routinely use Tool A when you are working toward Effect X, then even if Tool A actually (for whatever value of “actually”) has no connection to X, your brain will learn to associate the two, and perform better toward X when A is present.
So some of the composition of the toolbox is inventing stuff from scratch, declaring that orange candles are to do with wealth and good harvests, or whatever, and some is picking up on existing associations, like oak for longevity and permanence. And the toolbox isn’t necessary, many of the tools being in one’s own head, but is useful, much like having a plumbing wrench when you need it rather than making do with a vicegrips.
There’s a quote in an article I just read from someone called Hal Elrod which reads:
“The first key to waking up is to remember this: Your first thought in the morning is usually the last thought you had before you went to bed.”
And I just want to record my utter bogglement at this, which feels to me like saying the sky is green. My first thoughts in the morning are random, connected with dreams, incoherent, and after those, frequently about coffee. They are almost never what I went to sleep thinking about, if indeed I was thinking about anything going to sleep.
I want to do some more thinking about vestigia, though I’m going to need a different term, since in the novels it is/they are a trace left behind, not an impression in the moment. Sensoria would work, except I think that’s a technical term for the collective sense organs of the body. But maybe I can work with that until I find a better term.
This is a set of sensations (sometimes) and mental images (usually) I get when I stand in particular spaces or in contact with particular objects (structures and trees, rarely if ever anything smaller) and empty my own mind of conscious thought. The images can be closely related to what’s there in ordinary reality, or they can be something else entirely. There’s an area of beech trees in Donadea, for instance, where in my head it is always autumn, with slow-falling brown-gold leaves. But in an area of woods near Castletown, it’s a different wood, with much more hazel and wetter ground, and in Raglan Castle in Wales, there’s a sensation of busy purpose and things being carried. There’s a tall oak in Charleville which carries with it the sensation of beams of sunlight coming down at a sharp angle through windows high up in a gothic structure, despite my only having seen the tree in the darker end of twilight, and another oak elsewhere in Offaly which makes me think of cavaliers around a campfire.
I don’t know what these sensoria mean, or if I can do anything with them. It is of course entirely possible that they are just associations of my own overactive imagination. They are definitely no more than unsubstantiated personal gnosis, as the saying goes. But they are there in the range of things I can “pick up”, and they seem to have a relation to what I think of as magic.
The obvious-to-me thought is that if I want to effect change or the possibility of change in the world - which is what magic is for, tipping the scales - then I can get particular effects by working magic in those places. And if I’m to work out a systematic approach to magic (of which I am not yet convinced), then I should have some kind of understanding of what those effects are. I can see uses for the sensation of autumn, or the metaphor of the falling leaf. The hazel is perhaps a more practical landscape, one of provision or harvest or forage. Light in dark places is an image with wide application, although I have no idea what to do with the cavaliers. And so forth. A catalogue of these things might be useful, though I would imagine it will be slow to build up. A notebook would work, but the Locke index that I would otherwise like to use is probably less useful. Strong indexing would be a necessity.
What I’m envisioning here is that I can sit down at the kitchen table and go “right, I need a working to do X”, and from my various notes and systems pull together that I’ll need particular materials, maybe, particular words or invocations, at a specific time, in a place with the correct sensoria, and then be able to go there and do that. More local places will be useful, of course - I can’t go to Raglan every time I want to invoke the spirit of moving-things-busily.