In which I rant a little bit about people who put hard emphasis on magick over religion.

[railenthe]

Note:  I’ve spelled magick with a ‘k’…because it’s the way I’ve been doing it since I got involved.  Maybe I have too many Llewellyn sourcebooks…nah.  No such thing. xD

It isn’t an uncommon thing to find out that someone who is thinking of starting out in a pagan system places more emphasis on the nifty magick stuff than on the religion.  In fact, this is one of the reasons that it managed that crazy surge of growth that it has had.

That doesn’t stop it from bothering me, though.

It shouldn’t, I know—it’s not my concern what someone else’s initial motives for it were.  But, it bothers me nonetheless.

And oddly enough I know just why it bothers me.  (It’s odd because if something bugs me to the degree that this does, I usually hav no clue why that is.)

When I got started, I didn’t really consider the magick aspect of things.  I got started in shamanism.  My main focuses were on journeywalking and trance work.  In fact it wasn’t until near the end of the book that I had been working with that I even seriously considered magick as being something serious.

Yeah, I know.  Sounds crazy.  But it just never occurred to me.  It took six months into full-out work before I even attempted it.  I did eventually get into it.

Between time I spent a lot of time at my tiny little makeshift altar, quiet music piped in through the sound system that I jury-rigged together and incense sitting on top of a candle-warmer—at the time I wasn’t allowed to burn it—simply sitting quietly in a circle.  It was more than enough for me on most days.  There’s a unique sort of peaceful, pleasant buzz that you can get while sitting in circle with energies called to it, and I can’t count the number of times that I’ve cast one just to get that delicious connected feeling.

Wait…wasn’t I making a rant-point?  Yeah, I was.  So back to topic, seeing as I can rant about the DELICIOUS sensation of being connected later on…and probably make it make much more sense later on than if I were to sidetrack into it now, amirite?

Part of what got me into it was a holdover from my elementary school days.  By the fifth grade I knew what I wanted to be (as opposed to what I wanted to do, which is still up in the air)—and I wanted to be a priest.  Sure, at that age, maybe the slightest bit of it was the pretty robes, but no matter what the trappings were, I wanted to feel that certain connection to divinity.  I’d never felt it before, and it was something that I’d wanted almost more than anything.  Imagine my rage when I find out in my church history class that year—no girl priests allowed.

It didn’t help the church’s cause when nothing I asked for was EVER answered, either.  It was like talking to a cold brick wall.  Add in the compulsory services, retreats, dark, cold, old churches built on the blood of so many slain…

*shudder* Ooh.  Better not to think about that.  Gives me flashbacks to freshman year.  Back to the rant.  I was mentioning that my main motivation was a spiritual connection, as opposed to the ability to do different flashy stuff with fancy other stuff and manipulate my own fortunes at will.  I just wanted that connection.  That was my shiny.  The magick was the awesome accessory that went with it—not totally necessary but not something to be ignored, either.

Anyway.  My gripe rises from when you run into people who think that magick is all that it is, and that’s it.  I admit that it was the first thing that got my attention going into it, but that mindset went explode around the second ritual that I did—which happened to contain an invocation.  After that, I went a solid six months without doing a single piece of magick.  I think I might have spent at least three days a week during that time simply casting circles to make offerings of homemade incenses and cookies.

I don’t know why I’d picked those two things.  It just happens that my main offerings have been of incense and cookies, usually both at the same time.  My mind equates delicious fragrances to good stuff, as well as anything sweet…always has.

Even when I started using magick again I started out doing little tiny things here and there with simple candle magick—extra few bucks here, good grade on the midterm there, faster healing of an injury every now and then.  But even that was loaded with invocations and entreaties.  For a long time it felt as if there were something missing from the working if I didn’t.

Of course now my magick’s just as complicated…ceremonial stuff galore, lots of nifty toys, the occasional Enochian ritual.  But even with all that stuff I hit right back into the spiritual side of it.

Well, I have often said that I feel like a priest stuck in the wrong place and time.  Guess I just can’t get away from it.