Travis Hedge Coke
There is Nothing Left to Say (On The Invisibles)
Light Bend Backwards
by Clive Nolan
Clive Patrick Nolan is a photographer and psychotherapist who lives in Snowdonia, Wales.
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6.0
Disobedience Pt 2
Anthony Nine
There are a couple of points in Mad Tom’s teaching narrative where he tells Dane that he placed most of his instruction in magic on a deeper level of consciousness, “where it will do the most good.” Dane experiences lapses in memory and observes that time seems to be passing too quickly, and it’s implied that we’re only seeing snippets of the initiatory process in the comic, as much of what is being imparted to Dane is taking place below his conscious awareness.
This seems almost a metaphor for how real concepts of magic can often be better conveyed if smuggled in through the medium of fiction – imprinting more effectively in narrative form than they otherwise would if presented in the format of an instructional non-fiction textbook on matters of the occult.
There are broadly two main sets of interrelated ideas that constitute Tom a Bedlam’s instruction in magic. The first is a presentation of the city as a landscape of magic, and the second concerns magic as a technology for deprogramming oneself from negative and restrictive conditioned behaviors.
Much has been written on urban magic and psychogeography in the intervening years, but this was still not a very widely taken up idea in 1994. Magic was either something that happened in hermetically sealed indoor temple spaces, or else in a pastoral outdoors setting. The built environment was more typically seen as a man-made aberration that was counter-productive to magic and if you wanted any encounters with the numinous, then you had to get away from the cities and out into unspoiled nature, not try to actively locate your magic in the tower blocks, motorways and industrial estates.
Everything in this sequence captured my imagination, from the idea of there being an alternate shadow side London, Luan Dun, the City of the Moon; to the various methods implied for accessing and interacting with cities and their spirits, such as the magical application of the Situationist derive, a process of walking the streets and allowing the mysteries of the city to arise out of the noise and tumult unfolding before you. Or methods inspired by the cut-up technique of Burroughs and Gysin, such as discovering the names of spirits in the reflection of neon signs or in audio recordings of traffic noise.
I very much moved to London with these ideas in mind and this sort of toolkit in my back pocket, and set out to see if I could learn magic from the city itself and its magicians. Generally speaking, when people claim to be practicing intact initiatory traditions of UK witchcraft or magic that are alleged to extend further back than the 20th or at best late 19th century, they can be taken with a pinch of salt. A fact that can be borne out by the substance of these alleged traditional practices consisting of the same set of moves that populate every other book on the subject with scant sense of any differentiating currents beyond a few surface elements.
But that said, there’s still a fractured continuity of individuals practicing many different evolving modes of magic within the parameters of the city. There’s never been a time when there haven’t been any magicians operating in London, or when those magicians haven’t communicated or at least known about one another. Even the Victorian “Magical Revival” is a misleading label as there were still urban cunning people offering professional folk magic services for money in London during the same time period that the Golden Dawn magicians were busy “reviving” it.
In my experience it’s more of a trope from fiction that the outward, external form of things is always the most essential component. These exact words and specific ritual actions handed down intact from time immemorial as a form of pageantry, and the continuity of this rote repetition of form being the means by which magic is transmitted over expanses of time. Outward forms will tend to change, evolve and update, absorbing new influences along the way and adapting in order to be more relevant to the time period they are being practiced in – which is the reason why chaos magic is able to work in the first place.
There are also other forms of transmission than simply handing along a set of ritual moves, however, and magic can be imparted in ways that are far more under the counter and more concerned with how you relate to a practice and manage the material that it generates, as opposed to prescriptive directions for the practice itself. Fragmented continuity such as this is as likely to play out in settings such as conversation down the pub, for instance, before, after or adjacent to any sort of ritual practice, and as such will fly under the radar of any efforts to trace a straightforward transmission through time. Occulted. Invisible.
Then there is also the matter of the city itself, the multilayered history that can be found at its various sites of import, and the conglomerates of spirits that may inhabit a particular locale. London magicians are participants on the same finite stage and subject to the same influences of spirit, in time joining them, as their own bones are planted in London soil. There is a continuity of place that connects the depth of the city’s past to the contemporary moment, making itself felt as a magician learns how to access this ghost memory and wire their magic into its landscape currents.
Every crossroads in London functions as an entry point into a complex of spirit associated with that place, whether it’s the financial district, theatre land, red light district or sites of public execution. The city is encircled by a ring of seven cemeteries each with their own specific boneyard politics and notable spirits, its urban expanse punctuated by ancient churches many built over older pre-Christian sites or holy wells. London’s underlying mythic topography is built upon the lunar hill of Diana where St Paul’s Cathedral perches and the solar hill of Apollo where Westminster Abbey squats, each an atua or spirit box housing the nations notable necromantic remains. The River Thames is a tidal force that divides north from south and has its own underwater rulers and winding tributaries swimming with undines. While the tube system affords a sorcerer access to London’s seething unconscious shadow shelf and a wealth of possibilities for magic for those who know its bylaws and ground rules. How to make the underworld journey and return with knowledge or employ the Circle Line as a magical barrier.
Later in Tom a Bedlam’s occult London training montage, he relates to Dane what he describes as a secret of magic, which is that cities are an alien virus that infected our human frame of reference. A virus with the sole directive to use up all available resources making copies of itself until there are no raw materials left and the host body dies. The city virus wants us to become good builders and eventually travel into space and carry the virus to other worlds, but in the meantime, magicians can learn to communicate with cities, enter into pacts with them, and make an ally of the urban environment.
I don’t literally believe that cities are an alien virus from space, but aside from this as an obvious metaphor for growth-obsessed capitalism, the practice of landscape-based magic does make you wake up to your surroundings in interesting ways. Especially in cities as old as London where every square foot of ground has thousands of years of lived history embedded below. It’s easy to feel fenced-in by a city as you fall into its rhythms, habitually sleepwalking through a commute, headphones on or head in a book, shuttling from one aim to another. Whereas seeking to speak with cities and their spirits creates a new way of relating to urban spaces, where the topography matters, the deep history matters, the immediate moment matters.
Neither do we need any ancient aliens to account for this sense of dislocation from landscape or the encroaching feeling of urban oppression we can sometimes experience within cities. A more recent underlying psychic culprit might be the process of land enclosures that took place between the 1600s and early 1900s. Over the course of multiple generations, wild spaces once understood to be “common” ground were seized and enclosed by landowners. Landless peasants who had survived by subsistence farming in these spaces for generations were forced off the land and either criminalized for vagrancy or herded towards cities to labor in the burgeoning factories of the Industrial Revolution. The same methods of land expropriation implemented throughout this period also became a use test for colonization – exported around the globe to physically and psychically annex the untamed landscape, not unlike Mad Tom’s city virus.
So regardless of whether you are attempting to speak with the dead that haunt the tube system, communicate with the undine of a forgotten buried river, or create a sigil from the pattern made by the tracks of your daily commute, the living process of urban magic will tend to unpick these artificially imposed psychic bindings around how we relate to space and environment. Like many areas of magic, you can’t do the practice without being shaped by the practice on some level.
The other main teaching conveyed in Tom a Bedlam’s initiatory narrative is more about purpose than practice. An important and often overlooked foundational practice in any version of occultism is to ask yourself – why am I doing this? And to revisit that question intermittently as you go along and make sure you have a good answer coming from a place of integrity. If your honest response is “for the aesthetic and so that people will think I’m a bit spooky and edgy” or “to grift off it on the internet instead of having to do a regular job” then don’t be too surprised if that lamp leads you into questionable and potentially treacherous waters.
Perhaps the most common responses to this question are located somewhere on the spectrum between worldly empowerment – the ability to help yourself and others with results magic; or an often vaguely defined sense of “spiritual enlightenment”. The latter pose often affects a sneery, superior disdain towards the presumed crass materialism of the former, but more often than not, it’s the white light self-proclaimed adept mob that will seek to leverage their enlightened status at the first opportunity and set themselves up as a half-baked cult leader with a bevy of impressionable, exploitable followers. While the sorcerer providing workable strategies for helping those within their orbit to navigate worldly survival needs is doing more tangible good and operating with less raging ego and inflated self-importance.
Mad Tom’s raison d’etre for magic comfortably occupies neither of these easy narratives. Not purely about sorcery, although encompassing it. Less about any spiritual enlightenment or upwardly mobile sense of ascendance, and more a strategy of readjustment to a prior and freer way of being that has become compromised by a process of immersion in the hostile worldly conditions we’re subject to.
Much of what Tom a Bedlam has to say on this subject seems inspired by the ideas of Wilhelm Reich, and specifically the notion of character armor. Composed of muscular tension in the body, Reich describes this as a form of armoring against the rigors of the world that is accrued through the course of our upbringing, socialization and ongoing struggles in a day-to-day environment that does not support our healthy physical and emotional well-being. Reichian therapy will attempt to work on this muscular armoring directly to restore us to the original energetic pulsation of our natural state without this self-imposed and socially constructed defensive rigidity that limits and diminishes the full expression of our being.
“So tough and rigid and frozen that you can’t even move out of the space you’ve been given,” Tom a Bedlam says to Dane during a crisis point of his initiation on the banks of the Thames. “Your head’s like mine – like all our heads – big enough to contain every god and devil there ever was. Big enough to hold the weight of oceans and turning stars. Whole universes fit in there! But what do we choose to keep in this miraculous cabinet? Little broken things. Sad trinkets that we play with over and over. The world turns our key and we play the same little tune again and again, and we think that tune is all we are.”
Suggested here is a reasoning for magic that’s about undoing various forms of hypnosis – both societal and those created by the internal narratives we put in place ourselves – in order to more clearly experience the mysteries of nature within which we’re embedded, as well as to throw off the artificial fetters that have clamped down and restricted the full expression of our being. Sorcery is then a set of tools for better facilitating this process and working upon resistant obstacles stacked against our capacity to move out of the limited space we’ve been given.
Magic as disobedience, in the sense that it empowers a capacity for changing the scripts allotted to us, either by societal expectation or within the minutia of any given moment. Magic envisioned as a process for reconfiguring how we relate to space and environment, as well as our own embodied existence as animals within nature subject to its seasons and fluctuations. The language of magic providing leverage upon otherwise elusive territories of experience and permitting accessible, reciprocal dialogue with the fundamental conditions of nature we are intimately embedded within. Modes of experience purposefully undermined and edited out to shape societal structures that benefit robber barons and profiteers. Mocked, obfuscated and sidelined with increasing sophistication but never quite fully erased. The pulse of life as it reverberates bodily, in our bones and in the trees, through our blood and tears as in the rivers and the seas. “Try to remember”, as the extra-terrestrial satellite intelligence taking on the form of a blinking traffic light said to the pilled-up joyriding teenager in the forgotten tube station.
