It’s been a minute since my last newsletter - due to a combination of circumstances but mostly because I’ve been doing a lot of magic and not having sufficient time available to also write about it. But I’ve also been giving some thought to how I want to use this platform, and what sort of frequency of content will be sustainable for me on an ongoing basis. My aim is to create at least three content-heavy Blazing Fire posts over the course of a year, which will contain my more polished writing and eventually be for paying subscribers only. In addition to that, I want to aim to make Rude Interruption monthly, containing more ephemeral and less involved content and updates. The next Blazing Fire isn’t far off - but due to some travel commitments I won’t have time to work on it for a couple of weeks so I thought I had better post something else in the interim.
Black Candle is a reworked and extended version of a thread I wrote on twitter @spaceweather9 last week, which was in response to various online calls to curse the Supreme Court following its recent decisions. I have certain criticisms of the sort of online mass workings towards political ends that have become popular in recent years – but more pertinently, I wanted to share some alternative strategies for how one might approach activist magic in such a way that circumvents some of these thorny issues.
Duppy Conqueror Sounds 1 is a playlist of some recent music I’ve been listening to, mostly dancehall and reggaeton with some UK things here and there.
In other news, the latest issue of Fortean Times contains an obituary that I wrote for Jake Stratton-Kent who died earlier this year. The task of writing this went around the houses a little before it landed back with me, so I thought I would have an attempt at trying to communicate something about Jake’s work and why it mattered to the FT’s more general readership of non-occultist Bigfoot enthusiasts and such like. Here’s a short extract:
“While there was already growing interest in classical magic, the publication of The True Grimoire heralded a watershed moment and the beginning of a renaissance in grimoire studies. Jake’s writing and online presence shaped many vectors of this into being, but also reflected an ongoing culture-wide process of recovery and recapitulation of older magic that had been simmering for some time and was beginning to attain critical mass.
As well as new practitioner editions of occult manuscripts that Victorian occultists did not have access to when they constructed their interpretations of ceremonial magic, this Grimoire Revival also crossed several language barriers and included new practitioner translations that had not previously been available in English language editions.
As these currents and trajectories of the Grimoire Revival took shape, Jake Stratton-Kent continued to be a mover and shaker in the world of chthonic magic, contributing his acerbic wit and down-to-earth takes that centred practical cunning and spirit conjuration. Jake believed that magicians shouldn’t be afraid to get their fingers burned in the pursuit of magic and his life and work are a testament to that burning, uncompromising fearlessness.”
Black Candle
It's more difficult to effectively curse a high profile public figure than you might like it to be as they exist more as a complex of swarming ideologies and invested dreams than as a regular person, and the pathway for the work can get lost or diverted within that complex maze.
Similarly, if the substance of your curse consists of little more than a black candle and a spoken charm, it's hubris to expect that to upturn a world. If you have not accrued very much first-hand experience of malefica or know your way around the field of that work and its variables, then trying to throw fairly basic black candle curses at high profile public figures in a live situation with the eyes of the world upon it might not be the best introduction to that sphere of practice, and we should also be mindful of seeking easy solutions to complex problems.
With that in mind, we may then want to approach this sphere with more subtlety and cunning. We may want to be less obvious, less flailing, and more considered in how we move and where we seek to apply pressure. Knowing a few moves to apply pressure is the easy bit. The skill of sorcery is in knowing *where* to apply pressure, and when, and why. Where are the moving parts, how are the dominoes placed, what might be susceptible to being toppled over in such a way that the more difficult target is impacted, and the solid structure is toppled.
It’s always variables all the way down. If you are literally trying to *kill* someone with magic then it's ambitious to expect that you would be able to do that with just a black candle and ill intent. Other factors would need to be in play, and circumstances would need to be stacked up in such a way that your work is just the final straw. It would need a dynamic where you're simply forcing the issue upon something that is already very present and exacerbating a trajectory that there is already ample potential for.
But equally, variables can stack up against the work and make it harder to land something, of which the factors surrounding a public figure are just one set of complicating possibilities among many.
People often describe their activities in this area with imprecise language and speak of curses and hexes, but the specifics around whether you're trying to bring someone a run of bad luck or murk them are best not left imprecise.
Often these things are done hot, in the heat of the moment, and often in response to distressing news stories that feel beyond our control. The energetic pattern is reactive like an instinctive lashing out at something that has hurt or threatens to hurt you.
And there is magic located here – in the way these actions represent an individual or collective reclaiming of power and agency in circumstances where we otherwise feel powerless. It gives tangible shape and form to your dissent, and lends it a gravity that you carry forward with you into the world.
Small, cumulative acts of resistance – affirmed fiercely within your spirit and given tangible shape as a spell – are not nothing, and can impact by contagion creating more conducive circumstances for change through collective attrition, yet malefica is a dish best served cold.
Less coked-up Tony Montana with a machine gun, and more Michael Corleone methodically settling the affairs of his family. "Throwing a Hex" is emotive language, and perhaps just a short-hand, but it's vague and could mean many different types of malign work and potential outcomes.
There is sometimes a disconnect between the passionate impulse to "throw a Hex" and trying to resolve the actual problem. Do you want to bring harm for harm's sake, or are you trying to restore balance to an unbalanced situation, in the spirit of tending a garden by rooting out aspects that will strangle healthy growth.
Would bringing someone a run of bad luck and misfortune be very transformative to the matter of concern? Is the difficult, and for most people, fairly ambitious area of actually trying to murder somebody with magic the only solution you can think of for administering to a situation? Or are you just lashing out and trying to assert agency?
Perhaps your interests might be better served by employing a range of more granular, targeted acts of magic, which seek to undermine a problem from multiple angles until you expose a weak point in the larger structure that you can then further exploit, adjusting tactics as required within the unfolding live situation. Maybe you need to remove someone from the office they hold, or hot foot them out of a position, or distract and confuse so their attention is elsewhere, or occupy them with other matters so they no longer have the facility to cause you problems.
Perhaps it's the moving parts of a person's political campaign that you want to focus on, rather than the figurehead of that campaign. If the top dog is a difficult target, then who isn’t? Who does that hard-to-reach person rely on and what might cause the engine of their actions to grind to a halt if they were taken off the board? Who is already a conspicuous mass of problems waiting for an opportunity to self-destruct, and how might that self-destruction be guided along certain desired lines? What openings and opportunities might be divined within the sprawling, seething eco-system of grifters and propagandists that nourish tin-pot would-be rulers?
Who keeps things running on a day-to-day basis and what would happen if they weren’t occupying that space anymore or began having doubts or making clumsy mistakes in their work? Perhaps you need to make someone just lose interest in their offending activities entirely? Turn sour on it all and drift away to something else. How much energy and effort must it take to sustain these structures of falsehood, fear and bigotry - and what rude uncertainties and awkward conflicts might simmer below the surface begging to be inflamed?
Instead of blindly throwing magical rocks in the direction of the problem as a whole, you might be better served trying to amplify certain qualities that are already inherent in a person or situation. Kindle a small fire and then pour petrol on it. Exacerbate a person's own self-destructive impulses or employ work to sow the seeds of distrust and discord between two people or factions that need to work together to implement oppression.
Fascism means a bundle of sticks and the clue to its undoing is contained in this image. It's only strong when the separate pieces are bound together, and its vulnerability is in the unraveling and unloosening and undermining of these individual components wherever there is an opening.