The Innate Queerness of Magic, Part II
Previously, I offered a two-pronged definition as an answer to the question: What is Magic?
To recap:
Magic is the art and practice of making meaning
Magic is the art and practice of creating, recognising and enthusiastically taking part in the synchronicities that flow out of the loci of meaning you’ve created
We explored the radical power of making our own multidimensional meaning(s) in the last email so now, let’s wade into the waters of synchronicities - which I introduced as “the resonant relationship between a subjective (inner)event or field of meaning and an objective (outer) event.”
As a practitioner and teacher of the Hermetic arts, seasoned with a bold alchemical-tantric flavour, I am a firm friend of the ancient Hermetic dictum:
As above, so below;
As within, so without.
For the purposes of apprehending synchronicities of meaning in the tangible experience of our daily lives, let’s zoom in on: As within, so without.
As Within, So Without
Individually and collectively, we’ve been force-fed our meanings, which then become internalized - but rarely metabolized - creating the terrain of our withins, like a sort of psychological indigestion.
These then create resonant ripples of meaning in our lives, our withouts - in the form of synchronicities: events and happenings that rhyme with the internalised, undigested meanings we’ve been colonized by.
After this come the feedback loops: the synchronicities rhyming with the meanings rhyming with the synchronicities...a never-ending mobius strip that’s handed down from generation to generation.
Also known as the wheel of Samsara: sleepyhead incarnations of birth, death and rebirth. Sleepyhead, because we have not woken up to our individual and collective force-fed meanings.
Here’s the slippery bit- the patterns of internalised meanings that keep creating the same old, same old rhymes have become unconscious - and addictively safe.
We are the perpetual pupa, too afraid to emerge from the safety of the chrysalis stage into the certain death-rebirth wholeness of the disco-ball butterfly.
Our magic, inseparable from our unconscious, internalised meanings, keeps creating the same patterns of synchronicity.
What’s more- stepping out of this inner/outer colonization is deeply dangerous to the ego, which has become comfortably calcified in its pupa stage.
It also involves stepping out of wider societal agreements of meaning, such as scarcity, worthlessness, the dogma of fear, and their attendant patterns of behaviour and reactivity.
This stepping off of the hamster wheel isn’t for the faint of heart. But the alternative is enslavement to the colonizer and the stifling safety of Stockholm Syndrome.
Having experienced this overthrowing of the inner-coloniser first-hand, I can tell you that it is very much like looking over the precipice of the sheer drop of a cliff edge.
You look behind you at the looming behemoth of unconscious meanings and their torches of dogma that you’ve just made conscious by coughing them up like a giant, grizzly furball.
Instead of staying safe and swallowing it back up again, you jump into the rich, dark abyss of your indigenous magic, meaning and synchronicity.
Interestingly, the first time I was psychologically limbering up to jump over the precipice of force-fed meanings and into the abyss, I synchronistically developed an alarming fondness for jumping out of airplanes and having ritualised ego death/rebirth experiences with plant entheogens: as within, so without.
So how to create the meaningful synchronicities in our lives? The ones that have a resonant relationship with our own decolonised cache of meaning?
In the words of the witchy Carl Jung - the person who coined the term synchronicity from the perspective of the alchemy of the psyche -
“Until you make your unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate”.
To put this another way: until you make your force-fed, undigested meanings conscious by coughing them up like a furball, alchemically transmute them into your own radical meaning(s), and then integrate them, the synchronicities you accidentally create will keep you feeling like a victim of fate, rather than a collaborator with it.
It’s worth noting here that the Basque word for witch - Sorginak - means “one who wields her own fate.”
And also that Basque witches were heavily, heavily persecuted, tortured and murdered during the Spanish Inquisition.
We may not have literal witch-burnings anymore, but once you start wielding your own magic, meaning and synchronicity, you will become deeply offensive and garner some disapproval and cancelling.
And that’s all part of the juicy path towards decolonized wholeness - especially when you learn to transmute that into deep reserves of magical power.
You’ll also co-create your own gorgeous mandalas of meaning and synchronicity - a multi-valenced reflection of all that you life is. Not just the lopsided fickleness of the so-called “good” bits.
Mandala 105 by Carl Jung, from The Red Book
This is also when things start to become delightfully queer.
Where before you felt yourself to be an alienated, helpless victim of cruel fate, now the conscious collaboration with “as within, so without” becomes your magical-laboratory of experimentation and play.
You begin to experience yourself as the paradox of both/and: seemingly separate from and yet inextricably, intimately connected to the Universe.
Life becomes more of a magical mystery tour, and less of a meaningless meat-suit grind- unless you consciously choose to experience it as the latter, in which case it becomes more vivid and sensual and turns into a magical mystery tour, and...you get the gist.
You begin to embody and experience the delicious, kinky, queerness of alchemy-magic - also known as the tantric, left-hand, lightning path. This is striding towards a potently decolonized mindset, which ripples out into the rich, meaningful mandala of your life.
Are you ready?
If jumping out of airplanes isn’t your thing but you’re interested in discovering more about the brave, subversive work of being in intimate alignment with your fate through the magic of meaning & synchronicity, get in touch!
As well as working parachutes and wise plant allies, I had - and continue to have when I need it - powerful, transformative guidance from my own teacher.
This work is potent and can be topsy-turvy making. Your life and relationships will transform - I’m here to help you initiate, move through and integrate deep change if you so desire.