The Best Way to Share Magick?
Let’s face it. If I went by what most media outlets—newpapers, magazines, radio, TV, movies, books—said about magick, I’d hate us (or be afraid of us), too. Even movies that are supposed to be pro-magick or pro-Pagan are usually barely—and I mean just barely—positive. As occultists, mystics, Pagans, and magickal folk, we just don’t have a positive media image.
Interviews in the news media are often not very good. The reporter has usually determined the story he or she wants to tell, and the questions lead you in the direction that supports their story, no matter how silly, how wrong, or how inflammatory it may be. If you don’t give the answers the reporter wants, your segment just happens to get left out.
Fiction isn’t much better. Everyone loves Harry Potter, but the stories have little to do with any sort of real magick. Sure, Pottermania has sold lots of books, action figures, Halloween costumes and plastic, light-up wands (and let’s not talk about the infamous “Nimbus 2000”), but waving wands and mumbling pseudo-Latin won’t do magick. People left the 1981 film Excalibur fascinated by the Merlin character. However memorizing his “Spell of Making” won’t make you anything.
Still, I have a strong belief that one way—perhaps the best way—to get the truth about magick, occultism, Paganism, and the philosophies behind them to the masses can be through the media and especially through the use of fiction. My first novel, The Resurrection Murders, attempts to do just that. Set in present-day Hollywood, a police detective begins with the usual misconceptions about magick. As the novel develops, he meets a variety of occultists and learns about real magick. Of course, there are exaggerations to make the story more exciting, but the basics are all there in what I think it the most exciting, contemporary magickal adventure ever published.
Of course, I’m prejudiced…
Luckily, this type of magickal realism is spreading. My good friends, Raven Grimassi and his wife, Stephanie Taylor, make a feature appearance in…a comic book:
Raven’s appearance is in issue 58 of the “Tarot: Witch of the Black Rose” comic. This is a highly respected comic series, having won numerous awards. In this issue, Raven is shown to be a “guide to anyone who seeks the knowledge held inside the library of magick.” This library, it turns out, contains every spell ever written in a huge, seemingly endless catacomb of shelves of books.
Now, I’m not going to give away what happens in the story. I imagine, however, that some readers will wonder if such a library really exists. Well, I can tell you right now that this library really does exist. Although not given the appropriate name in the comic—the akashic records—it allows Raven to tell truths about this knowledge and the nature of occultism.
Although I would encourage everyone to get a copy of this fun comic, I can’t do that. This comic is definitely for adults only. The cover shown above only hints at the larger amounts of nudity (and women with impossibly enormous breasts) shown in the comic. However, I will recommend this for all open-minded adults.
Raven was one of my first teachers of the Craft, and if you don’t have some of his regular books, I would encourage you to get some of those, too! Read the comic for fun and insight. Read his books for wisdom and guidance. Find out more about him and his books by clicking here.
