On Frauds, Teachers and Complaining

Imagine mowing a lawn in the middle of a Georgia summer. Imagine re-shingling someone’s roof when you barely know how. Imagine cleaning a house again and again, learning the meticulous details of how its owner wants things to look and knowing you will be chastised and maybe sent away if you fail even once. These are some things one might have had to do in order to learn conjure while living at a rootworker’s home during one’s teenaged years.

Imagine, further, learning an entirely new language, researching the culture of another country and making meticulous connections on social media platforms only to go and visit a place to be told, in that language you speak poorly, that you will not be taught anything. Your effort was for nothing. If you have the heart for it, you return back to the drawing board and try to find the next mentor.

Imagine putting up with the stereotypical curmudgeon wizard’s ranting, debasements and outdated social notions in the effort to learn how he did it. Your gritted-teeth patience pushed to the razor’s edge every day, you still find it worth it when those kernels of magical truth enhance your own practice. You look back, years gone, and say it was worth it.

So many things had to be done to learn magic in times gone. You’d wade through shit book after shit book. You’d maybe talk to your peers on some early-internet forums and hope to glean some insight. You may have been lucky enough to be born into a family of practitioners or geographically near enough to one to be taught something, maybe not even something as good as you’d hoped it would be. Regardless of how you did what you did, learned what you learned, you had to put your yards in…

At least some people did. What’s more honest is that for every one who did, a dozen exist next to them more-or-less taking up space in the occult, then as now, doing precious little and training hardly at all. Yet, in a world of people who have all the gusto in the world to complain about how people selling courses, mentorship, books and everything else, rarely is it said aloud that we live in a golden age of information about magic. Rarely is this appreciated. To that end, allow me to appreciate and elucidate in equal measure.

It’s been said by the detractors of people making a living doing a cool job (magic, teaching magic, selling amulets, etc) and being happy that all one truly needs is to browse Esoteric Archives and one will have all the information one needs to build a complete and fleshed-out magical practice. Because the grimoire community isn’t already famous for spending years not doing the method in the book and, instead, arguing over the finer points of lionskin belts and religion. Right. Very cool, guys.

Those same sorts might also talk a lot of fiction about how a true “adept” would never charge for instruction. I imagine the ideal in their minds is that they’d meet an old, wise and remarkably similar to themselves (except older and cooler) magician who takes them under his wing and shows them the world. No thought is given to how nothing is free. I bet they wouldn’t even be willing or able to mow his lawn for him because that doesn’t fit into their comfort-fantasy about how it’d all go down.

I’ve often wondered if some of the classic authors we adore wouldn’t also be selling classes and mentorship if they’d been alive during this point in history. I think they would. Hero-worshippers probably disagree but, then again, people hero-worship Crowley and that’s never made sense to me. No accounting for taste, I suspect. Easy to deride an entire era of time without accepting that our eras shape us and our behavior thoroughly and deeply.

Living today means being able to not just content yourself to trawl free (or pirated) PDFs of manuscripts but, rather, being able to buy and actualize more useful and workable magical training from the comfort of your own home than ever before. Entire communities of practitioners grow around these classes and, while it’d be a stretch to say everyone is a goldmine of useful information or even willing to do the training they pay for very well, plenty of idea sounding-boards exist for the aspiring student.

While autodidactism is real, useful and during periods inevitable, having a teacher or teachers who you can literally pay to provide direction is priceless. In the sense that magic is, for some reason unknown to me, held to a different standard than anything else, let me provide an example in a mundane way. A person can teach themselves a musical instrument. They can learn by ear in a painstaking way. They can learn from method books which is a bit better. They can learn from free YouTube videos which is also good. All of these things can, and do, create excellent musicians.

But what creates better ones? Lessons. Workshops. Musicianship clinics. Things one pays for and actively internalizes, at this point, from the comfort of one’s own home often. This is seen as an entirely reasonable progression and rarely does one find someone decrying the selling of online guitar tutelage packages, for example. I have often asked what the genuine difference is between magic and all other skills and have rarely gotten a satisfactory answer. I fear I won’t in this, either.

It’s amusing to me that people whose lives don’t really seem terribly magical and who are, in many cases, decades-in lodge magicians who got their first taste of PGM sorcery a few years ago, will be the first to decry someone making a living teaching methods that routinely get positive feedback as, wait for it, sorcerous technology that actively works and changes lives. It seems like sour grapes to me. Seems like the lady doth protest and all that.