But this rough magic
I here abjure; and when I have requir’d
Some heavenly music (which even now I do)
To work mine end upon their senses that
This airy charm is for, I’ll break my staff,
Bury it certain fathoms in the earth,
And deeper than did ever plummet sound
I’ll drown my book.
-Prospero, The Tempest
This column is a ritual. All of my columns have been. What is a spell, after all, but an attempt to change the world? What is a story, an argument, a play or a poem, if not an attempt to do the same? A new idea is introduced, and someone’s mind changes. A tale is internalized, and the way someone thinks about the topic shifts, just a little. I write, and I hope, and I put intention into it- and maybe someone reads it. Maybe the spell works.
I wrote the first of my regular columns for The Wild Hunt in summer of 2018. This is the last. Eight years worth of writing is a chronicle of change, no matter the venue, and my magic has always been about change. It seems fitting to look back and see myself refracted through eight years of spellwork, stories of a younger man with a different pantheon, stories of a Witch excited to join a broader conversation in the community. Eight years worth of practice is a chronicle of improvement, no matter the subject, and I am pleased to look back and see myself telling better stories, doing better magic, walking a better path as the years rolled on. I have learned to write, and to love, and to work in a way that is more in tune with myself – because, of course, doing magic works just as much on the practitioner as on the world around them. I have, through my columns, worked through my own challenges and discovered my own beliefs. I have learned more about my magic through this practice than through any course or book on the subject.
Now, I am teaching myself how to end a spell.
The History of Witches and Wizards, 1720 [public domain]
It’s hard to avoid the temptation of a tortured metaphor. I could talk about this as a road trip, pulling off the road to get my bearings after a long drive while I decipher where I’m going next. I could talk about it in language borrowed from spells themselves – a ritual cut off by instinct, completed or abandoned or simply the first of several needed parts. I could tell the whole thing at a distance, held away from me so that the meaning is blurred and open to interpretation, enough lost between me and my readers to keep me safe.
It’s also very tempting to absolve myself of the responsibility of choice. I could point to the gods and spirits I work with and the changes in my own path as the reasons I am called to put down my pen. It would be a reasonable explanation, and it would carry some truth, but it would not satisfy me. I have written through bigger changes, and worse times, than this summer brings me. There is no divine mandate, no geas or prohibition that I can point to without it feeling like an excuse, instead of a reason.
Maybe that’s the point. If magic is, as I have so often heard, about knowing and enacting my own Will, then I cannot lay the reasoning or blame on anyone else. I am choosing to step away from The Wild Hunt, from the structure of deadlines and editors that make it easy for me to feel as though I have to write. I want to know what happens when there is no structure, no god or editor or imagined audience, and I write only what I want to. Perhaps it will be better magic. Perhaps I won’t write at all. I’m curious to find out.
The final temptation, then, is to call this a lesson, part of a pattern of endings in my life, a divine or cosmic test of my growth and boundaries. I want to make meaning of it, to knot it into my story of myself. I want to prove that I can end things well, that I can step away when I need to, that this is just one more way to close a chapter so that whatever is happening next can come. I want to point to my divorce, to my upcoming surgery, to a dozen signs and portents and say “See? I’m doing it because it’s thematic! There’s a plan for the next thing, and I just have to be ready!”
I am a storyteller, and that’s a compelling narrative. With enough energy, I know that I can make it true. Maybe I will, after a while.
The History of Witches and Wizards, 1720 [public domain]
Let me be clear – it is not as though I had a specific end in mind, a goal towards which I crafted each column as a component. This is not a grand reveal to my readers, no whisking back of the curtain to show the ritual framework in which they have been ensnared all unknowing. It is just that I believe magic is holistic, baked inexorably into the way we influence each other. It’s just that I’ve used this column to share what I believe about the world, the gods, the Pagan community. It’s just that I believe to read is to be acted upon, to write is to be a conduit, to live is to be in conversation.
We do not know what happens after Prospero returns to Milan – but we tell his story again and again. He is always a magician on the brink of retirement, but never quite reaching it, staff unbroken and magic undimmed. Four hundred years ago his story was written, and someone is reading it for the first time today.
I think a lot about the responsibility of releasing words into the world, and how little control I have on what they do. I barely remember the person I was when I started this column – am I responsible for the things that they wrote? If I am ending something cohesive – then what was it? What did I say? Who heard it, and what did it do? Did I create a spell, or was one cast through me, or did we, my readers and I, weave it together between us?
I think of Schmendrick, arms upstretched as he let the magic work through him and absolved himself of his own responsibility. I think of a younger version of myself, arguing passionately and not feeling heard. I think about you, and wonder who you are, and wonder what we’ve done together, here.
I hope, in a few years, I can look back from wherever I have gone and whoever I have become to think well of these years. I hope the spell is something I am proud of casting, and that it has been successful – but that is not up to me. I can only cast it, tug on the infinitely complicated strings of the universe, and believe that something moves.
Maybe I’ll get to read about it.
But release me from my bands
With the help of your good hands.
Gentle breath of yours my sails
Must fill, or else my project fails,
Which was to please.
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