The Wild Hunt (https://wildhunt.org/tag/magic)
“Almost every magical system in fiction has a rule about who is allowed to learn,” writes Beatrix Kondo. “What has been remarkable about fantasy over the past few decades is how many of those systems have stopped pretending this rule is natural.”
“Art is not concerned with being right so much as it is with being true,” writes Storm Faerywolf. “When we approach magic as art, we accept that subjectivity is not a flaw to be corrected, but an inherent quality to be cultivated and grown.”
Happy Halloween! To celebrate, Karl E.H. Seigfried considers novels by George A. Romero & Daniel Kraus, F. Paul Wilson, and John Bellairs, and what their horrors can teach us about the horrors that face us today.
“Nobody shushed the room. The lower house lights did not dim. There was no call to order. Energy simply shifted between us and within us, and the hush was total.” Meg Elison writes of her magical experience inside the Skyspace installation at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art.
I have always thought of magic as the language that we use to speak to the universe. Many Witches use words of power, chanting, and sigils to communicate their intention in their spellwork. That is practical magic, intended to use language to work their will.