The mundanity of magical practice

This is another post about my “magical practice”. Reminder that although I call these things “spells” there’s little to no mysticism in any of the things I do, although in this particular post I will be referencing some books that are quite straightforwardly occult.

This post is quite long. Your email client may truncate it, especially if you’re a paid subscriber and have the full thing. Please click on the title to read it on Substack.

Speaking of paid subscribers, I’m trying an experiment. Only paid subscribers will be able to read the footnotes, and there will be a few bonus things below the paywall. All of the main content is available for free. This does mean free subscribers can’t comment. Sorry. I wish I had a solution for that, but you can always join the discord if you want a place to talk about these posts.

---

This post is a bit more of an in depth explanation of the mechanics of what I’m doing with spells, and how I think about them.

Equally importantly, it’s an opportunity for me to finally begin trying to poke at the overlap between two books I love, and that have been hugely influential on me, but that I’ve never quite been able to figure out how to get them to fully mesh.¹

What do “normal” spells look like?

Let me get out the closest “real” book of magic I’ve got to hand and give you an example. Here is “Empacho - Blockage” from Page 22 of “Magia Magia: Invoking Mexican Magic” by Alexis A. Arredondo and Eric J. Labrado:

Empacho - Blockage

Empacho is a physical and spiritual ailment that affects the stomach and digestive system. Symptoms include vomiting, constipation, and indigestion, but the biggest giveaway is the feeling of weight like a large stone blocking the system. It’s generally cured through various teas and a somewhat uncomfortable technique that a sobadora can perform that pushes the empacho out of the body. An easy way to remove empacho yourself is to rub some coconut or sesame oil on your hands while repeatedly praying:

Jesus Christo vencedor, ayudame con el dolor. (Victorious Jesus Christ, help me with the pain)

Directions:

1. Place your hands, palms down, one over the other just below your solar plexus.

2. Slightly push down and slide your hands left, moving in a clockwise motion over the stomach. Be sure to keep pressure continuously as you slide the hands clockwise.

3. You can continue repeating the prayer if you like.

4. Soon, you will begin to feel things push and move along.

This spell is pretty representative of the sort of directions you get in the book, and is not unusual in the broader context of magical practice. Magia magia is pretty keen on invocations directly to Jesus, or sometimes a saint,² and this spell is typical in that regard.

Crucially, the spell consists of basically two things: It tells you what it’s for, and it tells you how to do it. This one doesn’t even have a name. Most of them do, but Magia Magia is very straightforward in its naming and just tends to use descriptions of what you are doing and/or who you are asking for help with it as the titles.

I don’t use any of the spells from magia magia, partly because I’ve not found any that really work for me conceptually, and mostly because I don’t really believe in asking Jesus and/or Saints for their help - I don’t believe in them, and I’m not super convinced that asking them for their help would be a good idea if I were wrong.³

I’m just pointing this out as a particular structure, and vibe: Here’s a thing you do, it will solve your problem. It’s basically a recipe or set of instructions,⁴ and not a particularly complicated one.⁵

In contrast, here’s one of mine:

Breath Holding Attention Lock

This is a simple spell for getting an overactive thought loop to quit it, and to generally take the wind out of the sails of an unpleasant emotional reaction by giving yourself something else to focus on and reset how your body is feeling rather than keeping feeding the reaction.

A single breath hold works like this:⁶

1. Do three “candle blows” - breathe in deeply through your mouth, then out as rapidly as possible, making an O with your lips as you blow out.

2. Take a deep breath in.

3. Pinch your nose closed.

4. Hold your breath for a silent count of 60. Count as fast as you need to to comfortably get to 60 before you run out of air. These don’t have to be second long counts.

5. When you get to 60, ask “Can I make it another 10?”. If you think you can, keep counting. Repeat until you can’t go any further.

Whenever you need to stop, breathe out, and the breathe normally for a bit.

Doing three of these - with smallish gaps in between - reliably calms an overactive thought process for me, because tying it to the breath hold keeps you very focused on the silent count in a way that straightforwardly stops monologue.

The vibe is obviously very different. I don’t have any invocations to a god or saint in there.⁷ But it’s a similar thing - here’s a problem that might occur, here’s what to do about it.

I was talking with

Think Feel Play

about this on discord, and one of the things we were discussing was whether calling my extremely mechanical procedures “spells” really had the right vibe. I think this underestimates quite how mechanical most spells found in people’s actual magical practices are, and quite how straightforward and mundane the problems they’re designed to solve are.

It’s certainly true that what I’m doing isn’t the sort of thing you’d find in a fantasy novel. It also lacks a lot of the deep spiritual experience you’d think of as “truly magical”. There’s nothing ineffable about it. You just do the thing and you get the result. Which is, I think, a thing that most people who think of themselves as magical practitioners would recognise as a spell.

You could, quite reasonably, argue that the invocation, and its associated connection to a higher power, is an essential part of what makes the spell for removing an empacho a spell and breath holding attention lock not a spell… well, I won’t necessarily say you’re wrong, but it’s not like every spell in every magical tradition involves invoking a saint or a spirit. I think it would be hard to come up with a criterion that every magical tradition meets and this doesn’t.⁸

Even if it were, I think the actual nature of the spells cast in spiritual traditions tends to be quite in line with what I’m describing, given the background assumptions of the tradition. If I believed in the same things they did, and took my current practice of spellcraft pretty much unchanged, I would start casting spells that involved asking Jesus Christ for help. The reason I don’t do that isn’t because of some fundamental incompatibility of my notion of spell with doing so, it’s that I don’t think it works. I might be wrong (though I would of course find that very surprising), and if I turn out to be wrong then my practice will evolve.

Ultimately, I’m not that invested in whether the things I’m describing are “really” spells. They’re certainly not supernatural, and if you want to make that the spell/not-spell dividing line, OK. For me, it’s useful to think of them as spells, because they sure look a lot like what people who practice magic talk about when they talk about spells.⁹

What are spells?

I’m referencing a bunch of books on magic and don’t get me wrong I’ve read a bunch of those and even got a few useful things from them, but honestly the single most useful book I’ve read for the design of my practice is “Games: Agency as Art” by C Thi Nguyen.

As you might infer from the title, this is not a book of magic, it’s a book about the philosophy of games. It’s also excellent. You should read it.

Nguyen’s conception of games comes from Bernard Suits’s book “The Grasshopper”, which is about what games are and their role in life. I’m less enthused about The Grasshopper and think you largely don’t need to read it if you’ve read Nguyen’s book, but it’s also quite good.

Suits’s definition of a game is as follows:

To play a game is to attempt to achieve a specific state of affairs [prelusory goal], using only means permitted by rules [lusory means], where the rules prohibit use of more efficient in favour of less efficient means [constitutive rules], and where the rules are accepted just because they make possible such activity [lusory attitude].

Or, his “portable definition”, a game is “the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles”.

One of Nguyen’s examples of this that I like is that of mountain climbing as a game.¹⁰ You want to get to the top of the mountain (your prelusory goal - whether you are at the top of the mountain is a fact about the world, not about the game you are playing). To do mountain climbing, you must get there by, well, climbing the mountain. You can get there by helicopter if you want, and there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with that, but in doing so you have not done mountain climbing.

This is what Suits means by “constitutive rules”. They are a set of rules that you follow because the activity you want to perform constitutes following those rules. If you don’t want to do mountain climbing, that’s fine, but mountain climbing is performing the act of climbing a mountain in a particular way.

The same is true of many other games - e.g. if all you want to do is to put a ball through a net, you can do that, but only certain ways of doing that count as playing football.

A spell is not a game. The difference is the lack of this lusory attitude. Yes you’re following the constitutive rules of the spell in order to achieve some goal, because that’s what casting the spell is, but the goal is the thing, and you’re only following the rules of the spell in order to achieve it.

The rules allow you to say whether you’re casting the spell correctly or not, but you’re somewhat indifferent to the question of whether you’re casting the spell correctly or not as long as you achieve the goal.¹¹ You are taking on the constitutive rules of the spell not in order to cast the spell, but because they give you a means of achieving the goal.

Sometimes a spell is a bit game-like. e.g. part of the appeal of the breath holding attention lock is as a challenge to yourself - how long can I make it? You’re doing it to achieve an effect, but the way you are achieving that effect is by playing a game with yourself.¹²

But regardless of whether any given spell is a game, they are made of the same sorts of things as games.

The key of Nguyen’s book is that he’s arguing that games are an art form, and that it follows from Suits’s definition of a game that the medium of that art form is agency. In a game, you create a sort of constrained set of actions you can take, and a goal for the player to achieve. You give them an agential mode - a way of operating in the world as a particular type of agent, and you craft that specifically to achieve a particular aesthetic experience.

A spell is, pretty much, that except your goal in casting the spell is not an aesthetic one. You are giving someone a particular way of operating in the world. You’re defining the success criteria of the spell, and the means by which you may achieve it. This make spells, like games, a type of technology that you build in the medium of agency. You may not be picking them up for aesthetic reasons, but you can learn a lot from the main people working seriously in this space about how to make them pleasant to use¹³, and many things that we use to understand games will also work for understanding spells.

One of the most useful ideas I’ve got from Nguyen’s book is the idea of us as having a library of agencies - a collection of agential modes we can adopt. An agential mode is just a particular way of being in the world, with a particular focused set of goals:

An agential mode is a focused way of being an agent. To enter an agential mode is to focus on a particular set of goals and on a particular set of abilities as the method for achieving those goals. Approaching a house with the goal of makingit more energy-efficient, by focusing on my abilities as a carpenter and a mechanic—that’s one agential mode. Approaching a house with the goal of making it more energy-efficient, by focusing on my economic abilities to purchase the services of others—that’s another agential mode. Approaching a house with the goal of making it beautiful, by focusing on my abilities and sensitivities as a painter—that’s another.

Cognitively limited beings like us usually approach the world one agential mode at a time. When I want to make my home better, I do so by taking on a sequence of agential modes, which take me independently through the various qualities of the house I might wish to consider—its structural integrity, its daily usability, its beauty—and engaging with each of these qualities while focused on different sets of abilities. And I constantly switch agential modes as I deal with the wildly varying practical demands of my life. When I am at a committee meeting wrangling for resources for my department, I focus on my goals of supporting my department, and on doing so with my political abilities. When I am working with my students, I focus on the goals of education, and on using my communicative abilities. And we often use different agential modes in sequence, as part of the same project. When I work on a piece of writing, I switch between a research mode, a creative mode, a rigorous mode, a communicative mode, and then finally a nit-picky proofreading mode. Often, doing the right thing involves finding an appropriate agential mode. When talking with a student during office hours, I might realize that our conversation isn’t just about the details of a paper, but that they are actually profoundly distressed and emotionally overwhelmed. I need to switch from philosophy-teacher mode—focused on teaching rigorous arguments and writing clarity using the tools of argument analysis—to a more therapeutic mode, where I aim at finding and easing their emotional distress using various empathetic abilities.

One of Nguyen’s points is that games teach us new agential modes. Through playing Chess, you learn a mode of focused concentration on strategy. Through playing Werewolf, you learn a mode of social deduction.¹⁴

Games, Nguyen argues, allow us to write down forms of agency, that we can then use to train up agential modes that we can use in real life.¹⁵

Spellcraft is essentially skipping a step here: What if we just write down agential modes for you to use in real life directly. They have a very similar structure to a game, and can be written down in exactly the same way as one, they’re just not played with a lusory attitude.

Spells without specific goals

Here’s another spell:

Talking Object¹⁶

This is a spell for managing the flow of an in person group conversation. It's good for meetings, and discussion groups, and such.

Pick a talking object. It's better if it be something soft and light (you will find yourself wanting to throw it). I've used stuffed animals for this in the past.

For some predetermined duration (generally “until the end of the meeting” or similar, only the member of the group who is holding the talking object may speak, with the exception that people may concisely answer direct questions from the speaker.

Anyone who is not holding the talking object may raise their hand indicating that they'd like to speak.

Once people start raising their hands the speaker should relatively rapidly wrap up what they're saying (or say "Sorry, I know you're waiting to speak, just give me a moment to finish this thought because it's important" or similar thing that in some way verbally acknowledges that they are aware they need to wrap up soon).

If you've had your hand raised for a while and they're still talking, you should start waving insistently at them. If they're still failing to acknowledge waving, at some point verbally interrupt. It's helpful to have a designated facilitator whose job it is to do this, but with or without that anyone can wrap up.

The person holding the talking object then passes it to whoever has their hand up who has spoken least recently (if they're not sure, ask out loud and people are permitted to answer this question. If nobody is sure, or if there's a tie because multiple people haven't spoken yet, free choice among plausible candidates. If you don't want to make a choice, pick the first to your left in a circle going round).

Although it’s a group spell, this is otherwise relatively similar to several other spells I’ve talked about, but I do think makes another difference between spells and games quite clear: A spell doesn’t necessarily come with a goal baked in.

There’s a reason you’re using the spell - it makes the conversation flow go better - but that reason is not part of the spell per se. This spell has constitutive rules that dictate how you can operate, but it doesn’t actually tell you whether you’ve done a good job or not - that’s still on you to decide. All it tells you is whether you’ve followed the rules or not, but you may come away from the same performance of it either totally satisfied or totally dissatisfied depending on what you were going in trying to achieve.

In this case the spell acts much more like a ritual than it does like a game, which brings me to another book that is hugely influential in my thinking in this area, which is “Ritual and its Consequences” by Seligman, Weller, Puett, and Simon.

A ritual in their conception is the creation of a subjunctive world. A world in which you behave as-if certain things were true - as if there were inviolable rules that you have to follow.

Like a game, there’s nothing that stops you from breaking out of the ritual. Nobody engaged in the ritual need actually believe that these rules genuinely are inviolable. They are merely choosing to enter into the ritual aspect of this.

One of their examples, and one that I think makes clear the ritual function of talking objects, is saying please and thank you at dinner:

The courtesy and politeness of daily life are also modes of ritual action. The truth value of such ritual invocations (like saying ‘‘please’’ and ‘‘thank you’’) is not very important. We are inviting our interlocutor to join us in imagining a particular symbolic universe within which to construe our actions. When I frame my requests with please and thank you, I am not giving a command (to pass the salt), but I am very much recognizing your agency (your ability to decline my request). Hence, saying please and thank you communicates in a formal and invariant manner—to both of us—that we understand our inter- action as the voluntary actions of free and equal individuals. ‘‘Please’’ creates the illusion of equality by recognizing the other’s power to decline.

(…)

Note that even in the imagined equalities of American courtesy, the power to decline may not be real. When we ask our children to please clear their plates or our students to please open their books, declining is not a normal option. Nevertheless, we ask as if the behavior were voluntary, because that ritual creates the social world that allows our interactions to continue in peace. Rituals such as saying ‘‘please’’ and ‘‘thank you’’ create an illusion, but with no attempt to deceive. This is a crucial difference from a lie, which is an illusion with a clear attempt to deceive the other. In this ritual is much more like play, which is the joint entrance into an illusionary world (and which we shall explore much further in chapter 3).

By framing our interaction with the ‘‘illusions’’ of courtesy, the frame actually pulls us in after it, making the illusion the reality. And the reality will last only as long as we adhere to the illusion. So, for example, when we ask our children to please feed the dog and they refuse, we may get angry and shout, ‘‘damn it, feed the dog now!’’. At this point we both leave the illusionary world of mutuality and respect for the one of brute power. We fall back into a world from which politeness had saved us.¹⁷

The function of the talking object is to artificially create a similar form of ritual politeness where nobody talks over each other, everyone gets a chance to speak, and the norms of turn taking are temporarily made much more explicit.

The excised bit in the middle is relevant here:

Other forms of politeness, of course, construct quite different social illu- sions. Chinese courtesies have long marked hierarchies instead of imagining equalities. Endless modernizing campaigns by both republican and commu- nist governments over the twentieth century—to say please and thank you or to call everyone comrade—have attempted to substitute other visions of the social world. None, however, has so far succeeded over the long term, because they posit a very different kind of social self underlying the convention.

The Talking Object system succeeds precisely because it’s not meant to succeed over the long term. It’s a constructed form of politeness deliberately made for short-term use. A ritual built like a game. You begin the ritual, and you end the ritual, and you are only required to adhere to its rules over the course of the session.

But… at the same time, in much the same way that Chess teaches you focused attention, Talking Object teaches you to be aware of how long you are speaking and that other people are currently waiting for you so they can take their turn. It teaches you to be aware of who is speaking too much, and who hasn’t spoken recently. These are important things to be able to do even when nobody is holding the Talking Object.

This is, for Seligman et al, one of the points of ritual. Drawing on Confucian theorists, expecially Xunxi, they argue (p 34):

Building a better society, therefore, is based upon ritualization: creating a canon of practices that everyone should follow. And the criterion for which actions from the past should become part of that ritual canon is simply based on whether a continued performance of them helps to refine one’s ability to respond to others. Thus, one learns types of actions, pieces of music, exem- plary speeches, moving poems, and so on.

The implication of this argument is that the world is inherently frag- mented: there is no foundation, there are no overarching sets of guidelines, laws, or principles. There are only actions, and it is up to humans to ritualize some of those actions and thereby set up an ordered world. The resulting ritual canon is a set of practices that emerged out of previous responses.

Just as we saw with Robert Orsi’s arguments, ritual is defined here not as a system of meaning but rather as a set of relationships. Some of these relationships come to be defined as ritual, and are to be enacted on a constant basis by the latter-born. An inherent tension is thus built up between ritual actions and those actions of the mundane world. In the ideal, the practice of the former will help direct the proper conduct of the latter. But the tension is never erased.

And then:

The problem is very simple: if one is constructing a subjunctive world of ‘‘as if ’’ through ritual, then what happens when one confronts a situation (as one does all the time—it is, after all, a fractured world) where there is no clear ritual telling one what to do, or where there are conflicting ritual obligations. This is a problem that confronts the most complex decisions we have to face in our lives, and it is also one that appears in common, mundane, everyday circumstances—if one is a parent and a child does something wrong, when does one speak sympathetically, and when does one speak harshly?

For our Confucian ritualists, the answer was clear: one of the goals of ritual is to train practitioners to be able to act as if there were a ritual telling them what to do. A contemporary example will help to make the point. When a child asks for butter at the dining table, one tells the child to say ‘‘please.’’ When one then gives the butter, one tells the child to say ‘‘thank you.’’ For the first few years of this, it is just by rote: one simply tries to get the child to repeat the words. And, if it stops at just this, then one has, to a minimal degree, created a subjunctive world of politeness. But the hope is clearly that it will not stop there: the hope is that the child, as she grows, will be able to express equivalent forms of making requests and expressing gratitude in situations where a simple ‘‘please’’ or ‘‘thank you’’ would be inappropriate.

The goal of Talking Object as a spell is to help manage the flow of conversation, but the hope of Talking Object as a spell is that once you’ve done it enough, you won’t need to.

Secondary Anchor is like this too - it both aids your ability to maintain focused concentration on a task, but ideally also helps you train that ability.

My hope is that, as well as the specific spells I (and you) develop helping with specific situations, developing the general skill of spellcraft alongside practicing specific spells helps develop the general disposition of behaving as if you have a spell for this problem, even if you have never previously seen one.

So what makes something a spell?

Spells aren’t exactly games or rituals, but it seems like there’s a very fuzzy cloud of basically similar things - agential technologies is the slightly clunky term I’m using for them for now - that include all of spells, games, and rituals. They’re ways of doing things that you can treat as artefacts in their own right that can be improved upon through the usual methods of technological progress.¹⁸

On top of that there’s also habits, skills, practices, etc.

Spells have a sort of building block character to them. A lot of spells come from - or can be turned into - habits, games, rituals, etc. One of my favourite ways to get a spell is to take an existing agential technology apart and strip bits of it from their context to use on their own. In a game context, a spell might be the analogue of a “move” or a “game mechanic”. Another way of thinking of spells is that they are a problem-solving tool. These two views don’t have perfect overlap, but I think they both point to an important feature of what I’m talking about.

I think what roughly carves out the space that I’m point at when I talk about spells is that they’ve got the following properties:

1. They’ve got a well-defined start and end. A spell is a thing you do, and then you stop doing.

2. A spell is something you actively choose to do, rather than something like a prompt. A habit is “When X, I will Y”. A spell is just the “Y” part. You have to choose when to use it.

3. A spell is transmissible. It’s something that you can write down and someone with the relevant prerequisite skills can pretty much follow the instructions and do the spell (although it might take some practice to get it good, like with following a recipe for the first time).

4. A spell is designed to change something. It’s not an act of making something specific, it’s a way of intervening in something that already exists (usually your life, or a process, or some other system). Another word I’ve been entertaining as a possible substitute for “spell” who don’t like like the magic terminology is “intervention”, and that’s not quite right but it’s pretty close.

I’m not yet convinced this is a perfect characterisation of what I mean by “spell” but it’s pretty good.

So for example:

• A vow or a commitment is not a spell if you intend to maintain it indefinitely (it fails condition 1).

• A daily habit is not a spell, because it comes with a specific prompt built into it.

• Something like a session of massage, therapy, or meditation are not spells, because they’re a skilled practice that is not really reducible to a simple set of instructions but are instead hugely dependent on the skill of the practitioner and their ability to respond to the situation. There are a lot of components to them that you could view as spells, but not the whole thing.

• A recipe (i.e. a literal actual food recipe) is not a spell, because it makes something new rather than being an intervention in an existing thing.

I’ll likely tinker around with these definitions a bit I’m reasonably happy with the examples of non-spells, and I’ve got some examples of spells already, but I don’t think I’ve got the boundary of quite what I mean by the concept fully pinned down. I’m close enough that I’ve more or less met my standards for definitions, but I’m not quite there yet.

Why should we care about spellcraft?

I think agential technologies are an interesting category that I’d really like to see more focus on, and spells in particular just seem really useful to me. There are all of these things that we do, and they’re clearly useful. What if we did them better? Spellcraft, as I am using the term, is the art of noticing the things we do, and trying to improve upon them. That seems clearly worthwhile to me.

Thanks for reading

You’ve reached the end of the free content. Below this line is paywalled content. This mostly consists of the footnotes, because I figure there’s a pretty strong link between being keen enough on my writing to want to read all my ridiculously long and rambling footnotes and getting enough out of my writing to want to pay for it.

There’s also a bonus spell, largely unrelated to the content of this post, as a thank you, and a few short notes about where I’m going with all this.

Also, if you’re not a subscriber yet, you can sign up here: