Thoughts on Word Magick

Word magick, or the process whereby one changes another’s perspective or behavior based on an idea or the general notion that ideas have the power to move bodies, is such a power form of magick that often goes unnoticed in America due to its ubiquity. Yes, as Stenger and Phillarpe note in Capitalist Sorcery: Breaking the Spell, we live in a system soaked in sorcery but devoid of sorcerers. Think of advertisements, often derided as a droning hum that accompanies much of our time living in capitalist America. Those ad campaigns are like so many spells sent across airwaves seeking to influence your perspective on yourself and your actions. The ads incant that you should eat healthier and, wait for it, they also have the perfect packaged dinner service for you. These simple forms of word magick work, because we, as Americans, believe deeply that ideas have the power to change the world. It used to be grand ideas like emancipation and democracy that drove the behavior of Americans. Now, it is our choice of a healthy meal plan option, which will transform what we think of ourselves.

If we are so bold to believe magick in our materialist-dominated times, then one might take on the adbusters-esque challenge (do you remember when they conjured occupy from nothing with an ad in their magazine? I do) of becoming the sorcerer that our capitalist patriarchy denies exists. There is a power from below, a power from want that one can wield with words to wake others from these spells hiding in plain sight but binding them from finding their own power. It’s one of the paradoxical openings offered by a system of power that chooses to wield its magick by denying its existence. Yes, following the lead of discussions on the magick of words that I have heard from Amy and Risa of @missingwitches and the guests of their podcasts, we can make clear the intent of our words to dislodge ossified behavior, thought patterns, or structures by alchemizing linguistic tools into incantations, conjurings, or other spell work. We can be the magick workers that the system denies exists. We can re-awaken a purposeful engagement with magick toward human emancipation, because this is how good magick has always operated.

These theoretical musing come from a place of pondering my writing, especially my penchant towards appeals to action based on my own experiences. I, like the transcendentalists of old, believe strongly that my words can shift people. I used to question whether this was an egoistic response to my own art. However, following listening to a wonderful podcast with Mitch Horowitz on the Aquarium Drunkard Podcast, it became evident to me that this is based in my own very American notion (derived from the strong strain of transcendentalism in our society) that ideas have the power to cause change in society and that my own experience finding my magick may be beneficial to someone else who is teetering on starting their own love affair with finding their own power. What if my words are the spell that brings back enchantment to that person’s life or sets them on a path toward seeking that enchanment? Honestly, once I viewed it within this lens, it seemed that I had an obligation to do this magickal word work and discuss it as the aim of my written text.

Yes, my only dream as a worker of word magick is that my words are a rupture, or a disruptive event in someone’s life to open up possibilities for creating a new world. A disruptive event (often what I call a death in my work) is often one, such as the passing of a loved one, a change of job, a relationship change, the birth of a child, a conversion event, that leads to one make a radical departure with a past version of oneself and be reborn as someone new. I have experienced so many of these ruptures, these death and rebirth cycles, while finding sociology, when my mother passed, when my daughter was born, when I found my druidry, and dealing with our decaying world. Consequently, to use word magick to create a rupture is to practice a form of death work where you are laying to rest the old order that is decaying before our eyes and opening up the generative possibilities of the world that we will create together.