Magic, Spirituality, and Fall

Autumnal reflections on intention and intuition

Quinn McClurg

(Disclaimer: I write this article upon a pile of years-neglected tarot cards, meditations, and stale visions. I bring up my magical past (self-made (to avoid appropriation), esoteric-informed, unconscious-centered, and manic) only to illustrate how “far gone” I’ve been before, and its correlations with the most intense periods of my life. I’ve long equated my inherited “intuitions” with my mother’s mental illnesses. I wouldn’t say I believe in magic, but I believe those who do; I, too, have seen and felt things that could not be easily explained. Perhaps I still don’t want to try to explain them.) 

Summer dies slowly, and Fall usurps its cooling mantle. As Winter is the season for death, Fall is the season for grief. As the last rays of sun grow shorter and shorter, the veil thins, and the dead speak with tongues of dry leaves. Fall’s passing forces us to reconnect to our pasts and reconcile our old ghosts, to connect with nature to ease and embrace her transitions, to turn to our trusted traditions and the most ancient glimmers of nameless conviction living in our bones. 

I speak of magic. As universal as our desires to believe in it, as old as humans drawing breath themselves, magic is that tenuous lifeforce breathed into mankind by creator gods in almost every religion—that same life force swimming through everything else. Magic is not only a practice, but the very fact of being itself, from evolution to transduction, from stardust to sentience. Reeling from the sheer logistical impossibility of existence itself, one may assume not only that driving and guiding forces exist, but that they are meaningful. After all, just because the universe is as it is now, it may as well have been destined to be this way (this may be seen as a form of hindsight bias to some, or rather a signification of order / affirmation of destiny by others; again, it is almost maddening to live upon an “accidental” history with no meaning guiding any event other than that the event had occurred (I personally believe humanity, life, and consciousness is all an infinitely impossible fluke; wonder and nihilism and existentialism ensue)).

In truth, the reconciliation and management of these unseen forces comprises the majority of modern practices of magic, not the stereotypical images of bloody sacrifice or demon-summoning. In fact, most common Western practices—general spirituality to witchcraft, Paganism to Wicca—rely mainly on intuition and intention to guide, fulfill, or execute rituals and practices. Intuition is gleaned from previous experience or observation: channeling, listening, or connecting to some signifier (internal or external; sometimes identified as specific deities or ancestors). Intention generated by the practitioner’s conscious or unconscious desires is integrated into or answered by their practice (sometimes solidified in sigils or specific utterances). If used, relics (ex: heirlooms, curios), natural objects (ex: herbs, bones, crystals), personal objects (ex: hair, saliva, blood), and tools (ex: oracle / tarot decks, candles) can all aid in a ritual, use guided by intention, intuition, or custom. 

Very rarely are rituals and practices focused on the material (money, transmutation, physical harm, etc.), but rather on encouraging positive energy, balance, reinforcement, connection, cleansing, or protection. Because these practices are so immaterial, they are far more likely to appear to alter reality than a placebo—they create and inform a rich inner life, further connecting the practitioner to themselves, others, and the world around them. 

Tangent: Curses are the rarest and most dire form of magic, used only in the most extreme cases, as each magic has a cost, and most curses are returned onto the caster. Curses bring mutual destruction and generational collateral, prophesying brings with it paranoia, and channeling encourages loss of touch with reality.

In the poll accompanying this article, Char, a practitioner, summarized: “I practice witchcraft because it allows me to romanticize the processes of managing all the different aspects of my health and wellbeing. It makes life fun, and allows me to express my individuality!”

Alyssa, another respondent, stated: “Not only does Wicca remind me that a universe exists outside of myself, it reminds me that the world exists with or without me. Wicca is my constant reminder to be kind, whether that is to [an unbearable] colleague [...] or to a tree that I sit under..”

Sydney wrote: “i practice spiritualism because i work in death care and i take care of the dead everyday. i couldn’t handle the brutal reality of death without finding a deeper answer to why. why does everything die and where is there some good in that truth?”

And Nico, a culturally informed pagan and our last respondent, wrote: “We have to protect the Earth because without it we and all the things we hold dear will fade away. I practice for the birds, the water, the fire, my ancestors, and the people who walk ahead of me.”

Of these respondents, 41.6% cite some form of religious trauma as their introduction to magic, while 25% cite influence from their friends and communities, and two groups of 16.6% cite pure curiosity or being born into their practices respectively. The most represented practices within these responses was Paganism (4), Wicca (3), Witchcraft (2), Spiritualism (1), Astrology (1), Tarot (1), Numerology (1), Specific Cultural Practices (1), Gnosticism (1), and Chaos Magick (1) (some respondents identified with more than one). Three respondents mentioned following deities from various cultures, while three others raised concerns for appropriation: one for Norse symbols by neo-nazis, one for being on stolen land and misuse of Native American culture, and one for how Wicca played into “that ‘noble savage’ fallacy mixed with [...] orientalism, plus a complete misunderstanding of history….”. 

Historically, magic was respected, used for the benefit of a collective (agriculture, medicine, religion, guidance, etc). Then, with colonizers and their conditional god(s) comes “difference,” violence, and erasure. However, magic endured, even at the threat of death, carrying with it centuries of otherwise lost oral histories, ancient religions, folklores, and restorative practices. For example, from Precolonial America, various Native American practices and Brujería emerged; from Africa, Vodún and Ìṣẹ̀ṣe endured post-slave-trade, adapting into Voodoo, Hoodoo, and Pan-African spirituality; from the pre-Christian Celts, Goths, Greeks, and Slavs, various Pagan practices, many of which intermingled and influence modern day Paganism and Wicca. 

Determining the spatial and cultural origins of witchcraft is a very difficult task, specifically due to its near universal distributions and histories of accusation—witches have been mentioned and persecuted in some of humanity’s oldest literature at least 3,000 to 4,000 years ago (range derived from mention of Circe in Homer’s “Odyssey” which followed the “Iliad,” thought to be a continued oral history from the sacking of Troy around the 13th to 11th century). Additionally, pinning witchcraft of specific groups like the Romani people is racist, Eurocentric (ignoring distributions of the cultural archetype of the witch across the world (Africa and the Indigenous Americas (which also points to either convergent evolution of folklore or the existence of a witch archetype that was then disseminated at least 30,000 to 10,000 years ago))), and upholds the damaging stereotypes of the appearance of witches (influenced mostly by caricatures of Romania and Jewish people).

As for the esoteric and mystical (ex: Hermeticism / alchemy, Kabbalah, Gnosticism, Sufism, etc.), these practices endured due to being favored by academia and Western “science,” particularly by the elites, royalty, and leaders who wished to benefit from them. 

These practices, necessary for the survival of the practitioner, their culture, and soul, are often poached and made piecemeal by the rich white man for entertainment, specifically from the late 19th century to today. Seances, secret societies, and thinly-veiled sex cults mark the heights of these appropriations and fetishizations, being deeply rooted within several occult, esoteric, and even spiritual practices still.

At risk of sounding cliché, I believe magic is in the histories, preservation, and continuation of any culture at all: necromancy is as simple as reading the words of the long-dead; enchantment as simple as folklore and storytelling; empowerment as simple as connecting to the generations before and after you through practice. It is up to us to reexamine the histories, origins, and implications of our magics, thereby preserving or reinterpreting them, uprooting each shred of bigotry, appropriation, colonial violence, and dehumanization within—the infinities within us are not enabled by their judgements or limitations, but rather freedoms, paradoxes, and possible impossibilities. Perhaps we may be inspired to create our own reparative doctrines of magic from these infinite, universal, and ever-shifting wells of magic within us, bound by archetypes and experience rather than decontextualized gods. And we must not forget the dark, the inherent violence and self-destruction seeded within all living things—a doctrine of magic or philosophy that ignores the dark is bound to fail as it is utopian, not bound to the true realities of life, death, existence, and nature.

Regardless, practice need not be a faith either: to reenchant oneself is merely to live with wonder, curiosity, veneration, devotion, and love.

Bear witness. Take action. Make magic.