It’s a Kind of Magic

I don’t believe in magic. I have a very rational view of the world, a view that could also be called “boring.” My world has no magic, no monsters, no gods, no fey. I know because I’ve looked. I’ve looked in closets and under beds and in forests and down lonely mountain roads and among tombs in abandoned graveyards and inside houses set to a lean against a night sky. My explorations have shown me that this is a world bereft of the supernatural and the extra-sensory and that the only daemons are borne of the hearts and minds of men.

It’s a real bummer.

There’s a part of me that refuses to let go of the idea that there might be something more to the world than what we directly experience. I keep poking my nose into the ephemeral in the hopes that I’ll experience something, anything, that is beyond the veil. So far I haven’t found anything that’s convinced me that Bigfoot isn’t some redneck’s meth-and-Pabst-fueled hallucination or that ghosts are anything more than decrepit house farts.

However, recent events have convinced me that magic might be real.

Well, a kind of magic anyway.

Let’s back this up a little bit.

Recently, I’ve had this issue where I kept smoking cigarettes and my partner didn’t want me to do that. After a conversation in which she looked particularly sad/upset/angry at my stubborn refusal to not die from cancer/emphysema/cancer again/heart attack, I decided I should try and stop. Five or six attempts later, I decided I should really try and stop. I did research, looked into hypnosis (there’s no hard evidence that hypnosis works for treating nicotine addiction, by the way), and cobbled together my own means of quitting:

• I purchased a desk calendar, one of those cheap ones that you can use as a desk blotter or hang on the wall.

• I blacked out the days prior to day I was going to quit. Those were my smoking days, back in the past.

• On the day I quit, I wrote out the five most important reasons why I was quitting, filling the day on the calendar. I would do this every morning, reminding myself every day why I was quitting.

• During the day, if I felt the urge to smoke, I would use the calendar. Look at the reasons I had written down, drawing on it, scratching out the days behind me, counting how far I had come.

• Every morning, I would repeat the ritual. Fill the day with my reasons for quitting. Use the calendar as a touchstone throughout the day to stay away from the nicotine.

• It took about two weeks, and the urge to smoke was getting weaker, so I stopped writing out the words every morning and just marked off the days as I continued to stay off the butts.

• Occasionally, the urge would come back and I would write out my reasons to not smoke again and the urge would pass.

• By the 32nd day, I felt like I could stop completely and that was on December 9th. Since then, I haven’t had a cigarette.

I cobbled this method together from different articles and websites I read about quitting smoking, choosing techniques that were based on cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) research that also appealed to me. I then threw in some nonsense that would just make me feel better, like the doodles and blacking out the days before I quit smoking. In the end, it was the whole package that helped me stop smoking.

I have been thinking about this a lot, because what I did was a magic spell. If I had described the elements involved in a different way or with different language, I could have sold that stop smoking spell in a cheap, self-published grimoire that you could find by the register at your local vegan coffeeshop (stay tuned!). In certain traditions, magic and CBT have a lot in common: the importance of ritual and repetition, the use of texts that have the weight of tradition and research behind them, the importance of putting in the work and not just expecting something for nothing.

The mind is still very much a mystery, even to the people that study it. We don’t know why certain people react to treatments and others don’t. We don’t know why some people develop addictions or depression or a whole host of other mental illnesses and others don’t. We’re learning, but there’s a lot of unexplored territory still, where there are still dragons and where we might still need a little bit of magic. And while I know the psychology behind cognitive behavioral therapy, there’s still a large part of it that seems like magic to me. Leaning into that magical aspect, using items and techniques that are occult in nature, in conjunction with psychological treatment, seems like a potent and powerful combination.

I can see the benefits of doing so, for myself anyway. My natural tendency to drift toward the weird and the macabre makes me a perfect candidate for the hybridization of science and the occult. I can also see how easily someone could tumble down the rabbit-hole into irrationality and lose all connection to reason. It would be a delicate mental tightrope, of just almost believing in the irrational without teetering over the edge into madness. At a certain point, there might be no turning back and no way to even recognize when that moment has arrived.

If I am not careful, I could be consumed by my own insane beliefs of magicks and daemonic energies, that Fate’s hand guides my deeds and that the cards spell out the lines of the universe’s plans for all of us, thin strands of crimson silk binding the lives of mortals to a predestined cascade into the ravenous maw of Chaos.

But I should be fine, so lets see where this can take us.

-D-