Witches dance in ways that are not so different from the ways party-goers dance in a club, but the witches’ dance is enchanted, because it takes place in a magic circle. Because it is made into a ritual. Witches want to live in modern cities and fully engage with them, and at the same time they want to cultivate an ancestral mindset that harks back to a time before cities, an age of wild shamans and things in caves. An age of wonder found in shadows. In those shadows, in mythos, dancing with your friends is also a prayer, an illness is also a demon, a lake is also a god. This system of echoes and mirrors within mirrors, this dazzling world view in which some things are real, others are fake, and others yet are mythic, is what they create in their mind through ritual. And by doing so they transform their kitchens into mythical sites, dreamier than a distant temple where people levitate. Hogwarts is not a place you go to, it is a place you make up. This is what both W. B. Yeats and Aleister Crowley were striving for with their poetry and their magic – if there is, at this point, any difference.
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We cannot decide to have a numinous experience any more than we can decide to fall in love. But we certainly can do something to open our heart to love, and similarly we can open ourselves to the numinous. We can create the conditions for it to happen. It seems an odd endeavour only because our society prizes love and talks about it incessantly, while by and large it ignores the out-of-fashion and incommunicable numinous. Even churches look at it with embarrassment, as if it were a drunken grandfather crashing a very polite party. We start at a disadvantage here.
The numinous is shy. It cannot be chased, only lured, and the more we hunt it, the further it flees. All we can do is turn off the light, burn a candle, and invite it in. We open the door and we wait, in the silence, in the shadows.
THE WORKOUT
In our second workout, we are going to learn how to embed mythos in our life.
1. The Transfiguration of the Everyday
Write down three or more dull things that you often do, or that you are going to do soon, or that you have recently done. For example: a long meeting, dinner with the in-laws, standing in a queue. Make notes on why you find that particular activity so dull.
Then talk to a friend about these dull activities. With her, find reasons why they are not so dull after all. The difficult bit here is that you are not looking for ways to make those activities less dull; you are looking for reasons why they might not be that dull. Reasons you did not see in the first place.
I cannot promise that this will make everything you do fun and interesting, but it will show you how to cultivate a deeper, more enchanted perspective, in ways that make sense for you.
2. The Candlelit Week
For a week, use electric lights as little as you can. When evening comes and you are home, rather than turning on the light, turn on candles. Make notes on how this makes you feel, and what impact it has, if any, on your relationship with darkness, on your mood and on your creativity.
3. The Mythos of You
Create, and write down in your Book of Wonder, a mythic reason to explain the loss of wonder in grown-ups, and the dangers that loss entails. For example: a jealous god steals wonder from early teenagers and keeps it in a jar. Has anyone ever stolen theirs back? How can you steal back yours?
4. The Ritual
Based on the mythos you wrote, create a small ritual for yourself, and repeat it over a period of time that you set in advance – a week, or ten days, or even a month. For example, if your mythos says that a god stole wonder and kept it in a jar, your ritual might consist in drinking every evening a sip of water from a jar you bought only for this reason, and that you filled with water on the first day. You keep the ritual going until the jar is empty. Make the moment in which you sip the water a meaningful, sacred moment. Approach the water as if it really was your wonder made liquid.
Whatever your ritual is, keep it a secret: do not reveal it to anybody, not even to your partner or closest friends. It is only for you. When you are creating the ritual, consider the necessity of secrecy (if you are not often home alone, it might be difficult to have a secret ritual entailing a perfumed bath every day for one month).
Write down the ritual in your Book of Wonder, and give it a name. Also, make a note every time you do the ritual.
5. Fear of the Dark
This can be an upsetting exercise; please skip it if you are particularly anxious, prone to fear, or you just feel it is too much for you at this moment of your life.
We pretend that we stopped being afraid of the dark. When that happens, it is because we refuse to imagine what the dark could hide. Fear and attraction are both features of the numinous, and we need to reconnect with both.
Sit somewhere in your house, alone, in darkness. Do not put a blindfold on; just find a room that is as close as possible to completely dark.
Listen to the silence: is there a scratching on the wall? Focus on the shapes in the dark: why are they moving? And is that a strange smell that you sense? A cold hand brushing against your shoulder? Think of the things that made you afraid when you were little: are they still with you, unseen, unheard?
Do this for five or ten minutes, depending on how long it takes for you to become unnerved. Repeat it three times, letting at least a day pass between each iteration. Every time, write down your thoughts immediately after you turn on the light. What was it that made you afraid – and how is that connected to what attracts you?
If the exercise causes you anxiety, stop it at once.
The Third Key
The Light
Too much of a good thing can be wonderful
In my early twenties I visited a Wunderkammer, a chamber of wonders.
Such a chamber, also referred to in English as a ‘cabinet of curiosities’, does what it says on the tin: it is a collection of wondrous curios. Picture the scene. You enter a candlelit room overflowing with oddities stacked from floor to ceiling in no perceivable order, looming over you on all sides. On your right, a human-shaped root sits side by side with the remnants of a creature that might or might not exist. On your left, an elaborately carved wooden clock rests below a tiny ivory ship. You will find crammed in a square metre more objects than you have in your entire home, and each of them is (or purports to be) unique.
When modern science was getting started, between the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, it was common for people of note to keep such a Wunderkammer, which could be as small as a cabinet or big enough to occupy a suite of rooms in a palace, depending on the owner’s wealth and inclinations. Natural ‘wonders’ merged seamlessly with artefacts. A wealthy collector might juxtapose a real, stuffed, brightly coloured bird of paradise with an automaton in the form of a duck that appeared to eat grain, digest it and then defecate it. And those fearsome talons, labelled ‘griffin claws’ – were they perchance the claws of an actual griffin?
The thread connecting the exhibits was that they were all in some way interesting, strange – and new. The Wunderkammer gave visible form to the cutting-edge spirit of science, with its insatiable curiosity about everything beneath and beyond the sky, and its thirst to catalogue, to understand, and to know.
In our enlightened times, that kind of Wunderkammer is no more. Some descendants linger, in the form of commercial museums big and small. Ripley’s Believe It or Not! is a chain with branches worldwide; the Viktor Wynd Museum of Curiosities, Fine Art and Natural History occupies a basement in Hackney, London.