Does the crazy-seeming stuff I believe have anything to do with transsexuality or with sorcery? Sorcery, obviously. Many of you probably come here to my nacent blog for the entries on gender and sexuality. You have every right to regard any reference to sorcery (or call it magic, magick with a “k”, witchcraft, or bullshit, or whatever you will) as an aberration, or with a tolerant, unbelieving smile, or with a snort and disdain. And that’s fine. But you also have a right, if you’re interested enough to be here, to know why I believe in and practice magic, or, as I prefer to call what I do, sorcery. And why I believe in the bogies that go along with sorcery, too. Angels and demons, Gods and ghosts…
If you actually practice sorcery (at my house we call it “woo woo stuff”), if you actually open your mind enough and suspend disbelief — no more than you do when you read a book — and really do the hard work of learning to practice it, you will inevitably experience encounters with call ’em entities, and unless you’ve done the work and practiced the practices you’re going to have to take my word for it that during such encounters with entities, etc., you experience them as if they were real as rocks, rivers, gravity and galaxies. You might be tempted to focus on the words as if in the previous sentence. I ask you to focus on the word experience. Because the experiences, which are a matter of perception, which ultimately take place in your mind, of course, are quite real. I repeat: the experiences are real. Yes, they are your perceptions, they become distorted with time the way all memories do, but they become a part of your real life which you have unquestionably experienced.
Well, you may reasonably ask, despite that, why in the world would anyone regard such stuff and nonsense as real? Even if you experience it, don’t reason, science, common sense and consensus reality all dictate that such things can not be?
Why don’t you understand that, Rachel Izabella?
This is why I don’t understand that. If you discard your own lived experience, your own life itself for the Gods’ sakes, and in its place you adopt the belief system and opinion of others, you are, dear friend, doing yourself a great harm. Your experiences, your life, are all you’ve got, and vicarious experience and the rational opinions of others — the majority’s beliefs, “the way things are”, the status quo — cannot replace your own lived experience. If you allow this to happen, you are, friend, quite literally throwing your life away. You are discarding your lived experiences in favor of what you, for the most part, have not yourself experienced and lived.
Let’s all not do that. It sounds absolutely awful.
So — Let’s suspend disbelief for a moment and imagine that you’ve done the hard, hard work, you’ve practiced sorcery and now you’ve seen and met spirits, entities, monstrosities and the things that go bump in the night. If you believe a spirit you meet and speak with is real, consensus reality collapses like the house of cards that it is. If you ask a spirit for a favor in exchange for some small token of a reward — and, by the way, in this example you don’t need to have seen or really even believe in said spirit, just give it the benefit of the doubt —and the favor comes to pass, and you do this again and again, you have shifted into another reality than that of the consensus. If you do this enough, you see that spirits effect real change upon the real world. Now consensus reality begins to seem quite foolish and quite small, squeezed and confining. You don’t want to go back to it. You now live in a separate reality.
In fact, you can’t go back. When you step onto the sorcerous path, really, really step onto it, there can be no turning back.
One more example, this time not involving anything normally considered supernatural. Let’s say for whatever reason you decide to practice the most elementary form of candle magic. You crystallize your intent in your mind, for example, I get the promotion and Bob does not. You hold your candle, you meditate upon your intent for fifteen minutes, I get the promotion and Bob does not, all the while focusing your eyes unwaveringly on your candle. Then you light your candle and walk away and think, I hope I get the promotion and Bob doesn’t, but you don’t obsess on it. Sure the thought enters your mind several times a day, but that’s all. —You, my friend, have just performed your first act of magic. The first time or two, it may not work. But it may work the first time.
Let’s say it worked and you got the promotion. It could have been a coincidence, you think. Maybe. So maybe you try it again, because after all the last time it seemed as if it worked… And say you repeat this little experiment one hundred times. Seventy-five times it worked, twenty-five times it didn’t. Maybe it worked ninety times, and ten times it didn’t. Coincidence is starting to seem like a thin explanation, especially if your magic worked ninety percent of the time. This is your life, this is what happened in your life — what do you choose to think about what you’ve just done those seventy-five or ninety times? You’re probably going to think your magic bent reality in your favor. To believe otherwise might well be self-defeating. It would also be a betrayal of your own lived experience.
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For the sake of argument, I’ve created hypothetical, easy to understand examples here. But I’ve worked (small) wonders — which means I’ve done thaumaturgy, wonder-working, sorcery. I’ve spoken with Gods and received answers. I’ve summoned angels and demons and they have come and I have seen them and spoken with them. They have acted upon this world and changed its course, in however small a way.
And that’s why I believe in sorcery, Gods, angels and demons. Besides my family (and I am not going to blog about my family), my transsexuality and my practice of sorcery are the most important things in my life. And I know there are transsexual practitioners out there. Perhaps some day one of them will chance across this blog. Hence the strange subtitle of this blog, T and Sorcery. It’s admittedly an odd combination, and maybe it won’t work as a blog concept. But now you know why I blog about gender and sexuality and my personal experiences in these areas, and also why I blog about stuff that most people think is craziness, or just a bunch of figments if they’re charitable. —Whatever you made of the above post, I hope you’ll come back for the T, for the sorcery, or for both.
Much love.
The Way of the Transgressor is Hard 