Why Go Deeper

I had the exciting experience of going to Barnes and Noble the other day and finding it in a state of transition and relative disarray.

Entire sections were in the gradual process of being packed away and replaced with what I assume would be holiday merchandise. Red library carts haphazardly appeared throughout the store, ferrying tomes to and fro from location to location. “Old” Autumn and Halloween season adjacent books found themselves packed tightly in taller movable shelves in the far corner of the store. It was as if the building itself was bidding farewell to the new occult in vogue and harkening in the season of saccharine sweet, still widely Christmas-oriented, generally vacuous festivities.

Oddly enough all this liminality, the casual pace of employees waiting for the new merchandise, and the general lack of customers at that hour put me at ease in a way that I haven’t experienced since visiting my old college library. I was at my leisure to explore, not worrying about shopping quickly or being in anyone’s way or messing up displays. Tucked in a cluttered corner, I could really take a good look at the books I wanted to examine. And naturally, I found myself kneeling on the floor in front of one of those tall portable shelves stuffed with witchy books, journals, and sketchbooks.

After sliding out a few interesting books from the mix, I happened across a witch journal with a lovely front cover, filled with simple drawings of occult symbols such as crystals, tarot cards, and stars. ✨ Magic ✨ The inside of the book was even more charming (pun fully intended), with beautiful sections dedicated to dreaming, herbalism, and more. I paged through the book, thinking back to my journals, my practice, and my journey into magick. It was a book that I bought at B&N which launched that spiritual journey: it just wasn’t actually an occult book.

On this day, I was at Barnes and Noble to find an unlined, unmarked book suitable for my particular book of shadows needs. I set out to purchase something only after realizing that some important planetary information that I gathered wouldn’t really fit well in any of my current notebooks. I needed a reference book for my future practice.

So when I unexpectedly found this colorfully decorated, ready-made book of shadows, it got me thinking:

If you have all these pretty and readily available witchy journals and simple but seemingly complete spellbooks, then why would you ever need to go deeper?

Why would you need to craft your own book of shadows from scratch?

Why would you need to consult needlessly complicated pre-Enlightenment grimoires and books on occult philosophy?

Why make things harder for yourself in an already challenging path?

I honestly believe there is real value in asking these types of questions. And I’m not interested in easy, dismissive answers that rely on value judgements like “we should study texts because they are old and have lasted the test of time” or “ancient ideas (especially from Western cultures or adopted by the West) have more inherent value than any new ideas could ever hope to” or “only that which is difficult to grasp or hard-earned is truly important”. I try not to buy into ideas like that, though it takes some practice to disentangle my initial judgments from the Eurocentric values of the society and educational system in which I was raised.

And the idea that I should delve into books that work within an established ceremonial tradition or initiatory grade system for the sake of a structured path offends the very vocal spiritual anarchist in me. Besides, many capital t Traditions don’t want me anyway — or they want me only for a slightly less elevated position. A female. A woman who will never be a mother. A person not fully educated in the quadrivium. An individual who hasn’t meditated regularly or studied magick for a decade or more. And yes, yes, all of this with a grain of salt, understanding the cultural limitations of the time of writing, but STILL. I came to magick (in part) for personal freedom and empowerment, let’s not cut the legs off halfway to the ground now. If you have wisdom for me it had better be damned valuable in its own right, and then I’ll listen carefully. I have before. I will again.

And I know that there’s a lot of work and authors out there that do write to me and people like me. Several of those books are on the shelves of my local Barnes and Noble. As mentioned before, one of those books launched my occult journey: Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass. Her writing and ideas about the intelligence of the natural world and the collective efforts towards flourishing inspired a desire in me to repair my relationship with the world. This brought me to druidry, runes, animism, mediumship, séance, and magick. I remember what it was like to find and purchase that book years ago, as if I was getting insight into the wisdom it holds and the effect it would have on my life.

So how do we know where to find the teachings we need, and if a work contains what we’re searching for? We return to our primary question: why seek additional, often more abstruse resources beyond what’s “popular” in bookstores now?

Some of the most useful books I’ve read have been written in the past few years. Some of them have been obscure, others relatively popular and easily found at a B&N. Some of them have been written in the Renaissance period (a couple from earlier), others from this year.

Some I’ve read cover to cover, others I’ve read only the Introduction. Some I haven’t read at all — they sit on my bookshelf waiting for me to be ready.

The fact is that, regardless of what I intended to say at the beginning of this piece, the wisdom you need right now comes from many places — not just atavistic occult books. It comes from modern teachers, it comes from science fiction movies, it comes from self-help videos, it comes from a conversation with a trusted friend, heck it comes from gnosis — the classic fromage mystique. And we are always guided to what we need when we need it.

What I will say is that a journey into magick is not a practice of collecting books, regardless of what they are or where they are from. Book collection is usually a part of the magickian’s development, but it is not the thing in itself. It does not cause development, it reflects development.

In a similar way, the witchy journal that I came across was fun and cute, but it didn’t have the space I needed to really define my own path and be as creative. It doesn’t exist as a representation of my practice or solidify my identity. Beyond the consumption or collection of books, which sometimes contain valuable ideas, is the need to practice, to make, to work magick.

And if you want to do that in a meaningful way, I suggest you stick with an occult subject and go deeper. Find the advanced works, teachers, and other resources in a subject you’re interested in and explore what works for you in practice.

And go deeper to:

-engage with perspectives not popularly held

-encounter ideas outside of the norm or highly specialized in a given area of interest

-seek to understand the history and lineage of a spiritual belief or tradition through primary sources

-advance your understanding of a given subject by going beyond beginner literature

-find knowledge that is lesser-known, otherwise understood as “occult”

Keep exploring!