G is for Goofy

(This is a response to the Pagan Blog Project. )

 

"Alright, alright, Mickey's a mouse, Donald's a duck, Pluto's a dog. What's Goofy?"
"He can't be a dog. He drives a car and wears a hat. "
 "Oh, God. That's weird. What the hell is Goofy?"
 - Stand By Me 

There's a little secret about being a magician that nobody tells you when you first start out.

However it happens, you develop an interest in the occult. You search about online, go to bookstores, order from Amazon, slowly amassing your base of knowledge piece by piece. You read damn near constantly, and regale your long suffering friends/ blog readers with tales of the latest articles you've found on astral projection. You remember Great Aunt Mabel and how she once had her tea leaves read, and you buy tarot cards and ouija boards and runes. You're ready for this shit.

You're ready to actually practice magic.

 And that's when you discover the secret, the one thing no author puts in their Introduction to Sorcery books: you look really, really stupid.

PHEAR MY HAT.

You may as well just accept it now. Your robes are hilarious. Your wand looks like a stick, or maybe a penis. You are waving a big knife around despite the fact that you do not work at Medieval Times. Yes, you've painstakingly picked everything in this ritual to correspond to your goal, and that is undeniably good magic, but you do not look impressive or mystical. You look like, well. You. In a robe, waving your arms about.

Magic is goofy.

I think it's hard, especially when you're first starting out, to jump the "I feel SO stupid" hurdle. You read your books and intellectually it all makes sense (I hope) but then when you're actually standing in your living room with a candle and a pentagram you made out of popsicle sticks it's easy to fall prey to the reality that they sure don't look like this on Buffy. Thankfully the allure of magic usually motivates people to push forward anyway, and then the results justify feeling a bit silly.

The feeling can resurface, however.

Personally speaking, I find that working alone (and nowhere near a full length mirror) builds a sort of happy blindness to the ridiculous. Nobody can see you gesticulating, nobody can hear you trying to figure out how the fuck you pronounce "JHShVH." You can tape a Batman symbol to a flashlight and flick it on and off while yelling "I AM THE DARK KNIGHT!" as you fire sigils and nobody will ever know until you blog about it, and then you'll be sure to phrase it much cooler.

You will be reminded, however, of how odd you appear when you're forced to interact with other human beings. Although a coven or lodge still can look pretty funny, it's usually offset by the fact that you all look equally ridiculous. Also you might be naked.

I remember, many years ago now, meeting up with some internet buddies at Dragon Con. (DC taught me two things: ghost hunters are stupid, and Texans don't believe in walking. ...also apparently everything in Texas costs under five bucks, judging by the bitching about the prices.) One of these friends remains dear to me, and this was our first in-person meetup. We're both pagan, so we wanted to do some work together. But holy shit, we were both struck by a) the fact that hotel rooms are inherently non-magical feeling due to being ugly and b) performance anxiety. Still, we could laugh at ourselves a bit and we understood what we were trying to achieve.

Now where you're going to look really goofy is when you need to preform magic in front of normal people.

I've had to do this. I'm sure most people who have been at this game for any length of time have, too. You're the witch friend - or at least the 'friend into weird shit' - and inevitably if something spooky happens to someone in your social circle, you're going to hear about it. And so you wind up packing your supplies into a bag and driving off to someone's house to investigate a haunting, or helping someone construct a love spell.

Have you ever done the LBRP in front of a layperson? I have. You feel like an asshole. You know what you're doing, you are focused on the energy, but you still have a part of your mind going, "She must think I am completely insane. ...oh fuck. My secret's out - I AM completely insane."

You can only pray you seem vaguely mystical enough that she won't snap photos of you with her iPhone and upload them to Facebook.

Perhaps the only saving grace is that there's always someone who looks and acts goofier than you out there...