#crypt's magic starter pack series

[libraryofruinaofficial]

People should really stop overcomplicating spirit work by making it sound like spirits have a whole different, special set of rules when in reality the best rule of thumb with spirit work is "if you wouldn't take it from another person, don't take it from a spirit." You're not going to go around telling people your boss is an evil cult leader just for bad business practices, so there's no point in labeling a spirit as "evil", "dangerous", or "malicious" when you'd call an incarnate being "an asshole" or "a creep" for the same behaviors.

Your language is inflienced by the subconscious, and your subconscious can be influenced by language in turn. Make sure you really, truly believe what you say about this sort of thing. Offer discarnate entities the same certainty of existence as you give to incarnate ones. If you wouldn't use the same word for a friend, coworker, parent, etc., don't use it for a spirit, god, landwight, house spirit, etc.

If a post, book, article, etc. is worth using, you should be able to replace any and all references to the metaphysical and supernatural with the mundane and physical. If a post says "spirit/entity/etc." you should still be able to comprehend it perfectly by substituting with "person/[person's title/how they know the individual]". You should be able to replace "spirit companions/SoulBonds" with "friends/family/partner/significant other". And you should be able to use any references to magic or energy as metaphors for someone's actions on a mundane level.

[libraryofruinaofficial]

Categories of Practical Magic

So most people would think of “categories of magic” as meaning something like divination vs. cursing vs. potion-making, or fictional/Otherworldly schools of study, or otherwise differentiating things by the purpose of the magic and the tools it utilizes. What we’re doing, though, is defining a few "types" of practical, physical-realm results-based magic based on where they derive their power from and what sorts of rules they tend to follow, as they all have different considerations for how they work, especially depending on where you're working magic in the multiverse. That bit may sound absurd to some, but it is the basis of Otherworldly Reconstructionism, and therefore deserves an explanation, and honestly if the absurdity seems to be too much you may wish to reconsider some of your stances on Nonhumanity and metaphysics as a whole.

For those of you who understand that truth, knowing and understanding the different categories of magic can be insights into and potential fixes for using magic in multiple places. Pattern-based magic can be exceedingly difficult to work on the astral and oftentimes cause trouble when attempting to find substitutions for plants, minerals, and substances not found in this world, for example, and spirit-based magic will fail if you try to send someone or something to run an errand for you in a place they have no access to. By analyzing your situation, your tools, your methods, and your goals with these categories in mind, you can achieve greater success and understanding in your workings.

All of these categories may overlap, and we're certain there are more types of practical magic, but in general, there are four categories of magic aimed at achieving some sort of material or short-term life goal based on how they work: pattern-based, archetypal-based, spirit-based, and resonance-based.

Pattern-based

This is the format of most spells with ingredients based in correspondence. These types of spells often rely on physical, chemical patterns and actions and sympathetic magic according to the planets, elements, concepts, etc. associated with both historical and here-and-now physical Earth life.

Pattern-based magic can seem anywhere from eclectic to rote and formulaic, but at its base it relies on patterns of correspondence or similarity between things, and many books of spells and magical ingredients are rooted in pattern-based magic such as this, usually drawing on the lore of specific traditions such as the Doctrine of Signatures. Author Raven Kaldera calls this type of magic "thaumaturgic", however that specific term technically refers to practical or "low" folk magic aimed at getting results and improving circumstances. Pattern-based magic can still cause change on nonphysical levels and be used to achieve transcendental results.

This type of magic can actually cause problems and confusion when working a spell on a Nonhuman individual, as many do not have any sense of personal connection to their human body, appearance, or even chosen daily use-name, legally-backed or not. As a result, traditional taglocks may be useless unless modified or worked with unconventionally, and typical spell correspondences may as well be useless. (We’ll address these things in depth at another time.)

Archetypal-based

This is the realm of passed-down folk magic and the rituals and so-called superstitions that seem to have inherent power across time and space regardless of whatever reality, world, dimension, or whatever term you prefer from which that specific spell or ritual hails from. This can be due to historical usage building up an archetypal energy store, or that archetypal energy store existing elsewhere in the multiverse to be called upon, or some other unknown factor resulting in it becoming a more widely-accessible energy "program", so to speak. 

Kaldera classifies this form of magic as "theurgic", however we ourselves, along with many others, use that term to denote works of magic that involve connecting and developing different parts of the self such as transcendental alchemy and invocation/evocation to achieve direct contact with other entities for reasons of self-progression and adopting traits of those entities.

Most Recon work will be at least partially archetypal-based magic, as it draws on Otherworldly archetypal patterns and energies that are pre-established and can be tapped into and potentially modified depending on where you are, and as such can have practical applications not aimed at personal betterment and ascension.

Spirit-based

Spirit-based magic is directly partnering with a spirit, deity, wight, ancestor, kami, egregore, oversoul, etc. to achieve results on any level that does not involve merging, possession, or emulation of said being. This sort of magic is the traditional reason behind the summoning of demons, imps, and familiars to perform tasks for the practitioner, ranging anywhere from ensuring a romantic/sexual partner is "delivered" to the mage, to hiding or revealing hidden treasure, or instructing the summoner in herbology or mechanical science. Asking a SoulBond or spirit companion to gather information for you is spirit-based magic! There's just a different set of agreements in place in those cases (that is, you already have an interpersonal relationship, working or not) when normally such things would involve propitiation, petition, and prayer, especially when approaching a new “business partner”.

Resonance-based

This is the most direct, but most tricky form of magic. It can be thought of as the basis for the other three types, as they all rely on resonance in some way, but with a modifier. This type of magic could be seen as a sort of "meta-magic", magic that transcends boundaries and awareness yet is inherent in all forms. Pattern-based magic seeks resonance through physical means. Archetypal-based achieves resonance through a storehouse or transmitter of magical energy. Spirit-based magic reaches resonance by using an intermediary. But all types ultimately aim for changing the energy of a person, place, thing, concept, scenario, etc. to a different goal energy, and resonance-based magic alters the resonance of something directly to achieve said goal. You seek to make that thing resonant with your goal, and to maintain that resonance long enough for it to become permanent, or at least fully manifested.

Maintenance of the resonance is often the hardest part, since nothing exists in a vacuum, and any energy by nature will move and alter things on some level by proximity. Whether that's the physical heat energy of water transferring to your body to raise your temperature on a material level, or the magical energy of your species transferring to your aura and energy signature to manifest unusual phenomena, there will always be contrary factors that redirect that energy, accidentally or intentionally.

Resonance-based magic is often the basis for pure energy work and astral magic, and can be difficult to learn and master for a whole host of reasons. 

[libraryofruinaofficial]

How to Become Aware of the Physical Body (Without Hating Yourself For It)

As usual, this is mostly aimed at Nonhumans, but this can work for anyone with a different body map on the etheric and astral levels, anyone with physical incarnation issues, and maybe potentially even if it’s just a mental or psychological difference, as well. Please note this does not work for physical body scans or physical healing work, or anything else where the focus is actually the physical body in full.

We’re also gonna come straight out and explain why such a thing is necessary.

The point of many of the exercises and meditations that draw focus to the physical body is to use it as a “jumping-off” point for sensing more-than-physical anatomy on a more detailed level, or sensing something specific in your more-than-physical body/bodies.

If you really want proficiency in a lot of areas (things like more vivid and tactile astral travel or projection, any magic or energy work carried out on other levels of existence besides the physical, increased sensation and “physicality” of astral limbs, any sort of nonphysical healing/surgery, and glamour magic), then being able to tell the minute differences between different layers and levels of your nonphysical anatomy is vital. Like in physical bodies, where one organ may be part of multiple organ systems and/or not fully, clearly separated and defined from an adjacent organ or set of organs, there will be blurred lines and overlap, but it’s still helpful to find any places of definition between them.

Using all that as a baseline, we can modify the whole concept of physical body awareness in a very simple way to avoid invoking discomfort, dysphoria, disassociation, or more severe symptoms. Honestly, it’s possible for it to become more or less of your baseline body map and therefore even alleviate some of those things, partially or totally. (No guarantees, though, and be warned: it’s also possible to have the inverse happen, or have it collapse on you, so if you feel that’s a legitimate risk, just make sure you separate back out afterwards.)

There’s one really simple trick to all this:

You only really need to focus on one part of your physical body as physical. Everything else can be nebulous and vaguely-shaped.

By this we mean if the only thing you’re even vaguely okay with or can cope with in your body is your hair, eyes, upper arms, or even an internal organ like heart or stomach, use that as your focus. Anything internal make you panic? Use the tip of your nose. Is there exactly one birthmark that corresponds to a past/other life injury or mark? There you go, there’s your focus. We don’t care, because the whole goal is to:

Identify the feeling of “purely physical”

Gradually differentiate that into things like “physical lifeforce (the basic “energy” of a conscious being in a biological body that most breath exercises aim to isolate and concentrate on)”, “more-than-physical bodies”, “more-than-physical energy systems”, etc.

Learn to manipulate those things as needed as described by the method/meditation/whatever you’re using.

This is also a stepping stone for more differentiated, precise, and detailed understandings of different types of energies that feel superficially similar. It’s just easy to start with something you tote around all day and therefore are more familiar with, whether or not you prefer it that way.

How To Do It, In-Depth

You’ve already identified your focus point by now. If not, this is the step where you do that! Find just one part of your physical body that you can identify and accept as physical without hating yourself over it.

Now for the hardest part: exploring that physical sensation as physical. How does it feel, physically? Is it cold, or warm, or picking up a slight draft from somewhere? What qualities make it what it is, and what differentiates it from other physical parts of you, conceptually and metaphorically? What’s the “essence” of that physical-ness? What underlies it, both including and beyond the literal physical structures that form it? Really work to identify this as its own thing. This is crucial.

Once you have this “essence of physicality” identified, then you can just apply it to a vague body map that allows only for identification of the physical as physical. This means any parts you actually hate or actually cause you undue distress can be absorbed into a conglomerate of “identified as physical body mass somehow”, and anything you come across that you don’t mind can be ignored or defined as desired and needed.

Past this, guess what? You can mostly ignore the physical, since you’re probably at least partly aware of more-than-physical things at this point. Focus on that, and go into whatever other techniques you’re using or practicing.

Over time, you’ll probably find a method that works better for you, or maybe not! We’ve just never seen any of this addressed before, and suspect it may be part of the reason many Nonhumans struggle with accepting magic and the supernatural, since a lot of the body-focus in many practices may be offputting. Well, hopefully we’ve provided at least a partial solution, or at least get ideas going!

[libraryofruinaofficial]

Understanding and Explaining “The Veil”

So, the Veil has been a topic of debate for a bit now and people keep citing a certain Twitter post about its “proof” as ~not a real thing~ due to taking its root in the Victorian era. “It’s a veil, not a blanket,” some people say, “it’s not blocking you or anything”. These same people will then go on to talk about the power in egregores, completely oblivious to the implications they’re putting out there in conjunction with the ideas they’re pooh-poohing. To us, from our perspective, the Veil is a real and pesky thing, and yes, it’s much thicker in some places than others, and some people get a free pass. Why are we writing this? Well, for one, the concept is hugely important to convey if many of our other posts are going to make any sense. Secondly, modernity isn’t a synonym for “fake” and that shit needs to be uprooted and disposed of right the fuck now. Third, and perhaps most importantly, to be informed is to be aware, and to be aware is to open the doors for removing unwanted influence in your own life and practice.

What is The Veil, anyhow?

Well, see, that’s the tricky part, isn’t it? If the definition were already set out for us, I don’t think we’d be in this situation. While it is certainly a relatively new concept in terms of historical references, there are descriptions and legends of beings like elves and dwarves retreating into the hills and forests and separating themselves from humanity that some will point to as evidence of the Veil being a recent magical construction brought about by human action. Others cite things like the prevalence of yokai in modern rural Japan, and Celtic countries having very present taboos on faery trees and monuments being moved, touched, or destroyed, and the prevalence of strange happenings around the world as counter-evidence to the existence of such a thing.

Typically, the Veil is understood as some sort of barrier between the physical and the more-than-physical. (Most things aren’t physical in one way or another, so “nonphysical” feels arbitrary to us, but people still need a point of reference.) It either seems to keep magic out, or keep humans out, depending on who you ask. It does generally seem to be a product of modern, post-industrial human life and the relentless push to destroy the idea of the unknowable, though. It’s some force or another that people don’t really seem to agree on the origin of that acts to separate things for some reason or another. Seems confusing, but we actually have a solution based on research and experience.

We define the Veil as a construct of a subtle nature fueled by bias that serves to limit the expression and experiences of certain more-than-physical events and forces to varying degrees in a given locality, but may be acted upon, pushed aside, or removed outright by other events and forces, either temporarily or permanently. This separates it from shields, wards, and other things that are meant to keep some things out based on harm or need but allow other extranormal experiences to occur.

Personal Veils and Collective Veils

So, if some people with high magical talent and certain capabilities can just run into spirits and elementals and angels and what have you on the daily, and they claim the Veil isn’t real or isn’t a big deal, and then if a group of brain-dead, mundane, ignorant humans have a really fucking weird experience in one location but go back to scoffing at the idea of aliens and landwights when they go back to work the next day, what gives? What’s the reality of some magic-dampening force acting on the world, if any?

Well, the answer is, Veils (yes, there are more than one, as implied in our definition) vary in range and thickness based on a metric fuckton of factors, and we’ve broken them down into a few basic categories. We have Personal Veils (also known to Chaotes and derivatives as the “psychic censor”) and Collective Veils. We also have individuals with the ability to Unveil, or are Veil-resistant or Veil-removing by nature, as well as locations with the same properties. Some events and occurrences can also temporarily or permanently move Veils from a person or place. Spiritual or Nonhuman Awakenings can be a partial permanent Unveiling of a person, for example.

Personal Veils exist over people who just can’t deal with magic and the supernatural. At this point in time, practically every human and too damn many so-called “nonhumans” have them, and as a result they don’t experience magic as part of their existence, It’s a bit like curating your social media feed, or only listening to certain radio stations, or in extreme cases, delusional thinking. You ignore a whole set of circumstances based on a set of specific factors, and this can generate spiritual or magical force that acts to blacklist yourself against anything extranormal.

Collective Veils occur when many people with Personal Veils reinforce this network of spiritual/magical negation. These can occur around locations, families, and even concepts or realms of study. There are absolutely spirits in neurology labs and particle accelerators and anywhere their adjacent fields of study are, but since a lot of people with Personal Veils congregate in places like that, they can accidentally Veil other things as well.

Unveiled, Veil-resistant or Veil-removing Individuals are typically magic workers, who, for any number of reasons, just don’t have issues with losing “visibility”. This may be a hereditary gift, a result of spirit initiation, gained via practice, or just so happen to be that way. Many people have specific ways they remove Veils, such as Sighted people having good more-than-physical visual skills, and actual energetic empaths (so not Karens crying about how much a news story hurt them before they go back to their lifestyles of exploitation, but people who genuinely pick up on and process subtle energy they come into contact with whether they want to or not) are usually Unveiled in terms of sensations and emotional data gained by nonstandard means.

An Unveiled individual is typically Veil-resistant, at least in some specific areas of experience and with one or more senses. Even people who are born Unveiled can revoke that through a number of means, indoctrination and fear being the prime suspects. Veil-removing is another skillset entirely, and can be achieved through magic or by accident.

Unveiled, Veil-resistant or Veil-removing Locations and Objects are your sacred sites, hauntings, cursed relics, and so forth. These are locations or objects that just have the right vibes in place to ensure contact with Anywhere Else and can even force the most staunch and unwavering of debunkers to question their motives and understanding in their presence, even if it’s just a tiny bit. These locations and objects can be created, and it’s usually easier to Unveil a place or thing, even on accident, and keep it that way since they can’t automatically put it back if they don’t like it. (Some places probably can, but we have yet to meet one. We’d be curious to talk to them and wonder if they have identity crises like beings with Minds and Brains do.)

Veil-removing objects are likely magical implements of some sort, and this may simply be a side-effect of whatever enchantments or ensoulments are placed on them or linked to them. Veil-removing locations will serve to act on whoever enters that vicinity to make them temporarily more susceptible to things outside their accepted worldview and spectrum of comprehension.

Why does this matter?

Basically, what this means is that whether the Veil is a self-created thing, a result of pockets of belief “overwhelming” supernatural and metaphysical phenomena, or something else, the issue still stands that many people feel there is something in the way of freely-flowing magic, and that alone is reason to consider its reality. Some people may simply live in areas that are either not as dense in ambient magic or have been Veiled by human interference, or perhaps it’s an issue of their own senses, but people inside and outside spaces catering to Nonhumans of various types have lamented the seeming loss of deep magic in the world at large.

The Veil may be a thing inside some peoples’ heads, like an advanced psychic censor, that can come together to form a larger local Veil that may seem like a feature of the spiritual and metaphysical environment. It may be a geographically-linked thing, where some places are seemingly immune to it, or it may be something else entirely.

Regardless of the origin of the Veil, and the arguments for or against its existence, another issue exists regarding what exactly should be done about it, if we take the idea that the Veil is, in fact, a real energy barrier or set of barriers that makes it harder for people to access other realms, forces, and entities. Some groups, like the DKMU, feel the Veil is something that needs to be destroyed at all costs, and that people being contacted by various entities and unable to deny their existence even if they’re scared shitless by waking up to a seemingly-physical phouka rummaging through their garbage and then vanishing without a trace, that’s simply collateral in the grand scheme of things, and those people should get used to it as much as they’re used to raccoons and squirrels doing the same and should learn to make astral rodent traps if it pisses them off so much.

Others, like the authors Willow Polson and D.J. Conway, feel the Veil is a necessary safety feature, keeping the magical beings away from the humans for their safety and vice versa, citing the human tendency to conquer and dissect as being reason enough the worlds should stay separated. Arguments resembling the sci-fi notion of “non-interference” with a developing species (which has been adopted almost wholesale by New Age groups interested in ET contact despite the fact that it finds its origins in Star Trek) have been raised as well, stating that humans simply aren’t ready to accept a wider existence, and the Veil exists to keep humans from destroying everything in a fit of panic and further aggravating the denizens of the multiverse, who end up creating more astral “no-fly” rules for humans, which can get in the way of people with diplomatic work and actual roles to play and jobs to do in the cosmos.

Our take on the Veil is simply that it’s real, at least in some form, and the uncontrolled spread of it is a problem. We’re sure temporary Veiling and safe havens against the supernatural are needed, but the whole world certainly shouldn’t be one. We do tend towards creating breaches, portals, gateways, entry points, gaping holes, and so on between worlds and dimensions, yes. But the way we see it is that it’s another important part of the ecosystem and that barricading everything and creating a sterile environment dominated by one energy type is just plain unhealthy.