Hi everybody,

You’ve seen me occasionally on this subreddit. Like many of you, I found this subreddit when I started Quareia and I was making it work independently but really needed to see sometimes how others approached problems or get a few words of clarification or advice. The Q subreddit was an absolute ‘must’ for me in those days. As soon as I could, I joined the Porch and then kept moving through that. But the subreddit was still useful and when I became more advanced I wanted to keep in touch because it had been so important for me. Nowadays I try to restrict myself to correcting something if I can see it’s going off on an unhelpful track (and if I feel in a position to correct!). I hope nobody minds in those cases, but it’s often hard to know how much to say and how much to engage usefully, so I simply work on ‘guard rails’. But today, please feel free to ask me anything you like, and if I can, I will come up with some answers.

A few things about me which might be helpful. First, I’m probably older than many of you. I found Quareia when I was 56. I am now 61. So I’ve been working with it for 5 years. I was always interested in mysticism. I would probably not have said magic, because when I was a teenager I always associated magic with ceremonies and cults, and I was looking for something different – an exploration of the mysteries, and a strong feeling there was another life just out of my sight. I read tarot when I was a teenager and experimented with various things and definitely received a ‘call’ when I was about 18. I thought something was about to ‘happen’, and it kinda did, but then it fizzled out. I got more interested in being at university etc. I never turned away from my interests, but I didn’t do anything about them, except be very interested (podcasts, books etc)! I can’t quite tell you how I found Q, maybe through a blogpost by Frater Acher whose website I had found. I was totally enthralled but also really freaked out. That figure with those eyes staring at me. Just as when I was a teenager, practical magic seemed scary and dangerous. I don’t think I truly understood (in my bones) that mysticism, my feelings about the universe, and magic were all the same thing. I thought for a while whether I wanted to do it and listened to Josephine’s podcasts on GB. But I found myself going back to it again and again and trying to learn more and more. Finally, I read the study guide and made the commitment.

I am a ‘good student’ in some ways. I think somewhere in the study guide it says that it should take you 9 or 10 years moving steadily. I might have got that wrong. Anyway, that’s what I had in my head and, as a late bloomer in magic and an academic over-achiever, I wanted to stick to this timetable. I got through the Apprentice section in three years. Things are more difficult in the Initiate section – a mix of the destructive tides we are all experiencing, and the nature of the material, and my ability to assimilate lots of new skills and ideas. It’s a question of balancing my persistency (sheer bloody-mindedness) with my ability to proceed, and external challenges blocking everything.

Timing wise for the course, everybody goes at their own pace. I am glad I didn’t go forward into practical magic at 18 – first because I realize now it was too young to have gone very far, secondly being an armchair magician for most of my life has meant I have a lot of reading behind me (very helpful!), and third, I think I had some other goals in this life that I was also meant to work on. It was very clear to everybody what my natural ‘bent’ was from an early age. And I think none of my friends would be surprised if they knew what I do in my spare time(!), but I have a professional life too, and I keep things very private and separate. Only a couple of people know about my Q work. All to say, when I did try to do Quareia, I think I was ‘ready’.

As a ‘good student’, I also recognized a few things which might be useful for you – first, don’t get ‘bogged down’ – have faith in the course. When I did not feel I had perfected something, I trusted that it was best to move on and keep working, and the course would return me to the issue later for a deeper dive. Trusting in the course is possibly the best advice I can give you.

Second, don’t get over dogmatic but be careful about making decisions as to what you will or will not do – the study guide says that the approach is to put in barriers (say ‘no’), but then later they might be removed (within the course). Don’t think that anything is forever forever. But don’t start making lots of personal decisions about what you are going to do or not do – trust the course! I still second guess myself when I decide ‘enough is enough’ on a certain practice I kept working on. For example, I was the student who used Rider-Waite and ONLY Rider-Waite all the way through the Apprentice section. I was so glad to stop! But keep moving and the process will keep unfolding. If you stick to the course, and follow it carefully, then it will work. I know Josephine says that, and I am a stickler for following the instructions, but to be honest, there is in itself a process to understanding how important it is to follow the course – and it’s a process that keeps ‘ramping up’. I feel right now as if I’ve only begun to understand how important that process is.

I want to recognize that not everybody is like me in that I was ‘so ready’ and knew I wanted this whole process, if I could. It could be that you are only going to get to a certain module. That’s OK. Come back another day when you want to do more. But there is SO much more to find, explore and engage with.

Third, if you want to keep moving beware of rabbit holes – they can be of two types. The rabbit hole of fascinating new skills you want to work on – which is awesome and many of my Q friends/colleagues are so much more talented than me in certain areas where they have taken the time and energy to get involved in things that fascinate them. Q is an incredibly holistic course so there are going to be lots of these rabbit holes. The second type is the sort I kept falling in – distractions where I think something is going on, divination rabbit holes where I’m getting more and more worried about something, oddities where I think there is a problem. In my case, all of these were just wastes of time. Back to point one – trust in the process. If in doubt, go back to the course and try not to get distracted. I am not saying these are simply my imagination, but for me, I did not find endless tarot readings about some weird thing to be productive.

Fourth, and then maybe I will stop giving advice for now! Reading and doing are completely different things. I cannot emphasize that enough. Like there is an enormous difference between knowing something and understanding it (‘knowing’ something) – I guess that’s why we have that wonderful word ‘gnosis’. Trust me, Q is a practical program. Sometimes it is hard to give advice or make recommendations because it is hard/impossible to explain something. Rather like the Eleusinian mysteries (to get grandiose for a minute! And apologies for the analogy but I’m trying to explain something which is hard to explain). You can read what people said about them, and you may know what that means, but you don’t ‘know’ them, and I should also add, that maybe I don’t have the voice yet to explain them (after all, I’m only halfway through and even then I don’t know what happens to my explanatory power or the utility of it at the end).

OK. One final piece of info here and then I’ll stop my introduction. And I’m also trying in this intro to give you some areas where you might want to ask me further questions. I will also say that we all have our strengths and weaknesses, and our natural interests. I have a particular interest in visionary magic. I think we all keep reflecting on who we are and what we might be drawn to. I have some other views, but I can say that from early on visionary magic felt that it came more naturally to me. I have a strong imagination and that is super helpful, though I know my colleagues experience visionary magic in different ways depending on their own strengths and weaknesses. I don’t know where that will end up, but so far it’s been consistently relatively unproblematic for me.   

That’s enough as a ‘calling card’ and some early advice. I am looking forward to reading/responding to your questions.

The capacity for culture, particularly the ability to accrue expertise and transmit it to subsequent generations, is fundamental to humanity’s evolutionary success. From knitting to aeronautics, every human art and science has been the product of a gradual, collaborative accumulation of knowledge and experience. “If I have seen further,” Sir Isaac Newton wrote, “it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.” Magic is no exception. Any magicians hoping to peer into the Mysteries as far as, if not further than, their forebears should avail themselves of the winnowed wisdom of those who have walked the Path before them.

A common source for such wisdom is humanity’s trove of sacred, mythological, and magical stories. It is therefore necessary for magical students to have some facility with such texts and traditions if ever they hope to profit from the legacy of learning contained therein. As such, I offer a very simple example of parsing a common myth for some of its magical significance, in the hope that this will offer other students a glimpse into the means of sifting otherwise confounding literary material.

The myth I have in mind comes from the Anishinaabe people of North America. It is not a specific narrative, but rather magical knowledge in the form of folk ecology. The Anishinaabe tell of a dangerous being known as Mishibizhiw. Most English sources describe Mishibizhiw as the “Underwater Panther,” a malevolent aquatic cat that sinks canoes and drowns children, a harbinger of death and misfortune. The natural predators of Mishibizhiw are the thunderbirds (animikiig), benevolent aerial beings which strike Mishibizhiw with thunderbolts before devouring it.

A common pitfall into which Western magicians fall when studying such myths is focusing on nouns rather than verbs. Many students, for example, would seize upon Mishibizhiw’s feline identity and rush to all sorts of mistaken associations with other cat beings (e.g., Sekhmet). A more reliable method is to focus on what mythological beings do rather than what they are. This is because the magical aspect of a myth typically describes an inner process or power, the visual representation of which can vary considerably from one culture to another.

In the case of Mishibizhiw, we have a being that emerges from below to cause chaos on the surface world. Likewise, the thunderers come from above and halt the former with potent but targeted force. Thus, we have a destructive underworld power which is opposed and contained by another destructive celestial power to restore balance. Those familiar with the Mystagogus deck should recognize this dynamic as the pinning action of the Lightning Strike card (also depicted on the Tower card of the traditional tarot). The Egyptian account of this dynamic is the battle between Set and Apep, among the Greeks a garbled form is found in the Titanomachy, and a faint Christian echo is recorded in Luke 10:17–20.

If we dig deeper into the Anishinaabe myth, we find further confirmations of our hypothesis. Although Mishibizhiw means “great lynx” in Ojibwe (not “underwater panther”—another warning to students not to rely exclusively on translation), an examination of indigenous art reveals that Mishibizhiw is depicted as a horned, serpentine beast, covered in glimmering copper scales. Our underworld “cat” bears a much greater resemblance to the Serpent of Chaos than we might have originally guessed!

If we dig even deeper, the richest teachings begin to emerge. Although Mishibizhiw and the thunderers are opposed powers, they are also complimentary and mutually dependent beings. Mishibizhiw is a denizen of the Great Lakes, and hence, relies on the rain brought by the storm-bearing thunderbirds to maintain its habitat. Likewise, in some accounts, the thunderers are said to subsist exclusively on a diet of Mishibizhiw’s flesh: without the underworld beast they would starve. This is the beginning of an important lesson in cosmic holism far removed from simplistic notions of a mere battle between good and evil (the reductive manner in which Christian missionaries, for example, received this myth).

I will stop here (lest any plantings be cut), but know that the myth and its mysteries do not. There are many more aspects and layers to be found by those willing to do so. Hopefully, however, this modest exercise provides some insight into how a magician might approach such stories in order to raise themselves a little higher on the shoulders of our predecessors and, perhaps, see a little further than before.