occultvisions:

woodsatnight:

A lot of the time we will feel lost or disoriented when trying to navigate through all the different magical practices that exist, especially if we’re trying to learn on our own. With no teacher to guide us, we must make our own path through a wild jungle of information, and it’s easy to end up stagnant because we fear we might go wrong, or indeed walking somewhere that will not do us good. In my experience, the most important thing we can do is know our own strengths. And our strengths often lie with our tempers, despite what some may think. Where one person is always very calm and logical, and might very well benefit from a detached approach to magic, another like myself might only be able to do things 100% or not at all, and therefore need a lot more passion in their magic workings. This is why knowing ourselves, both strengths and weaknesses are so important. If we go with the magic that already fits us, we are more likely to breeze through a lot of things that would be challenging had we chosen another route. 

On the other hand, even knowing our strengths we might choose to go where we have no experience and where we are completely wrong-footed. We might go to the place where there will only be trial after trial, and where each trial either means evolving or dying. And that to me is where traditional craft differs from modern and new age practices.
The latter are likely to encourage you to do what feels good, to never push yourself to that place where you are ready to lie down and cry and the only reason you don’t is that you know you won’t get up again if you do. Of course, this has its own benefits, people would not follow this path otherwise. Some people especially might need this approach because they’ve been hard on themselves all their lives and need to learn kindness. This path is gentle healing.
But traditional craft does the thing that magic was always meant to do in my opinion. It forces us to constantly face the weakest parts of ourselves, to know our mortality yet challenge it anyway. And every time we do, new challenges arise and keep us moving. However, it is not nice and there is no point pretending otherwise. Traditional witchcraft might very well take you so far that you are barely human, for better and for worse. It forces you to exist in all worlds at once and that means constantly losing and rebuilding parts of yourself. There can be healing found here too, when we face the darkest parts of our minds we might find that we are unable to hate ourselves anymore, no matter what. But this healing is only a minor part and it is born of never-ending destruction. 

Neither path is neccessarily better than the other, but it is only when we know ourselves that we can make an informed choice in where we want to go.

MY SIDE BLOG OCCULT VISIONS IS COLLECTING
INTERESTING ASPECTS OF THE OCCULT.
AN OVERVIEW, MENT AS INSPIRATION.
IT’S NEITHER COMPLETE, NOR AN INSTRUCTION.

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