There’s a candle on the table in front of me. It’s the second one this week. The first burned out yesterday morning during what I’m now calling, with some discomfort, a ritual.
Three months ago I started a daily ritual magick practice. Not because I believe in magick the way some people believe in stocks, or in CrossFit. Because I make videos and audio dramas and write essays about real witchcraft and treating the occult seriously, and there’s a point at which not actually practicing it starts to feel like writing food criticism without eating.
How the practice started.
I started small. A candle. Five minutes. A tarot card. A few sentences of intention. Nothing operatic — the kind of practice you could do in front of a roommate without explaining yourself. I was suspicious of operatic. I had spent enough years interviewing practitioners to know that operatic was usually for the camera, not the work.
The first month I was bad at it. I forgot most days. Some days I rushed it just to check the box. Some days I made it more elaborate than it needed to be — adding incense, candles, oils, a journal — in a way I now recognize as a form of avoidance. Decoration as procrastination. The ritual was the thing; the trappings were not.
” The thing I’m making is no longer a brand exercise. It’s a practice — in the same way the ritual is a practice. “
The hard parts.
There are hard parts. The days I miss feel worse than they should. There’s a particular shame in skipping something you set up for yourself, especially when nobody would know. I’ve also caught myself trying to make the practice look impressive in conversations with people who don’t have a practice, which is exactly the kind of thing the practice is supposed to be inoculating me against.
And there’s the question of what the practice is for. I don’t think the candle does anything. I don’t think the card does anything. I think the practice does something, and I think the candle and the card are the apparatus by which the practice gets done. This is, I gather, what most working witches have thought for most of recorded history.
What I now believe.
What I now believe — and this is going to sound either dramatic or obvious depending on your priors — is that the practice and the work are not separate. They’re the same thing. The work is to take something seriously. The practice is taking it seriously, daily, in a form you can repeat. You do the ritual to remind yourself that the work is sacred. You do the work to discharge the obligation that the ritual incurs.
That’s it. That’s what I’ve learned in three months. It’s not a tidy answer. It’s not a clickbait answer. It’s just what the candle has taught me. And the candle is still burning.
