Tag: texas

Xeper Starts at Home

May 9, 2017

Fitness 3

Photo by midlman

Austin is a beautiful city, with a thriving outdoor culture. It’s no surprise, then, that the Capital City has ranked as the #1 fittest city in Texas for years. Visitors to Austin often comment on how healthy and happy everyone looks, and it’s true. Living in a town with pleasing outdoor spaces makes you want to get out and experience them, move through them. Being surrounded by a populace who take care of themselves has an effect on you, and it often doesn’t take long for new residents to take up a healthy lifestyle of their own.

Fitness 5

Photo by Todd Dwyer

So what does this have to do with magic? Plenty, as it turns out. Historically, of course, occultists and magicians have been *ahem* not the most athletic bunch. We were often mired so deeply in philosophy and meditation that even thinking about working with our bodies never entered the picture.

This kind of neglect not only creates an imbalance between the parts of the Self, it leads to more significant difficulties in all areas as we age. More and more scientific studies are proving the importance of the body/brain connection, showing how vital it is that we care for, maintain, and challenge our bodies in order to keep our brains at optimal function throughout our lives.

Fitness 2

Photo by Jason Dean

We’re now beginning to see more black magicians who understand the importance of Working with their bodies, the value of physical challenges, and the real need to maintain bodily health. After all, your body is your home from birth until death, and can never be replaced. It makes perfect sense that, in order to create a more perfected Self, we should start with caring for and ordering that home.

Fitness 4

Photo by Kid Clutch

Establishing a solid foundation of physical health is an investment of time and energy, which will pay significant dividends towards your overall well-being. It teaches discipline, focus, and will. It transforms your inner world, while making your outer world more beautiful. It creates new avenues and possibilities.

Xeper is not only concerned with altering one’s inner landscape, or with creating change in a person’s outer life (such as that new job/car/girlfriend). Xeper can happen anywhere. It might be in a gym (or your living room), alone at 5 AM, testing your own limits. Creating change in your body by force of will.

Like magic.

Magic of Place

March 31, 2017

Globe

Photo by Jayel Aheram

Black Magicians tend to be a resourceful lot, and most of us learn early into our Initiatory journey that there is great value in being adaptable. Learning to Work with the tools that are available to us at any given moment is a good skill to develop.

I’ve also found that tapping into the magical essence of my location is an useful ability that has benefited my magical operations. All places have a magical current that runs through them, and through learning to recognize its nature, a skilled Black Magician can harness the power of a location and use it to help fulfill their goals.

Everyone has traveled to a new place and experienced its “vibe” – a kind of subjective state created by certain cues, its apparent character, and the kinds of people one most encounters there. As I traveled to different parts of the world, I became aware that, beyond the surface traits that various cities and regions seemed to have, I could often feel something else running through them – a sort of energy that seemed to be reflective of that place’s essence. The obvious vibe of a place, and its magical current are often closely aligned, but not always. Sometimes the magical character of a specific location is mostly hidden unless one seeks it out.

Austin night

Photo by Ed Schipul

I live and Work in Austin, Texas, and this city has a definite magical personality of its own, as does Houston, my hometown, and the entire Lone Star State. I have encountered Magicians who didn’t respond well to their time here, not finding the heat or culture to their liking (Newsflash: Texas is hot, it’s probably not a good place to move to if you can’t handle that). That’s completely valid. There are plenty of places in the U.S. and world where I wouldn’t want to spend a lot of time if I could help it.

But the Magic of Place is a reciprocal thing. One gets out of it what they put in, and even a skilled Magician can miss opportunities to tap into a location’s current and its benefit, if they don’t engage with it.

Houston

Photo by Adam Baker

Houston’s magic is strong – a strange mixture of urban energy, electric and vibrant, swirling and intermingling with the wilderness that snakes through the city along dark bayous. It is a perfectly evocative environment to perform Magic of all types, and when I learned to appreciate and embrace Houston’s unique energy instead of working against it, my magical success blossomed.

Austin is known for being quirky and cool, packed with hipsters, live music, and youthful innovators. It’s a haven for hippies and free-thinkers of all kinds, perceived to be an oasis of liberal ideas within an otherwise conservative state. It’s not at all surprising that there has been a long tradition of alternative religion in Austin.  But of course all magic has a dark side, and there is a decidedly sinister, vampiric current running through Texas’ Capital City – drawing in the unwary and feeding on their energy. It is, after all, also known as Bat City.

nightwing
Photo by Caomal

I’m fortunate to know many great Black Magicians, Working all over the world, and it’s clear that their Initiatory journey and their day to day magic is shaped by their environments. It made me realize that it’s worthwhile to develop my ability to Work wherever I might find myself. I might not be overjoyed to land in rural Mississippi for several months, but I would do my best to discover its magic while I was there. And it does have magic unique to it. All places do. It’s our responsibility to ourselves as Black Magicians to explore the currents local to us at any given time, and to learn to adapt our Work to them. Or we can miss out, and just complain about how no one sells good sushi in rural Mississippi. The choice, as always, is ours to make.