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| Thoth Amon's tower in Conan the Destroyer (1984) |
Sorcery seems very much like a gun. After many years of study and trial-and-error experimentation, I got good at miraculously adjusting things and sometimes causing outright changes in myself and the world around me. I learned which so-called "laws of magic" apply to my experience and which do not. I got good enough that I could teach this art to others and even do it for hire.
But for every problem I avoided or neutralized through practical magic, other problems were created (much the way a weapon can function as an agent of change in a difficult situation without being a perfect solution to the root problems).
Ultimately, I came to see that I was trading one set of difficulties for another. I still do sorcery because sometimes that "trade" is better than the status quo. Sometimes, a bullet improves a situation (the attacker is taken down; justice is served), but the problem nearly always continues in some other form. The sorcerer has to accept this and be ready to adjust to the new circumstances that came about, at least partly, through her magic.
Only consistent mundane efforts that include self-work cause lasting positive change. This can be hard for beginners and intermediates in magic to accept, especially when they start to get comfortable with a form of practical magic that works for them. They want to change everything and get upset and confused when those efforts, no matter how successful, embroil them in further difficulties.
"Mundane efforts" because we may be spiritual beings having a physical experience, but we are also made of clay and live in a clay world, the material plane, the realm of physics and cause-and-effect. Consider: you live in a house with 20 windows. They are all open (maybe you just fumigated the place or something). What would be more effective, walking around and shutting each one with your hand or doing a ritual that causes a convergence of remarkable events and probabilities to render each window closed over a month's time? Sometimes the most effective way of travel is on the ground, using your two feet.
"Self-work" because all magic begins in the perceptual field, the inner imaginative "subjective universe," of the magician. If he doesn't work to improve and change who he is inside, his magical efforts will be circumscribed by that unwillingness to change. In pragmatic terms, this means he has to clarify his values and determine how the magical working(s) are in line with them: who is he becoming in this work and why is it good?
1970s sword-and-sorcery movies and comics are great teachers of this and it's why I wrote "Rule of the Sorcerer" at the top. Remember what happens when Conan the Destroyer slays the evil wizard? The wizard's crystal tower collapses. This is a fantasy trope repeated throughout this genre of pop-culture and may come from Robert E. Howard's influence on Gary Gygax: the magic is sustained by the wizard's will. When his will falters, the magical creations crumble. The will was the lasting thing. The magic was only a temporary expression of it in the world. And when the tower collapses, something is always revealed—a treasure chamber, a monster, a portal to another place. And so one problem is replaced by another . . .