Engraving of a Mongol Shaman from Suite de gravures coloriées avec leurs explications by J.B.B. Eyriès – c. 1823

I find being in magical spaces quite difficult to navigate sometimes. Specifically, I mean those patterned along the lines of western esoteric tradition. I don't know if it's cos I came from zen, which has the habit of making virtually everything feel extraneous. But I don't, as a rule, like stuff. It stresses me out, it feels like having too many tabs open or something.

so I'm never going to be that guy with the overflowing altar and dozens of talismans. I think it's extremely fucking cool lol but it is not accessible to me personally

Magic, for me, has always looked a lot more like the animistic end of witchcraft, earth magic and, much as the word carries a lot of baggage today – shamanism. This was never particularly a conscious choice on my part, it's just what has always got me fired up. For example I'm currently reading Jan Fries' Visual Magick, and the stuff he's laying out is so exciting to me. Like carving sigils in the mud, and then dancing on them until they vanish. sooo good!!

I think is also why I'm not the most technical astrologer in the world. It's a marvel to see someone running these crazy calculations and using different tables etc but I just can't lol. Due to this I've often fallen on the side of championing more vibes based methods and practitioners, because I recognise full well that these approaches do not lack conceptual or intellectual rigour – despite appearances.

I was thinking about the throughline of my experiences with magic, and recollected the very first working I ever did – it happened long before I consciously turned my attention to this stuff.

My first girlfriend was a goth wiccan from Texas. She made quite an impression when she moved to my secondary school in rural southern England. She got me into black metal. I was obsessed. I had also never met someone before who was in to magic in a sincere way. I considered myself a rational materialist concerned with measurable facts – I thought the way I was conditioned to think.

Accordingly I didn't really know what to do with the magically operant aspect of my partner. It scared me, and in a number of different ways. One of them was: what if this is real? That's a big thing, it has huge consequences. Another was: Is she actually deranged – like surely she doesn't actually think there's anything to this? Like it was surely just an aesthetic choice.

Looking back now, it's hard not to see that so much of the blockage was just run of the mill misogyny, which is frustrating. I only ever did one working with her, but it hit! It put a hairline crack in my consensus notion of the world. To say it was an oldie but a goodie is something of an understatement, as the rite we undertook would be instantly recognisable to a medicine person from 100,000 years ago: We called for rain*

*The author will acknowledge here that he lives on an island in the Atlantic that has around 170 days of rainfall a year, so you'll have to take his word for it that it was a significant event

She lived in such a spooky old house in a dark pine glade. Kinda perfect. We went out into her garden, and huddled at the base of a large tree, out of view of the house. We had a cereal bowl filled with tap water. We placed it between us, on the floor in the grass. We recited, in unison, a prayer for rain – three times.

Three heartbeats after we finished the recitation, a raindrop landed in the very centre of the bowl – followed quickly by a downpour

We looked at each other 😮 & I felt as though I was being watched. I looked around, but there was no one else there.

That feeling of being watched from coming from all directions. It was everything. I had had my first taste of being in dialogue with the world.

I think I pretty quickly shut it down, filtered it out. But from the vantage point of today, it's pretty cute to look back on. & it feels as though it was a wonderful gift given out freely, from the hidden reaches of all that is