Living in the Magical Mode: Notes from the Book of Minutes of a Guild of Shy Sorcerers
Documents edited by Phil Smith
Publication: May 2022
List Price: £20.00 Format: ~ Paperback - 232pp Size: 15.6 x 23.4 cm ISBN: 978-1-913743-57-4 Tags: walking, walking arts, web-walking, embodiment, Plymouth, magical mode, drift, dérive, mythogeography, psychogeography, sexy theory Buy the paperback (£20)
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In 2019 a group of book-lovers began to turn from their usual diet of contemporary novels to read classics of the ‘English eerie’ like Arthur Machen’s The Great God Pan. The documents recovered, (edited by Phil Smith of Mythogeography), and published here as Living In The Magical Mode, describe the subsequently inspired attempts of these readers – in a time of virus and social and climate catastrophe –– to live anew, with ‘magic-as-ordinary’, to do magic as if it were the washing up.
At first, the readers fall on new ways of remaking their everyday lives in the magical mode, but the mode soon find ways to remake the readers. Challenging assumptions, magic turns lives upside down and shakes out mysteries. The documents of Living In The Magical Mode describe a pulling back of veils, until all veils but one are exhausted; then the book-lovers put their hands upon the veil inside themselves.... Living In The Magical World crosses dream wastelands, racecourses, motorway cafes, edgeland quarries and suburban valleys, in an adventure of encounters with ‘others’. It brings its readers to an occulted realm of unbounded desires that once unfolded refuses to recede. The surviving documents of the book club, reprinted here, describe the final frantic efforts of what remains of its members to understand a collision of many worlds and make novel webs of reconciliation. ReadershipLiving in the Magical Mode is for radical-, artist, performance- and everyday-walkers, Situationists and dérivistes; artists and [site-specific] performers who use walking in their work; human, urban and cultural geographers; psychogeographers; students discovering and studying a world of resistant and aesthetic walking, ecologists, ecosensualists, anyone interested in mythogeography & the aesthetics and practice of civilisational collapse.
Reviewed in Northern Earth Issue 171, March 2023
"This is something of an oddity, spinning out of Phil Smith’s cultural history of drama, walking, occult reading and the approach he has coined in his book Mythogeography. Imagine a book club, when “some idiot suggested we read The Great God Pan … Now we’re caught up in a never-ending backstory of haunted cultural studies”, and the club gets renamed as The Guild of Shy Sorcerers. The book follows their communication in a chatgroup, as they toss around assumptions of the eerie, and sometimes get rather unsettled in their quest for a more magical mode, but as you’d expect, like life itself it isn’t exactly linear. Threads and comments intermingle in that typical staggered time of the chatgroup, and vary just as typically between the inane and the insightful, laden with typos. A collective denouement does eventually arrive through this miasma of Situationism, paganism and pontification, but often I felt lost. I may not be painting an attractive picture of this book, but this is the kind of disjointed discourse and perception we are all surely familiar with nowadays, whether we like it or not. Its interface with NE comes in the irruption of memorates of 1970s folk horror TV, flashbacks to early earth mysteries ideas, namechecks for people like Ithell Colquhoun, Guy Debord, Rev. Robert Kirk, the Focus Group and Shirley Collins, allusions to the Scarfolk mythos and a liberal scattering of psychogeographical asides. “In desperation to have something to be haunted by, we have got into magic”. Which probably sums up the way many of us were drawn into earth mysteries topics in the late 1960s to 70s, and have stumbled on in our quest since, seeking gems of observation amongst a general chat chaos of the virtual." [John Billingsley] |
Publisher’s Note
An account of how the Living In The Magical Mode manuscript found its way to us is given in the book. But it does little to explain why the events described in the manuscript happened. The manuscript is what remains of the minutes book of a reading group, with numerous insertions by its members. Its first part consists of fragmentary reactions to the club’s collapse, but no proper explanation as to why or how it collapsed. It had been our intention to make enquiries about this but, no sooner had we begun ‘putting out feelers’ than it was made abundantly clear that the manuscript’s lack of explanation and the absence of any easing into its peculiar narrative were intentional omissions. Indeed, that they reflect a world view in which there can be no preparation for initiation into a magical mode. Each novice being “thrown directly into the maelstrom, ready to forget what they know and striving to learn quickly the nature of the web on which they find themselves”. Living In The Magical Mode describes an attempt to live magically-as-ordinary, to do magic as if it were the washing up. It is a guide to letting the extraordinary into ordinary lives. Other than that, we note that the two texts studied on the evening the book club changed – Rosanne Rabinowitz’s Helen’s Story (2013) and The Great God Pan (1894) by Arthur Machen – both concern the pulling back of the veil of ordinary appearances to uncover a hidden realm of unbounded power and desire. The manuscript describes what happens when such a veil is pulled back to reveal a second veil and further veils... until all veils are exhausted, only for the occulted realm of unbounded power and desire to reveal itself as the same realm as this one. What has changed, though, are the readers... |
Extract
From the chapter entitled 'Pan'
"Has anyone else noticed how at the start of Shakespeare’s ‘Scottish play’ the weird sisters are not calling their familiars, but are being called by them: “I come, Graymalkin!” “Paddock calls”? Magic is not a power or command over nature, but a relationship with nature. Listening and answering. It’s the ‘heroic’ characters who try to take control of destiny and end up in murder and madness; the sisters attend to destiny, i.e. what just is; if the heroes would listen to the sisters and wait, the good things would come to them without the need for crimes.."
"Has anyone else noticed how at the start of Shakespeare’s ‘Scottish play’ the weird sisters are not calling their familiars, but are being called by them: “I come, Graymalkin!” “Paddock calls”? Magic is not a power or command over nature, but a relationship with nature. Listening and answering. It’s the ‘heroic’ characters who try to take control of destiny and end up in murder and madness; the sisters attend to destiny, i.e. what just is; if the heroes would listen to the sisters and wait, the good things would come to them without the need for crimes.."
Contents
Publisher’s Note ~ The Discovery of the Text ~The Group Disintegrates ~ The Field Reports ~ There is a Planet B
Happenings ~ “The Fuck Up in the Club is the Fuck Up in the World” ~ Pan ~ The Minutes Book contd.
More Arguments ~ Separateness ~ Conspiracy Theories ~ Inner Life ~ Yet More Happenings ~ Alchemy
Games, Rituals, Arts and Journeys ~ Sacred Space ~ “Something Ancient and Dreadful” ~ The Minutes Book contd.
Horses and The Origins of Melancholy ~ Psychic War ~ Manifestoes and Grimoires ~ Psychic War 2
Ritual ~ Psychic War 3 ~ How This Story Ends ~ References
Appendix l: Lexicon of pseudo-sacred spaces
Appendix 2: bibliography for the Professor’s paper ‘Dancing in pseudo-sacred spaces: signs passing through flesh’
Appendix 3: pamphlet extracts received by the Guild
Happenings ~ “The Fuck Up in the Club is the Fuck Up in the World” ~ Pan ~ The Minutes Book contd.
More Arguments ~ Separateness ~ Conspiracy Theories ~ Inner Life ~ Yet More Happenings ~ Alchemy
Games, Rituals, Arts and Journeys ~ Sacred Space ~ “Something Ancient and Dreadful” ~ The Minutes Book contd.
Horses and The Origins of Melancholy ~ Psychic War ~ Manifestoes and Grimoires ~ Psychic War 2
Ritual ~ Psychic War 3 ~ How This Story Ends ~ References
Appendix l: Lexicon of pseudo-sacred spaces
Appendix 2: bibliography for the Professor’s paper ‘Dancing in pseudo-sacred spaces: signs passing through flesh’
Appendix 3: pamphlet extracts received by the Guild