Monday, August 16, 2010

Mytho-Fictional-Magick : The Death Stick.

Nothing is real and everything is permitted? This truth is not the motto of my heart. Hear the wisdom of the threshold-walker - Everything is real, and the taboo is in the harnessing of it's reality.



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This is one of the only times you'll see me addressing meta-magick, or mytho-fictional magick. The reason is that it is both a supremely serious pursuit for those involved in it, and incredibly hard not to outright laugh at.

Those of us who dance around the edges of consensus reality have been gifted with a sublime amount of material from which to draw our experimental corpus. Not the least amongst these is the Harry Potter universe. In this universe there is a line between users of magick, and those who are utterly incapable of using it. Further still is a line between magick-users, and those willing to use -every- kind of magick for their own aims. In the canon of this series, it's made abundantly clear that anyone willing and able to use "all" arts, is probably using "dark" arts.

The topic of "dark" versus "light" when dealing with meta-magick is enough to fill a hundred entries, several books and many dimly-lit afternoons over multiple packs of tobacco-in-paper deathsticks. I'll leave that for another time and focus on the main point : Wandlore.

I've always made wands. I cultivate the trees, I've even arbrosculpted the living tree to shape the final wand (which could have stones, or other material, embedded inside of the living tissue). Once upon a time someone asked me if I could "core" a wand, as in Harry Potter.

I gave it some consideration: Take a supple young branch, split it like you're de-veining a shrimp, insert the material, bind until healed, allow the branch to grow to the desired thickness and harvest. Yes, that would indeed put a "core" in a wand. Would it be of use? What use would it have? How would it effect the wand?

The core would not be any "mythical" being. No more mythical than a surgically altered goat, or the bones of a particularly ill-tempered snake, that happened to be hatched under a toad or some such. And yet, if I'm to take stock in the claims of other Witches and Pagans - there are mythotypal beings wandering around in the Astral, and some of them are willing to entreat with Witches.

So, I gave it a try. I put a physical substance into the middle of a supple branch in a tree particularly beloved by the local spirit-life. I journeyed into the between-world, and worked with the spirit of the tree itself. I journeyed into the other-world and obtained the needed concerns. And as I came back, and back, at each level I wove that power into the branch.

It worked. Willow 14 1/2", hair of a water fairy (probably an unseelie). Undulating and supple, with an inclination toward purification work, and particularly good for water-witching. Unfortunately, it also enjoys slinging some of the nastier curses I can formulate, and does so with a familiar ease.

Anyone who took the time could construct their own Elder Wand, a Deathstick of uncanny accuracy and lethality. The question is: Why? The Willow-wand spends most of it's time neatly put away, where it won't stab anyone's eye out. I can't imagine the ferocity of nature one would get from attempting to replicate Death's own wand.

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