The Accidental Wizard
Musings on the Intersection Between the Artist and The Occult Path
The art of magic has been practiced in one form or another since the dawn of the human experience. From it’s animistic origins to its height in Renaissance Europe, people have always been interested in using unseen forces to manipulate the world around them. This article explores the interrelated paths of the artist and the magician through the progression and reflection of my own journey, down the twisting and turning paths of music and magic.
Coincidental Beginnings?
In another walk of life or in another age, I might be ashamed to admit that my first interaction with the Pagan path was through comic books. But as Aleister Crowley and Alan Moore have told us time and again, casting a spell is akin to spelling and The Great Work should also be your Great Art, so it’s not surprising that some of the greatest occultists of the modern age are authors, with a few notable ones being authors of comic books.
I was 24 years old and living a rock and roll lifestyle, playing in a band and living in a house with a bunch of band people. There was a movement in the house that had steered itself towards the occult. I think the Rolling Stones had something to do with it though I really wasn’t paying attention until everyone started passing around copies of Grant Morrison’s The Invisibles graphic novels. Little did I know that the comic itself was meant to be a magical spell to bring other people into the magical realm. Kind of like when Baptists come knocking on your front door every Sunday and try to save you and get you to join their church, except more colorful. If you haven’t heard of the comic, this is my favorite introduction:
Proceed with caution. Chaos magic, LSD, tantric sex, the sunspot cycle, neuro-linguistic programming, memes, William S. Burroughs, Timothy Leary, Terrence McKenna, Robert Anton Wilson, Michael Moorcock’s Jerry Cornelius stories, the Mayan calendar, alien abduction, Gnosticism, Manichaeism, Situationism, Discordianism, Dadaism, shamanism, transcendentalism, and several other -isms all find their way into the book, providing numerous pathways of discovery for the adventurous reader willing to stop and write down every eclectic reference and thought-provoking idea contained in every issue. — Comics Alliance
I read the series thoroughly that year and then hit the road for a European adventure. Along the way, I got sidetracked into a musical tour through New England where I found myself in the car for a few days with the self-proclaimed musician/magician, Norman Oak. As I watched him perform his song-spells every night, something was bubbling up inside of me, pushing me, though I didn’t yet realize it. During the tour, I discovered a copy of a book of Sufi writings called The Mysticism of Sound and Music which thoroughly affected my ideas about music and the human voice.
After Europe, I stumbled into a seasonal job at a yoga retreat center in Upstate New York. The center was founded on Sufi principles in the 1970s and acts as a haven for New Age people to come and take workshops. I was just beginning my self-training in the Western Magical Tradition. I had come into it via the pop writings of Grant Morrison, eagerly consuming the comics, talks, and articles that he released in the early 2000’s. That led me to Aleister Crowley, Terrance McKenna, Robert Anton Wilson, Alan Moore, and then into the DisInformation group where I learned about Austin Osman Spare, Kenneth Grant, William S. Burroughs, Brion Gysin, and more. I was going through the Who’s Who of 20th century magic.
I was asking myself, What is Magic? What is it for? Why does it matter? There are some elementary explanations that one regularly comes across: Magic is about wielding power. Magic is about manifesting your will upon reality to manipulate the outcome of events. Magic is about getting in touch with your True Will. Most of the explanations never rang true for me although I couldn’t help but continue to pursue magic out of sheer curiosity. It wasn’t until years later that I came across Alan Moore’s interpretation of Magic as Art and Art as Magic that I felt someone had hit the nail on the head;
If consciousness itself, with its existence in the natural world being beyond the power of science to confirm, is therefore super-natural and occult, surely art is one of the most obvious and spectacular means by which that supernatural realm of mind and soul reveals itself, makes itself manifest upon a gross material plane.
Growing up in the 21st century means that you have too much access to the world’s total knowledge and not enough filters. I could simultaneously consume Ancient Greek legends about the goat-footed Greek God Pan, read books about post-modern magic, and watch What the Bleep Do We Know. At some point you have to learn to filter out the shit from the gold. And I quickly learned that there is much more shit than the gold you’re searching for.
You’ve been trained to approach the world with Logic, Reason, and Rationality, but those things are not always compatible with a magical path. Encountering this whole body of magical knowledge, shit mixed with gold, led me to a place where I could make a rapid life upgrade. Though some of that body of knowledge didn’t serve my personal progression at all, it did serve to propel me to the places that had the real knowledge and answers I was craving. It really makes you wonder about synchronicities and the possibility of a pre-ordained path or at least metaphysical influence from above…
A Decade Lived in A Year
Back to the yoga retreat center, where I was looking for certain types of answers. I didn’t know it at the time but I had just moved to a region that had a history of weird, occult-esque behavior and beliefs beginning with founding of America. (see Mitch Horowitz’s Occult America: The Secret History of How Mysticism Shaped Our Nation) People in the retreat center referred to the land we lived on as an Energy Vortex but I didn’t realize at the time that the sentiment had an historical root.
I continued my self-study of western magic which was encouraged by interactions with the large community of coworkers around me, many of whom were also practicing some sort of Pagan path. Then the classes started. To make the story short let me say that I joined an energy healer’s guild for six months and I was trained in the energy healing modalities of Reiki/Reiki Magic, Magical Awakening (healing from the Merlin lineage), Reiju, and Light of the Eternal One, aside from regular psychic development classes and treatments of all of the above plus Deeksha, sound healing, angelic healing, shamanic healing, astrology readings, tarot readings, and a bunch of group therapy sessions where we revealed things about ourselves in an attempt to heal our inner wounds and cried a lot. It was a buffet of New Age mysticism and as before, there was still a fair amount useless shit mixed with gold.
During the year that I lived there, I became very accustomed to meditation, as it was the foundation for all the energy healing that I was doing. I got very good at long voyages into my inner worlds in the form of shamanic journeys. I was doing yoga everyday, and recording my dreams in a notebook every night. This year was also the year that I started to steer my musical path into a new direction. Thanks to the Sufi inspirations I was getting from the retreat center library plus the possibilities I was becoming aware of from previous musicians who had dabbled in the occult, I was starting to incorporate the magical arts into my music. The first experiment was an all-vocal, tape-loop based album song-spells. I was regularly performing these mantra-like vocal spells, though I was still early in my magical training and was just trying to feel out what was possible with the combination of magic and music.
I was looking for influence and guidance among the musician-magicians that came before me and one potent songwriter and mystic that I discovered at that time seemed especially tapped into the Mystery. The band was Lungfish and the frontman was Daniel Higgs who became a solo artist in the early 2000s. I really like the way he sums up the mystical aspect of the artist’s path here:
Artist and Musician are ways of concisely describing integral aspects of my Vocation, my immediate Pathway….I have powers as dictated by the limits of my immediate human incarnation, that is, limitless powers in combination. I am a power, as are we all. This plain fact should humble one, prior to exaltation in The Lord… Music can be defined as True or False, with authority, as it is perceived into the psycho-spiritual-architectonic construct, that is, the unique orientation and vantage of the listener (the musician is a listener). — DANIEL HIGGS
Once the retreat center season was over, I flew directly to Georgia to do an 8-day intensive training as a spiritual medium. It was an incredible experience that has been hard to describe though did a detailed account of my experience and transformation here. I graduated from the program on my 25th birthday with the ability to read the auric fields of other people in order to give them a sort of spiritual psychotherapy treatment.
At the point, I had been steeped in so many traditions that it took me a long time to sort out my path. I felt like I had lived a whole decade in one year and as usual there was a lot of shit mixed with tidbits of gold. Luckily, one of the skills that had been reinforced in me was to follow my heart and to keep a skeptic’s mind. I skimmed away most of the junk that had been downloaded into my brain and came out with this: yoga made my body feel good, Magical Awakening made my mind feel good, Merlin got all my curiosity circuits tingling, and the spiritual psychotherapy sessions were having a very strong impact on the people that experienced them.
The Western Magical Tradition was put to the side, as I felt like the tools I was using in my Magical Awakening energy practice were more potent than anything I had felt in a ritual magic setting. If I wanted to cleanse my energy and release the bonds of childhood trauma, I didn’t need to do a ritual with candles and incense, I just needed to meditate with the psychic tools I had been trained in. They were effective and symbolically the same. I could invoke the energy of the four elements, archangels, ascended masters, or whatever with no preparation or materials. Magic was built into my body now. I was a living, breathing ritual and I was encountering the world with a magical perspective. I was also continuing to craft my own magical music for ritual, meditation, and magical storytelling.
Taking Magic into the World
From the Georgia mediumship school, I moved to Indianapolis to rejoin the indie-rock band that I had been in years before. It was an amazing moment in time for us because, by coincidence (I think), the members of the band were individually focused on spiritual pursuits and during our year of touring and playing shows, we spent many hours in the van talking about philosophy, magic, religion, and more. We started to recognize that the five piece band was organized into five elemental influences and each member of the band was responsible for certain aspects of our daily experience based around which element he was representing. We started meditating together before we played, we started sending Reiki and Magical Awakening energy into the venues we were playing to try and effect the audience in a positive way while they heard our music. Halfway through the year, we were convinced that we were on a spiritual and magical mission to spread the Light among the disgruntled rock and roll populations of America and when people asked what kind of music we played we told them “Space Gospel.”
After a year of the touring, it was time to move on and my next destination was back to my childhood region of Chicago, where I quickly began a shamanic healing training program. I had learned a lot in the previous few years but I knew there were some gaps in my knowledge and I had been advised by my mentors to seek out a shamanic program.
I began the three year training program in my 26th year. It was a one-weekend-a-month type thing that covered the foundations of shamanic journeying, healing, and soul retrievals. It was a very physical practice that was rooted in the body and in movement. This was very different from everything I had previously experienced, which was mostly centered around visualizations and meditations. We moved and danced and sang our way into trances. We called upon ancestors and spirit guides and all kinds of other diving beings as we manifested our intentions through the motions of our bodies. As a singer, it was good thing for me and a good example of how to take a magical practice into the physical world instead of being preoccupied solely in the mental one.
By this time, I had released eight short EP’s and split records that I had done with magical intentions in my mind. I had done a lot of solo vocal shows and was starting to get more advanced in my personal practice of combining magic with my loop-based vocal music for a potent audio experience. Rjyan Kidwell of Cex summed up my intentions perfectly when he talked about making his 2007 Dannibal record:
It had been 7 years since I first picked up The Invisibles comic that pulled me into this weird occult world and I wanted to pass that kind of invitation on to others through my musical spells. As I approached the end of my three year shamanic program, I was feeling called from the Universe and it was time to go again. Just before I left Chicago, I released the album that I had been writing the whole time I was undergoing my shamanic training. It felt like the most potent magic/music that I could manifest at the time. I left Chicago and at the same time, decided to put music away to explore other aspects of life.
Sufis and British Wizards
It was January 1st, 2012, supposedly the year that the world (or the age) was going to end, according to Mayan calendar predictions. I left America and thanks to a strange series of connections, I spent a whole summer bouncing from California to Spain to Morocco to Turkey to the UK, meeting Sufis and taking part in various Zikr ceremonies and getting my mind blown bit by bit as I sang prayers and felt a lot of things coming down on me from higher realities. I wrote an article about my Sufi summer here.
Upon returning to America, I became further initiated into the world of Merlin. It was 2013 and I had been living with Merlin in my head and heart for five years. I was invited to become a teacher in the Magical Awakening energy healing system. I started leading group healing sessions in Oakland and San Francisco, where I was living. First, I did monthly sessions at a yoga studio and then later I met another Merlin-inspired teacher and we co-led a monthly full moon magic workshop in an occult bookstore in Oakland called The Sacred Well. I started training a few students in the Magical Awakening modality as well.
It was during this time that I started to feel like I had to take my Merlin experience even deeper. I needed to go on a holy pilgrimage. Downloaded straight from Merlin via my meditation, The Heart of Merlin was to be the spiritual quest to end one chapter of my life (the musician in his 20s) and begin another (the author in his 30s). I spent a year preparing and then enacting the pilgrimage. I wrote a book but have yet to publish it, though there is plenty written about it here and here.
My experience during the pilgrimage was profound to say the least. I was meditating and doing energy work everyday while trying to experience the ancient landscapes of Britain in every possible way. Everywhere I went, I was singing my rituals to connect the ancient landscapes of Merlin together. Merlin was speaking to me from all sides and I really felt like I was doing the Great Work, in perfect alignment with my True Will. The culmination of my trip was the realization that for the survival of our species, humans must act as stewards of the land, in magical and non-magical ways. It was a dark realization for a dark time in history where environmental concerns aren’t much of a consideration while the destruction of the Earth by our society is at an all time high. Merlin help us.
Wizard Gemcutter
Unlikely as it seems, my next relocation was to Bangkok, Thailand for gemology school. I had begun cutting gemstones as a hobby around the same time I became a Magical Awakening teacher. For the first few years, it was a very satisfying hobby that consumed the creative energy that was stagnating since I had given up the musical path a few years earlier.
Having gone fairly deep in various magical communities around America, I had some pretty heavy self-reflections during this transitional time. The whole experience really made me reflect on why I got into this weird world of the occult in the first place. Was it destiny? Was I compelled by a higher power? Was there something in my childhood that made me particularly attracted to this kind of worldview? Was I simply looking for a constructive way to understand the world around me or was it merely a distraction? I really had to consider why I was still pursuing this magical mode of thought. This caused me to look deeper into the history of magic, something I hadn’t previously considered.
Meanwhile, I moved to Bangkok, the center of the world’s gemstone trade, and started cutting stones full time. I had a decade of magical training behind me and was completely unsure about how it would manifest in my new occupation. Regardless, it seemed completely natural to call myself Wizard Gemcutter and start a company called Magus Gems. The ability to meditate and focus for extended periods of time turned out to be essential for gem cutting and my experience with magic ritual and practice gave me a unique lens to view my jewelry creations through.
In all magical traditions, from the philosophers of Ancient Greece and Egypt to the Alchemists of Renaissance Europe and on to modern New-Age crystal healers like Katrina Raphaell, gemstones have always been viewed as something with a unique power and presence among nature’s artifacts. Although I don’t follow much of what is said about the metaphysics of gemstones, I do recognize that for much of human history, gemstones have been practically worshipped for their curative powers and their ability to dispel darkness and bring one closer to the heavens.
Working with gemstones as an artist feels especially appropriate with the kind of magical background and training that I have. The more interested I get in the history of the gemstone trade, the more it overlaps with my interest in the history of the occult. Gemcutters have always been seen as having some sort of power over stones due to their ability to cut them in ways that can increase the light that emits from them, light that has always been associated with divine metaphysical power.
Conclusion
As I begin my 35th year, and the 11th since I started down the magicians path, I am more aware than ever of the importance of a magical worldview and the use of magical intention in my craft as a gemcutter. By putting the magical tradition into its proper historical context, I’ve come to terms with it’s purpose and it’s relationship with mankind. Although I no longer feel interested in using magic as a way of exerting my will onto the universe, I still think it’s vitally important for the evolution of our individual creative powers and possibly for our species as a whole. As I continue to develop in my own magical way, I keep looking back to the comic book magicians that came before me for inspiration about where the tradition of magic is going and how we can adapt ourselves to it in the 21st century;
By understanding art as magic, by conceiving pen or brush as wand, we thus return to the magician his or her original shamanic powers and social import, giving back to the occult both a product and a purpose…
Nothing prevents us throwing off the callipers and the restraints, the training wheels that have retarded magic’s forward progress for so long that moss obliterates its railway tracks. Nothing can stop us, if we have the will, from redefining magic as an art, as something vital and progressive. Something which in its ability to deal with the interior human world has a demonstrable utility, can be of actual use to ordinary people, with their inner worlds increasingly encroached upon by a tyrannical, colonialist exterior that’s intent on strip-mining them of any dreams or joy or self-determination. If we so resolved we could restore to magic a potential and a potency, a purpose it has barely caught a glimpse of in the last four hundred years…
We could, were we to so decide, ensure that current occultism be remembered in the history of magic as a fanfare peak rather than as a fading sigh… We could achieve it not by scrawling sigils but by crafting stories, paintings, symphonies. We could allow our art to spread its holy psychedelic scarab wings across society once more. — Alan Moore
About the Author
Justin K Prim is an American gem cutter and gemologist living and working in Bangkok, Thailand. He has travelled all over the world, studying various types of meditation techniques, psycho-spiritual healing therapies, as well as his trade skills of audio engineering and gemcutting. He is in the process of publishing two books, the first is about a spiritual quest through the UK to find the hidden heart of Merlin the wizard, and the second is a book about the worldwide history of gemstone faceting. He has explored careers in spiritual counseling and energy healing but now works as a Gemstone Faceting Instructor in Bangkok as well as writing articles, producing videos, and giving talks about gem cutting history.
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