Month: March 2018

By the archaeological evidence, magick before civilization was practiced by tribal men and women, who learned to talk with spirits, both alien spirits and spirits of the dead. The term shaman originally referred to the wise men of certain Siberian hunter-gatherer tribes, but it has been adopted to mean any wise person from a tribal culture who uses altered states of consciousness to travel to other realms and contact spirits.
     They were the lynchpin of tribal society, responsible for maintaining the tribe’s social bonds. Since they could communicate with the ancestors, they served as their representative, passing on traditions and keeping the tribe’s history.
     They also maintained the bonds by leading group ritual. The shaman talked to the plant spirits and learned the properties of plants and the processes of turning them into a sacrament. The sacrament almost always consisted of a mixture of alcohol and psychedelics. The shaman used the sacrament in their own spirit quests, and distributed them to the entire tribe in times of celebration. Using ritual that contained dancing and drumming, the tribe would build a communal consciousness.
     The shaman also provided healing and divination for the tribe through contact with the spirits.

Emergent Magick (EMK) views the practice of magick as an evolving art form starting from the very beginnings of the Homo genus. Archaeological evidence shows that even Neanderthals honored their dead. The tombs of our ancestors show that to some degree, we as a species have always known something exists beyond what we can normally perceive.

In this view, magick progresses from era to era in different forms. However, even though the practice has evolved, it does not make older forms of magick less valid. While EMK provides the most useful philosophy of magick for modern magi in our current culture, there remains much to learn from older forms of magick. They continue to reveal their secrets through advances in archaeology and history. They also benefit from being practiced in a culture that universally believed in magick and having the best minds of their eras tasked to the magical arts. While EMK takes a progressive, postmodern approach to magick, it also seeks to learn from and in some ways emulate the shamanic magicians that practiced magick for tens of thousands of years of human pre-history.