Punk Magick: a DIY guide to creating your own magickal system

By Tom Swiss

PUNK MAGICK

a DIY guide to creating your own magickal system
“...strip the art down to its absolute bare essentials, and go forward confidently, with a ‘do it yourself’ spirit to engage directly with it.”

1.Decide what you want. (”Set intention.”)
2.Do weird stuff. (”Raise energy.”)
3.Make the weird stuff connect in your mind with what you want. (”Direct energy.”)
4.Seal the deal. (”Cool down.”)
5.Get off your ass!

PUNK MAGICK

a DIY guide to creating your own magickal system

Learn how to strip the art of magick down to its absolute bare essentials, and go forward confidently with a ‘do it yourself’ spirit to engage directly with it, using a five part structure for any magickal working:

1.Decide what you want. (”Set intention.”)

2.Do weird stuff. (”Raise energy.”)

3.Make the weird stuff connect in your mind with what you want. (”Direct energy.”)

4.Seal the deal. (”Cool down.”)

5.Get off your ass!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Oct 30, 2021
• ISBN: 9781794871670

Book preview

"We grow up through magic and in magic...Our first response to the frustrations of reality is magic; and without this belief in ourselves, in our own specific ability or magic, we cannot hold our own against the environment and against the superego…

...

In magic, mankind is fighting for freedom. – Gèza Róheim, Magic and Schizophrenia

Tom Swiss

Why should you study and practice Magick? Because you can't help doing it, and you had better do it well than badly. – Aleister Crowley, Magick Without Tears

Be the awesome space wizard you want to see airbrushed on the side of a van – Internet meme

Copyright ©2021 Tom Swiss

All rights reserved

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Please don't sell copies (it's rude to sell copies and not pay the author a cut), please don't make altered copies (except as necessary for technological compatibility, it's rude to change an author's work), and please leave the author's name on it (it's rude to not properly attribute a work). Otherwise, please share and enjoy.

Printing history:

• print

- 0.96 Starwood Festival limited prerelease, July 2021

- 1.05 First mass market printing, November 2021

• epub

- 1.05 Ebook release, October 2021

ISBN: 978-1-7948-7167-0

Infamous Productions

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Catonsville MD 21228

www.infamous.net

What Is Magic(k)?

This is not a book about the sort of magic David Copperfield or Penn and Teller perform. If you picked it up looking for card tricks...sorry. (No disrespect to the arts of prestidigitation and illusion.) It’s about magic in the sense of rituals, spells, and enchantment.

The objective of this booklet is to give you a framework for thinking about this art of magic, and for thinking about art in general. It’s not a detailed how-to guide – there are hundreds of Introduction to Witchcraft or Ritual Magick 101 books already on the shelves, and countless such pages on the web.

Instead it’s meant as a guide to turning whatever basic skills you may have or learn, into a complete personal magical system.

Sometimes people spell magic in the sense we’re talking about here as magick or magik to distinguish this ritual practice from the performing art. But not always, or even usually. So there will be differences in the sources we quote, and while we used the K in the book’s title as a clue to the reader as to what kind of magic the book is about, we generally won’t in the rest of the book.

What is this magic(k)?

Aleister Crowley: Magick is the Science and Art of causing Change to occur in conformity with Will….Every intentional act is a Magickal Act.

Aleister Crowley again, this time writing with his mentor MacGregor Matthews: Our Ceremonial Magic fines down, then, to a series of minute, though of course empirical, physiological experiments, and whoso will carry them through intelligently need not fear the result.

Dion Fortune: Magic is the art of changing consciousness at will.

Margot Adler: Magic is convenient word for a whole collection of techniques, all of which involve the mind. In this case, we might conceive of these techniques as including the mobilization of confidence, will, and emotion brought about by the recognition of necessity; the use of imaginative faculties, particularly the ability to visualize, in order to begin to understand how other beings function in nature so we can use this knowledge to achieve necessary ends.

Maybe this almost sounds like some sort of self-help gimmick. Like we might have a The Seven Magical Practices of Highly Effective People book on the shelves of corporate managers across the country.

And that’s not entirely wrong – you can help yourself with magic, even use it at work. Daniel Lawrence O’Keefe wrote that part of magic is "speaking in the management voice before you belong

Reviews for Punk Magick

[Leigha Castleberry · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

An excellent writing, with a great understanding of both punk, and magic, and the places they overlap that'd never been known to me before reading this

[Mackenzie Robin · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I consider this nothing short of required reading for anyone looking to find a personal understanding of magic in their lives. As someone who self describes as a "folkpunk witch" I was immediately enamored, and consistently impressed.