Crazy Chaos Surfer Finds Personal Magickal Path
===============================================

There aren't many people here on the list who have met me, and a very few
who know me well, but if there is one element that could be said to
describe me, it would be fire.  With a sun, moon, and four planets in fire
signs, more than half my chart is involved in three grand trines in fire. 
It's because of this that I've never really gotten along with the ocean.

You see, I've had a rather bad experience in the past with the ocean.  And
it wasn't one of those fluke accidents that scare so many others off.  The
story is too long to go into, but the end of it is that for some reason
Brighid has adopted me (one of the things that put me on the path of
magick), which explains the relationship with fire.  The bad end of it,
however, is that Manaanan and I don't get along really well.  So I've
spent most of my time avoiding the ocean, even though I've lived near the
California coast all of my life.  The ocean only has to try to eat you
once and you become very wary of it.

So I'll admit that I was the person most surprised when I realized that I
had the urge to learn how to surf.  I guess it's inevitable, hanging
around the Mad Prophet as much as I do, that sooner or later I'd wonder
just what it was like to be out there on the waves.  But I never thought
it would become an urge to actually be out there myself.  But I've been
drawn to the ocean for completely different reasons than pleasure.

Three months ago, the Mad Prophet dragged six of us to the ocean at night
where we built a bonfire, listened to the surf breaking, and walked the
beach staring at the stars.  And I sacraficed a portion of my own hair,
along with a portion fo the bonfire I had lit, into the ocean in a ritual
whose purpose was to finally make peace with it and cease this endless
battle I have fought my entire life.

I guess it worked.

The ocean finally felt kind to me two weeks ago, not the threatening
monster that it has been my entire life, and I finally began to sense the
great generative power of a force that command three quarters of this
planet.

And I finally was struck by inspiration.  For seven months I have been 
searching for my magickal path.  I had pursued nearly everything that I 
could find, yet nothing seemed to be my calling.  No magickal system, not 
even the standard practices of most chaos mages, seemed to fully resonate 
with me.  And so I began to create one of my own.

Not that this is an easy task mind you.  I have a love/hate relationship
with the idea of magickal "opposites" of all things being aspects of yin
and yang, so I had no idea where to start.  Perhaps the most pertinent
example in my life of those "opposites" would be those of Fire and Water
-- yet the more I thought about it, the more I realized that these two are
more similar than dissimilar.  Both are liquids, after a fashion (yeah
yeah, fire's really a plasma, but have you ever sat there and actually
watched a slow-moving fire *burn*?).  Both are chaotic in nature.  Both
destroy as well as create.  Both are necessary for life, the fires of the
sun and the rains from the ocean.  And it all clicked.

There should be absolutely no reason that Fire and Water should not mix.

And suddenly I found the urge to surf.

I'd never been in the ocean, and I'd never even touched a surfboard 
except when I'd helped the Mad Prophet move into his new apartment.  I 
didn't even really care much for the sport except for one thing:  It was 
now an excuse to become intimately familiar with the ocean.

So the Mad Prophet set up a date when we'd all head out and rendezvous 
with a surfing buddy of his who had an extra wetsuit that would fit me.  
We'd head out, he'd teach me some basics of how the ocean works, how 
waves break, and how to do the basic things:  Get on the board, paddle, 
and turtle dive through a wave.

It struck me how much learning to surf is like learning magick.  In 
magick, it's not uncommon for a neophyte to want to learn how to do all 
sorts of really impressive things, contact and control major spirits, 
channel bizarre otherworldly ideas, and impress everyone.  But first they 
need to master meditation, control of the body, and visualization, and 
this is where most of them fail.

Having gone through the magickal path, I realized the value of learning 
to paddle the damn board before I try to stand up on that godawful 
unstable thing, let alone try to stand up on it with several hundred 
thousand pounds of water bearing down on you faster than you can scream 
"MOMMY!"

So I learned to paddle, and at the same time made some wonderful 
discoveries about the ocean and its motions.  It is gentle, but at the 
same time powerful, and the moment you think you've got control over 
*IT*, it smacks you back into place.  There's a great part of the wave 
that surfers call "The Washing Machine".  It's that part at the front 
that tumbles, spinning over and over and over again, rolling in on itself 
where the white foam is formed and rolls in to shore.  You come to a full 
appreciation of that name after you've made even a tiny mistake while 
learning to paddle out and gone through the spin cycle a few times.

I've spent the last twenty years appreciating fire.  It's time for me to 
appreciate water.  Which is why I think I finally made my magickal 
breakthrough as well.  I'd been so narrowminded that I hadn't looked in the 
one direction I feared most:  The Ocean.

Once I did, it all came.  The night before we took off, I was going to 
bed when it all flashed into my head, a new magickal framework in which to 
work, one that does not rely on opposite ends of a binary or on their 
exclusion.  One whose four main principles are embodied by the aspects of 
Fire, Water, The Hidden, and The Revealed.  It arrived with diagrams for 
a circle that I am to inscribe on each beach whose waters I enter, as 
part of my dedication to *MY* magickal path.

You don't need all this fancy crap you find in books that pass themselves 
off as "magick".  Most of those authors don't even practice the art.  And 
the ones who do often find that their own path is so personal that books 
about it are of little or no use to the general occult audience:  so 
books about general techniques are written in their stead.

You don't need magickal orders, or even disorders, or these "Temporary 
Autonomous Zones" to learn.  It's all just posturing anyway.  Your own 
path is one that is so highly personalized that NOONE else should ever be 
able to understand it in its entirety.  Austin Osman Spare understood 
this, and I think he's the only magician who ever got anywhere with it.  
His expression of magick was through his art and sometimes through his 
writing, and they were so personal that we only capture a small glimpse 
of what those realms were like for him.  We will never be able to see the 
same realms that he saw, no matter how hard we try to, because he was a 
man who was following his own path.  It was not our path.

It is for this very same reason that when I speak of Fire, Water, The 
Hidden, and The Revealed, no matter how hard I try to make others 
understand, they will never see the same thing that I have seen.  They 
might make use of its parts, but will never understand its whole.

I believe this is why I never felt content on any established path, even 
one such as Chaos, as much as it can be said to be "established".  
Because magick is an intensely personal art.  Magick us ultimately an 
experience of the world that can never be transmitted to another.

I would try to explain the transformations that my own magick has taken,
but it goes beyond words.  All that I can say is that my own experience
has led me to the conclusion that you can only go so far with somebody
else's magickal system.  In order to advance, you will have to find your 
own path.

I finally broke through.  I finally see the world in a magickal splendor 
that had eluded me my entire life.  And it is a sight that I cannot share, 
though I wish I could.  I still have the road of a lifetime ahead of me 
as I seek not its mastery, but its companionship.  One can never be a 
master of the ocean, nor of fire.  All it takes is one good trip through 
the washing machine to remind you of that.

It would seem that the waves washed much more than my wetsuit.

In Life, Love, and Laughter,

--Fenwick Rysen
  fenwick@soic.net