Your grimoire is fan fiction

Somebody is reading a leather book by lamplight, and the book is somebody else's fan fiction.

I say that with love and a little contempt. Every grimoire on your shelf is a person in a room writing down what worked for them in the vocabulary they had. Their heroes were angels and kings. Their cast came out of the stories of their century, and they wrote themselves right into the plot. Good for them. Humans do that with any story they love and any want they can't shake.

The trouble is the reputation. The fan fiction got old, got a spine and a price tag, and now it gets to look down its nose at yours.

Age is the only credential most of those books have. Strip the dust off and you've got a guy with a favorite cast and a list of things he wanted.

Your head has a different library

You grew up inside different stories. A comic book hero who never quits. A game character you've died as four hundred times. A cartoon dog loyal to a fault, who got up off the floor after every anvil. Those figures already live in your head, with faces and voices and a feel for how they'd walk into a room. Nobody had to drill you on their names.

The old books ask you to learn a foreign cast and then pretend it moves you. Your own cast moves you before you sit down.

I ran a working once with a cartoon dog. That's the whole description and I stand by it. I stuck a drawing of him on the wall, gave him a title, stacked three more titles behind it until it got embarrassing and then two more for spite, and asked him for one checkable thing: a phone call I'd been dodging, made by Friday. I made the call Thursday night. That's the only result I'll report, because it's the only one I can check. Turns out a dog who gets back up is useful when your own spine has gone to soup.

Does that prove anything? NO. One working, one head. Run it yourself and log it.

The lineage argument is the weakest one in the room

The traditionalist always shows up with a family tree. Fine. Let's walk it.

The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn was founded in 1888 by Westcott, Mathers and Woodman. It took scattered Western practice and stacked it into grades with exams, and Israel Regardie published its papers between 1937 and 1940. People have been dressing up as it ever since. Crowley said a being dictated The Book of the Law to him in Cairo in 1904. That's his claim, and you're welcome to it. Every link in that chain is a person deciding which story gets to be the serious one, then charging admission.

Then there's Spare. He published The Book of Pleasure in 1913, and his sigil method is the one half the internet runs. Spare threw out the medieval idea of sigils as seals for spirits. He treated beings as complexes of the unconscious that you make by sigilizing. The man behind the most borrowed technique in the whole current put the beings in your own head.

If the beings come out of your head, your head's own library is the right place to shop. Spare's argument, carried one step further.

And the flag. The eight arrows on every chaos magic patch and tattoo were designed by Michael Moorcock in the 1960s for his Elric stories, as a picture of Chaos set against Law. Carroll's Liber Null uses an eight arrow figure for the Chaosphere. The emblem of the whole current was drawn for a sword and sorcery hero.

Grant Morrison coined "hypersigil" for the comic The Invisibles, which ran 1994 to 2000. A comic book handed the current one of its working tools. If that bothers you, go check what else on your shelf started out as somebody's story.

The lineage people want a pedigree on a dog that was always a mutt. The whole current is borrowed parts and pulp. That's the good news.

The cosplay charge

I've said it before and I'll keep saying it: the sash is a costume. The snob who sneers at a pop culture godform is dressed as a century he never lived in. He wants the dust and the Latin and the reverent hush, and he calls the wanting "tradition." He didn't inherit any of it. He bought it, the same way you'd buy a Halloween costume, and he's FURIOUS that yours came free.

Here's the test he never runs. Did the working move anything? He can tell you whether it was properly dressed, properly sourced, properly pronounced, properly dated to the right phase of the right moon in the right century. Ask him what changed in his week and watch him reach for a footnote.

Where the old books earn their keep

They aren't worthless. Some are gorgeous objects, and a few are hard, strange, rewarding reads. Read them after you've done something. Read them first and they'll tell you what you're supposed to feel, and you'll feel it on cue, and you'll have learned exactly nothing about your own head.

Be honest in the log, too. A pop culture figure does not do the work for you. The hero on your wall is a handle. Keep the date and the want, check them in a month, and you'll find out what the handle was attached to.

Run one tonight

1. Pick one figure from a story you actually loved, never the one that sounds impressive at parties.
2. Draw it, rough is fine. Give it a title and stack three more behind it.
3. Ask for one checkable thing, small, within your own reach. A call, a message, a thing you've been dodging. Nothing aimed at another person's body, money or mind.
4. Thank the figure by name. Laugh until the laugh is real. Put the want and the date in the Log and look at it in a month.

If the working leaves you shaky, sleepless or low for days, stop and talk to a person. Doing that is part of the practice. For a longer run at the same idea, Tonight you invent a god has the whole sequence, and the sigil guide covers the mark.

Think I'm wrong about the grimoires? Bring the book you'd die on to The Pit and defend it to my face.