Pop Culture Magick by Taylor Ellwood

Author:Taylor Ellwood
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Megalithica Books
Published: 2012-03-10T06:00:00+00:00

Exercises

Buy one of the books I recommend in the Appendix and try to find some ideas that could be potential magickal experiments.

If you’re a writer, create a world which has a working system of magick woven into it?

Time/Space via Comics

In this chapter, we won’t focus on comics in the way we did with SF and fantasy genre books. Instead, I will introduce you to an innovative way of using the comic book format to understand time/space, and to work some very effective magick. By focusing on the format of comics, we open ourselves up to new perspectives, ones that enable us to take the use of magick in different directions.

The format of comics is a combination of word and image that fits in a panel and sometimes connects to other panels to tell a story. The space between the panels is known as the gutter. The gutter divides each panel, but also enables readers to visualize the story. Scott McCloud erroneously calls this process closure and defines it as follows: “Comic panels fracture both time and space, offering a jagged, staccato rhythm of unconnected moments. But closure allows us to connect these moments and mentally construct a continuous unified reality” (McCloud 67). For closure to occur, one would have to mentally close the gaps; block them out of sight, as it were. However, in reading comics what actually happens is visualization, wherein you use the gap to mentally move the time/space (action) of one panel into the next. You exercise your mind by actively creating associations that enable you to understand and make the story of the comic happen. You provide the voices, the action, and the entire world of the story within the comic, using the gutter as the medium of the act of visualization. The panels only serve as indicators of the actors involved in the story. You make the reality of the story manifest through your mind. That in and of itself is a valuable exercise to any magician which enables hir to focus hir mind effectively on making ideas become reality.

Now each panel of a comic book represents one moment of time/space. That moment is part of the story and completes it when linked with other such moments, as represented by other panels. In Watchmen, Alan Moore explores the notion of time/space in comics by using panels to represent specific moments of time in different characters’ pasts. Each moment of time/space represents an opportunity to relive the moment, as if the character was again living that part of hir life. The irony here is that we are living in the past, even as we live in the present, and in the future. We are present in all moments of time that we have existed in. However, our perception of time is focused on linear reality, which, as Moore points out on page 6 of issue 9 of Watchmen, can be a detriment to us: “Time is simultaneous, an intricately structured jewel that humans insist on viewing one edge at a time, when the whole design is visible in every facet.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.