The Grieving Magician

One of the most frequent and desperate requests I see across occult spaces is for a spell or ritual or process to bypass grieving in one way or another, and my response is always the same: Please don’t.

I’ve written it 100 times in 100 ways and I figure it is high time I make it official and put it down somewhere more permanent than a social media reply (this is just off the top of my head so you can probably expect edits).

Grief sucks, by definition. It’s a horrible ache that will tear the guts right out of you.

And it’s slow. If you ever find the end, let me know because I haven’t. In time it can change, fade into the background, become more accepted or less active, but I don’t think it ever goes away completely. Just when you think it has, you’ll see something that reminds you it hasn’t.

Hell, even as I write this there’s a banner just at the top of my site for someone who is no longer with us. It may come down one day but that won’t mean I’ve forgotten. Man, what a great fucking guy he was, seriously…

But as much as it completely sucks, I firmly believe that it is an extremely important and sacred process that you shouldn’t try to shortcut or bypass. I don’t think it’s healthy for the mind to skip it. I think it’s a process the psyche needs to go through, step by step and at your own pace, without rushing.

I believe that every emotion in the human experience needs to be processed and moved through. Not just the fun ones. Grief, sadness, anger, frustration, jealousy, embarrassment, shame. They’re no fun, but I believe that sweeping them under the rug is eventually going to lead to a major rug problem in your future, and it will be much harder to clean up after it’s reached critical mass.

And I think you know that deep down too, you’re just desperate and hurting right now, which is totally normal.

Grief can come from many sources (big and small, this is not a comparison or contest). A departed loved one, a breakup, a dear pet gone, your own childhood after growing up and realizing “your normal” wasn’t normal, a friendship that was finally in too many pieces to be glued back together again, a treasured object lost, a state of mind you think you’ll never find again, a career flushed, a physical injury that leaves you changed, an interpersonal dynamic that withered even though the person is still right there; the list goes on and on.

The list of solutions I see requested is much shorter. Over and over again I see them in different phrasings and inflections but they boil down to the same thing: Make it stop! Either by remedying the situation or forcing happiness, or inspiring one to forget, just please for the love of god MAKE IT STOP!

And that’s a pretty normal reaction to intense pain isn’t it? When you touch a flame you move away from it, even before you have time to process it. It’s a reflex. If you cannot move away from it, it’s torture.

But I think that’s one of the key differences between emotional pain and physical pain. Physical pain from an external source you can alleviate by avoiding. Internal emotional pain I believe grows and grows the longer you avoid it. We generally have a much harder time dealing with it after it’s been bottled up and festers and grows into a monster that finally demands our attention.

I believe it’s absolutely essential to our well being to take the time to fight these fires as they come up instead of letting them rage. I know that it hurts, I’ve done it before, I’m doing it now, I’ll have a new reason to do it again very very soon. I’ve been there. And by far, BY FAR, my biggest struggles with it have been the ones I didn’t address in a timely manner. The times that I waited decades before trying to tackle it. They grew so much by then they seemed bigger than me.

I know that a quick fix looks delicious, more especially to the magically inclined who believe they can do anything at all if they have the will, but I implore you for your own sake to process what you need to process, painful though it may be. You won’t get far on the journey to healing that wound if you avoid taking the first steps.

“But what is grief, if not love persevering?”

-Vision

It’s the price you pay for love. The deal has already been struck. You’ve accepted love, and the bill will come due one day. If you’re reading this now, maybe that’s today. Was the transaction worth it? Absolutely. But I think you’re going to run into a lot of trouble mentally and emotionally if you try to avoid paying for it. You’ll be charged interest. Not to mention the trouble you’ll be facing logistically if you believe you are more powerful than love.

Take all the time you need, baby steps are still steps. But please grieve so you can move forward.

The Five (ish) Stages of Grief

The map is not the territory, but one common map we see repeated is the Five Stages of Grief:

1. Denial
2. Anger
3. Bargaining ← (You are here in a Facebook group, asking for magic to; bring someone back, talk to them, to forget they existed, or to simply be happy)
4. Depression
5. Acceptance

It’s easy to get stuck at ANY point, but as magicians we are particularly vulnerable to getting stuck on #3 “Bargaining”, because we often believe that we can control everything, or at least reach out to an entity that can.

It’s ok to be here, it’s a step like all the rest. But don’t get stuck there, there’s another step afterwards. It’s a painful cycle to be stuck in, and I promise they wouldn’t want that for you.

Do the grief. It’s a basic function of consciousness. Being able to navigate it is a far more enviable and enlightened feat than being able to sidestep it (and will get better results).

Have you ever met someone who grew up never having to do anything hard? What were they like? Dealing with adversity is how we grow and mature and psychologically develop.

Rocks don’t grieve (maybe). This is literally part of what makes you a person.

The Flip Side

I don’t know what you believe about the afterlife, there are so many different paths. But here are a few thoughts I had:

They are kind of going through a lot too, wherever they are. They’ve likely got a lot more to process and adjust to than you do right now.

Would your magical intervention be helpful?

Could it possibly make things harder for them? Not just emotionally as a reminder of what they lost, but like, possibly even consequences for meddling?

Would they even want your intervention? Or is that just something you want for yourself?

Do they want or need to hear from you right now? How long has it been for them, does time work the same there?

Could you be undoing years of their own inner work by bringing this right back to the surface for them? They’ve lost a lot and are trying to process it too, you know.

I don’t know the answers. Anyone who says they do is selling something. Every person and situation is different, but those are some questions you should at least ask yourself.

“I was happy. Wherever I was… I was happy… at peace. I knew that everyone I cared about was all right. I knew it. Time… didn’t mean anything. Nothing had form. But I was still me, you know? And I was warm. And I was loved. And I was finished. Complete. I… I don’t understand theology or dimensions, any of it really… but I think I was in heaven. And now I’m not. I was torn out of there. Pulled out, by my friends. Everything here is hard and bright and violent. Everything I feel, everything I touch. This is Hell. Just getting through the next moment, and the one after that. Knowing what I’ve lost. They can never know. Never.”

-Buffy Summers

A Warning To Facilitators

Be fucking responsible. Handle with care. The person who comes to you seeking magical help is in an extremely vulnerable and desperate state. The potential damage you can do at this juncture is almost unfathomable. Do you have training for this situation? Do you have experience with this situation? These are not rhetorical questions, maybe you do, I don’t know.

But they are questions you should ask yourself before deciding to proceed. Now is probably not the time to cowboy-up and try something new outside your wheelhouse just because you have a surplus of confidence.

Whether you fancy yourself a shaman or a witch, or a techno-pagan, or a pop culture magician, or whatever; I believe there often IS a lot you can do to help people who are grieving. But you A.) should already know what the fuck you are doing and not be using them as your guinea pig, and B.) such things would be firmly rooted in fostering a normal, healthy grieving process with the mental and emotional well being of the grieving party as the utmost goal in the forefront.

I don’t think there’s anything to be gained by bypassing the process.

A Warning to the Grieving

You are in an extremely vulnerable and desperate state. Don’t make any rash decisions right now. Take the time you need to heal from this blow. Where do we go when we are very hurt? Someplace safe to be cared for by people we know we can trust. Now is a time to seek comfort with the people who know you the best and love you the most. Sometimes that’s friends and family. If you’re not lucky enough to have that it may only be a support group of individuals going through something similar.

If you instead seek comfort in total strangers in occult spaces and open yourself up to just anyone during this extremely vulnerable time, you can rest assured that there’s a shark out there who will smell your blood in the water.

There are many magical people with experience and skill and emotional intelligence who can be very helpful right now, but if that’s the route you go, make sure you’ve got a good one. You probably already know them or were referred by someone who did. What we NOT fixin’ to do, is put out a homing beacon on the internet to attract every snake oil salesman who can read.

Most of my time administrating my social media is spent deleting scammers who promise to fix all your problems with a $pell if you will only just DM them your payment info.

When (And How) to Seek Help

There’s absolutely no shame in seeking help. Sometimes things are just too much to bear, and we haven’t got the tools we need in our toolbox.

But you don’t learn to ride a bike by avoiding riding a bike. Seek the help of someone who can help you effectively navigate the actual grieving process, not bypass it.

If the comfort of the people you trust from your inner circle who love you the most isn’t working, and raw-dogging it yourself isn’t working, seek out a licensed professional grief counselor, a support group, or any type of therapist or mental health professional you think fits the situation.

If the pain is so great you feel that you are in danger, please call a suicide hotline immediately.

Nobody (who matters) is saying “get over it”. As I’ve said above I don’t think you ever completely get over it. But it gets easier, and I believe the path to “easier” is through the rough part, not around it. Don’t rush. It’s ok to grieve and it’s not a race.

Disclaimer

I am not a grief counselor or mental health professional. This is just the opinion of a guy who thinks he’s a techno-wizard and has been through a lot of loss in his life. Maybe this is all horrible advice, I don’t know man.