Aidan Wachter is well-known among a subset of the magical community for his gorgeous talismanic creations, forged from silver and bearing arcane markings of his own design or derived from richly sorcerous sources. This year, he has also embarked upon a career as an author of magical texts, building upon his years of experience and bringing the same level of creativity and depth to his writing that he has long done with his jewelry. With Six Ways: Approaches and Entries for Practical Magic, Wachter seeks to open up pathways into practice for those who, like him, are “dirt sorcerors,” practitioners who may have some cosmological interests but who are far more interested in applying magic to the world around them in inventive, operational ways. At the end of Chapter Eight of his self-published work, he says, “The first and most important enchantment is the enchantment of the world, which by its very nature is also the enchantment of us, its perceiver. A large amount of the work of magic and sorcery as I have come to know it has to do with this concept” (44). Wachter’s stated aim, reenchantment, has been on the minds of the magically-inclined since Keith Thomas’ summative text on the decline of magic in the modern world, and if many hands make light work then Six Ways shoulders a goodly portion of that burden.
The book’s thirty-three chapters all come in digestible chunks of a few pages, but in most of those bite-size portions the flavor runs deep (except in his rejection of red onions, an opinion in which he is clearly wrong). He begins by introducing himself and his purpose: to add “approaches and entries” to the Field of magic (I capitalize that term here because Wachter does, explaining that the Field is the “totality of manifest and unmanifest reality. Sorcery is the art of effective inter-being with the Field”) (10). The emphasis here is in the practice, the application, the dirt-under-your-fingernails approach to getting things done in ways that most people can’t or won’t. By Chapter Two, Wachter is already handing out homework and pushing the reader to put the book down (a hard task at times) and go do the stuff. Exercises within the text are wide-ranging and pull from a variety of systems including some Ceremonial and chaos magic, hoodoo, and Traditional Witchcraft, although seldom in any way that feels disrespectful or disharmonious. In Chapter Nine, he leads the reader into silence as a way of understanding meditation, then segues into trance in Chapter Ten. He relates the practice of offerings (in a general animistic sense) to a more specific chapter on working with the Dead and follows the deeper relationship-building practices into a chapter on “the stacking of skulls” as a way of understanding altar construction. Of course, one of his standout sections comes in the form of chapters on sigil work and talisman creation, where his expertise is evident.
Wachter’s book is remarkable in that it feels very much like having tea with a friend—a friend who knows a great deal about practical, action-oriented, behavioral occultism. The conversational tone he strikes may actually deter some readers because he speaks from his own experience and the lessons he’s learned but does not do so in a prescriptive way beyond providing potential tasks for a developing magician to try. Put another way, the book is a bit like an afternoon break with a mad scientist in his workshop, where he allows you to tinker a bit with his Tesla coils and bottles of bubbling concoctions as you walk and talk. It is a strange book in some ways, and at times I found myself a bit astray from his path (I do not particularly follow some of his meditative methods), but he always drew me back in again. His arguments about making contracts with spirits responsibly, seeing animism in its most relationship-oriented form, and making magic a thing you do in the world, rather than something that happens to you all resonated with my own sense of folk magic as a continuum of praxis.
One of my favorite moments in the book is Wachter’s description of the feeling when magic works: “This is magic, and if done with intention, and devotion, it should feel a bit like falling in love…Magic is the art of falling in love with the Field and its inhabitants” (120). Those inhabitants include us, of course, and falling in love with ourselves, the world around us, and all the beautiful threads that weave us together is a bit of magic itself. It is a reenchantment of the world, and this book makes that task a little easier.
Thanks for reading!
-Cory
*In the interest of full disclosure, I received a review copy of the book from the author.
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