For a while now, in various groups I’m a member of that actually discuss Chaos magic, there’s been a fair bit of talk about #OpGrimoire: The Hexorian Field Guide to Urban Witchcraft. I’m almost always on the lookout for new reading material, even if my stack of unread books is substantial. Especially when people across the gamut sing its praises, both in and out of Chaos circles. Like the slag I am, I immediately tried to pirate a copy to no avail. It would be a month and half before I actually decided to buy a copy, finding to my surprise that it was only $6.00. Given the reviews I’d heard, this was more than reasonable a price for me, so I one-clicked and waited.
Being only 80 pages long, I went from cover to cover in a couple of hours. Somehow, this little tome managed to be a delightful fusion of several of my preferred belief systems. Tantalizing bits of shamanism, Hermeticism, pop and urban magick, and more gleamed through the pages, while also managing to align pretty much perfectly with my moral and ethical principles.
Feed the City, and the City will feed us.
For a while I’d been meaning to put out some food for the crows that have recently started appearing in my area again. The next day after finishing the book, I felt this… almost a compulsion to follow through on that. I made a very brief and impromptu acknowledgement/offering to Hexorius, then went inside to wash up. As I was drying my hands, thinking of how the crows were serving as a sort of proxy for the City, I was struck with the idea that, in a similar way to how I viewed the crows as deities of a sort, they might see humans who leave them food as divine beings as well if they were capable of that kind of cognition.
My mind went off on a thought experiment of all existence practicing mutual animism; what would our society be like if we recognized each other as the gods that we are? How different would things be if we consciously gave everyone and everything the same respect many of us reserve for our supernatural guides and patrons? This is the secret of the City: it is both a singular entity, and a collective. It’s gods all the way up and down, the sigil of Hexorius perfectly representing the axiom of “as above, so below,” reminding us that we are part of the whole and we are also each our own universes for smaller organisms and organic collectives, and so on ad infinitum in either direction. I do still wish I could have this sort of insight on a more chronic and less acute basis, but I am still thankful for those little flashes of insight that remind me of how truly magical this world is.
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NAMA OD TELOAH 