Reflexivity as Occult Practice – I
In a recent essay, I posed the question – How do we learn to be magicians? Is it simply a matter of reading books, studying with a teacher, doing practices, and taking on particular beliefs and attitudes? My answer was to reflect on my early dive into the world of the occult in which I introduced the term reflexivity. In this post, I will discuss the concept of reflexivity and propose that it should be accepted as a core occult practice.
What is a core practice? It’s common to find occult authors making a distinction between beginner and advanced practice. You begin with the easy or basic practices and then move on to more ‘advanced’ practices. I prefer to think of ‘core’ practices as the practices that you do every day – the skills you continue to develop throughout your life. They are often very simple, although they might take time to flower. Reflexivity is such a practice.
What is reflexivity? It is the critical, considered appraisal of your practice. The process through which you challenge your own beliefs and assumptions. How you frame issues in particular ways. How you develop particular forms of knowledge and how that knowledge is shaped and filtered through social identities (race, class, age, nationality, sexuality, gender, etc). It is about being unwilling to accept unquestioningly what you are told is right or correct – and a readiness to ask ‘why’ questions; to challenge received wisdom. It can be done within the context of an unfolding event, or afterwards. Reflexivity requires not merely taking in information passively, but actively thinking about your learning process: recognizing how you learn; why what you need to learn is important to you, and identifying gaps in your knowledge and learning. This latter process is sometimes called (forgive the jargon) metacognition – thinking about thinking. The key point, however, is that reflexivity is deliberate.
Again, in a previous post, I reflected on my early years of occult practice and pointed out that I spent a good amount of time passively absorbing ‘occult wisdom’ from books without really subjecting any of it to critical appraisal – and I don’t believe that I am unusual in any way in doing that. From talking to friends, it seems to be quite a common experience. It’s easy to take attractive ideas and concepts on board – it can be harder to ‘unlearn’ them. Sometimes that initial questioning arises when we encounter something that doesn’t fit with our preconceptions.
A simple example from my time in Wicca. In the coven I was initiated into, the High Priestess told me that crossing the circle would damage my aura. I believed her. Some years later, I was in another coven where the members didn’t seem to bother about this. They’d cast a circle, and someone would say “Hang on, I’ve forgotten the incense” or similar and pop across the circle without a care in the world. At first, I thought they must be really ‘powerful’ to do this, but eventually, I began to wonder if the whole business about crossing the circle damaging your aura was true in the way I’d accepted. It’s easy to forget that experiences don’t always fit with our preconceptions and expectations – with what we’ve taken on board and accepted as true from other people, books, social media, etc. It’s easy enough to have an experience that conforms to our expectations but harder to deal with something that throws our cherished beliefs and attitudes into disarray. It’s worth bearing in mind the words of Joan Scott:
“Experience is at once always already an interpretation and something that needs to be interpreted. What counts as experience is neither self-evident nor straightforward; it is always contested, and always therefore political.”
The Evidence of Experience. Joan W. Scott Critical Inquiry, Vol 17, No.4. (Summer, 1991), pp773-797.
There’s a tendency, I feel, to take occult experience as evidential of its propositions. We adopt beliefs and propositions and then, perhaps unsurprisingly, find that our experiences conform to those expectations. After all, many occult books assert that if we but try out the practices, we’ll find that they work. But what happens when they don’t work? Spells don’t bring us wealth or a new lover; goddesses don’t appear before us flashing their tits and dispensing wisdom; the bloke on the web who sold us a talisman doesn’t do refunds. It seems to me that there is a general reluctance to admit that yes, sometimes, magical practices don’t work. I’m increasingly interested in how that is accommodated – is it because one is a poor practitioner; did some vital component get missed; is it just that the ‘universe’ didn’t want that to happen? How we deal with such failures is an important aspect of reflexivity. Do we reject them, brush them aside, or see them as moments for re-evaluation? That’s equally valid for apparent ‘successes’ of course. In this post, I gave an example – an apparently successful ritual that led me to drastically question the relationship between magical act and outcome.
In the next post in this series, I’ll discuss some of the theories underpinning reflexivity and various strategies for developing the skill.
