What the f*** is grief magic?
Magic means something different to each of us, and like all our understandings, is likely changing for us all the time. I think that’s beautiful and important. I don’t want to define or lock in a singular understanding of magic or “grief magic” so much as share some of the context for my use of the phrase.
These quotes below in particular speak to different threads of magic and grief that I’m excited about. They gesture to something about the ways we sense ourselves, the world, and what’s possible. They gesture to a more deeply embodied sensing of the life and worlds around us that colonialism and capitalism seek to flatten:
“The biggest scam in history was to convince us magic wasn’t real…. Ritual and magic was the air that every human being breathed until fairly recently… There are few things more human than becoming embedded in the web of sentience that the magical traditions can offer.”
-Hanna Williams, Organic Abundance
“Things were surreal in the early days of death. Amidst all the awfulness that is the death of her, in the days and weeks following her death, I did appreciate the sense that anything was possible because nothing made sense. I really felt like I was experiencing multiple dimensions. Another world existed right there! ...Her death cracked me open to something I still can’t explain with words. It has made the world far less flat, made being alive far more incredible. I now feel enchanted by life in a way I never could have imagined before she died. The world felt terrible but also full of some kind of magic that made her presence visible in everything. I started to believe in multiple dimensions.”
- Chelsea Granger, So many ways to draw a ghost
"The task of the magician is to startle our senses and free us from outmoded ways of thinking."
-David Abram, The Ecology of Magic
Disenchantment is a tool of colonialism
In her book, Caliban and the Witch, Silvia Federici writes, “The world had to be ‘disenchanted’ in order to be dominated.” She shows how the persecution of magic, of “witches”, of people’s connection with land, seasonal rituals, and their own bodies, was crucial to privatizing land and disrupting collective power and resistance during the middle ages, and how this process was inextricable from colonial projects elsewhere. Witch-hunts and genocides were committed against indigenous people for their earth based traditions that valued ecological kinship over profit.
And so Empire continues targeting those with deep and wide understandings of kinship, uprooting people from the lands they love, destroying their olive groves, using weapons of sexual and gender violence, and mass murdering those who resist.
Our awe, reverence, enchantment, attunement to the world, has been intentionally disrupted by systems of oppression seeking to disrupt our relationships, our erotic power, our creativity, and our relationships with ourselves as bodies of land, as networks of kin inseparable from the land.
So I understand disenchantment to ourselves and one another and the world around us as a tool of colonialism. And I understand our re-enchantment as something that can trouble systems that depend on the denial of the magical in all things. Leaning into enchantment can help us stay with the trouble, and dare us to reach for each other.
Grief and Re-enchantment: Becoming Magicians
I’m interested in the ways that grief and enchantment are related. I’m interested in what grief can disenchant us from and re-enchant us to.
I’m interested in the ways that grief can make us into magicians.
And by that I mean I’m interested in the ways that grief disrupts colonial mentalities and ways of perceiving and moving through the world, and brings us back into deeper attunement with ourselves as ecosystems. I’m interested in the ways grief altars our perceptions, in the way grief itself is an altared state, and the ways grief altars the world. I’m interested in how grief itself is a magician.
If, as Sophie Strand shares in The Flowering Wand, “each death opens up a wound, and a song”, then perhaps the magician is the one who sings. We are unmade and remade by this singing, a singing of ourselves into the world as the world sings itself into us. As grievers, we may no longer see ourselves as neat and tidy individuals, but entangled webs of relationships and dimensions.
So our unraveling becomes a way that we witness how we too are woven through with the threads of mystery and change. And we recognize our own power to transform, and tell powerful stories about ourselves and what’s possible.
In the Magician card in the Rider-Waite tarot deck, a figure is behind an altar surrounded by roses, one hand gesturing towards the ground, rooting us to earth, and a hand held upward, reaching with a double sided wand towards the sky. This magician recognizes that within the ruins, uncertainty, and chaos of our lives, dwells the possibility to join the world in its endless changing and to live life as art together. The Magician is also a trickster, creating illusions, playing with perception, inviting us to play. Holding simultaneously the ways we are both ephemeral and still very much alive, the magician bows to, draws from, and becomes a channel for forces of change, creativity, and mystery. In stepping fully into this role, which is to say, their creative capacity, the magician gestures to a collective capacity to be both small and powerful together.
In grief, we learn to bear unbearable feelings alongside feelings of love and awe. Perhaps the magician is the wisdom of our animal bodies that allows us to be both ruined and blooming. As Martín Prechtel says, “we must be willing to fail magnificently.” This is not a passive surrender. It is a breaking and bursting into song, a celebration of voices that risk cracking and singing off key.
It is also a merging with the world. And it is risky.
The magician takes this risk. In their piece, “We Must Risk New Shapes,” Sophie Strand writes: “Becoming new is never safe. Survival is never safe. It is always a breach. A break in the skin. It is a leap across the abyss.”
For examples of this kind of risk taking and shapeshifting, we need only slow down enough to sense to the worlds around us and inside of us. We have never done grief, death, life, or magic alone, as individuals, or as a single species. The greatest magicians and shapeshifters are perhaps the ecosystems we find ourselves in, and other more than human beings.
This is an excerpt from the Grief Magic Course, which I’m releasing the first season’s materials for this week! See details below!
GRIEF MAGIC: TIMEBENDING, SHAPESHIFTING, AND BECOMING MULTITUDES
Self paced Study
Grief Magic Self Paced Study is a year long course exploring themes around grief, magic, creativity, and shapeshifting in tune with the seasons.
WHAT’S INCLUDED IN THE SELF PACED STUDY:
Each season, you’ll receive:
Recordings of all bonus workshops and studios with guest instructors
An audio recording and PDF summary handout of seasonal/ ecological stories and inspiration for grief and creative process
A PDF of with creative prompts drawing inspiration from each season
A PDF guide to a grief ritual or practice inspired by the season
A PDF list of additional resources
Access to a discord specifically for other slow study participants
Additional bonus recordings of exercises and materials released throughout the year
*There are 6 seasons included in the course, beginning in April 2024 and moving through March 2025 - see the main Grief Magic course page for a more detailed outline of seasonal themes.
THE SELF PACED STUDY IS A GREAT OPTION FOR YOU IF…
You want to find ways to link your creative practice and grief process
You are interested in grounding your creative, magical, and grief support practices in the seasons
You are looking to hunker down with resources, rituals, and your creative process on your own, rather than participate in the community or collaborative aspects of the course
You’re not really a zoom or online calls person
You want to move through materials at your own pace
The live class filled before you were able to sign up
Cost - $30 per month for 12 months
Article Sources
Abram, D. (1996). The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World (1st edition). Pantheon.
Emergence Magazine. (2020, July 20). The Ecology of Perception – David Abram. Retrieved April 2, 2024, from https://emergencemagazine.org/interview/the-ecology-of-perception/
Federici, S. (2004). Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation (Illustrated edition). Autonomedia.
Granger, C. (2022). So Many Ways to Draw a Ghost.
London, S. (n.d.). The Ecology of Magic – An Interview with David Abram. Retrieved April 2, 2024, from https://scott.london/interviews/abram.html
Resilience. (2023, June 27). Coming to Our Animal Senses: A Conversation with David Abram. Resilience. https://www.resilience.org/stories/2023-06-27/coming-to-our-animal-senses-a-conversation-with-david-abram/
Strand, S. (2022a). The Flowering Wand: Rewilding the Sacred Masculine. Inner Traditions.
Strand, S. (2022b, June 4). We Must Risk New Shapes [Substack newsletter]. Make Me Good Soil.
Williams, Hannah. spiritual field guide (@organic.abundance). https://www.instagram.com/organic.abundance/