Each of us approaches the Art and Science of Magick from a variety of ways, philosophies, traditions, conventions, cherished notions, secret transmissions, dusty old scrolls, direct knowledge, channeled manuscripts, goetic evocations, angelic visitations, aliens with those cold little probe-thingys, and many other directions and orientations. People are label-making animals. We put everything into boxes. It's a design flaw in the currently fashionable Operating System.

The Old Ways dealt with re-programming the psyche through means that in many instances are now considered too dangerous, illegal, or just plain horrific. That doesn't invalidate them, it just points out that our expectations and threshold for pain is different than what our ancestors are alleged to have perpetrated in order to achieve some vestige of Gnosis. There's a lot of myths, lies and tall-tales surrounding the past. Just like the guy claiming to have jumped off a cliff from 40' up and killing a stag with one blow. Cool story. Great image. True or false? Doesn't matter.

Why doesn't it matter? It's a story, a magickal sharing of a particular experience that carries its own message, and it's own frame of reference with it. Magick is inherently subjective in it's focus, even when it produces objective results. It's all our own trip--we can help someone walk alongside for a spell, but they're not going to be walking in your shoes or thinking in your brain. You're on your own. We're all on our own. That's lonely, so we reach out. We make up stories. We create mythologies and fiction, politics and music, hymns to Gods we hope are listening and rap about the stuff that outrages us. We're human, limited in our perceptions and innately dissatisfied with the Purina Dog Chow reality that the prevailing default culture is always trying to ram down our throats.

Magick is dangerous. It deals in change and transformation. Magicians do not accept things as they are so much as they are aware of where things are in the HereNow. Perhaps the term Magician is too limiting, but it will serve well enough for now. Sorceror, shaman, priestess--all of these masks and roles are known to a magician, their rites and forms are colors on the palette of a Mage. Just as is all of Creation. Our limits are self-imposed. The crushing weight of conventional societies' expectations and slavish insistence upon the Way Things Are, and the inertia that keeps us all in the lock-step observation of The Real World are tough things to overcome, to shrug off, to get out from under, to escape, to pass beyond, to conquer. In the end it's really not about that, but the notion of fighting the Big Monster is so seductive that everyone faces the reflections and glamours dredged up from the collective unconscious and we falter. We fail. We accept. We let down our guard and lower our sword. Then the real magick of the world hits us full force.

It's not about us--at least not about the us that is rooted in ego. The world is bigger than us, older, and it's already in motion. It'll be here after us as well. We're here to play a part in the pageant, to walk onstage for a bit and deliver our lines, say our piece, present our pet project, make our pitch, and do a little tap dance or strip-tease depending upon our respective talents and predispositions. We're here to entertain, comfort and support each other in our co-dependent slavery to the World.

Magick is about change, though. Once you've tasted wisdom or truth, you want more. It's like love. And that is what makes Magick dangerous. It fosters and foments change in conformity with the Will. The more exposure to Magick one has, the more one is confronted with the notion that things could be different. We ask the infamous "What if?" questions, and then we begin to realize from deep down inside us, the place the slave masters never want you to reach or connect with, and we begin to Know.

We begin to Know that all is not as it needs to be, but rather as it is needed to be. We see that we all play our part in maintaining the farce that passes for life in our offices, factories, and warehouses. We feel the dreadful ache deep within us, and realize that we all feel that lingering pain from separation, from being out in the cold. We learn that our neighbors cling to their illusions because they make things more bearable for a time. It is cruelty to strip away these things and not offer something in their place, unless you can pierce the veil surrounding each of us and open up to the underlying machine code that makes it all possible.

Waking up sucks. It's cold, scary and hard. All of a sudden everything you knew is gone and it's all different now...and there's no going back. Kinda like getting born. Perspective is born of experience. Insight comes from making connections between previously unrelated items. Gnosis comes of its own accord, or in response to stress, or from relaxing into a state of readiness. It comes in its own way, and is unique to each one of us. No one path can carry us all, nor can any one perspective hope to encompass us all.

Magick is dangerous because it is the path to waking up made up of all the random bits of information we each one accumulate. It's more in how we assemble he things we're given, than any thing in particular. It's a way of doing, not an object of attainment. You do Magick and it interacts with you to create a synergistic process of self-transformation. Magick takes you out of the stream, casts you onto the rocks, and leaves you to find your own way through a deserted wasteland filled with other peoples' footprints all criss-crossing over each other.

Magick is about making choices and acting upon those choices. People who think for themselves and who act upon their principles are dangerous, often times criminals. Heretics, artists, poets--there are a lot of ways to attempt to harness these feral children of the numinous, the Fey who are finding themselves among the sleepers...those drawn to Magick. The only ways that matter are the ways we choose, whatever they may be.

Our stories and our myths are expressions of our guiding genius, constructions of our minds, hearts and spirits that we share among one another like sacraments, viruses or flatulence, depending upon the situation. What matters is how we perform these pieces, how we present them to our intended partners, audiences, clients, victims. By our very nature, we are creatures of Magick, every one of us. Our very similarity in this function, this aspect of our consciousness makes us unique and we rebel from the group-mind that exists while we strive to grow a new collective, our own group, a fresh God molded in our own image.

Magick is consciousness, it's how we interact with consciousness, and each other.

That's why it is dangerous--it works, it's all around us, and we are already part of it.