FERAL MAGICK (Preface & Beginning Introduction)
Copyright D.Sargent 2024 – Weiser Publishing
A short ‘unveiling’ for my new book-in-development on Neo-Animism
Happy Spring Equinox 🙂
WELCOME TO NEO-ANIMISM
“The world is full of persons, only some of whom are human”
-Graham Harvey, Animism: Respecting the Living World
“Communication is only possible between equals.”
– Robert Anton Wilson, Prometheus-Rising
Take a moment and remember a time when a hike in the wilderness entranced you and made you stop in wonder. You breathed deeply, relaxed and let the beauty and power of the Nature that surrounded and filled you. Birds sang, the trees swayed, you felt incredibly alive. The woods filled your senses and the incessant mental chattering of your mind fell silent. In that moment you opened up to the beauty, wonder and joy of simply being immersed in the glory of nature as its energy flowed around and through you. At that moment, your spirit reached out and touched two things: The otherworldly ethereal world of Animism and the intuitive understanding of the Feral Magick and manifests in this world of Nature spirits..
What you experienced was the ongoing Animistic worldview of our paleolithic ancestors, and even today Animism is alive and well in several countries. Animism is a state of consciousness we can enter when we choose to remove the barriers in our mind and open to that world and this was and can still be done with the conscious use of Feral Magick, the rites, rituals and spells of working with the spirits of Nature.
This book offers simple ways to enter this transcendent world of primal Nature and so experience spiritual unity and learn ways to work with the many spirits of this world. One thing that I learned from a Siberian shaman I knew is that to form deep relationships with the conscious powers of Nature you must go where they are by rediscovering and unleashing your own animalistic self, then you can communicate as equals and work with the spirits. Entering this most ancient mystic world is like traveling in a completely different alien country with a very different culture. When I moved to Japan I was completely lost until I learned the Animistic worldview of Japanese culture, only then could I really understand and communicate with others. It wasn’t a language issue, it was a very alien worldview. I had to accept that everyone in Japan saw the world filled with spirits and musical forces. Everyone carried Omamori or Feral Magick charms for protection, love, success, health and so on, all empowered by Kami or spirits. Some of these Kami were powerful, akin to gods, others were simpler and were more Primal Spirits, like the spirit of Mt. Fuji, which had many shrines dedicated to it.
There are also many Animal Spirits (I use the term Spirit Animals in this book) as well, like Ookami, the ancient and powerful wolf spirit who has many shrines in Japan. This powerful Animal Spirit, the Great Wolf Spirit, was the spirit that came and saved me long after I returned from Japan. At first, communication with this wolf spirit was confusing and alien to me. It wasn’t until the great Wolf Spirit showed me how to enter a deep animalistic trance state that our communication became more comprehensible and I moved deeper into the Animistic world of the spirits.
To connect with, communicate with and bond with an Animal Spirit, we must rediscover and come to terms with our own inner Spirit as well as our Animal self. In this way we can communicate with the Spirit Animals as equals, as shamans and believers in Animism have been doing for thousands of years.
The beginning of this path is accepting on every level that we are animals. This takes some deprogramming work because western culture has taught all of us from birth that we are not animals, we are superior, we have souls, and God gave us dominion over the animals who are soulless as well as all nature. As long as we stay within this narrow worldview, we can not contemplate and experience the spirits of Nature, we can not practice Feral Magick unless we know we are part of Nature, that we are animals and spirits as are all living things. Knowing this opens the door.
The key to success in this powerful shift lies in the dynamics of your own animal self. Your Animalself is very real and exists within your atavistic or unconscious mind but has been denigrated and smothered by civilization.. This is centered in your lower cortex, what Carl Sagon called the ‘dragon mind.’ This deep animalistic part of you arises during times of stress or situations where instinctual motivation and immediate actions supersede thinking. We have all been there! We often use instinctual actions that are not driven by higher cognition or thinking. Our Anima Self makes us run out of a burning building or swerve our car to avoid a collision before our thinking process has even finished thinking about it! This is the realm of the Animalself and what is called the body memory. This is the deep, dark place from where intuitive and primal Feral Magick arises. This is the magick my Mambo in New Orleans relies on, intuitively listening to and working with spirits and casting spells and doing impromptu rites intuitively. No books or grimoires necessary in her Animistic world, the spirits guide.
Feral magick works because our Animalself is rooted in the DNA encoding that is embodied within each of us. We each contain the genetics of all living things because all life arose from the first living cell, the beginning of all life. This is why your human DNA is 98% identical with a chimpanzee and 87% the same as that of a wolf and so on. This is the reason why we are born with deep intuitive connections with all Animals as well as with the Spirits of Animals, but we have forgotten. Connecting with Spirit Animals as an Animal Being is ritually accomplished in tribal cultures through what is called atavistic resurgence, the arising of the inner animal powers. This is accomplished with feral rites and trance states as the ancients did. Amongst many tribal people I have met this is the normal part of magical Nature rites and a key to magick.
As children we intuitively knew that we are alive with such animalistic energies and run wild and free, in and out of feral states of consciousness. Then our parents, school and culture reprogrammed us to fit into the ‘real world.’ So we forgot that this magical world still exists. The goal of this book is to awaken that wonder and help you remember your wildness.
Once we discover and accept our bonds with animals (and Spirit Animals) and the powers or spirits of nature, then we can work with such Primal Spirits. To accomplish this we must acknowledge, for example, Animal Spirits as our brothers and sisters and as kin. If we believe we are separate from animals, we lose our ability to communicate with the Spirit Animals we wish to work with. ‘Communication is only possible between equals’ is the key, there can be no relationships without communication. We can start this transformational process by going into the wilderness and opening our mind and senses, stilling our mental chatter and just being to everything around us as being alive, interconnected, flowing and present. In silence, we open our senses, we relax, feel the root of all magick and and without thinking we can sidestep our ego and truly perceive how everything is alive and interconnected.
This is the beginning of opening to the Animistic worldview or primal web of life that is wondrous and ever-changing. If you can accept that Nature is woven full of energies and spirits that can be seen or even entered, then you can acknowledge the reality of personal relationships with these spirits and powers as many ancient peoples did. This interaction with the vast living weave of Nature Spirits, as your Animalself, is the basis of all practical feral magick.
A loving and conscious relationship with the Spirit Animals is key as the ancient hunters did. The Animistic views of tribal hunters tells us to greet the deer as a fellow being, request and honor the deer’s sacrifice, then kill it humanely if it offers its life to us and then eat its flesh with humility and gratitude and use the whole animals. In the modern world we are often disconnected from the food we eat and thus disconnected from the Spirits of Nature that provide it. This blindness further separates us from Nature and the Spirit Animals. This is self destructive.
Feral magick exists to awaken in us a mostly forgotten point of view which is becoming more popular. We need to relearn to accept and see the spirits of nature and then working with them would again become a natural way of living. The fastest way to do this is to accept and utilize our Animal being or Animal self and so awaken to our place in the infinite web of Nature. Then we become part of the collective Animistic world and are accepted by the Spirits. This process is simple and very old and unlocks our feral magick. Then the real intuitive and natural work begins!
Once we open up to the Animistic world and our own Animalself, then the rites, rituals, spells and other practices in this book will come alive and help guide you as the spirits help you. From then on, our feral magick will become a more creative and impromptu personal dance with the spirits. In this way we unlock the deep powers within Nature and so within ourselves.
May the Spirit Animals and all the Spirits of Nature guard, guide and bring you happiness and loving wisdom! Success to your Wild Work!
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Feral Magick as the Manifestation of Neo-Animism
The word feral has a lot to unpack. It comes from the Latin ferus meaning ‘wild’ and this nicely describes the magick of pragmatic Animism, the belief that all things are alive and embodied as spirits. When describing humans as feral, or the magick we do, it gets even more apropos. A feral animal or person is a “wild being who was once domesticated …and has reverted to a wild condition following an escape from captivity.” If we look at this from the point of view of the growing revulsion at our current dysfunctional culture and emerging dystopian world, it describes most free-thinking people I know.Some simply define feral as ‘wild’ or ‘existing in a natural state.’ Feral magick folks have indeed somewhat reverted to the wild state after fleeing domestication in order to work with wild magick. In many ways this describes all the Pagans, Feral Magick can thus be summarized as magick that is free, unfettered, Nature oriented, free of captivity and, most of all, wild. Yes, that is Feral Magick. If this shocks or horrifies you, this may not be for you, but my guess is that you saw the title of this book and your wild inner beast grabbed it. How very feral of you! You are one of us, one of us.
https://www.oxfordreference.com/display/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803095814646;jsessionid=B50E05B003A872B056B37A5E6E280ED2 https://www.collinsdictionary.com/us/dictionary/english/feral
Feral magick in this book can be defined as the operating principles of intuitive spiritual Animistic practices which acknowledge and work with the Spirits of nature. In our case, the focus is on the Spirit Animals, or Animal Spirit if you prefer. So feral Magick is the active magickal work we do within an Animistic setting or Paradigm. It is therefore understood that the feral magickal person identifies as an animal within nature, a biological fact that escapes most humans. The key to this work is unleashing your Spirit Animal being and thus joining the Animistic universe as an equal. We refer to this inner animal that calls to be released from ‘domestication’ as the Animalself. It is unleashed by primal trance states and shapeshifting into the feral being we are. It does require a lot of letting go however, but once you have shifted into being unfettered, the world of Nature Spirits and powers is open to you. Once one had let go of domestication, that is, slavery to our toxic, stifling and anti-life culture.
Animism teaches that all things such as trees, mountains, lakes and animals, are spirits, but it is the Spirit Animals who have the most agency. They have evolved for thousands of years to help, guide and free us. A good example is the dangerous direwolf who decided to protest us in our caves rather than eat us. If you have a dog, it evolved from ancient wolves. Yea wolves and Spirit Wolves. Case in point, the Wolf Spirit came to me and freed me, what Animal Spirit will call to you and change your life?
Unleash your Animalself and open the gateway for the Animistic Spirits and the Spirit Animal that is right for you will come. Animal Spirits have been helping people who have accepted themselves as one with the animals for millenia.
Feral magick is often about intuitive acceptance of the Spirits and will lead to you form relationships bond with all kinds of Spirits that call to you. These Spirits wish to help you become a wilder, happier, free being. Animism and the feral magick that helps implement it, is an ancient yet also ever-new, ever evolving intuitive magickal path with no set dogma or rules. Animistic feral magick is a pragmatic, open-source process as one lives and survives within Nature and is dependent on direct communion with and help from, There are no orders, holy books or grimoires. Feral magick requires nothing beyond basic civility of all spirits and acceptance that all is alive and interdependent within Nature. The goal of this work is to exist in a primal state of consciousness and living that frees you from the blinders placed on you by your civilized programming.
We live in an amazing but toxic cultural paradigm, nothing like the open Animistic world the Paleolithic hunter/gatherers Existed in. The simpler, wondrous world around them was a natural universe with abundant life and dangers. It was filled with Spirits everywhere who taught them much when treated honorably as fellow beings. Such early hominids, our ancestors, saw the world filled with people, but only some of the people were human. Some, though not all, animals, trees, rocks, mountains, rivers, lakes and more were alive and conscious and spoke to the humans that could hear and see and communicate with them. Their images and spells and teachings cover the ancient caves, some as old as 40,000 years old. Today we call these especially sensitive or psychic humans who saw the spirits Shamans, but in the past, when there were no blinders, all accepted the Spirits and the free-flowing world that was open to them and in constant flux. There are Animistic cultures still around today, in Australia, Africa, South America and Asia who still believe in the spirits and work with them daily.
Animists see that all beings are born, grow old and die and then they too become Spirits who live on as all other Spirits that fill the world. The Abrahamic religions radically changed that ancient belief system by declaring that those who die are gone forever, yet many of us still feel they are with us, help us and can bless us. This is an Animistic belief, the spirits are alive and with us..
In Japan Shinto, ‘the way of the Spirits’, pervades everything. Shinto offers us a modern example of what I call Neo-Animism and pragmatic feral magick. Cars have spirits there and new cars are ritually purified (Harae) with a wand with paper streamers on it called a haraigushi. This Animistic Magick, which we refer to as Feral Magick, accepts the modern Neo-Animist point of view as a viable and more fundamentally true vision of the world of spirits we live in: ‘All things are alive.’
Many tribal cultures teach that it is the Animal Spirits, the most potent children of the Earth Mother, who guide and help us survive, but nowadays we have rejected and forgotten these crucial natural voices and teachings. I have increasingly loved the feral world since the Wolf Spirit broke through my wall of modern western conditioning and revealed to me the world of the Spirits (the Other) and the primeval heart of Nature which still transforms me. My goal is to help open that door for you, thus this book. If you break out of your cage and escape domestication and leap into the real Neo-Animistic world of wildness and feral magick, then your eyes will open and the feral Spirits will guide you into the true reality of freedom and wonder.
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