Sorcery for Dummies

I don't have any original duck artwork to hand ...

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I'm currently planning my training regime to become a fully fledged Psychic Warrior Monk member of the First Earth Battalion. So far I have downloaded the training manual and had my hair cut to facilitate better electrical contact between my skull and my psychic helmet.
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I have also stopped drinking coffee and have turned to tea which, as everyone knows, is an altogether more spiritual beverage. Unfortunately, I am currently not wearing my psychic helmet as I just used it to drain some potatoes and it is drying upstairs in the kitchen. I feel strangely unprotected.
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I am also currently considering whether to resume sorcery as pastime or not. Like many teenage fads I toyed briefly with the practice of witchcraft for a while, years back, but gradually interest waned. I started to skip my Tuesday evening classes and the Sabbats always seemed to clash with more fun, social events like Christmas, Easter and Halloween. Yup, my interest in magic went the same way as my attempts to learn Spanish and how to play acoustic guitar.
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I dusted off some of my old course notes last night and they are dry fare indeed. That's the problem with most references on the subject; frequently written in Latin and authored by deranged lunatics, they are very hard going indeed. Sadly, nobody has had the sense to publish Sorcery for Dummies or similar.
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The theory behind the Practice of Magic isn't that difficult to understand though. Essentially, all magic techniques are intended to serve the same purpose; 'The imposition of the magician's will on another entity'.
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Some magicians are able to do this by force of will alone, others find that acting out their intentions with a doll or a little dance helps, others believe that knowing the true names of things conveys power over those things.
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Sadly, I was not born with mad staring eyes and therefore cannot impose my wishes by force of will alone. Hats off to the likes of Crowley and Rasputin. They DID come equipped with mad staring eyes and, working on the sound assumption that inbred people are particularly stupid and gullible, they engaged on successful careers cadging money off the upper classes and taking their wives in front of them on their dining room tables. And they loved it, those minxes.
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For those of us without charismatic personalities, sympathetic magic, is normally a better technique. Use of voodoo dolls or formulation of potions based on unlikely ingredients both fall into this category. At the risk of sounding gross, I used to work with a guy who swore blind that he could have any woman he wanted to simply by slipping a few drops of his own personal baby batter into something they consumed. Sadly for all of us, he did work in the catering industry.
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Hitler is an interesting example of someone who dabbled in both sympathetic magic and direct application of will. After the totally bollcksed-up Munich Putsch in 1923 he fell in with some most peculiar types and returned to the politics having acquired a strangely hypnotic stare and a peculiar cadence when speaking. It worked a treat and in 1933 he became Chancellor. For the avoidance of any doubt on this matter, a rather hypnotic film about the rise of Hitler was made in 1934 and appropriately entitled 'Triumph of the Will'. I remember seeing an edited version in Secondary School in 1979. The editing was necessary because the original cut of the film was so compelling that it was still capable of turning people into National Socialists 50 years after it was made, particularly in South London. Anyway, later on in his career the direct application of will proved surprisingly ineffective on an army of 20 million vengeance-seeking Russians, so Hitler took to sympathetic magic. Accounts of the last few weeks in his bunker talk about him refusing to listen to bad news and giving orders to imaginary armies. We are told that this was because he was mad. Nope, not mad just trying to think positive thoughts, powered by the blood sacrifice of a million or two of his own people.
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The other magical technique for imposition of will is based on the belief that all things have a common name and a true name. If you address something by its true name you can control it; that's where all that Latin mumbo jumbo comes from in B-Movies. Want a demon to be your slave? Summon it by its true name and it will come to do your bidding. Make sure you get his name right though, as he might be spoofing you and tear your knackers off for a giggle.
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By the way, demons are not to be confused with daemons which are an entirely different food group altogether. Being teamed up with a particularly career-focused daemon can do wonders for your magical powers. Unfortunately, mine is more of a slacker than I am but that's another post altogether.
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As with all magic, we practice the 'true name gives power' technique every day in the modern world. For example, to the average person, a duck is a duck, but to the scientist it's an anas platyrhynchos. The simple act of naming that duck has conveyed power to the scientist. The implication is that he understands the anas platyrhynchos in a way that the uninitiated cannot, even if he knows absolutely biff all else about ducks and their aspirations. I spent three years as a geology student, most of which was devoted to learning the taxonomy of rocks and fossils. It all seemed pretty pointless at the time but I truly get the point now. If you don’t really understand the genesis of something just give it a silly name, it makes you feel a lot less impotent.
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So here we are in the modern, enlightened age with people practising magic all around us. Know someone who lives a lifestyle beyond their means in the hope that reality will catch up with that lifestyle? That's magic. Does someone in your life buy a potion 'that visibly reduces krinkling' because it may have been touched by Andie McDowell? That's magic too.
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Yes, we're as silly and superstitious as Mongo The Caveman and I would suggest that you never convince yourself otherwise. Get in front of the mirror and practice that stare.
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Excuse me, I think my psychic helmet may have dried out by now …