A couple things have shifted in my relationship to magick recently in ways I am still learning to navigate.

Oftentimes I observe something we tend to do when we’re on a rapid growth path, which is that in the effort not to rest on our laurels, we take for granted how far we’ve come and how much more powerful we’ve become. The first instance of this tends to be when we notice we’re still acting/feeling like a victim even when we’re actually in a position of leadership – when we react with the habitual assumption that we’re being attacked when really someone was just clumsy in how they spoke to us, and is now heartbroken they’ve accidentally offended someone they looked up to. I caught this one several years back and adjusted it as quickly as I could (or at least I hope I did).

Repatterning is an iterative, exponential process: the more you do it, the better you get at it, and the more bandwidth you create, the more bandwidth you can reinvest. I’ve been consciously repatterning for four years now since I put it all together in a system and taught it for the first time, and I’m starting to see the results of a new tipping point.

A few key things have happened in my magick practice:

1. In Sept 2021 I entered into a contract to work with Hermes on my music career. (I tracked this process in a video series on YouTube and documented all the signs of communication I had received about doing it, and I continue to document the ongoing results)

2. My teacher, Grant Morrison, named me heir to their magickal lineage in April 2022. I had been studying with them by email for a few years by then but the public announcement caused me to step up and begin compiling their curriculum in a manner that befit my now-official role as apprentice. Grant, it should be noted, is perhaps best known in magick for coining the term “hypersigil,” which is a sigil extended through the fourth dimension of time, using characterization, drama, and plot in order to alter reality in accordance with intent. In choosing Grant as a mentor, I specifically communicated with the universe that I would like for this to be one of my primary forms of magick. I use my songs as hypersigils, using the melodies/lyrics I write (or even cover – it works just the same) to shape my reality.

3. I finished writing the full-length twin flame path album, in Nov 2021. The production’s got a few moving parts that are still coming together but it’s at that stage where you already know you’ve won the race and you’re just finishing it out. I generally expect follow-through on my projects so I wasn’t surprised, but it does feel like completing it – especially considering it is technically designed to be a magickal initiation – has given me a certain gravitas I did not have before.Something new is now happening.

As a result of being done writing the full-length (and also from making the deal with Hermes, if my divination is to be trusted), I’ve been able to work on lots of musical collaborations with other artists/songwriters/producers, and so I’m now writing more lyrics at a faster pace than ever before. I’ve been writing/singing guest vocals for other artists/producers and I’m also working on a collaborative Arden & The Wolves EP with my co-writer Maddox. This is wonderful news creatively, because it means that I have room to explore my voice on subjects outside magickal necessity, that I can push myself as an artist to write songs that don’t have the constrictions of being spellwork.

However, some of the songs I wrote as purely fiction are also now coming true, in ways I have not always been able to predict. A song I wrote as a mere tribute to a selection of artists/styles ended up crashing quite uncannily into my reality.

And some songs that I intended merely as emotional purges for myself may have contributed to unintentional harm. I wrote about some things that happened in the past for the purpose of processing them, and then they happened again. Would they have happened anyway? I don’t know.

A key factor here is that I did explicitly agree in my contract with Hermes to allow him to inspire the content of my songwriting if he saw fit, and there were some songs that I actually resisted writing at first because I didn’t want to dig up my old wounds, until even after weeks they seemed the only authentic emotional topic that fit the tracks I was sent, and I ultimately chose to put my art first and go the route of that authenticity. I checked in with my usual trusted peers about the ethics of my songwriting, and they all told me that I was making a sound decision, that I was permitted to write about my experiences.

Hermes is a trickster, and the patterns I’m seeing as well as the signs I have been getting – and there have been a ton of them – are that everything is working out for the greater good, that certain patterns were accelerated so that they could come up to be released. This isn’t a judgment call I feel comfortable personally making but it is what my divination is showing.

Regardless, it’s my responsibility to now understand and responsibly wield the newfound power of my magick.

And it’s also my responsibility to realize that I am reaching a point where I actually know better about this kind of magick than most of my peers, and that the folks I go to for my usual ethics check-ins are not necessarily equipped to advise me on the level of magick I’m now practicing, that I now need to seek specifically magickally advanced people (like my teacher, whom I usually try not to bug with my songwriting processes til the songs are finished) to help me on these queries going forward.

I have to be really mindful of what I write.

It feels very X-men mutant.

There does seem to be a difference in potency regarding whether the songs are strictly Arden & the Wolves songs or guest features with other artists – my features with other artists don’t seem to have the same impact, though they sometimes show reflections in reality here or there. Oddly, the Arden & the Wolves songs I’m writing for the collaborative EP with my co-writer Maddox, which I’m toplining to tracks he sends me, do seem to have the same potency as the other Arden & the Wolves songs that I create the toplines to first, so the differentiating factor seems to be whether the song is intended as a full Arden & the Wolves song or as a guest feature, and not whether the track or the topline came first.

I’m sharing this for accountability and transparency and because I need to not put the enormity of this gift into shadow where it can do harm. I may in time learn to set up proper guardrails so that I can write fictional songs without unexpected repercussions; I truly hope I have not actually written my last toxic fantasy or evil villain song, because making art is supposed to be a way of integrating shadow, and I want to be able to play dress-up sometimes.

But until I understand this gift better I need to be cautious with it. I’ll be finishing the songs I started before the date of this post and then applying a new standard of mindfulness to my lyrics going forward until I figure out how to better control it.

Thanks for witnessing.