Do you even Magick Bro?

The condescending phrase "Do you even lift bro?" initially grew out of fitness and bodybuilding forums post-2010. Originally that rhetorical question was used to attack the pomposity of an individual forwarding seemingly intellectual and evidence-based opinions, reducing their argument to a fundamental point: where's the evidence of you personally demonstrating the reality of your claims? You can probably see where I'm going here.

Contextually, it is the trump card of the gym bro over the academic, of those getting their hands dirty in the trenches over those who require peer-reviewed studies before lifting a weight. In reality those are extreme ends of the spectrum; there exist bros knee deep in science literature just as there exist academics who actually look like they lift. That said, the extremes do exist.

As flippant as it may appear on the surface, if you peel back the layers the question raises some very important points that can be extrapolated into other fields — for present purposes, Practical Magick.

1. Firstly, if you've invested any amount of time and effort studying something you should be able to demonstrate that through your own personhood.

2. Second, the validity of your opinion should be contingent on your capacity to demonstrate those claims.

3. Lastly, academic speculation always lags behind experience on the gym floor.

On point three, Olympic Strength Coach Charles Poliquin once quipped that scientific studies are decades behind the cutting edge of what results-orientated coaches are doing. For guys like Poliquin, waiting for the glacial pace of science to catch up can cost you a gold medal.

ASKING THE QUESTION OF MAGICK

In many respects the cultures of fitness and magick share parallel features. Both are predicated on changing or improving yourself, allow for multiple points of entry, and have very specialised areas of interest and application. On the negative side, both fields are top heavy with armchair theorists and individuals with tribal attitudes towards subjective opinions, as well as suffering from shiny ball syndrome.

With this in mind, I'm frequently confused why the question — Do you even Magick Bro? — isn't more frequently levelled at individuals within the occult milieu. Why can't that withering question be posed of those making the boldest claims? It's fine to have a strong opinion and be well-versed in the historical origins of grimoires, but what have you actually got to show for it? Surely the greater the claims, the greater the burden of proof.

Let me be brutally honest here: no one ever gets into magick without wanting to in some way improve or change some aspect of their life. No one. To think otherwise is ahistorical in the extreme. From the earliest neolithic evidence through to the PGM, medieval grimoires, cunning folk, New World Hoodoo — across continents and cultures diverse in time and place — gaining advantage in the material world through supernatural agency has always been the name of the game.

I'm sympathetic to anyone wanting to improve aspects of their life through magick. What I take issue with is anyone offering guidance who hasn't done the thing they're prescribing. This is where Do you even Magick Bro? becomes important, because taking advice from someone who can't demonstrate results is, at best, a waste of your time.

Chaos Magick in its early stages asks the question quite directly. Writing in the opening of Liber KKK, Peter Carroll argues:

Objective results are the proof of magic, all else is mysticism.

Taken in a wider context, Carroll is attempting to establish a magical paradigm distinct from both the materialistic and the transcendental. As long as you keep this in mind, his prejudice against spirit-based paradigms becomes easier to contextualise. In practice the overlap between mysticism and operative magic is less clean than Carroll implies. What is clear is that the pursuit of practical magick should produce objectively demonstrable results.

WHAT CONSTITUTES OBJECTIVE RESULTS?

Let's set aside psi phenomena, visible manifestations of spirits, and other weird and spooky occurrences. These things do happen, but apart from occasionally getting whacked in the head by rogue furniture and scaring the life out of yourself, they're a side effect, not a goal.

No mincing words — real results equate to deploying the techniques of magick to achieve something desirable in your life. Wealth workings should produce money in your bank account. Love and lust workings should have you in your desired amorous situations. Conjurations to alter your body should be noticeable to people who are not you. There are countless permutations of specific and generalised goals, but that doesn't change the fundamental dynamic.

GOAL HIJACKING

There's a frailty of human behaviour that tends to be exaggerated in both occult and fitness circles — the tendency to have your goals hijacked.

This is easy to see in fitness. Someone enters wanting to look better, encounters someone doing something interesting — let's say kettlebells — and before long they're the kettlebell guy. They hang out with other kettlebell guys, binge everything kettlebell, dismiss anything that isn't kettlebell. You could substitute powerlifting, CrossFit, or carnivore diet and the pattern of behaviour and outcome remains the same.

A couple of things are happening here. The fixation on a training modality hijacks the initial desire for a change in appearance, which then gets underwritten by the significance of being knowledgeable in that area, combined with the mammalian pull toward group belonging. Chances are they'll have experienced some early success toward their initial goal, but that generally falls by the wayside once the sense of identity solidifies around being "kettlebell guy."

The occult analogy writes itself. The initial desire — love, sex, money, fame — gets co-opted by the modality used to pursue it. Thus we get Chaos Guy, Goetia Man, Hermetic Dude, or Witchy Lady. This isn't to say those paths can't produce results, only that the line between being an intellectual authority, wanting to belong, and being someone who can actually demonstrate results is pencil thin. The fact that the occult comes pre-loaded with esoteric jargon means that disguising a lack of success — from yourself as much as anyone else — has a convenient extra layer to hide behind.

MAGICK FOR MAGICK'S SAKE

Social media has kicked this can considerably further down the road, but it would be dishonest to lay the problem entirely at its door. The temptation to make the practice itself the destination has always existed within occult culture — social media has simply handed it a megaphone and a monetisation strategy.

What we're really talking about is the point at which the map becomes more interesting than the territory. The study of magick — the history, the symbolism, the comparative mythology, the aesthetic world it opens up — is genuinely rich and rewarding. No argument there. The problem emerges when that richness becomes a substitute for deployment rather than a foundation for it. At that point you're no longer a practitioner. You're a collector.

This is compounded by the fact that magick, perhaps more than any other discipline, provides near-infinite intellectual justification for not actually doing anything. You can spend years debating paradigms, refining your understanding of a grimoire, or curating an altar that would make a museum curator weep — and frame every moment of it as practice. The jargon helps. So does the culture of initiated gatekeeping, which conveniently places the real results perpetually one more grade, one more initiation, one more text away.

Social media accelerates all of this because it rewards the performance of expertise over its demonstration. Aesthetic posts, arcane references, and the careful cultivation of mystique generate engagement whether or not the person behind them has ever produced a result worth mentioning. The feedback loop is immediate and flattering. Actual results — the kind Carroll was pointing at — are slow, private, and don't photograph well.

The net effect is a culture in which the appearance of being a serious practitioner and actually being one have become almost entirely decoupled. Which brings us back, unavoidably, to the question.

THE SOLUTION

Realistically, you don't want to be the sort of person who responds to the question with "yeah bro, and here's everything I've done." You want to be the sort of person where the question doesn't need to get asked in the first place. Getting there is no different from any other discipline: set a clear and compelling goal, put your blinkers on, and go make it happen.

The practical reality is that it's very difficult to pursue multiple meaningful aims simultaneously. Some goals will accommodate others and make them more likely — changing your physical appearance, for example, tends to have positive repercussions in love, relationships, and confidence — but as a wise man once said, you can't ride two horses with one arse.

Set one meaningful goal that gives you the most leverage in your life right now. Give yourself a timeframe and go and get it. Think about it this way: if you could be guaranteed one result, right now, what would it be? There's your goal. Come back in three, six, or twelve months — are you physically unrecognisable in the best sense, running your own business, living somewhere you actually want to be? Those are your terms. Define them.

You could be in school working your ass off, Raymond Hessel, or you could be dead. You choose.

UNLOCKING THE CHAD-LEVEL WARLOCK: DEVOTIONAL SORCERY

This is where my approach parts ways with most of what's on offer in either space.

Working devotionally with archetypal godforms and entities isn't theology for its own sake — it's applied positive pressure on the self to become the thing you are seeking in the world. I'm not claiming to have invented this approach, I've just weaponised it in a particular direction. You can see the seeds of it in Crowley's Astarte vel Liber Beryl and Carroll's model of multiple selves within the psyche. As to the reality of gods and spirits, my own perspective is perhaps closest to the Hermetic description offered by Stephen Flowers:

...the gods and goddesses are understood as representing living beings, but at the same time they are archetypes, representatives of certain principles in the sub-stellar realms...Changes or transformation will occur in accordance with the nature of the divinity invoked.

There is certainly a psychological component to attaching yourself to a godform consistent with your goals — it focuses intention and attention in ways few other methods can. But that is the tip of the iceberg. This is an experiential thing. Reading about it won't get you there. You need to be a gym bro, not a science bro.

Classical mythologies offer an abundance of archetypal forms that produce results. Apollo, Dionysus, Hermes, Aphrodite, Freyja, Ishtar — in their various cultural expressions — all generate outcomes consistent with their nature. For those drawn to darker currents of sexuality and attraction, Lilith, Naamah, Igrat, Frimost, Semyaza, and Lucifer each carry qualities that can be consciously cultivated. It should be noted that the methods of approach vary considerably in degree and intensity, and this warrants serious consideration before beginning. Some doors open easily and close slowly. Knowing what you're walking toward — and being honest about your capacity to sustain the relationship — is part of the work, not a preamble to it.

In truth the applications are endless. My own focus within devotional sorcery is necessarily narrow because I work best in the areas I've actually lived — primarily physical transformation, presence, attraction, and the cultivation of will. This is as it should be. We can't all be experts at everything, but we can be exceptional in specific fields, and specificity is precisely the point.

The practical architecture looks like this: lock in on a single, definable goal. Choose a godform whose nature is genuinely consistent with that goal — not the one that sounds most interesting, the one that fits. Build your place of working; a dedicated space, however modest, that belongs to that relationship and nothing else. Show up to it with consistency, with offering, and with the expectation of being changed by the encounter. Then take the actions in the world that the work demands of you. The godform provides the current. You still have to wire the house.

So: Do you even Magick Bro?