Around 4,300 years ago, Egyptian scribes carved columns of heiroglyphs into the walls of a pharaoh's pyramid at Saqqara. These are the Pyramid Texts, the oldest religious writings we have, and their purpose was practical. The words were spells, meant to carry a dead king safely through the night and into the sky. The Egyptians had a word for the force that made language effective, heka, and their god of writing, Thoth was also their god of magick. Not a coincidence. For the Egyptians, the two were one.
We believe they had it right, and believe the rest of history has been catching up, in ways, to our predecessors. Let's go for a little journey through time and see how magick and writing have always been intertwined since humanity first began to turn thought into symbol.
The First Named Author Was a Priestess
Most do not know that the earliest known author in history whose name we know is Enheduanna, lived around 2300 BCE. She was the daughter of King Sargon of Akkad and the high priestess of the moon god Nanna (Sīn) at Ur. She wrote hymns to the goddess Inanna of such power and craft that scholars still study them. She also wrote a set of temple hymns that gathered the gods of many conquered cities into one shared sacred map. Her poetry did political work, binding a patchwork empire together through a common story, through a deliberate working on a grand scale. All carried out in cuneiform.
We talk often about the magick of conquest and Liber Noctis, Book IV describes it.
Words That Were Made to Act
The Greeks and Romans wrote curses on thin sheets of lead, folded or nailed them, and dropped them into graves and wells. Archeologists have found thousands of these tablets aimed at rival athletes, business partners, and unfaithful lovers. The writing was the spell, and the act of inscribing it was the rite. Greek magical papyri from Roman Egypt show the same belief in manuals full of formulas, with instructions for when and how to speak or write each one. Across the Atlantic, the K'iche' Maya preserved a creation story in the Popol Vuh, in which the gods speak the world into being. They say a name and the thing rises. Nahuatl poets in the Aztec world used the phrase, in xochitl in cuicatl, 'flower and song,' as their word for poetry. And they treated it (poetry) as a path to truth.
These examples among hundreds, prove that peoples who had never met each other reached the same conclusion long ago — that language builds and shapes what exists.
The Scribe the Colonizers Feared
In the early 1820s, the Cherokee silversmith Sequoyah created a writing system for his language. According to tradition, his neighbors first suspected him of witchcraft, and he had to prove the symbols were ordinary by having his daughter read back messages he had written. Within a few years, thousands of Cherokee were literate in their own language, and in 1828 the Nation began publishing a newspaper, the Cherokee Phoenix.
This is magick in the broadest sense, and it is also, sorcery, because Sequoyah chose his aim and carried it through with remarkable discipline.
The Pamphleteer
Thomas Paine's famous pamphlet, Common Sense, offers a European-colonial counterpart. Published in January 1776, it sold an estimated hundred thousand copies in its first months, in a population of about two and a half million. Colonists who had thought of themselves as loyal subjects began to think of themselves as citizens of a new country. A few thousand words shifted a continent's idea of what was possible.
The Poets Who Said It Out Loud
Some writers have openly called their craft magick.
William Blake printed and hand-colored his own books and built an entire mythology around the creative imagination. He summed up his views in a line from, Jerusalem, 'I must Create a System or be enslav'd by another Man's.' Blake understood that those who write the story of the world, hold power over the people who live inside it.
William Butler Yeats joined the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn in 1890 and wove its symbols through his poems for the rest of his life. His wife, Georgie, within days of their wedding in 1917, began producing automatic writing that became the foundation of his book — A Vision. Readers have long seen William Shakespeare's Prospero, the magician whose power lives in his books, as a figure for the playwright himself.
Could there be a strange magick to the name William?
The Notebook That Made a Career
One of our favorite examples of sorcery on a small scale comes from Octavia Butler. In a notebook from the late 1980s, now held at the Huntington Library, she wrote out declarations about her future in the present tense. She stated that she would be a bestselling author, that her books would be read by millions, and that she would be able to give generously to others. She closed the entry with, 'So be it! See to it!'
Sound familiar?
She then went to work. She wrote every morning before her job, submitted her stories, and kept at it through years of rejection. In 1995, she became the first science fiction writer to receive a MacArthur Fellowship. The notebook held an intention, a form, and a ritual. The work that followed was the integration.
The Living Sorcerers
Alan Moore, who wrote, From Hell, V for Vendetta, and Watchmen, declared himself a magician on his fortieth birthday in 1993. He believes that writing and magic are the same activity — both manipulate language to change what people perceive. His cosmic Promethea, works as an illustrated manual of Western occult tradition inside an adventure story.
Grant Morrison went further with a concept they called a hypersigil. Where a sigil compresses an intention into one small mark, a hypersigil stretches the same intention across an entire narrative. Morrison describes their series, The Invisibles, in these terms. A long comic written as a working, with characters who carried the writer's own hopes and fears through a story they could steer.
The idea gave writers a name for what many of them were already doing.
Ursula K. Le Guin famously built a fantasy world, Earthsea, in which wizards gain power over things by learning their true names. Her essay collection, The Language of the Night, argued that fantasy is a serious way of telling the truth. In her 2014 speech at the National Book Awards, she reminded the room that the divine right of kings once seemed as unshakable as the economic systems of today, and that human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. She added that often change begins in art, and especially in the art of words, to echo Alan Moore. Toni Morrison, in her 1993 Nobel lecture, described language as a living thing and warned that oppressive language does violence in its own right. Joan Didion, whose essays mapped the stories a culture tells itself, wrote the line that many of us keep at our desks, 'We tell ourselves stories in order to live.
Where Sorcery Begins
Put all these writers side by side and a pattern appears.
All of them did magick, in the sense of changing consciousness through words. We call that magick, and a great deal of it happens by accident. Think about writing an angry email at midnight and making an enemy, rehearsing a worry in our head over and over, deepening its grip on us, or telling ourselves we're a lazy person often enough that we start to behave accordingly. Words are working on us all the time, with no hand on the controls.
Sorcery is the awakened version. The deliberate version.
Enheduanna, Pain, and Butler each picked a change, shaped the words to carry it, and then followed through until the change landed in the world. A sorcerous act of writing carries four marks:
- It begins from a stated intention
- It chooses its symbols and words on purpose
- It is carried out as a ritual with a clear start and finish
- It leads to a concrete action, followed by a reflection
The Temple's Book of the Rite puts the standard in one line — a working without an act is only a mood.
The Five Steps (For Writers)
The Temple teaches the Five Steps, and each has a long history on the page.
Intention. State the change in one plain sentence, naming the shift in perception, emotion, or behavior. Octavia Butler did this in a notebook in the late 1980s.
Symbolization. Give the intention a form. A title, a recurring image, a single line that holds the whole aim. Blake did this with entire books, and Morrison's hypersigil does it with a whole narrative. For most of us a card with one sentence on it is enough. The symbol compresses the aim so we can find it again quickly.
Ritualization. Bind the symbol to repeated action. Butler wrote in the early morning before her day job, year after year. Maya Angelou kept a hotel room just for writing, and her habit of going there each morning marked off the work from the rest of the world. Any structure that turns your entire attention toward the page does the job.
Integration. Carry the writing into the day. Sequoyah's symbols became lessons, then a newspaper, then a literate nation. For us, the step can be small. If the page said we would speak more kindly, we say the kind thing to someone before the day ends.
Reflection. Record the baseline before you begin, the procedure you used, what you noticed afterward, and what lasts across the follows days, weeks, months. Yeats and his wife filled notebooks with their sessions over years, and the record is why scholars can study the work. A grimoire holds your version, and over time it shows which kinds of writing change you and which only entertain you.
A Word of Warning
The craft that freed Sequoyah's people has also been used to deceive crowds, sell people things don't need, and bend nations toward cruelty. Blake's warning about being enslaved by another person's system applies to every reader and every writer. When we write for others, we hold real power, and we practice best when our readers come away freer and more capable than they arrived.
A Practice To Try
You will need paper, a pen, and about twenty quiet minutes
- Pick one writer from this post whose work moved you. Read a page of it slowly.
- Write one sentence naming a change you want in hour you see, feel, or act.
- Write a short paragraph in the present tense, describing that change as already true. Give it sensory detail.
- Copy one line from the paragraph onto a card and place it where you will see it tomorrow.
- Do one small things that matches the paragraph before the week is out.
- Record the baseline, the procedure, and what you noticed in your grimoire, and add a note a week later.
- Share your work at Monday gathering or in the Temple of Night community on Reddit.
In Tenebris, Lux