NO GODS BUT MY OWN 10
Cracking the Ovumind
OVUMIND
THE NEVER-HATCHED
THE YET-BORN
Contained within a thin shell is the fragile embryonic spirit of Ovumind, the manifestation of potential and carrier of new thoughts, ideas, and feelings. Ovumind is the representative of the new but only if one is truly vigilant when bringing it forth.
Encounters with Ovumind can go one of two ways:
You successfully harness help from Ovumind through careful practice.
Ovumind’s embryonic essence spills on the floor in a sticky mess.
Like the potential it represents, Ovumind is fragile and can be ruined easily so great care must be taken when summoning them. The true hazard is that even the most diligent can see their encounter with Ovumind shattered and spoiled.
A simple way to petition Ovumind is through a form of egg magic. Take a dozen or so white eggs, formulate sigils for each egg, draw on their shells using a white crayon or similar writing implement that blends with the egg color, and put the eggs back into the carton and in the fridge. Using colors that disappear and replacing them in the carton will both help you forget the intentions behind each of the sigils and will help with their potency.Â
Each time one of those special eggs gets used for cooking or baking it will now be a call to Ovumind. Depending on your style of practice a simple prayer may be spoken if you think it will help the efficacy of the sigil.
This form of egg magic was inspired by the work of Luxa Strada of the Lux Occult podcast. I recommend everyone check out her podcast and Instagram.
ROUTINE/RITUAL/INTENT
A MUNDANE MAGIC PRIMER
WHAT IS MUNDANE MAGIC?
You say a short prayer before laying a thin stripe of toothpaste across the jagged, worn out bristles of your toothbrush. You say another, just before plunging it into your mouth.
"May this paste purify and cleanse. May it protect my teeth and gums."
You gesture with the tip of the brush, making a circle around your heart and then around your mouth in a looking figure eight.
You close your eyes and begin to scrub with short, deliberate strokes.
Soon your teeth will be clean.
With only the slightest investment of time and a deeper consideration you have changed a simple task into a luminous one, rife with intention. This concept is the core of MUNDANE MAGIC.
Think of it as a dynamic animism where anything and everything can be the source or focus of your practice. It's the idea that a boring life is only that because the narrative you're subscribing to says it has to be but there is a potential for more in every atom in your orbit.
It's a choice to view the world around you with a cold disconnection, like a surgeon refusing to learn the name of their patient so they can work without fear or regret. Many of us want nothing more than to go through our days with as little friction as possible. It can be a bit overwhelming to consider the depth of your environment in an already chaotic world.Â
Where most occult practices might intimidate a novice practitioner with their enormity of scope, mundane magic does so through an abundance of presence. You aren't petitioning a god or spirit, you're petitioning anything and everything in your world. It's an overflow of small, deliberate allies collaborating to cause a willful disruption to the regular flow of life.
The drive to romanticize or transcend normal life to find success in magic is one of the many pitfalls of occulture even though the magical practitioner has no means to fully ignore or evade the basic needs of eating, shitting, fixing their car, or getting to work on time. No amount of meditation or spellcraft is enough to escape the reality of your body and the world it finds itself planted on.Â
Wouldn't it be preferable then to reconcile the seemingly opposite threads of the mundane and the magical by weaving them so thoroughly together that they've become one in the same without losing the essential nature of either part?Â
To find a way to make the mundane magical and the magical mundane, without weaving illusions of either?
There's a saying that I like to use when I try to describe MUNDANE MAGIC:
The only difference between routine and ritual is intent.
It truly cuts to the core of my thoughts on the concept but has always felt a little too simplistic and reductive. What I want to do here is really drill down, way down into the bedrock of my practice, and find the depth within the terms I've always fallen back on:
ROUTINE
RITUAL
INTENT
ROUTINE
It started simple.Â
I began losing my hair in my mid-twenties. I thoroughly hated the idea of going for the midlife dad baseball cap coverup of my growing bald spot so I decided to start shaving my head instead.
It was a particularly raw point in my life. My girlfriend had just recently left me and I felt like I was on a precipice. I could fall back, farther into the darkness, or I could push ahead and plunge into the unknown. I was in an uncomfortable holding pattern with no escape in sight. Shaving my head became one of the many slight changes to personal habits that I used as a distraction from the changes that really needed to happen.
Shaving had always been a chore for me. My dad only ever used an electric razor so I never learned the art of properly using a blade for shaving and never tried until a friend of mine pressured me into using his razor when I was a teenager. I switched over but never learned proper technique so no matter how I went about it my face would end up shredded.
Taking after my scalp with a razor was agony. The troubles I had shaving my face were compounded because the scalp is even more sensitive and easier to knick. Every morning my towels developed new, larger bloodstains. Even after weeks of practice I never got good enough to avoid the occasional gouge and had to learn to live with the pain and blood.
There was a potency within the simple act of shaving, an energy crackling around the edges that I couldn’t recognize at the time but became obvious to me later. I was tapping into something but I didn’t yet have the discipline to take full advantage.
This may seem like a lot of unnecessary details on something as simple as shaving but it's vitally important that to know all the minutiae of your routine and why you perform it so diligently. This intimacy with the actions allows you to pull it apart and ascribe new meanings to all of the minor pieces to make the whole a more potent thing. Without knowing what you are doing, down to a cellular level, you will be left with emotional blind spots or functional cul-de-sacs that may hinder progress later.
Routine is nothing more than unrealized potential shrouded in something mundane. They are actions taken without willful intention but are necessary to maintain our levels of social interaction, personal hygiene, or home maintenance. It doesn’t take radical modification to bring these actions to a place of deeper meaning.
RITUAL
The act of shaving my head had taken over my morning routine. I felt like it centered me, like a painful meditation to start my day.
I went through the motions aimlessly at first, taking out each of my implements and haphazardly spreading them across my bathroom counter in a sleepy daze. My razors would be caked with old hair and the handle was frosted with aged shaving foam. The shaving pattern was utilitarian, following the path of least damage. I felt hollow and tired but kept going through the motions without question.
Slowly I began to lose myself a little as I stared into my own eyes in the mirror every morning. I began to see myself, not as I was but as I wanted to be. Skinnier, happier, more present and energetic. Every day I would see that image and every day that image came more into focus.
My morning routine had become an unspoken prayer to produce the man I saw in the mirror. Shaving my head was no longer about removing the unsightly male pattern baldness but instead became a building up of what I aspired to make flesh and blood.
There was purpose in my movements now. Every implement had it’s particular place on the counter. I kept a special container of mineral oil to keep my blades sharp and rust-free. The counter was cleaned thoroughly both before and after I shaved.
It had become a ritual, through and through. Every piece had been changed and given meaning. I could feel myself embodying that man in the mirror as I went through every deliberate and measured movement in the process.
It's hard for me to know now whether I came to the point I did because I was so emotionally devastated and wanted nothing more than to fill the void or if it was the culmination of disparate elements colliding to make previously impossible connections. Whatever it was, my routine had metamorphosed into a ritual with impacts much deeper than simple cosmetics or the pursuit of a healthier lifestyle.
Honesty is the key here. You must be honest with yourself and what you’re doing. A ritual done in earnest and with emotional clarity is far more likely to succeed than one performed in jest or with unclear motivation. You are trying to create something from nothing and a ritual is a conduit toward that end.
The actual content of your ritual will be different for every situation and it’s best to build one to your particular specifications.Â
INTENT
Once the motions became second nature it became far easier to move the pieces around as needed to add desires into the mix. A magical practice is called that for a reason. By the time I had any real intentionality behind what I was doing the routine had been set. It hit me that if I could move things in my life accidentally then perhaps I could actually TRY to make things happen through the actions I was already performing.
I brought the idea of the ritualized mundane to places like my job, doing yard work, and shopping. I began visualizing all of these things being sewn together like a new suit and that suit was what I wanted life to look like. The concept of ritualized routine saturated every aspect of my life and the work compounded until nearly everything I did had an overlay of intention.
I ran five miles a day as both a trance practice and self-flagellative ritual to build strength. I prepared meals in deliberate ways, cooking food with reverence and cleansing my cooking implements as a makeshift banishing ritual. These were direct companions to my shaving ritual, going hand-in-hand in manifesting the man in the mirror. Without the ritualization I don't think I could have kept up with it and gotten such positive results.
After nine months of difficult work and painful dedication I had become the man I had been seeing in the mirror. I had lost over a third of my body weight and filled my closet with better fitting clothes. People treated me differently and I developed an attitude that made me feel like an alien in my own body. I saw the old me in the mirror instead, as if the idealized me had usurped the physical body. It was the best possible result but it was also the worst. There is something to the adage of being careful what you wish for.
During the same period I had a strong desire for my life to get more interesting. It seemed simple and open ended that I didn't think I could possibly fail. In the past I had been hermit-like and never accepted invitations for social gatherings, opting instead to stay home and watch movies or read. I approached this problem with the same ritualization and intention that I had come at everything else.
My reward for that work was a summer filled with narrowly missed fistfights, parties at meth houses, and a strange romantic entanglement that ended in tears after going on for far too long. I may have gotten exactly what I asked for but it definitely didn't arrive in the way I intended.
That unpredictable snowball effect seemed to be a feature and not a bug while working towards those kinds of intentions. This calls back to what I said about honesty before. You must have an earnest intention in mind or things can go off the rails pretty fast.Â
After all of that I was completely and utterly spent. At that point I had been doing physically and mentally exhausting work for two years without respite. Taking a break when it's needed is just as essential as the work itself. What's the point of making change if you don't take time to enjoy the results?
After taking a short vacation in Portland, Oregon I was reinvigorated and developed a new goal: moving away from my hometown of nearly thirty years. I got to work, visualizing my desires and formulating new rituals to supplement what I was already doing to maintain my previous results. Magically retrofitted workouts and enchanted man-scaping were perfect for my previous goals but had no relation to what I wanted next.
The rituals I created involved sacrifice and cleaning, both actions that felt perfect for facilitating the change I wanted to manifest. First, I began donating parts of my book collection to the local library as an offering to assist in selling off my comic book collection. Next I began doing a weekly cleansing of my workspace at the factory. I removed all of my personal items that hung from the shelves and cubicle walls, leaving them blank to reflect an environment where I no longer existed.
What arrived during this work was mandatory overtime and successfully selling off almost all of my belongings. The conduit had opened and It brought me plenty of money to fulfill my plan. There was a great price, far beyond the books I donated and property I sold.Â
My entire home and job had become filled with allies masked in the mundane. My books, the machines at my job, my vacuum cleaner, and everything in-between. The rituals provided us all with the choreography we needed to to urge change into being.Â
While I can't say those events only took place because of the transformation of my daily routines into magical rituals, I have no doubts that these events would never have happened had I not. Even if the magic was only in my mind, it was the belief that I could willfully change my circumstances that inspired me to do the work that needed to be done.
To give this story some closure I will tell you that I did make it to Portland, over a decade ago. I still live there, with my wife and son. Although I still go through my routines with reverence and intention, I no longer look for major changes. The last time I did was just before I met my wife.Â
My intention was to no longer feel alone.
I succeeded.
CREATIONS AND CONCLUSIONS
I want to circle back and try to give you a step by step process for how I ritualize my routines. The narrative above works great as an illustration of what doing the ritual looks like but only scratches the surface on how.
These rituals do not need to be complicated. All they truly require is dedication and intention. The dedication is already there, considering the ritual is based on a routine that you’ve already been performing on a regular basis. I’m going to use the example of brushing your teeth. It’s a simple task that you are easily able to look at in an exploded view so all the pieces are highly visible.Â
Materials should be your first consideration. Do I use a cheap paste, splurge a little for something more organic, or make your own from baking soda and peroxide? Is your toothbrush the freebie you got at the dentist or are you more deliberate on what you use to scrub your teeth? These are all things I need to think about if I want to brush my teeth in a more symbolic and ritualistic way.
Next I think about altar design. In this case the bathroom sink will be an altar of sorts. I need to place everything in such a way that you can perform all the movements necessary in a thoughtful way and create a better flow for the ritual you are trying to perform. Does the toothbrush go on the left side or the right? Do I leave it in a special holder with the tube of toothpaste? All things that need to be thought out before any action should take place.
It's here that your intention should be made clear. Brushing my teeth is a cleansing action so I would want to make sure my intention is in line with that theme. I bring in my intentions late because for me the urge to ritualize a routine always comes to me first. It may seem like putting the cart before the horse but it has always been how my inspiration hits me. It's as if I instinctively know which of my routine actions have the most potential for this kind of usage.
A specific intention is unnecessary and not recommended from my experience. The practice is a payoff in and of itself because the point is to deepen the mundane portions of life and not bring about physical reward. It's why I honestly can't say if my practice manifested the results from my earlier story or if they simply happened because my practice helped put me in a more open mindset or setting that allowed the pieces to fall into place. Wanting something, ANYTHING, to change is enough sometimes and asking for specific outcomes may only bring disappointment and disenchantment.
After I've got all of that squared away it's time to think about movements and words. I was very deliberate in using the word choreography earlier. A ritual is essentially a dance performed with your body, words, and intention for the benefit of your intended conclusion. My practice has always been agnostic at its core so I never invoke gods or spirits but I sure they could be slotted in if that's how you work.
Words and movements are important because they're the conduit between my intention and my desired endpoint. Do I want to use rhyming couplets in the spoken parts of my ritual? Do I even want to verbalize? Do I make hand movements that slow down the base routine or do I want to keep that as pure as possible and just perform the original action without time adding flourishes?Â
Honestly, brushing my teeth doesn't need to change unless I want it to. I could do the exact same actions I have been doing since time immemorial with a seasoning of deeper intention and have no outward manifestation. Magic does not have to be publicly performative to be potent.
Most recently my practice has been art based, centered around daily drawings in my sketchbook. It has no obvious magical connections but in my mind I am working with the fetishized tools of a specific drawing pad and specific pen. It's been my most satisfying practice and nobody but myself knows what I am doing.
That’s the real secret of mundane magic. I think it’s the secret behind all magic, honestly. It only ever has to be what you want it to be and only you need to experience it.
You can be performing an epic ritual toward order and organization or just folding your laundry.
It’s all up to you to decide the relationship between the liminal and the mundane in your life. It's up to you to find the glowing germ at the center or the dull chafe.
We’re down to the home stretch with only two more installments of NGBMO left before my indefinite break from the newsletter.
These two issues will be a little different than what has come before.
Next week will be the first half of a long essay entitled THE DAMNED MACHINE: LESSONS IN FACTORY GNOSIS, exploring what I learned about magic from my fifteen years of menial labor. The week after will be the conclusion of that essay and the endpoint of the newsletter as it currently exists.
All of this will be collected up into a book in a couple months. I’ll be dropping a line when it’s ready.
As always, thank you for sticking around and reading. I hope the coming week treats you all well and know that I’m rooting for you.
Until next time,
EJM