My Wizardry Teen Years

Tales of magick in the post-Soviet era

Disclaimer: this is not a typical post for this newsletter. Its final form eluded me until after it was finished. Planned as an account of some events from my past, it warped itself into a piece of mystical realism. Take all that follows with a grain of salt.

---

It started when they gave me that numerology book for my 13th birthday. A screaming yellow cover and slightly grayish pages, but it had all the secrets in the world — and I was eager to learn them. By the end of the next day I had: the book, a pen, a handful of pencils, and a calculator. Not that I really needed one but it was better to check myself since the fates were involved.

“What’s our postal code again, gran?”

“127521. Are you pen palling someone?”

“No. It’s… ten plus eight… eighteen, one and eight… nine, it’s nine!”

“What?”

“It’s the number of Completeness. Our neighborhood is…”

“Please! Better help me with the dishes.”

I would help but then I’d importunately proceed to instill the sacred knowledge. Granny could postpone that with a household task but never prevent it.

“I helped, now please listen to me — it’s important. And interesting!”

“Well, what’s that with your numberology?”

“Numerology. Our postal code sums up to the number of Completeness. It means that the district under its influence is touched by the divine.”

“Gibberish! How would one even know this?”

“Well, I sum the digits in a number, and then sum the digits in the result, and so on, until I get a single-digit number. That number is the number.”

“Said who?”

“Pythagoras… and some other ancient Greek guys.”

“Alright then, wise man!” Granny smiled condescendingly every time I laid out a theory that had been occupying my mind. “Now go do your homework, I have to feed the cats.”

In a couple of months, I had a solid summary of the entire book, 30 pages of a very neat handwriting. Family friends who knew about my passion would often bring me some printouts on the topic that also found their way to my compendium notebook. I always was an excitable boy, falling for new hobbies faster than forgetting the former ones. But that interest was the one to take me on a decade-long adventure.

Numerology alone exhausted itself pretty quickly. I would turn to it now and then in the following years but the main focus of my interest in the occult lore changed at a very fast pace, as my major interests before that.

Our minds seek patterns. Sometimes we begin to see them even in randomness.

We lived not far away from a Chinese market. They mostly sold clothes there, but also all kinds of things you would expect to find in a Chinese market. Tea, unfamiliar but delicious snacks, glass-looking noodles, and by the opposite wall — fans, wind chimes, incense, and oils. In the shop that displayed decorative swords and sparring bokkens, you might ask the seller for something more extreme, like throwing weapons, and he would cautiously check the aisle before turning to the heap of boxes and digging up a smaller one, full of sharp metal knives and shurikens.

That market would be the place of my monthly pilgrimage for many years after. I’d buy my first bokken from that seller who at some point would stop to check the aisle for he would know I’d never come with a tail. That would happen much later, but even then…

“Philip, what’s that book?” My mom was never materialistic but my excitement with a thing could be so fleeting sometimes that she knew better not to buy it, and I would often appreciate later that we didn’t buy the thing.

“Look, it’s ‘The Feng Shui Encyclopedia’ — it costs only 200 rubles.” With a solid cover and 200 pages, that was a good deal.

“Numerology, and now Feng Shui?”

“It’s an ancient Chinese tradition of designing and adorning your house. It brings harmony into your life, and many other things.”

“Yes, I know, a friend of mine is working as a Feng Shui consultant.”

“Really? So it’s a working methodology? May we buy it? Please!”

“Remember the mess you’ve been constantly making of your room?”

“I’ll clean it all, I swear!”

“Alright, let’s have it.”

And in the week that followed, I cleaned up the whole flat. Like, for real. I thoroughly cleaned even the vents, and washed all the flowers (we had tens of pots in there), and put all my clothes out to reorganize them, and dusted the curtain rods, and so on, and so forth. The next weekend, our apartment shone brighter than ever.

“We need a big crystal in the center of the hallway.”

“Crystals are rather expensive, you know. Probably we can have a glass one?”

“No, the crystal energy is unique to crystals.”

“Maybe a small one then?”

“Well… I think a small one will work. After all, the flat is not too big either.”

Along with my mom’s self-help book collection, that hobby formed a solid part of my set of beliefs. It provided me with spatial intuitions about how “energy” flowed that partly informed my perception of interiors and design solutions that lasts to this day.

Elegance and beauty don’t mean something is true. But, if something is not true, that doesn’t mean it ceases to be elegant or beautiful.

“Where do I find unicorn hairs?”

“Philip, please…”

I can’t say what period in my life exhibited the most audaciously lunatic version of me, but the Harry Potter period is one of those closest to the mountains of madness. I read the first book in the series eight times over while waiting for the second one. Which, in turn, I read 5 times. Only the last book had me for just one read-through.

Many kids waited for an owl to bring them an invitation letter from Hogwarts but only a handful would surreptitiously ask Chinese merchants for dragon scales. None of the peers shared my joy when I found a thicket of elderberry bushes an hour’s walk away from our countryside houses. Sadly, I never made it there on Samhain in the full moon: who knows, what might have ensued?

It was the all-absorbing mania. The whole world was seen through a lens of wizardry and magic — and for many years, even though it assumed different shapes, that lens remained mystical.

A year or so later I read The Lord of The Rings. Although I was never as fanboyish to it as I was to the Harry Potter series, I still love the book and the Eä lore. Much later, as a part of my English studies, I would wade through The Silmarillion. A bit more tedious than Tolkien’s epic stories, but nonetheless enchantingly beautiful.

That’s how I’ve started to collect the beads on my necklace of fictional universes. It is hard to count them because the beads flicker, move, and spontaneously teleport in and out of materia mundi around my head. But they are always there to provide advice and offer a place to escape to.

Although some things don’t lead you anywhere, they can guide you.

Yet another book, along with a couple of samizdat printouts, inspired me to take the first steps towards what I would see as real magic for several years. Nick Perumov’s books are not well-known worldwide but he’s a fairly popular fantasy writer in Russia. I am glad I read them when I was young because the inconsistency of the magic system and unfounded plot twists made me feel acute pain when I tried to reread one of his tomes several years later. It was especially frustrating to see the cherished worlds through the analytical prism of an aspiring software engineer.

Despite my later disillusionment, back at the time when I was 16, these books gave me a burst of new hope for magic to be real, after several years of never succeeding with spells and potions from Joanne Rowling’s universe. It was then that I started to look for a proper classification of the schools of magic, and later for a correct model of the world that would account for all the forces I deemed real.

At different stages, my arcane worldview included: the Elements of the classic Western tradition, Feng Shui’s Five Forces, Chaos and Order, Death (both as opposing Life and not), primordial Darkness, and… you don’t expect me to recall all of that, do you? Aside from these pillars of creation, the world was multilayered and consisted of 7 shells that are known to many Yoga practitioners. My sources were eclectic indeed.

Thankfully, in all those scriptures one could find exercises for concentration, mental agility, and those now popularly known as mindfulness techniques. I cannot say I was a devoted practitioner — I rather touched parts of this and that and contemplated the immense horizon of opportunities that unfolded before my mind’s eye.

“Close your eyes and imagine a point. Feel through its 0-dimensionality.”

“Meaning?” One of my few friends was an aspiring sorcerer as well as me.

“There’s no direction that can be traversed.”

“Uh, okay…” Half a minute of eager silence.

“Now, realize that this point is an end of a segment. Rotate the scene to see the segment. The space is now 1-dimensional. Feel that through, too.”

“Uh-huh.” Another 30 seconds.

“Now, that segment is an edge of a square. Face the square and see how it is 2-dimensional.”

Pause. “Alright, done.”

“You can guess what’s coming. Rotate your view to see a 3-dimensional cube.”

“The cube’s in sight, sir.”

“No time for jokes. Sit still and concentrate on it.” 30… 20… 10… “Now, don’t expect anything specific and rotate the view one more time.”

“Um… Nothing?”

“Let’s try again. This is not a simple exercise.”

Our goal was to envision the 4th dimension and, hopefully, beyond. Back in the day, we did many things: meditated on Magic: the Gathering land and enchantment cards, tried to summon the rain, attempted to perform divination. Some of these things we thought we managed to achieve. If only we knew about reproducibility!

What we have gotten out of those practices is a slightly higher awareness of the world around us, our own thoughts and emotions, and who we are. Of course, that was not preventing our further deranged adventures.

However delusional, some paths may turn out to be of great use.

I’m 17 and an avid user of the ICQ messenger. I type “Warhammer” in the search bar and set the location to my city. Some tens of accounts pop up. I methodically write to all of them. Most don’t answer at all. Some send “fuck off and don’t write me anymore” in response to my intro lines.

“Hi! My name is Phil and I’m building the Imperial Inquisition.”

“The what?”

“Warhammer 40k is on your list of interests, you should know what that means.”

“Ah, that Inquisition! And how, may I inquire, are you building it?”

“I’m enlisting people to my retinue right now, and then we will seek out Satanists and other malevolent mages and kill them.”

“Are you serious?”

“Yes, I’m dead serious.”

“Like, for real? You’re not punking me?”

“No, why would I?”

“Okay, so what’s your plan then, in some more detail?”

Such was my first chat with my first “serious” girlfriend. And damn me if I didn’t have an elaborate plan. Among other things, I created a MyBB forum that featured: mission and general rules, detailed rules, training regimens for my future battle brothers and sisters, and thematic meditation practices. It had separate private spaces for members of the three Ordos — Malleus, Xenos, and Hereticus. We had disputes on whether we needed all three since there were no aliens but we stuck with the canon in the end.

Don’t get me wrong, my endeavor was not religious and not as crazy as it may seem at the first sight. Yes, I loved the grim aesthetic of that fictional universe, but I was also driven by the rumors about Satanists, that they committed blood rituals with animals and sometimes even humans, and whatever. I just wanted to stop that, and… yes, it was definitely completely crazy. I thank myself for being a blabbermouth back then, for not taking any real action. Some places in the city were popular among goth kids, and who knows how wrong it could go once started.

In the grim darkness of the far past, there is only cringe.

Some ideas may sound cool but you better never bring them into existence.

In the aftermath of my Inquisition saga, I found myself sticking with groups of people who said they were members of secret orders and cults. My primary intent was to show those “disciples” a way out and destroy the cults. Some of them were non-existent (as in, there was just a group of kids who role-played a cult), some were heavily prepared for an intervention, leaders of others were good psychologists. That was yet another controversial idea of mine that fortunately didn’t bring anyone into trouble.

And yet, however cringeworthy cults, their meetings, and my attempts at dismantling them might be, I met many of my future friends there. Our ways with most of them parted but I have warm memories of the time we spent together. Even the thing that eventually pushed me away from magic, namely programming, I started doing it on the advice of a friend from an esoteric community.

It’s always fascinating to see how ideas from the worlds so different can intertwine. As a software developer, I once had to explain our new architecture to several people of various backgrounds after our team leader’s approach turned up unsuccessful because not everybody was ready to intuit the difference between services and gateways. I then drew an analogy between every such entity and a building in an ancient city. Services became infrastructure buildings and gateways became temples that asked divinities for assistance. It worked and everybody started making their contributions to the discussion because suddenly we all had a meaningful shared context. If not for my wizardry pursuits, that idea wouldn’t ever come to me.

Anything, everything can be a source of metaphors and inspiration.

All that came next is history: I learned to be a better programmer, worked diligently for several years, and now I write this newsletter and learn something new, again.

---

Thank you for reading! I hope you liked these short excerpts from my past. Something might be not precisely as I wrote here, but it was close for sure. Now that this piece is out, I can finally proceed with Architect of Thought, a project of mine that is devoted to the development of our mind and the creation of mental techniques. You can support that project (and this newsletter) on Patreon or by sharing any of my posts with your friends.