101 Rant
Colours are cool. Stay with me, it’s odd to say be it’s true. Look at that colour wheel, every colour humans can see is part of that wheel, just some adjustments for light and dark. If we frame our world as a visual thing, and most people do, that wheel contains the elements for everything we’ll ever see. Every stone beneath our feet, every reflection we catch in a window, every sunrise, every not-quite-right skin tone as we say our final goodbye to a loved one, it’s all there.
In some ways that’s just too much for us to work with. Thankfully we can divide the wheel in two, that’s much easier to manage. The colours on the left are considered cold, the colours on the right are warm, and sure they blend in the middle, but you can see why the line fits where it does.
That’s still a lot though, everything we’ll ever see divided between warm and cold? But if we divide it in three, now we’re getting somewhere. Now we see the wheel is broken into primary colours: blue, red, and yellow. But if we divide it the other way now those three sections are secondary colours: purple, orange, and green. It’s the exact same wheel, but those divisions make a clear difference, and yet, the divisions are completely meaningless too.
Including both sets of lines we get the six primary and secondary colours. We clearly can identify these colours, we know what is blue and what is orange, even without the lines on the wheel if I asked you could point to red.
These divisions will make sense to most of us, we know this colour breakdown, even if we never deal with colour blending it’s probably drilled in our heads from childhood. But what if we divide the wheel into quarters? What are these sections now? Blue, and golden yellow, and orangey red, and olive green? It’s harder to say what those sections are? What about five sections? What are they now? These divisions probably make less sense to most of us, and yet they’re just as valid as any other way we split the wheel up. There is no good reason to divide the wheel one of these ways versus another.
What if we take away the lines again? I said if I asked you could point to red, can you find red on the wheel? Can you find blue? What’s between them? Purple. Now looking at the wheel can you tell me where blue ends and purple begins? We can identify the “centre” of the colour, but the edges aren’t clear, there are no edges. The difference between blue and purple is one of convenience essentially agreed upon by our society, and yet I’m sure we’ve all had at least one conversation with someone disagreeing what colour a car or dress was. Even with our cultural boundaries, that which lies on the edges is hard to define, impossible to pin down.
This is magick. This is one of those 101 things that I feel shouldn’t have to be said, that I shouldn’t need to post and ramble on, and yet all the time I see people making what I would consider magickal errors because they don’t understand the colour wheel. Or even when they’re not making a mistake, they’re making an ass of themselves.
The colours on the wheel are everything we could ever see, but let’s expand that. The colours are a representation of everything, we could limit it to the human experience, or scale it up to include everything, but we can use this wheel as a map for reality, for all experience, for all magick.
Speaking of 101, think back to the last time you read a description of the different levels of energy bodies, how many divisions were there? Two? Three? Seven? It doesn’t really matter. We break up these levels for convenience, but it’s a gradient, like the colour wheel. Even the line between our physical and energetic body is blurrier than a lot of people realize the closer you look. Yet how many of us have seen (or participated) in discussions where there is a disagreement about this? “Your system is incomplete, you think there are three bodies: energy, ethereal, and astral. Please, what about the noetic body? Or the mental body?” I’ll let you into a secret Judgy McMage, those other divisions of the body? They’re probably in that “incomplete” system, it’s just their boundaries for the bodies are a bit bigger, so the mental body is part of the astral. (Note: I actually don’t ascribe to any clear language about layers of the energy bodies, so if they’re out of order or anything, it doesn’t matter, they’re not literal, either in this analogy or in reality.)
Or when people argue about how many elements there are. Again systems of three, four, a different four, five, a different five, another five, seven, whatever, they’re all complete within themselves. They’re all a whole wheel divided. The problem is people think the boundaries are objective, but we should know by now that magick is subtle, and abstract. Sure, that system might be “limited” because it doesn’t inclue the elements of Light, or Dark, or Time, or whatever people want to add on. All the powers and attributes you’d ascribe to those elements, they exist in that “limited” system, they’ve just drawn the lines a different way, so those elements are part of the other elements.
“Your colour system is incomplete, sure you have blue, red, and yellow, but where is your purple?” Again, the boundary for blue and red are a bit larger, and purple is within it.
This applies to pretty much everything in magick. How many elements are there? Three, four, five, seven? Again it’s where you draw the lines. How many types of people are there? Three? Wet, dry, and faith? Three? Vata, pitta, and kapha? Three? Priest, Warrior, Counsellor. Even when the same number of divisions exist, they can divide the wheel differently.
This analogy can be applied to a lot of areas in magick. How many layers are there to the energy body? How many energy centers? How many elements? Are they the same four/five? What makes a god a god, and what makes a celestial a celestial? Where is the dividing line between god and celestial? Where is the dividing line between celestial and saint? What makes demons demons? How many planes are there?
There are dozens of small simple discussions, yet these blurry edges are everywhere. If you know that, it’s great. If you apply arbitrary boundaries to help conceptualize it, that’s great. If you ascribe to an unwavering division because you can’t see beyond your boundaries, then you’re on the wrong path. These divisions help us work with something vast and abstract, and that’s wonderful, but when you confuse the map for the territory, as they say, you’re the one who is working with a “limited” or “incomplete” system.
I hope none of you are that person in the online arguments, but if you are, next time you’re disagreeing in a woogity conversation take a moment and ask if you are disagreeing with the idea itself, or are your boundaries just drawn on the colour wheel differently?
Nothing in life is clear and straight forward. The boundaries in every aspect of our lives are blurry somewhere. Why would you assume that magick would be perfectly divided into clear distinct parts with no blurring?
