Llewellyn, 2011, 9780738729268, 247pp
Brain Magick was the book I picked for the first Sorcerer’s Shelf Reading Challenge 2025; Reread a magick book you found valuable- with more experience and knowledge, you catch things you missed the first time. Reread a foundational text with a few more years of practical experience, or something that interested you but you never really got into. It fits both of these categories for me. I first read it shortly after its 2011 release, and though I found the ideas compelling, I didn’t delve deeply into the practices at the time. Instead, the book influenced me more on a theoretical level, I took the concepts to heart, but not the actual techniques. Now, as I’m working on shifting various aspects of my life and retraining my mind, it has become more relevant to my current path, and invaluable in some recent work.
Part of the premise of Brain Magick revolves around the idea that universal patterns in magickal practices across cultures stem from common neurological processes. Farber argues that “anything we can do, magically or otherwise, will be represented by corresponding processes in our brains, bodies, and behaviors” (p. 4). Understanding these processes can enhance both our magick and our lives.
I often describe this book as “Magick about magick” or “Magickal biofeedback.” Through a variety of exercises, Farber guides us to analyze our thoughts, emotions, and the corresponding physiological responses they trigger. For example, when you feel loved, your chest may feel expansive; when anxious, it can feel as though a cold heavy hand pushes your shoulders down. By learning to recognize and recreate these physical sensations, you can consciously trigger emotional states. If you want to summon confidence, for instance, you can cultivate the physical feeling of it in your body and use it on demand. You can also work with anxiety by safely triggering the sensation in controlled situations, gradually replacing it with more empowering emotional states, or project it as a being to engage with, or project beneficial mental states onto anticipated negative events to help improve the mental/emotional response when the event occurs. This approach extends to magickal and meditative states, allowing you to invoke these responses to deepen your practices, think about creating magickal biofeedback so you can help trigger specific deeper magickal states more quickly.
As the book progresses, Farber introduces the idea of treating these states as entities that can be invoked, customized, and even created from scratch. For example, you can externalize negative emotions, like fear of failure, by turning them into a “spirit” that you can interact with, negotiate with, and heal. Over time, you learn to create and manipulate emotions, overlaying them on events in your life to foster the desired mental state. Farber takes this further by teaching how to combine multiple states into a single “god” that embodies all the qualities you need for a particular situation. If you need to confront a malevolent spirit, for instance, you could create a “god” filled with authority, courage, and an unshakable will to support you in the encounter. If you’re facing a high-stakes work presentation, you could create a “god” of charisma and quick wit to help you excel, tapping on memories of times you were at your best or imagining how you could be.
In essence, Brain Magick is about bringing all the best aspects of yourself under conscious control, both by amplifying your natural traits and by developing new ones. Early in my reread, I used the techniques in the book to handle an issue at work. Something went sideways at work, no one’s fault, but it was after everyone else had left on a Friday, so I knew we’d have to address it Monday, during a meeting so early I’m usually not conscious most days at that time (joys of being on a global team). The manager for that meeting just manages to rub me the wrong way, so the idea of this pre-waking meeting with this problem and that manager had already soured my weekend, I really didn’t want to deal with that manager being cranky when I should be sleeping.
Using the techniques from Brain Magick, I tapped into a feeling of resourceful, calm confidence from playing a card game with family the previous week, and I had that moment of realizing I was in control. I would win on the next turn and no one could play anything to stop me, I had already won, I just needed to play the final card. I projected that feeling onto my expectations of the upcoming meeting, replacing my expected anxiety and annoyance with this sense of resourceful control. As a result, I was able to enjoy my weekend without the looming stress of Monday morning. When the meeting came, I was calm, focused, and able to address the issue efficiently, create a solution, and delegate tasks. Even though the manager tried to press my buttons, I remained unbothered, because I had already won, I just needed to play the final card.
Brain Magick also teaches you to create “gods” with your best traits and aspirations. For instance, I’ve never been good with dreams, but using these techniques, I’ve been building a “Dreaming God.” At first, I focused on recreating the physical sensations associated with dream recall, the feeling of holding onto a memory right after waking up as I write it down. I then projected that sensation to enhance my dream recall. Gradually, as recall improved I began working with other aspects of dreaming as I observed them, like shifting between sleep stages and incubating ideas for dreams. Each success in dreaming gives me another experience or mental state that I can recreate and incorporate adding new layers to my Dreaming God and giving me greater access to those dream states.
Brain Magick teaches the art of observing, creating, and modifying personal psycho-energetic patterns whether they are emotional states, “gods,” or transmuted personal flaws. Self-mastery is a vital skill for any sorcerer, and this book provides a powerful method for cultivating your best self. I highly recommend it, especially for anyone framing their magickal path as a journey of guiding or transmuting aspects of their personality.
I’m starting 2025 off with The Sorcerer’s Shelf Reading Challenge. The idea is to provide a series of prompts suggesting different types of magick/occult books to read, encouraging people to explore works they might not have tried otherwise. It’s easy to unintentionally fall into the habit of reading within a narrow range, sticking to familiar authors, topics, or traditions, simply because we gravitate toward what we already know and may not realize the wealth of fascinating occult traditions, histories, and practices explored in other works. Hopefully this challenge will provide a few nudges to reading something that might have missed otherwise.
One of the main reasons I recommend following the 12 base options is that the point of this challenge is to push yourself to read books you might not otherwise pick up. If you look at a prompt and think “Enh, I don’t want to read anything like that” – that’s exactly the kind of book you wouldn’t read otherwise, so go for it. If you feel you might not have the time and/or energy for twelve books throughout the year, you can reduce the list to an appropriate amount. Though in that case, I encourage you to challenge yourself – we often have more time and energy than we think when we set goals and intentionally prioritize our time. Give it your best regardless!
Advanced Challenge:
Here are two before pictures. This is me attempting to fan out my tarot decks. This is the best I could manage after a few attempts, and for t
The secret to refreshing cards like this is a product called Fanning Powder. Fanning Powder is a powder created for just this purpose, it’s applied to cards to allow them to fan better and work better for flourishes in close-up card magic. I’m not going to recommend a specific brand, my favourite brand went out of business, the one I used here was literally just the first one that came up when I googled. There shouldn’t be much difference between brands. (Note: Sometimes people recommend alternatives like corn starch, but that usually doesn’t end well.)
To start you need a large storage zipper bag, you can also use small garbage bags. I prefer zipper bags because the zipper is useful for sealing it, and I like to see the cards while I do this. Put your cards in the bag. Really in this case I should have done this in at least two batches, these cards were too big for all 78 in the bag which made it difficult to manage. I recommend tossing, dealing, or dropping the cards into the bag one-by-one, just to spread them out a bit and reveal more of their surface, it makes the next few steps easier. Most decks should be divided into half or thirds for this, you can do an entire deck at once, but that makes more work.
Now sprinkle a generous helping of Fanning Powder. It’s cheap, don’t worry about wasting it. I find it’s an odd material, it needs a lot to work, but a little goes a long way. What I mean is it doesn’t actually take much to be effective when it’s on the cards, but you need to put a lot in the bags to ensure it covers everything. You can save what is leftover if you want, but personally for how cheap it is, and how rarely I need to use it, I find it’s not worth the hassle of saving.
Once there is a generous dusting of the powder, seal the bag, almost the entire way. When there is just a little bit of open space in the zipper, blow into the bag. Don’t blow too hard, you can pop it, but blow it up enough that there is plenty of room inside for the cards to shake around. Close the zipper, or tie the end if using a garbage bag. Now shake the bag around. Keep shaking it until you have a dusting of powder over all the cards. If there is too much on some cards, don’t worry, if there isn’t enough on other cards, don’t worry. This generally balances out in the end. Just keep shaking it around to try to get something on every card. Sometimes I like to pinch a few cards through the bag, and hold them out of place while I shake the rest of the cards, just to make sure they’re really mixing around in the bag.
You can see how smoothly the cards fan. An old tired deck, and a nearly impossible to shuffle new deck, now gliding smoothly and perfectly. Hopefully this helps save a deck or two out there.
adia: A Witch’s Handbook to Magical Resistance, edited by Laura Tempest Zakroff