I came to magic in my late teens through a deep and wordless affinity with the spirit of the land. I felt the presence of place in a way that seemed both natural and mysterious, as if I was able to hear the subtle voice of the earth itself. At the same time, I was living in what I would describe as a world of dreaming. I was a precognitive dreamer. The night’s dreams would reveal their meaning in the days that followed, as events quietly aligned with what I had already seen while sleeping.
At that age I did not have a framework for understanding these two experiences. On the one hand there was the tangible world of forests, stones, and water that seemed alive with spirit. On the other hand there was the inner landscape of dreams that anticipated the future. They felt like two separate realms. Later I discovered that Shamanism held space for both. It recognised the dreamer and the land as parts of the same continuum of awareness.
Books about Shamanism began to appear in my life almost by chance, and through them I was able to understand the Path of the Dreamer, about individuals who learned through visions and journeys into altered states. Around the same time a mentor appeared with a Tarot deck and a guidebook. Rather than simply teaching me the cards, I was given the unusual task of redrawing every single card by hand and copying out the explanations in my own writing into my own personal notebook.
This slow process changed the way I learned. Drawing the images forced me to study every symbol, every gesture and colour. Writing the meanings by hand embedded them in my memory in a way that reading never could. The Tarot became less like a book of instructions and more like a living language. Combined with the messages that came through dreams, it gradually reshaped my worldview. I began to understand that reality was layered, that intuition and symbolism offered another way of navigating life.
Many years later, during a period when I was searching for a new truth, I encountered the Chaos Magic paradigm. Chaos Magic brought me a radical idea: belief itself could be treated as a tool. One of the fundamental practices for a magician is metamorphosis.
Learning to change ourselves is central to magical practice. The exercise is deceptively simple: choose an aspect of your behaviour and change it deliberately. Observe the process and document it. In doing so you demonstrate to yourself—and to the universe—that transformation is possible. Then you can begin to change your beliefs.
What appears to be a small shift can open the door to profound change. In my own case the process began with something almost trivial. I changed my habit of drinking tea and began drinking coffee instead. It sounds insignificant, but the act carried symbolic weight. It reminded me that patterns are not fixed. From there the experiment expanded.
As I allowed myself to question one habit, I began questioning many others. I started conversations with new gods, explored unfamiliar rituals, and examined the structures of my life with fresh eyes. The most difficult realisation was that I was living within a relationship that no longer gave me the space to grow. The new aspects of myself—the tender shoots of an emerging identity—had nowhere to take root.
Restructuring my life was not easy. Some of the challenges required enormous amounts of energy and courage. Yet the practice of metamorphosis had already taught me a crucial lesson: do not cling too tightly to any belief system. When beliefs are flexible, possibilities multiply. Different outcomes can be imagined, different paths explored.
In Chaos Magic this ‘unfixedness’ also means that assistance can come from many directions. Different entities, archetypes, and magical techniques become available as allies. Instead of defending a single worldview, the magician learns to navigate between perspectives.
This practice has had another unexpected consequence. It allows me to perceive the many layers of reality. I am no longer confined to believing only what the media tells me or what politicians argue about. I recognise that what we call reality may be only one level among many. Once you have learned the art of metamorphosis, you begin to understand that both the self and the world are far more fluid than we are taught to believe.
