Modernity scrapes the soul raw. There is no gentleness in its
light, no lull in its pressure. You wake already hunted. The clock loops its
threats. The walls press close, and the ceiling flickers with the electric
mouth of a sun that never warms. You are expected to perform with a pleasant
face and a willing heart as if your bones were not rattling with a dread older
than speech.
They call it stress. As if the name were sterile. As if it
didn’t have a shape, a scent, a theology. They dose it. They stretch it. They
chart its graphs. But they never kneel before it. They never listen to what
it’s saying through the clenched jaw, the trembling hand, the breath that
catches at the edge of a scream. They never ask why the soul has begun to
twitch in its cage.
And so you search; at night, mostly, when the walls speak
louder. You search with that old, frightened part of you that remembers woods,
candles, warnings. You search with your eyes half-closed and your spirit ajar.
And what you find is not wellness. Not therapy. Not instruction. You find the
old languages.
You find the occult.
There is no comfort in it – not at first. The sigils look
back at you with indifference. The diagrams twitch. The air thickens. You feel
stupid, lighting incense in the bathroom, sketching glyphs in the margins of
your planner. But then the world slows. Something shifts. You sleep, and you
dream of animals with too many eyes. You wake, and your chest is still tight,
but it is not empty. Something is moving there. Something is watching with
you, rather than at you.
This is the beginning.
Magic does not fix you. It reintroduces you to your own form.
Not the sleek, digestible shape you wear for your boss, your lover, your
therapist – but the ragged, spiraled, temple-born form you were before the
world touched you. You remember how to mark things. You begin to draw. Not for
art. For protection. You inscribe things – on paper, on mirrors, in the air.
Your gestures become deliberate. You move through your rooms like a priest, not
a patient. The occult has no interest in your trauma story. It asks only this: What
will you do with the pain? What will you build from it? What will you bind?
You begin with a sigil. You distill a sentence – tight as a
prayer, sharp as a hook. You crush it into symbol. You don’t need to understand
it. Understanding is the vice of the waking mind. You charge it–not with
electricity but with attention, with exhaustion, with that trembling focus that
comes just before the scream. Then you destroy it. Burn it. Hide it. Tattoo it
beneath your thoughts. It knows what to do.
From there, you seek objects. Not charms, not props. Anchors.
A piece of onyx from the flea market. A nail rusted to a red. A bone–unknown
animal, stolen from a drawer. These are not decorations. They are witnesses.
They hold your shape when you cannot. You wear them. You hide them. You whisper
to them when the panic flares. They do not speak back, but they remember you.
The world forgets. Your phone forgets. Your job forgets. But the bone does not
forget.
The ritual grows. You stop treating your body as a traitor.
You feed it salt, wine, song. You let it move–not for calorie burn, but for
ecstasy, for invocation. You light candles with names. You speak words you do
not translate. You begin to suspect that stress is not disorder, but a signal –
a holy interference. A call. Not from God, no. God left the building with the
last working payphone. This is older than God. This is the architecture beneath
reason.
One night you catch yourself laughing. Not with joy, exactly,
but with recognition. The panic that once knocked you flat now kneels beside
you. It doesn’t go away. But it changes shape. You give it a name. Not
‘anxiety,’ that thin clinic word. You call it Shemhazai. Or Ereshkigal. Or the
Hollow Bride. You say her name when the lights flicker. You leave offerings in
your sink. She does not thank you. But she lets you breathe.
You stop asking for calm. You ask instead for clarity. For
communion. For precision. You mark a circle in chalk and sit within it. You
feel the pressure lift. Something has been
acknowledged. The world can be bargained with, if you speak its language. And
the occult is a language, half ash, half echo. You learn to listen.
The books help. But not the clean ones. You want the ones
with corners gnawed, spines cracked, pages stained by hands like yours. You
want grimoires, hand-copied, badly translated. You want myth misremembered,
rewritten in hunger. The internet is too sterile. You want books that carry consequence.
Books that feel watched.
There is no syllabus. There is only instinct. You follow the
symbols that hum. You draw the lines that itch in your wrist. You begin to pray
– but not upwards. You pray down. Into the soil. Into the dust behind the
mirror. You leave out milk. You spit into your own palm. You write things and
don’t read them twice.
The stress still comes. Of course it does. The bills don’t
stop. The clock still screams. But now you have weapons. Not to kill the fear.
To charm it. To trap it in forms of your choosing. You light a candle
with every call. You carry obsidian into meetings. You wear red thread beneath
your clothes like an unspoken sentence. You are not less frightened. But you
are not alone.
You notice the world more. Not the data. The pulses. The
moments when the lights dim slightly without cause. The cat that stares into
corners. The word that repeats in three mouths in one day. You stop brushing
these things aside. You keep a notebook. Not for goals. For omens. You
begin to move like someone watched. Not in paranoia, but in ceremony.
The mundane becomes unbearable without the magic. You walk
into a bank and feel ill. You sit in a waiting room and see only ghosts. You
realize that everyone around you is suffering from the same rupture–and most of
them have no name for it. They think it’s normal. They think they’re supposed
to be tired forever.
You no longer think that. You are not healed, but you are accompanied.
The circle you drew months ago still lingers in your bones. The gods may be
gone, but the daimon is not. The daemon sleeps in your clavicle. It stirs when
the panic comes. It does not protect you. It remembers you. That is
enough.
One night, when the walls are closing in, you don’t reach for
your phone. You reach for the old box – the one with the feather, the wax, the
photograph. You light the match with hands that do not shake. You kneel. You
speak. And the air shifts.
The room knows your name.
And the stress, that parasite, that shrieking mask of
modernity, retreats – not because you have outwitted it, but because you have named
it, bound it, woven it into a spell so old no one remembers how it ends.
