Found 20 posts tagged ‘wizardry’ |
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We're honored that Cyril the Sorcerer calligraphized two lines of ours about speaking magic words: "Speak your words of magic with all the weight of saying 'I love you' to someone for the very first time. ... Speak the word as if you were presenting a lost relic from another time." Cyril added, " Thanks Prof. Oddfellow aka Craig Conley for your artistry with ink, words and magic."
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The Right Word –
October 16, 2017 |
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Go Out in a Blaze of Glory –
February 2, 2017 |
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By the way, the story of how The Young Wizard's Hexopedia came to be is just about as unlikely as the book itself. One November morning, a stranger wrote from out of the blue, asking for assistance with an extraordinary book of magic. The stranger turned out to be the CEO of a publishing house specializing in the world's quirkiest subject matter, in search of a grimoire that didn't technically exist. His own research had somehow determined that I was the one with the know-how to bring this lost book back from the depths. It seems that he had seen a window display of an esoteric bookshop and had noticed that the lost book in question wasn't there. The problem was that no surviving copies of the book are known to exist. My task was to rediscover and recreate the entire document from quotations and implications in magical literature. The stranger provided me with some crucial scraps, trusting that the whole work might be holographically contained within the parts. Knowing the title and a rough idea of the table of contents, I set to work hunting through cryptic volumes in private libraries of magic (whose locations I'm not at liberty to reveal, though I can say that I visited Hollywood's Magic Castle). Suffice it to say, I left no philosopher's stone unturned. The process was very much like putting together a jigsaw puzzle in a dark room, with only a flickering candle for illumination. To my own surprise, the lost book began taking shape almost immediately. Restoring fragments into sentences and arranging them into paragraphs proved less challenging than one might suppose. For example, you can surely divine what the last word of this sentence will [...]. Whenever a passage seemed to have something almost tangibly missing, like the absence of a vital book in an esoteric shop window, I knew to keep digging. The moment it was clear that the entire Hexopedia was restored, I verified the accuracy of my work with three highly gifted wizards of words: a playwright in New Hampshire, a poet in Pennsylvania, and a teacher of magical arts in Nevada. Then I sent the restoration to the stranger, who flabbergasted me by suggesting that the book should not come back into print at all but rather remain hidden in shadowy slumber until a more enlightened era. (Apparently the trickster merely desired a copy for his personal use!) Having worked so intimately with the text for so long, I felt convinced that the world was ready once again for the Hexopedia ... that it shouldn't rest only in the private library of one megalomaniacal* publisher. And the rest, as the former, is history. Here's a random page from The Young Wizard's Hexopedia.*Note that "megalomaniacal" is an anagram of "ole magi almanac," so it all seems to be part of some mysterious tapestry, eh?
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Restoring the Lost Sense –
March 18, 2016 |
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| [Inexplicable images from generations ago invite us to restore the lost
sense of immediacy. We follow the founder of the Theater of
Spontaneity, Jacob Moreno, who proposed stringing together "now and then
flashes" to unfetter illusion and let imagination run free. The images
we have collected for this series came at a tremendous price, which we explained previously.] |
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The Right Word –
September 5, 2015 |
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Thanks to the reviewer over at Amazon who rated our Hexopedia four stars: " Interesting read! So far, the effects are subtle, but they are there."
Meanwhile, here's a page from the book, revealing the forgotten secret of bibliomancy:
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Go Out in a Blaze of Glory –
July 3, 2015 |
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Renowned magic headliner Jeff McBride tweets:
Is Conley's HEXOPEDIA considered the "NEW magic?" or is "HEX-O" the OLD magic renewing itself? Perhaps"HEX_O" is the Phoenix of THIS generation?
Meanwhile, check out how we illustrated the chapter headings for McBride's book The Show Doctor, now in softcover.
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I Found a Penny Today, So Here's a Thought –
June 10, 2015 |
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I'm nearing the point of obsession. I can’t look away, and don’t want to. Like Tarot cards, but with built-in illumination, and much more fun. Brilliant, says I! —Jeff Hawkins
A few years ago, we collaborated on a deck of "wide-awake dreaming" cards for the celebrated mentalist Kenton Knepper. Kenton occasionally demonstrated this deck at gatherings of the magical underground in Las Vegas, and that's how the cards got the street names of "Waking Dream Cards," "Metaphor Cards," "Subconscious Communication Cards," "Transformation Cards," and "K-Kards." But their official name is "[Self-Intuiting] Polarity Cards." The deck long-remained one of Kenton's best-kept secrets, but we can now reveal that they're finally available to anyone who wishes to experience a mind-blowing insight that they verifiably didn't have before. Unlike Tarot cards or other well-known reading decks, Polarity Cards are wholly free of dogma and therefore allow for fresh, intuitive understandings that are neither influenced nor hindered by preconceptions. Deeply rooted in coded principles from the Mystery traditions, the cards also work as powerful meditational tools, unlocking a greater sense of harmony and well-being. Lots more information about the deck is at TheGameCrafter.
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I Found a Penny Today, So Here's a Thought –
May 11, 2015 |
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The story of how The Young Wizard's Hexopedia came to be is just about as unlikely as the book itself. One November morning, a stranger wrote from out of the blue, asking for assistance with an extraordinary book of magic. The stranger turned out to be the CEO of a publishing house specializing in the world's quirkiest subject matter, in search of a grimoire that didn't technically exist. His own research had somehow determined that I was the one with the know-how to bring this lost book back from the depths. It seems that he had seen a window display of an esoteric bookshop and had noticed that the lost book in question wasn't there. The problem was that no surviving copies of the book are known to exist. My task was to rediscover and recreate the entire document from quotations and implications in magical literature. The stranger provided me with some crucial scraps, trusting that the whole work might be holographically contained within the parts. Knowing the title and a rough idea of the table of contents, I set to work hunting through cryptic volumes in private libraries of magic (whose locations I'm not at liberty to reveal, though I can say that I visited Hollywood's Magic Castle). Suffice it to say, I left no philosopher's stone unturned. The process was very much like putting together a jigsaw puzzle in a dark room, with only a flickering candle for illumination. To my own surprise, the lost book began taking shape almost immediately. Restoring fragments into sentences and arranging them into paragraphs proved less challenging than one might suppose. For example, you can surely divine what the last word of this sentence will [...]. Whenever a passage seemed to have something almost tangibly missing, like the absence of a vital book in an esoteric shop window, I knew to keep digging. The moment it was clear that the entire Hexopedia was restored, I verified the accuracy of my work with three highly gifted wizards of words: a playwright in New Hampshire, a poet in Pennsylvania, and a teacher of magical arts in Nevada. Then I sent the restoration to the stranger, who flabbergasted me by suggesting that the book should not come back into print at all but rather remain hidden in shadowy slumber until a more enlightened era. (Apparently the trickster merely desired a copy for his personal use!) Having worked so intimately with the text for so long, I felt convinced that the world was ready once again for the Hexopedia ... that it shouldn't rest only in the private library of one megalomaniacal* publisher. And the rest, as the former, is history. Here's a random page from The Young Wizard's Hexopedia.
*Note that "megalomaniacal" is an anagram of "ole magi almanac," so it all seems to be part of some mysterious tapestry, eh?
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Given our substantial research into esoteric tomes, we're sometimes consulted for strange and unusual magical spells. An award-winning quarterly magazine of art and culture based in New York [name withheld for reasons of discretion] once asked us for a spell to cast over their printing press. Most recently, a winner of two Gertrude Stein Awards in Innovative American Poetry [name withheld in a nod to our lost age of privacy] asked us for no fewer than thirteen different spells:
- A spell which finds and locates the source of (malicious) gossip and renders the "first tongue" of this gossip chain either serpent-like (i.e. forks the tongue) or like that of some other loathsome beast.
- A spell which will allow a refrigerator to enchant the food in it, so that when you eat the food you see the food's history (such as the worker picking the grapes. This would be quite grisly when it came to lunch meat and we realized it had a "family life.")
- A spell which will render water capable of transmitting its memories. When an enemy steps into a tub of "blissful" water, suddenly he or she is overcome with a thousand television stations of water memory, all the way back to the time of the dinosaurs.
- A spell that turns pussy willows back into the cats they once were.
- A spell which allows you to enter into a painting or use a painting, drawing, etc. as an avenue of escape.
- A spell to send snow back upwards into the sky—a reverse snowstorm spell.
- A spell whereby you can have birds carry a message to other birds to so on to other birds in order to reach someone far away.
- A spell which makes someone the reverse of a money magnet, so money is always figuratively (and literally) flying away from him or her.
- A spell to make someone fall in love with his or her own reflection. For example, a teenager cannot concentrate in class but must constantly seek a reflective surface to the point of madness. Good for a stuck up kid in school, beauty queen hex, etc.
- A spell whereby planes flying overhead will drop valuable things into your yard or on your roof, like a form of tribute from airplane.
- A spell to turn pancake batter into quicksand, so when the person eats the finished product, the pancake inside the person slowly causes the person to implode into himself/herself, vanishing throughout the day in a very geometrically weird way.
- A spell on cookies to make them like online cookies; they drop without the eater's consent and glow, leading you to the person you are trailing and to whom you have given the bewitched cookie.
- A spell to make tornados play music. Needles appears within and the tornado is turned into an old school record player even as it grinds away at a landscape.
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Original Content Copyright © 2025 by Craig Conley. All rights reserved.
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