[on reading the musings of some elderly magicians on “urban magick”]
Have they ever even MET a City? Pfff. Preposterous bollocks.
Here’s a magical practice : Métromancie. You start off on a Situationist Dérive ( a “drift” where you let the signs and symbols of the City guide your steps, as theorised by Guy Debord), and it becomes a kind of walking mediation. It’s an excitatory practice rather than inhibitory (so like gnosis through dance or whirling or drumming, rather than through silent still mediation). It’s ecstatic. Your senses start to become overloaded, and the layers of the city, like a palimpsest, are clamouring to be read through, over, under each other.
You let the signs guide you. Street signs, shop fronts, random snatches of conversation, blasts of music. Then…
You begin your Divination. You read the City like a Tarot Deck. You read its Runes, its signs, its symbols. You are the Magician, and the Cityscape your greatest recombinatory constantly shifting Grimoire.
It leads you on a quest. You become legendary, in your own lunchbreak.
These people cannot hear the Spirits of the City, for their senses are tuned to the spirits of long ago, when there was no Metropolis like today.
The Spirits of the City speak in high whining voices, in bursts of static, in a shattered street lamp, in the strange sigils left by mystical graffiti artists and urban adventurers who plumb the Undercity.
Tramp-sign, thieves cant, the patois of the urchins. They know.
And when you tune in to their frequency, you realise : They could not hear them, these stodgy old men, these relics, because they are old, and slow. They could not see them, because they are as a flicker of neon in the dusk.
And they could not count them, for they are Legion: Innumerable, and electric. Those old men only know the light of candles and midnight oil. We know the Red Light, and the Black Light, and the Strobe.
The Spirits of the City need their Speakers. They are HOWLING.
