#mathers

A Touch-Up For Shady

The bathroom smelled like a toxic mix of chemical peroxide and the half smoked blunt he’d abandoned on the edge of the sink, a thin spiral of gray smoke curling toward the ceiling. Marshall was leaning so close to the mirror his forehead almost touched the glass, squinting at his dark roots with a scowl that usually meant a reporter had pissed him off earlier that day.

“Yo, it’s getting dark again,” he muttered, rubbing a hand aggressively over his head before turning to face her. “Look at this. I look crazy. Fix it before we gotta leave for the venue.”

“I’m trying to, but you won’t sit still for two seconds,” she said, shaking the plastic bottle of developer in her hand.

She had to physically grab him by the shoulders and push him down onto the closed toilet lid. He let out a dramatic groan but stayed put, a dark towel draped over his oversized white tee to catch the drips. Even sitting down, he was a jumble of nervous, restless energy—his foot tapping a rapid, frantic rhythm against the bathmat, his eyes darting around the small space. He was under fire from the entire media world right now, and the bleach was part of the armor he wore to face it. But in here, with the door locked, the loud public persona was dialed back, replaced by the raw, hyperactive guy who just needed a second to breathe.

She parted his hair with the tail comb, gently pressing the first brush stroke of cold bleach against his scalp. He flinched, his shoulders tensing up instantly.

“Damn, that’s freezing,” he complained, rolling his eyes up to try and look at her. “If my hair falls out from this, I’m telling the press you did it on purpose. “

“Local rapper bald after domestic dispute.” he changed his voice suddenly to sound like a news anchor.

“Keep talking and I’ll accidentally leave it on for two hours,” she teased, smoothing another layer over his roots.

A faint, quick smirk tugged at the corner of his lips. He quieted down for a minute, his hands coming up to grab at the back of her thighs, his gaze dropping to the floor. As her gloved fingers worked the thick mixture through his hair, massaging it in to make sure it was even, she felt the tension slowly drain out of his neck. The constant tapping of his foot stopped. He let out a long, heavy sigh—the kind he only let out when it was just the two of them—and leaned his head back slightly against her hands, closing his eyes.

For a rare moment, the chaos outside didn't exist. He didn't have to be defensive, or angry, or on guard. He was just Marshall, trusting her completely with the look that defined him to the rest of the world.

The peace lasted exactly two minutes before the chemical heat started to kick in.

"How much longer do I gotta sit here looking like a Q-tip? It’s burning. Is it supposed to itch like this, or are you trying to fry my brain cells?" he said, his eyes snapping open as he reached up to scratch at his sideburns. She swatted his hand away.

“No, seriously, it’s itching like crazy. Is it supposed to feel like someone’s lighting a match on my skull?”

“It’s lifting, Marshall. It’s supposed to tingle. Don’t touch it.”

Request: No

Summary: Imagine you & Marshall at a Detroit Lions' football game

Ceremonial magic was a lie

And the history it has sold benefits no one. It benefits the folk magicians least of all.

Aleister Crowley and McGregor Mathers and the other actors in the height of the lodge magic era were selling an image, an idea. This concept of the grand high magus, the spiritual sovereign separate from the world and above it. They wanted this history because they wanted it for themselves. Really, there's nothing wrong with that aspiration, if it is in an isolated individual. But the history they built became magical history. It became the history of us rather than them.

The rebellion against this is understandable. Seeing these men on their self appointed pedestals and thinking "well I can't possibly be that".

So we make up history then in turn. If the grimoire tradition, the solomonic tradition, is of them.... then that tradition could not possibly be mine. So we invent, we create. Secret witch cults and underground traditions and all of it wrapped in a fervent and undying paganism. "No syncretism happened here, we simply went into hiding".

But the moment we do that we commit the same crime that was inflicted on us. Inventing a history, claiming a story that wasn't ours.

The fact is, Crowley and Mathers were wrong. The traditions they borrowed from to craft their image were folk traditions. Traditions of the common person, the cunningcraft. The grimoires, the old texts. They robbed them from their common writers and resold them gilded and laden with mystery.

The fact is, we were wrong. There was no sacred witch cult. And the cultural colonialism of Christianity is a far more complex story, with syncretism, blending, and cultural trade happening all throughout. The good mixed in with the bad far too much for an easy enemy.

Ultimately, the grimoires, the goetia, their history IS our history. And we have as much if not more claim to it than the pompous men in their satin robes. The story of cunningcraft is one of many faiths, and far harder to break down than the clear walls of paradigm.

We owe much to those dusty old books. And more of who we are emerges from their pages than we might like to admit.