Petromagick is one of the newest disciplines of magical praxis. Really coming into coherence in the first half of the 20th century, petromages work primarily with synthetic channelers—usually plastic wands or staves. Historically, petromages worked to locate and exploit petroleum deposits, an extremely technical (and often dangerous) form of magical engineering.

 More recently, petromages have split into two camps and the more traditional magical engineers working (employed, as a rule, by oil companies) are countered by mages specializing in protest or performance magicks. Protest mages use petromagicks to draw attention to destructive aspects of the fossil fuel economy.

 Most petromagic is said to have an indescribably iridescent quality. Some mages have said it’s like a synethetic taste, a sort of “rainbow adrenaline” in the back of their throat. Petromages use this tendency toward iridescence to perform searingly vivid visual magic, often used to draw attention to protest demonstrations. One of the earliest and most memorable visual protests took place in Edmonton, Alberta, in April of 1993, when a group of unidentified petromages halted late evening traffic along Whyte Ave with a display that stretched for about a kilometer. It was an arcing, shifting light show visible even from the north side of the city, and although no damage or injuries were reported conservative politicians played on the sensational quality of the protest to pass legislation criminalizing unlicensed petromagic by the end of 1994.

Climate magic is the holy grail of contemporary magical research. No magical climatic alteration or stabilization efforts have succeeded to date because the climate as a magical subject simply possesses too many variables. It’s stochastic, resisting predictable analysis even without magical interference. 

Magicians can shape local conditions with area effect spells (i.e., spells that affect everything within a specified range), but these spells don’t play very nicely and they aren’t modular or scaleable-- i.e., you can’t simply cast a series of area effect spells until the entire globe has been covered.  Additionally, area effect spells tend to weaken the ecological health of the affected area; whether this is due to as yet undetected magical drain or simply the result of isolating a place from its biosphere is an object of debate and study.

Channelers in the History of North American Magicks

So, as I mentioned last time, wands/staves (a.k.a. channelers) made from non-local plants are inefficient and lose a lot of energy in the form of light or heat. If you make a wand from a holly tree growing in your Victoria, BC back yard, it won’t work very well. A holly wand made from a tree grown in its native, Eastern NA range will be noticeably more efficient, even when used in Victoria, BC. Even so, shipping a channeler across a continent decreases its longevity, and most people are wary of ordering a channeler sight-unseen.

 This means that, despite the best of efforts of mainstream (western) magical culture and tradition, magic is difficult to codify and standardize. The most common practice among magical schools outside of Europe is to teach the generalities and theory and rely on a few European distributors who grow the more traditional woods and export trusted, reliable products. 

Criticism of Western magic’s imperial baggage and blind spots has hit the educational institutions hard, and many mages have rejected the accredited training institutions as hidebound and elitist. In the early ‘60s there was a brief flurry (with all the whiteness that word implies) to emulate Indigenous practices. However, magic is culturally contingent, essentially resisting cultural appropriation, because a practitioner’s ontological assumptions & paradigms affect results. At best, attempts by settler society to appropriate and co-opt any of the spiritualities and traditions of Indigenous North American nations resulted in failure; at worst, they ended in accidents of varying severity. 

The most recent trend is to learn how native NA plants perform in and interact with Western magical traditions. Many native NA  plants have been overlooked and ignored by pedagogical texts and institutions, and their magical capabilities (called affordances) are often unknown. Similarly, because local ecology determines the affordances of a channeler, a Garry oak wand harvested and trimmed in Victoria, BC will have different preferences and tendencies than one originating in Southern California. As one magical theorist has put it, “Magic, like wine, has a terroir.”