A hostile magical practice—the Conus magus charm--excerpt from fantasy novel La Maga

Leonard could now clearly hear his father griping to someone that the “folk-woman” (“Reverend Lady” Professor La Maga, that is) was in for it and that Leonard should be told to join his father in Dr. Bruno’s office on the other side of the pavilion. Dr. Giordano (Danny) Bruno was the dean of the graduate school and chief administrator of the secondary school.

Then, as if beaming with pride, Professor La Maga announced: “Mister Leonard de Lux, Junior. Can you explain to the class the origin of the term the ‘Conus magus maneuver’?”

As if awestruck, Leonard uttered, “Yes.”  He had spent the summer studying its legend and swimming in fantasies about how he had discovered its lost key.

 “Go ahead, then, Leonard. Please tell us,” the professor coached.

“In common parlance, the term ‘Conus magus maneuver’ means that a sorcerer or mage has pacified a foe, but the meaning, mostly among  sorcerers, is that the sorcerer has paralyzed his opponent—that the opponent is too mystified to act,” Leonard began.

“It’s an insult,” the professor announced to the class, “mostly uttered by ‘sore winners.’

Continue,” Professor La Maga requested.

“It’s a figure of speech,” Leonard said, “about a hostile magical practice—the Conus magus charm—which involves striking and then absorbing energy from an opponent.”

“And when is this hostile practice typically used?” questioned Professor La Maga.

“All the time, but no one ever admits it,” Leonard responded.

 “Indeed, it’s rampant even among Commons in the Outer Plane,” the professor confirmed. “Go on, Mr. Junior de Lux. We’re waiting to hear about the legend.”

“The term ‘Conus magus charm’ refers to the legendary charm of the same name, which is much more intense than the charm used today,” Leonard said. “According to legend, the original charm was discovered by a sorcerer named Mare Maré who lived around 250 BCE. He was a Melanesian sorcerer who was very familiar with venomous cone snails of the South Pacific, particularly the snail that millennia later would be christened ‘Conus magus’ by Outer Plane marine biologists,” Leonard explained.

 “He was a sea-charmer,” Professor La Maga interjected, adding that sea-charming was how Mare Maré “managed to cross great expanses of ocean long before the invention of luxury cruise liners. The name Mare Maré means ‘Nightmare of the Dark Sea.’”

The professor magically materialized the tapered shell of a cone snail. Grasping it between her thumb and forefinger, she held it out so all could see how harmless it looked: white with brown and tawny bands and dapples. Red, needle-like claws jutted out of the shell’s opening.

 “But this is only the tip of the proverbial iceberg, isn’t it, Mister de Lux, Junior,” she said and lobbed the deadly creature into her audience. Students ducked and screeched, but the snail vanished in midair. 

Excerpt from Chapter 1 The Conus Magus Maneuver from La Maga A Story about Sorcerers and Magi. Available at amazon.com

Sofia La Maga The Heroine of the Sorcerer and Magi Series

Leonard’s father repeated that Sofia La Maga was a fake. He said that the heroic tales about her were hoaxes. He stressed that she was the bastard spawn of a wayward woman who had died under suspicious circumstances. He reminded Leonard and his friends that this one Sofia La Maga also had been kicked out of the H. Trismegistus Mystical Arts Academy School of Graduate Studies in her junior year of college. She was a trouble-maker who almost took the school down because of her political extremism. A terrorist, Leonard’s father insisted. Furthermore, rather than applying herself to unusual scholarship in the Terra Mysticus as was claimed about her, she had been running some sort of silly “New Age” cult among the Commons in the Outer Plane for the past 15 years . . .  

Available through amazon.com. See tab at the header of this page. 

The Savior at the End of Time 3rd in the Sorcerers and Magi Series now Available in Kindle format

Chaos Magic meets Jesus Christ Superstar. The Savior at the End of Time, the third book in the Sorcerers and Magi series, will be available in Kindle format on July 4, 2013.

The tale is a veiled take on the Christ-story in which the unassuming and disheveled but oddly charismatic iconoclast, Professor Aurelio Zosimo, introduced in book one, is haplessly rendered into a new messiah for the Lions of Light agenda and the “Immanentization of the Eschaton.” The novel references the post-modern magical counterculture current of Chaos Magic. In this installment of the series, Leo de Lux and Sofia La Maga are at odds about their designs regarding Aurelio Zosimo. Both find themselves in over their heads as plot line of the series progresses toward an apocalyptic showdown and the revelation of portentous secrets.

The Sorcerers and Magi series offers thought-provoking ideas about finding oneself and one’s true purpose in the context of mystical magical fantasy and will be interest to adult fiction readers drawn to magia, mysticism, and spiritual philosophy. Book 1 in the series, La Maga A Story about Sorcerers andMagi, introduces us to the Inner Plane and its fragmented society of sorcerers, magi, and folk practitioners. There, the binding quality of love, transforms a father and son, shifts a paradigm, and gives a jump start to a utopian movement The Lions of Light. Magical fantasy is deftly woven with Eastern mysticism. In Book 2, The Sex Lives of Sorcerers, a hapless fairy incarnates as a woman in the world of “Commons” in the Outer Plane. Sorcerers from the Inner Plane swoop in to vie for her affections in the interests of love and occult power and opportunism. . As savior, a redeemer, and a siren, the story’s heroine circumspectly aids the Lions of Light and sets the stage for radical and illuminating transformations of all who come into contact with her. References to alchemy, medieval occultism, steganography, and sex magic permeate the text.

The Dragon Dieth Not Unless It Be Killed by Brother and Sister at Once

Excerpt from Chapter 6 [The Lovers] The Sun and the Moon in  by The Fallen Fairy 

The “Law of Karma” posited three lines of force: sanchita karma, prarabdha karma, and agami karma. Sanchita karma was the momentum that had originated in some mysterious and distant past. It had built up over eons like a snowflake becomes an avalanche as it accumulates compacted snow, ice, rocks, twigs, shrubs, small animals, then big ones, all kinds of crap in the path of its ferocious trajectory. Wherever the exponentially building mass was as it fell was the present. That was prarabdha karma—fate, destiny—where the past caught up with a person, dictated the present, and set the direction for the future.

Then there was agami karma, which was where the avalanche might be headed and how its structure might change because of it. It was the potential future, predicated on both where it had been (sanchita karma) and where it was (prarabdha karma). Even though the residual effects of the past were relentlessly barreling from the present to the future, the present still could modify the future’s course.

Bellaluna Drago was a fallen fairy because having had the ill-fortune of becoming some sinister Renaissance necromancer’s pet (and Michael knew who that fiendish bastard now was), she had haplessly done something despicable that led to the necromancer’s and her own ruin. She was now clawing through lives and worlds in atonement. Her redemption had come. Michael felt privileged to play a role in it.

“There is a saying in the alchemical texts that goes like this,” Michael murmured. “The dragon only dies when he is killed by his brother and sister at once; not by one alone, but by both at once. That is, by the sun and moon.’ You and me,” he said.

“We’re compelled to create stories for the whys and wherefores of things in an attempt to trump a wild card, which is existence itself. And existence happens despite us and also is a product of our own making. It’s a bit of a paradox,” Michael continued. “You dream of being attacked by a man who would pull you down to Hell with him. This is all the fluff of the mind—a subterfuge for some other vexation that is limiting you. But even that is a mere projection of mental noise. We torture ourselves with it for no good reason.”

Michael told Bella this to console her, even though it was and wasn’t what was going on. Nevertheless, he continued.

“In creation mythology, we talk about the world forming from chaos and void by the will of a conscious entity—God. But the chaos—the so-called prima materia—is not matter, nature, or the world; it is the human psyche full of convoluted impressions, habituations, and the conditioning of nature and nurture. This is the seven-headed dragon that must be slain by the hero who is none other than the divine spirit within asserting itself. It rescues the damsel, which is the soul.”

The path of inner alchemy and of mysticism in all the great traditions founded in gnosis, Michael contended, was to transform the human creature, who was nothing more than a helpless gear of the world machine, into a real person with real will, intention, and creative abilities.

“Some persons call this enlightenment; some call it ‘being like unto God’; some call it the Great Work, which is magic,” he said.

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