Sofia La Maga: Nothing but a bedraggled kitchen witch--Illustrated excerpt from La Maga

I am scheduled to speak at a Crowley Con conference this fall about my fiction writing--my Sorcerers and Magi series triology. It is metaphysical fiction that is meant to begin as a play on classic children's magical fantasy fiction but moves on to address concepts about the nature of self, will, transformation, and enlightenment. Political metaphor and issues related to the "Immanentization of the Eschaton" build as the series progresses. What is it to wake up from the idea of yourself? That is the koan-like question. My work is for adult fiction readers with authentic interest and literacy in the magical and mystical. Explore insights from the Western Mystery Tradition, Vedanta, and Buddhism through creative expression.

This short video is a character study of the heroine of the series, Sofia La Maga. Images are original art work. More of my art work can be viewed at http://www.deerapposelli.com 

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Leonard (Junior) and his buddies, Anil, Cary, and Bertrand, had gotten a glimpse of Sofia La Maga the day before. They gloated like the spoiled-brat junior elitist patricians they were that the hype about the professor was nonsense. It was just as Leonard’s father had insisted. Professor La Maga was nothing but a bedraggled kitchen witch.

She didn’t seem at all like the stories told about her. In fact, she roamed through the secondary school’s second-floor corridor as if she were roller-skating with three left feet and had the mental disposition of a hedgehog. 

She was a tall, slender but robust woman with the rough-and-tumble appearance of someone who had weathered hard climbs in exotic lands. Her clothes were rustic, quaintly worn, and embellished with savage jewelry: jangling bells and sashes of bone and fur, claws, shells, and spike-studded pods. Her Medusa-like mane was haphazardly plaited here and there and cluttered her face, blinding her as she toddled along.  She was gripping a mass of overstuffed folders, and from her arms dangled plastic bags filled with items that were heavy. The bags swung like pendulums in the wake of her clumsy pace. The heels of her worn leather lace-up boots alternately caught on the frayed hem of an ankle-length skirt. It caused her to wobble pathetically as the heavy bags alternately beat against her ribs.  

No one offered assistance. They were busy gawking at her and probably thinking the same as Leonard and his pals were. This was the prodigy who had been gallivanting across exotic lands and speed-reading through mentorships with wild wizards, shamans, and hermits?

Leonard reported the observation to his father who smirked and lectured him about how the Inner Plane was going to the dogs. He blamed immigration and student exchange laws and especially the prohibition against the caste system—even though it had been nearly a century since the prohibition had been in effect.

As far as de Lux senior was concerned, the discontinuation of the system undercut the privilege of the privileged. It made for circumstances whereby the child of the lowliest peasant spell-caster (that is, Sofia La Maga) could become a prestigious mage—all because she had spent 12 years spelunking through some caves on the Inner Plane of Katmandu or Machu Picchu or . . . some place.

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 . . .