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 . . .

Enlightenment and the Nature of the Self

Although I’ve spent the past several years delving into folk magic, Neopaganism, and the Western Mystery Tradition, my primary spiritual orientation is Advaita Vedanta. Advaita Vedanta is a form of Hinduism that I was introduced to nearly 40 years ago. It is a system that dates back to about the 7^th century and is primarily founded in the Upanishads. The Upanishads are the philosophical portion of a set texts called the Vedas, the earliest written record of Hindu thought and praxis.

When I first began writing La Maga A Story aboutSorcerers and Magi in 2004, I was absorbed in Vedanta and related Eastern philosophies. And so concepts distilled from my then spiritual practice are represented in the work and intermingle with fanciful as well as some authentic motifs about magic.

The spiritual journey in Advaita Vedanta is, in part, about intimately realizing the connection between one’s own true nature and the Divine and also realizing that “the world is in the mind, like space in a jar”—as stated in a text called the Yoga-Vasishtha—which I worked into the very last chapter of La Maga. Advaita Vedantist philosophy is concerned with the idea of projection—the problem of not experiencing reality as it is but as dreamlike mental projections—colored by bias, fears, ignorance and automated habits and conditioning. For this reason, my characters sometimes contemplate the nature of reality and illusion. They also ask the question: What is it to wake up from the idea of yourself? To paraphrase thoughts I attributed to the antihero of the series, the sorcerer Leo de Lux:

Becoming truly real, conscious, and capable of free will begins by realizing the whimsical and fabricated nature of one’s own being—the idea of self—and then detaching from the automaton (the robot) of its personality, habits, and conditioning. Then the person who is the life beneath the mask of selfhood opens his eyes and watches himself reveling through the motions of daily life like a dreamer reveling in lucidity and exercising free will in it.

In the last published book in the series, The Savior at the End of Time (available in Kindle format), I have the main character of that story--a whacky Christlike figure who is a chaos-magic-practicing sorcerer named Aurelio Zosimo--deliver a sermon that basically crystalizes what I’ve come away with from my exposure to Eastern spirituality and spirituality in general, including magical spirituality:

Excerpt from Chapter 20 of The Savior at the End of Time 

About 42 days after his confrontation with Lord Consul Tau-Bridge, Zosi began to be spotted in flamboyantly full ceremonial regalia within the Mercury Gardens. He would wear a tunic of thick raw silk and tightly fitted, black leggings that were made of tanned leather and full of straps and whips of lacings. Over this, he would wear high boots that matched a mottled, purple-black tanned leather cope embossed with images of ourobori, moondragons, and griffins. His hair was meticulously plaited and decorated with pins and ribbons. His head was topped with a black double-cone hat that was rakishly crimped and folded over so that the tips of the horn-like cones, embellished with opalescent jingle bells, menacingly flounced and jangled in front of his face. He wielded a rather large and tall staff, the core of which was made of slender poles of cedar and fennel stalks. It was wrapped in embossed leather that matched his ensemble. Like a sinister maypole, the staff’s leather sheath was itself wrapped in a filigreed design of cords and leather straps on which gadgets and flotsam were affixed and that dangled, flail- and cat-o-nine-tails-like, from the staff’s finial, which was a gold spearhead in the shape of a fish with an acorn protruding from its mouth.

Like that, he would stroll about the Gardens and then stop here or there to deliver a sermon that attracted larger and larger crowds as word of the spectacle grew. He would begin the rant in a gentle voice with the words, “See the illumination at the center of being,” and materialize some small sparkly object that would fascinate and mesmerize onlookers.

“The body and all phenomena arise causally and provisionally within absolute being,” he would continue, yet still in a very meek and quiet voice. It would be trembling and barely audible despite his ferocious appearance. “There is no time and no dimension to space, both being mere adaptive projections of mind. The personality is an interdependently arising construction of circumstances and experiences, driven by reactivity bred by conditioning devoid of awareness or true will. What is it to wake up from the idea of yourself? Heaven, hell, God, the Adversary, pleasure, pain, and all the pairs of opposites are projections of your own consciousness. You project ideas out of yourself. Treating them as independent entities, you go into them, fear them, and allow them to have power over you although they are your own creations. No one is there to deliver you; you must deliver yourself. Glimpse self-effacement and the root of your existence. Reality is silent, blissful, self-composed Being. This is the Redemptive Principle, the Christos, the Ground, and the Life beneath the mechanism.”

About La Maga A Story about Sorcerers and Magi

"What is it like to wake up from the idea of yourself?"  That is a question discovered by characters in the fantasy fiction novel La Maga A Story about Sorcerers and Magi. I got the idea that I should illustrate the novel. I like to say that is it sort of like Harry Potter for grown-ups but is especially for grownups who like classic children's literature and also have an authentic interest in magic and mysticism. 

The main character is a magical woman named Sofia La Maga.  After many  years in political exile Sofia returns to her homeland and becomes a professor at her alma mater The H. Trismegistus mystical arts academy.







Even though the governor of her homeland doesn’t much like her, Sofia befriends and mentors his juvenile delinquent son, Leonard de Lux, Junior.  The only thing Leonard is good at—or think he’s good at—is playing the Phaeton Maneuver—a  very dangerous, outlawed game that magical teenage boys secretly  play in the  where all these magical people live.

When Leonard’s father finds out that Sofia has not only  gotten Leonard on the straight and narrow but has given him the experience of enlightenment, he is not  sure whether he should be happy about it. After all, Sofia is an anti-establishment political dissident and a person from a much lower caste of society than he is. But he is impressed with her, and like young Leonard, he falls in love with her.  Like Leonard, he undergoes a profound spiritual transformation that will, in turn, profoundly shapes destiny.

 –Dionesia Rapposelli

Kindle edition

Paperback Night Horse Press

                                                     

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. 

About the Sorcerers and Magi Series --Listen to the Podcast

I started writing the Sorcerers and Magi series in 2003, which was the time that the Harry Potter series was gaining a lot of momentum.  I knew very many 30- to 60- year-olds who were very enthusiastic about the series.  Honestly, I never read the books, but I really enjoyed watching the movies. They—especially the earlier ones in the series—coddled me in the sweetest nostalgia of childhood and holiday movie extravaganzas—of treats from grandma and Christmas tinsel and that sort of thing.

One day in the late summer of 2003, I found myself watching a DVD of the second movie in the series, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, every night for a week. I was particularly fascinated with the villainous Lucius Malfoy character, played by Jason Isaacs. I kept hoping that, as the series winded down to its denouement, that character would emerge as an antihero. That was not the case, but it inspired the development of my own antihero Leo de Lux. He starts out as a caustic and villainous but complex character and becomes an ambiguous hero and maintains that role throughout the series.

 So, after watching the second movie over and over again one week and wanting more stories but not managing to read the books, I started to make up episodes in my head so I could be entertained in between movies. I realized that I had built up a completely unique story. I dithered about whether I should write it down, because I was reluctant to invest the time in a writing project only to then beat my head against a brick wall trying to get someone of influence—an agent or publisher—to give me the time of day.  I couldn’t help myself, though, and got it into my head that I should simply pursue the  project for my own entertainment and insight.

Listen to me discuss the series and the writing life in podcast #36 The Savior at the End of Time at EatSleepWrite.

The story I was entertaining was not a children’s story. It was a magical fantasy fiction story for adults. My aim, however, was to maintain a tone similar to that found within classic children’s fantasy fiction. My target audience was adults who like classic children’s literature—the work of C. S. Lewis, for example.  I did not initially intend to write a series, but as I completed the first draft of the first book La Maga A Story about Sorcerers and Magi, another story popped into my head, which I originally gave the provocative title.The Sex Lives of Sorcerers but renamed The Fallen Fairy. I ended up linking them in the progression of an underlying apocalyptic theme introduced in the first book that culminates in the third book, titled The Savior at the End of Time. I intend to write at least 2 more books in the series. One will be a prequel and one will begin where book 3 ends.

My story takes place in a parallel universe called the inner plane. It has a look and feel like our own. The structure of government is loosely based on the classical Roman paradigm. The same sort of powermongering and dog-eat-dog kind of stuff that goes on in our world also happens in this Inner Plane, with the idea that Inner Plane strongly influences how things roll in the Outer plane (our world, that is).  People from our world can enter the inner plane through dreams, trance or altered states of consciousness and through forbidden dabblings in the occult and sometimes they transition from the Outer to Inner Plane in my stories.

The term “Inner Plane” comes from a writer within the Western Mystery Tradition named Gareth Knight, who is an apologist for a type of Hermetic magic originating in the medieval era, called Magical Christianity, which is a type of gnostic—or self-revelatory (as opposed to dogmatic)—Christianity . The Inner Plane is basically the world within the mind. It is a place of archetypal forms, dreams, and ideas in general. This place is more commonly called the astral plane, referring the realm of thought and feeling.  In a sense, it is in incubation place where thought becomes paradigm and Reality.  Reference to the Inner Plane is also a tip of the hat to a form of philosophical Hinduism called Advaita Vedanta, which I have followed for very many years. A strong influence from this philosophy and Buddhism permeates the series.

I’m using fiction as a creative and playful way to express my long-time interests in spirituality, magic, and mysticism. The work is a product of my research, practice, and hands on experience.  My writing is a way to feed information back to myself—reaffirm and integrate it and also to entertain myself.

The main character of the first book, Sofia LaMaga, is something of an alter ego—or maybe someone who I would like to be. At the beginning of La Maga A Story about Sorcerers and Magi, we learn that Sofia has been living in political exile in a parallel plane coinciding with Tibet. Having received amnesty, she returns to her hometown where she becomes a high school teacher and wreaks havoc by forming a friendship with the juvenile delinquent teenaged son of the place’s governor, Leo de Lux. Because Sofia has been living in the environs of India and Tibet, she comes back steeped in the spirituality of those cultures.

When I was writing LaMaga, although I had all long-time background in eastern spirituality, I was also interested in folk magic and had been reminiscing about one of my great grandmothers who was said to be a stregona—that’s Italian for “sorceress.” Another word for that is “maga.” I began to explore Italian folk magic, and so that is why there is a lot referencing to Italian folk culture and evil eye lore in La Maga. My interest in folk magic led to interest in aspects of Western Occultism, including the work of Dion Fortune and Aleister Crowley—big names in relation to the so-called Occult revival that took place at the turn of the 20^th century.

By the time I got to writing the second book, The Fallen Fairy, I had become interested in philosophical alchemy and medieval magic, and so we have underlying themes about alchemy and spiritual transformation as well as reincarnation, fairy lore, and sex magic in that book. When I got around to writing the third book, The Savior at the End of Time, I had become an enthusiast of a current in postmodern occultism called Chaos Magick and a related counterculture scene called Discordianism.

No, Really, listen to me discuss the series and the writing life in podcast #36 The Savior at the End of Time at EatSleepWrite.

That story, which recently became available as a Kindle ebook and will be available for download through smashwords.com—and also as a print edition—in the late fall,  is about a character named Aurelio Zosimo who  is being set up to be the poster boy of a utopian political movement, introduced in book 1 of the series. What inspired me to launch that story was the rock opera Jesus Christ Superstar, which is my all-time favorite theater piece. It was around Easter time in 2006 and I was coming out of the winter blues. I was on a roll watching film and live theater versions of Jesus Christ  Superstar and got the idea to adapt the template of the gospel story to the third novel of the Sorcerers and Magi series. The premise is similar to that of The Who’s rock opera, Tommy or Jerzy Kasinsky’s novel Being There, in which a person who is a little “off” is haplessly fashioned into a leader or cult hero.

 We are told that Aurelio Zosimo has a plaque on his office door that says “Nothing is true, everything is permitted.” This is a famous slogan among  Chaos magicians that was picked up from the cult classic novel The Illuminatus! Triology, which is a wild-ride parody about conspiracy theories, secret societies, and the immanentization of the eschaton—that is, the hastening the end of the world—the apocalypse. There is an apocalyptic thread running through my series that culminates in this third book, and we find characters discussing the immanentization of the eschaton and Zosimo’s potential role in it in the third book.  

Elephants, Eagles, and Crocodiles: Excerpt from La Maga

“And what are these creatures on your dress?” Madame Whitehead inquired and waved to Leo and a man who seemed to be Mister Whitehead. “Come and listen. The maga is going to tell us a story about her dress.”

“Alright then, let’s see it in color—the story, I mean. Leo, you’re the expert,” the gentleman said.

“An illustrated tale?” Leo mused.

“Do you want to see Leonard do it?” Sofia grinned. “Lenny. Come here,” she anxiously chanted.

A group converged around Sofia and Leonard in the center of the patio to hear the story.

“Okay. Now make it nice. Nothing cheesy, Leonard,” Sofia admonished.

“First tell us what these creatures are, La Maga Magus—the one’s on your dress,” Miss Noumen requested.

Sofia answered, “Elephants, eagles, and crocodiles.” Then she began: “Once, there was an elephant.”

With a fidget of fingers, Leonard created a handsome-looking, scaled down elephant, the size of a chair. It had big, winnowing ears and long, thick tusks and was floating in space.

“We need an Indian elephant. That one’s African,” Sofia said. “Sorry, Lenny.”

The ears had to shrink, and the tusks had to be much thinner although Sofia told Leonard that they could be longer and curly.

“Make the scene junglely with a watering hole,” she instructed.

The elephant began to plod in place while the flora within the courtyard grew denser and more enveloping. The creature reared its trunk and let out a squeak.

“Okay. So, once there was an elephant,” she stuttered again, with her usual goofy bravado. “And it went to go soak in a lake when a humongous crocodile—not an alligator, Leonard, a crocodile—caught the elephant’s leg in its jaws.”

The ladies screamed. A creature heretofore resembling a rock jumped out and gripped the elephant’s right hind leg. Bellowing and thrashing began. The ruckus spilled beyond the magical mirage’s boundaries causing the walls and pillars within the courtyard to shudder, the trees to bend and sway. Quelled swamp water doused everyone and made a mess.

“Good show, Leonard!” the impressed guests cried. They blotted their mussed hair and attire.

“The crocodile was going to drag the elephant under and have a tasty meal, but in that moment, as the elephant faced its death, it remembered that, in a past life, it was a human king who was very devoted to the Divine Pervading Principle of the Universe, Lord Vishnu. I’ll do that one, Lenny,” Sofia interjected and went on: “The elephant prayed to Lord Vishnu but nothing happened. So then he prayed again, and nothing, ‘cause . . . gods are like that.” 

The thrashing and splashing, rumbling and roar continued with heightened violence. Sofia hollered her story above it: “Finally, just as the elephant was about to be overcome by the crocodile, its heart filled with the desire for—not life but . . . redemption. Nearly with its last breath, it called out one last time to the Divine Lord of the Universe. And then, the deity finally showed up, wafting around on his mighty giant eagle.”

With hands swirling in the air, Sofia materialized an image of a white eagle astride which was a handsome pale blue deity bejeweled, garlanded, and clad in orange-yellow fabric. A pack of arrows were strapped to his back. With his four arms, he held a conch shell, a discus, a gilded club, and an ornate archer’s bow.

The eagle and the deity placidly soared in loops overhead that Leo—inspired—doctored into a luminously endless galactic sky. Indeed, he obscured the boundaries of the courtyard with a wave of his hand, creating a jungle. Startling caws of birds and small primates, moisture, heat, and smells of musk, detritus, exotic flora, and loam enveloped the audience. Wild creatures lurked in the distance.

“Although on the brink death, the elephant plucked a lotus from the lake and held it aloft as an offering to the deity,” Sofia continued. “Acknowledging the gesture, Lord Vishnu whirled his discus to stun the crocodile. He dismounted his eagle, and—this should be good, Len—grasping the crocodile’s jaws, he tore the creature apart.”

Guts spattered across the room and doused all who were near. Squeals, grunts, and laughter resounded.

Quietly amused, Sofia wiped her forehead and picked bloody bits of grizzle from her hair. Lord Vishnu, spotless despite the grisly conquest, flew on his eagle into the sky’s galactic radiance. The elephant, showered in flowers, trumpeted and assumed a kneeling stance. Sofia recited the last stanza of a prayer:

“In the early morning, I praise that great god who holds the conch and the discus with which he tore apart the crocodile to relieve the elephant’s great distress. He who removes all fear, him I praise so that the sins committed by me in previous births may be destroyed.”

Sofia placed her hands over her face because the words still made her cry.

“That was very sweet,” the ladies said. The men heartily applauded and pat Leo on the back because his son was so clever.

Excerpt from Chapter 9 Elephants, Eagles and Crocodiles from La Maga A Story about Sorcerers and Magi by Soror ZSD23 available from amazon.com 

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