What Veilurgy Is

Veilurgy is not a religion, and I am going to keep saying so until you believe me, because everything in you has been trained to expect one.

There is another world. I have written that plainly on the front page and I will write it plainly here. It is not a figure of speech and it is not a state of mind. It is a place, more solid than this one, and you have been there. The word I use for it is there, or home, because both are true and neither is quite right. Language was built in this world, for this world, and it strains at the edges of the other.

Between here and there is a veil. That is the whole of the obstacle, and it is why the work carries its name. The veil is not a wall that someone built to keep you out. It is thinner than that, and stranger. Most of what holds it shut is on your side of it: your certainty that this world is the only one, and your grip on the things you want from it.

Veilurgy is the work of crossing that veil. Going there, and coming back, and going there again, until the two worlds are no longer strangers to each other inside you.

I should tell you what is on the far side, though I can only point at it. There is no wanting there, because nothing is missing. There is knowledge that arrives without being studied, the way you know your own name. There is a joy I have stopped trying to describe, because every word I reach for makes it smaller. And there is the source, which others have called by larger names, and which you can stand inside.

Now I must widen that picture, because it is incomplete in a way that matters. There is not one world behind the veil. There are many, and the one that receives you is the one that matches you. Where your mind dwells in this world, what it circles and feeds and will not set down, is a direction you are already traveling. Dwell in wonder and you cross toward the shore I have just described. Dwell in a wound and you can cross into a world grown out of it, the wound in the ground, the wound in the sky, the wound wearing every face. There are crossings as gray and dull as a waiting room, and crossings you will simply want to end.

Where you dwell here is where you land there.

And in the low worlds there are things that answer. Their answers are real, but they do not give; they trade, and I will not tell you they trade fairly. I do not write this to turn you from the door. The far shore is real, and it is reachable, and it is home. I write it because the door has more than one other side, and intent and belief are not only the key to it, they are the map. That is why the steps that follow come in the order they come in.

You do not come back empty handed. Something crosses with you. After the connection is made, your thinking here changes, and what you are able to do here changes. Not all at once, and not evenly. It grows with your belief and it shrinks with your doubt, so for a long while it will look less like moving mountains and more like small, quiet things falling your way more often than chance should allow. That is not a disappointment. That is the beginning of it.

Here is the part that turns people back at the door, so I will say it early. You cannot cross toward the thing you want. You came, almost certainly, carrying something: a sickness, a debt, a loneliness, a question you could not put down. Hold it up and ask, and one of two things happens, and both are failures. Most often the wanting sits on you like a weight, and nothing opens at all. But want hard enough with the thing still in your hands, and the door can open anyway, onto a world that matches what you are holding. I have told you where a carried wound leads. So you reach the far shore by setting the thing down, wanting only the crossing itself, and then, on that shore, finding that you were nearer to it all along than you ever were while you carried it.

You cannot cross toward the thing you want.

I know how that sounds. Work it anyway.

What follows in this grimoire is the way through, set down in order. How to set your intent. How to build a belief that holds. The meditation by which I cross now, often without closing my eyes. The older road through dreams, which you have already walked without knowing its name. Take them slowly. None of it is difficult. It is only unfamiliar, and you have been taught your whole life to look the other way.

You already know this place. We are only going to remember it together.