Arden_Leigh_w_text1

Newly added to the backer rewards on the Magick Show Kickstarter is a place in Arden Leigh’s Myths & Magick class, a 4-week course on narrative magick and archetypal invocation. Arden is a practicing chaos magican and musician living in Los Angeles who Grant Morrison has described as his “magical heir.”

I asked Arden a few questions over email.

What is the Re-Patterning Project course and what should someone expect to get out of it?

The Re-Patterning Project is an 8-week course container that provides a comprehensive view of the way our human operating system forms the beliefs, mindsets, and patterns that inform our responses, habits, choices, worldviews, and ideas of what is possible. It is a multi-disciplinary approach to unearthing our core bugs and re-installing our behavioral patterns and frameworks, culled together with information and practices from cutting-edge trauma and addiction research, neuroscience, attachment theory, neuro-linguistic programming, Timeline Therapy… and a little bit of magick. It’s being handed the keys to deep self-awareness and integration of our past timeline so that we can fully meet our present and evolve to generate our ideal future. Graduates of the program report an overwhelming, often eyeball-melting slide into the life of their dreams about six to twelve months after the course ends, renewed excitement and engagement with life when they realize they have the ability to volley with reality and learn how to control their results, crystal clear manifestation energy for building their future (the result of untangling patterns imprinted by past trauma), the ability to predict how situations are going to play out based on the patterns present in them, and a sense of peace, capability, awareness, and badassery, as well as the ongoing will to live even in times that challenge it.

How many students do you teach at a time and it’s over Zoom?

Usually, it’s around a dozen. Lectures and group calls are both held over Zoom and there’s also a private Facebook group so participants can ask questions in between meetings or process the material that’s coming up for them. I also offer 1-1 work to those who are either current students or graduates of the course, to facilitate the rewiring of those patterns, especially if there are particularly stubborn ones or if they prefer facilitation over DIYing them.

Grant Morrison has called you his “magical heir” which is quite the wand to be dinged with, obviously. What does that mean, exactly?

Grant was extraordinarily generous to take me on as an apprentice. The apprenticeship was my idea; since we were already forming a friendship around our shared love of magick, and since around that time I’d managed a successful spell for the safe return of one of Grant’s cats, I suggested we add a more formal mentorship structure and that I could perhaps be of service to them in a spellcraft capacity that would help me develop my magickal skillset. Grant responded with a beautifully well-thought-out correspondence curriculum based on the Kabbalah’s Tree of Life, with homework, ritual exercises, and reading assignments based on each sphere. I complete the assignments on my own time and then report back with my thoughts, findings, and results. One day we’ll turn all this into an epistolary book, we hope, so that the curriculum we’re carving out as teacher and student can one day be made available to anyone who wants to replicate the journey — but we began five years ago and have only just wrapped up Netzach, so future readers may have to wait a bit as it’s likely to be a path that spans a large chunk of our lives.

You’re a musician, too. Can you tell the readers about Arden and the Wolves?

Arden and the Wolves is the solo project I created to contain all my songwriting. The music is mostly pop/rock, but I don’t limit myself in a genre as I use it as a narrative device to create the world that best suits whatever story I want to tell in the song or album. The next album, titled The Bourbon Room Sessions, leans more Southern gothic blues since the subject matter is heavy, dealing with the transmutation of deep-set patterns causing addiction and the grit it requires to pave the way back from the brink of death. At this point, all of my albums are hypersigils, and my songs are individual works of narrative magick, whether I’ve been fully aware of it at the time of writing them or not. I’ve learned I need to be extraordinarily careful with what I sing into being, so going forward any musical work I create gets approached first and foremost as a work of magick. The magick hits hardest around the time of their release, and following that the albums stand as monuments to the aspects of reality I’ve altered in writing them.