A new Old Key

After I started giving serious thought to creating a Silver Key, a key found its way to me. Of course it did. Keys like to find their way to me. Always have.

This one is actually a key I've wanted for many years. I spent a lot of time as a child reading books about Harry Houdini, watching David Copperfield specials, and dreaming of someday being an apprentice to Blackstone the Magician. This is a particular type of key I eventually gave up on the idea of ever having. It had to be the right one, and after that hadn't happened for a long enough period of time, I thought it just wouldn't.

Randolph Carter lost his key after he'd been an adult for too long. Maybe I found mine.

I'm still going to make that very special key for very special uses. This one is special in its own ways, and not just because of the particular things it was specifically created for.

Groups of occult practitioners can sometimes get a bit aggravated about wanting people to understand there's a solid difference between stage magic and occult magic. But is that difference as defined as we sometimes insist? My love of one was born of my love of the other. The psychology of ritual can be seen in the work of priests and priestesses, and also in the work of stage magicians. Both types of magic, from a practitioners view, are largely about exploring the unknown and making the "impossible" happen.

Yes, they serve different purposes. They have different foundations, skills, and goals. They are, in fact, Different Things. Those differences matter. But one should not be so easily dismissed because it isn't the other, and there are spaces where the two can play together.

The key remembers what it is meant to lock and unlock. It turns in my hand and, somewhere in space and time, something opens.