Re-enchanting the Workplace

Magical Resistance in the Capitalist Wasteland

Sitting here at my desk, slightly chilly under the unnatural spectrum of florescent lights and the indistinct hum of office hardware, I am experiencing a deep melancholy. Maybe melancholy isn’t the right descriptor, because typically melancholy stems from an unknown cause. In my specific case, the cause is quite clear: wasting away in the capitalist grind until I retire after my best years are over is setting quite a mood.

Dear reader, are you also feeling that mood?

It’s easy to feel helpless, especially in the current climate where it seems our choices are rather limited. Bills need to be paid, and it’s quite hard to enjoy life much without the basic necessities, which of course cost money. If you are living in America, like me, you are probably quite aware that the basic human necessities are currently an all-you-can-eat buffet for corporations to profit off your bodily requirements.

This isn’t really an essay on the evils of capitalism, at least not directly. Instead, I want to take a more practical approach for the office occultist, that of resistance from within the system. How do we take back our hours spent at a desk and reclaim our agency? How do we re-enchant our working hours?

Preliminaries

Many of us take for granted that things just “are the way they are” and there is nothing that can be done to change it. This is an attitude encouraged by capitalists to foster complacency. Why bother trying to change anything when it’s not going to have any effect on the future? Despite seeming hopeless on the surface, there have actually been many improvements to the lives of the working class that have been made over the last century¹, and while the plight of workers has stagnated in the last few decades, workers are starting to reclaim their leverage as Covid workforce shortages have created employers desperate to find employees at almost any cost.

As folk of magical persuasion, we are used to working within systems, but not engaging with or embracing the dogma of that system at the cellular level (looking at the chaos wizards out there). We get in, do what we need to do, and then get out. That’s what we aim to do here. Very few of us can leave the system, but that doesn’t mean we have to embrace it utterly as the one true way. Maintaining spiritual agency is key to navigating the capitalist wasteland.

The jig is up when it comes to the workforce placidly accepting 40 (or often many more) hours per week of labor in order to attempt to make ends meet. The 40-hour workweek was predicated on a single-income household where women were expected to do the household chores and childcare while the husband was away at work. Times have changed since then, and now we have exponentially less time to undertake basic household maintenance, care for our children or cook dinner after working all day. While we still need to pay the bills, fewer and fewer people are happy about the prospect of wasting the best years of their life behind a desk or on a production floor and then scrambling with what little free time they have left to just keep the house up. Magically speaking, the glamor is fading, and fading fast. The premise of capitalism rests on the exploitation of our time and energy to produce wealth, literally to work is to become the capital of a capitalist (hint: if you have no capital, you are not a capitalist but instead a cog in that system). When we are squeezed and stretched in many directions, the idea of being the capital in the capitalist system doesn’t sit well with many of us.

It helps that society’s sentiment towards work is changing on a large scale. Not only does this provide a bit of comfort that we aren’t walking this road alone, but it also provides energy to put towards future resistance work. The changing collective unconscious² is both an indicator of current sentiment and a reservoir for moving the zeitgeist forward. Before we can resist in ways small and big, we must mentally reject that the shape of our lives must be described by capitalist ideas.

Practical Magick

One of these ideas is that our worth is linked to hours worked. In this view, the implication is that creativity and leisure are therefore worthless unless they are done in the service of making money. We have been inundated in our personal lives by constant prompts to only do things that will make us money in one way or another. We see this doctrine manifested in the employee who brags about working long hours with little sleep or the person who proudly responds to an email at 9 pm. These days, the doctrine of monetization often manifests as “entrepreneurial spirit” or the ever-present side hustle. For people who have fully embraced this idea, no aspect of life isn’t an opportunity to make money. Unfortunately, this is how we’ve ended up with coin-operated water fountains and for-profit healthcare. It’s unsurprising that American capitalism ultimately evolved to its current manifestation, given the puritan worldview that it grew from. If idleness was the domain of the devil, the only way to godliness was to work. Clearly, this is an idea that was readily embraced by the so-called job creators.

Our first act of resistance will be to reject this doctrine. To reclaim our minutes and seconds as belonging to us, not to a dollar value, is to allow us time to embody our purest unmitigated Self. If it is possible, do so during work hours. Write, draw and research at your desk. If your work situation is such that you cannot risk being caught not doing work, make sure to give yourself ample time at home to do whatever you please. Additionally, make yourself unavailable during non-work hours. Enchant profusely towards this aim if the mundane methods aren’t an option for you.

You might notice that I rarely go into detail on the nitty-gritty of how to enchant for something. Mainly, this is because I believe that the methods don’t matter in achieving your magical work. In short, it all works. I do, however, want to bring your attention in this case to working with Hermes/Mercury. As the god of liars, tricksters, and thieves as well as commerce, working with Mercury might provide some interesting opportunities for making space for non-work activities while at work. For a deeper dive into working with Hermes/Mercury, check out my previous article here.

We could learn a thing or two by imitating Hermes at work. Hermes is clever, and we must be too so that we can navigate through the wasteland without losing ourselves or our source of income. We will be required to wear many masks, present many identities. As Aleister Crowley said, change equals stability³.

Water Cooler Divination

Our second act of resistance is to flip the power dynamic and make work work for us. We can do this in part by taking the opportunity to sharpen our magical skills while we are at work since we have to be there anyway. There are tons of small and big opportunities to practice in the workplace, with a bit of ingenuity.

One of the easiest magical practices to undertake at work is divination. If you have the type of job where you can scribble, Geomancy⁴ is an incredibly practical and quick way to use divination in places where you can’t access your phone, but where you have pen and paper handy. I have often thrown down 4 lines of dots to create a figure that represents the energetic tone of a meeting I was stuck at. You can do it quite inconspicuously and it has the added benefit of providing some entertainment. If tarot is more your thing, there are several great phone apps that will allow you to check the cards⁵. Fun ways to use divination at work include the following:

• What is that secret upper management meeting really about?

• How will this secret meeting affect me?

• Why is the boss late every morning?

• Will the company go under this year?

• Should I look for another job?

• What was the real motive for the conversation I just had with Judy from HR?

Another great aspect of using divination at work is that things tend to move quickly enough that you can test your results and get a gauge for how accurate they are. I have often used horary astrology to discern the nature of an upper management meeting and then been able to judge my result that day, or the next day when an announcement was made.

Another form of resistance that you can easily adapt to workplace usage is sigil magick⁶. Sigils are easy to create, charge and place in prime spots on the fly. If you get caught it’s easy to pass them off as a doodle. Good usages for sigils at work are for protection from enemies, invisibility from prying managerial eyes, and enhanced compensation.

Here’s an example workday in the life of the enterprising wizard:

Our workplace wizard arrives at work exactly on time Monday morning. They don’t clock in a minute before the scheduled time. On the way to their desk, they greet their co-workers. Sitting down to start the day, they check their email and find that there is a meeting request from HR. Puzzled by this, they take the time to throw up a quick horary chart on their phone. They see that Jupiter is in the 10th house with an applying sextile from Venus in domicile, putting their mind at ease that this isn’t a meeting to worry about. They find there is enough time for a quick banishing ritual in the bathroom before the HR meeting, just in case. At 10 am they head down to the conference room and meet with HR. Apparently, they’ve been doing a great job and everyone is happy to work with them. Clearly, the sigil they created last week to increase their compensation has paid off (literally). After the meeting, they go back to their desk to finish up the work for the day. In the few hours left before quitting time, they discretely read some magical texts and start to formulate new ideas for sigils that will be launched in the coming days. At the end of the day, they draw up a quick geomancy chart to see what tomorrow holds in store. At the end of the day, they leave not a second past quitting time and go home to enjoy life to the best of their ability.

The shape that re-enchanting your specific workplace takes will vary from person to person. A factory floor job is not the same as a desk job, and so will take a bit of creative finagling to work out the best practical solution in each scenario. No matter what, the focus should be the balance between practicality and discretion. Unless it is your will to leave your current work situation, don’t do anything obvious that will get you fired. The point isn’t to lose your income, it is to take back some of your agency that is stripped away in the capitalist system that forces you to work almost all of your waking hours in order to survive.

Rewilding as Counterbalance

Are we really ok with a life hidden from the sky and sun 8 hours of every day? The idea sits uneasily with me. The artificiality of the workplace and the unnatural hierarchical and anti-human philosophies grind us down day after day. It is easy to become removed from our connection to the Earth and her cycles when we scarcely experience them. After the weekly grind, it is hard to muster the energy or time to look up and see the phase of the moon or notice the first chill air of autumn in the air.

Embracing our natural cycles and reasserting our physicality as part of the larger whole, is anathema to the capitalist cult. Nature keeps no office hours and cares not for quotas or goals. Time flows differently in the woods and the fields, the stars wheel overhead according to their own plans. We are a part of that beautiful chaos, not the world of 15 minutes breaks and mandatory overtime. To accept that as the natural order is to be cut from our true connection to the Earth and to ourselves.

The options, though, seem limited when you are forced to spend most of your hours at work. How can we rewild our life? First, become aware of the natural cycles and acknowledge the part they play. Day and night are the easiest, to begin with. Next, add in the seasonal changes, the equinoxes, and solstices. These mark the journey of the Sun in the sky over the course of the year. You may also choose to add in the Sun’s zodiacal journey and the phases of the Moon. Do what feels best for you, and don’t worry when you forget, this isn’t a competition!

In addition to marking and honoring the cycles of nature, visit wild places as often as possible. There is much to learn from observing and being a part of the natural environment. Not only is there much to learn, but it’s also actually great for your health⁷. Even just walking in your yard or nearby green space and seeing the plants, insects, and birds doing their thing is stress-relieving. There is also something special (but sometimes not comfortable) about being in wild spaces. It’s dirty, the temperature might not be pleasant and the humidity is sometimes unbearable, but it’s real. It’s not temperature controlled or dehumidified. Not to say there is anything wrong with those things (especially as a person living in Florida), but to think they are anything other than artificial is mistaken. Their loss in certain places would bring into sharp perspective the challenges of existing as human beings in certain climates.

To sum up, these are just a few things you can do to take back agency in a disenchanted world. They may be the whole picture or just small parts in your larger one, that is for you to decide. At whatever scale, resisting total assimilation into the corporate cult is deeply satisfying and liberating. Give it a try!

Do you have a story to share about how you’ve re-enchanted your workplace? Please comment! Remember, we are all in this together.

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1. The 40-hour workweek is a testament to the thousands who participated in strikes to fight for better working conditions and shorter work hours. Read about the history of the weekend here. I don’t think the article goes far enough in acknowledging the inherent problem of wasting away your life at work, but it’s by far the least fawning over capitalist ideas I’ve found amongst the mainstream articles online.

2. The collective unconscious is a term coined by psychologist Carl Jung to describe the shared archetypical experience of humanity on a universal scale.

3. In De Lege Libellum, Crowley writes, “Know that the Universe is not at rest, but in extreme motion whose sum is Rest. And this understanding that Stability is Change, and Change Stability, that Being is Becoming, and Becoming Being, is the Key to the Golden Palace of this Law.”

4. Despite the name, geomancy has nothing directly to do with rocks or the earth. Geomancy is instead divination by manipulating points drawn on paper into various figures that have meaning. The Art and Practice of Geomancy by John Michael Greer is a very accessible entryway into divination by geomancy. Online, the Digital Ambler has a wealth of information about divination via geomancy.

5. I like the Fool’s Dog apps, they have a ton of different decks you can get and are really affordable, with no ads. I really like the Tabula Mundi version. If you are worried that a digital deck won’t work like the real thing, put your worries aside. I’ve often had the same card present itself in the digital and real-world deck when asked the same question.

6. The ultimate OG guide to sigils can be found here.

7. https://qz.com/804022/health-benefits-japanese-forest-bathing/