24 Jul The Wizard Devin Person
The Wizard Devin Person
LECTURE
So Let It Be Written: The Magic of Metafiction
You are reading the abstract for the lecture “So Let It Be Written: The Magic of Metafiction,” which will be delivered by the American wizard Devin Person at the 2025 Occulture Conference. Should you choose to attend this lecture, you will be exposed to key ideas from Person’s book “So Let It Be Written: A Wizards’ Guide to Metafiction” exploring how magicians can both write as an act of magic and view magic as a way of co-authoring their life in collaboration with the creative forces we call entities, deities, or perhaps the Universe itself. By referencing the meta-context of their text, metafictional creators like Grant Morrison, Italo Calvino, and Charlie Kaufman pierce the veil of ordinary reality and reflect the “as above” of the author’s plane of existence in the “so below” of the text itself. These works offer a model for breaking our own fourth wall, viewing ritual as a form of foreshadowing, and conversing with the characters we create.
Person’s self-referential lecture will of course be a piece of metafiction itself, situated within the larger context of the Occulture conference, as its participants take part in writing their own story into the reality of the event…
Bio
Devin Person lives his life as an unfolding answer to the question, “What would a modern day wizard do?” Viewing “the wizard” as a unique cultural object blurring the line between the historic magical praxis of the Western esoteric tradition and the popular fantasies of iconic characters like Dumbledore and Gandalf, Person’s magic mixes silliness and seriousness to create radical, yet accessible, experiences. From granting wishes for commuters on the New York City subway to hosting the ongoing-ritual-disguised-as-a-podcast, This Podcast is a Ritual, Person seeks the sublime in the surreal and the magic in the mundane. He is the author of Mysteries of the Deep, Mystic Tokes: Magical Guidance for Cannabis Experiences, and So Let It Be Written: A Wizards’ Guide to Metafiction (with co-author Eric Millar), a self-aware piece of metafiction which bends the genre in on itself as an act of magical inquiry.
