The BOTTOMLESS BAG bag paperback, complete with all 400 items available here!
PANIC!
The situation has become dire. Confusion, darkness, and the unknown surround you. You dig deep into your bag, hoping for something useful, knowing that the bag will give you whatever fate decides.
Will you find help?
Will you find confusion?
Will you find glazed nuts?
This is the chance you take with BOTTOMLESS BAG!
Close your eyes
Reach inside
FROM WITHIN
This grouping was selected at random from a communally generated master list of four hundred. It is my hope that these ten items can be used as a forecast or guide to your week ahead. You can also use a ten sided dice to turn each weeks items into a miniature oracle. Whether you choose to take these items literally or metaphorically, it’s up to you to find how these things may help. For a more thorough overview go to Introducing Bottomless Bag and Bottomless Bag 01.
Item 201
#5: FRINGE
An ornamental trim
Item 202
#34: FOLDING TABLE
Portable support
Item 203
#32: SAND
Too many grains to count
Item 204
#261: COWBOY HAT
A western accessory
Item 205
#135: CANVAS
A material of utility
Item 206
#57: FERN
A common houseplant
Item 207
#163: SUNGLASSES
Eye shade
Item 208
#216: GARNISH
For a natural presentation
Item 209
#225: EMPTY BASKETBALL COURT
The potential for play
Item 210
#193: WALKING SHOES
A needed cushion underfoot
DIGGING DEEPER
Welcome back, brave wanderers! As we ease back into our regularly scheduled program I wanted to share something special this week in DIGGING DEEPER. We, the Hallowed’s own Revelator and soothsayer Keats Ross wrote an amazing foreword to the freshly released BOTTOMLESS BAG book and I felt that nothing could be better for kicking off our second half.
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“You could call it Amateur Magick. You could call it Mundane Magick. You could call it absolute bullshit. All of that is up to you.”
– Eric J. Millar
I don’t call it bullshit. I would call it revelatory, incendiary, astounding…however, my ostentatious wordy-winks belittle the actual point. It’s remarkably usual. And that’s what tethers. Not some five dollar vernacular piecemealed for fancy folk. This is right pauper prophetic. This magick is for the tumbling, and the doubtful.
Yet, “mundane” screams volumes above it’s otherwise nullified connotation. “Mundane Magick” bleeds of the caster’s (Eric J. Millar) transcendent humility. It’s easy to make Eric blush, to swell a rosacea; a rosy-cheeked shy. But demeanor is part and parcel to such an illuminating work, and Eric’s humble nature oozes within every pen stroke. In the few years I’ve known the man, he has managed to conjure some of the most important modern oracular works within my own praxis. He would tell you it’s “routine”, that it’s 90 minutes a day while his child sleeps that these extraordinary gut-punches push out of him. That it’s just “mundane.”
As a constant collaborator with the man, I can tell you that he’s simply found a psychic stitch – a lush evergreen of value and focus he finds amidst his child rearing. And the “other” speaks through him fluently during these meditations! But not just in the anarchic doodle, also in the ascription of definition in each sketch. He is centered, sound, and for a short time a day he can relay heavy communion with great wisdom seldom found in most soothseers. Austin Osman Spare had the neither/neither, and Eric has the quiet/quiet. Yet, all the while, Eric grins off his creations with a shrug and a hum.
“It’s part of why I like the term “operator” for what I do as opposed to “practitioner” or whatever other magical titles others choose to use… The rhythmic beat of those operations match my heart.”
– Eric J. Millar
It’s within this simplicity, this beauty within the usual, he has inspired my own need to touch my toes to earth. The trick is mundane ain’t actually mundane, and that’s the magick. Eric has said that the difference between “routine and ritual is intention.” He would know.
Everyday for the last few years, Eric has been an incredible light to my own form of magicks. I call my practice Divergent Magick, as my search for the confluence of mental health and spiritual practice, yet Eric has been there to hear the terrors and toils as I find the earths beneath my divergence. I refuse to consider his accompaniment in my journey as “mundane,” knowing that’s what he’d remark to be unobtrusive. The fact is he’s a part of my ritual. Our practices, nay operations, are allowed to foster and frolic together. That’s the beauty. There is no dogma. There is only communion. Mr. Millar has been nothing less than a meteor for my growth as a human, and he’s got the heavy lush to fill such wells. And we can call it whatever we want.
Through my many years of seeking and speaking to luminaries in these esoteric measures via the Pragmagick podcast, Eric has sang louder and more somatic to me than most. He’s the first to know, to listen, to dispel, to enhance. Because he is his own toils and troubles, he is his beautiful triumph that is his family, he is utterly organic as both perennial student and omnipotent curmudgeon. This is the sort of ghost that echoes to me most: The ghost of burned and earned triumph; the great Redeemer. And I’ve had the pleasure of commanding a connection within this new dawn of his Outlet Press channeling. For that I am forever grateful and I forever glean still.
Eric has told me that Bottomless Bag will be his last output under Outlet Press, a pen name he had been using for years to publish a deluge of wonderful works. It’s quite fitting that the third installment of his oracular trilogy would be the culmination of all the works prior. It’s the piscean age of Outlet Press, indeed.
The Disruption Generator left-hooked the overwrought academia of the arcana; The Impossible Game became the Mobius Strip of inward revelation due to trials and tribulations. And here, in the Season Of The Witch, 2020, The Bottomless Bag takes all that lay before. Yet, The BB is a communal effort in one of the hardest, cross-platform years in our living history. When we all are cowering to bureaucracies, to civil unrest, to pandemics, Eric found a way to make our daily statics sing with magick.
The concept is simple: oracular components divined by lists of otherwise mundane objects, provided by numerous folks in the We The Hallowed sphere. The ascription, I find, is where the darkstar really churns: Each item, illustrated by Eric, is ascribed a simple, revelatory definition. It’s the marriage of these communal components, Eric’s whimsically crude and stark illustrations, and his subtle read of otherwise ordinary objects that allow us a divinity this oh so haunting year.
That’s 400 components of mundane clairvoyance. 400 illustrations and erudite descriptions of things that surround you every day. Roll the dice and animate the placid items that stare, that we are all now arrested to. Surrender to the idea that although we are relatively static, stationed and sullen, the objects we see most around us feel the same. Animate. And whether you call this an amateur practice, or a mundane magick, it certainly ain’t bullshit. We echo still, living ghosts reverbing in our sanctuaries, now loud as ever. Let’s give credence to the entombed tools we take for granted. Grant them. Animate them.
And Haunt On, through art and ideas and praxis, Haunt On.
Keats Ross
Static and Quarantined, 2020
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That’s all for now. Come back next week for another dig into the BOTTOMLESS BAG.
As always:
SEE WHAT’S INSIDE
DIG DEEP
AND
HAUNT ON
The BOTTOMLESS BAG bag paperback, complete with all 400 items available here!
ABOUT ERIC J. MILLAR
Eric is the artist and writer behind Outlet Press. He has published over 20 books over the last four year with VACA: Outlet Illustrated, Volume 5 being his most recent publication. He is also the creator of The Disruption Generator, the randomly generated bibliomantic oracle, and The Impossible Game, a cleromantic oracle, both published in partnership with We The Hallowed.
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