Cartoon Magick

incomplete draft. last updated 2025-10-19

In this blog post I will explain what cartoon magick is and provide a curriculum for learning and practicing cartoon magick.

Definition

Cartoon magick is the practice of cartooning as a means of navigating emotional, psychological, and spiritual territory.

Cartoons live in the liminal space between realistic imagery and symbolic language. Thus cartoons have the ability to serve as a bridge between these two worlds and also as a gateway to other worlds that are only accessible through such liminal zones.

Magick (with a k to differentiate from stage magic) is applied spirituality. Approximately speaking, magick is to spirituality what engineering is to science. Many practicing magicians would object to that definition of magick. They might even describe it as cartoonish. However it’s a good enough definition for our purposes here. So we’ll leave it at that for now and you can look up more nuanced definitions of magick on your own if you wish.

Lightheartedness

In addition to the definition above, the name “cartoon magick” also has a humorous double meaning as something like magick that is exaggerated and non-serious like a cartoon, i.e. not real magick. This interpretation is a useful perspective that helps keep the practice lighthearted.

Cartoons bring humor and playfulness where it is not typically found, which provides openings to new places that would otherwise be closed off. If magick (or the broader domain of things labeled as “woo”) is difficult for you to take seriously, cartoons can act as a sort of permission slip that let you engage with the territory anyway.

In fact, magick often works better when you don’t take it too seriously. It’s a bit. It’s a bit you are committing to, but a bit nonetheless. Cartoons can make this apparent contradiction easier to navigate.

The Curriculum

The following curriculum is my own recommended path for learning cartoon magick. You should find your own path, but the curriculum laid out here provides a useful structure that you can follow as much or as little as you wish. You can treat it as a linear sequence or as a choose-your-own-adventure landscape.

Foundations

Practical

Each of the following three books contains a set of exercises that provide important experiential insights into the nature of visual perception, conceptual perception, and the playful navigation of these two perceptual modes. These books are not specifically about magick per se, but they provide the foundational understanding of perception and cartooning that will be applied in subsequent practices.

  1. Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain by Betty Edwards
  2. Making Sense of Nonsense by Raymond Moody
  3. Cartooning: Philosophy and Practice by Ivan Brunetti

Theoretical

Steven Lehar’s A Cartoon Epistemology

Practices

Optical meditation

The finger that points at the moon is not the moon. Likewise, the reflection of the moon on the surface of the lake is also not the moon. But the reflection tells you something about the appearance of the moon, while the finger does not.

Optical meditation is meditation on the visual appearance of things as both reflections of an underlying reality that is unseen and projections of one’s expectations about that underlying reality. It is a practice of experiencing images in different ways through intention.

[Rabbit duck optical illusion]

Using the famous rabbit duck illusion as an example, you can practice switching between seeing the rabbit and seeing the duck. Practicing this perceptual shift gives you greater perceptual freedom.

[Metatron’s cube]

Other examples of optical meditation include using Metatron’s Cube to visualize all of the Platonic solids.

Relevant books:

Doodling

[TODO]

Relevant books:

Visual writing

[TODO]

Relevant books:

Tarot

[TODO]

Simplifying

[TODO]

Relevant books: