Part 3: Dark Clarity: Divination and Spirit-Work During Exhaustion
People think clarity is a feeling, calm, focused, bright. And while that may be true from a Yang perspective, classical Daoist texts describe another kind of clarity as a counterpart:
bright clarity (明, ming): sharp, directional, upward
dark clarity (幽, you): diffused, subterranean, dreamlike
Most Western practitioners only know (and trust) the first. The the second is the one that appears when you’re in a Yin season, whether that is reflected through Winter, are in a liminal space, or are simply spent and exhausted. Yang is associated with knowledge; Yin is associated with knowing, or what is oracular and peripheral.
Part 1: Magic When You’re Exhausted: A Change in Spirit Governance
The assumption that magic relies on clarity and elevated mood is largely a Western inheritance, an artifact of the idea that power should be linear, solar, upward. But in animist and Daoist cosmologies, exhaustion and depression are not “blocks” or something “wrong”. They are transfers of jurisdiction. Your field is being resonating with a different set of custodians, entities or energies who specialize in depth, slowness, dark clarity, and the intelligence of submerged or subconscious-making.
To work magically in these seasons, you must work with the spirits, elements, and hexagrams that govern this terrain. Any other approach is simply the old problem: trying to perform Yang inside a Yin moment.
Low Mood as a Change in Cosmic Jurisdiction
There are phases when your rituals stop responding the way they did during your bright seasons. It’s not because the spirits “left,” and it’s not because your energy is “low vibration.” It’s because your field’s governance has shifted. (Arthur Edward Waite discusses the hierarchy and governance of spirits in The Occult Sciences).
In bright seasons, you’re under solar, upper-world or Yang influence: spirits of fire, breath, clarity, forward movement.
In depleted seasons, you fall under the care of Yin’s jurisdiction…