"Mistymorning, clouds in the sky
Without warning, the Wizard walksby
Casting his shadow, weaving his spell
Funny clothes,tinkling bell

Nevertalking

justkeeps walking

spreadinghis magick.

Evilpower disappears

Demons worry when the Wizard is near
He turnstears into joy
Everyone's happy when the Wizard walks by

Nevertalking

Just keeps walking
Spreading his magick

Sunis shining, clouds have gone by

All the people give a happy sigh

Hehas passed by, giving his sign

Leftall the people feeling so fineNevertalking

Just keeps walking
Spreading his magick."

-TheWizard, Black Sabbath

You stand at thedoor to the Wizard's Inner Sanctum.

It is large andornate, with Celtic knots behind ivy and acorns and holly berries allcarved in red oak, but with the real thing growing over it. As itswings to, a heady potpourri of scents swirl around you, rich andearthy. The room is all wrought of stone, uneven bricks covered bytapestries and rugs adorned with unfamiliar symbols and fantasticmythological scenes. All manner of strange apparatus catch therippling candlelight at odd angles, casting dancing fairies of lightaround the room. The shelves upon which the equipment sits arecluttered also with countless dusty tomes and scrolls containingancient knowledge forgotten by all but the most wise.

A half-dome of glassdominates the upper left side of the room, and a massive telescopeextends out one window. A giant astrolabe takes the place of a clockon the farthest wall, and directly under it, you see him.

Sitting behind hisdesk, the Wizard pets his cat as he looks at you under long, bushyeyebrows. His hat extends high above his head, a symbol of hisconnection to the heavens, and his long, white beard reaches to thefloor, showing his groundedness to the earth and his great wisdomfrom the long years he took to acquire it.

He regards youcoldly for a moment, sizing you up.

Then, his cat leapsfrom his lap, and rubs up against your leg, purring.

He smiles, his darkand threatening persona melting away into a soft, warm glow.

"Welcome, friend!"he says.

SoYou've Always Wanted to Meet a Wizard?

Well, now you have.

Allow me tointroduce myself before we get going here. You're going to want toknow who you're dealing with if you've picked up a book with a titlelike this one.

I am the WanderingWizard Simon Kalimanus.

Before we explainhow I qualify as a Wizard, we may have to figure out exactly whatqualifies as the definition for such a charged word. Thatword, "Wizard," comes from the English word "wise," which inturn is from a number of other ancestor languages, in most of whichthe words are very similar.

The word itself hasa lot of meanings. The first and foremost of these has to be the mostobvious, then, based on its etymology: someone who exhibits thecharacteristic of wisdom.

...So now we haveanother definition to work on.

"Wisdom" isdefined in several ways. First is having the quality of being wise,meaning to have a knowledge of what is right and wrong, what is trueand false, and having one's action judged by higher conscience andjustice for all involved. In short,"sagacity, discernment, or insight."

The opposite of"wise" is "foolish."

The next definitionwe see is "scholarly learning," which is not necessarily thedefinition I agree with most.Intelligence and Wisdom are very often confused with each other, andwith Knowledge. A proper I.Q. Testdoes not include questions you would find on your homework or whichrequire any kind of book learning. They mainly include patternrecognition, memory, and reading comprehension and cognition.

Let's define ourterms one more step further then:

Knowledge: Meansthe learning you have acquired; the things you know about.

Intelligence:Means your ability to usethe knowledge you have to figure out patterns in things and deducefurther information or synthesize meaningful new ideas. It's thethings you not just know about,but the things you comprehend.Sherlock Holmes explained that a skilled logician could in theorydeduce the existence of an Atlantic or Pacific ocean, without havingpreviously known of the existence of one or the other, from but asingle drop of water. Any internet troll can have knowledge they readout of a book, but someone with real intellect has the ability tofigure out new thingsbased on that knowledge.

Wisdom:Means having the Knowledge and Intelligence to rightly divide theinput you receive from the world around you and make the rightdecision for the most possible interests.King Solomon, to whom the Old Testament books of Ecclesiastes,Proverbs, and the Song of Songs are attributed,was widely considered to be the wisest man in history.When two women came to him, both claiming to be the mother of onebaby, he immediately ordered the baby be cut in half. Now, I've seena lot of overzealous atheists try to use this to point out the evilsin the Bible,but the story doesn't end there. The plan was never to kill the baby,and it was never even in any danger, because this caused the realmother to wail out in sorrow and provedthatshe was the one to give it to.

The seconddefinition of "Wizard" that I can find is "a man who hasmagical powers, especially in legends and fairy tales."This is something we'll get into, but yes, it applies to me and thetype of Wizard we're mentioning in the title as well.

The lastis someone who is particularly skilled at something.

It's probably goingto take the length and breadth of this book to explain how all ofthis applies to me, but let's get some things straight right off thebat.

Thisbook isand should be completelyaccessible to anyone, regardless of your current beliefs. I'm goingto claim to have been thrownup against a wall by a demon inthis book, but I promise you that I can explain everything I'm goingto say in such a way that even the staunchest atheist could easilysay "oh, yeah, I don't know if I necessarily agree that you'recorrect, but what you're saying doesn't actually conflict withanything that I currently believe, or my current worldview." I'llbreak down each event in a way that makes sense both with and withoutthe framework of magick or the supernatural.

That's a big claim,I know. But it's going to take the whole book, so if you don'tbelieve what I'm saying, remember...

...thetitle of this book is How to Become a Wizard, butin parentheses after that there's a (With or WithoutMagick). The magickpart isn't necessary, because it isn't real.

Nothing is. But,we'll get there.

SoYou've Always Wanted to BE a Wizard?

You're in goodcompany, Harry.Lots of people grew up reading the Lord of the Rings and other booksabout swords and sorcery and Arnold Schwarzenegger murdering DarthVader. From that, lots of people developed a desire to become likethese mythical people, capable of hurling fireballs from theirfingertips, summoning or banishing spirits with a word, and healingtheir allies with a touch.

Some people actuallybelieve that it's possible to do this in the real world.And lots, lots more believethat it isn't.

In this book, I'mgoing to teach you how to actually become a Real Wizard, in the realworld, in the truest sense of the word.

Andthe trick is, I'm going to do it whether or not you believein magick.

Introducingthe Wandering Wizard Simon Kalimanus

As a kid, I had tworecurring dreams. One, in which my father died and I had to bury him.This dream stopped the day he, the only human being who ever trulyloved me with their whole heart and soul, and who I loved similarlyin return, died.

The other was agiant squid-headed monster on the bottom of the ocean calling myname, a full decade or so before I discovered the work of H.P.Lovecraft.

When I was five, Itaught myself to read,and by the time I reached first grade I had a tenth-grade readinglevel.Within a year I had taught myself to write in print, cursive,Futhark,and all of Tolkien's fantasy scripts.

Atseven, I taught myself to code on a Commodore 64.I had already memorized hundreds of passages from dozens of classicalauthors. The pastor of our little country church used to have to stophis sermons every few minutes to answer my questions, and because Ikept answering ones he didn't intend to be answered.

He never really didanswer my questions, or respond to my answers, just laughing them offand having my parents take me out to the Sunday School room.

Mybrother noticed that I was a wacky little goober, and decided tointroduce me to the world of Magick. In training with him and histeachers, I learned how to meditate, communicate with my spiritguides, and feel the pulse of nature.

My training didn'tlast very long.

Later that year, Iwas kidnapped by my mother. My stepfather held my mouth shut whileshe called my father in front of me and told him she had murdered meand buried parts of my body all over a lonely field somewhere inCanada.

My stepfather wasthe first personI used magick to destroy utterly.

Mymother married another disgusting animal later on who had beenaccused of beating and sexually assaulting his wheelchair-boundex-wife. Although my mother hadwon custody over me, my dad heard about this and sent me a planeticket back home, and my sister and some very kind members of ourchurch helped me get to the airport.

I used a Britishaccent whenever any strangers would talk to me for some reason. Ithink I felt like my mom had thugs out trying to nab me and bring mehome.

At eleven, I enteredmy first haunted house with a group of friends.We survived, but we never spoke again. My sister, who followed meback to New England shortly afterwards to reconnect with her child'sfather, used this experience to introduce me to her pastor and get meinto church again. I was made to watch Billy Graham's terrifyingThe Thief in the Night seriesof films, and was scared enough to make a profession of faith inJesus Christ on the spot. I was baptized immediately after, followinga very large-breasted girl in a white dress, which was in fact thebest part of the experience.

Iimmediately began to realize that the religion was silly, and clearlyhad the hallmarks of a cult. Part of this was the fact that I wasn'tallowed to know anyone who wasn't part of our sect, or to do anythingnot considered "holy living" by the pastor. Dissent would lead toeverybody thinking Satan had his hooks in you, which further led tobeing shunned by every single person you knew.

Theonly problem was, at the time, I simply hadn't considered the optionthat maybe God didn't exist, and this religion actually turned out toreally closely follow the most respected document in most of the past2000 years of history,so I forced myself to follow it as closely as possible until itbecame part of me... and then I really felt the presence of God, andbecame very serious about my religion... even though nobody else atthe church could see that I just wanted to be the best servant of GodI possibly could, and treated me like I was the worst possiblesinner, I would still spend hours, morning and evening, praying andreading my Bible.

I went to anAccelerated Christian Education school, a type of communal homeschoolwith a curriculum based on religious comic books. The entire studentbody were (at any given time) between ten and thirty students fromK-12 in two rooms at the back of Calvary Baptist Church inMiddletown, Rhode Island.

Ibecame a master of apologetics, studying world religions and theproofs of their invalidity. I went to debates all over the country,and I was always verysuccessful. I can honestly say that, if you use the entiretyof the Bible, Old and New Testaments,the Independent Fundamentalist Baptists are probably the closestmodern theology to what the words in the Bible literallysay.Thus, I stuck with it.

Years down the line,I finally turned my powers of deduction and my knowledge ofapologetics on to my own sect, and rejected it.

However,everyone I knew was heavily religious, and my life in a cult hadn'tprepared me for the outside world. I also was afraid that God hadto exist, and if he did, theonly way any of us had any idea about him was because of ancienttexts that describe him, but which can't be verified at all orcompared for truth in any way. Because I believed my religion wasobjectively the closest to what the most accepted of these textssaid, I decided to try to stay in it and reform it from the insiderather than leave it outright.

I also decided to domy own studies. I wasn't learning what I needed to in school as theinformation was obviously biased,so I took it upon myself to learn literature, art, highermathematics,and all levels of science on my own.

Ialso continued my solitary studies into the occult and magick. Duringthis time, I primarily studied what modern folks have come to referto as "Defense Against the Dark Arts,"as my studies into Sun Tzu's The Art of War andMusashi's Book of Five Rings hadindicated the only way to truly win a battle is to know your enemy.

And as a Christian,my enemy was Satan.

It was when I wassixteen that a boy that went to my church and school disappeared.Some of the other boys knew about my secret studies and brought me tohis house one day to talk to his mother. She pleaded with me to helpfind her son, and that became the first of many investigations intoso-called "Satanic" cults.

It was also aroundthis time that my dad died of the cancer that had turned my oncestrong, energetic father into a hallucinating skeleton from almostthe entire time I had been back with him.

At eighteen, I wentto college. I probably could have gone to any school I wanted, butNewport Baptist Academy was unaccreditedand my family was poor as dirt. As such, I went to Atlantic BaptistBible College, a seminary tucked away in the woods of Chester,Virginia.

Whileat seminary, some strange, supernatural events started to take place,and with time their frequency dramatically increased. It was there Imet a lifelong colleague, who I'll call here by one of his manynames: The Blue Wizard Chasm. We worked together to help people whowere experiencing these things to understand they weren't goingcrazy, and that they weren't alone.

And then we'd go Fthat S up.

Theadministration of the college didn't appreciate our efforts, and didtheir best to silence me. We kept our hands clean, so they couldnever finger us for anything.In order to help surreptitiously continue doing what we were doing,we gave ourselves a special name to ward off suspicion. Even thoughnone of us had ever met before this, we had all previously used theterm "funk," and variations thereof,almost all our lives to refer to the supernatural. Thus, we calledourselves "The Funk Club."

Westarted meeting regularly in private to discuss the events that wereseemingly happening every day now all over campus. All thisculminated into something we have come to refer to as "The Night ofa Thousand Hells," which we will definitely getto in a later chapter.

During this time, Ialso became the pastor of Dutch Gap Baptist Church for a brief periodduring a schism between the pastor, a Calvinist, and some churchmembers who didn't think babies should burn in Hell.

Eventually,just as I was about to graduate, the school destroyed all of myresearch into my thesis,and expelled me. The real reason they got me on was because I hadgone into the library on a day when it was open and unlocked, turnedthe heat up, wrote and printed my weekly 1500 word paper, and left.The reason they gave me was that I broke into the library andtampered with school property.

The"official" reason, which they sent home to my family, was"Witchcraft."

Without either ofthe other explanations.

That's okay, though,because I got the chance to flip a table before I left, and as Iwalked out, everyone hopped in their cars and followed me off campusin a farewell parade. Some offered me money, handshakes, and hugs.They also used to sneak me back on campus in the trunks of theircars, and we eventually worked together to destroy the college forembezzling upwards of a million dollars from the families of thestudents.

Today, the campus isa ghost ruin in the woods.

For a few years, thestudents from ABBC spread the word about me, and I started gettingcalled from people all over the United States to come help them withimminently dangerous supernatural problems.

Afterone event where a girl possessed by a sexually vampiric entity triedto "assault" me to death,we met at a Denny's in Manassas, VA and decided to officially form anorganization to do what we were doing on a professional level. Wecalled it ESPER, the society for Extraordinary Supernatural PhenomenaExplored and Revealed.

Unfortunately,almost immediately, the group fell apart. Some decided the thingsthey had seen were too terrifying to continue dealing with them. Somewere pressured by Christian families to stop their "evil" ways. Afew of them killed themselves or just went silent, too afraid to dealwith reality now that they knew just how real that reality could get.

I wasn't about to gohome, so I went to the home of my best friend, who had justgraduated, in Saint Louis. Unfortunately, the school had alreadycontacted him before I arrived and handed him their one-wordexplanation as to why I had been expelled. He had a pregnant wife athome that was a very ardently pious believer with a nervousdisposition.He gave me his grandfather's old car and sent me on my way.

I lived in that caron the streets of Saint Louis for two years.

Inearly went insane from loneliness during this time, and tried tocommit suicide by becoming a superhero. We'll talk more about thatlater, too.

When I finally hadsaved up enough money to get back, I tried going home, but I foundonly hatred and distrust, evenfrom my own family. My sister's husband took me aside and told meprivately "If you ever do any of that black magick stuff in myhouse, around my kids, I'll frigging kill you."I was made to sleep on a one-inch thick egg crate mattress under mysister's kitchen table like a dime-store Harry Potter,while her kids homeschooled at the table above me.

Assoon as I made enough money to escape, I did. Shutting off everyonefrom my previous life, I began to travel and do what I could to helppeople change their lives for the better. Since then, I haven't oftenfound too many supernatural problems to deal with, but I have mainlyspent time among minority groups helping young people developphysical, mental, creative, and spiritual skills.

Iwas married somewhere in there, for about a decade. We'll get to thattoo.

InMay of 2016, I declared myself to be the Wizard Simon Kalimanus,casting off entirely the thirty-six year old boy I had once been inorder to completely embody exactly the man I had always desired to besince my brother first read the stories of J.R.R. Tolkien to me as achild.

I'verun an animation company and several video game production companies,I've lived on a boat in Pier 39 of San Francisco and donePirate-themed tours of the Bay from it, I've formed tutoring programsto help children learn to program and to connect artists with jobsdoing what they love for local companies. I've officiated weddings,funerals, and baptisms, performed exorcisms and cleansings andsummonings and banishments, I've done battles with humans, demons,angels, and gods, and I've always come out on the other side assomething better than I was before. I've preached the Word of God andwon hundreds of souls to Christ, and debated the religious with theirown books until they had nothing more to say.

So now you know atleast who I have been.

Itell this story not to prove to you that I'm something special. Nowthat we've said all that, I'll be explaining to you throughout mostof the rest of this book how there's really nothing special about me.

Youknow who's special?

Letme tell you.

I'vebeen studying the occult for a very long time... over thirty years,in fact. I've studied almost every extant text of every possiblereligion, philosophy, and tradition of belief available to me. I'veread the theology of cultures throughout all recorded eras, and thegreatest minds of science from Isaac Newton to Richard Feynman, andI'm here to tell you that I know one thing very clearly.

Explainingthat one thing to you is going to be the primary focus of this book,and will take the entire thing.

Iknow the identity of the One True God, the one spoken of in the Bibleand the Q'uran and the Torah... the one who is responsible forcreating the Universe.

Doyou want to know too?

...

.

...

..

...

.

...

...

..

.

..

...

...It's YOU.

TheRoad Not Taken

ByRobert Frost

Tworoads diverged in a yellow wood,

Andsorry I could not travel both

Andbe one traveler, long I stood

Andlooked down one as far as I could

Towhere it bent in the undergrowth;

Thentook the other, as just as fair,

Andhaving perhaps the better claim,

Becauseit was grassy and wanted wear;

Thoughas for that the passing there

Hadworn them really about the same,

Andboth that morning equally lay

Inleaves no step had trodden black.

Oh,I kept the first for another day!

Yetknowing how way leads on to way,

Idoubted if I should ever come back.

Ishall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhereages and ages hence:

Tworoads diverged in a wood, and I—

Itook the one less traveled by,

Andthat has made all the difference.

NOTE: For the pdf version, which includes footnotes to give you a deeper understanding of the real world of Wizardry and how to unlock it in your own life, head over to https://the-wizards-tales.itch.io/howtobeawizard