The autistic grimoire....

We could have a model for our internal monologue and a mental guide to surviving the autistic life in our very own book of magic....

Hi, I’m sorry it’s been so long…I’m here with another one and hopefully, I’ll be back next week too. Stay safe and thank you for your support as always.

********************

I’m not a psychologist, I’m not a doctor, I’m an autistic woman writing about the lived experience of living with the condition. I can’t give medical advice or guidance and if you are unsure of anything regarding your mental health, or you think you may be on the spectrum, I would guide you towards your own doctor for further information on what to do next. Although this touches on painful experiences in my own life, I am currently fully supported by both friends and family.

**********************

Wikipedia describes a grimoire as being -

“a textbook of magic, typically including instructions on how to create magical objects like talismans and amulets, how to perform magical spells, charms, and divination, and how to summon or invoke supernatural entities such as angels, spirits, deities and demons.”

Before you assume that I’m a part-time witch I don’t believe in magic, except the type you make for yourself or those you love. However, the grimoire reminds me of all the chants, incantations, instructions, and charms the autistic person uses every day to survive an imperfect world that feels like it was never designed for them.

Admittedly, we can all feel like that sometimes, regardless of whether we’re autistic or not. Still, the amount of adjustment for a neurotypical person on a good day feels infinitesimally small in comparison to what an autistic person will need to do every day. The number of times you’ll need to adjust depends on how severe some of your symptoms are. Those little repetitions in your head which feel like an internal echolalic incantation, or a chant.

The rituals we have to go through before leaving the house - the meltdowns, are we possessed? If this existed before the 19th century, would we have been seen that way, of being possessed by evil spirits? The first recorded case of autism goes back further than I thought, towards the end of the 18th century -

“In 1798 before the first use of the word autism, French physician Jean-Marc Gaspard Itard described Victor the Wild Boy of Aveyron, a young boy who was found after being isolated in the woods for 11 years, as being socially withdrawn in addition to having language and intellectual disabilities. He recognized Victor as being developmentally different from other children his age. Itard’s description of Victor’s tendencies would later be formally characterized as autistic (Itard, 1932).” (this is from a study written in 2015)

Coming back to the correlation between autism and magical grimoires. I find it interesting that there’s an interest in witchcraft and the occult within the autistic community.

I don’t want to turn this into an article on the Occult, but the piece below proved to be insightful in looking at the relationship between autism, systems of order and studying witchcraft -

“On the surface a lot of neurodivergent people are drawn to systems of order. Whether this is an intrinsic aspect of neurodivergent thinking or a coping mechanism for living in a world that so frequently doesn’t seem to make any sense is a question that needs to be researched - but what we do know is that autistic people in particular see to crave structure and order. We like rules, and we like the complexity that emerges from rules.”

Neurodiversity and the Occult | A Commissioned Essay for Chris Dancy | Coda.io

We’re bombarded by representations of the stereotype autistic person, brilliant at computing and maths, but many on the spectrum are creative and have a strong interest in art, writing and of course, spirituality. As a child I had a strong interest in ‘magick,’ it helped make sense of my world and gave me order and something to focus on. It probably also contributed to me being seen as weird or ‘other.’

So here we have a rough guide to the contents of a grimoire -

If you’d like to read on, you can get a subscription for as little as £4.50 a month, or you can take out a paid annual subscription too, or you can be a free subscriber, and I’ll be creating some free content later this week!