Magic

I’ve had quite an eclectic education over the years. When I was in school I was fascinated by archaelogy, paleontology, math, physics. When I was six I wanted to be a paleontologist. By the time I hit junior high school I planned on being an electrical engineer. The Amateur Scientist column in Scientific American was a must read for me every month. I remembering begging my parents for money, and trying to track down sources of the materials so I could build the dye laser they described once. I did manage to build a cloud chamber they described in another column. My father and I had lively discussions regarding the benefits of hydroponics against those of traditional gardening. I was convinced that hovercraft would be all the rage as road vehicles, and believed we would all be better off living in geodesic domes (I still think domes are a great idea ). My dream was to live in outer space.

As I hit my late teens my interests remained focused on learning how things worked, but turned more from the physical universe to the psychological and spiritual universe. I explored psychology, Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, Taoism, the Kabbalah, magic, ancient religions, Wicca, Theosophy, Edgar Cayce, dreams, astral projection, meditation, the occult. While, much to my dismay, outer space has remained out of reach for most of us, inner space - the world of thought, the exploration of subjective experience and its effect on objective experience - has become my home.

The best general definition I have been able to come up with for magic is the creation of change through psychological techniques. The sought after change can be internal, as in emotional or spiritual growth, or it can be external, as in getting a new job or healing a friend. The prime tools are emotion or passion and imagination focused by intent. Any thing you do in the external world is meant to reinforce these things. What is being called the law of attraction is a species of magic.

Magic is no secret. It has been around for millenia. Until the past couple of hundred years very few people did not accept magic as a fact. Only with the growth of materialism has the role of psycho-spiritual factors in the events of life been relegated to the category of deluded fantasy.

There has been a resurgent interest in magic in the Western world for the past 125 years in several forms. This has occurred concurrently with the establishment of psychology as a science and a therapy, and with the growing awareness of the ennui and anomie that materialistic scientism have led to in popular culture. People want their lives to have meaning.

There are two branches of magic - thaumaturgy and theurgy. Thaumaturgy is concerned with inducing change in the objective world. Theurgy is concerned with inducing change in the internal world.

Theurgy has much the same goals as mysticism - attaining an experiential awareness of the ground from which we spring. Its emphasis is on changing who you are. I have seen it termed a yoga for the West. The methods can be baroque and the symbol systems used syncretic, but they bear a strong resemblence to the methods of tantra, especially as seen in the use of mantra and yantra.

Thaumaturgy’s aims are purely in the material world. Its emphasis is on changing what you have. Thaumaturgical acts can range from healing, the attainment of material goods, love, to harming other people. Sometimes I think of thaumaturgy as a harnessing of Maxwell’s Demon. Improbable coincidences occur to manifest the desired change through normal channels. I read once, I can’t remember where, that a clergyman said it was amazing what coincidences would follow his prayers.

Very few people would say I believe in magic. It’s embarrassing. Magic is for primitive people, the ignorant, children, and people who just aren’t terribly bright. Dress it up with a new name like New Thought, the Science of Life, the Law of Attraction and it becomes much more palatable. Much of what goes under the rubric of magic is nonsense, but it’s basic thesis that the universe is a multilevel organic whole, in which activity in one area can affect outcomes in another, not little bits and pieces that interact only glancingly and by chance, is not.

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