This is a follow-up on our post about The Magical Overton Window. Which as mentioned we wrote first as a discord post and then turned into a blog post in a semi dissociated frenzied state which is how we’ve gotten most of our recent blog posts live.
And in doing so I realised I missed a lot of important things that I think I need to clarify. Things that people asked us about later.
The Past
One important thing has to do with the past. In recent years we’ve grown fond of saying “The Magic that we Seek is in the Future, not the past.” I do not wish to add to the romanticisation of the past or advocate for any sort of Retvrn. I think it’s important to keep advancing the practice and theory of magic into the future. As with any knowledge, not just magic, there is a lot of knowledge we can still retrieve from the past. Things that have been half forgotten that can be remembered. New discoveries of archaeological data. That’s all good. But we do not need to return to the past, we can incorporate this knowledge into our current understanding and keep advancing.
I have a healthy respect for the past and for its inhabitants. I do not buy into the idea that they were all ignorant fools who believed in magic because they didn’t know any better. Some of the ancient magicians were the most scholarly people of their time, and they engaged the matter seriously. There are a number of philosophers where it’s unclear to separate what they believed with what was politic to believe. It cuts both ways. It was disadvantageous to speak ill of the gods or to try to do away with them, in ancient Greece, it was dangerous to speak ill or try to do away with god in medieval Christendom. There’s sometimes an effort to paint, with our modern sensibilities, thinkers who we assume would be more skeptical if it wasn’t literally illegal for them to be. The truth is we can’t know.
It can be disadvantegous or dangerous to believe in spirits today. I meet a lot of people who believe in magic but are hasty to clarify that they believe in psychological magic, and not necessarily spirits. Or they don’t believe in spirts but they believe in egregores, because after all egregores are only mental and societal constructs from the realm of ideas. I think it would be accurate to say that a lot of spirits exist in this realm, as subtle entities arising from the interplay of human culture (and non human animal culture tbh), I just don’t think that’s ALL that they are. I don’t profess a strong opinion, I just prefer to treat spirits as spirits, as people, non human persons. I also know a lot of people who engage with spirits in this modality. It’s hard to tell, unless you’re intimate with a person what they believe or don’t believe. I’m trying to be as candid as possible, and it’s very hard, and that’s part of the reason why this blog posts are so haphazard. But I think it’s important to put it out there as much as I can, because we want to keep advancing the art, and I can only do so much by ourselves.
Science
I still want to be a scientist. Life has taken me in a different direction, but I still have a deep love and respect for science. Science and magic are often placed at odds to each other, but I don’t believe it has to be so. I think science is wholly separate from epistemology. I don’t think science can have an opinion about things that it hasn’t explored with the scientific method.
It is part of our lives work to get these two loves of mine to play nicely with each other. (metamour drama)
Once again alluding to the past, it is well known that many scientific pursuits were magical pursuits. We tend to look at them as ancestral. Astrology begot astronomy, alchemy begot chemistry. The fact that the two of them could exist side by side seems like an atavism. But I think that’s more like the specialisation we see in all fields. What used to be the Natural Sciences, are now Physics, Biology and Chemistry. What used to be Biology is now molecular biology, macrobiology, microbiology, neurology, epidemiology, and so many more ologies. Ologies proliferate. Not even to mention omics.
I don’t think magic and science are sister principles I think they’re different categories. Science is very practical. Science is the method of advancing knowledge through systemitasion and experimentaiton. You can do science on magic.
Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa developed a whole system of magic which he published as 3 volumes known as the Three Books of Occult Philosophy. Through experimentation he devised a system that was internally consistent. With correspondences between materials and rituals and effects. Every chaos magician practicing today applies part of the scientific ethos to their personal practice, trying things out and seeing what works. They’re not exhaustively testing and retesting things until they get statistically significant results because they’re more interest in getting their results and running. There are people who are engaged in testing magical theories through modern scientific methods, the most famous of which is probably Dean Radin, who has run many randomized control trials on parapsychology and ESP and well magic.
I admit, I don’t pay too much attention to these sorts of studies. I’m certainly not waiting on them to prove magic to believe in it. I do appreciate that they exist I think they can help us advance our knowledge of magic. As a spirit type caster however, I think spirits will probably get in the way of getting results, I think spirits and magic are willful and whimsical, and depending on myriad factors, and disappears or lose potency when these factors are controlled. Practical Enchantment, the kind of magic you do to get changes in your life, always seems to manifest as various factors coming together in a way that puts you closer to your goal. Serendipitous coincidences, right place at the right time, random chance. If magic indeed requires to manifest these things, it’s hard to capture it in an environment where this is all controlled.
I think the practical magic has the same relationship to magical theory that engineering does to practical science. You can take what you know, even if you haven’t been able to prove it under all conditions, and use it to achieve desired results. And in doing so you often learn up learning a lot about the thing, many practical applications end up advancing and enriching the theory they derive from.
So what is Magic Anyways?
I mean, that’s a question that merits its own blog post, but let me put some thoughts down here too. Magic is a force that pervades reality. It’s related to will and wonder and teleology. It’s the way multiple disparate processes can combine to achieve understandable percievable results. It is not just, things we don’t know yet.
Some will say we shouldn’t call emergent processes magic because they can be understood. And emergence is a concept that’s under attack right now because people try to use it to justify too many things. I don’t think magic stops being magic when it’s understood.
By way of Illustration I would like us to consider the word Automagical. Automagical, or more commonly, Automagically is a term used often by software people to refer to a process that takes complexity away from the user. Like dragging and dropping a picture from your computer onto a page on the browser and have it immedialy prepare it to post on whichever website. It seems to happen automatically, but it often requires a lot of work that’s happening in the background where the user can’t see it. More importantly it requires a bunch of disaparate parts to somehow work together, it requires the work of separate teams of engineers working together to lay down infrastructure and protocols to allow such a thing to happen.
Some would argue the term is meaningless, since automatically suffices, but I would say that automagical processes are automatic but not all automatic processes are automagical. No automagical process is unexplainable but it might be indeed the case that no single human understands every aspect of the process. This happens a lot in software, large programs are not necessarily understood wholly by the engineers that work on them, and plenty of software engineers do good work without understanding on a basic level how their instructions are being interpreted by the various systems where they may run. Sometimes part of the process might be deliberately occluded. Nevertheless it all could theoretically be understood.
I think magic can’t be wholy explained just like the natural world can’t be fully explained. The more we learn about it the more we find out we don’t know. There are aspects of magic that have been forgotten, knowledge can be forgotten and rediscovered, but we do overall have much broader magical literacy now than before. The fact that some of it has stopped being referred to as magic hasn’t stopped it from being magic.
Magic is a combination of cooperation and opportunism, of chance and order. It is both a thing that exists independent of our manipulations, and a thing which we can manipulate. Anything that changes your reality is magic, and the way reality itself works is a magic.
Now is when I would write a conclusion if I had one. I promised I’ll get better at this. Ultimately I’m not done writing about science or magic. They’re both words with multiple diverse meanings and they interact differently when they’re used to mean different things.
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